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Al Daily link to an interview with philosopher Peter Singer. The tone of it is well exemplified by this (NR is the interviewer Noel Rooney – any relation to Wayne, I wonder? – while PS is the great man himself):

NR: I heard Chomsky speaking recently about the elision of moral truisms as a kind of political strategy, and the refusal of universalism in US foreign policy. Do you see the President of Good and Evil as operating in the same sort of assumptive arena?

PS: Well, Bush is morally a universalist. For instance, he says the freedom is good, the same thing is good, all over the world. So in that sense he’s a universalist.

NR: Do you think he believes it?

PS: Oh, I think so.

NR: What do you think happens when the practicalities fall very short of that? Say the American refusal to count civilian casualties?

PS: What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that he doesn’t have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos; I think that’s certainly true, but in that I think he’s simply focusing elsewhere, not looking at that and saying ‘how can I justify my support for human life against what I do in Iraq’; he rather takes a view that’s relatively widely held – he simply says we didn’t intend these deaths, so therefore they somehow don’t count.

NR: Yes, you sometimes get a sense they’re somehow less fatal, those deaths.

PS: Yes that’s right; the people are sort of less dead.

Fascinating. Bush is accused of regarding Iraqi lives as being worth less than American lives. But they’re talking here only of Iraqi deaths caused by the US. For them Iraqis killed by other Iraqis just don’t figure in the equation at all. The mass graves, the torture chambers, the bombs now aimed at ordinary Iraqis in the street by Islamic terror groups…they don’t just count for less; they don’t count at all.

Moral philosophers, eh…where would we be without them?

lumnists wrote of the danger of absolute decline, not just relative decline. The success story has, I think, three main elements.

One is the importance of the international financial services industry. London’s dominance of the commercial banking side of that goes back to the 1960s and pre-dates the recent boom, but the Big Bang reforms of the City in 1986 enabled it to dominate investment banking and securities business in this time zone. Finance is a huge money machine, pulling in its wake other services industries ranging from expensive lawyers to expensive restaurants.

But it is not just finance. After all, the region’s economy has weathered the worst downturn in the markets for a generation. The second general reason for success is the march of globalisation. As economic relationships become ever more international, a big advantage accrues to existing international centres. A Chinese manufacturer needs a European base. Where does it go? It goes to the place where the Chinese banks have offices. It could perhaps choose Paris or Frankfurt but London is a more natural choice. So a “winner-take-all” situation develops, where leading centres in each time zone go on growing because they are the leading centres. A global superleague of cities is emerging and London happens to in pole position.

That leads to the third force driving the economy of the South-east: the social/cultural/intellectual mix. That is, an amalgam of the world language, an open culture, two of the world’s top 10 universities and a vibrant cultural and intellectual life. Example: Britain now publishes more book titles than any other country. Further example: there are more Chinese students in the UK than in any other country, again more than the US. Of course, this is a UK phenomenon but it is one that is skewed disproportionately to the South-east.

Update: here’s that Henry James quote – “It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners…all this and much more you may expatiate upon… But these are occasional moods, and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world. The human race is better represented here than anywhere else, and if you learn to know your London you learn a great many things.”

Further to an earlier post of mine about the Moroccan community in Antwerp, Live in Brussels writes about more trouble, with Jewish boys being attacked by muslims:

The mayor of Antwerp, socialist Patrick Janssens, was quick to condemn the increase of ‘racism’ and ‘anti-semitism’. The talking heads on TV also condemned ‘violence between two communities’.

Funny how this violence ‘between’ two communities only means that there are concrete blocks in front of synagogues and Jewish schools, and increased police patrols in Jewish neighbourhoods. And none of that in ‘muslim’ neighbourhoods. Maybe because the violence is uni-directional?

Scary things are happening in Antwerp, and maybe the thirties are coming back after all, but not in the way the Antwerp left has been saying all these years.

Nice timing: just as Labour proposes a smoking ban in public places, including bars, along comes a new study claiming to show that passive smoking is twice as risky as previously thought.

