The Importance of Disappointment

Thought for today

2005-02-21T08:18:00.000Z

Extract from Paul Foot's The Vote in today's Guardian:

"The socialist who joins nothing and links with nobody is the most useless of all. "

Slavery in Niger

2005-02-10T06:14:00.000Z

Despite being prohibited under the 1999 Constitution and the Penal Code, many people remain in various forms of slavery. People are born into slavery, and are forced to work without pay for their so-called masters throughout their lives, primarily herding cattle, working on farmland or as domestic servants. Born into slavery, children become the property of their masters and can be passed from one slave owner to another as gifts or as part of a dowry. Girls are forced to start work as domestic servants at a very young age and are at the continual beck and call of their masters. Girls may be sexually abused by men in the household or forced to marry at a young age.

The true scale of slavery became clear last year, after Timidria carried out extensive research, supported by Anti-Slavery International. In this, the first national survey on slavery, over 11,000 people were interviewed, most of whom were identified as slaves. The research establishes that a minimum of 43,000 people are in slavery across the country.

From: Anti-Slavery

Veritas

2005-02-10T05:31:00.000Z

Readers looking for examples of the downside of inflated self-esteem should examine the career of Robert Kilroy-Silk. Eclectech treat the launch of his new right-wing, populist party with the respect and seriousness it deserves. See also their tribute to Mr Tangerine Man.

Via: Europhobia

Against high self-esteem

2005-02-09T06:42:00.000Z

After all these years, I'm sorry to say, my recommendation is this: Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.

So concludes psychologist Roy F Baumeister in an article for the LA Times. He reports on a major literature review that problematises the current popular and policy preoccupation with the importance of high self-esteem. Longer extract:

Five years ago, the American Psychological Society commissioned me and several other experts to wade with an open mind through the enormous amount of published research on the subject and to assess the benefits of high self-esteem.

Here are some of our disappointing findings. High self- esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades. (Actually, kids with high self-esteem do have slightly better grades in most studies, but that's because getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, not the other way around.) In fact, according to a study by Donald Forsyth at Virginia Commonwealth University, college students with mediocre grades who got regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.

Self-esteem doesn't make adults perform better at their jobs either. Sure, people with high self-esteem rate their own performance better — even declaring themselves smarter and more attractive than their low self-esteem peers — but neither objective tests nor impartial raters can detect any difference in the quality of work.

Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data don't support their self-flattering views. If anything, people who love themselves too much sometimes annoy other people by their defensive or know-it-all attitudes. Self-esteem doesn't predict who will make a good leader, and some work (including that of psychologist Robert Hogan writing in the Harvard Business Review) has found humility rather than self-esteem to be a key trait of successful leaders.

It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves. They turn violent toward others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve. Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise.

High self-esteem doesn't prevent youngsters from cheating or stealing or experimenting with drugs and sex. (If anything, kids with high self-esteem may be more willing to try these things at a young age.)

There were a few areas where higher self-esteem seemed to bring some benefits. For instance, people with high self- esteem are generally happier and less depressed than others, though we can't quite prove that high self-esteem prevents depression or causes happiness. Young women with high self- esteem seem less susceptible to eating disorders. In some studies (though not all), people with high self-esteem bounce back from misfortune and trauma faster than others.

High self-esteem also promotes initiative. People who have it are more likely to speak up in a group, persist in the face of failure, resist other people's advice or pressure and strike up conversations with strangers. Of course, initiative can cut both ways: One study on bullying found that self-esteem was high among the bullies and among the people who intervened to resist them. Low self-esteem marked the victims of bullying.

In short, despite the enthusiastic embrace of self-esteem, we found that it conferred only two benefits. It feels good and it supports initiative. Those are nice, but they are far less than we had once hoped for, and it is very questionable whether they justify the effort and expense that schools, parents and therapists have put into raising self-esteem.

Via: Kieran Healy

The EU and immigration

2005-02-08T21:06:00.000Z

Can't say I share all its underlying assumptions but there is a lively post on the EU and immigration at Europhobia.

Migration matters more

2005-02-08T08:22:00.000Z

The Guardian today:

The government is to close the door on low-skilled migrants from the developing world who come to Britain legally under existing work permit schemes, the home secretary, Charles Clarke, disclosed yesterday.

The measure is part of Labour's five-year plan for immigration and asylum, which includes a 'points system' for new migrants that critics fear will lead to a 'two-tier guestworker' labour force.

Migration matters

2005-02-07T21:29:00.000Z

Dead Men Left is rightly angry about the familiar way in which pre-election debate on migration in Britain is shaping up. The main parties have legitimated the notion that the public has lost faith with the current legal framework and are in a competition as to who would be 'tougher' or more efficient at controlling immigration. Some of the evidence DML cites to rebut the assumptions underpinning this moral panic will be familiar to readers of Importance. Two new nuggets are worth checking: firstly a 2004 Citizens Advice Bureau Report on exploitation of migrant workers and secondly this from The Guardian highlighting mistreatment of foreign nurses in the UK.

Why does it appear that only left-leaning blogs are concerned about the situation of migrant workers? Surely for the libertarians this should be a struggle for personal liberty and free markets against the overbearing state? Why don't the liberals see that this as being about the rights of others to share in the benefits of Western democracy? I suspect Dead Men Left would say I was naive to even ask these questions.

Bob Marley

2005-02-06T14:26:00.000Z

Today is the sixtieth aniversary of Bob Marley's birth. There is extensive written and audio material available via the BBC website. I'd particularly recommend this programme (originally broadcast in 2003) in which Benjamin Zephaniah pays tribute to Marley.

Shooting people is fun

2005-02-06T11:08:00.000Z

Apparently, according to Lt. Gen. James Mattis, a career US infantry officer who is now in charge of developing better ways to train and equip Marines.

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

Thanks: Lenin's Tomb

Top 10 of shame

2005-02-06T10:53:00.000Z

See MSF-USA: Special Report: The 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Crises of 2004

What is a progressive?

2005-02-06T10:34:00.000Z

Afronetizen at personal democracy answers:

I finally figured it out:

A progressive is a white liberal with a broadband connection.

I feel like such an idiot. Until now, I had thought it was a person committed to true social and economic justice and equal opportunity for all.

See what happens when you think too hard -- you can't see what's right in front of you!

Imperialism revival (4)

2005-02-06T07:57:00.000Z

Following my earlier posts here, here, and here questioning Gordon Brown's assertion that Britain should be proud of its colonial past, The Guardian yesterday reported on the release of previously secret government documents discussing army torture of suspected Mau Mau rebels in Kenya in the 1950s. A confidential letter from General George Erskine to the War Office, acknowledged that prisoners had been "beaten to extract information".

