cloudsoup

I have lately been reminded of this

he gets into his stride, or rather his lurch, announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific — war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft… It’s all here: the Stock Exchange, the arms dealers, the press barons… You can’t fool Brodie — patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism… Pages and pages of it. It’s like being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show of favourite simpletons, the India rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea…

Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

The person who contacted me claiming:

• the West ‘harboured’ Christian terrorists
• the Taliban attempted to hand over bin Laden to the US
• the FBI has never claimed Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11

has sent another message. She’s not backing down on her previous random nonsense, oh no; she has blithely moved on leaving spectators baffled by the chaff spewed out. Now she’s linking to a Glenn Greenwald column. Not sure why…

Here’s a video.

Janet Daly in The Telegraph:

The tragic events of 9/11 were immediately followed by a grotesque and shameful fusillade of anti-Americanism, which still resonates today.

…The Guardian led the way, of course, with a now infamous series of comment pieces which reiterated the same vengeful theme: America had got what it deserved.
Its pages were filled with callous triumphalism (“They can’t see why they are hated”, “A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully”) alternating with frank threats: until the US changes its policy on the Middle East, it will continue to suffer terrorist attacks – which turned out, thankfully, to be wrong. (Oddly, there were no claims that the Spanish had got what they deserved after the later Madrid bombings, even though that incident was related to the Islamist goal of re-establishing the caliphate.)

…not quite everybody. When I wrote about this vicious campaign in the following weeks, I was deluged with letters from readers (in those days, people still wrote letters to columnists rather than posting comments on a website) who were as appalled as I was, and deeply ashamed of the picture that was being created of British public opinion

Which pretty much mirrors my memory – and not only memory. Case in point the lunatic commentator on this blog mentioned below.

Related articles

• JANET DALEY: 9/11: The dark day that brought out the worst in Britain. “The tragic events of 9/11 … (pajamasmedia.com)

Here’s one comment I’ve received today:

The USA/ the West could, if it had wished, reacted to 9/11 with international criminal justice procedures.

Now of course the person who made it has lost touch with reality somewhat. Let’s just recap.

1. Libya issued the first official Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden in 1998.
2. An American  grand jury indicted him on charges of killing five Americans and two Indians in the November 14, 1995, truck bombing of a U.S.-operated Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh.
3. He had been added to  the FBI’s most wanted list in June 1999 for his part in the  bombings of the United States embassies in  Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, attacks that killed over 200 people and for the October 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 people.
4. President Bill Clinton convinced the United Nations to impose sanctions against Afghanistan in an attempt to force the Taliban to extradite him.
5.  Despite the multiple indictments and multiple requests, the Taliban refused to extradite him

The person who left that comment here probably has no idea about all of this  - I know in the past they were disinterested in politics and foreign affairs, and rather ignorant of them – and is just parroting something that passes for a truism in the internet echo chambers she inhabits. But on 9/11 of all days, to come up with this?

But it goes on. She writes:

the Afghans or the Taliban, forget which at this point, offered to hand bin Laden over to the USA at one point, but the USA refused

of course, the Taliban never offered to hand Bin Laden over to the US but the takeway for this person is that something about all this was the fault of the US. And finally, she writes:

the FBI has never claimed that there is any evidence for bin Laden being directly involved in 9/11

now I’m not sure what she means to suggest here. That Bin Laden and Al Qaeda weren’t behind 9/11? What else could she mean?

The norm for the FBI is to use one indictment; they’ve never officially claimed his involvement in the Cole bombing either. But Dale L. Watson, FBI Executive Assistant Director, Counterterrorism/Counterintelligence Division, talking to a Senate committee in 2003 said:

as the events of September 11 demonstrated with horrible clarity, the United States also confronts serious challenges from international terrorists. The transnational Al-Qaeda terrorist network headed by Usama Bin Laden has clearly emerged as the most urgent threat to U.S. interests. The evidence linking Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden to the attacks of September 11 is clear and irrefutable.

Not that this or anything else  will convince this person.

Harry’s Place has a few comment threads running about 9/11. One commentator says:#

Again, the Reactionary Left were smoked out by 9/11 and we know exactly where they are coming from, the filth.
A lot of sociopaths were smoked out, people who seemed normal but weren’t.
I remember one woman writing (for radio) that she watched the towers fall from her apartment in New York and had no pity at all for the victims… I listened to her mad hatred for her fellow Americans for a few more minutes then turning off the radio in disgust

Exactly. Right here on this blog an old acquaintance wrote:

Do western govts go to war against countries harbouring right-wing and/or christian fundamentalist terrorists

- a bizarre and delusional effort to carry on blaming the West. I tried asking her which states harboured Christian terrorists but she just became more incoherent. Perhaps she’s not typical of the Left. Perhaps she’s more typical of people who are mentally ill.

