Acclaimed with faint criticism

23Feb10

I have an essay on Kant’s prescription for perpetual peace due in yesterday, so naturally I’ve spent the past hour or two scouring the internet for distractions. Sadly they just don’t pump out lolcats fast enough to satisfy the procrastinatory needs of the modern arts student, so I was forced to resort to Googling the names of my subject supervisors for some juicy gossip (on which point: why oh why is there no Heat magazine for the world of academia? ‘GAMBLE-ING PROBLEM: After a Series of Risque Fashion Choices, Students Implore Politics Professor: Leather Was Meant for Briefcases and Book Bindings Only’, ‘STEAL HIS STYLE: Ape Rentrows’s Shirt-Tie Combo for only $30‘, etc.).

Apart from the news that one of my psychology lecturers is an expert witness in the on-going ‘Prop 8′ trial in the US (as far as I can tell, he’s on the not-crazy side), the most exciting discovery was that my politics supervisor is actually a pyjama-wearing basement-dwelling blogger in disguise. Here he is on…

• then-Labour immigration minister Liam Byrne: “What a wanker” http://virtualstoa.net/2008/09/16/monday-tuesday-british-values-day/

• Prime Minister Gordon Brown and then-immigration minister Liam Byrne: “arrogantly, stupidly vapid” (ibid.)

• Donald Rumsfeld’s arguments: “gibberish” http://virtualstoa.net/2002/02/05/9415048/

• then-President George W. Bush and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair: “Whereas W. needs to concentrate hard in order to get his words out at all, Blair can effortlessly disengage his thinking from his speaking parts, and is able to appear oblivious to the fact that his conversation in filmed interviews in quite inane” http://virtualstoa.net/2001/09/19/5788261/

• Labour MP Denis MacShane (the idiot who launched into a racist rant last term at the Union debate on Israel/Palestine): “Has Denis MacShane’s slide into absurdity been a gradual, steady thing, or has it gone in fits and starts?” http://virtualstoa.net/2008/06/16/macshane/

• Nick Clegg (who is coming to Cambridge in the near future) and the Lib Dem leadership contest: “Is there anything worth knowing about Nick Clegg? Did anyone write anything interesting about the contest / Party during the last six weeks or so? I suspect the answers are “no”, “not really”, and “no, I don’t think so”” http://virtualstoa.net/2007/12/18/new-lib-dem-leader/

• Jewish Chronicle editor and poorly-disguised blobfish Stephen Pollard: “an Ignorant Git” http://virtualstoa.net/2004/08/18/109284336476508972/

etc.

I remember reading his feedback on my first essay (a truly magesterial, ground-breaking discussion of Hobbes’s argument for state authority, or something)  and thinking he was damning me with faint praise – “nothing seriously wrong here” was how he put it, if I recall. After reading the above, though, I’m actually quite pleased. Still, probably better get back to the Kant.

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Tags: Cambridge, Chris Brooke, meta