Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
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Tuesday, December 31, 2002
Why don't I just automatically redirect you to Joanne Jacobs and save you the trouble of coming here before linking to her? She has another story you shouldn't miss, all about the Oakland School for Social Justice, Community Development [and Creating Habitual Malcontents Destined For a Rotten Life.] Lots of laughs there. The students get to go to "culture and resistance" class. More laughs yet to come when they apply for a job.
The deserving poor. Joanne Jacobs tells a sad story in a post on public and private charity. Follow the link to find her starting point, a post by Jane Galt, which is itself followed by a great discussion in the comments. Question from me: why do so many people hate the idea of dividing the poor or the rich into deserving and undeserving groups, yet nearly everyone is quite happy to assess the middle class by their deserts.
(Nice dictionary, good dictionary. I came very close just then to asking why everyone is quite happy to judge the middle class by their puddings. Mind you, this too is a profound question. When were you last served jam roly-poly by anyone of your own age or younger? Cultural cleansing, I call it.)
Producer trying to sign up Amartya Sen for Bollywood role. Honestly, that's what it says. And for a film called Wild Noise, too, not for my own private project Confessions of a Teenage Welfare Economist. Monday, December 30, 2002
Sorry for the silence - I didn't get a chance to say a formal farewell before going off to visit computerless relatives. Blogging will be light over the next few days while I catch up with life... ...and with the news. You know how the minute you stop looking the world goes and throws a triple-somersault? My husband certainly boggled when he saw a headline in the AOL news page reading "Hussain appeals to Blair for help." Boringly the Hussain in question turned out not to be Saddam but England cricket captain Nasser Hussain-with-an-a. He is seeking political guidance over whether the England team should play in Zimbabwe. Make your own decisions, Nasser. Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Heya, life ain't so bad. Most people mean well, do all right, get along. Happy Christmas everyone. Meanwhile.... 5 June 1944 And that's how much chance I have of doing any more blogging for the next twenty four hours. Horrifying. Every implication of the story cited here by Amygdala left me sick at heart. A black American victim of terrorism in Africa was left to die because he was mistaken for an African. (NB free registration for Washington Post required to read Amygdala's link.) Part of the horror is that one can see why it happened. Ach, I don't want to go into it. CORRECTION: Gary, it was very charitable of you in your e-mail not to put forward the obvious explanation for my confusion; namely that I was drunk. I might well have been, you know. Just 2cc of dry sherry and I'm murmuring 1980s pop songs from a corner of the sofa. My New Year's resolution is going to be if you want to blog it, blog it immediately. With this story I posted the url then went away and did Christmas stuff. Later I came back, wrote the commentary, and published it. Somewhere in the intervening period I imagined or picked up from another story a terrorism connection which isn't there. Mea culpa. In a spirit of Christmas thoughtfulness, it seems David Trimble is reviewing the sometimes surprising history of Northern Irish unionism. Letter to Slugger points out a review by Mr Trimble of 'The Secret History of the IRA.' David Irving & Mona Baker. The relationship* that dare not speak its name? Diane E of the newly reborn Gotham2003 has been tracking the story, which, like everything to do with Mr Irving, is more twisty than a piece of fusili trying to impress the teacher at pasta school. Scroll up from the link above for more updates as they come. *Note to Mr Irving's ever-busy lawyers. Don't bother. Relationship can mean many things. Monday, December 23, 2002
No, you haven't had one sherry too many. You keep seeing Iain Murray's name over at the Volokh Conspiracy because it is really there. He's acting as a sort of locum conspirator. In this post he reports on figures suggesting the UK is less anti-semitic than either the US or Europe. I read somewhere that the UK also has one of the highest rates of mixed-race marriages in the world. So perhaps we don't all hate each other as much as we keep hearing we do. Someone has not forgotten the Korean kidnap victims. John Costello writes: Today's New York Times has a full page ad on page A11. It starts with "This is a Fact," below which is a photo of Megumi Yokota, it then provides more information on the situation than I have read in the Times news sections. For example, the North Koreans claim the remains of the dead Japanese were "washed away by a flood," also: the one set of remains they did provide belonged to someone else.(I can't make that link work, but it may just be busy - NS.) Saturday, December 21, 2002
