The Minute Blog

Wilde? I'm absolutely livid.

The opening of this Stephen Pollard article may seem familiar.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to smile at the slow political death of Gordon Brown.

You would have to have an ear of tin not to be fed up of this hackneyed, ugly, convoluted and annoying quotation.

Books that have changed the way that I think

Here's a list of books that have changed the way that I think. They're not necessarily my favourite books, or even good ones, but they've had an effect.

War and Peace.

If Woody Allen had read it a bit more slowly, he'd realise that it's not about Russia but about the fundamental attribution error. I was always inclined towards minimising the importance of individuals on historical events, and this book did not have much effect on me on that issue. The effect it had on me was to emphasise the chaotic nature of decision-making, and the messiness power. The best bit is the analysis of the battle of Borodino. 

Koba the Dread.  Funnily enough, this book had more influence on me when it came out than when I actually read the whole thing, a few years later. I was a little disappointed when I actually read it - it's a bit messy and sometimes self-indulgent -  but the book did make me seriously think about the good judgement of the liberal-left intellegentsia for the first time. Most people either think that communism was a great idea that was let down by its leaders, or that it was essentially an evil idea from the start and had to be combatted. It's very difficult to take a middle road, and whichever choice you make will affect the way you view 20th century history, and so, the world today.

Vietnam: The Necessary War, Michael Lind. This book is less about Vietnam than about foreign policy ideology and the cold war. Without convincing me, or even really trying that hard to convince me, that the war in Vietnam was necessary, the book has made me view foreign policy strategy in a completely different way.

Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse An obvious choice, but an excellent book for anyone that finds that they're getting lured by the siren calls of misanthropy and self-pity. The only book on this list that I'd definitely recommend.

A Suitable Boy. The most shocking ending of any book that I have ever read: the heroine chooses obligation over romantic love, and it's presented as a happy ending. It's a refreshing change from the western tradition.

Why Terrorism Worsk: Alan Dershowitz. Again, this book did not convince me of all its conclusions, but the arguments for torture were new and interesting. When I first saw a chapter subtitled "How our European allies made September 11 inevitable" I thought it was dangerous and stupid, but the wider argument, that appeasement to terrorism can encourage more of the same, was one that I had not taken seriously before and now do.

The State We're In, Will Hutton. Politically, I'm a lot different to Will Hutton, but this is the book that got me interested in economics. Two things in particular struck me in this book: his ability to refer to capitalism as a positive thing, and his recognition of the importance and benefits of the Industrial Revolution - both rare on the left.

American Pastoral, Philip Roth. It's almost impossible to imagine a highbrow British author writing a book in which a businessman is the hero, but Philip Roth did. This book made me see the new left from the outisde for the first time. God, it's not a pretty sight.

A Fat Cat, Spinning His Web, With a Tentacle in Every Pie

The Times manages to mix five metaphors in a single sentence.

A string of profit warnings from safe-haven British companies sparked fears yesterday that the deadly tentacles of the sub-prime crisis were starting to spread.

This short article has three authors; maybe they were having some kind of competition. The next sentence has six.

A cut in interest rates by the Bank of England to 5.25 per cent failed to overcome investor gloom as a volley of surprise profit and sales warnings from bellwether British companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline, Yell and BT, fuelled fears of a deepening economic crisis. One-off factors as well as a general souring of investor sentiment led to a sell-off across the board.

The Mail Obsession with Breasts

Oliver Kamm gets his priorities wrong in a discussion of the merits of the Daily Mail

The Daily Mail...is the newspaper above all others whose opinions I disagree with on ... The site might have changed by the time you read Stephen's article, but as I write this Stephen is wedged between an online poll entitled "Is it acceptable for female politicians to show this much cleavage in the Commons?" and an article entitled "My instant boob job from 36A to 36DD - and the effect it had on men (and women)". Just thought you'd like to know.

The Mail is, of course, the paper most read by women. As such, the level of cleavage that female professionals should show is a matter of some importance to its readers, as is society's reaction to breast enlargements. Stephen Pollard's gossipy article is probably the most trivial of the three mentioned, and certainly the least relevant to its readers.

The World's Most Irritating...

Rod Liddle has me reaching for the dictionary.

The world’s most irritating woman, the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, was on BBC1’s Question Time last week...this bowl-faced receptacle of jabbering fifth-form outrage and whining sanctimony...glib, didactic and – on almost every issue – both ineluctably wrong and full of conviction and self-righteousness.

