Atavistic monks and nationalism

Using religion as a talisman of conflict is a bad sign, but this perhaps has more to do with a barely concealed ethnocentrism - Vietnam to send Buddhist monks to Spratly Islands

Waking from a dream

I woke up last night, confused and disorientated. Like Zhuang Zi, I could not determine the direction in which I had been dreaming.

I recalled the various dreams I have lived in and tried to trace a continuity of memory to establish which must be real, but I was tired and scattered.

Kind

Caribbean Food Made Easy

I experience this at work...

Speaking of the British

I recently went on a business trip with three members of the British ruling classes. The late-night banter over drinks was predictably excellent. Sometimes, though, we had to work. When that happened, my companions showed up unprepared and without notes – and did just fine. No wonder, because their entire education had been a lesson in winging it. They knew that all you need to succeed is to speak well, and that’s what the British ruling classes do: they speak well.

What motivates achievers

Whither the judiciary

I wonder how the US and UK judiciaries differ. The U.S. Supreme Court judges are (expected to be) political actors. Judicial activism goes by many guises (it is easier to defend a static "original" constitution when one's goal is to defend inequality, and make acceptable the status quo)...

A young couple fall in love and marry. She is British; he is Chilean. Because they are both under 21, immigration rules, which set out Home Office policy, forbid him to settle here with his wife, who has a university place and a promising career ahead. The purpose of the rule is to inhibit the importation of spouses by forced marriage. Forced marriage is a serious matter meriting determined government action, but there is nothing to link the vast majority of young couples affected by the rule with it. The young couple bring judicial review proceedings. The impact of the rule on their right to marry and to live as a family is manifest. The rule itself has a lawful purpose, but the Home Office accepts that it has no bearing on them. How could the courts decide whether the impact on the couple was legitimate without considering in detail the justification for the rule itself? That is what both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court did. Had they not done so, the home secretary’s case would have gone unheard. All but one of the judges decided that the impact on the individuals before them was out of proportion to the policy objective. The result was not to stifle policy initiatives designed to inhibit forced marriages; these remain a matter for government alone. It was to ensure that such initiatives conformed to the law by not impacting disproportionately on individuals. This is a critical linkage which recurs in the now well developed law of legitimate expectation, which sometimes requires government to honour its promises even when its policy has legitimately shifted.

Judicial Politics

Political and Economic Exigencies in Republican China

From Sino-Americana, by Perry Anderson (London Review of Books, 2012), Vol. 34 No. 3 · 9 February 2012, pages 20-22

"The historical reality was that no outstanding leaders emerged from the confused morass of the KMT in the Republican period. "

"The military clique that ruled Guangxi, on the border with Indochina, were better generals and ran a more progressive and efficient government, but their province was too poor and remote for them to be able to compete successfully against Chiang." ( whom was based in Shanghai and Zhejiang, and the surrounding Yangtze delta region, where he cultivated connections in both criminal and business worlds, in what was by far the richest and most industrialised zone in China)."

Normalization of Asian-American perceptions and power relations still have long ways to go...

 “He’s quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.”

Harvard Targeted in U.S. Asian-American Discrimination Probe

 

Space opera never looked so delicious

I've just started re-watching the 110 episode Legend of the Galactic Heroes and all its prequels.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes Café

The Plight of the Poor in the Midst of Plenty

A well-ordered society advances the good of each and all of its members, so that there is no one from whose gaze or plight we have to avert our eyes, no one whose complaints can be met only with lies or pious nonsense about following one’s dream.

The Plight of the Poor in the Midst of Plenty

‘Well-ordered’ does not mean docile or regimented. Quite the contrary, it means a society whose members – all of them, individual men and women of every creed, class and background – are prepared to raise awkward questions about how things are organised and to justify their laws and institutions to one another in good faith, without any myths or illusions.

Overlooking the city

U.S. wealth gap in the 1960s and 70s

It’s a complicated empirical issue.

The Great Compression 

Then came the economist

Thomas Sargent, speaking for himself and the other Economics winner, Christopher Sims, decided, in effect, to tell the Swedes (and everyone else) to lower their taxes and cut their social spending, in obedience to what are coming to appear more and more discredited free market theories. They must remember, he said, that ‘there is a trade-off between equality and efficiency’. But this is just what the Swedes over the years have shown to be untrue. Sweden is both more equal and more efficient than (say) the USA. Most Swedes would say the two qualities are connected. The mean, narrow dogmatism of Sargent’s contribution contrasted vividly with the breadth and humility of the natural scientists’.

Then came the economist

Mobile Armor

All paths...

... lead to K162

 

Downton Abbey

I think that thing of being polite, of making people easy in your company, of not burdening them with your troubles; that's quite nice...

Julian Fellowes Q&A

All successes grow to be alike; only the failures remain interesting

From Cosmic Neutrality, by Fredric Jameson. London Review of Books. Vol. 33 No. 20 · 20 October 2011 pages 17-18:

One of the most decisive things that happened to narrative in the 19th century had to do with the problematisation of its formal conclusions, which closed their narrative circuit in earlier and simpler societies either by way of a happy ending (in fairytales, for example, or romances) or a catastrophic defeat. Those older endings had content, as we might put it in philosophical language; in the new world of money and business, the whole social variety of existential outcomes was slowly reduced to a new set of abstract categories: the opposition between success and failure. Winning the girl is success, losing the war is failure: these abstractions do not on the face of it involve earning or losing money, but it is in reality the abstraction of money as such that governs the new system and which begins to impose the new simplified classification in terms of the stark alternatives of winning or losing, success or failure.

The formal result, for the novel, is strange and paradoxical, yet momentous: all successes grow to be alike, they lose their specificity and indeed their interest. Success sinks to the level of emergent mass culture – which is to say, fantasy and wish-fulfilment. Only the failures remain interesting, only the failures offer genuine literary raw material, both in their variety and in the quality of their experience.

Apophis

Drink from the cup of ice, drink from the cup of fire

"Fantasy gives us the colors. Fantasy is strong emotion and red wine and dreams and visions. It's life imagined more intensely, and lived more intensely, vicariously as we read about it in our own lives, that we can experience great loves and great tragedies, and do things we would never do in real life. It's the whole reason I think people read, and particularly when they read fiction. The non-reader just lives one life, while the reader lives a thousand lives, does amazing things: climbs mountains, goes to other planets, explores the bottom of the sea, loves a hundred women/loves a hundred men, lives and dies, and gives birth to children and conquers kingdoms, and all of that you experience only in fiction (most of us anyway)."

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