Glaikit
Feartie
a blog about philosophy, politics, music ... and stuff
Thursday, April 1, 2004Enlightenment Bad-asses ( part 1)
I'm on a big historical philosophy binge at the moment (sparked partly by the need to correct some huge gaps in my knowledge re: Kant for my thesis).
Partly in this connection, but mostly for my own amusement, I've been reading Jonathan I. Israel's monumental Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 which is both incredibly entertaining and dripping with erudition.
One of the things that's most striking is how the Enlightenment period (and particularly the earlier Enlightenment) was such a seething hot-bed of political intrigue, republican radicalism, religious schism, sexual libertinism and theological and philosophical upheaval --- it's something I was aware of in the abstract but Isreal's book really gives a sense of how things must have been. The key figures of the period are just incredible characters. Through the book one comes across dozens of people about whom you want to read more, who would make amazing subjects even for a work of fiction or a movie. These guys were just total bad-asses --- rip-roaring, dangerous men (and in some cases women) at total odds with dry, ivory-tower academic philosophy.
Here, for example, is what Isreal has to say about the Prince of Savoy and his aide-de-camp Baron von Hohendorf:
"A leading personality of the age, as well as a famous military commander, diplomat and courtier, Eugene of Savoy had entered the Emperor's service at the time of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683...Publicly renowned as a collector of art and a sponsor of Jansenism, privately he was a noted connoisseur of courtesans and the erotic, and a frenetic bibliophile with a special liking for suspect philosophical and erotic literature. His closest associate in philosophical, as well as military and convivial matters, was Hohendorf...who certainly procured for him many of his choicest rare books and manuscripts.
...
Baron Georg Wilhelm von Hohendorf (d. 1719), a Prussian Junker by origin who had, however, served many years in the Ottoman army as a mercenary, learnt excellent Greek in Constantinople, and was an expert on the religion, customs and erotic life of the Levant." p. 65
|
The multilingual, book-smuggling mercenary and expert on the erotic and the famed military commander and connoisseur of the banned and the suspect... boring or staid, these guys were not.
Isreal's book makes a tremendous companion piece to Neal Stephenson's excellent Quicksilver --- even if sometimes the reality in Isreal's book actually outstrips the fiction in Stephenson's.
posted @ 12:38 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Tuesday, March 30, 2004Jet - Get Born
Australian rock band Jet were live on Channel 4 last week and were impressive enough that I picked up the album "Get Born".
The result is pretty disappointing. Their live performance promised bundles of stripped down, drainpipe-trouser tight, AC/DC-style rock. Fantastic power chord riffing, no nonsense, not much in the way of guitar solos.
The album delivers that in a couple of places -- Cold Hearted Bitch, in particular, channels the spirit of Malcolm Young circa 1979 with perfectly timed rhythm playing, straight and clipped, and simple, tied to unreconstructed rock lyrics that might as well have come out of 1973.
However, for the most it's smeared-out sub-Oasis loud fuzzy pop-rock -- which has the volume but not the tightness and crispness of great rock music -- and a bunch of not very interesting power-ballads [a song-writing genre that ought to have been drowned at birth] -- all of which sound derivative of someone else. Cold Hearted Bitch is derivative but its derived from some of the most perfectly conceived and executed 3 minute rock songs ever created -- AC/DC of the late '70s -- music so simple and tight it goes right through "straight" and comes out the other side as funky.
All very disappointing as their live performance was great -- rendering a lot of the more derivative, fuzzy tunes on the album as precisely the kind of razor sharp, stripped to the bone rock that's only delivered in a couple of places on the record.
posted @ 10:13 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [2 Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Saturday, March 27, 2004Rights
Today's Guardian Review section has a profile of Helena Kennedy QC. The profile itself is fairly routine, however, one comment, by Labour MP Clive Soley caught my attention, he says, in the course of arguing that Kennedy's relatively hard-line support for the upholding of human rights and civil liberties legislation--even in the face of an increased terrorist threat--is counter-productive, that:
| She comes at the issue from a liberal-left point of view; which is something I support. But I think she underestimates how much the public is fearful and wants to know the government is protecting them. This is probably because she is not an elected politician and doesn't hear that side so much. |
This is one of the most jaw-droppingly weak justifications for the violation of suspects' civil liberties that I've heard.
