Never meet your idol

Via Jon Hotten I find this flesh-crawlingly weird Huffpo article by one Steve Mariotti, about his encounters with his intellectual idol Ayn Rand.

After the first meeting:

This incident cut me deeply. I was so scarred by the rejection that I couldn't even tell anyone about it for 15 years.

And after the third:

It was like someone had taken a hot knife to my stomach...This final communication hurt so much that I have never talked about it until now.


You really have to read the whole thing to believe it.

Greens versus Israel, BBC versus UKIP

Norm Geras has been running a series of posts about how Greens are instinctively anti-Israel. There's further evidence today that anti-Semitism is now a left-wing thing as the Scottish Green Party launches its manifesto and, on page 25, announces that it will seek to boycott Israel but mentions no other countries as being problematic.

Greens are fanatics unable to think clearly and are therefore dangerous. They're also London. UKIP (who are ridiculous but less so than the Greens) are Not-London. This is why the BBC - being London - thinks that UKIP is a small bad party in the same bad, Not-London category as the BNP, but the Greens are in a different, essentially good, London category.

As Daniel Hannan observes, you will frequently hear BBC reporters make throwaway remarks that are variations on: "...minority parties like UKIP and the BNP", but never "...like the Greens and BNP".

This is odd considering that the Greens and the BNP have similar support in most opinion polls (4%) whereas UKIP is at 8%; and at the 2009 European elections, UKIP came second behind the Tories with 16.5%, whereas the BNP (6.2%) and Greens(8.6%) got two seats each, making them very comparable 'minority parties', in that respect at least.

Tony Benn - wrong to the end

It was a sorry thing, seeing Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn on last night's Newsnight. He was representing the Stop the War Coalition, which has decided to oppose any international attempts to save Libyans from Gaddafi's thugocracy (even though this time it's 'legal' and even the French and the Arabs are for it and the Russians not against it (so that whole UN legality thing was in fact irrelevant in the anti-Iraq invasion protests, it turns out)).

Benn looked really, really old. Old and confused and just wrong for the sake of it; as if, feeling the burden of being the nation's favourite tireless, articulate man who is always wrong (and has been wrong about absolutely everything in his long career), he feared he was now running out of chances to be wrong and had better have this last fling at glorious, thick-skulled, obstinate, morally bankrupt wrongness.

Wikileaks 2

Good article by David Aaranovitch in today's Times. It's behind the paywall so to summarise:

- confounding expectations, the Bradley Manning wikileaks prove that the US is on the side of liberty

- since they can't be construed by the anti-yank left as proving 'Bad America', they will be construed as proving 'Spent America'

Or as Aaranovitch puts it: We will be told that, properly interpreted, the WikiLeaks splurge shows how weakened the US is in the era of China, multipolarity and economic crisis. How it simply cannot do in the future what it did in the past. The suggested lesson in this is usually for the US to retreat still farther from close engagement in the affairs of the world, and leave them to Beijing, Hezbollah or (alas) Mullah Omar. Beware this latest manifestation of America-knocking.

Red Ken was trying to prove Bad America on last night's Question Time of course. The idiots clapped.

American Exceptionalism

The 21st Century Nightmare post and thread below was not an attempt to have a general debate about the rights and wrongs of capital punishment, as if bringing it back in the UK was some sort of a viable option, because clearly it isn’t. It was more that I began to wonder if the occasional bellow (only remaining argument?) from the populist Right – that a majority ‘support’ it – is not only morally and constitutionally irrelevant but actually incoherent, because ‘supporting capital punishment’ is, in terms of practical application, meaningless.

(If I did want to have a debate about the rights and wrongs of capital punishment generally I would certainly mention the usual and well-rehearsed philosophical arguments, such as the internal conceptual problem of a society thinking it is demonstrating that it holds life sacred by punishing murderers with death.)

But our beloved American contingent inevitably broadened the argument because in the States it is still a live issue (if you’ll pardon the expression). Difficult thing to come up against, American exceptionalism. We all hate having our business criticised by forriners, but boy, Americans really hate having their business criticised by forriners…as I suppose you would if you believe your founding documents to be, effectively, sacred texts.

All of which preambling brings me on to the point of this post. Here is a random A-Z list of some of the 137 countries that have banned the death penalty outright:

Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Honduras, Ireland, Lichtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, Venezuala.

