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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at blog2-at-tallrite-dot-com |
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| April 2005 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISSUE #98 - 24th April 2005 [180]
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British Conservatives Need to Radicalise Themselves Michael Howard won't win with "modest" proposals on tax, health etc Britain is now half way through its month-long election campaign and Labour has been drawing steadily ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls, initially by just a couple of percentage points, now by around 39% to 33%. This means that without an extraordinary turnaround, or the polls being drastically wrong, the Conservatives are heading for a record-breaking third landslide defeat. Tony Blair has moved New Labour so far rightwards that it is pretty much sitting on the rightish centre ground dominated by the Conservatives throughout Margaret Thatcher's 1980s and much of 1990s - liberal markets, privatisation, curtailed union power, individual freedoms, low(ish) taxes. This has placed the Conservatives in a desperate situation if they want to distinguish themselves from their rivals. In theory they could abandon their ideology, leapfrog over Labour and occupy the vacated socialist ground, appealing to the workers oppressed by Tony Blair's rampant capitalism. Only problem - that ground is already firmly occupied by the dithering Liberal Democrats who become more loony every day under the wishy-washy Charles Kennedy who openly promises high taxes, free-of-charge everything and flight from Iraq. So what are the Conservatives continuing to do? Offer policies which are almost identical to Labour's, just a little more rightish.
Uncommitted thoughtful voters, whether left-leaning or right-leaning will look at the two manifestos, discern little between them, and probably opt for the devil they know, who has demonstrated a reasonable degree of competence for the past eight years. Labour. And this is the effect we are seeing in the polls. There is no glory in losing an election by a landslide, nor indeed by any margin. Therefore, the Conservatives don't really risk anything in if, even at this late stage, they propound a profoundly radical agenda that for the first time since before 1997 puts clear blue water between them and Labour. The worst that can happen is another crushing defeat and a career move southward for Michael Howard. But on present trends, that's going to happen anyway. So what should that radical agenda comprise? With movement leftward effectively blocked, it's pretty obvious, really, especially if you're already a Conservative. You start promoting a truly right-wing agenda, you say it out loud and proudly, you explain the virtues of the capitalism, freedom and opportunity which are the essence of right wing thought and the source of all the world's wealth and wellbeing. And you start using “leftwing” and “socialism” as the terms of abuse that they should be, and asking why anyone would want to be associated with the 20th century's most murderous ideology and cretins like Mao, Leinin, Stalin, Pol Pot.
Thus, you promote, inter alia,
It is surely time to blow this insipid election apart and introduce some real issues and alternatives that people will love or hate. But do Michael Howard and his Conservatives have the guts? I very much doubt it, so they will deserve to lose, and lose again, until they wake up. For some extraordinary reason, they are embarrassed by the thought of supporting the individual freedoms inherent in open market capitalism, though this is the founding ideology of their party, an ideology that has tremendous moral integrity as well as being of proven economic benefit ever since the Industrial Revolution.
Rivals Provide an Easy Election for Sinn Féin and the DUP The Westminster election is also being played out in the parallel universe that is Northern Ireland, where issues like health, education, taxes, defence etc play no part. You might think that the big issues are Unionist vs Republican, Catholic vs Protestant, Pro Good Friday Agreement vs Anti. Not so, for the simple reason that nobody on one side of these divides has the remotest hope of securing a vote from someone on the other side, so it's not worth the bother of trying, though no party will admit this. Instead, the real battles are between the two dominant parties on either side, viz the DUP and UUP for the Unionists, and Sinn Féin and the SDLP for the Republicans. Except that, curiously, the UUP and the SDLP don't want to recognize their electoral enemies as enemies, a sentiment not shared by those enemies.
Why the UUP nor SDLP both prefer suicide to a bare-knuckled showdown with their principal rivals remains a mystery. No wonder Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams are all smiles. They're having an easy election, and since they're both bare-knucklers, they will equally enjoy sparring with each other afterwards. Of course none of this is to the slightest benefit of the ordinary people of Northern Ireland. But they have always come last.
