Parallel passages: English riots edition

Glen Newey, "To Hell in a Looted Shopping Trolley":

The weather here this week has been typical of the Scottish summer. No one feels like rioting when it’s pissing down with rain.


Lewis Namier famously described 18th-century British politics as ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’. In fact riots often combine the form of radical protest with reactionary content. The Gordon Riots that erupted in the early summer of 1780 after the partial repeal of the 1698 Popery Act led to an orgy of looting not of moveable property, but of gin (though that isn’t where the name comes from). The riots drew on long-simmering resentment against excise duties on liquor. Horace Walpole remarked that more people had been killed by drink than by musket-ball, as the mob rifled gin-palaces for free booze; at one point a fire in the Fleet was unwittingly fuelled when it was doused with gin instead of water. One of the rioters’ targets was the old Clink prison. That was part of the medieval ‘manor’ or liberty of Southwark, an area so free of city jurisdiction that the bishop, whose manor it was, used it to run bear-baiting shows and a brothel.

Jon Day, "In Hackney":

A young woman with a red bandana tied round her head carried a green recycling box filled with bottles to throw. ... A man carrying a charred rocking horse ran up and clowned around for the phalanx of photographers and cameramen that stood between the riot police and a large group of teenagers. ... Someone threw a Molotov cocktail, but it went out in flight. An off-licence was broken into and people formed a reasonably orderly queue, emerging with bottles of spirits, cartons of cigarettes and boxes of lottery scratch cards, which they smashed open on the curb.

(Both from the LRB Blog, which has a great deal of excellent coverage.) Perhaps it is inappropriate to blog about this issue in a purely frivolous way, but I have read virtually no interesting analysis, & have little to say other than what is obviously implied by my general political outlook.

Unrelated link -- or related only through the non-etymology of Gordon's! -- a list of words for which the first OED quotation is from 1925: incl. arachnophobia, chewy, Comintern, cuppa, electron volt, enhat (i.e. provide with a hat), Kleenex, Leica, knitwear, makeover, neurosurgeon, nudnik, oncologist, paraphilia, recycle, shamus, sousaphone, superstar, Tootsie roll, Trotskyism, and zipper.

The Grayling Farce: a Link-Dump

[Disclaimer: I am sympathetic in the abstract to the following argument -- the bureaucrats and politicians who run higher education in the UK are incorrigible vandals who are out to destroy the humanities (and maybe the pure sciences); the situation is less dire in the US because well-endowed private universities exist; therefore there is an argument to be made that the private university is a refuge for researchers in the humanities. (I do not know how accurate this is. Differences in tenure might also be relevant.) If a university cannot run itself on an endowment or government grants, it has to raise money somehow, and one way to do this is through students' fees. It is very bad, perhaps reprehensible, that low-income students would not have access, but we live in hard times and it's better that some people have access than that no one does.
I would not consider this a knock-down argument but it isn't without force.]

A.C. Grayling's increasingly absurd new scheme (appropriately, the URL is nchum.org) seems at first sight to be related, but in fact it is not. As Mary Beard says, there is no real research component. The "distinguished professors" are all public intellectuals (mostly over-committed), e.g., the Guardian lists

Richard Dawkins teaching evolutionary biology and science literacy, Niall Ferguson teaching economics and economic history and Steven Pinker teaching philosophy and psychology [...] Ronald Dworkin QC, a leading constitutional lawyer teaching at University College London and New York University; and Steve Jones, a leading geneticist. Lawrence Krauss, professor of Earth and space exploration and physics at Arizona state university.

(It is interesting how many of these are nominally scientists, given that it's the "New College for the Humanities"...) Today the Guardian reports that the nchum website has posted syllabuses "copied from the University of London's own web pages." The point becomes clearer once you understand (via Jack of Kent's excellent roundup) that

it is not even a College in any meaningful sense.

Its students will be enrolled on University of London degrees which, it seems, they will have to apply for directly.

However, instead of the £1,000 to £2,000 a year they would expect to be charged for a University of London degree, the “gifted” student will be expected to pay £18,000.

At least Boris Johnson gets the point:

London's mayor, Boris Johnson, backed Grayling's idea, saying "it fully deserves to succeed and to be imitated".

