The Virtual Stoa

And now for a swift anniversary commemoration: the Bolshevik Revolution, eighty-five years ago today!

Dan writes in to the Virtual Stoa:

Did you see the Telegraph editorial yesterday? It concludes with the line (repeated on the front page), “Yesterday was the most desperate day in the history of the Conservative Party.” Now there must SURELY be some competition for that particular title…

Does anyone have any alternative suggestions? Do send them in. In fact, I hadn’t read that particular leader - and I’m very glad Dan pointed it out. Near the end, Charles Moore (or whoever) writes this:

It’s a remarkable passage. First, in the way in which it transplants the rhetoric of “Tory democracy” out of its nineteenth-century context (and the notion that the Tory party might in fact do rather well out of the extended franchise of 1867) into a purely internal party matter. Second, because it itself illustrates the depth of the crisis in the Tory party - still in agonies about the removal of Mrs Thatcher in 1990, all those years ago. The parliamentary party conspired to get rid of Thatcher, against the desires of the grassroots, because they were terrified that they would lose the 1992 election with her in charge. And they were almost certainly right, and the party won the election that followed. Similarly, today, elements of the parliamentary party - with their finely developed instinct for electoral survival - want to get rid of IDS for the single reason that they are already convinced they will lose ignominiously if he leads them into an election, in the manner advocated by the leader column. And they are almost certainly right, again. And it is the Telegraph and the party grassroots who seem to have the most developed death instinct - which would be comic, if it weren’t so comic already.

Happy Guy Fawkes Night — as they say, the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions… I was once told, and I believed (to use the rather useful Socratic locution) that I was distantly related to a couple of Gunpowder Plotters. My grandmother’s maiden name was Winter — the name of two of the conspirators — and hers was a Catholic family. But this page has persuaded me that, sadly, this fact is probably not a true one.

For those who haven’t studied these charts yet, here ’s a useful piece of equal opportunities bigotry. (White gods??)

When God created the Mediterranean he addressed it, saying, ‘I have created thee and shall send thee my servants. When these will ask for some favour of me, they will say, “Glory to God!” and “God is Holy!” and “God is Great!” and “There is no God but God!” How wilt thou then treat these?’

‘Well, Lord’, replied the Mediterranean - ‘I shall drown them.’ ‘Away with thee — I curse thee — I shall impoverish thy appearance and render thee less fishy!’

From Al-Maqaddasu, The Best Arrangement for the Understanding of the Lands, 37, trans. Miquel, 1963, and quoted as the third epigraph to chapter one of The Corrupting Sea, by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (Blackwells, 2000).

Hilary wrote to the Virtual Stoa the other day [1.11.2002]:

Up till now I’ve been a passive reader of the Virtual Stoa (can’t rememebr how I stumbled upon it in the first place!), but thought this might interest you.

Appended to her message is a a summary of Gore Vidal’s essay on the war against terrorism, published in last Sunday’s Observer. (The Observer hasn’t published the article on its website, saying that it is “exclusive to the print edition”, but last time I looked there was a copy of the full text posted here). And attached to this summary was a link to the page at emperors-clothes.com, Jared Israel’s website which peddles an awful lot of conspiracism.It’s always nice to get letters from readers of the Stoa - but on this occasion I’m not very interested in this kind of material. Insofar as Vidal’s argument is about grand Republican strategies for dominating Eurasia, it’s quite interesting (though there are better treatments of the topic elsehwere). Insofar as it just repeats the staple claims of 911 conspiracy theories, with their minute-by-minute analyses of who knew what, when, and what they then did about it, or did not do about it, on the day itself, it doesn’t seem to me to be very interesting at all.

Chip Berlet’s page on post-911 conspiracizing is useful, and well-documented, and the rest of the Political Research Associates website has a ton of material on Conspiracy Theories and What is Wrong with Them. Another nice discussion of War against Terror conspiracies is this article from In These Times.

As Max Sawicky notes in a post to the new No War Blog banning conspiracizing discussions on the site, “everything you need to criticize the U.S. government or the capitalist system is right out in the open. The same goes for this war”.

The collapse of the Regina v. Burrell owing to the incompetence of, er, Regina is a lot of fun. And for ordinary viewers, readers and listeners, a fine chance to hear some more of the opinions of the Patron of the Society of King Charles, Martyr, Lord St John of Fawsley. TV viewers, for example, were treated to a lengthy appearance by the artist formerly known as Norman St John Stevas on Friday’s Newsnight, complete with an outsized and particularly floppy poppy.

And, in yesterday’s press, he was ubiquitous. The Guardian quoted him as saying that, “The Queen is aware of her constitutional duty and has a strong sense of justice. As ever, the Queen is blameless and emerges with utmost credit.” No doubt. Warren Hoge, the dreary London correspondent for the New York Times, reported “>these additional words: “There could have been a constitutional crisis if it could be said that the queen was influencing the course of justice in her favor”; and the AP’s correspondent had the Sage of Fawsley packaged in slightly different terms: “She came to the conclusion that something needed to be said and quite rightly the meeting with Paul Burrell was brought to the attention of the police,'’ said Lord St. John of Fawsley, a friend of the royal family. “As for this conspiracy theory,'’ he told the British Broadcasting Corp., “anyone who knows the queen knows she would be incapable of such actions. You don’t have to meet the queen to know her. Everybody knows of her devotion to duty.'’ BBC Online had the best snippet, however: “The Queen is the greatest constitutional monarch we have ever had. She knows she is the fount of justice. She knows she cannot appear in a court and her majesty to have intervened would have not only been unconstitutional, but it would have been highly dangerous politically to intervene in the case where members of her own family were involved.” Indeed.

Please report further sightings.

You may remember a post earlier in the year advertising the excellent Bible in Lego. A less ambitious project, though in some ways a more extraordinary one, is Anthony Giddens teaching in his office in Lego, thanks to the people at theory.org.uk.

Chris adds [3.11.2002]: New stories are being added to the Bible in Lego every month: visit its Latest Additions page. Recent highlights include all ten plagues afflicting Egypt from the Book of Exodus!

Sealions are immensely smart.