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Chris Bertram
The world’s oldest mountain guide, Ulrich Inderbinen, has died at the age of 103, having climbed the Matterhorn more than 370 times (making his final ascent at the age of 90). “The Economist has the story”:http://www.economist.co.uk/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2787797 . I’m sure what they write of him is true, but anyone who has read the beginning of Ernest Gellner’s best book — “Thought and Change”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226286983/junius-20 — will feel slightly suspicious. Gellner illustrates the idea of a society living against “an unchanging temporal horizon”, where everything stays the same “like a train crossing a featureless landscape” with the story of the Taugwalders, survivors of the first ascent in 1865.
Brian Weatherson watched the England–Croatia game with us the other night, so he can attest to the general level of invective directed towards the television at Chateau Bertram. But, whilst I didn’t watch last night’s proceedings with detachment, I can say that one event followed another with the depressing inevitability all long-term England watchers expect. The early goal (Michael Owen, 6/1 at bluesquare.com — thanks very much!) reminiscent of Germany-England 1996 followed by the Portuguese equalizer just before the 90 minutes. Then the disallowed goal (an exact re-run of England-Argentina 1998), all ending, finally, with the penalty-shoot-out (too many precendents to bother listing here). At least we can enjoy the rest of the tournament free of “Rooneymania” and most of the St George’s crosses will disappear from assorted motor vehicles. Come on the Czech Republic!
Prospect Magazine are running a poll to find the top 5 “British” public intellectuals. You can see “the whole list here”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/HtmlPages/intellectuals.asp and can vote by email to intellectuals@prospect-magazine.co.uk . I say “British” rather than British because the blurb reads: “Candidates do not need to live here or be British citizens, but they should make their most significant impact here.” So Seamus Heaney, Amartya Sen and Michael Ignatieff end up being “British”. There are some pretty dodgy characters on the list, various low rent talking heads, a Daily Mail columnist, and several people whose public ravings are at the outer limits of sanity (these aren’t meant to be exclusive categories). I’ll avoid mentioning names for fear of a libel suit. I thought about voting for Quentin Skinner as the only person on the list ever to have left a comment on Crooked Timber, and Richard Dawkins irritates me too often. In the end, my choice from their top 100, in no particular order is:
bq. Onora O’Neill (I had to pick a philosopher and the other philosophical options are _terrible_ and she’s done some good stuff over the years. Her Reith lectures are one of the most forthright recent attempts to drive back the “audit culture” that is wrecking Britain’s public services.)
bq. Amartya Sen (his work on democracy and famines alone should get him near the top of any such list.)
bq. Seamus Heaney (the only poet on the list.)
bq. V.S. Naipaul (the only _great_ novelist in their selection.)
bq. W.G. Runciman (manages to be a shipping magnate and a social theorist at the same time.)
Sen and Runciman were also, aeons ago, co-authors of a paper on Rousseau, the general will and the prisoner’s dilemma, all topics close to my heart.
Distinguished legal scholar “Cass Sunstein is guest-blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_21.shtml#1087950677 (and starts with some useful reflections on the legacy of FDR). What a coup for the Volokhs and what an improvement in the class of their guest-bloggers!
I’m a great admirer of Karma Nabulsi’s book “Traditions of War”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198294077/junius-20 . But “her piece in the Guardian today”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1245135,00.html is an exercise in wishfully projecting ideals onto real-world people without any critical examination of their claim either to represent those ideals or their chances of realizing them. She makes one point which seems right, namely, that sovereignty rests with the Iraqi people rather than with whoever happens to be exercising de facto authority at any time. But she then makes the astonishing leap to claim that the bearers of popular sovereignty in Palestine and in Iraq are the armed resistance groups there.
bq. The young men who defended Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, and who recently won back the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Najaf from the occupying power, are not the terrorists – or the enemies of democracy. They are our own past torchbearers, the founding citizens of popular sovereignty and democratic practice, the very tradition that freed Europe and that we honoured on D-day.
Are they? Do they see themselves that way? All of them or some of them? Don’t some of them favour theocracy rather than democracy?
Jacek Kuron, one of the heroes of the postwar eastern Europe and a man of the left , despite and against Stalinism, is dead. There are obits in the New York Times , the Guardian , the Telegraph , The Scotsman , from the BBC , and in many other places.
