The Virtual Stoa

Killer Fact: Harry Hutton has an especially good one this weekend:

“In 2004 the works of Snoop Dogg outsold the works of Professor Roger Scruton for the 11th year running.”

A surprise phone call yesterday led to a visit to a bar with Dave Gwydion, visiting Oxford to buy books from Blackwell’s and do something or other in a library. Conversation revolved around the staples — you know, frogging, sex-bloggers and the 2002ers. And it brings the number of bloggers on my blogroll I’ve met in the non-virtual flesh to a surprising twenty-five or so, even though that’s never anything I’ve really made any kind of effort to do…

President Bush may have budgeted no funds for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean that we have to follow suit. On 17 April, my friend Juliane Fuerst will be taking a break from the academic study of late Stalin-era youth movements in order to run in the London Marathon. Seems to me like a crazy thing to want to do, but apparently it’s in order to raise money for AfghanAid. She’s got a page on the web about it where you can sponsor her here.

Well, a hero of just about everybody who cares to consider the matter.

Bob Marley, 60 today.

I’m told by someone who was told by someone who was there that the first words spoken at the celebrations of Zimbabwean independence after the Union Jack came down were these: “Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Marley and the Wailers…”

Every man gotta right
To decide his own destiny
And in this judgment
There is no partiality
So arm in arms, with arms
We will fight this little struggle
‘Cause that’s the only way
We can overcome our little troubleBrother you’re right, you’re right
You’re right, you’re right, you’re so right
We gonna fight, we’ll have to fight
We gonna fight, fight for our rights

Natty dread it ina Zimbabwe
Set it up ina Zimbabwe
Mash it up ina Zimbabwe
Africans a liberate Zimbabwe

No more internal power struggle
We come together, to overcome
The little trouble
Soon we will find out
Who is the real revolutionary
‘Cause I don’t want my people
To be contrary

Brothers you’re right, you’re right
You’re right, you’re right, you’re so right
We’ll have to fight, we gonna fight
We’ll have to fight, fighting for our rights…

[lyrics over here, more over here, pic from here]

Filemon Ka Popoy Lagman, Filipino revolutionary, born 17 March 1953, murdered 6 February 2001.

Pyotr Lavrov, Russian philosopher of narodnikism, born 14 June 1823, died 6 February 1890.

Hmm. In 2003 and 2004 I’ve commemorated Hanns Eisler, socialist composer, born 6 July 1898, on this day. But I may have been making a mistake, and I think that he probably died on 6 September. So he is being reallocated to a different section of the Dead Socialist Watch.

This, while embarrassing, is not administratively inconvenient, as I made him share #17 in the roster with REW, above. She will now remain at #17, and Cde Eisler can have a brand new number of his own when the time comes.

“Red” Ellen Wilkinson, born 8 October 1891, died 6 February 1947.

That’s Gavin Henson of Wales running past Matthew Tait, quite a while before kicking the winning goal to beat England 11-9. Pic from the BBC.

[and a reminder of why I support Wales against England these days over here.]

G. E. M. de ste Croix, the greatest Marxist ancient historian of them all, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and author of the Big Red Book, aka The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Born 8 February 1910; died 5 February 2002.

Well, not today. But recent.

MP VOTES AGAINST 24-HOUR DRINKING IN SOUTH LAKES

Growing concern over the introduction of new licensing laws which will allow an explosion in late night drinking across South Lakeland have been echoed by the area’s local MP Tim Collins who has voted in favour of a special House of Commons Motion to block the changes. For more on this story, click here.

I see that it’s Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday today. (Here, here, here.) Do we have Randians in the UK at all, or are they, like Straussians, just a funny American phenomenon that was never successfully exported over here?

Rudolf Hilferding, socialist economist and politician: born in Vienna, 10 August 1877; died in a Nazi prison, 2 February 1941.

I’ve just been introduced to a fine shortened version of the argument of Plato’s Republic, attributed to some nineteenth-century Leibniz scholar or other whose name eludes me for the present. It goes something like this:

- You will agree that the whole is greater than the part.
- Yes, O Socrates.
- But earlier we showed that the part was greater than the whole.
- Indeed you did, O Socrates.
- Therefore the Philosophers should rule in the City.
- How could anything else be the case, O Socrates?

I’m very pleased to read over at the Normblog that “[A] baby born in [a] Baghdad maternity hospital yesterday has been named Intikhabat - the Arabic word for “Elections”…” That seems to be a fine name, if not quite in the same scale of excellence as Tractorina, for enthusiastic Soviet babies.

My niece was born on the day of the Good Friday agreement in 1998. There was talk of calling her “Trimble”, though sadly the suggestion didn’t make it as far as the birth certificate.

Is this man the leader of a major new national political formation?

Robert Kilroy-Silk launched his ridiculous new vehicle today, which should entertain us over the days and weeks to come. And according to the Electoral Commission’s page for Veritas, someone called Anthony Bennett is simultaneously the Leader, the Nominating Officer (whatever that is) and the Campaigns Officer for the new party. I’d never heard of him, but quickly found this image, above, which may very well be our chap. Who’d have thought that Kilroy might be in league with a Eurocrazy UKIP metric martyr type?

[Image found here.

UPDATE [3.2.05]: Today’s Guardian has more.

UPDATE [6.2.05]: And Nick Barlow reports that Bennett’s a member of Christian Voice, that bunch of ignorant bigots.

For slow/no posts recently. It’s the combination of a laptop on the blink and a handful of deadlines to meet.

I’m concerned that all four verses are about to disappear from the internetweb. So here they are again. Sing along please, drink in hand. Double points to anyone who knows the verses in Irish.

Why spend your leisure bereft of pleasure,
Amassing treasure, why scrape and save?
Why look so canny at every penny?
You’ll take no money within the grave.
Landlords and gentry with all their plenty
Must still go empty where’er they’re bound.
So to my thinking, we’d best be drinking,
Our glasses clinking in round on round.

King Solomon’s glory, so famed in story,
Was far outshone by the lily’s guise.
But hard winds harden both field and garden;
Pleading for pardon, the lily dies.
Life’s but a bauble of toil and trouble,
The feathered arrow, once shot ne’er found.
So lads and lasses, because time passes,
Come fill your glasses for another round.

The huxter greedy he blinds the needy
Their straits unheeding, shouts, “money down!”
His special vice is his fancy prices,
For a florin’s value he’ll charge a crown.
With hump for trammel, the Scripture’s camel
Missed the needle’s eye and so came to ground.
Why pine for riches while still you’ve stitches
To hold your britches up — another round!

The schooner trading ‘tween Spain and Aden
Returns well laden with oil and corn.
And from Gibraltar her course she’ll alter
And steer for Malta and the Golden Horn.
With easy motion they sail life’s ocean
With ne’er a notion they’ll run aground.
It’s nought but miming, so ends my rhyming
And still we’ve time in for another round!