Chelsea have had a jinx over Liverpool at Stamford Bridge for as long as I can remember. Tonight, with the bookies offering 4/1 against, “that jinx was broken”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/3362519.stm by a superb Bruno Cheyrou goal set set up by Emile Heskey and by a great defensive effort from the team. I’m off to have another drink.
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Chris Bertram
I’m off to the Oxford Political Thought Conference (programme “here in Word format”:http://www.bham.ac.uk/POLSIS/department/Oxford%20Conference%202004.doc ) tomorrow. I’ve never been before, but I’m very much looking forward to it. Jonathan Israel, author of the monumental “Radical Enlightenment”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199254567/junius-20 is speaking, as is Michael Otsuka whose “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 I’ve been discussing on Crooked Timber. I’m also hoping to meet up with Chris Brooke of the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html , who has “recently blogged”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_01_01_archive.html#107332397845568991 about both Jonathan Israel and about Sankar Muthu’s new “Enlightenment Against Empire”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691115176/junius-20 (of which I’ve read a chapter and a half and may comment on soonish).
I’m always keen on parodies of social-scientific writing and “this one from John Adams at spiked-online”:http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006E02C.htm , complete with typologies, weird and complicated diagrams and so on, reminded me of Daniel Bell’s “The Parameters of Social Movements: A Formal Paradigm”, from the “Dwight Macdonald collection”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306802392/junius-20 I “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001048.html a while back. Great stuff! (via “A&L Daily”:http://www.aldaily.com/ )
Lucy Kellaway in the _Financial Times_ (my favourite columnist but subscribers only) reveals that:
bq. A new year and a new type of management hero: Tony Soprano, foul-mouthed, bullying mob boss from the telly. Tony has just had a leadership book written about him, putting him on a par with Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, General George S. Patton, Moses, Sven-Goran Eriksson and Jesus, all of whom have been sucked dry for their last management lesson. But with _Leadership Sopranos Style_ , Deborrah Himsel has taken the genre into fictional territory for the first time (that is if one gives Moses the benefit of the doubt). Ms Himsel, whose day job is vice-president of organisational effectiveness at Avon Products, explains her unusual choice of subject as follows: “Tony’s . . . results orientation and empathy are certainly at the heart of his leadership gestalt.”
An issue arises from “comments and discussion”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001085.html on Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 that I’d like to take out of that context and discuss as a free-standing matter. It concerns the freedom people ought to have to make binding agreements, and specifically such agreements as marriage. Currently, marriage as an institution is a creature of law and, whatever the promises the parties make — for richer, for poorer, etc — there exist mechanisms such as divorce to terminate the relationship. But surely this ought to bother libertarians? Why shouldn’t people be free to enter into unions that are permanent and from which there is no possibility of exit? Why shouldn’t people simply define the terms of “marriage” as they like?
Liberals have an answer to this one, which is roughly that given the core interests we take people to have, we ought to describe and circumscribe those rights in ways that further and protect those interests. We know that marriages go wrong but also that people being people are likely to deceive themselves about that possibility in their own case. So we seek to protect people against their own decisions, irrationality and lack of foresight and to provide them with ways to salvage their lives if things go wrong. But it is hard to see how libertarians can be that paternalistic. Suggestions?
Following up a link from “Iain Murray”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000559.html on mad cow disease and the threat it does or doesn’t pose to humans I came across “a column on the subject”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-milloy2jan02,1,1799702.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions by Steven Milloy “an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute” and proprietor of “JunkScience.Com”:http://www.junkscience.com/ in the LA Times. Molloy is sceptical of the prion theory and reports of the British experience that:
bq. Though laboratory testing seemed to indicate that BSE and variant CJD were similar, no one could determine with certainty whether and how the BSE epidemic was related to the “human mad cow” cases. There were no geographic areas in Britain with a significantly higher incidence of variant CJD cases, and there were no cases of variant CJD among apparently high-risk groups such as farmers, slaughterhouse workers and butchers.
Two minutes of googling found the report of the British government’s report into BSE and vCJD.
As well as the Trappists (“Orval”:http://www.orval.be/an/FS_an.html , “Chimay”:http://www.chimay.be/ , “Rochefort”:http://www.producteursdupaysderochefort.be/nl/prodinfos.php?iduser=anddsr&societe=ABBAYE%20NOTRE-DAME%20DE%20SAINT-REMY ,”Westmalle”:http://www.trappistwestmalle.be/ and “Westvleteren”:http://www.sintsixtus.be/eng/index2.html – the hardest to obtain) there are many distinctive styles such as the Lambics (Gueze Belle Vue) either straight or fruit flavoured, lager-style beers, British-style beers (developed for WW1 Scottish soldiers), dark ales, white beers (such as Hoegaarden) and so on. I’ve been given many different estimates of how many different ones there are (up to 2500!) Wonderful.
Readers with long memories will recall that “I commented”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000946.html on chapter 5 of Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 nearly a month ago. Chapter 6 is very much a continuation of the theme of that earlier chapter, and addresses a central liberal-egalitarian objection to the conception of legitimate state authority that Otsuka advanced there. Below the fold are some reactions to Chapter 6: feel free to comment if you have read or are reading the book.
