Big news — UPDATED

Just a little prompt for my 'army' of RSS subscribers: I'm now writing Fair Vote Watch. See you there?

UPDATE 25/11/05: This is an ex-blog. I'm now at The Jarndyce Blog and co-running The Sharpener. Ta.

Goodbye

Maybe I should be eating more fruit or something, but I suddenly find myself, like a character in Grimm or Aesop, struck completely dumb. Call it what you like: the mojo has evaporated, the desire to share my thoughts with and on the world is no more. It might be post-election blues, I guess, but the plain fact is that I can't think of anything remotely interesting to write about.

Well, that's not entirely true. I can think of plenty of things I'd like to write about, but cannot find the desire for research or the creative process. The election and rapid return to business-as-usual from NuLab has left me feeling thoroughly depressed with the state of the British polity, but without sufficient anger to strike out in words. It's like I've got the first line to a thousand protest novels but neither the guts nor the heart to fill the other 300 pages.

Regular readers will have noted a distinct decline in the quality of pieces appearing here since last week. The place is losing its way, and me with it. I have no wish to write shit. Better not to write at all, I think. I will continue at The Sharpener, and already have an idea for something else new to appear soon. But, for now at least, the Pseudo Magazine is an ex-blog.

I think...

LATE NIGHT UPDATE: Or I may be suffering a temporary lapse in sanity (or in my particular insanity)... Or I may be on holiday... Or I may morph, Transformer-style, into something unexpected but much more useful. Meanwhile, catch me and the much greater and gooder at The Sharpener.

Dirrrrty coalition talk

From the New Zealand Herald:

National leader Don Brash has quashed any suggestion that his party could form a coalition government headed by New Zealand First leader Winston Peters [after the election later this year].


But the Prime Minister [Clark] said she was sure both leaders were "desperate and dateless" enough to consider such a scenario.


Their comments follow a report in yesterday's Herald which said MPs in both National and NZ First were informally discussing a power-sharing scenario in which Mr Peters would be Prime Minister - for half, if not all of, a three-year term.


The outcome would be possible only if NZ First held the balance of power after the election.


NZ First negotiators suggested such a power-sharing deal between Mr Peters and National PM Jim Bolger during coalition talks in 1996.


Helen Clark said yesterday that the same proposal was raised with Labour during talks that year.

Such open discussion of potential and past post-election alignments blows away one coalition myth: that these alliances are necesarily furtive, unaccountable and secret. Of course, what leaders say before an election may not match what they do once power is within reach.


But that isn't unique to coalition government: New Labour gave no advance warning about plans to give the Bank absolute power over monetary policy, and promised to extend 24-hour drinking in a 2001 election-eve text message. Trumpeteers of the accountability of single-party government take note.

Please bear with me...

...while I revamp the place. My command of HTML is right up there with my numismatic knowledge, so it may be a few hours before I have this place looking even respectable. Any comments on the design as it stands gratefully received.

Ask and you shall receive

Via Nick: even the good guys on the Labour benches are not your friends:

But yesterday there were signs of a rapprochement between the government and its most outspoken critics, who have indicated they are unlikely to mount a serious challenge over ID cards.

Glenda Jackson, the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, said: “Where we have principled objections to pieces of legislation we will obviously make our views known, but we will not be trapped into engaging in some virility test with Tony Blair.”

And ID cards and supercomputer databases don't deserve a morsel of principled objection, it seems. Next time, never mind the hand-wringing. If you vote Labour, you get Labour.

With friends like these

Democracy on the march once more in Saudi Arabia:

A Saudi court has sentenced three reformists to jail terms of between six and nine years for "stirring up sedition and disobeying the ruler".

The three activists were arrested in March 2004 after urging the rulers to move towards a constitutional monarchy and speed up reforms.

They refused to defend themselves on the grounds that the trial was taking place behind closed doors.

Human rights representatives were also barred from the courtroom.

Using Western terminology, causing instability and collecting signatures for a petition reportedly were among the accusations levelled against them.

One hopes this sort of thing doesn't sour relations over a cordial White House breakfast too much:

Today, we renewed our personal friendship and that between our nations. In our meeting we agreed that momentous changes in the world call on us to forge a new relationship between our two countries — a strengthened partnership that builds on our past partnership, meets today's challenges, and embraces the opportunities our nations will face in the next sixty years.

It couldn't be that spreading freedom and democracy is a secondary concern for US–Saudi relations, could it?

Never trust an interrogator

Not quite sure what to make of this report on crafty interrogation techniques from the Detroit Free Press:

U.S. interrogators at the Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba have told two Kuwaiti prisoners not to trust their lawyers because they are Jewish and would "betray Muslims," one of their lawyers said in an affidavit filed in federal court.


The allegations, denied by the U.S. government, also include an account of one interrogator telling a prisoner that the law firm handling his case is Jewish and represents Israel...

Aha, those eeeevil Yanks:

...said lawyer Tom Wilner, who is Jewish.

Well, they made the Israel bit up at least, surely:

Wilner noted that his Washington firm, Shearman & Sterling, has a "diverse membership" and represented Israel in a trade dispute 15 years ago.

Regular readers here will know my thoughts on the human rights hell-hole that is Guantanamo, but I'm tempted in this case to say that interrogators giving inmates facts in the full knowledge that ingrained anti-semitism will do the rest of the work is perfectly valid in what is, after all, a state of war (real or imagined, discarded Geneva Conventions notwithstanding).


Anyway, what are they going to do them for? Telling the truth? And where's Jon Ronson when you need him?