Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

In today's Sunday Times Comment

Simon Jenkins says that Tony Blair’s foreign policy has replaced Labour bleeding-heart syndrome with tabloid bleeding-head syndrome... India Knight wonders whether, if it’s simply not worth suing bloggers, bloggers will become self-moderating... Frank Field explains why Gordon Brown's pensions policy is destructive in the longer term... Jill Kirby asks whether we are really comfortable with the prospect of mothers going on active service... and Michael Portillo points out that if the Stormont settlement was a defeat for Blairism, so too was the vote on casinos

Anyone want an electronic book?

Will anyone want the Sony Reader? The electronic portable book gadget sounds exciting and has an immediate appeal to anyone who loves "stuff", as I do.

But in the end, what is it for? After all, most books are pretty portable already. And the selection of texts available is fairly limited.

In the long run, of course, such devices will cut the cost of publishing, expanding the range of books you can buy cheaply. But in the short to medium term, the prospects for the product seem more limited.

But here's an idea (via Arts and Letters Daily). The electronic book might be perfect for those of us running out of book shelves.

Friday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Ben Macintyre: Burma’s new capital is a place for the junta to seal itself away from the people
• Ali Ansari: Iran’s seizure of British sailors reflects the confidence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
• Gerard Baker: Israel right or wrong’ is not a grown-up debate. In America, saying something sympathetic about the Palestinians is evidently now deemed unsayable
• Peter Riddell: Mr Reid has won because the terrorism card is invariably a winner in Whitehall debate
• Simon Barnes: Such hatred... but not in my name. I am now enrolled as the only member of Steve McClaren's Barmy Army
• Libby Purves: So many comments on Michael Apted’s film about William Wilberforce betray whiningly dishonest right-on attitudes and must be challenged
• Mick Hume: Gordon Brown, our prime-minister-in-waiting, is transmogrifying into Steve McClaren. Or is it the other way around?

And from the rest of the papers…

• Dominic Lawson: (The Independent) - Maxine Carr and Lady Black: unlikely victims of our misogynistic attitudes
• Matthew Norman: (The Independent) - We've lost the authority to lecture Iran
• Christina Patterson: (The Independent) - Poverty, crime and the power of forgiveness
• Jeff Randall: (The Daily Telegraph) - Three cheers for Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising tycoon. Hip, hip, hooray! At a time when news seems uniformly depressing, along comes Sir Martin to part the clouds
• David Davis: (The Daily Telegraph) - John Reid normally leaves a department at the first sign of trouble. This time, by splitting up the Home Office, a department is leaving him.
• Con Coughlin: (The Daily Telegraph) - The dictator's 27-year rule of fear may be finally drawing to a close. But if Mugabe goes, will Zimbabwe's salvation inevitably follow?
• Polly Toynbee: (The Guardian) - You can't talk about children's well-being unless you dare talk about the inequality of their life experience
• Simon Jenkins: (The Guardian) - All attempts to drive the nation's Sir Humphreys to distant parts have met with disaster, and it won't be different for the peers.
• Mark Lawson: (The Guardian) - The championing of one sort of women's work runs counter to the distaste for another

And from around the world…

• Charles Krauthammer: (Washington Post) - Our bill calls for the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq so that we can focus more fully on the real war on terror, which is in Afghanistan
• Steve Forbes: (The Wall Street Journal) - Giuliani is the free-market leader of the GOP field
• Max Hastings: (New York Times) - We must keep talking to the Iranians, offering carrots even when these are contemptuously tossed into the gutter, because there is no credible alternative
• Francis Fukuyama: (Japan Times) - Barely half a year into his premiership, Shinzo Abe is provoking anger across Asia. Will the Bush administration use its influence to nudge Abe away from inflammatory behaviour?

Today's Web Grab

You might enjoy:

• Chris Dillow: Why your genes affect your socioeconomic status
• Tim Worstall: Skiing the Tube
• Slate: Why Vote When You Can Bet? A guide to all the political betting markets
• Jessica Hagy in Indexed: A graph explaining grief

Why the Iranians wanted Faye Turney to "confess"

The purpose of getting Faye Turney to appear on television "confessing" to trespass was not just to put pressure on the British Government via the airwaves. It was to get her to believe the version of the story the Iranian's are retailing.

In his book, Influence, Professor Robert Cialdini explains how the Chinese applied basic ideas from social psychology in their treatment of American prisoners of war. They would get them to write down and then repeat confessions and admissions that communism was superior to capitalism.