There is no doubt that in the early days ... there was a great deal of indiscriminate shooting by army and police. I am quite certain prisoners were beaten to extract information. It is a short step from beating to torture and I'm now sure ... that torture was a feature of many police posts.

Also in yesterday's The Guardian, there is a review of David Anderson's and Caroline Elkins' books on the British in Kenya in the 1950s (see previous posts). Extract:

One officer quoted by Anderson gives a taste of the impunity - and the hatred. Interviewing three enemy suspects he says: 'One of them, a tall coal-black bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I slapped him hard, but he kept on grinning at me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could ... When he finally got up on his feet he grinned at me again and I snapped. I really did. I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth ... And I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two (suspects) were standing there looking blank ... so I shot them both ... when the sub-inspector drove up, I told him the (suspects) tried to escape. He didn't believe me but all he said was "bury them and see the wall is cleaned up".'

No British official, military or civilian, has ever been investigated or prosecuted for what happened in the suppression of Mau Mau.

Also of interest is this transcript of a talk by Marxist historian Neil Davidson discussing 'Scotish Imperialism and National Identity'. Extract 1:

When I first suggested that there might a connection between the Scottish nation and the British Empire, four years ago in The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, the suggestion was met with outrage in some quarters of the left, on two main grounds. One was that the Scots had no special role in the British Empire and that, if we had, it was because the English made us do it: in other words, the `we were only obeying orders' defence, which, apart from being a lie, is not particularly flattering to the Scots. However, since my book appeared, two weighty tomes have been published - Michael Fry's The Scottish Empire and Tom Devine's Scotland's Empire - which, whatever else you might want to say about them, set out the facts fairly clearly. Far from being in any sense a victim of imperialism, Scotland was, as an integral part of the British state, a major component of one. Nor was it a `junior partner' - a thesis whose main function is to evade Scottish responsibility for the nature of the British Empire.

Extract 2:

What does this history mean for socialists in Scotland today? The attitudes fostered by our imperial role survive even though the Empire itself is largely - and thankfully - history. But the militarism, racism and xenophobia that so disfigure Scottish society - overlaid and strengthened by our very own traditions of Protestant bigotry - are not superficial aspects which can be discarded by the establishment of border posts along the Tweed. They are part, you might say, of our 'ethnicity'. I am not arguing that Scotland should not secede from England, incidentally - that is a decision which the Scots have every right to make if they wish - simply that it is complacency of the highest order to imagine that secession alone, without a deeper transformation of values, will remove the darker side of our national psyche: in a nation formed by Empire it could scarcely be otherwise. Against this, we have a reservoir of other traditions, radical and socialist traditions, upon which to draw; but we will have to draw on them, because we can be sure that the imperial legacy will not be expunged without our conscious intervention.

Guerrilla knitters

2005-02-04T21:30:00.000Z

I am obviously too stuck in the old politics to understand fully how knitting can be a form of activism. Thanks to near near future, however, I have learnt about Guerrilla knitters.

"By knitting you are resisting capitalism and consumerism. You are not responding to the fashion industry; you are making your own decisions."

Knitting in public seems "almost as transgressive as breastfeeding in public 20 years ago."

Members of Cast Off hold a mass knit on the London underground.

Naked woman on book case

2005-02-04T18:23:00.000Z

The Paris Review have just put 300 author interviews from the past 50 years on the web. Their archive is full of high-brow gems but I'll lower the tone by quoting from a 1955 exchange with James Thurber.

INTERVIEWER: You say that your drawings often don’t come out the way you intended?

THURBER: Well, once I did a drawing for The New Yorker of a naked woman on all fours up on top of a bookcase–a big bookcase. She’s up there near the ceiling, and in the room are her husband and two other women. The husband is saying to one of the women, obviously a guest, “This is the present Mrs. Harris. That’s my first wife up there.” Well, when I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and instead of getting in the stairs when I drew my line down, there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase. Incidentally, that cartoon really threw The New Yorker editor, Harold Ross. He approached any humorous piece of writing, or more particularly a drawing, not only grimly but realistically. He called me on the phone and asked if the woman up on the bookcase was supposed to be alive, stuffed, or dead. I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll let you know in a couple of hours.” After a while I called him back and told him I’d just talked to my taxidermist, who said you can’t stuff a woman, that my doctor had told me a dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours. “So, Ross,” I said, “she must be alive.” “Well then,” he said, “what’s she doing up there naked in the home of her husband’s second wife?” I told him he had me there.

Damning migrant report delayed

2005-02-03T04:41:00.000Z

And those migration stories just keep coming.

This time the focus in Britain. The Guardian tells us that government saught to bury, delay and distance itself from a report highlighting the 'super-exploitation' of migrant workers produced for the International Labour Organisation in Geneva and the Trade Union Congress in London.

You can read 'Forced Labour and Migration to the UK' by Bridget Anderson and Ben Rogaly (University of Sussex) here. I am not sure whether it has been 'revised' as the Guardian report suggests. See also this comment piece by Felicity Lawrence:

"If exploitation of migrant labour turns out to be at the core of our competitiveness, as this report suggests, then tackling the problem requires Labour to address the structure of big business and its regulation - to rethink the philosophies inherited from the Tories that advocate subcontracting, outsourcing, competitive tendering, low piece rates, short-term contracts, workforce mobility and a light touch on red tape. But that undermines New Labour's whole narrative - the third way in which economic growth, based on global competitiveness, can be combined with tackling poverty and inequality.

The lives of migrant workers described in this report make a mockery of the government's programme of social justice. Social justice for our own population turns out to depend on the importation of an underclass of foreigners to create our wealth. We compete with countries that have no labour rights by importing their conditions.

There is ammunition for both the anti-immigration far right and pro-regulation old left here, and small wonder Labour would rather postpone the discussion until after an election."

There are also an interesting range of responses to the story in the letters page of The Guardian today. Finally, this report on the conviction of a 'gang-master' who exploited migrant works is timely.

"Victor Solomka, based in King's Lynn, Norfolk, controlled the lives of more than 700 eastern Europeans who worked gruelling hours and lived in cramped conditions, while he accumulated a fleet of four-wheel drive vehicles and laundered his profits abroad."

Discussing racism in British education from a prision cell in Grenada

2005-02-03T04:20:00.000Z

An interesting footnote to the intertwined histories of metropolitan discussions of race inequality and global discussions of post-colonialism comes via a piece in the Guardian's education section. Extract:

"In 1970, Bernard Coard, a Grenadian academic and teacher living in the UK, came upon the first study of immigrant children in London ESN [ESN= Educationally Subnormal]schools, conducted by the now defunct Inner London Education Authority. It revealed a shocking picture. In "normal" London schools, 17% of pupils were from ethnic minorities. In ESN schools, that figure was 34% - and four out of five were from the West Indies.

