“So you’ve got this political, societal section that says that being a racist is bad … and at the same time they go into court and say it’s not provably true, calling somebody a racist,” Glasser said. “I find that stunning.”
Glasser explained why he thinks CNN settled in its case with Sandmann, which ended up being for an undisclosed amount of money, instead of trying to win outright.
“The sympathy out there and the attitude of the American jury pool no longer sees reporters as Woodward and Bernstein crusading, but instead they think of Jayson Blair and Sabrina Erdely who make things up to suit their own agenda,” Glasser said.
— Read on www.dailysignal.com/2020/01/09/lawyer-explains-why-cnn-settlement-in-libel-case-is-a-big-deal/
Getting it wrong – and getting it right
It can often be fun re-reading publications some time after their sell-by date. Like this example which I stumbled over yesterday.
“It’s time for me to stick my neck out. The Tory push north will end in failure”
I suppose he had to write something and the possibility of having a chance to write in the aftermath of 12 December, “I told you so”, was too tempting.
He did cover himself somewhat with this: “What follows is anecdotal and my hunches have often been wrong.”
However, the only accurate phrase in this, from his opening paragraph, which came near to matching yesterday morning’s reality was “Mr Johnson will win”. He could not foresee any “enduring shift northwards”. That might turn out to be right – but we will have to wait at least five years to find out.
Parris wrote, “Tory strategists’ hopes of surfing a tidal wave of new support from ‘tribal’ Labour voters in the English Midlands and the North will not be fulfilled. Mr Johnson will win this time, but there will be no substantial and enduring shift northwards of Tory support. “
But, I suppose he had a bit of fun writing it – as we have had reading it.
A far more enlightening and hopeful read in the same issue was Robert Tombs’ reflective speculation about the future of Britain – and Europe – in the aftermath of Thursday’s results. Tombs is a historian and knows how to take the long view of contemporary events. This one, he predicted would change “us and Europe, and have an impact on the wider international system.” And that includes Ireland.
That long view contrasted with the actual campaign so much that a sense of reality pervaded the past six weeks. He wrote:
Commentators focus on spending plans and personal foibles, but what will make next week’s vote historic is something else, something so momentous that we draw back from discussing it seriously. The Lib Dems boast of Stopping Brexit, knowing that as things are now they will never have to try.
We now know where that got them – oblivion for at least another five years.
Jeremy Corbyn pleads neutrality: the first leader not sure which side he was on since poor Henry VI in the Wars of the Roses.
Not many people know the sad history of Henry VI. Were it not for Shakespeare many fewer would know it. Unless James Graham writes a companion piece to his “Brexit: An Uncivil War”, even less will be known about Jeremy Corbyn.
The Conservatives, whose hopes of office depend entirely on this issue, downplay its importance: ‘Get Brexit Done,’ ministers repeat, as if it were a tiresome distraction from real politics. Perhaps it is, if ‘real politics’ is only about mending potholes and recruiting nurses. But however much politicians, and perhaps voters, would prefer it all to go away, this election will change us and Europe, and have an impact on the wider international system.
There has always been something ironic about the Republic of Ireland’s stance on the British electorate’s Brexit decision. Tombs saw that essentially Brexit was about British independence. That Ireland, formerly – but no more – ferociously independent did not sympathise with that psychologically was always a bit of a puzzle. The answer is, of course, on the economic side. Fear of serious economic discomfort trumped psychology. Not so for the British.
Tombs sees the Brexit decision as all about resistance to being driven down a path on which Britain would have become “a subordinate component of a larger sovereign entity” Their independence, as he saw it, was not primarily a matter of the details of European laws and regulations, however voluminous; or of the creation of a common citizenship with 27 other states; or even of the intended future development of EU control in still wider areas of government. It was primarily a matter of psychology.
“Britain voted in 2016 by a clear majority to be an independent state”.
The election he said would show whether or not the British electorate would back away from that decision, “perhaps through fear of the consequences following a constant battering with anti-Brexit propaganda, perhaps through the coming of age of a new generation for whom independent national democracy appears to have little meaning.”
It was a test of stamina. Were the two and a half years of chaoatic politics and the prospect of difficulties to come going to prove too much and lead them to “surrender ultimate control of their destiny because independence was too difficult.”
Writing over two weeks ago, he was optimistic about the outcome.
