More on History

In this post I took up the issue of the misuse of history by Baltic ultra-nationalists who are promoting the notion that fascism and communism are equivalents, rather than being contrasting variants of totalitarianism, in order to hide politically inconvenient complicity in the Holocaust. Now, David Neiwert, a journalist specialising in the American right, has pointed to the recent expansion by a Glen Beck documentary/rant on Fox News of a long-standing thesis, which argues that fascism sprang from the socialist movement, into one that goes much further, asserting that American liberalism and fascism are intrinsically linked. And yes, just to complete a full house of false analogies, they did manage to wangle the word 'holocaust' into the title ("The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free Or Die").

It is a very easy trick to play. First of all make your definition as wide as possible. A precise definition will not catch all that you want to be caught by it. Then blur important distinctions and assert that anything that is vaguely authoritarian, or even statist, is objectively fascist. Highlight all the commonalities, ignore all the differences and thus 'prove' that they are the same. In that way you can make nonsense appear credible.

It also helps if there is a vague connection to some reputable history and there have been scholarly studies of the origins of fascism and its relationship to all kinds of radical and ecological thought. These overlaps are interesting. However, a few shared assumptions or common origins do not make ideologies identical and, as ideas and movements develop, very different beasts emerge.

The current basis of all this is yet another piece of best-selling polemical history, Jonah Goldberg's oxymoronic Liberal Fascism (to my horror given a surprisingly appreciative review by Nick Cohen). The book has long been a target of Neiwert's and now George Mason University's History News Network has invited a scholarly response. There is little support. The latest contribution to be posted, an open letter from Matthew Feldman in response to Goldberg's self-defence, is utterly damning.

So let me be totally clear in rejoinder: I have no agenda, and genuinely have no desire to slander you personally. But it needs to be said, loud and clear: your book is just ridiculous.

More substantial contributions, including Feldman's original review, can be read here, here, here and here.

Whilst Michael Leeden mounts a partial defence, he admits that the book "is a work of political theory, not a history". Leeden also reckons that, "Despite the provocative title, he's not saying that liberalism is the same as fascism". Beck and Fox quite clearly have no such scruples, mounting an exercise in guilt by association and using this as a platform to question the legitimacy of the Obama presidency. After the Muslim terrorist death panel angles, they can now claim that he is a Marxist and a fascist simultaneously.

It is this deliberate, systematic and infectious undermining of Obama, sometimes based on lies, innuendo, breathtakingly false analogies and closet racism, that drags this debate about the merits of a book into the political arena and highlights this comment of Feldman's:

Furthermore, I believe, Liberal Fascism is also dangerous. ... I say again: your book is manna from heaven for actual, ideological, revolutionary, radical right-wing, ultra-nationalistic fascists.

Once again, history is being misused as a justification for a wild and vicious political assault. Sometimes the debate becomes so absurd that you can't imagine anyone taking it seriously. However, you then read things like this:

The onward march of Fox News, the relentlessly rightwing channel that has revolutionised American television news by making it overtly partisan, has been boosted by an opinion poll that suggests it is the most trusted news operation in the country.

Almost half of all Americans surveyed in the poll of 1,151 registered voters said they trusted Fox News. That is a notably larger vote of confidence than the 39% who said they trusted Fox's great rival CNN, and vastly more than the credibility ratings of the traditional news networks ABC News (31%), CBS News (32%) and NBC News (35%).

Yikes.

Obama strikes me as a cautious centrist with some social democratic leanings, hardly deserving of the ludicrous rhetoric, conspiracy theories and monstrous distortions of the raving right. I suppose they haven't 'discovered' a link between him and Charles Manson yet, but give them time. And as the mood music changes, disillusioned liberals are joining in the chorus, making me distinctly uneasy that a deliberate attempt to sabotage the first African American presidency may yet prove successful and dash the hopes of a small amelioration of the lives of the poor. And in this instance a defence of the legitimacy of an elected president is also a defence of the proper use of history.

Emotion

Just how much can an ageing fat man take? If the football wasn't heart stopping enough, it was knocked into insignificance by tonight. This is one of the pleasures of being back in Manchester, I was able to go to the Bridgewater Hall for the second concert in the Mahler cycle. Being the second, it was Symphony No. 2 - The Resurrection. What a performance it was, bringing out all the theatricality and drama as well as its subtlety and complexity. The applause was thunderous. You can hear a recording of the concert on BBC Radio 3 on April 12th. I am still breathless.

I find the beauty of the first movement overwhelming, it tears at you with its intensity. And then it builds to the climactic finale - a depiction of the Last Judgement, though not an orthodox one. As Mahler described it,

...there are no sinners, no just. None is great, none small. There is no punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love illuminates our being. We know and we are.

Lest we forget

And see here.

Culture wars

And war is the right word.

"After eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 406 death threats, 179 assaults, and four kidnappings, people are still in denial. They say, 'Well, this was just some wingnut guy who just decided to go blow up somebody.' Wrong. This was a cold-blooded, brutal, political assassination that is the logical consequence of 35 years of hate speech and incitement to violence by people from the highest levels of American society, including but in no way limited to George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Bill O'Reilly, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson."

A must read by John H Richardson on the life under siege of the last late-term abortion doctor working in the United States and the terrorism of the Christian right.

Good moaning

It is like birdsong in the Greek spring, a constant accompaniment to English life. Moaning, incessant moaning. Cameron spouting drivel about "broken Britain"; the papers full of accounts of the alienated misery of modern human relationships caused solely by email; of why bloggers coarsen everyday life; of how the English language has been ruined by texting. Then there was the snow - why oh why are we not in a constant state of readiness for the sort of extreme weather that hits us once every thirty years or so and lasts three weeks at most?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Guardian, here comes Simon Jenkins - moaning - moaning about archaeology. Yes, archaeology. Or as he likes to think of it, the worship of relics.

The BBC relic department (once called history) now incants hourly radio plugs for MacGregor's 100 objects show. ... MacGregor speaks of his museum objects in hushed and reverential tones, so as to enhance their aura of holiness. ... The objects are like icons behind a Byzantine screen, over which we hear only the chant of the saintly MacGregor.

It's only a bloody radio programme, and rather a neat one at that. Then there is more ...

Museums have given this object worship a metaphysical clutter like that of the 8th-century Council of Nicaea, which ordained that no church could be consecrated without a true relic. ... Museum staff are trained to behave as acolytes to their objects, swearing allegiance to the gods of authenticity and locationism. They don their chasubles and scrape, analyse, clean and study – the meanest shard taking on a spirit that passes mortal understanding.

