Unfinished articles 1

Much as it may look like it- I have not gone away. The last month or so has been a rather tiresome time at work because I have been travelling a lot and that's reduced the time I've had to spend with my computer and I just haven't felt inspiration recently. One of the things I find about blogging is that I need an idea to animate a piece- it happens every so often that you read a book or see a film which sparks in you an idea- sometimes though you can feel you are stretching your material or are unsure of what you want to say. M.R. James in his ghost stories once wrote an article about unfinished stories- unfinished ideas that he had had- I'd like to borrow his concept- these are posts which are lurking in my subconscious as I write this piece. They may appear one day- they may never appear- but they are things I have started writing since April and haven't finished.

Religion and Realism: I am currently in the midst of the Brothers Karamazov. In the book at one point the narrator notes that Alyosha the religious one of the three brothers is the supreme realist. It is an interesting idea I think, particularly given that since Dosteovsky wrote the world has become more and more convinced that religion is separate from the natural world we live in. I think what he was trying to get at was that for Alyosha and for most premodern religious people, religion permeated their everyday perception of events and was not separate from it. This is true probably of many modern religious people and I think it marks out the fallacy of implying that religion is about faith or dreams or the supernatural, it is something that one perceives.

Burnt by the Sun: this film I was shown by a friend of mine over Easter- actually on the Royal Wedding weekend (which I avoided by going to Normandy). Its a very sad examination of Stalinism and I found it incredibly tragic- the kind of film that you cry over. I think its so powerful because it shows you ordinary lives effected by Stalin: the most pathetic character is a little girl who is sweet and curious and naive but over whom hangs a threat that she does not understand. It also perfectly gets who faced danger in Stalin's Russia- the Revolution really did eat its Children.

Hamlet: over Easter I went to the National Theatre's production of Hamlet. Its not a play I know well- I did Othello and Twelfth Night at School- but it was an amazing performance and really made me think both positively and negatively about life itself. I couldn't think of how to say anything new or interesting about Hamlet but I found it a very powerful experience- I'm not sure that this was an idea for an article or simply a platitude in search of a home!

Bloodlands: Tim Snyder's book is one I've been trying to review for ages but have never quite found the key to unlock it. Its about one of the most terrifying periods and places in history- Poland, Belorrussia and Ukraine from 1932 to 1945. Uncountable numbers of people were killed by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes in that period. What Snyder gives you is both a new reference point for the killings- more from starvation and 'low tech' murder than from gassing- and a new grasp of their horror for individual Jews, Poles and Ukrainians- but also a sense of how these two barbaric tyrannies squared off against each other for being the land based rival to the sea based atlantic imperiums to their west. Its a gruesome story and Snyder brings out elements that I had never understood. It is all the more powerful because for Snyder the individaul deaths are deaths of individuals- fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers. I find this one hard to write because reading it was difficult and writing about it would be worse: that Snyder and others can is something I admire. Thinking about Stalin or Hitler reduces me to depression!

These are just some of the thoughts which haven't quite made it out there over the last month- I apologise for the rambling nature of this post but I wanted to get something down on them all. Thoughts will flee and be replaced by others- what I hope is that some day all of these turn into articles: if not then I hope they can grow in the minds of others!

Comments policy

I thought I'd clarify something because of something that I came across this evening- I don't want to be mystical about it but that's all I'm going to say. Basically my comments policy on this blog is pretty straightforward: I will publish and respond (if I have time) to any comment that I think is genuinely engaging with what I have to say. I'll be a bit more curt with comments that I think are being curt with me. I won't publish comments that are obviously spam or offensive in some way.

If a comment is acceptable by my criteria and with people like Claude or Goodbanker or Edmund and numerous others that's almost always true, the only reason I won't have published it is that I've just forgotten to check comments recently! I should be better: sometimes I wonder if I should take off moderation, that is until I get attacked by the spammers again. But that's the basic rule: anyone who engages with me as a commenter, who thinks and wants to be in a conversation with me and others will be published: if you don't, you won't.

If anyone is ever worried about a comment not being published do email me on the email address which is around somewhere but is gracchii at gmail and I'll respond.

(And come and look at my website selling spanners is not a comment which is the start of a conversation about near anything this blog covers!)

Happy Birthday Bloggingheads

Its the fifth birthday of Bloggingheads. Its a wonderful resource even for those of us outside America- I love some of the diavlogues they have hosted and if you haven't listened, go over there and try something on language, science or American politics.

Jose Saramago's Blog

I wish I could read Portugeese: unfortunately I can't. If I did, I'd be reading Jose Saramago's blog. Saramago's blog explodes two virulent myths. The first is that the internet is only for the young. Saramago is voyaging into the latter half of his eighties, indeed if anything he is a model for a future in which noone stops working until they stop being able to work. Secondly there is the idea that great writers- academics, novelists etc- should stick only to the book or article forms. Obviously a blog is different from a book or an article- I'm currently writing an article about 1653 and the Barebones Parliament which I would never publish here (partly as I don't know how to do footnotes on blogger), but that doesn't mean its impossible to do useful stuff up here. Useful stuff both in the sense that it is useful to read- I have learnt a lot from a variety of blogs- and in the sense that it is useful to the writer, it refines what you think. Saramago is a new blogger but I hope many more writers and thinkers join him, the internet is too valuable a place to be left to those currently on it!

