The musical refuge of British political bloggers is now coming online.

The brainchild of Neil of the Bleeding Heart Show, its purpose is to take some of the strain off us beleaguered partisans as the election approaches and allow us to come together to talk about something else which is dear to our hearts: music.

I encourage all of you poli bloggers out there (or semi-poli bloggers) who are interested in writing something here and there to visit the website and send an email to let us know you’re keen. It’d be great if loads of people joined in. We’ve already got posts in the dock and we hope to go properly live this weekend!

And if you don’t want to write but you like music, please add Heaven is Whenever to your blogroll/RSS feed. You can also follow on Twitter.

Neil Robertson of the Bleeding Heart Show has had a great idea to take some of the unceasing election pressure off us poor exhausted political bloggers:

We are in the midst of an election campaign which would try the patience of a saint. Though blogging is necessarily combative, we would do well to remember that one of its joys is the space it creates to interact with opposing points of view. In the ongoing campaign for our own utopias – our own visions how Britain can be made better – we should not lose sight of this, nor forget that behind the psedonyms & avatars are real people.

So how do we preserve, and even build upon, the fledgling community that this election campaign threatens to coarsen? I have one idea.

We create a space where everyone – regardless of party or ideology – can write about the music they enjoy; our favourite albums, overlooked artists, most memorable gigs or cherished social experiences. We write not as esteemed political bloggers with our gripes and demands and agendas, but as music fans.

For this to work, there should be but three rules:

• You should be a political blogger.
• You should write about any aspect or genre of music.
• Your writing should not be party-political.

Here’s the catch: I can’t do this on my own. As you might’ve noticed, work constraints mean that I’m not currently able to keep my own blog ticking over as much as I’d like, so running two is an impossibility. I’ve already had some kind offers of contribution and admin, and I would be happy to receive more. I would also be delighted if those of you who believe in the concept could promote it within your own blogging communities – the experience will only be richer for having a multitude of voices. Naturally, all contributors would have a link back to their own political blogs, and a spot on the blogroll.

If you would like to contribute, or have any ideas/suggestions, do feel free to leave a comment either here or with LeftOutside, or leave an email at bleedingheartblog at gmail dot com.

I’m doing it. You should too.

For those who attribute basically good and selfless motives to government, consider this logic:

This sort of argumentation reflects a general double standard of morality that is always applied to State rulers but not to anyone else. No one, for example, is surprised or horrified to learn that businessmen are seeking higher profits. No one is horrified if workers leave lower-paying for higher-paying jobs. All this is considered proper and normal behavior. But if anyone should dare assert that politicians and bureaucrats are motivated by the desire to maximize their incomes, the hue and cry of “conspiracy theorist” or “economic determinist” spreads throughout the land.

From Rothbard, For a New Liberty

Simon Heffer laments that funding cutbacks at universities may lead to the teaching of history’s being limited to Britain post-1700 and Europe post-1900.

As a medieval historian, I lament this too (in a way), particularly because, as Heffer points out, historical eras do not exist as discrete events or trends, and everything that happens is entirely dependent on everything else that has happened.

History is also subject to misinterpretation and politicisation. Witness this comment, by one Harbinger, who takes issue with Heffer’s belief that the events of World War I are rooted in the Franco-Prussian War.

I happened to have a very good education, but now I’ve began to seriously question history, especially what I know of WW1 and WW2. I also hate to say it as well, but even going back to the English civil war, I’m now beginning to believe that that itself was orchestrated by the Jewry/Zionists, in order to put Cromwell in power and remove their condition of exile, previously placed upon them in the early 13th century.

Oh rilly? Nothing to do with a series of tyrannical and micromanaging monarchs, then, who ran roughshod over the people’s liberties and declared it was what God himself wanted. No, it was the Joos.

What I also continue to question are the motives behind Britain’s entering WW1, to help France, our arch enemy throughout history, when in all reality, Jewry was also involved yet again, playing the west into destroying the Ottoman Empire in order to create the illegal state of Israel. If course, those who also know history know that WW1 resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Brits, wiping away the possibility of child bearing generations (fathers) in order to utterly destroy the British and their Empire. WW1 was thus created for two reasons – destruction of Britain and the creation of Israel, although our historical propaganda machine won’t tell us that will they?

