As I think I’ve said before, my main present (from my parents) this past Christmas was a Mac. I laid out my reasons for wanting a Mac in a post a couple of weeks ago. I still have my old (2003) eMac, which can’t run any version of Mac OS X after Leopard (and in fact still runs Tiger, when I ever put it on, which I never do) and always intended to upgrade if I could ever afford it, or persuade someone to buy me one (or if there was ever one whose specification justified the cost). Back in 2006 I wrote a post in response to someone who said (in a long post on OSNews) why he would never buy another Mac, and said I would replace my old Mac with another, which in the event I didn’t (I’ve been using PCs with Windows and Linux since retiring that one). I’ve always liked the Mac OS, just not the hardware.
There is a scene in Orwell’s Animal Farm in which the pigs (who had become the ruling class of the post-revolutionary farm once Farmer Jones had been thrown out) and the other animals argue over who gets the apples. Snowball (later ousted violently) tells the other animals that, although he personally doesn’t like apples, pigs are brain-workers and need the apples to keep their brains working, otherwise the farm will cease working properly and Jones would come back — and if there was one thing on which everyone was agreed, it was that they did not want Jones to come back. This comes to mind pretty much every time there is an election in which the purported ‘left’ are defending their position, despite having betrayed those who voted for them.
Recently, there has been much coverage of an inquiry, known as the Leveson inquiry after the presiding judge, into improper practices at a number of British popular newspapers. This started when it was revealed that the News of the World had employed private investigators who tampered with the voice-mails of not only celebrities but also victims of prominent crimes and other ordinary people, a practice which had gone on for decades, which in one case led the parents of a murdered schoolgirl (Milly Dowler) to believe she was alive when she in fact was not. Recently, a number of those whose lives have been damaged by press malpratice have been giving their testimony.
In the days since Col Gaddafi was killed, I have noticed that the western media are obsessed with ensuring that Libyan officials answer to western courts for things the régime did in the 1980s in Europe, such as the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 and even the Lockerbie bombing (in which their involvement, and that of Abdul-Baset al-Megrahi who is currently terminally ill, are heavily disputed). People have expressed huge regret that Gaddafi was killed, rather than taken to answer before a court for his crimes. The latter has been expressed by Libyans as well, particularly given that his death would stop him exposing the crimes of those who defected to the new régime during the war, but coming from westerners it always seems to refer to their involvement in international terrorism, not their repression and mass murder against Libyans.