More Noted Things
is up at Blogenspiel. Another Damned Medievalist is your host. And the Carnival of Bad History is up at Miland Brown's World History Blog. Enjoy yourself!At Rhine River, Nathanael Robinson has a roundup of locations for digitized, searchable German language periodicals.
Harvey Blume,"Q & A with Niall Ferguson," Boston Globe, 24 September, finds NF at his provocative best, profoundly on target one moment, deeply wrong the next, and even both in the same breath. On the invasion of Iraq and Osama bin Laden, for example:
if it was to be done, it should be done well or not at all. But I didn't oppose it. With the benefit of hindsight, I regret that. It was a disaster to commit so few troops and to have no coherent plan for reconstruction. It was in defiance not only of British imperial history but of successful American occupations-for example of Germany, Japan, and Korea, where the United States stayed long enough to change institutions.
But typically, American interventions last only a few years. In the case of the Middle East, the result will be turning Iraq into a Haiti on the Tigris.IDEAS: How do you understand radical Islamism? Is it, as some say, the successor to Marxism?
FERGUSON: It is. The great category error of our time is to equate radical Islamism with fascism. If you actually read what Osama bin Laden says, it's clearly Lenin plus the Koran. It's internationalist, revolutionary, and anticapitalist-rhetoric far more of the left than of the right.
Read the whole thing, as they say. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.
Via Jacob Levy, congratulations to both:
Radley Balko, who brings us up to speed on"The Case of Cory Maye," ReasonOnLine, October. Given where he started, the news is better. Balko should get a lot of credit for pursuing the case.
John Holbo, who vaults into publishing as the editor of the Glassbead Books imprint of Parlor Press. Initially, at least, it will publish texts from book events generated by Crooked Timber and The Valve. Their first production: Looking for a Fight: Is There a Republican War on Science? It is a series of essays in response to Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science.
A symposium on Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: Jennifer Howard (subscriber only), LizardBreath (sic), Scott McLemee, Clarence Page, Christopher Shea, and Margaret Soltan.
Finally, seen over at Dial"M" for Musicology:"A CFP (Call for Papers) arrives over one of the musicology lists--there is a new online journal that will be called Radical Musicology. I cannot get past this. So, if they publish me, I'm happening and radical and de rigueur and à la mode, and if not I'm…what, Old Musicology, God help me, or just Old? How damning is it, really, to be Not Radical? Perhaps the real question is how damning will it be to have your stuff appear in the previous issue of Radical Musicology, not the forthcoming one? (‘Oh, yeah, X's stuff. That's so Winter-Spring 2007…')"