The Virtual Stoa

Apparently he’s back in the Shadow Cabinet, which is where, I think we all agree, he belongs.

Here’s how Oxford voted in the Euro-elections:

7,977 Liberal Democrats
7,681 Labour
7,017 Greens
5,706 Conservative Party - Putting Britain First
3,640 UK Independence Party
803 Respect - The Unity Coalition (George Galloway)
800 Senior Citizens Party
743 British National Party
389 English Democrats
334 Peace Party
233 Pro Life
231 Chistian People’s Alliance
83 Philip Rhodes

Sarah has usefully spotted that the comments box to the post below now comes up top for a google search on the phrase “anti-english website“…

I’m delighted to see that I’m not the only blogger to have installed a French Revolutionary Calendar: the folks at Republikeinse have one, too (on the left-hand menubar, scroll down a bit), along with a Roman republican calendar, too. (More details on this kind of thing here.)

Careful readers will notice that their calendar and mine are a day out of sync with one another, which probably calls for explanation. The Virtual Stoa’s calendar is based on the mathematical version of the French Repbulican Calendar, which was approved but (alas) never implemented. Republikeinse probably have a script to generate dates according to the astronomical version of the calendar, which was the one actually in force in France in the 1790s, etc.

It’s good to clear that one up.

Probably.

Just seen a traffic warden handing out some kind of ticket or other to a vehicle flying a St George Cross.

It’s probably wishful thinking to think that this is part of a deliberate campaign…

From today’s Guardian Backbencher:

Ken and Jack visited Brixton market. Steve engaged a poodle in conversation. Frank “Baloney” Maloney of Ukip persuaded two pouting young women in white shorts to stick posters on his double-decker bus. And the three Conservative bellies pictured here were spotted marching along a Battersea street today. To whom does each belong? If you think you can name them - left to right, please - then email backbencher@guardianunlimited.co.uk. This week’s coveted prize is a copy of Paul “The Thinker” Richards’ How to Win an Election - out yesterday in an updated version, with a new section on the power of the interweb.

[Via Sarah].

Andrew Sullivan quotes a chunk of Ronald Reagan’s 1967 rhetoric on race in America, and concludes that “Yes, Reagan was a skeptic about legislating tolerance. But these are not the words of a racist”.

So let’s juxtapose Reagan’s words with the symbolic politics of where he chose to say what he said on these kinds of subjects. Here’s Roger Wilkins, on American telly the other night:

Well, Reagan was an incredible combination of a person who was very optimistic, upbeat, but underneath there were some really ugly parts of his politics.He was, I said once before on this program, he capitalized on anti-black populism by going to Philadelphia, Mississippi, for example, in the beginning of his campaign in 1980. Nobody had ever heard of Philadelphia, Mississippi outside of Mississippi, except as the place where three civil rights workers had been lynched - in 1964 - he said “I believe in states’ rights.” Everybody knew what that meant.

He went to Stone Mountain , Georgia , where the Ku Klux Klan used to burn its crosses, and he said “Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine.” He was rebuked by the Atlanta newspapers - they said we don’t need that any more here.

He went to Charlotte, North Carolina one of the most successful busing for integration programs in the country and he said I’m against busing and again the Charlotte papers rebuked him.

And the impact of that plus his attacks on welfare women, welfare queens in Cadillacs, for example. And his call for cutting the government. He didn’t cut the government; the military bloomed in his time. But programs for poor people diminished entirely and America became a less civilized and less decent place…

That sounds about right.

It’s good that while the VS isn’t posting for a few days, others — well, Marc — are paying attention to dead socialists. It’s important work, and someone’s got to do it.

Does Alan Turing, dead fifty years ago yesterday, qualify as a Dead Socialist, too? Hmm: I don’t know enough about his life. Comments, please.

Birthday greetings to the silverdollarcircle [and scroll down a bit]. It’s a great, odd blog, and my only regular source of information about grime music.

It is excellent to read that the Cow Parade is coming to Manchester. [via Norm.]

If I scratch my head and try to work out whether there were any real advances in global culture in the 1990s, the decision to put brightly-decorated sculptures of lifesize cows around the centres of major cities is certainly one that springs to mind, and I’m not sure there were that many more.

But even better than the Cow Parade is the Moose Parade, which adorned Toronto on the only occasion I’ve ever visited the city in the Summer of 2000.

Average Gallup two-term presidential approval/disapproval ratings (gaps computed from unrounded numbers, so these may not add):

Eisenhower 65/21 (gap: 44)
Reagan 54/36 (gap: 17)
Clinton 55/37 (gap: 18)

[via lbo-talk]

Sarah gets onto the pitcher’s mound, and onto the phone to the National Blood Service…

Time to bring up the century with Arthur Ransome, author of Six Weeks in Russia, The Crisis in Russia, Swallows and Amazons and other fine books; born in Leeds, 18 January 1884, died 3 June 1967.

Take the quiz: “Which American City Are You?”

You are under-world power and old-world tradition.
You get the job done and it’s better if nobody asks how.