No, they won’t tell us that, because it’s ridiculous. The ethnic and cultural tensions in Austria-Hungary had nothing to do with the Joos and everything to do with the mishmash of the Holy Roman Empire and its very strange mixture of local, central, and ecclesiastical sovereignty. As for the destruction of the British Empire, why would the Joos have wanted to do that? They were safe and valued in the British Empire, as much as Joos of the period could be said to be safe and valued. It was the British Empire that made the creation of Israel possible.

We can take the slave trade, which of course is told from the slave point of view, not the colonialists now… There is of course the Holocaust, taboo in today’s society that no one may discuss, so as not to upset the Jewish community and if one attempts to deny the “given” death toll they are immediately lambasted and pilloried by society, branded as Holocaust deniers and anti semites and hurriedly pushed out of the positions they hold within society. Some are even arrested and imprisoned for free speech. How bad has society now got, especially as we are told 6 million died, yet a plaque in Auschwitz which stood up until 1995 was removed, stating 4 million died here and replaced with 1.1million died here in WW2?

Um…

We are also never taught either not just about “THE PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION” but also if possession of it in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century would have one instantly shot on sight.

Wha…?

What was Britain has now long since departed the majority of people’s thoughts. We are now simply moving into the last phase of the plans of the NWO, created a long time ago.

And the money shot:

Bottom line Mr Heffer, you can pontificate all you wish on the fact that we are not teaching history, but I’d rather remain blissfully ignorant than brainwashed into believing nothing but rubbish, continually promoted by those who want to see the destruction of your civilisation and downfall of your people.

While it’s true we are not taught everything that ever happened in history, it’s not because of the NWO, the Joos, and the brainwashers (mostly). Our interpretation of history is of course subject to fads, cultural biases, and wider social and political movements, but by and large the evidence of history is cut-and-dried. People do study the effects of the Protocols of Zion, but they don’t treat it as a piece of gospel truth. In the same way, people study texts on alchemy from the Middle Ages – but they don’t set up alchemy labs and use them as instruction manuals for turning lead into gold or making a philosopher’s stone.

I like that this guy is advocating a healthy scepticism, which is of course vital for any student of history. I just wish he’d apply it to his own arguments as well as his opponents’.

(That’s ‘thicker’ in the American blues sense, meaning amply proportioned but shapely.)

Scientists say: big bottoms and thighs protect against cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Big bellies… don’t.

Lead researcher Dr Konstantinos Manolopoulos, of Oxford University, said: “It is shape that matters and where the fat gathers.

“Fat around the hips and thighs is good for you but around the tummy is bad.”

He said in an ideal world, the more fat around the thighs the better – as long as the tummy stays slim.

Coolness. I shall continue to cultivate the figure of a pre-agrarian fertility statue* secure in the knowledge that it is excellent for my health.

*Pub quiz question: What is the Greek-derived term for this type of female figure? (Archaeology buffs, sing it with me now…)

The Devil and I attended a lovely house party last night in honour of the new year. Not only was it tremendously pleasant to meet (and re-meet) some very interesting and friendly people, it was gratifying to learn that some of them read this blog.

Wii Karaoke competitions also took place – how many of you would have thought that the Devil has a lovely singing voice? Also good drink, good food made by the lady of the house, and excellent conversation.

Needless to say, I had a very enjoyable time. And as I always try to start as I mean to go on, this bodes very well for 2010. Here’s hoping the rest of you enjoyed the changing of the year and look forward to more good times to come!

I’ve discovered Mencius Moldbug, thanks to a comment left here by sconzey.*

I shall not even bother linking to particular posts I like, because I like them all (so far). Tearing myself away to do such necessary self-maintenance as eating has become difficult.

However. There is one bit of Moldbuggery I’d like to share with you. He’s articulated, quite tangentially and by accident, exactly why I enjoy British politics and find American politics so depressing. I used to think it was because the spectacle was better (it’s not), or because I could observe with equanimity since it doesn’t affect me (it does). But here’s really why:

If you’ve ever lived in a foreign country, you know exactly what life is like without the nanoslice [of power conferred by the franchise]: pretty much what life is like with it. Except for the Zen of abandoning the constant, unrequited longing for control that is the cruel karma of the democratic citizen, and the breath of honest fresh air in exchanging a first-person government for a third-person one, not “we” but “they.”

*Why don’t my comments have permalinks? Argh, must fix.

Delivered at the Students for Liberty conference last weekend in Philadelphia by Dr Alan Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. My brother was there, and he and a friend of his provided the link.

This paper brought me to tears.

Some highlights:

The intellectual manifestation of this pathology was and is a collective delusion that ignores both history and ethology. It is a belief that goodness, stable order, justice, peace, freedom, legal equality, mutual forbearance, and kindness are the default state of things in human affairs, and that malice, disorder, violence, coercion, legal inequality, intolerance, and cruelty are the aberrations that stand in need of historical explanation. Getting the defaults precisely and systematically wrong, Western intellectuals fail to understand and appreciate the form of society that has given us the ability to alter them. The pathology is also the demented belief that evolved successful societies may be redrawn at will by intellectuals with political power and that the most productive human cultures are almost wholly dysfunctional.

Rousseau and all the Marxisizing intellectuals who have cast their darkness over the past one hundred years and more have had it all backward in this domain. It is not aversion to difference that requires historical explanation —aversion to difference is the human condition. Rather, it is liberal society’s partial but breathtaking ability to overcome tribalism and exclusion that demands elucidation, above all in the singular American accomplishment. Tyranny and abuse of power have also been the human condition. It is, in contrast, the limitation of power and the recognition of individual rights that demand historical explanation. It is not slavery that startles, because slavery is one of the most universal of all human institutions. Rather, it is the view of self-ownership, liberty, and voluntary labor that requires historical explanation, the values and agencies by which the West identified slavery as an evil, and, to what should be our wonder, abolished it. Western intellectuals write, dramatically, as if it were relative pockets of Western poverty that should occasion our astonishment, when in fact the term until recently for almost infinitely worse absolute levels of poverty was simply “life.” What generally remains unaddressed by our secular intellectuals is the question of what values, institutions, knowledge, behaviors, risks, and liberties allowed the West to create such prosperity that we even notice such relative poverty at all, let alone believe that it is eradicable. Tragically, the very effort to overturn the evolved systems and values of the West has produced the most extreme examples in history of, precisely, malice, disorder, violence, coercion, legal inequality, intolerance, and cruelty.

…

There is no revivification of the principles that separated us from the socialists in power. “You put private property ahead of people” remains a potent malediction, as if we had not learned sufficiently and amply that the former is essential to the well-being, dignity, liberty, and lives of the latter. “You put profits ahead of people” remains of equal force, as if we had not learned sufficiently that profits are the measure of other people’s satisfactions of want and desire. Indeed, it is precisely to avoid the revivification of classical liberal principles that our teachers, professors, information media, and filmmakers ignore the comparative inquiry that the time so urgently demands.

Indeed, it is precisely because of the lessons that would be taught by knowledge and truth that no revision of the curriculum occurs. For at least a generation, intellectual contempt for liberal society —as a civilization, a set of institutions, and a constellation of ideals —has been at the core of the humanities and soft social sciences. This has accelerated, not changed, despite the fact that now there is no intellectual excuse for ignoring certain verities. We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of liberty and of dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire “socialist experiment,” by contrast, ended in stasis, ethnic hatreds, the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal, and categorical contempt for both individuation and minority rights. Our children do not know this true comparison.

...