Entitled Opinions and A History of Rome

Its been a fairly heavy week workwise and the blog has had to take a backseat. Next week I am away and the redoubtable Sulla will be posting on the blog. I thought though rather than arguing about history or about films or anything else today, I'd actually post about something I have just discovered or rather two things I have just discovered. Both illustrate the use that the internet can be put to in the course of civilising us all- including myself. Both are podcasts. The first is Entitled Opinions- this comes from Stanford University and is hosted by Stanford's professor of Italian and French, Robert Harrison. Basically Harrison invites members of the academic community and other intellectuals onto his program and interviews them for an hour about the subject of their specialism. In a sense it resembles In our Time, my favourite BBC podcast, but it is probably slightly less accessible than In our Time. No allowances are made here- there is no dumbing down- there is even an entire discussion with Michel Serre in French. The themes and quality varies widely of course- it depends on how well Professor Harrison's guests adapt to the format. Some of the programs are brilliant though- I particularly enjoyed a series of programs he did with Professor Thomas Sheehan about the historical Jesus and Resurrection Event. Before them I had never paid enough attention to Matthew 27.53- quite what Professor Sheehan makes of that I will leave you to discover.

The second podcast is actually one that was recommended to me by Peter Cuthbertson. Mike Duncan is a great narrator. Basically what he does is take you week by week through the entire history of Rome- starting with the first foundation in 753 BC perhaps and currently he is up to Domitian (I'm a couple of episodes behind so he may have got to Nerva). What he does is to read the ancient historians and some modern historians- he does not pretend to be an expert on what happened- but what he offers is a very accessible and fun introduction to the history of Rome. He has a great sense of humour as well which makes his podcasts very lively and they are intellectually stimulating. What he does is provide you with a chronology upon which you can hang the other knowledge that you have- some of the things he has said have filled in gaps for me in my knowledge of Rome and I'm sure that will be true for many of his listeners- very few people know about the entire history of Rome from beggining to end and its good to have this simple and straightforward, entertaining, amusing and accurate narrative of what happened.

These two podcasts illustrate to me what the internet should and could be about- distributing knowledge from people who know stuff to people who don't, sharing our experiences of the world. So often it is merely a talking shop or rather a shouting shop as one side abuses the other politically or culturally- but it does not have to be like that and both Harrison and Duncan capture ways in which the internet can contribute to, rather than detract from, the enlightenment of mankind.

Podcasts

I want to mention a blog I've just come across- Podthoughts- its a set of reviews of podcasts which I've found very useful. It has introduced me to two fantastic podcasts- Entitled Opinions from the University of Stanford. The second is Leftfield Cinema. Both are really very good- entitled opinions surveys with expert opinion everything from the history of Jesus to the text of Virgil to Freud. Left field Cinema is the best film podcast that I have yet come across- broadcast by a young British film maker it surveys films from Bergman, Tarkovsky, Herzog, Hitchcock and so many others in an intelligent ways. I listened to Leftfield Cinema and thought for a moment that I wished that that was what I wished my own film reviews were like.

Sulla again

Sulla returns again. I'll be posting for Gracchi while his away this week. So any errors,typoos, aggreviations etc should be blamed on myself and not he!

Computers and Books

Stacy's post on Huntingdon's Clash of Civilisations is well written and thought out. But Stacy's post exemplifies something more than that- something that I often try to do on this blog. It is to take something that does not exist on the net- a book, a film, whatever- and to record your impressions on the net. That kind of article seems to me to distill something for the reader- gives the reader something that they could not find themselves unless they devoted time to reading an hundred pages of Livy or a passage of Huntingdon. I do not underrate the things that you can find on the internet- the Old Bailey website as I have commented before is a key resource for this blog- but I do think that the best blogs are about something more than a dialogue within the internet. Like Ashok for example, they take texts and arguments from outside the net and explain, refine and consider them within the internet. The net here becomes a mere extension of the Republic of Letters- an extension which allows everyone to write a common place book.

I was provoked to this by reading an article from the Scientific American about how we process text. It is an interesting article which argues that reading on the net involves more distractions and makes cognition and comprehension harder- as I read a page on the internet, I have to adapt to colours and adverts- often moving adverts. I find the argument that that changes the experience of reading and perhaps makes it a less intense and 'thick' experience quite convincing. The means of communication may make concentration harder: and in a sense blogging itself is a medium which does not require as much concentration as reading a book. I would expect you to take a couple of minutes to read this article- and then you might pass over to read something else either on this blog or another. Personally this form helpful to distill my arguments about longer passages- like a book or film- but I would find it hard to read for much further than the 10,000th word of an article (trust me on this having written a PhD I have had to read 80,000 words on a screen, it was painful!) Blogging works online because it allows us not to develop major ideas or scholarly rigour- we have neither space nor time- but it allows a common place book, recording impressions and ideas and hopefully developing a community around each blog which discusses and thinks about similar things.

