No I’m still here, I haven’t run off with the minstrels. It’s just that there’s this deadline for TPM (The Philosophers’ Mag, you know) and I’ve been taken up with that. But I was reading an old Harper’s the other day, from November 2003, and found a lively article by Benjamin DeMott on ‘Junk Politics’ (excerpted from an eponymous book published a couple of months later). It’s not online, unfortunately, so I’ll give you an extract or two.

The case is that both the essential planks and the elaborating tropes of today’s junk politics are troublingly underexamined, yet they’ve been functioning for some time as major agents of public confusion…Junk politics introduces new qualifications for high political office…It tilts courage

Alan Wolfe wrote a very, erm, unsatisfactory review of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? in the NY Times book review on Sunday. We could just slap it into that largish collection we’re starting to build up of Weirdly, Almost Perversely Bad Reviews from the NYTBR – there’s the one William Vollman did of a book on Nietzsche that Brian Leiter ripped up one side and down the other, there’s the Leon Wieseltier one of Dennett’s new book that Brian also took issue with, there was that Wonkette mess on Katha Pollitt’s new book that I was faintly critical of, and now this.

It starts horridly – “Bérubé comes off as spunky, likable and anything … Read the rest

I found the old comment on Ates and the one on Homa’s win because I went rummaging through last September’s comments to find out when B&W’s birthday is – to find I’m late again. I was late last year and I’m late again. I always think it’s later, because it didn’t really get going until October, I think, but no matter, it was born on September 10 so that’s it’s birthday. It’s four years old. That’s old, man. Four years old and still going strong. Toot toot.… Read the rest

Well that’s a funny thing – I’ve already commented on that Seyran Ates piece, I commented on it when it was new. I’d forgotten that. And furthermore, that was the day before Homa won her long fight, when Ontario’s premier decided not to allow Sharia in Ontario. Remember that? That was a good day. I ended the comment on Ates and Fadela Amara and others by saying I was looking forward to congratulating Homa on her victory – but I wasn’t expecting to be able to as soon as the next day. That was a good surprise.… Read the rest