The Homburg factor (contd)

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Today’s papers are full of absurdly feeble stories about the ‘crisis’ now afflicting the government. Nobody really knows anything — so there are lots of ‘analysis’ pieces which simply string together every factoid and unattributable quote that the hacks have managed to garner.

Yesterday, Martin Kettle wrote this:

So far, very few MPs have gone public about their lack of confidence in Brown. But, make no mistake, such views are now the norm among increasingly large numbers of consenting backbenchers in private. These backbenchers have finally been pummelled out of their comfort zone by the events of this spring. They now fear Labour cannot win the next general election under Brown’s leadership. They say and believe that he has to go. They do not believe either that Brown will change or that – even if he did – voters would any longer pay attention to it. The question that now consumes these MPs is not whether Gordon Brown will step down – but how and when…

What this conveniently overlooks is that these are the same Labour MPs who lacked the bottle to challenge Brown’s appropriation of the leadership less than 12 months ago. In that sense they’re all complicit in the unfolding disaster. Although Martin Kettle still thinks it unlikely, it’s possible that they will eventually find the nerve to unhorse Brown. But that won’t make any difference. The game’s over. The electorate is bored with them. And besides the British system only works by alternating power between elected dictatorships.

Footnote: Puzzled by the Homburg reference? See here. And, while we’re on the subject, it’s interesting that in his memoirs Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s bagman, quotes Blair as telling him that Brown lacked the political qualities needed to defeat David Cameron.

Chatter in Cyberspace

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This morning’s Observer column…

Q: WHAT DO Cyberspace and Cranford have in common? A: Both are places capable of being driven wild by rumour. Viewers of the landmark BBC1 series will recall how the most trivial aside could instantly be transformed into an incontrovertible fact. When it was rumoured that the railway would be coming to Cranford, for example, Eileen Atkins exclaimed with horror that this meant that the Irish were coming, and promptly expired at the prospect.

I was reminded of this while listening to the chatter of the blogosphere on Thursday night…

Clinton ‘explains’ her assassination reference

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Hillary Clinton said something foolish the other day, and has spent the time since trying to extricate herself.

BRANDON, South Dakota (CNN) — Sen. Hillary Clinton said Friday that she regretted comments that evoked the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as part of her explanation for why she was staying in the presidential race late into the primary season.

Earlier Friday afternoon, she told the editorial board of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Argus Leader that “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said.

As devoted readers will know, the dangers to Obama in a gun-crazy culture have been on my mind too. But I’m not running for the nomination. What’s unacceptable is that Clinton appeared to be using the possibility of Obama’s assassination as a reason for staying in the Democratic race ‘just in case…’.

Dave Winer posted an MP3 of Keith Olbermann’s rant on the subject. It would have been just as effective at a quarter of the length. Olbermann hasn’t heard that brevity is the soul of wit.

The geek shall inherit the earth

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Nice column by David Brooks on the irresistible rise of the nerd/geek in American culture.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

Social networking site bans oldies

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At dinner in college last night I sat opposite a charming young woman who seemed surprised to learn that I had a FaceBook account. “Oooh”, she said, “Can I be your friend?”. “Certainly”, I replied, with what I imagined to be old-world courtesy, “I’d be honoured”. At which point one of her (slightly inebriated) friends further down the table shouted “Are you stalking her, then?”

Harrumph. But Lo! — here’s a weird report from The Register:

A social networking site has deleted most of its users over the age of 36 because it claims older users pose a danger of sex offending. It claims to be forced into the action by the Government, but the part of a law it cites is not yet in force.

Faceparty has deleted what it describes as “a huge number of accounts” from its social networking site in recent weeks. It lists ‘over 36 years old’ as one of its reasons for deletion.

“We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which,” it says in its explanation of the deletion of accounts.

“New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list,” says its notice. “This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme.”

I’d never heard of Faceparty, and the Register thinks that the company has misinterpreted the legislation, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?

And the real irony is that I’ve probably been on FaceBook much longer than anyone else at the table last night!

The Bridge

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Today is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Nice piece about it in the New York Times…

The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24, 1883, was a joyous occasion with “two great cities united.” That 125th anniversary is being marked with a series of celebrations over the holiday weekend. But few remember that the bridge’s public debut was marred days later by a stampede in which a dozen people were crushed to death, and 35 others injured. The May 30 mayhem was exacerbated by a false rumor that the bridge was going to collapse.

The traffic that surged onto the Brooklyn bridge as soon as it opened was overwhelming and dominated by pedestrians who were charged one cent to pass. There was room for 15,000 people on the footpaths at any one time (though overcrowding sometimes drove it to as high as 20,000).

On the second day, there was “a crush of foot passengers from 11 o’clock in the morning to 7 o’clock at night.” The pedestrians “collected at the entrance, compressed themselves into a funnel about 15 feet in width and then ran the gantlet, one by one, of the tolltakers.”

One of the best works of engineering history I’ve read is David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, a wonderful account of how the bridge was built.

Flat Earth News: the seminar

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Photograph by Michael Dales.

We had a terrific seminar last Monday in Wolfson. Nick Davies (left in the photograph) came to talk about his book, Flat Earth News, a scorching critique of the UK newspaper industry, and John Kelly (right) of the Washington Post was the discussant. The event was chaired by Phil Parvin (centre). MP3 of Phil’s introduction is here. For Nick Davies’s presentation, click here. And John Kelly’s comments are here.

John later posted a thoughtful account of the discussion on his blog. He also counted all the roundabouts between Cambridge and Oxford. Guess how many? Er, 71.

Things that are younger than John McCain

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Tut, tut! A web site devoted to listing things that are younger than John McCain.

Sample: Jack Nicholson, Zip Codes, duct tape, 90% of the US population, the ‘Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous’, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, penicillin, etc…

Shameful, eh? Disgraceful. Why, if I could find my stick I’d give them young fellers behind the site a good hiding. Meantime, has anyone seen my medication? Harrumph.