Waffle

My knowledge of the background to today's terrorist attack in Madrid (presumably by ETA despite denials from their official spokesbastards) can best be summed up as "bugger all" but I'm finding that close reading of recent postings and comments at A Fistful of Euros is helping me cure this ignorance. Go there.

If you are one of those who think the victory by the Spanish Socialist Party in last Sunday's elections is some sort of capitulation to the terrorists, read these two posts at Harry's Place for a much needed antidote, and follow the links from there.

Cowards
It hardly needs to be pointed out how offensive and patronising such views are, coming just days after over ten million Spaniards took to the streets in those moving silent protests against terrorist attacks which killed 200 of their compatriots.
and
Best of the blogs on Spain
So, yes, 11-M influenced the vote, but not because we are overcome by fear, or because we think that we can avert further attacks, but because we will only put up with so much lying and manipulation, and especially not when it is the dead and their families that are being heartlessly and shamelessly manipulated. (quoted from another blog cited in that article)
I've set these links to open in a new window and disallowed comments for this post here because there is much better and more well-informed discussion going on in those other blogs already than the subject could ever generate here.

Princess Juliana of the Netherlands has died, so the country is becoming an island for the rest of the weekend. I agree that the death of a former monarch deserves a lot of media attention, and I'm actually somewhat interested in it, but the media here are covering nothing else! As if the world economy, the war on terror, the democratic process in the USA and all other important issues are taking a breather out of respect for a member of a small country's royal family member who has been retired from active duty for a generation.

Still, it's not entirely wasted on me. She did lead an interesting life, after all.

I wonder why I bother with putting politics in this blog at all... Gene at Harry's Place voices my thoughts on Israel's assassination of Sheikh Yassim exactly, even using the same words I'd have used if I'd blogged it myself.

Joey Manley comments on Sinclair Broadcasting's recent decision not to broadcast Nightline's roll call of American war dead today, highlighting the free speech aspect and questioning SBGI's historical awareness:

This is scary, people. A rollcall honoring those who gave their lives in this war is not only appropriate, it's traditional and conventional journalism -- this kind of thing has been done by journalistic outlets in every American war since, at least, World War I. It's even a little jingoistic, frankly. That something like this can be considered verboten is truly a sign of the danger free speech is in, right now, in our country.

After two hours, The Old Man was looking forward to the end of the ordeal. On the whole, he had not done badly. He had surprised many by admitting that the whole mess was his fault and had even looked sincere while saying it. Sure, there had been moments when he had wavered, fidgeted or waffled. Sure, it might not have been a good idea to say that Alpha had been blindsided; in Alpha's position, being blindsided was not an option. But these moments would surely be glossed over, forgotten. He would ride it out.

Then it was time for That Woman to ask her question. That Woman, mention of whose name still made his and his supporters' hackles rise.

As That Woman spoke, and, it seemed to The Old Man, she spoke interminably, making the minutes allocated to her seem like an eternity, The Old Man fidgeted again. The Old Man swayed from side to side, looking to his left, looking to his right, never meeting That Woman's Gaze. But he felt the Gaze, all right. Who would not? It didn't matter that he now wielded more power than That Woman, that he had always had fewer scruples than That Woman. It didn't matter, even, that That Woman's question wasn't particularly interesting or salient. That Woman's Gaze came with electrodes. Under That Woman's Gaze, part of him slunk away, and now it was The Old Man himself who was on the box, being pointed at and laughed at.

That Woman had stopped talking. Her Gaze, though, stayed fixed on The Old Man. What was her question, again? The Old Man fidgeted, grimaced, squirmed, and scratched the top of his head. 15 more minutes to go.

A left-wing RL buddy (well, sort of: we know one another from the Dutch small-press comics circuit and he has stayed in my house a few times. By the standards of online friendship, that means we're practically engaged) of mine and a right-wing online friend and colleague of mine are both making comments in their blogs that show exactly the same sort of selective blindness. I should be grateful to them. It's very rare to have such a great opportunity to be fair and balanced dropped into your lap.

First, Martin Wisse asks, rhetorically:

Does the fact that US soldiers have engaged in torture in Iraq demand of those on the left who supported the war to re-evaluate their position?

[snip]

Then surely, the fact that the liberators themselve engage in torture and rape, must cause some soul searching? After all, what does liberation matter if torture still happens?

I suppose Johann Hari and Harry of Harry's Place are chopped liver? I presume you didn't check back to see what such vocal supporters of the war as Christopher Hitchens and Norman Geras have been saying, Martin? Seriously, you didn't, did you? You went "fuck'em" in January and haven't looked back since, have you? Because if you had bothered to look, you'd know that there was plenty of soul-searching.