As for the mea culpas, we await them in vain from those who claim not to have known or who still choose not to learn. When Eisenhower heard that the German residents of a nearby large town “didn’t know” about a death camp whose stench should have reached their nostrils, he marched them, well dressed, through the rotting corpses, and made them help dispose of the dead. We lack his authority. Milan Kundera, the dissident Czech novelist during the Communist period, stated the moral reality with reference to its only appropriate genre, tragedy. Take the extreme case, he suggested. What about those with good intentions? he asked in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. What about those who didn’t know, and who acted in good faith? Kundera wrote of Oedipus:

Little did he know that the man he had killed in the mountains was his father and the woman with whom he slept his mother. In the meantime, fate visited a plague on his subjects and tortured them with great pestilences. When Oedipus realized that he himself was the cause of their suffering, he put out his own eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes. . . . Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by “not knowing,” he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

How not to be tempted by this? For me, I would offer one indulgence. Let the socialists, fellow travelers, apologists, and revisionists acknowledge the dead, bury the dead, teach what they have learned, and atone for the dead. Otherwise, given the enormity of what has occurred, let them indeed be forgiven only when they have put out their eyes and wandered blind away from Moscow, Beijing, or Thebes. Let Western intellectuals repeat the phrase of “Requiem,” a work written during the Stalinist terror by Anna Akhmatova, the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century: “I will remember them always and everywhere, I will never forget them no matter what comes.”

From Ayn Rand on Donahue:

I judge myself in the following way: Have I absorbed and practised all of the principles of behaviour which I preach? Then I would say yes, resoundingly.

Would that we all judged ourselves in this way.

ILU Milton Friedman:

Not strictly blogular, but… I was bored.

UPDATE: There is more. Part I.1 is here; new bits are here.

Via my flatmate, this is incredibly cool (and graceful):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_citFkSNtk&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

I’m in love:

Journalists, quite rightly, are interested in moats and beams.

Perhaps it’s spending my days in the presence of juvenile intellectual pygmies that results in the delight I feel upon reading a clever wordplay…

I do so love parables. What is this one about, do you think?

Indulge me this little fable of our times…

There once was a man, a young man, a man afflicted with a passionate desire. He wanted nothing more in all the world than to play music on the violin. He never had much time for music as a child, but as he grew up and hit his teenage years he found himself seized by a powerful and unsettling urge to play the violin. Nothing but a violin would do. This was not like him, so he thought, and he worried about how others would react to him should they find out that he harboured this forbidden desire.

The society he lived in did not much care for music, and treated it rather strictly – as something to be played only by chartered professionals who owned their own instruments. It was not despised, by and large, though some fringe lunatics certainly did despise it, and when kept within certain bounds it was generally accepted. It was certainly not something to be discussed outside the auditorium or the concert hall, however, especially with those too junior to acquire an instrument or seek accreditation. Furthermore, in a cruel twist of fate, the violin in particular was deeply frowned upon, especially for boys. Nobody wanted their son to grow up to be a violinist, though daughters were actively encouraged to take up the instrument. Boys were not allowed to seek accreditation for a violin charter, though many who wanted to kept playing on the fringes of society, outside the official remit of the state musicians’ guild. There was prejudice, but it seemed to be getting more tolerable…

I’d provide a link, but…meh. Not going to happen.

The other night, after finishing my umpteenth reading of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the creative urge struck. Just as the anti-hero is a non-traditional, pragmatic protagonist, I thought it might be fun to write something about an anti-Faust: a non-traditional, pragmatic protagonist who sells his soul to the devil. I produced a couple of introductory paragraphs, which I reread earlier this evening, before (a) I ran out of steam, and (b) thinking about Led Zeppelin distracted me.

One marathon job-application-session and three glasses of wine later, I’m fascinated by the idea again. So I’ve given the burblings their own page on ye olde blog. Hurrah!

At xkcd:

There’s more, but the strip doesn’t fit in my blog field…

Via A Commonplace Book, Lord of the Rings as written by others.

My favourite:

“Fascinating, Captain. It appears to be an unknown creature that lurks in the pool waiting for passing strangers. Ecologically implausible, captain.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“I believe I said it was unknown, Dr Gimli. Logically, if I knew what it was, then it wouldn’t be unknown.”

The source of the link is the Astronomy department at the University of Maryland. I do so love astronomy types…

On communism, terrorism, and totalitarianism. Over at the Landed Underclass.

Long but fascinating, and contains lots of good sci-fi/fantasy allusions: at the Ministry of Truth.