Gracchi is back

I am back- thanks to Vino for a fine guest post. I was away for work for a week but normal service is now returned.

Blogpower- the pious roundup

A couple of years ago I joined a group of small bloggers called blogpower. What is Blogpower? When it was started I remember that it was about the smaller blogger and attempting to get him or her a bit of the limelight and to be supportive of each other. Going round Blogpower this evening I learnt a hell of a lot- and perhaps the most important lesson I learnt was how good the blogs in Blogpower are. This roundup was pretty easy- and if I missed you off it was because I didn't have to look hard for posts at all and so being a lazy blogger, didn't. Anyway to business.

When thinking about the high profile bloggers- lots of them from Iain Dale to Andrew Sullivan have become minor celebrities- as David Hadley writesthis concept of the celebrity is something that we all should be thinking about, it dominates our landscape (and renders me suspicious that larger bloggers can ever provide the change in perspective that the Tin Drummer wants to see). The thing you miss with celebrity bloggers though is that they only take on celebrated issues- smaller bloggers are often more interesting- just take a look for example at the Fake Consultant's post on Egyptian elections- its an issue which will never make the tabloids but which we need to understand. On a similar theme, the Cornish Democrat posts a fascinating essay from Tom Nairn on the concept of nationalism- this is exactly the kind of thing that small blogs do well, disseminate academic work which often gets lost. If you stray from the mainstream, you also think about new and interesting issues- like why for example there are so few famous female artists, whether a sexual orientation really can have a duty to vote one way or another, why national symbols can be counter-productive (this is a long and exceptionally interesting article), whether assisted suicide should be made legal, whether cricket can conquer America- small bloggers do this whilst also providing concise and thoughtful reformations of current issues (like this summary of the arguments against the bailout and David Keen's guide to the British conferences is essential reading for those who weren't there). Coming out of the party conferences- Louis shows the Tories the way forward, Bob marvels at Gordon's gamble of a reshuffle, Mike questions Cameron's links to the hedge funds and Andrew praises the Libdems.

Away from such stuff- politics is not life and bloggers do not just blog about politics. Tom puts politics in perspective this week. My own recent post on Cincinnatus attempts to go back into Roman history and reinterpret this figure's place within that history. Others are also in the business of reading stuff, so you don't have to- Heather has been reading Esure press releases about cars and comes to some interesting conclusions. I like Crushed's unconstrained enthusiasm for the film, the Libertine, he also compliments one of my favourite actresses Samantha Morton which is a mark of good taste, and prompts me to want to see the film. If Crushed is ecstatic, perhaps he needs to listen to this piece of music whose sad movement is the perfect audio post. JMB doesn't need sad music, she has computer shops to contend with. But at least she doesn't live in Rabat, where sexism in Ramadan seems to thrive nor face the gloom of British adverts- bah humbug. Morning star just keeps the gloom going by discussing pain during diabetic eye tests. But even in dark times, we need humour- I loved this post of bad spellings and misplaced sentences. Jams helps by bringing us news of British triumphs at the IG Nobels. Just to surprise everyone Welshcakes has yet again posted some pictures of a pure cullinary delight (he says feeling his stomach rumbling). On a serious note, Liz posts about support in the blogosphere and how important it can be: Callum suggests the very act of blogging can be helpful in bad times. We should never lose sight of the fact that its humans writing blogs- and humans get ill, have bad times and good times: one who hasn't been having it so well recently is Mutley who's been to hospital- here's to him getting well again.

This may seem all a bit ideological but I think there is a point here- whether you agree or disagree with the posts above (and I agree with some and disagree with others) you can find a lot there to make you think. As the Pub Philosopher notes, we face at the moment a gap in information about things that are important to our live- he is talking about politics but could be talking about any number of things- I beleive that good blogs can help shrink that gap. I'm sure I've missed good posts- but this is what I saw this week and this reassures me that there is a hell of a lot of good thinking and writing going on- and that's without even including some of my favourite blogpower blogs that didn't post over the last couple of days.

And with that pious paean to the small blogger, that's all folks till next week's roundup!

Comrades!

Just thought I'd mention two blogs by two friends of mine- Doug and the Organic Viking- both are interesting and thoughtful and both of their blogs are worth reading. Anyway I thought I'd introduce them by providing an examination of two of their posts. The Organic Viking has recently posted what looks like a delicious courgette fritter recipe (she is running the risk of being as bad for me as Welshcakes Limoncello- whose blog I can never read without feeling hungry) however that is not the post of hers I wanted to highlight.