You can tell a woman by the company she keeps. Giles Coren of the Times found out something about poor persecuted friend of the Palestinians Mona Baker - namely that she writes in friendly terms to holocaust-denier David Irving. Note she seems to have initiated the correspondence, not him. I found this item via Damian Penny, who has a report of it that will outlast the Times' deadline for charging foreign readers. Do her supporters who write to the Guardian know? Does boycotter-in-chief Stephen Rose know? (Mr Rose is a Jew who supports a boycott of Israeli academics out of political conviction, but I doubt that he cares for Mr Irving or Mr Irving's friends.) By the way, I really do believe in academic freedom. Thus support Mona Baker's right to organize boycotts, so long as others have the right to denounce her and boycott her back. I also think that it is legitimate and praiseworthy (though it should not be compulsory) for universities to have a policy against racial discrimination and to fire people who breach it. If academic journals want to judge academic papers on the race of the writer, let them, but let them be revealed as temples of a pernicious cult, not temples of knowledge.
It seems that I am rarer in this belief than I would once have thought. Stephen Rose's views on academic freedom seem to be gaining ground. He writes in the article linked to above: "Academic freedom I find a completely spurious argument in a world in which science is so bound up with military and corporate funding." Very revealing. He has gone that far. He should not be too surprised when Irving and his like come up to meet him. You don't want to hear all my moaning. Your role in the script now requires you to write in saying, oh, but we do! Please Natalie, tell us more about your unmet deadlines, your faulty ISDN line, your tormented life as a Christmas shopping survivor, the crow-like rasp that precedes each cough... Friday, December 20, 2002
A Happy and Vigilant Christmas To All My Readers. Especially Capt. Heinrichs, who discovered this idle diversion. A fisking here, a fisking there. Layman's Logic takes on the Great Cham himself and the Mirror besides. I haven't even bothered to send you to the permalink this time, since I know it won't be working. But for the archives here it is. "The Two Towers makes no effort to look for root causes." From Innocents Abroad, a reflection on watching The Two Towers with an enthusiastic French cinema audience. If Blogger permalinks aren't working go here. Whateveryado, go there and read this: ...there is a problem with root causes. Root causes assume something that is rarely mentioned. Root causes assume that humans can escape their moral obligations by standing outside the normal world. It assumes humans can abstract themselves from reality and go romping through history looking for the all-powerful distant cause that will explain each and every aspect of our current situation. Then, having discerned the historical secret, the wily scholar can, with a gentle wave of his hand, dismiss all those silly concerns about morality, responsibility and honor, while providing the road map for solving all our social ills. That this approach, which is really none other than the methodology of the social sciences, is simplistic in the extreme, reducing human decisions to little more than unthinking reactions to a single dominant stimulus, means little to its proponents. They accept all this because the root cause provides an immediate and simplistic explanation to impress the gullible and justify the foolish.There is one phrase later in the post that I don't think I can quite sign up to, namely "evil is its own cause", but other than that, this post had me cheering. Thursday, December 19, 2002
Habemus internetionem! When I told her that I was having my computer upgraded a friend of mine said, "Oh, that sounds bad. Whenever or a shop has an upgrade that usually means that they are unable to function for days. I hate jokes like that.
Now I've been back for five whole minutes, I am going to read my e-mail. I hope no one is desperate for a speedy answer. Saturday, December 14, 2002
Isn't this headline absurd? "The National Crisis." It's about Cherie Blair. Sure, Cherie has tried to have it both ways for too long: standing on her privacy yet holding seminars on policy issues. And who fixed it for Euan Blair to hob nob with Kate Winslet at a movie première?
