Design a Building for Me

A magnificent response from Uncle Dick Madeley to my request for architectural assistance. I find the distant hills strangely moving.

Discuss 13

'The universe looks like a put-up job.'

Fred Hoyle

Design a Building for Me

Will Alsop has asked me to draw - my drawing is about as good as my skateboarding - a building for an Italian magazine feature of some kind. It has to be a multi-purpose building. I would like suggestions and drawings, but I don't know if you can put those in comments. Preferably these will not be completely stupid, though somewhat stupid is probably okay.

Afghanistan 2

From where I'm sitting, I don't think it's possible, honest or meaningful to have an opinion about Afghanistan. It's not going well, our people are dying in a dubious cause and the Karzai government is corrupt; on the other hand, it sounds like a good idea to kill Taliban and withdrawal would be a regional catastrophe. I could stick a pin in 'fight on' or 'withdraw' and then get all columnistic about it. But why?

Anyway, I just heard this soldier on the Today programme. He drew attention to the standard, withdrawalist statement about the conflict - 'Of course, I support our troops, but I don't support the cause.' The soldier said the troops supported the cause and the best way to support them was to do the same. In other words, the engagement of our troops is co-extensive with the cause.

Now it's easy to question this argument by generalising it. Would a German have been right to support the SS guards at Auschwitz because they were 'our boys'? Well, no. But our troops are not SS guards and our rulers are not Nazis. We should be able to allow ourselves a reasonable degree of confidence that somebody, somewhere, has thought long hard and humanely about this deployment. Most don't because of contemporary mistrust of the motivation and wisdom of politicians and because of the intensity of the media focus. By historic standards, our casualties in Afghanistan are light, but each one is given maximum emotional impact.

Once we would have believed our cause was just on principle - simply because we are who we are - and, to some extent, the Americans still do this. Now we can't unless we are able to identify a clear case of national security. Brown knows this and his primary argument is that fighting the Taliban will keep the terrorists off our streets. This seems unlikely.

The point is that neither a universal cause - we are fighting for justice and democracy - nor a patriotic one - it will be better for these people if we, the British, sort this out - has any traction. Supranational bodies like NATO or the UN provide some cover but unity always seem to crumble when the going gets tough. This raises the question of whether we can fight any wars at all, any, at least, that are not immediately defensive of our home territory. Perhaps, you may say, that's a good thing. But I wonder.

Discuss 12

'I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.'

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How Did New York Get Nicer?

Simon Heffer sticks to the view that it was Giuliani and Bratton's zero tolerance strategy that made New York a nicer, safer place. In Freakonomics Levitt and Dubner deny this, saying the drop in crime had already begun, there had already been a police hiring binge, crime was dropping everywhere not just in New York and this - their killer counter-intuitive argument - was a result of the legalisation of abortion. Poor single women started aborting future hoodlums. I don't know which side I'm on. The improvement in New York since the seventies when I first went there is certainly spectacular. London is now a more alienating city. One question would be: is the improvement in New York solely a function of the falling crime rate or is there some other force at work? The city feels better in all kinds of ways, not just because one no longer feels one might be mugged. Perhaps this is a knock-on effect or perhaps the zero tolerance strategy drew the citizens together, gave them a communal purpose, in some intangible way. This would, of course, be reinforced by 9/11. Anyway, I don't know and I'm recording a discussion with Levitt for Radio 3 on Tuesday, so perhaps I ought to make up my mind.

Read Nick and Weep

Great piece by Nick Cohen. He's absolutely right, MP's expenses has become a distraction from proper City regulation. I presume health reform is distracting the Americans from the same goal. Nick rightly mentions Larry Summers as one of the Americans standing in the way of bank reform. It is worth noting something Summers said in 1991:

'Spread the truth - the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.'

Dolly Parton said it cost a lot to look as cheap as she did. Equally, it takes a lot of education to be as wrong as that, Larry. Anyway, in case you were wondering whether the City boys were working on the next ruinous scam - yes they are. Of course, bonuses are back up there and, in New York, the bankers have even jumped the queue for H1N1 vaccine. This time it's much more fun because there is less competition and more cash to play with thanks to quantitative easing. This is what it sounds like, a laxative. Assuredly, the bitch that bore them is in heat again.

Haneke - Fukuyama

In The Sunday Times I interview Michael Haneke. I also interview Francis Fukuyama twenty years after his End of History essay appeared - however, I can't, for the moment, find the link.

Discuss 11

'The concentration on violence - riots, assassinations, uprisings, and civil war - valuable in itself for understanding how such things happen and what might be done to hinder them from happening, as well as for showing to what red hells our sightless souls may stray, gives a misleading picture of religious conflict by representing it in its most pathological forms. There are profounder matters at work than mere unreason, to which, after all, all human enterprises are subject, not just those concerned with the Meaning of Life.'

Clifford Geertz

For PZ Myers

Read Michael Ruse in The Guardian now. There, bracing wasn't it? I note there are 1,000 plus comments. The ones I read were all anti-Ruse and pro-Dawkins. But Dawkins is a very context-sensitive meme. In The Telegraph the comments would probably be pro-Ruse and anti-Dawkins. I note also the appearance of this character P.Z.Myers. I've never read him before but I now discover he once did me over - 'How stupid are the editors and managers who keep paying for his badly written lumps of self-contradictory fatuousness?' Okay, I'm prepared to accept that I may be wrong about everything - I wake up every morning thinking just that - and PZ may be right, but 'BADLY WRITTEN'! Coming from this sub-verbal sack of shit that's a bit rich. I mean just scan his stuff. 'Badly written lumps' needs a bit of work, PZ, if you really want to nail me on grounds of literacy. 'Sub-verbal sack of shit' is so much better, no? PZ knows as much about prose as I do about angling (which is, in fact, slightly more than usual because I'm getting to sleep by reading Carl Hiaasen's Double Whammy) and he has an ear that would be made of tin if it weren't made of lead. Intellectually, of course, he's beneath consideration, but I won't go there. I'm with Napoleon on the subject of PZ - 'Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.'