It seems to me (and it's a bit unfair to pick merely this example) that male politicians really do not get this kind of personal attack.

Omission Bias

Graham Boynton defends minority rule in Rhodesia, in this article on Ian Smith.

Although the first 20 years of Mugabe's rule saw a slow, somewhat even-paced decline, the calamitous collapse has been achieved in little more than half a decade, an extraordinary feat of self-destruction when one considers that it took more than a century for Ian Smith's white antecedents to carve a modern, functioning, European-style society out of raw African bushveld.

If Iraq has killed off liberal interventionism, then why hasn't Mugabe killed off liberal non-interventionism?

A Silly Article

Inayat Bunglawala writes at Comment is Free on the teddy bear case ("a silly affair", apparently).

...the Sudanese government is certainly sore about the way it has been internationally reviled for its handling of the Darfur issue.... a typically incendiary "Sun Says" editorial...No mention is made whether the Sun actually approached any British Muslim figures to comment on this case before they wrote up their story.....On [The] Sun's website, free rein is given to readers for their views (or should I say their "barbarity") to be on open display....

Yes, I thought that it would turn out that the real victim in all this is him.

Learning from Mistakes

An interesting juxtaposition of sentences from Gordon Brown, at Prime Minister's Questions (column 1181).

The idea that we are complacent about the matter is ridiculous. We are taking all the action that is necessary.

Hmmm.

Freedom is Slavery

Richard Gott (of whom more here, in this Partridgean article) writes an article defending communism on the grounds of its enlightened, liberating, anti-imperialist foreign policy.

Millions of people in the then thriving empires ... were transformed almost overnight into agents of their own destiny. From listless and oppressed peasants, with little hope of change or improvement, they became soldiers in a new revolutionary struggle...what occurred in Petrograd in 1917...had a liberating impact on the rest of the world. We should salute [its] memory; one day, [it] will happen again.

They should follow this up with other articles on the benefits of communism. May I suggest:

•     the honesty of its broadcasting,
•     the modesty of its leaders,
•     the lively and disparate nature of its political debates,
•     the fairness of its judicial system,
•     the quality of its cars, and
•     the integrity and wisdom of its followers in the West.

There's Only One...

Someone finally gets it right on Keegan (part of Scott Murray's excellent "Second Thoughts" series which exposes the uniformity and poor judgement of sports journalists). Mind you, if he's a real man he'll do Graham Taylor and Alex Ferguson next.

Keegan has been, if not one of the most successful, then certainly one of the greatest managers this country has ever seen. And should be celebrated as such.

Keegan was brought down by goalkeepers: Hislop's injury was crucial in 1996, as were mistakes by Seaman and Martyn in those games against Portugal, Romania and Germany.

This is a Gaffe? This is News?

The Times (The Times!) leads with this report of an interview (headline: Harman Gaffe Adds to Brown Woes):-

But in an interview with BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend, Ms Harman, the Labour deputy leader, made an unfortunate gaffe by publicly accepting the possibility that the episode could have harmed Mr Brown's reputation.

Asked if it had damaged him, she said: “I don’t think it should damage him at all.” Put to her that there was a difference between whether she thought it should and whether it had, she replied: “I don’t think it should is what I would say...”

The interviewer then interrupted to ask: “So it may have done?” She said: “Well, you know, we’ll see.”

Maybe this kind of reporting is a clue to why political interviews are so dull and vacuous.

Tea of the Week

Assam

Well, it's very nice, but you can forget that you're drinking a speciality tea (and paying a premium for it). It's just tea, really. Not much more that can be said.

Likely to be drunk by: People that like tea. (Especially popular with people that like paying extra for a functionally equivalent product: buyers of three-wheeler baby buggies, shirts that cost more than £10, flat-screen TVs, high-performance computers, ...)

Not likely to be drunk by: People that don't like tea.

Update: I've just got to use a three-wheeler baby buggy. They're really good, it's like pushing a buggy that floats on a cushion of air. I take it back what I said about them.

Morality and Religion

Yet another unbeliever writes on Comment is Free to defend religion.

For most people, reaching for the Ten Commandments or the Eightfold Path or the Five Pillars of Islam offers a simpler and perhaps less solipsistic [!] way forward.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the same newspaper on the same day...