As so often there was a whole new story lurking in the margins of the one everybody's talking about. Explaining the hostility between the normally pro-Labour Mirror and Cherie Blair, the Guardian comments: There is no great mystery as to the reason for the hostility. Piers Morgan, the Mirror editor, recently revealed that Mrs Blair had tried to get him the sack, complaining to his bosses that he was missing a moral compass.I am surprised and concerned to learn that the Prime Minister's wife could even think she had the power or influence to get a newspaper editor sacked. All very revealing. But not a national crisis, let alone the national crisis.
Dan Dare was actually a little too scary for the six-year old market today. Arachno-humanoid aliens wrapped up captives - including our heroes - in cocoons and ate them as and when. Fortunately Sondar was there to whop their heads off, spreading ichor all over the place. It owed something to the film of Starship Troopers and something to Aliens. One of the best in-atmosphere spaceship battle sequences I have ever seen, though. Thursday, December 12, 2002
No, Natalie you have not pressed the right buttons. Some Blogger glitch or other means that I'm stuck with the malformed post before this one, my shame public for evermore. Good thing I didn't idly tap my fingers on the keys and write My vote for Sexpot of the Blogiverse is [edit] Here is the previous post done properly:
No, Margo, you are not well read. Tee hee. Margo Kingston, the dame Tim Blair made world famous, has been caught out by the same fake Shakespeare quote that earlier caught out Barbra Streisand. In this webdiary entry she¹ writes: "Quoting historical figures can be perilous when confronting the convictions of the righteous, but just to demonstrate that this has all happened before, I've included a selection of the sayings of the wise and not so wise over the ages. Just in case anyone thinks I am well read (I wish!) I found these by trawling the internet for a few minutes. If you don't need further convincing you can skip this part."I do need further convincing that Julius Caesar, either in his own right or as imagined by Shakespeare, ever said this: Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervour. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and patriotism, will offer up all of their rights to the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Julius Caesar.Barbra Streisand quoted almost identical words in a speech to the Democratic National Gala, but later on had to put this correction on her website. (The Kingston and Streisand versions of this internet hoax are almost identical but not quite. The last line Kingston quotes has "And I am Julius Caesar" where Streisand had "And I am Caesar." Also Kingston has "drum" for Streisand's "drums". However, in comparison to publishing the notion that the phrase "...the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry-" either came from the Latin or was penned by William Shakespeare, the misquotation of a misquotation is no great sin.)
Funny thing is, Babra Streisand's slip happened two months ago and was widely reported then. Ms Kingston ought to read more Mark Steyn. Then she'd catch up with things.
¹ LATER: What a complicated post this is turning out to be. I thought there were two mid-length quotations from this chap David Makinson in this Margo Kingston webdiary entry, each of them starting with his name and ending with three little stars. I never dreamed that any real journalist would get away with putting their byline at the top of an article, writing an entry quote and one paragraph and then abandoning the whole of the rest of the article to be filled up by quotes from a mate of theirs. (How did they split the take, I wonder?) Yet this is what Tim Blair claims has happened, and he knows more about what is allowed in Australian newspapers than I do. So it's David, not Margo, who is not well read. Well, both of them actually. No, Margo, you are not well read. Tee hee. Margo Kingston, the dame Tim Blair made famous, caught out by the same fake Shakespeare quote that earlier caught out Barbra Streisand. In this webdiary Wot, no posts? I am on a secret mission to hunt down and destroy the enemies of our country. My claim to be trying to learn two different graphics programmes at once in order to earn a few pennies is mere cover. I know I can trust you guys not to tell. "All right then, who would He vote for?" I have a post about the phrase 'What would Jesus Do?' over at Samizdata. Tuesday, December 10, 2002
"We must prevent an exchange of monologues." Airstrip One reports how brave little Holland is standing up to be counted in the face of Mugabe's tyranny. Asymptotically limited blogging today. I have to make some money. But I can't resist quoting an exchange in the Libertarian Alliance Forum between me and Sean Gabb, the author of the God and Margaret Thatcher piece linked to in the post below. After Dr Gabb posted his piece, I commented thus :
SG responded: Just in case the BBC's lawyers are already on the case, it was me that added the copyright sign, seeing as it had got swamped by tachyonic inteference in the temporal transfer. Monday, December 09, 2002
God and Margaret Thatcher and The Established Church of England. The inimitable Sean Gabb lets fall an avalanche of criticism on a snowball of an aside thrown out by a report to the Church of England. The report said, just in passing: [u]ntil the Church of England can choose its own bishops, Christian ecumenicism is stymied, because no other church will amalgamate with one whose bishops might be chosen by a future Margaret Thatcher.That little remark spurred Dr Gabb's commentary. "Far more effective, the authors of the report knew, was to imply her theological status in a sneer of 32 words - 32 words that it has taken 3,200 words of even abbreviated argument to expose and refute."The 100 to one ratio is not so disproportionate if you think of the many more than a hundred occasions that foolish little sneers like this one have appeared in the media. LATER: I can't link directly to the piece concerned, so the link takes you to the Free Life Commentary index page. Scroll down the little blue window on the left to find Free Life Commentary No. 82.
