Blogoir: March

Here is Britblog Roundup 213.

Which leads us to Chris Dillow (Stumbling and Mumbling: An extremist, not a fanatic):

A key part of the task for the post-New Labour party must be to reshape the electorate, creating client groups loyal to it. In this context, redistribution becomes more important - because this creates such groups...

Success in politics requires that government create the right people. The case for redistribution, then, lies not in idealistic dreaming, but rather in hard-headed Machiavellian necessity.

This nightmarish claim sums up his argument that Labour policies have not 'created' the right client-base for staying in power.

Sounds pretty extreme to me.

This story of the ghastly township violence in South Africa against real or suspected lesbians - 'corrective rape' - has drawn a lot of attention.

The ferocity and brutality of Simelane's murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the sprawling township.

Her mother, Mally Simelane, said she always feared for her daughter's safety but never imagined her life would be taken in such a way.

"I'm scared of these people ... She was a sweet lady, she never fought with anyone, but why would they kill her like this? She was stabbed, 25 holes in her. The whole body, even under the feet."

South Africa has a unique combination of wonderful people and natural assets, and quite amazing violence.

How many people do readers know personally who either have died in car crashes or were murdered?

In my professional and personal life I have known former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic who was assassinated in 2003. And that's about it.

Apart from when I was in South Africa, where in four years I knew about 14 people killed on the roads or murdered. This is a formidable statistical spike.

The obvious argument is that 'apartheid' is to blame for everything bad which happens in South Africa - its poisonous legacy must last for decades.

Yet there is more to it than that. The way the anti-apartheid struggle evolved in the 1980s away from the tough, radical but thoughtful self-disciplines of the Black Consciousness Movement (Steve Biko et al) into explicit Marxist ANC/SACP-sponsored revolutionary terror aimed primarily at fellow Africans (not 'whites') is in my view a central factor.

Which is why I am delighted that when one types South Africa peaceful transition into Google, this comes up near the top of page one.

South Africa did not have a Peaceful Transition.

It had a Really Violent Transition which still continues, in large part of course because of the callous racist degradation that apartheid imposed on that country's majority for so long.

In part too because of a vile culture of the-means-justify-any-ends necklacing, crucifictions and other nameless horrors which went on in the townships in the 1980s, as the ANC/SACP tried to wipe out opposition by whipping up psychotic violence among children and teenagers. Twenty years on, look what these people are doing now. 

And also, interestingly, because progressive establishments there and more widely have not wanted to accept that South Africa has a powerful traditionalist un-European African tradition with its own norms of exotic violence, which if anything was isolated from modernity by powerful walls apartheid erected.

I recall a top Black Consciousness activist telling me in 1991 that a big post-apartheid philosophical problem would be how to deal with authentic African values in that country (witchcraft etc) which had flourished well away from modernising urban eyes and which were quite incompatible with a 'modern' democratic state.

Such subtleties have not featured much among the multi-racial ANC elite who took over the government and who (albeit uneasily in some cases) indeed pronounced the unique moral rectitude of the full package of modern 'European' urban rainbow liberal values (gay rights etc), with scant regard for more traditional 'African' sensibilities.

Thus these new horrors.

And some bafflement? Is it OK to condemn such behaviour out of hand? Or does that give legitimacy to racist Westernist ideas of cultural supremacy?

We think that what people get up to in bed is their private matter. But what if other societies do not?

Does that make us 'better'? Who are we to be 'judgemental'?

A vile mess.

From top to bottom.

Yesterday while prowling through the fields near where we live I saw two dogs far from their owners chase and bring down a small deer.

What I learned from this episode is that the gruesome wildlife programmes which we sometimes see on TV are dumbed down for our entertainment.

It is one thing filming and broadcasting an antelope being chased by a leopard, or a croc hauling an errant wildebeest under water - as an abstract spectacle it is rather elegaic and splendid.

