Quote of the Day

"For in all countries, in proportion as the love of virtue diminishes, we find the love of talents to increase."

(the anonymous 1841 author of Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World, discussing the women of Ancient Rome - "During upwards of six hundred years, the virtues had been found sufficient to please. They now found it necessary to call in the accomplishments.")


UPDATE - I forgot Glubb Pasha :

"The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. "

On Sheridan and Scabs

I don’t understand, so talk me through this one.

a) Tommy Sheridan visits clubs and fesses up to the SSP when the press find out

b) SSP advise him to ‘lay low and say nuthin’

c) TS decides to brazen it out in the libel court

d) SSP comrades know they’ll be called as witnesses, and as I understand they have no choice about turning up. Their only choice is whether to lie and commit perjury or tell the truth. They (mostly) tell the truth.

e) but TS rhetoric wins the day, and he brilliantly persuades the jury. Result!

f) and immediately afterwards he publicly calls the truthful SSP members ’scabs’ and announces that he intends to ‘destroy them’

Now at this point our SSP comrades, like Colin Fox, are socialists in good standing, who gave TS sensible advice that he ignored. TS, hitherto a socialist in good standing, asserts that their unwillingness to risk jail for his family-man reputation renders them ’scabs’ to be ‘destroyed’ by unspecified means.

OK. At this point, who are the good guys and who the bad guys? The people with the correct analysis or the guy who wants to destroy them because they wouldn’t put their testes in a vice for him? Not for socialism, not for a principle, but to perpetuate a false image of a Great Leader?

Now I’m not too sure about going to the police with affidavits and secret tape recordings. But one socialist has insulted and threatened to destroy other socialists - on completely insufficient and self-interested grounds. Don’t they have a right to self-defence - in the last resort, to destroy the man who’s trying to destroy them?

(this piece of course assumes that d) is correct. My whole analysis rests on the assumption that the SSP exec had no choice about testifying in court.

Is this correct ? I don’t know Scots law. Martin ?

If it’s not correct and they were under no obligation to testify, then my analysis falls to bits - because the exec should then, from an SSP perspective, have lain low and said nuthin - leaving TS in his own juice rather than adding their own.)