Why Modern Novels Are Boring and Worthy

Julian Gough, writing in this month's Prospect, argues that the modern literary novel is boring and worthy partly because it's been professionalised, partly because these days the tragic is valued more than the comic. He says modern novelists should look to the "new" media and to TV cartoons like the Simpsons for their inspiration.

Link to Gough's article:
Essays: 'Divine comedy' by Julian Gough | Prospect Magazine May 2007 issue 134

Words of Wisdom (4): Jenny McCartney

Jenny McCartney on the apotheosis of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as, respectively, First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland:

"... Although I am certainly grateful that Mr Mc Guinness is no longer an active murderer and Mr Paisley no longer an active sectarian bigot, I cannot pretend that my heart soars to see them as joint leaders of the new Northern Ireland. They have abandoned their intransigence at the precise moment at which its shedding will deliver them the greatest political rewards."

(Jenny McCartney writing in today's Sunday Telegraph)

NATO vs Taliban in Afghanistan - One-Sided War

Mark Steyn, writing in the Western Standard, revisits the difference between NATO countries willing to do "peacekeeping duties" and those who are willing to fight.

The latter group, he notes, is a lot smaller than the first, and in Afghanistan is composed of the English-speaking countries plus Holland.

Fighting against the Taliban is being done by soldiers from US, UK, Oz, Canada and the Netherlands. (In noting this, Steyn remarks that Holland "isn't officially an English-speaking country but speaks better English than most of the ones that are.") The photocopiers up north, he mocks, are manned by two dozen other NATO countries.

Even so, the fighting soldiers are hampered by bizarrely over-sensitive rules of engagement - aimed at minimising civilian casualties - which, claims Steyn, allow them to target only specifically-named Taliban fighters. This results in a one-sided war which is near-impossible for the NATO soldiers to win.

Link to article: Western Standard

Globalisation Hurts USA, Says Ex-IBM Man

The Nation discusses Ralph Gomory's take on globalisation. "What countries want and what companies want are different" is the ex-IBM staffer's starting point.

US Companies who move jobs and production offshore are benefitting themselves and the host countries, but not the USA. The conventional globalisers' idea of "win-win" is naive, he reckons. There will most certainly be "losers".

Gomory proposes two courses: cap the US trade deficit and use the tax code to incentivise multinationals to keep added-value jobs and production within the USA.

Gomory isn't aiming at wholescale protectionism, but he's persuasive enough to make that a possible outcome of the debate he wants to start.
Link to Nation's article: The Establishment Rethinks Globalization

Ijtihad vs Jihad

Johann Hari, writing in Dissent, argues that the focal point of current Islamic conflict is not one between jihad and western values, but between jihad and moderate Islam.

Hari points to the spread of Islamic liberalism and Islamic feminism amongst immigrants in Europe. He sees this as an opportunity to help reintroduce ijtihad (the use of reason to reinterpret the Koran which was abandoned in the thirteenth century) in preference to jihad. This could lead to an Islamic Enlightenment.

Link to Hari's article:Islam in the West :: Dissent Winter 2007 Issue

Words of Wisdom (3): Spark on Woolf

Muriel Spark on Virginia Woolf: "A spoilt brat. All right, she committed suicide, but she didn't have to take the dog with her."

Words of Wisdom (2): Albert Einstein

"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.…His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. "

Albert Einstein
The Religiousness of Science

Words of Wisdom (1): John Prescott

"If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there."

John Prescott, British Deputy Prime Minister.

Dalrymple OnThe Delusions Of Neuropsychiatric Triumphalism

Theodore Dalrymple has been to an inspiring neuropsychiatry convention where he learned about the latest dramatic advances in the fields of neuroimaging, neurochemistry, neurogenetics and so forth.

But he was bothered by the triumphalism he detected among some speakers. They implied that neuropsychiatry might soon be able to give a scientific explanation for all human actions and motivations.

Scientific self-knowledge, rejoins the ineffable ex-prison doctor, is neither possible, desirable - nor, if achieved, sufferable.

Link to Dalrymple's article: Do the Impossible: Know Thyself - New English Review

Do the Living Outnumber the Dead?

No, we don't. The claim you sometimes hear - that the number of people living today exceeds the number of people who ever lived - is a myth, according to the linked article in Scientific American.

Apparently some 100 billion people have lived since mankind first emerged around 50,000 BC. Today's global population of 6.5 billion is thus about 6.5% of people who ever lived.
Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead: Scientific American

Profitable Gossip

A PR report (by social studies group SIRC) finds that mobile phones serve a key therapeutic role in our fragmented society, enabling us to gossip with each other. Gossip is, apparently, an endorphin-building "grooming" activity essential to our mental and physical health. Good to have that spelled out.

The report was sponsored by a company which will be especially delighted with the findings - BT Cellnet, the UK's leading supplier of mobile phone solutions. It is BT Cellnet themselves who make most profit out of mobile-phone gossip.
Mobile Gossip

Murder in Putin's Russia

Anna Politkovskaya, "Russia's dead Cassandra" was murdered in Moscow last October, four weeks before another dissident, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London.

"We are nobody," she'd said, "while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God."

Michael Specter, in the New Yorker, shows how Russia's pockets of stability and prosperity have come at a price few in the West would be willing to pay.
The New Yorker: PRINTABLES