Comments on Aaronovitch Watch: Decency Is Dead

I understand you're onto me, cheeseboard. Care to ...

2008-06-22T01:27:00.000Z

I understand you're onto me, cheeseboard. Care to give me a clue in return...?

Morgoth is a muppet, by the way. I would say "even I" think that. But there's no "even" about it.

...but what if you had the misfortune to be sad yo...

2008-06-19T15:04:00.000Z

...but what if you had the misfortune to be sad young and literary in 1998?

Well there was was always globalisation/No Logo/Gen X...but maybe Coupland cornered that market?

[redpesto]

I've also been wondering about the Decent response...

2008-06-19T14:35:00.000Z

I've also been wondering about the Decent response to the revelation that Israel and Hamas have been talking with the backing of the USA. There's been nothing about it on Harry's Place whatsoever. I wonder why.

is there any chance of setting up a League for Tru...

2008-06-19T14:10:00.000Z

is there any chance of setting up a League for True Decency? After all, if the editor of the Daily Telegraph stops saying the right thing it is presumably time to break with him. And now Israel is negotiating with Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria one would surely expect some denunciations from those who have long been proclaiming the undesirability/impossibility of such a dialogue. Perhaps David T, one

a lot of the early stuff in the novel might seem q...

2008-06-19T13:50:00.000Z

a lot of the early stuff in the novel might seem quite, er, personal then... as might some of the later stuff too actually. i really liked it, but can see why other people might not.

Gessen was one of the first students I ever gave a...

2008-06-19T13:27:00.000Z

Gessen was one of the first students I ever gave an "A" to, in the history of ancient and mediaeval political thought class I was teaching in at Harvard in 1997 (so we probably called it "medieval"). He wrote a cracking paper on Cicero's De officiis, as I recall. I'm looking forward to reading the novel.

morgoth, it looks like:http://decentpedia.blogspot...

2008-06-19T12:20:00.000Z

morgoth, it looks like:

http://decentpedia.blogspot.com/2007/08/winston-churchill.html

something I've meant to post on here for a while. In Keith Gessen's new novel 'all the sad young literary men' (very good despite what the blogospphere thinks) there's an interesting bit at the beginning, where the young graduates in the late 90s are described thus:

most of all

"It is 1939 and I am Winston Churcill"which of the...

2008-06-19T11:51:00.000Z
"It is 1939 and I am Winston Churcill"

which of the Harry's Place commenters said that again?

I've always found decency a fairly incoherent 'mov...

2008-06-19T11:12:00.000Z
I've always found decency a fairly incoherent 'movement' anyway, despite that awful article by 'Ben' a month or so ago on HP in which he expressed his pride at being 'a decent' - for him the term seemed interchangeable with 'Labour party loyalist who hated ken livingstone'.

Hitchens's views on Israel/Palestine would get him labelled an antisemite by the HP lot if he wasn't so anti-Muslim

Hey Matthew, believe Hitchens wrote it - he is jus...

2008-06-19T07:51:00.000Z
Hey Matthew, believe Hitchens wrote it - he is just a slippery coward here.

Remember , he is writing for the Mirror. this is well paid work, and he will enjoy being read by a very different, British, Labour supporting working class audience. At the same time he will know that some useless defence of Bush and Iraq in this arena will mean a big complaint from this (very large) audience -

Yeah, but surely it doesn't follow that people alw...

2008-06-19T06:46:00.000Z
Yeah, but surely it doesn't follow that people always take that into account.

The general view was that you were a provincial Te...

2008-06-18T23:37:00.000Z
The general view was that you were a provincial Texan with no interest in doing anything much except shrinking the budget and cutting the maximum tax rate. (This general view was more or less right.)

Hitchens (if it is he, Matthew's conjecture really can't be ruled out at this stage) seems to be ignoring the fact that wars cost money.[1]

[1] sorry everybody but they do,

I can't quite believe Hitchens - The Hitch, again,...

2008-06-18T23:29:00.000Z
I can't quite believe Hitchens - The Hitch, again, surely - wrote all that. Maybe it's a much more elaborate version of the Nation 'who are you voting for' debacle of 2004, when an over-zealous Sub wrongly interpreted his words. Perhaps this time around the Mirror sub had to write the entire letter, as Hitchens failed to deliver?

It seems to me that Decency or more specifically H...

2008-06-18T21:22:00.000Z
It seems to me that Decency or more specifically Harry Place has not so much died, but transfigured into Catherine Tate’s "Gran" – “what a bl**dy liberty!”