The following year Coard wrote and published a pamphlet entitled: How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System. He identified three factors that were causing black boys, in particular, to fail: "Low expectations on his part about his likely performance in a white-controlled system of education; low motivation to succeed academically because he feels the cards are stacked against him; and low teacher expectations, which affect the amount of effort expended on his behalf by the teacher and also affect his own image of himself and his abilities."

The Guardian published a chapter from the pamphlet on its Comment pages, and a row over the education of black children, and the failures of the system, has raged ever since. Wally Brown, principal of Liverpool Community College, remembers its impact. "That book is a seminal piece. What it says is: if the person who is supposed to be teaching you has no confidence in you, how can you learn? Parents who were fresh from the Caribbean had expectations for their children that were at the opposite end of the spectrum from the teachers'."

"He was the first person to raise this issue," says Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North. "Sadly, if the education authorities and schools had listened to him then, we wouldn't have the crisis we have now."

Coard, now in his 60s, is still passionate about the debate. But he follows it remotely from a prison cell in Grenada. In the late 1970s, Coard returned to Grenada, became active in politics and formed the New Jewel Movement, a Marxist group, with his childhood friend Maurice Bishop. When Bishop became prime minister in 1979, Coard became his deputy and together they reformed the education, health and housing systems in what became known as the Grenadan revolution. But the pair fell out ideologically and, in 1983, there was a coup. Bishop was killed, allegedly by Coard's supporters acting on his orders. Coard took power briefly before Ronald Reagan's administration invaded the island and toppled his government.

It was a Reagan-backed jury that sentenced Coard and 13 others to death. Another three were given lengthy sentences, and together they became known as the Grenadan 17. The death penalties were later commuted to life imprisonment. An Amnesty International report last year condemned the torture they had suffered and claimed that their trial had violated international law. The verdict of an appeal hearing for their release, heard in November last year, is imminent."

Migration and African Americans

2005-02-02T18:26:00.000Z

Thanks to Afro-Netizen I learn of 'In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience' probably the largest single documentation of the migrations of all people of African ancestry in North America. Judging from reports in the New York Times, this study has thrown up some fascinating insights into the diversity of black experiences in the US.

Historian Howard Dodson who is director of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is quoted extensively in the New York Times piece:

" "This is a huge story," Mr. Dodson said. "This will serve as a catalyst for the continued re-thinking of who the African-American community is. For the first time, here's a project that explores the extraordinary diversity of the African-American community. This is organized around 13 migrations, 2 of them involuntary: the domestic slave trade and the trans-Atlantic slave trade."

Broadening the examination of migration beyond the slave trade means "you come away with some very different perspectives," Mr. Dodson said. Twice as many sub-Saharan Africans - about one million - have migrated to the United States in the last 30 years as during the entire era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, project organizers said.

The project is chock full of illuminating facts. It shows that in recent years, twice as many African-Americans have moved from the North to the South as from the South to other regions. From 1995 to 2000 approximately 680,000 African-Americans moved to the South and 330,000 left, for a net gain of 350,000.

And for the first time, all the elements of the African diaspora - natives of Africa, Americans whose ancestors were enslaved Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Central and South Americans of African descent, as well as Europeans with African or Afro-Caribbean roots - can be found in the United States.

This has happened in only the last 15 years and is prompting a far broader view of the term African-American, said Sylviane Diouf, a historian who served as the content manager for the project."

See also the In Motion website.

Expulsion of migrant workers from Malaysia

2005-02-01T22:50:00.000Z

I have seriously considered stopping referring to specific posts at At Any Street Corner as they are all worth reading. Yet another example of blogging at its best is the reporting of the expulsion of migrant workers in Malaysia here and here. Many of these workers are being forced to return to disaster-hit Aceh. This is a major story that has hardly registered with the British media.
Added Feb 2nd: now see updates here and here.

Roger Mayne

2005-01-31T13:33:00.000Z

Following my post below, here is a photograph by Roger Mayne taken in 1956:

"I got past them, thank God I got past them, and then I heard this voice, 'take our photo Mister!'. So, of course, immediately I turned around and photographed the group, because I mean I wasn't going to miss a chance like that and I realised that they weren't sinister. They were actually being quite friendly. So I went in quite close amongst the group and got quite a lot more photographs quite close to them."

Two things worth reading about Iraq

2005-01-30T07:08:00.000Z

Two very different pieces about the Iraq war that are both a cut above. Eliot Weinberger is impassioned in What I Heard About Iraq from the London Review of Books.

In the Financial Times Carne Davis writes:

"I was, from 1998 to 2002, the British “expert” on Iraq for the UK delegation to the UN Security Council, responsible for policy on both weapons inspections and sanctions against Iraq. My experience in those years and what happened subsequently is in part why I recently resigned from the Foreign Office."

Now read on.

Suburban dreams

2005-01-30T06:46:00.000Z

Thanks to Conscientious I have discovered Beth Yarnelle Edwards' images of the contemporary, suburban domestic sphere. These are wonderful, intimate photographs that turn the mundane and familiar into something exotic and important. One could imagine these pictures showing up on the covers of sociology and psychology books for years to come - much like Roger Mayne's photographs of Southam Street did in the 1960s. Although unlike Mayne's images, one is often left wondering how they were contrived . Of course, the shifting gaze from outside to inside is also interesting.

Max Weber and Auschwitz

2005-01-27T22:49:00.000Z

"In organisational ideology, readiness for such an extreme self-sacrifice is articulated as a moral virtue; indeed, as the moral virtue destined to put paid to all other moral demands. The selfless observance of the moral virtue is then represented, in Weber's famous words, as the honour of the civil servant; 'The honour of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction. This holds even if the order seems wrong to him and if, despite the civil servant's remonstrances, the authority insists on the order'. This kind of behaviour means, for a civil servant, 'moral discipline and self-denial in the highest sense'. Through honour, discipline is substituted for moral responsibility. The delegitimation of all but inner-organisational rules as the source and guarantee of propriety, and thus denial of the authority of private conscience, become now the highest moral virtue." (Zygmunt Bauman Modernity and the Holocaust)

The Drowned and the Saved

2005-01-27T22:19:00.000Z

"... I too entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day; actually the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were the children sent to the gas? I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in my hand, I was waiting to file past the 'commission' that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it." (Auschwitz Survivor Primo Levi)

Barney Greenman

2005-01-27T07:38:00.000Z

Today I remember Barnett 'Barney' Greenman, born on March 17 1940; gassed in Auschwitz two and a half years later.

