normblog

McGlew, McLean and Goddard

I just ordered an item from J.W. McKenzie's latest catalogue (No. 172) that many people would throw away if you gave it to them: it's the programme for a game between Rhodesia and Natal in November 1959, and is signed by 11 members of the Natal team, including D.J. McGlew, R.A. McLean and T.L. Goddard. I want it for the signatures, though I already have them on other items in my collection. Such are the peculiarities of the human spectacle.

Socialism without elites

Owen Jones considers the question why 'socialism' is such an unpopular word with so many people in this country today. He offers two reasons for it: first, Margaret Thatcher's victory; second, widespread identification of the idea of socialism with Stalinist totalitarianism (despite the fact that most socialists had come to abhor that). I'd add a third reason: it's the existence of a very common scepticism that there's still a credible, viable alternative model of society for which the word 'socialism' might stand.

Of course, Owen can't be expected to supply this in the space of a newspaper column but he does gesture in the direction of it, and it is there, in the paragraph in which he does so, that there's an oddity - to my eye anyway. He writes:

If socialists really were running the show in Britain, they would be building a society run by, and in the interests of, working people. Our banks – propped by the British people – would be taken under genuine democratic control, forcing them to operate in the interests of society as a whole. Our booming wealthy elite would be forced to pay a fair share of tax... After the disastrous failures of market economics, real socialists would be taking our utilities - such as the railways and rip-off energy companies - into social ownership: not old-style, statist nationalisation, but democratically run by workers and consumers. They would bring down welfare spending, not by kicking people at the bottom, but by building social housing, introducing a living wage, and creating jobs. And they would be reversing the scandalous lack of rights that workers have in the workplace, which is what ensured that wages were declining for many before the crash had even happened.

The oddity, for me, is in 'booming wealthy elite'. Would there be one of these in a society run on socialist lines? I know that different socialists conceive socialism differently but if socialism embodies an ideal of (rough) equality, I don't see how it could accommodate a booming wealthy elite and - what this implies - a marked division between it and everybody else. Which just goes to highlight the point that socialists today need to articulate clearly the alternative envisaged to massively inegalitarian forms of capitalism.

A meaning to be examined

'Explain, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews' - this was an exam question on a GCSE religious studies paper, and some people, including Education Secretary Michael Gove, have taken exception to it. There's been a discussion about this on Facebook in which, roughly, one view of the matter is that the question is offensive because it is inviting students to think there might be good reasons, and ones for which Jews themselves are responsible, why Jews are not liked; and the other view is that the question asks for no more than the likely sociological causes of scapegoating, racism etc.

I can see something on both sides of the issue, but if one takes the question strictly as phrased, then I think the second of the two views summarized above has more to be said for it. Read quickly and by someone without much experience in analysing subtleties of meaning, the question could indeed suggest that candidates are being asked in a general way why Jews might incur dislike or hatred; being asked whether there are any acceptable reasons for this. However, once you note that the explanation being sought concerns prejudice, that interpretation is ruled out. According to my New Shorter Oxford, prejudice in its relevant meaning is 'Preconceived opinion not based on actual experience; bias, partiality... an unreasoning preference or objection...' Anyone who sees this should be able to see that they're not being asked for explanations that could justify anti-Semitism but, rather, for an attempt to explain unjustified belief.

One can wonder, all the same, whether the exam question was a prudent choice, or whether it didn't expect too much from students at GCSE level, many of whom may have little or no philosophical or linguistic training.

The normblog profile 406: Stella Duffy

Stella Duffy was born in Woolwich, South London, and grew up in Tokoroa, New Zealand. She returned to London in her early 20s. She has written 13 novels, 10 plays, and many short stories. She is also a performer, an improviser and a theatre director, with a particular interest in devising/ensemble and work made in Open Space. She is looking forward to marrying Shelley Silas, also a writer, and her partner of 22 years, when Equal Marriage becomes law. Stella blogs at Not Writing But Blogging.

Why do you blog? > Usually because something riles, upsets or intrigues me. Very often when I am having a long Facebook conversation and I realize my point would be better made on my own page, at a length of my choosing.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Responding to a person who was directed to my blog by googling 'my daughter is struggling with her sexuality', with an open letter to the parents of anyone struggling with their sexuality. It was read many times, and continues to be, and I really hoped it helped.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Regularity helps. As does brevity.

