Wednesday, 15th August 2007
1:58pm
Daniel Finkelstein has managed to come up with a wonderfully rich prospect for pointless speculation:
When to call an election is one problem, but here's another - when do you uncall an election?
Gordon Brown will want to keep the option of an Autumn election as long as he can. But the longer he keeps it open, the more difficult it will be to call it off.
He doesn't want the media to become so convinced that he is about to fire the starting gun that everyone is disappointed when he doesn't. It's a tricky problem.
With a bit of luck I should be able to start a whole new type of pointless speculation - what is the timetable and the method for calling the whole thing off?
So let's have spme of that pointless speculation in the comments, here. When will he signal that there won't be an autumn election? And, more interestingly, perhaps, how and where will he give that signal?
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Tuesday, 14th August 2007
2:59pm
A couple of people have wondered why on earth I would spend time in the US in August talking about politics. The answer is straighforward: I am sad like that. To me, that's fun.
It's my poor fiancee for whom I feel sorry. We'll be on honeymoon in Australia just after (assuming the polls and pundits are correct) there's been a change of government. She knows that I'll find it hard to resist being glued to the TV and papers there.
But I am lucky enought to be marrying my dream woman. Without my even asking she said she's not only happy for me to blog about it, she's happy for me to write columns on it.
I don't deserve such a perfect woman!
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1:46pm
You have to hand it to Neil Clark (readers bored by another post about this oaf, please just ignore this). His revolting piece on the importance of Iraqi translators being left in Iraq to be murdered began with a definition of the yiddish word chutzpah. Well, it takes one to know one, as they say.
Clark has complained about anonymous commenters. He also seems to have got it into his head at various times first that I am Joshua, a regularly commenter here and, now, that Oliver Kamm is Joshua. He also seems to think that Oliver is David T, a regular poster atHarry's Place. (I happen to know David T in non-blogging life; and if Oliver is Joshua then I am Mahatma Gandhi).
I happen to agree with the view that, generally, comments should only be left by 'real' people, although sometimes professional requirements force people to adopt an alias. So long as the aliases are consistent I think that's fair enough.
What is not fair enough is total hypocrisy. So I was curious when, on my old site, regular mention of Clark (I have a penchant for giving people who hero worship mass murderers a verbal kicking) often prompted a comment praising him by one GreenGoddess. Strangely, this commenter only ever left comments about Clark, and always praised him to the sky.
Another commenter had an interesting thought. Perhaps the two were in some way related?
It turned out that they were, in one sense, very closely related. It is incredibly easy to track IP addresses left by commenters, and Mr Clark is, as his fabled conversation with a spambot demonstrated, not exactly an IT expert. Mr Clark's computer had an IP address which - who would ever have believed it? - was exactly the same as that of GreenGoddess.
I never bothered printing this information on my site, but took great amusement from it (I know it's not really done to mock the intellectually afflicted but, in Clark's case, I can't help myself).
This information has now been made public by Oliver Kamm, in a thread on Harry's Place (one of my favourite sites).
Here's how he put it:
...GreenGoddess flourished briefly in the comments section of Stephen's old blog. All her comments were devoted to praising the wisdom of Neil Clark, using Neil Clark's own distinctive form of words. It took Stephen and me almost literally no time at all to trace those comments to Neil Clark's computer - a finding that we agreed not to put on our blogs, as we felt that no good purpose would be served by it. (Strange to relate, and as has obviously been superseded by the most recent exchange, we considered the man had suffered enough ridicule already.) As GreenGoddess specifically and vigorously denied being Neil Clark when Stephen raised this possibility, we can conclude with complete certainty that she was in fact Mr and Mrs Clark's au pair. Posted by: Oliver Kamm at August 11, 2007 12:39 AM
Oliver then went on to relate a further story he had discovered (there is a sting in the tail of this post, so do stick with it):
...[T]here is a splendid exchange on Wikipedia between an administrator and the most ardent defender of Clark's reputation. You can read it here, and it is a pearl of great price. The user, called Citylightsgirl, was permanently banned from editing Wikipedia, and the page about Neil Clark that "Citylightsgirl" had so painstakingly edited was deleted on grounds of the subject's non-notability. You'll see from the exchange that, faced with an admirably toughminded administrator, "Citylightsgirl" goes from blustering indignation to whimpering pleas without any intermediate stage. That, coincidentally, is my own experience of the switch in Clark's tone before and after he heard from my libel lawyer in the case of his worthless purported writ.Posted by: Oliver Kamm at August 11, 2007 12:20 PM
This was also fascinating:
...I feel almost a sense of relief, having held it back for so long in deference to the man's feelings, now to share my appreciation of his output with a wider public, even at the end of an HP thread.