What they edit out are the sounds. The sustained unwordly whining and panting and squealing and keening of the stricken animal as it gets torn to pieces.

Then suddenly ... silence, broken by busy snuffling.

If they gave us those sounds too, the unsettled public clamour against our wallowing in such 'cruelty' could be immense.

Disconcerting how the human senses of hearing and smelling are so powerful in this primal way once we go outside our 'normal' range of experience... 

As I have previously noted, Diplomatic Blogging by serving diplomats is fraught with complications:

The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can't work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government or HQ or both.

Which helps explain why this piece by HM Ambassador to North Korea Peter Hughes about the cheery atmosphere prevailing during North Korea's elections has gone down badly, to the point of being rubbished in the Evening Standard by Paul Waugh:

In a manner that would have George Orwell spinning in his grave, Hughes describes election day in the totalitarian state as if it were a festival of democracy. Forget the Axis of Evil, forget labour camps, secret police, a nation nearly reduced to starvation only a few years ago. No, it's a veritable Butlins here in the DPRK.

Peter Hughes' subsequent explanation is alas unconvincing.

Basically, he got this trite exercise in 'public diplomacy' badly wrong, reminding me of an earlier very high profile example of a senior British diplomat failing to Grasp the Point.

Methinks the FCO should have another look at this blogging by its officials - the laboured blandness of most of the output strikes a bizarre and even self-defeating note?

The point about Political Correctness is that it is an attempt to define an ideological and then physical control agenda solely on progressive/leftist terms.

It matters less what those terms are than that no-one else other than in-crowd progressives/leftists gets to have a say in defining them.

Often the issue is really trivial, exposing all the more vividly the true aim: Control.

Above all, no challenge can be tolerated. When one arises it must not be dealt with honestly, since to do that implies surrendering Control.

If there is nonetheless a challenge, because the issue is Control there is little to say.

Which sometimes gets a bit awkward (emphasis added):

"I talked to the parents who are coordinating the talent show, and they feel it's inappropriate and potentially offensive," Llewellyn Principal Steve Powell said.

When asked what was offensive about Dru's skit, Powell refused to discuss it.

"I won't say why it's inappropriate," he said. "I'm not saying anything to The Oregonian. Why? Because I don't want to."

That's clear enough.

Soaring sales of Ayn Rand's books in the USA (Atlas Shrugged is high at number 30 in the Amazon bestsellers list) are rattling supposedly progressive thinkers over here.

See eg the Guardian desperately falling back on those two honest thinkers Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek to try to put people off buying her work. Although this other account of her books' new found popularity is at least more more or less sensible.

And see this even more feeble effort at the Independent:

The truth is, the yearning for strong men, strong leaders, the impulse towards fascism, in fact, and the fetishisation of what Bryan Ferry called (without irony) Nazi chic is nearly always the mark of an infantilised society and a childish mind.

One theme in these laboured efforts is a swipe at the idea they claim is central to the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, namely the motive fascistic power of Greed.

"Do", wail these critics, "we need more greed? If greedy men of the sort extolled in Atlas Shrugged go on strike and even better go away, won't we all be much better off?"

Greed.

There's a concept.

Yet what exactly is it in these books that describes the sort of fascist greed these critics claim to denounce?

Come on, Guardian and Indy. Show us you have actually read these books - quote some substantive examples (and do not make a twerp of yourself like Johann Hari whose ridiculous account of the Atlas Shrugged railway crash has not a word in common with what the book actually says).

Greed for power and wealth there is aplenty in these novels, but not among the leading heroes and heroines who battle tirelessly to offer their fine products to the market at the best price they can get. Yes, they want to make money as a measure of their success in their endeavours. But they also want to show integrity and straightforwardness in all their dealings.

Is not that something Guardian and Indy readers too might value? Not to mention the strong anti-religion themes, and the trail-blazing feminist portrayal of Dagny Taggart as an indomitable principled senior woman industrialist - something else many Guardian/Indy readers might think a teensy bit of a plus?