Muslim Council of Britain

2005-01-27T07:27:00.000Z

The Muslim Council of Britain's decision not to attend Auschwitz commemoration events has rightly come in for criticism.

Normblog tells us:

"Musselmanner (Moslems) was Auschwitz slang for people near death from starvation and privation... The exact derivation of the phrase is not known, but it was common to all concentration camps."

George Edward Chamberlain

2005-01-21T10:18:00.000Z

I was really touched by this.

30 years of Race & Class

2005-01-21T06:47:00.000Z

Two really good posts by At Any Street Corner here and here on the thirtieth aniversary edition of the journal Race and Class.

The great imperialism revival (3)

2005-01-20T22:42:00.000Z

Two miss-the-point letters in the Guardian today in response to Paul Gilroy's article on Harry, Nazis and Empire (discussed in an earlier post). Historian John MacKenzie writes:

"Something odd is happening in American academia these days (Why Harry's disoriented about empire, January 18), explained in terms of denial. Despite being critical of the British experience and having no truck with Harry's fancy-dress set, I find Paul Gilroy's views absurd. There is absolutely no evidence to connect British attitudes towards Nazism with their own guilt about empire nor is there the moral equivalence which Gilroy implies.

"Throughout the imperial period, there was always an exceptionally healthy scepticism about empire, not to say fierce criticism of its methods, among British politicians, in the press, and within missionary, humanitarian and academic lobbies. So far as the specific case of Kenya and Mau Mau is concerned, contemporary anxiety about British methods was always present. In any case, the Mau Mau fighters killed very many more Africans than they did whites and the result of the British realisation of error was decolonisation not only in Kenya, but ultimately in the rest of east and central Africa.

"By contrast, criticism of the effects of US imperialism in Chile, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq has been strikingly muted. Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, not to mention the scandal of the domestic adherence to the death penalty (placing the US in a club with China and Iran), produce so little in the way of press, political or academic critiques that Bush and his administration are re-elected. Gilroy and the rest of the group known as the post-colonialists are as severe a case of denial as you could find."

OK except:
1) Paul Gilroy is British
2) I can think of no contemporary thinker on race issues who has written more (and more seriously) about fascism and the Holocaust - i.e. the last person who would want to get into a colonialism v Nazism pissing contest

MacKenzie could be forgiven for not knowing the above but why did the Guardian bother to print his letter? I must also say that the suggestions that firstly British imperialism was OK because lots of people at home were 'anxious' about it and that secondly nobody criticises US imperialism are both spectacularly wide of the mark. Many Brits are in denial about the history of British foreign policy and a focus on those beastly yanks can just be another way of perpetuating this. Who taught the Americans how to suppress the peasantry of South Vietnam? Ans: British military advisors fresh from Malaya.

Hadi Saleh 1949-2005

2005-01-20T13:51:00.000Z

Normblog rightly highlights the Guardian obituary of Communist and Trade Unionist Hadi Saleh recently killed by insurgents in Iraq (see previous post). Abdullah Muhsin writes:

"Hadi Saleh's commitment to trade unionism was a vital feature of his vision for a democratic, peaceful and federal Iraq, which would unite all Iraqis, regardless of their background, ethnicity or religion. For him, trade unions would be the key to achieving such unity. Thus he championed workers' rights to organise and to strike to achieve decent jobs, pay and working conditions: the basic building blocks of strong, non-sectarian trade unionism. Such a strategy remains the only way to defeat the IMF shock therapy and trans-national economic occupation, which has been imposed undemocratically on Iraqis by the occupying powers.

"However, his commitment to independent trade unionism was also linked to his determination to end the occupation of our country and to rebuild civil society."

Cafe culture

2005-01-20T09:23:00.000Z

Hi readers it's new happy, whacky Dave here.

I'm probably the last to discover this but I really enjoyed Russell Davies' tribute to egg, bacon, chips and beans.

The truth hurts ...

2005-01-19T22:18:00.000Z

Importance gets a namecheck from the admirable pas au-delà as part of a list of new blogs but there is a sting in the tail:

" ...do the blogs have the new year blues a bit? Come on now, lighten up you spoiled brats."

Point taken.

The great imperialism revival (2)

2005-01-18T09:05:00.000Z

I liked Paul Gilroy's article in today's Guardian on Prince Harry attending a 'Colonists and Natives' fancy dress party in a Nazi uniform. Extract:

"Prince Harry's indiscretions have been seen in the context of the Auschwitz anniversary and the failure of his elite education. His youth, his ignorance, poor parenting and a hatred of political correctness have all been offered in mitigation.

These explanations are insufficient. To leave interpretation of his conduct on that level would be to miss an opportunity to understand something fundamental about the cultural life of a post-colonial country that has never dealt with the consequences of its loss of empire.

Harry's behaviour, rather than just being part of the sub-culture of a group of toffs, raises mainstream themes. The telling mix of Nazis and colonial fantasy provides an insight into the core of the two-world-wars-and-one-world-cup mentality. That nihilistic outlook dictates that conflicts against Hitler and Hitlerism remain imaginatively close while Britain's many wars of decolonisation - particularly in Africa, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden - are to be actively forgotten.

Standing firm against Nazis comforts Brits by making them feel righteous and perennially innocent. Being forced to reckon with the ongoing consequences of imperial crimes makes them uncomfortable in equal measure. "

Read part 1 of the great imperialism revival here.

Manchester United are the Jews of English football

2005-01-17T21:01:00.000Z

Possibly according to Normblog.

The biological and the social

2005-01-17T10:45:00.000Z

Eric Hobsbawm's defence of objective historical knowledge reproduced in Saurday's Guardian has rightly been highlighted across the blogsphere (too many links to mention). It is well worth reading in full. What struck me, however, was the way he chose to ground his claim:

"While postmodernists have denied the possibility of historical understanding, developments in the natural sciences have put an evolutionary history of humanity firmly back on the agenda.

"Firstly, DNA analysis has established a firmer chronology of the spread of the species from its original African origin throughout the world, before the appearance of written sources. This has both established the astonishing brevity of human history and eliminated the reductionist solution of neo-Darwinian socio-biology.

"The changes in human life in past 10,000 years, let alone the past 10 generations, are too great to be explained by a wholly Darwinian mechanism of evolution via genes. They amount to the accelerating inheritance of acquired characteristics by cultural and not genetic mechanisms.

"In short, the DNA revolution calls for a specific, historical, method of studying the evolution of the human species. It also provides us with a rational framework for a world history. History is the continuance of the biological evolution of homo sapiens by other means.

