Naughty Americans

British people really do love to have a good whinge about America. I was thinking about this today while listening to a radio debate between Shami Chakrabarti, leader of the pro-civil-liberties lobby group Liberty, and an American legal expert, over the question of rendition of suspects. Apparently in a recent case before the Supreme Court, it has been ruled that even if a criminal suspect has been brought to the US illegally from another country (i. e., outside the ordinary extradition procedures), then setting aside the question of the legality of the seizure or otherwise, they can be tried before a US court.

Needless to say, Chakrabarti was vigorously opposed to this decision. She used the hoary old liberal chestnut that, in a democratic society, the rule of law is vitally important and if compromised by the government for any reason in any small manner, then tyranny and dictatorship follow. Most of the people who phoned in afterwards agreed with her. They saw it as yet another example of America riding roughshod over freedom and liberty, bullying the rest of the world, and ignoring international law. (They also mostly completely misinterpreted the whole thing to mean, 'George Bush is now going to go around kidnapping whoever he likes and having them stand trial!' as you would expect.)

As is often the case, I always want to ask Chakrabarti-ist liberals what they would have liked the alternative to have been in a case like that of Eichmann, who as you probably know was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires in 1960 and taken to Israel to face trial. In that case, Israel technically violated a long-established customary rule of international law - that of State sovereignty - but very few people would argue that it wasn't justified. Eichmann was not the type of man the world could continue to allow to escape justice, and even if Israel should technically not have kidnapped him, the fact remained that he ought to have been tried - and would not if he had been allowed to remain in Argentina.

I would submit that 'the rule of law' is often bandied about by liberals as the cornerstone of society, but that the law is in the end only a means by which justice is served. In Eichmann's case justice demanded that a certain law be broken, and if on occasion the US judiciary is faced with the decision of whether or not to try a dangerous criminal based on a possible illegality in his or her seizure, I would applaud its decision to go ahead with a trial.

British readers will remember Ronny Biggs, a man involved in one of the most famous crimes in post-war Britain - The Great Train Robbery. Biggs was responsible for the theft of a huge amount of money and was at the very least an accomplice to murder, but because he managed to flee to Brazil he never faced the punishment that he should have. He lived free to a ripe old age. I call that madness - but what is madder still is that, if Ms. Chakrabarti had her way, if Biggs had somehow ended up back in the UK circa 1970 without being properly extradited, it would have been wrong to try him. That is liberty at the expense of common sense.

In any case, I sincerely doubt that any court in any country in the world would act in a different way to the US Supreme Court in this matter, so the rest of us can hardly point the finger at Washington. People do, though - because nothing beats a good Thursday lunchtime grip about evil old Uncle Sam.

Mr. President

I find US presidential elections very interesting. Partly it's because in Britain we don't vote for our Prime Ministers - only the party - so the idea of actually voting for a person is a sort of novelty. Also, to an outsider, the whole process seems so wonderfully Byzantine; full of terms like "caucus" and "primary" and "electoral college" - it creates and atmosphere of mystery and romance. We just tick the box for who we want to be our local MP, which is easier and more efficient but less quaint and consequently, to my mind, a bit dull. (And, it must be said, often we can't even get that right.)

Anyway, I was reading an article about the upcoming election today in an old Time magazine while I waited for Mamiko at the doctor's (I would never ordinarily stoop to reading Time, but at a GP's surgery sometimes you have to make do with what's available). It had a link in it to this site, which allows you to take a survey and work out which candidate is best for you.

My personal winner is somebody called "Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel", while at number two is "Illinois Senator Barack Obama", and number three "New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson". This makes me a Democrat, apparently.

At the bottom of the barrell - the candidate I'm least likely to support - is "Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo". Yeah, he sounds like a right twat.

Perhaps some of my cousins from across the pond can explain something about these people.

Incidentally, I've discovered that if you answer 'yes' to every question you end up with Rudy Giuliani, if 'no' you get Ron Paul, and if 'unsure' you get somebody called Joseph Biden (although that seems to be based on alphabetical order).

