Giles Coren in today’s Times (£):

So let’s cancel the Ashes. I’m sick of Australia. All it has to do, the only thing expected of that entire country on the international stage, is to send a team of cricketers to England every three or four years who are better than ours, and who desperately want to win, so that we in England get a decent series of cricket matches over the summer, which we can heroically win maybe three times a century against all the odds, but which mostly we don’t mind losing because in the end we are still British and they, when the fuss has died down and winter comes, will always be Australian.

But none of that works if they’re rubbish. None of it! The whole thing is pointless. It’s as if the Germans were bad at football – who would care about them then?…

Don’t worry that I am jinxing things. I’ve talked to some cricketers and ex-cricketers in the past few weeks, level-headed men without a triumphalist bone in their body, who have looked at me sadly and said: “I can’t predict 5-0 because there’s always the weather. But I honestly can’t see Australia winning a game.” Matches intended to last five days are going to start on Thursday and only make it to the end of Friday if it rains.

Pull the other one. That’s the second time I’ve come across this view in the last few days. It’s the romantic delusion – to the fore mostly when England are losing to Australia – that the Poms don’t really mind losing to them. Good cricket, respect for a tough foe, and all that. But the truth is that there’s no one that England love to beat at cricket more than Australia. And there’s no one they hate, really hate, losing to as much. Five-nil, ten-nil, it won’t matter – that will go down a treat. And with good reason. There’s some history to be made up for here.

And quite right too. Let’s not turn the Ashes, the greatest sporting contest there is, into some spiff jolly what-ho production. No quarter asked or given – that’s what’s made the contest what it is.

From time to time since the US-led intervention in Iraq, people have popped up to say that the human costs of leaving Saddam in power were never part of the rationale for going to war, that this was merely a post hoc justification once WMD were not found. Being of a helpful disposition, on some of these occasions I would pop up in my turn to point out to those saying this sort of thing, and to others who might be misled by what they were saying, that there was clear evidence to the contrary, particularly in key speeches made by George W Bush and Tony Blair, and that for many of us who supported the Iraq war the potential costs of leaving Saddam in power were indeed central to our support.

Well, now we know. By this I don’t mean that we now know that the costs of non-intervention would have been greater than the costs of intervention have in fact been; merely that we now know that the costs of non-intervention could have been greater than the costs of intervention have been. Why we know is because of Syria – and I direct you to two pieces, one by Hopi Sen and the other by Terry Glavin, in case you haven’t already seen them. ‘Where is the outrage of the humanitarian left?’ Hopi asks, referring to the death rate in Syria. And:

The awful truth is that inaction and intervention both have terrible costs, and those who decide between them cannot ever truly know what will result. Some forgot that in the last decade, choosing to believe that only intervention could have a terrible price. I don’t forget the reverse now.

No, they didn’t forget; they just didn’t want to know. Because this was a way of trying to discredit the bona fide reasons of those who supported regime change in Iraq. Terry, for his part, has more about the present human costs in Syria. Clive James wrote a while back:

those appalled by the moral cost of toppling a tyrannical regime are still stuck with counting the moral cost incurred by leaving it alone.

Except that few of them have ever wanted to count this second cost. It has been the great falsehood of the liberal-left during the last decade, and if you detect a certain reticence about that now, you won’t be the only one who does. (Thanks, RB, for the James link.)

A handwritten doctor’s note was found attached to the clothing of a Syrian man brought to Israel in critical condition Tuesday. The note explained, in Arabic, previous surgical procedures and medical care the man had received days before in Syria. It asked Israel to save his life because the Syrian doctors could not provide the necessary medical treatment.

While Israel has started to treat growing numbers of people wounded in Syrian battles close to the border in recent months, this was the first case of a cross-border “transfer” from a Syrian medical facility.

The note, which was signed by a Syrian doctor and dated June 8, opened with “Hello distinguished surgeon” and explained that the patient, aged 28, suffered from a gunshot wound in the chest and shrapnel damage to his diaphragm and liver…

The Syrian doctor performed surgery to address “heavy abdominal bleeding” but noted that “the liver could not be sewed up” and that “it was necessary to examine the condition of the abdominal injury and remove the heavy pressure bandages” that the doctor had applied.

“Please do what is necessary and thanks in advance,” the note concluded, while noting the various drugs that had been used during treatment and that the patient had been hospitalized for two days.

Israel has so far treated around 20 Syrians who have been injured as a result of the Syrian civil war, and the IDF has set up a field hospital along the Israeli-Syrian border to help care for the injured. This particular patient, transferred by the IDF to Ziv Medical Center in Safed on Tuesday, is believed to be the first to be treated in Israel who had recent medical care in Syria.

Dr. Amiram Hadari, director of the trauma unit at Ziv hospital, said the procedure carried out in Syria was likely performed in a makeshift hospital and was “rudimentary,” but that “it seems that the [Syrian] operation saved his life.”

Here. (Thanks: GC.)

Sent to me last night as promising a treat, this radio interview with Bob Dylan from 1962 delivered in spades. There’s an account of the occasion here on Open Culture, and a transcript of the interview here. And you can hear the songs as well.

