Comments policy in 2010: what do readers think?
SEVERAL regular readers have pointed to the increasingly acrimonious tone in this blog’s comments box, and have suggested that I start deleting comments, and even banning individuals of which they disapprove. However, I don’t plan to go down that road. Well, not yet, anyway. There are number of reasons why I want Dave’s Part to [...]
Ahmadinejad’s ‘mature democracy’: reply to Andy Newman
HOW would you define a ‘mature democracy’? Would a government that restricts the right to stand in elections solely to candidates approved in advance, and even then regularly stuffs ballot boxes, deserve the designation in your book? What if you were told that the state in question was an open theocracy which consolidated its hold [...]
After Abdulmutallab
ODDS are that the 278 passengers on board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day represented a reasonably random demographic. Opinions about Afghanistan and Iraq will naturally have varied, but a majority of adults on board will probably have been liberal-minded opponents of the invasions. I’m guessing entirely, of course, but [...]
Finkelstein and the far left
BACK in 2000 – the year in which ‘The Holocaust Industry’ was first published – I can plausibly claim to have been too preoccupied with the arrival of my first child to have kept up to speed with then-current controversies. But to allow almost a decade to elapse without picking up on what must rank [...]
Election debates: the trouble with the new consensus
SERIOUS political debate – in the sense of well-argued clashes between sharply opposing viewpoints – has been on the decline in this country since it was stifled by ideological consensus at some point in the 1980s. The key problem is that once all sides share all the same essential premises, it becomes increasingly harder to [...]
Arbeit Macht Frei sign: the logic of desecration
THERE was – from Indira Gandhi’s point of view, anyway – obvious security justification for Operation Blue Star. Sikh militants were hoarding arms in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site of all for adherents to that religion. So one day in 1984, India’s prime minister ordered the army to move in. Hundreds perished [...]
The killings of Katie Summers and Tulay Goren
SEXUAL jealousy, personal insecurity, the pain of rejection, mental illness, twisted religious belief, and oh so many other reasons few of us could ever begin to comprehend; men murder women in a huge range of circumstances, as illustrated by two stories in the media this week. Greater Manchester Police finds itself having to explain how [...]
British Airways cabin crew: right to strike
LIBBIE Escolme Schmidt – speaking as the author of a book documenting the too, too glamorous time she spent as a 1960s trolley dolly, you understand – thinks that striking British Airways cabin crew are ‘a disgrace to their profession’, and gets space in Britain’s biggest-circulation quality newspaper to tell them as much. One line [...]
Labour’s agonising strategic choice
THE OLD socialist slogan that the worst imaginable Labour government is still preferable to the best imaginable Conservative government has been sorely tested over the last 12 years. Not only did we not get the New Jerusalem, what we have lived through barely qualifies as a Barratt estate hastily flung up on the outskirts of [...]
