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Mark Rosenfelder has been reading George Orwell, and compares the world of sixty years ago with the world today.

Current politics is always dismal; it always looks like the bad guys are about to win. The best way to get some perspective is to look at something from half a century back. I’ve been rereading a book of essays by George Orwell, and it’s perked me right up.

What’s remarkable, and rather reassuring, is how much better the world is than it was sixty years ago. Orwell wrote at a time when to believe in democracy was to be as isolated and irrational as Don Quixote. The intellectuals were mostly communists of the most irresponsible sort; the upper classes were solidly and stupidly reactionary; and Europe was caught in a totalitarian nightmare– and worse yet, the totalitarians seemed immeasurably more practical and successful than anything the free world could come up with. . (Despite Tolkien’s protestations, the atmosphere of near-hopeless confrontation with near-omnipotent evil in LOTR was very much of the times.)

You can read the whole article on the Zompist Rants Page. While it’s not update that frequently, and isn’t really structured as a blog, whatever he writes is always worth reading.

I’d meant to post this a few days ago. I don’t know much about American politics, being British, but the late Senator Wellstone sounds a bit like an American answer to Tony Benn (only without the arrogance). Even his political opponents respected his principles although they didn’t agree with him.

Respect for opponents doesn’t seem to cut any ice with some warbloggers, though. One, calling himself “The Anti-Idoitarian Rottweiler” dances on his grave, with lines like this:

As far as I’m concerned, this piece of traitorous sh*t useless idiot can rot in Hell forever, I’m not ever going to say something nice about a load of crap that was willing to trade the future of my two boys for the fake halo of being “principled”.

Words fail me. It seems to me that some of the pro-war crowd are now so convinced about their arguments that anyone that disagrees with them are not only misguided, but evil.

That’s the sort of thinking that causes atrocities and genocides.

I refuse to link to this rabid animal myself, but I will link to A Skeptical Blog‘s ‘fisking’ of it.

BBC NEWS | Wales | Blow-up tank ‘missing in action’
The British army have lost an inflatable tank!

The inflatable, life-size dummy tank was moored to the ground during a training exercise near Tredegar, south Wales.

But 80 mile per hour winds tore the battle tank replica from ropes tethering it to the ground and the vehicle is officially “missing in action”.

A widescale search including a helicopter is now underway for the errant inflatable.

On Monday a military spokesman said they were anxious to hear from anyone who may have woken during the morning to find a tank in their garden.

Shades of Pink Floyd’s famous escaped pig (from the cover of “Animals”) that drifted over south London 25 years ago.

I haven’t said much about Iraq on this blog, for the reason that anything I might have to say has already been said by others better at words than I; for instance, go read what people like Bruce Baugh have to say.

There’s a long thread about Bush, Iraq etc. on Dreamlyrics. Anne Blaeske has already posted the first message of the thread on her blog. This is David Edelstein‘s most recent response.

I’ve never been much of a liberal, as you well know. When Bush was elected, I was slightly disappointed, but not terribly upset. I didn’t think Gore was much better, and while nothing about Bush impressed me, at least he had a reputation for picking competent “assistants” who actually make all the decisions.

I figured he’d be a mediocre President, quickly forgotten, much like Jimmy Carter (except that Carter has gone on to do far more good as an ex-President than he ever did as a President, something I don’t expect from Bush.)

Instead, Bush has been pretty nearly an utter disaster.

A year ago, the entire world was rallied around us. We had the sympathy and support of the entire planet. We were getting condolences from freakin’ /Libya/!

In one year, Bush has pissed all that away and turned us into the bumbling cowboys that everybody hates again. Afghanistan was one thing — we were perfectly justified in bombing the s*** out of the Taliban, and I’m glad we went there, although now we are rather predictably mishandling the aftermath.

But instead of maybe pressing Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to do more about the fanatics in their country from whom al-Qaida and the Taliban originated, instead of doing something about the mess in Israel and Palestine, instead of standing up to China’s desire to become the next superpower, or pushing North Korea towards its inevitable collapse and trying to do something to make it as bloodless as possible, Bush doesn’t show a single spark of statesmanship. Instead, out of left field, suddenly the villain we all need to worry about is _Saddam Hussein_! WTF? Saddam has been a noxious toad squatting in Baghdad doing exactly what he has done for the last 10 years, no more or less. He blusters and threatens and tries to rattle our chain now and then, but he hasn’t done anything to provoke a serious U.S. response, and is highly unlikely to do so. All this crap about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” is dubious at best, considering that all the experts who don’t happen to be taking their marching orders from the Administration say it’s unlikely Iraq has any or could develop any in the near future.

