Society

Thursday

14 Aug 2014

From the archives

From ‘The Call to Arms’, The Spectator, 15 August 1914: At this moment it is the duty of all employers, rich or poor, to discharge no man but this does not apply to men of military age — i.e., those between 19 and 30, who are sound in wind and limb. In our opinion, employers not only have a moral right to discharge such men if they will not go into the fighting line, but in many cases also have a positive duty to do so. Rich men who are over military age need not to continue keeping soft billets for footmen, under-gardeners, stable boys, or young gamekeepers merely because

Andrew J.

The West isn’t the solution in Iraq. It’s the problem

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Peter Hitchens and Douglas Murray discuss Iraq and Isis” startat=52] Listen [/audioplayer]To hawkish right-wingers, but also to many militant liberals, the antidote to the problem of Isis is clear: the application of military power to defeat the jihadists and lay the foundation for a humane and stable political order, beginning in Iraq but eventually extending across the Islamic world. There are several problems with this analysis. For starters, it glosses over the fact that military power in the form of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion created the opening for the jihadists in the first place. Where there had been stability, US and British forces sowed the seeds of anarchy.

Max Boot

We can’t afford to let Isis run wild in Iraq

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Peter Hitchens and Douglas Murray discuss Iraq and Isis” startat=52] Listen [/audioplayer]Iraq is a bloody mess. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has extended its hold from eastern Syria into western and northern Iraq, massacring Shi’ites, Christians and Yazidis wherever it can. Meanwhile in Baghdad there has been a constitutional crisis, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki threatening to cling to power even though his own political bloc has chosen a different candidate. The situation is now so bad that it has impinged on the holiday arrangements of our own leaders in the West. President Barack Obama, as he relaxes in Martha’s Vineyard, is at the same time

Ian Thomson

Ten years and an earthquake: the changing face of Haiti

This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the Caribbean republic had changed after the terrible earthquake of 12 January 2010. This time, I would not be travelling by jitney, lorry or fishing boat, but in taxis and air-conditioned tourist coaches. Port-au-Prince, the capital, was as exhilarating and exhausting as I remembered it. The streets, thronged with pack animals and porters were a human ant heap. The smells I knew so well from earlier visits — sewage, burning rubbish — hit me forcefully and it was as though I had never been away. I made a bee-line for the Hotel Oloffson,

Rory Sutherland

How oneupmanship wrecks things for everyone

‘There’s a little bit of a fascist in all of us. For some, the tragedy of human want may provoke an impatient urge to expropriate and centralise economic resources. Others, alarmed at the world’s exploding population, may be attracted by calls for a programme of mass compulsory sterilisation. But for me it’s letter boxes and street numbering. I want order. I want consistency. I want standards. And I want eye-watering penalties for property owners who try their fellow Britons’ patience and waste our time by making their addresses impossible to find.’ You may remember reading this from Matthew Parris in last week’s Spectator. When delivering leaflets in Derbyshire, he was

Mark Mason

Nira Alpina, St Moritz: A cool Alpine hotel that’s perfect for the under-tens

It’s a terrible moment, the realisation that you’ve spawned a monster. Parenthood, it becomes clear, has wiped stylish holidays off the agenda for a good few years. Somewhere like St Moritz, for instance, won’t thank you for polluting its elegant slopes with Bratbot 5.1. Then you stumble across Nira Alpina, and your desperation disappears. The hotel, its website claims, puts ‘fun before formality’. My partner and I took great delight in tiring out our young son (and ourselves) with the various activities on offer. The ‘high ropes’ course involved walking, wobbling and zip-wiring our way through the Alpine treetops, learning en route that vertigo hits the over-forties far worse than

Bruce Anderson

Visiting Burgundy from my hospital bed

There have been some splendid rumours about my health. According to the most exotic, I was cas-evacked from a hill in Scotland, flown to St Thomas’s by private plane and then tested positive for Chateau Lafite. The truth is more banal — and much more reprehensible. I had neglected an infected foot: what an idiot. Finally, it came out in revolt. By the time I did turn myself in to Tommy’s, I was not far from being seriously ill. That has had one advantage. I think that it put me off the booze. The medics were pumping me full of antibiotics and I was determined to co-operate. One or two

