In the midday open thread, devilstower brought Philip Pullman's recent piece on liberty to our attention. The piece was subsequently removed from the Times UK website with no explanation. The Google cache disappeared shortly thereafter.
Update: now the Times Online is slamming Pullman for attacking Labor. This particular Times article has not gone missing yet. The quotes in the Times article match neither the transcript of Pullman's fairly hopeful keynote nor the "poem".
The content of Pullman's piece on liberty is a nightmare: a modern "poem" (to borrow devilstower's term) with elements from George Orwell's 1984 and today's politics. While the piece focuses on the situation in the UK, it brings to mind parallels to our modern police state apparatus in the US (patriot act enabled domestic spying--nothing new here, move along). More horrifying is the call to arms at the end ("Sleep, you scum"). Horrifying because yes I will sleep tonight after having done nothing more than create this diary and peruse the comments ("Next!"). Horrifying because we rant then sleep. The tireless amongst us have their targets and projects, while we the many, the lethargic, tap and click, type and read....
To read the piece, you must now travel to sites that managed to capture the fulltext before it was scrubbed. You have several choices:
The website of our very own ibonewits
The ARRSE website the UK Army Rumor service (you need to scroll down to Iolis' comment about halfway to get the text)
or the libertarian alliance (kudos if you can name all the pictures to the left of Reagan).
The variety of these sources reflects the broad appeal, the horror, and the potential for people of massively disparate viewpoints to unite against a common evil.
Philip Pullman's keynote address to the Convention on Modern Liberty balances the bleakness of the Times piece (also written in the context of the convention). His keynote focused on virtue and is full of hope for the future.
Every day a thousand or more newsworthy elements pass our interweb screens. Some scream for emotional responses, others a simple shake of the head (are people (I mean former ambassadors) really that stupid?). All demand some kind of action beyond clicking to the next screen. Yet many of us will click "next" (say it with ennui!) like the scene from "Jacque Brel is a alive and well and living in Paris". We fought hard for Obama and thousands of candidates across the country. We are fighting again for 2010 and 2012. Liberty is a more difficult battle, lacking an obvious foe. The convention is passing under the MSM radar for obvious reasons.
Addicted I am to dKos, lurking for months before an undiaried story remained undiaried long enough for my lethargy ("Next!") to be overcome with that victorious feeling that "I've finally found something to diary on dKos!"
UPDATE: More links. I am grateful that the fulltext has been posted by Clio2 below. However, visiting the websites preserving Pullman's text is an experience in diversity.
Little man, what now?
Quebedox