Today and tomorrow I'm otherwise engaged, so normblog will be resting. There is a conference in Manchester to discuss the work of my longtime friend and colleague Hillel Steiner, and that's where I'm going to be. I should be back here on Sunday.

Gnotalex is a Canadian blogger, now living in Alberta and blogging from an attic somewhere, maybe yours. He is in his 50s. He blogs at The Blog Québécois.

Why do you blog? > For the money, fame and chicks, of course. Which is so gonna happen any day now. If only they could figure out who I am.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Try to remain consistent with your output, ideally posting at least something every day. Slow and steady won't win the race, but it will get you some regular readers.

What are your favourite blogs? > Ace of Spades HQ; Small Dead Animals; Tim Blair.

What are you reading at the moment? > Erik Larson's The Devil In The White City - the (real-life) intersection of H.H. Holmes, considered one of America's first serial murderers, and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Mark Steyn; Garry Kasparov; Pete Townshend.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Orwell. A frighteningly prescient book.

What is your favourite poem? > T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'.

What is your favourite movie? > Irma la Douce.

What is your favourite song? > 'Won't Get Fooled Again' by The Who.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. It was impossible after reading it to regard the Soviet Union (and Communism in general) as anything but a malignant tumour, as compared to the summer camp with a few bad counsellors that our laughable MSM would have had you believe.

Who are your political heroes? > Ronald Reagan; Margaret Thatcher; Václav Havel.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > This global-warming farce. To declare war on '... the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all known lifeforms, and in the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen. This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life. (Wikipedia)' is beyond parody; only a greedy, preening dolt (c'mon down, Al Gore!) could possibly believe it. The Canadian Government should boycott the upcoming Copenhagen conference and dare Gaia to do her worst.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > I'm perfectly happy with Canada's present PM, Stephen Harper. Politics is very much the art of the possible, and I'd far rather have someone deliver 80 per cent of what I want than 80 per cent of what I don't.

What would you do with the UN? > If fumigation is successful, I would redevelop it into luxury condos. Failing that, the words 'bulldozer' and 'East River' come to mind.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > See above.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > Depends on the size of her zoomers. (Serious answer: No.)

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > Arthur Koestler famously described World War II as 'the war of the half-lie against a total lie'. (Possibly a paraphrase.) That would seem a good place to start.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > I've totally given up on writing to Barack Obama with friendly advice. He's unteachable, if you ask me.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd certainly be more focused.

What would you call your autobiography? > I Can't Believe You're Reading This.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Sean Penn. Just for the pleasure of watching his head explode.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Japan. The country has long fascinated me.

What would your ideal holiday be? > By the time February rolls around, anywhere warm and sandy.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > I've lately taken up sketching and painting (watercolours). I'm by no means a natural, but I sometimes surprise myself.

What is your most treasured possession? > My Fender Stratocaster guitar.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Something crazy like 'knotalex' or 'pnotalex'.

What talent would you most like to have? > Computer programming. I write small programs occasionally, but it'd be nice to be able to tackle big, complex projects like Will Wright (The Sims, Spore) or Sid Meier (Civilization, Railroad Tycoon).

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Musician.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > David Burge, a.k.a. Iowahawk, the deadliest satirist in the blogosphere.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood. At least, the late 50s-early 60s incarnations of same. There will be much laughter and scintillating conversation, followed by after-dinner brandies, cigars, and several spirited rounds of semi-nude Jello wrestling (Greco-Roman rules).

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Brian Whitaker worries that Barack Obama risks getting in a muddle about the meaning of respect as between countries, but I don't find that his discussion of the issue clarifies things.

Here's a simple distinction: one person can respect another while not respecting some of her opinions. He might find one or other of these stupid or unpleasant or even dangerous, but not deny the other person respect, whether because he thinks she's an admirable sort all in all, or because respect for others is his default position, or for whatever other reason or combination of reasons.

Adapting this now to the case of countries: one political leader can express respect for another and for the country she represents, both in a personal sense - he observes various social forms of respect and is sincere in doing so - and in the more political sense of acknowledging that the other represents a sovereign country, and that that sovereignty is accepted within certain limits (limits prohibiting genocide, crimes against humanity and so forth). This form of respect may go along with respecting values and procedures important to the culture and/or politics of the sovereign country concerned; or it may not. And therefore it may not. Just as one person can respect another without respecting all her beliefs, so one political leader can be respectful in his dealings with another and express his and his country's respect for the sovereignty of the other's country, but still speak openly about differences of moral or political principle. He can choose to do this in mild terms, or more robust ones, or very severely. He can indeed speak disrespectfully of certain beliefs and practices without that necessarily detracting either from his personally respectful relation to the other leader or from the respect for national sovereignty that is the norm between nations. It can sometimes be tricky, obviously, to disparage another's beliefs or practices while maintaining a posture of person-to-person respect, but it is certainly possible.