And on and on, until we get to the final reason why we apparently go in for all this relic worship. I bet you can guess. Dead right, it is all the fault of the internet.

The craving for authentic objects is another manifestation of the longing for the real, for an escape from the tyranny of the lighted screen, the keyboard, the world wide web. When the eye rises blearily from the LED it seeks reality above all else, something not machined, not plasticated, not back-lit, not plugged into the wall.

No, please god no.

I do historical research and I never get over the sheer, visceral thrill of actually touching original documents. But there is a difference. Just because I am holding a letter written by Peter Kropotkin does not mean that I think that I am going to be cured of whatever ailment is affecting me, miraculously lose weight or be swept up into heaven. Instead, there is an historical interest in the contents certainly, but there is something more, a sense of the reality of the past, of real lives with their own ideas and aesthetics, with their practical, everyday concerns, the very stuff of history. Then there is the excitement of research, of unearthing something new, clarifying ideas, the sheer pleasure of intellectual inquiry. It is brilliant, and anything that conveys that thrill to others is something to be encouraged and celebrated, not sneered at with a self-satisfied intellectual disdain at the inadequacy of the lower orders.

So here is a resolution for the day. Stop it. Stop moaning. Stop it right now. And I will stop moaning about people moaning too.

Defending history

In an intriguing article on CiF, Dovid Katz takes the Conservative Party to task for their extraordinary decision to ally with some of the most bizarre, authoritarian and ultra-nationalist far right groups in the European Parliament, seemingly to appease anti-EU sentiment in the party. It is an act of gross irresponsibility for a party that seeks to govern and will no doubt count for absolutely nothing in the coming election campaign.

However, this is not the main subject of the piece. Instead Katz is concerned about a rewriting of history, the equating of Stalinist oppression with the Holocaust in the so called "double genocide" model that sees the Nazi genocide committed against the Jews as equal to Stalin's endeavour to eradicate national identity in the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union. He sees it as an attempt to mitigate Nazism by "insisting that communism's evils be proclaimed "equal" to Nazism by all of Europe, and trashing the Allied war effort as one that did nothing but replace one tyranny with another "equal" one in the east".

Katz isn't trying to diminish the crimes of Stalinism, he is pointing out that this supposed equivalence has been propagated to hide some rather awkward evidence of complicity in the holocaust.

In the case of the countries in the far east of the European Union, the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), there is a reluctance to own up to any complicity with the Holocaust. The percentages of their Jewish populations killed (mid-90s) were the highest in Europe. Further west, collaboration had meant ratting to the Gestapo or taking neighbours to the train station to be deported. In these countries, it meant something different. Many thousands of enthusiastic local volunteers did most of the actual shooting of their country's Jewish citizens, whose remains lie scattered in hundreds of local killing pits. In Lithuania and Latvia, the butchery started before the Nazis even arrived.

The ultra nationalist account is seeking to conceal this by turning the perpetrators into victims, this time of a second "genocide".

I am always concerned by historical attempts to make qualitative judgements between unambiguous evils - was Stalin worse than Hitler (thereby implying one was actually better), was Fascism the same as Communism etc. – as they are either a form of sloppy shorthand or an attempt to dissemble. Nor is it enough to quantitatively evaluate regimes by counting the corpses (there are always corpses; many, many corpses). Katz is clear that what we have here is not laziness, but a clever and deliberate attempt at eradicating inconvenient facts from a nationalist narrative. And, what is more, that has meant turning on the victims themselves.

Then, in May 2008, at the lowpoint of modern Lithuanian history, armed police came looking for two incredibly valorous women veterans: Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (born 1922), librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and Rachel Margolis (1921), a biologist and Holocaust scholar. Margolis is especially loathed by proponents of the "double genocide" industry because she rediscovered, deciphered and published the long-lost diary of a Christian Pole, Kazimierz Sakowicz. Sakowicz, witness to tens of thousands of murders at the Ponar (Paneriai) site outside Vilnius, recorded accurately that most of the killers were enthusiastic locals. Now resident in Rechovot, Israel, she is unable to return to her beloved hometown in Lithuania for fear of prosecutorial harassment.

The falsification of history by the powerful is rarely good for the health of either witnesses or serious writers and historians.

This is not to say that we cannot make meaningful comparisons about the generalities of different regimes. We have an excellent conceptual tool to do just that, totalitarianism, a concept that I have defended here and here against the attempt to extend it so far as to render it meaningless. Certainly both Fascism and Communism were totalitarian, but the specifics of their historical roots, the source of their support, motivation of their supporters and their ideological aims were markedly different. The trouble is that the term is often not used analytically, but as abuse or simply for playing a game of guilt by association. And the moment that happens, history slips across the border into propaganda. That is when it is used to hide things, things that matter, things like the criminal singularity of the attempt to exterminate every Jewish, man, woman and child in Europe through industrial slaughter, together with the inconvenient identity of some of those who did the killing.

I have been re-reading Mark Mazower's history of Europe in the Twentieth Century, Dark Continent. He is very clear about the distinctions between Fascism and Communism and makes a strong argument that Fascism was not an aberration, "National Socialism, in particular, fits into the mainstream not only of German but also of European history far more comfortably than most people would like to admit". This made it a more potent threat to democracy across the continent than Communism. His book is a warning against complacency and to stop us hiding from the reality and continuing threat of barbarism. He quotes Hannah Arendt,

"We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury into oblivion".

She is right and there are examples closer to home. Recently, the idea of a post-left has gained some currency. It emerged out of a critique of what has also been referred to as a red/brown alliance between some far left groups and jihadi theocrats. I have no problem with the description and condemnation of these political factions, I just want to know what is particularly novel about them.

To me the idea of a post-left is an evasion of a discussion of long-standing anti-Semitic and totalitarian discourses within the left. It offers a nice and convenient view that the left was pure and innocent before the Stop the War Coalition came along. This is not so and if we are to realise the emancipatory aims of left thinking, we have to acknowledge, study and counter the darker side too, the one that led to the Gulags, one that has a very long history indeed.

Dishonest history plays games like this. It does things like diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its grotesque historical specificity. Nor does it help us understand the other horrors of our recent past – the Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Saddams and many others. They may be united by the deliberate practice of misery and death, but they were not the same, nor were they equivalents, and, most certainly, one was not worse than the others. They were different, distinct variants of totalitarianism.

