Prepositions

The Grauniad hasn't really lived up to the nickname for a while, so it's good to see them keeping their hand in. (They got it right at the top of the page.)

Moderate

It's worth pausing to acknowledge that the real Hillary Clinton is a charming person of moderate intellect and ability whose true talent lies in convincing college-educated people that her ambition, and by extension theirs, is a genuine expression of competence. Among the striving professional classes there is no greater analogy for career advancement than the presidency, and Clinton’s bitter defeat at the hands of a mad pretender has only deepened their conviction, successfully branded as feminist, that the height of injustice consists in the withholding of privileges owed.

Ian Holm 1931-2020

Privilege

The rhetoric of privilege is a weapon, but it’s not pointed at actually (ie, financially) privileged white people. We get off lightly. All we have to do is reflect on our privilege, chase our dreamy reflections through an endlessly mirrored habitus – and that was already our favourite game. You might as well decide that the only cure for white privilege is ice cream. Working-class whites get no such luxuries. But as always, the real brunt falls on non-white people. What happens when you present inequality in terms of privileges bestowed on white people, rather than rights and dignity denied to non-white people? The situation of the oppressed becomes a natural base-state. You end up thinking some very strange things.

Read this from Mr Kriss. All of it.

Jack Mundey 1929-2020

For God's sake, let's sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings...

Decorum

About the only weird thing about people reacting with predictable schadenfreude to Rush Limbaugh's lung cancer diagnosis is the large number calling him a blowhard compared to the much smaller number calling him a blowhard as a joke.

Identity Politics

Just so we're clear, pointing out that "all elephants are gray, and Dumbo is an elephant, therefore Dumbo can fly" is not a valid syllogism is not the same thing as denying Dumbo's lived experience as an elephant.

Although, while we're on the subject, the technical term for someone who questions lived experience is a neurologist. Narrative memory not being reliable and all.

Catchphrase

When the convincing result of the vote was announced, helped by more than 100 new recruits to the government benches, one Tory MP was caught on microphone exclaiming: “Back of the net.”

A missed opportunity, I feel.

Laudable Pus

Consider the example of the weapon salve. This was a famous, or notorious, magical oint­ment developed and promoted by the Paracelsians... It was an ointment that could cure wounds incurred in battle by applying the ointment to the weapon that caused the wound... If, as seems likely, the weapon was not available, then the ointment was applied to a bandage or piece of cloth that had been soaked in blood from the wound but which was then kept away from the injury. This proved to be much more successful than the standard means of treating wounds... To understand this you just need to know what the standard method of treatment was.

Since time immemorial, healers had noticed that wounds run with yellow matter, pus, before they heal. We are speaking, of course, of the days before antiseptics - indeed before anybody ever dreamed there were such things as invisible germs and before any concomitant ideas of the need for hygiene in this regard. Formation of pus in a wound seemed, therefore, to be part of the healing process. Here, then, we have a perfectly reasonable conclusion based on often-repeated observational evidence. This was the medical theory ... of ‘laudable pus’: pus is a good thing, a sign that healing is taking place. Accordingly, doctors and surgeons throughout the ages would pack wounds with irritating substances - ground up egg-shells, sand, coarse feathers and the like - in order deliberately to stimulate the formation of pus and thereby, as they thought, accelerate the healing process. In the case of serious wounds they would often bandage the packed wound really tightly to increase the irritation, and would arrange a goose quill (or some other tube), emerging from the dressing, to act as an outlet pipe to drain off the pus as it formed.

By contrast, in the case of treatment by the weapon salve, the wound would simply be kept clean and dry, perhaps with a light dressing ... while the doctors concentrated on smearing their obnoxious potions on a sword or a blood-stained cloth. It's easy to see, therefore, why the weapon salve was so successful as a cure for wounds... The theory of laudable pus was so strongly held that on-lookers concluded not that the theory of laudable pus must be wrong, but that somehow the weapon salve had an occult power of curing wounds without the formation of pus...

From Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Helped Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science by John Henry. Under current circumstances, I should clarify this cite has no allegorical meaning, that I’m aware of.

Lest We Remember

In early March 1919, demonstrations in Cairo, mainly by students, initiated an outburst of anti-British rioting, which within a few days spread through all the lower provinces and extended to upper Egypt. The situation was exacerbated by the local civil service's declaration of a general strike and the rapid suspension of railway and telegraph services. In the absence of a large British force in Egypt, elements of the Australian and ANZAC Mounted Divisions, then awaiting embarkation to Australia, were instructed to restore order. Within a month of the uprising order had been restored and principal political agitators imprisoned. The flexibility and mobility of the ANZAC forces involved were principal factors in the suppression of the rioting.

At the Australian War Memorial web page for the Egyptian Uprising 1919, "Category: Riot"

See also the collection items: an improvised cricket bat from Egypt in 1919, which for some reason they keep in the Western Front gallery, and the diary of an Australian CO - I wonder what all the references to military courts involving men with Arabic names were about.

Outsiders

Outsiders are supposed to be good because they bring the perspective of, well, outsiders. Before he worked in the Office of the White House Counsel, Shomik Dutta was pressing his street cred to the fundraising arm of the Obama campaign. His pitch? “You need someone who really understands the mid-Atlantic—the less established donors, the real-estate-developer folks.” That’s what passes for heterodoxy in these quarters.

Grin

Niceness is the blank grin on the face of the psychopath: it is the public enactment of all the forms of love and kindness without the troublesome burden of loving anyone or treating people with kindness.