And here is a random A-Z list of some of the 69 countries where capital punishment is still technically permitted (although nearly 90% of actual executions worldwide occur in China, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US alone):

Afghanistan, Burundi, Cuba, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Iraq, Jordan
Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, North Korea, Oman, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, United States, Vietnam, Yemen, Zimbabwe.

Full lists are here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777460.html

So my question is this: is there a more striking anomaly anywhere, in terms of global approaches to ethics and politics, than the fact that the US is on the second list rather than the first?

A 21st Century Nightmare

I suppose the latest tawdry tale of a US execution will briefly raise the 'Capital Punishment Debate' again, though it’s a defunct one in this country. As I’ve become more right-wing over the years, as most sensible people do, I’ve only become more convinced of the wrongness of the use of execution as a punishment. That shouldn’t be surprising really since the strongest (and a wholly sufficient) argument against it is a conservative one: that the State, being composed of flawed humans and corruptible systems, sometimes gets the wrong man even when it has the best of intentions, and therefore ought not to be trusted to kill its own citizens because killing them is a uniquely irreversible punishment. There aren’t many good arguments in favour of capital punishment and the most commonly used one is the very worst: that it meets a need for societal revenge (my perception is that a great many intelligent rightwing Americans only end up using these bad arguments because the debate is part of that country's narrow but intense left-right polarisation in political discourse, and therefore arguing against execution puts you on the same ‘side’ as such buffoons as Sean Penn, which is less tolerable than acknowledging that Penn’s conclusions may be righter than his reasonings).

Ultimately the Worst Argument reduces - because it is based on our sense of outrage and the (correct but not pertinent) notion that some crimes really deserve death - to a defence of mob rule. In which case we may as well junk civilisation now since the great achievement of the rule of law is to acknowledge that the little voice in your head, of justified outrage and desire for immediate righting of wrongs, must be suppressed while some sort of least-worst objective rational process, flawed as it is, takes its course. All of which brings me on to the hellish ordeal of Eddie Thompson: a true 21st Century nightmare that demonstrates, for the zillionth time, why everyone is innocent until proven guilty and that mob rule is the opposite of justice.

Hawkins and Dawking

“There’s no God” announced Stephen Hawking,
The result was a great deal of squawking,
'Til someone came clean
That his voicebox machine
Had been sabotaged by Richard Dawking.*

*(sic)

Libraries

I note a startling fact about public libraries at The D (as I'm now calling it).

Burka

Philip Hollobone’s arguments for a France-style burka ban make little sense – “it’s part of British culture to see people’s faces and say ‘Good morning’”? Oh really? Has he been to any British cities lately? Anyway, by that logic we’d have to ban low hats and high scarves in bad weather. But France generally gets it wrong. From the British perspective the only thing that matters is whether all the women who wear burkas are being forced to wear them against their will. If some but not all are being forced, then the possible ban available would be on the forcing of burka-wearing. And by all means, feminist or moderate pressure groups can feel free to encourage Muslim women not to wear it. But if at least some women are choosing to wear the burka, then that’s the end of the ban idea.

The thing was neatly summed up by a correspondent to a BBC Radio 2 programme yesterday morning. “When I’ve been to Arab countries,” she wrote, “I have had to cover my head and body. I strongly feel that when they come to this country they should obey our rules.” Her error, and the nub of it being, of course, that we don’t have rules like that.

Platonism

Nick Cohen (whose link to the Yard sports the hover text description “Brilliant on everything except God” - a succinct, unwitting self-description) has a post about radical Islam and the right-wing loon Melanie Phillips, under which commenter James Bloodworth writes:

She might have a better argument against moral relativism if the biblical morality she was advocating had the ability to build a better society than secularism. History tells us otherwise. Her argument might also hold more weight if Christianity itself did not consist of an, albeit tamer, version of what the leading Al Qaeda thinkers are themselves advocating. That’s not by any means to equate figures such as Melanie Phillips with Al Qaeda, rather obviously; however, I suspect a fully Christianised West would be a lot closer to what the Islamists dream of than a strong secularised one.

Though he was occasionally prone to it himself on the issue of God (we all are sometimes, it’s unavoidable), the late Duck accurately argued that Platonic thinking is one of the biggest hindrances to understanding the world. James Bloodworth suggests that society consists of some degree of compromise between two opposed Platonic ideal worldviews: Secularism and Religion. This bears no relation to historical reality (secular liberalism is rooted in a world of Christians) and even as an analogy it makes little sense and has almost no practical application. History, being the sum of the affairs of humans, is unknowably tangled and complex and, as with America, whatever you try to say about it the opposite is also true.

