Caffeine Notes

2006-01-13T01:22:00.000Z

Respect
Not much to say about Tone's latest crusade, except that I couldn't let my housemate's appearance in the Western Mail slip by unnoticed.

But it reminds me of a hilarious Bill Deedes article that I mentioned more than a year ago, in which the nonogenarian conservative argues youths are much the same as they've always been:

"On the night of my 21st birthday in London, I can remember half a dozen of us playing rugger in Jermyn Street. Luckily, the police were elsewhere, for we were in helmet-nicking mood..."

2006-01-09T17:01:00.000Z

A Sectarian Welfare Function?
Derry City Council want to donate some wasteland to a local GAA club so they can build a second pitch, thus transforming a dead loss into something positive for the local community. The land is worth an estimated £240,000, though I presume this is rather notional since it is still wasteland. It is undoubtedly a Pareto improvement, and, since it's wasteland, there's presumably very little opportunity cost.

Whatever social welfare function you use, I don't think you could raise an objection to this. That is until you get to Northern Ireland and people like Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry DUP MP).

When will the small-minded pricks who blight the Northern Ireland polity leave this imagined zero-sum universe? It's time they rubbed out their sectarian welfare functions and pencilled in a social welfare function.

2006-01-06T16:00:00.000Z

The demise of the Bulldozer
The coverage of Sharon’s demise (I know he’s not dead yet, but he is for political purposes) has been fascinating.

When the Gaza pullout was being talked of, and even once it was underway, the left wing press struggled to come to terms with how Sharon - the butcher of Lebanon, the catalyst of the second intifada - could engage in such dovish unilateralism. The image of the fat general trundling his way onto the Temple Mount and trampling over Palestinian sensitivities was an easier one to convey.

This circumnavigated the fractious and complex subtleties of Israeli party-politics. The narrative of a hardline Israeli PM diametrically opposed to the Palestinians is easier to fit into an inverted pyramid than the Knesset’s beehive of small parties and unstable coalitions.

The press are now finding themselves having to recast Sharon. Israel has lost its De Gaulle and its best chance of finding a peace with the Palestinians. The parallels run deep. The French Fifth Republic was modelled around De Gaulle, and once he had gone there was nobody who could – or who can ever – fill the vacuum. The failures of the Fifth Republic – most notably the ambiguous role of the president – can be traced to the drafting of the constitution by De Gaulle and Michelle Debré. (As Mitterand put it before he became President: “One can not be referee and captain one of the teams”). Only he could transcend French party-politics, and the French political system was fashioned in his image.

De Gaulle’s war-time heroism and reputation as a hard man enabled him to cede Algeria. Only he could have. It’s not hard to see the parallels. Similarly, Kadima will struggle without Sharon’s authority and gravity. Does Olmert have the necessary charisma and credibility for the Israeli centre to countenance further concessions? Rabin and Sharon, afterall, were both war heroes.

Israel, as Jonathan Freedland writes in today’s Guardian, is missing its grandfather. In his excellent piece from Jerusalem he quotes a Tel Aviv University analyst: “It’s as if we’re living in a Greek tragedy, every time there’s a leader who has what it takes to save us from ourselves, he gets taken from us”.

What could be more befitting of a Greek tragedy than redemption in death?

2006-01-06T15:47:00.000Z

Back again
I've just returned to Cardiff, several pounds heavier, after spending the festive period in the OC (occupied counties) with a quick jaunt to the free state for the New Year.

It was great being back in the six counties. The big stories were the OTR legislation, the Stormont spyring and Dennis Donaldson, and the Costello reforms to the education system. Brilliant stuff, but no-one seemed to care much. All part of the post-ceasefire ennui. As Henry McDonald wrote in Sunday's Observer (can't find a link to it), people don't really care what the politicians get up to as long as there aren't bombs going off and they've got jobs.

2005-12-13T00:43:00.000Z

Joined-up politics...though perhaps not when it comes to Ulster
David Burnside has called for the Ulster Unionists to rejoin the Conservative party structure. This will be an attractive proposition for many marginalised Ulster Unionists.

Unionists of a conservative bent will doubtless look towards the Cameron effect and reckon that the rejuvenated Tory bandwagon is one on which they’d do well to hitch a ride. With only one MP the UUP have never been in a worse position.

It’s intriguing news, but I’m profoundly ambivalent towards it. The essential logic is something I’ve long advocated: the normalisation of Northern Irish politics entails parties developing non-traditional (ie non-sectarian) politics. Or put less charitably, in engaging in politics (how we should govern) as opposed to primal power-play (who should govern).

But what of the poor weirdos like me who want to see Northern Ireland remain in the UK but want to see it as part of a more equal, more equitable Britain? Many people react to my politics as if I suffered from a split personality, and on occasions I begin to believe them. In fact, I only know one other unionist republican (small ‘u’, small ‘r’).

I occasionally find myself rapaciously agreeing with Conservatives when discussing Northern Ireland but wanting to strangle them when we turn to virtually any other issue. Neither the Tories or Labour have a shining record on Northern Ireland. It was the Iron Lady who gave us the perversely undemocratic Anglo-Irish agreement, and in 2003 New Labour had to be taken to the European Court of Human Rights to allow Northern Irish people to join it. Not one Northern Irish person cast a vote for the incumbent government at the last election. They weren’t allowed to. Labour’s refusal to run against its ‘sister party’ the SDLP makes them a de facto nationalist party. Socialist unionists can run and jump. Weird, isn’t it?

So there’s a conceptual gap for a social democratic party that takes the consent principle as given. (I say conceptual because I recognise that me and my weirdo unionist-republican mate doesn’t constitute a demographic niche).

Some would argues that "while the union is under threat" (yawn) we can not indulge in such 'soft' unionism. Conversely, I think this type of unionism, where the unionist element is a small and relatively unimportant part of a left-liberal philosophy, is better placed to protect the union than it’s traditional cousins. By facilitating a positive agenda it will allow unionists to construct an argument for the union. It will give them the vocabulary to talk about the values that Britain should have. The alternative offered by traditional unionism is a simple reiteration that the majority of NI favour remaining in the UK, without constructive arguments beyond an assertion of a vague, unexamined ‘British’ identity. (This is a point I’ve made before.)

The question of why this conceptual niche has not and will not be filled is the most interesting. Have a look at Ian Paisley’s Westminster voting record. Take Northern Irish issues and so-called ‘moral’ issues out of the equation and how does he vote? Exactly like a left-wing Labour rebel. (Against foundation hospitals, ID cards, and top-up fees, for example). The DUP are the working-class unionist’s party of choice. Generally, they’re rubbish parliamentarians (they tend not to be active on committees, or speak that often) but they’re tireless constituency MPs with reputations in their areas. (See this entry from the last election). The poisonous influence of the Troubles prevented working class unionists from being represented by a proactive and egalitarian left wing party with working class origins (instead they got either the ‘fir coat brigade’ or the reactionary DUP). A broad parallel exists with the UDA’s origins in Housing Associations in the early troubles. Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack’s book is an excellent account of how an organisation which had its roots in housing problems – similar to the civil rights movement – mutated into a nakedly sectarian killing machine.

That is one of the greatest shames of the Troubles. And Labour’s failure to adapt to post-GFA Northern Ireland by admitting there’s no contradiction in being left-wing and being unionist is one of the most sickening blotches on its record. It amounts to the wilful abandonment of its own citizens – some of whom are among the most deprived in the UK. Not very egalitarian. In fact in its combination of gutlessness and dogma epitomizes what is wrong with the culture of the British left.

Ultimately, as much as the restoration of the official link between the Unionists and the Tories would sicken me, I’m glad someone is seeing the bigger picture. For too long unionists have ignored the bigger picture – the very same bigger picture that they supposedly wanted to be a part of.

2005-12-08T13:43:00.000Z

The public interest vs the public's interests
The last post reminded me of something I’ve meant to post for a while. Pete Clifton, the head of BBC interactive, spoke in an online lecture a couple of weeks ago.

He outlined the BBC’s interactive agenda in some detail, but what he was prepared to rule out was most heartening for me.

When asked whether the personalisation of news (both online and in digital TV) undermined the BBC’s public service ethos, he said: “I am very uncomfortable with the idea that somebody could effectively create their own website using feeds.”

One of the motifs in the lecture series has been how keenly the BBC has felt the tension between empowering users through user generated content, personalisation and interactive platforms, and providing a public service that tells people what’s important in the world.

It’s a dilemma which the BBC aren’t taking lightly.

2005-12-06T17:47:00.000Z

The grim mathematics of newspaper ethics
When training to be a journalist you’re constantly reminded that as news travels it sheds weight. We’re always after local pegs. Today’s Western Mail front page headline reads: “Do Brown’s sums add up for Wales?”. (Indeed the front page splashes on the 3 Western Mails which happen to be on my floor at the moment: “Jamie Oliver cash pledged for Welsh school dinners”; “Work until we’re 69? Pensions crisis worse in Wales”; and “Thirty years on, Welsh women still paying price of inequality”).

There’s even a quasi-scientific name for it: the Hardcastle formula. The gist of it is 5000 dead in Chinese earthquake = 15 dead in Italian ski lift tragedy = 2 dead in local road accident = next door neighbour breaks wrist.

This partly reflects a very human trait. But only partly. The key is not to think merely in terms of physical distance. Cultural distance is the most telling predictive factor for relating events to column inches.

In column inches per death, a murdered Briton achieves a fame that 10,000 dead Africans could not touch. Why? It’s not just to do with Africa being far away – the US is just as remote, but Hurricane Katerina was covered to saturation. It’s to do with their way of life, language, colour of skin, and countless other differences that test our empathy to its limits. We can imagine being stabbed to death in a bungled robbery. We can not as easily imagine slowly dying for want of an antibiotic. You can argue it’s a morally suspect reaction (and I would) and that the best journalism will bring home the human element regardless (which it does). But this doesn't change the fact that we care less about people with whom we can not empathise, and a cursory glance at any newspaper will serve as a stark reminder.

I don’t think this is anything controversial, though it’s not often mentioned explicitly because of its ethical grubbiness. But it leads me to think that a bit more honesty and a bit more rigour could help newspapers in the dirty business of prioritising news.

We need a Hardcastle Projection Map. It would workslightly like a Peters Projection Map, and would give countries the size they deserve according to their column inches/death ratio. It wouldsoon become a vital analytical tool for editors, academics and readers. It would help a well-meaning editor decide which countries to shower attention upon; which atrocities should be page-leads, which should be NIBs. It would help the hard-nosed editor decide which countries can be safely ignored.