"Secondly, the new evolutionary biology eliminates the distinction between history and the natural sciences and bypasses the bogus debates on whether history is or is not a science.

"Thirdly, it returns us to the basic approach to human evolution adopted by prehistorians, which is to study the modes of interaction between our species and its environment and its growing control over it.

Hobsbawm's take on the state of population genetics and the new biology is simplistic but the willingness of a figure like this to use biological knowledge in this way is striking.Those searching for other examples of the new biologism do not have to look far. The same edition of the Guardian contains a review by Steven Rose of The Wayward Mind by Guy Claxton. Rose writes:

"His agenda becomes more transparent as the book proceeds. First, he must once more topple Freud from his pedestal. Not merely were his ideas about the tripartite division of the self between ego, id and superego crude, and his reductive approach to the interpretation of dreams often bathetic, but he wasn't even really original (Claxton unearths a variety of intellectual precursors, from Schopenhauer onwards).

"Then comes the dénouement. Modern neuroscience can, it seems, as tidily explain "the unconscious" as it can consciousness. Goodbye demons; goodbye the analyst's couch. It is really all about the way in which different regions of the brain, especially the massive frontal lobe, are integrated, so that each region can either activate or inactivate others. "The brain," he concludes, "actually produces two kinds of thing: physical effects and mental experiences."

Also in the same edition is Jonathon Porritt's review of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond. Porritt writes:

"In Collapse, Jared Diamond uses that elemental power of nature as his background, but fills his foreground with an astonishing cavalcade of different peoples and cultures from across the planet. They are linked by Diamond's inquiry into what caused some of these societies (such as the Mayan civilisation or the people of Easter Island) to collapse, while others facing similar challenges managed to survive.

"He admits to having started out on this inquiry assuming it would prove to be straightforward abuse of their physical environment that precipitated their demise. In other words, serial ecocide. It turned out to be a lot more complex, with several equally influential factors involved, such as climate change, the presence of hostile neighbours, any involvement in trade, and a host of different response mechanisms on the part of those facing potential collapse. Each collapse or near-collapse throws up a different balance of those key factors.

Toy Story

2005-01-17T09:17:00.000Z

I have given up trying to post any pictures from Michael Wood's work on the toy industry so you'll have to look here

Thanks to Conscientious.

The great imperialism revival (1)

2005-01-16T17:24:00.000Z

I'm grateful to Lenin's Tomb for highighting this from Saturday's Daily Mail:

"Britain must stop apologising for its colonial past and recognise that it has produced some of the greatest ideas in history, Gordon Brown has declared. The Chancellor called for the "great British values" - freedom, tolerance, civic duty - to be admired as some of our most successful exports.

"He used a visit to one of Britain's former East African colonies and one of the strongholds of the campaign against 'white imperialism' to make an unabashed pitch for a return to patriotism.

Brown is quoted thus:

'We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.

'And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.

'Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.'

Perhaps this should be read alongside a discussion of British policy in Kenya in the 1950s from today's Observer. Highlights include over a thousand people hanged and 160,000 detained in camps.

Make love not war

2005-01-15T23:51:00.000Z

Saturday's Sun reports:

" A SEX bomb to make enemy soldiers turn GAY and romp with each other was planned by US Government scientists.
Experts plotted the bizarre chemical weapon as an alternative to deadly nuclear devices, newly declassified documents reveal.

They hoped the tactic, proposed in 1994 when Bill Clinton was President, would distract the enemy from military duties so their troops could attack.

The team at US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, aimed to use hormones called pheromones, which attract other humans.

The report said: "Provoking homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a distasteful but completely non-lethal blow to morale."

Wrapping up on 'Are Muslims Hated?'

2005-01-15T17:04:00.000Z

Kenan Malik's programme 'Are Muslims Hated?' (discussed below here, here and here) did not engender as much public debate as I thought it would. Malik's Guardian article did prompt this response from Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain.

There was an interesting post from www.perfect.co.uk that links the programme to Malik's other recent activity. Anyone wishing to understand the development of Malik's thinking might wish to look at this and this critique of multiculturalism.

For opinions on Malik's programme from an unscientific sample of British Muslims see PakPassion.net - Unofficial Pakistan Cricket Message Board!

MindMapping

2005-01-15T08:01:00.000Z

Interesting and useful post on MindMaps from Russell Davies.

Through the attached comments, I learn of the role of similar diagrams in the 'Conspiracy' Art of Mark Lombardi.

Survivors of Auschwitz

2005-01-13T20:09:00.000Z

Two snippets from Stephen Moss' interviews with Auschwitz survivors in today's Guardian. Moss begins his piece on Leon Greenman thus:

" The first thing you notice about Leon Greenman's large but shabby terraced house in Ilford is that it has mesh shutters. He had them put up 10 years ago, soon after the National Front threw bricks through the windows. Two years ago, he received a Christmas card from the local fascists telling him he would make a lovely lampshade. Don't tell Greenman that nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon."

Barbara Stimler on retelling her story in London schools:

"When I speak to the children, I ask myself, 'Do they believe me?' Because sometimes I don't believe it myself."

Hadi Saleh

2005-01-13T01:25:00.000Z

The brutal killing of Iraqi trade unionist Hadi Saleh by insurgents, its use in an open letter to the Stop the War Coalition from Labour Friends of Iraq, and its discussion in recent columns by Nick Cohen in the Observer column and Johann Hari in The Independant have rightly received considerable attention in the blogsphere.

But in the rush to condemn those Nick Cohen terms 'the cowards of the Left' have opponents of the Iraq war been misrepresented? See typically robust response from Dead Man Left and response from The Stop the War Coalition here, here and here.

Perhaps not such a cut and dried dispute of principle as it has been represented.

Yet more on Malik

2005-01-11T01:07:00.000Z

A good response to Malik's debunking of Islamophobia in Dead Man Left.

At Any Street Corner is more supportive, quoting an interesting interview with anthropologist Adam Kuper discussing the confused ways in which notions of cultural difference are used in public discourse. When I was a callow PhD student in the 1980s Kuper fell asleep not once but twice during a paper I was giving so he is obviously a man of sound judgement.

More Kenan Malik

2005-01-08T13:35:00.000Z

Kenan Mailk's programme on 'Are Muslims Hated' is on tonight. Article in the Guardian yesterday. Extract:

"Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants us to believe that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia - a morbid fear and hatred of Islam and of Muslims. Former Home Office minister John Denham has warned of the 'cancer of Islamophobia' infecting the nation. The veteran anti-racist Richard Stone, a consultant to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, suggests that Islamophobia is 'a challenge to us all'. The director of public prosecutions has worried that the war on terror is 'alienating whole communities' in this country.

