h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

RF:
>>you do something about the rose geek rose that you're wearing, or take yourself down to Specsavers, pronto.

Leaving aside that your comments are becoming ever more insulting, Leaving aside the fact that I am *not* a Brown supporter (merely not a knee-jerk enemy)....Surely your finishing salvo there makes the point.

Maybe I *do* need to go to Specsavers. Maybe if I did, I'd be able to spot mistakes in Brown's handwriting.

But that's the whole point: he couldn't. He has an *uncorrectable* visual impairment.

And I'm afraid I must reply to RF on some other comments, also:

>>But why does he continue to lie about his ability to read, write, and see?

Can you cite examples of where he has lied? In fact, until recently, when he was forced to do so following media attention, he didn't talk about it. Whether this is considered to be lying, not playing the sympathy card or simply not seeing the relevance probably depends on who is doing the considering.


>>It's clearly impeding his ability to do his job.

Agreed. To the extent that he has angered an already angry, grieving mother. (And given the Sun an opportunity to make capital from this.)

He has, I believe (and RF believes even more), made other mistakes. But I doubt that these can be attributed to his visual impairment. Does a visual impairment cause one to support an illegal war? To not increase income tax?


>>He should get help.

Well my understanding is that he receives constant medical help, not least in the form of some heavy duty pain relief. Perhaps there could be additional help in the form of a (human) Reader (I know a visually impaired local government manager who works with the aid of a Reader.)

But it's good of you to be concerned for his wellbeing, RF.



So where would we be without leaders who were disqualified due to medical conditions?
FDR?
JFK?
Churchill?

Yes, you're welcome to list some on the demerit side also. My point is that serious medical conditions are not necessarily germane, despite RF's loaded 'He should get help'.

(Sorry...I read that as '...instead of struggling on in his job. Did anyone else?)

Hee hee. Do I take it from PM that the Sun's sales have plummeted?


btw...it's my understanding that some leaders do hardly any reading or writing. Blair (perhaps not the best example) is proud of not having sent a single e-mail. Clinton sent only one (to the International Space Station). Churchill devised a system of short (1-3 line report summaries) to help him cope with overload.

Obama, otoh, is said to be recovering from a serious Crackberry addiction. Which possibly explains why on LinkedIn (Facebook for grownups) I'm only two degrees of Kevin Bacon from him.

Sorry...but in this context I'm genuinely struggling to see penmanship or visual acuity as a qualification for high office.

Writing is the Queen's job. And she's paid handsomely for it, too!

I agree with all of your post I think... Including the inference around 'should get help'.

I dont know why these letters weren't proof-read. Perhaps he sent them without checking with anyone in an attempt to connect more personally with some of the people he's meant to be serving. No matter my position, if I was in a situation where I felt it might be a prropriate to send someone a letter of condolence I wouldn't necessarily go and get it proof-read, especially if I felt it was close to me also and therefore had an element of privacy to it and didn't want it spun, dumbed-down or removed from me in any way.

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, Ed. F19585?thread=7068455&skip=42&show=1

RF

I don't know what you're implying, RF. You may need big letters to br able to see. If so...I have no problem with that. But in the case of Brown...*you^ seem to.

Or possibly not. I deeply suspect that you have got yourself into such a kerfuffle over this letter not because of the incident itself but because of a pre-existing antipathy towards Brown and all things Brownian.

Well...as I've repeatedly said, I am no Brown supporter. But at least in the list of why I'm not voting SLP (and it's quite a long list)...Brown's handwriting comes waaaaaaay down on my list of priorities.

On the 'Should we pull out?' issue (Afghanistanus Interruptus: should we stop ing the place?)

Last night HonestIago put the view (and Mrs Z applauded) that now we're there, we have responsibiities.

OK. But would you have accepted that line from the Soviet Union? They had their own reasons for invasaion (some rather good ones, from their p,o,v.). It turned almost immediately into a quagmire. Eventually, when Gorbachev pulled out, they left one hell of a mess which has led as night follows day to the situation that pertains today.