"You've done nothing but cause problems around this article [about Neil Clark]. You've added vanity material; you've vandalized it; you've insulted other living persons on the talk page; you've imported a real-life legal row into Wikipedia; you've removed material that is demonstrably correct; and you've used a sockpuppet or meatpuppet to revert to your version. You seem to have access to unpublished personal details about Clark, and therefore I have to assume you're either Clark himself or someone close to him, which places you in a conflict of interest."
As the entry on Neil Clark was shortly afterwards deleted from Wikipedia on the grounds of its subject's non-notability, the details of the administrator's complaints about Citylightsgirl are no longer available on the site. I can tell you what they are, though.
The vanity material referred to was Citylightsgirl's insistence on including mention of a book authored by Clark about a racehorse. The title of the book, so Citylightsgirl maintained, was Flying Ace, and the publisher was Fresh Ayr Books. You will never have heard of either the book or the publisher. But the administrator valiantly searched for details, and managed to turn up the controlling genius behind the mighty publishing empire of Fresh Ayr Books: if you go to this page and scoll down to the bottom of the left-hand column, you'll find the answer in some rather small print.
The vandalism referred to was Citylightsgirl's continual removal of any critical reference to Neil Clark from any source. The "insults against other living persons" were Citylightsgirl's imprecations against me. Every single Wikipedia editor or administrator who made any amendment to anything written by Citylightsgirl was accused by Citylightsgirl of either being me or of being controlled by me: see here, among numerous other examples.
The information Citylightsgirl removed that was demonstrably correct was that his purported legal action against me had been thrown out as an abuse of process.
The sockpuppet or meatpuppet whom Citylightsgirl had used to revert to his version of the page once he had been banned from the site went under the user name "meenaghml". Martin L. Meenagh is Clark's immediate colleague at Oxford Tutorial College (an institution that, ahem, has no connection with the University of Oxford). He was permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia along with Citylightsgirl.
Through all of this fiasco, Citylightsgirl, like GreenGoddess before him, used identical language to Neil Clark (including even the same mistakes in English usage, such as confusing the words "imply" and "infer") - and repeatedly denied being Neil Clark.
Posted by: Oliver Kamm at August 12, 2007 10:34 PM
So we can see a clear pattern of Clark leaving booster comments about himself on other people's sites, and attempting to remove anything which reveals his own - I'll put it no stronger than this - mistakes.
Given what Clark has said, and how he claims only to reject comments on his site which are libellous, I thought I ought to put this to the test and alert his readers to their host's behaviour. So I left the following comment:
Mr Clark:
Since you choose to quote my words 'I am a warmonger' entirely out of context, might I draw the attention of your readers - entirely in context - to the exposure on Harry's Place by my friend Oliver Kamm of the IP address of GreenGoddess, a regular commenter at my former blog.
The IP address, just to summarise the comments referred to, is exactly the same as that of one...Neil Clark
Not that you'll post this, will you?
To say I am flabbergasted that Clark has not printed my comment is to use that word...wrongly. He has published two other comments timed after I left my comment. But mine remains in the ether somewhere, destined never to see the light of day on Clark's site.
Neil Clark: worshipper of mass murderers; defender of the murder of Iraqi civilians; and utter hypocrite. I wonder what his next trick will be?