Everyone accepts that, when civil rights debates take place with reference to the restriction or removal of suspected terrorists' civil rights, we are dealing with a case where two different sets of rights are in conflict. On the one hand, there are the rights of the suspect to due judicial process, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, freedom from detention without trial, independent legal representation, a fair hearing before a jury, and soon; and on the other, there are the rights of ordinary citizens to go about their business free from the immediate threat of death or injury through the actions of terrorist criminals. The circumstances existing in, say, 1943 and the circumstances existing in 2004 may well be different and the legislative balance may need to be struck differently.
In any such case the arguments can be difficult and it's not always clear on which side---public safety or civil liberties---the balance ought best to be struck. Principled and sincere arguments can be given by people of integrity in support of both sides of the debate. My own personal position tends towards the view that the removal or restriction of civil rights is a step that ought never to be taken, except in cases of immediate and present national danger on the sort of scale that was present during WWII--neither the current threat from Al-Qaeda nor the past threat from the IRA and Loyalist terrorists placed us in that position. Nevertheless, I can understand that others views may differ.
However, Soley seems to be suggesting that the reason (or a reason) that draconian anti-terror laws have been passed in the UK over the past 3 years is that the government needs to be seen to be doing something. The rights of individuals to fair treatment under the law is trumped not by the pressing and immediate need to protect public safety, but rather by the need to give the appearance of protecting public safety.
... and it seems to me that that just isn't a good reason for the removal or restriction of centuries old traditions of justice in this country.
posted @ 06:49 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack]
Agendas
This at made me laugh.
Link via Crooked Timber.
Further down the page is a link to a reminder of how truly great the Onion can really be.
posted @ 01:08 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Saturday, March 20, 2004Dr Who
I'm just about the perfect age to remember Dr. Who when it was still at its peak. I was born in the early 70s and watched through the Tom Baker era. Everybody says that their Doctor - the one who was Doctor Who when they were 8, 9, or 10 - was the best Doctor but I'm just right on this one. Baker was the best actor to play the role. After Baker left the series went into fairly rapid and woeful decline.
So the news that the great Christopher Ecclestone is to play the new Doctor Who in the revived series is wonderful.... The fact that the show is being put together by Russell T. Davies who has a great track record with 'Queer as folk' and 'The Second Coming' among other things is even more promising.
posted @ 01:45 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Saturday, March 13, 2004Lack of posts
There haven't been many posts this week and there probably won't be very many this week (or at least nothing of any length).
I'm finishing off a paper for a conference, compiling supporting material for a post-doc application and trying to finish the next chapter of my D.Phil - so time is short.
posted @ 11:32 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Thursday, March 11, 2004Libertarian Purity Test
Following on from the autism test of the other day...
Here's the Libertarian Purity Test.
I scored 24, which makes me not very Libertarian at all.
posted @ 10:24 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [1 Comment] [TrackBack] [more] Monday, March 8, 2004Autism Test
Wired has an on-line version of Simon Baron-Cohen's Autism Quotient test - which allegedly measures the extent of the "autism trait" (i.e. a weak ability to understand/predict the mental states and behaviour of others; to 'read' their mind).
I scored 8 where the lower the score the less 'autistic' on Baron-Cohen's scale one is. The median is approx. 16 and those with autism or Asperger's Syndrome tend to score over 30.
Leaving aside any worries about Baron-Cohen's theories and/or methodology, which are not uncontroversial, this makes me profoundly non-autistic on his scale. Which is nice!
posted @ 03:08 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [5 Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Saturday, March 6, 2004Hmmm...
The post below looks longer than I thought it would... sorry. Must be more concise.
posted @ 05:42 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack]
Domestic "Abuse"
[rambling slightly anecdotal post alert] There have been a few blog-posts floating around recently on the subject of domestic servants, cleaners, nannies and what-not. Timothy Burke, for example, in the context of a discussion of Caitlin Flanagan's recent article How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movementin the Atlantic Monthly, writes that:
| One thing in Flanagan’s piece and the reaction to it where I feel a bit distant from almost everyone in the debate has to do with Flanagan’s charge that middle-class feminists are exploiting and thus betraying other women by using them as domestics and nannies. In a way, it’s a silly point, because it’s awfully hard to contain to domesticity. What’s the difference between a once-a-month cleaning service and all the other kinds of service jobs that the middle-class makes use of? If the charge of exploitation attaches generically to domestic work (not to specific low-wage conditions of employment), then it attaches to all service-industry labor and Flanagan’s critique is suddenly a lot less about child-raising and much more a back-door socialism. |
Belle Waring followed up with this response, written from the point of view of someone who has a cleaner/maid (and with some of the cleaner/maid's own views included) as well as agreeing with the comments of Burke quoted above also writes, among other things, that:
Tena [her maid] and I went on to discuss generally similar jobs she wouldn't take over this one, even at a modest price premium (obviously, if we stipulatively raised the wages to the moon, she'd do any of them.) I thought it was interesting...
