A retraction: New Yorkers are polite

[Daniel]

One or two readers have, ahem, replied to my suggestion that New Yorkers are not polite. Michael Hauptman goes one further and destroys my theory altogether.

He writes:

I’m sure you meant it humo(u)rously

Er, yes.

And then he continues:

But the truth is somewhat otherwise. I would like to point you to this little gem, in which NY ranked as the politest city in the world. Yes, the world.

He then links to this.

I withdraw. Unfortunately this leaves me with only nine things in my list. So I add:

10. Billy Beane.

Dissing cousins

[Clive]

If there’s one thing that has driven me mad about American conservatism lately, it’s the spate of columns and books banging on about the imminent "end of Europe". Show me the the phrase "death spiral" one more time, and I’ll tear up all my back issues of National Review. All right, the continent faces its share of problems, demographic and otherwise, and there’s enough dumb anti-Americanism washing around to keep Michael Moore supplied with hamburgers for many lifetimes. But let’s have a little more nuance, please, and less of this kind of talk radio hype:

In brief: Europeans are lazy, unwilling to fight for anything and willing to surrender to anyone; they are fascinated by decadence; they favour the bureaucracy over the corporation; they are unable to assimilate their immigrants; they no longer have children; they no longer produce much of cultural or scientific significance; they have lost their religious vocation and they no longer hold their lives to be meaningful.

Behind the shrill tone, I sometimes sense a desperate urge to forget some of the difficulties America faces at home and in certain corners of the globe. (Is unchecked Mexican immigration a glowing example of multiethnic politics?) I haven’t yet got a copy of Mark Steyn’s bestseller, "America Alone", but veteran German journalist Josef Joffe – a Fellow at the Hoover Institution – offers some perspective in the New York Sun:

He has got punch, wit, and smarts, and if he were teaching in a North American humanities department, they would send him off to "sensitivity training" for life, without parole….This book is a relentlessly funny and felicitous polemic, but as in any polemic, its sparkling insights don’t quite add up to a watertight brief. Sentences are honed to the sharpest, wittiest point, but, in the end, they leave you breathless and with a sense of de trop. You begin to scratch your head once your look past the sheer delight of reading.

Above all, Joffe  doesn’t buy the "Eurabia" thesis, which has become common currency in certain parts of the Right:

There are only 20 million self-righteous and embittered Muslims in Europe — and 430 million soi-disant Euro-weenies. It will take a while before the former overwhelm the latter — a couple of hundred years at least. Meanwhile, these secular and Christian folks are not amoebae or lemmings, driven to their demise by forces they neither understand nor control. If September 11, 2001, was no wake-up call, July 7, 2005, in Britain was, and so were the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam and a spate of foiled terror attacks since then.

Those Euros are beginning to see multiculturalism as an unforeseen passport to "parallel universes" in their inner and outer cities; they are taking a hard look at their mosques, and what is taught in them; and they are tightening up on immigration. The new buzzword is "integration," which is a more correct moniker for "assimilation." Nor is America as exceptional as Mr. Steyn would have us believe. Berkeley is more like Berlin than Boise when it comes to the siren call of multiculturalism and "Otherism."

None of this is to say the dangers are imaginary. History hasn’t ended. But some of the Cassandras have a habit of sounding as crudely deterministic as any old school Marxist.

Patricia Barber, diva

[Clive]

The woman is on a roll right now. It’s hard to describe the music of Chicago singer-pianist Patricia Barber. Maybe Diana Krall meets Joni Mitchell comes close. I posted "Gotcha" on my own site not long ago. Apologies if you’ve heard it before; I really can’t resist sharing it with a wider audience. (Try to ignore the chat at the start and in the middle.)

Barber’s latest album, "Mythologies" (inspired by Ovid, no less) is my favourite release of the past year. If you’ve never heard her before, however, her previous CD, "Live: A Fortnight in France", is an even better place to start. As you can see from her fascinating travel diary, she’s been in Russia this month. Before that, she and her musicians got robbed on the train to Amsterdam: "The heist was brilliantly executed, like a magic show." Can’t imagine that happening to the likes of J-Lo. (Does she even know what a train looks like?)

With the troops

[Clive]

Yes, I’m extremely gloomy about Iraq, yet I’m also aware that it’s easy to pontificate on the subject without bothering to listen to the men and women at the sharp end. One source of useful information is Bill Roggio, a blogger who has been embedded with US forces. Via Glenn Reynolds comes a dispatch in which Roggio weighs up the successes and failures of liaison work between Marines and Iraqi soldiers in Fallujah.

Among the positive news about the performance of the Iraqis:

The soldiers are gathering their own intelligence, are planning and executing operations independently. They are able to adjust planning on the fly. And perhaps most importantly, they are independently developing intelligence section[s] at the company level. Counterinsurgency is largely a war of intelligence.

And a couple of ominous negatives:

Some soldiers and officers haven’t been paid in over a year. Some soldiers are talking about leaving the Army if they are not paid soon. The lower ranks strongly suspect senior officers are pocketing their pay. Soldiers that have left the military are also kept on the rolls and their paychecks are often pocketed by officers and ministry officials….

As there is no central banking system, soldiers must physically take their paychecks home. They are forced to travel home unarmed (the weapons are needed at the units, and there is fear the soldiers would sell the weapons), and the soldiers become targets for death squads.

Good to get some boots-on-the-ground perspective. I’m trying not to read too much into the fact that high in the list of plus points is that the Iraqis have a better understanding of the language and customs than the Marines. I hope that’s not the sound of someone whistling in the dark.

The other L-word

[Clive]

(Note to libertarians: I’m an agnostic on the issue, so after reading this post, send any hate-mail to David W, not to me. OK? Now read on…)

WillettsAlex’s very interesting reflections on the prospects for libertarianism reminded me of the comment by senior Tory politician, David "Two Brains" Willetts, in an interview earlier this year:

Someone described a libertarian as being someone in favour of childless immortals. My personal and autobiographical definition of conservatism is a free marketeer with children.