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iest) proletarian intellectual to come out of the British Communist Party”] inevitably ran afoul of the Communist Party hierarchy. “The party line,” he once sighed, “is always moving in a circle.” Early British Marxists tended to dismiss as “bourgeois” the same classic literature that autodidacts found so liberating, a fact that goes a long way toward explaining why Marxism failed to gain a following among British workers. As the manifesto of the Communist-affiliated Workers’ Theatre Movement proclaimed, “It rejects decisively the role of raising the cultural levels of the workers through contact with great dramatic art.” That ruled out Shakespeare and just about every other important playwright: even Sean O’Casey was considered ideologically unsafe. Ewan MacColl was a Communist and the son of a Communist iron-founder, but he had been raised on Gogol, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and he found the party’s agitprop drama an insult to his intelligence. “We had a strong feeling that we were being written down to,” he remembered. “I’ve noticed frequently that among middle-class party people that I’ve worked with, over the years, that there’s an idea that workers will accept anything, providing the message is OK. The quality doesn’t matter, the form doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we agree on the correct slogans.”

Here’s a useful site: I, Rearrangement Servant (aka the Internet Anagram Server). Via the compelling if bizarre bogol.

A Milky Retch? That’s what I should have called this blog.

Via Solomonia, an oldie but a goodie.

On the “Let’s Make a Deal” game show, Monty Hall gives a contestant his choice of three closed doors. One of the doors has a fabulous prize behind it; the other two have worthless prizes. Only Monty knows which door has the good prize.

The contestant chooses a door. Before the chosen door is opened, Monty opens one of the other doors, showing that it has a booby prize behind it. At this point he tells the contestant that he may, if he wishes, change his choice to the remaining closed door.

Is it better for the contestant to switch his choice to the remaining door or to stick with his original choice?

I’ve seen this often enough to know what the correct answer is (yes, you should switch), but it always takes some thought to remember why, because it’s kind of counter-intuitive. The comments to this post provide a good run-through of the logic, with the second comment by “Cynical Nation” providing one of the clearest explanations I’ve come across.

Up to 28 hours of recently discovered high quality film dating from 1900 to 1913, capturing Northern working-class life at the height of Britain’s industrial power, has now been restored by the BFI:

In 1994, workmen stripping out an empty shop at 40 Northgate, Blackburn, Lancashire, went down to the cellar and discovered three large metal drums, like big rusting milk churns, which turned out to contain more than 800 rolls of nitrate film. A cinephile and film historian, Peter Worden, knew of the site as the old studios of two Blackburn men, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, who had made and processed films there until 1913.

Worden had kept a watchful eye on the shop in case anything was discovered inside it. He arranged for the metal drums to be delivered to him – the alternative destination was the skip – and transferred their contents to 17 plastic food containers, the size of family ice-cream tubs, and stored them in a chest freezer. To preserve and restore the films proved beyond Worden’s means. The BFI took them over as the Mitchell and Kenyon collection in 2000 and then began their painstaking restoration at its laboratories in Berkhamsted. […]

The images, then, have a freshness and clarity, but that (to the film historian or otherwise) is only part of their appeal. What they show is a world now lost to us: the busy world of northern Britain in its manufacturing, mining heyday; the world that, among other things, created and sustained this newspaper as the Manchester Guardian. Not until the 1930s and the British documentary movement did film-makers pay it so much attention again, this time as a subject for moral concern because it had then begun its slow collapse.

In Mitchell and Kenyon’s films you can see it as an independent civilisation, glorying in its new recreations and enjoyments such as electric trams, professional sport, street parades and pageants, and seaside holidays. There are films of 32 northern soccer matches, and of 18 rugby games played by professional teams in the newly-founded Northern Union (later the Rugby League) which broke from the amateur Rugby Football Union in 1895. You can see the new electric trams in Halifax, Lytham and Accrington, Catholic and temperance processions in the streets of Manchester, a flotilla of destoyers moving up the Manchester Ship Canal, the crowded piers at Blackpool and Morecambe. You see horses pulling people and goods – stables in British towns then contained 1.7 million of them. You see many factory chimneys, smoking.

Here are some stills from the films, and here‘s a short film of workers outside Pendlebury Colliery. “The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon” will be on BBC2 at 9pm next Friday.

Via Yahoo “Finds of the Year”, via Harry’s Place, this is a great website.

Dress Down Friday over at Harry’s Place not hitting the spot? Fuck you. (Via Blog of a Bookslut)

nd to none in my enthusiasm for things Belgian, but spending more per head per day is not that significant if the total number of heads is a only couple of hundred. Still, the tide could be turning for Belgians, used to being the butt of jokes on both sides of the linguistic divide, from the French and the Dutch, nevermind us Brits. And the canard about no famous Belgians? It’s rubbish! What about Bernard Van Hool, Edward de Smedt, Helmut Lotti, Stijn Streuvels, Karel van de Woestijne, Ann Demeulemeester, Zenobe Gramme? I could go on…..

nning with a candidate of their own next time round.

The “Wipe Israel Off the Map” groups see Abbas as a stopgap leader who could buy them time to strengthen their positions, especially in Gaza, before making their own bid for power.

Many in the outside world (including the Arab states, Israel and Washington) also see Abbas as their second-best choice, albeit for different reasons.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has gone out of his way to praise Abbas, who is also the only Palestinian leader to have shaken hands with President Bush. In the past few weeks Abbas, has received red-carpet welcomes from a dozen Arab leaders during a high-profile tour of the Middle East.

All that is good news — which explains the wave of optimism that seems to be sweeping away whatever is left of realism with regard to a conflict that has defied logic for more than half a century.

The bad news is that there is no indication that a majority either of the Palestinians or of the Israelis are prepared to quickly switch from a mood of conflict to one of peace, if not reconciliation.

s and pre-linguistic children, although they can be sensitive, alert, responsive to pain and suffering, and cognitively competent in many remarkable ways–including ways that exceed normal adult human competence–are not really conscious (in this strong sense): there is no organized subject (yet) to be the enjoyer or sufferer, no owner of the experiences as contrasted with a mere cerebral locus of effects.

While Susan Blackmore, with a rigorous Buddhist sensibility, continues the argument she developed in “The Meme Machine“:

It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.” With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time, more than 200 years ago. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away. […]

As for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether—this is very much harder. I just keep on seeming to exist. But though I cannot prove it—I think it is true that I don’t.

Chilling stuff from the Jerusalem Post (via lgf):

Days after former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy expressed fears that Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia might have acquired some kind of nuclear capability via an illicit weapons trafficking network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the chief architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Israeli military sources have told The Jerusalem Post that, thanks to Khan, one of those three Arab states now has the potential to achieve a “significant nuclear leap.”

The sources said that Israel is aware of Khan’s contacts with all three countries, but that he had provided to one of them expertise and material to manufacture nuclear bombs. They would not specify which country.

The sources also spoke of an assessment in the IDF that Arab terrorist organizations are stepping up their efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs.

They noted that there is now evidence of increased debate as to whether Islamic law could allow for the deaths of Muslims as part of the price when tens of millions of heathens are killed – a debate whose very nature, the sources said, implies that thought is being given to the notion of using weapons of mass destruction.

Whether Islamic law could allow for the deaths of Muslims as part of the price when tens of millions of heathens are killed……makes a change from post-tsunami theological arguments, I suppose.