Despite illustrating a satire on the Bush administration's handling of the run-up to the war, I have counted myself among the "pro-war" left for some time - and that has taken, and still takes, quite a bit of soul-searching. There are no easy answers here, no morally pure[spit] position. But these particular horrors will end, and end soon. The horrors that Saddam inflicted on his people would not have ended any time soon.

At least Martin (unlike myself), makes his point quickly and concisely. A few days earlier, Carson Fire, who I have quite a few reasons to call my friend even if I've never met him in the flesh, wrote a rambling post trying to make several points at once. The main point, as far as I can tell, was to portray himself as a lone right-wing voice in a vast left-wing wilderness of webcartoonists:

My fellow webcartoonists who sit on the "other side of the aisle" have been quite vocal for some time, now, and it just seems like it's a good thing to let you all know that we're not all marching in lockstep.

No, Carson, webcartoonists are not all marching in lockstep. You make it seem like we're all some sort of Borg hive-mind that only allows for leftist voices. As if Jeff Darlington, Jim Alexander, Howard Tayler, Syke, Ryan Higgins, Scott Kurz, Ian MacDonald, Sarah Huntrods and Kaichi Satake for goodness' sake are chopped liver. Some of them are very vocal, others are not. All of them have made their opinions known at opportunities of their choosing, and will do so again. It may surprise Carson to know that there are also left-wing cartoonists who choose not to voice their political opinions on their sites, for reasons that concern them only.

But the extent of Carson's selective blindness is revealed in the following two paragraphs:

And you can see who gets all the press for cartoonists these days... vile voices like Aaron McGruder and Ted Rall. While some on the left are shocked that Ann Coulter is allowed to live, McGruder and Rall spread some of the most wicked vitriol into the mainstream, and under cover of little drawings.

[paragraph snipped]

Rall is the kind of cartoonist who's syndicated, oh, just everywhere, and gets nominated for Pulitzer Prizes. Even an embarrassed MSNBC had to yank the feed last week when the Tillman cartoon surfaced. To many Americans, who detest leftist-hate rants, this is the face of modern American cartooning.

These are striking for what they don't say:
1. That the amount of vitriol expended by the left on Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and her ilk is matched drop for drop, if not more, by the right's response to Rall, McGruder or Michael Moore for that matter. Duh!
2. That the press Rall in particular gets isn't universally positive among the American left (the international left isn't aware of him).
Andrew Sullivan, a much more astute conservative commentator than Carson, has kept tabs on left-wing bloggers distancing themselves from Rall - he missed some that were made earlier and undoubtedly there are many more. The ones that he mentioned include some prominent left bloggers. I don't think the many people denouncing him regularly in The Comics Journal forums and Talk About Comics are all raving reactionaries either.

My point with this long ramble that took almost two hours to put together? Like the Jacobean theatre-goer said when London's two theaters both featured Romeo and Juliet: "A pox on both houses". If you post political opinion on a weblog, be prepared to do some legwork. Don't just read those sources that confirm your own prejudices about your opponents - and steer clear of the fringes of both (or rather, all) sides.

Hesiod at Counterspin Central reports about a TV program he saw about interrogation techniques in recent history. The program gave some examples of the similarities and differences between various historical torture techniques such as those used by the Gestapo, and those used at Abu Ghraib.

But it is the story of the Germans' most effective interrogator that caught my eye:

The second example was of a Luftwaffe Corporal, Hans Joachim Scharff, who spoke perfect English. He was in charge of interrogating downed American and British pilots.

His technique?

He was really nice, joked around with the prisoners, treated them well, gave them coffee and tea...and found out an absolute shitload of information from them.

You see, the pilots were all conditioned by the allies to believe that the Germans would do all sorts of horrible things to them if they were ever captured. So when their captor was a really nice and pleasant guy you could smoke a cigarette with and joke around with, they dropped their guard and gave away a lot of information inadvertently.

Amazing, huh?

He was probably the most effective interrogator the Germans had during WWII, and he was extremely humane.

[snippage]

Now, Scharff was the exception to the rule for German interrogators. But, he was also the most effective, and did not violate the Geneva conventions to do it.

Not to toot my own horn, but Geir and I were right about this.

The French are trying to ban it.