US Theocons equate liberal democracy to Nazism? I've been a great fan of Andrew Sullivan's sensible, incisive writing ever since I first discovered him in the Sunday Times some four years ago, and then started following his daily blog. But as from about a year ago, his blog started wobbling. He went off George Bush largely for economics reasons (understandable), yet deliberately ignored the evidence of John Kerry's ignominious military record and appeasing attitude towards terror. He became obsessed with gay marriage to the point of hysteria, abandoning much of the cold reason he had formerly applied to the issue. And he has taken a real turn against Pope Benedict XVI, because he fears there will be no warming towards gays, women priest, divorce etc. Moreover, he's taken to providing quotes out of context so that they seem to mean one thing when in fact they don't. A recent example is the following quote, lifted from an article by Princeton's Daniel Maloney whom he derides as a theocon and who supports the new pope.
This, says Andrew, means that Mr Maloney is equating Nazism with today's democratic freedom to listen to iPods. I was shocked, so went to the source article, entitled “Sin’s the Thing : What Benedict XVI learned in the shadows of the Nazis”. Mr Maloney's point is quite different. He says that Nazism preached that there was no God and thus you should feel no guilt for your sins. This made it easier to commit them. In the West today, many people also decry the notion of sin and guilt - if it feels good, do it. So of course the net result is similar; if I don't feel bad about something I'll do more of it. But the causations and extent are totally different.
But unlike Nazism, today's guilt-free ethos is entirely voluntary; moreover it has very severe limits. Sexual picaddillos are one thing, but few would feel guilt-free about committing murder or robbery or rape or paedophilia. Nevertheless, by selective extract, Andrew would rather we think the theocons believe we are living in a Nazi world. That's dishonest blogging.
My thanks to Graham for alerting me to one of those rare news items that are guaranteed make you smile. Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo are three students at MIT who are concerned about the standards of some academic conferences. So they decided to try an exposé, which worked to perfection. They developed a computer programme to generate phony research papers by putting together randomly selected text and charts, and used it to generate and submit two papers to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics to be held next July in Florida. To their delight, one paper, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” was selected for presentation, despite - or because of - such erudite gems as
The penniless students are currently soliciting donations so they can go to the conference and give what they call a “randomly generated talk”. So far, they have raised $2,000 over the Internet, and they still plan to go even though the Conference, once the hoax was revealed in the foreign media and elsewhere, promptly disinvited them. The fun thing is, you can generate your own scholarly paper using their algorithm by typing in a few author names. Here's one I generated earlier, entitled “Deconstructing Web Browsers Using LopsidedKale”**, complete with diagrams, graphs and now fewer than 22 scholarly references, authored by a certain, ahem, Tony Allwright. Try it. See you in Florida.
Quote : “Habemus papem” Cardinal
Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estévez, Quote: “I'm a national politician, I don't care about the Welsh situation. Bugger off, you amateur, get back on your bus ... Ooooh, I'm scared.” John Prescott, the Old Labour, famously pugilistic Quote : “Vote Blair, get browner”
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ISSUE #97 - 17th April 2005 [194]
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The Opposite Personas of Pope John Paul II Now that the drama of the Pope's slow death and spectacular funeral has passed, it is time to reflect a little on his legacy.
