It is a good long time since we had a sporting thread — and especially one that is utterly incomprehensible to most of our American readers. Today marks “the beginning of the Six Nations”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/rugby_union/fixtures/4777061.stm , and Ireland seem to be everyone’s nailed-on favourites. But I reckon there could be some surprises. Brian Ashton, the new England coach, will play a different kind of game to his predecessor, Wilkinson and Farrell may come good, and Leicester (with a good chunk of the England team) recently beat Munster (with much of the Irish one) in the Heineken Cup. So I’m backing England to do better than expected (and maybe win, pipping Ireland), for the French to be flakey and unpredictable but finish third, and Wales to come in fourth. As for last place, I think Italy might just do it this time and edge out Scotland, maybe by getting a home win against Wales. (The Merseyside derby is today too, so it will be a long stretch in front of the telly.)
Sign seen here in Tucson while on the way home, outside a pizza joint on Broadway:
bq. Mooninites Eat Free.
Insidious. Someone call the mayor of Boston. But — what they don’t know is that I ate there once and the pizza is terrible. Ha! Who’s laughing now, you little bastards.
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Doing the usual stroll through Bloglines a little while ago (168 feeds and counting), I read:
The Weblog’s military aggression this week against The Valve and Long Sunday has been a radically unqualified success. Further action against Crooked Timber will be unnecessary at this time because The Valve and Long Sunday have been transformed into beacons of democracy and hope for the entire academic blogosphere.
That sounds less like serious de-escalation than momentary retrenchment before an eventual attempted conquest. If you want to watch one of the more self-aware blogspats in recent memory, check out the comments section for this entry at The Weblog, the field headquarters for this bloodstained militarist operation.
It’s now up to more than 400 comments. One of them indicates that the invasion of CT was originally scheduled for this weekend. The above-quoted statement indicates otherwise, but that may be an effort to throw everyone off guard.
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So now you only have to wait until July 21 to read it
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“Al Franken will probably run for U.S. Senate in Minnesota.”:http://news.google.com/news?client=safari&rls=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&tab=wn&ncl=1113214687&hl=en Presumably because he’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and doggone it, people like him. This had better be his campaign slogan, by the way.
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So I skimmed the whole Biden gaffe story. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American, who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” But then, forsaking the news for the sake of the news that stays news – great literature! – I ran into this sinister speech by Mr. Big, from Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die:
In the history of negro emancipation,’ Mr. Big continued in an easy conversational tone, ‘there have already appeared great athletes, great musicians, great writers, great doctors and scientists. In due course, as in the developing history of other races, there will appear negroes great and famous in every other walk of life.’ He paused. ‘It is unfortunate for you, Mister Bond, and for this girl, that you have encountered the first of the great negro criminals.’
Mr. Big blathers on about Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, etc. “I am by nature and predilection a wolf and I live by a wolf’s laws. Naturally the sheep describe such a person as a ‘criminal’.” Then things about taking, “not dull, plodding pains, but artistic, subtle pains.” Then he explains how he will kill Bond – but it’s not even sharks with head-mounted lasers. Mere keel-hauling. (Yawn.)
Auric Goldfinger, in his parallel ‘but before I kill you’ scene, manages to be a bit more romantically high-flown:
Man has climbed Everest and he has scraped the depths of the ocean. He has fired rockets into outer space and split the atom. He has invented, devised, created in every realm of human endeavour, and everywhere he has triumphed, broken records, achieved miracles. I said in every realm, but there is one that he has neglected, Mr. Bond. That one is the human activity loosely known as crime. The so-called criminal exploits committed by individual humans – I do not of course refer to their idiotic wars, their clumsy destruction of each other – are of miserable dimensions: little bank robberies, tiny swindles, picayune forgeries. And yet, ready to hand, a few hundred miles from here, opportunity for the greatest crime is offered. Only the actors are missing. But the producer is at last here, Mr. Bond, and he has chosen his cast. This very afternoon the script will be read to the leading actors. Then rehearsals will begin and, in one week the curtain will go up for this single, the unique performance. And then will come the applause, the applause for the greatest single extra-legal coup of all time. And, Mr. Bond, the world will rock with that applause for centuries.