The Religious Policeman tells us what life is like in Saudi-Arabia, a country so vile it spawned, what, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. He is a rare voice of reason from the heartland of Wahabbi fundamentalism, and for that he risks "disappearing". Although he has little to report that is hopeful, the fact that he exists gives me hope.

Likewise Irshad Manji who also faces death threats for her outspoken opinions even though she lives in Canada. At least her death threats don't come from the government though.

(Via, again, Brad DeLong.Warning: non-expert opinions below (not the quoted ones; my own.) )
Mark Kleyman makes a case that nuclear fuel should get another chance:

Nukes, if run right, are fully competitive with coal, and a hell of a lot cleaner. (Modern coal plants are much cleaner than they used to be, but that's not saying much. In addition to all that greenhousing carbon dioxide, coal makes particles, and particles are BAD. As for all the old coal plants still running -- the ones whose lives the Bush Administration just extended to infinity by changing the New Source Review standards -- fuhgettabadit.)

I'm not really qualified to judge this, but I think (and have thought for some time) that a return to nukes would reduce two problems that could bite us in the ass in the next generation or so. One is climate change, which is likely to inconvenience a few people here and there in the not-so-distant future, the other is our dependency on not just coal, but oil, much of which is owned by countries whose governments and/or populations hate us *).

But these are all short-term problems, what about the nuclear waste that will irradiate us until the end of time? Mark makes the point quite forcefully:

Nuclear waste. This is a problem only if you think that we need to plan waste disposal that will (no, I'm not making this up) survive the end of civilization and be safe for the ignorant primitive nomads who will wander the earth 10,000 years from now. Actually, the solution isn't technically very hard.

I am still less optimistic than Mark about operational security (both the large-scale problem of a plant going KABOOM and the smaller contaminations that come from routine human error) and the risk of spent nuclear fuel falling in the wrong hands, but if these problems are solvable, then we should give nukes a chance.

Mark concludes his article with:

[Note: Thirty years ago, I was pretty current on this stuff. I had to take the engineering on faith, but I knew the policy problem just about as well as anyone did. (I think I was the original author of the pyramid idea, which didn't pass the giggle test but which no one, as far as I'm aware, actually refuted.) But that was thirty years ago, and it's more than possible that my memory is faulty or that the world has changed so that some important detail above is imprecisely stated or flat wrong. Corrections invited.]

I'm looking forward to seeing those corrections to Mark's article, and also to seeing any misconceptions of my own cleared up. I'll follow this debate with great interest.

*)I know oil isn't a major resource for electricity generation, but oil, coal and gas are still part of the same market. If the price of one of them goes up, so do the others. Oil dependency exacerbates the effect of our other fossil fuel dependencies. Plus, as Matt Yglesias notes "... any strategy to burn less gasoline -- electric cars, the "hydrogen economy," more mass transit, some combination of the three -- is going to require the production of more electricity."

I got the Dutch ballot lists for the European elections in the mail a few days ago. In the List Vote system, I can vote for any of several hundred candidates whose votes will primarily be assigned to the party list. If a candidate gets more than an X number of votes, he or she may get a seat in preference to the candidtates higher up the list. Political parties put their most important personalities at the top, giving them the best chance at gaining a seat in Parliament, but they like putting interesting or famous characters at the bottom of the list to gain attention and show these characters' endorsement of the party.

The list on the left takes this idea to extremes! The Partij voor de Dieren, "Party for the Animals", is a party whose platform is entirely based on animal rights, animal welfare and support for organic farming. "Kooks", I hear you say? If they are, then the Netherlands has quite a few kooks. The party narrowly missed getting a seat (out of 150) in the Dutch parliament. "Pig-hugging PETA members?" I hear you say...

Well, let's look at the bottom of the list. Who are these people?

At number 1, we find the party leader, Marianne Thieme. She's 30-ish and is the same person who nearly got a seat in the Dutch parliament last year. Other than that, I don't know that much about her. Let's go further down the list...

At 13, we find Paul Cliteur, formerly of the right-wing VVD. A jurist, columnist and philosopher known for his critique of Islam and multiculturalism. Not known as a woolly thinker, generally.
At 14, we find writer and painter Gerti Bierenbroodspot. I'm unfamiliar with her work.
At 15, we find another writer: Mensje van Keulen.
At 16: Belinda Meuldijk, a songwriter (the party's own page lists Maarten 't Hart, another writer, who unfortunately had to be scrapped from the list because he couldn't show a passport in time).
Seeing a pattern here?
At 17: Martin Gaus, owner of several dog training schools, writer of several books about dogs, and a presenter of animal programs on Dutch television. When Jeroen saw the list, he said "It's tempting to vote for Martin Gaus, just so I can say I did".
At 18: Jan Wolkers, one of the Netherlands best-loved writers, known internationally for Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight).
And at 19: Rudy Kousbroek, writer and essayist.

