Talk about strange bedfellows! (Paging Leftish Brit...)

[onager]

Irony! I recently saw the Sundance documentary about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Its title was...The Fortune Hunter.

:rofl:

OTOH, it looks like one source for this story was the Daily Fail. Still seems legit, though.

I've read some of Ferguson's stuff, like "War of the World." IMO, he's sort of a British version of the no-godawful Gertrude Himmelfarb (wife of Irving Kristol and alleged mother of pitiful neo-con hack William Kristol).

Just as Himmelfarb only sees GOOD things with the Victorian era, ignoring 9-yr-old coal miners and 12-yr-old whores, Ferguson seems to believe British imperialism was the golden glue that held the world together. And the world has been falling apart ever since the British were kicked out of Afghanistan. And Singapore. And India. And Egypt. And Palestine. And probably Hong Kong...

Anyway, here's the dirt:

Harvard professor, hedge-fund millionaire, and "court historian for the imperial American hard right" Niall Ferguson is leaving his wife for a feminist filmmaker he met at the Time 100 party.

Sex! Scandal! Murderous Muslim clerics! This story has it all.

Ferguson (whose career highs include defending colonialism and parlaying books about the Rothschild dynasty into a lucrative Rothschild-endorsed hedge fund career) is divorcing his wife of sixteen years, former editor and Condé Nasty Susan Douglas, reports The Daily Mail.

Niall's new lovah: Somali-born filmmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali. After meeting at a party for Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World, Niall and Ayaan launched into the most glamorously snobby, geopolitically thrilling forbidden love since Cleopatra and both Roman triumvirates...

Other people who come up in this story: Henry Kissinger and British historian Sir Alistair Horne (who knew of the affair before it went public), a member of Parliament, and seven other mistresses.



http://gawker.com/5466433/fabulously-snobby-divorce-scandal-of-the-week-niall-fergusons-fatwa-mistress-two+step

[LeftishBrit]

1. Thank you for your thoughtfully considering me...

but entering an eightsome with Niall Ferguson has never been high on my list of Valentines daydreams! Ayaan can have him!

He is nutty and arrogant at the same time, not a refreshing combination.

ETA: although I am very happy to say that I've never met him, I met a few of the clever (but far from wise), ambitious, up-and-coming types who studied certain subjects at Oxford in the Thatcherite 80s. I note he was there at around that time, and seems very much of the type. Reminds me of why I determinedly avoided such people...

[onager]

2. Thanks! Never considred that eightsome!

My eyes are watering just thinking of such a thing. Gack!

I posted this here because Hirsi Ali is a prominent atheist. And also, I thought it would be easier to get your attention.

You often have interesting information on British crackpots, as indeed you did this time! Thank you.

Not long ago I read Piers Brendon's massive (816 pages!) book, Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997. The allusion to Edward Gibbon in the title was intentional, and Brendon uses that other Decline and Fall throughout as a reference point.

In the Washington Post book review, Karl Mayer mentioned Ferguson as Imperialist Cheerleader:

(Brendon's) book is in no sense an apologia; it is history with the nasty bits left in. Not one massacre, civil war, famine, racist outrage, covert trick or egregious human-rights abuse is passed over.

His chronicle thus serves as a useful counterpoint to the generally upbeat accounts of Britain's imperial era, notably Harvard professor Niall Ferguson's well-written yet almost nostalgic encomiums.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/used/product.asp?EAN=2693402893332&Itm=4

[LeftishBrit]

3. P.S. - and would you believe that Ferguson has been asked to be involved in planning school history

textbooks in the UK!

Yikes.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

4. Ferguson's counterfactual approach to history is a load of arse

It's been rightfully torn apart and ridiculed in peer-review. But his intended audience is not other academics but a section of the public hankering after "the good old days" of empire but not wanting to hear about the nasty bits.