Martin Meenagh blog

The Paradox of General Duty. “You can't please God & the world at the same time; they're opposed to each other in thought, desire & action”—attributed to the Cure D’Ars O n the internet, there are so many false quotes attributed to Mother Theresa in circulation that her eponymous Calcutta Centre has taken to issuing lists of denials. Some of them sound very much like the sort of things that she could have said, with Balkan commonsense; one that strikes me, for instance, is that if you want to love the world, go home and love your family. I’ve been thinking a lot about that quote this week as I turned over the issues of selective abortion, gay marriage, the American contraceptive debate, workfare and the economic crisis in my mind. Solipsist that I am, I would say that they were all linked in a way that was obvious to others; but the truth is that they are, because they represent the failings of a society so dedicated to enforcing general duties from the top down that it...

Crazy Days in a Wet Cold Winter "The language and thought police are hardly some Orwellian invention; America has been unusually susceptible to plagues of Comstockery and self-righteous tomfoolery." --George Bernard Shaw Finally, in his pastoral letter Testem Benevolentiae (January 22, 1899; “Witness to Our Benevolence”) addressed to Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, Leo condemned other forms of Americanism...These included the following doctrines or tendencies : 1)undue insistence on interior initiative in the spiritual life, as leading to disobedience 2)attacks on religious vows, and disparagement of the value of religious orders in the modern world 3)minimizing Catholic doctrine4)minimizing the importance of spiritual direction --Gerald P. Fogarty, The Vatican and the American hierarchy from 1870 to 1965 (1985) T he United States and the United Kingdom have both been marked--I won't say convulsed, because that would bring things beyond the bounds of ir...

When Greece Joined Yugoslavia : Some Counterfactual Fun January 17, 1949. P resident Beloyannis grasped the hand of his predecessor, President Tito, tightly, and smiled, as Tito’s searching, scalpel-like gaze fell on the plans for the new Capital of the Balkan Union. How different history could have been, he reflected. If Franklin Roosevelt had managed to live through 1944, President Wallace would never have begun the chain of confusion and complication which had led to the messy, delayed end to the war in Europe in the atomic bombing of Germany in 1946. America may have had some moral authority, some governing will to continue interference in European affairs, and the Democratic Army of Greece-in truth the Communists—would never have been able to wear down the British as they had done. Now, all the Americans wanted to do was to warn off the Soviets, and take care of the remains of the capitalist West as the British and French decolonised their markets into American arms. A more determ...

Why I Read Blogs Occasionally, I find opinions which agree with my suspicions....see this excellent post on www.nakedcapitalism.com

Shenanigans I've armed myself with a copy of Marty Cohen's The Party Decides which details the origins of the American system for selection of party presidential candidates, and it certainly makes fascinating reading (well, to me, anyway). In it, Cohen details how the Party system has evolved from one based around patronage, in which issues did not matter and party elites controlled things, to a much more dessicated process. Today, 'invisible' primaries controlled by party donors, establishment endorsements, and the media, merge with different systems of delegate selection, county and state caucuses, and primary selection votes to produce a Byzantine system that I'm not sure anyone can understand. As Nate Silver points out on the New York Times' ' fivethirtyeight ' blog, it's almost impossible to tell how many delegates anyone has won at the moment. It's also very difficult for any one person or group of campaign directors to plot how party inter...

From The Archives Sun Journalists arrested, hacking probe widens .... This blog July 2011: "Democracy is Government by Explanation"--David Cameron I thought that I would replicate a facebook note that I wrote here, as this scandal about the media-political class and their bubble is becoming more interesting. Sicut Erat, et Nunc, et Semper--Until Judgment Tom Watson MP, who knows lots about the hacking scandal, has just asked about elements of the intelligence services working with News International, who in themselves were working with criminal elements. Significantly, the head of the Legal department at NI has just quietly resigned. Big and bad things are moving. This may seem a silly bubble scandal, while the real economy here freezes and the west's economy burns. It is becoming something else. We're getting a glimpse beneath the murk of the political-media class and the financial monsters who live in the deep. Watergate was important not because of Nixon, and Dalla...

February 11 Today is the anniversary of the beginnings of the visions of Bernadette Soubirous, a miller's daughter, who claimed in 1858 to have encountered the Queen of Heaven at Lourdes. I thought it appropriate to record the date, since Our Lady has a special place in my heart, and anyway, I get an excuse to play the following song--one of Leonard Cohen's best, sung superbly by Jennifer Warnes. I first heard it on my first trip to America, with the rest of the Famous Blue Raincoat album, and love it very much.

Can You Go Down to The Dark Again? Thanks to a link from another website , I noticed this morning that Germany's somewhat rash decision to shut down nuclear power stations is having a predictable, and predictably unanticipated, effect. The Germans, Austrians and Northern Europeans in general, like the Chinese, are having to depend more and more on coal-fired power stations. At the same time, the coalition government in this country--led by a Cabinet of millionaires--has become somewhat sentimental. Just this week, they floated a scheme to create tax breaks for employers of domestic servants , and today are building on their plans by withdrawing tax credits for working families who can only find part-time jobs . It seems appropriate, somehow, that these proposals came in the week of Dickens' birthday. It wasn't just Dicken's two hundredth birthday this past month, however; it was also the 101st anniversary of the death of Robert Tressel, whose Ragged Trousered Philanthro...

The Yugoslav Space Programme One of the great things about tutoring students is that you learn things. I am lucky enough to teach across the range of undergraduate and very bright sixth-form, with almost no restrictions bar the proper requirement, enforced by the market, that some of my learning is reciprocated by their examination success. I've had epiphanies when doing so--moments of extreme pleasure that just arise because someone has learned something, or because a group from some country far along one of the compass points is about to grasp a point. I love the challenge of it all. So, there was I last week, after a neat tutorial on American governance, and a bright young man of Serbian extraction fell into chatting about collective presidencies with me--we'd been discussing the capacity of the US Senate to run the country, as by some accounts it had orginally been intended to do. Then he produced the following video on the monitor for me; It speaks to my narcissism that th...

Banning Blogs This blog, via anecdotal evidence, has from time to time been inaccessible in China, Iran, and sundry other tyrannies. I take that as a badge of honour. Apparently, google is now participating in this process , and will switch off blogs at the behest of States. It's a long time since I made an observation on contemporary Persian governance (though of course I remain, you could say, unkeen, on an Iranian war, which I think would be disastrous). For Auld Lang Syne, then, this is what Iran is meant to be like, according to the associated press; and this is how it works; Don't try looking for 7p.com, either. It was by all accounts a somewhat unsavoury site, which has now disappeared or been subsumed.

I Want Labour to Be This... But then again, I have very rarely voted for anyone who won, and Noel Skelton died a long time ago. More over at the David Lindsay blog; The Lanchester Declaration 1. Our common position is one of absolute commitment to the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, and a powerful Parliament. 2. That is fully compatible with a no less absolute commitment to any, all or none of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist...