I don’t follow the baseball as closely as I used to, after years living away from New England, but I’m nevertheless pleased to see that in the ALCS against the Indians the Red Sox won Game Six 12-2 and Game Seven 11-2 and are now their way to the World Series against the Colorado Rockies. (Go, Sox.)
Guy Aldred, anarchist, conscientious objector, communist, propagandist, militant, etc., born 5 November 1886, died (according to the ODNB) 16 October 1963.
Someone recently arrived at the Stoa while searching on this question. Stoa-readers! Do any of you know the answer?
Thomas Sankara, prime minister and President of Upper Volta / Burkina Faso. Born 21 December 1949, killed in a coup, 15 October 1987.
Benny Lévy, aka Pierre Victor, French militant, leading ideologist for La Gauche Prolétarienne, later Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary, and convert to Judaism. Died 15 October 2003, aged 58.
Public reason may be possibly the most boring topic in contemporary political philosophy, which takes some doing, but it is also the name of a new blog by a bunch of political philosophers which looks as if it might become quite good. They’ve got a distinguished line up of contributors, not all of whom have yet contributed, and I suppose those of us with a sense of history will worry that this looks a little bit too much like the old Left2Right blog, which looked so promising at first, but never seemed to me to do that much beyond hosting some great posts by Elizabeth Anderson on Hayek and other related topics, and rather ran into the buffers. Anyway, I’m particularly pleased to see my old-friend-whom-I-haven’t-seen-in-years Alyssa Bernstein on the roster, as she’s great fun, if not a little Rawlsian.
Thinking of Rawlsians, this thread over at Brian Leiter’s place could become great fun, and possibly quite heated. In my balanced splitting-the-difference kind of way, I’m comfortable with the thought that Rawls was both a political philosopher of the first rank and that much Rawlsian thought is very possibly deep down “a generalizing [of] one’s own local prejudices and [a] repackaging [of] them as demands of reason”. And I think I’m comfortable with that thought because it seems obvious to me that much top-notch political philosophy has always been that, but the good stuff has never been just that, and one of the reasons progress gets made in philosophy, if it does, is through thinking about the extent to which this might in fact be the case and what, if anything, we might do about it. What’s funny is that philosophers sometimes get quite so defensive about the idea that their work might just be a little bit more parochial and a little less universal than they like to think it is, and that historians too often use their discipline’s own distinctive and not always attractive prejudices as a way of avoiding thinking hard about the difficult, interesting stuff.
Thanks also to this thread from Harry B at Crooked Timber, who asked the important question, “are philosophers scruffy?”, thereby reminding me of one of my favourite bits of De Civitate Dei, at the start of Book XIX, in which Augustine discusses Varro’s demonstration that there are 288 logically possible sects of philosophers, 144 of which are scruffy (”following the habits and fashions of the Cynics”), which I suppose follows naturally from our discussion of bearded philosophers from a few days ago.
Right: back to work.
What’s the connection between Rugby World Cup success and beardedness?
[Thanks, SF]
Over here.
Apparently we Oxford residents are also shoving a lot of cocaine up our noses in the men’s toilets of the city’s pubs and bars, even when the students aren’t really around, though I’ve never noticed. But then I suppose you’d need quite strong drugs to cope with some of the places they visited.
tehgraun has a big pic of Jonny Wilkinson on its front page (webpage, haven’t seen the paper version) with the headline “The man with the golden boot”. Were we watching different semi-finals? His kicking wasn’t actually that good last night; and while the drop-goal he landed at the end wasn’t bad at all, (i) it wasn’t a match-winning kick of the kind to get properly excited about, and (ii) the kind of possession England had at the time meant that he was pretty much assured of a regulation drop-goal opportunity some time around that point in the match.
Pretty scrappy game, I thought, especially after it settled down after a very high-tempo opening fifteen minutes or so. I’m not sure that England deserved to win it, but I know that France didn’t, and I’m sorry we didn’t really see Michalak get to do anything special.
Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, born 13 April 1922, died 14 October 1999.
Norm has posted on Eric Hollies’ dismissal of Don Bradman for 0 in the latter’s final Test Match at the Oval in August 1948 — you know, the duck that ensured that he only averaged 99.94 over the course of his international career (YouTube over here) — and he discusses the phenomenon of inherited cricket memories, of events that took place before you were born, or that you couldn’t possibly have experienced firsthand yourself, but of which you possess the most vivid of memories. And this example and this phenomenon makes me think of my dad.
As it happens, he was in the crowd at the Oval during that match as a twelve-year-old, though he didn’t see Bradman bat (not that he batted much), and I think his only memory is of Bradman fielding on the boundary.
(Australia, as it happens, didn’t need Bradman’s runs, as in the first innings England had been all out for 52, with Lindwall taking 6 for 20; Australia replied with 389, with 196 from Morris; and England only managed 188 in the second innings, with Hutton top-scoring with 64, Australia winning by an innings and 149 runs.)
