A little from Foucault himself, since it’s available. Some wisdom and insight from M. Discipline and Punish.

One thing must be clear. By “Islamic government,” nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.

Shrewd, ain’t it! Noooo, nobody meant that! Clerics? A role? A role of supervision or control? Oh, hell no! That’s not what anybody meant.

He did go to Iran, right? He wasn’t confused? He didn’t, like, get off the plane a stop or two early? In Marseille or someplace? He didn’t accidentally say ‘Stockholm’ to the ticket clerk when he meant to say ‘Tehran’?

To me, the phrase “Islamic government” seemed to point to two

So Foucault went to Iran in 1979, to see what he could see.

While many liberals and leftists supported the populist uprising that pitted unarmed masses against one of the world’s best-armed regimes, none welcomed the announcement of the growing power of radical Islam with the portentous lyricism that Foucault brought to his brief, and never repeated, foray into journalism…Foucault’s Iranian adventure was a “tragic and farcical error” that fits into a long tradition of ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993 biography “The Passion of Michel Foucault” contains one of the few previous English-language accounts of the episode. Indeed, Foucault’s search for an alternative that was absolutely other to liberal democracy seems peculiarly

May the god of the atheists shine its everlasting light on Polly Toynbee. Wait. May the – oh never mind, you know what I mean.

At least she hasn’t swapped her brain for a fleece.

It would be entirely reasonable for secular Labour MPs to plead conscience on this, just as the religious are excused the whip on matters that trespass on their faith. This touches on freedom of thought and ideas, with far-reaching consequences for the values of the Enlightenment that are under growing threat from a collective softening of the brain on faith and superstitions of all kinds.

Yep. And you need to watch out for that collective softening of the brain stuff. It can creep up on … Read the rest

I’ve been reading a little Orwell lately – prompted partly by my offhand comment in an email to Norm that Orwell was good but Hitchens is better – which itself was prompted by Philip Dodd’s introduction of Hitchens on ‘Night Waves’ in which he quoted someone (someone unnamed, I think) as writing in a review that Hitchens is as good as Orwell, or almost as good as Orwell, or some such. That annoyed me. It is my considered opinion – despite the offhandedness of the comment alluded to above – that Orwell is over-rated as a writer. Really quite seriously over-rated. That his language is very often decidedly tired and uninspired, even banal, and that there is a lot of … Read the rest