That all leaves wide open the question of what combination of respect and frank talking is called for in the dealings of political leaders representing democratic countries with leaders who do not. And there is a lot of argument about how the balance should be struck in particular cases. But this is just the stuff, and the difficulty, of global politics. There's no muddle inherent to the issue, or to Obama's way with it.

That, argues Roger Cohen, is the best that can be expected for the time being in Israel-Palestine. You can read the details of his argument for yourself; but the bottom line is that peace isn't available until Israeli (and, I presume, Palestinian) psychology shifts. Hence this advice to Obama: 'Stop talking about peace.' Why one shouldn't talk in such a way as to try and help shift the prevailing psychology, Cohen fails to explain. Where shall we go next? Stop talking about democratization in Zimabwe or Iran?

What is a blog? Well, you know what one is. You read blogs often - or from to time to time anyway. But you may want a definition all the same. So I'll point you to a few. Here is Wikipedia's:

A blog (a contraction of the term "web log") is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order...

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.

Here are some other definitions, all much of a muchness. Note that the Wikipedia entry also has this:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

And according to this, it is most blogs that enable comments. So, some blogs don't enable comments though many or most do. Along with the definitions sampled that are silent on this score, it would appear to be the case that blogs either do allow comments or they don't.

However, you will occasionally come across the view that if a site doesn't allow comments it isn't a blog, and this view was expressed with some feeling yesterday by Tom Paine at The Last Ditch: normblog, he insists, is 'never a blog... [because] a blog provides the opportunity for readers to comment'. Be my guest, Tom. If you want that normblog isn't a blog, feel free to call it something else - a lobg, or a glob; or a blocg, maybe. I'm not that bothered. People can name things how they want. But here's another way of looking at the thing. Along with other... er, websites that don't enable comments, normblog is commonly referred to as a blog, and you shouldn't take your own preference for all of reality, even it is only semantic reality. Tom wants to be able to comment on something I write? He can do so. He can do it by email to me, or he can do it for anyone else's benefit on his own blog. He has a perfect liberty there. But should he want just to have his comments on my blo[c]g, then tough - unless it is by arrangement. Long live libertarianism. I have given my reasons here. Tom isn't even obliged to agree with them. It's a wonderful world, full of variety. And part of that variety is that Tom isn't the sole arbiter of public meanings.

Further on the trial - now to be held in a US federal court - of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others: I'm puzzled by the the objection that it will provide terrorism with a platform. Doesn't this betray a lack of confidence in the appeal of the rule of law relative to acts of terrorist mass murder? That America is willing to put these men on trial, to accord them due process, will itself be testimony to the strength and superiority of American democracy vis-à-vis the methods they prefer. Taking up the opposing objection, Steven Simon writes:

Historically, the public exposure of state-sponsored mass murder or terrorism through a transparent judicial process has strengthened the forces of good and undercut the extremists.

I commented yesterday on the widespread practice of people commenting on nothing - by which I don't mean not commenting on anything, but rather commenting on matters that don't amount to anything. I now raise this to a second-order activity, by pointing out such a nothing comment. Why did Gordon Brown laugh while walking along? Next up: why did the Doge of Didge House scratch his ear?

The BBC Trust has rejected calls for non-religious contributors to be allowed on Radio 4's Thought for the Day.

Complaints were made earlier this year that banning atheists, secularist[s] or humanists from taking part in Thought for the Day breached the BBC's guidelines on impartiality.
.....
The National Secular Society, which was one of the complainants, said it would continue to look at "other ways of challenging this unjustifiable slot"[.]

The contemporary phenomenon of round-the-clock, round-the-world, round-the-houses media and internet commentary on just about everything that happens in public life has a lot to be said for it. I'll just say two of the things by way of indication: it makes it easier to stay informed; and it gives far more people than used to have it a voice in the forums where issues are raised and clarified. But there are also some less positive sides, and one of these is that there's hardly anything that doesn't get up somebody's nose. I don't know, you look around and some things you think 'Hey, that's interesting' or 'Hey, this is worrying' or 'Gee, how funny'. But often don't you just think 'Nah, nothing'? Yet there ain't nothing that isn't something to somebody.

