Chris Bertram

The Times Higher Education Supplement “is leading with the story”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2020705 that the British government — having recently introduced student fees of £3000 pa but having promised (as a sop to the opposition) to keep them capped until 2010 — has been pushing senior figures in the sector to campaign for the abolition of the cap. Not that they’ll need much persuading to do that, of course. Whether or not you agree with the principle of fees, a government that pursues its secret policy by galvanising opposition to its publicly declared policy might be thought to be acting a little unethically.

Oliver Kamm “has a crack at me”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/james_callaghan.html for my judgement that Jim Callaghan & Co. let us in for 18 years of Tory misrule. He struggles somewhat to rebut my claim that Callaghan had not a “single policy achievement worth listing to his credit.” After all, as the convoluted one reminds us, Callaghan

bq. had been undistinguished – failing to devalue sterling early enough; the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968, which violated this country’s obligations to British citizens in East Africa; and his role in the defeat of industrial relations reform in 1969 …

Never mind:

bq. His greatest single achievement was to destroy Socialism as a serious proposition in British politics.

Not a “policy” achievement exactly, and hardly something for a self-proclaimed socialist (as Callaghan was) to boast about, but still….

I know that FrontPageMag (and everything Horowitz-related) is bonkers. But I wasn’t really prepared to see I face I know staring out at me. Today they have “a piece attacking Brendan O’Leary”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17538 , political scientist at UPenn, formerly of the LSE. I’ve know Brendan since we were undergraduates together in the late 70s. For most of the time I’ve known him he has been gently chiding me from the right for my “infantile leftism”. He’s been an advisor to top Labour politicians on Northern Ireland, always on the side of moderation. Now Brendan is a “leftist” and a “terror apologist”. Well, as I said, I knew that Horowitz was crazy, but it is helpful to have a marker against which to judge just how crazy.

Update: One small thought – Brendan’s reputation in the UK is such that he could sue FrontPageMag for libel in London. He’d stand every chance of success and some serious damages.

2nd update: the full text of the remarks that FrontPageMage characterize as “terror apology” are “online”:http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v48/n04/OLeary.html for all to inspect.

I don’t feel rich. In fact, I know a lot of people who are richer than I am. Many of them live in my street; some of them work in my department. But when I take “the GlobalRichList test”:http://www.globalrichlist.com/index.php I come out well into the the top 1 per cent of earners in the world. That’s right, well over 99 per cent of the world’s population earn less than I do. Matthew Yglesias “wrote the other day”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/03/superinequality.html about income distribution in the US and the psychological mechanisms that mean that people misperceive their own place in that distribution:

bq. This extreme inequality at the top does a lot to explain, I think, why you see a lot of people who make more than 85-90 percent of the population refusing to think of themselves as rich. Once you enter into the Rich Zone, you start coming into contact with people who are way, way, way, way richer than you are. If you run into somebody who has twice — to say nothing of 10 or 100 — times your earnings, it’s hard to think of yourself as rich. After all, you’re closer to making $0 and being out on the streets than you are to making what he makes.

And this is all the more true for the global distribution of income, where our place in the local distribution makes us radically misperceive our position in relation to the vast majority of humanity (my ex ante guess would have put me in the top 5 or 10 per cent — but the top 1 per cent!). My guess is that most active bloggers and journalists (in the developed world) are in that top 1 per cent also. One effect of this is that the blogosphere casually trades in assumptions about what is normal, where those assumptions are just a projection of what is normal for that top 1 per cent.

My colleague Alison Hills has “an op-ed piece on animal rights in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1447866,00.html following the recent publication of her book “Do Animals Have Rights?”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1840466235/junius-21

BBC2 broadcast “a fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/4352171.stm this evening about France’s Islamic headscarf law. It followed a group of young Muslim women about and had them explain their thoughts and feelings about the law and did the same with the teachers in their school. The teachers clearly sincerely believed that the women were the puppets of fundamentalist groups, though this wasn’t the impression given by the film. Rather, their families urged compromise so that they might finish their education. Obviously, much of the impression the viewer gets will have been shaped by the editing decisions of the film-makers. Nevertheless, the message I took was of the profound unwisdom of the measure. The headmaster tried to be pragmatic (by his own lights) and insisted that the law could be complied with if girls wore a bandana in a colour other than black that left the forehead and ears clearly visible. This upset some of the extreme secularist teachers (who saw this as backsliding from pure Republican principle) but didn’t leave the pupils happy either (though they largely complied). But the image that one was left with was of the hapless headteacher stopping the Muslims one by one at the school gate, singling them out, insisting on minor adjustments to their dress (“A bit more ear please!”). Utterly, utterly humiliating for all concerned. And the women themselves, now convinced that they would never be accepted in France. One had ambitions to be a nurse, but the government has now extended the law to medical service. Petty inspection, endless argument about the tiniest details of the garb worn by “those people”: humiliating and counterproductive.

