The unravelling of Tony Blair

One of the things my American friends don’t understand is why the subterfuge over Iraqi WMD is so damaging to Tony Blair. The best articulation of this comes from a lovely essay by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books. Central passage reads:

“The key issue for Blair seems to be his own sincerity. He is desperate to convince us that he believes in the rightness of his actions. This has been a faultline in his personality from the very beginning. It’s instructive, in this context, to consider the ways in which he differs from Thatcher. Her psychological and political make-up was based on the proposition ‘I am right.’ She relished disagreement and opposition, and the feeling that she was saying things that people did not want to hear but secretly knew were true. When she slipped into madness, or if not madness then something close to it, she did so with the wattage of her blazing-eyed rectitude higher than ever. But Thatcher never claimed to be Good, just Right. Blair’s political personality has always been predicated on the proposition ‘I am good.’ His dewy-eyed, slightly fumbling sincerity – his brilliantly articulate impersonation of earnest inarticulacy – has all along been tied to this self-projection as a Good Man. He is careful about not touting his religion in public, but he doesn’t need to, since the conviction of his own goodness is imprinted in everything he says and does. It is one of the things he has in common with the party he leads, and one of the reasons people are wrong when they say that Blair is a natural Tory. Thatcher’s sense of being right fits into the Tory Party’s self-image as the home of unpopular and uncomfortable truths. Blair’s sense of being good fits the Labour self-image as the party of virtue: the party we would all vote for if we were less selfish and greedy.

Blair seems to want this sense of himself to override all the boring factual details about things like why we went to war, the legal basis of war, whether Saddam had WMD, whether he in point of fact posed any risk to the UK, whether MI6 are incompetent or merely ill-used or both; Blair just wants us to take his word for all of it. Inside the Downing Street Wolfsschanze, all this is seen as an issue for the ‘chattering classes’ – a phrase as beloved of New Labour as it was of the Tories and one which would have caused Goebbels a snicker of professional respect. This world-view means that the Government doesn’t have to listen to a word said by its critics since all our arguments come pre- dismissed. It is exactly analogous to the point Thatcher got to when her sense of her own rightness began to override her sense of external reality. It may be too simple to say, as Clare Short said, quoting an unnamed Tory, that ‘no one ever leaves Downing Street entirely sane.’ But there is a moment in most premierships when it is clear that the external world no longer counts quite as much in the Prime Minister’s deliberations as it once did; a point where we no longer believe them, and they no longer much care what we think.”

This is a thoughtful piece, well worth reading in full.

The direct costs of spam

From the Guardian‘s OnlineBlog:

“Spam costs $874 per employee per year IDG reports as follows: Unsolicited commercial e-mail costs US companies $874 per employee per year in lost productivity, according to a report released yesterday from independent research company Nucleus Research Inc. The report, titled “Spam: The Silent ROI Killer,” details the results of interviews with employees and IT administrators at 76 US companies. The $874 figure is based on an hourly pay of $30 and a work year of 2,080 hours, Nucleus said.”

Internet Law Conference at Stanford

Terrific Blogged transcript by Aaron Schwartz.

Home-made WMD

I’ve long wondered whether fears that terrorists could actually make a nuclear bomb are justified. This fascinating Guardian article reveals that the Pentagon actually tried to find out in the 1960s, by recruiting two physics students under conditions of absolute secrecy and telling them to get on with it. The methodology for the test was interesting (the students would work out a design and then it would be secretly validated by Los Alamos scientists), but the outcome was alarming: given access to the necessary fissile material, the students could have done it. Hmmm.

Thanks to FAB, who spotted that the first sentence, as originally published, lacked a verb. What a thing it is to have punctilious readers!

Surfing the Zeitgeist

I’m writing something at the moment about the paradox that we are awash with confident Forrester-type analyses of all aspects of the digital revolution yet none of us actually has a clue what’s really going on beneath our feet. Manuel Castells has a lovely phrase to describe this state of affairs. He calls it “informed bewilderment”.

Geekdom as a state of mind

As someone who is fortunate to have many non-techie friends, I am often struck by their bewilderment at the pleasure I get from technology, and especially that sort-of-aesthetic thrill one gets from seeing something done really neatly — what Slashdot readers would call ‘cool hacks’.

Example 1: Last night I downloaded a beautiful little application called the Salling Clicker. What it does it turn my Sony-Ericsson T68i Bluetooth phone into a remote control for my PowerBook — so I can drive iTunes (or, more importantly, Keynote) while walking about. It’s a lovely, elegant application and it works perfectly and I’m thrilled with it. But already I can see my friends wrinking their noses in disbelief. “You’re excited about using your phone as a remote control!!! How pathetic is that?” I can understand their disdain, but it doesn’t lessen my pleasure at seeing something done so well.

Example 2: I use my PowerBook for all my work, most of which involves writing. The writing tools available on the Mac — from OSX TextEdit to MS Word to Dreamweaver — are marvels in their way. But actually they are too elaborate for what I do most of the time, which is to write plain text. So I’ve been hunting for a Really Simple, Fast and Efficient text editor for a while. Now I’ve got one — Haxial TextEdit. By the standards of the OSX interface, the program is incredibly crude. It even breaks some of the rules of the OS X GUI — by having its own File etc. menu bar for example. It has its own fonts which are crude by comparison with those of OS X applications. It looks damn ugly and has no formatting capability — all it does is put text on the screen. In fact, it looks like something derived from the early days of time-shared Unix machines. But it’s incredibly fast and gives instant word-counts so is just what I need for stream-of-consciousness note-taking. I love it!

