The Virtual Stoa

Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, better known to the world as Lenin, founder of Soviet communism, born 22 April 1870 in Simbirsk, died 21 January 1924 in Moscow.

Tony Blair says that Ruth Turner is “is a person of the highest integrity”. Tessa Jowell says that “she is a person of utter decency and conscientiousness”. Lord Puttnam says that “She’s one of those half-dozen, dozen people who I would stake my life on.” David Blunkett has spoken of her “decency and honesty” in a BBC interview. Even bloggers like Will Parbury (and an occasional Stoa-commenter) are getting in on the act saying that “Having met Ruth I simply will not believe that she would do anything wrong.”

I’m sure that settles it.

“For a generation or more [from the 1960s], the dominant model of human behaviour on Left and Right was highly individualistic. This was true in the liberation of private life and in intellectual debate. The Left was captivated by the elegance and power of Professor John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971). His manifesto for an egalitarian society is a brilliant exposition of the argument that an equal society is in the interests of anyone who does not know which position in that society they would occupy. But it is derived from a highly individualistic view of the world.”

I don’t think Googling will help here, but perhaps some of you have better Googling skills than I.

John Ruskin, English critic, born 8 February 1819, died 20 January 1900.

I think that I should like members of the Prime Minister’s staff to be arrested every day. (Maybe just every week-day.)

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French anarchist socialist, born 15 January 1809, died 19 January 1865. He never really did manage to get on with Karl Marx.

Q: Why do anarchists drink herbal tea?
A: Because proper tea is theft.

Ethel Bentham, doctor, suffragist, Fabian, member of the Labour Party’s NEC, magistrate and MP for East Islington from 1929 until her death. Born in the City of London, 5 January 1861 died in Chelsea, 19 January 1931.

Sylvain Maréchal, Babouvist and author of the Dictionnaire des Athées, born 15 August 1750, died 18 January 1803.

Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, born 9 April 1906, died 18 January 1963.

By special request, here’s a picture of Babar the Elephant (and Celeste).

They have a poster up in Blackwells café right now for “Babar et les ballons”, but the mood at the Stoa is that Babar looks best in a balloon when he’s waving his handkerchief from the balloon, as above.

Following Richard’s recommendation in comments below, I got myself a copy of Thomas E. Ricks’s Fiasco, and am now halfway through. It’s alright, though it’s a bit heavy-handed, and I still prefer the reporter George Packer’s book (The Assassins’ Gate) to the stay-at-home-and-swap-emails-with-the-troops approach of Ricks.

Anyway: my  favourite detail so far concerns the role of PowerPoint in the run-up to the war:

[Army Lt Gen David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging, issue. He couldn’t get [Tommy] Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld. “It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD [Office of Strategic Defense] and Secretary of Defense… In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides… [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.”

That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld’s amateurish approach to war planning. “Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD’s contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology – above all information technology – has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war,” commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. “To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness.” It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer’s glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

[Thomas E Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Allen Lane, 2006, pp.75-6.]

G. D. H. Cole, Fabian, Guild Socialist and (with Margaret Cole) author of detective fiction, born 1889, died 15 January 1959.

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered in Berlin, 15 January 1919.

(Older tribute posts here and here.)

David Robb (“Davy”) Campbell, Belfast protestant trade unionist and Home Ruler, leading figure in the Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party, later leader of the Labour group on the Belfast Corporation in 1920, shortly before the collapse of socialist politics in Ulster; born in Belfast, 1874/5, died, also in Belfast, 14 January 1934.

Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov, Soviet politician: briefly the successor to Stalin, later the manager of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan; born 8 January 1902, died 14 January 1988.

Michael Young, principal author of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto, “Let Us Face the Future“, author of the funny novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy [see his later remarks on his neologism here], co-author of the classic study, Family and Kinship in East London, inspiration behind the Consumers’ Association, the Open University, et cetera, born 9 August 1915, died 14 January 2002.