1. Working in a hospital as a nurse's aide. She really doesn't want to wash people's sores and change bedpans and wound dressings. (She quit a job here in Singapore where the employer's father was becoming ill, as she could see a lot of this in her future. She lied that she had a family emergency in the Philippines and broke her contract, then came back to work for someone else.)
2. Cleaning up in a hawker centre. Obvious, this one; no one wants to clean public toilets and greasy old food (somone does, though. Old Chinese and Indian aunties, mostly.)
3. Working as a cleaner at the University. Same problem with public toilets, plus "students are messy, and professors are worse." Sorry, John.
4. Working the same hours, but in a store, cleaning up and restocking shelves. Public toilets again, plus you're busy the whole time. Her current job is no picnic, but she gets to have a nap in the afternoon, chat on the phone with friends, go out shopping with her friends and sister (taking my daughter along) and so on. She's not under continuous supervision. |
The comments are interesting but both, I think, are wrong in certain respects. My wife worked an au pair for two years when she first came to the UK and I have worked at several of the cleaning jobs Belle Waring's maid would turn down(!) [more below] so I have some perspective on this issue from the other, employee rather than employer, side of the coin.
One of the main problems for domestic labour, apart from generally low wage levels, is that the domestic employee is in a particularly vulnerable situation and this is a situation exploited by many employers. The once-a-month contract cleaner employed by an agency is one thing, the full-time live-in employee - the au pair, nanny, maid, full-time cleaner, or whatever, is another.
- Their place of work is also their home. Losing your job means losing where you live. This is a particular problem for citizens of another country - overseas domestic workers and au pairs - if you lose your job it can't always be easy to find somewhere to live and in some cases you can be deported. I've seen friends of my wife's who are here as au pairs being unceremoniously dumped out on the streets by their employers with nowhere to go. Sometimes with no notice at all. Not just because of a disagreement about work or a personal fall-out -- sometimes merely for convenience. The family wants to go away on an extended foreign holiday, they don't want to take the au pair with them, they don't want to leave them in the house - bye-bye au pair. The old au pair's visa is close to running out. The new au pair is about to arrive. Simple. Just turf the old one out on to the streets to make way for the new one. I've seen situations like this happen far more often than ought to be comfortable for the domestic employer classes.
- The domestic employee is usually the only employee. This means that they are not in a union, nor do they have any power of collective bargaining (even at an informal level). Again, employers can exploit this. I've regularly seen au pairs being (financially) mis-treated by employers who know that they are in the position of strength. Typically, for example, money is docked from their allowance at any petty excuse. Telephone bills, use of utilities (like heating and electricity!), often food. All of these things can be abused by employers to leave their employees with little money. I should stress that I am not talking about an employee being charged for, say, a high phone bill rung up calling their home country or their friends mobiles. I'm talking about every potential cost that the employee might be costing their employer being meticulously accounted for and charged to them with excess. One friend of my wife's was charged 240! UK pounds for Internet use over a 3 month period, for example. This sort of thing was not an isolated incident. The boundless mean-ness of the rich was a real shock to me - my wife's friends were almost all working for people of at least comfortable means and in many cases millionaires - and even the richest of them engaged this kind of pathetic penny pinching.
- The domestic employee often becomes a friend of the family and can become particularly attached to young children. Belle Waring's maid cites this as a positive benefit. But I have also seen it being ruthlessly exploited where children are more or less raised by the au pair whose love for the child is often abused - they end up working crazily long hours with little or no free time for little or no money because they have come to feel a lot like a mother to the child(ren). This can make it doubly hard when, as mentioned in (1), they are dumped unceremoniously as soon as is convenient. Again this happens much more often than members of the domestic employer class ought to be comfortable with.
I could continue on with dozens of anecdotes. It was, and continues to be, shocking to me, to witness the degree to which wealthy, powerful, middle-class people will go to exploit mostly young, often poor, foreign, women in their own interest. The unique position of the live-in domestic worker leaves them exposed to this sort of mis-treatment.
I, on the other hand, have also worked a cleaner/domestic worker but in my case I worked in a hospital for the mentally handicapped and in a school. In both cases the employment situation was considerably more dirty and less pleasant than the average middle-class home, but there were distinct advantages to working in this kind of evironment was well.
