I assume that everyone reads “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/ , but if not, they should. Belle linked the other day to his coverage of the burned double agent story. But, of course, he is best know for his continuing coverage of Iraq. One popular narrative has the current Iraqi government as the harbingers of peace and democracy, impeded in their efforts by ex-Baathists, Al Qaida, the Mehdi Army, the Iranians, etc, and therefore fully justified in using all the force at their disposal to establish order. If I read Cole correctly there is another, competing story, the credibility of which is bolstered by the arrest warrants against the Chalabis (including the one in charge of Saddam’s trial). Namely that Allawi and his allies are using their position, and their access to US and allied firepower, to crush their competitors for political power. The distinction between these narratives is somewhat blurred, of course, by the fact that the current objects of repressive or judicial action are or include very many people who are indeed rogues, gangsters, fanatics, etc. Still, I wouldn’t bet my house on the first version, in which Allawi and co will turn out to have been the good guys, there will be genuinely competitive elections, the righteous will flourish and the unjust will be punished, and so on.
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Chris Bertram
It seems that Prozac is “being prescribed so widely in the UK”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3545684.stm that there’s a buildup in our drinking water:
bq. Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation’s drinking water, it has been revealed.
bq. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater.
See also “The Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1278760,00.html.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” So said George Orwell, in a quote adopted by British blog “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ . It is a quote worth recalling in “the light of the decision of the Iraqi government”:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/9C888134-9481-485A-A675-DD3C50DA224D.htm “to close”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3545514.stm down “Al Jazeera’s”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage Baghdad offices for a month. The new “Iraqi foreign minister justified the closure”:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A3BF4F15-97CC-4B0B-BAFE-55A1CB3D859F.htm in these terms:
bq. Hoshyar Zibari accused Aljazeera, along with other Arabic language satellite channels, of “incitement” and hiding behind media freedoms.
bq. Zibari said the channel’s coverage of Iraq was “one-sided” and “distorted”.
bq. He made the comments in an interview with an Aljazeera correspondent during an offcial visit to Moscow on Sunday.
bq. “They [Aljazeera and other Arabic channels] have all become incitement channels which are against the interests of security, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people,” Zibari said.
bq. He added “the new Iraqi government will not tolerate these kinds of intentional breaches and violations”.
Looks like the new Iraqi government doesn’t think people should have the right to tell them what they don’t want to hear.
UPDATE: “This piece”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=549052 on Al-Jazeera by David Usborne in the Independent is worth reading.
The Guardian have “a long extract from Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1277111,00.html , an entertaining polemic against hard-work, time-keeping, self-improvement, and Protestant anxiety: a worthy riposte to those who think the quality of life is best measured in terms of per capita income. It also gives me an excuse to link to Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to be Lazy”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ .
Most of the on-line obituaries for Henri Cartier-Bresson are photograph-free, which is a bit pointless. But the “New York Times is an exception”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/arts/04CND-CARTIER.html?hp , and includes links beyond to Magnum and elsewhere.
UPDATE: _Libération_ has “a good set of links”:http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=228457 to HCB galleries on the web.
I bought a copy of “Transformer”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001U3K/junius-20 the other day. I was fourteen when it first came out in December 1972, and I probably paid about the same amount of money back then (£5), or maybe the year after. 1972 is a long time ago — thirty-two years — but Transformer is clearly an album that lives on this side of a temporal watershed. If a song with the lyrical content of “Walk on the Wild Side” had been made ten years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have received much exposure, and certainly wouldn’t have been in the record collections of fourteen-year-olds (invisibly shaping their perception of sexual possibility and acceptability). But if it is an album from _now_, rather than _then_, it is still stiking how close it was to _then_. In Britain the Sexual Offences Act had been passed only five years before. _Five years_ . Not that the following years have been ones of seamless progress, what with “Section 28”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 and that.
To check on some of the dates, I looked at this “gay rights timeline”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_rights_timeline . Shocking — so shocking — to read entries like the following
bq. * 1945 – Upon the liberation of concentration camps by Allied forces, those interned for homosexuality are not freed, but required to serve out the full term of their sentences under Paragraph 175
Unimaginable. And yet closer in time to 1972 than we are. Remember that next time you hear a commentator deploring the influence of the 1960s.
“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/001764.html reports that “Sidney Morgenbesser”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/ has died at the age of 92 [Sorry, that’s what NPR said, the right age is 82]. NPR have “an audio tribute with Arthur Danto”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3810783 . I’ll post links to obituaries as they appear. There was a rash of Morgenbesser anecdotes posted a while back, the best place to start is probably with “this post at Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/05/more_sydney_sto.html and follow the links back. My favourite:
bq. Question:”Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Morgenbesser: “Even if there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”
Obits: “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/obituaries/04morgenbesser.html , “New York Sun”:http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/08/03&ID=Ar01400 , “Columbia News”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/04/08/sidneyMorgenbesser.html ,
There’s “an article in today’s Guardian by John Laughland”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1273982,00.html , warning us that the Tony Blair’s humanitarian concern about Darfur is just a cloak to mask his desire to launch another oil-resource grabbing war. Of course, the facts should speak for themselves, but I’m not above a bit of _ad hominem_ , especially when it comes to wondering where the Guardian gets its op-ed contributors from these days. Thanks to Google, it is possible to read “an earlier Guardian article denouncing the Spectator as bonkers”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,711616,00.html , partly on the grounds of a John Laughland interview with Jean-Marie Le Pen, that same, “highly sympathetic interview”:http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/laughland1.html , a “review by the Virtual Stoa’s Chris Brooke of a book by Laughland”:http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=134 (“read the whole thing”), and Laughland’s views on “Zimbabwe”:http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/3-18-2002-14883.asp , “Slobodan Milosevic”:http://www.icdsm.org/more/Laughland1007.htm (one representative piece, google for more if you like), “John Kerry”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,9328751,00.html (more of a warmonger than Bush), “Blair and the Euro”:http://www.antiwar.com/orig/laughland16.html , and “Cyprus”:http://www.bhhrg.org/pressDetails.asp?ArticleID=13 . Readers may find that Laughland’s views on this issue or that coincide with their own, but, taken in the round, a certain picture emerges. (UPDATE: “This Laughland article”:http://www.bhhrg.org/pressDetails.asp?ArticleID=19 , about recent events in Georgia, is a particularly fine example of his work. Scroll down for his speculations about why Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić remain at liberty!)
