Tasting the blues

food

Following on from Floyd here is the much more reserved Rick Stein who goes on a sojourn through the Mississippi Delta. It was Floyd who gave Rick his television break and I notice that Dave Prichard who Floyd “directed” (Prichard was ostensibly the director), directs Stein here.

Ever since the early 1960s, Rick Stein has been in love with the blues and years later he is fascinated by the dishes ingrained in its lyrics – fried chicken and turnip greens, catfish and black-eyed peas, and the rest. In this film, Rick pays homage to the musicians who created this music and to the great dishes of the Mississippi Delta that go hand in hand with the blues.

Robo Law

robotics, robots

How the law should deal with technologies that blur man and machine

Philosophers at the Humboldt University of Berlin, meanwhile, are exploring the various ways in which robotic technologies challenge the notion of what it means to be human. To what extent is it defined by having a body of a particular shape, or by cultural factors?

Michael Oakeshott on the Rule of Law and the Liberal Order

a companion to michael oakeshott

Tim Fuller, one of our Companion’s eminent contributors, here with an article on the Liberty Fund website.

A defining theme of Michael Oakeshott’s thought is that, through the past five centuries, European civilization can count among its greatest achievements the invention of “civil association” and the clarification of the “rule of law.” These are arrangements in which individuals, who think of themselves as individuals, associate with each other, not in terms of a teleological purpose or in pursuit of a uniform goal or end for humanity, but in terms of agreed-upon procedures and expectations to secure opportunities for such self-regulating individuals to pursue their wished-for satisfactions in voluntary associations supported by appropriate rules.  Civil association is not a theory of the “state,” but is our picture of what we can expect in our interactions with each other.  The modern state, in its variously constituted forms, is designed to support civil association.

Scotch Hunter

beer

I don’t normally recommend websites/blogs but this one was started by two enthusiasts with day jobs in another world. I assume their naming of their website Scotch Hunter is a tribute/allusion to the chap that started me on the road to educating me in beer, scotch and other wonderful drinks – the late Michael Jackson aka the “Beer Hunter” – a lovely gentle man who I met at a CAMRA event years back.

I never took to the Kriek/Lambic style that Michael talks about at the end of this clip. It was through Michael that I discovered my favourite beer – Rochefort 10 – a world away from the “poodle piss” called Bud (not casting aspersions on the real Budvar) that the ignorant think is beer. Anyway, this week’s primary imbibition has been Talisker 18, Ardbeg 10 and St Bernardus 8. Cheers Michael!

Behike 52

cigars

I’m still convinced after two years that this remains the finest (matured) cigar I have ever tried (Wikipedia). I couldn’t get it for “love nor money” at Heathrow but fortunately I have my sources (and they don’t gouge me). There are other very good brands (not necessarily Cuban) but the workmanship on these is THE benchmark.

Rattle, Ligeti, Wagner and Ravel

music

An exceptional prom in a so-so season despite this being one of London’s biggest years since VE Day. What was distinctive was that each piece cleverly flowed into each other thereby “robbing” the audience of the opportunity to clap. And no, the photo is of Simon Rattle and not Steven Pinker. See The Telegraph’s glowing review.

Jazz and freedom

libertarianism, liberty

I’ve always thought that there is a conceptual link between spontaneous order (in the Hayek sense), conversation (in the Oakeshottian sense) and jazz. Here is a small squib from a libertarian blog that makes such a link though I’m not a libertarian as such.

Oakeshott as Conservative

philosophy of social science, political philosophy, politics

Rob Devigne (or maybe it’s really Jack Nicholson) looks at Oakeshott’s ostensibly conservative stance – as several in this volume point out, this is very tricky territory indeed. Oakeshott is not a conservative that even most self-avowed conservatives would typically recognise.

The identification of Michael Oakeshott with conservatism is fraught with debate. To be sure, some analysts consider Oakeshott to be the modern incarnation of Burke. Moreover, during the closing decades of the twentieth century, conservative thinkers in the United Kingdom made the greatest claims to Oakeshott. Yet, different features of Oakeshott’s thought have made it possible for him to be read as a liberal, pragmatist, historicist, existentialist, postmodernist, as well as, a conservative.  What, then, is conservative in Oakeshott’s political philosophy?