The Virtual Stoa

… and let’s get it right this year: it’s Frimaire! (See the Calendar above).

Sharp-eyed francophone reader Phersu pointed out to me in a comment attached to the post below that this month was entered in my French Republican Calendar Database as “Frigidaire”, which is a mistake now that has been cycling round for several years, and is almost certainly entirely my stupid fault. (Steve: if you read this you might want to correct your own FRCD.)

Frigidaire is not a month in the World’s Finest Calendar, but a brand of refrigerator.

I haven’t been following it of late, so I was pleased to see that The Head Heeb has been paying attention to the issues that matter and has a useful round-up of recent developments in the Pitcairn Island sexual assault case.

There’s a useful summary of opinions about various European peoples from an 1856 British geography textbook posted over at the Fistful of Euros site. Shot by Both Sides is calling it “probably the most accurate guide to Europeans that I’ve ever seen”, which in turn probably means that he’s never seen The Exile’s handy and far more up-to-date chart of what the European tribes think of one another…

Matthew Turner complains: “Isn’t the blogosphere boring at the moment?”

Well, I don’t much like the word “blogosphere”, I don’t think it’s appeared on this blog before, and I agree that things have been quite quiet chez the Virtual Stoa since an possibly-unprecedented amount of material was posted in the first half of November. But some of the following links have been keeping me entertained over the last few days, in the interstices of this, that and the other (which mostly involves marking essays).

Gert’s blog of President Bush’s trip to London is very well done, and very useful for those of us who aren’t living there and only use the telly for rugby and DVDs. Recently there’s been Josh Cherniss’s Greatest Marxists poll which started here, ended here, and prompted discussion here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here; and some of us are waiting for the announcement of the normblog’s Alternative Big Read (my picks were Ulysses, War and Peace and Midnight’s Children with Catch-22 following closely behind, and a long hard brood about what I really think about Brideshead Revisited).

One unintended consequence of the Mass. Supreme Court’s work this week is that Andrew Sullivan’s blog has become readable again — and, just as predictably, it has prompted howls of… something… over at Conservative Commentary as well as a more thoughtful dissent from Nathan Newman (and this recent post of his on free speech and the Right also deserves a second look).

Thinking of the Right, Melanie Phillips’ blog is now churning out her particular brand of reasoned social commentary on a more-than-daily basis, and she has accumulated a small army of balanced commentators. And she certainly won’t like being listed next to what is almost certainly the most intriguing new-ish blog, Belle de Jour, being the blog of a London call girl, and which Green Fairy has been usefully advertising for a while now.

Finally, looking beyond the blogs to the kinds of things people occasionally blog about, if only to say, go here and read this: The Onion has a small classic, “Media Criticized for Biased Hometown Sports Reporting“, though it’s probably better if (a) you’ve ever lived in America and (b) you’ve ever been on the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting emailing list.

What we’re all really regretting, though, is not being at the Kendal ASDA for a chat with Tim Collins MP on the issues that matter last week.

Alright. That’s not a great deal. But it’s better than nothing, and probably better than whatever the TV show was that Matthew thought we should be watching instead. Perhaps the world of blogs has been dull because we’ve all been watching too much rugby and going to Emmylou Harris concerts instead of staring at our computer screens for too many hours of the day.

Joe Hill, bard of the Wobblies, born 7 October 1879, died 19 November 1915.

Most of the time it’s the Boston Red Sox which remind me of what an excellent place Massachusetts — where I lived for five years from 1995 to 2000 — can be.

Today it’s the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The full verdict is here.

Francesco de Martino, Italian Socialist, born 31 May 1907, died 18 November 2002.

They are discussing national anthems over at Crooked Timber, and some people are saying rude things about the ever-splendid Marseillaise, which is possibly the only song to feature centrally in two of the world’s very finest cinema scenes (in Casablanca, of course, and — less well-known but more remarkably — in the silent classic Napol�on vu par Abel Gance). Around a decade ago there was a movement to get the words rewritten to make them a little less bloody, but I’m glad to say that it failed.

One of my favourite moments from my time in America came on Bastille Day in 1999 when the carillon in the campanile at UC Berkeley played the Marseillaise at noon, its chiming, tinkling bells offering a fine and idiosyncratic tribute from one great republic to another. (I wonder if they still do that, now that transatlantic relations have soured a bit: I still think that if the Americans really want to pick a fight with the French by renaming their chips they should have the decency to return the Statue of Liberty first).