The main greed in these books comes not from the industrialists and inventors but from the busily mediocre politicians and manipulators and social parasites and commentators, whose nervous lack of ability combined with lust for power and control drives them to ever-more extreme oppression. In fact, to the sort of communism/fascism which overwhelmed Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the backdrop to Ayn Rand's work

Likewise the books are probably the only novels ever written to look in minute (let's be fair - also obsessive) detail at the sort of moral responsibilities which successful innovators have to the wider public - and the sort of response from the public they might hope to expect in return.

Here Ayn Rand lays out in bleak terms another form of greed: widespread public clamour for the practical fruits of others' creativity, tied to widespread public sneering at the people who create those fruits.

Do we give much thought to the people fixed on their work and toiling late into the night and/or making all sorts of other sacrifices for months or years on end  to invent new medicines and solar power cells and clever computer programmes capable of changing the world?

Do we reduce everything they are doing to their 'greed' and lust for wealth? If not, what is it? If they succeed, what do we owe them? A fair price for their products? An unfair price? Some sense of minimal respect and appreciation too?

Ayn Rand is indeed tough on 'altruism'. But her core target is the pseudo-altruism on the part of those with ability and energy towards those who have less of both and who make a moral claim on the genius/hard work of others as some sort of entitlement.

Her basic point is that acknowledging any such blank-cheque entitlement belittles the giver and the receiver alike. Both become slaves to reduced expectations of each other - and of themselves.

This is the sort of argument which in a different context wins progressive support - see eg objections to tipping in restaurants as intrinsically patronising and wrong. And it helps support the claim by Dambisa Moyo that Western developmentalist ideology in Africa is doing far more harm than good in psychological terms - too much dependency is bad for everyone concerned. You need not agree with these points of view to agree that they are substantial.

The lesson?

The Left hate Ayn Rand because she pared down the logic of collectivism to its darkest, inhuman core. The Right are uneasy about Ayn Rand because she was suspicious of inherited power and organised religion.

Her two great novels are timeless, uncategorisably majestic in their insights and zany failings alike.

Unlike Indy and Guardian pip-squeak pea-shooters, read them for yourself.

Here (hat-tip Instapundit) is a superb analysis by Clay Sharky of why newspapers are dying - fast.

Clay looks back to the turbulent times of the invention of printing itself, to explain why newspapers arose to deal with a technical problem which no longer exists - how to print and distribute lots of copies of something to people:

Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other...

For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents.

It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

Now it's all turmoil:

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah.

What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

Beautiful analysis.

Polly Toynbee and Simon Jenkins and the rest of the daily UK newspaper pontificariat have no claim to deserving the huge access they have had to public opinion for many years, other than the fact that they acquired a strong position and have kept it.

Yes, they were and are good at it. But their skill developed in an age when there were far fewer ways for others who might have been equally good to compete in a free market. Now being good at 'it' is not enough. Since no-one knows any more what 'it' is.

Now a new sort of Tower of Babel is emerging, this blog included. Much of it is free (alas for me as a writer, great for you as a reader). And ads are steadily migrating to where people are, which tends not to be where newspapers are.

Yup. It's over for that model of 'keeping the public informed'.

For better or worse. Probably both.

Wait for the squealing for taxpayers' subsidy.

Some rather disobliging words have been written by former Foreign Office Minister Chris Mullins in his memoirs about an allegedly garrulous senior British diplomat :

‘a fifty-something, chain-smoking (what is it about ambassadors in this part of the world) woman’ who is ‘oh, so noisy’.

So, of course, the media have been busy tracking her down.

Footling non-story, other than the fact that the new FCO Rules on what former diplomats might say in public about their careers give special emphasis to avoiding being destructive of the confidential relationship between ministers and officials.

Does that rather sound principle apply to former Ministers' gossipy memoirs too? 

RFE/RL has many excellent pieces on the less settled parts of Europe and beyond.

