Wis[s]e Words

The Dave Osler drinking game

Published on May 20, 2009

The Dave Osler drinking game, as inspired by this post:

A glass of your favourite for every time Dave brings up a pointless anecdote from the seventies.
Another glass for noticing some current political development unfavourably. The more scolding and po-faced the tone, the stronger you can make your drink.
Just half a glass for the inevitable tedious history lesson of disjoined examples of why this development is bad; you need to save your liver.
Nasty, unnecessary sneer at Respect or the SWP? Just a sip.
Empty the bottle when you come to the last paragraph and Dave’s conclusion is that we need a true socialist movement and therefore you need to vote Labour “through gritted teeth” or otherwise.

That’s it, every Dave Osler domestic electionering post ever. Drink plenty of water before you go to bed and have fun with your inevitable hangover the next morning.

Myth Conceptions

Published on May 19, 2009

In an otherwise standard post about the misguided longing of readers for an imagined Golden Age of book publishing, Robert McCrum

Myth Three: In the good old days, books were longer, and more demanding. Today, given the minuscule attention span of the Twitter Age, the classics of yesteryear will inevitably slip off the modern reader’s radar. This is simply not true. For every mammoth Dickens or Henry James (and yes, there are plenty of those), there were also miracles of brevity. The Great Gatsby is barely 60,000 words long. Most Graham Greene novels come in at about 220 pages; Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is barely 175 pages in my edition. With the exception of 1984, George Orwell rarely wrote more than 250 pages. Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant first book, Running in the Family, is scarcely 180 pages; Elizabeth Taylor’s marvellous novel The Wedding Group just 230 pages. And so on.

What’s interesting is that this supposedly common “myth conception” (thank you Robert Asprin!) is the direct inverse of a common complaint of older science fiction readers. Hang out at any sf blog or forum and sooner or later you’ll hear some old fart complaining about how nobody writes short books anymore like they did in the Golden Age when a novel had a good idea, great characters and a proper plot and only needed 150 pages to do so! Readers who sample these classics without the benefit of nostalgia will quickly notice how shallow most of them actually were, with cardboard characters and barely developed plots, but that never stopped the old farts. One wonders what the current science fiction and fantasy reader, having grown up with fat fantasy bricks and 700 page space operas will moan about in thirty years….

How torture was used to sell the War on Iraq

Published on May 18, 2009

We now know (and had suspected earlier) that the bush regime used torture to “find” links between Iraq and Al-Quida. This “evidence” was to be used to justify the invasion of Iraq, with various stories about Al-Quida conencteds planted in the (usually pliant) media. Alex lays out the timetable:

But what strikes me as interesting is that it corresponds well with the PR-driven schedule for the famous dossiers and the run-up to war in general. Recall the “Downing Street Memo”, written in late July. The facts and intelligence were being fixed around the policy. This culminated in the first coordinated spin drive in the autumn. At the same time as Abu Zubeydah was being lashed to the board, the White House Iraq Group and the Iraq Communications Group were being established to coordinate transatlantic PR operations. The first dossier would be launched in September. Interestingly, I’m seeing a spike in search requests for both organisations.

A second wave of propaganda activity was then launched in the spring as the key UN and parliamentary votes approached and the military time-table counted down. And, sure enough, there was a second bout of torture; on this occasion, extra torture was approved by Donald Rumsfeld before the authorisation was taken back.

Start with the outcome you want, structure your process to get these answers, then repackage and sell the polished turds to suckers while omitting the gruesome details ; it’s amazing how much the selling of the War on Iraq resembles what was happening in American finance in the same period. The moral of both is to never assume shit is shinola just because some well respected source tells you so. On a more serious note, this is more evidence that torture does work, just not in the way 24 wants us to believe. The Bush thugs wanted links between Al-Quida and Iraq and they got them. That these links were made up by people desperate to avoid more “simulated drowning” was one of those details omitted in the breathless NYT writeups about meeting Mohammed Atta in Praque.

Stephen, you ignorant slut!

Published on May 15, 20091 Comment

In a week that’s designed to showing the folly of taking the opinions of your favourite writers (*cough* LoisMcMasterBujold *cough*) or entertainers too seriously, Stephen Fry has decided to up the ante by blowing off the public anger about the way members of parliament have been fiddling their expenses. His comments on what he characterised as “this rather tedious bourgious obsession with whether or not [MPs] charge for their wisteria” could’ve only been made by somebody whose bank account is comfortably in the six or seven figures. He scolds that we should concentrate on the things that “really matter” rather than this “journalistic made-up frenzy”, but then he is unlikely to ever again get into a position where he’ll have to explain a discrepancy of five pounds to a bored department of work and pensions civil servant who is going to decide whether or this means he’ll lose his benefits or just has to pay a fine he can’t afford.

The point is that after twelve years of Labour government, inequality is at its highest since the sixties while the MPs and Labour ministers supposed to look out for the poor and the common people have been stuffing their face. Millions of people have to survive on wages or benefits of less than 20,000 per year without any expense account and when they “forget” to declare income or get slightly more benefits than they’ve got a right to, whether through their own fault or not, they get prosecuted to the full extent of the law for it. And all this time, with succesive work and pensions ministers talking tough about taking on benefit cheats, MPs of all parties felt entitled to not just their sixty grand salary and very favourable expense account but to every dirty trick that could squeeze a few more pounds out of the taxpayer. It’s not just getting your 1500 quid new telly reimbursted, it’s getting sweetheart deals for your second home, building miniature property empires, getting rich out of being in parliament. The worst example being one T. Blair, now worth several millions on the back of the contacts made during his premiership.

What’s we’ve seen these last twelve years in parliament is a frenzy of corruption and greed mirroring the corruption and greed in high finance; it’s no accident that Brown’s economic policy has always revolved around the financial sector. Even before they got into power it was obvious New Labour had been seduced –had willingly thrown itself in the arms of — this sort of Cool Brittania view of a classless society where everybody is rich, young and has a job doing something interesting in new media or finance or property. A New Labour MP is somebody who wanted to be a banker or stockbroker but was too stupid for it, who compares himself to them rather than to the rest of us and it’s this attitude that has lead directly to this widescale expense fiddling.

It’s not the expenses therefore, it’s the culture, of having one law for the rich and another for everybody else. To say it’s all a media hype isn’t just downright stupid, it’s dangerous. This corruption needs to be rooted out if Britain stands a chance of solving its problems.

Comment of the Day: Blasphemy!

Published on May 14, 2009

James Nicoll:

I hear when Christ returns, he will be bearing a copy of [Duke Nukem Forever] in one hand and a copy of Final Dangerous Visions in the other.

He’s wrong of course, it’ll be Last Dangerous Visions. Also:

The Bible with a creator’s commentary track would be interesting.

“OK, what you have to understand about this next section is that I gave Moses a map, a compass and a set of directions, all of which he managed to leave on his dresser back in Egypt. Then he blamed Me because he wouldn’t admit he was lost for the next forty years.”

Both quotes coming from a typically freewheeling conversation sparked by Neil Gaiman’s somewhat overwrought’s George R.R. Martin is not your bitch post. Fanboy entitlement can be scary, but the view of the writer as artiste dishing out goods to the grateful plebs from on high isn’t nice either.