Category: Uncategorized

Flock’s sake

If you were watching Newsnight this evening, you’ll have seen a classic bit of technojournalist gush over a ‘revolutionary’ new browser called Flock, that’s going to sweep away MSIE and is created by these extraordinary people called geeks who eat pizza and … oh, forget it.

Anyway, the free ad worked to the extent that I’m now sitting here using a beta of Flock and … er … it’s just another browser. Specifically just another browser based on Mozilla, like Firefox and Camino.

Except this one allows you to:

  1. post to your blog from the browser.
  2. share your bookmarks on del.icio.us.
  3. and…
  4. er…
  5. that’s it.

Comrades! On to the Winter Palace! Forward with the Revolution!

Rousseau: Government of Poland

Thought for the day from Rousseau’s Government of Poland.

As long as luxury reigns among the great, cupidity will reign in all hearts. The object of public admiration and the desires of private individuals will always be the same; and if one must be rich in order to shine, to be rich will always be the dominant passion. This is a great source of corruption, which must be diminished as much as possible.

Ranting nutters defiant

Someone sitting opposite me on the train is reading the Daily Express, house journal of paranoid xenophobes. He has that pinch-faced disapproving look that seems to go with reading the Express or the Mail.

I see from the cover that the “World’s Greatest Newspaper” (© Daily Express) has put the Union Jack behind the crusader emblem, and added a subtitle ‘Britain defiant’.

I’m not sure whether this is pathetic or disturbing. One the one hand, the siege mentality of the far right is deeply, deeply contemptible and stupid. On the other, the power of the stupid is not to be underestimated, and I’ve always thought Richard Desmond was a natural for Fascist dictator.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha

Ludicrous self-publicist Robert Kilroy-Silk has quit the party he founded, Veritas.

Apparently, the ideas he espoused, such as immediate withdrawal from the European Union, abolishing inheritance tax on houses and expelling all asylum seekers (except those with children) are “now part of the political mainstream”. I can’t say I’d noticed, to be honest, but perhaps that’s what all washed up has-been xenophobes like to think.

Kwasniewski on rabble-rousing

I'm currently reading <a href="http://www.prezydent.pl/pre/en_index.php3">Aleksander Kwasniewski's</a> 2000 book "Our home – Poland" (PDF download available in <a href="http://www.prezydent.pl/media/our_home_Poland.pdf">English</a> and <a href="http://www.prezydent.pl/media/dom_wszystkich_Polska.pdf">Polish</a>). It's a fairly interesting read, as re-election campaign books go.

Mr Kwasniewski is rightly presidential in his attacks on partisanship, and the tendency for politicians to foretell the end of Polish democracy every time they disagree. (If Mr Kwasniewski is worried that this <a href="http://www.ongoing-tales.com/SERIALS/oldtime/FAIRYTALES/chicklicken.html">Chicken Licken</a> syndrome is restricted to Poland, I'm sure the British Embassy can provide him with some back issues of the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/dailymail/home.html?in_page_id=1766">Mail</a>, the <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/">Express</a> and the <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/">Spectator</a>.)

I thought these paragraphs (from p. 19 of the English version), were a good illustration of the argument:

<blockquote>The lack of dialogue, the language of political aggression and, in extreme cases, 'political apartheid', threaten to divide Poland in two halves. This is a great danger for democracy and Poland's future. I do not want to sound sarcastic, but this would be proof of a lack of imagination – felling the bough on which our entire political establishment is sitting.

When I was a journalist, and editor-in-chief at the student weekly <i>itd</i> and later <i>Sztandar Mlodych</i>, I always opposed using the language of aggression. I believed that the task of the media, among other things, is to promote the political culture of the general public, to accustom people to the strength of arguments and not just strong language and accuusations.</blockquote>

Nemo iudex in causa sua, part 94

A <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20795-2004Oct9.html">report</a> in the Washington Post on partisan rows over election procedure proves once again the old legal maxim – "No-one should be judge in his own case".

NYT profiles John Kerry

There's an interesting and detailed profile of John Kerry in the New York Times magazine (and online <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/magazine/10KERRY.html?oref=login">here</a>). It is, to use a very <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/y/yesminister_7777145.shtml">Sir Humphrey</a> term of approval, nuanced.