Most casual comment is not dishonest, it is sloppy. But sloppy history has its perils too. We should guard against the falsifications that allow our defences to slip against new enemies of liberty. This does not just mean the noisy threat of theocratic terrorism, but something more insidious, a growing anti-democratic, ultra nationalist right, something much more in tune with the dark side of European history. Potentially more dangerous and capable of success (just as long as it can just get round those little awkward historical facts that might make people think twice), this tendency is something that the Tory Party has shamefully chosen to work with in the European Parliament.

Given the penchant for the systematic distortion of history, the practice of good historical enquiry and debate has an important role to play in the defence and advancement of democratic societies. Cicero's famous maxim seems apt:

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge

(Thanks to the man with no blog)

Conspiracy latest

Heavy marking means light posting, but now I have finished most of it with a huge sigh of relief. So after opening the paper today I have time to share with you the shocking new revelation about the extent of the conspiracy that those damn Elders keep going (with a bit of help from the Illuminati, a bunch of Aliens, the Anti-Christ of course, oops nearly forgot the Masons, then there is always the reptilian Boxcar Willie). Yes, the Taliban are theirs too. Sort of. Perhaps.

Class hatred

A government in waiting?

Neanderthal news

Research finds Neanderthals enjoyed makeup

These days they just use Photoshop


From the wonderful mydavidcameron.com via Will the blogless

Politics

In June of last year a young Frenchwoman jumped off the sixth floor balcony of her sister's flat in London holding her five-month-old baby in her arms. Both were killed.

A tragedy, but one with a reason. Let Jenni Russell take up the story.

Christelle fitted no stereotype. She was a 32-year-old Frenchwoman living in Hackney who had lived in Britain since she and her sister moved here in 1997. In May 2008 she graduated from London's Metropolitan University with a degree in philosophy. At about the same time she discovered she was pregnant. She looked for work while claiming jobseeker's allowance and housing benefit. Then in December 2008, the advisers at the jobcentre told her she no longer qualified for jobseeker's allowance. According to the Department for Work and Pensions the fact that she was within 11 weeks of giving birth disqualified her from being an active jobseeker. She was told to apply for income support instead.

What no one warned her was that European nationals who claim income support must provide more proof of residence than jobseekers have to. All a jobseeker needs do is show they are looking for work. Income support is only given if the claimant can prove that for the previous five years they have been either in work, searching for work, studying, or self-sufficient. Christelle had an eight-month period in 2003 when she said she had been working in a cafe but had no employment records to prove it. Her claim was turned down.

Once that happened, the welfare state stopped operating. Her housing benefit was automatically withdrawn. The state, having decreed she was not in a fit condition to look for work, took no further interest in how the penniless mother of a new baby was going to survive.

This is how it ends. All the endless measures aimed at tightening the rules on claimants and foreigners in an attempt to appease the supposed, and probably fictional, atavistic appetites of the electorate, all the cosying up to the the editors of the right wing press, all the creation of increasingly labyrinthine bureaucratic rules, they all result in two broken bodies lying on a Hackney pavement.

And now we turn to the 'coup' that failed - the last ditch attempt to oust the Prime Minister. I may have missed it, but I can't recall any debate about what the Labour Party should be and what would change under a new leader. Was there a discussion of alternative ideas, philosophies and policies? Was there any mention of how to create a better Britain, one forged from the best traditions of the Labour movement, one that would not lead someone to choose death over destitution? Not as far as I could see. Instead all the talk was of who would be most likely to win an election, of who is in and who is out, of factions and intrigues.

Court politics. That is what we are left with, court politics.

Jenni Russell concluded,

I don't believe this is a stance a civilised society can justify. It pitches foreign-born mothers back into a Victorian-style existence in which pregnancy may mean destitution and disgrace.

I agree. And as the ghastly prospect of a prolonged election campaign, dripping with platitudes, looms, don't expect to hear anything about the suicide of a young mother and how we should ensure that something as grotesquely tragic never happens again. It wouldn't do to disturb the formulaic answers and sloganising with the lives and deaths of real people. Would it?

Snow business

I suppose it makes a change from drizzle.

Picture from NASA

Tone deaf

The Times Higher reports

Staff at the University of Leeds have been told to "demonstrate their positivity" and even use "some gentle wit" when composing official documents.

New "tone-of-voice guidelines" have been drawn up to help employees "write more creatively and effectively" and create "a strong verbal identity that we all understand".

"Words are our most powerful tool," says the 30-page document, which has been sent to all staff. "What's more they're free, available and ready to use."

The guide includes a list of university principles - "collaboration", "challenge", "generosity" and "excellence" - which it says should "come through in the content of our language and the messages we try to communicate".

Leeds? Have they been to Yorkshire, home to the Geoff Boycott charm school? Well, I suppose that the connection of universities to their locality can be tangential. Even so, the attempt to turn academics, cynical moaners par excellence, into a bunch of beaming Moonies seems doomed to failure.

The guidelines continue, without any sense of irony,

The university is "down to earth ... in touch and relevant", the document says, warning academics and others against "falling back on tired old clichés" in their communications.

Like, 'positivity', 'challenge', 'excellence', 'relevant', etc?

I despair.

Via Norm

Blues and reds

It is a sign of the times that the best football journalist of our times concentrates on the game's finances. Yesterday David Conn produced two excellent articles about the fortunes of the two top flight Manchester clubs, United and City. I am old enough to remember the 1968 season when they formed the top two in the First Division (though in the wrong order) and in subsequent years neither club fared particularly well until United finally found a manager able to transform potential into achievement, to reconstruct the club, deliver its first title in twenty-five years and then move on to dominate the era of the Premiership. It won't last. It never does. Players and managers age and move on, mistakes are made and even a club as big as United was relegated in the 70s. City's history has been more chequered still.

Now the two clubs stand as contrasting models of what has become of football. City supporters may be delighted at the moment, but I would argue that both models are disastrous for the game as a whole. City are certainly winners. They are now owned by an oil-rich Middle East elite who are pouring money in with little regard to losses. Despite the talk of long-term sustainability, it is hard to see it happening even in the medium term, not least because the flood of money has inflated the already ludicrously high level of transfer fees, agent payments and player salaries. In the meantime, United too have fallen into foreign ownership, though of a very different kind.

Manchester United were actually sustainable, successful and debt free. Then they were taken over by American owners. Now their debt has reached £700 million and they are liable for interest payments of £263 million over the past three years. Where has the debt come from? It was a leveraged buyout. This is the money borrowed by the owners to buy the club. United are in colossal debt in order to buy themselves.

United's owners are now trying to refinance and continually looking to raise money to service the debt. Supporters are one source. Top price season tickets have risen from £550 to £931. The other day there were spare seats available and I thought about going until I saw the price of £53. Forget it. I can't afford to go.