What are you reading at the moment? > Sarah Quigley's The Conductor.

What is your favourite poem? > It changes, and often would be Emily Dickenson or Wallace Stevens, but today it's T S Eliot's The Wasteland.

What is your favourite movie? > All About Eve.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > Well, one issue on which I've never changed my mind is that good quality education should be accessible and free for everyone.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > That private education and private healthcare can ever be good for any society.

Who are your political heroes? > Michael Joseph Savage (NZ Prime Minister 1935-1940, architect of the Welfare State); Kate Sheppard (NZ suffragette, one of the women who gained universal suffrage 25 years before British women had the vote).

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Eliminate private education and spread those vast resources equitably across the nation for the better education of all.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Climate change, closely followed by (still??!!) nuclear proliferation.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > It's always yet to come.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > 'Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life.' (Nichiren Daishonin)

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > No.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Empathy.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Lying. (Though aggressive ambition is a very close second.)

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > Very few.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I tend to think that people born into wealth and/or privilege don't often realize how lucky they are.

What is your favourite proverb? > 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Shopping.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > Health. Once you've had cancer, it's hard not to worry it will come back.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd pay more attention when my father told me the names of birds and of stars.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Pick up London, put it on the East Coast of New Zealand.

What would your ideal holiday be? > A weekend in Paris, two weeks in the Bay of Islands in NZ, four days in NYC on the way home.

What is your most treasured possession? > My father's WWII prisoner of war diary.

What talent would you most like to have? > To be like one of those people who can just pick up any instrument and play.

Who are your sporting heroes? > The All Blacks.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > This one's definitely much less realistic: I'd like an afternoon at Lake Whakamaru with my Mum and Dad. He's been dead 24 years, she's been dead nine, there are a few things we didn't get a chance to say, and it would be nice to go for a swim and then eat doorstep cheese sandwiches sitting on the old tartan rug.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > Other than moving to a house with a swimming pool/by the sea, so I could more easily swim every day, I can't imagine wanting to change anything else.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Nussbaum on the burqa

I've spent some time on normblog arguing against the burqa ban, so on this occasion I'll just let Martha Nussbaum do the talking:

In general, it's always a good idea when you make an argument against somebody else's culture, to first look at your own, and if you have the same problem, to treat the two similarly. The first argument is about security risk of bulky clothing under which you could carry a bomb or a gun. Because Chicago is a very cold place, when I go out in the winter, I'm more covered than a woman in a burqa, even more. I have a floor-length down coat, a shawl over my mouth and nose, a hat pulled down over my eyebrows and sunglasses, so my whole body is covered. And nobody thinks that's a threat because they're used to this. So we have to ask ourselves, when do we think that there's a reason for extra caution? I'm prepared to say that in airports, let's have the full body scan, as long as everyone has it. I don't think they should single out the Muslims for special treatment.

The other argument is that you can't have a good human relationship unless you can see their whole face. I think that's just wrong. For one thing, eyes are traditionally thought of as the windows to the soul and the main place you make contact. Also, think about all the people with disabilities who can't see, yet they have rich human relationships. Human beings have many ways of making connections with each other – through the voice, for instance - without seeing each other's faces.

And then there's the argument that the burqa objectifies women. I think the fact that women are often treated as objects for male use and control is a real problem. But let's also think about porn magazines, the treatment of women in advertising and in the media, where women are treated as consumer objects and are encouraged to package themselves for male use and control in a way that eclipses their individuality... There are lots of practices in our society that objectify women, unfortunately.

Advice for graduates

One evening in late 1967 or early 1968, Adèle and I were at the movies when I was seized by a sudden panic. I was in my first year lecturing and the panic was brought on by realizing how little I actually knew. There I was, fresh from two years as a not very hard-working graduate student, having to teach people stuff. I said to Adèle that I couldn't continue watching the movie, we went home, and I made a comprehensive plan for the next few months that I hoped would enable me to cope with the various subjects about which I was supposed to know more than my students did. From then on, I put those two years of taking life a bit too easy behind me and got on with the job. I'm reminded of all this by reading the interview here with Robert Paul Wolff, this section of it in particular:

It is extremely important for graduate students to have a demonstrable teaching record. Allow me to impart a lesson from my own career. The fundamental rule is that when you're looking for a job, remember you can learn anything between March and September. If they ask you whether you want to teach something that you don't know anything about, have never studied, and have no interest in, the proper answer is, Oh yeah, I always wanted to teach that, but I've never had the chance and I would just love to. And then you go back to your room and you spend four of five months cramming this stuff into you. I mean, I got my first job teaching history, and my last history course had been in high school, so I sat down and I read 20,000 pages of European history. I just started with the Greeks and read right up to Napoleon. And I stayed 100 years ahead of the students, so it all worked out.
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As a professor, I feel like I have spent my entire career doing a high-wire act without a net. I think this is a universal experience.

