The late Queen died one year and 22 days ago

Telegraph obituaries are the best, wonderfully funny and intentionally the nearest modern equivalent to John Aubrey's Brief Lives, one of my favourite books.

I suppose I read the Daily Telegraph obituary of Queen Elizabeth II or did I? I am reading it now anyway and thought these passages were interesting. 

I knew but had forgotten that Prince Philip was born in a house with the same name as many bungalows in the English home counties, Mon Repos. 

He had wanted his children to bear his name, of course, but to be the House of Edinburgh rather than the House of Mountbatten. I regret that this did not happen.

The future Queen Elizabeth II was born at 17 Bruton Street, off Berkeley Square, the five-storey London house of the Duchess of York’s parents, the 14th Earl of Strathmore and his wife. The child’s parents were then living at White Lodge, Richmond Park, a draughty, neglected royal residence without adequate heating or plumbing, too near London for privacy, too far for convenience. Nor was a maternity home thought suitable for the birth of a princess.

Even a generation later her father, who by then had succeeded to the throne as George VI, declined to undergo an operation on which his life depended except in the familiar but far from aseptic rooms of Buckingham Palace. Pressed by doctors and surgeons to change his mind, he declared: “I have never heard of a king going to a hospital before.”

Liquid modernity

I'd heard of Zygmunt Bauman but he hadn't registered with me until today. I have just read two essays talking about him.


This is from Mark Lilla's essay on Ukraine on November 5, 2022, which I read today:

It seems to me that the ultimate source of democratic erosion is the fact that our societies have become more liquid and less solid, to adopt the terms of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman’s use of the term “liquid” was an oblique reference to The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels declared that under capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”.

Elon Musk

"Like Gulliver, tied down by thousands of of little strings, we lose our freedom one regulation at a time."

"This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

Disinformation comes from above

 

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

·

Sep 26

Nobody spreads "disinformation" more destructively than US corporate media. Those who said Saddam had WMDs; Putin blackmailed Trump with sex tapes; the Hunter laptop was "Russian disinformation": Have *no credibility* to accuse others of disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Yaroslav Hunka, war criminal or patriot or both?

When German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 they were greeted, understandably, as liberators. 

Millions of Ukrainians, Russians and Balts welcomed them and large numbers of soldiers willingly surrendered to the Germans. 

At the end of the war those in areas occupied by the British and Americans were given to Stalin.

Soviet citizens and emigres from Communism made up as much as a fifth of the German forces in the Soviet Union. About half of them were ethnic Russians. 

From Douglas Murray's wonderful piece about Teen Vogue

'Even earlier this year, in April, Teen Vogue published an article headlined “What ‘Capitalism’ Is And How It Affects People“. It was an explicitly anti-capitalist piece written by a campaigning anti-capitalist called Kim Kelly. On social media, the publication promoted this piece under the heading “Everything you need to know about capitalism”. A surprising claim, and – some might say – presumptuous. After all, is it really possible to write everything that people might need to know about capitalism in one article? And if so would the likely source of such an article really be Teen Vogue?' 

The BBC news is insufferable - and full of spin

John Simpson is shown in a clip every hour on the BBC World Service saying the BBC presents the news with 'absolutely no spin', but tweeted this, which he later deleted. 

Suella Braverman, who went to my college, seems to be a good thing

Twitter, now lamely X, sends me tweets (now Xes) unbidden and always ones expressing establishment views. I was presented with these two at the top of my feed this morning. 

Hugo Rifkind (is also on Threads as @hugorif)

@hugorifkind

Remarkable to hear Braverman say multiculturalism has failed. She's a British Home Secretary descended from Goan Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, in a government headed by Britain's first Hindu PM. What would successful multiculturalism look like?

Jon Sopel

@jonsopel

·

14h

‘Multiculturalism has failed’ says Suella Braverman who is from Kenyan and Mauritian background and married to a Jew, serving as Home Secretary in a govt led by someone whose family came from India. Wonder what multicultural success looks like…..

The Home Secretary is provoking outrage (allegedly) whereas Lawrence Fox inadvertently threw away his acting career (his agent refused to represent him) when he denied, on the BBC TV programme Question Time, that Britain is a racist country. 'We're a lovely country' were his words and they have not been forgiven. 

Advice

“I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed.”

Leonard Cohen

“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” 

William Morris

"My advice to myself: Be yourself; there is no other you. Don't perform and achieve in order to accept and be happy with yourself. Accept and be happy with yourself and let your performance flow out of that self-acceptance and happiness. Don't hold yourself to an imaginary standard; the standard is you."

Michael Rectenwald

Tidying up my desktop, I found these

 

Rameses II was Ozymandias

The past is another country. They do things differently there.

I refer to 2020-21. I went to Bodrum for a week in October 2020 and stayed for six months to avoid Covid nonsense, but finally and reluctantly returned to Bucharest to get vaccinated. I then had to go to Egypt in May to escape being confined to my Bucharest flat for a fortnight. 

I was a digital nomad but also had great adventures.

Everywhere in Egypt was empty and the guides at the Great Temple of Luxor disconsolately rested against monuments. I took Moses and he showed me round the sights jumping onto a bus or hailing down the most cranky taxi I ever saw. 

He took me of course to the Colosseum of Memnon and the Ramesseum early in the morning, before the heat became unbearable by half past 9. 

I only discovered after I returned that Ozymandias is the Greek version of Rameses and that Shelley wrote his poem after the British Museum announced that it had acquired a large fragment of a statue of Rameses from the Italian Belzoni.

Yanis Varoufakis's new book

"Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook. You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”

Varoufakis says that Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, doesn’t produce capital but charges rent, which isn’t capitalism but feudalism. Here he is interviewed by one of my least favourite writers Carol Cadwalladr, who owed a lot of money after lying about Aaron Banks and who repeats the CIA or MI6 line on Assange.

Democracy is impossible without a demos

"It seems, then, that the original reasons for favoring democracy don’t last forever. First, it depends on strong popular identification with the nation, which is vanishing." 

James Kalb, 'Should Catholics Favor Democracy?', Crisis magazine, August 2, 2017

This is how I feel about history

"Philosophy was the mission of my life. I had to philosophize; otherwise, I was not able to live in this world." Edmund Husserl

“I don't want people who WANT to dance. I want people who HAVE to dance.” Choreographer George Balanchine

What is Biden going to do now?

A friend who's a retired academic just sent me an email.

What if the 'sides' in the Ukraine war are peaceful coexistence v. ruinous (except for a few, for whom it's highly lucrative) war?

I agree and have said this in this blog since last year. It's tiresome when I get attacked for being pro Putin and tiresome that there are people who are. They are as annoying as the ones who lose their temper if it's suggested that the Americans made mistakes which provoked Putin. 

I am not interested in Ukraine at the moment - only Nagorno Karabak and Armenia

Dmitry Medvedev, the last Russian President and Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council said this on Telegram on the 29th talked about Nikol Pashinya, Prime Minister of Armenia.

One day, one of my colleagues from a fraternal country told me: “Well, I’m a stranger to you, you won’t accept me.” I answered what I had to: “We will judge not by biography, but by actions.” Then he lost the war, but strangely stayed in place. Then he decided to blame Russia for his mediocre defeat. Then he gave up part of the territory of his country. Then he decided to flirt with NATO, and his wife defiantly went to our enemies with cookies.
Guess what fate awaits him...

Quotations

"Strive not to be a success but rather of value".

Albert Einstein

"It will end with everything that is Armenian gone." The fall of Nagorno Karabak makes me even sadder than the invasion of Ukraine

Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyn came to power in "a colourless colour revolution" in 2018. The previous government which had been friendly to Armenia's protector, Russia. He has brought irremediable catastrophe on Nagorno Karabak by cosying up to America when Armenia depends on the protection of Russia.

In an interview with DW, Armenian analyst Styopa Safaryan accused Russia of trying to "punish Armenia for the so-called disloyalty, and it's doing with Azerbaijan's hands. This absolutely resembles the attack, the aggression of Russia in Ukraine. It's absolutely the same situation." The second sentence, I am sure is not true. Azerbaijan has agency and has chosen her moment carefully. The parallel with Ukraine is a close one, however - both Armenia and Ukraine relied on America and thumbed their noses at Moscow, with what results we see.

Researcher Ruben Enkopolov from the Barcelona Institute of Political Economy and Governance told DW:

"The only scenario [for Nagorno-Karabakh]is the full transfer under Azerbaijani control. It will end with everything that is Armenian gone."

This seems to show beyond doubt that the threat of NATO expansion is the reason why Putin invaded Ukraine

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that. He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.” 

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this to committee of the European Parliament on September 7.

And yet many people get angry when this is suggested by people who are not Secretary General of NATO. 

There was never a time when there was less respect for freely exchanging opinions than now, except perhaps in wartime - but only Russia and Ukraine are at war. 

Tsarist Russia, unlike Russia or the rest of Europe today, had free speech, more or less. I thought I'd mention that.

The Canadian Prime Minister is wearing brown shoes