Two of my favourite snippets on the subject of national anthems:

Yes, that’s why the All Blacks lost against Australia on Saturday, according to eminent ex-All Black David Kirk.

“Take your pick of modern “isms” - populism, socialism, me too-ism, not fair-ism, free ride-ism - they all add up to mediocrity and that’s exactly what we got on a warm Saturday evening in Sydney as the dream of a second World Cup crown slipped away.”

Thanks to eminent Kiwi Richard for pointing out this hitherto-undetected aspect of the ubiquitous Red Menace.

Online cricket archives are getting better and better.

This page gives an elegant summary of my grandfather Wilfrid Kalaugher’s first-class career, 1928-1931, with links to the scorecards of the eight matches in which he played, including the one in which he played against Wilfred Rhodes and got Maurice Leyland out and the one in which Kent scored far too many runs.

Far more important than the politics of the various rugby teams I’ve been supporting is the fact that I’ve managed to watch five of the six quarter- and semi-finals, and in all five the team I’ve been supporting has lost: Ireland against France, Scotland against Australia, Wales against England, New Zealand against Australia and France against England. (And weren’t France disappointing.) I wanted New Zealand to beat South Africa, but that game was only on ITV2, which isn’t on my telly.

Australian supporters will therefore be pleased to learn that I shall finally be gunning for England next Saturday…

Robert Owen, 14 May 1771 - 17 November 1858.

Guinness is Good for You! I knew it all along.

Which reminds me of my favourite joke on a similar subject.

At times of royal scandal, anxious Britons scan the European papers, in the hope that they will stumble across the news stories that Fleet Street dares not print.

And for those who can’t read the major European languages, there’s always babelfish and the other Internet Translation Tools, which make everything far too exciting for words.

So, from La Repubblica of 8 November, read on — and, preferably, read aloud — as “The megaphone of the Windsor takes part on a subject of gossip and the prince refutes in Tv one love story with the butler…”

Chris Bertram is spending some of his time writing friendly criticisms of my various personal preferences over at Crooked Timber here and here. I’m now spending more of my time justifying my choices back on this blog. Yesterday I dealt with the Marxists (though read on for some second thoughts on the matter), and today I’m turning to the altogether more complicated Question of Sport.

So, beginning towards the end of his post with his double misplacements, I’m entertained to learn that when he cheers for England against Scotland in football or rugby he feels himself able to play (if necessary) the postcolonial card against the memory of Colley’s beastly Scottish imperialists… On the second misplacement, I’m not at all sure that I agree that “the displacement of the Union Jack by the Cross of St George in the hands of English sporting fans represents if not an explicit rejection of Great British colonial nationalism, at least an adaptation to something less jingoistic and aggressive”. But that may in part be because the only time I’ve experienced my own College bar as a less than fully welcoming place was the time there was a group of usually intelligent male (did I have to say that?) undergraduates with the Cross of St George painted on their faces singing, um, jingoistic and aggressive songs about how the Argentinian football team’s fondness for gay sex was grounds for asserting the superiority of the English. (Somehow I don’t think that this particular poisonous triangle of English nationalism, homophobia and football is unique to Oxford University.) One anecdote certainly does not a theoretical argument make — and I’m not going to pretend for a moment that the older Union Jackshirts never expressed similar attitudes — but I hope Chris will forgive me if my inclination is to respond to these expressions of this Cross of St George English nationalism by wanting to have nothing to do with it, rather than by launching a campaign of my own to try and contest and resignify the meanings of national symbols in sport. There’s certainly a disidentification here (though it’s a far stronger disidentification with nationalist expressions of support than with the object of support, the English football team, which I sometimes do support, as I did in that England v Argentina game), but as I’ve described it so far this disidentification has nothing straightforwardly to do with either postcolonial guilt or the romance of the Celtic nations, the two explanatory factors to which Chris draws attention.