Now, one of my favorite statesmen, Vaclav Havel, is a writer, and he has done a great job as one of communist Czechoslovakia's foremost dissidents and the Czech Republic's first President. But this list looks like the party is aiming exclusively at support from the nation's literati. Are they the only ones who support animal rights, or just the only ones who will base their vote on that one issue to the exclusion of everything else?

(Note: while I was, uh, ruminating on this posting, I found out that this weblog had been added to the blogroll of A Fistful of Euros, in its "Living in Europe" section. I hope those of you coming here from there enjoyed this little Euro-political oddity!)

In the UK, the Monster Raving Loony Party used to be a good lightning rod for the disaffected. They could vote for a party that consisted of harmless nutters who were in it for laughs (or maybe that should read "critics wishing to expose the inherent sillyness of the political process"), safe in the knowledge that if they had any sensible policy, it would be by accident (but it would become law in 20 years time).
Since the death of its charismatic and fearless leader, Screaming Lord Sutch ("His views on whether there should be more than one Monopolies Commission also gave many pause."), the party has never been the same.

Without a leader who has Sutch's charisma, vision and sheer barking madness, the MRLP is spent. So who should replace him? Post in the comments.

And be nice. Don't say "Tony Blair".

Listening to news and current affairs radio is a bad habit that I should lose. A few minutes ago I heard a report by the station's UK correspondent sampling opinions from voters for the UK Independence Party. Asked why they voted UKIP, one voter had the gall to reply "I don't want to be in a totalitarian regime"!
Excuse me? Excuse me? Have you been arbitrarily arrested lately? Denied Habeas Corpus? Tortured, perhaps? Disenfranchised? Barred from travel, denied access to outside news sources?
A month ago, 10 countries that, less than two decades ago, had totalitarian regimes were finally allowed to be part of the EU, a prize that the democratic governments of these countries fought hard to qualify for. Several other countries including Turkey are still grasping for that brass ring, and one stumbling block for Turkey is its human rights record, which it is trying to improve just so it has better chance of joining. If any of these countries thought they were joining a totalitarian regime, would they bother?

There is a lot wrong with the EU. Improvements can certainly be made to the democratic representation and accountability. Some of the money that goes to the EU is very badly spent - the world would become a better place quickly if its agricultural subsidies were scrapped, for example. But anyone who seriously claims it's a totalitarian regime has is something very badly wrong with them.

And if totalitarianism offends you at all, UKIP is about the last party you should vote for. Here's what Johann Hari had to say about the UKIP:

Searchlight even alleges that UKIP's current national chairman and one of its leading candidates, Mike Nattrass, has been a member of the extreme right, pro-Apartheid, pro-Rhodesia New Britain Party.

UKIP boasts that it now requires all candidates to declare they are not racists. Yet they don't seem to try very hard to make sure these anti-racist declarations are accurate: Private Eye recently provided a summary of the public racism of UKIP's new star recruit, Robert Kilroy-Silk. "Pakistanis want to generate hate ... but then what else can we expect from Pakistan?" he asks. Iraqis are "not worth the life of one British soldier, not one. All they seem to do is moan, incessantly, about their lack of amenities". He raves against "pushy blacks" and "talentless Asians", and suggests that asylum- seekers should be "herded together" by the paras and "dumped on a secure slow boat to ... wherever".

Yup, liberal democracy is in great hands with these people.

Bananas sold in the EU are not, in fact, banned from being excessively curved. There's also no standard length for condoms.

Despite this misunderstanding, Bananas is still a pretty good Deep Purple album. I just hope Ian G didn't vote UKIP.

A good article by Frans Groenendijk (who posted in the comments here a week or so ago! Hi Frans!) about the success of Paul van Buitenen's Europe Transparent party in the European Elections. He calls it "the best thing that happened in Dutch politics in many many years" and he's right. Would that the British had had a candidate of van Buitenen's caliber to vote for, to channel their quite legitimate distrust of the EU-as-it-is-now into something constructive instead of having to vote for a bunch of dweebs whom Paul Schroeder described to me as "one evolutionary rung removed from the BNP" - and I'm not sure if he meant that UKIP were one rung above the BNP.

