Dilip Simeon's blog

NB : Premen Addy passed away on January 15, 2020, coincidentally exactly a year after the death of my old friend and comrade Rabindra Ray . He was my kaka - my late father E.J. Simeon 's maternal cousin. His father, Kiron Chandra Addy, was my granduncle, whom my father had nicknamed 'Mejo'. He was Principal of St Pauls College Calcutta. His mother Shanti Addy (nee Sinha) was educated in  Rangoon (her birthplace) and Calcutta, where she graduated from  Victoria Institution.  She too, was in the teaching profession for over 30 years.   This is a fine obituary by one of his old friends, and I have little to add to it but personal memories. Between 1970 and 1972 I was in the Naxalite movement, out of touch with my family and a source of grave anxiety to my parents. At the time my father was Principal of La Martineire Boys' School in Calcutta. In December 1971, Premen happened to visit Calcutta to research an essay he was writing - to be published later as 'Polit...

Hayhoe wrote particularly critically of those who imply that dissenting voices are suppressed - arguing that they're not, they're simply contradicted with evidence.  But over the last 10 years, at least 38 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals, each claiming various reasons why climate wasn't changing, or if it was, it wasn't humans, or it wasn't bad. They weren't suppressed. They're out there, where anyone can find them.  So we took those papers and - thanks to the superhuman efforts of my colleague  Rasmus Benestad  - recalculated all their analyses. From scratch. And you know what we found?  Every single one of those analyses had an error - in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis - that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus.  It's real, it's us, it's serious. The study found that some scientists were 'cherry picking' data and using flawed methodologies to reach their c...

Duncan White:   Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War Reviewed by DJ Taylor Hastening through New York sometime in the late 1950s, the Marxist critic Isaac Deutscher was approached by a news-vendor, who pressed a paperback copy of George Orwell’s  Nineteen Eighty-Four  into his hands: “You must read it sir. Then you will know why we must drop the atom bomb on the bolshies!” It is not known whether Deutscher bought the book. But this odd little vignette reveals something of the way in which the international power politics of the pre-Kennedy era were being played out literally at street level, the responses stirred in ordinary people and the tools—in this case a bestselling novel weaponised by the CIA—employed to shunt politics into the public imagination. If newspaper headlines tend to suggest that the Cold War was a clash of binary opposites—democrat versus tyrant, liberty versus oppression, Eisenhower versus Khrushchev—then from the angle o...

Democracy and capitalism have, for good or for ill, often been closely aligned. But this moment in global politics is characterised by the intensification of the tension between the two. This tension provides the new ideological faultline in many contexts. Democracy, as Karl Polanyi argued, had as one its functions, the “self-protection” of society against what he called the “satanic mills” of capitalism.  Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Book review: Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology This protection had to take place on a number of dimensions.  First, there had to be a modicum of social justice, as e videnced in the share between labour and capital, for the system to have any legitimacy. In practice, this social justice was achieved through the welfare state, which by ensuring basic goods at least maintained the fig leaf of equality of opportunity.  The second was to ensure that the political process was not entirely beholden to monied interests to the po...

Reviewed by Larry Elliott Capital and Ideology expands on the themes sketched out in  Capital in the 21st Century , which sold 2m copies worldwide after its publication in 2013. Piketty’s new book – which runs to 1,232 pages and is as long as War and Peace – explores the ideas that have justified inequality down the ages, bemoans the ineffectiveness of the traditional parties of left and right at coming up with solutions for redistributing wealth, and advances his own ideas for making economies fairer. The book is released in France on Thursday but English language readers will have to wait until next March for the translation. More posts on Piketty Among the proposals in the book are that employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards; that the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be capped at 10%; much higher taxes on property, rising to 90% for the largest estates; a lump sum capital allocation of €120,000 (just over £107,000) to ever...

Adrienne Miller:  In the Land of Men Reviewed by Laura Marsh A young woman - observant, self-conscious, harboring literary aspirations, though not quite sure where she wants to end up - meets an older novelist, and they start dating. He is as famous as it’s possible for a contemporary writer to be. He is obsessed with his privacy: She is not to draw any attention, occupying a hidden corner of his life. In fact, he sets all the terms of their relationship; the age gap benefits him. While there’s plenty of desire, it’s tinged with condescension (even spite), which contributes more than it should to their sexual tension. In return, he allows her to soak up some of his brilliance, as if by osmosis. Of course, she will have to leave him if she wants to be the star of her own life. The experience is only worth having if it is the precursor to something bigger.... This is, loosely, the arc of Adrienne Miller’s new memoir, In the Land of Men. The book is a recollection of her career a...

NB : Harari uses the sentence ' The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago'.  This is problematic.  Kick-started history ? 'History' is just a name for human experience. Here's another view on the origins of that experience:  Henry Plotkin's lecture   Cognition and History: The Evolution of Intelligence and Culture . The lecture is little less than Harari's God's Eye View. With YNH's stratospheric detachment, indeed, nothing seems to matter that much. But if our ancestors - as much as us today - were so detached, there would have been no history. Beauty, goodness, justice and truth mattered millenia ago, and they matter now.  DS In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern...