Chris Bertram

So “David Blunkett has resigned”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4099581.stm . I felt pretty sympathetic to him concerning his private life, but let us all hope that his policy agenda departs with him.

It seems that no op-ed piece on the British government’s proposals to criminalize incitement to religious hatred is complete without some reference to Voltaire. So, for example, “Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1373878,00.html (and cf Toynbee “on the same subject”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1285291,00.html in August):

bq. Voltaire would have defended Islamic communities to the death from racists – but not set their beliefs beyond ordinary debate.

From Maurice Cranston’s “The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226118665/junius-20 pp. 100–101:

bq. It was amid these ominous stirrings that the _Letters from the Mountain_ [by Rousseau] arrived in Geneva like ‘a firebrand in a powder magazine’, a phrase used in a letter from Francois d’Ivernois to Rousseau and often repeated. One or two magistrates proposed burning the book immediately, and Voltaire wrote impassioned letters urging them to do so. Posing as a champion of Christianity, he pressed his best friend on the Petit Conseil, Francois Tronchin, to ensure that the government acted against a ‘seditious blasphemer’ and put a stop to ‘the audacity of a criminal’ not simply by burning the book but by punishing the author ‘with all the severity of the law’.

A commenter to “one of John Q’s posts”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002899.html suggested “Asia by Blog”:http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/cat_asia_by_blog.php, which provides a twice-weekly digest of links to asian blogs. And the same friend who drew that to my attention also recommended “Life in China”:http://www.zonaeuropa.com/lifeinchina.htm , a stunning collection of photographs without commentary.

Many across the bits of the blogosphere I read have declared themselves simply bowled-over by “the latest column from the Observer’s Nick Cohen”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1371935,00.html . Cohen is writing, _inter alia_ in opposition to David Blunkett’s deeply flawed proposal to ban incitement to religious hatred, and one passage in particular has been reproduced in full or in part on at least five blogs (“Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/cat_uk_politics.html#003048 ,
“Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/12/the_power_to_sh.html , “SIAW”:http://marxist-org-uk.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_marxist-org-uk_archive.html#110285818716789492 , “Mick Hartley”:http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/nick_cohen_gets.html , “Melanie Phillips”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000941.html ) :

bq. MPs didn’t point out that when society decides that people’s religion, rather than their class or gender, is the cultural fact that matters, power inevitably passes to the priests and the devout for whom religion does indeed matter most. To their shame, many on the left have broken with the Enlightenment to perform
this manoeuvre. They have ridden the Islamic wave and agreed to convert one billion people into ‘the Muslims’. A measure of their bad faith is that they would react with horror if this trick was pulled on them, and they were turned into ‘the Christians’ whose authentic representatives were the Archbishop of Canterbury and ‘Dr’ Ian Paisley.

I hope I’m not alone in being considerably less admiring of the passage in question.

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Further to “my post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002982.html on Lomborg below, here’s an idea. Maybe it isn’t new, but I’d still be grateful for critical comment. Lomborg says that it would be better to direct our resources to helping the world’s poor, rather than trying to implement Kyoto. Well, one thing first-world governments could do would be to introduce taxes on carbon emissions (many already have these) and to hypothecate those taxes (or some fixed proportion of them) to foreign-development aid.[1]

fn1. I take it that those who think that foreign aid is always a waste of money or counterproductive would not, themselves, put the Lomborg argument in good faith (whatever their opinions on CO2 and global warming). No need for them to comment below then.

Asia Source has “an interview with Amartya Sen”:http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/sen.cfm , which touches on the record of the World Bank and IMF, the evolution of Sen’s ideas on “capabilities”, democracy, the postwar histories of India and China, anticolonialism, and much else. (Found via “INBB”:http://www.inbb.org/ , which looks like a really interesting blog.)

Bjorn Lomborg has “a column in today’s Sunday Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/12/do1202.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/12/12/ixopinion.html arguing that it would be much better to spend money on helping the world’s poor than on Kyoto-style measures to cut carbon emissions. It is an interesting way of putting things, especially since, as he points out, the world’s poor are likely to be the principal victims of climate change. Thank goodness, then, that those governments most sceptical about Kyoto are also “among the most generous with their foreign-aid budgets”:http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp (scroll down for table). And shame on those Kyoto-enthusiasts who are, comparatively, so mean with their foreign-aid contributions (and who also tie what little aid they do give to compliance with their foreign-policy objectives).

