Chris Bertram

Last June I wrote about my friend Havi Carel and her battle with the lung disease Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). Havi has an “article in today’s Independent about LAM”:http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2369574.ece and about what it is like to live with a terminal illness and how that changes your relationship to others, indeed, to everything.

Last time I wrote I invited you to sponsor Havi on a bike-ride to raise money for LAM Action which supports patients and raises money for research. This time “Kate Gamez”:http://www.justgiving.com/kategamez and “Becky Tunstall”:http://www.justgiving.com/beckytunstall are running the London Marathon for LAM Action – so please click on one of their names if you want to sponsor them.

Pierre Assouline’s excellent blog at Le Monde “has some figures”:http://passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/03/17/langlais-regne-en-librairie/ for the provenance of novels published in French translation:

bq. in 2006, 41.4% of novels published in France were translated from a foreign language…. English is, naturally, in first place with 2503 titles but the extent of English domination is surprising: 75.5 per cent of the total! In the runners-up spot are German and Spanish with 134 titles (4%), followed by Italian (108 titles or 3.3%). Juste après, on trouve l’allemand et l’espagnol avec 134 titres (soit 4%) suivis par l’italien (108 titres soit 3,3%). …. Russian (which is in decline) and the languages of the East [meaning? CB] are neck and neck (with 44 titles translated in the year), then come the Scandinavian languages and Japanese. The only notable breakthrough is the Chinese novel, with 37 titles translated.

UK viewers were treated the other night to a superficially impressive global-warming denialist documentary: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”:http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html . The programme was the work of “Martin Durkin”:http://tinyurl.com/38n6np who has previous form for dodgy science documentaries. “Medialens”:http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php has a reasonably comprehensive account of the film’s reception and also gives an idea of the contents. See also “George Monbiot”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2032575,00.html in the Guardian and “Steve Connor”:http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece in the Independent. Central to the film was the testimony of the MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch. Wunsch’s own account of how his material was edited and presented so as to give a misleading account of his actual views is “here”:http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2359057.ece .

There’s been just about nothing in the Anglophone media about the controversy surrounding Volker Schlöndorff’s new film “Strajk: die Heldin von Danzig”:http://www.strajk-derfilm.de/ which deals with the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement and is loosely based on the role of Anna Walentynowicz in the union. Walentynowicz is outraged at Schlöndorff’s movie which portrays her as illiterate and the shipyard workers as, among other things, hard drinkers. She’s threatening legal action. There’s some coverage “here”:http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1232.html , “here”:http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2377595,00.html and “here”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aVmHZrXT7C6g&refer=muse . I’d be interested to read comments from Polish or German readers about how the row is being reported in those countries.

Tyler Cowen “announces”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/03/libertarian_ron.html : “Libertarian Ron Paul is running for President”. Well who am I to intrude on the private arguments of a sect of which I’m not a member? But following “the link”:http://www.smallgovtimes.com/story/07mar12.paul.official/index.html Tyler provides I read

bq. He supports controls on immigration and increased use of visas for skilled workers.

In other words, Paul is one of the many Americans who styles himself “libertarian” but actually stands for libertarianism for US citizens and the use of state coercion against outsiders. Instapundit-libertarianism perhaps, but libertarianism? I don’t think so.

So I’m contemplating buying a digital SLR, and, after much huffing, puffing and reading of reviews I’m hesitating between a Nikon D40 and Canon EOS 400D (or Digital Rebel XTi as they call it in the US). The Nikon has a six megapixel sensor and the Canon has ten, and the Canon has some patented dust-removal system. But the Canon costs £100 more. I figure the extra isn’t worth it, and, ten days ago, I buy the Nikon. A couple of days ago Nikon announce a new camera, the D40x. Same as the D40 (more or less) but with a 10MP sensor and an expected price-tag that matches or exceeds the Canon. The comment boards go nuts with discontented D40 buyers, and I think — for a moment — “I should have bought the Canon.” Reminds me of the Sidney Morgenbesser joke:

bq. After finishing dinner, Sidney Morgenbesser decides to order dessert. The waitress tells him he has two choices: apple pie and blueberry pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. After a few minutes the waitress returns and says that they also have cherry pie at which point Morgenbesser says “In that case I’ll have the blueberry pie.”