She works on Vikings- and a couple of days ago spent her time in Cafe Nero on King Street in Cambridge working on her thesis and knitting at the same time. One of the things that I think is underrated in working life today is the ability of people to relax and get more out of what they are doing. I know exactly what she was up to- in the sense that what you do as a historian is absorb texts and then try and work out what in that morass of pages is interesting and what provides something that you can work with. Often when you are doing that, changing your surroundings and doing something else whilst you are doing it helps- because it keeps the mind active and also supple. The mind in a sense is a muscle that you need to keep in exercise- one of the things that I wonder about modern jobs in offices is that whilst they provide you with assurance that all your employees are there all the time, I'm not entirely sure that they provide work of the best quality.

Doug on the other hand is a lawyer- a breed not known for their ability to relax and for whom lateral thinking is called all sorts of names (don't worry Doug is the kind of lawyer who can see minature golf courses in ancient monuments!). What Doug provides though is an example of the way that lateral thinking benefits a group of the best entrepreuneurs in the world- the Italian mafia. In times of financial crisis with food prices rising, they have diversified into the smuggling of bread and mozarella. Its interesting to reflect on the capacity of crime to change its nature depending on the law throughout history- people are often after the fast buck whether that's drink in the Great Depression or the corporations of crime that emerged after the second world war. The nature of crime tells us a lot about the society we live within- in a society in which commodity prices are rising, where health and safety laws are proliferating- it was only a matter of time before someone decided to ignore the latter in order to keep the former down: the fact its the latest evolution of the Italian Mafia is merely a testament to their creativity.

Anyway back to Livy!

Where were you when you heard about...

Dave Cole has just tagged me with a meme- and as I think its an ok one- and furthermore I hadn't got any better ideas of anything to write about this evening here goes,

The Death of Princess Diana- I was half asleep. To be fair I remember being half asleep and my brother coming into my room and saying Diana's dead and we went down and watched it on TV. I can't remember anything else about it- apart from the fact that all the TV networks were showing Diana non stop for weeks afterwards.

Margerate Thatcher's resignation 22nd November 1990- actually this is an interesting one because it is my first significant political memory (before that I'd been far more into Arthur Ransome and history). I was coming home from Sainsburys and school with my mother- we got out of the car and a neighbour shouted across, 'She's gone', no need to know who 'She' was. My next political memory interestingly is a chat about John Major with my dad.

Attack on the Twin Towers 11th September 2001- this actually came at an odd time in my life when every time I was abroad there was a national disaster. It all started with a trip that me and Vino and some others took to Europe- immediatly there was the fuel crisis. The next year again I set off with Vino and the same group to Ireland, and we were on a bus in Ireland, got off the bus went into a neighbouring cafe to wait for another bus to take us to our youth hostel- and this must have been in the late afternoon- they had footage of what had happened on the screen behind us. Cue, as you would expect, political argument ad nauseum...

England vs Germany World Cup Semi-Final 1990- this seems to be a good exercise in picking firsts- this was the first football match I properly and consciously watched, being aware of how it went, aware of what the tactics were etc. I still remember the desperation of the last half hour and the terrible bad luck of the German goal...

President Kennedy's assassination 22nd November 1963: strange to think that this was 27 years before Margerate Thatcher's resignation! But I wasn't alive at that point- it is one of the many events- from the Potsdam and Yalta conferences forward that my generation lives in the direct shadow of. I suspect with Ted Kennedy's speech at the Democratic convention we are moving yet another step further away from JFK- if that is indeed his brother's last contribution to politics- and one of the perilous insights of historians is that all these events will one day, however dramatic they seem now, pass out of story and song into forgetfulness. It is happening with Diana's death- it is happening with that semi-final, will happen to Thatcher and to September 11th. Kennedy's death was so important at the time- but now it is fading and I suspect for my grandchildren will be as important as President McKinlay's is today.

I suppose I have to tag someone incidentally- I'm going to go for James Hamilton, the Organic Viking, Ian Appleby, Chris Dillow and Matt Sinclair.

Jumping Karra

One of my favourite bloggers on the internet is Ashok Karra- his website has just moved from blogger to here- I cannot recommend what he writes enough, its detailed, thoughtful and interesting- even when you disagree with it, you have to take it into account.

Friendship and the Internet

The internet is decidedly a rum thing. It is not just that it facilitates communication over hundreds of miles, between cultures and continents that have never communicated on this level before- or disseminates news so fast that I can beat a BBC correspondent to knowing something and know it seconds after it has happened on the other side of the world- but that it has done things to human communication that other media (with the limited exception of the telephone) could never do. It has given us not a new dimension to our personalities but a new dimension to the way that we communicate. I am writing this- and I know there are about fifty of you, maybe more, maybe less, who are reading it- you could be in Salisbury, Cirencester, Saratoga or Swaziland- I have no idea- all I know is that you are reading it and we are communicating. That's rum. It is something that would not have happened twenty years ago- I couldn't phone fifty people- I might meet fifty people in a day but they would all be in my office, probably live quite near to me and probably have quite similar backgrounds and interests (ie they have turned up in the same place as me at some point in their life). Now though- you are all reading me and I have the same relationship to you in some ways that a film star had to their audience- I know you are there, I have no idea who you are.