There is no doubt he was by any measure a giant of a man, yet he seemed to project two quite distinct personas. One was the public face of morality and the other the chief executive officer of the Roman Catholic Church, and though they were certainly intertwined you can arrive at rather different conclusions for each persona. Public Face of Morality Raised and honed under two despicable tyrannies, Nazism and Sovietism, he was a man who had learnt to truly understand both the nature and the inherent evil of these twin ideologies. This was the man
He it was, also, who made plain the immorality of divorce, abortion, birth control, homosexual practices, excessive materialism, the rich/poor divide, and who insisted that priests should be exclusively male, straight and celibate. You may not like his position on these matters, and indeed even many Catholics ignored or fulminated against them, yet there was no doubting his beliefs and his teaching. And his irreproachable piety, sincerity and integrity gave his proclamations a force that no other person could convey, or indeed gainsay. And there was a flood of proclamations: 14 encyclicals , 13 apostolic exhortations , 11 apostolic constitutions, 42 apostolic letters, 3 books and a book of poems. Oh and 2,300 speeches. Though a mortal enemy to Nazism and Sovietism (though, strangely not to Ba'athism), he was also no friend to unbridled capitalism, believing that the excessive materialism that it can foster should be resisted. As Melanie Phillips put it, “ the Pope could not be categorised as belonging to either the left or the right. What he stood for was upholding faith against secularism, spirituality against godlessness, and morality against selfish individualism”. He was the first Pope to reach out to other religions, seeking “victory of the religious over the irreligious”. In 1986, he organized a conference in Assisi in which 130 leaders of the world's major religions joined together to pray for peace - snake worshippers, spiritists, animists, witch doctors, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and various Christians sects. But perhaps his most outstanding achievement was to seek forgiveness of the Jews for the grievous slander that the Catholic Church perpetrated through the centuries, starting with St Paul, that Jews rather than Romans crucified Christ and that this justified centuries of victimisation of Jews by Catholics. He was also the first Pope to enter a mosque, in Damascus, an act that endeared him to Muslims across the world, despite the anti-Christian strictures of Mohammed. Of course his opposition to the Iraq war endeared him further (though why he should have supported the totalitarian tyrant Saddam in this way remains a mystery.) Finally, this persona was the relentless traveller and pre-eminent communicator. His itinerary of 104 foreign pilgrimages, covering a million kilometres and the delivery of those 2,300 speeches outstrips all his predecessors combined. And, quite apart from being fluent in no fewer than eight languages, he had a way of putting across his message whether to an audience of one or one million, that made each listener think he/she had the Pope's undivided attention and interest. I once attended one of his regular Wednesday mass-audiences in the Vatican. From the back of a huge hall, he appeared no more than a white dot in the distance, yet his charisma and the clarity of his language were palpable. He was indeed “great”. Chief Executive of the Roman Catholic Church Now, how do you judge the performance of a long-serving chief executive of a massive multinational organization? Let's take Jack Welch, who until 2001 served for two decades as the chief executive of General Electric, one of America's largest and most successful multinationals. His no-nonsense management skills and his reputation of being hard, even ruthless, but also fair, became almost legendary. He gave his managers wide latitude but demanded that they drive constant change and improvement, insisting that each GE business be the best in its field or get sold. On the same philosophy he would sack the 10% worst-performing employees every year. Though probably loved and hated in equal measure, his management ideas and leadership skills are both admired by business commentators and imitated by business leaders worldwide. And the objective measure of his success? GE grew in shareholder value from $12 billion to $500 bn under his watch. However, the US and the world also grew in terms of GDP, by about 83%.
Hence, allowing for this, you can say that Jack Welch enriched GE shareholders by a mind-boggling factor of about 23. And if the share value is compared against movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which increased by a factor of 11.5 over the period, GE still out-performed by a factor of 3.6. Now that's success. Karol Wojtyla's CV is remarkable, probably better than Mr Welch's: a priest at 26, bishop at 38, archbishop at 44, cardinal at 47, pope at 58. And he served as Pope John Paul II for a comparable period - 27 years. So how do we comparably measure his performance as CEO? If we think of God as being the Catholic Church's “shareholder”, the direct equivalent of shareholder value is probably the number of souls getting in to heaven thanks to its teaching and guidance. But since that's not something we on earth can measure directly, we have to look for proxies. For example, numbers signing up to the Catholic faith, attending Mass, joining religious orders, obeying Church teaching. His record here is mixed, as my chart summarises (no data available for 2003 and 04).
