normblog

Weekend walkabout

> Michael Brooke has a suggestion in response to my question why it is that Londoners keep thin. I thought it might be the time spent waiting on the Northern Line with nothing to eat. Michael says:

Possibly - though it might just as easily be people crash dieting specifically in order to use the Northern Line at all during the rush hour.

Michael's new blog, which I linked to a couple of weeks ago, has settled in. It has a new name, Mischievous Constructions, and there's a lot to read there - every day.

> Talking about a lot to read and every day, what else can I follow up with but... Socialism in an Age of Waiting. I mean, I have to repeat Butch Cassidy in the movie of that name (not forgetting the Sundance Kid):

Who are those guys?

I use 'guys', needless to say (and therefore saying it) in a non-gender-specific way, to allow for the possibility, or even the fact, that they may contain people of the female tendency or faction. But, in any event, how do they write so much? You have to keep rushing over there in order not to fall behind. If you nod off any time, you're done for. You have, then, to stay awake till 2.00 or 3.00 AM catching up. Check out SIAW if you haven't already.

> Harry - I've got a bone to pick with him. He's gone and ruined one of the normblog profile questions.

> Here's a response to Germaine Greer from Padraic McGuinness. I've seen more punchy responses in my life, to be honest. (Hat tip: Jim Nolan.)

> Dragunia. You thought it was my doing? Well, I thought it was my doing. But via my Stats and Referrers and Google, I find this:

Już w 1266 roku o wsi wspominają dokumenty nabycia wioski przez klasztor cystersów z Dragunia w Meklemburgii.

Translations welcome.

> This week's instalment of John Mullan on Roth's The Human Stain deals with the theme of email - relevant to an important episode in the novel. Mullan writes:

Roth exploits what we all know from occasional news items and perhaps our own lives: the recklessness into which this all-too-easy means of expression can lead the person at the keyboard.

Yes, and why is that, everyone? Why will people say things by email they never would face to face? I was talking to a friend about this the other day, and she suggested it was exactly that - you don't see the other's face. Maybe. But then I think people will sometimes tend to being rude by email who would not, or not to the same extent, by letter or over the phone. It's an ineffable mystery, don't you think?

> Joe Queenan 'nearly loses the will to live' seeing the film Sylvia:

Graduate students at Cambridge, they [Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes] are only just launching their careers: he, in fact, may have given a bad review to her early poems. They get drunk, they go punting on the canals, they recite passages from Shakespeare, they declaim lines from Chaucer to dismayed cows, who wonder where all of this is leading.
.....
At certain points - say when Plath grows her hair out in the full Ophelia - the film verges on parody: speaking as a male who has bedded down a few Ophelias in my time, I can say that once the person you are sharing your bed with starts to adopt hairstyles commonly associated with the doomed virgins of the pre-Raphaelite brethren, it's time to check when the next train's leaving for Cleveland.

This is definitely a 'read the rest', though I can't myself say one way or another about the movie.

Revulsion

Here's a person (see second letter) who doesn't get why there should be any 'revulsion of western public opinion over Islamist suicide bombings', though she does seem to be in favour of condemning 'mass murderers'. But suicide bombers, evidently, are not the authors of their own actions.

Post-Hutton readings

Writing in today's Guardian, Max Hastings says the following:

Yet Hutton's assault upon the whole culture of the BBC and journalism is out of all proportion to their offences. It ignores the huge, ugly reality, that Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq on a fraudulent prospectus. I say this as one of those who swallowed it at the time. It is partly because I accepted the Whitehall line on WMD that I feel so dismayed today, when it has been shown to be false, whether wilfully or no.

There's the bit where you say it, and there's the bit where you take it back. The word 'fraudulent', as in 'fraudulent prospectus', suggests, I would reckon, wilful deceit. But then the final phrase, 'whether wilfully or no', leaves it open whether or not there was any. It's precisely that vagueness I wrote of a couple of days ago (See Whitewash, point 5). But, in any case, there's then the bit where, after taking it back, you go and say it again. Max Hastings:

Most of us want to be in there rooting for the BBC in its hour of humiliation, against the conceits and deceits of our rulers.

