Chris Bertram

Eszter’s post has put me in mind of the excellent Financial Times preview of the latin oration on the (hypothetical) occasion of Bill Clinton assuming the Chancellorship of Oxford University:

bq. Sed Eheu! Magnum disastrum suscepit sua maxima culpa. Per noctem, Novembre MCMLXXXXV Alia Occidentalis Domus Albus laborante, sibi pizza donata est a Monica Lewinsky, puella pulchrissima, sensuosa californicante, fellatrix superiore.

bq. ‘Non coitus est cum hac femina,’ dixit. Sed, per laborem longus et penetrante Kennethi Starri, procurator independentus, et senatoribus Republicanis agitates, testimonia inculpata; togam maculatam, cigarrus grandus, revelata sunt. Domus Representatis imperator Clinton defenestrare tentavit. Senatus, 50-50 divisa est, absolvit.

The full text is here .

Check out the speech made by art critic Robert Hughes at Burlington House last night, and note the following judgment:

bq. I don’t want to disparage dealers, collectors or museum directors, by the way. But I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

I wonder what they’ll make of that over at Marginal Revolution ?

Eve Garrard, who figured prominently in our comments last week on my posts discussing Amnesty International (here and here ) has written an impassioned criticism of AI over at Normblog. You should read what she says, although I happen to disagree with her claim — which I regard as obviously misguided — that the universal applicability of a principle entails that all who violate it are equally blameworthy for so doing (penultimate paragraph). The most serious criticism to be made of Garrard’s post, though, is that it seriously misrepresents what Amnesty said.

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Apart from going to the Rivals, the bank holiday weekend was something of an Almodovar fest for me. I watched All About My Mother on Friday and Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown on Sunday, capping it all with a visit to Bad Education at the cinema last night. Bad Education really is a terrific film, and the main device of a film-within-a-film (and a script-within-a-script) works well. I won’t post any spoilers, but I will say that it contains one great cinematic moment and that Hollywood would deal with the sexual abuse of boys by priests rather differently. Highly recommended.

On Saturday night we went to a performance of Sheridan’s The Rivals at Bristol’s Old Vic , which has some claim to being the oldest working theatre in Britain (a claim that is carefully qualified to exlude some rivals, though). A very enjoyable evening, complete with a reminder that anxieties about the corrupting effects of new media (internet, the telephone etc) had been fully awakened by the 18th century. Libraries were identified as the cause of moral decline in this exchange between Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute:

bq. Mrs. Mal. There’s a little intricate hussy for you!

bq. Sir Anth. It is not to be wondered at, ma’am,—all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Nay, nay, Sir Anthony, you are an absolute misanthropy.

bq. Sir Anth. In my way hither, Mrs. Malaprop, I observed your niece’s maid coming forth from a circulating library!—She had a book in each hand—they were half-bound volumes, with marble covers!—From that moment I guessed how full of duty I should see her mistress!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Those are vile places, indeed!

bq. Sir Anth. Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!—And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.

I just read a particularly egregious column from Jonah Goldberg in the London Times. The Times is only freely available to people within the UK, so I thought I’d surf over to the National Review Online to see if the content was also posted there. I didn’t find the Times piece, but I did happen upon Goldberg's take on the Instapundit-Yglesias spat which concludes:

bq. Yglesias would improve his arguments if he stopped his recent habit of increasingly asserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with.

Back to the Times, where Goldberg begins thusly a column aimed at critics of the administration’s Iraq policies in general and Anthony Zinni in particular:

bq. HERE we go again. It is time to blame the Jews. That seems to be this month’s explanation for the Iraq war. Obviously, this is hardly a new idea on either side of the Atlantic, particularly for readers of, say, The Guardian or Le Monde. But in America, the emphasis on the theory has reached almost French proportions

“[A]sserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with” ?

My post the other day about Amnesty International generated some comments, as I expected. It also led to Jacob Levy over at the Volokh Conspiracy getting excited over the following statement by AI:

bq. AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.

Now I happen to think that’s a reasonable thing for an organization like Amnesty to say. Libertarian Cain and Socialist Abel may disagree on a lot of things. Cain believes that socialized medicine is the first step on the road to serfdom and Abel believes that the capitalist system inevitably leads to exploitation and oppression. No matter. They can work together to protest against torture, extrajudical killing and so on — which they agree are _bad_ things. An organization that insisted the everyone sign up to an analysis of underlying causes would be sectarian and ineffective. But because the smart thing for an organization like Amnesty to do is to stay out of the business of root causes, that doesn’t mean it is committed to the positive view that Jacob now attributes to it in a further post. To whit:

bq. I emphasized the organization’s institutional stance that no system of government is preferable to any other, that human rights abuses just kind of happen rather than being matters of official policy in some cases and not in others. This requires a pose of believing in equivalence among liberal democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, and so on.