Nobelling, Pt. II

I had some correspondence with a friend regarding what I think about Al Gore's Nobel Prize, which I think expands on what I wrote yesterday (odd how you sometimes have to work through a thought process "out loud" in order to properly articulate it), and even though I wrote what I did to her last night after coming home from the pub off the back of a few pints, I think sums my position up pretty well:

"It's the Swedish Academy wagging their collective finger [I wrote] and saying, 'If you only you'd asked us to elect your president, silly Americans! The the planet wouldn't be in this mess!'

I hate that patronising impulse that we Europeans have. All this hand-wringing about why Americans are so stupid - but we never stop to look at ourselves and ask what's stupid about us.

...

The electoral process might have been fucked up, but that's a matter for the US to deal with internally. Who are the Swedish Academy to make sly hints about it?

As far as Al Gore being president is concerned, it's impossible to say without a crystal ball, but from what I've heard of him he's a compulsive liar, self-promoter and hypocrite, which probably makes him the same as all politicians...with nothing to recommend him above the rest.

I remember seeing a clip of him giving a speech in back in 1999, where he said, pretty much word-for-word, that "Sure we might make mistakes, but we're still the greatest nation the world has ever seen - we always have been, we always will be!" while pounding his fist on the lecturn and glaring wildly at the audience. That sort of thing makes me think, well, George Bush might have had his blow-ups with the Germans and the French, and might have treated the UN in an arrogant way...but at least he never came out with anything as blindly idiotic and jingoistic as that.

Anyway, I'm sick and tired of people - in the UK, the US, Japan, wherever - whingeing about the political choices that are made in other countries, or whingeing about the way people vote. Sometimes other countries elect leaders you don't like, and sometimes electorates don't vote the way you'd like, but you just have to deal with it. That's democracy, and if you don't like it, then try to change the system. Don't waste your time ranting about Bush, making jokes about how stupid he is, and feeling smug - which is what most Brits and Europeans spend their time doing when the issue of US politics comes up."


I think my US readers would be surprised at how the cheapest humour at George Bush's expense can pass for satire in Europe, ever since the election of 2000. And the worst thing is, most Europeans secretly love the fact that Bush won that election, because to them it proved all the assumptions they make about middle-America - that it's full of illiterate hill-billies - true. It confirmed all their blind prejudices about the US, and the impluse for them is to go ahead and give themselves a nice pat on the back for not being American themselves. And I find that impluse, frankly, revolting.

It's the same impulse that sees the European left almost revelling in bad news from Iraq because they see it is another nail in Bush's coffin, which sees them love the fact that a militant, fascist regime is now in charge of Gaza because it does down Israel and Israel is the darling of the US, and which sees them stick up for buffons like Chavez purely because his rhetoric is directed at US foreign policy.

It's a sad state of affairs that so many so-called intelligent, broad-minded and well-educated people can be so biased and blinkered in their thinking, but that's intellectual life these days in the political left in Europe.

Pet Hates

I'm in the mood for a good rant, and quite a few things have irked me over the last few days. They are:

• The obsession with climate change, to the extent that politicians now barely talk about anything else. Yesterday the Conservative Party proposed that big out-of-town supermarkets should be forced to charge parking fees, which I think is a great way of levelling the playing field to help small local businesses, but which was only presented as a way of cutting CO2 emissions by discouraging people to drive. Politicians only seem to care about wooing Middle England, and because Middle England is a flock of sheep who've bought the climate change argument wholesale, the policiticans have to join in the 'baaing' wholeheartedly in order to grab votes. What happened to the idea that we should just be trying to make Britain a nice place to live in? Because that's the better argument for this scheme.
  
• The sections of the liberal left wing in this country who seem to actively want coalition troops to fail in Iraq, because if the whole thing is a disaster it will prove them right and they can use it for their political advantage. Yesterday Simon Jenkins wrote that the gains from the surge are 'worth nothing' because they won't be 'embedded politically'; I felt the urge to yell "Speak for yourself, mate!" - I know if I was living in Baghdad that, first things first, a reduction in car bombings and sectarian violence wouldn't be 'worth nothing' to me.
  
