The Virtual Stoa

Chris Lightfoot, 1978-2007.

Chris was splendid, and one of the few bloggers whose contributions to the world stretched far beyond blogging. (Some details over here.)

Two trivial details: he’s the only person I’ve ever successfully identified in a pub, having only seen their South Park version of themselves ahead of time; and he will always be remembered at the Virtual Stoa for writing the code that powered the Melanie Phillips Naziometer, which used to adorn the sidebar.

UPDATE [6.3.2007]: More links, over here and here.

The BBC have turned my friend Rory Stewart’s book about walking across Afghanistan into the Thursday Afternoon Play this week (2.15pm, Radio 4).

You can use the link to listen to the show for up to a week after the broadcast, which is helpful, as only a madman (or madwoman) turns on Radio 4 in the afternoon before 10pm.

Can people stop dying, please, at least for a bit? The last six months or so of my life have been punctuated far more than I’d like them to be by the news of deaths. My grandmother Eileen died in August at 95, which is a pretty good innings by any stretch of the imagination; the others have all gone long before their time, whether scholars in my field like Robert Wokler (cancer) or Iris Marion Young (cancer), colleagues and friends here in Oxford like Ewen Green (MS-related) or Peter Derow (heart attack), the poor 15-year old chap who rode his bike into the river a few hundred yards from where I live, or, most recently, one of my undergraduate political philosophy students here at Balliol, Andrew Mason, whom I’d barely got to know, but who was clearly a great guy. It’s too many. And I’d like it to stop.

My old friend Raj Patel, who used to blog at Class Worrier, is now running a new blog over at Stuffed and Starved, on the politics of the world food system, which is a sort of multimedia hyperspace experience thingy designed to supplement his book of the same name. Except the book hasn’t been published yet. He’s in Nairobi right now, at the World Social Forum, and it’s not a wholly happy place: see “Forum for Sale“.

If you missed it last night — and it’s just conceivable that you weren’t watching BBC News24 at 11.30pm — you can watch my friend Rory Stewart being interviewed on the HARDtalk show about Iraq. (I don’t know why it calls itself HARDtalk, which is a silly name for a show.) About half an hour. His books are both excellent, too, in case you’re looking for something to spend your Christmas book tokens on.

My dear friend Ewen Green died last week at 47, after years of wrestling with multiple sclerosis. His obituary appears in today’s Independent.

If anyone reading this falls into the “have read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue more often than most and thinks it’s a pretty good book” category, can you drop me a line.

Thanks.

… to my brother Michael’s new blog, Closely Watched DVDs, devoted to the world of Czech cinema.

Hurry over there now to learn the handy Czech phrase, “Tomorrow I’ll wake up and scald myself with tea”*, and do remember to go back every day in January, when he’ll be presenting his Jan Švankmajer blog-retrospective.

[* The only Czech phrase I can really remember from the time I tried to learn the language is the equally handy, "I think there's going to be a revolution in the West soon."]

My brother-in-law Paddy has gone off to live in India for a year to teach Trigonometry Through Dance (or something like that) to poor kids in Bangalore. You can read all about his trip over at paddyinindia.com and you can also help him raise money for the Inter-Cultural Youth Exchange through his fundraising page here. What a good idea, I hear you cry in unison as you reach for your credit cards.

My friend Dave Renton has posted the text of a talk he’s given recently on the problems of defining fascism over on his increasingly-sort-of-blog-like website. It’s an interesting piece: Dave published a short book on theories of fascism a few years ago (which I reviewed here), and in this talk he takes a long look back at the argument he made in that book, as well as commenting on two excellent, more recent books on fascism, Michael Mann’s Fascists and Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism.

All of which reminds me that I think I got half-way through both Mann and Paxton, and then stopped, and I must return to both before too long. I was enjoying both of them enormously (insofar as one enjoys books about fascism).

I had the lunchtime news on the telly yesterday, which I hardly ever watch, and there in the middle of the programme was my old friend David Renton with his new baby Sam talking about not getting enough paternity leave. More on them here.

My old friend Sasha Abramsky has an essay up in Open Democracy on this, that, and the other. Go and read it.

My friend Hamish Nixon has a piece about the elections in Afghanistan over at OpenDemocracy.

Well, Oxford West and Abingdon’s a pretty safe Lib Dem seat these days. (I remember when John Patten was the local Tory MP, but those days are long gone.) But Antonia Bance (or Bunce, if you believe the Guardian, which you shouldn’t) was a terrific Labour candidate, polling a thoroughly respectable 8,725 votes, and somehow managing to appear to be in a good mood all the way through. It was a good choice by the constituency party, and a good campaign. Shame about the County Council results, though.

My old friend Kwasi Kwarteng fought Brent East for the Conservatives, and polled 3,000 votes. More importantly, though, I’d hazard a guess that this was the seat in which the variation in the heights of the various candidates was most pronounced. Kwasi’s really quite tall, and the two leading candidates, Sarah Teather for the Lib Dems and Yasmin Qureshi for Labour, are really quite short. It certainly made for dramatic television as the Returning Officer announced the result.

Here’s a fine picture of your Labour candidate in Oxford West and Abingdon, Antonia Bance, swiped from her blog.

As a friend said when I told him who the local party was running in the constituency, “They let Antonia onto the Approved Candidates’ List!” Well, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I’m not too clear on what the rules are down at Labour Party HQ about this kind of thing. But she’s an excellent candidate, and she’ll be a very good MP.

My friend and favourite vicar-in-training William Whyte has an op-ed in today’s Guardian.

He would appear to think that the truths of Christianity don’t lend themselves unproblematically to conventional authoritarian rightist politics.

Find a copy of this week’s New Statesman to read my friend Daphna Baram’s sensible observations about Melanie Phillips.

Excerpts below:

At the Royal Geographical Society in London on 27 January, Melanie Phillips fought like a lioness against the motion tabled by Profesor Avi Shlaim of St Antony’s College, Oxford University, stating “Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews”…Phillips wasn’t prepared to leave it there [after her side lost the vote]. She decided to have another go at the opposition - “the three Jewish persecutors of Israel” as she called them - in her personal internet blog, using language that was extreme even by her standards.

“I came away from that debate,” she wrote, “feeling the kind of emotion one feels - in a totally different context - when forced to listen to or even watch the details of paedophile assaults on children. It is a physical numbness, a feeling of the very darkest despair; a feeling that a very great evil has been unleashed which reveals the depths of pathological malice to which human beings can descend - to turn on their own at a time when they are already under murderous attack. It seems like a repudiation not just of their Jewishness but their humanity.” …

Phillips doesn’t accuse her enemies, the dead or the living, of being “self-hating Jews”. She gets straight down to business and charges them with treason. But who are the real “instigators” of “diabolical calumnies” against their fellow Jews? Those who initiate an open debate about the nature of the leading ideological movement among Jews today, or those who accuse dissident Jewish thinkers of evil and “pathological malice”? As an Israeli and a Jew, I know whom I would prefer not to meet in a dark alley.

Not sure whether it’s available online or not. The Statesman has one of those rather annoying websites where it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Anyway, it’s on sale at your local newsagent.

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.

Letter of the (Yester)Day: Don’t miss Class Worrier Raj Patel’s letter in yesterday’s Financial Times, on just what Thabo Mbeki’s up to with regards to Zimbabwe these days.

He (Raj, not Thabo) apologises for referring to COSATU as a Confederation. It is, of course, a Congress.

Alexandra Samuel, who is one of the world’s finest Canadians (and a fellow member of the Harvard Government Department’s 1995 cohort), has started her own blog over at Otherwise Engaged.

It’ll probably be full of the kind of technogeekery that’s a bit too technogeeky for me, but then that’s the kind of technogeek that Alex is, and that I’m not. But do pay her a visit, and learn about how computers can participate in the building of Canadian social democracy, or whatever it is that (i) computers and (ii) Alex are doing these days.

Right, I’m off to have lunch with PooterGeek.

My brother Michael’s blog is now in both the gold and silver medal positions on google for “Worthing sex entertainment“.

As he writes, “This suggests that either I inadvertently provide a great deal of it (I do hope not), or that there’s not a lot to be had.”

According to the comments box on this post here, my brother Michael suffers from something called “gonadal ideological blinkeredness”.

(I hope it’s not too painful.)