Those absurd creatures from the English Democrats have reiterated their intention to initiate legal action against Chris Lightfoot:

Subject: English Democrats Party - comments which are offensiveWe advise you to remove offensive statements relating to the English Democrats Party. We have downloaded the offensive copy from your web-site and intend to prosecute you directly and your ISP if you do not remove the slanderous comments that you have published on your site.

We give notice that should the offensive material not be deleted from your site by 10.00am 4th June, we will instigate proceedings. against you.

C. Constable
English Democrats Party

Christine Constable is the vice-chair of the party, and is top of their candidates’ list in the North West region.Chris has responded by posting the relevant legal text, which explains why “it was of the highest public importance that a democratically electable political party should be open to uninhibited public criticism and since the threat of a civil action for defamation would place an undesirable fetter on the freedom to express such criticism, it would be contrary to the public interest for it to have any right at common law to maintain an action for damages for defamation”. And he also has this to say to his critics:

There is no part of Englishness which consists in suppressing dissent by threats, and no-one who does so has any claim to speak for England. I make no claim for English exceptionalism; the same, I believe, could be said for almost any country. But we are faced with an ugly crowd who do not belong here, and yet purport to speak for me and fifty million and more others while what they have to say would disgrace a pigsty.

Couldn’t agree more.

There’s a headline over at the BBC today which is underwhelming: “Sir Paul Reveals Beatles Drug Use“.

But it does contain the claim that one of John and Paul’s drugs was tea — which was something some of us had known about a long time ago…

John Dewey, American pragmatist, born 20 October 1859, died 1 June 1952.

So I telephone First Great Western yesterday to book a ticket on one of their trains, and they tell me that the train’s not yet open for booking, so why don’t I call back this morning? And I call back this morning, and they tell me that their booking system isn’t working right now, so why don’t I call back this afternoon? And I call back this afternoon, and they say they can’t do the booking because maybe the train doesn’t exist after all, and why don’t I check with National Rail Enquiries? So I check with National Rail Enquiries, and they tell me the train does exist and that they get their information, in any case, direct from First Great Western. So I call FGW Customer Relations and ask what they think might be going on, because this is not a little puzzling and not a little frustrating, and they tell me that, yes, the train does exist, and no, they don’t have any idea why telesales are unable to make the booking, so why don’t I call them back, and if I run into any difficulties, ask to speak to the supervisor? So I call FGW telesales again, and after keeping me on hold for a while, a supervisor is consulted, and the matter is looked into, and in the end I get told that the train does exist but that it’s not the kind of train you can make reservations on anyway, which they bloody well could have told me right at the start of the whole proceedings.

Grrrr.

That’s an entry in Monty Python’s series on “What famous people have said about goats”, from William Pitt the Younger [possibly misheard]. But moving seamlessly from the eighteenth century to the present, as I try to do every day, I’m glad to say that this entry isn’t anything about bestiality (see below, passim) but a link to the Non-Bloggish Blogger, who has provided an important round-up on Goats in Cyberspace. Let’s hope this becomes a regular feature. There aren’t enough goats in cyberspace. [Via Norm.]

I saw Polly Toynbee’s article in the Guardian the other day, which discussed the link between inequality and obesity, and was inclined to nod along sagely, not just because it was a nice piece of social democratic propagdanda, but because it fitted with my anecdotal experience. In the years I lived in America, there was a stark contrast between the middle-class students who inhabited the campus, who were hardly ever fat, and, in particular, the working-class teenagers who worked at the check-out desks of the local supermarket, who were often extremely fat.

Now, American bloggers and some of their friends didn’t like what they found in Toynbee’s piece and said so here, here and, most recently, here. And, for all I know or care, Toynbee’s article may very well have contained various mistakes, misrepresentations, sloppinesses, etc. But the power of anecdotal experience meant that these critiques didn’t quite shake my opinion that she was probably onto something important enough to warrant further discussion. And that’s one reason why it’s good to see Matthew Turner’s number-crunching in support of the Toynbee Thesis, or at least a part of it.

UPDATE [5pm]: Chris Lightfoot weighs in.

Robot Alarm Clock at Smart or Happy has some thoughts.

Steve writes to the Virtual Stoa: “Not bestiality (though the penguins do get ****ed), but after Penguin Cricket and whatever the second one was here’s Penguin Darts.”

Thanks for that, Steve. These are good games.

Just as John “Mars and Venus” Gray must rue the day he decided to fuck with Gavin Sheridan, so too the wretched, despicable English Democrats (who are running candidates in the Euro elections) will rue the day they — one of them, at any rate, a chap called Steve Uncles (though there can’t be many of them) — decided to fuck with Chris Lightfoot, after he read a chunk of their manifesto, reckoned that he thought they appeared to be “some sort of quasi-fascist mob”, and said so on his blog.

Moral support for Chris has come from Lib Dem Nick and Tory Anthony, making the slagging-off of the English Democrats a genuinely cross-party effort.

The moral of this story: blogreaders who make unreasonable threats of legal action against blogwriters deserve all the shit that can get thrown at them.