We don’t often have photographs on Crooked Timber, but I though it worth making an exception in this case. I spent the afternoon at London’s “Tate Modern”:http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/default.htm where an installation by Olafur Eliasson entitles “The Weather Project”:http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/eliasson/ currently dominates the Turbine Hall through which one enters the gallery. The “sun” bathes everyone in yellow light, figures are reflected in mirrors on the ceiling and steam jets create an atmosphere of shimmering mystery appropriate for an operatic stage set. It is as if we are in the dying days of an aged planet. Go and see it if you can.
I spent three days over Christmas reading Antony Beevor’s “Berlin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142002801/junius-20 . It really is a magnificent account of the final battle of the Second World War [in the European theatre — see comments] and a suitable companion volume to his “Stalingrad”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140284583/junius-20 (which I read at Christmas a couple of years ago). When “Berlin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142002801/junius-20 first came out, most of the reviews focused on the book’s detailing of the extensive rape of German women by the invading Soviet soldiers. That is indeed a prominent feature of the book, but there is much much more going on.
I’ve had to check myself several times when writing on CT recently. I’ve been tempted to use the word “quite” as a modifier of words like “good”. The trouble with this is that Americans (and perhaps all other English users outside the UK?) use the word as a modifier also but in a different sense from the way I would naturally do. If an English person is asked what they thought of a film or a play or a restaurant and they reply that it was “quite good”, they are likely to mean that it was good only to a moderate degree. Americans will intend and understand by the same phrase that something was absolutely, wholly or certainly good. If you tell me that my work is “quite good”, I’m likely to understand that as damning with faint praise. But If you are an American you probably meant to compliment me. Just to confuse matters, a British person who says they are “quite sure” does indeed mean that they are absolutely sure. I hope we’ve quite cleared up that misunderstanding.
The image of “Hogarth’s Gin Lane”:http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/hogarth/Decay11.html comes to mind after reading three pieces on Open Democracy on the booze culture in “England”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-4-64-1659.jsp , “Ireland”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-4-64-1660.jsp and “Scotland”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-4-64-1664.jsp . Central Bristol on a Friday and Saturday night is very much as Ken Worpole describes the centre of many British cities: full of inebriated teenagers, casual violence and, eventually, vomit. Dublin — a destination of choice for young Brits seeking to get smashed out of their brains — also has a big problem:
bq. The results of this behaviour are alarming –- doctors, from a variety of hospitals, estimate that from 15-25% of admissions to accident and emergency units in 2002 were alcohol-related. In March 2003, representatives of the medical profession highlighted some of the horrendous consequences of excessive drinking. Mary Holohan, director of the sexual assault treatment unit at the Rotunda Hospital in central Dublin, said the pattern of alcohol consumption had changed greatly. One shuddering statistic that emerged was that in the past five years there had been a four-fold increase in the number of women who had been so drunk they could not remember if they had been sexually assaulted.
That last could be a dodgy statistic (if the number rose from one to four for example) but it sounds like there’s a serious issue.
Iain Murray has “a column on global warming in the Washington Times”:http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20031226-114728-6336r.htm . As is typical of the genre, the column employs very different epistemic standards when assessing the claims of scientists about climate change than it does when invoking the projections of enviro-sceptics about the economic consequences of Kyoto. Be that as it may, I thought the following sentence worthy of at least an honourable mention in any “It could have been in _The Onion_ ” competition:
bq. Moreover, the alleged increase in extreme weather events may simply be due to better reporting, as more people move to areas susceptible to such events.
History News Network has “a discussion”:http://hnn.us/articles/1882.html of whether Christopher Hitchens has sought to misrepresent his own reaction to 9/11 in the light of his subsequent political evolution (via “Au Currant”:http://www.jackieblogs.com/ ). When the Guardian article Sean Wilenz descibes as “particularly sickening” (available “here”:http://www.ucolick.org/~de/WTChit/Hitchens.html ) is re-read, I don’t think Hitchens has anything to be ashamed of or that there’s great inconsistency between what he said then and the positions he has adopted since. What has changed appreciably is Hitchens’s attitude to both the Bush administration and the Iraq war. On my old blog Junius, “I linked on March 2 2002”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_03_03_junius_archive.html to a “Hitchens article in the Daily Mirror”:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=11650232&method=full (subtitle: “On the peril of America’s muddled, ignorant hawks”) in which he attacks the Bush administration’s “axis of evil” approach and refers to “an overconfident superpower whose leaders appear to be making up foreign policy as they go along.” Hitchens has every right to change his mind about the issues of the day. What some of us find unsettling is the ease with which he is today able to denounce as lacking in moral intelligence people who agree with positions he himself spouted as recently as the spring of 2002.
I went to see _Love Actually_ last night. My vote was for _Master and Commander_ , but since that meant getting in the car and driving to a mulitplex whereas LA was showing at the end of the street, it was a battle I was never going to win. Two reactions: first, the intellectual in me was saying “this is utter crap” throughout; second, my eyes watered at various points during the evening. Now it isn’t hard for a film to engage my emotions — I always find it hard to stay composed during the closing scenes of _Crocodile Dundee_ — but for what it’s worth the film does work pretty well on that level. Hugh Grant’s as Prime Minister really is awful, but Bill Nighy as the ageing rocker is really funny and both Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson put in fine performances. It isn’t that I want to recommend it as such, but it did overcome my determination not to enjoy myself.