We are now on "new blogger"

And surprise surprise, it is causing problems. My posts now all appear as "The Management" rather than "Bruschettaboy" and Rioja Kid and Captain Cabernet have been unpersonned. Guys I think you will need to create a "google account" under some pseudonym or other. I will endeavour to sort it out. This was not my idea, by the way; "New Blogger" is apparently now non-optional.

Meanwhile:

"Bizarre proclamations came out of Amnesty press conferences, and none was wackier than the claim that Guantanamo Bay ' has become the Gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law'. A brief pause to look at its own files would have shown Amnesty that in Solzhenitsyn's gulag the secret police executed several millions and drove countless millions more to early deaths from starvation, disease or exhaustion"

-- Nick Cohen, "What's Left", p324-5

"Outsiders don't understand the enfeebling self-consciousness of political debate on the middle-class liberal-left: they can't imagine the thoughts strangled and tongues bitten to avoid giving the smallest offence to audiences overanxious to find it. The director of a prison reform charity once told me that he struck out all metaphorsand similes from his speeches. Even ifit was a bland cliche of ' the government is like a rabbit caught in the headlights' type, he wouldn't use it because he knew half his listeners would stop listening to him for thirty seconds as they double-checked that he had not unintentionally insulted a disadvantaged or ill-favoured group"

-- Nick Cohen, "What's Left", p337