If I have one criticism of van Buitenen, it's that I think his portrayal of himself as an anti-politician looks disingenuous to me. I refuse to believe, for instance, that he didn't have a suit to wear on TV during the election night, and that he would have naively chosen to wear a hideous neon-green tie over his green lumberjack shirt, thinking that that would do. I think that was a deliberate act of political portrayal. But that's a minor grumble when I think of what he may be able to accomplish, and what his (and one of his comrades, writer Els de Groen)getting elected in the first place signifies. Let's wait and see.

(Update: I was right: van Buitenen does have a suit.)

[Note: I have a long-ish piece about webcomics in the works. While assembling my thoughts on that, I'm doing some linking to political stuff that I happen to find interesting]
[Note no. 2: if I was female and Johann Hari wasn't gay, I'd very much want to have his baby]
Johann Hari talks of the need to avoid despairing for the future of democracy in Iraq, and discusses some encouraging signs, focusing specifically on the heroic role that trade unions are playing in the process:

Here is a small illustration: two months ago Moqtada Sadr, the de facto leader of the Shia uprising, was leading his Army of Mehdi towards Nasiriyah . They stumbled across an aluminium plant and ordered the staff to evacuate, but the workers would not leave. Their trade union, the Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq, issued a statement saying their workers "refuse to evacuate their workplaces and turn them into battlefields".

The union rejected "the two poles of terrorism in Iraq" - the armed militias and the occupying forces - and insisted on a transition to a democratic Iraq. Here we have ordinary Iraqis refusing to allow yet another war to disrupt their lives, and they are greeted with total silence from progressive Brits.

(note: In Europe, trade unions typically are reduced to bickering about whether wages should go up 1 or 2 percentage points. In the US, as I understand it, they are discounted entirely, presumably because no one remembers what life was like a hundred years ago. This example shows what unions can be.)

Norman Geras reports that one of my favorite political blogs, Harry's Place, has vanished from the earth along with its host, Bloghouse, which must house a lot of blogs, because it has blog and house in the name. Eep!

This is a bit like the disappearance of Dave Winer's weblogging service a few weeks ago, only in this case the host's flesh-and-blood owner has also disappeared.

Norm says Harry

doesn't know if they have any chance of recovering the material but it looks very much as though they may have lost everything.

I'd help, but all I have is the RSS summaries of the past few weeks. No full posts on disk, alas.

(via Socialism in an Age of Waiting who are also sort of MIA, but that's only because they've decided to concentrate on the waiting and leave the socialism for a rainy day. And they heard the news from The Virtual Stoa. Yes we're learning to be thorough about our sourcing practices here at Waffle.)

Update: Of course, Archive.org has quite a bit of material.

Yay!

A well-researched, well-argued piece by Johann Hari about the totalitarian policies of Home Secretary David Blunkett, and Britain's failure to learn from the miscarriages of justice that came to light in the 1990s:

Twelve Muslim men are being held indefinitely in Belmarsh Prison. They are boxed into small cells for 22 hours a day. Their offence? They don't know, and nor do you. Under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2000, even their lawyers have no right to be told why they are being detained. After two years, there are no plans to charge them with any crime.

This is not punishment, it is judicial kidnapping. The canon of Western law - built upon habeas corpus - was designed to prevent precisely this arbitrary exercise of power. Blunkett sneers that only residents of NW3 would worry about such trivia.

The Home Secretary seems to have genuinely missed the point of civil liberties. By ensuring that the police and politicians are not just rounding up the usual suspects, proper judicial process actually makes everyone safer. When the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six were jailed, it wasn't only their lives that were ruined; real terrorists were left free to carry on murdering - and there are graveyards full of innocent people who can vouch for it. Blunkett's plan for constricting civil liberties is based on a trade-off - liberty for security - that does not work in reality.

(emphasis mine)

More from my personal Johann Hari Echo Chamber in a later post.

Another one from Johann Hari. I'm not too sure about this one, but I have to say it takes real balls for a young, left-leaning gay journalist to write in a gay magazine that

It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It’s a gay thing, baby, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.

Hari stacks the deck somewhat in favor of this daring thesis. Surveying European fascist leaders in the past thirty years, he includes in his count of fascists right-wing populists such as the late Pim Fortuyn and Joerg Haider. I don't care much for their anti-immigration platforms but considering them fascists is a bit over the top. Not that I'd be able to argue it, because the term "fascist" is treated as if everyone agrees what it means anyway. Strangely, Hari does not mention Filip Dewinter, Belgium's very succesful far-right leader (who does look a bit swish to me, but let's not go there), and refers to France's Jean-Marie LePen only as an "exception". That's a big exception!