Even if I do know who you are the change is still there and still interesting. There are some people who I know read this blog. There are some who I know read it avidly- there are some who I have emailed, discussed issues with, chatted with via the medium of Mr Google and yet have never ever seen in my life. There are some who after having chatted to on the internet- I have met- but most of the people I know through this blog, I wouldn't know if I walked past them on the street. That is an interesting thing to think about- and it is something I want to spend some time working out- because I think that my social interraction with people I know through the internet is different and similar to that with people I do not know through the internet.

Let us start with the basics of a friendship developed over the internet. How do I know you- and how do you know me? We know each other through the written word. We have no idea of what each other looks like or sounds like. That is odd. We all work by looks in every day life. We all think x looks a bit shifty, y looks open minded- and we all rely on physical signals- picking your nose demonstrates that you do not understand modern manners, smelling of sweat demonstrates that you do not understand modern sanitation and so on. We all do it- and those signals are only used because they are useful. If you are incredibly smelly, it could be because its a hot day- but it also could be because you have not bathed for a month. The same thing goes for the way that people speak- if I drone on, its probably because I don't enjoy what I'm talking about which is a good signal that noone else in their right mind would- excitement denotes the fact that someone else might be excited. Conversations are more difficult without those little signals- the sarcastic incline of the head, the joky insult, the moment at which you are close to breaking point and sound angry- those are all impossible on the web- Google chat has as many smillies as you could imagine but cannot cover all of the uses of the human head in the permutations of the 100 or so keys on a standard computer keyboard.

So relationships formed over the internet are bound to be less communicative- they are also bound to take less time. I went out on Friday evening with a friend- and spent around 4 hours solidly chatting with her. I would never spend four hours chatting with someone on Gchat. The longest I have spent must run to half an hour. My longest ever phone conversation runs to three hours. Just think though that in the three hours phone conversation I have the tone of my interlocutor's voice as well as their words, in the four hours with someone in resturants, cafes etc I have their tone and their manner, on the screen I have nothing- potentially the odd smiley and the delay as they write their words which could be down to a computer fault, them getting a cup of tea or just pure irritation with what I last wrote. Its even worse if I am not using a chat program but communicating through the comments on a blog- who knows what reaction I'm getting and how considered it is and how I ought to understand it- and who has ever taken more than 2 minutes over a response to a blog article. Quite simply friendships online are friendships based on so much less in terms of communication. They are based on sentences rather than conversations.

That does not mean that friendship online is impossible. I personally prefer to meet people that I like offline- I then get to understand them better- but some you can't. This article was in response to someone I consider a friend, Ashok, who wrote an article over at his place on a similar theme. But I'd say its more difficult to be friends online than off. Real life friendship and internet friendship are the same beast- fundementally those who think that real life and the internet are completely separate are living in a deluded make believe world- what is different about them is the extent of the communication. When we talk online we do not have the clues that we normally rely on- the reason we rely on those clues is because they are generally useful. There is nothing wrong with having internet friends- but they are harder to understand simply because the keyboard is not as subtle an instrument as the human face.

Britblog

Apologies for being late with this, but as the Tin Drummer suggests Blogging is harder than it looks. Having said that, here goes with this latest series in the Britblog roundup- I hope you enjoy- there is everything from politics to a free film involved!

So lets get started. How about a glass of wine before we zoom into the distance, I mean afterall as Gene Expression notes that was Asterix's magic potion. You aren't so sure about drinking on a school night, well yes I agree, my behaviour changes over the week as well, as Vino points out that's hardly surprising, apparantly the polls in the US are different depending on what day of the week they are taken on. But at least we can trust polls, which is more than you can say, as Tim Ireland argues, about some of the visiting figures put out by bloggers. Tut, tut Tim obsessive I call you- obsession leads to all sorts of bad things, to what Thunderdragon shows is a really bad idea, banning samurai swords and it leads to multiple useless articles being published. Paulie wonders do you really for instance need to read a film's reviews before you go to it: as a reviewer of films I feel guilty and slink under my desk at this point, though I'd argue mine are best read after you've seen the film!

Its hard to type under this here table (thanks Paulie) but I can see the tv screen and even from here I share James Hamilton's view that Cristiano Ronaldo is really astonishing, its almost like watching Dixie Dean. And then I started wondering afterall plenty of people hide under tables, maybe its quite normal- yeah I'm behaving a bit like Letters on a Tory says David Milliband behaves. David and I need to realise that folly ain't so bad, like Lear (as the Wardman Wire suggests) we need fools to tell us the truth. Or else we might all go through that evil process Bob Piper has labelled Torification. Bob is right afterall, the private lives of politicians do matter to an extent. Tim Montgomerie provides the a list as to why they matter over at Centre Right, Matt Sinclair comments on it a bit (and I'm going to write a further addition later). Private lives, that's code for sex isn't it? Sex, sex and more sex. So what about sex then- as Dave Cole argues, our definitions of what constitutes a sex establishment varies- time to go campaigning against lapdancing.

