James Delingpole is a bestselling British author and blogger who helped expose the Climategate scandal back in 2009. Reason.tv caught up with Delingpole in Los Angeles recently to learn more about his entertaining and provocative new book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors. At its very roots, argues Delingpole, climate change is an ideological battle, not a scientific one. In other words, it’s green on the outside and red on the inside. At the end of the day, according to Delingpole, the “watermelons” of the modern environmental movement do not want to save the world. They want to rule it.
September 27, 2011
ReasonTV: ManBearPig, Climategate, and Watermelons
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Reaping the (censorship) whirlwind
Mick Hume points out that the recent threat of police cracking down on the press — the Guardian in particular — was illiberal and unjustified, yet quite in line with what the Guardian had encouraged be done to Murdoch’s media empire.
It was, as all liberal-minded people (and Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail) agreed, an egregious assault on press freedom for the Metropolitan Police to threaten legal action to force the Guardian to reveal its sources. So there was much celebration and not a little smug satisfaction in media circles when the Met, under pressure from within and without the legal system, dropped the action last week.
Where, the Guardian editors and their outraged high-level supporters demanded, did the Met ever get the ‘ill-judged’, ‘misconceived’ and ‘perverse in the extreme’ idea that they could order the Guardian to tell them who leaked details of Operation Weeting, the phone-hacking investigation?
It’s a good question. Where on earth could Inspector Censor and PC Prodnose have got the notion that it was their business to investigate, arrest and prosecute journalists, or interfere with the operations of a free press? Step forward the moral crusaders at of the Guardian and its allies.
For years they have been demanding more police and legal action against the Murdoch press and those allegedly involved in phone-hacking, inviting the authorities to police the media more closely. Then these illiberal liberals throw their arms up in horror when the authorities try to take advantage of their invitation to investigate the high-minded ‘good guys’ at the Guardian as well as the lowlife at the defunct News of the World. Their naivety is only exceeded by their elitism. Give the state a licence to interfere with the press, and you should not be surprised if it tries to exploit it — even if today’s spineless state officials ultimately lacked the gumption to take on the Guardian.
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Why even giving Saudi women a “token” vote is welcome
Saudi women will get the vote soon, which is a major development that is being greeted with jeers and yawns. Brendan O’Neill explains why it matters:
The granting of the right to vote to women in Saudi Arabia is a wonderful leap forward for democracy. Yet it has induced a weird concoction of cynicism and shoulder-shrugging indifference amongst the so-called sisterhood in the West, including in the upper echelons of human-rights groups who normally campaign for this kind of breakthrough. Amnesty International sniffily says “it is no great achievement to be one of the last countries in the world to grant women the vote”. Both Amnesty and the even more high-minded Human Rights Watch are serving up generous dollops of doom about this big shift in Saudi life, warning that having the vote is no “guarantee of rights” for Saudi women. Meanwhile, female members of the liberal commentariat pump out articles with headlines like “Why women in Saudi Arabia have a long way to go yet”.
Why are so many people so down on this development? Of course, the “democracy” which, from 2015, Saudi women will be allowed to take part in is far from perfect; like men, they will only get to vote in occasional municipal elections for advisers to the religious Shura Council. And yes, Saudi women’s lives will not magically transform overnight. In Britain in 1918, female suffrage was first only granted to women over the age of 30; it wasn’t until 1928 that women got the vote on equal terms with men. And it took many more years, decades in fact, for women to become full participants in society. Yet nobody, surely, would look back at the breakthroughs won by the Suffragettes in the 1910s and say, “Well, it was a big fat waste of time giving women the right to vote when many of them couldn’t aspire to anything more than housewifing drudgery”. Why do we say such things in relation to Saudi Arabia?
The reason the granting of the vote to Saudi women is a potentially brilliant development is because it implicitly recognises that these women are political beings, individuals with opinions and the right to express them (albeit in a limited fashion). Having recognised that fact, the Saudi authorities will now find it increasingly hard to justify and sustain the repression of women in other areas of social and political life. If Saudi rulers think they can grant women the right to vote and leave it at that — that there will be no further pressure for more reforms — then they must be even more insulated from reality and ignorant of history than we thought. History shows again and again that political concessions, even big ones, do not leave people satisfied, but rather fuel their aspirations for a better and freer life; they potentially make people angrier, in a good way, rather than happier.
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Britain (finally) admits it will “never again be among the global superpowers”
For something that’s been obvious to casual observers since 1945 (1956 if you’re generous), it’s taken a while to admit:
The warning comes from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) thinktank in a tough report which questions whether Britain’s defence crisis is really over.
Last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review led to sweeping redundancies across all three services, and the early mothballing of, among others, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, and the fleet of Harrier jets.
In a brutally frank assessment of the British military, the report states: “The UK will never again be a member of the select club of global superpowers. Indeed it has not been one for decades.
“But currently planned levels of defence spending should be enough for it to maintain its position as one of the world’s five second-rank military powers (with only the US in the first rank).”
Many in the military are likely to bridle at the analysis; last week the former head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Lord West, struck a completely different tone, causing a furore when he said the UK should not consider itself a second-tier power like “bloody Belgium or Denmark”.
Except for brief wartime surges, Britain’s military strength has rarely been the army: it’s been the Royal Navy that provided Britain with both military and economic clout. Gutting the striking power of the navy (HMS Ark Royal and the Harriers) was merely the final admission that the government had higher priorities domestically than internationally. As Admiral Cunningham once said, “It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition. It’s remarkable how quickly one can destroy a tradition.
NFL week 3 results
Favourites are listed first, my picks are in bold.
- ∅ New England vs @Buffalo (8.5) Sun 1:00pm
- √ @Cincinnati vs San Francisco (2.5) Sun 1:00pm
- ∅ @Cleveland vs Miami (2.5) Sun 1:00pm
- √ @Tennessee vs Denver (6.5) Sun 1:00pm
- ∅ Detroit vs @Minnesota (3.5) Sun 1:00pm
- √ @New Orleans vs Houston (4.0) Sun 1:00pm
- ∅ @Philadelphia vs New York (NYG) (0) Sun 1:00pm
- √ @Carolina vs Jacksonville (3.5) Sun 1:00pm
- √ New York (NYJ) vs @Oakland (3.5) Sun 4:05pm
- √ Baltimore vs @St. Louis (4.0) Sun 4:05pm
- √ @San Diego vs Kansas City (14.5) Sun 4:05pm
- √ Green Bay vs @Chicago (3.5) Sun 4:15pm
- ∅ Arizona vs @Seattle (3.5) Sun 4:15pm
- ∅ @Tampa Bay vs Atlanta (1.5) Sun 4:15pm
- √ Pittsburgh vs @Indianapolis (10.5) Sun 8:20pm
- √ @Dallas vs Washington (0) Mon 8:30pm
This week 10-6 (9-7 against the spread)
Season to date 31-17
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