I was trying to frame some thoughts about the recently emerged situation with the Speaker of the House of Commons and the police raid. And then I realised, I don’t really have any coherent thoughts about this. I know so very little about the emergence of British Parliamentary Democracy, and what I do know is all in bits and pieces. I know I’m interested in it, but I don’t really know anything about it.
So now I know I’m pretty horrified at the teaching of history and civics in British schools – and indeed at university. The survey courses I took before specialising at honours completely skipped the English Civil War, skimmed over the Restoration, featured a bit part by the Glorious Revolution before mostly ignoring the arrival of the Hannoverian monarchs in favour of dealing with the international wars of the eighteenth century. And nineteenth century history was mostly social history – but yet not really featuring the Reform Laws at all.
However, that doesn’t really help me improve my knowledge. So if someone could recommend me a good book or two on the subject for starters I’d be grateful.
Tag: Politics
Go to tag galaxy and type stuff in. Try, say, ‘Obama’, ‘cos you get a lot of results.
Today my supervisor says to me:
“I feel really sorry for Sarah Palin, she has such a big head and no brain inside it. It can’t be comfortable going through life like that.”
I’m back from Spain and re-embarking on the thesis. I begin by setting aside 120-odd years of scholarship on the Roman constitution.
Please tell me that this is not the new England shirt. I adore the sight of Paul Sackey scoring tries, but I’m not sure that I adore that shirt. Please tell me that it’s just a change strip because the Pacific Islanders were in white. Please. It looks like an Arsenal shirt. Ugh.
In other news, Spain is lots of nice things. Among other stuff, the hot chocolate is amazing, clearly, and the food is all kinds of good things. I have been taking lots’n'lots of pictures, as ever, but I forgot my camera cable, and so ye cannae see any of them till I get home on Wednesday. Or as my father said, “So the world can expect a deluge of Madrid photos then, can it?” Well, just my world. I very much doubt refugees in the DRC will be paying attention.
Jim Wallis tells Dr James Dobson what he thinks of Focus on the Family’s 2012 Letter.
“James Dobson, you owe America an apology. The fictional letter released through your Focus on the Family Action organization, titled “Letter From 2012 in Obama’s America”, crosses all lines of decent public discourse. In a time of utter political incivility, it shows the kind of negative Christian leadership that has become so embarrassing to so many of your fellow Christians in America. We are weary of this kind of Christian leadership, and that is why so many are forsaking the Religious Right in this election…”
This is pretty much exactly what needed to be said.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is my hero. Really, truly, properly. I just think he’s one of the best men to ever have lived. I got to meet him once, when he was the Archbishop of Cape Town, as my Nan and Aunt worshipped there and knew him a little. It’ll probably be one of my favourite memories till I die.
Anyway, it turns out that he has been in Chicago, where he was giving a talk called, “The Dawn of a New Moral Awakening,” at a breakfast given at Chicago Center for Cultural Connections.
This is some of what he said, from Cathleen Falsani at God’s Politics
“The other day, we were traveling and went through one or another of the airports,” Tutu told the diverse audience that included several other Christian bishops, rabbis, imams, Sikhs, and Buddhists, among others. “And the [television] screens showed some illustrations or cartoons of Barack Obama wearing Arab clothes, Muslim garb. I didn’t see all of it because we were passing through, but there was something about it … he was holding a gun and ‘terrorist’ was something that was put down there.”
“I felt incredibly sad for this country,” Tutu said, his sparkly eyes flashing with emotion behind wire-rimmed spectacles. “I thought, how obscene. How repulsive. And also, how dangerous! You know what’s happened already? There are people in this country and in many other countries who are saying, ‘Islam is a religion that propagates violence. Islam is a religion that propagates terrorism.’ It’s an offensive, repulsive, obscene [mischaracterization] and dangerous. And they say this because one of his names is ‘Hussein’? They forget that the other name means ‘blessing.’”
These people need to be stopped from being allowed to claim that they are speaking for Christianity as a whole, right about now.
I am horrified that this is actually a serious advert, though not surprised. I am sick of the way that this kind of thing makes a lot of militant athesists assume that this is what I think and believe just because I’m a Christian. I’m sick of the way the Christians who believe and promote this kind of thing get to tell me I’m going to hell because I don’t think like they do. And I am absolutely disgusted by things like Focus on the Family’s Letter from 2012 which not only misinterprets Obama’s policies and views and the amount any president can get done in one term, but which seeks to make people vote based on fear, and which condems young evangelicals for voting for Obama.
It is way past time for those young evangelicals to reclaim their faith from these people, and to say, “No, I think you’re getting it wrong.” It doesn’t have to be a condemnation of the beliefs – though it certainly should be of some of the methods of spreading them – but an explanation of why we believe what we believe, and why it’s ok for us to believe it. Kudos to Jim Wallis and Co. at God’s Politics and Sojourners who try and drag Christian social concerns into a non-partisan-specific but politcally active field. We need to stop the fundamentalist religious right from dictating the discourse about the Christian faith. They don’t speak for all of us, and they shouldn’t be allowed to.
On Saturdays, I get the Telegraph delivered. Don’t judge me, I just like the supplements. Will Greenwood on rugby alone makes up for the raving Tory-dom. Plus the General Knowledge crossword makes me feel smart.
Normally I ignore most of the ‘Comment’ page (that would, I believe, be the Op-Ed section, if you’re an American), especially if it’s a day when Boris Johnson indulges his wholehearted interest in the Classics and generally gets stuff wrong. However, today I took a look at the section because it had Charles Moore, former editor, autobiographer-in-progress of Margaret Thatcher writing about the George Osborne Situation, and I’ve spent most of the last week referring to Little Georgie as a “complete ninny”. I maintain that it is so far beyond dim to go to a party on Corfu and then gossip snarkily about another attendee – one, moreover, who has the nickname ‘Prince of Darkness’ – when you also spoke to the nice Russian man, without expecting there to be repercussions that it is actually impossible to do more than shake one’s head sadly and call the man a ninny, a nincompoop, or a twit.
This is Moore: “The Tory dogs did not rush out barking to defend their man… Why?… The first [reason] is that lots of Tories do not like Mr Osborne very much. This is a pity, since he is the most able political tactician they have. They should recognise that master tacticians sometimes need to have unrepeatable conversations with unspeakable people, and be understanding when they are caught out doing so. Instead of which, a shadow cabinet minister was quoted – unattributably of course – as calling him a ‘twerp’.”
