JR has received some welcome plaudits for the new page design, based on EE’s latest update.  He is entirely responsible, so don’t blame - or praise - me.  I’d like to add my congratulations and thanks.  I am well aware that he has put a lot of thought and a lot of time into it and the result, at least as far as I am concerned, is very satisfying.  It isn’t quite the final article.  We’ve still got to work out the MR Forum details and there are a couple of plug-ins to come on stream, plus whatever creative tweaks are still lurking at the back of JR’s mind.

I’m giving some consideration now to what we want forum-wise.  What we clearly don’t want is anything that might lead to this sad situation.  The main page will always be open-house.  But access to the MR Forum will require members’ log-in.  Either I or JR will post here on access when the facility is up and running.

Content-wise, the areas of off-blog debate which are most profitable for us are political, scientific and daily news, and we will probably start operating the forum accordingly.  Main page content will adjust to the presence of the forum, probably by losing some of the pure link-based content to it and, therefore, concentrating more on originated pieces.

However, this is not set in stone.  I am open to constructive suggestions, and you are welcome to pitch in with your ideas.

So that’s it.  Thanks to all for your continued patronage.  Let’s hope, after all JR’s work, the guys at EE don’t rush out a new and irresistible, improved version tomorrow morning.

Many readers will have already come across this famous statement by John Jay on the founding of the US:

“It has often given me pleasure to observe that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, widespreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty ... A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together ...

“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people - a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs ...”

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Two new, perfectly contradictory currents are just now beginning to course through the British body politic.  How they will fare - if they will, indeed, survive to develop at all – cannot be known with any degree of certainty.  Both hold the potential to change this island’s politics.  But only one can fundamentally change the future that is mapped out for us today.

Much the more advanced of the two is strictly elitist in conception, in a liberal-political sense.  It cares nothing for the opinions of the people, has no connection to them and is desired by none of them.  Yet it claims democracy as its ultimate value.  It aims, then, only to capture the imagination of men of power and influence, to seduce their minds with a grand, global objective requiring the commitment of our diplomatic resources, our treasure and, if necessary, our sons’ lives.  That objective, if you have not already guessed, is to carry liberal democracy beyond its present confines and into the world.

We are, therefore, talking here about naked, unabashed neoconservatism.  All references by its supporters to other, more native political traditions are simply an illusionist’s trick, a stratagem to get around the negative, particularist associations of neoconservatism and to appeal thereby to a confused, post-Blairite centre-left.

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Thanks to Michael R for the link to this example of wonderfully wayward feminist politics in Norway.

The new coalition government in Oslo said it was considering introducing a law which would require 40% of boardroom posts to be filled by women.  Norway’s previous government drew up the law, which it threatened to apply if companies failed voluntarily to meet minimum quotas by 1 July this year.  Only a fifth of Norway’s 590 publicly listed firms comply with the quotas.

“It’s not going fast enough,” said Karita Bekkemellem, Norway’s minister for family and children.  “I don’t want to wait 20 or 30 years until sufficiently intelligent men finally appoint women to the boardrooms.”  She added: “I wish to establish, from January 1 2006, a system of sanctions which makes it possible to break up companies.”

... a spokeswoman for Ms Bekkemellem said introducing the law could be the only way to of ensuring equality in the boardroom.  “It is a question of power,” the spokeswoman said, insisting that several surveys had found that companies where both sexes were strongly represented on the board were more profitable.  “For a woman to get in a man must get out.  It is not difficult to find qualified women.”

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A key distinguishing feature of humanity is its communication ability.  But what exactly is communication as opposed to manipulation?  How does communication arise?  What are the conditions for its continuation?  There have been a number of attempts at simulating the evolution of communication but till the simulation described in this article was run, none of them combined migration, climatic variation and the prisoner’s dilemma.

The simulaton is schematic but suggestive that migration can eliminate the very genetic capacity for communication and replace it with pure manipulation.

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It is still strange to my ears to hear how the British economy - three decades ago the “sick man of Europe” – is spoken of as a model the rest of the continent should emulate.  It is doubly strange, in fact, since just about any degree of confidence in modern Britain flies in the face of our general experience of daily, abject cultural defeatism.  If it isn’t the anguish of Anglican liberals we have to endure, it’s another crazy anti-racism campaign.  Or we are bleeding with guilt after a crazed axe murder.  Or we are binge drinking into the middle of the night while Old Father Thames is brained on crack.  Or record numbers of children are growing up without a father, whilst marriage has become just too tiresome for the modern couple …

The list is long.

Still, when British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stands up in Strasbourg to tell the European Parliament that “Without significant changes I see little prospect of a deal”, one has to raise a couple of patriotic cheers, however weakly.  One has also to acknowledge that, actually, this is nothing knew.  Straw is simply sounding the latest charge across some very old battle lines.  Our liberalising economic agenda for the EU is all of a piece with Napoleon Bonaparte’s supposed observation that, “L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.”

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Have you ever read an article which begins well but then takes a disastrously wrong turn?

There’s an article being praised amongst some conservative groups here in Melbourne, written by Augusto Zimmermann. Augusto hails from Brazil but is undertaking his Ph.D in law at Melbourne’s Monash University (he appears to be of German descent). Augusto is an obviously intelligent young man, who appears regularly in the Christian conservative press.

His latest article takes aim at Victoria’s religious vilification legislation. Augusto begins by noting that the legislation contradicts the Western legal tradition by disallowing the truth of a statement as a defence. That’s why two Christian pastors could be prosecuted under the legislation for accurately quoting parts of the Koran to a private church gathering.

Augusto then criticises the idea that the legislation will help to create a “multicultural democracy”. He argues that not all cultures are equally committed to democracy, and that democracy and the rule of law might not be preserved if Australia “eventually decides to reject its own culture on account of multiculturalism”.

Augusto’s article then reaches its high point when he observes that,

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