This is of vital importance in the internet age now news is increasingly consumer-driven (“Too often, the question we ask is “Do we have the story? rather than “Does anyone want the story?”. Mr R Murdoch, April 2005). Striking the balance between telling people about the world and telling them what they want to hear would be much easier with it.

Step forward, cartographers. If we are to weather these tumultuous times we must first chart the waters!

2005-11-27T18:51:00.000Z

A Portrait of the Artist as an Ulsterman
I’ve just spent half an hour throwing out the week’s newspapers from my room, and one familiar visage stares out , ghost-like, from every paper.

Like every other football-following Ulsterman I’ve found myself having quite a few conversations about George Best since he died on Friday.

We take immeasurable pride in the fact that he hails from the same small corner of the world. But Best belonged, in fact belongs, to everyone. That’s the point.

He was the first popstar player, the first player to make an impact on a nascent popular culture. Football is fiercely territorial and tribal by its very nature. Fans understand it in the language of warfare: attack, defence, penetration, walls, midfield generals. Their tribalistic mentality has provided rich pickings for anthropologists. It’s often not the most gifted players who win the supporter's approval, it’s the most devoted. The ones who play for the shirt, who wear their heart on their sleeve.

Best belonged to an increasingly globalised youth culture, not just to those who cheered him on from the Stretford End or Windsor Park’s Kop.

From a small rain forest’s worth of articles, a couple of quotes stood out for me as being particularly apposite. First, the eloquent Danny Blanchflower – another Ulsterman who played the game in the right way, and had a famously quick wit. The difference, of course, was that Blanchflower was the archetypal footballing gentleman. He said of Best:

“Best makes a greater appeal to the senses than Finney and Matthews. His movements are quicker, lighter, more balletic. He offers the greater surprise to the mind and eye, he has the more refined, unexpected range. And with it all there is his utter disregard of physical danger. He has ice in his veins, warmth in his heart and timing and balance in his feet.” [From the Guardian]

The other (I’ll link to the article when I find it) concerns George’s father Dick, on the night when Best destroyed Eusebio’s Benfica in 1966 (Best scored the first two in a 5-1 win). Dick listened on the radio during a nightshift at Harland and Wolff. George arrived back at London airport wearing a giant sombrero and was duly christened ‘El Beatle’ by the papers. If you’re looking for an epoch or an image to define how football rose from working-class culture to become a global phenomenon, look no further than Belfast and its most famous son.

2005-11-07T19:32:00.000Z

How not to translate Translations for Wales
or...When not to laugh at the Theatre

"If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of every city in the world. In that particular is contained the universal. " James Joyce

I went to see Brian Friel’s Translations in Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre the other day. It was an NT production, and, as you’d expect, was pretty good. Translations, like much of Friel’s work, is set in Ballybeg (from the Irish Baile Beag, “small townland”). It concerns the arrival of the English army in 1830s Donegal to map Ireland and render its place names into English.

To be truthful, it’s not the kind of play that a blog entry could do justice to. So I’m not going to try. But Ballybeg is, needless to say, a vehicle for both universality and particularity; for the global and the parochial.

It’s a love story; a story about communication, culture and politics. What fascinates me about Translations – and this is testament to Friels’s art as a playwright – in striving for universality the particularity is not lost. It’s not a play of conceited generalizations.

So I was pissed off in the first act by a knowing laugh coming from the front row.

Only the one guy. Most lone-laughers in the theatre are a) mentalists or else b) proving their intelligence in ‘getting’ a joke or reference.

This laugh, however, was definitely a Welsh nationalist laugh. It was a laugh of solidarity. It was a laugh that said “We can transpose everything. This could be Wales.” As is the wont of nationalists.

This is, on the face of it, fair enough. Both Ireland and Wales have suffered a decline in their ‘native’ languages at the hands of English.

Yet it seems to me to be a huge exercise in missing the point. Translations has to be viewed through the basic contradiction that you’re watching a lament for the Irish language in English. That’s part of its appeal, part of what makes it desperately sad. It helps makes Hugh – the school master who only speaks English “outside the parish” and for commercial use only – such a comically pathetic figure. He’s a deluded drunk more at home with Virgil and Homer than Dan O’Connell or the United Irishmen. So what does this say about our lone-laugher in the front row?

An attempt to read (or, in fact, to translate) Translations as a straightforwardly nationalist and pro-Irish language play would be like interpreting MacBeth as a play about the Scottish succession. It is – but there’s so much more.

Translations is universal, but its universality lies not in narrow-minded nationalism. It lies in its exploration of the possibility of communication between languages and culture, about how language shapes how we imagine ourselves, about the tension that arises when an ancient world comes into contact with an unstoppably modern civilization. (When a language “no longer matches the landscape of fact”).

In short, it’s too philosophically complex for a mere blog entry to do it justice. Better go to see it.

But just don’t fall into the trap of seeing wrought-iron parallels where they may not exist. You’ll end up laughing at all the wrong bits.

2005-11-06T13:46:00.000Z

Am I an album snob?
This G2 article caught my eye a couple of weeks ago (I'm not sure what I've been doing since..). G2 music writer Caroline Sullivan makes the startling admission that she doesn't bother collecting albums.

This is an uncool admission, since serious music fans are judged by the size and breadth of their album stash. To pare things down to the most listenable 10 minutes per record is considered cheating, since albums aren't meant to be consumed in bits. Well, maybe they are.

I disagree (Astral Weeks? Ok Computer? Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots?). But it's quite fresh to find a music critic thinking that way. I just wonder if she ever finds it undermines what she does for a living.

2005-11-03T17:07:00.000Z

Ask a philosopher!
Ever found yourself ruminating on a philosophical puzzle at the bus stop? If so, Ask Philosophers is the site for you.(I picked this up from the Guardian blog.)

I reckon this is a fantastic idea, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the panel of philosophers includes my former philosophy tutor Professor AW Moore, who I know to be an elegant writer and a brilliant communicator of ideas.

Moreover, <> I hope it will encourage people to be more reflective in conisidering philosophy and life in general < /worthiness >. A philosopher once told me a very good joke: two old ladies are discussing a problem on a bus. After a pause, one turns to the other and says: "You've got to be philosophical about it, dear: don't give it another thought".

Philosophy is profoundly useless in a way. You can't use it to make countries richer, you can't build bridges with it and it'll never send someone into space. Indeed, it's the only subject where there's a very real danger you'll know less than when you began studying it. But this site highlights an important fact: it's compulsive and invades our everyday lives everytime we think about the world or engage with other sentients. So you may as well be as rigourous as possible, even if you're just at the bus stop.

(Note: Normal service will be resumed on Caffeine Notes now that I've got that out of my system - it's a symptom of having people take the piss out of your degree once too often)

2005-10-24T21:46:00.000+01:00

Who controls the past controls the future...
In Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith sits in a dusty office in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history to fit the current party line. In the internet age rewriting the Times’ archives seems as tricky as closing Pandora’s box or stirring the jam back into the custard.

Amanda Powell, editor of BBC Wales Online, made such a point in a visiting lecture on online journalism. It is, on the face of it, very true. There’s no need to recount the tales of how the internet has focused scrutiny on journalists. As Powell stated, the archives are online for good, ready to be called up at any moment to prove some assertion wrong or to haunt some haphazard journo. According to the conventional wisdom, this has put journalists under relentless pressure and highlighted the necessity of accuracy.

This is all true. But the very nature of the online news means Orwellian possibilities are never far away. What happens when a newspaper gets something entirely wrong? It may be taken to court. It will probably have to publish an apology. In extreme cases (remember the Sunday Mirror’s lotto-rapist-buys-a-boat story?) it may have to recall the papers and pulp them. When broadcasters get something wrong it stays wrong. Red-faced retractions forced by hasty conclusions are felt to undermine the trustworthiness of the news source.

But the internet requires no Winston Smith. If BBC online get something wrong they need only edit the page. Even the Ministry of Truth had to pulp the old papers. Unless you can find a cached version there is simply no way of working out what the first edition of the page said.

What does it matter? Powell’s response was to state that it simply increased the need for the Beeb (especially the Beeb) to get it right first time, every time.

This may be true. But one case from last month made me think otherwise. Remember the rather murky story of the ‘special operatives’ who had to be rescued from a Basra jail in a tank raid? Read this post at Lenin’s Tomb.

The allegation is that as the MoD changed their outline of events, the BBC seamlessly edited their version to agree. The cached version he links to is no longer around. This isn’t really the point (or, indeed, may only reinforce the point). Lenin might be entirely wrong (I think he often is – albeit in an entertainingly acerbic fashion). The point is there is nothing stopping the BBC covering their tracks (or covering the MoD’s tracks on their behalf).

It allows critics, as above, to accuse the BBC (or for that matter, any online news service) of swallowing the official line too easily. Or of playing fast and loose with the truth, or of being wildly inaccurate - safe in the knowledge they can go back to the story and erase mistakes from history.

Remember that chilling scene from 1984 when Winston finds himself with concrete proof of official lies? “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed -- after the event: that was what counted -- concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds.”

It’s not as sinister as all that. But the potential is there. And those 30 second moments might be just as difficult to come by.

Ps: how ironic. I’ve found an old article thinking about exactly the same subject, but coming to rather different conclusions (warning: this article contains the phrase ‘misguided liberty-loving geeks’).

2005-10-23T13:13:00.000+01:00

Back again
It's been a while! I was in China for three months, so I couldn't access any blogs.

Since my return I've started a postgraduate dipoma in newspaper journalism at Cardiff University, so Caffeine Notes might be of a different hue from now on.

2005-05-20T18:09:00.000+01:00

Re Wombles
Apparently, 'womble' is slang for a UDA member (See below). Answers on a postcard.

2005-05-19T11:54:00.000+01:00

Loyalist Womble
It has come to my attention that Caffeine Notes is one of the top hits when you google loyalist womble. What a curious thought.

"Over ground, under ground, wombling free. You will not deny us our civil and religious liberties. Wombles will fight, and wombles will be right!"

Now, if anyone has Photoshop and a bit too much time on their hands, I'd quite like to see a mock-up of Great Uncle Bill-garia.

2005-05-19T00:35:00.001+01:00

A new ballgame in a new ballpark
An interesting article appeared in yesterday's WaPo (I've picked this up - belatedly - from OxBlog) on attempts to accommodate immigrants’ sports in the US. Apparently, "ovals of cricket" are beginning to spring up. Not to mention "soccer fields".