Deborah Ross

The Inbetweeners 2 is as filthy as a teenage boy – and it’s hilarious

The first Inbetweeners film made £45 million at the box office, and was such an unexpected smash there was always going to be a second one, which is fair enough. It is based on the TV sitcom (Channel 4, 2008–2010), which was a favourite in our house, not that I was ever allowed to watch it in the same room at the same time as my then teenage son. Why? I would want to know. Because you think I don’t know what ‘clunge’ is? Listen, I’ve had a clunge since before you were born. In fact, you wouldn’t have even been born had it not been for my clunge. But

Leo McKinstry

The squeezed middle is a myth

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ed West and Ryan Bourne discuss the moaning middle class” startat=1402] Listen [/audioplayer]Almost from the moment the coalition came to power four years ago, a mood of deepening grievance has gripped parts of the middle class, fuelled by a sense that they have been the biggest losers from the government’s austerity programme. They see themselves as ‘the squeezed middle’, the ones cruelly punished by rising taxation and the loss of state support. What makes their anger all the greater is the feeling of betrayal. David Cameron should be on their side. This narrative of victimhood has become conventional wisdom. Only this week Radio 4’s Jenni Murray, the epitome

Andrew Brown

The bizarre – and costly – cult of Richard Dawkins

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Andrew Brown and Daniel Trilling discuss the cult of Richard Dawkins” startat=788] Listen [/audioplayer]The other day I wrote something to upset the followers of Richard Dawkins and one of them tracked me down to a pub. I had been asked to give a talk to a group of ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ about whether there are any atheist babies — clearly not, in any interesting sense — and at the end a bearded bloke, bulging in a white T-shirt, asked very angrily where Dawkins had said there were any. I quoted a couple of his recent tweets on the subject: When you say X is the fastest growing

James Delingpole

You’re never too old, they say. But I am

For my 49th birthday treat, I went to see Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward theatre in London. Expensive but worth it: spry, funny, uplifting and moving but also, for all the surface froth, quite a deep meditation on the creative process and the enduring power of art. What everyone secretly loves best about it, though, I suspect, is the way it so shamelessly flatters their intelligence. We’re all aware that Shakespeare wrote a sonnet that begins ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; that Marlowe was stabbed to death in a pub brawl; that Malvolio wears yellow stockings and cross garters. This is basic, middlebrow general knowledge.

Rod Liddle

It’s OK to mention anti-Semitic attacks – but not who commits them

I was attacked by a swan the other day, as I walked along the bank of the River Stour in Kent. The creature climbed out of the water and lunged towards me, wings puffed up, making this guttural and hate-filled coughing noise. I kicked out at its stupid neck and told it to fuck off and the bird backed away towards the river, still making that demented hissing, like a badly maintained boiler. At first I was mystified as to how I had gained its enmity. I wasn’t near its mate and still further distant from its sallow and bedraggled idiot children. Nor had I advanced towards it, or even

Martin Vander Weyer

Why a City job should be graduates’ last resort

August is the season for conversation about career choices. Every holiday party seems to include new graduates or next year’s graduands in need of grown-up advice. Many yearn to be pastry chefs, having devoted their student years to watching The Great British Bake Off. Some want to be journalists, and I tell them it’s more fun than having a secure job with a decent income. Happily I’ve only met one young man this summer who wants to go into financial PR, the métier in which I believe Satan himself did his first internship. ‘Diplomacy’ is often mentioned, I suppose because there’s a lot of that on the telly these days

