Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Full toss over middle stump
Olïver Kamm writes, on the subject of Günter Grass or something:
(I should disclose an interest in that Tonkin refers to "the work of our remarkably gifted translators, such as Anthea Bell and Michael Hofmann", of whom the first named is my mother. If any of my regular crop of extremely frequent and - in the absence of any reply from me - surprisingly indefatigible correspondents wishes to write in to observe that familial giftedness plainly came to be severely diluted as it traversed a single generation, they should be aware that I have anticipated their contribution.)
I cannot speak for the ëxtremely frequent and surprisingly indefatigable community, but the joke I was going to make was that this perhaps expläined why Oliver's blog often looks as if it has bëën translated into German and back a few tïmes.
Üpdate: Gosh it's lovely being by the seaside. I suppose Ï should have put some sort of notice up that I was on hölïdäy.
Double update: Ötöh, while I was away you could have caught me having a go at "evidence based medicine", a trend toward the Taylorisation and managerialisation of medicine which I regard as quite baleful, here and here, as I had to pop back to London to TCB.
Update with a vengeance Oliver emails me to point out that my umlauts are all over the place and "Günter" isn't a "Gunther". Gunther, Gunter, stick it up yer jumper is my personal view of people who have the temerity to bear foreign names I can't spell (and balls to Francois Miterrand too), but thanks very much and I have made a correction. I have also scattered a few more umlauts throughout this post because I think they look nice and it helps amortise the fixed cost of learning how to do umlauts in HTML. Very metal.
Üpdate Éät ìt ràw, yöú Firefox using Communists. Ïnternet Explorer handles my non-conforming HTML jüst fïne.
this item posted by the management 8/27/2006 02:32:00 AM
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
The gradual suicide of liberal Europe
Since Melanie Philips is on holiday (see the posts below of which I note with horror this is the third consecutive one!), it falls to me to document the gradual suicide of liberal Europe. It is actually a lot more difficult than Mel makes it look to find real evidence of European societies literally committing suicide, but I think that this must surely count, from the Guardian letters:
"In the Netherlands, no bags are offered to customers. This saves money for shops and customers and stops landfill becoming choked in plastic."
Trying to reduce landfill in the Netherlands? What do they think polders are made of? The entire country is basically built on landfill! I can only assume that the postmodern green relativists and Gramscians are undermining the traditional values of Dutch society to the extent that the country will literally disappear beneath the waves. I bet the dhimmis are involved too but I can't work out how to fit them in.
this item posted by the management 8/08/2006 02:41:00 AM
Monday, August 07, 2006
From the Guardian
John Reid on immigration:
Mr Reid said he wanted to change the culture of the debate and end the "daft, so-called politically correct notion that anybody who talks about immigration is somehow a racist".
Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
more Freakonomics coming soon, plus a reply to Marc Mulholland on "Anti This War Now" as soon as I can think of a way of walking away from my original argument that looks suitably weaselly and inconclusive.
this item posted by the management 8/07/2006 12:56:00 AM
Friday, August 04, 2006
Melanie Phillips blogging
Mel has gone on holiday. I think this is probably the wisest course as she has written the following paragraph. You can play a fun game with the Melanie Phillips blog, btw; scroll down, select a paragraph and without looking at the title, try to guess whether it is part of the series "The War Against Israel", "The War Against the Jews", "The Media War Against Israel" or "The Media War Against the Jews". This one is from "The War Against Israel".
If, heaven forbid, this does turn into a second Holocaust, we can now discern the key difference from the first one. This time the Jews will be blamed for their own destruction. And this time, the political left and the media will have blood on their hands. Indeed, they already do. The lies, libels and distortions, the selective reporting and omissions, the egregious double standards, the moral inversion which turns jihadi murderers into resistance fighters and their victims into war criminals, the willingess to report Hezbollah propaganda as the truth while disparaging Israeli statements as lies (when they are even reported at all), not to mention the ancient canards against the Jews now being blurted out everywhere from California to Canary Wharf � all are not only creating a lethal climate of increasingly hysterical hatred against Israel and the Jews, but are also egging on the terror-puppeteers of the jihad and recruiting yet more to the cause of murdering Jews and waging holy war against the west.
The blog says that Ms Phillips has gone to the beach, but on the basis of the above, I think it is more likely that she is hiding in a cabin with a supply of tinned food[1]. On the other hand, it wasn't this paragraph that made me think she needs a holiday but the following one, which says "Mark Steyn, as ever, gets it right".
[1] Here's how much work I put into these blog posts; I tried and rejected "hiding in an attic" and "hiding in a bunker" in that sentence, rejecting both of them because of potentially slightly anti-Semitic connotations.
this item posted by the management 8/04/2006 05:24:00 AM
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Gimme shelter
Too trivial for an update to my CT post on war crimes, but Melanie Philips (to whom I am not linking more because I cannot be bothered than as a conscious snub; I am not linking to my own post either) has managed to provide the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the bad faith with which a lot of people are crying crocodile tears over the war crime of "sheltering" behind civilians.
She has attempted to claim that the apartment block at Qana (erratum: it was an apartment block elsewhere in Lebanon, thanks Chris) had its civilian protection compromised because Hezbollah had been seen firing an anti-aircraft gun from it.
Surprisingly enough, it is not a war crime under the Geneva Conventions to mount an AA gun on a building which is being attacked from the air.
In related news, Melanie Philips describes the Daily Telegraph's coverage of the Qana bombing as a "psychological pogrom against Israel"; I presume that Eve Garrard[1] has been informed of this new outbreak of Holocaust denial, from a somewhat surprisng quarter.
Update: Just to clarify, it is not the killing of the civilians which Mel is comparing to a pogrom; it is the reporting of their deaths in the Daily Telegraph. So far no word on which atrocity the coverage in the Western Mail resembles. The Melanie Philips Naziometer currently stands at 5, but I think it would be a foolish man who sold short at this price.
[1] If you can't be bothered, this is a link to what I believe may be the worst argument ever printed on the Internet; that placards saying "Bush = Hitler" are equivalent to Holocaust denial because if Hitler was only as bad as Bush then the Holocaust could not have been that bad (I defy anyone to tell me that's an unfair paraphrase). If the pogroms were only as bad as one day of a broadly Israel-supporting newspaper's coverage, then it is certainly hard to understand what all the fuss was about.
this item posted by the management 8/01/2006 02:01:00 AM
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