UPDATE: This is truly wonderful. I've just had a look at his site to see if the comment is up yet. Of course it isn't. So I had a read of his latest post.
He has written “sic” after quoting the word “materiel”.
It’s brilliant: a man who purports to write about security policy not only can’t tell the difference between the IISS and a bunch of Srebrenica deniers, but also believes the word “materiel” is a typo for “material”.
FURTHER UPDATE: He's a one off, he really is. He has deleted the word 'sic' - presumably after being told what a buffoon its insertion revealed him to be - but has of course ignored the usual bloggers' etiquette of making clear he has altered his post. Materially, as it were.
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11:04am
From the Guardian leader today:
At times following the election of 2000, America's Democrats came to see Karl Rove rather as some British soldiers in the second world war saw Rommel - as the master opponent against whom their cause, however noble, was bound to founder. The reputation was exaggerated in both cases. Yet it also contained some truth.
If the Guardian thinks there is 'some truth' in the idea of Rove as Rommel, that must mean the paper thinks of Bush as Hitler.
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8:48am
The first stop for any analysis of US polls and elections is Michael Barone. So what are you waiting for?
The full analysis is a must-read, but I think this is the most significant part:
1999 turnout: 23,685. 2007 turnout, 14,302, down 40 percent. Romney and his staff make the reasonable point that the heat may have held the turnout down; the temperature in 1999 was, as I remember, in the 80s. They add that George W. Bush then was running way ahead in national polls, while today Romney, far less well known, is running in single digits in most national polls, and the candidates who have been, at various times, leading the national polls—Giuliani, McCain, Thompson—weren't competing. A valid point: if they had been, they presumably would have brought out at least some people who weren't there. But how many? Another 10,000? One wonders. The Romney people make another probably valid point: if Giuliani, McCain and Thompson had thought they could have won, they would have entered. But evidently they concluded they couldn't match what turned out to be 4,516 votes. Which is not all that much. Romney won 506 fewer votes than second-finisher Steve Forbes won in 1999. Huckabee won 832 fewer votes than third-finisher Elizabeth Dole won in 1999, and she dropped out too not long thereafter. Brownback won 78 more votes than Gary Bauer won in 1999; he ended up finishing behind Alan Keyes in the precinct caucuses.
My conclusion is that the sag in turnout is bad news for the Republican Party. It suggests a lack of enthusiasm and esprit. Romney makes the point that eight years ago Republicans were enthused at the prospect of the end of the Clinton administration and were optimistic about taking back the White House. Today, by contrast, they seem depressed or at least unenthusiastic by the record of the Bush administration and pessimistic about holding the White House. Romney began his speech in the hall by calling for change and in his victory statement said, "Change begins here today in Iowa." A man from Mars listening to his speech and those of other candidates might be forgiven for supposing that we have a Democratic administration in office now.
...Republican candidates seem to be trying to do what Nicolas Sarkozy did in France: run as the candidate of change to succeed a president of his own party.
I'm off to the US in a few days and will spending much of my time talking to insiders and shrewd analysts of US politics. I'll make sure to post here on what I find.
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Monday, 13th August 2007
10:33am
I'm not sure I've ever seen a sillier, or misleading, supposedly serious piece in the Observer than this by their astrologer, Neil Spencer.
Astrology is, as any fule know, utter drivel. Much of it is simply made up (I know, because my job once involved doing just that for one of the leading 'serious' astrology phone lines) and anyone who takes it seriously believes in the equivalent of little fairies in the garden. The same goes, of course, for homeopathy, which is just as silly.
So - surprise, surprise - the paper's astrologer has a would-be attack on Richard Dawkins' dismissal of New Agey, 'alternative' medicine. And what a shoddy piece it is. This is typical of the sleights of hand he attempts:
Few things arouse the indignation of science's hard hats like non-conventional approaches to healing. Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics. Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.
