Stuff

Here are some things worth reading.

In The Sunday Times, Martin Ivens comments on Gordon Brown's uncomfortable embrace of Ken Livingstone:

"London’s election day, May 1, is [Brown's] opportunity to stop the rot. But the prime minister can help his new friend Livingstone only so much. Ken is Ken, a maverick whose fortunes go up or down according to his erratic behaviour and the antics of his wild friends. He is only semidetached Labour at best. It’s an odd twist of fate that puts Gordon’s future in his hands."

It's odd, but it's not the workings of fate. I regret to say it's the workings of Tony Blair, who welcomed Livingstone back into membership of the Labour Party for the transparently opportunistic reason that he wanted a Labour victory in London in 2004 to soften the headlines about Labour losses in municipal elections elsewhere. It was a bad and unprincipled decision, and it's appropriate that it should cause the party indignity now.

In The Observer, Agnès writes sympathetically of Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, former wife of President Sarkozy.

"Finally marrying the man for whom she twice left President Sarkozy, just weeks after his high-profile betrothal to the celebrated beauty Carla Bruni, may be seen as astute revenge. But it may also be the triumph of true love over Sarkozy's meretricious style."

It is at least a choice of personal fulfilment against a certain concept of duty, and you have to have some sympathy for this. Consider, by contrast, the stoicism of Claude Pompidou, who died last year at the age of 94. Through no fault of her husband's, but especially owing to the unfounded smears known as l'affaire Markovic, the glamorous and cultured Mme Pompidou was deeply unhappy as the first lady, later stating: "L'Elysée, c'est pour moi la maison du malheur." But she was convinced that her "absolute destiny" was by her husband's side.

The Telegraph carries a profile of General Petraeus. He is not a man given to overstatement or bombast:

'"We don't talk turning points, there are no lights at the end of the tunnel, we don't do victory dances, and we've moved the champagne to the back of the fridge," he tells me over a mid-morning coffee, his fourth in a day that typically starts with a five-mile dawn run. Neither he nor his close colleague, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, are either optimists or pessimists, he says. In a way it makes sense. The former, after all, have tried before out here and failed. The latter, presumably, would never set foot in post-Saddam Iraq in the first place.'

I wrote recently about the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in favour of my correspondent Karl Pfeifer, who had been defamed by right-wing extremists and then deserted by the Austrian courts when he tried to defend his reputation. Last month, Mr Pfeifer gave a lecture to the Wiener Library in London about his experience; the transcript is here, and I urge you to read it. He is a brave and determined man. Mr Pfeifer has also sent me a link to an article of his (in German) in the Viennese newspaper Der Standard. It discusses the disturbing possibility of coalition between Austria's Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Extraordinarily, some leading Social Democrats decline to rule out such a prospect. I shall have more to say about this in due course.

Here is an interesting blog post about one of the hoarier stories of the weekend: of all things, an attempt to claim historical veracity for the forgery known as the Shroud of Turin. I do not respect religious believers' convictions, but neither do I go out of my way to confront them. When religious apologetic is disguised as something else, however, then it's worth taking a blunderbuss to a mite. The superstitious fascination for religious relics is, like the Shroud itself, literally mediaeval. It is moderately scandalous that the BBC should have screened an alleged documentary on a "mystery" that is not mysterious, and to have filed a breathless write-up of this mumbo-jumbo under - so help me - "Science & Nature". The presenter of the programme and author of the associated promotional tract is Rageh Omaar, of whom I have had cause before to remark that he is no thinker and no writer.

One of the things I find perplexing about the cultists of the Shroud is how they reconcile their position with faith in the divine inspiration of Scripture. The Gospel accounts (e.g. John 19:40) suggest that Jesus's body was washed and anointed, in accord with Jewish burial custom. Yet the cultists believe the Shroud bears stains of Jesus's blood. If you have an answer to this conundrum, please don't post it here; I'm content to live without it.

Comments

[David]

Um, the idea that the shroud is authentic, i.e. was used to hold a man crucified in first century Israel, has no bearing on the veracity or otherwise of Christianity. Being under science and nature is perfectly valid, since it's a programme about a possible archaeological item from the Roman Empire in the first century. Similarly, Jesus may have indeed existed, being one of a number of apocalyptic preachers around at a time of great stress in Judaism under the Roman yoke.

