Can I take it as read that 'middle class' is now American English for 'working class'?
Jonathan Vos Post:
Diana is definitely in the 'inchoate global humanism' pantheon. Not so sure about Jimmy Carter. The whole phenomenon of media euhemerism is odd. Perhaps to find out 'how the gods were made' we need to study not savages but ourselves.
In other news, it seems Cardinal Ratzinger is in with a shout.
Brother Claymore of Mild Reason, reporting for duty. Well, reporting for possibly worthwhile activities.
Jonathan - I'll stick a (Via) on the Kung link (having just seen how to do that for comments).
Jonathan, I don't know much about the SNP's agenda, and only glanced at the news about Macbeth's 'rehabilitation'. My admittedly vague impression is that he got handed the fuzzy end of the dagger by W. Shakespeare, and that historians have long since agreed that the Scottish play is a travesty of the truth. But since that's the only way most people have heard of him, I think tourism would be better served by playing up his dark renown. Scottish history has so few villains, after all. Plenty of bad guys, of course, but their crimes scarcely rise to Shakespearean villainy.
Summer Edinburgh's being crawling with guided tours around spooky places associated with witchcraft, ghosts, murders and hangings, I've been idly thinking there's a market gap for 'Snuff Tours' - guided jaunts around the haunts of Smith, Hume, Millar, Hutton and other great minds of the Enlightenment. Daylight hours only.
Patrick wrote:
You can be right on the facts until you're blue in the face, but you're not going to deter these people until you master the same rhetorical techniques of measured brutality to which they've given a generation of study.
So, how do we master these techniques? Is mastering them a matter of learning to defeat them, or of learning to use rhetorical measured brutality too?
Just recently read The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity by Jack Repcheck. It's slim and bit thin with it. It has some misprisions and mistakes: the 'English' army won at Culloden, and the Jacobite victory at Prestonpanns outside Edinburgh is given as having happened at 'Preston'. I would have liked more geology - he wastes a chapter on how Biblical chronology developed, from Eusebius to Ussher. But the geology he does give is as far as I know sound. He understands the significance of the defeat of the Jacobites (the Scottish Revolution thesis, i.e. that the lead-up to and aftermath of the '45 laid the political, legal and social foundations of rapid capitalist development in Scotland) and gives a fascinating picture of Enlightenment Edinburgh. Smith, Hume, Hutton and all the other famous figures all knew each other and met frequently, often in pubs. Our very own Steven Baxter has also written about Hutton, but I haven't read his book yet.
Currently, and slowly, reading Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man, a famous 'good bad book' from the Victorian era. Orwell said of it that as soon as you read his sentence about the typical ancient Hebrew prophet: 'As soon as he received his mission, he ceased to wash' you knew the author was on your side. As far as I know, it's the first book to predict that 'mankind will migrate into space'.
Patrick, point taken. But it looks like a revival of the kind of Christianity with which I'm most familiar. Mind you, the revivalism-activism pattern exists in British history too, in Methodism for instance, and the Free Church.
About objections to gay marriage - I can see why some non-Catholic Christians might object to putting what looks to them like a big seal of civic approval on sin. From the background I referred to earlier, homosexuality is the real non-negotiable among the private sins. Fornication and adultery don't even come close, perhaps because there are no destroyed cities called Fornica and Adulter on a plain somewhere.
The idea that Christianity without an element of social justice activism (other than charity, and legislating morality) is unusual and in need of special explanation strikes me as exactly the wrong way round. I think it's pretty much the default condition, and not just for Evangelical Protestants. It certainly describes the conservative presbyterian denominations in Scotland over the past century or more.
It's taken a while for it all to sink in.
You know that feeling that something broke this week? That it wasn't just another election?
I've been looking around and found it articulated by one American socialist, Martin Schreader of The Appeal to Reason, writing in the British dissident-commie Weekly Worker:Until today, it remained something of a question whether or not the people of the United States would use the ballot as a means of demonstrating their desire to maintain nominally democratic norms. As it stands right now, the question has been answered ... in the negative. The combined power of the corporate media, the corporate parties (and their corporatised labour unions) and a contrived 'culture of fear' have turned the average American voter into a Pavlovian nightmare. The end result has been that the Bush regime, which came to power through a bloodless coup d'etat in 2000, has now been effectively legitimised through a large 'vote of confidence' by over 50 million Americans.
