Six of the Best 16

1. It's a good idea to try fighting an election if you fancy yourself as a bit of n political theorist. You have to articulate your ideas to other people and, if you get elected, grapple with a succession of problems that are not of your choosing. Mark Reckons gives his experience of fighting (and coming second in) a couple of by-elections in Bracknell.


2. Peter Black continues his admirable crusade against the cull of Badgers in North Pembrokeshire. "Following the public meeting in Newport, Pembrokeshire where I discovered that the Welsh Governemnt are funding extra police officers in the cull area for the five years that they will be shooting badgers I tabled a question seeking more information."


3. Good stuff from Brendan O'Neill on reason.com: "The weaponization of classical music speaks volumes about the British elite’s authoritarianism and cultural backwardness. They’re so desperate to control youth—but from a distance, without actually having to engage with them—that they will film their every move, fire high-pitched noises in their ears, shine lights in their eyes, and bombard them with Mozart. And they have so little faith in young people’s intellectual abilities, in their capacity and their willingness to engage with humanity’s highest forms of art, that they imagine Beethoven and Mozart and others will be repugnant to young ears. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."


4. Stump Lane has February's Carnival of the Liberals - a selection in the best of (largely American) Liberal blogging from the last month.


5. "Imagine you're a mega-rich Russian breeder with a brat to civilise - how could you fast-track it into an English public school such as Eton or Stowe for all the global advantages that money can buy?" Madame Arcati has the answer.


6. Random Blowe reviews Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die - "Urging patients to ‘stay positive’ went far beyond usefully helping patients to cope with the stress of their illness. Instead it placed an expectation and additional burden on them to constantly monitor their emotions, based on a completely unscientific belief that survival itself hinges on ‘attitude’."

Carnival of the Liberals 88

Here is Ray Bradbury writing in Something Wicked This Way Comes:

A carnival should be all growls, roars like timberlands stacked, bundled, rolled and crashed, great explosions of lion dust, men ablaze with working anger, pop bottles jangling, horse brasses shivering, engines and elephants in full stampede through rains of sweat while zebras neighed and trembled and like cage trapped in cage.

I'll see what I can do. But, seeing it from across the Atlantic, something seems to have gone out of the American liberal blogosphere in the 18 months since I last hosted this carnival. A little brio, a touch of élan, a modicum of pizazz.

The reason is clear: you no longer have George W. Bush to hate.

Belief Systems and Others BS still looks back to his administration:

In short, it seems to me that institutionalized torture is a national sin, and that confession and renunciation of that sin will be a form of national healing. And I say we get on with it.

Meanwhile Atheist Revolution does its best to summon up some animus against the new President, complaining of Obama's continued support for Bush's faith-based initiatives and the role of religion in his administration more generally.

Also dealing with religion, Dating Islam looks at some common misconception about Islam.

And also dealing with Obama's government, The Primate Diaries looks at the campaign that prevented the appointment of Charles Freeman as Chief of the National Intelligence.

Moving on the the environment, Bay of Fundie takes on global-warming "denialism". I am usually suspicious of talk of "denial, believing that liberals should be welcomers of new ideas rather than upholders of the conventional wisdom, but this blog does it with such humour that I was won over.

Greg Laden's Blog tells a less humorous environmental tale. A former student of his has become involved with the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. I always suspect that one of the attractions of animal rights as a cause is that animals are never going to tell you not to patronise them, but perhaps I'm being unfair.

The Barefoot Badger is more my sort of environmentalism. Not so much for this post on a possible new environmental tax as for its obvious enjoyment of the natural world.

On the economy, Rust Belt Philosophy defends the morality of taxation and Killer Buffalo warns President Obama against his close relations with General Motors.

And to finish, Mad Kane can always be trusted to cheer us up:

The purported Republican budget
Has no numbers, so how can we judge it?
There’s no dollars or sense
In this PR offense.
It appears they decided to fudge it.

The next Carnival of the Liberals will be hosted by Johnny Pez on 22 April. Please make you nominations via the carnival homepage.