God Save the Queen

Class

Should have done this sooner, but I've only just read the speech President Bush gave in Brussels. Genuine, generous, smart - he didn't write it but he wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it. Sometimes in recent years I've felt as though I was simply using a different set of eyes to those people who hate the guy. I think - in fifty years or so - they will be regarded as small. Bush has his flaws, but they are outweighed by his virtues.

It will be interesting, if I'm right, to watch the scholarly/ intellectual consensus shift, gradually, over the years and decades.

(Via Squander Two. Apologies for stealing the post title.)

Fun-loving Livingstone

To think I once considered voting for the man. The Bunny says it well, and Harry has been keeping on the case.

There was a time when I thought age and authority had matured him a bit, but he's just as daft as he was back in the bad old days, in the '80s. Ah, nostalgia for my days as a Tory teenager (I went a long way left before the elastic pulled me back):

"Ken Livingstone, Labour candidate for Brent East and former leader of the GLC:

'I'm not in favour of the army, I'm in favour of replacing it with armed workers' brigades to defend the factories.'"

Anyone feel like joining up?

Update: ATW has some further pertinent comments.

Foundling

I came across the following as a handwritten note in a book I once bought in Birmingham: it struck me quite strongly at the time and then I put it back between the pages and forgot about it. The other day I happened across it again when I picked the book off my shelf. It is a bit disjointed and might be someone's lecture notes, notes from a book, or it could be something someone was inspired to write down. In any case it seemed interestingly suggestive and worth making available to a wider audience, especially the last four lines.

"Describing prayer as swimming implies immediately the indispensable reality of the field of God’s love… A fish in water evidences a certain passivity in its natural habitat, a seemingly utter dependence and relaxation in the medium… To talk of prayer removes any quid pro quo connotations… Prayer is thus removed from the category of means and reinstated as an end… The Fish does not call for water: it is there already. So the praying person does not call forth God. God is already here. Prayer calls forth the person, in even deeper layers of the personality, to break loose, to see and behold."

If these are notes from a book, which one? Undoubtedly whoever wrote them was onto something.

Open goal

I like Harry's Place. Recently they've been running a series of posts about how to pursue socialism in an age of waiting. Believe it or not, I rather like the cut of their jib. Ideology is less important than competence and honesty, within certain limits, and we're all familiar with what those limits are by now. So how do sincere socialists act in a period when democratic socialism is weaker than at any time in the last century?

Laban's post might indicate a possible direction. He remarks that the old-style socialists regarded the family as an ideal type of the socialist commonwealth. But since the 1960s the Left has contained a large element deeply hostile to the idea of the family as bedrock of society. In part that was justified. But they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Tie that in with the following fact: the biggest contemporary enemy of family life is capitalism. (The welfare system probably runs it a close second. That's another post.) Long hours in particular make workers - both blue and white collar - too knackered to do much than watch television, or (still worse) read blogs, with obvious consequences for children.

So: in the short term, a socialist politics should make the cause of parental leave, for instance, more central than it is. Of course, it's already there: see here, for instance. But the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, or something like that, and getting a better work-life balance is not just right: it is also likely to be popular, including among the middle-class voters whom the Left need to seduce.

(That, though, would for some leftists be a problem - if one believes in fundamental and ubiquitous class conflicts, the only way for the workers to win is to make the middle classes lose. If you believe that, the age of waiting is going to be very long indeed.)

A related issue would be public holidays. There is a nice article here about the issue, which takes a slightly different tack from what I said here, but the point is the same, even if Michael Jacobs wants touchy-feely type holidays and I want patriotic ones. We'd split the difference, I'm sure.

None of this is very exciting world changing stuff. I can hear the undergraduates already: "Is that what socialism comes down to? Three months' extra parental leave and four extra bank holidays? I wanted something more exciting." The riposte is that it's a start, not a finish. The sharper riposte is that anyone who goes into politics looking for excitement is making a category error - like someone who goes into bond trading looking for holy simplicity, or into gardening looking for indoor work with no heavy lifting.

Childish things

Chrenkoff notes in this post how Putin might be a moderniser without being a liberaliser. He's probably right, and right to put him in with Peter the Great et al. But this isn't only a Russian phenomenon: a lot of people outside the West have historically looked at our technology - steamships and railways once upon a time, nuclear weapons and jet fighters nowadays - and thought they were the source of our strength. Nasser did it, Saddam and Kaiser Bill and the Japanese militarists of the 1930s did it, and more others than I can count. But our strength is in our free institutions, not in our toys, and there's a word for the kind of small persons who allow themselves to be impressed with toys.

The time came when Germany and Japan had to put aside childish things, and so will the rest. Chrenkoff is very quotable: "In doing so, they confuse the causes and consequences of the West's success and are thus bound to be disappointed, but not without a lot of heartache and disruption."
Childish beliefs, in a world with nuclear weapons, can't be allowed to survive.

Arash and Mojtaba

This looks interesting. It does feel strange for bloggers to be referred to as a community: I've never met any that I know of. Bloggers are no more a 'community' than the so-called intelligence community that was so often invoked during the Hutton affair, or the gay community (at any rate the gay men I know are quite clear that there is no such thing, or if there is it's more a cult than a community), etc. A single shared interest or activity does not a community make. Basically, it's BBC speak: never use one word where three will do.

Never mind, this is worth doing. Have you sent your email yet? 

(Via Mick Hartley.)

When Dubya met Jacques

It seems they're dining together this evening. As Jacques prepares to stick his nose into the Chinese weapons-sales trough, W. had better hold his. I'll bet - being a man who knows his Bible - he'll have thought of a certain proverb. He could never say so.

Zonked

I'm back.

But not very lucid.

For now:

-Tim Worstall's new idea is overdue, and I'm not saying that just because he mentions me on the first post on the matter. Mainly, but not only.

-Ostia Antica: still my favourite ruins.

-The Pantheon: still my favourite non-ruin.

-And the oranges in Italy are a different species from the ones in Sainsbury's. Either that or they don't travel well. Something like that.

The lair of the Scarlet Woman

Most unusually for me, I yesterday submitted to the lure of the Babylonish superstition: that is, I went to a Catholic Mass. Scarlet Women were conspicuous by their absence. It was about the third time in my life: when in Rome...

One very civilised custom here is that on occasional Sundays traffic is banned from the centro storico. The stroll along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, under these circumstances, is an unparalleled experience.

Comparisons are odious, but it was hard not to contrast the glorious suffusion of coloured marble in the churches of Santa Agnese and San Ignazio - both of which I visited for the first time yesterday evening - with the dullness of virtually any London church. I suppose it's not London's fault that there aren't any sources of brightly coloured marble within easy reach.

But the most extraordinary discovery of the day was finding actual Roman shops where the assistants don't regard customers as the enemy. This I take to be a beneficial side-effect of globalisation, though perhaps my previous Roman shopping experiences were just unlucky.

Withering away with theocracy

Nelson Ascher has posited that the Left's flirtation with Islamist theocracy (which has by now reached the horizontal stages) is motivated by a desire for revenge. (He's a busy man so can't necessarily be expected to know that not all the Left have deserted the Enlightenment.)

Not so: there's a perfectly good Marxist reason for it all. When the global jihad is victorious, all non-Muslims will have to pay the poll tax or jizya. Therefore - since in reductionist Marxism everything is reducible to economic advantage - everyone will convert to escape the tax. No more taxes - the State will wither away, thus achieving the ultimate Marxist goal of stateless utopia.

Well, it's no more bizarre than believing that Saddam was a secularist.

(Hat tip: Belmont Club.)