See how he conflates acupuncture and homeopathy, and talks about unknown mechanisms. There is a huge difference. Homeopathy doesn't work. End of story. It is a nonsense, a non science, and a non treatment. Any money spent on it is money down the drain. No reputable study has ever found evidence of its impact.
Acupuncture is very different. Evidence shows that it can indeed work. The puzzle is not whether it works, but how. Reputable scientists are indeed puzzled by how it works, and the quest is to unravel this.
Arguing that homeopathy - a waste of time and money - and acupuncture - which science shows works, but which science does not yet fully understand - are in any way similar is typical of the quackery which New Age charlatans promote and profit from.
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10:21am
This is an interesting insight into the mindset at Comment is Free. The editors are happy to publish a piece such as Neil Clark's. But according to Dr. Denis MacEoin, they rejected this entirely factual and mainstream piece by him on antisemitism, dismissing it as exaggerated.
Who'd ever have thought that the Guardian would behave like that, eh?
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6:40am
I have a piece in today's Times on the coverage of the Madeleine McCann case. Here's an extract:
Yesterday’s papers were full of more supposed information about Madeleine’s disappearance. That her friends had nothing to do with it. That her friends had something to do with it. That she was murdered. That she was abducted. That Robert Murat is involved. That he isn’t. That she had an accident.
And it is all - every last dot and comma of it - pure guesswork. All anyone knows (except, if there was a crime, her assailant) is that Madeleine is missing. Anything else, whether it’s labelled reporting, theory or speculation, and whether the source is the police, friends, acquaintances or reporters, is simply - how can I put this politely? - made up.
Not that the Madeleine story is unique in this respect. Not having a portal into Gordon Brown’s mind won’t stop people telling you when he’s going to call the next election. But they don’t know. All they know is what they’re guessing he might be thinking.
Do you want me to tell you who’ll be the next US President? I’m afraid I can’t. No one can tell you, as more than an educated guess, whether Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, let alone who will be the Republican nominee.
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Sunday, 12th August 2007
10:17am
Friday night means different things to different people. Last Friday I was at Sadler's Wells to see Paco Pena. Usually it's a Friday night meal with friends and family.
It seems I'm missing out, though. And poor Steve McFadden (East Enders' Phil Mitchell) has had his traditional Friday night ruined by his filming schedule:
In the old days before the show it was normal to have a fight on a Friday night. There would be a pint, a curry and a punch-up.
Ah, the good old days.
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Friday, 10th August 2007
3:25pm
I'm frankly flabbergasted by this. Regular readers will know of my disdain for Neil Clark, who seeks to silence the free expression of views through legal action and writes with love of the old days of the Warsaw Pact. But for all my disdain - nay, contempt - even I never thought to read such a truly vile piece as this by him (or indeed anyone else), let alone on a maninstream newspaper's site.
Clark expreses the view, with regard to the campaign to allow the Iraqi translators who have helped the British army in their service for the Iraqi government, that:
The interpreters did not work for "us", the British people, but for themselves - they are paid around £16 a day, an excellent wage in Iraq - and for an illegal occupying force. Let's not cast them as heroes. The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country.
...Before you rush to condemn Iraqis who feel ill disposed towards the interpreters, ask yourself a simple question: how would you view fellow Britons who worked for the forces of a foreign occupier, if Britain were ever invaded? History tells us that down through history, Quislings have - surprise, surprise - not been well received, and the Iraqi people's animosity towards those who collaborated with US and British forces is only to be expected.
...let's do all we can to keep self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain.
If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.
Words fail me.
I actually take heart from this, or rather from the reaction to it.. I have been the first to pillory the commenters on Comment is Free. But if you have a look at the comments on Clark's piece, you'll see that they are overwhelmingly appalled by what he has written - and that from their anti-war perspective. Clark has shown himself to be beyond the pale even of Comment is Free commenters.
(Here's what the campaign's progenitor, Dan Hardie (who was, not that it should matter a jot, antiwar) has to say.)
UPDATE: James has the same reaction (unsurprisingly, given that he is not Neil Clark.)
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