A Happy Christmas to all our readers and fellow bloggers. I’ve been enjoying a traditional East Midlands Christmas here in England — and that means starting the day with a choice of ham or pork pie before moving on to the turkey (accompanied by a rather good Margaux from 1983) somewhat later. I’m sure that many of my fellow Timberites have also been enjoying themselves in their various climates and time-zones. See you all soon!
Posts by author:
Chris Bertram
Jackie D from Au Currant has a “quote of the day”:http://www.jackieblogs.com/archives/001586.html picked up from “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2003/12/humiliation.html who gets it from “some columnist in the Jerusalem Post”:http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1071721355570&p=1006953079897 :
bq. [I]t’s about time we all stop treating Iraqis, and Arabs generally, as anything but what they are: Human beings, capable of making rational choices, who, _like the rest of us_ [emphasis added CB], are accountable for their own successes, their own failures, and their own fates.
On a plausible reading “like the rest of us” looks like a weasel phrase here: on the one hand appearing to stretch out the hand of a common humanity but with a wave of that same hand dismissing the very different conditions under which that human life gets lived. I wish I had a view about responsiblity, agency, choice, blame and so on that I was satisfied with. I don’t. But that view would have to satisfy at least two conditions: first, it would have to treat our fellow humans has having the capacity for free choice and second it would have to take a realistic view about the obstacles to their actualizing, developing, and exercising that capacity. If I lived (as I do) under conditions that are relatively propitious for that actualization, development and exercise, then I would hesitate before using phrases such as “like the rest of us” about those who have grown up under dictatorships and in much tougher material circumstances than I have.
Yesterday’s Sunday Times printed “a long list of people who had refused honours”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-939310,00.html from the British government. An interesting list including Michael Oakeshott, H.L.A.Hart, Isaiah Berlin and Gilbert Ryle. I also scrolled down the list to see if the reason the most successful manager in English football history had not been knighted was that he’d turned them down. No such luck — they never even offered (even though two managers from an inferior team have been honoured).
“Paul Krugman in the Nation”:http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20040105&s=krugman :
bq. The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago. The name of the leftist rag? _Business Week_ …
Those following recent French debates about the proposal that the ostentatious display of religious symbols in schools should be banned, may find “this article from Le Nouvel Observateur”:http://permanent.nouvelobs.com/societe/20031222.OBS1620.html by sociologists Jocelyne Césari et Jean Baubérot enlightening. As they point out, French law is actually rather close to the liberal view of these matters. But there is a mismatch between what French law requires — as reflected in successive decisions of the Conseil D’Etat — and a commonly held view of the principle of secularism which charges the state with the aggressive promotion of Enlightenment rationalism. It all seems a little odd from this side of the English Channel. I had a conversation with a French researcher last year who declared herself shocked to have seen a newsreader on the BBC wearing a small crucifix round her neck. I had to say that I’d never noticed such a thing, wouldn’t have cared if I had, and that I’m sure that most British people wouldn’t notice: in a country with an established church hardly anyone cares about religion.
One oddity of the French media’s representation of this issue: the controversy centres on the common Islamic practice of women covering their hair with a headscarf. Of course, in some Islamic societies rather more is covered: women are veiled or enclosed in outfits like the burqua. The French secularists object to schoolgirls wearing headscarves that cover their hair — and the word “foulard” is appropriate here — but often the press reports refer to the “voile” and sometimes this is absurd. So the the caption to photograph accompanying “this article”:http://permanent.nouvelobs.com/societe/20031222.OBS1620.html (again from the Nouvel Obs) reads “Lors de la manifestation des femmes voilées” but the women in the picture are _not_ veiled.
Norman Geras is running one of his polls again. The latest one is for “favourite films of all time”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2003/12/movies_today_ye.html (deadline January 18th). So get over to “Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ and cast your votes (up to ten). Here are mine, in no particular order except that the first on the list is my all-time favourite (with All About Eve probably my second choice):
The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)
All About Eve (Joseph L Mankiewicz)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Third Man (Carol Reed)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)
The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton)
Diva ( Jean-Jacques Beineix)
Lift to the Scaffold (Louis Malle)
I adopted a private one-entry-per-director rule, though, which limited my Hitchcock nominations, and I was really conflicted about which Louis Malle film to choose (Milou en Mai gets one aspect of France so right). And I’m puzzled that Stanley Kubrick didn’t end up on my final list.
Remembering the Eisenhower parody below had me leafing through the “Macdonald anthology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306802392/junius-20 and looking at some of my other favourites (and then googling to see if they are on the web anywhere) Pride of place goes to Paul Jennings’s “Report on Resistentialism”:http://www31.brinkster.com/yewtree/resources/resistentialism.htm which begins thus:
bq. It is the peculiar genius of the French to express their philosophical thought in aphorisms, sayings hard and tight as diamonds, each one the crystal centre of a whole constellation of ideas. Thus, the entire scheme of seventeenth century intellectual rationalism may be said to branch out from that single, pregnant saying of Descartes, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Resistentialism, the philosophy which has swept present-day France, runs true to this aphoristic form. Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.’ ‘Things are against us.’ This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialism, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre.