These figures are mind-boggling. Media and fashion have fuelled a gentrification of the sport at the expense of the fans who are becoming cash cows for a plutocratic elite. The game itself is still compelling, the players capable of great skill, the passion in the community for the game is intense. Everything is alive and well ... except the nagging doubts about both the ethics and economics of a game which, not least by me, is being watched more on the television.

Let's not get misty eyed about the past. It was great queueing up to pay 2/6d to watch Best, Charlton and Law. But the view was bad, the grounds uncomfortable and unsafe, crowd violence was rampant and the clubs themselves were the playthings of local businessmen with feudal attitudes and monstrous egos. The response to hooliganism was to fence the crowd in, treating supporters with contempt, as cattle to be controlled. Those fences killed.

Something had to change, but not this. Sport is one of those areas of life where irrational attachments enrich and entertain, where the fans have a sense of identity and of ownership of their club. Yet it is a dream. Us fans own nothing. We are at best customers, at worst voyeurs of the goings on of the super rich, certainly at the top level. In the crises that followed the deaths at Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough the model of reform mirrored the global attraction to turbo-capitalism. There are other models. Community ownership might not be a wholly viable option for top level sport, but there is also the European social model followed in Germany, where admission prices have been kept down, safe standing areas remain and the game is booming, though with one exception. Without the vast sums being poured in by plutocrats and media, the best players are elsewhere, most notably in England and Spain.

So there is a tension between success and stability. The English Premiership have chosen the high cost, ultra capitalist route. Smug in their satisfaction at the quality of what they keep referring to as 'the product', they ignore the sustainability of a model that rests on the benefaction of the capricious super rich or welcomes in the corporate asset stripper. It is horribly reminiscent of the financial services industry before the credit crunch. The German model certainly seems more robust in the long term and, for me, it would mean that I could still go to games and indulge an old obsession. Thank god for Rugby League.

And he's back too

Rejoice!

David Cameron: Campaign poster is not airbrushed

Back ...

Brrrrrrr...

From this



To this

Another view

Strong winds have blown the mists away, the paraleia is flooded and covered with debris washed in from the sea again, and the views have been spectacular in the clear air - here looking towards the city of Volos from the village of Lafkos. The weather continues to be mild, despite the breeze.

Tomorrow night we will drive back to Athens to catch an early morning flight on Monday. Then a different reality will hit. I prefer this one.

Major argument

"The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change."

John Major quoted in today's Guardian.

I can think of some people who may disagree.

Happy New Year

I intended to post something more substantial for the New Year, but I haven't quite managed it and there is no hope of doing so today.

New Year's Eve was another glorious day, filled with warm sunshine. The clear air had given way to soft mists filling the gaps between islands, mountains and sea. There was no wind. The sea was calm, decorated with ripples of light, and dolphins leapt from the water in the bay. The temperature rose.

By late afternoon the heat of the sun departs and the evening becomes crisp and cold. The fire is lit and then friends arrive armed with many bottles of wine. As midnight approaches the locals lose patience and begin letting off firecrackers and firing guns in the air. The moment the New Year is officially here, the house is rocked by explosions. Our neighbour, the local butcher, is throwing thunderflashes from his front porch, pausing only to let off a couple more barrels from his shotgun. Abandoning my friends, I wander up the lane, glass in hand, through the smoke and the patter of shotgun pellets. "Chronia polla, Costa!" "Kali chronia, yeitona!" I am beckoned in for wine, offered the opportunity to fire off some more shotgun rounds (wisdom prevailed, I refused), join his family and friends and am given home made wine and kokoretsi. Meat from a butcher's table is a privilege to be savoured. Several glasses later and even fuller than before I rejoin my friends for cards, cake and yet more wine. I like this place.

So today, all I want to do is to gently sober up, do much digesting, sit in the sun and continue to thwart the desire of the bread eating cat to move in ... oh yes, and to wish anyone reading this blog a brilliant 2010.

Windy!

The weather's changed.

Still lots of warm sun and magnificent views though.













Sorry Mike.

The days of the kingfishers

Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor'd middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really finish'd and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

From Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

The unseasonably warm weather continues here as Britain freezes. These are halcyon days - a phrase, like so many, whose origins lie in Ancient Greek mythology.

They are named after Alcyone, who was the daughter of Aeolus, the keeper of the winds. She fell in love and married Ceyx, King of Trachis and son of the evening star. Greek gods were not benign, all-merciful beings, they were arbitrary and capricious tyrants. Alcyone and Ceyx had angered Zeus by comparing themselves to Hera and Zeus himself and so, in a fit of temper, he drowned Ceyx at sea by throwing a thunderbolt at his ship as he was travelling to consult an oracle. His body was washed ashore and discovered by Alcyone who, overcome by grief, first performed the rites of burial and then threw herself into the sea to join her beloved in death. Deeply moved, the gods relented and turned Alcyone and Ceyx into kingfishers. Every December, around the winter solstice, the winds are supposed to cease and still, calm weather prevails as the kingfishers lay their eggs - Αλκυονίδες ημέρες, kingfisher days.

The soft winter warmth gives a sense of calm and peace, but Whitman got his seasons wrong. Halcyon days are not autumnal. They are not a moment of self-satisfied reflection at the end of life. They are a time of rebirth in the depths of winter, of a new life being forged and a reminder of the glories of summer to come - a cause for celebration. And today, for me, they are also a time of gratitude, for feeling incredibly lucky, as well as insufferably smug, about the fact that I am not shivering in a bitterly cold Manchester, even if I have to return there in around a week's time.

Sunday cat blogging

When you put bread out for the birds you might be setting up prey for the local cats. This one cuts out the middleman and just eats the bread.








He has a friend that visits as well - not one with the same vegetarian tendencies though.

No ... no

Some time ago the Observer gave away the DVD of the 1984 David Lynch sci-fi epic, Dune. They described it as a cult classic. I watched it tonight. The plot is excruciating, the script is terrible, characterisation is negligible, the dialogue is stilted, the acting is awful, and really plumbs the depths when Sting emerges in a homo-erotic pose wearing nothing but a smirk and a pair of tin underpants; it is a messianic, fascistic mess. I feel stunned. I need a drink - I really need a drink.

Scepticism, blogging and science

One of the features of the blogosphere at the moment is the sound and fury being devoted to the topic of climate change. Much of it is uninformed by even a vague smattering of scientific knowledge. A lack of expertise is seldom a barrier to a fervently-held opinion, but this excellent post by Daniel Loxton gives a good guide to what can be reliably tackled by a non-specialist and, specifically, by a sceptic about climate change denial.

