Chris Bertram

Norman Geras tells a couple of “Sidney Morgenbesser anecdotes”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/philosophical_t.html , but (at least IMHO) omits the best one, where Morgenbesser was asked his opinion of pragmatism:

bq. “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

“Chris Brooke reports”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_01_01_archive.html#10742438267620365 that “BBC Radio 3″:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3401901.stm are to broadcast a performance of John Cage’s 4′ 33” this evening. At the time of the “Mike Batt copyright row”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2002/07/20/do2002.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2002/07/20/ixopinion.html I recounted on my old blog that I had attended a school performance of 4′ 33″. We all sat completely silent. No-one coughed, no-one shuffled. At the end of the 4 minutes and 33 seconds the pianist turned and berated us for giving such a poor rendition of the Cage’s work. He explained that “the point” of the work is to attend to the sounds produced by a restless and impatient audience and that, by sitting so quietly, we had sabotaged the “performance”. What he didn’t know was that a week earlier, rowdy behaviour by boys during a lecture from an explorer recently returned from the Hindu Kush had been savagely punished by the headmaster — several boys were caned — as a result, none of us had dared to make a sound for fear of further beatings.

I quoted from the now notorious “Benny Morris interview”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/380986.html yesterday. Norman Geras has now “posted some of his thoughts”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/israels_origins.html on the matters raised by the interview.

The Christian Science Monitor has “a helpful summary”:http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0112/dailyUpdate.html?s=mets of the main propositions advanced by Richard Perle and David Frum in a new book:

# France is really more an enemy than an ally of the US and that European nations must be forced to choose between Paris and Washington
# Muslims living in the US must be given special scrutiny by US law enforcement and other Americans
# The US must overthrow the regimes in Iran and Syria, and impose a blockade on North Korea
# Palestinians must not be allowed to have a state
# All Americans must carry a government issued identity card
# The US must explicitly reject the jurisdiction of the United Nations Charter.

It is reassuring to know that such lunatics could never achieve positions of power and influence.

Slate has a round-table entitled “Liberal Hawks Reconsider the War”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2093620/entry/2093641/ with Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria. It is definitely worth a look, though some of them are clearly smarter or more honest than others. Some of the reasons they advance for war are also better than others (with the human rights argument the strongest of all — whether conclusive or not). Thomas Friedman’s reasons, though, are indefensible, indeed criminal:

bq. The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the “terrorism bubble,” which had built up during the 1990s. This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as “martyrs,” and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it’s not very diplomatic—it’s not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

If I read that paragraph correctly, Friedman is advocating that a state kill people (including innocent people) for demonstrative purposes. He thereby shows complete disregard for the humanity and individuality of those who have died. It is a peculiar way to demonstrate the impermissibility of the very acts he deplores.

A few months ago I had lunch with a US army officer who told me that the Germans were “basically running Afghanistan for us.” No doubt having the “Germans in Afghanistan”:http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1432_A_1067481,00.html is somewhat useful when the US wants to get on with other projects. I was reminded of this when reading the “latest egregious anti-European outpourings from the Victor Davis Hanson”:http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200401090840.asp . The French come in for most of his venom, but the Germans get it too, and then this:

bq. We are in a race for civilization like none other since World War II. And yet, due *solely* to the courage and skill of an amazing generation of American professional soldiers battling in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are winning — as this difficult war is beginning to resemble 1944 far more than 1939.

Such gratitude! No wonder Hanson Davis finishes by calling for

bq. a much-needed honesty that will soon curtail both the deceitful rhetoric and hypocritical behavior that have insidiously warped us all in the West during the last 20 years.

Chris Brooke has “another snippet on Hanson Davis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_01_01_archive.html#107374838360931087 .

I came across the following quote recently, the person uttering it is described by blogger Michael Totten as articulating a “moral dilemma” and the following words are uttered as part of the elaboration of that dilemma:

bq. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

Karl Marx expresses similar sentiments at the very end of his “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (different Indians) but it isn’t him. And no, it isn’t Lenin or Stalin or Mao.

Many aeons ago I posted on a controversy about crime and the new urbanism (“here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000696.html and “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000761.html ). David Sucher has “an update on that argument over at City Comforts Blog”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2004/01/welcome_to_new_.html .

I see that “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html is guest-blogging over at a “Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His “first post there”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000246.php alerted me to something I’d missed, namely “Scott Martens’s excellent exposition of Marx’s On The Jewish Question”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000228.php (in comments – you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in “my post below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001118.html about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.

Brian “writes below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001116.html :

bq. it will be a long time before I start listing any especially good blogposts on my CV.

But the latest “thread from Invisible Adjunct”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000421.html suggests that he won’t have to, and that the good ones (and the bad ones) will be taken down in evidence ….

IA cites a member of a job search committee:

bq. I’ll be interviewing people at MLA, and, trust me, we’ve ‘Googled’ every job candidate to establish whether they are a good ‘fit’ for our institution. Watch what you say.

Oh dear.

The BBC website picks up on “Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn’s claim”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3387169.stm that lust should be reclassified as a virtue rather than a sin:

bq. Professor Blackburn is quoted as saying: “The important thing is that generally anything that gives pleasure has a presumption in its favour.

bq. “The question is how we control it.”

I had heard that lust had become fashionable among the Cambridge faculty, but I hadn’t expected a theoretical elaboration of its benefits.

I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about “playing Monopoly in the old GDR”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_12_15_junius_archive.html#90066036 and “he about”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2002_12_01_archive.html Bertell Ollman’s game “Class Struggle”:http://www.aardwolfgames.com/aardmakehtml.mv?look4=2985.00000&src=DETAILS . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an _anti-capitalist_ game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is “here”:http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/ (scroll down to list of articles) and “here”:http://www.washingtonfreepress.org//36/monopoly.html .

Norman Geras has “a post on anti-semitism in France”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/france_the_jews.html which documents some awful recent attacks on Jews. But he then goes on to cite another article by Serge Klarsfeld which alleges that France has been a “consistent adversary of the Jewish nation” and cites a 1789 speech to the National Assembly by Clermont-Tonnerre, one of the deputies. I was curious about this and googled for it, and “the whole speech is available on-line”:http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/284/ . The speech actually concerns the various groups who were excluded from various legal rights before the revolution, including members of “questionable professions” (such as actors and executioners) and religious minorities including Protestants and Jews. Clermont-Tonnerre is arguing for the extension of legal rights to all citizens, regardless of their religious opinion, and that no-one should have a special and distinct legal status because of the religious or ethnic identity: all individuals should be equal as citizens before the law. He attacks the idea that the Jews should be allowed to have their own judges and to exact their own punishments on lawbreakers. But it is clear that the point he is making is the same as a liberal would make now if it were proposed that Muslims should be allowed to establish Sharia courts with the power to enact punishments within France or Britain today. Maybe there is an argument supporting the thesis of a persistent anti-Jewish bias by the French state since the revolution, but the broadly liberal sentiments expressed by Clermont-Tonnerre in the National Assembly are no evidence for this.

Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian intellectual and former PLO representative — whose book “Traditions of War”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829407-7 reclaims a central place for Jean-Jacques Rousseau in thinking about the ethics and law of war and conflict — “writes today in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1118107,00.html about Rousseau, the Geneva accords and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Her piece points up a central problem in the politics of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: for all the neoconservative rhetoric about the centrality of democracy to progress in the Middle East, the sort of Palestinian leaders with whom Bush and Sharon want to deal are very different from those who would emerge from democratized Palestinian institutions.