Winter reading, "Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum

It is winter here in northern Europe. What better than to stay indoors, wrap up warm with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book. The perfect accompaniment to the winter snow is to read Anne Applebaum's 'Gulag: A History'.

It is also a cracking good read - lots of personal stories and with plenty of analysis for the more academically minded. This isn't a full review (I havent finished it yet.) But this morning's snow made me thankful of the more benign era and location that I live in.

News on Irvine Welsh and Skagboys

The latest news is that Irvine Welsh's new book is due for a release in 2012. Curious as I was led to believe it would be this year.

You have nothing to hide...or do you?

If you ever hear someone say that the security services should have more powers to protect its citizens, then I would hope you brush up on this defence of our liberties. Below is a review of Grayling's book on liberty:

The Economist 20-06-2009 “Paying the price” p91-2 Review of ‘Liberty in the Age of Terror: A defence of civil society and enlightenment values’ by A C Grayling
“He describes the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide argument as ‘one of the most seductive betrayals of liberty’ imaginable. The assumption being it is, he says, ‘that the authorities will always be benign; will always reliably identify and interfere with genuinely bad people only; will never find themselves engaging in ‘mission creep’, with more and more uses to their new powers and capabilities to; will not redefine crimes, nor redefine various behaviours or views now regarded as acceptable, to extend the range of things for which people can be placed under suspicion – and so considerably on.’”
“But as freedom without some risk is impossible, it is obvious that people cannot expect politicians to put protecting them from every conceivable danger (something they are anyway powerless to do) before all other duties to society.”
“As Benjamin Franklin observed: ‘They that can give up essential to liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’”
“The most important freedom is the freedom of speech: it is the freedom that supports all other freedoms.”

I believe in a strong defence for the UK, but A C Grayling is right. There is little point in having a defence if it ends up destroying the very thing we want to defend. The 'nothing to hide ' argument is spurious in that most people subscribing to it do so because they see the benefits but none of its costs, (it is not them that will come under suspicion after all), it is also a poor idea to entirely trust the suspicions of the security services even if the only people suspected and then detained are wearing religious clothing or the kind of sporting apparel common to those that are the subjects of certain confrontational day time TV shows; for such suspicions are based on prejudice rather than evidence, and as we all know, prejudice restricts the mind rather than expands it, and is as unlikely to protect us as it is to find a writer that can get all this down in one sentence.

If that doesn't convince you then hopefully AC Grayling can. You have been warned.

Thinking of the children when it comes to drugs? Think Again

The link for this video is in a previous post to access on You Tube - but I thought I would download it straight on to here anyway. If you are worried about the kids, then maybe we need to get in place some age restrictions.

Concern over Iain Duncan Smith

Earlier, this column drew concern over Iain Duncan-Smith's influence over the Conservative Party, for which read, influence over the Con-Dem government as a whole.

I am glad to acknowledge that LBR is not alone to be concerned with Mr Duncan Smith. Elements even within the Torygraph...whoops, sorry, The Telegraph have concerns too.

Read Tom Chivers here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tomchivers/100048529/iain-duncan-smith-is-cherry-picking-stats-on-broken-homes-and-criminality/

I particularly like the comment that Mr Duncan-Smith using the misleading statistic. This struck me particularly after listening to Radio 4's 'Thinking Aloud' program, broadcast to podcast on 27-10-10. On the show, Pat Thane of King's College London said that broken marriages are not down to lower morals in today's society.

People like Duncan-Smith seem to hanker for a golden age that didn't exist and are keen to blame the complex problems of society on to a lack of morality. Especially if those lacking in morality happen to be other people. It is good to see that at least some parts of the media are not prone to this type of babble.

Dismal science and good looks

Recently I read somewhere that Economics is considered to be "the dismal science" and that Politics is "show business for ugly people."

This got me wondering. Does it mean that Political Blogging is politics for even uglier and more dismal people?

"Ten Storey Love Song" by Richard Milward

This is the author’s second book, following on from the fantastic “Apples.” A departure for this book is that it has no paragraphs and no chapters. Or rather the book consists of simply one paragraph and one chapter. To begin with this makes this novel a challenging read, as there are no natural breaks with which to put the book down, make a cup of tea, go to work, and drink beer or whatever one would do in those moments in between reading. The lack of paragraphs and chapters seems to suggest the ‘interconnectedness of everything’ or at least all the characters in this book. However I am open to other suggestions. If you have heard the phrase of ‘interconnectedness of everything’ before, then look no further than Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently. One is more than happy to purge others for inspiration after all. Milward is my kind of writer. Observant, funny and original, plus the story is about intoxication. What could be better than that?

Just set aside huge chunks of time to yourself in order to read it.