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, July 23, 2007
Hostage situation
I have written part Four of the "Freakonomics" review. Entitled "Freakiology", it deals with the somewhat patronising and self-contradictory relationship that Freakonomics has with sociology.
However, this post is being held for ransom. It won't appear on the blog unless a clear half-dozen of my regular readers write to their MPs in support of the political asylum for Iraqi translators campaign. I am prepared to take your word for it, but get your finger out. NB that the target of six letters is subject to upward and downward revision as I don't really know what the readership of this blog is. Yes, sending the form letter counts, but it would be better to write your own. Letters to media contacts also count, and if the same reader writes to an MP and a media outlet I will count that as two letters.
By the way, in a display of the horrific intellectual dishonesty which is my trademark, I didn't mention on CT (because it might have made the campaign less popular) something which I think the slightly more grown up D^2D audience can probably cope with. Which is to say, that if we do have a blanket amnesty, we're quite likely to be letting in at least a couple of dozen of actual terrorists - the fact that the ranks of Army interpreters contain a fair few double agents of the insurgency is well known, and then there's the families to consider. So in other words, this humanitarian gesture could end up with us importing another 7/7. On the other hand a) it just seems so fucking unseemly for us to be worrying about the possibility of a single domestic terrorist attack when there are 655,000 plus Iraqis dead in this civil war we've unleashed and b) I bet I travel on the Tube more than you do. Not to mention Rachel North agrees with the campaign, so if she can handle the risk so can we.
this item posted by the management 7/23/2007 03:58:00 AM
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