I don’t know what, if anything, will kill radical Islamism (probably a mixture of moderate Islam, military force and some other fad coming along); but I’m confident it won’t be a post-religious secular utopia in which, thanks to the unanswerable rational arguments of secular liberals like Nick Cohen, Chris Hitchens and James Bloodworth, all religions are washed away, radical Islamism being just one more with them.

Award-winner of the day

In 2009 Myers was named the American Humanist Association's "Humanist of the Year".

From PZ Myers' wiki page

Hitchens versus God

If you’ve got a rainy or volcanic ash-blighted afternoon to kill you could do worse than type ‘Hitchens versus Hitchens’ into Youtube and watch Christopher and Peter debate Iraq and God in 14 fun-sized chunks. Chris Hitchens is a brilliant debater – a brilliant man - but he always needs to go too far. This need is pathological but it’s the essential element of his Hitchness so complaining about it is beside the point. It does mean, however, that even when he’s absolutely right he always says something absolutely wrong.

Chris isn’t keen on religion. He hates God and also disbelieves in Him, so at root he only differs from the most tediously predictable atheists in terms of style (for which reason I shouldn’t be surprised if he does eventually change to either a more moderate or more idiosyncratic position if only to escape the consensus; in fact, I’m tempted to speculate that he would be much less hardline if he didn’t reside in the US, where he can still just about provoke a bit of outrage by being so; whereas over here the best way to create a row is to defend God-bothering).

We can divide his position into the atheist parts and the anti-theist parts. Obviously we’re talking about the Abrahamic monotheist faiths here – Hindus don’t get much of a mention. Hitchens does the atheist bit - ie. exposing the absurdity of literal belief in the stuff of the Bible- with great aplomb. Meh. Aren’t we past all that? Really, how many believers operating in Hitchens’ sphere of pontification literally buy it all without doubts that can vary from troubling to severe to total? Hardcore Born-Agains, perhaps, as best they can, but their faith always looks brittle and not much more interesting than any cult or reality-avoidance method.

The sophisticate columnist/debater’s battleground today, surely, is in the question of whether religion, regardless of the truth-value of its tenets, really does Poison Everything. There seem to be three main strands in Hitchens’ anti-theism.

The first is that organised religion is responsible for all of history’s violence and genocide and exploitation and filth and horror and squalor. His response to the Stalin/Mao/Hitler objection is to make a historical argument that Communism and Fascism were supported by various establishment Churches (Papists mainly), and then a philosophical argument that Communism and Fascism are themselves religions anyway. Surely he must feel himself treading from the solid ground of straightforward atheism onto the wobbly wooden bridge of semantic dubiousness here, but he persists with vehemence. The refusal to accept that both God-fearing and Godless humans are perfectly capable of great evil is his most obvious tumble into the Hitchens trap of Going Too Far and harms his seriousness. But that’s a hundred other posts at least.

The second strand of Christopher’s anti-theism is what I would crudely term the Swinging Dick approach. To worship an omnipotent, omniscient God is to be a serf, a sheep, a slave, a sop and a sucker. In other words, to be the opposite of The Hitch, fearless intellectual gunslinger, alone in a cold universe and kickin’ ass. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Hitch has been inside the Total Perspective Vortex; he knew his place in the vast emptiness and liked what he saw. And if being an existential hero just happens to irresistible to the chicks, who is he to argue? The trouble with the Swinging Dick position is that it can lead to contempt; it conjures up the Ubermensch and Ayn Rand, or other unpleasant anti-human follies. This is because most humans are not Swinging Dicks and the Superman is a myth.

The third strand is the problem of evil (or the problem of suffering) which, he argues, makes the worship of an omnipotent God repulsive. Hitch goes for this at full throttle with the case of Elizabeth Fritzl. What could be more disgusting than your worship of a God who sits and looks on with folded arms as Josef Fritzl descends to his cellar once again? Imagine how many times Elizabeth must have prayed, unanswered, while God declined to intervene for 24 years. But this is an ancient problem within faiths and the anti-theist who believes that religion poisons everything should show why the post-God world he wishes to bring about offers something better or at least no worse to sufferers. In the believers’ universe, Elizabeth can at least hope for a better break in the afterlife, and for justice for Josef. In Hitch’s universe even this feeble consolation is denied. Life really is indifferent and there will be no more breaks. Of course, The Hitch can handle the cold truth but then he’s a Swinging Dick.