Hari is on safer ground, though, when he discusses the British National Party, and seems to have done his research well when he looks at gay fascists in history. You know, the guys with the cool uniforms:

And this Gaystapo has an icon to revere, an alternative Fuhrer to worship: the lost gay fascist leader Ernst Rohm. Along with Adolf Hitler, Rohm was the founding father of Nazism. Born to conservative Bavarian civil servants in 1887, Ernst Rohm’s life began – in his view – in the “heroic” trenches of the First World War. Like so many of the generation who formed the Nazi Party, he was nurtured by and obsessed with the homoerotic myth of the trenches – heroic, beautiful boys prepared to die for their brothers and their country.

...

Rohm’s blatant, out homosexuality seems bizarre now, given the gay genocide that was to follow. He talked openly about his fondness for gay bars and Turkish baths, and was known for his virility. He believed that gay people were superior to straights, and saw homosexuality as a key principle of his proposed Brave New Fascist Order. ...[The SA] promoted an aggressive, hypermasculine form of homosexuality, condemning “hysterical women of both sexes”, in reference to feminine gay men.

This belief in the superiority of homosexuality had a strong German tradition that grew up at the turn of the twentieth century around Adolf Brand, publisher of the country’s first gay magazine. You could call it ‘Queer as Volk’: they preached that gay men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented an elite, warrior caste that should rule.

Hari then goes on to look at the historical links between Rohm and the modern Neo-Nazi movement, and the psychology of hypermasculinity underlying it. Fascinating. Read the whole thing. I hope he posts it on Harry's Place soon so we can enjoy a vigorous discussion of this.
Update: He has. And one of the first comments denounces it as a real stinker and makes similar points about Fortuyn to the one I made. Pass the popcorn!

If I had a cat, I'd be doing this myself: posting pictures of my cat just to fill in some time. But instead I'll make do with cat pictures from The Religious Policeman who treats his readers to an overdose of adorable cuteness to tide them over during his vacation, but also manages to pack in a lot of information about the place cats and dogs occupy in Saudi life, and gets a chilling point across with one of his captions:

By the way, I cannot be traced from these cats. They are long gone.

By the way: while I agree with the point made about camels and think it applies to camel drawings as well, this should not be seen as an excuse for writers to work camels into comic scripts. So be warned, Geir Strøm.

Work went well today. I may soon have time to jump on the "commenting on Michael Moore" bandwagon. Yes, I know it's on the opposite end of the cuteness spectrum from baby kittens, but brash ping-ponging between aesthetic experiences is a big part of what ROCR is about.

I haven't blogged much about politics in the past two weeks. If I have time, I'll explain this later today using a little Zen parable from my misspent days trekking through the Hillemayas wearing saffron robes and a shiny skin wig. However, in the absense of original political thinking cheap shots and deep thoughts along the lines of "injustice is bad", here are three new articles from Johann Hari about some of the issues of the day.

In The Golden Age of American Documentaries, Hari mentions two other documentary movies I should very much like to see:

Crooked Timber's Ted Barlow would rather cook lamb than argue with Glenn "Isntapundit" Reynolds' latest bit of bollocks. Can't say I blame him myself. MMM lamb.

He says that Michael Moore (who is responsible for writing and directing left-wing films of questionable accuracy) is the American version of the Iraqi rebel cleric al-Sadr (who is responsible for killing our soldiers and running a repressive fundamentalist regime in Fallujah). Etc., etc.

I could argue with this nonsense. But wouldn’t all of our time be better spent sharing a genuinely delicious recipe for braised lamb shanks in red wine? I think so.

The recipe is impossible to screw up and requires little attention. I usually make it for just two people, which means that I only cook two lamb shanks with the same quantities of vegetables and liquids. Since the skillet easily holds two lamb shanks, this is a one-dish meal for two people.

Lightly adapted from Cooks Illustrated.

6 lamb shanks (3/4 to 1 pound each), trimmed of excess fat
Salt
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 medium onions, sliced thick...

Via A Fistful of Euros:

A long and well-written article in the New York Review of Books, about the progress made by Turkey's prime minister Erdogan towards democracy and qualifying for EU membership. Short version: there's a long way to go, but the country's becoming freeer and wealthier.