I had an email the other day from ‘Nicole Factfinder’ who said:

I’m involved in publishing a children’s guidebook to Devon and Cornwall and we were including a section on learning to surf in Cornwall. We’d love to use the photo below

my photo of surfers in Devon

but then Nicole went on to say:

as there are children in the picture I wanted to check with you first if you had photo release

Which made me rather cross. Unless Nicole’s hazarding a guessd that some of the tiny figures in the background are kids and that for some reason gives her concern then she can only be talking about the three figures in the foreground. They look to me like they might be a mother, a teenage son and a younger daughter.

This is a perfect example of moral panic, exactly the same in kind – though less of course in degree – as the idiots from South Wales who attacked a paediatrician because the job title sounded to them like ‘paedophile’. Really.

What exactly do you suppose Nicole thinks would be the problem with using the photo? That some paedophile might get his jollies from slavering over the innocuous photo? Well he might but then again, someone else might become aroused over a photo of my bicycle. Really. Or that someone might think Nicole herself had unsavoury thoughts on seeing an image of a girl going surfing. Because as far as I can tell that would be closer to the mark.

I replied to Nicole:

The picture was taken from a public beach of people on a public beach, it’s in perfectly good taste, the people in question have their backs to the camera and can’t be identified,  there’s no presumption of privacy in public and  people don’t own some mysterious right to their images captured on whatever cameras may be about. Model release forms are not required by law in the UK

Must do some research into this sometime. You might have expected the BBC, being our world-renowned national broadcaster, to employ website editors who can write English properly. Not so much.

Just recently there was the fare/fair cock-up (in a piece on A Levels, ironically) and now there’s this peice on Laura Dekker‘s bid to sail around the world. The title reads:

‘Teenager Dekker ‘sets sail’ on world record bid

and in the second paragraph says,

Her manager said she had left in a very good mood despite calm conditions, but did not want to speak to the media.

Firstly, the title. Why put ‘sets sail’ in quotes like that? ‘Sets sail’ is a perfectly well-known figure of speech; and yes it has a delibverate double meaning here because Dekker is physically setting sail; but unless the editor thought it a good idea to draw our attention to what he thought was a clever double meaning so that we could admire him, the quotes make the headline read as though it was written by  someone not used to writing. A kid, who uses quotes and exclamation marks,  and lols.

Then there’s the non sequitur in that second paragraph which seems to suggest that Dekker’s mood might have been expected to be excellent if sea conditions had been terrible and that under the boring circumstances of  plain sailing (sorry, that should be ‘plain sailing‘, of course) she’s bearing up well by nevertheless being in a good mood.

I’d have thought the Beeb could do better.

Oliver Kamm had a widely-read blog, which he moved to The Times. Then The Times put up a wall.

It’s a piece of bad news: that when its paywall goes up, the Times will be putting behind that wall, not only its regular journalism, but also its blogs. This means that Oliver’s blog, which I’ve been reading daily since it began, will no longer be freely accessible … it is regrettable in any case if one of the most formidable bloggers in the ‘sphere is now lost to a proportion of his readership

This is also confirmation – here of an unwelcome kind – of a point I’ve made before about the distinction between the free blogosphere and the blog-space that is merely an extension of the mainstream media. It’s a distinction to the advantage of the former.

Norman Geras Paywall Blogging.

The tape shows two police officers, on foot and in riot gear, slam McKenna into the wall.

Dear Sir/Madam

I have received a letter from the Chief Executive of the redacted PCT, redacted, telling me that my health records are to be computerised unless I choose to opt out.

I am usually keen to promote the appropriate use of of new technologies but I regret to say that in this case I do not wish for my electronic Summary Care Record to be created and I do wish to opt-out of the scheme.

I have first hand experience of incorrect data being recorded on NHS systems about me. In fact, my letter from the Chief Executive arrived with two other identical letters, one for my partner and one addressed or someone I don’t know and who has never lived at my house.

The NHS has a long history of abuse of patients’ data, some recent notable cases being those of Dr Andrew Jamieson and Helen Wilkinson. I have read the work of Professor Ross Anderson, a respected authority on security, who continues to raise significant concerns about the NHS Spine. For further reading I recommend as a start the Rowntree Trust’s publication:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/database-state.pdf

Yours faithfully,