Advenit
Indeed. A merry Christmas to all, and Happy New Year.
« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 »
Indeed. A merry Christmas to all, and Happy New Year.
I've tried to put that idiotic religious hatred Bill out of mind but it keeps coming back to niggle. On Today this morning I heard a Minister of the Crown express the view that freedom of speech carried a duty to respect - her word - the beliefs of others.
Red alert. Enforcing respect is not the same thing as prevention of hate speech. Maybe she was just being careless with words at the end of a long interview, but to say that the day after a play has been forced off the stage by religiously-inspired bullying sends as bad a message as possible. Up till now I have been inclined to defend the Government, for all its faults, but the badness of this Bill could make the difference for me between voting Labour and spoiling the ballot. (I'll bet that's got Tony quaking in his boots...)
I could go off on an extended rant about the evils of multiculturalism (at least in its actually existing form) and PCness, but other bloggers do that much better than I could and besides it's late.
Why can't we just all get along?
'Hello, could I have three tickets for the Messiah please?'
'He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!'
That conversation did not happen when I booked, and ticket agents for Handel's greatest work probably got bored with the joke years ago. Last night I went to do my bit for provincial arts by going to see the English Symphony Orchestra perform at Coventry Cathedral. It's not a great venue - the acoustics lack something - but frankly that's quibbling. This was the first time I've seen the oratorio in full and live. If you haven't yet, you haven't lived. IMHO.
The soprano, Claire Ormshaw, deserves a special mention. She has the kind of face, and the kind of voice, for which the word 'ravishing' was invented. Pace Anthony Flew, the Argument From Intelligent Design is a very poor argument for deism, let alone Christianity, but if it were a worthwhile argument Claire Ormshaw would be a significant feature of it. 'I know that my Redeemer liveth', indeed.
She's planning to be at the London Handel festival next year. Just thought you ought to know.
So I'll just link.
- Clive Davis has been posting some very good stuff lately. Here's one example from a fine addition to the blogosphere, on the whole Iraqi-army-disbandment thing.
- On a related subject, Mick Hartley quotes from the Times. I particularly liked the robust views of Abdul Sahib: the mystery and beauty of freedom is that it gives a few million like him the same weight as the enlightened types who sit in universities. And just as well.
- I could probably link to every other column by David Aaronovitch, but this one, on the Britishness Test, will have to do. I look forward to mentioning the bins to my Australian neighbour at some point towards 2012.
- And at this time of year, I always think of this poem. It hits the right note.
'What else can I answer,
When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?'
What indeed. RTWT.
Iran and China are the most serious medium-to-long-term threats the Allies have to deal with. Both bear a family resemblance to pre-1914 Germany: repressive, authoritarian militaristic states with expansionist ambitions, contained by the dominant world powers. Both - like Imperial Germany - have had chances to reform themselves down more productive paths.
And like Imperial Germany they have not done so. I forget now who it was who said that in 1848 Germany reached a turning point and failed to turn: the revolution of that year could have given a decisive liberalising impetus, but the combination of unrealistic socialist revolutionaries, impractical liberal idealists and (above all) unimaginative and thuggish autocrats was fatal to Germany's chance of achieving the happy balance of a British-style constitution. Germany had at least two later chances - at the time of the struggle between Parliament and Bismarck in the 1860s, then again on Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 - but the old regime was too set in its ways to get off the long slide. The ultimate victim was European civilisation, which was mortally wounded in 1914 and finished off in 1945. (The Americans resurrected a version of it, partly for their own purposes, but it was a mere shadow of the original).
The Fairy Godmother of History gave the Chinese regime three chances. (Three, of course.) Tiananmen was the first: the Falun Gong cult the second: Hong Kong the third. (I take it as a given that China will continue trying to stifle HK's freedoms: if I'm wrong on that feel free to correct me.) In each case the regime was asked a question, but showed no sign of recognising that it had any option other than repression. The regime is not reformable any longer, if it ever was: it has been shown to be interested only in the first stage of reform - the kinds of reform that increase the efficiency of the system without giving up anything essential.
Iran has had its chances too. The death of Khomeini, the elections of 2000 and the regime change in Iraq all gave the regime a possibility for internal reform and - hand-in-hand with that - international co-operation and even amity. The Fairy Godmother was not given house room, however, and she's unlikely to return.
The great virtue of the West is that we usually get her message, if not at the first time of asking: authoritarian, nationalistic thug-states don't, and so procure their own ruin. Which wouldn't be a problem if they didn't take so much else - of beauty and value - with them into the night.
the Catholics. The Archbishop of Cardiff was on Newsnight just now and actually managed to state a moral case clearly on the issue of the debate today about living wills. I'm not a Catholic myself (I just think like one), but it has to be said that they sometimes seem to be virtually the only powerful organisation in this country with a really well-grounded moral sense - for the rest, it's mostly a rather narrow utilitarianism.
Harry has had a lot to say about the proposed law against incitement to religious hate and I don't have much to add except to say the following to any thin-skinned types out there who get upset when their religion is abused:
Grow up.
Now, I want the translation.
'The Jews of Gibraltar are the only Jewish community to sing the anthem in Hebrew, asking not only for the Queen to be saved, but also "her husband".'
Had to cut lunch short today due to a bomb scare. Irritating because I had to finish half a glass of wine in half a minute on my way to the door, and one just can't enjoy it that way.
We were ushered away from the scene by Community Support Officers. CSOs aren't liked by the regular police, I believe, but on this occasion I for one was quite glad to see them about.
It is ironic, though, that London is the terrorists' target of choice. These plots come along every few months, usually with London as the presumed target. Michael Moore said of 9/11 that the victims weren't Bush voters - the usual parochial idiocy. But there would be some irony in a terrorist attack in London, if one assumes that terrorism is a mere symptom of anger about the war, since in London the population tends to be more anti-war than virtually anywhere else in Britain.
But stuff happens, doesn't it? I remember reading in Martin Gilbert's historical atlas of the Israeli-Arab conflict that the infant mortality rate in the West Bank was 7% before 1967. By the early '80s it was just over 2%. Martin Gilbert is strongly pro-Israel, but that needn't necessarily mean he's lying... Of course some of those kids whose lived probably grew up to be suicide bombers. Just another sick joke we played on ourselves.