I’ve just finished another Andrew Crumey novel, his latest, “Mobius Dick”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330419919/junius-21 . I thought I might be reporting that, whilst I’d enjoyed it, I enjoyed it less than his Mr Mee (which “I completed the other day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002241.html ). But the last twenty pages where all the different threads come together with a rush (a bit like a Jonathan Coe novel), gave me such delight that I’d have to rank them equally. Crumey is that unusual thing, a novelist with a PhD in theoretical physics. And here his learning is fully deployed: the Copenhagen interpretation, multiverses, Schrodinger; Schopenhauer, Nietszche and Thomas Mann; mad Nazis, Marxism, and a British Democratic Republic; Robert and Clara Schumann; a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and a Scottish nuclear power plant; weapons of mass destruction. All there, and he brings off the connections brilliantly (even lacerating literary postmodernists in the process). Fantastic. (Not yet published outside the UK as far as I can see, so my link is to Amazon.co.uk).
Talking of extremism… There’s something I’ve been meaning to post on for some time in the light of the documented connections between Trotskyism and neoconservatives and the continued enthusiasm of some admirers of Trotsky for aspects of recent US foreign policy. Trotsky had a dictum, of which “this passage from The Revolution Betrayed”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/ch08.htm is just one example:
bq. Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals.
I don’t think that’s _obviously_ a true generalization, but nor is it a thought devoid of interest. Discuss, with reference to the domestic and foreign policies of the Bush administration….
The novel I’m reading at the moment is full of stuff about multiverses, alternate realities and quantum physics, and maybe I’ll post about it in a few days. It was a shock to put the book down, leave the garden, do some surfing and “almost immediately read this by Tim Burke”:http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma72704.html :
bq. If Kerry is elected, and imposes a kind of extremist political vision root and branch upon the Americans who oppose him….
In what bizarre possible world might Kerry impose an “extremist political vision”? Perhaps one in which he’s actually “a reptoid alien disguised as a human?”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke To be fair to Tim, the hypothesis (of extremism rather than reptilism) is one that he dismisses, if only on the grounds that the Republicans have a solid majority! And there are some worthy sentiments in his post. But the very idea that Kerry, who, in European terms is a moderate conservative — and who won’t even “impose” such sensible ideas as “socialized medicine” — might seek to advance an “extremist vision”, shows how disconnected from reality American political discourse is becoming.
[UPDATE: I seem to have read Tim’s post rather too hastily. See comments for details]
Congratulations to Norman Geras, who “has now been blogging for a year”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/first_anniversa.html .
The (London) Times “is running a series on Muslims in the UK”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1192019,00.html . Not profound stuff, but a useful antidote to the demonization that prevails in parts of the blogosphere. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that young Muslims have views about sex and alcohol (among other things) that resemble in important respects the views that many young Catholics have about contraception.[1]
fn1. The article is freely accessible from within the UK, but may require registration from elsewhere. My information about whether those attempting to access from elsewhere need to subscribe varies.
I thought I’d indulge my fantasy of joining the hard-core techie kids (like Kieran) by installing Linux on my home PC at the weekend. Bravely ignoring the concerns of my family — who feared for their own future access to the computer — I downloaded a disk image for Suse 9.1 (Personal edition) and rebooted from the CD-ROM. I even managed successfully to repartition my hard disk (and Windows still works). But under Linux I have no mouse (mine’s a Logitech Optical USB creature) and no network (despite faithfully copying down and reproducing details of DNS servers, gateways etc.). Much googling and initialization of modules later, I’m no further forward. The problem isn’t Linux as such, since Knoppix works fine direct from the CD, recognizing the rodent, happily working with other USB devices, and auto-configuring the network. But I’d like a “proper” version, nicely installed on my new partition, so that I can escape the “told you sos” and “what did you expects” of partner and children. All advice gratefully received.
I finished Andrew Crumey’s “Mr Mee”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312268033/junius-20 last night, and, to adopt the “Chris Brooke evaluative vocabulary”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108221387921088431 , it is truly splendid and I’m going to read his other books as soon as I can. Crumey weaves together three interlocking stories: the unworldly octogenarian Mr Mee, and his discovery of the internet, porn and sex; the reflections of a terminally ill professor of French literature on his life, work on Rousseau, Proust, and (most pressingly) his plan to seduce his favourite student; and the adventures of Ferrand and Minard, two characters from Rousseau’s _Confessions_. I’ll avoid posting spoilers, but along with the “Monty Hall problem”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002227.html , we’re also treated to versions of Searle’s Chinese Room and Ned Block’s entire population of China, and one of the protagonists, seduced by an 18th century anticipation of the functionalist theory of mind, tries to construct a computer from string and paper. Anyone who has ever taught or been taught elementary logic will laugh aloud.