When I left school I took a summer job working in a residential hospital for the mentally handicapped which was a major employer in the Scottish village where I grew up. As a "Domestic" (my job title) I was required to do all of the cleaning, serving food, dish-washing, etc. for large residential wards of mentally handicapped patients/inmates. Something that people may not be aware of, is that such environments can be extremely dangerous as well as hygienically unpleasant. In my case, as the only male Domestic, I was primarily assigned to the 'locked' wards where patients who were a danger to themselves or others were housed. In some cases this was just because they were confused but in other cases it was because they were genuinely dangerous.
One ward I was employed in housed only men - all between the ages of around 20 and 50. This ward was locked and all of the nurses were young men all of whom had strong builds and none of whom wore normal uniforms (usually they hung out in the ward in jeans and heavy boots). Why? Well, imagine a 200lb, 6ft 2", 25 year old who has the impulse control of the average 2 year old but the sexual appetites of an adult - a full-on tantrum by an adult man is a frightening thing to witness. Most of the inmates of this ward, and they were more inmates than patients, had a history of assault and in some cases rape, or worse. The usual ward Domestic was a scary Scottish matriarch of whom all the patients were (rightly) scared. However, in her absence they couldn't employ any women in the ward - it was too unsafe - I was the replacement. Within a week I had to be moved out to another ward.
I only found out later that the reason I had been moved was because one of the inmates, with a history of sexual violence against men and women (and with a penchant for burning himself with cigarettes as a source of amusment), had been heard to show a distinct 'interest' in me and the Charge Nurse had become convinced I would be assaulted sooner, rather than later.
In other wards I was dealing with fairly unpleasant cleaning duties - you can imagine the sort of thing.
Similarly, in the high school where I was a cleaner I had to clean an extremely dirty environment. You really couldn't imagine the sh*t that teachers can deal out to the cleaners - the staff room was quite literally disgusting - I'd regularly find food trodden into the carpet, rotting milk spilled and not cleaned up, chairs and furniture tipped over, and much worse. Seriously, the state in which a group of art teachers left their staff room was considerably worse than the state in which the recreational rooms were left by the mentally handicapped inmates in 90% of the hospital wards I worked in, and the manner in which I was spoken to by teachers was much less respectful than the way in which mostly over-worked, harrassed, under-paid working class female Nurses Aides talked to me in the hospital. I might be a member of the liberal intelligensia working in education myself but there's nothing like working for teachers to shake up your whole world view. Egalitarianism was an idea paid lip-service to, at best.
Both of these working environments were unpleasant. However, in both cases I would argue that I wasn't exploited and that my situation was much better than that of the ordinary household live-in worker.
- Both working environments were highly unionised. Indeed the unions in both places were extremely effective advocates for their employees and both jobs were very well paid (for service work) and pensions and holiday pay were as good (proportional to the hours and salary scale) as any other job I've worked in (including high-status white collar jobs).
- In both cases I was working as part of a large team and the solidarity and informal 'power' this gives is not to be under-rated. I knew that if asked to do something unreasonable - as I sometimes was, particularly by teachers - then I had people who could back me up and who I could rely on to back me up, long before anything had to be raised in a formal manner with the union.
- In both cases my duties and my hours were clearly spelled out and I knew precisely what was expected of me.
- In direct contrast to the residential domestic worker and in contrast with a great many high-status white-collar jobs I've had, my 'soul' was my own. I wasn't required to kow-tow to anyone, to demonstrate 'customer service skills' (which is often little more than a nice euphemism for obsequious pandering to egos of people who feel they are your 'betters') and my thoughts were my own. Indeed, it was this fourth that led me to choose to take this kind of work when I was an undergraduate rather than take a job in a shop or in a bar as most of my friends did. I earned more or less the same money as them but in my job I had several hours a day alone with my thoughts and with no need to interact with people except on my own terms.
Belle Waring's view on the domestic worker situation is that of a person with a nice working relationship with their employee and who treats them with respect. Unfortunately, it's often not like that and the domestic worker often has little or no avenue of redress. It's a mistake to generalise from a near-ideal case of domestic servitude to domestic servitude in general.
Contra Timothy Burke being a domestic worker is emphatically not like other service jobs. In other service jobs your employer is usually not your landlord and usually you either work in an unionised environment (at best) or, in non-unionised enivornments, at least have some kind of collective informal bargaining power (at worst).