Some people do have a policy of not supporting England. Dennis Skinner is one, and it was his use of the phrase, “Anyone but England” which provided the title for Mike Marqusee’s fine cricket book, which I was glancing through again last night. (C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary also reminds us that the complex relationship of cricket, social class and national politics is a spur to the very best writing on the game: I’m half regretting not voting for James and Fred Engels in Josh Cherniss’s poll, replacing Benjamin and Habermas on my list, but I don’t know whether he’ll let me submit a replacement ballot.) I don’t hold to “Anyone but England” as a policy or principle, and often I do find myself wanting England teams to win the matches they play, in football or in cricket — though quite often in cricket it’s obvious to me that my desire for the English cricket team to do well in part stems from my desire to have a competitive match: good Test cricket is one of life’s great pleasures, but when the English middle order collapses and the bowlers are crap, as has been known to happen, that’s very unlikely to take place. Cricket really is the sport where postimperial questions are quite inescapable, since the international game is entirely a product of the British Empire and matters of immigration and apartheid have done so much to shape the game, but I’m not going to try to talk about them here (go and read James and Marqusee if you’re interested) — except to say that when I experience feelings of postimperial guilt with respect to Test cricket I think that it doesn’t so much concern my feelings about the England team in particular, so much as the pleasure I derive from the entire spectacle (which we should understand here to include the Test Match Special radio commentary).

So, what of the rugby World Cup?

The two World Cup games I’ve enjoyed most were Wales vs New Zealand and Ireland vs Australia, in both cases because spirited performances by the Northern sides showed that the gap between (most) Northern and (most) Southern hemisphere rugby was narrower than it’s often taken to be. And watching the first game made it very easy to support Wales wholeheartedly against a dull and in some respects disappointing England the following week. It was a thoroughly good choice: Wales were the firm underdogs before the tournament began, in a sport where underdogs rarely win (look at both the quarter-final and semi-final lineups); and in their quarter-final they scored three tries to England’s one, played some great attacking rugby, led at half-time, and would have remained competitive right to the end if only that penalty kick had gone over in the 74th minute (or whenever it was). England won because Wales conceded way too many penalties, Jonny Wilkinson’s a good kicker, and their levels of personal fitness and discipline remained quite a bit higher. But those aren’t reasons for feeling terribly excited about their performance or their team. A dozen years ago I used to enjoy England’s ten-man rugby, but that was when I was a back-row forward myself, and I enjoyed watching England’s pack play well. Now it’s almost exactly ten years since the last game I ever played, and I find that I much prefer watching the open running game which I’ve seen Wales and France play in this World Cup better than England have managed to do — and that makes me want sides like that to do well. (I’ll certainly cheer for England if it’s an Australia vs England final, though, and that fact does say something about the ineliminably agonistic construction of national sporting identities.)

Chris writes critically of the “people who are plainly acculturated as English” who “seek to identify as �really� something else (on the grounds that this or that ancestor was Irish, Scottish or Welsh)”, but he seems to me to get things only half right here (at least in my case — though I have reason to think he was thinking of my case when he wrote those words). I’m “plainly acculturated as English”, but the point of cultivating a memory of where my ancestors came from in the context of sporting contests (in my case Ireland, Wales, England, New Zealand and Denmark) isn’t to stake an implausible claim to an authentic national identity that overrides my thoroughgoing Englishness. (What could that possibly be?) The fact of my grandmother’s Welshness, for example, and the fact that her father played rugby for Wales around a century ago doesn’t make me Welsh, but it does provide the right kind of elective affinity or affective attachment which makes it easier for me to cheer for Wales (or Ireland, or New Zealand, with reference to slightly different facts) than it would be to rustle up any real enthusiasm for, say, Australia, Scotland, Canada or Uruguay. (I’ll stop there before I start talking about interpellation and the way in which the universal does not hail. Don’t worry.)

Chris raises the further question of whether this “displaced allegiance [is] welcome or irritating to the recipients”. I don’t know. I imagine that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, and that that depends on the context: there’s more than one public for sport, that’s usually a very good thing, and the problem he raises is not unique to matters of national identifications: what do local supporters of Liverpool and Manchester United make of the southern middle-class kids who fetishise those teams? Or, closer to my home at least, what do the supporters of Oxford United make of the small number of university students who go to the games, and would they like there to be a lot more of them, such that the overall character of the fan base were to change significantly in its social composition? I’m sure many Irish and Welsh fans would find my occasional support for their rugby teams ridiculous and not especially welcome. But I also suspect that if I were to go to Lansdowne Road with my Irish uncles-by-marriage for Ireland v England (not an implausible possibility), they would both want me to cheer for Ireland and reserve the right to take the piss out of me as a representative Englishman where appropriate — and that seems entirely reasonable on their part.