So here’s my question for you. Obviously Mr. Big is straight out of book I of Republic – Thrasymachus and the wolves and sheep and so forth. But when did the romantic notion of the artist-criminal first appear in literature? By the time we get to Goldfinger supervillain soliloquies are hardly cutting edge, I appreciate. But before it became a cliche it had to have a first occurrence. What would you say? (Not villain monologuing, per se: monologuing about how they are artists.)
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The British journalist Nick Cohen has been sorely misunderstood. His book, “What’s Left?”, is not a phillippic of the pro-war “Decent” left at all. It’s a scholarly assessment of the authoritarian strains of left wing politics, and the tension between resistance under capitalism and resistance to totalitarianism, as exemplified in the writings of George Orwell for example. As he says:
I look at and explain how Bosnia revealed the dark side of the pacifist European temperament and how and why Douglas Hurd and other liberal Tories appeased Serb nationalism. There’s a chapter on the strange and virtually forgotten story of how pacifists and communists ended up arguing against the British war effort during the Blitz. There’s even a chapter of how the intellectual history of Islamism can be traced back to the insane conspiracy theories developed in the furious ultra-right reaction to the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
You would never guess it from what the critics are saying, but the story of the Stop the War coalition fills just half of one chapter in a 13-chapter book.Contrary to what Peter Oborne maintains, I go to great lengths to separate decent people from the scoundrels who lead them. I put their arguments as well as I can, and say they were right in all respects except one: they couldn’t support their comrades in Iraq once the war was over.
Which is odd, because the publishers, Fourth Estate, had apparently originally been pitched a book entitled “Our Friends On The Left”, being “an examination of agonies, idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought”. Since Nick didn’t update his author profile on the Guardian blog, you can see the original blurb there.
Fair enough, maybe the project changed significantly in writing, as Nick decided that mainstream liberal thought wasn’t as agonised, idiotic and compromised as he’d previously believed when you get a good look at it. Except not.
Nick did update the biography on his personal website when he changed the title of the book. It’s described there as
“What’s Left? the story of how the liberal-Left of the 20th century ended up supporting the far Right of the 21st ”
I think the majority of Nick’s readers can hardly be blamed for taking exactly the same assessment of this book as its author. Did anyone really expect anyone to be fooled by this?
Background research on this subject provided by “Aaronovitch Watch (Incorporating Nick Cohen Watch)“, which is a general site about the nature of international politics in a world of globalisation, commonly mistaken for a specialist site for obsessives and stalkers of two named journalists.
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Via “Jason Stanley”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/01/steve_pyke_phot.html, a link to some “now classic photographs”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/philosophers_I.html of philosophers taken by Steve Pyke, together with a “new batch”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/philosophers_II.html by the same photographer. “Here”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_I_05.html is the much-missed David Lewis. “Here”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_I_07.html is a terrific shot of Elisabeth Anscombe and husband Peter Geach. Amongst the new batch, “here”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_II_16.html is Rae Langton. “Here”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_II_01.html is Anthony Appiah. And “here is Jason himself”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_II_08.html, looking more intense than usual, and also unusually quiet.
Throughout the first batch and for much of the second, Pyke got the philosophers to provide a little statement about themselves and their field. Some are jokey, some gnomic, others quite straightforward. (“H.L.A. Hart:”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_I_09.html “To be frank I think the idea of a 50-100 word summary is an absurd idea… I advise you to drop it.”) Amongst my favorites is that of “Geoffrey Warnock”:http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_I_08.html, which elegantly captures the virtues that the analytic tradition strives imperfectly to embody: “To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.”
But if that’s all too much for you, “here are some recent photos”:http://knowability.googlepages.com/arizonaontologyconference of philosophers having a blast pretending to be cowboys while riding uncertainly around on horses in the Sonoran desert. That’s what they’re _really_ like, you know, moody black-and-white headshots notwithstanding.