Read the whole thing.
I have a guilty secret: I’m a PowerPoint user. Why do I use PowerPoint? Because it is an easy way to get text and graphics up on a screen to illustrate a lecture. I’m sure there are other and better ways of doing this, but don’t know what they are. I’ve been feeling bad about this since reading some of “Edward Tufte”:http://www.edwardtufte.com/ ‘s anti-PP writings, and my guilt and shame are compounded after reading “John Naughton’s attack on PP in todays’ Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1110963,00.html . Sample quote:
bq. As an addiction of the white-collar classes, PowerPoint ranks second only in perniciousness to cocaine.
(Actually I have sometimes wondered whether my lectures would be improved by prior self-medication — a stiff drink perhaps — but have never run the experiment.)
Naughton links to Peter Norvig’s rendering of the “Gettysburg address in PowerPoint”:http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg — funny and effective.
Incidentally, this reminds me of Oliver Jensen’s “The Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowese” from Dwight Macdonald’s “Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm–And After”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306802392/junius-20 which begins thus:
bq. I haven’t checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual. Well, now, of course, we are dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance you might say, although I don’t like to appear to take sides or name any individuals….
I’ve been scanning the press coverage of the Britain’s “Soham murder trial”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/soham/0,14010,1073385,00.html to see whether anyone has asked a very obvious question. So far, commentary seems to be concentrating on the failure — if it was a failure — of the Humberside police to pass on details of the “ten allegations of sex crimes”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/soham/story/0,14010,1109155,00.html that had been made against Ian Huntley. (Anyone who has had experience of Britain’s Data Protection Act will sympathise with the police when they declare themselves confused about which records they were allowed to retain, and how much they were allowed to disclose.) But the dilemma of policy and principle is obvious: on the one hand there was information that could have prevented the murders; on the other hand, it seems wrong to allow mere allegations that have not been tested to be a barrier to someone getting a job. The question nobody seems to be asking, though, is why didn’t the earlier allegations go anywhere?
And there seems a worrying possible answer to that question. In today’s target culture, neither the police nor the Crown Prosecution Service will proceed with an case unless they think they stand a very good chance of success. To risk failure is to risk bad statistical outcomes. In other words, maybe Huntley was able to continue his career of rape and under-age sex because the threshold at which the authorities will now initiate a prosecution is set too high.
I’ve just reached Amartya Sen’s chapter “Famines and Other Crises” in “Development as Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385720270/junius-20 . He has some discussion of the great famines that depopulated Ireland from 1845 onwards. The potato blight had destroyed the crop but the Irish peasantry lacked the resources to buy alternative foodstuffs which continued to be exported:
bq. ship after ship — laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter — sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. (p.172)
A few new books in political philosophy have crossed my desk today either in the form of physical copies or publishers’ announcements. First among them is a new collection called “Social Justice”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405111461/junius-21 edited by Matthew Clayton (Warwick) and Andrew Williams (Reading) which contains an excellent selection of readings for an undergraduate course (and I’ll be recommending it to my charges). Second, my former PhD student Colin Farrelly (Waterloo, Canada) has a textbook — “An Introduction to Contemporary Political Theory”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761949089/junius-21 — and an accompanying reader: “Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761941843/junius-21 . Finally, my friend Axel Gosseries (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) has a new book out on intergenerational justice: “Penser la justice entre les générations”:http://www.editions.flammarion.com/catalogue/fiche.php?l=a%3A12%3A%7Bs%3A2%3A%22st%22%3Bs%3A4%3A%22tout%22%3Bs%3A8%3A%22searchId%22%3Bs%3A44%3A%22ZQQbtDLpauusMmxHw2aKcfLHLiDCLFn7suP%2BiicTp30%3D%22%3Bs%3A1%3A%22p%22%3Bi%3A1%3Bs%3A1%3A%22s%22%3Bs%3A8%3A%22DatParut%22%3Bs%3A4%3A%22mois%22%3BN%3Bs%3A7%3A%22editeur%22%3BN%3Bs%3A15%3A%22STEPTYPE_RAPIDE%22%3Bs%3A9%3A%22Gosseries%22%3Bs%3A14%3A%22STEPTYPE_TITRE%22%3BN%3Bs%3A15%3A%22STEPTYPE_AUTEUR%22%3BN%3Bs%3A7%3A%22isbnean%22%3BN%3Bs%3A10%3A%22tracktheme%22%3BN%3Bs%3A9%3A%22trackedit%22%3BN%3B%7D&i=2-7007-3687-7&nonotice=2003390240 which addresses some of the topics we’ve been discussing on CT recently including pensions and demography.
