by Chris Bertram on November 21, 2003
Assuming that Al Quaida or one of their sub-franchises were behind the recent bombings in Turkey, I’m amazed at some of the writing on the subject in today’s Guardian: especially the leader and Polly Toynbee.
“The leader”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/0,12700,1090102,00.html :
bq. The use of force in Iraq, now enshrined as a governing principle by Mr Bush, invited a highly aggressive response. That response is in progress. The whirlwind is being reaped.
“Toynbee”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1089947,00.html :
bq. These bombs made yesterday one of the darkest days of Tony Blair’s prime ministership. As if that horror were not enough, too many other disparate pigeons came fluttering home to roost at once. Whichever way he turned, things looked black. They were no mere accidents, for everything that happened came as a direct result of his own decisions, all of them taken against the better instincts of most of his party.
The “war or terror” may have been prosecuted in a stupid way. The Iraq war — nothing to do with the war on terror — may have stoked up Arab resentment against the West. These are reasonable subjects for serious argument. But these writers help themselves quickly, easily and cheaply to the claim that the bombings are a direct consequence of US and British policy since September 11th. To which there are two obvious ripostes. First (an argument too often deployed for rhetorical effect but, I think, applicable here) the bombers set out to do what they did deliberately and intentionally and were not forced to kill and maim many innocent people by Bush or Blair. Second, Al Quaida’s bombing campaign long pre-dates the current US and British governments — remember those East African embassies — and would plausibly have continued with or without the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq.
by Chris Bertram on November 21, 2003
The widespread hostilty to Bush and Blair over the war and the run-up to it is well reflected in the numbers attending the demonstrations in London and elsewhere yesterday. Many people here are still very angry that they were lied to (as they see it) about WMDs and the “threat” from Iraq. At the same time, liberal hawks are asking rhetorically why there were no demonstrations against Saddam Hussein, or against other tyrannies.
(I think that last question is pretty easy to answer: people usually demonstrate because they are angry at their own government (or its associates) rather than at someone else’s. Even anger at yesterday’s bombings in Turkey wouldn’t translate into demonstrations because there would be no point in marching against Al Quaida.)
But even walking a few streets around my home and looking at the posters urging people to demonstrate, I’m quickly reminded why I would not. “Bush” is represented on many of them with a swastika in places of the “S” — an absurd implied equivalence anyway, and a grotesque one a few days after the synagogue bombings in Istanbul. The stunt with the statue also suggest the triumph of theatre over political and moral judgement. And then there’s the fact that the Stop the War Coalition calls for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq and that some of its components even support what they call the “resistance”. Since the imperative now is to stop Britain and the US from “cutting and running” and to insist that they ensure a transition to stable and constitutional Iraqi self-goverment (and put the infrastructure back together again) what the demostrators largely want is the opposite of what ought to be done.
by Chris Bertram on November 20, 2003
A former student, himself living and working in China, emails to tell me about what looks like an interesting co-operative blog project: “Living in China”:http://www.livinginchina.com/index.shtml — definitely worth a look.
by Chris Bertram on November 20, 2003
Terrible, “terrible news”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3222608.stm from Turkey (for the second time in a few days).
by Chris Bertram on November 20, 2003
There have been some fairly furious reactions out there to the various postings by “me”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000848.html and others concerning “TCS”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/index.html yesterday, most of which don’t merit a reply. I would, though, like to invite those who have suggested that I’m reluctant to read or to link to sites which disagree with my own political beliefs to peruse my postings on CT (or earlier, on “Junius”:http://junius.blogspot.com/ ). They’ll see that their suggestion is misplaced. But I do see that my rather brief explanation of my unwillingness to write for TCS — “too right-wing for me” — was misleading. After all, if the Daily Telegraph offers me a column, I’ll happily accept. TCS, though, isn’t just a broadly conservative media outlet but a site that relentlessly pushes a particularly narrow agenda — “where free markets meet technology” — in a style reminiscent of “infotainment” or those articles you sometimes start reading that look like the proper thing but have “paid advertisment” discreetly tucked-away somewhere. And I felt that I didn’t want either to lend respectability to such an outfit or, conversely, to have my own undermined by association with it. (I’m still puzzled by the Curmudgeonly Clerk, by the way, “who opines”:http://www.curmudgeonlyclerk.com/weblog/archives/2003_11.html#000593 that my deciding not write for TCS reflects an “unhealthy politicization of personal decisionmaking”. Is there something wrong with allowing one’s values to inform one’s personal decisions?)
by Chris Bertram on November 19, 2003
A few weeks back I posted on cruelty to animals and was surprised to receive an inquiry about whether I’d be willing to write on the subject for “TechCentralStation”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/ . I declined (too right-wing for me). Reading “Nicholas Confessore’s article on the site and its backer”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html , I’m doubly glad I did. The bloggers who write for the site are mainly conservatives and libertarians, but not exclusively so (liberals such as “Matthew Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/ have featured there). I wonder if any of them will regret their choice in the light of Confessore’s exposure of TCS as being little more than a corporate lobbying operation? (via “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ ).