As someone once put it, include me out. The independence of the Beeb I'll defend. Its recent record, that's something else.

Having waded through a fair amount of the Hastings type of thing since Hutton reported, I round up here some writers I've read with interest and appreciation on this issue - which is not to say I agree with every single thing in each of the items I link to, just that, well, I read them with interest and appreciation: Polly Toynbee, Martin Woollacott, Oliver Kamm, Anthony Cox, British Spin (and again here), Michael Brooke (and again here), Harry Hatchett.

British Spin:

[T]hink about it. If all commentary about accountancy was written by other accountants, isn't there just a chance that the coverage of the topic might be slanted in favour of accountancy?

Berman's thumps

A lot of bloggers have linked to Paul Berman's article in Dissent over the last few days, with most of those I've come across doing so in an endorsing ('what he said') kind of a way. I want to do something slightly different here and distinguish amongst seven of his points in order to end on a question. As those who have read his article will know, Berman proffers six reasons - each accompanied by a thump on the bar he's sitting at - why people on the left don't see things his way over the war in Iraq. Abbreviating greatly here, since you can follow the link to read for yourself his own exposition of those reasons, and also adding a seventh to his six since it appears towards the end of the piece, though unaccompanied by a thump, I set out the reasons Berman gives for why others on the left take a view opposed to his - and, of course, that of other pro-war leftists: 1) Bush; 2) America; 3) support for anything construable as anti-colonial; 4) cultural relativism; 5) Israel; 6) a failure to take anti-Semitism seriously; and 7) lack of any genuine grasp of, or feeling for, the meaning of extreme forms of evil and oppression:

I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces - that is what fascism means!

I don't quarrel with the claim that, within current political debates, all of these seven themes figure as part of that left advocacy which Berman, and others of us, have opposed. But I want to raise a different question. Does any of these reasons have priority for the distinctively socialist far left, some of it of Marxist persuasion or at any rate formation, and amongst whom I would reckon cultural relativist and postmodern tropes are generally weak?

The answer to this question that I suggest is that, yes, two of them do carry more weight: namely, numbers 2 and 7. One way of supporting this suggestion is to point out that a very large segment of the political constituency I'm talking about not only opposed the Iraq war, but also opposed the intervention in Afghanistan before that, and in Kosovo before that, and so on back to the first Gulf War that evicted Saddam's armies from Kuwait. And either some or all of Berman's other reasons - 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 - did not figure in these previous conflicts. However America, as foremost representative of global capitalism, on one side, and (speaking loosely) regimes and movements of an utterly ghastly kind politically, on the other - those are two common poles throughout.

It's not a deeply researched or even much pondered argument this, just an early and provisional reaction to reading the Berman article, and one therefore which I may well want to amend or retract. But if there's anything in it, it prompts a further question. Why does this particular thematic combination lead so many to come down each time on the side they do - morally and politically, in my own view, the wrong side?

Fat city

Sinead Keller reports:

Manchester has the dubious honour of being Britain's fattest city, according to a survey yesterday by a fitness magazine.
.....
How the cities ranked, with their fat score and, in brackets, last year's ranking.

1 Manchester (6) 154
2 Stoke-on-Trent (3) 147
3= Liverpool (4) 146
3= Swansea (6) 146
5 Leicester (12) 137
6 Glasgow (1) 133
7= Edinburgh (2) 132
7= Wolverhampton (5) 132
9 Belfast (8) 131
10 Nottingham (11) 130
11 Bradford (16) 119
12 Birmingham (8) 117
13 Sheffield (14) 116
14 Plymouth (12) 115
15 Derby (10) 114
16 Newcastle (17) 114
17 Coventry (15) 111
18 Bristol (17) 106
19 Cardiff (19) 101
20 Leeds (20) 99
21 Southampton (20) 89
22 London (22) 55

Manchester seems to have exchanged places with Glasgow over the last year. I'm pleading innocent. And why does London keep people thinner? Is it all that time spent waiting on the Northern Line with nothing to eat?

