'We [have] not now that strength which in the old days / Moved earth and heaven'

DR. GEOFFREY WILLIAM GRIFFIN, M.G.H, M.B.S, O.B.E [1933 - 2005]

Nation, Standard, Standard II, Starehe.net.

Kenyan Blogger Meetup.

First, let me acknowledge that Mato has beaten me to this.

All the same, I'd like to propose a Kenyan blogger meetup. I'm thinking Nairobi in late July/early August. It'd be a wonderful chance to get to know each other better, and to compare barbecue skills.

You'll notice that I haven't got a venue, but I have some ideas...

I'd be delighted to hear from people regarding how/when/where to meet up, and would also be happy to combine efforts with anyone who wants to do the same, or has experience with it. (I'm thinking of you Nicholas Gichu& Martin Kimani)

What say you?

I'm it, apparently.

I've been tagged by WM, so here goes:

Total number of films I own on DVD/Video.

7 or so, including such gems as The Treble Season Review, and Au revoir Cantona.

Last film I watched.

So memorable I don't remember it...

Five films I watch often or that mean a lot to me.

Batman Forever: I know, I know. In my defence: I was particularly impressionable at the time, and I have been unable to unimpress myself since. All style and no substance, but what style.

Clerks: Kevin Smith peaked early. Great dialogue, bizarre and bizzarely believable situations, and the petit-bourgeois-analyis-of- Star-Wars scene is magic.

The Life of O-Haru: Ever wondered what it was like being a woman in medieval Japan?

LOTR. For immensely obvious reasons.

Cry Freedom: Great story; and because when I went to see it with my Dad, some loud guy three rows from the front gave away the final twist half an hour from the end.

The Matrix: Because it made philosophers (and dream skepticism) cool (if only very briefly). And because Colin McGinn was moved to write this, and David Chalmers was moved to write that.

the Sqatsi trilogy. Awesome Imagery + Philip Glass Score + Romanticisation Of Poverty = Puzzling and Strangely Satisfying Experience.

Five people I'd like to do this:

Exlaodiceans, Migz, Medusa, Rob Jubb, Kimani, MadKenyanWoman and Memoire.

buggery!

failed economic migrant goes home.

that old anglo-saxon sense of fair play II

The backlash begins. Christine Nicholls' Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya is, she admits, written from the colonist's perspective. Her explicit intention is to justify the ways of the mzungu. This may even be a worthy aim, but one expects some respect for the historical record. However, if the reviews here and here are to be believed, she makes some insupportable claims and disregards various inconvenient vilenesses.

A quick going-over of some of the claims:

Whites also, the book argues, enabled Kenyan farming to move onwards from a
subsistence level towards lucrative cash crops. "The whites made an enormous
contribution to the economic development and wellbeing of Kenya,"

This is at complete variance with well-established fact. Africans were, for most of the colonial period prohibited from growing cash-crops, in order to ensure a supply of cheap labour for large-scale white production. Harry Thuku, anyone?

"(But) much of what they had done was good. Kenya under African rule was
economically and politically viable in 1964, it was a democracy, Africans had
embraced 20th century ambitions and attitudes and advanced farming methods had
been introduced."

This is sheer mendacity. Let's review some salient facts.
Black Kenyans, all 7 million or so of them, were prohibited from participating directly in politics until 1944, and even then were allowed only a single (appointed) representative. White colonials, a population of 60, 000 or so, had 14. The first direct elections in which Africans could participate on anything like equal terms were in 1957, after sixty-odd years of colonial rule, and only six years before independence.
African property rights were disrespected, there were different codes of law for different races, and black kenyans could not enforce legal judgements against white colonials.
It would appear that black kenyans adopted democracy despite , rather than because of, the example of the mzungu.

The Spectator reviewer has managed to dig out a quote from Meinertzhagen's diary illustrating the plans that Charles Eliot (then our governor) had for Kenya (and Meinertzhagen's misgivings):

to confine the natives to reserves and use them as cheap labour on farms. I
suggested that the country belonged to Africans, that their interests must
prevail over the interests of strangers. [Eliot] would not have it; he kept on
using the word ‘paramount’ with reference to the claims of Europeans. I said
that some day the Africans would be educated and armed; that would lead to a
clash.

How is it that a man of blood like Meinertzhagen could see the problem with the colonial project yet Nicholls cannot?

mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...

...or why the Kenyan middle classes are not fit to live. Mato purges.

Fr. Tom Reese...

Fr. Thomas Reese has resigned as editor-in-chief of America. Most reports suggest that he was pushed by the CDF. See the Washington Post, NYT.

The National Catholic Reporter's take on the reasons for his dismissal:

Over the course of a five-year exchange between the doctrinal congregation and the Jesuits, the Vatican congregation had raised objections to various editorial choices at America under Reese's leadership, including:

• An essay exploring moral arguments for the approval of condoms in the context of HIV/AIDS;
• Several critical analyses of the doctrinal congregation's September 2000 document Dominus Iesus, on religious pluralism;
• An editorial criticizing what America called a lack of due process in the congregation's procedures for the investigation of theologians;
• An essay about homosexual priests;
• A guest essay from U.S. Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, challenging suggestions that the church should refuse Communion to Catholic politicians who do not vote as a number of bishops believe they should vote.

attack of the racist ice-cream!! (Northern European edition)

Via Slate.com. Start here, then try here, and if you haven't had enough..try this.

UPDATE: some responses here.

UPDATE II: and here's how to say it auf deutsch.

UPDATE III: More embarrassing product names!! Plopp chocolate, Basterd sugar, and (in a wholly different class) Zyklon boots.

Habemus Papam.

BENEDICTUM XVI

19 April 2005

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum;
habemus Papam:

Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum,
Dominum Josephum
Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger
qui sibi nomen imposuit Benedictum XVI

a somewhat incongruous successor.

cross-posted here.

Rob Jubb has handed me the baton.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?
One of:
- Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, ('worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass ...')
- Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity.
- Owen Chadwick's translation of Augustine's Confessions.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Definitely. Longest lasting: Julia from 1984, and Ihuoma from Elechi Amadi's The Concubine.

The last book you bought is:
David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind.

The last book you read is:
I'm still reading Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity.

Five books you would take to a desert island:
Descartes' Discourse on Method, Kripke's Naming and Necessity, Orwell's 1984, the Philosophical Investigations, the Douay-Rheims Bible, and Summa Contra Gentiles.
And yes, I've noticed that's one more than I'm allowed.

What are you currently reading?
David Braine's paper 'Aquinas, God and Being' and Anthony Kenny's Five Ways.

Who are you going to pass this stick to, and why?
The Exlaodicea crew, seeing as they're all massively erudite. Everyone at the Kenyan blog ring, now KenyaUnlimited. Ory Okolloh at Kenyan Pundit, as she's sensible, and Bee at things that go bump in the night because I can.

Karol Josef Wojtyla, lately Pope John Paul II.

May 18 1920 - April 2 2005

Official press release.

Obituaries and Memorials.
Guardian.BBC. NYT. Globe and Mail [Ca]. National Catholic Reporter . Times. Telegraph. Tablet. Vatican memorial. Archbishop Ndingi's tribute. Sandro Magister (via berenike). Commonweal. George Weigel. Times again. Economist.

Information.
Vatican. Zenit. Catholicnews. the Popeblog. Wikipedia.

There will be a requiem Mass in St. Mary's Cathedral in Aberdeen on Wednesday 6th April at 7pm.

feet of clay.

Over at Crooked timber, there's an interesting post marking the 25th anniversary of the St. Paul's riots. There's a link in the post to this paper [pdf!], which discusses race and policing in urban areas. The author of the paper gives, in illustration, Lord Denning's infamous quote from What next in the Law, which I'd quite forgotten about. My Dad thought Denning instantiated the ideal of the liberal judge, and bought every book of his that he could find. This hero-worship passed naturally to me, and so it was quite disappointing, when I came to England, to discover that Denning was capable of saying, publicly, such rubbish. Ah well.

il Papa

JPII
It would seem that the end is near. Please pray that he might have a 'quiet night and a perfect end'.
Here's a nice little picture from his first vist to Kenya. [from the Archdiocese of Sydney website]

housekeeping.

THEODOLUS is the saint of the day.

Ok, here's the plan. From now on, my philosophical posts will go there. Everything else will be put up here. I look forward to seeing you at philosophical investigations.

skeptical slumber over.

Sorry everyone, I've been away far too long. My dissertation is just about ready for despatch, so normal service ought to resume shortly.

Yes, the dialetheism post is still on its way...

suitably paschal. 

Prof. Elkins on tour

ELKINS gave a lecture yesterday at UoN, describing the methods used by the colonial administration to suppress MauMau. The Standard report is here.

Locke in the style of Immortal Technique

Crooked Timber called for hiphop renderings of philosophers; Lenin (duly added to the blogroll) responded with an absolute stonker- Locke in the style of Immortal Technique:

You betta watch what tha fuck flies outa ya mouth
Or I'ma burn your house down with ya tied to ya couch
Cos reward and punishment’s the only rational way
To make a fuckin man do whatever the fuck I say
I gotta viewa human nature that’s tabula rasa
Cos you don’t know shit til I make you my masta.

Separation a powers, got my checks and balances
And the Glorious Revolution got me in the palaces
And you mystical muthafuckas just look like some phalluses
Locke down and cold, murdering all yo fallacies.

Empirical truth, mutha, don’t ever try to diss me
Cos I got rhymes that’s colder than Walt Disney
My lyrics are like syphallus but harder to catch
An if you don’t obey my law, then you gettin yo ass capped
You gettin locked in the pen fo ten to fifty
Monopoly a violence boy, cos you lookin shifty.

You Hobbesian people swallow like Bambi Woods
And you’d never live a day in the projects or the hoods
Cos you ignorant about what keeps men from they selfish ways
Private property, boy, helps the people get paid.

Etc etc etc.

form is temporary, class is permanent.

STAREHE, again.

PETER BENENSON. Requiescat in pace. More here, and here.