Take Obama's bow to the emperor of Japan. I mean, he was greeting the guy - respectfully. Maybe too respectfully. Maybe he bowed too far. Maybe he shouldn't have bowed at all. Maybe it was just right. Maybe it was nearly right, but not quite right. You can count on there being, even in this matter, every shade of opinion and analysis, every nuance, inflection of meaning, every angle of the eyebrow and lay-out of the brow. Does it really matter in the larger scheme of political life? No prizes for the answer. Some of the comment was plain demented.

A poll commissioned by the MCC has found that only a small proportion of cricket followers in India, South Africa and New Zealand name Test cricket as their favourite form of the game. Peter Roebuck expresses his alarm, and I don't blame him. Whatever can be done to keep Test cricket where it belongs - that is, (a) in existence and (b) at the top of world cricket's own ranking of the forms of the game over which it presides - should be done. But I part company with Roebuck when he assigns responsibility for the falling popularity of Test cricket. He says:

Plain and simple, five-day cricket has lost its audience and the reason is simple. It's not a good enough product, has not worked hard enough on its presentation.

Presentation, maybe; ticket prices and facilities, indeed. But the product in its integral sense - the Test match and the Test series - is not only 'good enough', it's fine, and rather better than fine. Popularity matters, and the economic basis of the game can't be ignored. But you don't judge the quality of everything by how popular it is. The danger of doing so is that Test cricket will not be looked after properly.

Swindon, face of the future. Yep, you better believe it. Next up, Manchester, why not?

Thomas Axworthy asks, 'Do we have a moral obligation or a state interest in making democratic attainment for others as essential a priority as it is for ourselves?' His answer is yes, and he sets out the priorities of democracy-promotion as he sees them. Strange to relate, Axworthy doesn't view democracy-promotion as a form of cultural oppression. He accentuates, instead, 'the value of outside support for dissidents and those who fight for democracy'. Incalculable is what he calls it.

In Haiti, Afghanistan, Cuba and Zimbabwe, Canada can bring a... message of freedom and hope to those brave enough to fight autocracy.

It's what used to be known as solidarity.

Whatever one may think about the issues raised in my previous post, it seems safe to say that what is reported here is an unjustified inequality:

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce - 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

That's in a very rich country - which explains the following sentiment:

"This is unthinkable. It's like we are living in a Third World country," said Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America, the largest organization representing food banks and other emergency food sources.

It should, however, be unthinkable for children to have to go hungry anywhere.

In opening an article on inequality, Göran Therborn proposes three ways of distinguishing between an inequality and a (mere) difference. He writes:

First, a difference may be horizontal, without anything or anybody being higher or lower, better or worse, whereas an inequality is always vertical, or involves ranking. Secondly, differences are matters of taste and/or of categorisation only. An inequality, on the other hand, is not just a categorisation; it is something that violates a moral norm of equality among human beings... Thirdly, for a difference to become an inequality it must also be abolishable. The greater physical prowess of the average 20-year-old in comparison with the average 60-year-old is not an inequality. But the different social life-chances of women as compared to men, or of black working-class boys in comparison with white bankers boys, have come to be seen as inequalities. In one sentence: inequalities are avoidable, morally unjustified, hierarchical differences.

I must say, I have my doubts about all of these three distinctions - though doubts is what they are rather than entirely settled contrary convictions. This post should be taken only as the beginning of an effort to think the issue through.

Let's start from the second of Therborn's three differentiations. By saying that an inequality violates a moral norm of equality he moralizes the concept of an inequality. He thereby makes it impossible for us to agree that there is, descriptively, an inequality between two people - in the wealth they possess, say, or the size of their pensions, or of their gardens, or the number of their children - while at the same time disagreeing over whether these inequalities are acceptable or justified ones. It is true that everyone values equalities of some kinds, and that they therefore disvalue certain inequalities. A person who favours equality of opportunity, for example, will be critical of certain kinds of barrier closing off opportunities to one group of people that are available to others; they will see these as creating inequalities of the 'resource' they want equalized. By the same token, however, they will not be in favour of equality of outcomes or exact equality of material property. It should be possible - in opposition to Therborn's second criterion - to describe an inequality without prejudging whether it is a good or a bad one.