Jo Wolff’s “Guardian column today”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2027064,00.html is all about the limitations and dangers of using Powerpoint (a subject “I’ve discussed before”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/21/powerpoint/ ). In a spasm of anti-Microsoftness, I used “S5”:http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ in my lectures this year but eventually gave up because of the sheer hassle of doing anything other than bullet points with it – Powerpoint just worked better (as does Impress, btw). Jo’s key complaint, though, is about what PP does for spontaneity:

bq. For those who prefer to project the idea that a talk is a unique event, a voyage of discovery that could go in any one of a number of directions, and may well go in all of them, PowerPoint gives the game away. As someone once said: “The art is hiding the art.” With PowerPoint, everything is on display. Elegantly effortless performance is hard enough as it is. PowerPoint makes it impossible.

I don’t know how Jo does his lectures, but one thing it is pretty hard to get away without (given student expectations and all that) is the _handout_ . And once you’ve given them a handout then they either know where you’re going or you’ll confuse the hell out of them if you go somewhere else. How does Powerpoint make things any worse in this respect?

The Wall Street Journal has a confusing (to me) “editorial”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009742 about the attempt by the Italian courts to prosecute CIA agents involved in “extraordinary rendition”. Here’s what is supposed to have happened:

bq. Nasr, a radical imam also known as Abu Omar, is a terrorist suspect who had been under Italian police surveillance since 9/11. In the covert operation that took place in February 2003, Italians and Americans worked together to apprehend Nasr, before whisking him back to Egypt against his will and without the permission of an Italian court.

(Nice use of the word “whisking”, that. Next time I’m charged with kidnapping I’ll tell the police that I was just planning to whisk my victim from A to B.)

The conduct of the Italian courts is deeply wrong according to the WSJ:

bq. No one seriously claims, however, that the CIA agents were in Italy without the explicit knowledge and participation of Italy’s security services. This is the crucial point — and explains why the indictments are a hostile act against the U.S. By long-established international legal practice, the official agents of one country operating in another with that state’s permission are immune from prosecution. The status of forces agreement that governs U.S. troops stationed in Italy enshrines this principle at least for official conduct.

We might pause to note the last five words of that paragraph and wonder whether the “whisking” constituted “official conduct”. It is also worth noting the slippage between “explicit knowledge and participation of Italy’s security services” and “operating … with that state’s permission”. Would the Wall Street Journal really contend that all and any acts (kidnappings? assassinations?) performed by foreign agents on US soil with the “knowledge and participation” of US government agencies (such as the CIA, or its operatives) should be taken to be acts carried out with the permission of the US government? Would they want to say that the perpetrators of such acts should be immune from prosecution in American courts? I rather doubt it.

I’m very sorry to see, via “the Virtual Stoa”:http://virtualstoa.net/2007/03/05/in-memoriam/ , that “Chris Lightfoot”:http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/ , blogger, coder and social entrepreneur “has died suddenly”:http://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/rip-chris-lightfoot-1978-to-2007/ . My own knowledge of Chris was limited to reading his blog, exchanging the odd email, and sometimes visiting the various projects he helped create (such as “Pledgebank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ ). But I read enough to notice that he was one of the few really individual voices on the interwebs: quirky, stubborn, idiosyncratic and pretty determined about the things he cared about – such as government and commercial threats to privacy.

OpenDemocracy has a “very good article by Martin Shaw”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/icj_bosnia_serbia_4392.jsp on the recent International Court of Justice decision that found that the charge of genocide against Serbia in relation to the Bosnian was not established, a finding that has been seized upon by Milosevic apologists everywhere. As Shaw points out, the court did find that members of a protected group were systematically killed, raped and abused, and did decide that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide. Perversely, though it also found that it had not “been conclusively established that the massive killings of members of the protected group were committed with the specific intent (dolus specialis) on the part of the perpetrators to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such.” Also whilst conceding the involvement of the regular Yugoslav forces with the Bosnian Serb perpetrators of the pre-Srebrenica (and therefore not-genocidal) operations, the court limits their responsibility for the massacre that they are forced to characterize as genocide principally to that of mere omission. A feeble verdict.

