Old Russia

Some color photos of old Russia, taken (believe it or not) between 1909 and 1912.

Dumb or Dumber

Mocking Postmodernists

Here is Ophelia Benson mocking the strange views of postmodernists and their fellow-travellers.

The Looney Left

What do we know about the British politician George Galloway?

In this picture, George is the fellow with the dark glasses...

Max Dunbar says:

Galloway has said that "the disappearance of the Soviet Union was the biggest catastrophe of my life". To Saddam Hussein, he said, "I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem!" We know that Galloway signed a petition demanding the release of Saddam's number-two Tariq Aziz, with whom Galloway once danced in a North African nightclub. The Iraqi "resistance" (jihadis who kill civilians, socialists and aid workers) is "defending all the Arabs, and they are defending all the people of the world from American hegemony". When trade unionists broke down in tears at their recollections of torture under Iraqi Ba'athists, Galloway sneered that their visible emotion was "a party trick".

Galloway said of the Syrian dictator that "Syria is lucky to have Bashar al-Assad as her President".

Galloway fascinates as a symbol, a freakshow, a grotesque parody of leftwing politics. And one of the qualities I admire about Galloway is his resilience, and his ability to make a comeback; he walks away from the smoking ruins, whistling, cigar in hand, already thinking of the next opportunity, and planning his next big score.

Christopher Hitchens says:

"Galloway looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class wideboy and proud of it who is too used to the expenses account, the cars and the hotels - all cigars and back-slapping. He is a very cheap character and a short-arse like a lot of them are, puffed up like a turkey. He has managed to fuse being a Baathist with being a Muslim sectarian and a carpet bagger in the East End. He's got the venomous riff-raff at one end and your one-God fanatics on the other. Wonderful. Just what we need..."

Tony Judt

Tony Judt, the author of Postwar, a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemical essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died on Friday 6 August at his home in Manhattan.

The death was announced in a statement from New York University, where he had taught for many years. The cause was complications of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), which he learned he had in September 2008. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and able to breathe only with mechanical assistance, but he continued to lecture and write.

Judt said a few months ago: "Today I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I'm regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable."

Last October, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr Judt spoke about social democracy before an audience of 700 at NYU. During the lecture, his last public appearance, he told the audience that some of his American friends felt that seeing him talk about ALS would be uplifting. But he added, "I'm English, and we don't do 'uplifting'..."

History remained uppermost in his mind. In his book Ill Fares the Land, he turned his attention to a problem he regarded as acute: the loss of faith in social democracy, and the power of the state to do good, that had brought prosperity to so many European countries after World War II.

Wordsworth

From Wordsworth's poem Tintern Abbey

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

From Wordsworth's poem Ode on Immortality

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream...

But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth...

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day...

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Recruitment

Have a look at one of the ways in which the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party) attracted and recruited ordinary Germans in the early 1930s. Here follows the song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me":

Worth Watching

Paul Potts was a worker in a cellphone warehouse in England. He decided to enter a talent contest:

Integral World

You want theories of everything? Go for it...

Redefining Religion

Ophelia Benson: "It's interesting how willing people often are to redefine religion in order to defend it, and how thoroughly they're willing to redefine it for that purpose. In fact they do such a thorough job of it that one would have thought there was nothing left that needed defending. Who would bother to argue against feelings of awe or wonder, or an appreciation of stories and myths and poetry? I certainly wouldn't, in fact I think those are fine things. But they're not what I take religion to be, and I don't think they're what people generally mean when they talk about religion, either."

Dawkins is on the same page as Ophelia: "If God is a synonym for the deepest principles of physics, what word is left for a hypothetical being who answers prayers, intervenes to save cancer patients or helps evolution over difficult jumps, forgives sins or dies for them?... You have redefined science as religion, so it's hardly surprising if they turn out to 'converge'."

More Postmodern Mush

Judith Butler (a professor of literature at UCLA) is a postmodern "theorist" who writes so badly and pompously that she was actually awarded a PRIZE for bad writing by people who cannot read her without laughing in derision:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power".

Silly cow.

Postmodern Mush

Someone Ophelia Benson knows said: "In the first year of graduate school in archaeology we spent so much time learning about post-modernist theory and how archaeology could not really tell you about the past (it could only reveal your current political views on power relationships) that by the end of the year my professors convinced me that there was no reason to continue my studies in that field. I dropped out and went to law school."

I am speechless.

James on Fonda

The immortal Clive James on Jane Fonda: "I find Fonda very useful; any opinion of mine which I discover Fonda shares I immediately examine to find out what's wrong with it"...