So...whaddya reckon? What would have been your response to the average Russian-in-the-street, circa 1984, who'd told you
'Well now we're there, we've got to stay. It will just be too messy if we pull out now.'

Or look at it another way:
If they had pulled out...how famous would Osama Bin Laden be today?

There's a colossal difference here which you're not acknowledging, Ed, which is that the Afghan's supported the overthrow of the Taliban by quite a substantial margin and support the Afghan government.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/02_february/09/afghanistan.shtml

This is the major difference between this Afghan intervention and previous ones. We're on the *same side* as the Afghans. We're not fighting them (as the UK was in the 19th century and the Soviets were in the 20th) we're fighting their enemy.

Now there are various arguments to be made about extent of involvement, tactics to defeat the Taliban (hearts and minds are important, as is combatting the poppy trade possibly by legalising it and diverting Afghan heroin to Western medical supplies), dwindling confidence amongst Afghans about progress in the war itself etc etc. But no one should try and pretend that this is the same as what went before and should be judged on the same criteria.

The Soviet Union were trying to directly control Afghanistan as part of its historical push towards warm-water ports and I don't think that's the case now.

I think you could make a good argument for (the UK at least) calling this the Fourth Afghan War. It's antecedents weren't about controlling Afghanistan, they were aimed at preventing Afghan soil being used to launch attacks against British territory. The Afghans were, more or less, left to rule themselves

And while I'm not going be the cheerleader for colonialism, it wasn't all bad. Afghanistan under British suzerainty saw stability not equalled since the end of the Persian period.

We stay there until they can rule themselves and root out the terrorists in their own midst. We weren't the only ones to suffer from the rule of the Taliban and the partnership with Al Qaeda, and the majority of the Afghan population has no fight with us.

So many points to cover in this thread, but I'll cover the eyesight thing as I can be a bit more authoritative on that (my mum's boss met him )

I don't particularly care if Brown has 10%, 50% or a friggin badger in his 'good' eye. He is the prime minister after all and regardless of his vision will have plenty of people around him to assist him where it's needed (I'm being deliberately obtuse and focussing solely on his eyesight here ). If you must blame someone for the mistakes in the letter, blame his PA - they should have proof read it

> They had their own reasons for invasaion (some rather good ones, from their p,o,v.)

From a progressive point of view the Soviet invasion was to be welcomed since Marxism-Leninism is preferrable (just) to feudal autocracy but the fact remains that the Afghans didn't really want them or their satellite government (interesting fact: the Marxist Afghan government of the time was so unpopular they actually had to start incorporating Islamic symbols into things like the flag in a desperate attempt to appeal to their deeply Conservative Afghan subjects; the old man would have turned in his Highgate grave) and the Mujahedin, despite being Islamic and Conservative, was not the Taliban. Funnily enough, when the Taliban fell some Afghans said that during the years of Taliban rule they'd realised that the Communists weren't so bad after all...

>We stay there until they can rule themselves and root out the terrorists in their own midst. We weren't the only ones to suffer from the rule of the Taliban and the partnership with Al Qaeda, and the majority of the Afghan population has no fight with us.

I agree. Emphasis should be on creating a strong Afghan state and rule of law (and the recent fracus between the West and Karzai suggests the latter is still a while off) so we can go. The problem is that no Western government is going to be able to stay in Afghanistan on a war footing for that long.

>I think you could make a good argument for (the UK at least) calling this the Fourth Afghan War.

To be honest, it's just a Western intervention (a deciding one, I hope) in a civil war that's been ongoing since the 1970s.

>The Soviet Union were trying to directly control Afghanistan as part of its historical push towards warm-water ports and I don't think that's the case now.

