This week’s community round-up column at GuildMag is now online. Again this week, there’s lots of footage from BWE2, mass foaming-at-the-mouth over the dye system changes, and a brief stress test to be held next Wednesday. Oh, and the usual assortment of blog posts, podcasts, and videos.
June 22, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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The War of 1812 “remains the Jan Brady of American conflicts”
In The Atlantic, Adam Chandler explains why the War of 1812 is an also-ran in the American war popularity contest:
Of the many holes in the American national memory, the War of 1812 may be the most gaping. The war that gave America its national anthem, birthed Uncle Sam, and anointed four future presidents as war heroes remains the Jan Brady of American conflicts for good reason: not only was it book-ended by two vastly more significant wars, but its causes weren’t sexy, its conclusions were muddy, and its most famous battle took place after peace was declared. And so 1812 remains the only American war known by its date. (Even Congress refused to establish a bicentennial commission, leaving the commemorations up to the states.)
But as history buffs, state and local governments, and (doubtlessly) some zealous reenactors begin the mark the conflict that started on this date in 1812, there is much that modern-day Americans can learn from this clumsy moment in the nation’s childhood.
[. . .]
Congress finally declared war on Britain, with impeccably bad timing: Just a few days earlier, the British foreign minister had decided to rescind the policy towards American trade that had caused all of the hullabaloo to begin with. But word did not reach America in time, and ill-equipped U.S. forces fecklessly staggered into Canada to show the British not to mess with American trade (and to possibly snag some of Canada’s sweet farm land). Aided by a confederacy of Native Americans, Canada mostly repelled the invasion and won a large number of battles.
The most ridiculous moment of all featured the United States surrendering the entire city of Detroit without firing a shot in defense. “It was the most colossal screw-up of the war,” Alan Taylor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explained in an interview. “And it comes at the worst possible time in the first major invasion. The Madison administration was counting on winning a quick victory in invading Upper Canada from the western end via Detroit to render the war popular. And instead, he got a catastrophic defeat.”
However, most Americans, if they remember it at all, recall the scene that inspired the writing of the national anthem or the (technically post-war) battle at New Orleans:
“All of those are events that come in the last months of the war when the British were mounting a counterattack against the United States.” Taylor explained. “They are all events that lead Americans to think they were on the defensive in the war and that the British were the aggressor. What’s lost sight of is that the United States declared the war and conducted the first two years of the war primarily as an invasion of Canada. And so Americans don’t remember the battles in Canada because they went so badly for the United States.”
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Greek government getting serious about debt issues: selling off government land
It’s surprising it’s taken this long for the Greek government to consider selling off excess government-owned land as a way to address some of their debt issues:
There’s little that shouts “seriously rich” as much as a little island in the sun to call your own. For Sir Richard Branson it is Neckar in the Caribbean, the billionaire Barclay brothers prefer Brecqhou in the Channel Islands, while Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy on Skorpios, his Greek hideway.
Now Greece is making it easier for the rich and famous to fulfill their dreams by preparing to sell, or offering long-term leases on, some of its 6,000 sunkissed islands in a desperate attempt to repay its mountainous debts.
The Guardian has learned that an area in Mykonos, one of Greece’s top tourist destinations, is one of the sites for sale. The area is one-third owned by the government, which is looking for a buyer willing to inject capital and develop a luxury tourism complex, according to a source close to the negotiations.
However, if you’re in the market for a lovely little Greek island, you should also consider that land costs are going to be only a small part of your investment:
Only 227 Greek islands are populated and the decision to press ahead with potential sales has also been driven by the inability of the state to develop basic infrastructure, or police most of its islands. The hope is that the sale or long-term lease of some islands will attract investment that will generate jobs and taxable income.
Also on the block for sale are other government monopolies:
In its battle to raise funds, the country is also planning to sell its rail and water companies. Chinese investors are understood to be interested in the Greek train system, as they already control some of the ports. In a deal announced earlier this month, the Greek government also agreed to export olive oil to China.
Update: Ah, I didn’t notice that the article had originally been published in 2010, hence my expressed surprise that it had taken so long for these measures to be considered.
