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POPSHeroism Solzhenitsyn is right. It was heroic. The last time Great Britain was truly great.
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POPSPublic Space 2 There is a connection between this and the previous clip. The first is the result of the collapse of the boundaries between the public and the private so that there is no longer behaviour which is deemed wrong in public. The second is an attempt to reconstruct that boundary.
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POPSPublic Space 1 My son, 12, like Lord Brocket's, has been mugged. Yesterday evening, to be precise. Two 'youths', one in a hoodie, one a skinhead, just started laying into him about 300 yards from here. He didn't know them.
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POPSRepeat the lie I'm not sure about the intentionality, but the basic point is a good one: PC forces you, or attempts to, repeat a lie (though always for the sake of a better future that the lie will usher in).
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POPSFear and loathing in Sweden Is there any connection between the <a href="http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/158/full">cringing apologies</a> to offended Muslims over the cartoon affair and this sort of terror-of-terror reaction?
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POPSA subtle distinction
I have just read a book by Victor Frankl in which he recounts something of his experiences in Auschwitz and Dacchau. His aim, however, was not so much narration of history, personal or otherwise, but to build a philosophy of living from the ground up. In this case, the ground were the direst circumstances I can imagine - you are reduced to a number, what labour you can give is squeezed out of you so that you can die emptied and exhausted. Even here, according to Frankl (and I must take his word for it), you are still left with one freedom, that of choosing your attitude to your circumstances. He didn't think of himself as a victim - what he was living through was merely the choice that he could make between accepting the role imposed on him or not. He was not a victim because he did not. In asserting his freedom to make that choice, he escaped the role of victim as well as that of number. Lincoln's turn from the objective to the subjective here is as great a victory on the same field.
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POPSHatchet job It's always irresistible when someone examines what passes as received wisdom and leaves you wondering how anyone ever took it seriously. The tone of intellectual demolition is a popular one, but it is actually a difficult feat to pull off. This article does so.
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POPSHis shame is my shame Another sort of empathy, though in a very different context. Japanese tourists caught on camera applying graffiti to the hallowed walls of Florence by other Japanese tourists. Nothing is said on the spot, but the guilty parties are reported to their institutions, who then take action. Shame felt by a fellow national, and then by an institution 10,000 miles away. That is solidarity, though the word is never used in such a context.
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POPSHis genius is my genius A clue to the irrationality that sport can inspire is this: that it enables us to empathise, not with someone like us, but with someone most unlike us. Insofar as we are able to understand and appreciate what that someone does, so we are able to claim him as our own. I wonder if there is a parallel here with the unreasonable possessiveness men can have for a woman, with however little justification. The logic seems to be: I am able to appreciate your beauty, therefore it, and you, belong to me.
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