The Virtual Stoa

From the October edition of Harper’s magazine: A History of the Iraq War, Told Entirely in Lies, by Sam Smith.

Via Crooked Timber, I learn that Simon Kuper (author of the excellent Football against the Enemy) has an article in the Financial Times on strange sporting contests involving animals (elephant polo, that kind of thing), which discusses the impressive athletic achievements of Rosa Luxemburg, the Balliol College tortoise…

Tortoise racing, too, has failed to conquer the world. It barely exists outside Oxford University. Each June the university’s leading tortoises race in the garden of Corpus Christi College, spiritual home of the sport. But this year the race was not held due to bad organisation, and last year’s race was spoiled when a student entered in a tortoise costume and declared himself the winner.

Presumably this refers to someone at Magdalen, since the JCR here is very proud of its tortoise costume, and I certainly woudn’t put it past them to disrupt a major sporting contest like this. Vandals.

Corpus’s own reptile died years ago and the college now usually fields an animal borrowed from a tutor. “Various tutors own tortoises, bizarrely enough,” explains Jack Clift, former president of Corpus’s junior common room.

I don’t know which tutor’s tortoise gets borrowed: in the early 1990s, when I used to pay attention, I think the race was a three-cornered contest between the Balliol tortoise, the Corpus tortoise, and the Corpus gardener’s tortoise, who was (if I remember rightly) called Bulldozer.

Like goats, tortoises prefer sex to running. This favours Balliol’s veteran female champion, Rosa Luxemburg. “The tortoises we tend to borrow are male, so she toddles off and the males follow her,” complains Clift.

I hadn’t come across this theory before, and I wonder whether it is true. In fact, I’ve no idea whether Rosa Luxemburg actually is a female tortoise, having very little idea how to sex tortoises. I always thought she used to win owing to her combination of rigorous physical and ideological training provided by an elected official known as Comrade Tortoise, together with her unique diet consisting of the cigarette butts left out on the Garden Quad. But what do I know?”Sex is the whole point of camel wrestling…”, the article continues, at which point I think this discussion should draw to a close.

Or Why Alan Dershowitz owes the Palestine Liberation Organisation ten thousand dollars…

(The link is to the broadcast on Amy Goodman’s Pacifica show Democracy Now!; there’s also a transcript, but it’s often inaccurate and it misses out the last fifteen minutes, which include some of the more acrimonious exchanges between Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein, which contain the most best demonstrations as to why Alan Dershowitz owes the PLO $10,000. There’s some documentary background to this spat over here.)

Walter Benjamin, philosopher. Author of the Theses on the Philosophy of History and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, among much else. Born on 15 July 1892, he killed himself on 27 September 1940 in order to prevent his capture by the Nazis while attempting to cross the French border into Spain.

With a 14-3 win over the Orioles last night, the Boston Red Sox are in the playoffs for the first time since 1999…

Clearly writing a sunday newspaper is much like writing a weblog: sometimes you just feel the need to fill space. And so, armed only with the google search engine, Tom Shields was able to fill up pages and pages of this week’s Scottish Sunday Herald with an article devoted to the observation that some people have the same name as other people who are a little more famous than they are…

But not at the Virtual Stoa, where there’s only one Martin O’Neill…

Make Mine A Double: An internet search reveals lots of faces running around with the same names

… Martin O’Neill’s primary interests are in moral, political and legal philosophy, the philosophy of action, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. This may well be how the Celtic manager spends his off-duty hours, but the Martin O’Neill we are talking about is the PhD student at Harvard University.

The philosopher O’Neill is author of a treatise called “Pele, The M25 And Artistic Post-Modernism” and is obviously almost as cerebral as the football manager O’Neill. Philosopher O’Neill is described as ‘the Bard of the Hanger Lane gyratory system, West London’s Wittgenstein, and Man with a Liver of Steel’. But can he find a goalkeeper to get Celtic through the remaining European Champions League fixtures?

Martin is, of course, a Celtic fan himself (and Arsenal and Ireland, and, I hope, the Boston Red Sox — not that anyone should think that my attention is drifting towards Fenway Park a little too often these days as the playoffs draw ever closer). But it was in his Leicester City FC days that Martin used to receive email at his balliol.ox.ac.uk account imploring him to stay with the Foxes…

Here’s a snippet from Brit Hume’s interview with W on
Fox (Via LBO-talk):

HUME: How do you get your news?

BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything.

I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.

HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you’ve…

BUSH: Practice since day one.

HUME: Really?

BUSH: Yes. You know, look, I have great respect for the media. I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there’s opinions mixed in with news. And I…

HUME: I won’t disagree with that, sir.

BUSH: I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.

That’s reassuring. Karl Rove, no doubt, is the most objective of them all.

I thought that I was the world’s least likely baseball fan, but in the last few lines of David McKie’s fine obituary for Guardian columnist Hugo Young, it turns out he rooted for the New York Yankees. Somehow that doesn’t quite fit the image I had of him, after fifteen years of reading his columns.

(For fellow Red Sox fans: as of last night, the magic number is down to four…)

Happy New Year!

I was very pleased to see this, over at Labour MP Tom Watson’s blog. It’s the death warrant for Charles I, which he has posted in order to publicise the parliamentary contribution to Archives Awareness Month, which, apparently, is this month, so there’s not too much of it left.

I’ve said it before, and, no doubt, I’ll say it again: People in this country aren’t nearly as aware of our regicide past as we ought to be, except for the loons over at the Society of King Charles the Martyr (patron, Lord St John of Fawsley, no surprise there). Long before the Jacobins executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, or the Bolsheviks gunned down the Tsar and his family, the political authorities in London in January 1649 organised the trial and execution of the man of blood, Charles Stuart. It was a great moment in these islands’ story.

Things didn’t work out terribly well for the regicides in the long run, but it’s certainly high time we had another go at republican self-government. Who knows? It might be more durable this time around.

There’s some thoughtful revisionism by my friend Ted Vallance, now at Liverpool University, over here, which was written to mark last year’s wretched jubilee. He seems to think that if we are going to get rid of Brenda, lopping off her head probably isn’t the best way forward, and not just because killing people is wrong.

UPDATE [22.9.03]: Roll on the Jamaican Republic!

Dorothy Emmet, philosopher, born 29 September 1904, died 20 September 2000.

I’ve just added Oliver Kamm’s blog to the blogroll. He and I have recently been disagreeing about one or two things [scroll down for the comments], but since I’m making a habit of reading his contributions, it’s probably time he went onto the sidebar.

Duncan Hallas, Socialist Worker, born 23 December 1925, died one year ago today, 19 September 2002.

(The most interesting piece I’ve seen about his life and career was an essay written shortly after his death by Nigel Harris, but it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere on the web.)

It’s time for the monthly dip into the archives to see what those who surf the world wide internet web are looking for when they find themselves washed up on the shores of the Virtual Stoa…

lula da silva john rawls
interventionists during ww2
short paragraph on Leni Riefenstahl
ANL are racists in disguise
French’s mustard bottle
John Rawls photo
relationship of society and others
twinkie defense white
Emilio Salgari biography
hitchens anti-catholic
Robert Owen educationalist
Labour Party Absence of War Hare
slogan beach towels
Kim Jong Il anecdote
alasdair macintyre is a science of comparative politics possible

and

what is a stoa?

The traditional interest shown in this site from Bedfordshire swingers has faded away as mysteriously as it once arrived. Perhaps I should look for a new suburban niche audience for the weblog by scattering random phrases like “Northants dogging scene” into my various posts.Or perhaps not.

French Revolutionary Calendar watchers might like to notice (see above) that we’re currently cycling through the holidays at the end of Year CCXI, just before the start of the new year on 22 September (Gregorian), which will be the first day of Vend�miaire, Year CCXII.

Next year will be a leap year (that is, according to the Gilbert-Romme-inspired version of the calendar that’s this site displays, thanks to the inspired engineering skills of my friend Steve Pugh), which means that 21 September 2004 will be the quadrennial “Jour de la R�volution”, the day that neatly brings the calendrical cycle full circle.

E. J. Thribb rises to the occasion, in this week’s Private Eye:

Im Memoriam

So. Farewell
Then
Johnny Cash.

Famous country
Singer:

Yes, you were
Known as the
Man In Black.

