Saturday, September 29, 2007

It's a spade. That's all it is.

I would like to make a note of two things:
1)The Burmese government is oppressing its own people more than usual this week. The have been oppressing them for a long time but now it has come to the world's attention via the internet because they have shot monks and a foreign journalist. This puts them in a large and comfortable club of dictatorships with little regard for human life, freedom, or indeed, very much, apart from political and ideological survival and individual gain.
2) This may seem reasonably important, but it isn't. If you pay any attention to the news, you will see that of far greater importance is equine flu and football. Football, in fact, will be the most important issue this weekend.

The footballers, it seems, can run faster than Burmese monks.

This sort of narrow focus looks like delusional self interest and is, in consequence, an embarrassment, to say the very least.