Invaluable Guidance

I’ve long been concerned about what I would do if I ever became the guardian of a nubile woman. I have scoured local bookshops in vain for ‘Nubile Woman Guardianship for Dummies’ and Google searches for ‘nubile woman’ brought up some eye-opening but unhelpful results.

Thankfully, the Oman Observer came to the rescue this weekend with the following article. It’s heartwarming to see such sound and useful advice in the pages of a national newspaper.

 

 

Schadenfreude – The Johann Hari Edition

There may be some amongst you who recall a piece of execrable weekend journalism by Johann Hari entitled ‘The Dark Side of Dubai’. It was published in the Independent in 2009 and caused something of a furore in the UAE blogosphere. Most Dubai-based writers accepted that there were (and are) undeniably a lot of problems with Dubai that deserved to be reported on, and that Hari is a very effective writer, if polemic or propaganda are your cup of tea. However, Hari’s article was deeply flawed as a piece of journalism: lacking balance or perspective and filled with jarring stylistic flourishes, sensationalist hyperbole and rhetorical tropes.*

As well as these flaws, a number of Dubai-based bloggers and writers also observed that Hari’s piece contained a number of implausible anecdotes, conveniently apt quotations and exaggerations. Few people were willing to suggest outright fabrication given Hari’s status in the world of journalism, but nagging doubts have stayed with me since then. I am therefore very glad to see that Hari has been caught out recently over his use of quotations and is now facing some very awkward questions over his journalistic conduct.**

I am fully supportive of free speech and the media’s right to investigate; there is certainly plenty about Dubai that can and should be written about. However, if a journalist can actually be bothered, there is more than enough interesting subject matter out there without having to resort to lazy caricature, sensationalism and outright fabrication. It is a pretty damning indictment of the journalistic profession that there have been some journalists lining up to defend Hari’s transgressions and that his rhetorical style has been rewarded with the Orwell Prize for Journalism, particularly given Orwell’s own attitude to language (my emphases):

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

[…]

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Hari has sought to defend his practice but the fact remains that he has been caught out presenting a false picture to his readers to achieve a rhetorical aim. By presenting these quotes with his own dramatised context and tone, he has shown a disregard for accuracy and truth that calls into question the convenient anecdotes and quotes he has previously presented as fact. The only reason that he has been caught out in this instance is because the quotations have been from famous or prominent individuals: he can be even more cavalier with quotes and events that are below the radar and impossible to properly verify.

I am reminded of something Albert Einstein once said to me, as we had lunch together at a charming Bistro in Penge. He put down his glass of Merlot, fixed me with his gaze and said: “Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either”.

* – Brilliantly parodied and dissected by Chris Saul.

** – Links galore as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

Richard Williams (Part 2)

From Richard’s earlier article from August 10th:

A fresh start would have been nice, and there could have been no better moment. Laurent Blanc knew an opportunity when he saw one, and decided to “suspend” France’s entire World Cup squad for his first match as head coach. Fabio Capello, by contrast, has merely reassembled the remnants of his Rustenburg rabble for what amounts to a lap of dishonour.

Blanc’s action left no one in any doubt that for him this represents the start of a new era in which younger, fresher faces will be given the chance to make an impact. The French public will not mind if they are beaten by Norway in Oslo tomorrow as long as the performance shows commitment and promise, just as the 60,000 or so who will turn up at Wembley would not have minded an indifferent result against Hungary if they felt they were being shown some sort of vision of the future.

September 4th: Blanc selects “a young and largely untested team” and France lose their first qualifier 1-0 at home to Belarus. The players are booed from the pitch and the French media sharpens the knives. This is of course not mentioned in Richard’s article about England’s 4-0 victory over Bulgaria, which instead focused on England’s “familiar failings”.

Richard Williams

For those of you who are sensible enough not to waste your time by obsessively following football, Richard Williams is chief sports writer for The Guardian. On Tuesday his article was entitled “The heart sinks as Fabio Capello misses chance to make a fresh start”.

A fresh start would have been nice, and there could have been no better moment. Laurent Blanc knew an opportunity when he saw one, and decided to “suspend” France’s entire World Cup squad for his first match as head coach. Fabio Capello, by contrast, has merely reassembled the remnants of his Rustenburg rabble for what amounts to a lap of dishonour.

Blanc’s action left no one in any doubt that for him this represents the start of a new era in which younger, fresher faces will be given the chance to make an impact. The French public will not mind if they are beaten by Norway in Oslo tomorrow as long as the performance shows commitment and promise, just as the 60,000 or so who will turn up at Wembley would not have minded an indifferent result against Hungary if they felt they were being shown some sort of vision of the future.