But I thought of my dad more because I’m going to hazard a guess that his is the generation that is most familiar of all with powerful memories of cricket matches it never saw, owing to the Second World War. Men in their seventies now were boys during the war, when there was no significant domestic cricket and certainly no international cricket to follow. So they read up about games that had been played before the war, and very possibly about games that had been played before they were born, and can now talk about them as vividly as I can remember Test Matches that I saw on TV when I was younger, and above all in the early 1980s, with the England team of Ian Botham, David Gower and Bob Willis.
And I think this also helps to explain just why Dennis Compton’s runs in 1947 were quite so celebrated, or why the visit of Bradman’s Australians in 1948 was quite so exciting. During the war people could only read about past heroics, and here were the heroes finally playing again, and heroically, too.
So I’m not sure I’ve got any severely inherited cricket memories. I think I just belong to the wrong generation. The 1970s moment I’m most familiar with is when Fredericks hit Lillee for six but then trod on his stumps in the 1975 World Cup Final at Lord’s, but that’s just because that was the best game ever to screen highlights from during rain breaks in TV broadcasts in the 1980s. (It’s the third ball in this clip, coming after less than a minute.)
Readers! Any inherited cricket memories of your own? Or just cricket clips from YouTube you want to recommend? Fire away in the comments.
There’s a helpful round-up of the recent Martin Amis kerfuffle over at Matt’s place.
All I’ll add is that we need to see the remarks about his urges to stripsearch people who look as if they might be from Pakistan (etc.) in a slightly wider context. Amis is also someone who thinks he can discern murderous intentions towards his family in the glance of an Arab doing his job, who can write things like “the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male”, who seems to absorb Bernard Lewis-like explanations of historical problems when non-crazy explanations are readily available, who recycles inflammatory quotations from Hezbollah’s leader that circulate freely around the internet, but which no-one ever quite manages to trace back to an authentic-looking source, and so on.
(This last one strikes me as weird, because presumably it’s not too hard to find Hezbollah leaders saying offensive things, so why is the very-possibly-made-up quote the one that everyone’s heard somewhere or other?)
We can practice our careful reading skills as much as we like on that particular “urges” passage, and we can be as charitable towards him as we want to be (though we should also bear in mind that there’s a long history of people with really offensive views managing to present them in ways that aren’t quite so offensive on a charitable reading of their words). But Amis also has form here when it comes to saying the kinds of things about Muslims that the real crazies also like to say, and it’d be a shame to lose sight of that fact in the parsing of his words from the interview.
I’m not sure enough about what I really think is going on in Amis’s head (and I’m not interested enough in either him or his books to spend too much time on trying to work it out), but he seems to me to be somewhere on the slippery slope that has Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips festering at the bottom, and it doesn’t look to me as if he’s too anxious to be stepping off it any time soon. (But perhaps I’m being uncharitable.)
This made me laugh, from tehgraun:
“Blair was really astonished and angry,” says the UN official who gave him a presentation on the devastating effects of Israel’s “security barrier”, settlements, checkpoints, and closures on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. “He asked very smart questions, though I did think that someone who was prime minister for so long should already have known these facts.”
Sidney Webb, Fabian socialist, aka Lord Passfield; born 13 July 1859, died 13 October 1947, and, as it turned out, the last beardie in the Cabinet for over sixty-five years.
Apparently in response to queries from people like me, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband has posted on his blog about the on-going Iraqi employees issue. Please read what he has to say and comment, but please please please take extra care to be polite when you’re over at his blog. If you’re looking for points to make, some suitable thoughts are easily available in the bulletpoints here.
One other thing: I’ve had comments I’ve posted at that blog vanish without trace in the past. I think it’s cock-up rather than conspiracy, and that the FCO isn’t entirely in control of how to run blogging software. So save a copy of your comment before you hit “submit”, just in case, and do be patient — the comments don’t appear immediately (I suppose for fairly obvious reasons).
Gillo Pontecorvo, director of La Battaglia di Algeri (and others); born 19 November 1919, died 12 October 2006.
The Chris Lightfoot Memorial Naziometer (see sidebar) was recording pretty low values over the Summer. It was zero for quite a while, and although things have been improving recently, I’ve only been noticing scores hovering around the three / four mark. So I’m thrilled to report that it’s hit sixteen!, which may very well be an all-time high, thanks entirely to this fine post.
Donald Dewar [or here], Scottish Labour politician and first First Minister after Scottish Home Rule, born 21 August 1937, died 11 October 2000.
Apparently she’s stopped broadcasting.