It reminds me of a spectacle I came across in Barcelona two years ago. At first the scene was quintessentially Catalan - three small boys were kicking a tattered football about in one of the wide ramblas of Barcelona's dilapidated areas near the centre. One of the boys looked indigenous; the other two were from Indian or Pakistani backgrounds. I idly watched them over an espresso. After a while the football grew more lethargic, as knock-abouts in the evening sun often do. One of the Asian boys drifted off, and returned a moment later with a tennis ball and a cricket bat.

Taking guard against one of the trees lining the boulevard, the boy dispatched his friend's delivery across the road with a contemptuous late cut. An over hadn't been bowled by the time the young Catalan lad was playing.

Without coming across all “children-are-the-future”, I find it fascinating how, for adults, preserving a sport is a comforting, conservative factor ("You could talk your dialect, and folks would understand. You could tell your corny Caribbean jokes,"). Sport provides a sphere sealed from the strange new environment in which the immigrants find themselves - it's a hermetic, insular activity; another manifestation of the cultural and linguistic conservatism demonstrated by immigrants the world over.

Yet, in the hands of children, sport is the method of cross-pollination that makes multiculturalism possible.

What odds on USA vs Spain for the 2053 World Cup final?

2005-05-02T17:58:00.000+01:00

Fairweather fans
The weather here, in this tiny corner of London’s epic expanse, is scorching. Back home it is greyer and 10 C cooler.

There has been a fire at Mourneview Park, home of Glenavon FC, ahead of the Lurgan side’s battle to regain its rightful place in Northern Ireland’s top division tomorrow night. Offers of help are streaming in from supporters.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Portadown, David Trimble is fighting for his parliamentary life(Guardian, Slugger). It was a close-run thing last time (2058 votes in it). I voted for the first time in 2001, and was relieved to be able to vote for someone who had taken risks to advance the hopes of Northern Ireland. Watching Trimble’s acceptance speech over a cup of tea made me doubly glad – he was rudely heckled by DUP supporters. There can’t be a neater metaphor for the Democratic Unionist Party’s anti-democratic leanings…except for the incident earlier in the campaign when Trimble was prevented from canvassing in Portadown by DUP candidate David Simpson’s henchmen. His excuse for associating with the mob? He was merely “passing the time of day with them”.

Trimble’s international stature and reputation as a fine and tireless Parliamentarian are unlikely to be of help in the working class estates where the DUP are cashing in. They don’t care much for ‘airs and graces’, nor for interference from folks who aren’t local. In Suzanne Breen’s revealing article on the battle for Upper Bann, Trimble is quoted as saying, “I have the ear of Parliament”. But will he have the ear of those who perceive him to have turned his back on them?

Come tomorrow night I’ll be waiting anxiously for the result of the first leg of the Glenavon's play-off against Crusaders, without the opportunity to cheer them on. Or without having had the onerous task of watching second-string football for a season.

I can no longer vote at home. And the weather – far from being a consolation – seems to be ridiculing me with its incessant heat. Perhaps it’s time I accepted facts: I’m a fair-weather local lad, and I don’t deserve to have a say if I do not have to live with the consequences.

EDIT: It turns out, the fire was the result of a petrol bomb. (BBC Norn Iron)

2005-04-26T00:21:00.000+01:00

Firstly…
A great deal has already been written about the new Northern Irish papers in the nationals' media sections.

Henry McDonald describes the Daily View as reflecting “the obsession of middle-market tabloid journalism: property prices, crime and consumer rip-off stories.” A non-partisan paper for aspirational thirty-somethings.

As McDonald pointed out in the Observer, the release of the Daily View has provoked Tony O’Reilly into introducing the Belfast Tele’s morning compact edition sooner than anticipated.

This is not merely of local interest. The Tele’s profits are of tremendous importance since O’Reilly uses them to subsidise the loss-making Indie.

And there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Enter Andrew Marr with his semi-autobiographical history of British journalism My Trade.

In his account of his time as editor of the Indie, he describes being in the middle of a power-struggle between O’Reilly and David Montgomery, then of Mirror Group Newspapers.

No writer of exuberent fiction could have dreamed up the confrontation between Montgomery and O'Reilly. One was a lean, dry, sarcastic Ulster Protestant; the other was a large, extrovert, passionate Catholic Irish tycoon

Montgomery had been humiliated by the failure of Today's relaunch, and, still smarting, set out to prove that "his original vision, a Yuppie paper full of stories for and about expensive, ambitious people, preferably being mugged for their Rolex watches in Mayfair, could still work".

Eventually, Mirror Group withdrew from the Independent (though apparently not before Kelvin Mackenzie had put Montgomery against a wall). Fast forward a few years and Montgomery is in charge of the Local Press consortium who have taken control of the Newsletter, and have recently introduced the Daily View.

A coincidence? Hardly. This is the latest chapter in the O'Reilly vs Montgomery saga. And what odds on Montgomery's headstrong intransigence precipitating his downfall once more?

2005-04-25T23:50:00.000+01:00

Wake up and smell the coffee...
Apologies for the lengthy moratorium. Hopefully I’ll be able to build a head of steam for a few weeks. I have been stirred from my indolent slumber by a couple of observations that I haven’t seen anywhere else ( and yes, that probably is because I haven’t looked hard enough…).

2005-02-20T23:15:00.000Z

Sorry
Blogging has spluttered to a complete stop round these parts. Sadly, I've been too busy, or, when I've not been too busy, too tired.

At some point I'll make a page with an index of articles I've written or am working on. Until then, I'm 20p away from my overdraft limit, my housing benefit's just been frozen, and I'll be in court if I don't pay my council tax by Tuesday.

Suggestions, as ever, are welcome.

2005-01-09T19:56:00.000Z

Deep Play
Today's Observer reports that Lazio's Paulo Di Canio gave a fascist salute to supporters after they defeated Roma in the derby.

Of course, ol' Paolo is playing the 'I'm just a professional footballer, and I was celebrating with the fans' card. There are a number of coincidences that make his stiff arm salute seem more sinister.

Firstly, according to the Observer, he admitted to admiring Mussolini in his autobiography.

More tellingly, however, Lazio are the Italian fascists' club of choice. Drawing their support from Rome's middle class and right wing regions (as opposed to Roma's more working class and left-leaning support), they have a recent history cluttered with fascist incidents.

Sinisa Mihajlovic once dedicated a goal to Serbian war criminal Arkan. Mihajolovic, of course, was responsible for the repeated racist of abuse of Arsenal's iconic midfielder Patrick Vieira. That incident actually turned out to be thoroughly amusing as the little shit had to be escorted off the pitch for his own safety (Vieira being a good 8 inches taller). When Mihajlovic was forced to apologise he was boo-ed by Lazio's far-right Ultras.

The picture of Di Canio in the print edition of the Observer is telling enough. But the history of the two clubs meant that in this derby - and derby's tap into a huge source of passion at the best of times - Di Canio was celebrating not only a football match, but an ideological victory over the left

2004-12-17T17:58:00.000Z

Re Franglais Power Ballads
I'm in France at the moment, which partly explains the blogging haitus. Suffice to say that they are still playing Bonnie Tyler and some French woman's rendering of 'Total eclipse of the Heart'.

2004-12-09T17:33:00.000Z

"Ballots, Bullets, or -?"
Mildly depressed by my country's return to pathetic zero-sum politics, I was leafing through James Connolly's Selected Writings. I found a piece entitled - topically - Ballots, Bullets, or -?

There are a fascinating number of resonant points made, but this particular exert caught my eye for being so disasterously wrong, yet simultaneously profoundly correct:

Americans have been so enamoured of the achievements of the Wright brothers that too little attention has been paid to the development of the balloon by Zeppelin. Yet in his hands it has evolved into the most perfect and formidable fighting machine ever dreamt of. The words ‘dirigible balloon’ seem scarcely applicable to his creation. It is a balloon, and more. It is a floating ship, divided into a large number of separate compartments, so that the piercing of one even by a shell leaves the others intact and the machine still floating. Nothing less than fire can menace it with immediate destruction. It can carry seventeen tons and with that weight on board can be guided at will, perform all sorts of figures and evolutions, rise or descend, travel fast or remain stationary. It has already been equipped with a quick-firing Krupp gun and shells made for its own special use, and at the tests of the German army has proven itself capable of keeping up a rapid and sustained fire without interfering with its floating or manoeuvring powers. No army on earth, even of highly trained and disciplined men, could withstand an attack from ten of those monsters for as many minutes. It is more than probable that the development of these machines will eventuate in an armed truce from military conquest by the international capitalist class, the consecration of the flying machine to the cold task of holding in check the working class, and the making safe and profitable all sorts of attacks upon social and political rights. In facing such a weapon in the hands of our remorseless and unscrupulous masters the gun of comrade Victor Berger will be as ineffective as the paper ballot in the hands of a reformer. [International Socialist Review, Oct 1909]

He goes on to argue that industrial organisation and civil disobedience are the only anwers to modern military might. I wonder what his modern day successors in the republican movement would have thought of that?

2004-12-08T23:49:00.000Z

Top 5 Loyalist Nicknames
My girlfriend was kind enough to buy me Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack's book on the UDA.

Side-splittingly dreadful nicknames have long been a hallmark of loyalism, so without furthern ado:

The all-time top five loyalist nicknames:

1. Jackie 'Legs' Robinson (a mistress of Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair)
2. Gina 'Mad Bitch' Adair (wife of...)
3. Mark 'Swinger' Fulton
4. Billy 'King Rat' Wright
5. Stepthen 'Top Gun' McKeag.

There are dozens more classics. I wonder is there a mechanism for finding out your loyalist name, like you can find out your porn star name (first pet's name, mother's maiden name). Hmm...

2004-12-07T22:46:00.000Z

Religion and the Troubles
I only recently found this transcript of a remarkable talk delivered by Malachi O'Doherty, editor of Fortnight. There's not much I've got to add, apart that you should all read it.

It made me recall this post where I wondered if there was any link between apparent IRA doublethink and the doctrine of the double effect, which plays an important rolein Catholic ethics. This is not a question that is entirely philsophical, rather it has a connection to actual matters-of-fact. Sadly, no amount of rumination in front of my laptop will reveal to me the formative influences of the Provisional IRA.

Ps Apologies for the lack of blog action. It was my birthday, followed in hot pursuit by a debauched Christmas party and a deadline. I gratefully received several books that may provide fuel for some posts.