Were I to
Attend your
Funeral,
I too would
Be the Man
In Black.

But Tennessee is
A long way
From Tooting.

And Ryan Air
Do not
Fly there.

E. J. Thribb (aged 17 1/2)

PS. Apologies to
Leni Riefenstahl

For not writing a
Threnody,
Or a Thribbody
As they are known
On the occasion
Of her death.

“The Woman In Black
Shirt”.

Yes, that would have
Been a good title.

Or perhaps I
Should have used
It for Lady
Diana Mosley.

The same copy also reports that the verb “to hoon” means, according to the Urban Online Dictionary, “to act in an unacceptable way”.

I enjoyed TMWSLV very much indeed last night [see below]; and this morning enjoyed reading Steven Lubet’s discussion in the UCLA Law Review of what might have happened if the case of The People vs TMWSLV had gone to trial.

It’s a fun article, one of whose merits it that it’s probably the law journal article with the highest ratio of words to footnotes you’re ever likely to encounter. Don’t read it, though, if you haven’t seen the film.

Norman Geras has too much time on his hands, but my goodness he uses it well.

And, on a related note, as part of my long-intended but never-really-acted-upon plan to watch more Westerns, I’m looking forward to watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance this evening. This is the film which, as Victor Muniz reminds us, is the unlikely case study in an excellent essay by Christine Korsgaard - which I’ve mentioned before - on Immanuel Kant and the right to revolution.

It’s no wonder, really, that we sometimes call the subject I try to teach the History of Western Political Thought…

Why does he bother?

This advert appeared in the 14 March 1998 issue of Billboard magazine; the photo itself was taken during the famous 1969 San Quentin concert, during a spat with some people from Granada TV.

This wasn’t the only time Johnny Cash placed abusive adverts in the music press. Back in the 1960s another full-page ad heaped scorn on the DJs and radio stations which were refusing to play his recording of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes“, a Peter La Farge song about the Native American marine on Iwo Jima who ended up after the war drinking himself to death in a ditch.

The New Labour Government is not entirely useless. If you haven’t already, you can download the Government’s consultation document on same-sex civil partnership (oddly enough, it comes from the Department of Trade and Industry website). Having studied it carefully, you can then email civil.partnerships@dti.gsi.gov.uk to say that, for example, you think these are, on the whole, enlightened proposals, but that, come to think of it, you don’t see any terribly good reason as to why opposite-sex couples shouldn’t contract civil partnerships or same-sex sex couples civil marriage, if that’s what they want to do.

But hurry!, the Government is only anxious to hear your opinion before 30 September 2003 (so you’ve plenty of time both to talk like a pirate [see below] and to contribute to progressive social change). Those of you who’ve read the document most carefully of all might like to address the questions on p.65 when they send in their thoughts.

If you’d like a bit more information, Stonewall and Outrage! both have pages on the subject, and you can read more about Red Ken’s splendid scheme in London here.

A date for your diaries: this time next week, Friday 19 September, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Full details — including a detailed account of how to TLAP — are here (or, alternatively, from, you’ve guessed it, talklikeapirate.com).

Johnny Cash has died, aged 71.

“When I was just a baby, my mama told me, son,
Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns,
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die:
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.”

I started listening to Johnny Cash about five years ago, starting with the Man in Black compilation, and there are now a dozen Cash CDs in my collection; and the older I get and the more I listen to his songs, the more excellent and important a musician he always seems to me to be, for all kinds of reasons.There’s the remarkably harmonious fusion in his music of a surprising number of American traditions � country, rock�n�roll, gospel, folk, a bit of blues — in a career stretching from the million-dollar quartet of the 1950s (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash) through to the new millennium; there’s the combination of his own excellent songwriting (”Folsom Prison Blues”, “I Walk the Line”, “I Still Miss Someone”), with marvellous covers of songs by his contemporaries (Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman”, Kris Kristoferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down”), with older American classics (”Wreck of the Old ‘97″, “Cocaine Blues”, “The Great Speckled Bird”, and so on). It adds up to a body of work which treats of the most important, most difficult subjects of them all — love, God, murder, prison — with immense humanity, most remarkably displayed on Johnny Cash At San Quentin, the finest live recording I possess. And he could be very funny, too, and not just on “A Boy Named Sue”.

