Month: October 2007

British politics hasn’t been this exciting for over a decade. In two weeks, the parties have switched positions in the polls and the Conservatives have their biggest lead over Labour in 15 years. Labour hated Blair by the end of his tenure; but they’re beginning to realize why they put up with him for so long. Some Blairites are already stirring things up for Brown. William Rees-Mogg surveys the new – and young – Tory team:

This young group of Cameron, Hague, Osborne, Fox, Gove and Johnson – there are others of promise – are individually more than a match for the Labour ministers they shadow. I find them impressive; they have real political talents; several of them, particularly Mr Gove and Mr Cameron himself, are natural speakers.

They are people of serious political beliefs. They share a liberal-conservatism that reminds me of Keith Joseph and Edward Boyle. Their average age is still only 42; they have the prospect of four full parliaments ahead. I cannot remember a time since the early 1960s when any party had as strong a core of young talents in Parliament.

David Cameron is five years younger than Barack Obama. If an election were held today, he’d be prime minister. No one running, by the way, is related by blood or marriage to any previous prime minister. No one’s wife is running to inherit the country. But, hey, Britain is a mature meritocracy.

I watched Barbet Schroeder’s new documentary on Jacques Verges over the weekend. If you enjoy watching films that do not insult the intelligence and have a clear moral backbone without engaging in moral grandstanding, you’ll get a lot out of this film. Verges – adored by many of the interviewees – emerges as a monster of a kind – a proud supporter of the murder of innocents for political purposes. The film doesn’t flinch from this – and the horrifying calm of Verges as he responds to questions about his close connections to former Nazis and the international terrorist, Carlos, is the riveting performance of a sociopath.

But what it also reveals is that terrorism itself – especially in its modern variety – is rooted in the deepest sense of indignity and dishonor that afflicts many cultures reduced to servility by colonialism or indigenous pathologies. Verges’ profound anger from growing up in the developing world and righteous resistance to the French occupation of Algeria fuels his career of defending evil in the courtroom. You can see in this movie how violence begets more violence, how evil propels more evil, and how easy it is in advancing a cause to become morally corrupted by anger. A legal defense of terrorists is necessary; but a defense that also celebrates the guilty is one that tips over into evil as well. In our current war, we have to somehow retain a balance between acknowledging the evil of the enemy, while never losing sight of our own moral vulnerability as well. This requires constant self-assessment and unending self-awareness. It’s not easy. And this film reminds us of how hard it is.

Legal Theory Blog explains it all for you:

The reason why analytic philosophers (and similarly mathematicians and cognitive scientists) have a difficult time dressing themselves or dress poorly is that the satisfaction of any sentence involving the "goes with" relation is not finitely decidable. There is no algorithm by which one can in a finite amount of time, much less in the morning before you are too late for class, decide with deductive certainty whether an outfit is sharp and properly accessorized. Now, there are rules which by which we can rule out entire classes of ordered pairs, e.g., let x be a member of the class of checked clothing and y be a member of the class of striped clothing, it is fairly trivial to show that for all such x and all such y, Gxy must be false (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to provide a proof). But for the general case there is no finitely executable decision procedure such that for any two arbitrary articles of clothing one may determine the satisfaction of G.

(Hat tip: Harry.)

English rugby union team supporters jubilate after the rugby union World Cup semi final match England versus France, 13 October 2007 near ‘Gare du Nord’ in Paris. England won the match 14 to 9. By Joel Saget/AFP/Getty.

The Shiite power-broker vents:

"The foreign security companies working in Iraq belittle innocent Iraqi citizens. The occupying forces do the same in some of their operations, adding to the criminal acts of the takfiris [Sunni militants]."

Here’s a reminder of how clued in our commander-in-chief has been on the subject:

(Hat tip: Juan Cole and Greg Djerejian.)

It’s so easy to talk to him about something he doesn’t want to hear:

Bartlett recalled: "The Cheneys aren’t into small talk… So finally I said… ‘I just wanted to raise a couple issues.’ Kind of got out some perfunctory stuff — ‘you’re going to be going here, you’re going to be doing that.’ And he was just kind of nodding at me. And I said, ‘There is one issue we need to talk about. We had heard that maybe, you know, that your daughter was going to join the campaign trail, going to be on the campaign trail with you. I just want to let you know — perfectly fine, but I just want you to know that the press is going to really focus on this, they’re going to maybe intrude more into your lives than you may be prepared [for]. Well, I just wanted to put that on the table for you.’

"And the vice president looks at me," Bartlett said and, in a decent Cheney impersonation, quoted him: " ‘We won’t be talking about my daughter.’ I said, ‘Okaaay, thank you very much.’"

You begin to realize why no one was able to point out that there was an insurgency in Iraq for a little over three years.

A reader adds:

It is unbefuckinglievable that someone would say unfuckingbelievable. The stress test is tautological, it isn’t just that the stress follows where fucking would normally be inserted, it is that fucking SHOULD always be inserted prior to the stress. It is a phonetic necessity for the use of fucking to have its full impact.

Another explains:

Obviously your reader isn’t familiar with the "except after ‘un-‘" exception to the Fucking Stress Test. Drop prefixes before applying the test.

I guess if I haven’t yet been blocked from most expletive-leery sites, I am now.

Unimpressed by his address to the Freedom From Religion Conference:

Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again…

There were a scattered few who applauded wildly at every mention of bombing the Iranians, but the majority were stunned into silence. People were leaving — I heard one woman sing a few bars of "Onward, Christian soldiers" as she left to mock his strategy. The questions were all angry or disputative, and were all dismissed with comments about the audience’s intelligence. The answers were always, "War, war, war," and that we weren’t good atheists if we didn’t agree with murder as the answer. He seemed unable to comprehend that people could despise and oppose all religion, Christian, Moslem, or otherwise, yet have no desire to triumph by causing physical harm to the believers.

"By now, it’s clear that "We don’t torture" is going to be George Bush’s equivalent to "I am not a crook" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"–an embarrassingly transparent, obviously untrue statement that the speaker never would have even made in the first place if he hadn’t been obligated to deny something that everybody had already figured out was the case," – Phil Nugent.