Here is an excellent piece by RFE/RL on the work of Mirsad Tokaca who has been working hard to give definitive numbers for people killed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s’ conflicts. He comes out at some 97,000 people killed. A terrible number, of course, but way lower than […]
A reader kindly draws our attention to a further major demolition of Slavoj Zizek by Johann Hari at the New Statesman: So is Zizek a kind of philosophers’ Borat, taking ludicrous positions to see how far he can push them? His followers dismiss every depraved political statement as an ironic […]
How first to delude yourself that you are rich and then wreck everything, in several simple steps. When in doubt, re-read this timeless brilliance: "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d’Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is […]
Remember Slavoj Zizek, the self-indulgent Slovenian Marxist? Here is a fine if depressing piece by Adam Kirsch which drills deep into the black heart of Zizek’s cynicism. And finds … blackness: "To be clear and brutal to the end," he [Zizek] sums up, "there is a lesson to be learned […]
I have a mention this week at Philbiblon. These quixotic round-ups invariably take one to places one otherwise just would not go. Such as High on Rebellion, analysing the Guardian’s coverage of feminism: unsatisfactory, as evidenced by its coverage of the Tube Cleaners Strike. And Elizabeth Chadwick, giving us all […]
How to annoy people these days? Make the case that the arrest of Damian Green MP was, for different reasons, reasonable: Thus, what we have is a situation where a civil servant has been acting entirely in breach of the core principles of government administration, passing confidential information to a […]
The Mumbai massacres tell us a lot about the way power works (and doesn’t) these days. This is not a classic terrorist atrocity, but rather a fairly sophisticated military attack: The Mumbai attack is something different. Foreign assault teams that likely trained and originated from outside the country infiltrated a […]
Remember this one about South Africa’s peaceful transition from apartheid? Try to imagine the howling of fury had apartheid leader PW Botha denied the African population of S Africa the drugs needed to give sick people a chance to fight HIV – and 300,000 people had died as a result. […]
Foreign readers: see the latest outlandish development here in the UK. A highly-placed civil servant is suspected of leaking government material to a senior Oppostion MP. So the police descend on the MP’s house and arrest him, while also arresting the leaker. This development – arresting a politician for receiving […]
The UN Security Council has supported a plan for the deployment of the EULEX mission in Kosovo. Belgrade is happy, since the planned deployment is ‘status neutral’, ie it does not give in principle (and practice?) any encouragement to the idea that Kosovo is now independent. Which is why various […]