Bush wants to look better than his Daddy did. His oil cronies want a more “cooperative” trading partner in Baghdad. And there are an awful lot of chickenhawks, from Bush on down to certain people posting on message boards, who have never faced any danger and who know neither they nor their sons or daughters will ever go anywhere near the fighting, and from that safe vantage point bang their fists on tables and thunder that _Saddam must go_! The fact that most of the senior military leadership has been expressing reservations about an Iraq campaign (and when senior military officials express “reservations” about a plan proposed by a President they like a hell of a lot better than they liked his predecessor, it means that in private they’re probably saying “Is he out of his freaking /mind/?”) should say something about the advisability of stepping in there. But no, we have people who think that the Middle East will somehow become a safer, more peaceful place if we just kill someone we really don’t like. We can’t find Osama, so Saddam makes a convenient standin, because he’s /there/, like a scab that never completely healed.

Oh, and meanwhile the economy still sucks and the unemployment rate is still high and our budget surplus is history and health insurance is becoming so insane that even I am starting to think that socialized medicine might be a preferable alternative, and John Ashcroft wants us to do our patriotic duty and support a police state, but don’t worry about that because the /really important/ thing is that we take out a dictator on the other side of the planet, because that will so improve the lives of the Iraqi people.

*spits*

You can read the whole thread here.

It’s a pity Amadán doesn’t have a blog; he’s a good antidote to the increasingly shrill tone of all those warbloggers, many of whom seem to take all their political, social and moral opinions from the pages of Robert Heinlein juveniles.

To the person that just came here looking for railway delays due to todays weather, the site you want is www.nationalrail.co.uk/realtime/fs_realtime.htm. It’s not a pretty site at the moment; virtually nothing running in the midlands or the south north of the Thames; a long list of train companies (Virgin included), that have given up attempting to run any kind of service due to fallen power lines and trees on the line.

The worst of the wind has died down here in the Thames Valley, but the bad weather is moving north. At least I still have power and a phone connection, unlike some. I’m assuming this is what’s knocked Dreamlyrics off-line.

Update: Pete Hat has confirmed it is indeed the weather that’s taken Dreamlyrics off-line. Currently they have no power in the wilds of Cambridgeshire.

Blogger has been hacked! While blogs on blogspot.com still seem to be readable, the database has been trashed, and worse still, the hackers may have have got hold of your server passwords.

Blogger is currently “down for repairs”. It may be that they will restore the database from backups.

Full details and updates on anil dash‘s site.

I’m glad I’m now using Moveable Type

Samizdata has picked up on my link to Muhajabah.com, and has some additional comments. There seems to be some genuine surprise that not all Moslems support anti-western terrorism.

You should also read this posting by Bruce Baugh, which also questions a lot of the assumptions of certain sections of the Blogosphere.

Some of the right-wing blogs I’ve been reading have complained that they’d heard no condemnation of the awful atrocity in Bali from the Islamic community. They should read this.

I’ve added this blog to my blogroll; they were very helpful in answering my questions about the capabilities of Moveable Type.

Bible Geek pointed me at this and this at razormouth.com, about Christian attitudes towards drink.

Those articles make my glad my parents brought me up with a responsible attitude towards alcohol.

I grew up as (and still am) a Methodist, a church which has historically been very anti-alchohol, a reaction against the gin palaces prevalent in John Wesley’s day – “Drunk for a penny, Dead drunk for tuppence, Straw to lie on free” was their slogan, I’m told. Alcohol is still a Big Issue in some sections of the church, although far less nowadays than it used to be. I remember the church amateur dramatics group back in the 1970s blue-pencilling lines in plays with any reference to alcohol.

I know a Methodist minister who’s claimed that every alcoholic he’s ever had to deal with was either the child of an alcoholic, or the child of a total abstainer. This lends weight to the attitudes in the articles, although the fact that there are genetic factors involved in alcoholism could well be a another factor.

We British seem to have problems with our alcohol culture, with far too much so-called “binge drinking” often resulting in drunken violence, as seen in many town and city centres on a Friday night. Our continental cousins don’t seem to have anything like the same problem, despite drinking as much or even more alcohol than we do in total. I think we have lessons to learn from them.

I don’t know so much about the situation in America, but the “demon drink” meme seems stronger there, maybe as a legacy from the days of prohibition. On the other hand, the seemingly out-of-control ‘war on drugs’ appears to indicate that at least some Americans haven’t learned any lessons from the prohibition laws.

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Disbelief at devastation
The awful tragedy in Bali, with the current death toll reported to be 187, mostly Australians, hasn’t really sunk in.

The terrible truth is that terrorists always strike when and where you least expect them. While the obvious prime suspects have to be Islamic militants with links to Al-Queda, this article suggests another group of suspects – Indonesian nationalists wanting revenge on Australia over the loss of East Timor, which they blame on Australia. I suppose a mentality that was prepared to murder a third of the population of East Timor is quite evil enough commit an atrocity like this. Perhaps the culprits are a toxic combination of Islamic militancy and nationalism.

Guys, I’m not convinced that invading Iraq is going to make these guys go away.