Loxton outlines four different scenarios and the contributions a lay person can make in discussing science.

1) Where both scientific domain expertise and expert consensus exist, skeptics are (at best) straight science journalists. We can report the consensus, communicate findings in their proper context — and that’s it ...

2) Where scientific domain expertise exists, but not consensus, we can report that a controversy exists — but we cannot resolve it.

3) Where scientific domain expertise and consensus exist, but also a denier movement or pseudoscientific fringe, skeptics can finally roll up their sleeves and get to work. ... But note that there are two distinct components to critiquing fringe movements: knowledge of pseudoscience (our own area of domain expertise); and knowledge of the contrasting body of actual scientific literature — a literature on which we are not typically expert.

4) Where a paranormal or pseudoscientific topic has enthusiasts but no legitimate experts, skeptics may perform original research, advance new theories, and publish in the skeptical press.

Though the focus is on scepticism, as a general guide to talking sense from a number of perspectives this is admirable and it is worth reading his arguments in full.

Fine art

Two perfect presents yesterday:

First, Sandor Marai's The Rebels.

Second, a Petroula Kostidou calendar.

And I learnt a new proverb;

Ο μουσαφίρις και το ψάρι την τρίτη μέρα βρομάνε

This translates as, 'the visitor and the fish begin to smell on the third day'.

Ho, ho, ho

Happy Christmas to all who pass by.



More seasonal naffness in Greek here

Cruelty

Just rubbing it in.

From my stroll with friends this afternoon. Posted especially for mikeovswinton in the freezer cabinet.

Winter wonderland

Sorry Britain.

A day of rain

It is quiet, every sound is amplified. The dying log fire is crackling, inevitably a dog barks, roof timbers creak and the wind, which brought first rain and then cooler air after the temperature reached 16C this morning, is whipping up the sea at the front, setting the roar of the waves breaking against the paraleia as the soundtrack to a misty night.

Tonight I cooked a classic Greek dish, simple and bursting with flavour, pork and celeriac stew with egg and lemon sauce, and then started to re-read a very odd and insightful reinterpretation of the history of modern ideas by the late American Historian Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, subtitled Progress and its Critics. I hadn't picked it up for more than ten years. I am a slow reader and this is a long, questioning book with strengths and flaws. It will last me some time. I will post on some themes in due course.

But now it is time to settle, a small glass of wine in hand, and enjoy the soundscape of a rural Greek winter's night.

Oranges and lemons

A tiny orange tree that was inherited with the house has grown and this winter it produced its first fruit. I peeled it, smelt the heady aroma, bit into a segment and ... eek! It is a bitter orange not a sweet eating one. Another one to add to my collection of sour citrus, to go with the Bergamot and the lemon, both of which are heavily laden. Marmalade anyone?

Off again

Light posting ahoy as I escape to Greece tomorrow for Christmas. So to tide you over, here is a musical interlude.

Automatic ethics

The Guardian has found something else to worry about. Robots. Robot rights to be precise.

But if the robot was designed to have human-like capacities that might incidentally give rise to consciousness, we would have a good reason to think that it really was conscious. At that point, the movement for robot rights would begin.

Discriminate, discriminate:

Deserved

Giggsy

In the pink

Terry has alerted me to the latest piece by his formidable comrade, Lauryn Oates. It deals with the position taken by Code Pink, a Canadian feminist peace group, after a visit to Afghanistan to show solidarity with the women there. All was not as they thought.

"... the pink T-shirted women were surprised to learn the overwhelming majority of women do not support a withdrawal of foreign troops from their country."

So their decision?

"... Code Pink would stick to its position of calling for troop withdrawal."

Ah.

At this point it would be easy to lay into them and their branch of feminist pacifism (actually, it would be enjoyable as well as easy), but I am not going to. People who think like this are not bad people. They are idealists, dreaming of a better world, a world free from oppression. It is just that the purity of their dream, their righteous anger and their heroic self-image trumps reality every time. And this is the way that good people can do evil in the world.

I think back to Oskar Schindler. He was a crook. He saved over a thousand people from the Holocaust precisely because his skills were perfectly suited to the organised criminality of the Third Reich. There are times we need crooks with a conscience.

And so in an imperfect world we aren't always helped by dreams of perfection. We need imperfect action for imperfect, though hugely preferable, ends. And as for those people who scrap and cajole, who argue relentlessly to try and win support for those actions, I reckon they are heroes in their own way too.

Apocalypse now

Each time I pass into the zone, I feel that I have entered an unreal world. In the dead zone, the silence of the villages, roads, and woods seem to tell something at me....something that I strain to hear....something that attracts and repels me both at the same time. It is divinely eerie - like stepping into that Salvador Dali painting with the dripping clocks.

This comes from an astonishing photo essay by a Ukrainian woman, Elena ("Good girls go to heaven. Bad ones go to hell. And girls on fast bikes go anywhere they want"), of her motorbike rides around the dead zone of Chernobyl. Make sure that you click all the way through. Stunning.

With many, many thanks to Will the Blogless

Stout and out

I love my body, I love my fat, I love all ... why not?

The first Miss Fat Gay Venezuela contest. Full report and super video here.

"We all have rights, gays and fat people as much as anyone."

Festive joy

This and many more from Sketchy Santas.

Via Mick Hartley

Popular education

Two of the great instruments of popular education in this country, adult education and public libraries, are at risk. I have written much on adult education, but there is a similar undermining of the library service, both through cuts and the insidious growth of managerial gobbledygook. I mean, how can anyone have faith in a "modernisation review" of the library service that produces such nebulous, glossy jargon as "Empower, Inform, Enrich"? The document, for some reason, includes an essay by the managing director of Starbucks UK asking, "Can libraries learn anything from the coffee shop experience?"* Rachel Cooke in the Observer is scathing. It is worth reading this earlier piece of hers too.

I get the sense that an anxiety about being seen to be modern, leading to obsessions with fashionable notions such as the digital age or the knowledge economy, is obscuring the importance of a commitment to the old-fashioned and intrinsically simple notion of accessible popular education, itself fulfilling a human need and establishing a human right. Then again it does help relegate the importance of an embarrassing, politically inconvenient public commitment in an age of neoliberal political economy.

* My answer would be I bloody well hope not. I refer to the expertise of the man who sells the Big Issue outside Oxford Road Station. Last week he was disappointed that one of his customers had given him Starbucks vouchers for Christmas. "I won't go in the place", he said, "the coffee is overpriced mud. Use the Cornerhouse, you get a lovely latte in there".