A plurality of Americans has, through their votes, chosen to approve the burial of the second republic in favour of imperialist empire. Their legitimising of the Bush regime and their support for the 'culture war' has irreversibly broken the continuity of American democracy. The process of Weimarisation is complete.
Certain wooden-headed elements of the left will, of course, continue to assert that little, if anything, new has happened as a result of this election. They will continue to see the old institutional facades in place and will impressionistically conclude that all talk of a new period in American history as delusional. They will note that the uniquely American brand of anti-democratic, anti-worker corporatism that has taken hold in Washington does not correspond to what they read in history books and vulgarly conclude that nothing has really changed. In this author's view, these are little more than the echoes of the past and should be treated as such.
[...]
Today, I mourn the failure of the 215-year-old 'noble experiment'. The republic is dead: long live the republic!
The Billmon post is nice enough, and I'm glad to see him back, but right beside it is this:Osama's no slouch at information warfare. I'm sure he understands that the impact of a tape like this one on the mass mind is mainly subliminal, if not hormonal. By plastering his face over every TV in America for the next couple of days, he's given Bush a priceless gift -- a boogeyman with which to frighten that last sliver of undecided voters into rejecting change.With which I want to take issue. Bush, his administration and its supporters have been saying Osama's possible survival and freedom are no big deal since the battle of Tora Bora. Christopher Hitchens has flaunted his hunch that OBL is dead. They have not been scaring people by saying Big Bad Bin Laden is Still Out There. They have been saying he's a distraction from the real (i.e. trumped-up) threat. Kerry has insisted that Osama Bin Laden's escape is a scandal. His remark about outsourcing to warlords drew blood. The reappearance of the man behind the WTC attacks is not going to play well for Bush, and it shouldn't discourage Bush's opponents in the remaining days of the election campaign.
I'm getting disturbing echoes here of 'Divided by Infinity', a story in one of the Starlight anthologies, edited by PNH. That story explores the possibility that the many worlds interpretation (combined with another premise) has the consequence that as we get older, the world in which we live becomes increasingly improbable, because it's one of the ever-narrowing (but infinite) subset of the many worlds in which we survive, against the odds, to that age.
Even so, a Bush Wins in 2000 world is too freaky to be plausible.
One October Surprise I can imagine involves that Aegis-equipped US fleet off North Korea and those 500-pound bunker-busting bombs just supplied to Israel. The two remaining Axis of Evil countries defanged in a morning. Mission accomplished. Bush can then return to his native Mongo, his work here on Earth done.
A few years ago the Edinburgh Evening News carried a story about splitting the Hospital for Sick Children (locally known as the Sick Kids) between two sites. The front-page headline read:
SICK KIDS TO BE CUT IN HALF
I'm boggled at arguments over the plausibility of a character with ideas too advanced for their era, or too radical for their class, and a sex life too unregulated for either, in a discussion of a book that has, as another character, Frederick Engels.
Kevin: I should perhaps mention that I'm against stupidity and lying. The point is, if you want to get (back?) to politics as argument, you have to defeat those who see politics as a war.
I see that Avedon has linked to this excellent article in The eXile. If it does nothing but spread the meme 'backstabbing Vichy Left' it'll have done its job. But for my money the money quote is:Even the alt-paper I write for back home, the New York Press, published a cover article accusing Michael Moore of being a "Liberal Fascist." At first I assumed it was a compliment[...]That's the spirit. The left, however defined, should learn from Schmitt and fight like its enemies do, because that's what fighting is.
Mark Kleiman evidently thinks that Derek James has made a point by citing a handful of comments ('too many to ignore') on the BBC site urging acceptance of OBL's little ploy. The statistical validity of this can be left as an exercise for the reader, but I want to identify it as one of the moves in the Political Correctness of the Right (henceforth PCR): to dredge up comments at a site, signs at a demonstration, faces in the crowd, and pretend to believe that they are somehow representative and that if not instantly repudiated and denounced can be taken as endorsed. In this case, that they give anyone the slightest reason to think that the governments and peoples of Europe might, just might, hanker to cut a deal with a fanatic in a cave.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 7 |
| 2004 | 15 |
| 2003 | 18 |
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