Blogs
Owning a Country
January 6, 2009
I have read a lot over the years about the internal operation of totalitarian societies. So I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to read yet another book in that genre. But North Korea was much in the news, so I purchased veteran journalist Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. My fears were groundless, I found it deeply informative.
Turning Parents into Criminals
January 6, 2009
A great way to turn most parents into criminals overnight would be to ban all corporal punishment in the home. Make smacking illegal, and most of the adult population would find themselves to be lawbreakers. That is the likely outcome of yet another call to ban all hitting of children.
Read more...Bernard Black - a profile
December 14, 2008
You know Bernard Black. Everyone knows Bernard. The writer you think of whenever the words “Australia’s Leading Indigenous Writer and a Living National Treasure” pop into your mind.
Read more...Left win literary award - again
January 6, 2009
Richard Flanagan’s wild, environmentalist diatribe called “Out of Control” won the $15,000 John Curtin Prize for Journalism in the 2008 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Read more...Unequal bargaining power
January 5, 2009
A striking feature of actually existing socialism is that there is no sin of capitalism which it did not commit worse, usually far worse. The collection of articles in The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag describe a society, via a mixture of general analysis and case studies, with genuinely unequal bargaining power, using information now available from the former Soviet archives.
Read more...At the Movies with Blecker and Nun
January 4, 2009
For years and years and years Blecker and Nun have bored their way through weakly [sic] TV programs of film criticism.
Read more...American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
January 3, 2009
Two excellent books on human bondage are Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter Kolchin and Nobel Laureate Robert William Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. Fogel is a pioneer of cliometrics, the (particularly statistical) analysis of economic history. Both books are clearly written, tapping into a wealth of evidence.
Titanic Inc. buys Gitmo franchise
January 2, 2009
With emotion, though speaking falteringly in English, Kevin Rudd, the CEO of Titanic Inc, announced that the company has successfully purchased the franchise for Gitmo detonators in the Australasian region.
Read more...Riot or Revolution
December 22, 2008
Don Parham’s Riot or Revolution is an excellent documentary on the Eureka Stockade of 1854. Narration over scenes from the period (either pictures or acted recreations) is interspersed with comments by historians (Geoffrey Blainey, Weston Bate, Anne Beggs Sunter) and writer Thomas Keneally. Which is all good, but what makes Riot or Revolution particularly effective is the use of actors to portray historical characters speaking their documented words in a series of soliloquies. This anchors the documentary in the perspectives of the people at the time – either in their words as the events were unfolding or in their reflections later on what they did and saw.
Read more...Modelling the Medieval
January 2, 2009
Hatcher and Bailey’s Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England's Economic Development examines the various “supermodels” of medieval (particularly English medieval) history: the demographic model (Malthusian or neo-Malthusian), the class model (Marxist) and the commercialisation model (Smithian).
Obama in Hobart
January 2, 2009
Great News! On New Year’s day Global Warming was cured and the President Elect was sighted in Hobart.
Read more...Medieval Village Life
January 1, 2009
Life in a Medieval Village is by the inveterate medieval history popularisers (I mean that in a good sense) Frances & Joseph Gies. It concentrates on the village of Elton in England. (I wondered if there was a bit of an historian's in-joke in the choice.)
G. G. Coulton’s The Medieval Village is an older work (originally published in 1925) with much wider coverage geographically. It is so saturated with quotes from medieval sources that one gets a very good view of the complexity of medieval life.
Read more...So you think you’re a Darwinian?
December 31, 2008
Is the title of a philosophical journal article by philosopher David Stove. Darwinian Fairytales is a posthumously published book of essays attacking Darwinism, including said article.
David Stove was a very great admirer of Charles Darwin. He believed that the theory of natural selection was an enormous contribution to science. He believed that it is overwhelmingly probable that humans evolved from some other animal. He further believed that Darwinism was, as applied to humans, an obviously false, and, indeed, a ludicrous, slander on human beings.
Read more...The Lost Literature of Socialism
December 14, 2008
Genocide—in the broad sense the extermination of people by [particularly race or class]* category—is a socialist idea whose only significant public advocates from the 1840s to the 1940s all called themselves socialists. It starts with Marx and Engels writing in the Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung in January 1849 (The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward), includes H. G. Wells concluding his 1902 Anticipations with a programme of socialist genocide, George Bernard Shaw welcoming the Soviet adoption of the exterminatory principle in a 1933 preface to On the Rocks, a principle thoroughly endorsed by Lenin in his 1908 essay Lessons of the Commune (there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes).
Evolution as a Religion
December 30, 2008
Mary Midgley is one of the great ornaments of contemporary philosophy, a graceful, clear, penetrating and sensible thinker and writer. So I expected to enjoy, and be enlightened by, her Evolution as a Religion and, mostly, it was so.
The "cursed generation"
December 29, 2008
According to reviewer Bernard Chapin author Roger L. Simon had second thoughts about the havoc his cursed generation bought upon the American people.
Read more...Witchcraft in Europe
December 9, 2008
It took me a while to finish Witchcraft in Europe: 400-1700. Reading through primary sources is something that I find I can only do in spurts. The pieces tend to the wordy, which can be good for helping one go to sleep. Which is not to say I did other than appreciate the book greatly. The short lead-in commentaries were intelligent, helpful and informed. The pieces themselves were great insights into what people thought and did, though the misogyny becomes wearing after a while. Wow, what weird things people believed and acted upon. And we are talking the intellectual elite here – such substantial intellectual figures as Jean Bodin.