Ah puritanism- that brings us to religion doesn't it. I can see it now the dangerous territory of religion where a blogger mustn't lose their footing, otherwise they are swept off the path to righteousness. Chris Dillow discusses the left's approach to religion. I mean even being secular, as Stephen Law points out, is a difficult enterprise- maintaining neutrality always is. Kate Smurthwaite is not interested in maintaining neutrality, her granddad died of Alzheimers and she doesn't think that religious scruple ought to stand in the way of curing people. Death is the final frontier and its a terrible one: Ellee suggests that there are correlations between people's deaths and the deaths of their partners. Talking of our grandparent's generation, on a brighter note, they would have thrilled to the film The Third Man and despite the fact that its not a British blog as this is a masterpiece of British cinema, I think its worth pausing over this tribute to Bernard Lee and the film in which he played a crucial part (not to mention the fact you can watch it embedded there). Talking of embedded videos, Ben Goldacre has a great one of Jeremy Paxman embarrassing a quack, well worth seeing.

There aren't any quacks on the Blogosphere though- as Francis Sedgemore suggests there is plenty of good leftwing writing out there, despite the fact that the new Burkeans are out to depress us all. And sometimes all that remains is for us bloggers to shake our heads in despair about the way the 'real' world works: I mean as Winchester Whisperer argues do we really need another layer of regulation on the already regulated financial services industry. Whatever our attitude to the present government, we can all marvel that there are people too fascist for the BNP with Mr Eugenides. Away from such depressing thoughts, away lets instead study not the crazy marginalia of society but the interesting marginalia of books. Comments left on the pages of books or tea spilt on the spine are all the topics for Mercurius Politicus's blog post about books and their marginalia. Or lets take a look with the Umpire at some of the cricketing stats- honest they are fascinating.

Alright so there are some of you who just want to be depressed, ok kids well head over to the Early Modern Whale and read this post on Hell! That sorts you out. What you mean there are still some people in the corner who persist in being happy, good luck to you Philobiblon isn't in the mood for bad news either and has some good news items. That seems to have got rid of everyone! Good night and good luck!

Blogging audiences

Iain Dale is entirely right to say that blogging is not really a number's game. He is right for all the reasons he mentions. The one area I would suggest adding to Dale's account is the blog as purely a personal thing- this blog is undisciplined and eclectic partly because it just contains what I'm interested in on a particular day, could be Roman history, could be a 21st century Iranian film. You can market your blog obviously by being more specific but I think it depends what you are aiming for whilst blogging. Iain has been, though coyly he doesn't say this quite, a very successful blogger partly for his chatty style. Others adopt different styles and personas but there is no one right way to blog, you blog because you want to and ultimately its an expression of your personality. A blog which was marketted to a specific degree and turned away from your personality would not be one that was enjoyable to write (I have sometimes written articles because I had to and often those are the worst articles on here in my opinion). Iain is absolutely right and in some ways the more we worry about audiences, the less like blogs we become, the more constrained we are by our audiences.

Guido vs Gracchi the Counterpunch

I give this article a more confrontational title than I want it to have, because having read Guido's response at Samizdata I have to say that I think he has something right and that some of my critique of him was not as plausibly phrased as it should have been. Lets isolate I think three points- one on which we agree, one on which I think I am going to move a little backwards and one where I think we can also establish a point of contact. This is an interesting debate: it has forced me to be much more positive about the kind of blogging that Guido does.

Guido and I agree that perceived self interest is much more important to politicians than self interest- we agree that politicians have a world view in which they do things and that they operate in their own interests. I am interested in what degree politicians are a different species from the general population in this: I'm still thinking about this one.

Where I concede is that Paul Staines is right: there is a separation between Paul and Guido, between the person and the blog persona. Perhaps because this blog is so much the creation of my personal whim and not of any attempt to create a persona, that means that I underestimated that. I should apologise that criticisms of Guido were meant to address the persona and not the person lying behind that persona. I accept the assurances offered that Paul has a long record of thinking about policy- I am sure that he does- most libertarians afterall get to their position after a lot of thinking. Throughout this post therefore I'm going to be quite precise- when I say Paul, I mean the individual behind the blog, when I say Guido I mean the persona in front of the blog so to speak. I hope that is a distinction that we can all agree on.

Lastly he is possibly right that the 'struggle' so far as it is one is going on on his blog and not this one. For the sake of this one I don't care- were the struggle going on here, I couldn't write so many film posts for a start I'd have to be disciplined and stick to politics. That isn't my style. But the real issue I suppose is dual: firstly its about what Paul says is Guido's anti politics. I can see as a libertarian why anti-politics works- in a sense the libertarian answer to the dilemma is to abolish politics itself. Remove stuff from the politicians and things will be fine- I am personally not so sure, as I have written elsewhere I don't think coercive power is simply the same as state power. Nor do I accept that political power is not exercised in other ways in a libertarian society: the people might be different and wear different hats but underlying my suspicion of politicians (something I share with Guido) is a suspicion of people- and ultimately I'm not sure about an anti-political approach to dealing with that. We need to work out systems for constraining and checking individual power and though libertarianism has a lot to contribute to that, I'm not sure that it has the answers.