[...]

To read his projected team sheet for tomorrow’s match is to feel the spirits slump. Better late than never for Joe Hart and Michael Dawson, who may play most of the match, and there is the promise of a glimpse of Jack Wilshere and Kieran Gibbs. But the continued presence in the starting line-up of Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, John Terry, Gareth Barry and Wayne Rooney, en bloc, shouts the message that there will be no cleansing of the Augean stables before the Euro 2012 qualifying campaign starts in September.

England had a very poor World Cup, but France managed to make them look like a tightly-knit unit of footballing excellence and self-discipline. To compare a squad that played badly with one that actually went on strike in the midst of a World Cup is deeply misleading. Laurent Blanc was able to suspend his entire team safe in the knowledge that he would have the full backing of both the media and the fans and that the players were not in a position to complain. Mr. Williams is being either disingenuous or ignorant in arguing that Capello could have dropped “Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, John Terry, Gareth Barry and Wayne Rooney” without risking a backlash from the media or the dressing room. The unfortunate fact, which Mr. Williams must also be aware of, is that there is insufficient strength in depth in the English game for these players to be simply cast aside. The only possible scenario in which this may be feasible is if the English media and fans were willing to write off qualification for Euro 2012 with the aim of focusing on 2014, but of course this is also a fantasy: Messrs Capello and Williams both know that qualification for 2012 is expected and that any slip-ups will be instantly pounced upon. With the first qualifier only three weeks away, this friendly was as much a rehearsal for the qualifying campaign as a catharsis for England’s unfortunate summer failures: it was never realistic to expect a full-scale revamp of the team with young and untested players going into an important qualifier.

Mr. Williams also understates the extent to which the ‘Augean stables’ have been cleansed: only ten members of England World Cup squad remained in the selection for last night’s game. This may not constitute a revolution of the French variety (they lost 2-1 to Norway incidentally), but Wednesday night definitely signalled a new direction for the team.

Deep down, Capello blames the players. That much is clear. So perhaps his decision to recall almost all of those responsible for the World Cup debacle for tomorrow’s match is actually a gesture of ritual sacrifice before the genuine renewal can begin. Or maybe he just can’t think of a better plan.

Maths according to Richard Williams: 10 out of 23 = “almost all”.

The cupboard is by no means bare. England’s unwillingness to devote resources to training young coaches is an enduring disgrace, and the proportion of players in the Premier League eligible for selection by Capello – around 38% – is unquestionably a handicap, but somehow the talent continues to emerge, however unfinished it may be as it comes off the lathe.

I think he manages to contradict himself three times in this paragraph. The idea that there is actually a genuine pool of young talent to draw upon is questionable, and even Mr. Williams admits that is is ‘unfinished’. The problem is that ‘unfinished talent’ is often quite brutally exposed at international level and if the development is not happening at club level there is very little that Mr. Capello can do about that. The only two examples of this rich seam of talent that Mr. Williams mentions are John Bostock (no Premier League Appearances) and Nathan Delfouneso (1 Premier League Goal in 13 appearances): if he really thinks that these players are about to transform England into world-beaters I would suggest he gets some fresh air.

At least the Under-19s reached their semi-final and were beaten by the outstanding heirs to the new world champions. Pearce’s Under-21s reached their European final last year before being soundly beaten by Germany, several of whose team went on to reach the last four in South Africa last month. We know the last crop of Under-17s were outstanding, since they won their European Championship earlier this year, while the new intake, now in the care of Kenny Swain, have just won the annual Nordic tournament in Finland.

A semi-final appearance sounds impressive, but Mr. Williams fails to mention that this actually involved only winning one game (against the might of Austria) out of four: we are not dealing with a group of world-beating prodigies here.

It is what happens to the players after they emerge into the senior ranks that presents Capello with his greatest problem. The exaggerated sense of self-importance instilled by vast salaries and a retinue of sycophants can distort values and behaviour in ways that are hard to eradicate. Those recent pictures of Rooney smoking a cigarette and urinating in the street remind us, with a shudder, that only a few weeks ago he was being talked about as a plausible candidate for the England captaincy.

The Italian is powerless to influence what goes on at the clubs, but surely one way of creating a significant degree of control and loyalty would be to identify a group of mostly young players whom he can mould into the sort of team he wants to lead. He would not be the first international head coach to discover that such a policy entails the controversial step of excluding established favourites in favour of players who can do the sort of job that needs to be done, and others have found that it can work.