There are issues that apply across the board - most workers in service industries are under-paid and exploited - but the situations are not the same.
posted @ 05:27 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Thursday, March 4, 2004Anti-virus virus
This is fascinating. New Scientist is reporting that infection with a virus GBV-C (which has no known ill-effects) can protect against the on-set of AIDS in HIV-positive individuals.
| Survival for men who were continuously infected by GBV-C was 75 per cent compared with only 39 per cent for men with no evidence of infection...Those results suggest GBV-C infection is as powerful a protective agent against HIV as some genetic factors that have been linked to slow progression of AIDS. Exactly how GBV-C can accomplish this is not clear. |
The possibilities are really interesting.
posted @ 02:28 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Wednesday, March 3, 2004Imaginary Bands (1)
I noticed today on Brian Weatherson's Online Papers in Philosophy that there is something called the Arizona Minimalist Syntax Archive.
I don't really know what they do (or how it contrasts with say, Texas Maximalist Syntax), but, the Arizona Minimalist Syntax Archive would make a cool name for a band, along the lines of The Preston School of Industry or the Mull Historical Society.
posted @ 04:03 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Monday, March 1, 2004Danger Mouse
Today I've been listening to DJ Danger Mouse's "Grey Album" the now semi-notorious and much hyped mix of Jay-Z's "Black Album" & The Beatles' "White Album".
EMI court action against Dj Danger Mouse has made the album something of a cause célèbre and huge numbers of copies of the album have been downloaded.
However, on listening, it just doesn't live up to the hype. Danger Mouse has produced an incredible masterpiece of sample based music - every beat and loop is sourced from the White Album with the breakbeats built up from individual Ringo Starr drum hits beat by beat and melodies from several songs at once repeating and overlapping. It also has a novel analogue warmth and fuzziness. The music is smeared out and blurry in stark contrast to the usual shiny, precise, glistening, almost radical Modernism of say, a Timbaland production.
The problem is not with Danger Mouse, it's with Jay-Z. I just don't rate him as a rapper. A lot of people do but I find him pedestrian, he doesn't have the quick-fire lyrical flow of Dr Octagon (the transcendent idiot savant lyrical genius of hip-hop) or Eminem, or their surreal/scatalogical humour, nor does he have the vocal presence of any number of other rappers. I have to admit I'm mystified by his fame and reputation. But then I'm not a hard-core hip-hop connoisseur so maybe I'm missing something.
It would have spoiled the clever concept - and Danger Mouse's work is as much as piece of conceptual art as it is a hip-hop album - if he'd blended the White Album with anything other than Jay-Z's Black album. But it would have made a better record.
posted @ 06:40 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Sunday, February 29, 2004The Passion (part 1)
I fully intend to comment on Mel Gibson's new film, The Passion, at some point this week. Despite not actually having seen it, nor actually being able to see it for at least a month.
However, in lieu of comments (which, sarcasm aside, really will appear in the next few days), here's another wonderful poem by Josef Hanzlik precisely on the Passion (and on the role of Judas Iscariot as Zealot, liberation theologist, cynic, revolutionary, proto-Marxist, advocate of realpolitik, self-deceiver/self-justifier, etc. )...
It's darkly funny, and vaguely blasphemous so, if any of that is a problem, sorry in advance. It's also quite marvellous. The ending is bathetic but moving.
Also, as I said, I don't normally get poetry so I won't be posting any again in a long while.
Judas
(To Christ's disciples)
It's over then You cowardly dogs
you proud, cultured and exalted men with your gentle eyes
and measured gestures and fulsome sentiment
now you spit at me and as from a pulpit
shout Traitor Dirty filthy traitor
For thirty pieces of silver for one night with a whore
he robbed the world of its Light robbed us of the Teacher
You rats Where did you scuttle
as they led Him to Golgotha Where did you shake
with liquid-bellied fear Where in your confusion did you
throw your badges and how many of you like Peter
denied Him thrice You sanctimonious weaklings
did I not offer you
a sword Did you not flee from a mere dozen men
Did even one of you His darlings and His brothers
attempt to shield Him with your own body< /br>
Or afterwards when He was tortured in his cell
did you go out among the people calling for help
Were not the people able to decide Surely the people
could have said No to Pilate Let Him be our King
You pharisees You wanted Him
killed For on the corpse the still warm corpse
you built a temple where you would be kings...
I'm off
to find a stout branch
and one that's seen so that Jerusalem
shall have its three-day giggle I who alone
was worthy of a place beside Him or after Him
I who had a sense
of tactics and strategy I who did not shrink from
stealing lying even garroting
for a Sacred Cause I who understood
that I was to use the funds
even for tricks and corruption I who longed
to multiply our property and secretly buy weapons I
who realised that the Master's whole repertoire
of childish miracles and deeds of human kindness
was useless stuff today That today the Teaching
must be propagated by the swifter language of arrow and battle-axe
And I
had a plan I wanted
the Master to be taken and held in the worst of
dungeons That's why I thought up
the crown of thorns so that the mob should see
the red drops That's why I advocated
heavier beams for the cross That's why I egged on
that crowd of layabouts to line
the road to Calvary And lastly that's why
I got on to the high priest...
How cruelly
he was to have been outwitted For I
relied on you you gentle vipers
to use the power of the Word to unleash in the crowd
a protest a longing for revenge a longing for murder
I hoped that apathetic mob would sharpen their knives
pick up the stones that there'd be a slaughter
which would burn Jerusalem to the ground and like a blind dog
race across the frontiers
the enemy would be routed and - why not admit it - a good few
of our friends would inevitably die
But what of it I would unite the survivors
in a great everlasting happy realm of the Faith
O the Master knew well the strength inside me And he realised
that I am more consistent that I am more apt
to propagate the Light for He
had but a name Otherwise a simpleton
and also alas a coward That's why He feared me
and would rather go
meekly like a lamb to the slaughter
Not only you but He too
lost me my fight and betrayed...
But the traitor for eternity
for the record of history which as always
has the last laugh that's to be my role
I blood-brother to Cain who was wiser
and braver than the rest for he was not afraid of murder
who was by your forefathers as I am today by you
branded with the mark I'm off now
I don't want to live like an outcast
despised I'm off
That hill up there
looks suitable
All I need is a branch
I have a rope
Josef Hanzlik, 1967
posted @ 06:00 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more]
Friday, February 27, 2004Poetry
I don't normally read poetry. On the whole, I just don't get it. Today, however, I bought the Czech poet Josef Hanzlik's "Selected Poems" for my wife and I've been really enjoying it. So here's a taster:
Moment
It's twelve o'clock Central European Time
and the girl feeding the pigeons
seems to have stepped out from a precious painting
from an ancient dream
for the sun is shining from up high
and the air's vibrating warmly
and the high-rise blocks around the girl and the pigeons
seem brittle and translucent
like special-occasion porcelain cups
and the eleven-year old girl in a check skirt
with eyes shining from up high and warmly and preciously
is casting crumbs of bread to the pigeons
like the Host
and the beautiful pigeons
with attentive trustful eyes
flutter and strut around the girl
like gentle friends
like flowers and the air
and the sun
and the girl brushes the last crumbs from her palms
smiles into the pigeon's eyes
who wait a moment longer
and then
one by one reluctantly fly off
as though luring the girl
to follow them
into the warmly vibrating air
to the sun shining from up high
and the girl
gently opens her arms
embraces the porcelain buildings with shining eyes
and
flies up
posted @ 05:35 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Tuesday, February 24, 2004Aaronovitch (Wrong or right?)
Last week David Aaronovitch wrote in the Guardian questioning whether he was correct to support the war in Iraq given what we now apparently know about the lack of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and the prominence of WMD in the justifications given for war in the lead up to the conflict. He writes that:
| Last week my colleague, Jonathan Freedland, dealt with what he called the "comedy" of George Bush's search for why the quest for WMD has turned up nothing. "And to think," he wrote "[Bush] could have known all the facts without firing a single shot - if only he had let Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors finish their work." But I now realise that there would not have been such a moment. Blix would never have been sure, and the US and UK intelligence services, as Hutton showed, would always have believed - and told their political masters - that something remained. Saddam's history, and the world after September 11, together meant that such a comforting certainty couldn't be ours. |
While this may be true, it seems absurd to believe that a war can be justified on the grounds that "comforting certainties" were impossible to achieve. Perhaps this was the first war fought on entirely epistemic grounds. Not just any old epistemic grounds, either. No, this war was fought because we weren't provided with proof of a high enough standard that a negative existential claim holds true.
Negative existential claims are notoriously difficult to prove - indeed, one often finds people claiming that negative existential claims are impossible to prove as a matter of logical necessity.
Whether one accepts this or not, it is certainly true that one would expect that, in order to justify war on such a claim, the burden of proof by extremely high. It's certainly possible to falsify negative existential claims. If I say "there are no X's" all you need to do to falsify that statement is present an instance of an "X".
Similarly, in the Iraq case the burden of proof ought not to have been that Iraq prove it didn't have weapons [even if this is a) logically possible and b) we accept that the US and the UK were prepared to accept any such proof even if it were offered (which is far from certain)]. Rather the burden of proof ought to have been to provide evidence that Iraq did have such weapons.
