I keep recommending ‘Blog entries from Oliver Kamm—another Leftie with principles—to my friends. Coincidentally, today in another excellent entry, he links to Norman Geras’s ‘Blog, as I did yesterday. How many times do we have to explain it to you, you bigoted, anti-American pinheads? Update: There is a problem with the link above. I think […]

Read the article quick, Sonya, because, goodness me, there’s a queue to give Edward Said a good kicking. Here’s a thwack from Norman Geras, Leftie lecturer at Manchester University, and a thump from Brad de Long, economist at Berkeley.

Judith sends a link to this clever little historical parody by military historian Victor David Hanson from the National Review Online.

Amir Taheri explains to the hard-of-thinking the single most important lesson of the New World Order: don’t fuck with the USA.

Thanks to Adam Woolfe for alerting me to this sensible and passionate article about the Aqaba talks written by a Palestinian human rights campaigner in Ha’aretz. Thanks to Claire Berlinski for this one about the expansion of democracy. (I should have posted it two days ago.) It’s one of those arguments that sounds crazy at […]

Do you remember the Cold War when people would talk about how things behind the Iron Curtain were nothing like as bad as the Americans said they were? Then the Curtain fell away and it turned out things were much worse. (After this revelation most of the Marxists on this side folded up their tables […]

A quiet morning on Radio 4’s Today Programme so there’s time for an item about the evolution of the eye (Oxford physiologist’s grand theory about species expansion undermined on air by Cambridge biologist pointing out that the former has his dates wrong), time for an interview with a slippery Sinn Fein representative (refusing to answer […]

“As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress” Cherie Blair The poor, poor things.

There are scarcely enough quotation marks available for this entry. Edward Said, Palestinian “intellectual”, has published his latest “book”. It is 84 pages long. It costs £13. I am not suspicious of Said’s status as a Palestinian victim of Zionism*—he seems to be honest—but I become ever more suspicious of his supposed talents—how many ways […]

The gang had some fun yesterday and today trying to make some sense out of this development in U.S. foreign policy. (It’s an example of the short attention spans of the Western media that this news seems to have been all but buried, by the way.) We had a little online debate and the three […]

Oh, the humanity! Britain brings its World-famous expertise in running railways to the newly liberated Iraq…

Before the popularity of moral relativism and other post-modern fashions in thinking, reasoning about right and wrong was less complicated. For example, tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily every year for decades was considered worse than tens of people dying over the same time span. Scholars have since identified the fundamental flaws in this […]

I know I've been quiet lately. Mainly, when I've been online, I've been reading other Weblogs. There's been a lot of good news from Iraq about liberation and bloodless battles. Even the anti-war lobby is behaving as though the war is over, bar the vicious, ignorant, trivial griping of so-called peace-lovers. There's been bad news […]

Next, a quote from a talking head on BBC Radio 4 this morning: "You see the painstaking care the archaeologists use when they dig up these relics and now there is all this bombing. It's the history being destroyed, not just the people. The history is being shot at—and for what?" How about the removal […]

I'll say one thing for visits to the Grassly-Khalifehs: they always give me something to put in my 'Blog. It was a baby-packed party to celebrate Maryam's first birthday—and excellent fun it was too, hanging out in a sunny Hampstead garden with a crowd of well-behaved children of ages up ten (I think). Maryam is […]

Richard sent me a link to this today.

Just before the war started, Claire mailed some of her arguments in favour and I failed to post them as my 19Mar03 Weblog entry as I intended. Here they are.