Hugh Roberts asks Who Said Gadaffi Had To Go?

It is tendentious and dishonest to say simply that Gadaffi was "killing his own people"; he was killing those of his own people who were rebelling. He was doing in his respect what every government in history has done when faced with a rebellion. We are all free to prefer the rebels to the government in any given case. But the relative merits of the two sides aren't the issue in such situations: the issue is the right of a state to defend itself against violent subversion. That right, once taken for granted as the corollary of sovereignty, is now compromised. Theoretically, it is qualified by certain rules. But as we have seen, the invocation of rules (e.g. no genocide) can go together with cynical exaggeration and distortion of the facts by other states. There are in fact no reliable rules. A state may repress a revolt if the permanent veto-holding powers on the Security Council allow it to (e.g. Bahrain, but also Sri Lanka) and not otherwise. And if a state thinks it can take this informal authorisation to defend itself as read because it is on good terms with London, Paris and Washington and is honouring all its agreements with them, as Libya was, it had better beware. Terms can change without warning from one day to the next. The matter is now arbitrary, and arbitrariness is the opposite of law.

Christopher Hitchens on death

"Death has this much to be said for it:
You don't have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you - free."
- Kingsley Amis

Dickens on TV every Christmas

The English middle classes like a conservative radical: Charles Dickens, Stephen Fry, Ian Hislop