Chris Bertram

Over at his blog, Stephen Pollard “reproduces his own article from the Times”:http://www.stephenpollard.net/001786.html . A few paragraphs:

bq. The Anthony Powell Society is to give its annual Widmerpool award this year to the journalist Sir Max Hastings. The award is in honour of Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the 20th century’s great fictional characters, a recurring presence in Powell’s series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.

bq. According to the society: “Widmerpool is variously pompous; self-obsessed and self-important; obsequious to those in authority and a bully to those below him. He is ambitious and pushy; ruthless; humourless; blind to the feelings of others; and has a complete lack of self-knowledge.”

bq. The description is redolent of so many characters in public life that more must be made of it.

Indeed, Stephen, indeed ….

Maybe someone can help me out here. I idly surfed to some of the far reaches of lunacy last night and ended up at David Horowitz’s Front Page Mag, there I found “an interview with someone called Bat Ye’or”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15044 whom further googling revealed to be quite well-known, though not to me. It also revealed that “this character”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Ye%27or is regularly cited and linked to approvingly by people like Melanie Phillips who, in turn, are approvingly linked to by others …. Anyway, this is Bat Ye’or’s summary of the recent history of the European Union:

bq. Eurabia represents a geo-political reality envisaged in 1973 through a system of informal alliances between, on the one hand, the nine countries of the European Community (EC)which, enlarged, became the European Union (EU) in 1992 and on the other hand, the Mediterranean Arab countries. The alliances and agreements were elaborated at the top political level of each EC country with the representative of the European Commission, and their Arab homologues with the Arab League’s delegate. This system was synchronised under the roof of an association called the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) created in July 1974 in Paris. A working body composed of committees and always presided jointly by a European and an Arab delegate planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the application of the decisions. …. Eurabia is the future of Europe. Its driving force, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, was created in Paris in 1974….

This seems to me to rank alongside the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Faked Moon Landings, Kennedy assassination conspiracies and the like. Yet this person has spoken at a United Nations Commission on Human Rights-organized conference and spoken before the United States Congress…..

Yusuf Islam — the former singer once known as Cat Stevens — “has been banned from the United States”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3678694.stm . And not just banned, they actually diverted the plane 600 miles to Maine to remove him from it. He’s made some equivocal statements in the past, but more recently “has been forthright in his condemnation of terrorism”:http://catstevens.com/news.html?id=00174 . Perhaps there’s something we don’t know, but, on the surface, this looks like a bad mistake. Ordinary Muslims will be bound to see this as hostility to their religion as such rather than just to extremists and terrorists.

The Observer, the Guardian’s Sunday-stablemate — and so the liberal paper of record for that day of the week — carried an account by one Sebastian Horsley of his “1000+ encounters with prostitutes”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1306267,00.html . This now features as one of today’s items on “A&L Daily”:http://www.aldaily.com/. Now Horsley’s tale may be true, but any reader savvy enough “to feed his name into Google”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&q=%22Sebastian+Horsley%22&btnG=Search will find that the very same Observer carried a feature on “the same guy and his struggle with heroin”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1241264,00.html and another on how, as “a performance artist, he crucified himself”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,722216,00.html . Seeing the various stories together certainly affects the epistemic situation of the reader, shall we say.

bq. “If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there.”

The “BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/3673568.stm that “Brian Clough”:http://www.brianclough.com/ has died. A sad loss after a sad decline. But his “achievements”:http://www.brianclough.com/new_page_4.htm — including back-to-back European Cups with an otherwise unexceptional team — speak for themselves. Bill Shankly said of him “He’s worse than the rain in Manchester. At least the rain in Manchester stops occasionally.” Now he’s stopped forever.

I sometimes wonder about the utility of mentioning films on CT because by the time us Brits get to see them (UK release dates being later than those in the US) they’ve often finished playing in cinemas in the US and elsewhere. But Richard Eyre’s “Stage Beauty”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368658/ , which I caught on Saturday is an exception. Set at the time of the Restoration, it explores the fate of Ned Kynaston, a male actor who specializes in female roles (women being prohibited from performing). When the law is changed, first to allow women on the stage and then to prohibit men from playing them altogether, Kynaston is out of a job. I won’t post spoilers but just say that what we get includes a good deal of exploration of sexual identity and sexuality. And I also laughed out loud (a lot) at some parts and was moved by others. (Sarah from the excellent “Just Another False Alarm”:http://www.rubberring.blogspot.com/ has “more”:http://rubberring.blogspot.com/2004_09_12_rubberring_archive.html#109495045156434120 — but with spoilers).

“A & L Daily”:http://www.aldaily.com/ is giving prominence to “an article by one Thomas F. Powers”:http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2004/argument_powers_sepoct04.html “an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth” arguing that a policy of “preventive detention an idea whose time has come”. There’s much that’s worthy of comment in Powers’s piece, not least the fact that he writes that ” we should look to other countries, especially England and Israel, which have crafted preventive detention policies with meaningful safeguards for due process.” England? !! Is this assistant professor of political science’s political geography really that bad? Anyway, he has this to say about the British Government’s internment policy introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971:

bq. Great Britain’s indefinite internment policy, formalized in 1973 following the recommendations of a famous report authored by Lord Diplock on the situation in Northern Ireland, was allowed to lapse in 1980. Lord Diplock was reacting to a legally murky use of police power, one he termed “imprisonment at the arbitrary Diktat of the Executive Government.” Though his reform proposal, incorporated in the 1973 Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, made preventive detention a matter of administrative, not judicial, oversight, the new policy reasserted civilian control and included due process safeguards. No less a figure than the secretary of state for Northern Ireland made initial detention determinations. Within a period of 28 days, an administrative official would then review each case with the option to extend the detention. Those detained also had a right to be informed of their status hearing in advance, and they were granted the right to an attorney paid for by the government.

