engaging in pointless tasks

I’ve being trying to work out what this means off and on over the past few days, and can only conclude that the correct term for the fellow who wrote it is now Alan “not the inhabitant of planet earth” Johnson.

It’s pretty easy to see how people like Melanie Phillips got to the apocalypse, since they share many of the basic notions of Islamic fundamentalists on matters such as the existence of evil and the importance of making militant distinctions between right and wrong. From their point of view there’s no way in which a movement which enshrines these notions can be anything but an existential threat to the decadent, slack-twisted liberal west, etc. There’s a particularly strong element of jihad envy in Mark Steyn’s writing.

Old lefties seem to have to go the long way round to the same position, essentially by re-inventing fascism as Islamism and re-interpreting it as a monolithic movement. Holding this position makes it difficult to keep in touch with actual events. Of all the words you could use to describe the various Muslim actors in Iraq –for instance - right now, monolithic would come pretty low down the list. Oh, well. Just picking over the rubble I suppose. Not to mention poisoning the argument.

Oh, and Famous Amis is on the case:

'Well, I do have a solution,' he says. 'It's basically consciousness-raising in Islamic women. There's a huge sexual element in this. It's about Islamic masculinity; it's to do with powerlessness and humiliation. When the last Islamic king was booted out of Spain, his mother said, "Do not cry like a woman for what you cannot maintain."

This just in: a crack squadron of facilitiators attached to 16 Air Assault Brigade established a women's group last week in troubled Helmand Province after a daring overnight raid. The facilitators, assisted by elements of the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, made a heliborne landing in the teeth of fierce opposition from Taliban fighters gathered in the area and staked out an autonomous space for women close to the town of Sangin, despite being subjected to heavy fire from mortars and RPGs.

Comments

[Backword Dave]

Is it me, or are the Decents getting bitter? All Alan 'NTM' Johnson has is insults and Paul Berman. He attacks Mark Seddon (Franklin Delano Seddon as he calls him at one point -- what next demonize whatever leftist warned against the 'military-industrial complex'?) for quoting FDR and John Foster Dulles, and he has one book! One book, but everything you need to know is in it.

[Simon]

"We may yet pay a terrible price for our reluctance to acknowledge what is new in the threat we face today, and our preference to think about that threat by analogy to older forms of terrorism."

Who is this 'we' in any case? It's not as if almost everyone in the British and American political establishments doesn't already agree with Alan 'NTM' Johnson and aren't already actively putting his theories into practice. In the meantime, forgive me if I, a daily user of peak-hour public transport in a major British city, is a little sceptical of the wisdom of enacting the revolutionary political schemes of a Politics teacher in Cumbria.

[dsquared]

agree on the bitterness thing. Geras has an absolutely shitty little aside aimed at Marc Mulholland at the moment.

[Matthew]

Btw Simon, I've been meaning to congratulate you on the clever way you haven't made a blog post for four months, yet your blog's top post remains as relevant to this week's Nick Cohen column as ever.

http://thisleadenpall.blogspot.com/

[dsquared]

good god the man's a halfwit.

[There must be a long-term battle of ideas alongside a drive to democratise and develop the region]

we can tell from the link that "long term battle of ideas" means Democratiya and the Euston Manifesto, and I'm guessing that "a drive to democratise and develop the region" means something like Fallujah. Talk about "that and fifty cents gets you a ride on the subway".

Note the elision between "Islamists" and "totalitarian movements in the Muslim word", btw. The estimate of millions of deaths for the latter is very dependent indeed on Suharto and Saddam, who are of course in the wrong section of the Venn diagram.

[Simon]

Btw Simon, I've been meaning to congratulate you on the clever way you haven't made a blog post for four months, yet your blog's top post remains as relevant to this week's Nick Cohen column as ever.

Well indeed. Eventually I ran out of things to say about stupid columns by Nick Cohen and then found I didn't have a great deal to say about much else.

I am however about halfway through a ponderous review of The Wind That Shakes The Barley which might appear on there at some point over the next year or two.

[bruschettaboy]

[Eventually I ran out of things to say about stupid columns by Nick Cohen and then found I didn't have a great deal to say about much else.]

oh you think *you've* got fucking problems?

[Backword Dave]

That was the other BB. Not I.

[Dan Goodman]

Hehehe, I tried to do the same thing. I wanted to write an entry responding to the Alan Johnson article but really nothing I could say would do it justice, so I decided in the end to just include a link to it - let it speak for itself. I am reminded more and more these days of Tom Lehrer's quote "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

[Alex]

Politics became obsolete when the neoconservatives, a movement set up to bash Kissinger, started asking him for advice.

[jamie]

Yeah, but Kissinger was always a "stay the courser" over Vietnam, at least until the political moment was right to be a "cut and runner." It's a salvage job.

It seems to me that what advocates of democratisation by force are looking for now isn't so much an ideology to practice but a means of political cover for whatever action they now find expedient to take. Given that the only coherence in Johnson's piece is as a free floating justification for any act of force abroad or repression at home, then this is presumably the actual business model for the Eustonauts right now.

[CKR]

It seems to me that what advocates of democratisation by force are looking for now isn't so much an ideology to practice but a means of political cover for whatever action they now find expedient to take.

On this side of the pond, it looks more like they're lying low until after the November election. Shut down the war talk against Iran so that the price of oil will go down. Hope that the media will shut up about Iraq or that the readers/listeners are inured to the daily deaths.

For a while, it appeared that scare talk about terrorists in your (yours, yes, but everyone's too) very own town was working. But Woodward's book, killings by lunatics in schools, and the underage predelictions of a Florida congressman have siezed the stage.

I suppose Karl Rove is trying to convince himself that those stories are better than an argument about the virues of democratization by force. Or perhaps another terrible terrorist plot will be uncovered. (Please, not this weekend while I'm traveling!)

Seymour Hersh, in a talk here a week ago, said that things will get worse in 2007, no matter who wins the elections. He didn't say that Bush will attack Iran, but that seemed to be what he was worried about.