Concrete Achievements

Category: Current Affairs

  • Democratic debate, nice while it lasted

    I posted this over at Metafilter, but it's very much what I've been feeling today, so I thought I post it here too.

    "What's depressed me about the whole Davis thing is realising how the blogs and comments on British media sites are starting to sound like Free Republic or Fox News. If I hear the words fascism, ZaNuLabour or Stalin again, I will scream. British political debate is being taken over by this angry self-righteous hate-filled tone and, as someone who believes in democracy, it's just killing me. 

    Britain today is nothing like a fascist state, nothing like Zimbabwe and nothing like Stalinism. People are comparing the Government to real historical regimes that really killed millions of real people, and what are they talking about? Speed cameras! European treaties! Income tax rates! Petrol Prices! Get over yourselves, for God's sake. If you don't agree, vote Tory at the next election, don't pretend you're some sort of heroic fighter for freedom and democracy. 

    I completely respect people who don't agree with 42 days, or speed cameras, or whatever. I stop respecting those people when they turn into tantruming six year olds and scream "I can do what I want! You're the worst Government ever and I hate you! Nazi!"

  • Worrying echoes of America

    It feels disturbingly like the abortion debate is becoming party-politicised.

    (link).

    There was a free vote but Labour MPs mostly backed the status quo – leaving anti-abortion campaigners pinning their hopes on a change of government.

  • Everyone back to the 1870s!

    Another day, another set of half-baked policy prescription from one of Gordon’s imports. This time it’s Quentin Davies, former Tory MP, who has produced an idea that will get the backing of peppery ex-colonels up and down the country: a bank holiday to celebrate the Armed Forces.

    Personally, I’d quite like to honour the armed forces by having a sensible foreign policy that didn’t say ‘me too’ to every American-led adventure, but I am sure that’s a hopeless dream. Adding a new bank holiday to celebrate the forces seems like the sort of thing the Government would have done after the Indian Mutiny, not in the 21st century. It seems quite American too, as we might expect from this PM.

    I don’t want people to hate the military, or to beat up soldiers for wearing their uniforms (something that has a strong whiff of urban legend, to my mind). But I also don’t want a contentious bank holiday full of tabloid masturbation about our grand imperial past and how we bashed the Hun back in the jolly old days. We get that every time we play Germany at football, anyway.

  • Oh those human rights!

    People who believe that all those ‘human rights’ things come from the wicked European Union* could usefully pay attention to what the California Supreme Court have just done.

    (* and yes, I know they come from the Council of Europe).

  • More hate-filled deceit from the Sun

    Amazingly, the Sun has published a not-entirely-accurate story about the EU. Report at Strange Maps.

  • Memory and forgetting

    A fascinating article by Tony Judt at the New York Review, entitled What Have We Learned, If Anything?, discusses how despite numerous memorials, the history of the 20th century is being misremembered, if it is remembered at all. Judt’s focus is particularly on the US, and its different experience of 20th century warfare, but it also contains some heartfelt passages arguing against the use of torture in modern warfare. As a statement of why the “War on Terror” is a ludicrous concept, it would be hard to improve upon.

  • Domestic flights aren’t necessary

    I note from a report in this weekend’s FT that when business travellers booked on domestic flights with BA were rebooking during the Terminal 5 screw-up, 50% of them chose rail as their mode of transport. Which makes me think, first, why weren’t they going by rail in the first place? And second, why aren’t we taxing domestic flights out of existence and freeing up some of those supposedly vital Heathrow landing slots? We could even use the revenue to build a useful national rail link to the airport, like at Schiphol or Paris CDG.

  • Compensation for T5

    Interesting but not surprising that the BBC Q&A on the rights of those stranded at Heathrow leaves until the third screen any mention of the fact that the rights derive from EU legislation. If it had been straight bananas, it would have been “new EU rules” in the headline.

  • Gordon Brown in le Monde

    Gordon Brown has given his first foreign press interview, to Le Monde. It’s here.

  • How journalism works

    New from the Daily Hate: make up a story about how immigrants are all lying thieving bastards. We won’t check the facts, and we’ll pay you one hundred pounds!

    (Greenslade)