Despite a humiliating trail of mismanagement, the 2016 vote will be confirmed by an electorate angry at being despised. This means that most of those who govern us — or governed us — in politics, the media, the quangocracy, the business lobbies and the universities will have been defied. Despite their strenuous efforts, they will have lost. What we have seen emerge — as in a bloodless War of the Roses — is a divided elite. On one hand, a national elite that bases its legitimacy on identification with the nation and the majority will. On the other, a transnational elite — far bigger, more determined, and less respectful of our constitution than we could have imagined in 2016 — which draws authority and a sense of entitlement from its multiple links with the EU. Defeat of the transnational elite would be a kind of peaceful revolution; and like all revolutions, its outcome is unpredictable and for some unpleasant. Most, like the Abbé Siéyès, who said his great achievement during the French Revolution was to have survived, will accept the new reality and ‘move on’. Others, like Old Regime nobles who learned nothing and forgot nothing, will go into internal exile and do their best to make trouble.
After reflecting on Britain’s long and fraught – often chaotic – imperial history, in which it often spent as much time escaping from imperial entanglements as acquiring imperial responsibilities, he concludes:
The British have been adept at escaping empires, including their own: Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin predicted that we would be part of a trans-Atlantic empire governed from New York, so the American Declaration of Independence in effect liberated Britain too. We made far less effort than the French to keep an empire after 1945. We seem to be about to escape again, this time from Mr Verhofstadt’s empire. We have long been used to relying on others for support and even to give us a sense of purpose: the empire, the Americans, the Europeans. Now that we have blackballed ourselves from the club, for the first time since the 17th century we may have to navigate our own course. We tend to put off thinking about essentials, and we shall probably vote on 12 December without having done so. But sooner or later we shall have to start thinking about what we have chosen, and what it will require of us.
Read his full article in The Spectator here.
Who was the real James Bond?
His name is Bond. James Bond. But as the trailer for the latest Bond movie comes out today, we wondered about the name’s origins.
The writer behind the super spy, Ian Fleming, was also an avid bird watcher. On a trip to Jamaica after World War II, he spotted a book, “Birds of the West Indies,” by an ornithologist from Philadelphia, who happened to be named James Bond.
Daniel Craig as James Bond in “Skyfall.” He says the coming “No Time to Die” will be his final Bond film. Francois Duhamel/Columbia Pictures and Metro Goldwyn Mayer
“It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed,” Mr. Fleming once wrote in a letter to the ornithologist’s wife.
But as in any good spy story, there’s a twist: Last year, the BBC reported that newly released records showed that an intelligence officer named James Bond had served under Fleming in a secret elite unit that led a guerrilla war against Hitler.
That Bond, a metal worker from Wales, had taken his spy past to the grave, his family said — and they suspected that Fleming had used the bird-watching Bond as a “classic red herring” to keep his identity a secret.
(Courtesy of the New York Times Daily Briefing)
Rock-bottom politics?
Is this not sad? Cynicism topped by bitter acrimony. Kamala Harris pulls out of the presidential race. The incumbent president, just on his way back from a meeting of world leaders tweets:
@realDonaldTrump
Too bad. We will miss you Kamala!
Kamala Harris responds:
@KamalaHarris
Don’t worry, Mr. President. I’ll see you at your trial.
For that vindictive bitterness she gets 618.4K Likes within a few hours.
Seduced by progressives
Today on Gript, a new Irish media platform:
The grip of progressivism on the minds and hearts of the majority of the Irish people is now frightening. As a result our State – encouraged, cowed and then applauded by Irish and Western liberal media – has put on our statute books one set of flawed laws after another. More are in preparation. Any opposition, parliamentary or otherwise, is negligible because of the dumbing down of the moral sense of the people – while shameful scandals have been outrageously manipulated to undermine the authority of the only agency in the culture which still proclaims the perennial moral value of the principles which have sustained our civilization for millennia. Those who dare to protest the new status quo of politically correct morality are branded populists – or worse.
It took the Irish of another time over 100 years to break free of the draconian laws which had excluded them from public life by a Protestant Ascendency. At the heart of the act of exclusion was the conviction that because Catholics believed that the Pope was the Vicar of Christ they could not be trusted. The new Progressivist Ascendancy in Ireland today now excludes from healthcare provision anyone who believes that human life begins at conception and that the child awaiting birth in its mother’s womb has as much right to life as any of us.
Read the full column here
Deceitful window-dressing
Philip Pullman is one of the nastier ideologues around. He is now getting a new boost for his anti-Christian venom – not anti-religious because he is profoundly pagan – with the televising of his Dark Materials trilogy. The problem is that his venom is too-venomous for the television producers who want to make a handsome profit from the 30 million pieces of silver they have invested in the project. They are huffing and puffing that Pullman is not at all anti-Christian. But, as Peter Hitchens points out in a detailed assessment of the Pullman phenomenon in First Things, it won’t wash. The man’s recorded mutterings give them an impossible job to do.
