Museum losses

Charlie Stross draws comparisons between the museum losses in Baghdad and hypothetical losses of equal scale in London.

Imagine London bombed. The V&A trashed, the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels looted, the British Library complex on Euston Road burned (along with all those annoying old bits of paper like the original draft of Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, and so on), the Natural History Museum used as a defensive fortification and shelled. (Goodbye, Apollo 10.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden also has an excellent summary of where we are right now, generously supplemented by commentary on the Free Republic crowd and Andrew Sullivan.