The researchers noted that most studies on passive smoking examined the risks of living with someone who smoked. They said that while this was important, it did not take into account the additional exposure at work and other places such as pubs and restaurants.

The team said that by measuring cotinine — a by-product of nicotine — they could get a more accurate measure of exposure to smoke from all sources. The study focused on 4,792 men from 18 British towns who were monitored for 20 years.

The researchers took blood samples to measure cotinine, concluding that higher concentrations of the substance in the blood of non-smokers were associated with an increased risk of heart disease.

The level of cotinine was taken as indicative of the degree of passive smoking, and was then found to be associated with an increased risk of heart disease. Fair enough: one must, I suppose, accept that the researchers are right in saying that passive smoking is the only possible source of cotinine. But even if that is the case is it not highly likely that people who spend a great deal of time in bars inhaling the second-hand fumes of others are in general far more likely to have dodgy tickers than those who spend their leisure time striding across the open countryside? There’s no evidence here that cotinine directly causes heart failure. It merely correlates with it. Research would surely find a positive correlation between time spent in pubs and risk of heart failure, and between amount of alcohol consumed and risk of heart failure, if for no other reason than lack of exercise, or bad diet. Passive smoking may have nothing to do with it.

But what the hell….it’s the current orthodoxy.

What Iraq can do to otherwise sane people….. Simon Jenkins has consistently refused to see anything but disaster there, and his latest effort provides more of the same:

The coalition skulks out of Iraq as the Americans did out of Vietnam, in armoured helicopters, while another three-hour power cut leaves Baghdad sweltering and fearful. Pentagon apologists have jeered: “Why not celebrate the good things in free and stable Iraq?” The answer is now clear. If Iraq were free and stable, nothing would have kept a certain president and a certain prime minister from flying down from Istanbul today to say so. They did not dare.

The coalition’s final decision, to get out early, was probably its shrewdest. Security in Iraq was worsening and nothing but corpses were to be gained by staying. True, 160,000 troops remain but they are increasingly confined to base. With the US presidential election approaching, the bodybags are talking. The loss of 40 Marines in the May retreat from Fallujah was the last straw. A land which a conqueror cannot hold, said Clausewitz, has not been conquered. Discretion is indeed the better part of valour.

Towns such as Najaf, Karbala, Ramadi and Fallujah, and Sadr City in Baghdad are now in the hands of gangsters and militias. The Kurdish region is beyond Baghdad’s aegis. More important, so are the transport network, the highways and airports. Contractors have recently had to stop most infrastructure work, leading to a return of power cuts and oil losses. The stuffing has gone out of this intervention. Everyone, not just the Iraqis, wants “foreign troops out”.

Anyone recognise this picture? The troops increasingly confined to base…the Kurdish region beyong Baghdad’s aegis. What is he talking about?

I have never subscribed to the Left’s view that the Iraq invasion was an act of US imperialism or commercial conquest. Washington’s new war-memoir industry depicts it rather as an extension of Afghanistan in revenge for 9/11, with added neocon twirly bits such as de-Baathification. If Iraq had been about oil or democracy, Mr Bush would not have left it to Mr Rumsfeld. If it had been about toppling dictators, he would not be courting the odious Colonel Gaddafi or funding the tyrant of Uzbekistan. Liberating Iraq was meant to be a short-term, self-financing populist gesture. As in Afghanistan, America would soon cut and run, with Britain trotting behind. At this point, the grammar of the Iraq debate goes haywire. Verbs slide from present and future to past exonerative and future aspirational. We are told that yes, everyone knows mistakes were made . . . (mistakes are always intransitive). We should set aside the past . . . what Baghdad now needs is . . . what all good people must hope is . . .

We can all do hope. It is dead easy. I can hope that that nice, tough Iyad Allawi gains swift control of his country. I can hope his police assert control over the gangsters now ruling his streets. I can hope the Kurds accept rule from suspect Baghdad. I can hope peaceful elections take place next year “as planned”. I can even hope that Dr Allawi one day dies safe in his bed.

De-Baathification one of the “added neocon twirly bits”?