I'm the kind of person you might expect to join this chorus. I've been an anti-racist all my life. I opposed the war on Iraq. I think that Britain's anti-terror laws are an affront to democracy. But I also think that Islamophobia is a myth - at least in the way that most people conceive of it. There is clearly ignorance and fear of Islam in this country. Muslims do get harassed and attacked because of their faith. Yet I believe that the hatred and abuse of Muslims is being exaggerated to suit politicians' needs and silence the critics of Islam. "

See also Malik's earlier critique of the value of 'diversity'.

NS article

2005-01-06T19:26:00.000Z

Here reproduced large extracts from the New Statesman article mentioned in yesterday's posts:

"''Always have at least one treat to look forward to. Ideally you should have one mini-treat each day, a slightly bigger one every week and a bumper one each year. People with low self-esteem rarely treat themselves enough."

So writes Gael Lindenfield, "the UK's number-one confidence expert", in the 51st of the 365 day-by-day tips that make up her bestselling Self-Esteem Bible. Contained in this nugget of advice is the key to a whole new way of looking at the British economy.

Not many people realise this (not even the British Retail Consortium, whose spokeswoman had never heard of the idea until I put it to her), but self-esteem is one of Britain's fastest-growing industries, worth at least £15bn a year and possibly as much as £30bn, compared with £8bn for the whole of what remains of British agriculture.

Products, therapies, lifestyle advisers, magazines, books and television programmes aimed at boosting self-esteem and "well-being" have become big business in themselves, not least because boosting self-esteem is now heralded as a catalyst for improved productivity in every other business sector. People with high self-esteem, it is said, are more likely to enjoy their jobs, accept challenging targets, resist stress and cope with negative events, so selling self-esteem is more than just a good wheeze for those who claim to be able to package and sell it. It is like prescribing Viagra for the whole of Britain's productive economy.

The social theorist we have to thank for this perception is Andy Westwood of the Work Foundation, whose recently published paper Me, Myself and Work (sponsored, significantly, by the Cosmetic Toiletry and Perfumery Association) sets out to examine why self-esteem is so important in our working lives today. In doing so, he provides some startling statistics. A survey of Yellow Pages directories since 1992 indicates a widespread decline in traditional shops and trades, but a 5,000 per cent increase in the number of aromatherapists. Roughly six million people in Britain pay a subscription to a private health club (though how often they visit them is another matter) and one British woman in five has attended a Weight Watchers class.

Clearly there is something going on in consumer markets, and it might be a response to a national epidemic of low self-esteem. Or it may be something much simpler: people have more money and time to spare for luxuries, and can overcome the guilt associated with luxuries by being persuaded that it helps address an inadequacy they did not realise was there in the first place.

A recent research exercise by Bridgepoint, the private equity firm, points out that while personal spending on food and clothing has remained relatively stable since 1978, spending on "leisure services" has more than tripled, partly because consumers no longer see any point in saving. As to how that leisure spend is allocated, focus groups say they are less interested in lifestyle brands and more interested in bargains (on eBay, for example) or treats: but the treat they value most is nothing more complicated than a bit of peace and quiet in the midst of their increasingly busy lives.

Meanwhile, more from Gael Lindenfield. Eighty-three: buy yourself a small book of motivational quotations. Ninety-nine: think of yourself as a product for sale. One hundred and seventeen: like celebrities, transform your appearance regularly. And finally, if Christmas shopping is getting you down, 119: imagine that you have three weeks to live."

The business of self-esteem

2005-01-05T20:14:00.000Z

The new year edition of the New Statesman picked 'Self-Esteem' as one of the key themes of 2005. Useful article which points to the rise of commercial services designed at dealing with the 'problem' of low self-esteem. Sadly only seems to be accessible electonically to subscribers. But then again it could just be me, I'm pretty useless at this ....

USA no longer a top ten economy

2005-01-05T20:00:00.000Z

The conservative low tax, low regulation Heritage Foundation no longer ranks the US in the world top ten of the 'freest economies'.

Although its score remains unchanged from last year, and it is still classified as free, the United States - now in a tie for 12th place with Switzerland - has been 'treading water'," according to the editors, "and hence has been surpassed by countries willing to open their economies still further."

Britain came 7th!

Are Muslims Hated?

2005-01-05T10:52:00.000Z

Thanks to AsiansinMedia.org I learn of Kenan Malik's programme due to air on Channel 4 on January 8th which asks 'are Muslims hated'? According to Mailik:

Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants to convince us that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia. But is this the reality or is hatred and abuse of Muslims being exaggerated to suit politicians' ends and to silence critics of Islam?

Malik always has something interesting to say so I await the programme and the debate that will no doubt follow with interest.

For an alternative tale on Islamaphobia see The Runnymede Trust.

Fundamentalism begins at home

2005-01-04T21:59:00.000Z

Only just picked up on this article by Josie Appleton on the French sociologist Oliver Roy and his book In Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. Roy argues that the politicisation of Islam including extreme militant Islam emerges not out of tradition or the Koran but is a by-product of modernisation and westernisation. Neofundamentalism is linked to developments such as individualisation, notions of self-development and self-expression, lifestyle and to identity politics. Here is a taste:

Neofundamentalists act in the name of a global ummah (community), but this is entirely an invention of their imagination. Roy writes that: 'Neofundamentalism provides an alternative group identity that does not impinge upon the individual life of the believer, precisely because such a community is imagined and has no real social basis.' Islamic militants tend to see both politics and community ties as a bit grubby, a distraction from the pure religious project of developing the self. The fact that radicals have made no attempt to win adherents at Mecca, Roy argues in his book, shows that they have 'no interest in the real ummah'.

See an interview with Roy in Religioscope. See also reviews in The Guardian, RUSI-Review, ICSAA, and The Economist.

More on Susan Sontag

2005-01-02T08:22:00.000Z

Great post from At Any Street Corner that pays tribute to Susan Sontag and even manages to provide insight into the dynamics of current horrors.

At Any Street Corner writes: "I have just re-read parts of Sontag's Regarding The Pain Of Others which seems to speak directly to the catastrophe that has unfolded in Asia and the visual reporting of it. Near the end she has a ferocious passage in which she excoriates those "citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk'' who ''will do anything to keep themselves from being moved" by disaster or pain. Surely she speaks of a profound truth when she says that photographs - like those we have seen recently - "haunt us" and also help to form part of a narrative of understanding and, ultimately, of solidarity. And then she has this to say of the impudence of the postmodern obsession of pain as spectacle:

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment .... It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain ... consumers of news, who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."

Can governments be charitable?

2005-01-02T07:38:00.000Z

2nd of January and already I am struggling with my resolution not to rise to the blogging bait...

