The Virtual Stoa

Anna Lindh, Swedish social democrat; born 19 June 1957, assassinated one year ago today, 11 September 2003.

Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, b. 17 April 1894, d. 11 September 1971.

Salvador Allende, President of Chile: born 26 June 1908, died 11 September 1973 in the violence surrounding the coup which brought General Pinochet to power.

I don’t always have polite things to say about government higher education reforms, but at first glance — and this is a first, very quick glance — I think the proposals trailed here seem eminently sensible.

(See DSW#110, below.) A correspondent writes with this (possibly apocryphal) anecdote:

The late Duncan Hallas used to tell how there had once been terrible internal disputes in Peter’s branch and Peter gave a great deal of thoght to how the problem could be resolved. Unfortunately in travelling to the meeting to discuss the issue his bus was seriously delayed and by the time Peter arrived the other comrades had already discussed the branch problem, decided it was Sedgwick, and expelled him. (This was a story Peter often used to tell against himself.)

Thanks very much for that. Anecdotes about Dead Socialists are always welcome at the Virtual Stoa.

Gerrard Winstanley, English Digger, b. 1609, d. 10 September 1676.

There’s some useful stuff on the Diggers collected here, with links to some of the classic tracts.

St George’s Hill is in large part given over to golf nowadays, which is really sad.

Mao Zedong, 1893-1976.

According to the programme notes for John Adams’s splendid opera, Nixon in China, “Chairman Mao was probably the closest thing to Plato’s Philosopher King that the world will ever see. He was a brilliant peasant autodidact who played up his thick Southern accent, spat, belched and scratched himself. He wrote great poetry in the classic Chinese forms, and later banned those forms. In a country he had made puritan, he was an inveterate womanizer. His enemies destroyed one another; millions died who opposed his thought.”

The Virtual Stoa seems to have made it into the lower ranks of the Marauding Marsupials over at the blog Ecosystem, and on the same day that I finally got round to buying a copy of The Origin of Species.

ten point type has this qualified endorsement of the blog you’re reading:

“If you can face coterie blogism at a rather unpleasant level, but with a kickass Dead Socialist Watch, there’s always the virtual stoa. Yuck. I feel cheap, now.”

Seeing Dodgeball last night (fun film, fun film) reminded me to remind you all that 19 September is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so get practicing.

I’m told that the advertising slogan for Dodgeball in the US is “Grab Life By The Ball”, and that the UK slogan adds the letter “S” to make the last word into “Balls”. This is entertaining, if true.

Those who want to practice T-ing like a P might want to ask themselves what letter comes before “S” in the alphabet, saying it loudly in a preposterous voice.

Peter Sedgwick, New Left socialist, died 8 September 1983.

Not much on the web about Sedgwick, though there’s one of his essays here and a brief discussion of his work on psychiatry here. I first came across his work via his review of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in the Socialist Register, and he’s always struck me as one of those British New Leftist writers I ought to know a bit more about than I do.

More and more is being posted at The Brick Testament, the internet’s only attempt to illustrate the entire Bible in Lego.

The book of Joshua is currently being published, so there’s some pretty dramatic stuff going on. Do go and have a look, if you haven’t been following it for years now.

One of the gloomy things about visits to America is hearing my far-better-informed-than-myself friends explain to me why they think W is going to win the forthcoming election, when I’ve tended to take the view all year that he can’t possibly pull this one off (for various reasons, but especially for some of those listed by Nathan Newman back in January).

The immediate feelings of gloom, however, are partially offset by this priceless new Bushism: speaking in Missouri, W. claimed that owing to the threat of legal action,

“Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”

Video clip here (via, via).

Marc Mulholland’s Daily Moiders appear to be back, after more than a month of streaming near-silence.

This is a substantially redundant advert, as I doubt there’s a Virtual Stoa reader out there who isn’t also a reader of the Normblog, but (if you aren’t) do tune in tomorrow for the start of Norm’s series on Marx and the State.

I tend to take the view that when Marx writes about the end of the state he either means something trivial (the state is an instrument for the violent suppression of one class at the hands of another, so when there’s a classless society there is, ipso facto, nothing that corresponds to the role of the state in class society), or else he means the end of something like the end or the absence of the specifically Hegelian state (though quite a lot then hinges, of course, on how much we pack into that notion, and I’m not quite sure how much I want to pack into it).

So I’ll be watching the series with great interest and, who knows?, may comment on it here.

While staying at the Sheraton hotel in Chicago at the APSA, I had the television on from time to time in the morning before I went out and in the evening after I came in, tuned to CNN (when I wasn’t trying to catch up with baseball news), with the result that I flew back to England knowing an awful lot about the moment-by-moment progress of hurricane Frances across the state of Florida, and (in comparison) a quite trivial amount about the atrocities in Beslan.

I’m catching up now.

A. J. P. Taylor, historian; born 25 March 1906, died 7 September 1990.

Apologies for the silence. I didn’t post for a few days, and then I went off to Chicago for the APSA (see here and here from a couple of years ago) and then also didn’t post for a few more days.

Back now.