Lucy Vickery

Pet sounds | 14 August 2014

In Competition No. 2860 you were invited to submit a short ode on the death of a pet in unusual circumstances. I was prompted to set this challenge by Thomas Gray’s charming and witty cautionary tale ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’, which he wrote in 1747 in memory of Horace Walpole’s beloved tabby Selima, whose desire leads her to a watery demise. ‘She stretched in vain to reach the prize./ What female heart can gold despise?/ What cat’s averse to fish?’ D.A. Prince’s winning composition below has strong echoes of Gray and there was plenty of wit and charm on

James Walton

The case of the amnesiac autobiographer

In October 2002, 28-year-old David Stuart MacLean woke up at Hyderabad railway station. He was standing at the time, and had no idea where or who he was. A kindly tourist police officer reassured him that his case wasn’t unusual: plenty of young people came to India, took too many drugs and ended up similarly ‘confused’. MacLean immediately had a flashback to injecting heroin with a redhead called Christina — but this proved to be untrue. (Nor was the universe, as he then believed, created by Jim Henson at a studio in Burbank.) Instead, after he’d been taken to a local mental hospital, the doctor diagnosed the side effects of

Marcus Berkmann

A toast to beer, from Plato to Frank Zappa

‘He was a wise man who invented beer,’ said Plato, although I imagine he had changed his mind by the following morning. Beer: A Global History (Reaktion, £9.99, Spectator Bookshop, £9.49) is the latest addition to ‘The Edible Series’, following Cake, Caviar, Offal, Wine, Soup and, rather shockingly, Hot Dog into the catalogue. As reading about food and drink is second only in pleasure to consuming it, this might be one of the most ingenious publishing ideas of all time. Gavin D. Smith, author of several books ‘on drink-related topics’, traces brewing history from the neolithic peoples of Asia Minor to beer’s current pre-eminence: global consumption has increased every year

John McEwen

What’s eating London’s songbirds?

This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity, because it is a thorough and entertaining history; the first to cover the entire London area within a 20-mile radius of St Paul’s, from the earliest record, in Roman times, to the present. A chronology lists the date when the 369 species were first recorded, from the red kite in the 2nd century AD to Bonaparte’s gull and the buff-bellied pipit in 2012. The last named illustrate the recent rise in esoteric sightings following the postwar birth of the bearded-birder brigade, with their competitive box-ticking and ever more hi-tech equipment.

Wednesday

13 Aug 2014

Andrew J. Bacevich

Don’t listen to the hawks — the west should leave Iraq alone

This is a preview from this week’s Spectator, available tomorrow: Peering down from the Olympian heights of the New York Times, the columnist David Brooks writes that “We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq.” There, in the Land of the Two Rivers, he continues, a succession of American presidents has confronted the “core problem” of our era: “the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.” To Brooks and other hawkish right wingers, but also to considerable number of militant liberals, the antidote to this problem is clear: the application of military power to defeat the jihadists and lay the foundation for a

Damian Thompson

‘Left Handers Day’ ignores the Ambidextrous and Transhand communities. End this discrimination now!

Today is International Left Handers Day, ‘the 22nd annual celebration of lefthanders’ superiority’. It’s an opportunity for ‘Lefties’ and their Right-handed supporters to highlight the discrimination they face from the Dextrous majority. ‘Getting right handers to do everything left-handed for the day is a great way to make the point!’ suggests its website. Some Righties may object to having a left-hand index finger wagged at them in this fashion, but my problem with Left Handers Day is that it isn’t inclusive enough. (That and the missing apostrophe.) Why are Ambidextrous (AD) people excluded from this exercise? What about the prejudice they confront as they switch their pen from right to

Douglas Murray

When it comes to jihad porn, abstinence is best

This feature is a preview from this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow: I am sure we’re all in agreement that watching videos of adults abusing children is wrong. At least outside the halls of BBC light entertainment (historically speaking) such a consensus must exist. So how has it become not just right, but seemingly virtuous, to watch and then promote pictures of big bearded men chopping off children’s heads? The proliferation of torture and beheading porn is one of the social media horrors of our day. Every minute millions of people around the world send links to videos and photographs. And as world news gets darker, even if you don’t seek