I’ve tagged this post ‘derangement syndromes’ in honour of my old friend Darius Guppy.

But phosphorous can be a serious problem for ecosystems, especially water systems where it can cause algal blooms. And it is very important to control the main channels through which it enters the environment. That’s why it’s so important to pick up leaves in urban areas.

Yup. One of the main sources of phosphorous pollution is fallen leaves (pdf), especially from the sort of deciduous trees you find bluebells growing beneath.

Pick up after your trees, Germaine.

3.03pm: Jack Shenker sends this from Cairo, where, America-style, capitalism has grabbed hold of the revolution with both hands.

A few weeks ago, the road from Talaat Harb to Tahrir Square formed the bloody no man’s land between pro-change demonstrators and state-backed thugs, both hurling rocks at each other’s front lines. Today anyone walking this stretch of downtown Cairo has to run through a very different gauntlet: the endless lines of hawkers peddling their own unique brand of protest kitsch. From T-shirts to facepaints, car license plates to martyrs’ pendants, Egypt’s revolution has well and truly been merchandised.

Arab hawkers are America-style?

I think the journalist must know, deep down, that north Africa is home to some of the most commerce-minded people on earth. He can’t have missed the souks. But he just can’t stop himself from regurgitating the meme: ‘Commerce is icky and the Yanks are to blame’.

The British ruing [sic] class is in a bigger crisis than Gadaffi, that is for sure.

From the Workers Revolutionary Party, dated Feb 23rd 2011. Oh, and yes – inevitably, they support Gaddafi.

It is hard not to feel happy at the discomfiture of US hubris.

Not only is the most important US/Israeli client dictator in danger of overthrow in Egypt, the last remaining rationale of their Afghan policy is collapsing, with Russia moving in on the trans Afghan gas pipeline.
http://centralasianewswire.com/Russian-TAPI-involvement-damages-Turkmenistan-US/viewstory.aspx?id=3075

Interesting times.

This holds that American support for tyrannical Arab dictators was not Kissingeresque Realpolitik, but rather that the genuine end of policy over many decades and through many different Presidents was to maintain tyrants in place.

It holds that Taliban nurturing of Al Qaeda up to 9/11 had nothing to do with the military intervention there, which was entirely to do with energy interests – and therefore a form of Realpolitik, this being a convenient explanation for one but not the other of Murray’s targets.

It’s a shame, really. One of the wonderful things the web has brought us is the chance to read the unfiltered voices of former diplomats like Charles Crawford and Craig Murray. Murray can be passionate, informed, moral and, importantly, interesting when he writes about foul dictatorships to which he was posted.

And then, occasionally, the maniac sticks his head out of the cave and bellows.

Incidentally, can hubris be discomfited?

This week, though, the water seemed to turn to sewage. A vicious, insane attack by a lone gunman in Tucson, Arizona, was seized on as an excuse to attack opponents in terms devoid of moral and intellectual integrity, leading to days where the political debate seemed a matter simply of wading through ordure, hurling handfuls at long-standing opponents.

Then, yesterday, President Obama went to Tucson. Hindsight will place his speech more accurately in the pantheon of great political oratory than we can in its immediate aftermath, but it was a great speech. He praised Republicans and Democrats, septuagenarian lovers dying in one another’s arms, young and old heroes who tackled the gunman, and a nine year old girl who went, full of optimism, to see her political representative, only to be shot in the back by someone for whom the word ‘ordure’ is scarcely a metaphor.

I defy you to be unmoved by this passage:

Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called “Faces of Hope.”  On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child’s life.  “I hope you help those in need,” read one.  “I hope you know all of the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart.  I hope you jump in rain puddles.”

If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today

The speech can be seen (and read) here.

… we live in an age where we see a resurgence of the idea that some people are fundamentally less intelligent than others

Resurgence? Beyond Ms Power’s collegiate circle-jerk, it’s never gone away. But what’s the justification for the idea that we are all equally intelligent?

That’s the sinister bit: there isn’t one. In fact, the lack of rationality in the argument is seen as a positive virtue:

The work of Jacques Rancière, who never tires of repeating his assertion that equality is not just something to be fought for, but something to be presupposed, is, for me, one of the most important ideas of the past decade… the axiomatic assertion of the equality of intelligence… On the basis of this assumption…

(emphasis added)

Presupposition, rather than argument, is “one of the most important ideas of the past decade”. The reason why this might be attractive to some could be their inability to argue at all. Take this, for example:

The reason why we can relatively quickly understand complex arguments and formulae that have taken very clever people a long time to work out lends credence to Rancière’s insight that, at base, nothing is in principle impossible to understand and that everyone has the potential to understand anything.

No, it doesn’t. It demonstrates that it’s much harder to have an original insight than to communicate it. This is the difference between exploring uncharted territory and travelling with a map. In fact, there’s almost complete general ignorance about “complex arguments and formulae that have taken very clever people a long time to work out”. Rigorous study of “crunchy” subjects is the province of a vanishingly small minority.

But if we are to ignore the need for rational thought and merely “assert” the things we’d like to believe, whose assertions win? Those of the best connected, the most conformist, the most aggressive and violent?

What if we find public policy is based on incorrect assertions?

