The Virtual Stoa

Full details on joining the French Foreign Legion are here.

For two days in a row now, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 seems to be dominated by stories of helicopter crashes which have killed quite a few people. The lengthy discussions of these incidents (about which there is, in fact, very little to say) annoy me, insofar as they tend to strengthen the impression that the major problems facing the US / UK troops are equipment failures of various kinds. I’m not sure that this is the case.

More interesting stories found online this morning include:

From Indymedia UK:

Students and residents in Oxford have continued the actions this morning and afternoon. On the Cornmarket shop-street, people dressed in black stood along the paved road, and at 12:30 many church bells rang in mourning. A discussion space was active under Carfax Tower. Subsequently some people chained all the gas pumps at the E$$O gas station in the south of the city. Others are now ocupying the offices of pro-war Labour MP Andrew Smith in East Oxford.

This follows on from an abortive attempt to occupy the town hall yesterday and a series of roadblocks. (Pictures, but not especially good ones, unfortunately, are here. The one at the bottom, in case you were wondering, is a pile of police-horse-shit).More activity promised later this evening.

As you can see, I’ve installed an Iraq Body Count counter at the top of this page: the site has full details about the methods being used in order to compile a database of reported incidents involving civilian fatalities at the hands of US/UK aggression in Iraq and a computation and running count of the number of well-documented deaths.

Sandra Osborne has recently resigned as PPS to Helen Liddell, the rather grim Secretary of State for Scotland, bringing the roll of honour up to eight.

UPDATE [19.3.2003]: David Kidney, PPS to Michael Meacher, resigns…

It’s the 132nd anniversary of the start of the Paris Commune. For lots of pictures, try here.

Ken Purchase can also join the roll of honour: being Robin Cook’s PPS, he automatically loses his post on the resignation of his boss. But since he has gone on to sign the rebel amendment currently being debated in the House of Commons, he deserves a place on the list.

The world gears up for war, and I am reading about masturbation…

(Via Arts and Letters) I enjoyed two reviews of Solitary Sex, the new book by the Berkeley historian Thomas Laqueur, here and here. I look forward to getting a copy of the book when it appears in UK bookshops.

Both reviews place a great deal of emphasis on the emerging ideologies of anti-masturbation which developed in eighteenth-century England, with the 1712 publication of Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences in both SEXES given pride of place. And these discussions reminded me, not for the first time this week, of one of the most intriguing eighteenth-century anti-masturbation essays: Jeremy Bentham on “Offences Against One’s Self” from around 1785.

It’s an intriguing piece, since the bulk of Bentham’s essay is given over to a slashing attack on Britain’s sex laws (which proscribed death for gay sex, etc.), up to and including the laws against bestiality (“Accidents of this sort will sometimes happen; for distress will force a man upon strange expedients”), much of which is splendidly humane.

But Bentham then turns to masturbation, concerning which he writes that “Of all irregularities of the venereal appetite, that which is the most incontestably pernicious is one which no legislator seems ever to have made an attempt to punish…” He doesn’t recommend legislation — since it “can always be committed without any danger or at least without any apparent danger of a discovery” — but he does disapprove…

Read the whole thing. It’s good stuff.

The BBC has a handy list of who’s resigning from the Government and when.

Monday
16:17GMT – Leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook resigns after a meeting with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. He said: “Neither the international community nor the British public are persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this action in Iraq.”

Tuesday
07:00GMT – Lord Hunt of Kings Heath announces his resignation as junior health minister on BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme, saying: “At the end of the day I don’t support this action and it would be hypocritical for me to stay in government.”

11:11GMT – Home Office Minister John Denham resigns saying: “I cannot support the government in tonight’s vote.”

11:39GMT – Bob Blizzard, Labour MP for Waveney, resigns as Private Parliamentary Secretary to work and pensions minister Nick Brown.

11:56GMT – Anne Campbell, Labour MP for Cambridge, resigns from her role as Private Parliamentary Secretary to Patricia Hewitt, secretary of state for trade and industry.

Any minister or PPS who resigns will be comemmorated on the Roll of Honour over on the right hand side of the Virtual Stoa, at least for a bit.

In Memoriam Karl Marx, died one hundred and twenty years ago in London, 14 March 1883. For Friedrich Engels’s graveside oration, click here.

Peering into the archives for the odd search strings which bring people to the shores of the Stoa…

josip broz car auction
domus aurea esquiline
anecdote about Kim Jong Il
daily mail mosley
bob marshall andrews [a few of these]
HUGH O’SHAUGHNESSY
“ari fleischer” satan
Ashcroft singing
thatcherweb
essay on the leopard by visconti
Ben M’hidi Battle of Algiers
italian word for troll
historian Christopher Hill
J. K. Rowling address
read my lips George Bush Tony Blair
iraq german students against the war
coordinated readings Aristophanes Lysistrata
Woyzeck mpeg
sealions war against terror

and, of course,

free zoo sex clip archive

So, all in all, a bit more highbrow than usual. It’s the first one which puzzles me the most. And I really don’t think the US military should be sending sealions into combat.

I’ve been rereading some of Kant’s political essays. As ever, the footnotes are tremendous.

“What is an absolute monarch? He is one at whose command war at once begins when he says it shall do so. And conversely, what is a limited monarch? He is one who must first ask the people whether or not there is to be a war, and if the people say that there shall be no war, then there will be none. For war is a condition in which all the powers of the state must be at the head of state’s disposal.

“Now the monarch of Great Britain has waged numerous wars without asking the people’s consent. This king is therefore an absolute monarch, although he should not be so according to the constitution. But he can always bypass the latter, since he can always be assured, by controlling the various powers of the state, that the people’s representatives will agree with him; for he has the authority to award all offices and dignities. This corrupt system, however, must naturally be given no publicity if it is to succeed. It therefore remains under a very transparent veil of secrecy.”

[From The Contest of Faculties, pp.186-7, Kant, Political Writings, ed. Reiss, 1991.]

As he goes on to explain, before we come to live under a suitable republican constitution, “it is the duty of monarchs to govern in a republican (not a democratic) manner, even although they may rule autocratically. In other words, they should treat the people in accordance with principles akin in spirit to the laws of freedom which a people of mature rational powers would prescribe for itself, even if the people is not literally asked for its consent.”

A question for regular VS readers (and others): Will Blair still be PM this time next month?

While on the subject of resignations, I’m sorry to see that Ron Davies has announced he’s not going to seek re-election as a member of the Welsh Assembly.

I met him a couple of years ago when he came to talk to the British Politics seminar here at Magdalen, and he was delightful, interesting and far more intelligent and articulate than most of the politicians who attempt to govern us. A great shame.

We have the first resignation from the Government… Well, sort of, since Parliamentary Private Secretaries come pretty low down the food chain. But it is the first resignation — the first of many, we hope — and that’s something to be happy about.

Click here after noon tomorrow for Comrade Reed’s official resignation statement.

Alexandra Kollontai, born in St Petersburg, 31 March 1872, died in Moscow, 9 March 1952. Old Bolshevik.

N.B. Some are asking, incidentally, why the DSW didn’t mark Stalin’s fiftieth the other day, since he’s a rather important Dead Socialist. (As one correspondent asked: “Was his exclusion from the Dead Socialist Hall of Infamy an editorial guillotine, or have I been misinformed and in fact he saw a few more days of March than I appreciated?”) Well, I forgot. He was on my list, but sometimes I don’t get round to posting anything. Given the degree of coverage in the mainstream press, you probably didn’t need the DSW to be reminded of the anniversary. Those who asked, in fact, demonstrated they didn’t need it by the fact of their asking.