Which only goes to confirm, I suppose, that I’m just a geek at heart. Sigh.

Blogs have legal protection — at least in the US

Wired story. “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers. Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily. “One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they’re not just selling information — they’re selling reliability,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren’t necessarily selling anything, they’re just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn’t exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward.”

Random thoughts from Old Europe

I’ve just come back from a day in the heart of what Don Rumsfeld patronisingly called “old Europe”. Following on my column last Sunday about the surge of interest in Open Source software in Germany, I went to Berlin (courtesy of IBM) to talk to some people who are determined advocates for non-proprietary standards in the public sector. Arriving this morning off the early flight from Stansted, I was struck by how nice it was to escape (temporarily) from the Anglo-Saxon world. The Blair-Bush axis has given me a very jaded feeling about the US. And anti-European feeling runs very high in the UK — and not just among Xenophobes either. Britain is really a very insular society, and insofar as it looks outside itself at all, it looks to the US. We’ve moved imperceptibly to an acceptance of a US worldview — towards a subconscious acceptance of the idea that there is really only one way to organise a society: the American Way.

The truth is, of course, that there are many ways of organising societies, and the German way is very persuasive. This after all is a country which is remarkably prosperous, peaceful (and peace-loving) and civilised. Sure, the economy is going through a rough patch (the right-wing Economist is consistently scathing about German economic policy), but the overwhelming impression one gets from the new Berlin is of prosperity and stability. This, remember, is a country that only recently re-absorbed its severed, looted, impoverished other half.

There’s still an incredible amount of new building going on, plus a lot of restoration. But what I hadn’t realised — or expected — is how civilised the centre of the city is. There is traffic, sure, but it’s nothing like aas crazy as London or Seattle. The streets are quiet. And — my big test for a capital — it’s a city where I feel I could safely cycle. It also has a nice cafe life. And prices that are eminently reasonable compared with the UK.

As I walked around, I fell to thinking that modern Germany is a perfect illustration of nation rebuilding done right. This was a country that was ruled — and ruined — by a brutal, murderous, genocidal dictator. It was then destroyed by war. Yet look at it now. If the Americans could do something like this in Iraq then one would feel better about it. But in fact their efforts post-Iraq-war are pathetically feeble compared with the effort that went in to rebuilding Germany. That may be partly because the middle East is a far more alien place to Americans than was post-war Germany. (After all, many Americans have their family roots in Germany.) But it’s also partly due to the impoverishment of the Bushies’ vision, and the poor calibre of their people. Just think of comparing anyone in the Bush Administration to General George Marshall or Harry Truman. Or Dean Acheson. Or George Kennan. Or, for that matter, even John Kenneth Galbraith.

One thing I simply had to do. I walked down Friedrichstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie, which was one of the frightening places of my boyhood, because of what it portended for all of us.

This was the flashpoint which could have ignited the war that would have incinerated our planet. For me, growing up in a society without television and hearing about it only on the radio, the place had an eerie, creepy fascination. And now, after walking a few blocks, here it is:

Odd to think that this was once where East met West in a stolid, imbecilic stand-off (much like the one that still exists in Korea). Now I can stand there and look both ways — East…

And West…

Needless to say, the place is now a tourist trap. There are stalls selling Russian officers’ caps and Soviet medals and insignia.

Thus do we make tourist trophies out of emblems for which people once died and were killed. There’s also a Museum of the Wall which I’d like to have visited but couldn’t because I ran out of time.

And here’s a funny thing: it was on this day (June 26) in 1963 that Jack Kennedy went to Checkpoint Charlie and made that famous speech with the phrase “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”. He made the speech at the Brandenburg Gate, but the East Germans had put up huge red banners which blocked his view into East Berlin. At Checkpoint Charlie, however, he was able, like me, to look East.

I want to go back to Berlin again, to spend some proper time there, go to the Opera and museums and churches and sit in cafes. For, whether Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair like it or not, this city is now the heart of the new Europe.

BBC goes the whole hog

Every bit of content on the enormous BBC website is now accessible through syndicated RSS feeds, and can easily be incorporated in weblogs. A list of the new feeds can be found here. Dave Winer writes: “This is a milestone in the world of open syndication on the Internet. I can’t recall a day when so much great content came on line. Bravo BBC.” Amen to that.

Blogging goes mainstream in Britain?

Well, well. Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme — required listening for all Britain’s chattering classes — had an item on Blogging today. It was based round a discussion between Cory Doctorow and a woman from Handbag.com whose name I didn’t catch. Overall, it was quite an illuminating item — for a mainstream media outlet anyway — though the lady from Handbag trotted out the hoary old objection about ‘quality’ — i.e. that one has to be ‘careful’ about what one reads on sites that are not professionally edited. Hmmm… Given the garbage that is regularly passed by ‘professionally edited’ outlets (e.g. Britain’s tabloids, Fox TV), I think on the whole Everyman Blogger has a lot to recommend him.