'Nother Solent

The much-hyped Sure Start programme

, which the Guardian calls a "concept" for some reason, actually sets back the development of the most deprived children. We are assured by the children's minister, Beverley Hughes, that the Platonic or Ideal Sure Start is not at fault; it is but the earthly copy that offends. "I don't think there is anything wrong with the philosophy, but the issue is implementation on the ground."

"Makes a change," says Mr Briffa.

A modest Thanksgiving.

Dawson writes

:

this may be ...not up yr current alley, but were I still blogging (and don't we all thank Christ I'm not)

Oooh, I dunno about that. Longtime readers - and I'm talking real longtime readers, going back to the misty dawn of the blogging era in 2001 (as he himself said, "blog years are like dog years"), will remember that Dawson's now departed blog was one of the pioneers. Anyway, Dawson continues:

I'd...beg somone to read this! Not as good as Mark Steyn or VDH...but a fresh prespective, and damn well said me thinks.

This is what he is recommending. A Der Spiegel interview with Robert Kagan: "The War is More Popular than Bush." An extract:

SPIEGEL: You were a strong advocate of the Iraq war. Iraq is still unstable, with more than 2,000 American troops dead. Many of the war's supporters are having second thoughts. What's your position on Iraq today?

Kagan: Not only do I not think that we should be pulling out, I don't think we should be reducing our forces. And I think we're going to be in Iraq five years from now, if not longer. The consequences of leaving Iraq are really very bad.

SPIEGEL: But will voters appreciate the abstract dangers of a withdrawal at a time when very real body bags are returning from Iraq every day?

Kagan: We will sustain this. We stayed in Vietnam for quite some time, suffering 50,000 casualties. It is true that the United States, like all democracies, is sensitive to casualties, but not as sensitive as people think. And Sept. 11 did have an impact on the amount of casualties Americans are willing to tolerate.

SPIEGEL: You really think the American public would accept 50,000 casualties?

Kagan: 50,000 at the present rate would take 50 years. We're not talking 50,000 casualties in Iraq. Or 50 years.

"...The difference between us and the Romans

was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue."

Discuss.

Brian Micklethwait and Samizdata commenters did.

Mr Micklethwait is, as he never tires of saying, a convinced atheist. However he is sometimes insightful on Christianity. After lamenting the empty-headed niceness of the current Western zeitgeist, he writes:

Niceness was, I suspect, a Roman fact but also a Roman secret. (How else could Christianity have ever caught on?) And then our nice Roman fixer would be back to the Senate to make blood-curdling speeches about the need to suppress with the utmost brutality whatever little challenge Rome faced that week.

I said above that "we" aspire to the virtue of kindness. Maybe that is a rather European view. Americans may be wondering quite where they fit into this dichotomy. In particular, they may be noting that it is precisely in the Christian bits of the USA that the semi-Roman virtue of cruel-to-be-kind foreign policy precision is still aspired to, and in the non- or anti-Christian bits of the USA where the kind of incompetent niceness I have been complaining about is most popular. Maybe Christianity has its own built-in safeguards against Christian and especially post-Christian feeblemindedness and sentimentality.

Among the generally fascinating comments, those by Paul Marks stood out. He argued against Brian Micklethwait, but I think they are both partly right. Trust me to say something like that. It's because I'm so nice.

Guilty, guilty, guilty.

I've been too busy to blog for the last few days. Hope to be back tomorrow, but I'm not actually promising anything.