There’s only one sports team about which I feel thoroughly and uncomplicatedly partisan, and that’s the Boston Red Sox. I was very surprised that I became interested in baseball at all, and after first going to a game at Fenway Park in 1996 my interest has continued to grow, and has (so far) survived a migration back from New to Old England three years ago. It’s not always easy to be a Sox fan on this side of the Atlantic (the internet — which, among other things, streams the WEEI Red Sox Radio Network — is invaluable), and I don’t quite know how I’ll feel about the Sox when all of the players I used to go and see or watch on television — Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez, Jason Varitek, Tim Wakefield and a handful of others — are no longer playing for the club. But I do enjoy being a Red Sox fan, enjoy hating the Yankees, and right now all I’m thinking is, Wait till next year!…

… Except that before next year, there’s next week-end, and the matter of who to support in France vs England. Well, I have an aunt who lives in Normandy…

According to The Guardian, Tim Collins CBE has just been appointed shadow secretary of state for education, though without a seat in the new-look, slimmed-down Shadow Cabinet.

The commemoration of Leonid Brezhnev below completes a year’s worth of Dead Socialists. I started commemorating Dead Socialists on 17 November 2002 with Robert Owen, and since there’s no-one in my notebook between 10 and 17 November, that’s it for the year.

Which raises the question of where to go from here. I’ve still got 58 in my notebook who are As Yet Uncommemorated (either because I added them after their anniversary had come around, or because I wasn’t blogging that day, or because — less frequently — I had a “Do I Really Want to Commemorate This One After All?” moment). And it’ll be easy to accumulate more to the basic list, since I didn’t trawl terribly deeply in Socialist History when I began this project (actually, that’s much too grand a word for what basically involves keeping a list and occasionally checking facts on reputable-looking websites and in standard reference works). And Living Socialists are Dying all the time, of course, which is a shame from one point of view, but it does help to swell the ranks from the point of view of a viable Dead Socialists Watch.

So this popular feature will certainly continue. The question is: would readers like to see last year’s Dead Socialists cycle round again, until every day of the year has its own Dead Socialist (repeat entries might just consist of a link to their original entry in the DSW, perhaps with added information if I can come up with anything appropriate, interesting or entertaining), or should I only commemorate Dead Socialists once, and press on with New Dead Socialists until I either run out or end up scraping the bottom of the barrel to the extent that it really doesn’t seem worth it anymore?

I can see the attractions of either approach, but I’d like to know what you think: feedback either in Comments or through private email, please.

Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, born 19 December 1906 in Kamenskoye (now Dneprodzerzhinsk), died 10 November 1982.

Chris Bertram has used my entries for Josh Cherniss’s Five Greatest Marxists poll to start a discussion over at Crooked Timber.

Habermas is the choice that has raised the biggest eyebrows: I go for Habermas, as my favourite Habermas book is Legitimation Crisis, which I’m happy to describe as a piece of Marxist theory, and an elegant and imaginative one at that. (I’m not sure that it gets it right, but in my world that’s not the chief importance of good theory: good theory raises good questions to talk about, and presents old problems in new and interesting ways, and Legitimation Crisis does that in abundance.) Yes, Habermas has become something of a bourgeois liberal over the subsequent quarter-century, and I wouldn’t characterise his recent work as Marxist, but I wouldn’t want to use that as a criterion for striking someone from the lists (as it were) of a competition like this one: G. A. Cohen (who has also navigated a passage from analytical Marxism to left-liberalism of a sort) would also fall victim, in that case, as would, no doubt, many other interesting scholars and activists. So Habermas still fits inside my Big Tent Marxism.

(I never worry too much about the precise boundaries of “Marxism”, but that may be because while I’ve been interested in and often strongly sympathetic to Marxist writings since I was 14 or so, I’ve never belonged to a Marxist political organisation or identified as Marxist — though I think quite a few of the people I know identify me as a Marxist, and I don’t really mind if they do.)

Chris suggested that a verdict of greatness should be passed in favour of those “who most creatively developed and applied Marx�s own methods of social analysis” (rather than “literary scribblers and misplaced German romantics”), but I’d say that that’s just what Adorno did, with his writings on music in particular. (And I will confess here to being a something of a sucker for tragic romance, which may partly explain the inclusions of Gramsci and Benjamin: not for nothing is Verdi my favourite composer.) I’m not going to say that this kind of cultural criticism was a vital component of building mass struggle, etc., nor that I think Marx would have approved of his use of Freudian jargon, but I do think it’s an important development of Marxist theory, and not to be discounted on that score.

