Wednesday 17 February 2010

A Match Made in Heaven Useless Exercise

The internationally known, controversial historian and media personality Niall Ferguson has broken up with his wife of 16 years after a string of adulterous affairs. The 45-year-old Harvard professor has left former newspaper editor Susan Douglas, who had enabled his breakthrough in the media and with whom he has three children from the age of nine to fourteen, for the Somalian-born Islam-critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, so the Mail informs us earlier this month. And:
The pair are understood to have met at Time magazine’s prestigious 100 Most Influential People In The World party in New York last May. Ferguson and Ms Hirsi Ali, who have both been on the list, were introduced by Belinda Luscombe, the magazine’s art editor.

[...]

Ms Luscombe, a friend of Ms Hirsi Ali, said: ‘I think that is where they met for the first time. In all the years I have known Ayaan, she’s never had a boyfriend. She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys.’
Cry me a river. But there's always another woman's husband or so it seems.

Hirsi Ali, who wants to ban conservative and Christian political parties, which includes immigration restriction parties, in Europe and equates the Catholic faith with Islam, Nazism and Communism, is an outspoken feminist, and yet she's dropping her knickers for a British Conservative and he's quite happy with the idea while the depraved, rotten to the core media stands by and applauds because it's so romantic. Isn't it amazing the way love (for lack of a better word) crosses racial, religious, and political boundaries. But only when it wants to.

Interestingly, in the inroduction of Ferguson's Virtual History (the counter-factualism on which it is based is highly controversial among historians), he explicitly equates Fascism, Communism, and Feminism. But what does it matter for a notorious philanderer if it comes with a new piece of pussy.

Many historians dismiss counterfactual history as sometimes entertaining, but not meeting the standards of serious historical research due to its speculative nature and dismiss it as "a useless exercise". Rather like Ms. Hirsi Ali's criticism of Islam or her "conservative think tank" work, or so it seems.