Wednesday, 6 June, 2007
- 6 Jun 07, 06:01 PM
From tonight's presenter, :
Military morale
Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has been hearing from serving British soldiers about low morale in Iraq and loss of support from some in the army for the mission there. One serving British Army officer has told us that the "overwhelming feeling" of many of his peers is that the invasion was "illegal, immoral and unwinnable". He describes troops who feel that they are "reluctantly providing target practice for insurgents, senselessly haemorrhaging casualties and squandering soldiers' lives." You can read the full text of the officer's email here.
It's a difficult story to get at - for obvious reasons. But the concerns are real.
G8
Stephanie Flanders is in Germany for the G8 Summit. She'll be looking at what, if anything, can be achieved from summits like these. Is the G8 just a "meaningless photo opportunity", "unrepresentative", "big on rhetoric low on substance" as some of you have suggested on our website?
Stephanie is blogging too and you can read her opening despatch here.
Climate change
Our environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, reports on how far carbon trading really will help solve the problems caused by climate change.
Orange Prize
The winner will be announced tonight - and Newsnight will be there. (Though some of us continue to wonder - when Kiran Desai's magnificent novel wins the Booker Prize) why in 2007 it continues to be necessary to have a women only literary prize. Isn't it rather like netball compared to basketball?)
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Why chromosome? Gavin mentioned it, not me.
Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in 1991. She would, I'm sure, be disgusted at the fact that on one website there is a special section listing "Female Nobel Laureates". Because Ms Gordimer said once that the Orange Prize was "sexist". The Nobel is for everybody. The Orange creates a sheltered workshop for those women writers not tough enough to stay the two-gender course. Unlike Austen, Female-Eliot, Antonia Byatt, etc., plus the surfeit of chicks slaving on the production line of chick-lit.
I'm glad that the Orange ladies were magnanimous enough to sport my very own male letter of criticism on their website for a short while. But I am as appalled as Nadine Gordimer about the Orange.
The Orange has shifted the goalposts. Now that many British publishers and persons of influence with British publishing are mostly women, it seems quite anachronistic to still maintain a literary soup kitchen for the weaker sex. The goalpost-shifting has been done by including Africa, a continent full of corruption and sexism. What is a literary prize, aimed at lady readers from the twee middle-classes of the First World, going to do to improve the lot of African women, now that one of their number has won the Orange?
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The true discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA was actually made by an English radiologist Rosalind Franklin while working in France. Her mentor Maurice Wilkins at Kings College passed on her discovery to two bimbos Watson and Crook who stole it and took the credit and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. Compared to Franklin, W-C were a pair of mental midgets who went off on the wrong track and never would have found their way out of the forest on their own. It is one of the great untold stories of intellectual theft of the twentieth century. Why did they get away with it? Because they were men and she was a mere woman.
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wars of empire are not about doing right but doing destiny. which is why all the morale songs totally exclude any explanations. Loyalty is after all not to the ideas of the government but to the idea of the regiment?
when the afghanistan war is already longer than ww2, iraq bogged down in a stalingrad meatgrinder and endemic sadistic bullying in the military exposed the best that can be said is anyone who joined up after 2003 can't say they didn't know what they were getting in to?
while desertions are up it seems the best way to get out is to take drugs and be kicked out rather than be hunted down by the MPs?
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Nice to see that the links to comments re Thursday's show have vanished.
Now I wonder why that would be?
Is Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ propaganda finally getting called out for what it is?
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