In terms of statistics, the best that can be said for John Paul II is that he managed to grow the number of Catholics from 0.7 to 1 billion, in line with the world's population growth, maintaining his “market share” of Catholicism at around 17%. On the other hand, the numbers in religious orders (priests, brothers, nuns and those in training) have actually gone down, 13% in absolute numbers, but a whopping 38% as a proportion of the world's population (and indeed of the Catholic population). Clearly he has left a major recruitment headache for his successor, because a shortfall of religious ministers and teachers will inevitably lead to a drop-off in laity numbers. Meanwhile, Mass attendance by the laiety, at least in Western countries, has steadily declined, for instance in the US from 44% in 1987 to 33% this year. This may be offset by higher attendance in Africa, Asia and South America, but figures are hard to come by. Even harder to measure is the extent to which Catholics actually obey the Church's moral teachings, especially in the controversial areas listed earlier. However, the anecdotal evidence of people ignoring the teachings is so overwhelming that it is hard to believe it is other than widespread. And, judging by the spread of AIDS, which is not sparing Catholics, it is not only in the decadent West where adherents practice a-la-carte Catholicism. So by many objective yardsticks, you cannot conclude that John Paul left the Church in better shape than he inherited it, surely the first priority of any CEO. And he has moreover departed the scene with one major stain on his reputation - his extraordinary unwillingness to deal decisively and ruthlessly with the child sex abuse scandal by clergy. The most appalling example of this is that after Cardinal Bernard Law was forced in 2002 to resign in disgrace as Archbishop of Boston for having shielded abusive priests, the Pope immediately appointed him to the prestigious post of archpriest of the Basilica of St Mary Major in the Vatican. Jack Welch would never have done something similar. Indeed, it says something about the ethos of the Vatican hierarchy that Cardinal Law himself didn't insist on a lowly position. He could perhaps, have emulated the former Anglican Archbishop of York, David Hope, who has voluntarily (and with no hint of scandal) chosen to end his illustrious clerical career as a humble parish priest. So, notwithstanding the genuine love and admiration that John Paul II inspired among his billion-strong flock, his performance as CEO of the Catholic Church was not memorable. _________________________ But this in no way takes from his magnificent performance as the world's foremost moralist and statesman. To me, there seems little doubt he will end up, probably within a decade, as Saint John Paul the Great, Doctor of the Church. And when I look at the totality of his papacy, the mighty pluses and the relatively lighter minuses, I have to say I hope that is the outcome. Meanwhile, may he rest in peace.
Anti-Japan Mobs Protest Too Much in Beijing Well, who'd have thought that China has now joined the ranks of those countries that permit public protests by mobs numbering in their thousands? That must be of great comfort to the countless 1989 Tiananmen Square protestors still languishing in Chinese jails, to the families of the thousands of colleagues killed by the Red Army, and of course to the exercise group Fulan Gong who have also been harrassed, jailed and in some cases killed by the Chinese authorities. Last week, we were told that in Beijing 10,000-strong mobs stoned the Japanese embassy and ambassador's residence, attacked Toyota cars and sushi bars and shouted anti-Japanese slogans in a rally. In the biggest such demonstration since 1972, we are told they were protesting against
Now, call me an old cynic. But who really spends his time fretting over UN would-be machinations or a foreign country's latest schoolbook? And why does it take six decades to start protesting about long-past atrocities? And if people feel (and are brave enough to be) in protest mood, would they really want to protest against one of their biggest foreign investors and foreign markets, rather than on issues closer to home? For example,
With those spontaneous anti-Japan protests, we were instead simply witnessing a little bit of orchestrated public diplomacy on the part of the Chinese Communist regime. Maybe it simply wishes to re-register its displeasure over Japan generally, and in particular because Japan has decided to explore for gas in East China Sea waters that the two countries dispute. This is but an illustration of the veil of lies which necessarily form the foundation of any totalitarian state, where things and words, mean precisely what the dictators decide that they mean, though this may be diametrically opposite from what they appear to mean. Thus,
China has always played the long game, and continues to do so skilfully. Anti-Japan mobs are merely a small part of it.
Croke Park and the Hated Foreign Games Dublin has two sports stadiums.
Lansdowne Road will itself, starting in 2007, be redeveloped into a 65,000 all-seater stadium, which will put it out of action for the following three years, so the rugby and soccer organizations need to find an alternative venue. Croke Park is the obvious choice but it is owned by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), Rule 42 of whose constitution forbids its use for “foreign” (read, English) games, being notably soccer and rugby, the games of choice of the imperial occupier of yore. Hence there has been a debate raging within the GAA about whether to rescind Rule 42 during the Lansdowne Road redevelopment.&nb | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