It reminds me, also, of the joke I first heard from Chris Brooke - about the academic who, when asked if he had read something or other, replied: 'Read it? I've never even taught it.'

Empathy through reading fiction?

This, from Adam Gopnik, is funny:

Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they'd be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.

Still, Gopnik's logic is unsound. The short answer to why it is unsound is that the capacity for empathy may depend on many other things than reading or not reading fiction. A longer version of the argument can be found in this earlier post.

Quieter but more silent

Is there any rule that tells us when the comparative form of an adjective is made by adding "-er" and when by being preceded by "more"?

Philologos in the Jewish Daily Forward looks into it and even comes up with some tentative suggestions, but in the end confesses himself defeated with respect to two-syllable adjectives. Sounds like a case for - danaaa - Language Log.

By no means a bastion of tolerance

Indonesia, that is. See this column from the New York Times by Andreas Harsono, a researcher for the Asia division at Human Rights Watch:

This week in Geneva, the United Nations is reviewing Indonesia's human rights record. It should call on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to crack down on extremists and protect minorities. While Indonesia has made great strides in consolidating a stable, democratic government after five decades of authoritarian rule, the country is by no means a bastion of tolerance. The rights of religious and ethnic minorities are routinely trampled. While Indonesia's Constitution protects freedom of religion, regulations against blasphemy and proselytizing are routinely used to prosecute atheists, Bahais, Christians, Shiites, Sufis and members of the Ahmadiyya faith - a Muslim sect declared to be deviant in many Islamic countries. By 2010, Indonesia had over 150 religiously motivated regulations restricting minorities' rights.

In 2006, Mr. Yudhoyono, in a new decree on "religious harmony," tightened criteria for building a house of worship. The decree is enforced only on religious minorities - often when Islamists pressure local officials not to authorize the construction of Christian churches or to harass and intimidate those worshiping in "illegal" churches, which lack official registration. More than 400 such churches have been closed since Mr. Yudhoyono took office in 2004.

Although the government has cracked down on Jemaah Islamiyah, an Al Qaeda affiliate that has bombed hotels, bars and embassies, it has not intervened to stop other Islamist militants who regularly commit less publicized crimes against religious minorities. Mr. Yudhoyono's government is reluctant to take them on because it rules Indonesia in a coalition with intolerant Islamist political parties.

And also this column by Michael Bachelard in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald.

[M]any Indonesians are worried a profound shift is happening in their culture. They are watching as a social movement of arrogant Islam grows more powerful, and moves virtually unopposed from victory to victory.

The Court settles an argument

The European Court of Human Rights has reaffirmed its earlier ruling (£) 'that the current UK blanket ban on prisoners being allowed to vote is a breach of human rights' (and see here). It has also, just by the way, personally given me justice on an issue that has been perplexing me for a while. That issue is why so many supporters of voting rights for prisoners feel it unnecessary to make any case for them; they just take it for granted that prisoners have the right to vote and have it unconditionally. If you follow these several links, you will find me putting this view in question. Prisoners, it is taken for granted, forfeit some of their rights when found guilty of committing a crime and it therefore isn't obvious how far this forfeiture should extend. Under the same links you will find further (internal) links to pieces simply assuming without argument that the right to vote is fundamental and not to be removed. For another expression of this view in the light of the ECHR's latest ruling, see Doug Saunders here: 'Imprisonment is denial of one right (mobility), so it seems axiomatic prisoners should vote'.

