Why are we still talking about Diana Spencer? I'm sure she was a lovely person. But I can't say that her record of achievement merits solemn hagiography. She was very pretty, and she was the most telegenic member of a vestigial royal family, and she was against land mines. Why is she on the front page?
« Tighter . . . and tighter . . . | Main | Why worry? » Mourning Di27 Aug 2007 05:09 pm Comments (33)
I love land mines--at least as employed by the Marines. Every minefield is mapped, and every minefield is watched and preferably covered by fire, i.e., weapons which will fire on anyone attempting to cross or breach the minefield. Once the need for the minefield has passed, the minefiled is dug up, destroyed, or permanently marked. I do not like land mines when employed by nations which do not employ them properly. 
And with this post I think we see why hard-nosed, libertarianesque analyses never, ever triumph in the political arena. Truthful, but so cold, so heartless, and so out of touch with people's emotions at a given moment.
Ectually, it's Diana Spencer Windsor. I'd like to y note that troops stationed, say, just south of the Korean DMZ likely think very highly of land mines.
"She was very pretty, and she was the most telegenic member of a vestigial royal family, and she was against land mines." And you don't even have those going for you.
Paul - I see where you are coming from and I apologise if i have offended you. My land-mine joke wasn't funny anyway! But this is not meant as all too serious. If I were to meet a di-hard Diana fan - I would not "talk like that..." But knowbody knew Diana. She is almost as virtual a product as.. Star Wars (and about 1 billion people, at least, would kill me for that claim alone). The Force is real.. or at least important?! I am an animal rights activist.. Every time I hear the line (they treated them) "like animals" - i take it almost personally.. as if if we knew that we treat animals badly and point it out only in the context to spare a dear human who we know or are somehow related to personally.. how much hypocrisy there is in only one line (as nobody who utters it has ever considered treating animals better himself) and yet not many people notice.. they do not mean to make fun of suffering or their own logic.. anyhow - now I sound as if i want to equate one bad with an atrocity ;-) I actually do - but no real harm intended and, again, apologies.
It's nice that Rex is so sanguine about the use of landmines by US Marines, I suppose. But consider this: "from the February 18, 2003 edition Another war, another round of land mines? These are not the nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons that President Bush charges Iraq is concealing, but they're equally indis- criminate and dangerous. Antipersonnel land mines emplaced by the US during the Gulf War in 1991, as well as those from the Iran-Iraq war, now continue to kill or maim up to 30 Iraqis each month. " That's from the Christian Science Monitor. Perhaps they were just joking.
Why are we still talking about Princess Diana? Because it sells newspapers, tabloids, magazines, memorabilia, documentaries, television advertisements, and John Elton albums. A market of consumers demands these products and suppliers are of course willing to produce and sell them. Supply and demand. Are you irritated? You shouldn't be. These are market forces at work. You love market forces and possibly wish to copulate with them. ;-)
Tabloid celebrity is hardly ever deserved, so at some level, questions of desert seem to be beside the point here. She seems to have been a better person than most on whom that sort of celebrity is bestowed, and she made good use of it (land mines). So I see nothing to criticize.
I thought her main claim to fame was being against AIDS before it was ultra-fashionable. Most of her big boosters were gay, and that sort of rings a chord with gay people. She was also against leprosy and for the children, two very heroic positions that are all too rare in modern society.
Not that I give a fat rat's ass about Di but...this hits awfully close to home doesn't it McMegan? "But I can't say that her record of achievement merits solemn hagiography." Sounds familiar. "She was very pretty, and she was the most telegenic member of a vestigial royal family," Well, you're probably prettier than Big Media Matt. "and she was against land mines. Why is she on the front page?" I don't know your stance on land mines I but ask myself that question about you, Megan every time a link brings me here.
In an era of Paris Hilton, K-Fed, etc, do you really need to ask that question?
Is this post something Ms. McArdle couldn't have written at her previous job?
I thought that comments were going to be filtered here? Is there no criteria. Honestly, while I think the original post wasn't necessarily merited - it just brought more attention to something that deserves NONE - snarky comments about the hostess and full-out insults??? WTF?
The HOSTESS? I think of her as more of a drunken tour guide in the wilderness of neo-liberalism. The assessment that she confirms in each of her posts was made on the Yglesias blog when her Atlantic blog was announced: "Megan McArdle is weapons-grade stupid." Her acquaintance with landmines seems to be limited to her current blogging.
Megan's not stupid. She's just a blinkered Chicago-school economist who looks at everything in life as a zero-sum economic transaction. Apparently. And she doesn't understand why people loved Princess Diana. After all, the British royal family don't seem to contribute anything in economic terms so what good are they?
I really don't understand her continued fame, either. I understand that her death was tragic, but I honestly have no idea why everyone cared THEN, let alone ten years later. I was very young at the time, and the only reason I remember her death at all (other than her persistent appearances in news headlines ten years later) is that she died within a few days of an actually interesting and inspiring individual, Mother Teresa. I imagine that most of you are older than I am, and perhaps ten years doesn't seem that long to you, but I was not yet 13 when Di cashed in, and I'm now in my twenties. Before she died, I had no clue that she had ever existed. It was a long time ago. She was kinda pretty (bad hairdos notwithstanding), and spent some time as a member of England's national mascot team (the royal family), before an ugly public divorce, and then she died in a car crash. It was sad. I'm sure that her family and friends (if she had any) still think of her often, but for the rest of us, it's water under the bridge. Why have we not moved on?
Wow, this site really epitomizes the argument against allowing comments! What a fertile bunch of anonyroaches infests this place.