Chris also said that a judgment of greatness shouldn’t imply an endorsement of the politics. I’m not sure that that’s wholly possible in the case of judging the Greatness of Marxists, but it’s true that I was compiling a list of writers whose politics I quite liked as well as whose writings I admired, and it’s certainly true that I do find it easier to admire the Marxists who never came close to directing state power, which says something about the squeamish liberal centre which lurks between my (infrequently militant) socialist exterior.

On a related note, Norm asked me the other day whether I had to approve of a Dead Socialist in order to include her or him in the Dead Socialist Watch, and I basically replied, No but it helps. You’ll find Mao and others whom I don’t much like in the DSW, because one of the points of the exercise is to draw attention to the great diversity of Dead Socialists in the tradition, and a simple Does Chris [Brooke, not Bertram] Approve? test would be, in that context, misplaced. On the other hand, I don’t go out of my way to track down the death-dates of Pol Pot, Vyshinsky and other socialist mass murderers in order to canonise them on this site. (On the other, other hand, I certainly don’t think that the propensity of self-proclaimed socialists to kill large numbers of their fellow-citizens when they take and hold power is something that can be shrugged off with a claim about how they weren’t really socialists after all: the phenomenon is a bit too pervasive for that to be an acceptable get-out.)

Thinking about favourites brings to mind one of my favourite short poems by Wendy Cope, which is both apposite and a good place to stop.

When they ask me, “Who’s your favourite poet?”,
I’d better not mention you.
But you certainly are my favourite poet
And I like your poems too.

I think this one’s from her second published volume, Serious Concerns.

It’s not looking too good for the Virtual Stoa’s favourite Tory MP Tim Collins…

There’s an obituary in today’s Guardian for John Baxter, who has died at 86 and whose great claim to fame was that he built the Westway.

Which gives me the chance to link to and quote from my friend Martin’s 1998 essay on contemporary art… It’s not so much From the Westway to the World as From the Westway to the World Cup (football, not rugby: read it and you’ll see why), it’s a fine piece of writing, and it’s probably the nicest thing that anyone’ll ever say about the Westway:

But, it [the M25] pales beside the elevated section of the A40(M) - the ‘Westway’. No finer building, or piece of public sculpture (for, dear reader, it is both) has been constructed in London in the last hundred years. A playful surge through Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, swerving joyfully towards Paddington - a muscular beast, both of the city, and acting as a conduit out of it: an arterial fixture, and a sign of beyondness, of escape. Our descendants will dance and drink and live and die on this huge, body-swerving altar of late capitalism, and will wonder at our lack of appreciation of our creation. Even now, the Westway supports, within its proud skeleton, the rich play of west-London life: night clubs, five-a-side football pitches, lock-ups, caf�’s, all nestle under its proud form. It is of its place completely. Settled, sheltering, succouring: a man-made force of nature. This hopeful, playful glyph has more to recommend it than any of our ‘gallery objects’. It is not just its physical bulk which makes the Westway too big to fit in any such ‘art space’: it is simply incapable of confinement, a plenum of force, energizing the city. And we made this thing. Or, rather, scores of workers did. In London, in our life times. We’ve probably met some of them, and not even thought of it. Our lack of appreciation, though, is a mere lag, an attachment to the old forms. It will change.

I quite like it, too, but then again, I’ve never lived in that part of London.

I’ve just deleted the post I published at 4.43pm yesterday afternoon, and then updated around twenty minutes later. I wrote it while I was feeling quite angry towards Paul “The Thinker” Richards, because I had noticed both that he had taken down the parts of his earlier post to which I (and others) had objected, and that he had not posted any admission that he had done so (despite having denounced the practice of “stealth-editing” on his blog shortly before that).

Very shortly after my post appeared, so too did his acknowledgment of his having altered the page — and while the update to my post referred to this acknowledgment, I think that, on balance, I should have retracted more of the strong language which I used in the original post of 4.43pm. I’m retracting it now, and I’m sorry if it has caused any offence. It’s not language which I want to use of anyone else in the blogging community, however much I disagree with them, and I’m going to apologise to Paul “The Thinker” Richards for using it by copying this message to his email account (if I can find out what it is).