A posting on Samizdata asserts that governments can never be charitable as 'money received from a nation-state cannot be charity as the money is not freely given, whereas willingly donated private funds are true charity.'

This got me thinking. What if responses to the Iraq crisis had been on the same scale and basis as the effort to help following the Tsunami? i.e. Western governments only 'donnate' substantial sums to the cause following largescale personal subscriptions from their citizens. Perhaps the assault on Fallujah should only have taken place provided NGOs could raise the finance through appeals to the public. Actually put like that it sounds a positive development...

Susan Sontag 1933-2004

2005-01-01T09:27:00.000Z

I thought it worth reproducing in full the paragraphs from the New Yorker that Susan Sontag wrote in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Centre outrage.

'The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.'

Happy new blog?

2005-01-01T08:28:00.000Z

There has been a lengthy hiatus since my last entry. This has been in part due to my traditional pre-Christmas virus followed by lots of enjoyable socialising. I have to admit, however, to a little reluctance to get back into the blogging routine. There are quite a few questions going around my head about why I am blogging and if I am being honest these are also linked to mixed feeling about the tone, purpose and cumulative effect of the some of the other blogs I read.

So for the next few weeks at least I resolve to do two (quite possibly contradictory) things:
1) Sharpen the focus of the blog which was always intended to be about the psycho-social and the political.
2) Reflect more on the experience of blogging.

The start of a debate not the end of it

2004-12-21T04:03:00.000Z

Thanks to Normblog I come across this from Peter Tatchell - a discussion of "the left's retreat from universal human rights".

"Liberal humanitarian values are under threat. Much of this threat comes not from the far right but from the left's moral equivocation and compromises. Sections of progressive opinion are wavering in their defence of universal human rights. In this era of post-modernism and live-and-let-live multiculturalism, moral relativism is gaining ground."

And later ...

"The same curious morality applies to Iraq. The Stop The War Coalition was right to oppose the US – UK led invasion, but utterly wrong to ignore Sadaam’s terrorization of the Kurds and Shias, and of socialists, democrats and trade unionists. The STWC’s failure to support the democratic and left opposition to Saddam ranks as one of the great moral failures of our era. It’s “do nothing” and “take no sides” policy failed to challenge Sadaam’s tyranny. Proposals for a campaign of international solidarity to help the Iraqi people topple the dictatorship and liberate themselves were decisively rejected by the STWC."

I find an audience and then alienate him

2004-12-19T01:23:00.000Z

Given that he is the first person ever to log a comment on my blog, it may be foolish to take issue with Doc Richard. But I was dismayed to discover from his website that there are some people seriously prepared to argue that Bush's election victory was the result of a giant fraud.

The counter-factuals to this claim seem so strong on the face of it that it does make me wonder once again about the great appeal of the conspiracy theory. More than anything, conspiracy explanations allow us not to face up to complexities and disappointments. Of course, constructing a conspiracy theory is not the only way to avoid facing up to things. My two gripes about the British liberal/left response to the Bush victory are that:

1) There is a tendency to caricature the Bush's supporters. One would be forgiven assuming from much of the commentary that they are predominantly fundamentalist Christians and/or neo-Con zealots and/or Forest Gump-like simpletons. In reality Bush's victory relied on a broad alliance of people, many of whom had little stomach for his social programme and had mixed feeling abut the Iraq war. As my exasperated 12 year old daughter concluded a political discussion with my American cousin 'you voted for Bush but you didn't agree with him'.
2) The continued focus on the States is a way of not thinking about a British dimension: Bush is the baddie and Blair is either led astray by him or else is a calming influence on him. The Bush victory should have got us beyond this but there is little sign so far.

Hopefully I haven't alienated Doc Richard with this. As compensation I will try and find out more about the "generator" theory of brain consciousness relationship.

Rollover

2004-12-18T01:16:00.000Z

Jon Ronson's new blog tells us The Daily Mail is unhappy that National Lottery Good Causes money has been allocated to the following organisations:

* A choir of homosexuals in Yorkshire called Gay Abandon.
* A trust helping improve guinea pig-breeding methods to feed peasants in Peru.
* Northern Ireland's Filipino community and its touring dance troupe.
* A group helping to develop non-governmental and community organisations in Bulgaria.
* A “pro-IRA organisation.”
* A “group which helps unruly children fight expulsion orders.”
* A “group which teaches children how to hide drugs from their parents.”
* “People undergoing sex change operations.”
* Dynamo Dykes Volleyball Club, “which provides professional coaching to lesbian volleyball players.”
* “A group which brings people from the gay and martial arts communities together.”
* “A group which has campaigned against the Robertson's Golliwog and promotes politically correct books and toys.”

I now feel quite guilty about never buying a ticket.

Change the world in 5 years

2004-12-17T13:53:00.000Z

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust is looking for "6 visionaries who can make the world - or part of it - more just and more peaceful."

Oh no, it's the anti-war Right

2004-12-17T13:19:00.000Z

Quite interesting article on the 'anti-war Right' by Lawrence Auster. Best quote:
"It was exactly the kind of resentment normally associated with the left, the impotent fury at a traitorous father figure or a supposed "oppressor" whom the supposed "oppressed," seeing himself as powerless and therefore not subject to any responsible restraints, feels justified in striking back at in any way he can. One of the typical forms this resentment took was the notion that the oppressor has no rational basis for doing what he's doing, but is acting out of insane or evil motives."

Your point being ...

Frank Ferudi on love experts

2004-12-17T11:53:00.000Z

Again from Ode
"Therapy culture frames the experience of everyday life as a struggle that ordinary people can not survive without professional guidance."

" ... therapy culture has shifted our attitudes toward love, by heightening our fears and inflating our expectations of failure and disappointment. Even worse, it has reduced intimate relationships to a kind of emotional business deal with a permanent opt-out clause. And that is not what we need to sustain human culture."

Another pathology of self management?

2004-12-17T11:41:00.000Z

Ode reports:
'Obsession about being healthy can make you sick. This condition even has a name: orthorexia, a term introduced in 1997 by American specialist in alternative health physician Steven Bratman. Orthorexia sufferers spend an unreasonable amount of time each day worrying about what they should and shouldn’t eat. As Bratman notes in Psychology Today (September/October 2004): “If your focus on healthy eating is interfering with your happiness and social life, you might have a problem.” Other specialists claim there is little difference between orthorexia and anorexia. Both conditions involve weight loss and their treatment is nearly the same. Psychology Today is concerned that all the recent coverage of low carb diets and the obesity epidemic will mean a rise in orthorexia.'