2004-12-02T23:36:00.000Z

"Work of art that inspired a movement...a urinal"
The Guardian report that in a survey of the 'artworld' Duchamp's 'Fountain' was voted the most influential work of art of the century.

I think it was the only possible result, although 'influential' should not be confused with 'good'. As I wrote at some length a a few months back, there is a sense in which the artworld has not been inspired by the 'Fountain' so much as stuck on it. The subversiveness of the 'Fountain' lies in its forcing us to question its status as a work of art. For a work of art to question the nature of art was radical. I get the sense that much of the contemporary conceptual artworld is still engaging in this conversation with itself.

2004-12-02T02:16:00.000Z

The archives are now fully functioning
Yay!

2004-12-02T01:42:00.000Z

Sharon's Coalition Collapses
What does Sharon's sacking of the Shinui cabinet members entail for the Gaza disengagement?

Labour have already pledged that they would join a coalition to ensure that the withdrawal went ahead. But will Labour be able to stomach the right's economic policies?

Could this be the stimulus for the fragmentation of Likud? Is Sharon breaking up the coalition in order to rebuild a more sound base for his policies?

Perhaps. This brings me to a rarely highlighted asymmetry in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Israel's very sensitive democracy results in a fractious system, which impedes the implementation of a grand strategy. This is another sense in which Israel is fighting with its hands tied. Whether a less constrained Israel will be a force for good in the Middle-East is, of course, another matter.

(I do realise that I have provided several times more questions than answers. Perhaps more coffee is needed.)

2004-12-01T23:35:00.000Z

I suppose this makes me a Romanist.

Paisley's progress, according to the Portadown News.

2004-12-01T01:46:00.000Z

Sackcloth and Ashes
Perusing the today's Grauniad headlines, I noticed the following headline: Ulster talks on track despite Paisley remark.

"The British and Irish governments remained quietly hopeful last night that Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist party will agree by next week to restore power sharing in Northern Ireland, despite a lapse into "offensive" language by Ian Paisley."

The "offensive" remark? The IRA should "wear sackcloth and ashes... until the sackcloth and ashes wear out". Perhaps the Guardian should have gone with "Paisley makes biblical reference; Pope a Catholic".

On a more serious note, while we should not take Sinn Fein's offence seriously (what was it JS Mill said about confusing offense with harm?), I think most Northern Irish people will be embarrassed by the way religion is seeping into Northern Irish politics. That men of the cloth must observe the act of decommissioning, suggests that the God-fearing folk of Norn Iron (dreary Ulster Protestants and thick Catholic Paddies alike) require a nod from the pulpit before choosing what to believe.

2004-11-30T01:29:00.000Z

Ukraine, with the benefit of foresight
Fair play to Marc Mullholland, he was exceedingly quick off the mark (almost an entire week ago!).

With respect to my last post, I find this particularly interesting:

More fundamentally, 'core' Ukrainian identity is uncertain. The very name
of the state - Okraina, Ukraina - translates simply as "frontier" or
"borderland". It has historically jostled with other names indicative of a hazy
self-conceptualisation: "Ruthenians" (rus'ki, rusyny) and "Little" or
"Lesser-Russians" (malorosy - 'little' here is a geographical specfication,
rather than a denigration).

He goes on to add that 'dangerously centrifugal forces' could develop. Whether these forces are dangerous is what I was questioning.

2004-11-29T23:52:00.000Z

Ukrainian partition?
The threat(by the Eastern states) that Ukraine be split along East/West lines has been regarded as a detioration of the situation. But perhaps only this can provide the consensual basis required by a state. I say perhaps because I'm not entirely sure of the exact demographic structure of the Ukraine.

This, however, suggests that the split may be fairly clean, although the report notes that the states in the middle of the Ukraine tend to be the 'swing states'.

If there are no enclaves - unlike in the West Bank and Northern Ireland, for example - then what may stand in the way of a peaceful partition? A nationalist sense of Ukrainian unity provides the obvious answer, but the western nationalists may not be able to impede a genuine desire for eastern autonomy. The crux is whether the Russian-speaking Orthodox east have a sufficiently strong nationalism that transcends ethnic, religious and linguistic differences. When stated as baldly as that, it seems unlikely.

The Guardian have the following telling quotation from an eastern governor:

It is easy to find Local officials in the east have threatened that their
regions may unite with Russia. Yevgeny Kushnarov, governor of the eastern town of Kharkiv, told Reuters: "Kiev is 480km from [Kharkiv], while Russia is only 40km away."

Of course, to hedge my bets, I'd also better quote this guy:

Mr Lukianchenko [Mayor of Donetsk] told the Guardian: "No
one wants autonomy - it's a last resort. Our call for a referendum is a warning
to the opposition to observe the constitution. The demonstrations in Kiev must
cease so that politicians can negotiate a compromise to include Yanukovich in
the government." [Also from the Guardian]

2004-11-27T20:18:00.000Z

More football racism...this time from the in-laws
BBC Northern Ireland report on a case where a Cameroonian footballer allegedly received racist abuse from the family of his Derry wife.

Had his trial at the Brandywell (home of Derry City FC) been successful, I'm sure he would have had enough racist abuse...

It reminds me of a Don McCullin photograph (I can't find it online, but it's in his retropsective book). It shows a bloodied and shaken Bogside rioter being escorted by two soldiers - one white, one black. In the top right hand corner a woman leans out of a window, shouting abuse at the black soldier.

It's a beautiful demonstration of the complexity that often lies behind ostensibly simple situations.

Does this add credence to the thesis that Northern Ireland's racism problem (or, put more precisely, bigotry problem)is an offshoot of the bitterness, anger and fear of 'otherness' caused by the Troubles and segregation? I used to scoff at this suggestion. It was, I thought, pandering to that exasperating tendency to explain every phenomenon in terms of the Troubles. All 'Bad Things' are the 'legacy of bitter conflict'. All 'Good Things' are part of the 'peace dividend'. I have since come to the opinion that there is more to it.

In a loyalist community that already feels under threat - from the decline of its industry, from an upwardly mobile Catholic population, from terrorism, from political change and from every other conceivable angle - it is understandable to resent the supposedly pernicious presence of foreigners, especially when they have a different colour of skin.

In a nationalist community that still harbours a 'Brits Out' attitude, the transition to 'Blacks Out', or 'Polish Out', or 'Portuguese Out', must be a smooth one. Nationalist communities have an additional impediment to racial harmony. The lie of Gaelic racial difference - an historically prominent component of nationalism - leads some to believe in the myth of Irish racial purity.

2004-11-25T17:40:00.000Z

More on Town/Gown strife in Belfast
Although nothing has been made of it in the press coverage (Tele, BBC Norn Iron) I've heard, as ever, that there may be a sectarian hue to the problems.

Reported shouts of 'Up the ra", "Sinn Fein" and late night street hurley matches (which actually sound quite fun) have led some to conclude that the nihilism of some students is stoked by the hatred of police and authority inherent in republican culture. Let's be honest though: students don't need an excuse to be rowdy.

All this does, however, serve as a timely reminder of why I didn't fancy going to university in Belfast. Then again, Oxford is probably the historic capital of town/gown disputes. In the middle ages it wasn't uncommon for dozens of people to be killed in riots.

2004-11-25T17:17:00.000Z

Paisley in drive to beat school bullies
It's a truly frighening thought, but I'm sure they all had a good laugh over the headline at the Newsletter.

Other favourite headlines: "British left waffles on Falklands", "Belfast's tunnel vision" (about the possibility of an underground system), "Eriksson poised to pick Butt", "Iraqi head seeks arms". Oh, and Cherwell recently had a front page headline that read "Mast Debate Grips LMH", though perhaps that says more about their sense of humour.

2004-11-25T16:49:00.000Z

Re: Friends one can do without
Returning to the theme of unwanted associations, Israel will be delighted to hear of its new ally.

Move over Barbara Amiel, Julie Burchill has arrived.

2004-11-24T10:27:00.000Z

Trouble in the Holyland
The Holyland area of Belfast (the streets around Queens are often named on a biblical theme) has housed students for as long as anyone can remember. There has been tension in the area for a while, and according to the BBC tempers are beginning to flair.

Most disturbing, however, is Sinn Fein's Alex Maskey commenting "I told people it was totally unacceptable that a family had to leave their home because of what was being described as a protest."

Sinn Fein would never use protest to intimidate people, nor would it ever force people to leave their home. Anyone who disagrees is asked to report to Sinn Fein quartermaster Gerry Kelly.

2004-11-24T01:27:00.000Z

The Indie of Evil?
I can't believe it's taken such a long time for this to come to my attention, but this month's Prospect reports that Osamah Bin Laden sees Robert Fisk as a model of neutrality.

As Gorgeous George will testify, there are some friends a guy can do without.

Whether Galloway and Fisk are connected is disputed, though I'm sure Colin Powell would reassure us that allegations of such a nexus were based on 'solid evidence'.

However, counter-claims are already emerging that the Galloway-Fisk link is based entirely on the intelligence of John Malkovich: the sole yield of a frantic Google search.

2004-11-22T02:10:00.000Z

More on football racism
I was quite critical of Guillem Balague's Observer article. However, the general thrust of it is true. One of the best points he makes is that the Spanish press were very muted on the issue until the ball was put in their court by Richard Caborn (for those of you who, unlike me, can speak Spanish). Indeed, Marca didn't mention it at all in the early additions, and when they did it was towards the end of this article, as an afterthought. (Note the chants of 'Gibralter Espanol').

A couple of observations. Firstly, without resorting to soap opera pyscho-babble, the problem won't go away if the press don't mention it and confront it. Secondly, this situation has at least some parallel with the Northern Ireland team. In Northern Ireland, 'Northern Irishness' is traditionally monopolised by unionists, so ownership of the team was widely (if incorrectly) assumed to be protestant. This allowed those who treated supporting Northern Ireland as a loyalist rally to dominate. With the help of the supporters clubs and www.ourweecountry.co.uk, the IFA's Football for All campaign successfully defeated this element. Supporting NI is now a positive expression and a source of optimism and pride. So with determination and organisation, there are grounds for hope.

However, as football supporters willingly accept, there is a strong tribalistic element to the relation between a club and its support. This is the anthropological basis of racism and bigotry, so its unwelcome residue will always remain. The best we can hope for is restraint and lack of provocation. Only this can prevent football becoming a medium for humanity's darker instincts.

2004-11-22T01:20:00.000Z

Football and facism
There's been much righteous indignation* this week regarding the racist jeering of England's black players in the Bernabéu.

