Chris Bertram

The Guardian “reports that”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/genes/article/0,2763,1082860,00.html

bq. Selecting the sex of a child is to be banned in the UK after a consultation exercise found the public outraged by the idea.

This is a recommendation from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to the British government and admits of some exceptions to cover families with sex-specific genetic disorders. The HFEA chairwoman, Suzi Leather expressed the body’s reasoning:

bq. We are mindful of their far-reaching nature. Nevertheless, it is clear that there is a substantial public consensus against sex selection for social reasons. We are not persuaded that the likely benefits of permitting sex selection for social reasons are strong enough to sustain a policy to which the vast majority are overwhelmingly opposed.

I don’t know whether there are other, good reasons, for banning sex selection, but I do believe that the reasons as stated are outrageous. The HFEA is arguing (and the Secretary of State is agreeing) that acts should be prohibited where a majority opposes them unless permitting those acts would have definite benefits for society at large. But this is to get the burden of proof completely the wrong way round. Whatever majorities think about some aspect of individual conduct, in a liberal society it has to be clearly demonstrable that an action would be _harmful_ if prohibition is to be justified. No such justification has been produced.

Norman Geras has some further thoughts on the “greatest Marxists” question discussed below. Norm’s list set off a train of thinking last night as I noticed how many of the books “he lists in his latest post”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_11_09_normangeras_archive.html#106858726244078850 are “meta-” studies: books agonizing about the Marxist method or about the history of Marxism by Marxists. Surely it can’t be right that the best examples of Marxist thought are not attempts to think about the world using the resources of Marxism, but rather Marxist books about Marxist thinking? Norm’s cricketing interests led him to mention C.L.R. James’s “Beyond a Boundary”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822313839/junius-20 , but the book by James that I most value is his study of the slave revolt in Haiti, “The Black Jacobins”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679724672/junius-20 — a work of history. So where are all the historians on our lists? E.P. Thompson, Albert Soboul, Christopher Hill et al? A striking and unwarranted omission by all of us.

The Guardian “reports”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/news/story/0,12891,1082720,00.html that US-style paranoia about biased professors has crossed the Atlantic with something called the Young Britons Foundation compiling dossiers about leftie academics. A Manchester student newspaper contacted them with made-up examples

bq. of so called left-wing bias at the University of Manchester – such as a professor who “forced” students to chant Karl Marx during lectures…..

The YBF swallowed the bait and

bq. said the incidents would be added to a database of complaints being made across the country that would go into a report to be presented to the government next year.

Expect to see that chanting professor denounced on a blog somewhere soon!

Below the fold are some more (and slightly belated) reflections on Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 . Today’s offering concerns chapter four. (Earlier posts concerned “one”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000687.html , “two”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000722.html and “three”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000756.html .) As then, comments are welcome from those who are reading or who have read the book.

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Chris Brooke has an “eloquent and quite persuasive response”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_11_01_archive.html#106855492205119024 to my post on whom the English should support at sport. A day of grim faculty meetings has quite robbed me of my wit and ripostefulness, so I can’t dash off a witty riposte to him. But do go read his thoughts.

The depressing state of debate over the British university system is well explored by “Stefan Collini in the LRB”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n21/coll01_.html . He ponders this paragraph from the White Paper on Higher Education:

bq. We see a higher education sector which meets the needs of the economy in terms of trained people, research and technology transfer. At the same time it needs to enable all suitably qualified individuals to develop their potential both intellectually and personally, and to provide the necessary storehouse of expertise in science and technology, and the arts and humanities which defines our civilisation and culture.

And observes

bq. Even those statements which are clearly intended to be upbeat affirmations of their importance have a way of making you feel slightly ill. It is not simply the fact that no single institution could successfully achieve all the aims crammed into this unlovely paragraph, taken from the introductory chapter to the Government’s White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, published earlier this year. It is also the thought of that room in Whitehall where these collages are assembled. As the findings from the latest survey of focus groups come in, an official cuts out all those things which earned a positive rating and glues them together in a straight line. When a respectable number of terms have been accumulated in this way, s/he puts a dot at the end and calls it a sentence.

As a certain person would say, read the whole thing.