Here is a gloomy piece about the current trends in former Yugoslavia, arguing that with so many other problems going on elsewhere the 'international community' is not gripping Balkanic divisons which are reappearing busily all over the place:

For political leaders in the Balkans and others who have their own agendas, this is a perfect opportunity. The cat is away, and so the mice will certainly become brave -- and will step up their efforts to use empty stomachs to create more hot heads...

Which means that:

... the global economic crisis, the lack of democratic habits and institutions, and the complete absence of a plan for future development have created fertile ground for nationalism and renewed ethnic conflict across the Balkans.

The wars in the Balkans have been put into pause mode. There were no winners, no losers, so all sides can claim victory and march on. New flags of nationalism are again waving in the region. Can it be long before people begin digging out their weapons as well?

Welcome back to Bosnia as High Representative, my excellent former colleague Valentin Inzko!

Thus:

The new high representative will be the seventh. Most likely, he or she will be in office to mark the 15th anniversary of the creation of the post of high representative with the task of supervising postwar normalization and the transition to stable democracy. But after 15 years of trying, Bosnia is neither stable nor democratic.

Rather than serving as midwife to a new democracy, the EU high representative is just a nanny to a sickly patient who refuses to take his medicine.

Ouch.

Or is it that the fact there is just too much poison in the system for the patient ever to get better, whatever modern diplomatic medicine might try to do?

Here is an eloquent article in Standpoint about claims that back in 1950 a youthful Milan Kundera gave a statement to the communist regime which caused others opposed to it immense suffering.

The article has prompted some revealing comments. Here is one asserting that 'context is everything:

... It is further evidence of the insanity latent in human nature.Judging and admonishing Kundera to "come clean" as several commenters have, is evidence of ignorance. Nuanced empathetic processes escape these self-righteous types. They are the same types who would proudly announce they would never work as a guard at concentration camp. How childish. Context is everything.

Post-modern Relativism Alert!

Don't you all see?

That there is no real difference between those who are weak or evil and serve as concentration camp guards, and those who refuse to do so, even if that refusal costs them everything?

That in the 'insanity latent in human nature' it is just a matter of luck who is sane and who is insane?

That accordingly it is of no significance who decides what is sanity and insanity?

And that therefore it is childish to give any credibility to the arbitrary judgements and admonitions of those claiming to be sane?

Don't you all see that Honesty and Integrity are all just a trivial result of Context? 

Here is my Comment:

• Those (few) who collaborated because they believed in the Marxist/Soviet project
• Those who took the bribe to get something for themselves (foreign travel, better job)
• Those who wanted or needed something for someone else (medical treatment for a close relative, a scholarship for a child)
• Those who could not stand it any more and who caved in under unrelenting pressure

Rummaging through the Internet I hit upon this excellent claim made in the French media, dating back to 1810:

This is the custom of the British Cabinet - to give their diplomatic missions to the most foolish and senseless persons the nation produces. The English diplomatic corps is the only one in which examples of madness are common.

As we say in England, plus ca change..?

Remember the fuss about the oppressive and unworkable FCO rules on what former diplomats might or might not say in public?

We now have new rules!

And they are actually sensible. They put the emphasis on intelligent people using their Judgement:

As I said before:

Here is a reasonable-sounding assessment by Jonathan Freedland of the early days of the Obama Administration's foreign policy:

That same official explained it to me like this yesterday: "The Bush administration hindered its own efforts by tying one hand behind its back. Diplomacy is a tool, but they viewed it with such suspicion, as if those who pursued it were somehow weak. This is about being wise."

Specifically:

... plaudits surely go to Obama's direct appeal to Medvedev, with its echoes of John F Kennedy's resolution of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Just as JFK agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey if the Soviet Union took theirs away from Cuba, so Obama implicitly made a similar offer to Russia: you get Iran to back down, and I'll remove my interceptor missiles and radar stations from Poland and the Czech Republic.