But maybe it doesn’t matter anyway – BBC/HBO investment seems destined to go the way of all expensive flops, down the drain. The critical view seems to be that the series, like the film made some years ago for something in the region of $130 million, is deadly dull.
Hitchens remarks:
His severe radicalism is not just an embarrassment. It is also a difficulty for filmmakers and TV moguls, who suspect that the mass market may not be quite ready for a man who openly seeks to undermine what is still in theory the majority faith in most Western countries. It is not that they necessarily disagree, just that they have to worry about revenue. This could be why the executive producer of the TV series, Jane Tranter, has gone on record in the USA to say that the new series is not in fact an attack on religion. “The religious controversy that was around the film was not relevant to the books themselves,” she argued. “Philip Pullman talks about depression, the control of information and the falsification of information . . . there is no direct contrast with any contemporary religious organisation.”
“Philip Pullman, in these books, is not attacking belief, not attacking faith, not attacking religion or the church per se,” Tranter insisted. “He’s attacking a particular form of control where there is a very deliberate attempt to withhold information, keep people in the dark, and not allow ideas and thinking to be free.” She went on: “At any time it can be personified by an authoritarian church or organisation, and in our series it’s personified by the Magisterium, but it’s not the equivalent of any church in our world.”
Isn’t it, though? In Pullman’s stories, priests are called “Father” and defer to Cardinals. The very word “Magisterium” (referred to with a sort of terrified awe, as if it were the NKVD) is closely associated with Roman Catholic teaching. And the emblem Pullman’s priests wear and display, though surrounded with twiddly extras, is unmistakably a cross. The TV series’ CGI Oxford, meanwhile, has acquired about a dozen extra unmistakably Christian spires. In the creepiest scene of all, we get a glimpse of an altered version of the Bible, in which a crucial passage set in the Garden of Eden is profoundly changed. The original from Genesis, in which the serpent tempts Eve, runs thus, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” But Pullman’s heroine, Lyra, is given this version by her kindly old tutor: “Your eyes shall be opened, and your daemons will assume their true form and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” I am not quite sure why this alteration of Holy Writ gives me such a jolt, but it does.
The Cultural Curse of the New Censorship – Quadrant Online
The Cultural Curse of the New Censorship – Quadrant Online
— Read on quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/the-cultural-curse-of-the-new-censorship/
Rubber-stamp wisdom
Micah Mattix, in the PRUFROCK newsletter today, informs us that in the latest issue of The Atlantic Lin-Manuel Miranda – of Hamilton fame – tells us that “All art is political.” Mirranda elaborate that “In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political.”
Mattix’s view of this:
This is the rubber-stamp-approved theory of art and has been for at least 25 years if not longer. It’s wonderfully safe, as are all rubber-stamp-approved things. Not an eyebrow would be raised nor a head lifted from slumber if you, in the squeak of adolescence, were to offer such an opinion to your AP English teacher’s pleasure—and, oh, how pleased she would be.
But all art is not political, and truth telling is not “an inherently political act.” Only people who think of all relationships (to spouses, children, dogs) as political could possibly believe such a thing—and as far as I can tell, no one actually does. Nor is art, unfortunately, “like bypass surgery,” allowing us “to go around all of the psychological distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable among us”—though it is very satisfying, I’m sure, for readers of literature to think of themselves as better than others. Frank O’Hara’s manifesto “Personism” is a joke, but he wasn’t joking when he asked other poets: How “can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears).”
All art, rather, is individual. I know that’s damningly ambiguous, but I don’t have time this morning to expand (I have a class to teach!). More on this later, perhaps. If there are any publishers out there who want to send me a fat book contract for 200 pages on the topic, I will consider all offers.”
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Stuck, not just in a market but in a political bloc?
Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist writes of Emmanuel Macron’s ambitions for Europe, and his fears if they fail to materialise.
For any European minnow like ourselves here in Ireland, those ambitions might not be ours – but in the end there is nothing we can do about them. We are stuck with Macron et al, like it or not.
The magazine’s cover story this week, she writes, considers Emmanuel Macron’s warning that Europe is “on the edge of a precipice”. In his Elysée Palace office, the French president spoke to The Economist in apocalyptic terms. NATO, the transatlantic alliance, is suffering from “brain-death”, he says; Europe needs to develop a military force of its own. The European Union needs to act not just as a market but as a political bloc, with policies on technology, data and climate change. And it must embrace realpolitik, for example by rebuilding relations with Russia. With protectionism and authoritarianism on the rise, Europe needs to wake up and prepare itself for a tougher, less forgiving world. It is hard to overstate the scale of the change Mr Macron is asking from his fellow Europeans. Is he right? At the very least, he deserves an answer.
Garvan Hill 