None of that includes resurrection or sons of divine beings, so you really shouldn't let your anti-religious stance block what is actually an interesting bit of archaeology.

[tolkein]

Were it proved that the Shroud was the burial cloth used to wrap Jesus, it still wouldn't prove the Resurrection or otherwise substantiate Christian claims about Jesus.

But it is hardly strange that on Easter Sunday, in a country where the majority profess Christianity, that the BBC should run a programme about this kind of topic. And why isn't a putative 1st century burial shroud of a crucifixion victim of scientific interest. Whether or not it's genuine it's the only one we've got.

Finally, you posed a question but refused an answer. Of course the body was washed - consistent with the Gospels and Jewish practice at the time - otherwise the shroud would be covered in blood. A link to an article follows which sets out the consistency of the medical evidence on what happens to wounds in dead bodies when they are washed. http://www.shroud.com/zugibe2.htm

[Bob]

You will no doubt be disconcerted to discover that David Lindsay, founder of the British People's Alliance and a man well known, at least in his own mind, for being absolutely right about everything, disagrees with you about the provenance of the shroud. He writes:

For does anyone seriously believe that a Mediaeval forger was able to fake the anatomical accuracy, the perfect consistency with the effects of crucifixion on the body, the Jewish features of the face, and what are still the inexplicable three-dimensional properties of the image? If you do believe that, then you really will believe absolutely anything at all. Rather, as so often with accounts of the miraculous, acceptance of the miraculous is in fact the most or only reasonable response, with which the purely descriptive realm of science will just have to come to terms.

The theory of a Mediaeval forgery is obviously absurd. What we have in the Holy Shroud is the image of Our Lord’s face, left by Him miraculously as a relic for our veneration and as a stimulus to faith. It was providentially proposed after nineteen centuries to the age of an unbelief founded on an historically and philosophically erroneous appeal to the science that in fact could not have arisen, and cannot survive, apart from the principles unique to Christianity. Even the BBC seems to be getting the point.

Incidentally, on another subject close to his heart, he asks the important question, "How long before the Han have to wear yellow stars?"

To quote the New Yorker cartoon: "No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?"

[Michael]

a man well known, at least in his own mind, for being absolutely right about everything

I can only assume that the reason Lindsay's posts rarely attract any comments (either on the blog itself or elsewhere) is because his is so clearly the final and definitive word on any given subject.

Truly, we are not worthy.

[Borboski]

There was some very incongrous content in the last episode of Delia, e.g. Delia wandering around with Sister Wendy banging on about how great their faith was.

[Anon]

Weirdly, David Lindsay and someone called Martin Miller make exactly the same comment, one after the other, here - on a thread about the Embryology Bill on which Oliver Kamm has also commented.

I wonder who Martin Miller is.

[Anon]

Lindsay is now alleging that Oliver Kamm is engaged in a campaign of criminal harassment against him.

[Oliver Kamm]

Good grief, not another one....

[Fake David Lindsay]

Martin Miller is a sock puppet invented by David Lindsay to post booster comments about (dah-dah!) David Lindsay. Martin Miller wrote to the editors of CiF to say how brilliant David Lindsay was and that they really ought to give him a column. He posted comments on lots of blogs to say how brilliant David Lindsay was. He even posted comments on the Speccie blog to recommend the Speccie to take Lindsay on as a columnist. Most crazily of all, Martin Miller posted comments on Lindsay's OWN blog agreeing with David Lindsay. It all came to grief when Lindsay posted a comment on Harry's Place but forgot to sign it as Martin Miller and put his real name instead.

I don't think the new Martin Miller is Lindsay, though.

[Michael]

I've just read the thread on Lindsay's blog.

Good grief, what a loon.

And I remember "Martin Miller's" slip-up - it occurred at 12:20pm on Thursday November 6 in this thread.

Presumably the act of disinterring public posts made voluntarily in a public forum and drawing them to your readers' attention for the purposes of mockery also constitutes "criminal harassment", but I'll try not to lose any sleep over it. Unless said sleep is forcibly curtailed by a 5am knock at the door, but I'll take that risk.