UPDATE: I should, of course, link to “Andrew Northrup”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002201.html#002201 on this one.
by Chris Bertram on November 17, 2003
Brian’s post has set me off reminiscing about the first album I ever bought – and one of the best. In Loughborough, the nondescript market town where I lived, Boots the Chemists was just about the only place you could buy records back in 1972. And most albums were just beyond my means (or certainly required deferring gratification through saving for longer than I could bear). But one day there appeared on the racks some samplers from Atlantic at 99p each. The one I settled on, though I’d never heard any of the artists, had a bright yellow cover with a dragster and was called _It All Started Here_ . My urge to possess overcame the irrationality of buying something I knew nothing about and so this 13-year-old came back home with the following tracks:
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by Chris Bertram on November 17, 2003
The “Constitutions, Democracy and the Rule of Law”:http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/c250/symposia/constitutions/constitutions_vid_archive.html symposium is online at Columbia. I’ve only listened to some of the October 17th proceedings: specifically Jerry Cohen’s “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Blame the Terrorists?” which argues that those who put terrorists in the position that they can only use morally unacceptable means thereby disqualify themselves from complaining about the the morally unacceptable acts terrorists then perform. (Thanks to Lwandile Sisilana for email about this.)
[Since my purspose here is merely to link to an interesting item and not to comment myself or to start a debate on CT, I’m going to disable comments — a policy I intend to use in similar link-only items on a selective basis.]
by Chris Bertram on November 17, 2003
Daily Telegraph owner Conrad Black looks to be “in deep trouble”:http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,1086980,00.html .
by Chris Bertram on November 17, 2003
I’m not keen on national anthems, but I was struck before the England–France semi-final by the constrast between “God Save the Queen”:http://acronet.net/~robokopp/english/godsaveo.htm and the “Marseillaise”:http://www.acronet.net/~robokopp/french/lamarsei.htm . One a dirge like hymn to hierarchy and submission, the other an upbeat celebration of martial comradeship. There’s no question that
bq. Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
are good lines to be singing before you take the field, even if — as it turned out — it hadn’t.
by Chris Bertram on November 16, 2003
“Maps and territories”:http://www.chriscorrigan.com/maps/ is an interesting new blog. Each entry features a map or a fragment of one and some commentary. Definitely worth a look (via “Davos Newbies”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ ).
by Chris Bertram on November 16, 2003
Josh Cherniss has published “the results”:http://j3.blogspot.com/2003_11_09_j3_archive.html#106891363408327776 of his top Marxists poll. I’m going to resist the temptation to sat anything about the accompanying commentary except to recommend, as an antidote, the essays on Lenin and Trotsky that feature in Alasdair Macintyre’s “Against the Self-Images of the Age”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0268005877/junius-20.
by Chris Bertram on November 14, 2003
Mary Kaldor (an opponent of the war) has “an interesting piece on Iraq on OpenDemocracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1579.jsp . One of her observations concerns the extent to which both the neo-cons and the Democrats are fixated on how it all plays “back home” :
bq. When I was in the CPA offices in the palace, the Green Zone was hit by mortar fire and we were evacuated to the basement. There, some of the American officials were overheard discussing how ‘the Democrats’ would play it back home, with their eyes on the election not the current situation in Iraq.
and
bq. Third, there is a presidential election coming up in America. Some people want America to fail in Iraq so that George W. Bush will lose the election. This kind of thinking prioritises domestic US concerns above the fate of Iraqis. It is as sick as the preoccupations of the Republicans in the CPA about ‘how will this play in the election?’ No one should support the military opposition to America. And there should be no immediate withdrawal of US troops until a framework for democracy is established.
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by Chris Bertram on November 13, 2003
Catherine Bennett has “a column in todays’ Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1083907,00.html making the points I made yesterday about the HFEA report on sex selection. She has a great opening paragraph:
bq. Here are some things that people think. The majority of people, anyway. People think that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is one of the best books ever written. People approve of the reintroduction of capital punishment (lethal injection, for preference). People want fox hunting banned. Their favourite song is Bohemian Rhapsody. People believe in ghosts and are in favour of identity cards. Their favourite meal is fish and chips and they feel sure GM food is a very bad thing. Almost half of them don’t think the MMR jab is safe. People underestimate the hygiene complications of preparing a Christmas turkey. They have never heard of the European Constitution. They think parents have the right to know the name and address of any sex offender in the neighbourhood. They think parental selection of a baby’s gender is so awful it should be banned.
by Chris Bertram on November 12, 2003
I’ve just happened upon a “piece in Guardian on the difficulties of televising philosophy”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/artsandhumanities/story/0,12241,1077474,00.html . It is full of interesting anecdotes about the attempts that have been made.
bq. The director took him to Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building in London and filmed him going up and down the escalators while he expatiated about Plato. When I met Rorty recently, I asked why they shot him there. “I have no idea,” he said. “It had nothing to do with what I was talking about so far as I could tell.”
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