June 22, 2007

The wisdom of crowds.

"Oh dear," say the worried people at Wikipedia. "The murder of Charlene Downes has become a cause célèbre for the extreme right who claim that it is being played down by the media because the victim was white and the accused Asian."

"What shall we do to remedy this regrettable situation?"

"I know! Let's prove them right."

(Via Laban Tall.)


Posted by Natalie at 10:10 PM

Ever closer union.

I generally think that any word or deed that brings closer the great day when the European Union shall perish is a good thing.

But all the same... Poles demand more EU votes to compensate for war deaths

You are kidding, right? Poland didn't lose a fifth of its population so that Tweedledum could have a bigger toy sword.
Posted by Natalie at 02:33 PM

June 20, 2007

No Title

Eve Garrard of Normblog on different attitudes to democracy in the Middle East:
Firstly, some people think that because a country is a democracy, it is vulnerable to certain kinds of pressure which wouldn't work on a non-democratic polity. So it may be legitimate to threaten and punish it in various ways, e.g. by boycotting its institutions, since these threats are likely to work [...] Furthermore, democratic governments have been voted in by a majority of their citizens, and hence those citizens share responsibility for their government's policies - they're complicit in them in a way that the subjects of a dictatorship, who have no choice, are not.
This view is contrasted with another:
On this second view, the fact that a government has been democratically elected gives it a special claim on our support. We have a duty to recognize it, and we shouldn't try to prevent it from carrying out its policies, since these have been democratically endorsed by the relevant electorate.
View A is usually applied to the voters of Israel; View B to the voters of the Palestinian Authority. But it doesn't have to be so.
So we could, if we wanted, use the first view to justify a boycott of Palestinian institutions because of Hamas's murderous policies, and we could use the second view to demand support and assistance for the Israeli government, indeed for any Israeli government, since they're all democratically elected.
Posted by Natalie at 11:05 AM

No Title

Michael Moore thinks*, concerning 9/11, that "there is much more to the story then we've been told."
"Why don't they want us to see that plane coming into the building? Because, you know, if you know anything about flying a plane, if you're going 500 mph, if you're off by that much, you're in the river. To hit a building that's only 5 stories high that expertly, I believe that there will be answers in that video tape and you should demand that that tape is released."
President Bush can comfort himself that at least now he will get some respect from Mr Moore for his expert ability to fly a plane onto a target considerably smaller than a building only five stories high, namely a runway.

*My headline is intended to amuse.


Posted by Natalie at 09:42 AM