Chris Brooke (the target of my comments in the post immediately below) has been blogging much of interest recently. He’s noticed “Josh Cherniss’s Greatest Marxists poll”:http://j3.blogspot.com/2003_11_02_j3_archive.html#106825002950107 and “gives his opinion”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_11_01_archive.html#106830719156581669 :

bq. I went for Gramsci, Luxemburg, Benjamin, Adorno and Habermas, raising a querymark over whether the last one was allowed, and worrying over whether this list was a little too full of the Frankfurt School.

All in all, a pretty rum set of choices if you ask me. The only one of them who would make my list is Rosa Luxemburg. Gramsci has always struck me as (a) unreadable and (b) uninteresting and — as Chris admits — Habermas wasn’t a Marxist (but then nor were Adorno and Benjamin). Whatever his faults, there’s no question that Leon Trosky should top the poll.

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Quite a sporting weekend for me: I saw Leicester Tigers beat Wasps 32-22 yesterday, then Wales gave England a scare in the Rugby world cup, then Liverpool were denied a deserved point against the S*** at Anfield when referee Graham Poll lacked the courage to award us a cast-iron penalty. Two wins out of three isn’t bad. but when I weight them by how much I care it is still pretty grim.

The only one of these events I attended in person was the Tigers-Wasps encounter which was thoroughly enjoyable and ended a losing streak for Tigers. Bizarrely, the Zurich Premiership continues whilst the leading players are all at the World Cup with the consequence that the strongest teams become the weakest overnight.

All of which is a prelude to brief comment on which teams the English should support at the Rugby World Cup.

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Yahia Said’s “account at OpenDemocracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1573.jsp of his return to Iraq is worth a look.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who was in a position to know the reality of what is happening inside Iraq. He painted a gloomy picture of poor preparation (or rather no preparation) for the period after the military defeat of the Iraqi army, of Iraqi attitudes ranging from entrepreneurial friendliness to outright hostility, and of a US army which may be good at warfighting but is utterly incompetent when it comes to peacekeeping. Max Hasting, veteran military correspondent and a man of decidely conservative political views has “a piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-11-08&id=3697 which essentially corroborates this picture. Hastings reports that the British military are very angry indeed with the Bush administration.

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Richard Wollheim has died. There’s an “obituary in the Guardian”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,1078109,00.html from Arthur Danto, and Chris Brooke has “a relevant excerpt”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_11_01_archive.html#106804985419728983 from Jerry Cohen’s “Future of a Disillusion”. Norman Geras has a “post on Wollheim’s paradox of democracy”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_11_02_normangeras_archive.html#106804463992397189 . I have pleasant memories of Richard Wollheim from my time at UCL where I went to read for the M.Phil in philosophy in 1981. He chaired the research seminars there and I remember him mainly as a benign presence who asked penetrating clarificatory questions in a very plummy voice. A sad loss.

A couple of follow-ups to things I’ve blogged recently: Tim Lambert has assembled “a chart of where various bloggers are”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/surveys/compass.html?seemore=y on the “Political Compass”:http://politicalcompass.org/ test. Three Timberites are listed so far. The two dimensions of the test seem to resolve to one in practice, with most people on a diagonal running from left-libertarian (hooray!) to right-authoritarian (boo!). In unrelated news, there’s an “op-ed at PLANETIZEN by Robert Steuteville”:http://www.planetizen.com/oped/item.php?id=110 on the new urbanism and crime issue (link via “City Comforts”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/ ).

Many years ago I had to supplement my income teaching evening classes in public administration. At the time — and maybe now for all I know — something called the “Baumol effect” was being widely blamed for higher inflation in the public sector than in the private sector. I was reminded of this recently when reading the “France Profonde column in the latest Prospect”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/LoginPage.asp?P_Article=12327 (subcribers only – free to web in about 3 weeks). The latest article bemoans the decline in French traditional cooking both at home and in restaurants. The basic problem seems to be the same in both establishments: traditional French dishes are often very time consuming and labour intensive. The result: people don’t bother much at home (except on special occasions) and restaurants buy in inferior pre-prepared vacuum-packed versions of favourite dishes.

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Simon Waldman’s tale of “how he discovered a special Homes and Gardens feature”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1076455,00.html on Hitler’s taste in decor is blogpspheric old news. But I’m linking just to note the reaction of IPC when he put up scans from a pre-war magazine on his blog:

bq. “This piece, text and photographs is still in copyright and any unauthorised reproduction is an infringement of copyright. In the circumstances I must request you to remove this article from your website.”

It turned out that they didn’t have copyright but asserted that they did anyway.