The much-documented chant of "I'd rather be a Paki than a Turk" is presumably not a racist slur (aired at the England vs Turkey game last year), because...Turks aren't black. Or English. Or vying to host the Olympic games.

I'm not sure what excuse the English tabloids (and some politicians) have for not taking the plank out of their own eye. Perhaps it is nothing as nefarious or distasteful as the above. Perhaps ignorance and amnesia are to blame. (Even so, there are still a few who seem keen on returning to the early 80s, when the likes of John Barnes and Viv Anderson regularly had bananas thrown at them).

What I find most intriguing, however, is why Spain has a problem with racists following the international side. The (usually latent) racism of some England fans only became apparent when incidents such as the stabbing of Leeds Utd supporters inflamed tensions. I haven't heard of any analoguous explanation for the Spaniards behaviour.

Even more preposterous is the suggestion by Guillem Balague's comment in The Observer
that, "We are new at multiculturalism, we need to be educated - but not by English tabloids."

So Spanish football fans need lessons in multiculturalism? Some of the best players to have graced Spanish pitches have been black. Indeed, Laurie Cunningham, the first black player to represent England (albeit at U21 level - the accolade for the senior squad belongs to Viv Anderson), impressed the Bernabéu faithful so much they dubbed him "The Black Pearl" in reference to the great Eusebio (take note, Luis Aragonés). Today the famous white of Real Madrid is worn by famous blacks such as Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos. Real Madrid may have been Franco's team, and its Ultras may have racist and fascist leanings, but they do not need to be taught about multiculturalism. Their team is the embodyment of all that multiculturalism can offer the game.

We have to look elswhere for explanations. The answer lies in Spain's fragmented national identity. Basques are highly unlikely to support the national team. Catalans have no allegiance to the Spain that is epitomized by the Bernabéu, Real Madrid and the national team. All over Spain regional identity overwhelms and - in some areas - annihilates national identity. Tribalism is inextricable to supporting a football team, but Spain is unique in that its club sides can provide outlets for both national and regional tribalism. A supporter of Athletic Bilbao could not countenance supporting Spain. Spain is a foreign country. Athletic Bilbao - who still field only Basque players - are a good surrogate for a Basque representative side. A Barcelona fan, who looked upon the Camp Nou as the heart of Catalonia, would have grave reservations about going to watch Spain play in the Bernabéu. To do so would be to disregard the role of the Camp Nou in providing a hermetic kernal for the Catalan language and the pride of its people in favour of investing emotion in a symbol of Madrid and Franco's authority.

This passionate regionalism creates a space for those of a fascist bent to project thier image of Spain onto the entire nation. It is, in this sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more the Spanish crowd are dominated by the right wing ultras, the more they attract those who harbour such political opinions. One Spain, one team, one race. Just don't mention Laurie Cunningham. Or the Moors.

*The Sun was even worse (unsurprisingly), but its archives are only available to subscribers.

2004-11-18T01:48:00.000Z

The moral mechanics of the Titanic
I saw Titanic Town earlier, and it was surprisingly good. It dispels the notion that in films about the troubles (and about recent well-documented history in general) sensitivity is achieved at the cost of honest realism. Indeed, I think the two are closely related.

It is a peculiarity of Northern Ireland that people don't like to talk about, or even express opinions about, the troubles in public situations. It's a disease that developed from the confusion of fairness with even-handedness or neutrality. The received wisdom was that 'one lot are as bad as the other'; that due to some miraculous moral mechanics every force had an equal and opposite reaction. Nobody and everybody could be blamed.

Titanic Town does not attempt to portray balance and symmetry where there is none. The British Army, for instance, do not come out of it covered in glory. Their brutality and beligerence towards the people of Andersontown (aka Andytown or Angrytown) looks provacative and unnecessary. Yet one gets the impression that their aggression is the offspring of their fear. The Provos, however, are unflinchingly portrayed as murderous, hypocritical bullies in their own community.

Titanic Town commendably steers clear of the temptation to view the Troubles as a diametric and symmetrical conflict between the Provos and the Brits. I see this as both real, and refreshingly sensitive. Sensitive towards the most overlooked victims of the IRA: those whom they were purportedly protecting.

Another cliche well-avoided in the film is that of the happy ending. Jonathan Peled, a spokesman for the Israeli government, told me in Israel (in January) that the source of American disillusionment with the peace process was a culture bred on movies that expected a straightforward narrative. With a beginning, a middle and a happy end*.

This brings me to Johathon Freedland's column in Wednesday's Grauniad. The gist of the argument is that Blair is being naive in believing that Bush will now turn his attention to Israel/Palestine, and casts doubt on the Bush administrations appetite for engaging in the sort of mucky, sleeves-rolled-up diplomacy that Blair and Clinton employed in Northern Ireland.

The basic point is probably true. What worries me, as ever, is the use of Northern Ireland as an example. The tried and tired metaphor doing the rounds as GFA negotiations reached a climax was that Blair and Clinton were arriving "to add momentum". The metaphor is a telling one: it implies a common direction. It was this very acknowledgement - that Northern Irish politics are not necessarily zero-sum - that made peace possible. Rather than two political, cultural and historical traditions colliding like tectonic plates, Northern Ireland had the impression that it had 'got the ball rolling'. Inertia was (and still is, I believe) the result of friction of fear, mistrust and intransigence, not the result of two equal and opposite forces.

With Israel/Palestine, I'm not sure that this consensus exists. A significantly large (and influencial) body of Israelis view Palestinians as nothing other than a security threat, and how many Palestinians will not rest until Israel has been driven into the sea, is unclear. That's why Sari Nusseibeh and Ami Ayalon's People's Voice Initiative is so necessary. Which reminds me of a film I saw about the Northern Ireland Troubles, once. It stars Julie Walters as a working class mother who starts a petition, and takes the peace movement to the grassroots. It's called Titanic Town and it's surprisingly good...[and so on, ad infinitum]

*I'm sorry, it's a dreadful link.

2004-11-16T01:49:00.000Z

Owed to Indolence...
Owing to a combination of indolence and interweb problems there haven't been any updates of late. Apologies.

This Irish Times article (subscription required) about Bertie Ahern hinting that same-sex partnerships may be granted legal recognition in the Republic reminded me about one of the many explanations of the US Presidential election result. (Apparently Bush won! That'll teach me to live on Mars between the 2nd and 16th of November...)

Simon Hoggart (among others) suggests that the Ulster-Scots won thon election, hi. The reasoning is based on the influence of the Ulster-Scots in defining America. Long before the Irish Catholics arrived in poor and huddled masses in the 19th century, the Ulster-Scots frontiersmen forged the America we know today. Based on the Protestant ideals of God-fearing industriousness, private property and tidiness they defined the American spirit. These firebrand Protestants are the ancestors of today's 'value-voters'.

This is a neat explanation that DUP types will revel in: historical confirmation that they are 'the people'. As with so many neat explanations, though, some inconvenient facts get in the way. Firstly, southern Irish Catholics have never been known for their religious and moral liberalism.

Paradoxically, the historical attitude of the Republic to abortion and divorce has provided ammunition for Unionists arguing that the Irish Government is Rome-influenced, and as a consequence that they would be unwelcome and repressed in a united Ireland . This shouldn't be surprising, since Unionism has roots in Protestant liberalism.

Afterall, Lockean liberalism and Ulster Protestant politics share a common genesis: the Glorious Revolution. Bertrand Russell states the early days with typical clarity in his History of Western Philosophy:

Early liberalism was a product of England and Holland, and had certain
well-marked characteristics. It stood for religious toleration; it was
Protestant, but of a latitudinarian rather than of a fanatical kind; it regarded
the wars of religion as silly. It valued commerce and industry, and favoured the
rising middle class rather than the monarchy and the aristocracy; it had immense
respect for the rights of property, especially when accumulated by the labours of
the individual possessor. [Chapter XII 'Philosophical Liberalism']

You can still find remnants of this liberalism in some unionist rhetoric, and I think it can be traced from the 1690s, becoming especially visible in the Home Rule crises. I will not try to score points by conflating contemporary American 'liberalism' with the very different 17th Century British variety, but it seems clear that intolerance and religious fanaticism is not a disease carried to America by the Ulster-Scots. The fear of being dominated, rather than an appetite for religious hegemony, has been their historical motivation.

2004-11-02T01:57:00.000Z

Investigative Journalism
In Saturday's Guardian Review Roy Greenslade reviews Tell Me No Lies, the collection of investigative journalism edited by John Pilger. Imagine my shock when I noticed that one of the featured journalists is a human rights observer called Jo Wilding.

I interviewed Jo Wilding in 2003, not long after she was back from Iraq for the second time in April 2003. She has since returned, this time to Falluja. What strikes me is the emphasis that Greenslade - a celebrated media professor - puts on this 'unofficial' journalist's first hand experience. Why is the mantle of investigative journalism being passed to wide-eyed activists?

The likes of Wilding provide vital first hand accounts that act as shots of reality to penetrate the numbness that we develop in a period of extended barbarity. My worry is that there are no guarantees that 'unofficial reporters' are as rigorous and guarded as professional journalists would be.

2004-10-29T17:56:00.000+01:00

"It's like a mission..."
As if to sneak by unnoticed, Greg Shaw died at roughly the same time as John Peel. In yesterday's Indie this quote typfies the spirit that John Peel was famed for:

Bomp! is an outgrowth of my love for music. Where many would view it as a
marginal business that barely breaks even, I prefer to see it as a hobby that's
profitable enough to allow me to build my life around it. It's like a mission to
try and get the cool music to the people. If nothing else, maybe we've set an
example that might offer an alternative to this increasingly corporate,
impersonal society. Or maybe not. At least we had a good time trying . . .

2004-10-29T01:14:00.000+01:00

More on Troubles double-think
Looking back over what I wrote a week ago regarding the disturbing and pervasive nature of Troubles double-think, it occurs to me that I need to explain why I interpret the Troubles in the way that I do.

The reason that I do not view the Troubles as a colonial war is simply that it was not colonial and was not a war. Sadly, I can not explain why it is a non-colonial conflict in this post, because the required brevity would lead to unionist circularity, which for the present purpose would be self-defeating (viz Northern Ireland is not a colony, which is precisely the issue at stake). The reason that the Troubles can not be viewed as a war is merely a matter of morbid statistics.