Alf Ramsey grasped that nettle when he made Nobby Stiles a vital component of his World Cup-winning team. Capello, however, has shown no appetite for making unorthodox choices based on his own perception and judgment rather than on reputations already established. When he backed Sven-Goran Eriksson’s initial hunch by calling up Theo Walcott he reaped the reward in Zagreb, but then, at the crucial hour, allowed his faith to become eroded.

Now, as he delivers apologies that appear to have been scripted by his employers and picks a couple of young players seemingly to mollify his critics, faith in him has vanished. Even a respectable qualification for the next big tournament will not fully repair the damage. After all, look what happened last time.

Once again, the problem with this is that such an approach carries risks that simply are not acceptable given the weight of expectation and the readiness of journalists such as Mr. Williams to criticise anything that falls short of footballing perfection. Developing a team of promising youngsters takes time and necessarily involves learning from mistakes. The FA know this, Capello knows this and I am pretty sure Richard Williams knows this. If the FA were to publicly state that the focus is on 2014 and that qualification for 2012 would simply be seen as a bonus, then of course Capello could be expected to follow Mr. William’s revolutionary manifesto; in the absence of such a commitment, he would be mad to to do so.

 

Hyperbole Alert

The Khaleej Times has long been an eccentric publication, even by UAE standards. A few years ago its formatting and editorials were becoming so quirky that I would not have been surprised if they had started using green ink. They seem to have sorted themselves out somewhat more recently, but they still manage to write some rather quirky stuff such as their recent editorial entitled Nature’s Unbridled Rage.

In much the same manner, this tinkering with the scientific balance and plundering of the natural resources are two activities that have combined inimically to create a violent and unforgiving force that we see today manifested in the natural crises that have increased exponentially.

There are those who say there is no such thing as global warning and this is a usual period in a cycle but for many of us the evidence seems strong enough to suggest otherwise. It is warm where it should be cold, it floods where the earth is largely parched. Hurricanes and cyclones and inundation have changed the global topography entirely. Rivers that were feeders are now torrents of rage, lakes overflow, mountains come sliding down, forests stay aflame for weeks and even the polar icecap splits into pieces, the last only two days ago being the largest splinter in living memory.

So, how can we be so blasé as to still believe that something unusual is not occurring, that earthquakes have not intensified, that pollution and the rape of the planet is not having a reciprocal effect that threatens life as we know it.

Even the natural migration of animals and birds and marine life has changed. Weather patterns have changed. Our lives have changed as the coastal areas live in suspense of the next tsunami.

What then, is the answer to this increasing catastrophe? If we do not wake up and realise that the globe is slipping away from underneath our feet and that floods and drought, disaster and devastation are no longer the bane of third world countries and that Nature is democratic is her reprisals things will only get worse. In one day we see Pakistan tottering under a major storm; the picturesque India city of Leh torn asunder by landslides and globs of mud, a 260-kilometre chunk of Greenland’s glacier ripped apart and more fury waiting in the wings we have no choice but to accept that the time for the payoff is upon us: time, as Merellus said, to run to our houses and fall upon our knees and pray.

Febrile stuff I’m sure you’ll agree. So are we all doomed? Or is this just lazy hyperbole and irrational anthropomorhism? Are we really witnessing an ‘exponential’ increase in natural disasters?

Here are the ten most deadly natural disasters in history…

1.	1931 China floods	China	July, November, 1931	1,000,000–2,500,000*[1]
2.	1887 Yellow River flood	China	September, October, 1887	900,000–2,000,000[2]
3.	1556 Shaanxi earthquake	Shaanxi Province, China	January 23, 1556	830,000[3]
4.	1970 Bhola cyclone	East Pakistan (nowBangladesh)	November 13, 1970	500,000[1]
5.	1839 India Cyclone	India	November 25, 1839	300,000[citation needed]
6.	526 Antioch earthquake	Antioch, Turkey	May 526	250,000–300,000
7.	1976 Tangshan earthquake	Tangshan, Hebei, China	July 28, 1976	242,419[1]
8.	1920 Haiyuan earthquake	Haiyuan, Ningxia-Gansu, China	December 16, 1920	234,117[1]
9.	2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami	Sumatra, Indonesia	December 26, 2004	230,210
10.	2010 Haiti earthquake	Port-au-Prince, Haiti	January 12, 2010	222,000[4]

… and of the last hundred years:

