No
I am currently reading The Austrians, a Thousand Year Odyssey, by Gordon Brook-Shepherd from which the following somewhat disturbing quote comes:
"But it was another story after 1520, when [Martin Luther] publicly burned the papal bull excommunicating him for heresy and he founded his own Protestant movement. That defiance, which placed him in open competition with the Vatican for the souls of men, not only destroyed for ever the unity of Christian faith;"
It's hard to overplay the ignorance this quote. Has the author not heard of the Armenian, Ethiopean or Coptic Churches, or even the better known eastern Orthodox Churches, all well established long before 1520? Coming as it does on page 14, this does not inspire much confidence in the rest of the book.
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Thu, 8 Jan 2004
BBC's The Big Read
The Big Read, in case you don't know, was one of the BBC's prestige programmes for 2003, aiming at finding the UK's favourite books. The top five favourite books, as voted on by the public at large turned out to be The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling. These are all, to my mind, very safe and predictable choices, but that is perhaps to be expected from a large scale popularity poll.
The reason I bring this up, is the reaction of Richard Calder, one of the up and coming British science fiction writers to the results of this poll: (y'all need to scroll down quite a bit)
I love British children's literature, and I love fantasy and the fantastic, but this poll, by and large, simply mirrors the tastes of a population that has not read anything since they were fourteen or fifteen years old. Again, I must admit to prejudice here -- Calder despises all panderings to 'populism'. But what has been revealed, I believe, is not the public's love of 'the childlike' and 'fantastic', but simply an endemic laziness and infantilism.
Which makes Calder sound a bit of a snob, to say the least. (An impression which if anything is strengthened by the rest of the entries on his blog...) I think he overlooks two things here. The first being that any large scale poll will probably skew towards predictable choices, sinces tastes tend to normalise. The second being that favourite books are quite often just those books we read first when we were fourteen or fifteen years old. He should remember that old adage, that "the Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen". The books you read in adolescence are the ones that stay with you.
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Fri, 26 Dec 2003
Norman Geras says, in the course of writing about Bush's war:
To give a crude analogy here: if someone burgles a house and her only motive in doing so is greed, I will approve of her action if, in order to bring off the burglary, she finds she has to release a terrified family from the grip of a bullying, violent and child-abusing patriarch. I will not think that what happened was overall bad because it was - 'in essence' - a burglary; or worry, in my approval, about the burglar going on to burgle others. If she does, we can disapprove of - and oppose - that.
Whereas I don't think, to give another crude analogy here, that a Mob war should be thought of as a public service, even if it clears the streets of some deserving scumbags.
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Hacked off at the BBC
Let's rag on the BBC for a bit then, eh? There are a few things about the BBC that cheese me off no end.
For one thing, for a non-commercial organisation they sure do put a lot of ads. Why the fuck do we need to be reminded forty times a day that this new exciting programme will premiere in two days? By the time it finally comes on I'm sick of it already. Not to mention that usually they're so obnoxious that you want to shoot everybody involved after the second time you'd seen them.
And the programmes being advertised are often no better. How many fucking shows do we need to have where some nice upper middle classwhite couple gets their room redecorated, their garden done, their clothes revamped or their life sorted out? Yes, they can be entertaining and obviously are cheap to make, but after the fifth variation on a theme I'm sick of them.
Let's not even mention Fame Academy.
Another cheap format that should've been discontinued by now: celebrity quiz shows. Have I Got News for you should've been stopped after Angus Deyton was fired. When it was good, it was very very good, but it only looks tired now. The same goes for Buzzcocks, which has had all of the interesting music celebrites by now and is now reduced to the third backup singer for Atomic Kitten.
A related format is that of the celebrity nostalgia shows. I Love 1999? What the fuck? Various non-entities talking about how much they liked four years ago? Or what about Grumpy Old Men? Various baby boomers whinging about all the predictable stuff you've heard your parents whinge about too often already.
But at least there's still Eastenders.
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Fri, 19 Dec 2003
On horror
In a recent discussion on genre in rec.arts.sf.written, someone quoted a post of mine I had written a year or so earlier. Looking at it, I thought it would be interesting enough to share here too.
Horror is a mood, fantasy is a genre.
To explain a bit: horror can be evoked through the mundane (Silence of the Lambs), the science fictional (Who Goes There?) or the fantastic (Dracula).
Horror revolves around evoking a mood of dread, of being scared shitless, a growing sense of unease or discomfort, the sense that something is wrong with the world.
Fantasy revolves around magic in some sense or other, like science fiction revolves around science in some sense or other and mainstream or memitic fiction revolves around "the real world".
Horror can be evoked in all three of them.
