pseudomagazine

Big news — UPDATED

2005-06-07T03:38:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-18T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

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...

2005-05-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

...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

2005-05-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-13T05:28:00.000-07:00

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?

Thin as Straw

2005-05-13T02:51:00.000-07:00

I was going to just hurl a little invective at Jack Straw's Graun piece and get on with my life. Hey, he doesn't like PR, so what? A turkey like him is hardly going to vote for Christmas. Anyway, expecting a NuLab insider to remember what it was like to believe in something as a matter of principle was always a long shot.

But way beyond the arguments over PR, Straw has inadvertantly nailed what's wrong with British politics. His deliberate misrepresentation of inconvenient arguments, his debasing of serious debate by obfuscation and teleological anti-intellectualism, is typical of NuLabbers. They didn't invent it — remember the Tories ribbing Gordon Brown when he dared mention three words with too many syllables for the Sun's column layout — but they have perfected it. And none better than Straw yesterday.

He knows it's dishonest and irrelevant to draw comparisons between the Israeli electoral system and what might be right for ours. It's empty scaremongering for the ill-informed. But that's what he did. He knows it's plain wrong to imply that with PR there would be no MP–constituency link. But that's what he did. He knows the old 'pivot party' argument doesn't stand up to evidence of what's actually happened elsewhere. What became of the famous German FDP, the theorists' 'pivot party' of the 1980s? The one that was deemed so central to the system that they could expect to be in eternal power, with the SPD and CDU falling over each other to offer concessions. Oh, that's right: they got booted out in 1998 and haven't danced their power-drunk pivot dance since.

He knows, most importantly of all, that the aim of PR isn't an equal share of power, as he mumbles half-way along his trot through the fallacies, but a fair share of representation. There's a whole library of difference. But he said it anyway.

And buried in the twisted detail he reaches the point where his self-regarding, self-serving prose achieves an orgasm of bathos:

[FPTP] enables a proper "contract" to be established between parties and their electors through their manifestos. For all the hyperbolic (and usually inaccurate) charges of "lying" that are thrown around at elections, parties and their leaders are careful and precise about what is promised in their manifesto, because, if elected, that document is the programme for which the country has voted and on which the government will be judged.

Well, we've had our say on your manifesto, Jack. And on the previous two — on the contractual promises you made and then ignored or watered down. Oh, and on your last minute txt msgs, too. 64% of us didn't like what you had to say in the slightest. If you were anywhere approaching a real democrat you'd recognise the verdict.

(Also at The Sharpener)

A genius speaks: Straw on PR

2005-05-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

I'd really like to take this to bits (it's too easy) but I'm right up against a deadline in the real world. Should you want a moronic view on the PR debate, with more straw men than Emmerdale Farm and more lame fallacies than a first year undergrad. course, go read some risible Pollardian shit.

UPDATE: Go and read this, Jack.

UPDATE 2: Then this.

UKIP splitterist bastards

2005-05-11T03:08:00.000-07:00

Writing in the Torygraph, Mark Steyn makes the same error being made by our right-loving friends here and here:

In this election, both the Left and the Right were split - on the Left, between the pro-war Blair and the anti-war Liberals; on the right, between Europhobic UKIP and Euroequivocating Tories. In Solihull, the Lib Dems won by 279 votes; the UKIP candidate got 990. Down the road in Warwick and Leamington, Labour won by 306 votes; the UKIP bloke got 921. By some analyses, the UKIP vote cost the Tories 25 seats. Without them, the Lib Dems would have won merely an extra seven seats and the Labour majority would have been down to 34.

But there's a problem: he's assuming that every UKIP voter, in the event of a Tory shift towards the Eurosceptic pole, will switch and vote blue (again). Which is wrong on at least two levels.

First, I see Tory Euro policy-maths as at best a zero-sum game. A switch sceptic-wards is likely to lose at least as many votes from one pole as join from UKIP (or the BNP, as Steyn suggests) at the other.

Second, it suggests that UKIP voters are naturally Tory and just borrowing the purple robes for a while. But there are at least as many complete anti-system types in UKIP, 'new voters' that the populist appeal calls to the poll for the first time. Some are perhaps ex-BNP (or 'latent' BNP, now happy to have found an acceptable xenophobic party) — hence the prominence given to immigration, even over the EU, on their campaign literature. Pulling out of the EU entirely is not incompatible with either socialism or conservatism, and UKIP are the only party proposing this. Who knows where voters have gravitated from? All over the place, most likely.

But Steyn's 25-seat claim relies on a pretty heroic assumption — that they are 'natural' Conservatives and easily won back. In fact, in Battersea, Carshalton, Cornwall North, Hereford, Hove, Portsmouth North and Watford, they would almost all have needed to return in order to overturn the result. That doesn't stand up to anaylsis.