Another of James' comments which I like is: "The British Secret Service consisted, at one point, almost entirely of alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB".

Cartoon Time

The Light of Reason

"It is unfortunate but true that rational thought -- what Hume called the 'calm sunshine of the mind' -- is historically rare, local, and ephemeral... Given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win." (the Australian philosopher David Stove, who died in 1994)

Stove ridiculed the work of some of his postmodernist and feminist colleagues, and described the arts faculty at the venerable old University of Sydney as "a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle"...

Tennyson

From Tennyson's poem Ulysses:

Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world...
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Glorious Albion

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea.

Shakespeare, writing about the glory that was England in a bygone age.

Stupid Thoughts

Sandra Harding (a Professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies) is off her rocker:

"Contemporary physicists, ethologists, and geologists collect evidence for or against hypotheses in ways different from those that medieval priests used to collect evidence for or against theological claims, yet it is difficult to identify or state in any formal way just what it is that is unique about the scientific methods".

This is the same Sandra Harding who called Isaac Newton's classic work Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy a "rape manual" (she seemed to see logic and reasoning as demeaning and brutal; rape is brutal, logic is brutal - it is harsh and dominating). Poor benighted creature.

More of Harding's wisdom:

"Scientific practices are common to every culture. Moreover, many phenomena of interest to science, though they can be predicted and explained, cannot be controlled – for example, the orbit of the sun and the location of fossils."

????? The moral of the story is that if you read too much postmodernism, your mind starts congealing and decomposing, and you say very silly things indeed.

After encountering Sandra Harding, would you like a breath of fresh air? Have a look at a bunch of women authors whose rationality, clarity and good sense shine through everything they write: Noretta Koertge, Daphne Patai, Susan Haack, and Cassandra Pinnick. Among many other things, they analyse what has gone wrong with Women's Studies programs, especially in academic contexts...

Sensible Thoughts

Jamie Whyte sounds like a sensible fellow:

"Too many people see truth as just a game between groups, as a kind of tribalism. That is not rational. Far too many people are not prepared to say: 'I don’t believe this and here's my argument why I don't'. They don’t feel they need to... These days, scientists are increasingly seen as part of various tribal groups, so when you read about their views the newspapers will go to great lengths to ask who they are working for, what their backgrounds are, and what are their political views are, and so on. Someone's motives may reasonably make you suspicious that that person has an incentive to mislead you, but their arguments are no better or worse than the evidence put forward to support them."

Salman Rushdie

"At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people's opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction...

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible."

The Wisdom of W.B. Yeats

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Meaning of Meaning

Richard Dawkins says: "My book Unweaving the Rainbow specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless".

The sort of cultured atheistic naturalism that Dawkins embraces may not mean that life has to be barren and depressing, but surely such naturalism cannot really get MEANING off the ground. I know that Dawkins would reply to me and say: "Life has the meaning which we create for it", but that is not what most people (including myself) MEAN by "meaning"!

By the way, Dawkins is the one on the left - but he sure looks like Harry Potter's girlfriend:

Free Books

Do you like free books? Knock yourself out at this place.

Tony B. Liar (aka Tiny Blur)

How can a pretty-boy have been so damned ugly?

Ophelia Benson's Creed

I'm for free inquiry -- open, fearless, unashamed, uninhibited inquiry. That means inquiry that is not expected to be deferential to majority opinion or belief; inquiry that follows the evidence wherever it goes without worrying about what the neighbours or bosses or "moderate believers" will think.

I'm for telling the truth, on the whole, especially in public discourse. (That means no, I'm not for telling people they're ugly or boring or fat or old, even if they are. I'm not for telling cruel personal truth, but that's a different subject, and not relevant here.) I'm for telling the truth more than I'm for manipulating or wheedling. I realize that that doesn't always work in politics, but that's one reason I wouldn't want to go into politics: because I am for telling the truth more than I am for manipulating or wheedling.

I'm for progress, and change, and reform, including in thinking. I think all of those are impeded by the idea that the majority must not be "offended" and that therefore certain ideas are taboo or sacrosanct.

I'm for thinking, and for universal freedom to think -- freely, fearlessly, without inhibition.

I'm for knowledge, and learning, and evidence, all of which require free inquiry in order to flourish.

I'm for treating people as sensible grownups who can bear to have their ideas challenged without going into meltdown. That means I'm against treating people as fragile idiots who have to be protected from disagreement.

I'm for honesty in public discourse, which entails making reasonable efforts to address questions and objections rather than ignoring them.