[Homosexuality is] against the word of God, simple as that. God has not foreseen that to be right. God created Adam and Eve and said go forth and bring forth fruit. That means they should have children and a family, that's the way God ordained the world to be. But the devil is tormenting people, deceiving them to make them think that homosexuality is OK.

Winning Ugly

Andrew Gilligan indulges in a little gloat.

...over the dossier, almost everybody in the party, as in the country, accepts (broadly) my version of events, rather than Campbell's.

It's true: most people believe that David Kelly was a senior intelligence officer in charge of drawing up the report, that the dossier (and in particular the 45-minute claim) was the main case for the invasion, that the 45-minute claim was entered into the dossier in the last week before publication, that it was brought in against the wishes of the intelligence chiefs, that it was invented by Alistair Campbell, that the government knew that it was probably wrong, that David Kelly had seen all the intelligence on the 45-minute claim and believed that it was wrong, that Alistair Campbell was aware of David Kelly's reservations, that David Kelly's reservations were over-ruled by Alistair Campbell - and many even believe that David Kelly was against the invasion. Well done.

Bell's Magical World

Martin Bell, in Comment is Free, calls for an inquiry on Iraq.

The mission will end, as it began, on the basis of a falsehood.

Why does everyone insist that Tony Blair lied about WMD? Apart from being demonstrably untrue, it
lets everyone that supported the invasion off the hook.

Iron in the Solent

Iron fertilisation is proposed as a solution to global warming.

Some researchers and commercial interests have recently proposed to provide that missing nutrient on a large scale in order to create artificial blooms. Theory holds that if you make such blooms large enough, you could remove excess carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere and carry it down into the deep ocean as organic matter (such as fecal pellets and dead plankton) sinks, thereby reducing the impact of greenhouse gases and global warming.

Geo-engineering is likely to be expensive, error-prone, and have painful side-effects, but it's probably more realistic than cutting CO2 emissions 75% - which would not reduce the CO2 already in the air.

Convince, Don't Explain

Robin Hanson mars a fascinating article on demand for medicine, with a couple of paragraphs of pop psychology.

Briefly, the idea is that our ancestors showed loyalty by taking care of sick allies, and that, for such signals, how much one spends matters more than how effective is the care, and commonly-observed clues of quality matter more than private clues. So today we spend enough to distinguish ourselves from people who don’t care as much as we do, and we pay little attention to private clues about the health effectiveness of medicine.

This kind of analysis is only of interest to people who have already been convinced by your argument, and it does not help them either.

In the Dark

Bartle Bull writes optimistically on Iraq in Prospect.

The argument of this article—that with nothing more to resolve from political violence, Iraqis can now settle down to gorge themselves at the oil trough—is based on two premises: Sunni acknowledgement of the failure of their insurgency and the need to reach an accommodation with the new Iraq, and a conjunction of interests between the coalition on one hand and the Kurds and Shias on the other.

As far as I can tell, the mainstream media has failed to cover the occupation as a conflict whose outcome is of interest in itself, rather than as a reflection of the decision to invade. This makes it difficult for the non-specialist to dispute either this analysis, or an alternative view (like that of Robert Kagan in Slate).

Incitement to Hatred

Has there ever been a more trivial issue behind a terror campaign?

He did not contest that he sent the letters to three forensic science laboratories, a computer company, an accountancy firm, the DVLA and a residential address, but denied intending to cause injury...Mr Cooper had told the jury his anger at the country's authorities had intensified when his father Clive was unable to have DNA samples removed from the police database, even though he had been cleared in 2003 of assault.

Most of the media are measured in their reporting of Muslim terrorism, say, because they want to avoid stirring up racial hatred. This is a good thing. Maybe it's time now that we got rid of the shrill, hysterical tones in which fringe civil liberties issues are discussed before someone gets killed.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Eamonn Butler, at the ASI, comments on Northern Rock

No, in this case I think things are going wrong simply because people don’t trust anyone in authority any more, certainly not forked-tongue politicians or pen-pushing quangocrats. And can you blame them?

Well, so far the forked-tongue politicians and the pen-pushing quangocrats have been right on MMR, the millennium bug, the fiscal "black holes", the Hutton report, the Butler report, asylum seekers numbers, the scale of the terrorist threat, the impact of the Russian bond crisis, the impact of the dot-com crash, the strong pound, cash-for-honours, and the housing crash; meanwhile the Cassandras have been right on the Millennium Dome and not much else, so I know where my money is.