The posts of 2.26pm yesterday and 2.11pm today (the language of which I am also toning down a little — but only a little) articulate my more settled opinions on this matter far more clearly and temperately.

I’m hoping now that since I have calmed down enough to apologise to Paul for what I’ve called him on this blog (and I’ll tell him what I called him if he doesn’t already know), he’ll also offer the apologies for his behaviour which I (and others) think are already overdue.

I’m still feeling very unhappy with the behaviour of Paul “The Thinker” Richards, so, at the risk of flogging this particular horse to death, I want to revisit the latter part of the exchange that took place yesterday on the comments section of his new-look blog.

(If you’re bored by my sniping at this guy, feel free to ignore what follows: I promise that normal blogging will be resumed reasonably soon — assuming that he doesn’t try to antagonise me still further.)

I quoted a chunk of the exchange below. Here’s the next contribution, from Jon (and, Jon, if you read this here and would rather I took this down, just say, and I’ll replace the quoted text with a link):

Regardless of whether or not your correspondent is a pub bore, you, Mr “Thinker”, are most definitely the virtual equivalent of David Brent. Not since Gervais� marvellous portrayal of that character in The Office have I seen such a combination of petulance, insecurity and comical triteness. Like Brent, you know what sounds like an impressive idea � thus, �most importantly [of all the wonderful features of your blog] it has space for comments and debates,� in order to combat an atmosphere of discourse that is, �reduced to gossip, smears and plain old getting it wrong.� Well, debates aren�t engaged by calling people �pub bores� (strategically identical to Brent�s favourite get-out when beaten in an argument, that of accusing his adversary of not understanding because they weren�t �with it�), and your serious allegations about Michael Howard, without evidence, ARE either just smears or �plain old getting it wrong�. Witness Brent�s meaningless aphorisms of management-babble when he explains his job description; witness the Thinker�s attempt at profundity, declaring that �Politics is dead. Long live politics�. How do you want others to see you? Look back at the pose Brent strikes whenever he prepares for a photograph, and look at the impressive stone figure in the top left hand corner of your page � they are identical, except Gervais was taking the piss. And, finger firmly placed on chin, what is it that the Thinker actually spends most of his time thinking about? Once more, like Brent, the topic seems to be ego, with special reference to pomposity; �Can blogs be beautiful as well as thought-provoking?� Dare man dream such a thing? Quite what the rest of the world has done to be �thought� about in this manner, only you can tell us. You�re the sort of person that makes me want to go into politics, and that�s about as polite as I can be. But ignore everything that I�ve just said (not so much water off a duck�s back as off two ronsealed planks, I should imagine) � you�ve got some important charges to answer above; charges which only a man without any regard for integrity could leave levelled unanswered. [November 8, 2003 04:52 PM]

Thus, with wit, wisdom and the right pop culture references, Jon skewered Paul “The Thinker” Richards, and in doing so usefully added evidence to the dossier of the various kinds of hypocrisy that his blogs have evinced over the last week or so.Now it would be nice if it were the case that it was Jon’s witty wisdom that shamed Paul “The Thinker” Richards into removing the offending and offensive words from his old blog, where my own heavy-handed “pub bore” moralism had failed. But that may not be quite right, for this comment is timestamped 4.52pm, and I noticed that the objectionable words had gone by 4.43pm. So it may be that my earlier comments had given “The Thinker” at least something of a bad conscience which had prompted him to act. Who knows? Not all timestamps are in sync with one another, and I don’t claim to know exactly when computers stamp various posts and comments, so I’m not going to claim to know for sure what happened and in what order.

But if you’re tempted to think that Paul “The Thinker” Richards has begun to behave honourably by cleaning up after himself, do pay careful attention to the way he composed his reply to Jon a few minutes later:

Dear Jon,thanks for your comments. You’re dead right to point out the erroneous quote about Howard, which I have removed. It appeared as part of an email which claimed to have been checked and properly sourced. An important lesson there for us all. The rest of the quotes about Howard are accurate as far as I know.

Thanks for taking an interest in The Thinker - and yes you should get involved in politics. Keep the comments coming! [November 8, 2003 05:02 PM]

Now there are a few interesting things here.

After his recent contributions to this thread, Marc Mulholland is being interesting on the subject of how the Indymedia sites (and, in particular, Indymedia Ireland) are re-shaping the ways in which far-leftists communicate with the world.