Well, why go on? But I wish he’d been honest enough to admit what he really wants, instead of all that guff about hoping for Allawi to gain swift control, or for peaceful elections to take place next year. It’s clear enough that what he really hopes for is the exact opposite. He hopes it all goes horribly wrong, lots of people get killed, and he can say, “I told you it would end in tears.”

Both Iraq the Model and The Mesopotamian are eloquent about the transfer of power.

Laban Tall convincingly takes apart Johann Hari’s article on the Nation of Islam and its growth in London.

Is there a hole in your life, now that Euro 2004 is coming to an end and there are evenings during the course of which no football whatsoever is being shown? The good news: one of the greatest of all sporting events is starting this weekend. Yes, the Tour de France! And this year is going to be even more exciting than usual, as Lance aims for that record sixth win. The bad news: where do we watch it?

Yes I should subscribe to Sky Sports – but why (oh why) can’t one of our terrestrial channels cover it decently? The sad thing is that Channel 4 got the format right back in the nineties, with those half-hour early evening programmes hosted by the wonderful Phil Liggett, and then ditched it when they got the cricket. ITV showed it last year, but late at night and never at the same time, clearly without much conviction. I mean, this is a sporting event just made for TV. Why can’t we get decent coverage? They show all kinds of boring crap: drizzly athletics meetings from some windswept field in Gateshead; endless golf; indoor bowls (indoor bowls! I wonder how many households echoed to cries of “Oh great, there’s indoor bowling on tonight!”).

Ah those long summers back in the nineties….I can remember the theme music, “da da da dum…da da da dum”….cycles swooshing past fields of sunflowers….alpine passes with the peloton snaking round the corners….chateaux from the air….those crazy names: Abdoudjaparov, Mario Cippollino, Bjarne Riis……..it all takes me back………

In the evenings we’d watch the tour, but in the mornings we used to take long walks over the fields to Little Beckhampton, Daphne and I. We’d managed to put the unfortunate misunderstanding with the reticule behind us, and I sensed our growing intimacy as I told her of my plans for a nationwide chain of falafel houses. But Rupert’s return cast a long shadow, and Daphne became increasingly cool and distant during our walks, as we struggled to manoeuvre the wheelchair over the cart-tracks. Then came the disturbing affair at Granston Manor, precipitating a chain of events which were to change our lives irrevocably, shattering my dreams for ever, and leading, for Daphne, to tragedy…..

But I digress. The Tour de France. Ah yes. I think they should devote at least an hour a night to it, and I think they should have Phil Liggett, and the same theme music.

Would Daphne, I wonder, hear it, and remember….

Do they even have TV in those places?

This week’s New Statesman diary is by Bianca Jagger. Is there a better personification of radical chic?

She tells us of her two recent visits to Hamburg, “this beautiful city”. Her first visit was to pick up the World Achievement Award at the Women’s World Awards. Congratulations Bianca! The second was to open the Special Olympic Games, where, at the ceremony, she met Agnes Wessalowski:

Agnes, who was born with Down’s syndrome, won a gold medal in the swimming competition. She is full of life and enormous courage

Doesn’t she know that it’s compulsory now for Down’s Syndrome sufferers to be full of life and have enormous courage? What they appreciate more than anything else, of course, is being patronised.

She reads something about herself in the paper: that she’s considering running for president of Nicaragua. Not true, alas.

Just a slight whiff by now of someone who’s really rather fond of herself, in, you know, a very humble sort of way.

So on, inevitably, to Iraq, and:

the cabal of George W Bush and Tony Blair, who continue to repeat their discredited mantra regarding weapons of mass destruction and the link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This despite the irrefutable evidence that there were no WMDs and no link.

Irrefutable evidence? Does she know something no else knows? To which the answer must be: not a chance.

Reminiscences of life in Central America follow, and the horrors of those nasty dictators (US-backed, of course) like Somoza. Fair enough; but you get the drift by now. The US is bad. They support nasty people. And, um, that’s it. Hey, once you’ve settled on a political philosophy that works for you, why change it?

books on the subject including “The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.” So the whole thing has rather a cultish, eccentric air about it. I still believe in it however, and will be extremely disappointed if it turns out not to be true.