Oh. I’ve just described the opening decade of the twenty first century.

By their well-intentioned activism, they have given murderous rebel militias – not only in Darfur but around the world – the idea that even if they have no hope of military victory, they can mobilise useful idiots around the world to take up their cause, and thereby win in the court of public opinion what they cannot win on the battlefield. The best way to do this is to provoke massacres by the other side, which Darfur rebels have dome [sic] quite successfully and remorselessly.

“Remorselessly” is a particularly ugly and nonsensical word in this context, bearing as it does the notion that these “rebels” even lack basic compassion when arranging their own deaths. Presumably, rape victims in such war zones are equally remorseless when provoking their own violation. No doubt if the victims had been less remorseless, they would have been treated with less brutality. It’s their own damn fault, they could have been considerately butchered and raped.

However, one thing I haven’t seen challenged anywhere is the notion that human rights are a western construct. They aren’t. Notions of freedom of conscience, democracy and the emancipation of slaves appeared in the Middle East and, of course, classical Greece which was far more a part of that world than of the cold  lands of the northern barbarians, long before they were thought of in western Europe.

This annexation of human rights for the West is a form of cultural… well, imperialism.

Incidentally, I’m not sure the term “useful idiot” was a safe one for that particular writer to have used.

A video on official Hamas TV calls for Allah to kill Jews, Christians, Communists and their supporters. The video asks Allah to “count them and kill them to the last one, and don’t leave even one.”

When, in the 1980s, Saudi-funded madrassas started appearing in Pakistan, the first thing the “students” did was attack the then flourishing left wing groups in the area, driving them out (or killing the left-wingers) in just a few years. Attacking socialists and communists is nothing new for Islamists.

Now, Priyamvada Gopal, on the other hand, bidding fair to become one of the Guardian and Comment is Free’smore active yes-butters hoping to distract attention from practices of which others are, with good reason, critical, has a different idea. For her, violence is just everything, more or less, that she politically opposes.Gopal ‘teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge’.

Second, from across the political divide, David Thompson on the same subject:

Violence. A word Ms Gopal uses no fewer than nine times. Fiscal responsibility, albeit belated, is violence, see? Reducing the national debt is violence. Extending credit for tuition fees is violence. Attempting to contain the growth of the state –  enlarged by around 30% under New Labour – that’s violence too. Audacious, isn’t it? Ms Gopal, who “teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge,” has casually redefined violence to include practically anything to which she takes political exception.

Also un-depraved, and remarkably similar in sentiment to Norm. Maybe they have something in common despite political differences?

Now Paul Sagar:

Whilst it is true that I may not support particular instances of the use of non-peaceful force – say against Labour HQ, or in the name of bigotry – this simply means precisely that in those instances I would oppose the use of direct non-peaceful action. This does nothing to undercut my general position that sometimes non-peaceful action is justified, nor my case-specific judgement that on Wednesday, in relation to the policies of this Government, non-peaceful direct action was indeed probably justified as a reaction to harm-about-to-be-incurred.

Again similar, but this time depraved. And Chris Dillow:

Paul Sagar welcomes this week’s riots as “a useful corrective, and a check against the abuses of the powerful”.
I in turn welcome his analysis as a breath of fresh air against the fetid hypocrisy of the sanctimonious moralizers who condemn violence.
The fact is that politics is founded upon violence, and the threat thereof, as it is this that underpins the very existence of the state. Sometimes – World War II or the American revolution – this violence is justified, and sometimes not.
The question of when violence should be used is merely an empirical matter – as Trotsky said, a question of expediency. What matters is what works.

And that’s depraved.

Yes, the justification for violence is an empirical matter. But the last two gentlemen are not the fucking suffragettes. There is the most staggering narcissism involved in thinking that whinges about how much of other people’s money you’re getting compare with, say, a regime that imports rapists to sodomise, to the point of death, students who were arrested protesting about the rigging of an election by theocratic dictators, or one that forces all women to be workless submissives and accommodates the enslavement of domestic servants. But neither of the last two have seemed particularly moved by the horror of the Iranian or Saudi regimes.

Chris quoted Trotsky – a man who revelled in the murder of innocents, introduced decimation into the armies he commanded and planned, as a theoretical good, the use of show trials. This is utter, utter depravity.

Paul Sagar stated that the purpose of democracy is:

that it leads to and secures (amongst other things) the respect and protection of citizens.

That’s complete balls. It serves two purposes: it stops us fighting and dilutes autocracy with some element of consensus, even if it’s consensus that operates over time with the swing of the pendulum. It’s imperfect, like every human institution that has existed, or ever will. But the whole point is that it prevents political violence. It’s the best system we have, imperfect though it is. And it’s a system under which, from time to time, people you disagree with will be in power.

Conservatives and liberals have lived through more than a decade of increasingly authoritarian, interfering, financially rapacious socialism without resorting to violence.

Those on the other side have a basic duty to suck it up and campaign for what they believe in. Just like we did for the past thirteen years. The narcissism that believes that one’s own opinions, but not those of others, warrant violence is a form of political depravity. It only ever leads to one place:  the very might-is-right world we have evolved away from, so painfully.

UPDATE: Norm’s at it again. Being un-depraved, that is.