Ah, and just when I was talking about Rwanda, here is this story. How very interesting. The first time media executives have been convicted since the Nurenberg trials. Well that’s too bad, for a start, because Serbian radio was also used to whip up murderous ethnic hatreds. But it’s better than nothing.

In the first verdict of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an international court today convicted three Rwandan news media executives of genocide for helping to incite a killing spree by machete-wielding gangs who slaughtered about 800,000 Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda in early 1994. A three judge panel found that the three defendants used a radio station and a twice-monthly newspaper to inflame ethnic hatred that eventually led

Another interesting point at normblog. Well I can’t help it if he says something that catches my attention twice in three days. That’s just how things fall out sometimes. And really, this is something I’ve been mulling over for a couple of weeks or more, ever since re-reading Philip Gourevitch’s book on Rwanda. Longer than that really, maybe since last spring – maybe around the time Fareed Zakaria’s book on democracy was published. It wasn’t the book itself (which I haven’t read in any case) that sparked the pondering, it was the air of surprise in some of the reviews, that someone could make some shrewd and pertinent comments about democracy which recognized that democracy has some tensions or dangers. … Read the rest

There was more of interest in that Start the Week than just the tv drama about the MMR issue. There was also a guy who’s written a book called A Dictionary of Idiocy, which is interesting because we have a little dictionary ourselves, so we’re interested in other examples of the genre. This one doesn’t sound much good though, frankly, at least not if the writer is anything to go by. He kept laughing too much, when nothing was all that funny. It’s always so embarrassing when people do that on chat shows and the people they’re chatting with don’t join them, but in fact get less and less giggly as they get more so. There was Stephen Bayley roaring … Read the rest

Front Row yesterday included discussion of and a clip from a Channel 5 drama called ‘Hear the Silence’ about the controversy over the MMR jab and autism. Monday’s Start the Week also discussed the drama, with Juliet Stevenson who stars in it.

The bit of dialogue we heard on Front Row confirmed my worst expectations of what such a drama would be like. Oh great, thought I when Mark Lawson first described the subject matter. Plucky victimized parent takes on medical establishment and shows how wrong it is about everything, thus convincing everyone that MMR jab causes autism. And sure enough – the bit of dialogue was well-acted, to be sure, but it was also utterly predictable. Chilly rational uncaring … Read the rest

There is a very interesting post at Normblog on the whole vexed question, which I’ve mentioned a time or two here, of what exactly is ‘left’ (or ‘right’) anyway, and who gets to decide, and how do we know, and why does it matter.

I find it odd, especially given that Marc himself was a supporter of the Iraq war, that he should feel it appropriate to frame the discussion as one about moving rightward – as if it’s already pre-defined where, in this division of opinion, the authentic values of the left lie, and we can gauge from that who’s moving which way. Why couldn’t it be, rather, that the left, like pretty well the rest of the world,