A Few Links... posted by Richard Seymour

Philip Challinor at Media Lies has expertly taken down a rather daft hosannah to the Prime Minister from Andrew Rawnsley:

"Andrew Rawnsley’s article "Blair is doomed to be ignored" (Observer, 14 March) compares Tony Blair to Cassandra. I fear Rawnsley’s erudition is a little shaky: Cassandra was a prisoner of war who always told the truth. Then again, Rawnsley's own dedication to the truth is nearly as impressive as his grasp of Greek myth..."

Go get him, tiger!

Terry Eagleton in The Guardian has a few words for those pampered jades posing as "realists":

"...On the other hand, nobody is more abstractly utopian than hard-nosed, street-wise pragmatists. Some of them cultivate a little philosophising on the side, or perpetrated a spot of it in their youth, but these academic speculations are not to be confused with the Real World. Their current bosses can forgive such adolescent indiscretions, secure in the knowledge that ideas don't matter anyway. As with bad breath, ideology is always what the other person has. Socialism and anti-racism are ideas; greed and inequality are just plain, honest-to-goodness facts of life."

Chris Young at See Why has a spat with Norman Geras. Frankly, I think he goes too easy on the guy, but he does at least identify a "Norm" or two. ("Norm" coming to mean, on this blog, a risible point dressed up in mildewy sarcasm and condescension). Visitors to Norm's blog will be delighted to note that he is offering the full text of a vacuous article by Andrew Anthony for The Guardian. Every single stale shibboleth of the pro-war Left is revisited and every single claim made by it before the war started is revised. And the usual snide stupidity attends it. So, right up Norm's street then...

And, Slugger O'Toole slams a meaty fist into the mouths of optimists on the Northern Ireland impasse. Slugger apparently brings you opinion from "across the political spectrum", which could mean literally what it says or simply that it has both Orange Bastards and Fenian Cunts writing for it. As for me, I'm agin it all. I don't go in for sectarian bigotry, shure it's only them other ones that's causin all the problems, killing one side or the other. I myself have always insisted on killing people from both sides of the divide. Just to keep it fair. Anyway, that's your link feed for today.