Category: The Dish

Friendly Fire

It happens in wartime; it’s tragic; it’s embarrassing. But why did the Pentagon have to lie about it? It’s the lying that undermines alliances, not the incidents. The Telegraph rightly vents here:

It is the Pentagon’s resistance to assisting in L/Cpl Hull’s inquest that is the most disturbing aspect of the case. As the United States’ most loyal ally, frankly we deserve better. The Ministry of Defence has presented a feeble spectacle, wringing its hands but unwilling to press the issue with Washington. Then, out of the blue, the video is leaked to a Labour-supporting tabloid (which, to its credit, defied Pentagon threats and published it). If it proves to be the Government that leaked it in an attempt to bounce Washington into action, what a depressing reflection that is on New Labour’s methods – and our alleged special relationship with Washington.

Clive Davis notices similar spluttering at the conservative Spectator:

There is little grasp in Washington of the resentment felt in this country by people who are instinctively pro-American but also rightly reluctant for Britain to be treated as the 51st State, a ploddingly dependable Delaware off the coast of mainland Europe … Each time America treats its most trusted ally in this way, the harder it becomes for Atlanticists to take a stand against those who, in increasing numbers, would like to see Britain put some distance between itself and the US.

Bush and Cheney have managed to lose even the British Tories. And they hope to win over the world’s Muslims?

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

Welcome to 2004! Your rate of catching up to reality has been increasing. Information has a way of doing that. I will over-look the fact that you called Joseph Wilson a two-bit, irrelevant jerk and a political bug. After all you were just articulating what the administration thought of him and not what you think, right? Good. No, the point I want to make is that you are presenting a false choice: Cheney is, in fact, both arrogant and scared. He was arrogant in thinking that he could use the resources of the most powerful nation on Earth to pursue a strategy of global dominance in petroleum production by trumping up a false story of an imminent Iraqi threat and he then became scared that the deception would be discovered by brave reporters investigating the only honest man to emerge from that period.

If you need somebody to draw this out in picture form then please let me know.

More on these lines here. Suffice to say I do not agree that the war in Iraq was about "global dominance in petroleum production."

A Welsh Prayer

A reader writes:

You have made me very happy recently by 1) posting the YouTube I sent you of the Barbarians and the Best Try Ever – note that all the key players were Welsh, and 2) posting that picture of the Welsh team ahead of the match with Ireland. Which they of course lost.

However, this is what I imagine they were praying in the photo, and I imagine it’s pretty similar before every Six Nations game but one:

Dear God, it would be nice if we win this one
But if we don’t, at least let us beat England,
And if we do, please let me be in the team.
Yes, that’s it, I’ll play my heart out on this one
And hope we win.
But if I have to choose between winning this or beating England,
I’ll take beating England.
Amen.

Thinking Unconsciously

Maybe our best decisions are not the ones we think most about:

Dijksterhuis and colleagues asked volunteers to read brief descriptions of four hypothetical cars and pick the one they’d like to buy after mulling it over for 4 minutes. The researchers made the decision far simpler than it is in real life by limiting the descriptions to just four attributes such as good gas mileage or poor legroom. One of the cars had more plusses than the others, and most participants chose this car.

But when the researchers made the decision more complex by listing 12 attributes for each car, people identified the best car only about 25% of the time – no better than chance. The real surprise came when the researchers distracted the participants with anagram puzzles for 4 minutes before asking for their choices. More than half picked the best car. The counterintuitive conclusion, Dijksterhuis says, is that complex decisions are best made without conscious attention to the problem at hand.

Just don’t tell the president. It will only encourage him.

Quote for the Day

"Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism. Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative.

My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both," – Jeffrey Hart, one of the eminences grises of the American conservative movement (and teacher of Dinesh D’Souza). Jim Kalb comments here.