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Microsoft Surface: “Lacking a physical product to test, all we can do is talk bollocks based on conjecture”
While I’ve been avoiding tablet computers, having an actual keyboard that can attach to a tablet makes it more like something I might be able to find a use for. In The Register, Alistair Dabbs explains why he’s already very fond of the announced-but-not-available-yet Microsoft Surface:
I don’t wish to suggest that Microsoft Surface is truly vapourware, but surely it’s suspicious that it’s announcing a product that no one’s going to be able to buy for half a year.
One supposes that Microsoft intends to create a buzz and get us talking about their forthcoming (new) foray into tablet computers. Yet the problem with jumping the gun — apart from the ‘false start’ accusations that lead on from this metaphor — is that commentators are left with a void to fill. Lacking a physical product to test, all we can do is talk bollocks based on conjecture.
This, as you know, is my specialty.
First, let me say that I don’t care a hoot about the provenance of the name ‘Surface’ — ho-ho, it used to be a table, so fucking what? Making fun of a name tells us nothing about the product.
Take ‘Metro’.
“We call it Metro because it’s modern and clean.” Oh, and here’s me thinking they called it Metro because it’s populated by young Algerians brandishing flick-knives and smells of wee. It’s just a word to put on the packaging and its actual meaning has no significance. After all, what does the word ‘pod’ have to do with playing MP3 files?
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Charities: the Trojan Horse for expansion of government
Some charities are still what they were twenty years ago: organizations that provide help to those in need. Others, however, have morphed into specialized entities that exist primarily to lobby the government for more funds … to allow them to lobby more efficiently:
The relationship between charities and the British state has been significantly transformed in the past 15 years. There is a gulf between the public’s perception of what is charitable – a traditional view still dominated by visions of self-sacrificing volunteers and jumble sales – and the third sector’s view of itself as a more caring, semi-professional wing of the state. The public can be forgiven for being confused about a ‘voluntary sector’ that, according to a 2009 report for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), employs more than 600,000 people. The public might equally be puzzled by the plethora of ‘non-governmental’ organisations which require an Office of the Third Sector to preside over them.
Between 1997 and 2005, the combined income of Britain’s charities nearly doubled, from £19.8 billion to £37.9 billion, with the biggest growth coming in grants and contracts from government departments. According to the Centre for Policy Studies, state funding rose by 38 per cent in the first years of the twenty-first century while private donations rose by just seven per cent.
This surge in government spending coincided with a politicisation of the third sector which was actively encouraged by the state apparatus from the prime minister down. Traditionally, lobbying activity could not be a charity’s ‘dominant’ activity, but could only be ‘incidental or ancillary’ to its charitable purpose. In 2002, however, a report from the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit called for charities to increase their lobbying activity and for the Charity Commission guidelines to be made ‘less cautionary’: ‘Charities perform a valuable role in campaigning for social change. The guidelines on campaigning should be revised to encourage charities to play this role to the fullest extent.’
The Charity Commission duly revised its guidelines on campaigning two years later, allowing all non-party political campaigning in furtherance of a charity’s goals so long as this activity was not ‘the dominant method by which the organisation will pursue its apparently charitable objects’. A subsequent Cabinet Office report in 2007 called for the rules to be relaxed further still. Accepting that charities had ‘considerable latitude… for political campaigning under existing rules’, the authors expressed concern about the range of legal and regulatory restraints which ‘unjustifiably restricts political campaigning by third-sector organisations’. Stressing the right of charities ‘to undertake campaigns, regardless of any funding relationship with government’, the Cabinet Office argued that organisations whose purpose was wholly political should not be barred from charitable status: ‘Provided that the ultimate purpose remains demonstrably a charitable one, the government can see no objection, legal or other, to a charity pursuing that purpose wholly or mainly through political activities.’
There are still charities that do what most of us think of as “charity”, but far too many of them are just lobbying devices to accomplish political rather than charitable ends. There’s no reason to prevent organizations from political lobbying, but they should not benefit from the special tax status of genuine charities.
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