Der Spiegel’s new English-language site has “an intruiging article”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,330728,00.html about foreigners — including a US strawberry-farmer, who have bought up German government bonds issued in the 1920s and are now trying to get the German government to pay the … billions. I have a vague memory that Piero Sraffa became fabulously rich (or his college did) because he bought up then-worthless Japanese government bonds during WW2 on the — correct — assumption that any postwar Japanese goverment would honour them. The Germans, unsurprisingly, don’t seem keen:

bq. But investors like Fulwood [the strawberry-farmer] don’t want to wait any longer: He’s the first to take on Germany’s Bundesbank, or central bankk, to force the government to pay up. On September 10, Fulwood filed suit in the 13th Judicial District, Hillsborough County, in Tampa, Florida.

bq. According to court documents, the strawberry farmer isn’t exactly asking for small change, either: Fulwood is demanding $382.5 million for 750 bonds.

bq. Other bond owners are also preparing to launch legal battles. In the United States, a group of investors has formed, seeking to turn 2,000 of the old bonds into cold, hard cash. In Italy, say insiders, the grandchild of former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie holds 20,000 of the bonds. And a U.S-based lawyer claims to represent the heir to Japan’s emperor, who allegedly owns “countless boxes filled with these bonds.”

Is this real? Or is it like those people who claim to own Manhattan?

The postgraduate colloquium at La Trobe have “archived their radio show”:http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/ltppc/web/radio.html on the web. I’ve listened to bits of the “democracy” programme and to this Pom’s ears, the participants begin by exuding a certain antipodean charm and thereby remind me of a certain Monty Python sketch … but the discussion gets serious pretty quickly. It continues the be marked by a certain Australian robustness, however, as when one participant utters the words:

bq. “.. if only those stupid arseholes out there would vote the right way, and take the right decision … yet we can’t disenfrancise any of them ….”

Other programmes have a bit too much of a po-mo ring about them for my taste, but others will disagree.

From the “FT’s review”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d98b25e6-4401-11d9-af06-00000e2511c8.html of Len Fisher’s Weighing the Soul :

bq. Weighing the Soul is a mine of delightful oddities, such as the origins of Galileo’s “scaling theory”, which is still used to estimate proportions when turning a model into an actual building. Early in his career Galileo was asked by the Pope to use his mathematical skills to work out the exact location and dimensions of Hell. His calculations showed it to be a cone-shaped structure with the point at the centre of the earth and the top a circle whose centre was below Jerusalem. The big structural problem was the unsupported roof, which spanned 5,000kms. Galileo claimed that the design used for the dome of the cathedral in Florence would do the job and was lavishly praised. In fact he rapidly realised that his calculations were wrong but kept it secret, only publishing the amended equations years later.

The Financial Times’s Simon Kuper is always worth reading, and in today’s paper he’s published “the best article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/95d75b52-441b-11d9-a5eb-00000e2511c8.html (by far) I’ve yet read on the anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands after the Van Gogh murder.

Via “Lance Knobel”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ , this “astonishing story”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0d159fbc-4408-11d9-be59-00000e2511c8.html from the Financial Times:

bq. US distributors of the film Merchant of Venice, which premiered in London this week, have asked the director to cut out a background fresco by a Venetian old master so it is fit for American television viewers…
According to [director Michael] Radford, there was “a very curious request which said ‘Could you please paint-box out the wallpaper?’. I said wallpaper, what wallpaper? This is the 16th century, people didn’t have wall-paper.”
When he examined the scenes, he realised the letter was referring to frescoes by Paolo Veronese, the acclaimed Venetian 16th-century artist, which, when examined closely, showed a naked cupid.
“A billion dollars worth of Veronese great master’s frescoes they want paint-boxed out because of this cupid’s willy. It is absolutely absurd,” he said.

I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses “the disproportionate impact on women in Africa”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4052531.stm . “India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/01/china.india.aids.reut/ , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the “South African Independent Online”:http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=vn20041201042230610C465958 . In Britain the “Guardian tells us”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1363277,00.html that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In “Lebanon”:http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=10570 , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda “a government minister warns the UN”:http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/11/113004uganda.htm not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.

I don’t want to turn Crooked Timber into a series of announcements for British radio shows, but I would like to give advance notice that “Alan Carling”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001911.html , sociologist, electoral candidate, and one of my collaborators on Imprints, is now on the radio with “Bradford Community Broadcasting”:http://www.bcb.yorks.com/index.php . His show — The Bradford Experience — goes out this Thursday, and he’ll be interviewing Home Office minister “Fiona McTaggart”:http://www.fionamactaggart.labour.co.uk/ . The show goes out from 1600-1700 (UK time) and I rather suspect they’ll be discussing race, religion, secularism and such matters. There’s sure to be plenty on the “live stream”:http://www.bcb.yorks.com/index.php that might interest — or infuriate — Harry, Ophelia Benson, Russell Arben Fox and others around these parts. So perhaps Crooked Timber can get Alan an audience beyond the limits of the Bradford–Leeds conurbation.

UPDATE: Alan tells me that the programme will be repeated on Saturday (9.00-10.00 am) and Sunday (4.00 – 5.00). He’ll also be interviewing the Bishop of Bradford.