A “piece in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1071251586971&p=1012571727085 contains the following startling claim:
bq. Webroot, a small US security software company that provides spyware blocking software for Earthlink, estimates up to 18 per cent of computers could be infected with keystroke loggers or RATs. Its estimate is based on results from 300,000 people who in November used its “spyware audit”, a free internet-based program that detects whether a computer has been infected.
18 per cent sounds like a crazily high number to me — the sort of number people come up with when they have a commercial interest (you know, “piracy is costing the music industry $40 trillion per nanosecond”). But it would be interesting to have some indication of how widespread the problem really is.
It isn’t just “the season to be girly”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001013.html , but also the one of good will to all men (and women). Which ought to provide ample opportunity for critical reflection on the various stories, lyrics, symbols and so forth that we encounter at Christmas time. I’m sure that many readers have already encountered this “libertarian reading”:http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=4491 of Dickens’s _A Christmas Carol_ (sample quote “Nowhere in the story does Dickens endorse welfare. Rather, he suggests that charity and hard work in the business world are how best to combat poverty.”) There are surely other possibilities. “Good King Wenceslas”:http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~av359/xmas/carols/gkw.html for example, as discussed on a blog’s comments board:
bq. We just aren’t told how the “poor man” came to be living a good league hence (which is a serious omission in a work of this nature). How about some rigorous comparisons with others in the kingdom? And for all we know he was poor because _he chose_ to live near St Agnes Fountain (which was a pretty stupid thing to do). Why was King Wenceslas — who as king should have been safeguarding property rights and looking after national defense — wasting our taxes on flesh, wine and logs for someone whose lifestyle is _no business_ of the state?!
Other suggestions?
Marko Attila Hoare has “a review essay”:http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=1041&reportid=162 in the latest “Bosnia Report”:http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/default.cfm on books on the left about the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. I won’t attempt a crisp summary here (Hoare’s judgements won’t secure everyone’s agreement though I largely concur with them). One passage was of particular interest to me though:
bq. The journal _New Left Review_ (NLR) commissioned the present author in October 2000 to travel to Belgrade to write an article on the popular rebellion against MiloÅ¡ević that was then taking place. NLR paid my air-fare and I arrived in Belgrade on the day that MiloÅ¡ević fell. But when I produced my report NLR refused to publish it: editor Susan Watkins [that’s Mrs Tariq Ali by the way – CB] explained to me that the editorial board objected to my article’s implied support for the Hague Tribunal and for Serbia’s integration into European institutions – these views were considered politically unacceptable. I was reminded of this some months later while reading Michael Parenti’s _To kill a nation: The attack on Yugoslavia_ , published by NLR’s sister organization, the publishing house Verso. The book is simply an outright apologia for MiloÅ¡ević and his regime. Period. Thus while it would appear that supporting the prosecution of war-criminals at the Hague Tribunal is unacceptable to NLR/Verso, actually supporting the principal war-criminal himself – orchestrator of the worst acts of imperialist aggression and racial mass-murder in Europe since the death of Stalin – is entirely acceptable. Lest any reader believes I am exaggerating Parenti’s views, his book recently appeared in Serbian translation (Majkl Parenti, _Ubiti Naciju: Napad na Jugoslaviju_ , Mediagraf, Belgrade 2002) – with a foreword by none other than Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević himself.
Full disclosure here: I’m a former member of the NLR editoral committee and resigned along with Hoare’s parents and blogger Norman Geras (and most of the rest of the EC) following an office coup in 1993. I’m also a former employee of Verso. Our resignation statement, heavily self-censored for legal reasons, is “here”:http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1993Mar5.145426.988%40bristol.ac.uk&output=gplain (the full story might get disclosed to people buying me enough beer in the right circumstances).
Great news that “mass-murdering dictator Saddam Hussein has been captured in Tikrit”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3317429.stm . With any luck the Iraqi people will get to try him for his crimes against them over so many years. One thing he won’t be charged with, tried for, or convicted of is involvement with 9/11, despite some reports in today’s Sunday Telegraph from the if-you-believe-that-you’ll -believe-anything department. As “one”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr114.xml of the “two”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr14.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/12/14/ixnewstop.html pieces says:
bq. For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.
Leaving out the “appears almost”, I’d agree with that. And it gets better …
bq. In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta “displayed extraordinary effort” and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be “responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy”.
bq. The second part of the memo, which is headed “Niger Shipment”, contains a report about an unspecified shipment – believed to be uranium – that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.
In next week’s episode Instapundit excitedly links to an article alleging the discovery of a Post-it apparently connecting Jacques Chirac, Noam Chomsky and Stavro Blofeld to a Cuban bioweapons project….
[UPDATE: This should really have been two separate posts – I had started writing on the absurd Torygraph story when the news of Saddam’s capture came through and ended up adding to the beginning. But the effect on some readers of my combining the two things may be to suggest that I’m somewhat grudging in my reaction to the tyrant’s arrest. I’m not — it really is great news.]