Here is a cross counter-view from Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky at NRO:

... instead of holding Russia accountable for abetting Iran’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, President Obama has invited Medvedev and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to name their price for some vague and unspecified “assistance” in controlling a problem that they deliberately created...

The Obama administration’s show of weakness will encourage Russia to treat the U.S. as it does Europe. Threats to U.S. supply lines will be used to extort all manner of concessions.

Will the United States be pressured to mute its criticism of Russia’s human-rights abuses and the Kremlin’s links to organized crime? To recognize Russia’s extravagant claims in the Arctic? To exclude Georgia and Ukraine from NATO? To abandon Georgia if Russia launches another offensive? Where will the Obama administration draw the line?

Meanwhile in Moscow there will be heard the view  that it makes little sense for Russia to 'cooperate' with Washington on Iran in return for the Americans rowing back on the missile shield system, "a problem they deliberately created".

And so on.

The underlying leitmotif of the Obama approach seems to be that better results will be achieved for the USA by proclaiming itself to be the 'UnBush', then determinedly pursuing reasonable and 'inclusive' policies aimed at opening up to many former opponents while marginalising those who show themselves to be implacable extremists.

Which might work for a while, although the risk is indeed that it will start to look more like weakness and uncertainty of purpose than smartness or wisdom.

And these days implacable extremists have a tendency to just get in the way. So, after all that friendly unclenched fist persuasion fails, at what point to heave a sigh and, in a flash of UnBush Bushlike firepower, blow them out of the way?

In fact it all depends hugely on what the Obama team think they are dealing with - the underlying assumptions.

It is one thing to negotiate with people who are capable of behaving reasonably - another to waste time giving concessions to people whose only aim is to pocket concessions and offer nothing serious in return (see eg the Bosnia conflict, passim).

Plus in engaging with one's opponents one needs to mobilise one's friends.

Jonathan Freedland:

... while it is the prospect of dialogue with America's enemies that generates headlines, no less important is the relationship with America's friends ... this was the thrust of Biden's message to Nato's North Atlantic Council in Brussels yesterday: not some kind of "wussy multilateralism", with lots of cosy meetings and platitudes, but a "results-oriented" desire to get things done - and the belief that that only happens when the world acts in concert.

Part of achieving that is all about dilgently sending positive signals to one's friends.

Not, perhaps, signals like these:

If it’s any consolation to Gordon Brown, he’s just not that into any of you.

What Mr. Brown and the rest of the world want is for America, the engine of the global economy, to pull the rest of them out of the quicksand — which isn’t unreasonable. Even though a big chunk of the subprime/securitization/credit-bubble axis originated in the United States and got exported round the planet, the reality is that almost every one of America’s trading partners will wind up getting far harder hit.

... We’re seeing not just the first contraction in the global economy since 1945, but also the first crisis of globalization. This was the system America and the other leading economies encouraged everybody else to grab a piece of.  But whatever piece you grabbed — exports in Taiwan, services in Ireland, construction in Spain, oligarchic industrial-scale kleptomania in Russia — it’s all crumbling.

Ireland and Italy are nation-state versions of Bank of America and General Motors. In Eastern Europe, the countries way out on the end of the globalization chain can’t take a lot of heat without widespread unrest. And the fellows who’ll be picking up the tab are the Western European banks who loaned them all the money.

Gordon Brown was hoping for a little more than: “I feel your pain. And have you ever seen The Wizard of Oz? It’s about this sweet little nobody who gets to pay a brief visit to the glittering Emerald City before being swept back to the reassuring familiarity of the poor thing’s broken-down windswept economically devastated monochrome dustbowl. You’ll love it!”

Thus, a prediction:

I would make a modest prediction that in 2012, after four years of the man who was supposed to heal America’s relations with a world sick of all that swaggering cowboy unilateralism, those relations will be much worse.

Only 150 weeks or so until we know how that gloomy view has worked out.

Yes.

The FCO has taken no action to amend the absurd spelling error on its Promote a low carbon, high growth, global economy webpage.