Sunday cat blogging

This mighty mog is the latest obstacle to the reunification of Cyprus. A national struggle between Greeks and Turks over cats has broken out.

The cats in question are the "Aphrodite giants", a beautiful, extremely large and gentle-natured creature, and the equally attractive St Helena breed. Unsurprisingly, the Cypriot Feline Society (CFS) is attempting to register the breeds as national cats, but allegations have emerged of a plot to claim the cats for the Turkish north of the country, depriving Greek Cypriots of breeds that have begun to win prizes abroad.

The CFS fears that Turkish Cypriots are keen on cross-breeding the Aphrodite and the St Helena with a Turkish cat and registering the new breeds as Turkish.

I wonder what the cat thinks?

Hysteria

The right wing assault on climate science continues. The argument has a commonplace structure. Take one small piece of evidence, misconstrue it and then build a whole narrative edifice on the misinterpretation, claiming it as proof positive, whilst leaving the originators baffled, struggling to know how to respond.

This is a pretty standard technique for constructing a false argument, has a resonance in popular culture as it is a mainstay of thriller writing, and it certainly isn't confined to the political right. The troubling aspect for me is the way it is being reported in news broadcasts. Unlike Murdoch's Fox News, which allows opinionated star presenters to rant and rave regardless of fact, British news broadcasts are supposed to be balanced. And what worries me is that this notion of balance seems to divorce reporting from the foundation of good journalism, research.

Rather than investigate and present the findings of that investigation, the style used is to take an accusation from whatever source and present it, often in the style of an advocate, to someone who disagrees and elicit a brief response. Either that or they stage a three minute debate between two people of opposite views, regardless of their credibility, and call the process balanced reporting. Often, it seems that the broadcaster's research team has read little more than competing press releases. In the reporting of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia, I have yet to hear evidence that anyone has bothered to read and analyse them. Climate scientists' lack of expertise in PR has been exposed, throwing them on the defensive, and only now are they belatedly trying to catch up.

So where is the authoritative research? How is balance served by treating fact and fiction as equivalents and truth to be simply a mater of opinion? It isn't as if the truth isn't out there and easily available. The person who put this video together probably had a bit too much fun making it, but it clearly and accessibly deals with the claims in a way that I have never seen on broadcast news.




All of this is not to deny that there is a deeply polarised debate. But it is political, social and economic. Material changes in our environment are forcing us to ask serious questions about how we respond and the nature of the world in which we wish to live, not just about the technology we use. It is a vital debate and by wandering off into the byways of denial, the right is excluding itself. In a perverse way I find that rather gratifying.

Video via here

A heavy cold...

...means light posting. Especially when your brain feels like this:

Doggone

After the crowds that prayed for a miracle cure from bits of a dead nun comes a new source of hope; the underside of a Polish dog.

There might be a new religion in this. What would Jack say?



Hat tipped to Kev

Yet more cuts

More grim news about adult education has just dropped into my inbox from the Campaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning (CALL). There will be £240 million of "efficiency savings" (what a disgusting euphemism that is) taken from the FE adult education budget in 2010/2011.

And how about this gem:

Funding has been shifted away from education provided in response to adult learner demands towards employer responsive training.

In plain English this means that you will not be allowed to learn what you want, only what employers want you to learn (in reality, what the government thinks that employers want you to learn). This is an unequivocal restatement of the abandonment of the historic mission of adult education, its roots in the labour movement and the working class autodidact tradition, and the idea of a continuing, liberal, life-enhancing education. Instead, learning is only permitted to be about work, and not even about what you need to improve your working life (like knowledge of legal employment rights) or change your career. No, it is only supposed to provide what employers want you to know so that you are more useful to them.

I get a combined sense of weary resignation and intense anger when I read this stuff. However, it was this article by Robert Skidelsky that put the whole dismal affair into perspective. The article deals with the failure of Keynes' prediction that there would come a time that we would have sufficient to live a good life, aspire to possess no more and the working week would drop to around 15 hours. Of course, Skidelsky doesn't mention that the reason why we continue to work longer is less to do with the social aspects of work or the continuing desire for more goodies, but because we bloody have to unless you hit it lucky with the chance of early retirement (phew!). However, Keynes also had a pessimism about a leisure society, one not shared by all his contemporaries.

He writes: "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional economy."

This horribly snobbish sentiment does have a grain of truth lurking in it that a leisure society needs leisure activities, and not just the mind numbing ones that I am about to open and switch on. Skidelsky, with a similar scant regard for popular pleasures, wrings his hands in Buntingesque misery at our collective failure:

Finding the means to nourish the fading "associations or duties or ties" that are so essential for individuals to flourish is the unsolved problem of the developed world...

Well one of the solutions was the joy of learning - skills, crafts, art, literature, history, philosophy, language, music, dance, drama, the list goes on and on. It was called adult education, and, you know what is happening now, we are killing it.

Revolutionary criminality

It is good to know that the forces of the state who actively protected us from, er, "leftwing bookshops" have such a firm grip on reality.

Taking a leak

One of the topics I used to teach in my last job was a short course on clear thinking. It was about how political arguments are constructed and how we fall prey to rhetorical tricks and false logic. I used a variety of examples, mainly drawn from contemporary campaigns, the media and, especially, from conspiracy theories. One of the most common of these is a process that concentrates all attention on a single small item and thereby exaggerates its significance. The item can be real, misinterpreted and/or taken out of context, or even downright fictitious. However, the use of this single, small point is then extended to question a conceptual whole. By fixating on a piece of minutiae, it is possible to distract someone from the mass of evidence pointing the other way.

This way of thinking is central to a whole range of conspiracy theories, and admirably suited to the mindset of obsessives, but one of the most common places you can run across it is if you study miscarriages of justice. One piece of evidence, such as a dodgy forensic test or, more frequently, a confession under duress (and note how one confession outweighs hundreds of denials even after it has been withdrawn) is used to obscure overwhelming evidence of innocence.

As a result of this interest of mine, my news feeds in recent days have been flooded with items about the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The story even became a dismal item on Channel 4 News, whose news values seem to plummet daily, and was given the usual irritating John Humphries treatment on Radio 4's Today Programme. If you want to follow some of the debate there are two horrendously long threads at Real Climate.

I was going to write something as a non-scientist about the construction of the argument when I saw the perfect post and knew I couldn't do better. So go over to Carbon Fixated where all is revealed, Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking’. The next blockbuster for Dan Brown perhaps?

(Via)

Eh?