The second point is about where the struggle is. Paul is right- I shouldn't care about Guido and I don't really care about millions of other blogs like Guido, but I do care about Guido. Thinking about it, its not Guido that I care about, so much as the fact that a gossip blog sits atop the blogging heirarchy in the UK. Its not envy precisely- I don't want this blog to be at the top of the blogging heirarchy- its a sense that Guido's blog doesn't allow his readers to understand what they should understand about the political world. Simply put I think that Guido should exist, but I wonder about the state of the political landscape if its the biggest in the country. That turns me I suppose to a bigger issue which is what blogs do and why people read them: I often wonder whether people's readership of blogs is simply to get a quick fix and whether we bloggers over analyse our output.Whether what people want is just to go over to Guido or Iain Dale and quickly read the latest on there as they take a break from work.

In the end Paul is right when he says that everyone is free to blog as they like- and then popularity comes. I suppose what I'm more interested in is what blogs tells us about politics and whether the story that they tell helps us understand politics. I'm not sure Guido is helpful there- because I think he makes us think that politics is about scandal only. Ultimately though I wonder whether we are still in the Drudge stage of the political cycle and whether as in America we shall see the slow growth of a wonkosphere eventually alongside the blogosphere. It does strike me that the problem with Guido as a blog is that it presents a naive view of politics- even if its writer doesn't hold that view of politics. That so many people read it says either one of two things- firstly that most people reading blogs read them for entertainment not enlightenment, and secondly that most people don't really understand politics that much and turn to sites like say Chris Dillow's or Matt Sinclair's which explain the thinking behind policy much better. I think its a mixture- my real issue is that its hard to find really good political commentary around about ideas and policy at the moment, you don't get it in the newspapers and you don't get it on many blogs. Its hard I think to know about the world of thinktanks and policy making (that world extends far beyond think tanks into the civil service and the business world as well) unless you are in the midst of it. Policy discussions go on over and above the general population who just get the gossip. In that sense Dale and Guido are just extreme versions of the MSM,

and what Britain needs is a stronger Wonkosphere- someone like Matt Yglesias to appear from somewhere!

Britblog

I apologise for not doing this yesterday- other things drove it out of my mind! Anyway here we are today with a more limited and yet still illustrious list of posts from the UK blogosphere. We cover a whole range of experience here from the 17th to the 20th Century. Anyway to kick off how about reading James Hamilton's views on Capello's managment style- interesting and thoughtful as ever. Capello may be adopting a distant style to his players, but as Dave Cole points out the Tories are adopting a much more nannying style to the country. Freemania suspects though that the Tories themselves may need some nannying: is Cameron really only just about as good as Kinnock? Who cares anyway? From the desk of George Galloway we have the greatest attack on Imperialist scum ever delivered- may they die in their own individual Trotskyite, Zinovievist, Bukharanist, revisionist running dog hells!

But if they don't it doesn't matter, as they'll start blogging and end up in a legal fight: Mr Eugenides seeks to adjudicate in the latest battle betwixt Tim Ireland and Guido Fawkes. Calm down lads, the real idiocy is about the issues (as I said yesterday), Matt Sinclair's got a bee in his bonnet about the latest paper from the Social Market foundation on climate change- he isn't too impressed. Incidentally happy birthday Matt- for a two year old you are quite articulate. Don Paskini is another articulate lad concerned with issues, this week its sharing the proceeds of growth and how the Tories don't even understand their own policies! And that's good as it means that you don't have to attend SOAS, where the Iranians are putting on conferences funded with our public money- go to Harry's Place and see what you can do about it. Or rather don't, because society is going to pot anyway and its all religion's fault: we've been having the argument over at Liberal Conspiracy, go and start with Kate Belgravia's provocative and well written post on why Jesus Christ should dominate our politics less. Thing is that Kate should calm down, afterall look at what all those Muslims gave us in the Middle Ages: modern science and all- not convinced- well time to bring on the historians!

And here they come, leaping like a herd of wilderbeast through some savannah forest. First up is that classic civil war debate between Pepper and Puddle the two dogs- canine confusion becomes a metaphor for other debates. On a more illustrious subject, the Early Modern Whale circles around the Old Cheapside Cross and finds out what he can about its history. Some of us though are only too depressed by the present, its hard to avoid when you here that the bulbs are coming up even earlier than usual in Kew Gardens. But not everything is depressing- and ending on a high note- just consider the Political Umpire's tale of these two human beings whose bodies are joined together.

So long till next time I host the carnival- sorry for a short one- but I hope there is something there to savour!