And it is this which has turned out to be questionable. We were told repeatedly before the war that such evidence was in the possession of our political leaders but we weren't being shown the evidence for reasons of national security. It has now become clear that no such evidence existed.
The Hutton evidence, even if it suggests that Blair did believe he had weapons, is irrelevant. His belief is immaterial. It may show that Blair was not a knowing deceiver. It doesn't provide any justification for war.
No amount of hand waving and "Saddam was a bad man" pleading will get Aaronovitch out of his bind.
Aaronovitch seems to accept that this line of criticism might be made:
| Perhaps I might allay disappointment by blaming Blair et al for being too credulous, or too willing to adopt the precautionary principle, in order perhaps to maintain solidarity with the Americans. But I invite open-minded readers to consider this. Had there been a dossier released detailing WMD proliferation in, say, Libya, and blaming rogue Islamicist scientists from, say, Pakistan, I would have been just as (or more) sceptical than I was over Iraq. Yet last week Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has admitted trading nuclear information and equipment with countries including Libya, was "the tip of an iceberg for us". |
However, appealing to the fact that we didn't know something about Libya doesn't get him anywhere either. OK, we didn't know that Libya did have a programme to develop nuclear technology. Appealing to our lack of information and the possibility that there might be, in Donald Rumsfield's immortal words, "unknown unknowns" merely points again to our lack of epistemic certainty in these situations.
Pointing to another parallel instance of epistemic uncertainty doesn't provide any justification when the whole point is that it was the whole lack of epistemic certainty that was the problem in the first place.
posted @ 01:29 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Sunday, February 22, 2004No updates
Sorry no updates for a week. I have been busy writing a new chapter for my thesis. It's been submitted to my supervisor so more entries to follow tomorrow.
posted @ 06:32 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Saturday, February 14, 2004Voting
Over at Crooked Timber Brian Weatherson has a post about computerised voting in which he remarks:
Which reminds me that I once thought about writing a paper on a similar issue...
Some political parties in the UK have either suggested or adopted all-female short-lists for elections in some constituencies or adopted some other measure, e.g. "zipping" where male and female candidates are alternated on party lists for Additional Members in the Scottish Parliament, in order to increase the number of female representatives to nearer 50%.
However, little explicit justification seems to be given for why this is a good thing. Presumably the reasoning involves something like an appeal to the claim that women's interests are insufficiently represented at the moment, and further, that this inadequacy of representation is due to the fact that there are, currently, many more men in parliament than women. Further, this inadequacy of representation only follows if it is the case that male representatives are less able to represent the interests of women qua women than female representatives.
Now it's possible that all of these things are true - it's at least superficially plausible - however it seems to embody a more questionable claim. Namely, that in order to be a good representative for individuals from some section of society or other it's necessary that the representative be a member of that section of society. In other words, that our representatives be just like us, rather than be someone who shares or is able to present our views.
And this - the politics of identity - seems to be contrary to the whole spirit of representative democracy. If we want our politicians to be like us, then why have a democracy at all? Why not select politicians at random from the population as a whole?
After all, if it is true that we ought to take special measures to ensure that the make-up of our parliament reflect the gender balance in our society, why not the racial balance? Age-distribution? Class? Wealth? Occupation? And which group membership is the right one? I'm white, male, Scottish and working class. I'm also in my early 30s and have an Oxford education. Which one is the relevant one when assessing how well parliament serves my interest? [In my case, I'm probably quite well represented since Parliament contains quite a few Scots, quite a few people with Oxford educations and men - I'm rather less well represented qua working-class - although the Speaker of the House of Commons is holding his end up with the 'Weegie' accent - and age.]
Our political system, for example, has a notoriously low number of ethnic minority representatives, but it also has a very low number of young people, the poor, the incredibly inarticulate, etc. Middle-class public-school educated lawyers on the other hand are massively over-represented.
If we want our political representatives to be like us, then the fairest way of doing that is just to select them at random - just like jury duty.
posted @ 09:16 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more]
Tuesday, February 10, 2004Books Every Educated Person Should Read
Harry at Crooked Timber has a post on books (published since 1970) that every educated person should read.
This got me thinking and then realising how hard it was to think of just two! If we were asked to list 20, or 30, it'd be much easier. A lot of the usual suspects are up, and a few unexpected ones.
