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We are a good year or so, from anyone looking unpatriotic when criticizing the current mission in Iraq. That fact that it was ever even implied, has always struck me as condescending & arrogant, and hopefully has come to an end. How anyone ever was able to convince a great number of people that questioning an armed conflict was the same as not supporting your troops, will forever be a mystery to me. It is completely obvious that supporting your troops while they are dealing with a situation of conflict & NOT supporting a government that has sent them to that conflict, are polar opposites. To be honest with you, I can't even believe this is still a topic of conversation, although this will be the last that I contribute to this particular one.
Good Luck & Goodnight,
Mrs. Collette K. Dauphinais, {Canada}

Solution to overcrowded prisons, three words - hang the lifers

ACTION:
1. diplomatic
2. military
3. none

SUPPORT:
1. for
2. against
3. none

HOTSPOT:
1) iraq
2) afghanistan
3) terrorism
4) rogue nations

THREAT:
1. real
2. perceived
3. potential
4. none

FOOTPRINT:
1. national
2. regional
3. global
4. none

ACTION + SUPPORT + HOTSPOT + THREAT+ FOOTPRINT = patriotism *

* a personal view of loyalty to idealology, nationhood, mankind etc

vikingar

The recommendation for the US to negotiate with Syria and Iran about peace in Iraq is the Neville Chamberlain syndrome all over again. It is a desperate need to achieve peace at any cost by acceding to impossible demands in return for empty promises which will never be kept. Israel has warned the United States that it is not Czechoslovakia and will not allow itself to be sacrificed. It is believed to have about 600 nuclear weapons and if it thinks its existance is threatened, it will not hesitate to use them. Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. World War III would make World War II seem like a minor skirmish by comparison. Anyone anywhere who thinks that they will escape the dire consequences are only fooling themselves. All out nuclear war has grave implications for the survival of all of humanity.

Good to see Newsnight discuss and celebrate hereos, any person who risks life and limb to save others is a hero, and the honours system should alknowledge this.

There is a dictinction between trained and untrained responses though. A soldier or firefighter or police officer on duty would often carry out herioc acts during the course of their job. In these cases, exceptional acts of courage are recognised. But when Joe Soap puts his life on the line, a true hero is born.

Gavin asked good questions of the prison reform panel, such as the inequity of a system whose punishment will depend upon the capacity of prisons at a point in time. An early release program for non violent offenders world help, together with emptying jails of thieves and dodgers, provided they pose no threat to life and limb.

1. Such a shame that this whole Iraq thing wasn´t over and done with quickly, that would have benefited everyone?

2. As factions of people in Iraq have offered so much resistance to our invasion, that must mean that they believe VERY STRONGLY in something we as western civilisation don´t symbolise for them.

3. Will democracy work when secularist pan arab values (represented by the early Baath party) failed to hold sway so miserably in the light of Saddam Hussains rise?

4. I would like to ask the other bloggers: Most arabic nations are not democracies in the western sense and those that are (appear in the western press to be pretty corrupt). Can arabic nations function in a western style democracy or do they work better when the leader and government is unelected? I would be interested to know.

I just caught 5 minutes of newsnight around three hours ago when it was still Wednesday(it's now 3:30 in the morning). You had a gentleman talking about his experience of saving someone (a young child I believe) from a fire in a car and what prompted him to do that. And then you had another gentleman whose ideas I thought were rather strange, cold and very emotioanlly detached, and sincerely thought for a moment he had psychologcial problems. I thought his evolutionary ideas lacked humanity. It should be remembered that evolution is just a theory and that on his death bed, before he met his maker, Darwin dismissed his own ideas as the ramblings of a young mind. I hope Newsnight can at least give a balanced viewpoint and whenever they invite an evolutionist to give their take on something there is a creationist next to him giving God's view on the matter. So at least people can make an informed decision and not just be given a biased one. I felt cold and empty as I listened to the evolutionist speaking and was thankful that through my own spiritual experiences I knew better.

Mark Bell

To Mark Bell (9 above):

Please don't think that everyone who is not a creationist would support what that evolutionary psychologist was saying. He didn't make any sense to me either, even though I'm a reasonably well-read and intelligent atheist.

Then again, you can get a "cold and empty" feeling listening to anyone who is over-reliant on their belief system to explain everything !

Gavin Esler - Boring ! but no red button for you, at the end of the day you do good stuff, but we need people who challenge and track down strong evidence.

A most thought-provoking piece on heroism.I do wish,however,that the selfish gene debate had not been dragged up.I saw many instances of heroism during the second world war-people simply did not think in that way then.We were all potential orphans.
I also agree with other bloggers that however astonishing the acts of courage by individuals in desperate situations,those people who take on a job which puts them in danger every day must be the unmatched heroes.

Vikinger

I just don´t get the impression that the political complexities of the problems in the arabic world have been fully understood by the powers that be (such as the ones I and you mentioned above.)

This has had the effect that our invasion of Iraq has been completely misunderstood by the very people we intended to help. (Rather like Vietnam when ill discipline and frustration in the American Forces led to war crimes being committed and to many Vietnamese joining the Vietcong rather than choosing democracy). It seems like some if not all of these mistakes have been repeated in Iraq.

TO CHAMPION ANY IDEALOGY BE IT SECULAR WESTERNISM, FREEDOM AND UNITY, FACISM, RELIGION WITH THE SWORD IS WRONG in my opinion.

What happens: Imagine I am kidnapped by a group of people who disagree with me writing this blog and tortured. Now the my kidnappers would probably say, you have insulted our view of the world and that kidnapping and perhaps killing me is justified. The British people who´s country I am part of would say it was an abomination, that my human rights had been affected and so on and would inclined to avenge my death especially if it was not an isolated incident.

BOTH SIDES ARE IN THE WRONG BECAUSE WE ARE NOT ATTEMPTING ANY FORM OF UNDERSTANDING AND DIPLOMACY.

Everybody gets angry, feels happy, is sad, is agressive and hurtful, laughs and cries at some stage. The question is WHY? If you don´t see the other side of the arguement however zany and unlike us it may be it is IMPOSSIBLE to win the real battle over hearts and minds.

H.

Just to clarify the point most invasions of other countries nowerdays occur in the name of

1. Religion
2. Freedom, harmony and unity

and the people who carry them out are prepared to lay down their lives for such an ideal.

The real power, as expressed by the French philosopher Foucault, lies in micro power, how individuals and media and traditions effect other people on a daily basis, this is more powerful than any modern army, and to understand micro power, and wield it´s powers is the key to saving civilisation, this is more likely to be achieved through diplomacy and influence rather than military invasion.

To invade for any idealism including "freedom" as it is in the eyes of the beholder is just as much murder as bad as to invade to expand an empire.

Last point. An illustration of my point.

We fought against the influence of the Soviet Union.

I asked some Russian freinds why Russian policy was and still is controlling of business and so on and they replied:

"We want to run our own affairs" (in what we in the west would describe as an almost isolationist fashion)"We do not want to accept the influence of America on what we do"

It´s interesting that this view is also (in part) a will for a form of freedom, a different identity to America even in this new world. Many in the Western Media regard this as a form of state corruption based on the policy of interference, seeing our own world market vision as "the best embodiement of freedom".

I strongly defend the leaders right to run countries the way they see fit. Most of them are there on some kind of merit and we must learn to aprreciate and accept that, (with China and Iraq too) and keep selling our lifestyle rather than our ideals, in order to implement change becuase ideals are always questionable, but you can by in large have a good life in a western democracy, more so than elsewhere. That is fact.

Surely a lot of heroes are people who see that something needs to be done - and immediately do it. Like the lad in World War One (Billy McFadyean?) who stepped on a grenade about to go off, saved his comrades and was blown to smithereens - he got a posthumous VC. If we must bring the baleful influence of our selfish genes into it, then it presumably stems from the fact that an instant reaction to danger is usually a better bet than working out the pros and cons of a course of action. Of course, unthinking reaction has its down side. My grandfather saw his daughter fall downstairs and jumped down after her to save her. Luckily it just became a family joke, not a family tragedy.

'The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his' - George Patton

vikingar

What did the UK government know, or ask about the plans for post-invasion Iraq before backing the invasion? Are they the victims of a bait and switch (as the New York Times just described the habitual methods of the Bush white House), or co-conspirators in a huge crime?

I'm getting the feeling recently that Michael Crick's function is to assist political people in their making digs at each other. Did he check if the think tank is getting any preference when it uses the rooms at Downing Street, or is it just the group that asks most? Is there anything wrong with a charity sharing premises with a magazine, even a political one? I don't think the charities lawyer was giving the whole picture when he said a charity has to do impartial research. Charities have particular objectives, and if that objective fits the criteria then anything legal it does, including making friends and influencing politicians, is charitable, short only of campaigning for one or more parties or candidates. There are a great many charities who are very biased in promoting their particular objectives. Christian ones, for example. What are the think tank's stated objectives?

The round table on prisons was still not a helpful idea even if it were an attempt to avoid having political supporters scoring points off each other, as was suggested. With so many ideas thrown around without evidence or illustration it was simply hot air with little prospect of advancing anything.

The section on heroes was also very disappointing, even though the heroic gentleman was wonderful. Your "evolutionary biologist" was spouting nonsense, way out of his area of knowledge. Evolutionary and cellular perspectives on our abilities and thought processes have much useful to provide but unfortunately evolutionary biology / psychology attracts some people who see it as providing justification for their existing, selfish, mean, reactionary beliefs. One can twist, distort or misquote to supposedly prove almost anything, but it doesn't make it true. Heroic behaviour can easily be explained by our inherited structures and propensities as being highly functional. We all share the vast majority of our genes, and a gentleman of that age - a grandfather - would be more likely to promote the human gene pool by saving a child and its mother than by living with the horror of having watched and allowed them to die (and being debilitated by the grief and guilt), or by having another child himself, since his own DNA may by now be somewhat deteriorated. He would also be promoting behaviour that might, perchance, save his own grandchild or other later descendents. A mother with a dependent child would be very unlikely to do the same extremely risky rescue because it would risk her own child. Genes and hormones adjust that. The gentleman praised by Bush for having saved a man on the New York Subway presumably calculated, instantly and unconsciously, that he could do it with little actual risk (that he and the man could fit in the space between the rails and below the approaching train), since visual information first goes to a part of the brain not subject to conscious involvement and he is a highly trained ex-US Marine. Him being a father of young children who were there at his side who would not consciously have decided to leave them alone on a platform edge. We, despite misleading slogans (such as "The Selfish Gene"), are actually social creatures, mostly programmed to form long-term relationships (a result of vassopressin receptors in crucial parts of our brains [1]) and thrive best when in positive social networks. Selflessness (or heroism) is a part of that. The mean, selfish, jealous creatures some evolutionary biologists describe are the mutant exceptions.

[1]

So, what happened to my response here, hours ago?