According to the CAIN database republican paramilitaries killed 1078 members of British security forces (the RUC and the British Army) between 1969 and 2001. We can throw in the killings of 45 loyalist paramilitaries in the same period to get a 'combatant' count of 1123. Wars generally have two sides aiming at each others destruction. That seems to be a fairly essential characteristic. Yet in the 1969 to 2001 period British Security forces killed only 145 republican paramilitaries, and a third of those killings came in 1972 and 1973. So for the last 30 years of the Troubles (or possibly during the whole period) the security forces strategy was one of containment, with the exception of alleged instances of collusion in the 'dirty war'.

Meanwhile, republican paramilitaries went about murdering civilians and the 'legitimate targets' in the security forces. The suggestion that loyalist paramilitaries were engaged in a war is even more laughable: according to Malcolm Sutton's CAIN statistics they murdered 873 civilians compared to a mere 42 republican paramilitaries. For God and Ulster, indeed.

These crude statistics do, I think, reveal a robust truth: the Troubles was no more a war than death-by-firing squad was a duel.

2004-10-27T18:10:00.000+01:00

I need excitement, oh I need it bad...
There's not a lot I can say about the sad death of John Peel that hasn't already been said.

When the news broke yesterday afternoon I was listening to Xfm. After playing Teenage Kicks Iain Baker was in tears. Ordinarily I'm critical of emotional outpourings over people one has never met. But,listening to the electrifying Undertones' cut, I found myself welling up. John Peel was always the exception.

I, like many others, owe vast swathes of my music taste to John Peel's show on Radio 1. He'd unearthed and introduced countless bands to the general public in an indefatigable manner. A slave to music but not the music industry. Occasionally ramshackle and always eclectic, John Peel's show could only have been produced by someone with a rare zest for what he does. To normal people, John Peel's endless excavation of new talent would seem like Sisyphus. One got the impression from Peel that it was his raison d'etre.

Last night I went out to see The Others and The Paddingtons. More than once songs were dedicated to John Peel. The Others have made a name for anarchic 'guerrilla gigs', which take music to people in unusual and exciting ways. I think John would have approved.

2004-10-26T01:08:00.000+01:00

Expenses whataboutery
I've been having a fairly close look at the recently disclosed MP's expenses, particularly the travel expenses of various Northern Ireland MPs. There has been the expected level of gurning about Sinn Fein 'members'' comparitively high total figures, considering they don't take their seats in Parliament.

After all, weekly to-ing and fro-ing across the Irish Sea must constitute a huge expenditure. Correspondingly, the Sinners do have lower travel expenses.

One question remains, though. Where were Mssrs Campbell (£25083), Burnside (£28419), Dodds (£26295) and Robinson (£28119)? Is there an anti-agreement party boat afloat in Irish Sea? Maybe a fact-finding mission to Magaluf?

2004-10-21T16:38:00.000+01:00

Rocks/hard places
A few things are coming to a head in Israel. The Independent reports on the religious right's claim that the Gaza exit contravenes Jewish law, and draws comparison with the situation in 1995 before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

Meanwhile, Haaretz reveals an open letter from religious figures (including some from West Bank settlements), who urge soldiers to carry out orders.

This is an interesting juncture, since it marks an important moment in the process of unilateral disengagement, while also opening another chapter of dissent in the IDF. The severity and importance of these tensions in Israeli politics can be conveyed through the military situation. Dov Weisglass referred to the refusal to serve in the occupied territories from 'some of our finest young people'*. This underscored the need to pull out of Gaza. Now the Israelis are faced with the possibility of a mutiny from those on the other extreme. It seems frivolous to say they're stuck between a rock and hard place. Rather, their plight reminds me of that American climber who, when his arm got wedged under a boulder, cut off his arm with a pen knife.

*Weisglass's comment in full: "These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose with a strong odour of grass. These were... really our finest young people" . [from the BBC].

2004-10-20T01:16:00.000+01:00

Fintan O'Toole has attacked Sinn Fein and IRA doublethink on confronting and coming to terms with past wrongs. A timely reminder of the odious nature of IRA hypocrisy, bearing in mind recent movements regarding alleged collusion in the murder of Pat Finucane.

A point rarely made, though, is that unionists can engage in similar doublethink. Take the Finucane case, for instance. Under the surface many of a Unionist frame of mind have an ingrained idea that he was a Provo, and that he got what he deserved. It's not something that will be said publicly, but the attitude exists all the same. I should know: I've found myself thinking this kind of thought before. It's an inbuilt reaction.

But that way lies contradiction and hypocrisy. To excuse the unlawful killing of terrorists (I'm not implying that Finucane was a terrorist) grants them the status that they so desire: that of freedom fighters in a legitimate war. There are two diametrically opposed ways of viewing the troubles. One is to see it as an extended war between a colonial power and nationalist insurgents. In the other view, it is a conflict between illegitimate aggressors and a reactionary security force. The problem arises when we try to explain events using whichever framework best suits us.

The IRA have provided many notable examples. Their response to the Gibralter killings, and to the 1987 SAS Loughhall operation (essentially, to plead human rights abuse) provide good cases in point. The Unionists get away with their doublethink to an even greater degree. They can not consistently believe that the shooting of Pat Finucane was acceptable and denounce the IRA as murderous criminals. To do so is to view the Troubles as simultaneously out-and-out war and cold-blooded murder.

Unionists who fall pray to this way of thinking accidently make a concession they could not normally countenance. They validate the old lie of glorious martyrdom.

2004-10-19T23:58:00.000+01:00

"The MO for the new terrorism is completely different."
Good to see that David Aaronovitch agrees with me (albeit unwittingly).

2004-10-17T21:02:00.000+01:00

Fool's Gold?
I found this interesting piece in Prospect by Ben Lewis.

It scratches the surface in explaining why people want to own contemporary art. The figures are headspinning. Lewis reckons it’s worth £22bn a year. That’s about the size of Kuwait’s GDP (World Bank 2003 statistics, based on Purchasing Power Parity).

Curiously, most of this expenditure is on contemporary art. The conventional explanation for this (according to Lewis) is that there is a huge demand for art, but a fixed and limited amount of old art, so huge quantities of money is diverted into new art. This, as Lewis points out, is a poor explanation. Art collectors could simply buy sketches by the ‘masters’ or works by lesser known artists if they were priced out of the market for (for example) Picasso. It seems that collectors increasingly want to be part of ‘the process of validation’. They want to play a cameo in history; to be a part of things as they happen.

Lewis makes some interesting points about how this desire may be having a distorting influence on the art world. Market value and artistic value have come to be seen as the same thing. What Lewis doesn’t discuss, however, is why anyone should want to own art in the first place.
Well, first of all, they are of aesthetic value. Part of the collector’s motivation will be to derive pleasure from an object. But £50m worth of aesthetic pleasure? It seems safe to say that there are other reasons for collecting art. We can perhaps decompose the motivation to own a work of art into different categories. First and foremost there is the aesthetic motivation. There is also an element, with some works, of historical curiosity (much like first edition books and hand-written manuscripts). A beneficiary effect also probably exists. Collectors wish to be benefactors; to both artists and the general public. Another effect - mentioned above as a reason for collecting contemporary art - is the desire to take a role in creating history , to be a part of something that is relevant and contemporary.

Aesthetically, it’s not obvious why someone would want to own art. When high-grade fakes, forgeries and copies can fool even experts, why bother paying a vast sum of money for an original? Goodman offers a fairly good answer(in Languages of Art). To summarise, if a person is shown two apparently identical objects, no amount of looking will be able to completely convince them that the two objects are the same. This uncertainty about the existence of aesthetically relevant differences between the two artworks will underscore the way they are viewed. The acknowledgement of the possibility of aesthetic differences between the two objects therefore allows room for the judgement that the original is superior (or perhaps not) to the copy. The point is that, aesthetically, it is just different. A collector buying a copy of a Van Gogh is not buying an object identical to a Van Gogh. He is buying an aesthetically distinct, if ostensibly similar, object.

This justification of why we look upon artworks as unique entities was framed with particular reference to paintings. It becomes less straightforward when we arrive at contemporary art, particularly readymade art. When Tate Modern wanted to replace Duchamp’s Foutain they went to great expense to have a replica made by an artist. By signing an object as banal, turning it upside down and placing it in an art gallery, Duchamp was obviously asking a philosophical question. And poking fun. Over the last 80 odd years the art world has consistently failed to get the joke. More worryingly though, is that it has failed to move beyond Duchamp’s question; the perenial “Is it art?” debate. The fact that the Tate paid to have a replica made demonstrates perfectly both failures of the art world . Isn’t getting a replica of a readymade somehow missing the point? The joke is that the fountain is a urinal, not that it seems or looks like a urinal. Here too lies the philosophical issue. Duchamp did not create the object in the ordinary sense of the word. You could argue that he created the object as a work of art, but that way lies a garbled ontology. The object does not have two separate existences that can be untangled. The Chinese artists who decided to piss on the foutain proved this point perfectly (or would have, were it not for a Perspex screen). A man trying to sleep in a painting of a bed would be committing a fairly obvious mistake; a man sleeping in a bed in an art gallery is not. That is what beds are for.
So why pay money for a readymade? It runs counter to the grain of the whole idea. To do so is to subscribe to a fraudulent image of the artist as magician. He waves his magic wand and an everyday object becomes a work of art, with the same unique status as the objects’ which Goodman described. The readymade artist is not Midas: he does not, by definition, change his subject/object. The urinal may be in a gallery, but is not now made of gold.

I wonder if those parting with hundreds of thousands of pounds at the Freize Art Fair ever wonder if it’s all fool's gold.

2004-10-13T02:22:00.000+01:00

More from the Telegraph...
Where to start with Robin Harris's praise for Thatcher's stance against the IRA?

The basic argument seems to be that Blair's negotiated settlement to the Troubles does not look as morally courageous in the light of Al-Queda's globalised terror of the last few years. What Britain needs, apparently, is a backbone like Mrs Thatcher's. Blair requires the bravery to stand up, show his resolve not to yield an inch to the terrorists. This, to my mind, is wrong in a number of places, for fairly obvious reasons.

Thatcher's (very impressive) decision to deliver her conference speech the next day is considered as proof of her unyielding, iron stance against sneering, evil provos. Yet, a year or so later, the Iron lady proved to be particularly malleable with respect to the Irish Government's role in Northern Ireland as set out in the Anglo-Irish Agreement. While this can be considered a concession to the Irish Government rather than the IRA, it does not show Thatcher to be the towering figure with "unconditional determination never to yield". Thatcher subsequently admitted that the concessions of the Anglo-Irish Agreement were forced by security considerations.