In the area of philosophy, I found it really hard to come up with books written since 1970 that really stood out as being head-and-shoulders above the crowd - there's so much good stuff out there but it doesn't seem to me that there are just a handful of truly great works that stick out. Plus, I have to confess that some of the books that crop up regularly on a lot of people's lists e.g. Anarchy, State and Utopia (Nozick) or Theory of Justice (Rawls) - I haven't read (properly, I mean, I've skimmed through both). As a result, the list is pretty ego-driven: it's stuff that affected me in some way at the time that I read it.
Philosophy:
A.C. Grayling - Berkeley: The Central Arguments (hands-down the best book on Berkeley; masterful exegesis; makes Berkeleyian idealism not just coherent but almost plausible...)
Alan Sidelle - Necessity, essence, and individuation : a defense of conventionalism (basically because he articulated all the intuitions that I had about the deep-seated sleekit shiftiness of the necessary a posteriori and semantic claims grounding essentialism, etc. and reconciled various nominalist intutions I had with the whole Twin-Earth publications industry... cracking stuff)
David Lewis - Collected Papers (do collections count?)
Novels:
Thomas Pynchon - Vineland (I know everyone nominates "Gravitys Rainbow", and it's great, but Vineland I read first, and it hit me the most as a child of hippy parents myself.)
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum (King of the high-brow conspiracy thriller. Again, a lot of people nominated the Name of the Rose, but Foucault's Pendulum was the one that had me up all night trying to finish it)
Don De Lillo - White Noise (even though I've hated nearly everything else of his I've tried to read....)
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (muj manzelka je česka a jsem hrozny romantik, ale mluvim spatne česky)
Katherine Dunn - Geek Love (just totally blew me away. Nothing else is like it. I quote "Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater and paterfamilias set out -- with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes -- to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There's Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . " - narrated by Olly, their bald-albino hunchback dwarf sister. I cannot emphasize enough how wonderful this book is.)
Irvine Welsh - Trainspotting (not necessarily a great book, and he's arguably written better, but it was incredibly liberating to read a book that captures something of the way working-class Scots actually speak. Slightly diminished by middle-class Media Studies students poncing around the West End of Glasgow calling everyone a 'radge c*nt' for weeks after the film came out.)
I'm sure I'll think of a dozen other things once I post this and then curse myself. Of course most of my actual favourite books are ineligible since they were written before 1970. And I have a sneaky suspicion I'm cheating by choosing just great books, rather than essential ones that everyone ought to read (for some reason other than sheer enjoyment).
posted @ 02:48 AM GMT by Matthew [link] [3 Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Saturday, February 7, 2004Get Your War On
There's a new episode of Get Your War On.
If this is new to you, start at Part 1 and read it all.
{Warning: contains 'bad' language.}
posted @ 02:51 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack]
Fantasy mix tape (part 1 of ... lots)
It occurred to me today that I don't listen to anything like enough music at the moment. I spend most of my days (and a large part of my evenings too) on thesis-related programme activities and I just can't listen to any music that I actually like when I'm working. I just end up listening to the music, or drifting off into a reverie.
This means I often end up listening to music I don't particularly like, or the radio (whch usually amounts to the same thing) just to provide some background noise. As an undergraduate I listened to a lot of "coffee-table drum 'n' bass" - LTJ Bukem, stuff with chattering breakbeats, washes of bland ambient noise, etc. - when studying just because it was so unobtrusive. However, if I could listen to quiet music when working, then:
Superior Muzak Mix
Gil Evans "Where Flamingo's Fly" - Out of the Cool
Enno Voorhorst "Adagio from Harpsichord concerto, BWV 974 (after the Oboe concerto by Alessandro Marcello)" - Bach: Guitar Transcriptions
Miles Davis "Shhh/Peaceful" - In A Silent Way
Grand Drive "Guy Who Could Carry On" - True Love and High Adventures
The Flaming Lips - "The Spark the Bled" - The Soft Bulletin
Lambchop - "Nashville Parent" - Nixon
The Beach Boys - "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" - Pet Sounds
Goldfrapp - "Pilots" - Felt Mountain
posted @ 02:38 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more] Sunday, February 1, 2004First post...
So, the first question is... does the colour scheme hurt your eyes?
About this blog/me: I'm a final year D.Phil student in philosophy. This blog is supposed to be an outlet where I can post short things about philosophy (although probably not much on my thesis as I am going insane thinking/writing about nothing except one topic for 3 years), stuff on music, political rants, and more or less anything else that catches my attention.
There's not likely to be any lengthy involved discussions of philosophical problems as my brain is 90% monopolized by my thesis, especially as I am nearing the end, but you never know...
posted @ 09:21 PM GMT by Matthew [link] [No Comments] [TrackBack] [more]
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