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Wed, 17 Dec 2003
This, if this is a true account of that battle in Samara, is bad:
A Combat Leader Gives The Inside Skinny Of The Biggest Battle Since The War Ended
[...] most of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the ambushes the tanks, brads and armored HUMVEES hosed down houses, buildings, and cars while using reflexive fire against the attackers. One of the precepts of "Iron Hammer" is to use an Iron Fist when dealing with the insurgents. As the division spokesman is telling the press, we are responding with overwhelming firepower and are taking the fight to the enemy. The response to these well coordinated ambushes was as a one would expect. The convoy continued to move, shooting at ANY target that appeared to be a threat. RPG fire from a house, the tank destroys the house with main gun fire and hoses the area down with 7.62 and 50cal MG fire. Rifle fire from an alley, the brads fire up the alley and fire up the surrounding buildings with 7.62mm and 25mm HE rounds. This was actually a rolling firefight through the entire town.
The ROE under "Iron Fist" is such that the US soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be hostile if enemy fire is received from them (regardless of who else is inside. It seems too many of us this is more an act of desperation, rather than a well thought out tactic. We really don't know if we kill anyone, because we don't stick around to find out. Since we armored troops and we are not trained to use counter-insurgency tactics; the logic is to respond to attacks using our superior firepower to kill the rebel insurgents. This is done in many cases knowing that there are people inside these buildings or cars who may not be connected to the insurgents.
The belief in superior firepower as a counter-insurgency tactic is then extended down to the average Iraqi, with the hope that the Iraqis will not support the guerillas and turn them in to coalition forces, knowing we will blow the hell out of their homes or towns if they don't. Of course in too many cases, if the insurgents bait us and goad us into leveling buildings and homes, the people inside will then hate us (even if they did not before) and we have created more recruits for the guerillas.
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Fri, 12 Dec 2003
"Dutch racism is a well-intentioned, friendly apartheid"
An interesting article on the openDemocracy site about the Dutch and racism
Dutch racism is a well-intentioned, friendly apartheid: white, Christian, and fuelled by feelings of supremacy and superiority which are self evident, although they will be generally denied.
Denial, indeed, appears to be a built-in part of the mix. Both in the form of anti- semitism, and in the various forms of racism, patronising attitudes prevail. In this sense, the anti-racist norm on which we have relied is part of this denial: since racism is seen as barbaric, nobody -- except for small fringe groups -- will allow themselves to be called racist or anti-semitic for one moment.
This attitude really came out in the open after the twin impact of the September 11 attacks and the rise of Pim Fortuyn. With a charismatic leader of a far right party legitimising what many people felt anyway, the sluicegates of intolerance have been fully opened these past two years. Many Dutch people just don't seem to want to have to live in a multicultural society, are fed up with the problem ethnicity du-jour and think that integration is a one-way process.
This is not an attitude unique to the Netherlands; it is also on display in some of the interviews in Stud Terkel's Race, which is about race relations in the USA. It seems to me to be an attitude common to a priviledged people anytime it stands to lose some of its priviledges.
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Ken Macleod has a long and interesting post up detailing why he isn't part of the pro-war left:
This is why no argument so far presented could convince me to take the position of the pro- war left. I admit to being one of those boring old ex-Trots whose thinking on war and peace was shaped, not only by the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, but by the oft-invoked historical memory of the 4th of August 1914, when the War to End All Wars began, and a world ended. As my oldest surviving uncle once said: 'I haven't believed in God since the First World War.' Most of the left, Marxist and liberal and anarchist, backed one side or another in that war too.
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Wed, 10 Dec 2003
Invasion of the entrists
I've sort of been following the group that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party, then morphed into Living Marxism and is now known as Spiked online/The Institute of Ideas. They're a classic example of how a group of extreme leftwing nutcases can metamorphose into a group of rightwing nutcases.
Yesterday they turned up on George Monbiot's radar:
One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The "neo-cons" pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics - entering organisations and taking them over - appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment.
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners' strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
When I first started getting interested in socialism and politics in general, Spiked Online looked interesting and modern, but it soon seemed to be more glitz than substance: establishment dogma with a fashionable cyberlibertarian sauce. Plenty of opinions on everything, but few ideas of their own...
Earlier posts on the Spiked crew:
Brendan O'Neill doesn't get it
one man's journey into sectarianism
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Disillusonment
Or, one man's journey into sectarianism:
We've all been there, it's a wet Saturday morning, you drag yourself into the city centre to part with some of your meagre funds, fighting your way through the throngs of shoppers, teenagers, stressed out parents, and there they stand, the radical lefties. Thrusting their 'radical' left wing politics at you, asking for your name on their petition, stopping you with loaded questions such as 'Do you think the National Health Service needs more funds?' or 'Do you agree with the governments policy on immigration' and then pulling you into a debate they are quite sure they are going to wipe the floor with you in. You are finally presented with the party paper to purchase for your greater advancement at the measly sum of ٠.50, or another such price which at the time seems just a bit too much for a piece of paper packed with political headbanging, which you will glance at idly one afternoon and then use to line the cats litter box, or mop up a spilt cup of tea. Who are these people, why do they spend their Saturdays doing this? Well, opening the dusty closet door of my murky past I can now reveal some insights, for, yes, shame of shame, I WAS ONE OF THEM!!
The Revolutionairy Communist Party of which he talks no longer exists; they're now the people behind Spiked Online, just as weird, but "left-libertarian".
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