Hitchens and Dawkins argue that religion needs to disappear for the progress and evolution of humanity, yet the suspicion for an evolutionist must be that religion persists because it is in some way beneficial (Dawkins’ virus theory is wobblier than the Communism = Religion one). If religion could be destroyed it would soon be invented again because humans are not Swinging Dicks and by and large they appear to need some kind of organised Hope in order to function in this sorry imperfect world. Hitchens can’t directly advocate banning religion because he distinguishes his own post-religious utopia from the ‘religion’ of Stalinism by explaining that his is based on the principles of democratic liberal secular humanism. Inherent in that, if it is to be worth anything, is the refusal to persecute people for what they believe. So he must drive religion away by appeal to each listener’s good sense and better nature, with argument and reason, and with ridicule and accusations of evil. Good luck with that. Strange how many of those calling themselves ‘humanists’ want to eradicate a persistent and fundamental part of humanity.

The conclusion of all of which, therefore, is that if the Hitch were here, swinging his dick or otherwise, I would put it to him that while you can be both a humanist and an atheist, you cannot coherently be both a humanist and an anti-theist. Then I would take cover while he commenced kicking my ass.

Review Show zinger

BBC2 live cultural discussion programme The Review Show (formerly Newsnight Review, formerly The Late Review) has of course declined significantly from the golden era of the mid 1990s when the regular dream team of Tony Parsons (cocky), Tom Paulin (preposterous) and either Julie Myerson Alison Pearson (head-girlish) or Germaine Greer (even more preposterous than Paulin) waffled away under the expert stewardship of Mark Lawson.

The presenters on today’s roster, including Malty’s favourite Kirsty Wark, aren’t a patch on Lawson, and, though the likes of Michael Gove (soon to be wasted on Government) and Joe Queenan provide some relief, too often the pundit-sofas are stuffed with interchangeable Guardian columnists who insist on mentioning the ‘illegal war in Iraq’ in every sentence and all talk over each other in their haste to do it, with Sarah Churchwell the rudest and most breathless talk-overer. The show doesn't need to be broadcast live; I’m convinced the whole thing would be much better if it were pre-recorded over a few hours and then edited down, to reduce the sense of hurry.

That said, Friday’s episode was a good one, with the usual political ratio reversed and some Scottish bloke called Pat Kane the only left-leaning conspiracy theorist. Most socialists have a contemptuous, impatient hatred of the People and must put the enduring popularity of conservativism amongst them down to ignorance or brainwashing by a sinister elite. Quite probably it does not occur to Kane - it is not even a possibility in his universe - that people can be decent, sentient and broadly right-wing all at the same time. It was warming to watch his fellow guests poke fun at him, and David Aaranovitch got off a real zinger right at the end with this exchange:

Kane: The Republicans are quite explicit about the fact that the reason they have had an American hegemony is because they tapped into psychologically-based marketing techniques to be able to manufacture certain kinds of consent to certain kinds of agenda...

Aaranovitch: Or to put it another way, people agreed with them.

Obama doesn’t like us very much

Over at Gaw’s place I mentioned my intuition that Obama doesn’t like us very much. I follow current affairs only in an idle sort of way because I don’t really believe in them, so this was based purely on reading the stars and tea leaves and the fact that I couldn’t remember any nice speeches about The Special Relationship etc. However, yesterday I spotted this article in the ST:

When the Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl asked White House officials to name a foreign leader with whom Obama had forged a personal relationship, there was “a lot of hemming and hawing”, he said. To his astonishment, no one mentioned Gordon Brown. Instead the name proffered was Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president.

The British feel particularly miffed. Within days of becoming president, Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. This, followed by Obama’s odd choice of gift to Brown — a box of DVDs including Psycho and Toy Story — prompted speculation of something deeper. In his memoir, Obama writes of how his grandfather was beaten by British troops in colonial Kenya.

A senior official from No 10, who was in Washington in December for Obama’s big speech on Afghanistan, was horrified that the president did not once mention Britain in the 45-minute address despite the presence there of 10,000 British troops.

We’re not alone though, as it appears Obama doesn’t like anyone much except the Russians, Chinese and Indonesians. The root problem, alas, seems to be that he is basically a bit of a jerk.

