Charlie Stross wants to know what the future holds in terms of ideology – what the killer memes of tomorrow are likely to be. He’s working from the position that the huge ideological systems of the 20th century were all ways of coping with, or seeking, modernity; thus you have the big two, communism and…
Read More modern thinkingThis Crooked Timber points to a column in the Economist about interns on the Bush campaign carefully hand-writing a range of fake homemade signs, confiscating the ones their positively vetted audience had brought along, and issuing them to the crowd for the media to wow over their rural authenticity. Well, not surprising. And the Economist…
Read More David Cameron…and the MAFIA, but not in the way you thinkOver at CT, a link to two polls – here and here. The killer finding is that the same sort of percentage of the US population, and the same sort of people, deny that Barack Obama is a US citizen *and* that the American and African continents were once part of the same landmass. Specifically,…
Read More tectonic platesHere’s Henry from Crooked Timber not getting it. Here’s Randy McDonald not getting it. Look, the fact that neo-con wankers deal in baseless smears and mindlessly repeated talking points should neither be cause for surprise, nor should you hope to convince them of anything. I occasionally make the point that after the Left invented post-modernism,…
Read More hitler hitler hitlerDoes anyone actually imagine that Blairites are interested in the ideas of Amartya Sen? I ask chiefly for information. After all, they often do things that look superficially like engaging intellectually with new ideas from the Left; writing articles about Sen or Etzioni or whoever in journals like Progress or Renewal, taking part in seminars…
Read More an elegant drive through the covers of RenewalNow this is absolutely terrifying; the Tory policy on what to do with the NHS National Programme for IT is apparently to give everyone’s data to “Google or Microsoft”. And that appears to be it. This is deranged in several ways. First of all, MICROSOFT??!!! What the fuck are they THINKING? You know, the people…
Read More the purpose of a system is what it doesAfter the Mancunian love-in at Jamie Kenny’s, my own thoughts on Joe Moran’s On Roads are inevitably coming. I didn’t know that we have Tony Benn to thank for the big-box supply chain logistics industry. But yes; at the end of the 1960s, the then Minister of Technology tore off a £150,000 innovation grant for…
Read More slip inside this (giant distribution ware)houseResistance – The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such…
Read More Review: Alistair Crooke, “Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution”What is all this whining about MPs doing constituency work? It seems to be conventional wisdom across the more fogeyish commentators (Simon Jenkins, Vernon Bogdanor etc) that members of the Commons are spending too much time representing the interests of their constituents; no article on the upshot of the great expenses row is complete without…
Read More For constituency workAfter some fiddling I got Jamie Zawinski’s Dadadodo, a program which analyses texts using a Markov chain and then generates random sentences based on their content, running. Obviously there was only one way this could go – straight to Melanie Phillips’ blog. I reproduce below the output from the machine, verbatim. DOCTYPE HTML public Melanie…
Read More The truth caught out in stockinged feet