I've never quite understood this argument. Afghanistan is landlocked so controlling it would give the USSR access to exactly no ports at all, warm or otherwise. Surely no one though the Soviets would have contemplated an invasion of Pakistan; that's the sort of thing that would have sparked off a nuclear standoff.

>> I'm genuinely struggling to see penmanship or visual acuity as a qualification for high office. <<

Tell that to the blind governor of New York State.
He could use the support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Paterson

"In April 2009, a poll of 1,528 New York State registered voters taken by Quinnipiac University found that 60 percent disapproved of the job Paterson was doing (the worst-ever rating for a New York governor), with 53 percent stating that Paterson should withdraw his candidacy for the gubernatorial election."


~jwf~

So...is it only me that sees the *current* Afghan War as a push towards (HonestIago's) warm water ports? Specifically, for a route for a Caspian oil pipeline that avoids Russian territory?

Oh, c'moooooon! Are we really there to get women out of burqas? If we are...we're doing a pretty pish job so far.






(Incidentally...the Soviet invasion was nothing to do with warm water ports. They were securing overland oil and gas supplies that they needed to sell on for hard cash to the FRG with whom they had a contract. Islamicist and other Nationalist activity in the region threatened that)

>> What would have been your response to the average Russian-in-the-street, circa 1984, who'd told you 'Well now we're there, we've got to stay. It will just be too messy if we pull out now.'

I don't know the answer to that. It's a long time ago, but as I recollect, I felt that the Russians were on a sticky wicket for exactly the same reasons that I think we are now.

Like it or not we have obligations - which is the word that Iago used - and we are messing them up royally: think of the Iraqui interpreters who we are hanging out to dry. That is the sort of thing we should NOT be doing in Iraq or in Afghanistan. I appreciate that the longer we are there, the messier it gets, but there are better and worse ways of withdrawing from a conflict.


>> If [the Russians] had pulled out...how famous would Osama Bin Laden be today?

Or to take another counter-factual: if the US hadn't funded Bin Laden how famous would he be today?

It's never actually about Afghanistan, is it? As a lot of the posts here imply: Afghanistan has been the hinge between Europe, Asia and Russia since the Himalayas rose from the India ocean. It goes back way beyond Kipling, Kim and "The Great Game" and beyond the Moghuls to Alexander.

I do wish my father was still alive, I'd have been fascinated to know what he made of all this since he never went there, no, no, of course not. Not at all. Ah well, it's a good day to remember him, I guess.

Out of interest...straw poll...why do we think we're in Afghanistan?

Me - I'm fairly sure that it wasn't ever to get Bin Laden and al Qaeeda: that would have been a quick snatch job for some special forces.

I'm not sure it was to get out an unsavoury government. Where does that leave us with Burma/Zimbabwe/Somalia?

And surely nothing to do with women in veils. How many Northern English mill towns have we invaded?

It's always been The War For The Caspian Sea Pipeline Route.

Hasn't it?

Which, if all goes as it should, will leave us looking especially silly after the Copenhagen Summit.

It angers me that boys are dying and will continue to die over trivia.

btw...I had the opportunity to speak to some Russians...not in '84, but 85, just a few months after Gorbachev had come in. I was assured that the CCCP had invaded Afghanistan for their excellent hashish.

(Fond memories of Afghani and Georgian in Moscow.`Staying up late enough to see the Intourist minibus taking the hookers home.)

One of those rare occasions when I totally agree with Ed.

It's about the oil-pipeline...the one they wanted to build before we invaded. Since we can't rely on Russian oil (or gas if they are piping that over).

It's not about Obama Bin laden or Al Queda...there are drone pictures of him pottering about years ago...they know if they took him out they would be in more trouble with reprisals for killing him..at the moment it's random nutbar Muslims blowing themselves for random religious reasons...along with the general point of the West invading 'their' countries.

There is no way htey will get Al Queada out of Afghanistan as the Taliban will be helping them and it's like trying to empty a desert with a colander...it can't be done.

It's not about corrupt government as we have seen over the past few weeks.