I spent Sunday afternoon at Bristol’s Memorial Ground watching the “Bristol Shoguns”:http://www.bristolrugby.co.uk/10_5.php demolish the Exeter Chiefs and thereby edge closer to promotion to the “Zurich Premiership”:http://www.zurichrugby.co.uk/partners/index.shtml . Great fun, an entertaining performance, a good atmosphere, a diverse crowd, a chance to stand together on the terraces, home and away fans mixed together and exchanging friendly chat, a programme with the head coach’s telephone number there for all to see, a pint of beer with the game if you like, and a ticket you can buy without having to sell the children into slavery … I could go on. I’ve watched Bristol four times this season, “Leicester”:http://www.leicestertigers.com/3_8.php once and England (v Scotland) once. In the same period I’ve not been to a single game of football (though I’ve watched a few games on the telly). Why? Aggressive atmosphere, crowd segregation, surly stewards, beer illegal, expensive tickets, cheating players, arrogant managers, and, above all, the fact that a Russian billionaire has made sure that the whole competition is sown up before the start. The downside? I think few rugby players can do things quite as breathtaking as Denis Bergkamp or Ronaldinho can (though Geordan Murphy can be exciting). But the bullshit and the money around football have just depressed me too much this season. This could be a long-term switch.

Lenin of the “Tomb” has “the funniest post”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_leninology_archive.html#111152157867233512 on the European holiday offer from FrontPage Magazine: “Tour London with David Horowitz, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Johnson” !! (Be sure to check out the comment from “Luc” as well.)

“Justwartheory.com”:http://justwartheory.com/ is a very useful set of resources on just war theory maintained by Mark Rigstad of Oakland University. There’s also “an accompanying blog”:http://www.justwartheory.com/editorial.html .

Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister defeated by Thatcher in 1979 and, amazingly the oldest living former British PM in history, has died at 92. I’m struggling to think of anything nice to say about his tenure as Home Secretary, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or PM. He was a machine politician rather than someone animated by a sense of social justice, and it is noteworthy that “the BBC obituary”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/941478.stm can’t find a single policy achievement worth listing to his credit. His government collapsed in chaos and recrimination and was followed by bitter civil war with Labour. Thanks to him and his ilk we suffered 18 years of Tory misrule. Still, RIP and all that.

I don’t share Mark Kaplan’s philosophical predilections, but he is a sharp observer of blogospheric rhetoric. At “Charlotte Street he announces”:http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2005/03/note-on-notes-turkey-ruse.html that his perceptive “Notes on Rhetoric” “now have their own site”:http://notesonrhetoric.blogspot.com/ . I particularly enjoyed his latest reflections on the “Turkey” ruse:

bq. Turkey – If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)….

bq. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.

bq. At worst, the ‘Turkey’ tactic can also short-circuit moral universality – the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with ‘but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..’; patient criticisms of the ‘democratic deficit’ in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.

I’m woefully ignorant about the geopolitics of Asia, so I’m not going to offer any opinions of my own here. Harry at “Harry’s Place has been linking”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/03/24/the_eus_military_industrial_complex.php to “a piece in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1444660,00.html which expresses relief at the EU’s decision to postpone the lifting of the arms embargo on China. In Garton Ash’s piece, China is cast as the bad guy. A different view is put in “a fascinating article by Chalmers Johnson”:http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2259 which sees American concern about democracy as being merely window-dressing for a policy which is basically about preventing the emergence of geopolitical rivals. Johnson also warns about US encouragement for the remilitarization of Japan as a counterweight to China.

As CT’s resident Rousseauiste, I’d like to pass on the news to residents of New York City (and parts thereabouts) that the Johnson Theater will be staging the “first ever US production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Narcisse”:http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/narcisse.htm from 7-10 April:

bq. an utterly contemporary drama that deals with the problem of narcissism and sexual ambiguity. The play is about a man who falls in love with an image of himself dressed as a woman and explores contemporary issues of desire, self-obsession and the difficulty of the relation between the sexes.

Enjoy!

I don’t know — and neither do you — if “Glenn Reynolds is trying to murder his wife”:http://instapundit.com/archives/021948.php (or if Bill Hobbs is trying to murder his) …. but I do know that I find it gratuitously offensive just to leave the possibility open, just hanging there, for rhetorical purposes. But, whatever … if they can dish it out, they can presumably take it. Read the whole thing.