1.	1931 China floods	China	November, 1931	1,000,000–2,500,000
2.	1970 Bhola cyclone	East Pakistan, Pakistan (nowBangladesh)	November, 1970	500,000
3.	1976 Tangshan earthquake	China	July, 1976	300,000
4.	1920 Haiyuan earthquake	China	December 1920	234,000
5.	2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami	Indonesia	December 2004	230,000+
6.	2010 Haiti earthquake	Haiti	January 2010	230,000
7.	1923 Great Kanto earthquake	Japan	September 1923	142,000
8.	1991 Bangladesh cyclone	Bangladesh	1991	138,000
9.	1948 Ashgabat earthquake	Turkmen SSR, (nowTurkmenistan)	October 1948	110,000
10.	2005 Kashmir earthquake	Pakistan (disputed region)	October 2005	79,000

I am not a Khaleej Times writer, but I am struggling to discern any recent ’exponential’ increase in natural disasters in these figures. Indeed, if you also look at the figures for those disasters with the most obvious links to climate change (cyclones, floods & landslides etc.) on the same page, there does not seem to be any apparent increase in the severity and impact of such events. I would posit that what has actually changed is that the development of mass communications and international 24-hour news media has vastly increased our awareness and the psychological impact of such events. It is also worth noting that the possible effect of climate change of the frequency and severity of natural disasters is still a matter of scientific debate and conjecture, although this has not stopped the idea taking root in the public consciousness and the rhetoric of politicians. Indeed, according to climate scientist Mike Hulme, there is “no real evidence” that natural disasters are already being made exacerbated by climate change.

Even more dubiously, the Khaleej Times seems to be implying a link between recent seismic activity (earthquakes and tsunamis) with climate change. Interestingly, there is scientific speculation that climate change could result in increased seismic activity in the future, but this still seems very uncertain and the extent of the impact is still a matter for conjecture. Certainly, there does not seem to be any serious scientific suggestion that the seismic events of the past decade have been in any way linked with climate change, so the editorial is simply veering into nonsense at this point.

I do find this proposed link between warmer temperatures and increased volcanic activity quite interesting though as it forms a possible negative feedback mechanism for climate change. Volcanic eruptions can have quite a dramatic cooling effect: for example, Mount Pinatubo lowered global temperatures by 0.4 to 0.5°C in 1992/3. It will be interesting to see if any firm scientific conclusions are reached on this issue. 

 

 

 

Antonia vs. Janice – no contest

Antonia Senior of The Times has written an excellent and very sensible article about feminism – well worth a read. Her comment pieces are normally very articulate, logical and measured, which makes it all the more baffling why they keep Janice Turner around.

Whip your wife into shape

One of the joys of living in the UAE is how often the local press print unintentionally hilarious articles like this one. Simply superb.

Something tells me that this approach would not help my beloved other half “understand the situation”.

UPDATE: Here is the link to the online version.

All hail The Onion

Out of the many acres of newsprint generated by the ‘Dubai Debt Crisis’, this is by far the best article of them all. The wonderful thing about it is that it simultaneously satirises both the Dubai real estate lunacy and the overwrought hyperbole of the overseas press reports.

Absolute genius.

A few quick things…

Holidays and various festivities have greatly reduced the output of this blog recently. Time for a few brief observations though:

A very good article on the Dubai media circus in The National from a week or so ago – well worth a read.

Unfortunately, Dubai seems to have carefully taken aim and shot itself in the foot again. This story was also in The Times today and will certainly give more ammunition to the anti-Dubai brigade amongst the UK press. Dubai really needs to get a grip on their PR right now. There needs to be a Head of Media Relations for the entire Emirate with direct subordinates within all the government departments and the quasi-government organisations. This matter should immediately have been red-flagged as a potential PR disaster and dealt with in a discreet and professional manner. These things are normally dealt with and ’swept under the carpet’, but only once the PR damage is done.

There’s no news like bad news…

It’s interesting to note the contrasting reactions of the British press to the Dubai World debt freeze and yesterday’s $10 billion bail-out. The debt-freeze was front page news and opinion fodder for several days; the bail-out and timely repayment of the sukuk are rapidly relegated to the business pages. Indeed, the word ‘Dubai’ doesn’t appear at all on the Daily Telegraph landing page right now. I find this lack of attention interesting given that we were apparently on the verge of catastrophe a few weeks ago.

Could that be because a number of opinion writers have been made to look a tad silly? Or perhaps because the story doesn’t fit neatly into the simplistic ‘rise-and-fall’ narrative they’ve been so busy constructing?