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!
Monday, June 25, 2007
A gentleman never offends anyone by accident
Rather like Jamie, I find myself not having an opinion about Sir Salman's gong, simply because the general rule of thumb of "take the position held by the fewest outright wankers" doesn't give a clear steer. It is in times of uncertainty like this that I retreat to the comfort of my childhood religion - conspiracy theories.
As far as I can tell, this is very much sloppy seconds compared to the Danish cartoon gig. More or less the only people in the world who give half a lazy shit about this knighthood are a small number of rabble-rousing imams in Pakistan. Furthermore, it is not as if our reputation in the Islamic world has got any worse; they hated us anyway. Which means that the practical effect of this knighthood has been to a) give the Islamists of Islamabad something to harmlessly shout about and b) give our good mate Pervez Musharraf a chance to look like a tough guy and maybe carry out some domestic repression.
Which is rather timely for him, since as of a couple of weeks ago, the Pakistani opposition almost looked like getting its act together. Now, a nice little wedge has been driven between Sharif and Bhutto, and the PPP have been given an opportunity to do some cheap and easy anti-Western showboating. Hmmmmm ...
Of course, this is all baseless speculation, but so is the theory that somehow, in all of this process, nobody even noticed that giving SR his K would PO the M's. Nope, it's all a massive cockup which has happened to be highly politically convenient for our favourite strongman in the mustaches & Allah club. We used to do this sort of thing all the time in the Cold War, you know. After a while, when the Foreign Office has "accidentally" dropped the soap for the twentieth time in the same set of showers, the "cock up theory of history" takes on something of a new meaning.
Of course, even if the whole thing was simply cooked up as a calculated and gratuitous insult to the Muslims of the world, that would still not make it OK to advocate suicide bombing, you know.Labels: bedtime for democracy, posts that seem to be hidden for some reason, posts which contain jokes that a harsh critic might consider borderling homophobic
this item posted by the management 6/25/2007 10:06:00 AM
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