I like history. I teach history. Like Shuggy, who knows far more about schools than I do, I think that changes to the primary curriculum, in History as elsewhere, are constructed from a particular strand of modern lunacy. I should be cheering Andrew Martin to the rafters. But then he starts his article with this:

Presumably Balls, who is highly educated, knows that the importation of a value word like "understanding" is a tactic associated with totalitarian regimes.

Hmm ... prison camps, yes; genocide, certainly; sworn obedience to a single leader, indeed. Understanding? Not too sure about that one myself.

Heritage

Swinton were the first and last club to play Oldham at the Watersheddings ground. I was at the last match. I wasn't here.

Good souls

Back in May Nick Cohen wrote a piece about seeing a performance of David Harrower's new translation of Bertold Brecht's play, The Good Soul of Szechuan, at the Young Vic. His line was that Brecht was "a communist writer, not a writer who happened to support communism", a political propagandist, and the play was there simply to say, "individual morality will only be possible when the collective morality of communism comes".

This week I saw the same translation beautifully performed in rep in the more humble surroundings of Manchester's Library Theatre. And did I see the play differently! I suppose you could read it the way Nick Cohen did, but I found that, rather than being didactic, the play was discursive, layered and complex. It is set amongst the underclass of an unjust society and the destructive effects of poverty were played out to the full and condemned. Yet this was a very un-heroic proletariat. The play, like so much Brecht, was about survival, this time amongst a 'low life' that clearly fascinated him.

The drama centres around the question of whether a bad society creates bad people or bad people create a bad society. It is about the possibility or impossibility of altruism. I found no conclusion. There is much more besides, with a range of existential dilemmas presenting themselves to the characters. Certainly the propagandist element was present, though only briefly and unconvincingly. At times virtue was punished and vice rewarded, at others it was reversed. And who were the three Gods who could find good only in the poor, never in the rich, but could still find only one virtuous person on earth? Whoever they were, they couldn't solve the conundrum so they made their excuses and left, abandoning humanity. There was no resolution. We were offered ambiguity rather than certainty.

That Brecht had been an apologist for Stalinism is well known, that he was a brute who insisted on being buried in a steel coffin with a stiletto through his heart is equally known. Neither are appealing. But his art stands, and did for me on Tuesday, because he asked questions, rather than provided answers, and used drama as a vehicle for depicting and discussing human imperfection. My answers were probably not the ones that he would have given.

I really can't make up my mind as to whether Brecht was too good a playwright to be a good Stalinist or too bad a Stalinist to be a bad playwright. And just as I was thinking that his picture of humanity was too bleak, I came back from the interval to find that someone had stolen my programme. Last word to Brecht I suggest.

The Dark Ages

Richard Williams writes:

Is modern rugby union really such a terrible game, or is that just the way England make it look? ... Everybody knows that something is wrong, but nobody seems to know how to put it right.

There is a solution. It is called Rugby League.

That's it!

I've had it with Chavez now.

Understanding inequality

I have the sort of mind that likes organisation and categorisation, something that can bring clarity to arguments. This is the strength of a striking, though not original, essay on inequality by Göran Therborn, whose title certainly doesn't undersell its significance, The Killing Fields of Inequality.

His argument is that inequality is not an engine of growth, nor a natural feature of human societies, but a construct that is utterly dysfunctional, "destructive of human lives and of human societies" - "it is something that violates a moral norm of equality among human beings". Yes, ultimately his argument rests on a moral stance and, to my mind, this is welcome. Utility without ethics is the politics of, using Nye Bevan's cruel description of Hugh Gaitskell, the "desiccated calculating machine". Therborn uses a raft of utilitarian arguments, but there is no mistaking that he is writing about the real lives of real people and is angry.

The usefulness of his approach is that he differentiates between a number of arguments that are often conflated and confused. So, for example he deals with the distinction to be made between difference and inequality. The most important is that inequality can be abolished and, of course, the whole thrust of the essay is that it should be.

He divides inequality into three different types - vital inequality of life and health; existential inequality based on discrimination and status; and material inequality of wealth and resources, both in access to opportunities and in rewards. All are the product of clearly defined processes:

Inequality can be produced in four basic ways. First there is distantiation – some people are running ahead and/or others falling behind. Secondly there is the mechanism of exclusion – through which a barrier is erected making it impossible, or at least more difficult, for certain categories of people to access a good life. Thirdly, the institutions of hierarchy mean that societies and organisations are constituted as ladders, with some people perched on top and others below. Finally, there is exploitation, in which the riches of the rich derive from the toil and the subjection of the poor and the disadvantaged.

You can read the full article if you want to see how he elaborates on these themes and on the strategies involved in countering the effects of these processes. I would just like to make a few observations.

Firstly, he is attempting to show that the different types of inequality, such as inequality of opportunity and outcome, are not mutually exclusive phenomena that conflict, but are contingent upon each other and the products of the same processes. Secondly, I would extend that approach to argue that the often assumed choice between equality and liberty is a false one. The liberty of all is predicated on equality, something that was clearer to 19th Century libertarians than it appears to be to some of their 21st Century descendants. And finally, countering the insane rhetoric of the American right about Obama as "a socialist at the head of a gangster regime", he makes a telling point about social democracy:

...the recurrent success of the Nordic welfare states on a world capitalist list (with Finland on rung 6 and oil-rich Norway on 16 among 131 countries) certainly means that generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but as highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives. And the literally lethal effects of inequality make searching for them imperative.

I couldn't agree more.

A responsibility to protect

Andrew Anthony, in a long and, at times, horrifying piece, recounts the experiences of Somaly Lun, a Cambodian survivor of the Khmer Rouge. It is worth reading in full. In particular I was struck by this,

In the midst of this revolutionary dystopia, one of the most difficult ideas for the teenager to accept was the thought that the world had abandoned Cambodia. "I kept thinking all the time, 'Why does no one come and rescue us?' We'd look up in the sky for the sign of a plane. Any little sound of gunfire got us excited – Somebody must have come! But it was just them killing somebody who had escaped, otherwise they wouldn't waste their bullets."

In the end it was the Vietnamese invasion and occupation that stopped the genocide. Tied up in Cold War politics, it was an action supported by many on the left who were to oppose subsequent Western interventions, whilst the Khmer Rouge continued to hold Cambodia's seat in the United Nations. Liberations are messy and imperfect, but after reading Somaly Lun's recollections of seeing her ten-year-old brother burned alive for taking a sweet potato who can doubt their necessity?