Try listening at 35 minutes in. (Thanks: SM.)

Ben Stanley was born in Cardiff in 1979. He lived in Bahrain as a child and returned to the UK in the late 1980s to live near Middlesbrough. After studying at the Universities of Warwick and Durham he moved to Warsaw, where he taught English for three years. He returned to the UK in 2005 to do a doctorate on the emergence of Polish populist parties that was awarded by the University of Essex in 2010. Since then Ben has worked in Bratislava and Warsaw, where he currently resides. From September 2013 onwards he will be a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at the Sussex European Institute. He blogs at Polish Party Politics.

Why do you blog? > To keep track of – and order my thoughts about – events in Polish party politics.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Post little and often. Advice that anybody checking my blog of late can see I have not heeded.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Leszek Kołakowski, Giovanni Sartori, John Stuart Mill, Michael Oakeshott.

What are you reading at the moment? > A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences by Gary Goertz and James Mahoney. Recommended reading for all methodological imperialists in the social sciences.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Warren Zevon, Stina Nordenstam, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, T.S. Eliot, Brian Wilson, Graham Greene, Elliott Smith, Philip Larkin, Jason Isbell, Sandy Denny.

What is the best novel you’ve ever read? > Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.

What is your favourite poem? > ‘Aubade‘ by Philip Larkin.

What is your favourite movie? > My Life As A Dog.

What is your favourite song? > ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice‘, by The Beach Boys.

Who is your favourite composer? > Mahler.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > I used to be in favour of a ban on prostitution on the grounds that it invariably involves the objectification and exploitation of women (yes, I know there are male prostitutes, but it is largely an issue about the status of women). However, I realized that I was making the unwarranted assumption that all women cannot exercise their own volition in this case. I cannot ignore the voices of that minority of women – and I am sure it is a minority – who explain why they have chosen of their own free will to become prostitutes. I have come to the conclusion that the duty of a liberal is to oppose those who would deprive women of their right to exercise consent – however those women would construe it.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > The libertarian idea that selfishness is not only natural but good, while altruism is unnatural and damaging to society. Both conditions are natural, and both are important.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Albert Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction not only taught me how to understand why I am not a conservative but also impressed upon me the need to be vigilant that my liberalism should not descend into a smug faith in the inexorable victory of progressive values.

Who are your political heroes? > Roy Jenkins, Jacek Kuroń and David Lloyd George. I am not particularly keen on many of Peter Tatchell’s ideological preferences, but courage is essential in politics, and Tatchell’s courage – both moral and physical – is exemplary.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > ‘Don’t burn down committees – form your own.’ (Jacek Kuroń)

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Assuming my country is currently Poland, I would repeal the obscenely restrictive abortion laws immediately.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > The combined, conflicted and combustive forces of the anti-Enlightenment.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > I wouldn’t be a liberal if I didn’t believe humans were capable of bettering themselves. However, that will depend on whether the right choices are made. I find anti-scientism particularly worrying for this reason.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Come to terms as early as possible with the overwhelming probability that your life is going to be fairly mediocre. Otherwise you will never be satisfied with anything.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > I find it hard to imagine that I would last long enough in a relationship with someone who had strongly authoritarian views for it to get to the ‘long-term relationship’ stage, let alone marriage.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > The ability to change one’s mind after being apprised of contrary facts.

Do you have any prejudices you’re willing to acknowledge? > I am prejudiced against people who think anti-intellectualism is a virtue – I actively avoid their company.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Fishing. I’d rather sit by the river with a book and a beer and spare myself the purchase of expensive equipment.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Philip Seymour Hoffman.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Idly playing guitar and drinking beer, only one of which I do with any real proficiency.

What talent would you most like to have? > The ability to play the guitar like Richard Thompson.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Dave Allen.

Who are your sporting heroes? > J.P.R. Williams, Paul Scholes, Shane Warne, and the 1996 US women’s gymnastics team.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I would build a house, amass a collection of vintage Telecasters and travel to the many places I have not yet seen.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Jacek Kuroń, Eleanor Roosevelt and Warren Zevon.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

It was predictable enough, but should be highlighted nonetheless. From Amnesty International:

Iran’s authorities have intensified the clampdown on dissidents ahead of the country’s presidential election on 14 June, Amnesty International said in a new briefing published today.

The briefing, Iran: Repression of dissent intensifies in run-up to presidential elections, documents dozens of arbitrary arrests and other human rights abuses in the run-up to election day, targeting journalists, political activists, trade unionists, advocates of greater rights for Iran’s religious and ethnic minorities, and students.

“The escalation in repression is an outrageous attempt by the Iranian authorities to silence critics ahead of the presidential election,” said Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“The surge in recent violations underlines Iran’s continued and brazen flouting of human rights standards through its persecution of political dissidents and betrays the glaring absence of a meaningful human rights discourse in the election campaign.”