Nine (well eight) Lords a' leaping

2004-12-17T05:32:00.000Z

"The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

From the judgement of the UK Law Lords who have ruled by an 8-1 majority that the indefinite detention without trial of foreign terrorism suspects was unlawful under the European convention on human rights

"We were arrested in December 2001 and taken straight to Belmarsh prison. We know that the police in this country have enormous powers to investigate suspected terrorists. Why did no one ever speak to us? Why were we never asked a single question before being locked up as terrorists? We have never had a trial. We were found guilty without one. We are imprisoned indefinitely and probably forever. We have no idea why. We have not been told what the evidence is against us. We are here. Speak to us. Listen to us. Tell us what you think and why. If you did, you would no longer believe we were a threat to this country. You would think perhaps that there was not the emergency you have imagined here. Everyone is giving their opinion about us. Why not think of coming to us first, rather than locking us up and never speaking to us?"

A letter from the detainees in The Guardian, 26 Feb 04. See also the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities.

Polly Toynbee again!

2004-12-16T07:18:00.000Z

This Polly Toynbee thing is getter out of hand. I have now discovered another brave, admirable article by her, this time on assisted death. Writing just 3 weeks after her mother's painful and undignified end from cancer, Toynbee discusses the guilt of not fulfilling her mother's wish to be released from her misery. Toynbee criticises the current legal and medical context that, she argues, wrongly insists that people should and can have a good, natural death through palliative care.

Given the circumstances of writing, I feel awkward at challenging anything Toynbee says but here goes. In the spirit of Ian Craib (see my very first post), I'd ask the following:

1) As Craib says death is the ultimate disappointment. Perhaps the focus on the process of dying is a way of not confronting that. Would assisted death be any more bearable or meaningful? Is there a danger here of promoting a different but equally unachieveable ideal of the good death?
2) So much of the rhetoric in this area plugs into the contemporary preoccupation with the notion of a self-managing individual in control of their own life. As Craib and others have suggested, these values are shot through with contradictions, deny social, psychological and biological realities, and are often the means through which power is exercised on us. Seen in these terms our 'right to die as we choose' is not unquestionable.

Norman makes my day

2004-12-15T22:55:00.000Z

I am quite ashamed of how excited I was to find my blog referred to in another blog; not just any blog mind, but the mighty Normblog. Readers will find the usual insight in a discussion of Eagleton on Furedi and the decline of the public intellectual.

Am I being solipsistic to think that Normblog's defense of Polly Toynbee (is there no taboo Norm will not challenge?) might also have been sparked by my dismissive comments? Normblog rightly highlights a good example of Toynbee's capacity to lift the level of public debate - this time on the proposed law on incitement to religious hatred.

I am more sympathetic than Normblog to the notion that something might be seriously awry with contemporary intellectual life. Then again I have spent my working day struggling with the HEFC QAA Foundation Degree Review methodology so my judgement might be distorted....

Where have all the intellectuals gone?

2004-12-15T06:38:00.000Z

Terry Eagleton's very good review of Frank Furedi's book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? contains the following:

'One mark of the classical intellectual (more recently dubbed a "theorist") was that he or she refused to be pinned to a single discipline. Instead, the idea was to bring ideas critically to bear on social life as a whole.... In fact, a snap definition of an intellectual would be "more or less the opposite of an academic". Once society is considered too complex to be known as a whole, however, the idea of truth yields to both specialism and relativism.'

The only problem is that Eagleton's example of a contemporary intellectual is Polly Toynbee!

See also review by Dylan Evans in Guardian. Other reviews include Theodore Dalrymple in The Spectator and Noel Malcolm in The Telegraph.

There is an interview with Furedi about the book in Spiked. David Aaronovitch (I'll try and restrain myself) also discusses Furedi's book.

2004-12-15T06:26:00.000Z

More Norman Geras

2004-12-11T08:22:00.000Z

An interview with Norman Geras

Is it too difficult for many liberals and lefties to really engage with the horrors of (and implications of) recent terror attacks on civilians? As Norman Geras suggests, we come up with arguments that 'contextualise' acts of terror or suggest that, for example, the US 'asked for' 9/11 (see Zizek?), or argue that there is a moral equivalence between the US and Bin Laden, al-Qaida, and the Taliban. I can't accept Geras' political conclusions and I have done a fair bit of 'contextualising' myself but he is worrying away at some really important issues. The questions that arise out of this for me relate to a) the capacity (or is it necessity) of people (on all sides) to suspend supposedly universal standards of human rights when it suits them b) that we all find it easier to deal in absolutes and certainties than with complexities and disappointments.

Not agreeing, thinking

2004-12-11T07:57:00.000Z

I suppose if this blog is really going to be in the spirit of Ian Craib I should break the habit of a lifetime and acknowledge that no one argument is all right and all wrong. Most importantly to think about how rigid, simple or all-encompassing arguments are appealing for all the wrong reasons.

A blog that I often read but often don't agree with normblog

Curtis v Zizek

2004-12-09T19:00:00.000Z

This probably says more about me and my bad reading habits than anything else but ... I am currently reading Zizek's and Mark Curtis' books (sort of) on the Iraq War in parallel. This is having the effect of getting me to think less about Iraq and more about the process of and motivation for reading.

The contrast in tone and style between the two books is sharp: Zizek skitish, oblique, funny; Curtis unwavering but polemical. Zizek plays with the ironies and the paradoxes, Curtis reveals the hidden facts. What works best and why?

Zizek's playfulness, his impulse to shock or show off can be infuriating but it is a way into the complexities. I worry, however, that his style is also a way of managing the faint embarassment that certainty, commitment and moral outrage now seem to engender. Curtis' approach, on the other hand risks precisely that kind of response.

A good reason not to count?

2004-12-09T18:58:00.000Z

To the UK government's response to the recent study in the Lancet suggesting that 100,000 have died as a result of the war and Tony Blair's rejection of the call to count Iraqi deaths we might add the following from Mark Curtis:

"...Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945...including Nigerians, Indonesians, Arabians, Ugandans, Chileans, Vietnamese..."

Disappointing theory?

2004-12-08T23:14:00.000Z

I belong to a book club. This month's book is Zizek's 'Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle'.

Reasons why I should like this book:

1) About Iraq War
2) Obscure/fashionable European social theorist
3) Comes from obscure/fashionable European country - Slovenia
4) Left leaning with a twist
5) Mixes politics, psychoanalytic ideas and popular culture
6) Smart arse
7) Writes loads and loads

So why can't I help feeling let down ...

Disappointing picture of Zizek

More to come on this.

I'll name that blog

2004-11-30T06:28:00.000Z

It's a book by Ian Craib stupid ...

His book not only has a great title but is full of insight.

You can read more on Craib here and here