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But even if Mr Parris were right, maybe he should ask whether he would feel safer 10 years from now had Saddam had not been removed, the UN had lost its will to enforce its resolutions against Iraq (following French, German and Russian pressure that the sanctions were killing “innocent Iraqis”) and Iraq had become a WMD bazaar for Terrorists? Farfetched? Maybe. But would Mr Parris be willing to bet his life (and his City) on it? I know I wouldn’t.
Patrick Bechet
Cape Town
Someone needs to buy Mr. Parris a new moral compass immediately.
Holly Watson
Comment on The Trotskyists of the Right by Aidan Rankin (14/06/2003)
I agree that today there is a lot of sycophantic behaviour going on, between alleged free-marketeers and the new governing class. And as such, there is plenty to be sceptical about, especially when they are making decisions that often have the power of life and death over us. But enlightened libertarians are not materialists; after all, isn’t the synonym for Marxism “dialectical materialism”? The human spirit is what we are trying to liberate, from excessive taxes and government regulation. Once set free, it can again triumph with creativity, over the mundane stagnation of modern society. The challenge, then, is to sell this vision of a better life – in an all-inclusive way. We need to allow everyone to have a greater “piece of the action.” Margaret Thatcher understood this, and it is my hope that we can formulate better policies to make a “people’s capitalism” that can truly transform the world. The human mind and its capacity for innovation are truly infinite, as the liberators of the Enlightenment understood. Let’s stop trying to be the king’s courtesans, and get back to creating better ideas. Then conservatives and libertarians can join forces instead of war-blogging each other!
Brent Bielema
Comment on The grim reefer by James Delingpole (14/06/2003)
Good piece overall, However, I thought the article was a bit overwrought in describing skunk as “a genetic mutation”. It’s no more of a genetic mutation than a carrot or a corgi. It’s a product of selective breeding. There is no question but that the motivation for the selective breeding has been prohibition. In a free market I suspect few would choose indica varieties for everyday use. Make no mistake; skunk is by and large cannabis indica bred for strength. Some varieties may be paired with sativa as a hybrid, but all the characteristics associated with skunk are indica characteristics. The reason indica has been the main focus of selective breeding programs has more to do with its yield potential and shorter growing season than its strength. It also has a higher resin content but this doesn’t always mean higher strength.
I used to know a great many marijuana farmers back in the early 1980’s and even then most grew a stash of sativa for their own use. They grew skunk for the great unwashed. It’s a myth that the indica strains are always much stronger than the sativas. There are frighteningly strong sativas; they just aren’t usually grown commercially because of the additional costs/risks.
Personally, I haven’t smoked the stuff for many years because it just doesn’t suit me any more. It would be interesting to see what varieties emerged in a truly free market. I suspect mid-strength sativas with sweet, fresh aromas would win
out overall with a hard-core of people wanting super strength indica. Much like the market for alcohol really.
Name and address withheld
May I point out that while skunk does indeed smell very bad, the name is not derived from the smell?
Instead, the name derives from the growing technique. “Skunk”, you see, is a Danish architectural term describing a windowless space between inner and outer walls of a building. Many tenement houses in Copenhagen have these spaces in top floors, and it is in these spaces that the weed was first grown because the plants were then well hidden from inspecting policemen.
This of course makes the comparison with Special Brew, another famous product of Copenhagen, all the more apt!
Dan Kjerulf
Copenhagen, Denmark
Comment on Language barriers by Peter Jones (14/06/2003)
I agree that in the universities there is a certain cloudiness about the language used. For example, in my teacher education program, we were to call ourselves “learning facilitators”. Whatever. But I will argue that a lover of words, someone who can taste them rolling off her tongue, will certainly pick “clandestine” over “secret” purely for the poetry and sheer delight of it. Please don’t discourage the armchair poets among us…
Sara Register
It has been my observation that academics in America have used similar language for different reasons. The soft sciences (i.e. English and History departments) have felt inferior to the “hard sciences” (Chemistry and Biology) for quite some time. Professors in the hard sciences were paid much more than soft sciences because 1. they could be paid much higher salaries in the private sector and 2. they could attract huge grants from the government for basic research, thus getting buildings built and secretaries paid.
The soft sciences fellows also felt inferior because the hard science guys had a dense and complex jargon that they could not understand. Like a South Pacific cargo cult, the soft sciences started to assemble a dense jargon so they too could get the big bucks.
It did not work out that way to a great extent, but it has made almost any modern literary criticism unreadable to anyone who is not a literary critic.
John R. McCarthy
Comment on It’s going to be sunny, or rainy by Ross Clark (14/06/2003)
Having lived through WW2 I am familiar with the anecdotal evidence of Eisenhower’s weather guru, Group Captain Stagg, being able to forecast, all those years ago, a break in the weather in the Channel sufficient to enable the invasion to take place.
What amazes me, nearly sixty years and millions of pounds spent on the Met Office later, is that the weather forecasts now are so laughably inaccurate.
Here in the middle of Dorset I look at the Met Office forecast every morning for this area and, being charitable, it is nearly right about a quarter of the time.
The whole exercise should be done away with and the money spent on something less useless; we would be no worse off.
Tom Livingston
Comment on How to win votes for the BNP by James Cartlidge (14/06/2003)
On reading James Cartlidge’s little rant about Carlton TV not “Playing The White Man”, in the manner required of “…a freelance print journalist with an eye on one day moving into the broadcasting side”, I was moved enough to set my yoghourt weaving aside for a few minutes. To have a Little Think about whether any sort of considered response was possible. Not, I hasten to say in sisterly support as a fellow freelance journalist, but as a representative of the woolly, leftist, Rafia Mafia sort of element in society that Mr Cartlidge would expect to support Carlton’s principles. So I won’t let him down.
Because although the other side of the argument makes for a very dull column and wouldn’t have guaranteed three loud huzzah’s from The Spectator’s subscribers, there are sound reasons why the media need to invite applications from certain ethnic groups. That those ethnic groups do not include the category of “white suburbanites” is as it should be. Unless one is like James Cartlidge and too many of his journalistic ilk whose creeping (and creepy) opinion of “Johnny Foreigner” provides an easy and useful way of earning a bob or two.
Multiculturalism can be an uncomfortable concept – especially for those prone to starting their sentences with “I’m not a racist…” – but Britain IS multicultural and all the better for it. There’s still a long way to go before this reality is reflected in the media, though. And a crude headcount of black and Asian TV news reporters simply isn’t good enough evidence to back Mr Cartlidge’s demand for White Rights.
Roz South
Comment on Banned Wagon by Ross Clark (14/06/2003)
I’m sure Ross Clark would not be quite so disparaging of Sir Edmund Hillary if he knew how much the New Zealander has put into projects aimed at helping the Nepalese.
That he has given unstintingly of his time, energy and, yes, money over many decades to improve their lives is a matter of public record.
Perhaps Hillary’s concern is less for some improbable diminution of his achievement than for the extraordinary damage climbers have caused to Everest and its surrounds, and the lack of resources available to the Nepalese – particularly in the midst of a Maoist insurgency – to deal with it.
John Hampshire
Sydney, Australia.
Comment on Science & Nature Special: Ecology by Zac Goldsmith (14/06/2003)
Sir; Irony rarely comes more succulent than when the son of a multi-millionaire, whose fortune came from the profits of large corporations, tells us that the source of all our woes is large corporations.
Out roll Zac Goldsmith’s eco canards, such as that half the world’s largest economies are corporations. As Martin Wolf and other economists have pointed out, this wrongly equates company turnover with national GDP. But GDP is not a measure of activity but of added value, roughly equivalent to a company’s profits. In reality, even the Ukraine is “bigger” than General Motors. Moreover, as repeated forced nationalisations of oil company and other assets over the years have shown, a government has absolute power over any private firm should it choose to wield it.
Goldsmith also manages to link corporations with rising cancer rates, although it is well known that cancer is predominately a disease of aging. Some 65% of cancers occur in the over-65s, the number of which doubled between 1961 and 2001. Since longevity is closely associated with national wealth, it is surprising that Goldsmith doesn’t plump for the obvious treatment: make everyone poorer.
Unless of course, that is the motive behind his plea for the Conservative Party to embrace the ideals of the Greens. Never mind that this is the party that is simultaneously infiltrating the LibDems and wooing the trade unions as Real Labour.
Like his patron Prince Charles (another rich man telling the rest of us to live more sustainably) Goldsmith thinks that by a flick of the organic farming switch, banning popular large supermarkets and pretending that the world agricultural market doesn’t exist, our rural economies will be transformed. A more likely outcome is more costly produce, less choice, farmers permanently dependent on land-tied subsidies, more food imports to replace lower production levels, and further pandering to the NIMBYs and the affluent who live rural but work (and shop) urban.
Seventy years ago, the National Socialists in Germany won the votes of millions of small farmers and shopkeepers by blaming all their difficulties on department stores and Jewish control of the world financial markets. Today it is the turn of multinationals and American-led globalisation. If this is the road that Conservatism wants to go down,
then God help us all.
Robert Blood
Freiburg, Germany
Comment on Science & Nature Special: Nanotechnology by Roger Highfield (14/06/2003)
My comments on your June 7,2003 Issue have layers of concentric complement. First, in general I must thank you for the wonderful “theme” articles on Science. But to be more to the point I must complement Roger Highfield for his critique of “nanotechnology” paranoia.
But I must add a modest layer of humble criticism, in that Mr. Highfield was not harsh enough on his critique. There are those of the fashionably worried who cannot sleep at night at the thought of Satanic “nanobots” seizing the World. Well, it ironic that those who today have paranoid fear of Technology are those who have least understanding of its scale.
The phantasmagorical “grey goo” hypothesis implies a human understanding of Biology such that Humanity could build an Ubermensch entity that in real power is far above anything yet conceived by Nature. Yet, please note, in reality-based terms, we cannot even build a respectable copy of a functional unicellular organism such as an amoeba, let alone anything as formidable and lethal as HIV. The dull truth is this- fashionable hysteria far exceeds the real capacity of dull reality to deliver!
J. Wroblewski
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Comment on Iraq: what must be done now by Mark Steyn (07/06/2003)
Steyn is onto a good idea. The newly forming democracy in Iraq should begin locally. One of the most difficult lessons of democracy is that a citizen’s vote matters. It is difficult to believe when your vote is one of 16 million. At a local level, where your vote is one of a few thousand, you can imagine it matters.
The issues of local politics à like whether to improve roads, sewers or schools – are more tangible and less abstract than federal issues like foreign policy. These are the first issues a novice electorate should debate.
Power should be placed in the hands of the local government as much as possible. By removing power from the central government, they will reduce the opportunity and temptation for a dictator to take hold.
Smaller jurisdictions also allow innovation with lower risk. If one town wants to govern according to Islamic law, others don‘t need to. What’s more, the others can watch and note which policies are most successful.
Suppose they use a parliamentary system. The coalition should first set up many of the legal institutions, or at least the frameworks for them. Next, draft a constitution that outlines basic rights, government functions and jurisdictions. Then the country would prepare for rounds of municipal elections, preferably not all at once. After people have had a chance to complete all the elections and see their local governments perform for a while, there should be provincial (or state?) elections. Some of the local politicians are likely to leave their municipal positions for the provincial government.
The next stage, but not the final stage, is to hold a federal election à but leave the coalition in control of the constitution. Once this is accomplished, the country can function on its own for years. Canada worked under this system for a hundred years: its best hundred years.
Elected leaders of could change to laws of the land however they want but any changes to the constitution (like cancelling elections) would need coalition approval. The coalition could ensure that changes are reasonable, followed a fair process and reflect the will of the citizens.
There is one more structure that will encourage a stable state: a preferential ballot. A multi-party system can lead to complicated politics if elections are won with a plurality. Proportional representation avoids these problems but allows parties to splinter. A preferential system forces people to listen to parties other than their favourites, if only to decide which to choose second. This will help foster respectful debate. Preferential ballots also encourage moderation since the winning party is always one the majority can accept.
Peter Enns
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