L’affaire Polanski

Posted on by

If, like me, you are puzzled by the ludicrous protestations of the movie world about the arrest of Roman Polanski, then this excellent piece by Nick Cohen should provide a useful antidote.

Poor France. What is there left to say about that unfortunate country? It destroys the feudal order in the Revolution only to replace an aristocracy of nobles with an aristocracy of celebrities. The notion that Polanski – an artist! – could be arrested for molesting 13-year old Samantha Gailey turned the brain of its foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, as soft as Camembert.

“It’s a bit sinister, this business,” he said, as he contemplated the lese-majesty. “A man of such talent recognised throughout the world… All this is not nice.” A host of auteurs, led by Constantin Costa-Gavras, director of the Cinémathèque Française, implied that the Zurich Film Festival was the equivalent of a medieval cathedral or United Nations General Assembly, a privileged space where the law&’s writ did not run.

“It seems inadmissible that an international cultural evening, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him,” the directors said as they decried the sacrilege.

Kouchner was right on one point: the scandal from 1977 is “not nice”. Gailey told a grand jury how Polanksi groomed her by saying he could get her into Vogue. He offered her champagne and Quaalude, a sedative which induces trances, raped and sodomised her. She kept saying she wanted to go home, and at one point feigned an asthma attack to get away from him. Asked why she did not struggle further, she replied: “Because I was afraid of him.” Polanski’s parting words were: “Don’t tell your mother about this and don’t tell your boyfriend either. This is our secret.”

He cut a deal, and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a child. Then he fled to Europe to escape sentence, where he promptly began walking out with Nastassja Kinski, then aged 15. In an interview with Martin Amis, he said if he was a murderer the press and police wouldn’t be so obsessed by him. “But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls – everyone wants to fuck young girls!”

What’s astonishing is that the French protected Polanski for so long from getting his just deserts in the US courts. But it isn’t only French foreign ministers who have a warped sense of their moral duty. Nick goes on to chronicle the compliance of an English libel judge in allowing Polanski to testify to a London court without making the trip to Britain (where he would properly have been arrested and extradited to the US). Hopefully the Swiss will now quickly hand him over and we can see justice done — finally.

NYT discovers Tablet PC

Posted on by

Yep. Here’s the evidence.

SAN FRANCISCO — The high-tech industry has been working itself into paroxysms of excitement lately over an idea that is not exactly new: tablet computers.

Quietly, several high-tech companies are lining up to deliver versions of these keyboard-free, touch-screen portable machines in the next few months. Industry watchers have their eye on Apple in particular to sell such a device by early next year.

Tablets have been around in various forms for two decades, thus far delivering little other than memorable failure. Nonetheless, the new batch of devices has gripped the imagination of tech executives, bloggers and gadget hounds, who are projecting their wildest dreams onto these literal blank slates.

In these visions, tablets will save the newspaper and book publishing industries, present another way to watch television and movies, play video games, and offer a visually rich way to enjoy the Web and the expanding world of mobile applications.

“Desktops, laptops — we already know how those work,” said Brian Lam, editorial director of the popular gadget site Gizmodo, which reports and hypothesizes almost daily about these devices. Tablets, he said, “are one of the last few mysteries left.”

On this day…

Posted on by

… in 1957, the Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit, thereby triggering the alarm in the Eisenhower Administration that led to the setting-up of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which funded the development of the Arpanet, which led to the Internet… Read all about it here. (Warning: shameless plug.)

There’s life in them thar fogeys

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

WE ARE all slaves of some defunct economist, said Keynes, who until the recent disturbances in the banking system was widely regarded as defunct himself. But it wasn't just bankers and politicians who denied their indebtedness to ancient economic principles. Newspaper and print publishers generally also ignored the axiom that, in a competitive market, prices tend to converge on the marginal cost – the cost of producing one more unit of the good(s) in question.

The internet provides a pretty good approximation of such a market…

How to deal with Iran: an aside

Posted on by

From a column by Timothy Garton-Ash.

A textbook example of what democracies should not do was provided last year by a joint venture between Siemens and Nokia, called Nokia Siemens Networks. It sold the Iranian regime a sophisticated system with which they can monitor the internet, including emails, internet phone calls and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, much used by Iranian protesters. In today’s politics of people power, that is the equivalent of selling a dictator tanks or poison gas.

So, to be clear: a German company, Siemens, which used slave labour during the Third Reich, sold a Holocaust-denying president the instruments with which he can persecute young Iranians risking their lives for freedom. Think of that every time you buy something made by Siemens.

Indeed. Last time I looked, the BBC had outsourced all of its IT systems to Siemens. We didn’t hear anything about that during the post-election demonstrations.

Welcome to dreamland

Posted on by

I watched Gordon Brown’s ghastly Conference speech and thought that Simon Hoggart got it right.

But there was a dreamlike quality to the whole speech. The gist of it was, that after nearly 13 years, Labour wants a crack at government. Having constructed a short, sanitised version of a past that did happen, he launched into a future that probably never will: whimpering bankers flee from the wrath of the British people, grateful old folk get free care at home, sinister-sounding “action squads” will sort out troublemakers on problem estates, no more hereditary peers, a plebiscite on PR, green jobs for green people, as he almost said, and a weird Victorian notion of an institution for fallen women – a barracks for single teenage mothers. There will be “family intervention projects” for the most “chaotic” families. “Blimey, it’s the fip-man at the door. Put that spliff out and get the dog off the baby’s tea.”

And asbos will be strictly enforced, no doubt by the same action squads that will stop binge drinking and bankers’ bonuses. But as the late Linda Smith said: “Don’t knock asbos – for some of these kids it’s the only qualification they’ve got.”

The whole fantasy, that Labour has another five years in office to do all the things it never quite got round to in the last 13, pleased the conference mightily.

They’re going to dream massive buy-two-get-one-free dreams and reach deep inside themselves like the monster from Alien. They loved it.

As regular readers know, I’ve thought for a long time that the reason Tony Blair hung on for so long was that he knew Brown would be a disaster. In that, at least, he was dead right.