Harris readily admits that the British Government today has 'nothing to offer' Al-qaeda and people of their ilk. That's precisely the point. It does not seem to occur to him that it is in the extremity and profundity of the assailants' grievances that post September 11 terrorism differs qualitatively from 'Irish' terrorism, not in its global nature, per se.

Harris's conclusion is that, "All we can do is use all the weapons in our arsenal to defeat them [Islamic terrorists]. These means are very much the same as those used in Ulster." (Please note that the phrase 'Islamic terrorists' and 'Irish terrorism' are both Harris's). "Used in Ulster", but to what effect? Harris does not venture to answer. Even when apparently successful (Loughall, Gibraltar or perhaps some of the alleged incidents of collusions), these means are of dubious long term benefit. They may well have (or, in Gibraltar's case, certainly did), help the downward spiral on its way. The following sentence, "And it is, therefore, doubly shameful that the Government is now complicit in vilifying those in the intelligence and Armed Services who risked their lives in that rehearsal for the war on terror.", is a vague allusion to something. It's difficult to know which particular episode of 'vilification' Harris refers to, but is it paranoid of me to assume he's getting at the 'dirty war'?

There are no shortage of attempts to use Northern Ireland as a template for the world's hotspots and conflicts, but this is surely one of the most ill-advised. Harris's attempt to exonerate a no-quarter-given stance against the IRA - a stance that never existed - by appealing to a wholly dissimilar movement with very different tactics in an entirely different struggle, is dangerously wrong-headed.

As are the arguments employed by those trying to stop the deportation of Ciaran Ferry in the US (registration required - I found this at Slugger).

I suppose this is the backlash against the backlash against terrorism. (Ex?)Provos like Ferry are certainly not ideological headcases who pose a serious and immediate threat to US security, but they are terrorists none the less. Simply because Ferry's crime was 'political' and he was released from the Maze under the GFA, this does not mean that he has been exculpated from his role in terrorism. If the American's are to allow an exception to be made for Ferry on the grounds that his crime and imprisonment were 'merely political', then they relegate death at the hands of the IRA to being 'merely political' (whatever 'merely' means in this context). And what would that mark, but a return to the cold, tit-for-tat logic of the Troubles?

2004-10-13T01:57:00.000+01:00

"Why does our education system fail black boys?"
...Reads one of those badly designed Socialist Worker posters (in New Cross). Bizarrely, Bill Deedes may have the answer in today's Telegraph. "There has been a deep-seated reluctance to spend the money needed, particularly in schools, to break down language barriers and other cultural gaps. All such spending, so it has been supposed, would be exploited by racists. So there has been a failure to equip a proportion of young immigrants with the means of earning an honest living in our relatively sophisticated society." Strange (and refreshing) to hear this "the kids are alright" attitude coming from a nonagenarian Conservative.

He uses fairly hilarious examples to demonstrate that yob culture has always existed. For instance, "a very rough scene at Lord's at the close of an Eton v Harrow match, when the youth of one school set about knocking in the top hats of youths at the other." This in the same week as a drive-by shooting of a 14 year old girl in Nottingham. However, the point is well-taken.

2004-10-11T23:44:00.000+01:00

A Road Map to Confusion
In Monday's Guardian Peter Preston wrote an article that proceeded to hoist him with his own platitudes. He lambastes the presidential debate by pointing out that the rhetoric of Bush (dur!) and Kerry fails to reflect the complexity and subtlety of international security. This is probably the biggest surprise I've had since getting out of bed this morning and realising the sun had risen. A televised live debate is never going to be an exercise in precise statements, rigourous consistency and complicated, incisive arguments. Never mind one between two candidates for the American presidency.

So far, so good. The world is, afterall, a complicated, inter-related place. It all goes awry in Israel, though. Apparently, "obfuscation is the name of Sharon's game". This is according to one of Sharon's "gabbiest advisors".

I find this sort of interpretation slightly muddled and slightly simplistic. If we deconstruct (now that Derrida is dead, I suppose we can misuse the word all we like) the word 'obfuscation', we come to the root of the confusion. As Dov Weisglass pointed out, the effect (regardless of the intention) of unilateral disengagement from Gaza was to 'freeze' the Palestinian Authority out of negotiations. What, then, does the word 'obfuscate' mean? Sharon is presumably using the planned withdrawal from Gaza to obscure something, but what? What lies behind the smoke screen? A nefarious resurrection of the greater Israel project? If so, then it's a funny way of going about it. Perhaps, then, a consolidation of some of the West Bank settlements? This is an infinitely more sensible suggestion, but it is hardly the headstrong behaviour to which Preston seems to allude. Rather an enforced version of something that would have been negotiated (were there somebody to negotiate with).

The most plausible suggestion is also the most innocent. Sharon is acting primarily to secure Israel. By jettisoning Gaza he prevents Israel from becoming over-extended, takes a step towards quelling the unease of those unwilling to serve in the occupied territories, and removes a few thousand people from a dangerous region.

Lastly, by using 'gabbiest' to describe Dov Weisglass, Preston extricates the situation from its complex and nuanced political context. I find it unlikely that Weisglass's comments were a garrulous outburst. More likely a carefully timed attempt to portray the tougher facet of Sharon's tactics to help woo those to the right of him.

Preston is perfectly correct. The world is a complicated place. Sadly, Israel is no exception.

2004-10-11T01:28:00.000+01:00

Caffeine Notes is back...
...and with a new URL, since my university webspace has been deleted. The absolute inaction of the last few months is to be explained by my nomadic existence. Now that I'm settled down in south east London and hooked up to the internet, I'll have permament record of my meanderings and musings.

2004-06-23T13:41:00.000+01:00

Radio ga-gag
Finally, we have an Alan Freed scandal for the 21st century! Tony Blackburn has been suspended for playing Cliff Richards records. On air he read out a 'cease and desist' notice before tearing it up and playing back-to-back Cliff Richards tunes.

This is probably the most punk thing to hit the airwaves since the Stiff Little Fingers said 'crap' (See the bar on the right hand side for a snippet).

2004-05-31T12:22:00.000+01:00

Media obsessed Israelis?
If you ever required proof that Israelis are obsessed with how their cause is conveyed to the outside world, have a look at this 2924 word Haaretz article about about Malcolm Balen, a senior editorial advisor on the Middle East for the BBC.

Nearly 3000 words. On an unheard of BBC suit.

The longest essay I ever handed in at Oxford was 2500 words.

If you don't have all day to spare the last two paragraphs are quite interesting.

2004-05-28T11:01:00.000+01:00

Compare and Contrast
While I agree with Hugh Orde to a certain extent that Loyalist paramilitaries are gangsters with an excuse, this interview with Zacharia Zubeidi (the leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin) shows that the power that 'freedom fighters' and 'defenders' gain moves imperceptibly towards organised crime and situations eerily similar to the flashbacks in Godfather 2. The transition is an easy one given the respect and kudos that they gain from the community.

2004-05-26T22:49:00.000+01:00

Finals...
Things here are excruciating due to finals.

If I hear any of the following sentences again I will attempt to kill someone with my mortar board:

"How are you coping?" Has there been a bereavement?

"Have you got an exam?" Usually when wearing subfusc.

"How did your exam go?" Do you really want to know?

"I'm sure you'll be fine" That means a lot, thanks.

Apologies for the general misanthropy.

On a cheerier note a very old man has started primary school in Kenya.

And this article about a personalised number plate gone wrong is hilarious.

2004-05-18T08:15:00.000+01:00

Katie Melua
I took a break from not revising last night to interview Katie Melua at the Union.

While her music is Radio 2 fodder, she does have a beautifully lush voice (just ask any of the lucky few in the debating chamber).

She was accompanied by her collaborator/manager Mike Batt who is also quite famous, as he seemed keen to point out. (He wrote Bright Eyes for Art Garfunkel. And Remember You're a Womble for infamous London group The Wombles). Talking in an amusing stream of conciousness about 'being creative in a commercial world', he mentioned collaborating with George Harrison in the same breath as helping with his children's homework. Batt is an admirably driven guy with an almost dangerous entrepreneurial streak, so nobody can begrudge his success with Melua.

His wife, Julianne also plays a large role in the Gatt's independent label Dramatico (which Melua is signed to), but more interestingly is an actress having starred in Sexy Beast.

EDIT: This Telegraph article about Mike Batt's travels is interesting reading. I'm beginning to wonder about the etymology of the word 'batty'.

2004-05-14T10:38:00.000+01:00

Cheers for the memories
Sorry about the pun, there. Frasier has ended. This saddens me because I can still remember Cheers ending and there's nothing more pathetic than getting nostalgic about TV shows.

2004-05-13T08:47:00.000+01:00

Caffeine News...
Apparently Oxfam are launching a chain of High St coffee shops. They plan to sell fair trade coffee at competitive prices.

This is great news for those that detest both the High St hegemony of plastic cafes and the lack of fair trade coffee in most places. Hopefully one of the planned 20 outlets will be in Oxford.

2004-05-10T09:30:00.000+01:00

Torture
I just heard Ariel Dorfman on Radio 4, talking about the 'torture' at Abu Ghraib.

He said that the most shocking thing about the affair was that we required photograhpic evidence to become outraged when Amnesty International tell us that it's been going on all over the world for years.

Firstly, it should be no surprise that we require things to be on the front page of papers and on television before we take any notice of things. The rather muted coverage of the disturbances in Sudan seems to confirm this.

Something bothers me about the coverage of the Abu Ghraib. I think it was the Times that called it the worst scandal to hit the US military since My Lai.

Now, if this is the worst scandal to hit the US military since My Lai then they have been remarkably well-behaved for over 30 years. To call what went on in Abu Ghraib torture erodes the severity of the word, diminishes its ability to shock. Take for example some of the torture techniques used under Pinochet - systematic rape, dogs tearing people's genitalia apart, and the occasional death by electrocution. Given the choice I'd take my chances with Private Lynndie.

We demand the highest standards in the conduct of British and American soldiers, which is no bad thing. Yet, losing perspective over the severity of the mistreatment won't do us any good. Let's not be relativists about torture.

2004-05-08T02:17:00.000+01:00

Provos and the doctrine of the double effect

Not an obvious combination, I'll grant you.

The other day I was revising some ethics, and I started thinking about Catholic ethics and the doctrine of the double effect.

It got me thinking about an old Guardian interview with Paddy Magee - the Brighton bomber, you know, the one who nearly killed Thatcher.