Chris Bertram points out that our mutual friend Martin O’Neill has an article about inheritance tax in a recent New Statesman. I hadn’t noticed this, as the postal strike means that my copy hasn’t arrived yet, and while the NS was nice enough to (e)mail out a pdf (no, not that kind of pdf), I thought I’d wait for the paper copy to arrive, which perhaps it will one day. It’s a good piece, and one that incorporates my favourite Ben Franklin quotation, and the intro blurb suggests that Martin’s going to be the NS in-house political philosopher, at least for a bit, and that can only be a good thing.
While I’m on the subejct of recent stuff by my mates: here’s Rory Stewart on Gertrude Bell in the New York Review of Books; here’s Raj Patel being interviewed in Australia’s finest newspaper, the Age (and do buy his book if you haven’t already); and while you’re in the bookshop you might want to pick up a copy of Patricia Owens’ new book, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, which ought to be hitting the shelves about now.
Fred Bramley, trade unionist. Apprenticed as a cabinet-maker, he joined the ILP and worked for The Clarion, campaigning against tariff reform after 1903. Active in the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association (acronym’d to NAFTA!), he became its national organiser in 1912 and was fully engaged in industrial struggle until the outbreak of war in 1914. He opposed British entry into the war, chaired the London branch of the Labour Party and campaigned for women’s suffrage. In 1920 and 1921 he was centrally involved in the restructuring of the TUC, with its General Council replacing the old Parliamentary Committee. He became the first full-time General Secretary of the TUC in 1923, and in post through the period of the first Labour Government. Born near Otley, W. Yorkshire, 27 September 1874, Bramley died in Amsterdam at an IFTU meeting, 10 October 1925.
Stoa favourite Charles Fourier, born 7 April 1772, died 10 October 1837. Here he is on the druids and here he is on the giraffe.
All silliness aside, though (well, perhaps not all silliness, it’s just too good) he’s an absolutely cracking social theorist, and well worth reading more often than you probably do. Fourier had any number of insights that only became commonplace decades later — that the everyday institutions of work and family in commercial society made people miserable, that the oppression of women was an absolute scandal, that people’s sex lives made a pretty substantial contribution to their overall well-being, that people are all quite different from one another so that one-size-fits-all politics and economics was always going to be a mistake, and so on — and blended these various concerns into a zany but captivating synthesis.
Gareth Stedman Jones is interested in him (among other reasons) because his writing shows how the origins of socialism lie more in the critique of religion than in the critique of capitalism; I’m interested in him (among other reasons) because his “socialism” was founded on a rejection of egalitarianism, often considered to be the core socialist concern; you should all be interested in him, because (among other reasons) he’s just so much fun to read.
The ministerial statement is here; comments from Dan Hardie, Daniel Davies, Jamie Kenny, Tim Ireland.
I agree — and I also have the same reaction I used to have when Michael Howard used to beat up on refugees and asylum seekers.
It seems to me extraordinary that the Foreign Secretary, whose father escaped from Ostend on the last boat to leave for England in May 1940 and was granted refugee status while at sea, should sign his name to a document arbitrarily abandoning some of the Iraqis whom we employed in and around Basra to the tender mercies of the Shi’ite death squads, and to whom we can easily offer sanctuary, just because they were employed for less than a year. That’s pretty disgraceful, and I expected better from Ralph Miliband’s son.
UPDATE [6.45pm]: Also: Sunny Hundal.
There was a pretty good segment on the Today Programme this morning at about ten to eight. You can listen to it (I think) by clicking this link (at least for a bit, at any rate).
And then the Prime Minister made his statement this afternoon about Iraq, in which he said this:
Mr Speaker, I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances exposing themselves and their families to danger.
And I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in uniquely difficult circumstances.
Existing staff who have been employed by us for more than twelve months and have completed their work will be able to apply for a package of financial payments to aid resettlement in Iraq or elsewhere in the region, or - in agreed circumstances - for admission to the UK. And professional staff — including interpreters and translators — with a similar length of service who have left our employ since the beginning of 2005 will also be able to apply for assistance.
We will make a further written statement on the detail of this scheme this week.
Well, obviously we’ll have to wait to see what’s in the further written statement.
But if anyone thinks this campaign is over, think again. We don’t want a quota of 500 (as floated in the papers quite recently), we don’t want the “financial packages” and the “agreed circumstances” to mean “bullying people into not seeking refuge in Britain”, and we badly need an explanation of why the assistance will only go to those who “have been employed by us for more than twelve months”, as it’s not unreasonable to think that there are people who worked for the British Armed Forces in Iraq for shorter periods of time who are nevertheless being threatened, tortured and killed. (If the death squads don’t make these fine discriminations, it’s not especially clear why HMG should, either.)
So tomorrow’s campaign meeting will still go ahead, as planned, but please note the change of venue: it’s now in the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House, but at the same time, from 7-9pm. We haven’t seen the written statement, and there’s still time to make a difference, and to tell the politicians what we think of them.
