Friday, February 22, 2008
News Annoys Nige
The BBC news managed to annoy me twice last night, for entirely different reasons (I really should give it up). At 10pm, Radio 4 led on the non-story of a couple of US planes having touched down to refuel on Diego Garcia while on 'extraordinary rendition' flights (a So What story if ever there was one, tho the lefist press is, predictably, having a field day with it too). To complete the double whammy, the BBC1 news devoted a full 20 minutes of a half-hour bulletin to the 'Suffolk Strangler', complete with endless futile speculation and psychobabble about his 'motive'. 20 minutes! Between them, these two news broadcasts seemed to encapsulate a lot of what's wrong with the BBC - institutionalised leftism on the one side, patronising dumbass populism on the other. At least I missed Question Time...
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
''institutionalised leftism on the one side, patronising dumbass populism on the other''
ReplyDeletelogically (presumably) that would be 'rightism'.
So you're saying you listened to both at once? Or perhaps you listened to the radio news while watching the TV news with the sound turned off? Kinky. This sounds like a clear case of binge-newsing. I think we'll need to increase your licence fee and ask local stores not to sell you cut-price televisions or radios.
ReplyDeleteThe high point of the little of Question Time I saw was Ruth Kelly saying of Gordo that the best way to establish a reputation for economic competence was to show that you were competent at running the economy. I don't think there were any cries of "Get her off" but perhaps there should have been.
I was moving, as ever, between two rooms, one with a radio in it, one with a TV. The Nigester never sits still. Sounds like I missed a treat with Question Time - I did glimpse it long enough to register La Kelly's luxuriant hair. Where did that come from? And does she really wear a garter of thorns or whatever it is? Best not speculate...
ReplyDeleteI watched Question Time - I liked it when that trade unionist wondered out loud why no one had spotted American planes on Diego Garcia, and the fact that none of the panelists seemed to know where it is...
ReplyDeleteAnswer -it is an American airbase...
Our friend Lord Archer has been to the Courtauld -I just thought you should know....
Thanks for the tipoff, Mutley - Jeff is excelling himself these days - I love the '(not very good)' judgment on the Degas - and the masterly 'on three floors' - genius!
ReplyDeleteWhy do you consider the extraordinary rendition story "leftist"?
ReplyDeleteI meant of course that US Planes are permanently on DG...
ReplyDeleteI made a suitably anodyne comment to His Lordship....
i guess it depends on your attitude to torture. If you feel torture is okay then aiding torturers by, for example, letting their planes land on your airstrips, or by selling them torture equipment, would be the decent thing to do.
ReplyDeleteIf, on the other hand, you feel that torture is a morally abhorrent practice on a par with rape or infanticide, and that no utilitarian argument could ever justify it, then one might see the extraordinary rendition thing as being quite important, rather than just saying 'so what?' You might indeed think that any decent human being should refuse to assist in the matter, whether it's called 'torture' or 'advanced interrogation', or some other fancy name.
This week was a hoot. Diane Abbott said Mao did alot more good than Hitler and that it's ok to wear a mao t-shirt. She barely blinked when portillo mentioned the 60 million, perhaps no-one told her.
ReplyDeleteHardly a case of letting them use our aistrips - more that they were using theirs, which just happen to be technically on British soil. I think it's impossible, in extreme circumstances, to be absolutist about torture, and I find it hard to believe that it has never ever yielded useful, life-saving information. Not noticing that a bit of far-flung 'British soil' happened to be used a couple of times for refuelling by a nation that's an ally is pretty small beer, it seems to me, compared to what we do allow to go on on in our own country, under our noses. By any reasonable analysis, it's only a matter of time till there's another home-grown terrorist atrocity. Still, I must try not to be grumpy. For the rest of today I shall be spreading good cheer.
ReplyDeleteYes, Nige, another home-grown atrocity is likely. However, its likelilhood is far greater precisely because Britain is complicit in such appalling acts. Your casual acceptance of torture as legitimate in certain circumstacnes, presumably at the discretion of the torturers, is rather distasteful in my view.
ReplyDeleteButs its hardly a story at all that some American airplanes landed in an American airbase very briefly. Refueled and then took off again.
ReplyDeleteNot casual, Neil, just reluctant to rule it out altogether. And I honestly don't believe the suicide bombers etc have, or need, any very strong justification beyond a lively desire to kill us all - Michael Burleigh's latest book makes this point at some length. They'll always find a justification if pressed, but I don't think it's primary.
ReplyDelete"Just happen to be technically on British soil.."
ReplyDeleteDiego Garcia is an island in the Indian Ocean whose native inhabitants were deported by the British government to provide the US with an airstrip. Is it really so extreme to say Britain is an American poodle ?
As for torture I would remind you that confessions were extracted from the Birmingham 6 and Guildford 4 using methods that American "special interrogators" also employ. How did these actions aid the fight against the IRA ?
The problem with torture is that future governments might give it wider usage besides terrorism if proven sucessful.
ReplyDeleteIt's also hard to mantain your position as a liberal society when you openly admit to torture.
Michael Burleigh wrote a rather careful pragmatic critique of torture in the Mail a few weeks ago. A point to ponder about the jihadists is the following. The Atocha station bombers sought to bomb Spain out of Iraq a few weeks before the general election. Incidentally Aznar has already said he was not a candidate for the PPE. They got their way when Zapatero pulled all the troops out after 200 people had died in Madrid. On 19th January 2008 (that's a month ago) Spanish authorities (acting on a tip from a brave French DGST agent inside the cell) arrested 14 Indians and Pakistanis in the final stages of a bombing Blitz in Barcelona timed to happen on 11 March (that is in three weeks time). That has nothing to do with Zapateros foreign policy since Z is hell-bent on 'dialogue' with the Islamic world. I know, I've been to some of those sessions, where lady Anglican clerics literally said to the gathered imams and the Iranian ambassador, 'perhaps these things could all be resolved if we all bought eachother a drink down the pub'. God help us. Incidentally, said ambassador has, shall we say, a past. Apropos future attacks, Hizbollah will already have dusted down off-the-shelf plans to 'return the serve' over Imad Mugniyeh's demise- a natural death if ever there was one ie it is 'natural' that someone who spends thirty years killing innocent people gets killed by a car bomb- so, given the time to put operations in place, I'd expect something really horrible to happen (in Latin America or Africa) around the Ides of March. Incidentally Nige is right about the BBC- see the apology they had to make when Mugniyeh was 'compared' to Rafik Hariri (who as far as I know was not a career terrorist) but the victim of Syrian assassins close to Mugniyah.
ReplyDeletei'm quite willing to accept that there are pragmatic justifications for torture; but morality is unconcerned with such explanations. i'd hardly describe myself as a 'moral' person, it's just that some things horrify me so absolutely i couldn't countenance them. If i had to torture Cheney or Bush to stop a close friend from being tortured - no, i couldn't do it.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine was tortured to death once. It took him 3 days to die. He wasn't a bad man; he simply fell into enemy hands. They weren't looking for information, they just wanted to express their domination. That's enough for me to turn my face from torture, whoever it's done to, for whatever reason.
A human being is a human being regardless of their race or religion or even whether they're good or bad people; if it would save lives to torture Bryan, for example, would you go ahead?
It's a quagmire unless you take a moral stand and say 'it's wrong under all circumstances'. Morality isn't about consequences, it's about the moment, the individual. While that may seem drastic and impractical, look what amoral pragmatic thinking has accomplished in the 20th Century.