A seeming contradiction sprang from the page - "Is he sorry that he failed to kill Margaret Thatcher? No, he says, all deaths are regrettable", then, a paragraph later, 'Are there any killings he regrets? "This sounds very pious, but actually there aren't." '

A short conversation with Newt Emerson introduced me to the notion of the apparent separability of the act of killing and death. Deaths are a regrettable but ultimately acceptable by-product of a political act.

I find Magee's use of the word 'pious' interesting - is this a self-aware hint at the supposed religious authority behind his actions, or an accidental deviation from the word's religious implications?

This little post-revision meandering of the mind leads me to wonder if anyone has written about the role that Catholic ethics and the principle of the double effect plays in republican doublethink/ideology.

2004-04-30T09:10:00.000+01:00

Definitely not Brazil...
Back home some politically motivated shit-stirrers are using Northern Ireland's lowly footballing position to question the 'relevance' of a Northern Ireland team.

This includes, sadly, Derek Dougan, the former Wolves and Northern Ireland player who coached me a few times when I was a wee lad.

The allegations are that Northern Ireland are a crap football team supported by bigots and sectarians, and hence have no place in post-GFA Ireland. Maybe that's what they mean by parity of esteem...

Even when Northern Ireland were in the doldrums recently (for example, being reduced to 9 men against Greece) I have not heard any sectarian comments or chants at Windsor Park. This is an almost miraculous result, and the Football For All campaign has to be credited. Sectarianism is so deeply ingrained that sometimes it's a battle getting people to even think about it being unacceptably offensive.

The Belfast Tele's Steven Beacom has some heartening things to say about it towards the end of this article.

2004-04-30T00:12:00.000+01:00

PPE Finals Paper 1958
Theory and Workings of political institutions.

12. How good a precedent is Northern Ireland for Malta?

I think that history has answered that question to full effect.

I found that gem of a question while looking for the famous question from May 1958, on the day that French paratroopers arrived back from Algeria, heralding the end of the Fourth Republic,

What accounts for the longevity of the Fourth Republic?

2004-04-27T21:29:00.000+01:00

Question: who recorded the album 'Dummy'?

Answer: Portishead. Which is also where an almost funny case of not-in-my-backyard-ism is taking place. David Aaronovitch takes the locals to task.

It almost reminds me of home.

2004-04-27T00:14:00.000+01:00

Robert the Bruce didn't have a lazy spider to contend with

I've not been updating the page for a while, although not for want of things to write about. I've spent the last few weeks doing paltry amounts of mediocre revision, and while I've not been doing that I've been feeling guilty for not working.

Outside the window facing my desk there's huge spider. Day after day he sits motionless in the middle of his wind-exposed web. He doesn't move an inch, unless shaken by a strong breeze. I keep on thinking of Robert the Bruce in his cave, watching a rather more tenacious and dilligent spider.

If, come finals, it all goes horribly wrong then I'm definitely blaming the spider.

Edit: I think the spider might be dead.

2004-04-11T19:27:00.000+01:00

This charming man?
When 40-somethings become self-parodies of themselves it's invariably a pathetic attempt to remain as interesting as when they were...well, more interesting, I suppose.

Not so with Morrissey.

"Dear God, if only I could change. We'd all be so relieved. Despite massive discouragement, I remain myself." (Other gems include, "I'm not really that hot on the human race to be honest. Very few people have anything to offer." And, "In a way I lead a very British life. It's still very much inanimate objects and a television screen and jolly old books and things like that.")

Very much the same man that sang this in 1987:

"A dreaded sunny day
so let's go where we're wanted
and I meet you at the cemetery gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
but you lose because Wilde is on mine"

The guy is a genius and the world of pop will be so much more colourful now that he has an album to push.

2004-04-10T00:49:00.000+01:00

On the subject of anniversaries...

It's roughly a year since Baghdad fell to the coalition.

I was in Barcelona at the time. The streets off La Rambla exploded into a spontaneous cacophony - people on balconies bashed pots and pans, passers-by rattled on shop shutters and the balmy evening was thick with sound. It was like the Garvaghy Road that year that the Drumcree march was forced down - except there was no Brendan Macoinnaith to be seen.

The rationale of the exercise was, to my mind, dubious,(surely the ousting of Saddam Hussein was the best possible outcome given the invasion?) but I'm still in awe of that completely unstaged outpouring of disgust and dissent. I wonder if it was a similar reaction that ensured Aznar was given the boot.

How different to that concurrent demonstration of disgust - the hauling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein, when american tanks arrived at an almost empty al-Firdos Square before providing the war's most famous image.

The commentsthat were being made at the time by conservative bloggers now seem a tad premature.

The understandable I-told-you-so-ing which
Andrew Sullivan and OxBlog succumbed to, reminded me of an interview I did with an admittedly naive 'human rights observer' called Jo Wilding.

Wilding had just returned from Baghdad, and said that "What a lot of people say is, 'Kurd, Sunni, Shia - it doesn't matter. We'll fight the Americans'".

Until recently it looked as if this was an woefully poor gauge of Iraqi opinion. It seems a bit closer to the bone now.

2004-04-09T10:23:00.000+01:00

Time flies when you're having fun...

Six years tomorrow since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

2004-03-27T00:16:00.000Z

I'm just back from Nice.

A couple of observations: firstly, the French are still in the 'power ballad' stage of pop music development. Seriously. They've resurrected Bonnie Tyler for a franglais cover of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'.

Second, living somewhere and holidaying there are mutually exclusive activities, which is a slightly more telling proposition than it might first appear. I remember grabbing someone's 'Rough Guide to Ireland' and looking up Portadown. It read something along the lines of "a deterrent, bigoted urban hinterland". On one level it was obviously correct and on another it displayed a woeful and willing ignorance of everything worthwhile and enjoyable that the thousands of inhabitants of the town took part in. I was partly insulted and partly amused. Ever since then I've read tourist guides through my fingers. Two very different notions of culture inform my travels - that of the travel guide and that of the inhabitant.

My experience in Nice straddled these two experiences. I was only there for a week and I speak very little French. But on the other hand, I was the guest of a friend who had been living there since August and had consequently sank into a local's routine. When viewed from this unique position the town acquires a split personality. On the Promenade, if you ask a question in French you will be answered in English. The restaurants on the sea front advertise English breakfasts and Premiership football. Similarly, the amount of Italian eateries, estate agents and grocers hints at the size of the Italian presence. Yet literally a couple of streets back from the promenade you can find the haunts of the locals - the bars and cafes where those with nothing better to do frequent. Typically and inescapably French. On the Promenade - obviously well used to Anglo-Saxon complaints - they check that you want an espresso after asking for 'un cafe seel voo play'. A couple of streets further back and they assume you know what you're asking for, and try to convince you that it's the wrong time of day for it.

2004-03-15T00:50:00.000Z

Frightened? I am.

With the arrival of a thoroughly mundane email an impulsive sense of helplessness and fear came over me.

The email was from the college computer technician (in other words, from the same person that has sent about 1/3 of the emails in my inbox) and, typically, it was about computer security, specifically the bagel-k virus. It had spread through the university and was spamming inane bullshit to hundreds of thousands of times a minute.

It had never really sunk in before; we aren't really in control of things. It is slightly odd that this epiphany occurred over a fairly harmless computer virus, as opposed to September 11th, or one of the two occasions that Portadown (my hometown) was bombed, but that says more about my state of mind than anything else.

I'm well-aware that a momentary sense of fear is not a sound basis for such a broad inference on the state of the world, but the world is getting scarier. I'm not pretending that this is entirely objective (for example, anxiety over my lack of revision for finals is bound to take it's toll!).

Yet, when I heard about the bombings in Madrid, I recalled the feeling of reading that email.
Some people said that they were sceptical of the people who were sceptical that the blast was carried out by ETA. I'm beginning to wonder whether that was wishful thinking on their part. By convincing themselves that such an uncharacteristic attack was carried out by ETA they could divorce the bombings from the role that Spain played in the Coalition. It undermines the security-based arguments for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to such an extent that some, even people as clever and informed as the OxBlog guys, try to convince themselves that it was a relatively localised and containable phenomena.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that what happened in Madrid was neither local nor containable. I wonder if Blair, Bush and Aznar feel like the sad computer technician, sending emails to warn us, always that bit too late.

2004-03-14T18:50:00.000Z

Waugh, Plath and me.

Isis - Oxford's culture and arts magazine - has finally got an online presence. As a result, an article I wrote about the relation between music and cultural identity exists on the same website as the writing of Sylvia Plath, John Betjeman, and Evelyn Waugh.

It all seems slightly ridiculous.

2004-03-10T01:39:00.000Z

...about democracy

At a political theory lecture today I got an accidental insight into unionism. "Wollheim's paradox: I vote for A because I believe A is the right policy. B wins. I am a democrat so I think B is the right policy. Does this mean I (incoherently) think that both A and B are the right policy?"

This formalised a tension in unionism that I've sensed for quite a while, namely; the reiteration that unionists are in the majority being used as a proxy for an actual argument as to why the status quo is a good thing. As the [A] and [B] (I could get used this terminology...) populations converge this can only serve to undermine the Unionist case.

On a (slightly) related note I came across this comment from Trimble yesterday: "I would much rather be the Mandela. De Klerk was the leader of a minority group that was frustrating the rights of the majority."

It reminded me of the Portadown News story about who had the right to be the "nig-nogs in this situation". Comic gold.

2004-03-08T02:44:00.000Z

Re homepages - I could add:

4. Webpages from people who should know better. This specimen comes from Joseph Raz - one of the world's most eminent political philsophers. Only fully appreciated with a soundcard.

2004-03-08T02:25:00.000Z

...about homepages.

I'm setting up a homepage. There, I've said it. It's out.

When I tell people they either try not to laugh, or look at me as though I've told them I have an interesting collection of bicycle clips.

After literally minutes of rigorous research - conducted mainly by looking at sites that vicariously occupy Oxford University's webspace - I have discovered the root of anti-homepage opinion.

Homepages can usually be classified into one of the following categories:
1. A thinly veiled exercise in exhibitionism. As if to convince the outside world that they have friends, these people seem to think that the minutiae of their social lives needs to be on the web. This may or may not provide an example.

2. A product of severe boredom. I know the person responsible for this and am quite frankly surprised.

3. The product of a profound passion in a fascinating subject matter. This is a classic of the genre. The notion that somebody somewhere gives a toss is quite heartwarming.

Of course, I'm as guilty as anyone (my homepage is a combination of 2 and 3), but at least I'm not going to sink to showing pictures of my pets or pissed-up friends. I don't have a scanner.

2004-03-05T18:53:00.000Z

What's going on?