The ECHR ruling itself, however, makes it plain that the judges do not share the opinion that it is axiomatic prisoners should vote. They say the opposite in fact:

83... the rights enshrined in Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 are not absolute. There is room for implied limitations and the Contracting States must be afforded a margin of appreciation in this sphere. The Court has repeatedly affirmed that the margin in this area is wide...
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86. In examining the particular circumstances of the Hirst (no. 2) case, the Court considered that the legislation of the United Kingdom depriving all convicted prisoners serving sentences of the right to vote (section 3 of the 1983 Act) was "a blunt instrument [which stripped] of their Convention right to vote a significant category of persons and it [did] so in a way which [was] indiscriminate". It found that the provision "impose[d] a blanket restriction on all convicted prisoners in prison. It applie[d] automatically to such prisoners, irrespective of the length of their sentence and irrespective of the nature or gravity of their offence and their individual circumstances."

The Court, in other words, rules that an indiscriminate ban on prisoner voting, irrespective of the nature or gravity of the offence committed, is in breach of the law; but the right to vote is not absolute and, by implication, may be forfeited for offences of a certain kind. Clear as you could want: the European Court does not endorse an unconditional right to vote for prisoners. Maybe I'll stop posting about this now.

Avoiding spoilers

In a piece on the New York Times website Stanley Fish acquits himself of any obligation not to include spoilers when giving an account of some fiction that his readers may not yet have read (seen etc). He does this by reporting on the so-called paradox of suspense, according to which 'suspense survives certainty'. Fish summarizes three explanations of why it does, and they are interesting; you can read them for yourself here. This isn't an exact analogy, but I can give partial confirmation of the sort of thing he's talking about: on the occasions I've taken out my video of Manchester United vs Bayern Munich, 1999, to watch the last few minutes, I have definitely relived the tension of the end of that game (see from one minute in) - as if I didn't already know the result.

Yet, the summary explanations of the paradox don't justify Fish's conclusion:

[W]hichever account of the paradox you accept, the supposedly deleterious effect of a spoiler is diminished. Either spoilers give back more than they take away or they take away nothing because suspense and surprise survive them.
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[T]he spoiler doesn't amount to much and alerting readers to it is not a high obligation.

This is rather an 'objectivist' conclusion for a man of Fish's anti-foundationalist philosophical leanings. There may be sound explanations for why many people don't mind spoilers, but there will still be some significant number of readers who do mind them. It is a small courtesy to alert such readers in advance. The spoilers will still be there for those who want or don't object to them.

Writer's choice 350: Stella Duffy

Stella Duffy was born in London and grew up in New Zealand. She has written thirteen novels, her latest being The Purple Shroud. She has also written ten plays – most recently The Book of Ruth (and Naomi) for Sixty-Six Books at the Bush Theatre; and fifty short stories. Stella won the 2002 CWA Short Story Dagger for her story 'Martha Grace', and has twice won a Stonewall Writer of the Year: in 2008 for The Room of Lost Things and in 2010 for Theodora. In addition to her writing work she is a theatre performer and director. She is looking forward to Equal Marriage so she can marry her partner of 22 years, the writer Shelley Silas. Here Stella writes about Patricia Highsmith's Carol.

Stella Duffy on Carol by Patricia Highsmith

'There was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol.'

Patricia Highsmith's Carol is my ideal love story. Some passion, some loss, something to fight for, and a happy ending. Mills and Boon, however, it is not. Not least because the lovers are both women. One young, new to the world, and hopeful; the other wiser, older, impossibly glamorous and already aware of what it takes to survive any relationship. It is as stylish and spare as any of Highsmith's works, with a humanity and compassion which readers who only know her as the creator of Ripley might find surprising. I love the Ripley books, Ripley Under Water in particular, but they don't exactly stand out for their human warmth.

Highsmith published Carol under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952. She wrote it after she finished Strangers on a Train, which was bought by Hitchcock to make into a film. In her afterword to the Bloomsbury (UK) revised edition of Carol, published in 1989, Highsmith recounts that her agent and publisher were keen for her to write a second novel similar to Strangers on a Train – publishing is a business like any other, it thrives on the slightly different packaging of more of the same, and Carol was definitely not more of the same. Eventually Carol was published by a different publisher, with the title The Price of Salt, selling respectably in hardback and then spectacularly in paperback. The publishers might have been frightened of selling a Patricia Highsmith novel about a lesbian relationship; the public were happy to buy it written by Claire Morgan.