The FCO is still hard at work Proteccting Asia's rain forest (sic).

The page also invites readers to link to latest case studies on our work on low carbon and climate change.

Maybe I have been blackballed for knowing too much, but when I have tried to do so to see what the FCO is doing to protecct Asia's rain forest I hit a password barrier.

And this FCO message appears, complete with a bungled repeated word plus bonus split infinitive:

The Adam Smith Institute has invited Guido, John Redwood MP and Alex Barker to address an evening seminar on the theme Politics and the Blog.

Be there.

Or be square.

As if by magic following my previous post, John Redwood asks some questions:

If the bankers who did the lending were greedy and wrong, weren’t the shareholders in the banks similarly guilty as they were happy to receive the dividends from all that excessive lending? Didn’t that include most people in the country?

The Church Commissioners who pay the clergy salaries doubtless owned lots of bank shares, as did practically every pension fund in the country. I don’t remember them speaking out at Bank shareholder meetings asking for the banks to grow less and pay smaller dividends.

Yup:

We all lived through the age of private sector irresponsibility, and are now all having to live through the age of government financial irresponsibility. It’s a very one sided morality which condemns lending too much but does not condemn borrowing too much.

It’s even more bizarre that over lending only matters if it is done by a private sector bank but is encouraged if done by a nationalised one.

We are all in it together. So let's adopt a certain humility?

Who is responsible for the current financial turmoil? Anyone?

Here is William Rees-Mogg using a sharp scalpel to cut through to what he says is the Prime Minister's personal responsibility for a serious misjudgement on Lloyds/HBOS, with massive ramifications down the road for us all:

It is bad enough that Gordon Brown has helped to destroy the value and independence of Lloyds Bank. What is even more serious is that he has massively increased the contingent liabilities that will face future governments.

We do not know their eventual size, but they are already disproportionate to total national expenditure. They will overshadow every over payment in future budgets until they have been worked off ... There will be less money to spend on all other requirements, including the National Health Service, education, welfare and our underfunded defence forces...

Responsibility comes in many different shapes and sizes.

Responsibility for specific outcomes you directly control, or should control.

Responsibility not so much for any given outcome within a system but instead for the health of that system as a whole, where you can shape the rules and workings and ideals of that system.

Responsibility for acting badly - or for shirking the responsibility to act.

And so on.

In the current maelstrom it is not easy to blame anyone specifically for the melt-down. No surprises there. Anyone with any direct responsibility probably will be doing a lot to throw up dust.

That said, history might look back quizzically on the various failed efforts supported by President Bush to act against unwise systemic risky mortgage excesses, and contrast them with the manoeuvres by the party of then Senator Obama to thwart said efforts. 'Greed' was not confined to banks, or indeed to one political tendency.

But what of the public? We have all all chortled when things were (or seemed to be) going well, and been happy to ignore warnings that it all might run awry. Where if anywhere does our own responsibility lie?

Back to Atlas Shrugged.

The book describes the battle of different people against the blandishments of collectivist socialism which slowly but surely drag the USA down. In one grim passage the corrupt owners of a railway company insist on an express train driving through a dangerous tunnel. But all down the command-chain line they sneak away from putting their own names on the order that it do so.

Eventually a hapless junior official authorises the journey and a drunk train-driver is found who will drive the train into what he knows is a high-risk situation.

In a chilling way Ayn Rand describes the attitudes of many of the passengers on the train:

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

She describes one by one how in their professional and private lives they each have espoused different sorts of facile sloganising irresponsibility, and/or blind adherence to collectivist dumbing-down of basic principles, and/or ungrateful sneering at talent and achievement. They hurtle to their doom.

Which brings us to Watchmen.