What's noticeable about this is that Erdogan is an Islamist. Contrary to expectations at the time and popular belief in much of Europe, this has not stopped him from proving himself

more committed to democracy than any of the self-proclaimed "secular" leaders who misruled Turkey during the 1990s. He has secured passage of laws and constitutional amendments abolishing the death penalty and army-dominated security courts; he repealed curbs on free speech, and brought the military budget under civilian control for the first time in Turkish history. He authorized Kurdish-language broadcasting, swept aside thirty years of Turkish intransigence on the Cyprus issue, and eased Greek–Turkish tension so effectively that when he visited Athens in May, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis proclaimed that the two countries now enjoyed "a relation of cooperation based on mutual trust."

I don't really know that much about Turkey, but it will be interesting to read this article again in December and see how things have gone since it was posted.

Continuing on a topic (albeit not deliberately) that was raised in the comments here, David T at Harry's Place argues in favour of abolishing the mandatory life sentence for murder in the UK:

(Via Johann Hari at Harry's Place:)

Mark Lynas's blog about climate change looks like one to watch for people interested in environmental/global warming issues. I've only given it a brief glimpse, and can't tell yet if it's going to be like the Informed Comment of global warming, but if it were, that would be much needed.

One thing that jumped out at me is the design, with its threaded comment excerpts on the front page. Me likes.

Girl!
I wanna take you to a gay bar,
I wanna take you to a gay bar,
I wanna take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.

You're a superstar, at the gay bar.
You're a superstar, at the gay bar.
Yeah! you're a superstar, at the gay bar.
You're a superstar, at the gay bar.
Superstar.
Super, super, superstar

Right! You're MTV. Did you just hear anything you want to censor? But ofcourse:

Let's start a war, start a nuclear war...(the word war made inaudible)

*sigh* I have no words for this... How stupid does it get?

(Lyrics: "Gay bar" - Electric Six)

There's something deeply depressing about watching the American electoral process at work, even when you do so from a safe distance, without the dubious benefit of American newspapers, American TV and American hate radio, and even when the candidate who you, for lack of a better word, support, has a fighting chance. Ed Brayton nails why. I'm not going to quote a single word from it here; go there, read the whole thing, then read the whole weblog from the first post to the last (including the posts at Dispatches From The Culture Wars' old location, from which Ed has just moved). It's one of the best blogs out there. Every post is an education.

Update: After posting this, I saw that Ed had followed his post up with Speaking Truth to Power, in which he points out two organisations that help separate spin from sooth:

After the last entry, I feel like I should at least point out the few people who actually are making an effort to find the truth about statements made by the politicians. There are two websites that come immediately to mind, both of which I link to under news sources on my sidebar - Spinsanity and FactCheck.Org. Both sites are non-partisan and both of them take the ads and pronouncements and talking points of the two major party candidates and check them for accuracy.

Nosemonkey at Europhobia sums up the controversy over the nomination of Neelie Kroes to the European Commission and looks at the underlying problems in how the Commission is put together and confirmed....so that I don't have to. Thanks, Nosemonkey!

Oddly, "the Parliament can only approve or vote down the entire commission and cannot pick out individual candidates for veto." This could make for tough work for the new Commission president, Jos� Manuel Barroso. Not only has he had no say in who his subordinates are (they are nominated by individual member states and he has to work with what he's got), but he's also been lumbered with some dodgy-sounding ones.

Something needs to be re-thought, indeed. Sounds like a job for Super-Paul!

I don't know how many people reading this are Republican-voting Americans - probably not too many by now. My fault - whenever one shows up in the comments, I tend to give only short, snarky responses, or not respond at all. I have my reasons; let's just say they have to do with wanting to avoid too much emotional investment in political debate.
That doesn't mean I don't read those few comments that have come from you guys. I do, often more than once. And I do pay attention to substantial arguments coming from right-wingers elsewhere in the big ol' blogosphere.
Why do I poke my head out right now to mention this? Well, it just so happens that one of those right-wingers I pay attention to is Sebastian Holsclaw of Obsidian Wings, and he has something to say :

My message to Republican leaders is this, either listen to the moral implications, or at least learn Dan Rather's lesson. The blogosphere is beginning to focus its attention on this issue... Put it to rest now. Admit that you hadn't fully thought through the implications of this small section of the bill and move on. It would be the height of foolishness to risk the American public's backing for the War on Terror on a practice which is both highly immoral and typically unhelpful. We are going to have to steel the public's nerves for a lot of things to come in the future. It would be a shame to waste time and energy defending the unhelpful and indefensible instead of dealing with other issues which are highly useful to the war and merely tough to defend.

Read the whole thing, and then start taking action so that this thing is off the table before the election.