Dick Morris, former Clinton adviser and UKIP spin-doctor was on the BBC’s flagship discussion programme, Question Time, last night. Very many of his utterances were outright falsehoods (though plain ignorance of British and European politics was evidently a good part of the explanation). Amazingly, he explained the problem of high house prices in the UK [only some parts of which actually have high house prices!] was caused by the British government having lost control of immigration to the EU [false], with the result that people were pouring in and bidding up the price of a scarce resource! Supply and demand, QED! I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that this idiot is credited as the “genius” behind Ewekip’s recent success or that he was once employed by a Democratic American President!
UPDATE: Chris Brooke links to a Mirror hatchet job on of Ewekip’s celebrity MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk.
UPDATE UPDATE: this is a restored post from Google’s cache.
Thanks to “Tyler Cowen, over at Volokh”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_14.shtml#1087407794 , I came across “Jason Brennan’s list of movies with philosophical themes”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~brennan/movies.htm . It’s a good list , though a bit lacking in non-American content. Possible additions? There’s already been “some blogospheric discussion”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_09_01_archive.html#106244549368342414 of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056217/ and Christine Korsgaard’s “claim that it illustrates Kant on revolutions”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000433.html (scroll down comments). “Strictly Ballroom”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105488/ arguably deals with freedom, existentialism, and revolution. “Rashomon”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/ is about the epistemology of testimony. “Dr Strangelove”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/ covers the ethics of war and peace and some issues in game theory (remember the doomsday machine?). Suggestions?
UPDATE: I see “Matthew Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.html#003568 is also discussing this.
bq. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
That’s always been pretty much my least favourite Orwell quote, but I couldn’t help thinking about it when contemplating “tonight’s Netherlands-Germany match”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787535.stm at Euro 2004. The Scotsman has “a useful guide to the history of footballing enmity”:http://sport.scotsman.com/football.cfm?id=670242004 between the two countries and one of the protagonists of the “last really nasty episode”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,6903,1009645,00.html (scroll down to #6) — Rudi Voeller — is now the German coach. The football should be pretty good too … at least from the Dutch.
British philosopher Sir Stuart Hampshire has died at the age of 89. The Telegraph has “a very interesting obituary”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/15/db1501.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/06/15/ixportal.html . I’ll add others to this post as they appear: “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1239568,00.html , “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1146540,00.html .
They’ll be dancing in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff tonight after England’s “last minute collapse to France”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787491.stm at Euro 2004. Not fatal, but very deflating to English morale. It is the worst way to lose a game, to think you’re home and dry and then to concede twice in extra time and I’m feeling almost as let down now as I did when Man U beat Bayern Munich in the European Cup (it isn’t quite that bad). Still, an entertaining start to the tournament with a “splendid Greek performance”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787343.stm against Portugal yesterday, and I rather fancy the Danes to shock Italy tomorrow.
My friend Alan Carling, “whose campaign”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/ I “blogged about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001911.html a few days ago, managed to secure “342 votes in Bradford’s Heaton ward”:http://www.bradford.gov.uk/election2004/index.asp?w=12 . I hope his campaign has more impact on local debate than it had on votes, since “elsewhere in Bradford”:http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_985471.html the extreme right-wing BNP had four councillors elected. Generally, the local elections look like “a disaster for Tony Blair”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3796497.stm (I ended up voting LD in the Euros) and I imagine that nervous backbenchers are sharpening their knives already.
I caught about five minutes of some retrospective on Reagan last night. One of the talking heads — a US protagonist whom I didn’t recognize — said something like the following:
bq. Of course, we now know that the Soviet Union was incredibly weak, falling apart in fact, and that it probably wouldn’t have survived even without the pressure we were putting on. But you have to remember that, _at the time_ , all the intelligence reports (and the media) stressed how _strong_ the Soviets were. On the basis of the intelligence we were getting, we’d never have guessed the reality.
Deja vu?
Mike Davis, “writing in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1236209,00.html , puts D-Day in perspective.
bq. But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.
bq. By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.
bq. Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 “Ivans” died for every “Private Ryan”. Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.