If one had been almost anywhere in Europe in the midst of all that cheering when Obama was elected and suggested that within a year or so the new President would have significantly worsened diplomatic relations with America’s traditional democratic allies compared to the Bush era, one would have risked a tar-and-feathering. Yet still people don’t listen when I observe the truism that everybody is always wrong about everything.

The Useful Idiot’s Useful Idiot

Sean Penn has defended Hugo Chávez as a model democrat and said those who call him a dictator should be jailed....

Good old Sean Penn. By the way, could there be a crueller summation of the current status of Failed Academic Noam Chomsky than this line, made all the more poignant for appearing in the Guardian:

Other celebrity endorsements [for Chavez] have come from the linguist and writer Noam Chomsky and model Naomi Campbell.

Eating animals

Jonathan Safran Foer has written an anti-meat book called Eating Animals.

Personally I find meat delicious and lack the will and/or moral fibre to sacrifice it and I don’t want to read Foer’s book because it will probably increase my feelings of guilt. I’m not proud of this.

Mrs Brit is a veggie and I’ve had to sit patiently with her through enough meals while some Clarkson-wannabe bore wags his forkful of steak and harangues her with tales of primitive man’s mammoth-hunting etc to know all the pro-meat arguments inside out. (If you are one of those people who feels the need to lecture vegetarian ladies you’ve just met, I urge you to desist. They will neither be convinced nor secretly thrilled and enraptured by your roguish forthrightness.) Anyway, it is of course perfectly possible to be vegetarian and healthy (how many obese veggies do you know?) and yes being able to give up meat is a luxury but then so is voting and not having to steal things.

Many of the anti-meat arguments are nonsense too, mind. Militant vegetarians - of which Mrs B is most certainly not one - often demand that meat-eaters should be prepared to slaughter their own animals. This makes no more sense than demanding that people who drive cars or use toilets should be prepared to fix their own engines or do their own plumbing.

On the other hand I find that I’m ever more conscious or guilty about free rangery and suchlike, and it seems clear that this is the direction the western world is going: until we perfect lab meat we’ll increasingly come to despise factory farming.

Moral values change and just as we feel sick at the way our forebears treated penniless orphans or petty criminals or ethnic minorities, so our descendants will be appalled by our battery chickens and many, many other things which we take for granted. We cannot even guess which of our routine behaviours will be the taboos of the future.

Kill your idols

One thing that really has gone to Prestatyn is the business of referring to “Tony Bliar”. Ho ho ho. In Standpoint the great Nick Cohen – that uniquely clear-eyed scourge of all forms of cant on both left and right wings - correctly observes that, like Thatcher before him, Blair has now become the cartoon baddie for the liberal media (the BBC and Channel 4 particularly).

Of course they hated Thatcher from the start, she had that advantage; Blair was adored so his former worshippers are like betrayed teenage lovers, flushed and hysterical. He was the Messiah so now he is the man who can do no good and who did no good. Even in Northern Ireland he contributed nothing, it was all Mo. Iraq was obviously the big one but no doubt it would have happened anyway.

It’s not that they say “Of course the removal of a genocidal tyrant is a good thing, but…”; it’s that Saddam doesn’t figure in ‘discussions’ at all. Instead there’s an endless argument from terms and conditions. Blair's “illegal war” has become a truism, as if the big thing about Iraq is that it was a case of white-collar fraud. I wonder what they’ll do to Obama when the last flickers of passion die.

The Indecent Left: A blast of the trumpet and some freestylin'

Dispiriting to read the apologists for Mary Beard on her blog. Her article was offensive because she had the arrogance to trot out a blasé personal theory putting 9/11 in a ‘context’ just three days after the atrocity - the vanity bred by a lifetime in the unreal world of academia meant that she thought she was qualified and worth listening to, when at that stage all that was required of anyone was acknowledgement that it was an atrocity. That she repeats her lame theory today is less morally offensive from that point of view but, given what we now know about Al Qaeda, is more intellectually insulting.