• The proposal that pregnant women should be given £200 by the government to encourage them to eat more healthily. Yes, you read that correctly: it is actually thought that by giving all pregnant women one-off cash payments they will buy healthier food. Leaving aside the sheer idiotic naivety of the scheme, what annoys me in particular is it feeds into this ridiculous myth that eating healthily costs more money than going to McDonald's every day. As if the only thing keeping an unhealthy-eating pregnant woman from going to the grocers is because it's prohibitively expensive. It isn't. Absurd. These people really do believe, you know, that if you just throw money at a problem it will go away.
  

Well, I feel better now. Something more sensible tomorrow, perhaps.

Condonites and Actonites

Mamiko and I watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room last night. It was fascinating stuff, but what is most interesting for me about the Enron debacle is that the lessons learned by Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay seem to have been completely forgotten. Only last year Japanese internet messiah Takefumi Horie was charged with one of the Enron bosses' crimes - decieving investors about stock price - and last month we saw the final fall of Conrad Black, the Canadian/British newspaper mogul charged with mail fraud and perverting the course of justice. What is especially chilling is that all these men were not simple businessmen: they were linked to - no, up to their eyeballs in - the political systems of their respective countries. Ken Lay was a close friend and confidante of the Bush family and mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary when Dubya came to power; Takefumi Horie was asked by then-PM Junichiro Koizumi to run for the Diet in 2006; Conrad Black was a life peer in the House of Lords. These weren't just ordinary moguls - they were figures of the establishment. They really should have been cleverer, if not more ethical.

It seems to me there are two schools of thought on the men who do these things (and they're invariably men):

a) That they were born bad, lied and cheated and conned their way to the top, and didn't stop doing it once they got there; their crimes were just an extension of a flawed and immoral personality type - they were sociopaths and narcissists with MBAs. We can call this the Condonian View, after Richard Condon, who once remarked that "It's no use kidding ourselves that [business moguls and politicians] are ordinary people just like us, because they're not. For all the similarities, they might as well be from another planet. Probably are."

b) That they started off good, moral and legit, but the more money and power they got, the more they started to believe that they were above the law and the less respect they started to have for it - they deluded themselves into thinking that fraud was their right and that they could get away with it; power had addled their brains. We can call this the Actonian View, after Lord Acton, who famously wrote that "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

I'm not sure which view I hold to be true. Either way, both seem to suggest that the only reason men like Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson, Lakshmi Mittal and Mohammed Fayed haven't been tried for any specific crime is that they're too clever to be caught.

A Flood of Bollocks

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There is, as my grandma used to say, "high ding-dong" over David Cameron's visit to Rwanda during a time of "disastrous" flooding in Southern England. (For readers outside of the UK, David Cameron is the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons and Conservative Party leader - the man who would be Prime Minister if the Tories win the next election.) I've just been listening to Jeremy Vine's show on BBC2 - the middle-class population of Britain's phone-in rant-a-thon - and the consensus is that Cameron is an almighty idiot, a weakling, has lost the next election already, and generally speaking the country is going to the dogs.

If ever evidence was needed that people in Britain have lost all sense of perspective, you just have to listen to the Jeremy Vine show on days with relatively "big" news stories like this ("big" in the sense that there's a lot to get sanctimonious and high-horsey about). The comments by listeners have uniformly managed to epitomise almost everything that I hate about the UK, and England in particular, being as they are ignorant, ill-thought out, prissy, moralising nonsense of the worst kind, but I can identify three distinct strands or themes:

1. David Cameron, it is said, is the Member of Parliament for Whitney and as such he should be in Whitney at a time of crisis to help sort things out rather than "gallavanting around" abroad. Why this should be isn't particularly clear: from what I can gather the fire service and the armed forces have the situation well in hand, and the flooding is hardly Hurricane Katrina (it's a level that would be considered laughable in most other countries) - but no, Cameron should be back home stealing ghastly photo opportunities and making cheap political points by pretending to help fill sandbags and showing how deeply compassionate he is, rather than trying to do something of value in a country benighted by genocide and famine which is hoping to join the Commonwealth and drag itself up out of the gutter. In other words, most people in Britain think it is more important for a leading politician to act in the name of cheap propaganda and superficial emoting rather than do real work to aid developing nations.