From the briefing itself:

Those targeted include political activists, journalists and other media workers, trade unionists, advocates of greater rights for Iran’s religious and ethnic minorities, students and others. In many cases, the full reasons for arrest and detention are not known; in others, those arrested have been brought before the courts on sweeping but vaguely worded charges, convicted and sentenced to prison terms. In yet other cases, individuals who were sentenced in previous years but not made to serve them immediately or else released provisionally for medical reasons have been summoned to prison to serve what remains of their sentences as the authorities seek to pre-empt protests at the time of the presidential election.

In the process of explaining why there can be good atheists, Peter Berger argues that to say different is, among other things, to commit the genetic fallacy. Thus:

Conservative Christians… typically argue that the morality at the core of Western civilization, specifically the values of human rights and liberties, is dependent on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Secularization is then assumed to dismantle that tradition, thus bringing about a pervasive relativism and eventually destroying the moral consensus required for the survival of every society.

I think that this argument suffers from what logicians call the genetic fallacy – that is, the view that the validity of any definition of reality depends on the history of the definition. To be sure, the Christian religion, grounded in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, was a very important source of Western civilization. There were other sources – Greek thought and political practice, Roman law, possibly aspects of Germanic traditions, and, crucially, the enormous effects of the rationality of Renaissance and Enlightenment. A distinctive moral discourse resulted from the confluence of all these historical developments. But it is not necessary to keep retracing this history in order to participate in the moral discourse. Once the discourse is formed and available, it can be accessed and embraced by people from different directions, including people from different religious and cultural backgrounds. (Italics in the original.)

Berger goes on to offer supporting material. It includes this homely tale:

Let me give a mundane example that has nothing to do with religion or culture: Some years ago, while in London, I was told of a bookstore in Bloomsbury that specialized in English-language books from India. I wanted the English translation of a recent novel originally published in an Indian language. I had difficulty finding the bookstore, and wandered around looking for it. Suddenly I came on the impressive old building of the British Museum (the one before it moved to its new quarters); I had not been there before. I then discovered that the book store I was looking for was virtually around the corner. Not long afterward I was with someone who wanted to see the old British Museum, with its reading room where Karl Marx labored to write his hugely misleading and hugely influential Das Kapital. I now knew where it was. I could go there directly, without retracing my journey in search of the bookstore.

So clear it could almost confuse you. Peter Berger wouldn’t be an academic by any chance, would he? (Thanks: LG.)

What do movements of protest and movements of change need in order to succeed? Far be it from me (and similar disclaimers) to pretend to offer a comprehensive answer. But they need some anger, and they need numbers, and they need good arguments, and they need hope. Yes, hope. And then some: they need inspiring watchwords, and perhaps a bit of rhetoric to throw into the mix, and a song or two. Even losing, a song or two. Remember the war against Franco? ‘Though he may have won all the battles / We had all the good songs‘

Ah, but that Owen Jones – he does have a way with the handily chosen quote. Owen:

“We can’t afford to cock this up this time round,” as a young man put it to me in Nottingham.

I’ve argued before that the concept of equality of opportunity, as generally used, is a misnomer. Equality of opportunity is, at once, ‘a worthwhile ideal and an impossible objective‘ – impossible because, among other reasons, advantages of wealth in one generation get passed on in the next. Mark Harvey and I reiterate the argument in our recent paper ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘ (and see also the excerpt here):

Genuine equality of opportunity – or something approximating it, for perfection in this domain, as in most, is likely to be unattainable – could only be based on a greater equality of condition in the parental generation… and on serious efforts to counteract the disadvantages among its offspring that are passed on willy-nilly.

It does no harm to draw people’s attention to a clear restatement of the same point in other terms. Here’s Ezra Klein on the subject:

Take equality of opportunity. Everyone in American life professes to believe in equality of opportunity. But nobody really believes in it. Equality of opportunity is often set in opposition to equality of outcome. Communists believe in equality of outcome. Capitalists believe in equality of opportunity.

In truth, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome aren’t opposites. They’re partners. Companions. Inseparable amigos. You can’t have real equality of opportunity without equality of outcome. A rich parent can purchase test prep a poor parent can’t. A rich parent can usher their children into social networks a poor parent can’t. A rich parent can make donations to Harvard that a poor parent can’t.

The inequalities of the parents always and everywhere become the inequalities of the children. As Theodore Dalrymple has written, “true equality of opportunity is unachievable – or could only be achieved through a level of social engineering that would make North Korea look like a paradise of laissez-faire.”

When people say they believe in “equality of opportunity,” they really mean they believe in “sufficiency of opportunity.” They don’t believe all children should start from the same place. But they believe all children should start from a good enough place. They believe they should have decent nutrition and functioning schools and a safe community and loving parents. They believe they should have a chance.

It’s a joke with which everyone is familiar: that of the prisoner in a Christmas cracker factory. Here’s a grimmer version:

The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.

“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labor,” a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial.

According to this report in the New York Times the author of the letter has now come forward. He and others have described ‘a catalog of horrific abuse, including frequent beatings, days of sleep deprivation and prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end’. The worst abuses are directed against members of Falun Gong.