The reaction of Highsmith's publisher is understandable, if sad. The reading public, ever keen to conflate writer with protagonist, might not have been quite so hungry for an amoral anti-hero written by a writer they also assumed was lesbian. In McCarthyite America, falling in love with a Europhile character as devious and deliciously transgressive as Ripley was permissible, at least in the context of a genre where the good reads are not always about good guys. Falling in love with that character, written by an author presumed to be lesbian, at a time when homosexuality equated with communism equated with evil, would no doubt have been an honesty too far. When we think of the number of public figures who are still shy about declaring their sexuality even now, it is to Highsmith's enormous credit to consider that she pushed to have it published in the first place, and then again later under her own name, outing her work and herself.

It is particularly surprising to realize that Carol was published sixty years ago. Of course there is Highsmith's prose to account for some of its longevity, but I also think the core relationship is so real in the good and bad of love and lust, the pleasures and the false starts, the discomforting presence of ex-lovers and difficult friends and confused family, that it becomes possible for us to read the novel as a thing in itself, not merely a historical account of how it was to be gay then.

I also think Carol is praiseworthy for what it is not. Highsmith is not overly concerned with coming out, she does not give us a study in agonized, unrequited passion, she does not give us only-bad men and only-good women. What we have instead are rounded characters with friends and relationships and lives outside of the central relationship between Therese and Carol, a beautifully evoked New York, and a passionate love story that slowly, and realistically, takes flight.

Two more flippant asides from this: one is that I'm almost entirely certain that Joyce, the young, lesbian character in Mad Men (the one who is Peggy's friend) is modelled on Therese: and the other is about When I Met Patricia Highsmith (it's not a big story, you don't need to sit up straight)...

I have never had a 'proper' job in my life. The one where you have holiday pay and sick pay and bank holidays and all that. But I did, in 1988, have something close, when I was a temp-who-stayed for five months at Bloomsbury. I was the office dogsbody, doing everything from photocopying A Prayer for Owen Meany and Cat's Eye backwards (old photocopier, no collating, and both also on my 'best books' list, brilliant backwards as well as forwards), to making showcards under the demanding eye of Caroline Michel. At lunchtime I would take over from Madeleine who sat on reception and answer the door, take messages, field calls from authors waiting for lunching editors. Often authors arrived for lunch with Liz (Calder) or Nigel (Newton), sometimes they were irritated with me that their lunch date wasn't ready and waiting, and sometimes they assumed I'd know their name. Once an author ran in, ran up the stairs, and shouted behind him 'Tell Nigel I'm here'. I so wanted to ask him who the hell he was. I didn't. It was 1988, everyone knew who Bob Geldof was. Terence Stamp, on the other hand, always gave his name. And once a small woman stood in front of me at the desk, and asked quietly for Liz, saying 'I'm Pat Highsmith'. I knew who she was. And I loved her for not assuming.

And so, back to Carol. A grey-eyed blonde in a fur coat wearing memorable perfume, a vibrant young woman trying to find her way as a theatre designer, a trickster best friend, a confused and angry boyfriend, Manhattan in the early '50s, sad-comedy neighbours, and a private detective recording conversations in a dingy hotel room... all this and a road trip. What more could you ask?

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Late memorial?

How long is it appropriate to memorialize an important event? How long, more specifically, is it appropriate to memorialize Britain's role in defeating Nazism and the people who fought to achieve this? I ask because it is the Guardian's view that '2012 is far too late to be building memorials to those involved in a war that ended nearly 70 years ago'. And it isn't just because I disagree with this view that I draw attention to it. I'd like to know the methodology of arriving at a correct answer; yet how the Guardian gets there we aren't really told. A war to rescue Europe from a political and social system of quite spectacular iniquity - what is that worth in the way of persistent memory? If not 70 years, what? Just 65? Less? 50? I'd say, for my part, that it doesn't matter how long we choose to remember 1939-1945. It was a hard-won victory over moral barbarism, and what can be the harm in not forgetting it?

Here, the Guardian leader under discussion offers the only thing that might stand in for the hint of an argument. This is that continued memorialization of Britain's role in the Second World War is an 'aggrandising of conflict [which] misrepresents and diminishes the truth'. Why so? Because 'many in Britain went to the front with the hope of rebuilding their country as a fairer society'; and their memorial 'is the NHS, social welfare and free education'. First of all, to memorialize the significance of the victory in WWII does not - not by so much as a blue paper clip - diminish the importance of other crucial goals related to social justice; if anything, the opposite. And, second, the 'aggrandising of conflict' strikes an anti-war note that could not be more wrong-headed in this context. The war against Nazi Germany was as necessary and as justified as any there has been, and one may celebrate the victory in it for as many years as one wants without licensing any aggrandizement of war just as such.