“Mick Fealty”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/ or “Marc Mulholland”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/ (or maybe other Timberites) could comment more authoritatively than I can on the strict accuracy of Powers’s account (1980 seems an odd date to choose for internment to lapse… and those of us who actually remember the period will wince at the rhetorical phrase “no less a figure than”). But it does seem strange to cite the Northern Ireland experience _in support_ of a policy of preventive detention. Here’s “the CAIN summary”:http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/intern/chron.htm of the introduction of internment and the political and security effects of the policy:

bq. In a series of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested and taken to makeshift camps. There was an immediate upsurge of violence and 17 people were killed during the next 48 hours. Of these 10 were Catholic civilians who were shot dead by the British Army. Hugh Mullan (38) was the first Catholic priest to be killed in the conflict when he was shot dead by the British Army as he was giving the last rites to a wounded man. Winston Donnell (22) became the first Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) solider to die in ‘the Troubles’ when he was shot by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) near Clady, County Tyrone. [There were more arrests in the following days and months. Internment was to continue until 5 December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were detained; 1,874 were Catholic / Republican, while 107 were Protestant / Loyalist. Internment had been proposed by Unionist politicians as the solution to the security situation in Northern Ireland but was to lead to a very high level of violence over the next few years and to increased support for the IRA. Even members of the security forces remarked on the drawbacks of internment.]

I just posted and (then deleted) a link to the BBC’s On this Day page, which I think is generally well worth a look. The reason for deletion was just that today is 19th September and the BBC were still linking to the 17th from their front page. Still, on _that_ day (the one I first linked to) the major item was the “60th anniversary of the Arnhem drop”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/17/newsid_3662000/3662264.stm , complete with links to audio footage and an animated map. But what also caught my eye was “a page about the Sabra and Chatila massacres”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/17/newsid_2519000/2519637.stm (22 years ago) by Lebanese Phalangists, a reminder that the murder of children is not the monopoly of any one faith or political current. Yesterday’s anniversaries were also noteworthy: they include “the arrival of the first Ugandan Asian refugees”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/18/newsid_2522000/2522627.stm in Britain (a great blow to the viability of Uganda and, as it has turned out, a major bonus for the UK). Today’s page has “the refusal of the US to allow Charlie Chaplin to re-enter the country”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/19/newsid_3102000/3102179.stm (1952) and the “Southall Rail Crash”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/19/newsid_2524000/2524283.stm (1997), the consequences of which are still very much with us.

Mira Bar-Hillel has an “interesting piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=old&section=current&issue=2004-09-18&id=5036 about the way in which English Heritage has undermined its own role by backing a deal not to reconstruct the Baltic Exchange in the City. I did a little googling to find out what the old building looked like and I was surprised to discover that the whole thing is up for sale in a dismantled state! Not on ebay, but on a web page of “Complete Large Buildings for Sale”:http://www.salvoweb.com/complete-buildings/forsale.html (scroll down). I happen to think that the Baltic Exchange would serve nicely as a new Crooked Timber corporate headquarters, though getting my colleagues’ agreement on location might be difficult.

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the latest in a series of conferences under the name “Priority in Practice”:http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctyjow/September2004.htm , which Jo Wolff has organized at UCL. I don’t think I’d be diminishing the contribution of the other speakers by saying that “Michael Marmot”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/epidemiology/staff/marmot.html was the real star of the show. He’s well known for the idea that status inequality is directly implicated in health outcomes, a thesis that he promotes in his most recent book “Status Syndrome”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0747570493/junius-21 and which first came to the fore with his Whitehall Study which showed that more highly promoted civil servants live longer even when we control for matters like lifestyle, smoking etc. Even when people have enough, materially speaking, their position in a status hierarchy still impacts upon their longevity. One interesting other finding that he revealed was that being in control at home (as opposed to at work) was massively important in affecting women’s longevity, but didn’t really impact upon men. There’s “an excellent interview of Marmot by Harry Kreisler of Berkeley”:http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Marmot/marmot-con0.html in which he outlines his central claims.

OK, so this may be the first and last time I quote anything by Steven Den Beste with approval, but “this observation about blogging”:http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/08/Thanksforallthefish.shtml (and comments) struck me as right on the money.

bq. I’ve learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren’t also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.

(via “Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/ ).

One interesting recent strand of research on justice and human well-being has been that inspired by Amartya Sen’s “capability” approach. There’s now an association dedicated to this, with Sen as its first President and Martha Nussbaum as President-elect. Details “here”:http://www.hd-ca.org/about.php .

The New York TImes has a “horrific report on the extent of pollution in China”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/international/asia/12china.html?hp and on the people who are bearing the costs of growth:

bq. Less than a mile downstream from the waste outlet, Wang Haiqing watched his seven goats chew on weeds. Mr. Wang lived on the other side of the stream, in Wangguo, and said several neighbors had contracted cancer or other intestinal ailments. He said his goats vomited if they drank from the blackened water.

bq. To reach clean drinking water, he said villagers must dig wells 130 feet deep. Most cannot afford to do so.

bq. “It’s been so polluted by the MSG factory,” said Mr. Wang, 60. “It tastes metallic even after you boil it and skim the stuff off it. But it’s the only water we have to drink and to use for cooking.”

This is fun: a “quiz based on McDonald’s Happy Meal game instructions”:http://explorers.whyte.com/34l/default.htm . Can you recognize the languages? (Via “Des von Bladet”:http://piginawig.diaryland.com/index.html ).