It prompted him, Johnson added, to recall his own idea of founding "Reject's College, Oxbridge", which would be "aimed squarely at the wrathful parents – many of them Oxbridge graduates – who simply could not understand how their own offspring could rack up three A-stars and grade 8 bassoon, and yet find themselves turned down".

In general this seems about as silly and somewhat less harmless than Alain de Botton's roughly contemporary venture, the School of Life.

Brits, beards, bubbles

1. Simon Kuper (FT) has a mildly amusing go at the usual transatlantic-cultural-misunderstandings genre:

Americans won’t touch strangers, the French won’t talk to them, but Brits will neither touch nor talk to them. Passport to the Pub, a semi-official guide for foreign tourists to the UK, warns: “Don’t ever introduce yourself. The ‘Hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama’ approach does not go down well in British pubs.”

Nor are Britons permitted to make eye contact: the former French prime minister Edith Cresson, disconcerted that British men didn’t look at her, estimated that one in four was homosexual. No wonder Britons drink ever-increasing amounts of alcohol. Alcohol was first distilled so that British people could reproduce.

Re his observations about American friend-hugging and the gingerness thereof, I seem to remember there being a facebook group, back in the early days, that stood against "ass-out hugging."

2. I was briefly obsessed last year with this trustworthiness-of-beards infographic, and the obvious resulting question of how much of the sequence one could go through starting with an enormous beard and progressively excising various bits of it until one ended up with, say, a Hitler mustache or a "pencil-thin chinstrap." Related to this is an old Vanity Fair article I came upon yesterday, in which Rich Cohen -- ostensibly writing about his experiment with the Hitler mustache -- talks about its history:

The Toothbrush mustache was first introduced in Germany by Americans, who turned up with it at the end of the 19th century the way Americans would turn up with ducktails in the 1950s. It was a bit of modern efficiency, an answer to the ornate mustaches of Europe—pop effluvia that fell into the grip of a bad, bad man.^[1] Before that, the most popular mustache in Germany and Austria had been the sort worn by the royals. It was called the Kaiser, and it was elaborate. It was perfumed, styled, teased and trained. It turned up at the ends. It was the old, monarchical world that was about to be crushed by the rising tide of assembly-line America. In other words, in the case of Hitler and his 'stache, America faced an extreme case of blowback.
By the beginning of the century, it had been taken up by enough Germans to draw notice in the foreign press. In 1907, The New York Times chronicled a growing distaste for the import under the headline "toothbrush" mustache: german women resent its usurpation of the "kaiserbart."

Cohen also attributes the decline of the mustache after WW2 to a sense that one had to navigate between the Scylla of Hitlerian brevity and the Charybdis of Stalinesque luxuriance, and it was therefore simpler to drop the thing altogether.

3. Mark Doty writes about the bubbles in his eyes:

Bubble number two has been with me since early January. At first I couldn't see anything, and then when I could make out light again I seemed to be looking a viscous gray field, translucent and rippling. If I moved much it made me feel disoriented and a little sick. This bubble was of a sturdier stuff than the first, so it took until early February for it to become a circle that almost filled my field of vision, and now in early March it's become surprisingly pleasing: it's the size of a perfectly round pea, near the bottom of the right-hand side of the world. It is dark at the rim, a Rothko-ish black-purple, and and then it pales to a light sky color and then in the center is a blotch of a darker gray roughly the shape of Australia. Somehow this conspires to make it look three dimensional, as if beautiful and oddly colored pearl is floating near the base of everything. It has, today, a tiny satellite. Yesterday there were three.

The two bubbles have given me a cataract (unavoidable side effect) so that may be contributing to the pearly aspect of the little sphere. Two oddities: at night, light bounces off the bubble into the upper reaches of my eye, so that I can see up high the double of a candle flame, a dashboard, a computer screen. And, if I tilt my head down and look at the floor, the bubble turns a magenta red, as if I'm looking at it through the screen of my own blood.

4. I enjoyed reading Jeffrey Friedman's essay on the trouble with libertarianism, viz. that it didn't stay true to its elitist, anti-democratic roots (!) -- and I agree locally with a considerable part of it, although in my view it is misguided to think of libertarianism as a philosophy at all.

5. It has occurred to me that, in these "closing-tabs" posts, I often misattribute or neglect to mention the sources of links. I'm sorry about this but it's inevitable as the tabs have usually been open for a while.