They understood that getting the prisoners to say these things was a big step to getting them to believe them.

For the same reason companies ask you to send back "tie breaker" forms for competitions, beginning with words such as "I like this detergent because...". Once you have written these reasons down and sent them off, you are far more likely to believe that you like the products.

So getting Faye Turney to praise the Iranians for their kindness on television and getting her to say she was in the wrong is a big step to getting her to believe these things.

If I'm right, they are attempting to brainwash her. 

The Message Meter results - Gordon Brown's budget speech

The Message Meter results are in. Here's a graph showing you the overall reactions:

Click here to to watch a brief video of the results as they come in.

Everything you've always wanted to know about Iran

Want to understand what is going on in Iran?  Kenneth Pollack is an excellent guide. The former Clinton adviser is author of The Persian Puzzle, a first class history of the conflict between Iran and America.

If you were after something a great deal shorter than a book then try this three page long Pollack primer on the Iran.

Ted Nugent Medal entry - Taxman by George Harrison

Our search for centre right songs and rockers continues with this excellent entry: Taxman by George Harrison.

The video below is Harrison performing the song with Eric Clapton.

Have you got any better suggestions?

Thursday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Camilla Cavendish: Who will be more upset by the opening up of family courts, children or sloppy professionals?
• Anatole Kaletsky: Anyone who talks to ordinary people realises that foreign policy is a bigger issue than economics
• Patrick Kidd: Everything’s banned at the accountancy World Cup - In an utterly counter-productive move, the International Cricket Council has ordered YouTube to remove match clips from its site
• Mary Ann Sieghart: Britain today is at ease with itself about class, which makes attacks on Cameron's upbringing so odd
• Matthew Parris: Birds, Brown, boobs . . . and an awful load of ballots
• Robert Crampton: Tackle a hoody – like Dave doesn’ t. The way a community used to enforce social norms is that respectable working-class men would threaten miscreants with force
• James Harding: It feels as though the Chancellor behaved like a Las Vegas card-dealer, shuffling the pack but not changing the odds
• Peter Riddell: Reinventing Labour doesn't mean that there are easy alternatives on foreign and domestic policy

And from the rest of the papers…

• Timothy Garton Ash (The Guardian) - : Faced with Iranian blackmail, Europe must show real solidarity - Iran depends on German government export guarantees. Let the EU presidency put its money where its mouth is
• Charles Clarke: (The Guardian) - We can't just carry on with New Labour. It is seen as self-obsessed, media-fixated and corrupt
• David Clark: (The Guardian) - The Blairite rejectionists would turn on Miliband just as they have against Brown - Blairism has now become a personality cult
• Adrian Hamilton: (The Independent) - Ratcheting up the Iran conflict is the wrong tactic
• Johann Hari: (The Independent) - The real Cameron is now coming into focus
• Steve Richards: (The Independent) - Northern Ireland has shown the triumph of hard and, at times, deceitful politics
• Boris Johnson: (The Daily Telegraph) - There’s a worrying correlation between the performance of the hapless England football team and our failing education system.
• Alice Thomson: (The Daily Telegraph) - I hope that Faye Turney will be celebrating her daughter's fourth birthday at home very soon
• David Miliband: (The Daily Telegraph) - How to harness the elusive sense of being in tune with the times and a potential fourth Labour election victory

And from around the world…

• Desmond Tutu and Madeleine Albright: (Washington Post) - Zimbabwe, long plagued by the repressive leadership of President Robert Mugabe, has reached the point of crisis
• Donald Shoup: (New York Times) - A surprising amount of traffic isn’t caused by people who are on their way somewhere, but by those who have already arrived and are looking for a place to park
• Daniel Henninger: (The Wall Street Journal) - "Netheads" take on "Bellheads." Look out, Mrs. Clinton
• David Ignatius: (Lebanon Daily Star) - France's losing battle to control the onset of globalization

Today's Web Grab

You might enjoy:

• Richard Lloyd Parry in Asia Exile: On Japan’s murder manhunt after the naked corpse of a young British woman was found in a Tokyo flat buried in a sand-filled bathtub
• Mark Tran in the Guardian News Blog: Inside Burma's new capital
• Michael van der Galien in The Moderate Voice: Is the Surge working?
• Steven M. Warshawsky in American Thinker: Mitt Romney is a Big Government conservative