The Mizard of Oz

Why Germaine won't live in Australia:

For the vast majority, life in Australia is neither urban nor rural but suburban. The reality is not Uluru or the Sydney Opera House but endless, ever-expanding replications of Ramsay Street that spread out as rapidly as oil stains on water, further and further from the tiny central business districts of the state capitals.
.....
If your ambition is to live on Ramsay Street, where nobody has ever been heard to discuss a book or a movie, let alone an international event, then Australia may be the place for you.
.....
I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to get out of Australia if my life was to begin. I had been bored ever since I could remember. I was ungainly and I was bored by sport, which in Australia is a sure sign that you're a bad person.
.....
The real reason I won't live in Australia, even when Britain has no further use for my services, is that I love the country too much. The pain of watching its relentless dilapidation by people too relaxed to give a damn is more than I can bear.

There's more of the same, be assured.

Some (other) candidates

By a triumph of investigative blogging, I am now able to provide some perspective on that last story - immediately below - with this:

The search has started for two high-profile media figures to replace Greg Dyke as BBC director-general and Gavyn Davies as chairman after their resignations over the Hutton report.

BBC News Online goes on to name some possible candidates, not including you know who.

Stranger than fiction

As he said - wow!

Update at 3.20 PM, January 31: The link under 'wow' has now gone dead. Yesterday it led one to a news item, to all appearances on the BBC's own site, announcing Alistair Campbell as the new director-general of the Corporation.

Kerry leads

Findings of the latest MSNBC Reuters Zogby poll:

WASHINGTON - As the Democratic presidential contenders struggle for victories in seven states that hold primaries and caucuses next Tuesday, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry holds substantial leads in the two states that have the largest number of delegates at stake, Missouri and Arizona, according to a new MSNBC/Reuters Zogby tracking poll released Friday morning.

With a total of 269 delegates to be selected Tuesday, Arizona and Missouri have a combined 129.

In Missouri, Kerry garners the support of 45 percent of likely primary voters, while his next-closest rival, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, has only 11 percent, according to the Zogby survey.

In Arizona, Kerry has taken a commanding lead with 38 percent, followed by retired Gen. Wesley Clark with 17 percent and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean with 12 percent.

In South Carolina, according to the poll, Kerry and Edwards are neck and neck, and in Oklahoma Clark is leading.

Walzer on occupations

There is a thoughtful discussion by Michael Walzer, in the latest issue of Dissent, on Just and Unjust Occupations:

[W]e need criteria for jus post bellum that are distinct from (though not wholly independent of) those that we use to judge the war and its conduct. We have to be able to argue about aftermaths as if this were a new argument - because, though it often isn't, it might be. The Iraq War is a case in point: the American debate about whether to fight doesn't seem particularly relevant to the debate about the occupation: how long to stay, how much to spend, when to begin the transfer of power - and, finally, who should answer these questions. The positions we took before the war don't determine the positions we take, or should take, on the occupation. Some people who opposed the war demand that we immediately "bring the troops home." But others argue, rightly, it seems to me, that having fought the war, we are now responsible for the well-being of the Iraqi people; we have to provide the resources - soldiers and dollars - necessary to guarantee their security and begin the political and economic reconstruction of their country. Still others argue that the aftermath of the war has to be managed by international agencies like the UN Security Council - with contributions from many countries that were not part of the war at all. And then the leaders of those countries ask, Why are we responsible for its costs?

Read the rest for Walzer's particular judgements about the present occupation of Iraq. He concludes:

So the justice of the occupation is up to the citizens of the United States. These are the tests that the Bush administration has to meet, and that we should insist on: first, the administration must be prepared to spend the money necessary for reconstruction; second, it must be committed to debaathification and to the equal protection of Iraq's different ethnic and religious groups; third, it must be prepared to cede power to a legitimate and genuinely independent Iraqi government - which could even, if the bidding went that way, give its oil contracts to European rather than American companies.

(Hat tip: SdeW.)