Gilad Shalit in Rome

A report from the Jewish Daily Forward that is worth relaying in full:

Thousands of Italians cheered Gilad Shalit when the former captive Israeli soldier went to Rome's City Hall, the Campidoglio, where he officially received honorary citizenship of the Eternal City.

"I thank you with all my heart for all you have done to obtain my liberation," Shalit told the crowd during the emotional ceremony May 17. "I want to remember all other hostages imprisoned against their will, and I hope that they return home soon," he said.

Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, officially conferring honorary citizenship on Shalit, called him a "symbol of hope and of firmness against barbarism, hate and fundamentalism."

Alemanno had championed the release of Shalit, who was kidnapped and held hostage for five years by Hamas. He declared Shalit an honorary citizen of Rome in 2009 and a large picture of Shalit was hung on the outside of the main building of the Campidoglio. Alemanno flew to Israel to meet with Shalit after the soldier was freed last year.

Obtrusive surface

I'd never read a novel by Don DeLillo, so I thought I'd try one. I tried Cosmopolis and gave up on page 55. Maybe it was too soon; maybe it was the wrong one to try. I'm happy to listen to advice to this effect. But apart from finding the general 'atmosphere' of the tale offputting, I'll indicate my main problem with it. It started on page 9, with this passage:

A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other. He'd thought about surfaces in the shower once.

What is it about this that nearly stopped me in my tracks? I'm not sure, but whatever else it is - cringeworthy, for example - it strikes me as violating one of Elmore Leonard's rules for writing: 'if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it'. Boy, does that passage sound like writing. And why I gave up Cosmopolis is that all of it does. DeLillo's writing in that book is, you might say, a surface between the reader and the story being told. You're all the time conscious of a writer who's straining for effect and to impress.

Screw-ups headed your way

Some good stuff in these remarks by Aaron Sorkin at Syracuse University's 158th Commencement:

There's another story. Two newborn babies are lying side by side in the hospital and they glance at each other. Ninety years later, through a remarkable coincidence, the two are back in the same hospital lying side by side in the same hospital room. They look at each other and one of them says, "So what'd you think?"

It's going to be a very long time before you have to answer that question, but time shifts gears right now and starts to gain speed. Just ask your parents whose heads, I promise you, are exploding right now. They think they took you home from the maternity ward last month. They think you learned how to walk last week. They don't understand how you could possibly be getting a degree in something today. They listened to "Cats in the Cradle" the whole car ride here.
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And make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You're a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You're barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they're a-coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

And he's only 50! (Via.)

All isn't always now

The football season is over. It's time (again) for that table of comparative performance of some top English football clubs. Here it is - for the last 21 seasons:

Manchester United: 2/1/1/2/1/1/2/1/1/1/3/1/3/3/2/1/1/1/2/1/2 (= 1.6)

Arsenal: 4/10/4/12/5/3/1/2/2/2/1/2/1/2/4/4/3/4/3/4/3 (= 3.6)

Liverpool: 6/6/8/4/3/4/3/7/4/3/2/5/4/5/3/3/4/2/7/6/8 (= 4.6)

Chelsea: 14/11/14/11/11/6/4/3/5/6/6/4/2/1/1/2/2/3/1/2/6 (= 5.5)

Some commentary...

There will be those wondering why I don't have a line for the new champions, Manchester City. I started to compile one but then found it would not be properly comparative because City have spent several seasons not in the Premier League but somewhere else. What number am I to assign for those seasons? 21? Higher?

This leads me to my next observation. Some people think you're only as good as your last result. But against this I would urge upon you the thought that there are other times as well as now. I congratulate Manchester City on winning the title, but quite apart from the past there's also the future and we have yet to see what that is.

I have read a certain amount about this being the end of an era for Manchester United. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Note that United have been third, including twice in a row, without the 'era' coming to an end.

As I have one or two Liverpool-supporting friends who enjoy sending out taunts when United suffer any reverse - such as coming second to Manchester City this season - I feel bound to draw attention to Liverpool's latest positioning as a mere mid-table team.