Greece leads the world

At least that is what Anthony Barnett and Mary Kaldor think in their gushing panegyric for the latest Papandreou to head the government of Greece. I thought their praise a little overdone until I read this,

We have direct experience of one small part of the learning process that lies behind Papandreou’s strategy. We have worked with many others in the ‘Symi Symposium’ that Papandreou initiated 12 years ago. Named after the Aegean island on which the first seminar was held, these informal workshops began as a joint initiative of the Andreas Papandreou and Olaf Palme institutes, as a way of exchanging views on the future of the left. Every year since then Papandreou has hosted these gatherings on a different Mediterranean island, bringing together leading global academics, activists and policy makers to debate how to achieve a better world.

Ah. I would be falling over myself to please anyone who would whisk me away to a Greek island every year to talk about what I like to talk about.

Cynicism aside, you have to wish success for a country that deserves better than what has been served up by successive governments. Welcome too is any attempt to lift European social democracy out of Third Way capitulation to the powerful, especially in the context of the twin assault of financial and ecological crises. I just wonder about how much we should place our hopes in an enlightened technocratic elite rather than the long hard work of building up social movements.

Freeloading

I have only been to two poetry readings in my life and both were by the same poet. Does this make me a groupie or a stalker even? More hopefully, a comrade and a friend.

The reading at Manchester University was so much grander than the one in Hull. Hull does cosy and bars, Manchester has theatres and plush, quality restaurants. Even without pre-lubrication in historic pubs, George read beautifully the complex beauty of his work. This time he was not alone. I was really taken by the Irish poet Vona Groake who shared the billing. Her latest collection aptly takes its name from the spray thrown up from the prow of a boat. As she read, each phrase was like time-lapse photography, a shimmering droplet rose and was let fall, a pause before the next glistened in view, crystallising thoughts, and then you glance down to the deck and, to your surprise and delight, there is a small pool of water, reflecting all around you.

Then the exquisite led on to the powerful, her translation and interpretation of the 18th Century Irish keen of a woman for her murdered husband, Lament for Art O'Leary. To my shame I had never heard of this before, though it is regarded as a great classic of Irish literature. As a document, it is a voice of an 18th Century woman, heard too seldom, and illustrative of the suppression of the Catholics of Ireland under English rule and the power of petty officials. As a work of art it is a wail of anguish, of anger and of desire - of thwarted passion and revenge. Rhythmically declaimed, it brought tears.

I am getting a taste for this, maybe I will go to more. Though the invitation to the free meal where I can brush against the skirts of fame will not be there and I will have to pay to get in. Now back to reading the lament.

Incomunicado

I am just back from a weekend away where there was no Internet and no signal for a mobile phone, cut off with only with a few friends from the Over the Hill Club (don't ask). The ten mile hikes are now replaced by gentle strolls and the alcohol consumption is down as age creeps up.

This time we were in Staithes, a North Yorkshire coastal village where the Arctic wind from the North Sea seems unrelenting. In November it is bleak with steep hills to climb and beautiful enough in a bleak and hilly way. The village itself is different, claustrophobic, wedged between two cliffs and divided by a ravine. In contrast to the wide sweep of the North York Moors it has the feel of the close fishing communities that lived there. And, since the end of the 19th Century it had played a role in the visual arts, hosting the Staithes Group or Northern Impressionists, the most notable of whom was Laura Knight. Now, inevitably, the village is dominated by holiday lets, though some life remains. It is the story of coastal communities as tourism develops and we rush to the sea for relaxation, which is exactly what I was doing this weekend.

Sanity

The world gone mad one

Fat people are more likely to become criminals, and their very fatness may help shape their criminality. That's the conclusion reached by Professor Gregory N Price in a study called Obesity and Crime: Is There a Relationship? published in the journal Economics Letters.

The world gone mad two

This Friday Sky1 HD and world-renowned psychic medium Derek Acorah will attempt to make contact with Michael Jackson in two special shows, Michael Jackson: The Live Seance and Michael Jackson: The Search For His Spirit.

Prisons and the vote

Norm discusses the disenfranchisement of prisoners and wonders why those who advocate giving inmates the vote seem to rarely put forward a clear case. Leaving aside the notions that prisoners are still human beings and citizens and that there is often an arbitrary division between custodial and non-custodial sentences, I would make two observations in support of the enfranchisement of offenders drawn from my experience working in a lifelong learning department that provided higher education in prisons.

The first is that prisoners are directly and intimately affected by decisions of the state and thus should have a say in their own representation. This is not just as a result of penal policy either.

For example, in 1997 the new Labour government introduced a very welcome funded fee remission scheme for low income students in part-time higher education. The money was managed by the universities' hardship funds and allowed the allocation of fee support to offender learning in prisons. Then, for some unknown reason, the government switched the allocation of funding from universities to local authorities. This created the usual short-term muddle out of a perfectly good system, but it also had another consequence. Prisoners do not have a local authority to apply to for support. Thus a, possibly unintended, effect of the change was the ending of inmates' access to some educational programmes. Prisoners are not a fashionable cause and, crucially, they are not voters. It makes it easy to overlook their needs.

Secondly, and more importantly, there is the issue of prison as something other than a system of retribution. Giving rights to prisoners may have wider social benefits.

Our experience in Hull was that those who were involved in our courses had a far lower rate of re-offending than the national average. Academically, many were amongst our highest achievers, but I think there is more to it than that. One thing that engagement in education did was aid in a process of social re-integration. Social exclusion and political exclusion walk hand-in-hand. The exercise of political rights is one small part of citizenship, of inclusion. It is that very social inclusion that is a key element in preventing recidivism.

These utilitarian points aside, I also liked the impassioned speech given at last year's presentation night by the person who accepted the awards on behalf of our students who were otherwise detained. He said that, "whether we liked it or not, prisoners were part of our community". They are and I see no reason why they should be excluded from the rights and duties of citizenship whilst deprived of their liberty.

Damage

At least the row on the unutterably stupid government decision not to fund institutions for teaching students who are studying for a qualification at an equivalent or lower level (ELQ) to one they hold already is not going away judging by this report (see here, here, here, here, and here for just some of my previous posts on this).

The article is about the absurdity of being unable to retrain if life takes a different path, but the focus is still on taking 'second degrees'. Anyone concerned with lifelong learning would know that the worst damage was done to the university adult education sector as a whole and short courses in particular.

Perversely, the people losing out often had no qualifications at all. The reason is simple. If around 20%-30% of students become unfundable as they have previous qualifications, then programmes and departments are seen as non-viable without them, so they close or downsize, leaving the remaining 70%-80% of students with little or nothing. As Ian Ground wrote, it marks the loss of the great civic mission (pdf) of universities.