Things Fall Apart

* One new pair of sandals (UKP6) to replace the old ones which gave me the most amazing blisters.
* One backup pair of sandals (UKP5) in case the first new pair falls apart after a week like the last new pair did.
* One new pair of trainers (UKP6) to replace the old ones which are just about to fall apart.
* One baseball cap (UKP3) annoyingly emblazoned with an "England" football motif, to replace the old one, which fell apart on the way to the shops.
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Tomorrow afternoon will be spent humping in a man's bedroom, continuing down that stairs and into the street.

No no no. John M is splashing out on a new orthopedic bed for his aching back, which is sufficiently debilitating that he can't do any lifting. So Lee S and myself are humping the old bed out of the bedroom, down the stairs and into the street. What did you think I meant?

After which I'm meeting a gay man in a park.

No no no. CW and I haven't seen each other in over a week, so we've carved a few hours out of our timetables for a chat, walk, and probably drink. What did you think I meant?

After which we will hopefully know whether to call each other "Friend" or "Boyfriend".
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I've been reading articles by Christoper Hitchens, Peter Tatchell and Andrew Sullivan on Iraq. These are self-proclaimed moderate leftists who take the line that Iraq (and Afganistan) have been royally messed up by the occupiers, who therefore have the moral duty to (a) put things right and (b) prevent hardline islamists committing attrocities.

The first point is common enough and defensible in the abstract, but as soon as you start to ask what "putting things right" means and how on earth it could be achieved, it collapses.

What do the occupiers actually want to achieve? Turn Iraq into a satellite state of America with outlets of Macdonnalds and Nike? Install two-party lobby-based democracy (and presumably it's attendant corruption)?

How can they do this? Build towns and factories while being shot at and bombed? Stage free elections while making sure only their candidates win? They've tried that twice so far, to general dirision.

The second point rather overlooks the fact that terrorism and "islamofascism" are products of occupation, so using continued occupation to stop them is like screwing down the lid on a pressure cooker to prevent it exploding.

The response of course is that these things are only products of botched occupation, and can be stopped by competent occupation. This looks plausible, until you consider past occupations by French, Portugese and British empires that were highly competent, but had the same type of effects.

There are two common beliefs, usually not explicitly stated, on the "moderate left" (ie right) of this debate. The first is that the natives are too backward to look after themselves, too volatile to be allowed freedom. The old "White Man's Burdan", in other words.

The second is that the "extreme left", in opposing the occupations of Iraq and Afganistan and the pressuring of Iran, is effectively supporting islamicist theocracy, which opresses and kills countless victims.

It seems odd that experienced political commentators should fail to grasp that opposing the opression of group B by group A does not disentail opposing the opression of group C by group B. Martin Luther King and Malcom X were homophobic. Does this mean supporting the civil rights battle entailed condoning their hatred of gay people? Of course not.

In any case, the idea that you can persuade a population to stop terrorising it's own people by terrorising them into being like you but without the terrorising...is just a little bizzare.
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I have 1 backing finished for All White in the Whiteness, which I really must retitle to something catchier - Nacht und Traume? How about Waiting? And one nearly finished for 12 Monsters, an unholy blend of 12 Monkeys and Goodbye Monster.