Despite the tireless haranguing from the likes of Nick Cohen, the arse of the Left has never been able to grasp that Al Qaeda is a death cult which hates everything it sees as blocking the worldwide imposition of an arcane interpretation of Islam. Appeasement, trying to understand their demands, the finer points of diplomacy, cheap-shot Nobel Peace prizes for Obama for not being Bush – these are all irrelevant to suicide bombers. Al Qaeda would just as happily see Mary Beard and her family dead as a Bush-voter and his family. Indeed, what could be more provocative to Al Qaeda than a bolshy female academic permitted by the liberal society to boast of her affairs with married men, and then mouth off about any topic she likes? Everything that permits Mary Beard to be Mary Beard is the enemy of Al Qaeda. This isn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, she has it coming...

The explanation for this blind spot is that the Indecent Left has never forgiven America for proving them wrong about communism. They have seen American capitalism as their number one enemy for so long that they can’t come to grips with the idea that they and America could share a mutual foe. For them it has always been a zero sum game – what’s bad for America is good for the world; they can't stomach the idea that jihad is bad for everyone, putting them in this case on the same side as, for example, Sarah Palin.

What is the excuse for this kind of thinking these days? Goodness knows we live in a fallen, flawed world in which nothing is black and white and the US and Britain have their fair share of mistakes and moral failures to reckon with, but when it comes down to it, since the early 20th Century there’s been a line with the Anglosphere on one side and the disastrous, murderous ideas engendered in Europe on the other, ie. the Nazis and the Commies (and not much better are the corrupted Old Europeans, collaborators and appeasers, dishing out prizes to Harold Pinter, drafting statements of condolence to the Haiti victims while America sorts out the rescue operation, inventing relative poverty, dithering over resolutions they’re unwilling to enforce, growing fat welfare states because the US gave them half a century of free defence against the Soviets et cetera et cetera); anyway, the point is that even in this fuzzy world there is a line, and if you consistently find yourself on the wrong side of that line, as a reflex, like a tic, over and over, drinking Coke and wearing jeans while you casually denounce the Hegemony of the Great Satan, then surely the time really has come to pull your head out of your backside and grow up. But what can you do? Why are there so many Mary Beards? The world is on its head and nothing makes sense and who of us so complexly entangled in our common human blah blah blah can plumb the innermost recesses of another’s and so forth and so on?

A can of worms

...would it be opening one of the aforementioned, I wonder, if I were to ask about the possible relationship between 'natural law' and, ahem, 'evolutionary psychology'?

Mary Beard 2: Wicked subversion and the donnish mind

Mary Beard has, I believe, visited the post below. My statistics machine – a Blötzmannometer attached to the computer via a pneumatic funnel and borrowed from Frank Key – shows that someone at Cambridge University has landed there by googling “Mary Beard desert island discs” and Beard’s own blog suggests an impatient, insecure desire for internet validation:

People have sent such great emails…Of course I recognise that only people who liked what you are said are likely to email or post directly. So far not a single email from a colleague (oh dear). And there have been a couple of blogs about 9/11 and about my crap choice of music, But all in all I reckon I've come out just about ahead.

In return I’ve left an abridged version of the post on her A Don’s Life blog. As a critique of her 9/11 views it will of course be nothing she hasn’t heard a thousand times before – usually in more violent tones - so I’m not expecting a reply. The fact that Beard still feels happy to profess these views despite an awareness of the offence she causes is worth pondering. Possibly it is the result of too many years in the unreality of academia, or maybe it is just that people like this are drawn to academia. Anyway, the Don’s life is one of constant argument and opinion in a protected environment. You say something to make a splash and expect disagreement. Beard’s self-image includes being “wickedly subversive”. Presumably she feels that her statements about 9/11 are just a continuation of the wicked subversion she brings to the received wisdom about Ancient Rome.

But there is ‘wickedly subversive’ as in “wink wink ooh isn’t she just wicked” and then there is “wickedly subversive’ as in “evil and perverse”. Perhaps Beard is simply too densely donnish to tell the difference. On Desert Island Discs she used as jutification the claim that ‘most people she talked to’ felt similarly. Given that she hangs out with dons and students, this might even be all too true.

Her notorious article used the standard 'roosting chickens' device of expressing unconvincing sympathy for the 9/11 victims and then introducing her theory about how they deserved it with the word ‘but’…

The horror of the tragedy was enormously intensified by the ringside seats we were offered through telephone answering machines and text-messages. But…

The ‘But’ is the bit I don’t understand. Surely, to a human in the real world, everything said before the ‘But’ suffices. When considering an atrocity such as 9/11 it is not required of you to add a ‘But’ and a theory. I cannot fathom Beard’s way of thinking: the density and the sheer gall.