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Via Bret Fausett, a great new toy called PshychicWhois. I’m putting it away now because it is addictive and the possibilities are many. So very clever.
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So this is a mild and modern dilemma. I have received from two sources an email notification urging me to take part, at 19:55 my time tomorrow, in a “mobilization of Citizens Against Global Warming!“.
All I have to do to be part of a this manifestation of people power is to turn off my lights and electrical appliances for five minutes. I’m as worried about climate change global warming (thanks, Steven Poole) as the next person. And this is probably a nice little gesture. So why do I feel so grumpy about it?
Well, first of all, it’s obviously useless as a way to save energy. Even more so than getting every German to stop using the standby on their tellies and ‘save enough energy’ to close down a nuclear power station. But that’s fine. I get it. We all understand that mass political acts are expressive rather than instrumental. So a little well-intentioned onanism to make an entirely rhetorical point is still in order.
And the organisers are quite up front about that:
“This is not just about saving 5 minutes worth of electricity; this is about getting the attention of the media, politicians, and ourselves.”
The mass action is tied in to the anticipated publication of a UN report on global climate. A visit to the UNEP website this morning already shows a sufficiently frightening report about glaciers melting. So as long as UNEP actually publishes its report on the right day, the whole thing could be the media event its organisers dream of.
“If we all participate, this action can have real media and political weight.”
Except. Who’s to know if I participate or not? I mean, practically. At 19:55 tomorrow night, I’ll be in the office, no surprises there. I’ll be alone, and most likely the only person on my floor. And I’ll be preparing for a conference call at 21:00, and meantime on the phone to people in different time zones. (And no, I will not tell them I’m sitting in the dark. I have some pride.) So there will be no raised consciousness here. I won’t be sitting around with my flatmate, discussing energy policy.
Can we use battery operated devices? Or should I turn off my mobile phone? What about my laptop – can’t I just put it to sleep because it’s a 2 year old Dell that takes 11 minutes to boot. Can I use a normal phone? After all, it doesn’t get its power from the same mains.
Many, many questions. Much resistance, very little of it related to this mass action. Perhaps I’m too prideful to participate wholeheartedly in making up the numbers. Mostly I’m just annoyed because I’ll still be in work.
Update Well, it looks as if the manifestation resulted in the lights of monuments like the Eiffel Tower and other European monuments being turned off – a very effective symbolic act.
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This post at Dr. Helen’s blog and its attendant comments have been widely linked around, and the finest comments already excerpted here at Feministe. Having read them all it occurs to me that if you are a heterosexual man of middle years, and it has been your life-long experience that women don’t like to have sex–with the result that they regard it indifferently as a bargaining chip rather than a pleasurable activity they would be denying themselves–maybe you’re doing it wrong. Just a thought.
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Well not us. But this guy.
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Sometimes there’s no parochialism like Manhattan parochialism:
bq. This season “House” has reached as many as 17.5 million viewers a week. … Things might never have worked out had a largely unknown British actor named Hugh Laurie not sent in an audition tape at just the right time.
I’d be quite happy to be as largely unknown (and well-off) as the pre-House Hugh Laurie, but maybe that’s just me. Still, this example doesn’t quite match Alan Bennett’s recent experience after the premiere of _The History Boys_ on Broadway, when a reporter asked him whether he thought the success of the play would kick-start his career.
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“This”:http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2007/01/scholars_studen.html is rather wonderful.
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Suppose that someone proposed using nuclear explosions to melt the Arctic ice cap*, with the aim of opening the Northwest passage and reducing shipping costs, and that this proposal was supported by an analysis showing that world GDP could be permanently increased by 1 per cent, or maybe 3 per cent, as a result.
On the face of it, this seems (to me, anyway) like a crazy idea. Should such a proposal be dismissed out of hand or taken seriously and subjected to benefit-cost analysis or ? And, if we did do a benefit-cost analysis, what would be the result?
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