Steve Ditko, a creative force behind the Watchmen characters and co-creator of Spiderman, was a big Ayn Rand fan. And this for better or worse shows in the storyline, as explained by Brian Doherty at Reason:

Moore’s conception of what an Objectivist hero would be like in “real life” (or at least in his realistically detailed fantasy) is both respectful and disrespectful to Rand’s vision in interesting ways: Rorschach seems driven to madness by his ideology; a radical Objectivism forges a character that seems obviously damaged in unpleasant ways.

Yet he’s also the only man around who stands up for everyone’s right to be judged individually on the basis of their character and actions, their right not to be a means to someone else’s higher end—no matter what one might think of that end.

So, the question. What do we all 'deserve'?

[G]iven Rorschach’s contempt for what he sees as the moral stink of the Watchmen world, it's easy to imagine that he might have been willing to accept that each and every person killed in the movie’s central scheme might have actually deserved it (as Rand did in a smaller-scale disaster; Atlas Shrugged’s train wreck scene).

I think that is not quite right. Surely the point of the train-crash scene is not that the decadent, smug people on the train 'deserved' what they got. The idea of giving a view on what they deserve seems to suggest a higher being pronouncing on who should get what and why - just the opposite of what Rand proposed.

See here a baffling misreading of this passage by someone who should have known better, which asserts that it reveals the sheer cruelty/heartlessness of the Rand vision:

Indeed, her contempt for ordinary people extends so far that when a railway worker in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ decides to punish the wicked socialist government by making a train crash happen, Rand implies the passengers had it coming.

Not only is the cause of the train disaster totally mis-described in this review, the argument quite misses the point.

The core issue is rather that 'ordinary people' too have to think, and to have responsibility for the results of their decisions. Sooner or later if we all in our own spheres, high or low, act in a way which in fact risks disaster, disaster is inexorably what we eventually get.

It is the sheer relentless 'objectivism' of this position which is powerful and striking:

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”

Our politicians sense this. And see how appalling it is for them personally.

And so back to William Rees-Mogg, describing the response of the Prime Minister to calls for him to apologise:

“You want me to go on television and apologise, but I am not going to do it. I have nothing to apologise for. It is not my fault. Get in the real world.”

In the real world, the disaster that has befallen Lloyds Bank is Gordon Brown's fault and his responsibility.

Should the USA and its Western allies talk to 'moderate elements in the Taleban'?

President Obama's musing about this publicly necessarily has various effects.

Above all, it rewards Afghanistan extremism and demoralises 'normal' people there who have been trying to build a normal life with our support. Why should they make the sacrifices needed to reject Islamist craziness if Washington does a U-turn for its own reasons and says 'Hey, moderate craziness is OK'?

On the other hand, if the Obama idea is not to Win but to extricate US/Western forces from Afghanistan asap with some sort of flimsy 'peace' left behind, there may be no choice but to talk to the people most likely to cut a peace deal which lasts, unjust or otherwise, which tends to mean the people with the worst attitudes.

Which, after all, is how the Dayton deal for Bosnia was struck in 1995. 

Finally (and after heavy Western policy disarray getting there) Washington decided that a quick and dirty deal involving Milosevic was better than unending mayhem. After bombing the Bosnian Serbs to help the Bosniacs get a better territorial deal, the Americans duly rammed through a settlement involving Little Bosnia and Big Serbia and Big Croatia.

The author of that was Richard Holbrooke, now reincarnated as US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Are these policies by some chance related?

Cynicism aside, one advantage of talking to allegedly moderate Taleban is that this looks like (and is) a crude Divide and Rule plan.

All being well, and if rumours of secret discussions and other active disinformation ploys are pumped out by the CIA and MI6, it will lead to Taleban leaders wondering who is cheating whom in their own ranks - and which faction grabs the spoils once the conflict stops.

Hence they soon should get busy killing each other in a lively Pragmatists v Traitors bloodbath.

Change! Hope! 

Here is a magnificent speech by Peter Oborne on the collapse of Integrity in British public life, delivered at the Centre for Policy Studies on 4 March.

He gets to the heart of many things, including the N-word:

And this:

Day by Day: