the greycat blog

The February 2008 issue of All The Rage is out, and the theme this month is ‘time’. I ramble on about the relative nature of time, the thought of Henri Bergson, and the cluelessness of post-modernist historians:

No past event is intrinsically in the past. It is only a past event in relation to other events that are in the present and the future. This does not mean, as some post-modernists like to tell us, that the relationship between past and future is consequently meaningless. Time passes and change occurs: did the trendy post-modernist historian write any of his vacuous articles before he was born? No, and nor will he write a single word once he is dead.

The highlight of the issue, however, is editor Leila Johnston’s mind-opening piece on ‘time and the future of writing’:

You could, if you wanted, read the great art of the past century as a laborious delivery of 21st century individualism. Maybe it was a kind of battle to own the unknowable years ahead. Whatever lay in front would still be beyond reference, but pehaps naming it as such meant it could be deliberately uncontrolled in ways the present and past could not. Unlike the past, which was vulnerable to subjective reading and revision, the future represented a lack of context, an absence of meaning. We can view this effort to represent chaos as rather quaint - so obviously idealistic, so clearly doomed to fail.

You can find the February issue of All The Rage here (PDF): go and read the lot, and look at the pictures.

‘Why the West is best’ by Ibn Warraq, City Journal, winter 2008:

A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

(Found via Campus Watch.)

A terrorist suicide bombing attack today has killed one Israeli civilian and injured at least six more in the southern town of Dimona. One of the two terrorists was killed by police before he could detonate his bomb. This is the first such bombing in Israel for over a year, and the emphasis in the BBC’s headline is on how unusual such attacks are these days: ‘Rare suicide bombing hits Israel’. The implication is clear: these things are rare, nobody should worry too much about them. Presumably if there were to be such an attack in London tomorrow the headline would be ‘Rare suicide bombing hits London’.

[UPDATE: the headline has been changed to ‘Israeli killed in suicide bombing’. The earlier versions with the ‘rare suicide bombing’ reference are preserved by the News Sniffer.]

Elsewhere, the Associated Press, in a report oddly headlined ‘1 Killed by Israel Suicide Bomber’, reveals itself as unable to spell ‘Mediterranean’.

For good updated coverage of the terrorist attack at Dimona, including the Gaza connection, see this post at Israellycool.

Robert Fisk’s name has been taken in vain by the author and publishers of a biography of Saddam Hussein. His name is given as author on the cover of the Cairo-published book, which he never wrote. In an article in The Independent he describes his unsuccessful hunt for the real author.

The book is called Saddam Hussein: From Birth to Martyrdom and is a fawning biography of the late Iraqi leader. It seems that is full of factual errors and distortions, plays fast and loose with history, is virulently anti-Western, and is written in lousy prose.

No wonder everyone finds it easy to believe Fisk wrote it.