He had been ill for a while, though the longstanding diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease later turned out, as I recall, to have been mistaken (it was just a surprisingly long hangover, or something); his most recent album (American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around) was alarmingly poor, its recordings of “Danny Boy” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” showing that he’d lost the plot a bit; his darling companion June Carter Cash died earlier this year: this seems to be a good time for this life to draw to a close.

But what a life — and what fantastic music.

[A few words in defence of the “Yes, but…” reaction to the events of 11 September 2001 follow. If you think that no defence is possible, you may want to stop reading now.]

The second anniversary of the atrocities of 11 September 2001 has come around, and there has, of course, been a lot of media coverage. There’s also been a bit of coverage in the media I read (other people’s blogs, really) critical of what we might call, because it has often been called, the “Yes, but…” response to the attack on the World Trade Center from many on the liberal and left end of the political spectrum, at home and abroad.

Many people, it is charged, said things like this, that “Yes, the attacks were awful, but we shouldn’t forget that the Americans have done bad things in the world before then”. And it is often contended that saying things like this has the effect of mitigating the atrocity, explaining it away, excusing the perpetrators, blaming nobody, blaming the victims, and other bad things. These attacks on the “Yes, but…” crowd are often - not always - meant by those who make them to constitute an indictment of what is sometimes called “the Left”, by drawing attention to its moral blindness, relativism, postmodernism, pathological anti-Americanism, and so on (fill in various other failings here).

Amid the more polemical contributions on this subject, there’s some reasonably temperate discussion of the matter today over at the Crooked Timber blog, in response to one of Chris Bertram’s characteristically thoughtful posts, and it is reading this that has prompted me to write this. (His new Rousseau book, by the way, is a fine piece of work: I’ve read a little bit more than half of it, and I’ll have more to say on this subject, probably, soon).

For it seems to me that if we’re to pick over the contextualising “Yes, but…” language that was around — and it was around — in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 (some of it, I am sure, falling from my own lips) we need to do some work in turn to remember the context in which that kind of language was itself used.

In the days following the Twin Towers atrocity, there was an awful lot of talk in the press and from the politicians which had the effect of decontextualising the shocking events of that day: “The planes came out of a clear blue sky”, we were told, repeatedly, as if the attacks themselves came out of the blue; there was a press discourse of America’s “innocence” being shattered by the violent destruction and loss of life; commentators were quick, too quick, to say that “everything changed” on September 11, and so on.

This kind of discourse was politically highly useful to a White House which decided very quickly to reverse its hitherto reasonably isolationist policy and adopt a new and highly interventionist foreign policy stance — one which has brought us the War Against Terrorism, the attack on Afghanistan and, more recently, the war against Iraq (as well as the US Patriot Act, etc.), and all of whose effects, for good and ill, are yet to be felt. The President, furthermore, had his own explanation for why what had happened had happened: “They hate our freedom; they hate our democracy”, he told us, in his speeches which set out and sought to justify this new American foreign policy.

Thus it was only to be expected that those who contested the policy — and there were lots of reasons for contesting the policy, as we all know — also sought to contest the underlying series of claims and justifications underpinning that policy, which included already-politicised claims about the causes of the events of 11 September. Against a President who rested content with over-simplistic (if not entirely stupid) public explanations for what happened, his critics had to explain that things were, as they saw it, a bit more complicated than that. But, in the circumstances, that was something which was very hard to do without saying things that could, either at the time or subsequently, be considered a piece of “Yes, buttery…”, for the “but” marked, as it were, the moment when the speaker began to set out at least part of the grounds of his or her political disagreement with the Administration’s view of things.

And that’s how, it seems to me, that troublesome “but” needs to be understood in most cases: not as the product of a morally defective desire to excuse atrocity, but as part of an (as it turned out) politically ineffective attempt to resist the drumbeat of war.

Of course, in the circumstances, some people on both left and right did say some pretty stupid things, and some people, both for and against the Bush administration, said some things which some of those who heard them found offensive. But that’s what happens in a politics of high stakes, and the stakes were extraordinarily high in September and October 2001.

UPDATE: Marc Mulholland has some sensible words on Yes Buttery, too, over at his Daily Moiders.