Tariq Ali. Winston Churchill, his times, his crimes.

        

The book by Tariq Ali is a welcome respite from a cult of Churchill upheld by the British media. Quite tame criticism amidst ample praise in Geoffrey Wheatcroft's "Churchill's Shadow. The Life and the Afterlife of Winston Churchill" was called a "character assassination" and other names by the standard chorus of cheerleaders. Too bad, that together with sound judgements on his policies and legacy, as well as on the British Empire as a whole, the book contains unfair and, frequently, bizarre allegations against him. 

Churchill was a product of Victorian class society and must be judged accordingly. Furthermore, as any great political figure, his errors were equally great. Bismarck, Gandhi, Nehru, Deng Xiaoping and Boris Yeltsin also committed great mistakes but their riding on "coattails of G-d" (Bismarck's maxim) was undeniable. Policies of the British Empire were egotistic and, sometimes, genocidal? Who can name another great power, lest the power, which once ruled over quarter of humanity, which was innocent of those traits? For all its horrors, British colonial rule was considered by most, including natives more benign than almost any other power. One needs only to compare it with chaos and mismanagement of the Italian, French or Spanish colonial rule, or with the naked brutality of the Germans, Japanese, Belgians and Dutch. 

And Churchill, during a relatively short period of his position as the Prime Minister, was preoccupied by the titanic struggle with the Nazi Germany. He could hardly could foresee the challenges of the postwar Britain. 

Kate Darling. The New Breed.

 Kate Darling continues the tradition of the brilliant but nearly-narcissistic auteurs reviewed on this blog. The book is cool and capably written. The main thesis of the book is that robots evolve into human companions similarly to the path and significance animals took in the past. Being historically considered as implements (her judgement; not mine), domesticated animals became anthropomorphic incarnations of our own selves. 

P.S. She claims that there is no acceptable definition of 'robot' and cannot come with one, which is strange for the Harvard-trained jurist. I suggest the following working definition:

Robot is a machine having:

1) Intelligence, i.e. the capability to gather information from its environment and use it to modify one's own actions;

2) Capability of autonomous movements, and

3)  Articulated parts, by which it performs its main functions. 

There will always be borderline cases, but it seems this definition provides clear distinction between robots and other computerized devices.