Friday, February 09, 2007

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

5 Comments:

Blogger ejh said...

When I try to comment on here it persistently refuses to recognise my password - the same one I use to sign in with Blogger if Blogging myself. Normally I have to go and login on the Blogger start page, albeit not today.

You haven't lost a posting, have you? I could have sworn I read something last night in which somebody referred to Cohen's hard left background...

2/09/2007 03:41:00 PM  
Blogger The Rioja Kid said...

I don't think so. You might have been reading one of the book reviews we linked to? Maybe the comment problem will clear up under "new blogger"? christ I am such a technical spazz

2/09/2007 04:10:00 PM  
Blogger The Couscous Kid said...

EJH: You were almost certainly reading John Kampfner's review, which says, "It matters that Cohen, like his fellow pro-war cheerleaders, comes from a far-left background."

And you may very well have got to that review by following the link from Captain Cabernet's post, below.

2/09/2007 04:41:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh yes you watchers, watch this…

at 11pm after Newsnight – the Newsnight Review - tonight discussing - Hogarth, Tate Britain; The Verdict, and The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer – is Sarah Churchwell, Rosie Boycott, Johann Hari…

And the man himself, Mr A.

2/09/2007 05:17:00 PM  
Blogger ejh said...

"It matters that Cohen, like his fellow pro-war cheerleaders, comes from a far-left background."


Ah yes, that was it. And what I thought I'd posted, but apparently hadn't, was a comment noting that this "far-left background" was the subject of some speculation in a comments box just a few days ago. So does Kampfner know somethig specific that we don't?

Hari and Aaro on the same show? Makes it almost worth having emigrated...

2/09/2007 05:23:00 PM  

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