"...this hits awfully close to home doesn't it McMegan" Did the tenth anniversary of Megan's death elicit similar coverage in the global press? "Sounds familiar." Does it? I was unaware that anyone had written a "solemn hagiography" of Megan. "...ask myself that question about you, Megan every time a link brings me here." You ask yourself "why is Megan on the front page?" every time a link brings you here? The front page of what -- her own blog? "snarky comments about the hostess" Please. "Snark" implies wit.
ML&J, Note the part about the mines being left over from the Iran-Iraq war? I'd guess that the article is just a typical anti-american snark, because I don't remember setting up any defensive emplacements inside Iraq during GW I. In case you've forgotten, we liberated Kuwait, where most of the fighting was, and went into Iraq only long enough to shatter the Iraqi Republican guard.
For several decades now, intelligence has been understood to be a multi-dimensional metric. Megan's peculiarly misshapen distribution of mental abilities accounts for the continuing embarrassments of her blog posts. Ms. McArdle appears to have huge deficits of empathy, compassion, common sense, and historical perspective. The cheap trick of writing a few paragraphs of cold-blooded contrarian analysis simply accentuates, again and again, her shallowness. Is it too much to ask for the Atlantic to pick a blogger with some substance, instead of a fumbling neo-liberal who views human existence as a collection of coin-operated machines?
Liberalrob: Positive-sum. That economic transactions are almost always positive-sum is one of the foundational principles of economics. It's the lefties who have a zero-sum view.
Rex, I was going to agree with you, but I did a little digging. According to DoD reports, all services combined to use approximately 118,000 landmines during the 1991 Gulf War. About 90,000 were anti-vehicle and the rest were anti-personnel. The majority were delivered by Gator cluster bomb, with the Marines delivering some by artillery. So much for mapping and digging them up. However, it seems that since the early eighties the US has exclusively used 'smart mines' which self-destruct after a predetermined time, which is of course not mentioned in the CS Monitor article.
Megan,
Megan,
You ask yourself "why is Megan on the front page?" every time a link brings you here? The front page of what -- her own blog? McMegan owns this blog? Wow. I am impressed. Parsing is fun.
Thanks, Jim. As I believe I said in my earlier comment, minefields are supposed to be dug up, destroyed, or permanently marked after the need has passed. Sure sounds like those mines were permanently destroyed, doesn't it?
Rex, I think the main issue with land mines is that usually war is pretty much a continuous series of foulups. This may not apply so much to American forces in recent wars, which (except when hobbled by political concerns, e.g. the "Blackhawk Down incident") have been very lopsided in our favor, but in general, you can't count on the guys who planted the mines surviving to file the proper reports. If they do get back to HQ and report, you can't count on the unit being able to remain in the area until the minefield can be removed. You can't count on the files of minefield locations not getting lost or destroyed when HQ is bombed or has to pick up and scram suddenly. If none of those problems happened but you "marked" the minefield and left, those markers aren't going to be there ten years later when some poor farmer decides he needs to plant more land. And even if none of those things happen, I saw daily screwups during the peacetime years when I was in the service - and having people shooting at you certainly increases the pressure and chances for error! So there is a big problem with mines, although it's probably 99% with other than American mines. (And better than that if we are using self-destruct timers. Any idea what the failure rate of those timers is?) Of course, there are also dud bombs and artillery shells, which often plunge into the ground and lay there corroding until the least disturbance will set them off, and if reporters will believe a woman who shows them unfired cartridges and claims the "bullets" hit her house, they'll believe that any underground explosion was a "mine".
We're always likely to impute Not my own.
"McMegan owns this blog? Wow. I am impressed." She does not, I presume, own the domain name theatlantic.com. But they did set up a subdomain (meganmcardle.theatlantic.com) for her to blog on, it's named after her, and she's the only one who posts here. So I don't see much controversy in referring to it as "her blog". If you have a problem with this, I can only assume that when a flight attendant instructs you to "fasten your seat belt", you respond "I don't own a seat belt, can I use this one?".
I never really understood the hype about Diana, either... but I don't get any of the obsession with the Royals in the UK or the world. Nor do I care about any of the celebs that are plasted all over magazines at the store. The whole land mine thing seemed pretty stupid to me. War kills people. Weapons used in war are dangerous. Land mines are a weapon of war. Unlike others, they can hang around for a long time, but I'm happy for the US to continue using them with appropriate safe guards. I'm more interested in banning dictators who destroy the economies of their countries to enrich themselves and enslave their populations to facilitate this. I think the land mine problem would largely go away if we did that. EI
"Ectually, it's Diana Spencer Windsor." No, after her divorce it was Diana, Princess of Wales but when a surname was needed she would be styled Diana Frances Mountbatten-Windsor.
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WHAT.. "was"??? she is.. dead??? Oh my god - what is going on? It was only last week that I saw on TV that Elvis has left the building?
Jokes aside - i think there is an Al Qaeda connection behind her death? seriously! after all - the Arab dude who was allowed to buy Harold's was refused the British citizenship.. and the UK gives those out to anybody. Then his son bangs the princess and.. BANG.. both dead. Coincidence? The odour goes back through Iraq, Iran to North-West Pakistan (you know - right at the border with Afghanistan). But there is also some Saudi-Money involved and Egyptian straw-men. I am actually writing a book about the whole thing and expect to break some charts and cause some wars!
PS: I liked that Di was against land-mines.. I do not know many people who do not like land-mines.. or I do not like many famous people who do not like land-mines and do something about it.. there are many famous people who like the idea of helping a sweet African baby but not many go out and adopt one.. walk the talk - like Diana.
Posted by Hugo | August 27, 2007 6:10 PM