2. David Cameron is the latest in a long line of British politicians to, apparently, put the needs of poor people in foreign countries above those of the British public. The indignance in people's voices is strident: why do politicians show all this concern for the populations of Bangladesh and Rwanda and The Philippines and Iraq but not US!?!? The answer - that in fact people in this country are spoiled and pampered and wrapped in cotton wool, and really our politicians should be doing a hell of a lot more to help those in the developing world - sails right over their heads, like a cool breeze on a summer's day.

3. David Cameron is Leader of the Opposition and should therefore be "opposing" Gordon Brown - in other words he should come back to the UK and start criticising the government for all the mistakes it has allegedly made. He should be taking Gordon Brown to the cleaners and making him "answer to the British people about what has happened". Wherease the truth, as any sensible person can see, is that David Cameron well understands that floods are an act of God and there's nothing much the government could have done about it - so what's the use in criticising? He should in fact be being applauded for showing principle and restraining himself from making cheap points. But then again we're dealing with shrill idiots.

Anyway, the whole thing is just too depressing and silly for words. What's most stupid of all is how fickle everybody has been. Only a year or two ago Middle England was falling over itself to kiss the feet of King Cameron, and here he is making one error of judgement (in the sense that he critically misread the capacity of the English for disproportionate outrage) and people are already predicting he'll lose the next election. It just goes to show how much superficiality reigns in contemporary British politics.

Against Silliness

I've realised recently that the majority of my opinions about current events are influenced to a large degree by the principle that, the more hysterical and overinflated the claims of one 'side' of a given argument are, the less likely I am to agree with them - no matter what their argument is.

The best example of this is the Israel-Palestine debate. Now, I'm reasonably aware that both parties to that struggle have legitemate grievances and concerns, and that without compromise on either side there can be no solution to the conflict. But the hyperbolic accusations of the pro-Palestinian cause - that Israel is based on a system of apartheid; that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians; that Israel's government is like the Nazi party; and that "Israel is the worst human rights violator in the world", have served in the past year or so to considerably sway my opinion against the Palestinian cause and toward Israel, whose supporters don't resort to such (frankly) silliness, and who comport themselves in a generally reasonable and responsible way - that is, without bandying about wild, patently untrue accusations.

Likewise, while my politics could be defined as broadly centrist and I find myself therefore disliking the policies of President Bush, I'm so sick of hearing talentless comedians making jokes about how stupid he is on the BBC that I've come to dislike his detractors even more. Personal attacks, especially obviously false ones - Bush might be inarticulate, but he's no fool - make me immediately hostile towards those using them; because if that's what you have to resort to, it's more than likely an admission that you don't have much else to say. "Bush is so stupid! Bwahahaha!" Yes, but what are your ideas about how to make the world a better place, again? More importantly, because you think he's stupid, does that mean you think that the millions of people who voted for him are stupid too? If so, what are the implications for your view of the democratic process?

And there's global warming too. I would describe myself as an environmentalist, and I regularly make contributions to Greenpeace. I believe that the most important task facing mankind today is how we can generate wealth in the developing world without impacting negatively on the environment, and how we can create sustainable fishing and forestry industries. But I'm tired of hearing about how global warming will spell the end for polar bears (who are highly adaptable, and lived in Greenland when the temperature there was considerably warmer than it is today), how it will destroy fish stocks (when the truth is much more complicated), and how it is responsible for the disappearance of British songbirds (when all reliable reports indicate that increased temperatures have led to greater berry growth in woodland, tempting songbirds away from gardens and actually leading to a large, sustained increase in their numbers) - especially when those animals and environments are under greater threat from direct human interference in the form of hunting, overuse, or habitat destruction. Global warming might be a legitemate fear and it might well require of us drastic measures to deal with it, but its cause is not served, as far as I'm concerned, by falsehoods and bombast, which can only damage the veracity of genuine calls for greater environmental protection.

Of course, I usually make my mind up on such issues based on the balance of probabilities - even though I dislike Bush's detractors, I also usually disagree with his policies; even though I detest the global warming bandwagon, I recognise that it is scientific reality and that it has to be tackled; even though I loathe the pro-Palestinian propaganda machine, the real reason I support Israel is because I've examined the facts. But I really, really wish that people would be sensible about these matters, without feeling they have to resort to shrill, sanctimonious blather. Hurled accusations are the last resort of the intellectually impoverished, and contribute nothing to constructive debate.