Tracey does Xmas
December 28, 2008
Caught up with Tracey after Christmas. Even though she is taking a well deserved break from researching her PhD in performing arts she was looking a bit frazzled. It can’t be easy being a checkout chick with a conservationist conscience giving out all those plastic bags and I know that Rudd's performance on the environment has been getting her a bit depressed lately.
Read more...Death of the Author
December 29, 2008
Literary critics can get all excited about that biographical stuff. It’s a living, I suppose. But us ordinary readers entirely understand that the narrative voice is, in all the senses relevant to us as mere readers, freestanding. We probably generally don’t think about it much, but the fact that we don’t feel the need to engage in biographical research to enjoy a novel can be taken as a fair indication that we are cool with the freestanding voice thing.
Read more...Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction
December 28, 2008
Edward Feser’s Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction is an excellent introduction to the philosophy of mind. As he brings out in his book, philosophy of mind is deeply interconnected with other areas of philosophy. It is also an extremely active area in contemporary philosophy. (Indeed, Feser appears to have already produced an updated version of the book.)
As is natural, given the subject, Feser starts with Descartes. Actually, he starts with the film The Matrix whose people-in-vats-sharing-a-virtual-reality is an updated version of Descartes how do you know what’s real? question – after all, everything you perceive might be delusions foisted on you by a malignant deity. (The modern version being you might be a brain in a vat being stimulated by Superscientist.)
Read more...Why Societies Need Dissent
December 19, 2008
A fanatic is a person who cannot change their mind and will not change the subject.
(Winston Churchill, attr.)
… they cannot change it, because they have no other subject. That is the nature of their crippled epistemology, without which they would not be fanatics.
Russell Hardin, elaborating.
There are books which give one a profound Aha! experience. Cass Sunstein’s splendid book Why Societies Need Dissent combined with a concept used in the book but taken from an article (The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism [pdf]) provided me which such an experience.
Read more...Race and Slavery in the Middle East
January 4, 2009
Bernard Lewis’s Race and Slavery in the Middle East (originally published in 1990), is a slim volume examining attitudes within Islam on race and slavery.
Lewis carefully distinguishes between Islam as the religion taught by Muhammad, Islam as the religious tradition that grew up from that and Islam as the civilisation based on the religion
Read more...Evolution's Rainbow
December 4, 2008
Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People is a treatise on taking diversity seriously which starts with biology, moves on to biologically-grounded anthropology and concludes with biologically-grounded sociology.
Read more...Al Qaeda in its own words
December 27, 2008
Islam and democracy are incompatible because democracy makes the people sovereign, an offence against the sovereignty of Allah; because democracy claims the right to legislate, taking what is Allah’s; and because democracy allows infidels to have authority over Muslims.
Islam and equality of rights are incompatible, because freedom of religion permits apostasy, abolishes jihad, fails to enforce the legal inferiority of non-Muslims as dhimmis on whom the jizya is to be levied and abolishes man’s dominion over woman.
Liberal democracy is thus un-Islamic, indeed blasphemous. So Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian theorist who is second-in-command of al Qaeda assures the world in Sharia and Democracy, a treatise extensively excerpted in The Al Qaeda Reader edited by Raymond Ibrahim, an American of Coptic background. The Al-Qaeda Reader provides a selection of texts from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s chief ideologist.
Read more...The Legacy of Jihad
December 24, 2008
It is doubtful that there is any aspect of Islam about which there is more misinformation disseminated – wittingly or unwittingly – than jihad. Typically, such misinformation belittles the role and nature of jihad to make Islam seem as innocuous as possible.
This despite the fact that there is a plethora of Islamic texts and historical accounts which show quite clearly that jihad – offensive war to spread Islam – was a basic feature of Islam from the time of the Prophet onwards, as The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims compiled by Andrew Bostom makes quite clear.
Read more...Naked
December 26, 2008
Corey Taylor’s Naked: The Life and Pornography of Michael Lucas is about a gay Russian Jew porn actor and director who has turned himself into New York celebrity.
Covering Michael Lucas’s life from growing up in the Soviet Union to his current near A-list celebrity status, it is an admiring celebration of a classic immigrant-makes-good-in-the-US story.
The story bounces along nicely. Taylor conveys well the claustrophobic oppressiveness of the Soviet Union, the sheer unpleasantness of so much of daily life. One gets a good picture of the pervasive anti-Semitism of an officially atheist state (a case which ironically demonstrates the silliness of Marx’s understanding of Jew-hatred and how to solve it—get rid of religion).
Taylor also conveys the wounding and oppressive nature of fear and ignorance about human sexuality.
Read more...Love among the ruins
December 27, 2008
Christmas is over. A splendid new year, well interesting anyway, stretches before us. But spare a thought for the unfortunate Left.
Read more...Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star
December 25, 2008
Some books just have irresistible titles and Rich Merritt’s Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star was such a book for me.
It turned out to be an engaging personal story that manages to encapsulate many of the tensions of modern American life, how divergent the roles one person can play. Particularly when raised in a social milieu where being true to one’s nature is not an acceptable role.
Read more...Tsunami warning
December 24, 2008
Thomas Sowell: The rise in unemployment after the stock market crash of 1929 was a blip on the screen compared to the soaring unemployment rates reached later, after a series of government interventions.
Read more...The ASIO tapes - Kevin Rudd
December 24, 2008
Kevin Rudd is the CEO of Titanic Inc. This confidential Report points to the source for his internationally acclaimed linguistic excellence and gives examples of his uncanny ability to descend to the level of his audience.
Read more...Islamic Imperialism
December 23, 2008