Robert Fisk's review of Fisk's biography of Saddam Hussein

You read the title right: here is Robert Fisk's review of his own biography of Saddam Hussein. Well not quite his own. Though Fisk has a biography of Saddam Hussein published in Egypt, it isn't actually by him, its a forgery, published by an enterprising journalist who had heard of Fisk's leftwing reputation and thought he should have written a biography of Saddam Hussein. Fisk's article is hilarious as he traces this man across Cairio but it brings up for me something even more interesting which is this. We often presume on the internet that we have our identities set in stone and the real danger is that people will snoop on what we write from afar and find out that we are secret conservatives or something. I think that's the wrong danger- though it exists- I wonder whether one of the more interesting internet problems over the next couple of years as blogging matures will be identity theft. Tim Ireland has drawn attention to the problem of sock puppetting on the internet- but I think there are more egregious things to come. Take Iain Dale, the reason I advance Iain is because of his electoral ambitions, it would be perfectly possible for someone to fake an identity as Iain Dale on the internet and start commenting on various blogs in his guise giving electorally embarrassing posts- the same goes for any politician blogging from Paul Flynn and Harry Barnes to Nadine Dorries and John Redwood. Trademark theft on the internet is an interesting issue: I'll be fascinated to see how it develops- especially given what Fisk rightly says about the difficulties of enforcing trademarks in various countries.

Civility

I found this post from Craig Murray rather surprising. Murray is rightly a critic of the ideas of the Times journalist David Aaronovitch- but he has gone further and stated that Aaronovitch is a "sleazy fat neo-con slob". Murray says in his defence of those words that

David Aaronovich is confused as to why I would wish to be impolite about him. The answer is quite plain. Supporting the Iraq War, and cheerleading for it, is not a legitimate policy choice. It is complicity in an appalling act of aggression and mass murder. The invasion of another country, resulting in the death of (literally) countless civilians, in order to seize control of natural resources, was an act of hideous criminality. Nazi "Journalists" stood trial at Nuremberg charged with propagandizing for illegal war.

I tend to have rigorously argued political views. I am, for example, strongly against the private finance initiative and other private provision in the NHS. I am opposed to state aid to Northern Rock. On those and other issues, many people have other opinions and I genuinely respect those views and engage with them, much as I may disagree.

But the Iraq war is not like that. Supporting the illegal invasion of other countries is a crime; it is no more legitimate than to argue that "The Yorkshire Ripper Was Right". It does not surprise me that Aaronovitch and other renegades of the hard left like Phillips and Hitchens have taken this position - ruthlessness and disregard for individuals provide the consistent thread in their odyssey around the unpleasant extremes of politics.

I am afraid, David, that decent people will look down on you the rest of your life. Get used to it.

Murray here equates some political choices with crimes whereas he says that others are just differences of opinion. To invade Iraq is to behave like the Yorkshire ripper, to demand that the NHS be left in inefficient public ownership is to have a political opinion. Nowhere does he define exactly what he means by any of this. Indeed the standard that Mr Murray adopts seems to be whether Mr Murray cares about a particular issue or not. Being opposed to state aid to Northern Rock risks for instance causing the decent into poverty of its depositors- no doubt Mr Murray would disagree- but you could say that to advocate that is to have that on your conscience. Again if you believe that (which I don't) the NHS is more inefficient within the public sector, to oppose its privatisation is literally to sign the death sentence of those who die because we have a worse health sector.

Those who argued for the invasion of Iraq argued that it would produce democracy within Iraq and replace a particularly nasty dictator with a democratic regime. They argued that the concept of international law that Mr Murray believes in, in which the invasion of Poland was a more serious crime than the Holocaust, is overwritten by a concept based on human rights law according to which Saddam Hussein's regime was illegitimate and ripe for deposition. You may agree or disagree with their analysis or their argument- but it isn't a criminal argument or criminal analysis no more than the prudential calculation about the health service or Northern Rock is. I am not sure that there are criminal arguments in politics anyway- though if there are they would one might think have to aim at criminal ends, like the extermination of a race, rather than aim at democratic liberation. Mr Murray's argument makes no sense.

Furthermore its also bad practise. Democracy is about different groups of citizens having widely different opinions on important issues. Freedom of speech allows us all to discuss those issues and come to a view. If we are to do that, we must be at liberty to make our views known and furthermore we must take our time to evaluate and consider views before dismissing them. We also have to take the fact that we are citizens of a comunity that has others within it too seriously- so for example we need to listen and attempt to persuade others to our point of view. Insulting people doesn't help persuade them that you are right- indeed insults prove to me that you have lost an argument because you aren't considering the possibility of persuading your interlocutor. We all occasionally lose our cool- and I am sure Mr Murray has on this occasion- these remarks are not aimed at him personally and there are some arguments which seem petty and ridiculous- but he has announced a principle and I disagree with him. Civility ultimately is neccessary for democracy to survive- something that eighteenth century theorists who crafted our modern notions of politeness well knew.

Amongst the blogosphere's major problems is this tide of invective: it doesn't help either those that manufacture it or those that are the recipients of it.