Shot by Both Sides never fails to deliver good snark:

Meanwhile, Mark Chapman has been refused parole after a "review of records". Clearly they didn't review any of John Lennon's post-1973 records, otherwise they'd have granted him an official pardon.

On the Internets, it only takes a day to get from the sex-drive-destroying documents detailing the alleged sexual harrassment by some troglodyte TV personality or other, to this: a new Psychopatia Sexualis entry with its own website. Don't click either of these links if you're a vegetarian - your dietary options are limited enough without the desire to ever eat a falafel again being knocked out of you.

(Via Boing Boing without whom I'd be a lot more productive)

From the "most of what you and I believe is wrong" files:

Matthew White's history site is essential reading. It gives a thorough account of the 20th Century's wars and massacres, answering such questions as "Who was worse, then, Stalin or Hitler?", "What killed more people, gun control or Christianity?", "Who and what were the most over- and underrated people and events of the 20th Century?" and "What are the parellels between the USA and the Roman Empire?" (that last one with a bit of future history thrown in! Yay!) Not bad at all, for an amateur.
Interestingly, White concludes that there isn't any religious, racial or ideological pattern to the atrocities of the century of genocide - the factors are all across the board. He considers it to make more sense to think of the slaughter that took place between 1900 and 1999 as a single historical event unfolding over time, just like the Medieval European Migration, the American Great Migration and the Great Vowel Shift. He calls it the "Hemoclysm", a name that I can see as having staying power. I'll be wasting spending quite a bit of time on this site.

Via Shot by Both Sides (whose RSS feed appears to be on the fritz, or at least Bloglines no longer gets it), via Sussurration.

(This Modern World, from Salon, via Atrios, although Talking Points Memo had it too)

Update: The article can now be found at Truthout, in full, registration-free

The New York Times' Ron Suskind describes George W Bush's metamorphosis into Nehemiah Scudder:

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

This makes my head spin: from an alternate reality in which Gore won the Presidency of the USA, comes a critique of an imagined alternate reality in which Bush won the presidency of the USA:

Following up on this post and the widening bruhaha over Suskind's NYTarticle*):

I'd buy the T-Shirt if someone made it to professional standards and the profits went to an anti-Bush cause.

Linked primarily so I won't forget to read them properly in the morning, Henry at Crooked Timber highlights some articles I oughtta go read.

Via Nosemonkey at Europhobia:

Are you a neoconservative? Take this quiz to find out.
It's only 10 questions, covering all foreign policy bases, and it's placed me correctly (as a liberal internationalist - I'd have liked to see more granular results to find out if there were any questions that I'd answered like a neoconservative or a realist would have done). I've had one other online quiz declare me a George Bush Republican so I've got a bit wary of these quizzes, but this one seems accurate enough.

Josh Marshall gets to the bottom of Pat Robertson's account of a conversation with President Bush in which Bush poo-poo'ed the notion that there'd be significant*) casualties in the war in Iraq:

Candor requires me to say that, as a general matter, I don't trust this guy as far as I could throw him. I certainly wouldn't put in any stock in his say-so if he were accusing someone I supported.
...But in this case, it's sort of an admission against interest. Robertson's no Kerry supporter. He has no interest in hurting the president.

And even if you assume that Robertson is acting out of some sort of intra-Republican pique, he's said this before -- and not at a time when the statement would be quite so politically charged.
...
When he spoke a few months ago, Robertson's point was that President Bush was sure the war would be a painless one.

That sounds a lot like our president.

Robertson had that conversation. Don't doubt it.

Abu Aardvark makes some predictions:

If Kerry wins, and Chalabi joins with Sadr to form an effective mass movement against the political regime which Kerry helps create in Iraq, I predict that certain elements of the current neo-conservative right will side with this Chalabist insurgency over the American-backed regime.
...
If Kerry wins, and there is a terrorist attack against the US homeland in the first year, conservatives will howl for blood, if not impeachment. There will be no rallying around the president...

... and more. I'll hang a scorecard over my monitor on November 3.

Via Europhobia: The Nation lists a 100 undisputable instances of mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, corruption and simple disconnection from reality on the part of the Bush administration. Every one of them properly sourced, and divided into the categories "Iraq", "Terrorism", "National Security", "Cronyism and corruption", "The Economy", "Education", "Healthcare", "Environment", "Rights and Liberties" "Flip Flops", (Bush's) "Biography". Essential reading for those outside the reality-based community who still argue "but Bush has accomplished a lot, really".
It's hard to tell which of the 100 facts is the most damning, but try Nosemonkey's shortlist if you're in a hurry.