- The monologue here from the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine, seems to me quite flawless. It is a teenage girl being censorious about another’s thong.
- The latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey is out, and I really wish I had access to the underlying data. There are some truly fascinating and unexpected answers — not so much to questions about religion, but to questions about national self-confidence and attitudes to war.
Not surprisingly, the most pacifist nations (except Pakistan) are those which have been most thoroughly defeated in wars. But who would have thought that more Swedes than Brits1 agreed with the statement that “Sometimes military force is necessary to maintain order in the world” or that Swedes were least likely of all the nations polled to suppose that their culture was superior to that of others. I really can’t take that figure at face value, though I suppose it depends on how you define culture. Italians, incidentally, were miles ahead2 even of Americans in supposing that their culture was superior to anyone else’s. I would like to know the figure for Americans who actually believe there are any other cultures. - Still on Pew, there are only two countries in the whole world where a majority actively disagrees with the statement that “We should have further restrictions on immigration”. They are Japan and the Palestinian Territories. I had thought there would be don’t knows, but they are not mentioned in the diagram and in every other country3 polled there are absolute majorities, often sizable, in favour of restricting immigration.
- I don’t think the campaign to boycott the Beijing Olympics over Burma is going to get very far. But if we start early, it must be possible to get an international campaign going to boycott the London Olympics, on the grounds that Britian has invaded the wrong countries. I don’t suppose the whole world would sign up. But some countries surely would and every little helps. The fewer athletes and the fewer tourists turn up in 2012 the better for London and Londoners.
1 Sweden 75% to Britain 67%
2 Italy 68% to USA 55%; Britain 31%, Sweden 21%
3 USA and Britain both 75%; Sweden 53%
I am still horrified by the student who told me that she’d never leave the US because ‘foreign people are weird’ (which category includes me) and whose solution to the problems of the post-Soviet republics was ‘they need Jesus’….