No way is such “equivalence” entailed by the Amnesty statement of aims that Jacob quoted and it is lazy of him to suggest that it is.

(I should add that Jacob does have a point about the emphasis of some of Amnesty’s up-front press releases, but it is absurd to suggest as Frida Ghetis does in the TNR piece that Jacob approvingly links to that Amnesty “has decided to stop doing its job” — since it demonstrably continues to produce the many detailed country-by-country resports that are its staple.)

This may well be an idea that has already occurred to most of you, but I hadn’t heard it before. Ingredients: a laptop with a DVD-drive, a data projector of the sort widely used for PowerPoint presentations, a large flat white wall. Yes with just these three items (and connecting cables) you can project your favourite movie in a rather more stylish manner than on a wide-screen TV.

Congratulations to Chris Brooke, whose funny, informative, enlightening (and splendid) Virtual Stoa is now three years old. In my experience the third birthday party is the one where hordes of children turn up, are abandoned by their parents for several hours, grind jelly and crisps into the carpet and play at sticking their heads through the cat-flap. So I’m imagining the Stoical attitude Chris is displaying to such mayhem at Magdalen Towers even now.

Via Lance Knobel I see that Jim Moore has started a blog to encourage more coverage of the unfolding tragedy in the Sudan, The Passion of the Present .

Amnesty International's annual report for 2004 is now out. A sobering reminder of how bad things are out there. It is also a reminder of how bad things are in world of chatterers, op-ed columnists and bloggers that we can expect (a) a great deal of moaning about how Amnesty has failed to treat country X (of which the writer approves) with due understanding, context, perspective etc; and (b) much noise about how the activites of country Y (of which the writer disapproves) are demonstrably condemned by the same report. Human rights are indivisible, and in my view, the burden of proof is on those whom Amnesty condemns to show their innocence.

Tim Smith’s and David Korevaar’s page on Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is one of the best things I’ve seen on the web in a long time. Click on the links and you get music, analysis, history and fantastic graphics. (via Michael Brooke )

From the Economist :

bq. At the next official meeting of OPEC, in Beirut on June 3rd, Saudi Arabia will be asked to demonstrate solidarity with its co-conspirators in the cartel. The bargain that holds OPEC together—each member shows restraint in production, so that all can enjoy higher prices—is at stake, they will say. But it is widely assumed that Saudi Arabia must also keep its side of a more fundamental bargain. It must be conscious of American petrol prices, especially in an election year, and, in return, the world’s only superpower will continue to offer the desert kingdom its protection.

My friend and occasional collaborator, the sociologist Alan Carling , is running as an independent candidate in local elections in Bradford, West Yorkshire (in the UK). Bradford has in recent years acquired something of a reputation for urban deprivation, ethnic violence and increasing patterns of residential segregation, something which the main political parties have done little to address. Alan has thought more than most people about the problems of combining social justice and ethnic diversity. I’m sure that if I lived in Bradford I would give him my support. Alan’s campaign aims to tackle some of these issues head-on. He has a campaign website BetterBradford.org.uk . From Alan’s campaign statement :

bq. Multicultural policies have rightly recognised the differences in ways of life. The question in Bradford is whether the well-intentioned practice of multiculturalism in the past has contributed inadvertently to undesirable forms of segregation in the present. Multiculturalism makes us think in terms of single identities and multiple ‘communities’: the White community, the African-Caribbean community, the gay and lesbian communities and so on. But ‘community’ can mean an inward-looking attitude, so that each separate group regulates its own affairs without reference to anyone else outside. This is undesirable in an open democratic society.

bq. Identity is about how we describe ourselves, as ‘White’ or ‘Sikh’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘English’ or ‘Ukrainian’. But whatever we choose as our main label, the truth is always more complicated. There are different meanings to each label, and there are many different ways of observing any religion. No-one is only White or only Muslim, because we are also women and men, young and old, and these different identities mean different things in different circumstances. A new perspective on multiculturalism would emphasise a single community and multiple identities.

(I don’t know what others at CT would make of Alan’s campaign: this just represents my own endorsement of Alan.)