I made the mistake of surfing over to Jeff Weintraub’s blog earlier, which is currently featuring “lengthy coverage of Andrei Markovits’s book _Uncouth Nation_ “:http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2007/02/andy-markovits-western-europes-america.html . Markovits argues that all the social strata of Europe are in the grip of a pervasive anti-Americanism, and that this is closely related to anti-semitism. Evidence for this thesis includes the fact that British sports journalists often moan about the Americanization of soccer. You know, I’m puzzled. Does this mean that those Budweiser ads which mocked American commentators for their poor grasp of football during the World Cup were borderline anti-semitic? Were the people who produced them self-hating Americans? And could I get funding to write a book about the pervasive anti-Europeanism of America and cite as evidence disparaging remarks about European sport from US commentators? And would blogospheric and op-ed moanings about the European welfare-state, immigrants, old Europe and cheese count as good evidence for such a thesis? And could I get a leading European intellectual to come up with a quote for the cover saying that anti-Europeanism is “the cousin” of Islamophobia? And if I had tenure in the political science department of a leading European university, would such a book enhance its research reputation? Just wondering.

One of the nice things about blogging is the way you get to find out about new things, read books and watch films you’d never otherwise have come across, and so on. “Eszter”:http://www.eszter.com/ recently persuaded “me”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbertram/ to take part in a Flickr project where you take “one photo per day”:http://www.flickr.com/groups/project365/pool/. Some days, especially dark cloudy ones with British weather, can be a challenge, and I’ve sometimes been reduced to taking a pitiful snap of a household object. But I’ve also noticed a real impact on my perception of the world. Walking around, camera in pocket, being open to the opportunity to take a picture has a striking effect on what one sees. An interesting form here, an odd pattern of rust there, a splash of colour, an unusual building or a surprising or funny scene…. And the competitive/comparative element comes in too: you hope for comments, or for a given image to be “favorited”. You quickly get to notice, too, that there are some pretty interesting people on Flickr here and there. There’s “this guy”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/fray_bentos/, for example, who has a nice line in images of buildings taken from the same point, but 20 or 30 years apart (and he supplies the architectural and social commentary to match). Or “this one”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanphotos/ , (a kind of latter-day Cartier-Bresson) who captures street scenes in New York in black and white and has a sharp eye for the incongruous. So thanks, Eszter, for opening my eyes a bit.

(I can see that this is going to get expensive too: I’m already looking to buy a digital SLR and puzzling over the Nikon-Canon version of the Apple-Microsoft divide.)

This is a note to former readers of my blog “Junius”, which I abandoned when we set up Crooked Timber back in 2003. Because of issues with the transition to the “new” (googlified) Blogger, I’ve deleted the site. I did save the archives first, though, and I may make these available from an new location if there’s any demand (and if I get round to it).

Eugene Goodheart writes in the latest issue of _Dissent_, in an article entitled “The London Review of Hezbollah”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=733 :

bq. The London Review of Books is an egregious instance of this one-sidedness. Almost _every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel_ [emphasis added], and the target is not simply the governing party, but the whole spectrum of Israeli political life. _Absent from the columns of the Review are the injustices and cruelties of political Islam_ [emphasis added].

Perhaps accuracy is not Mr Goodheart’s strong point. Maybe he is merely unfortunate that the latest issue of the LRB contains “an article by James Meek”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n03/meek01_.html that begins:

bq. In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors.

But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s online archives reveals a total of five articles about the Middle East in 2006, some of which are, of course, about Iraq. To those should no doubt be added the well-known Mearsheimer and Walt piece. The LRB is published 24 times a year.

UPDATE: it turns out (thanks to Henry and K. Williams in the comments below) that the LRB’s online indexing is crap. The final para above is incorrect, but the basic point stands and the following para would have been better:

But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s back issues reveals a total of 17 articles critical of Israel in 2006, but ten of these come from two issues published during the invasion of Lebanon (and the LRB is published 24 times a year). It is certainly false to say, as Goodheart does, that “Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel.”