No bad in Badiou

From a piece on Alain Badiou in yesterday's Graun:

Just as he has been faithful to all but one of his lovers, he has remained true to Maoism. Marianne magazine called him a "fossil of the 60s and 70s", but Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that the Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for him as falling in love – despite the deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights with which it has been associated.

I mean, why let deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights get in the way of a little inspiration?

Three steps forward and one to the side

Two years ago Fintan O'Toole wrote a noxious column in the Irish Times. In it he allowed himself the conceit, current on some parts of the left, that the contemporary heir of Nazism is the state of Israel. It's therefore good to note him now taking a clear distance from thinking of this sort in opposing a cultural boycott of Israel. His argument against the boycott has three virtues in particular.

First, he says upfront what many of us criticizing the boycott have been saying for years - namely, that the boycotters target Israelis indiscriminately, without regard to what they think or have done. He writes:

... it [the call to boycott Israel] is far too sweeping to be either morally justifiable or politically effective. The pledge "not to avail of any invitation to perform or exhibit in Israel" makes no distinction between government-sponsored events and, for example, the courageous Israeli theatre companies that present critical work. Lumping governments and civil societies together is a form of collective punishment.

Second, O'Toole insists on an awareness - such as few would-be boycotters ever evince - that European anti-Semitism has a history and that that history creates its own burdens:

If there's one thing western intellectuals can't afford to be crude about, it's the relationship of their own cultures to Jewish history. The Holocaust doesn't excuse Israeli abuses of human rights, but it does form the context in which collective acts like boycotts have to be set...

Third, he does not evade the question of questions - namely 'Why Israel in particular?' He says, entirely reasonably, that 'rather than focusing so crudely on Israel alone, campaigners should be looking for a consistent code of conduct for artists and performers in relation to regimes that egregiously abuse human rights'; and he goes on to propose the elements of such a code and bodies that might be fit to establish it.

There is one reservation I would express about this latest column of O'Toole's. It is that, having shown an understanding that anti-Semitism has a history and a cultural context, he falls back on the idea that 'the vast majority of those supporting a cultural boycott are not motivated by anti-Jewish prejudice'; as if anti-Semitism is all in the mind. But he knows - or, at least, what he writes here entails - that it isn't all in the mind. It is also in themes and practices that specially attack or disadvantage Jews, without good reason for the discrimination.

Still, the general shape of this column sets it way apart from the earlier one and is to be welcomed. (Thanks: EMc.)

Open borders?

Should there be open borders? That's what Jacqueline Stevens, professor of political science at Northwestern University, is arguing for. She's against relying on birth as the basis for assigning citizenship, thinks people 'should be citizens of the states where they happen to reside'. I have no deep reason of principle for opposing this, leaning, rather, towards the freest movement of people across national boundaries that is compatible with other important moral and political considerations. However, I do think Stevens bypasses the most important obstacle in the way of making a persuasive case; her argument isn't well focused enough.

She believes that birthright citizenship 'exists to alleviate anxieties about death', writing:

Belonging to the nation or any other community by birth, including one's family, sustains fantasies of immortality, as these groups persist after one's own life has ended.

Hmmm... is what I would say to this; it seems unduly metaphysical where I think there are more practical issues at stake. Again, I don't think the following is at all persuasive:

Impossible? Utopian? [She means abolishing birthright citizenship - NG.] That was the response to those who proposed the elimination of slavery, a persistent feature for most of the world's history...

But the fact that previous calls for change have been met by false claims of their being utopian doesn't prove that some particular new call for change wouldn't be utopian - or, if not utopian, merely a change for the worse.

The key point here - and Stevens doesn't really address it - is whether allowing the completely free migration of people could lead to overwhelming administrative or other problems when some countries are vastly richer than others and unrestrained population flows might be expected to be very large. Would this put a strain on welfare, medical and other provision in the receiving countries, a strain with which they would find it hard to cope? Would it have bad effects on the countries experiencing big net outflows? I don't know the answers to these questions, but they surely need to be addressed by someone making the case which Stevens does.

She does say that free movement of people in the US and EU hasn't caused serious problems, and this is a relevant point; but I think the argument - and some evidence in support of it - needs to be extended to cover the generalization of free movement across the global arena in circumstances of severe wealth and resource inequality. Even if much of this inequality is unjust - as it is - the case that uncontrolled migration will help to remedy it needs to be able to show, or at least suggest, that it wouldn't create enormous practical problems of its own.