Friday, December 06, 2002
The gift of life. John Costello was able to supply the name of the child mentioned by Joanne Jacobs below, the girl conceived in order to save her older sister: Marissa Ayala was conceived to save Anissa. Here are several stories from Time magazine about such living-to-living transplants. (The accounts had a doubly strange air for me because a great many of the people involved have similar names: Marissa, Anissa, Alyssa who lived and Alyssa who died.) Not all the decisions would be easy to make: "What if a couple conceives a baby in order to obtain matching marrow for another child: and what if amniocentesis shows that the tissue of the fetus is not compatible for transplant? Does the couple abort the fetus and then try again? "and, even harder: "Tamas Bosze, a Chicago bar owner, was told that only a marrow transplant could rescue his son Jean-Pierre, 12, from leukemia. The boy's only potential donors were twin half-siblings born out of wedlock to the father's former girlfriend. Bosze sued the woman in an attempt to compel her to have the children tested for tissue compatibility. She refused, and a court upheld her decision. Last November, Jean-Pierre Bosze died." Some hard choices there. But getting back to the original situation, that shared by Zain Hashmi and Anissa Ayala, I think it is clear. Give them their chance. Babies are conceived for much worse reasons. I don't know if this next thing is connected or not, and I will deliberately refrain from trying to find out, as should you who reads this. But a Google search for "Marissa Ayala" threw up these pictures which the young artists were clearly happy to show on the internet. To find the one by a child called Marissa Ayala, scroll almost to the bottom. I don't know how common a name it is; perhaps there are hundreds of Marissa Ayalas. But I find myself hoping it is the same girl. She does not sound as if her life is a burden to her. Next to her picture of the family starting their festive meal under the decorations she has written: "We celebrate new Year on the 31 st of December. I have supper at home with all my family. We wartch T.V and we eat grape."It took me ages to learn to spell "watch", too. Dispatches from the frontier. My husband spent a memorable few seconds yesterday travelling at speed down the motorway in his car. Sideways. While acting, as he put it, "as a hood ornament for a lorry." Life's rich tapestry, eh? No one was hurt and we are fully insured, but it's all a bit of a bleah. I am now stuck home waiting for a loan car and a tow-truck to take our poor little Fiesta to hospital and possible euthanasia. I had been planning to go to London and stock up on presents, not to mention meeting Brian Linse who is in London at the moment.
My husband said an interesting thing about his thoughts while being carried along. He didn't pray. He didn't think of his family. He's a teacher and he spends some of his time saying and even more time thinking, "Stop that! You're doing something stupid." And that's what he tried to convey telepathically to the driver of the lorry. Thursday, December 05, 2002
Joanne Jacobs writes: "Five or six years ago (if memory serves), a California couple's daughter desperately needed a bone marrow transplant. I think she had some form of leukemia. The parents' bone marrow couldn't be used. So they had a baby, hoping to save their daughter's life. There was criticism at the time: Were they using the baby? Etcetera. As it turned out, the baby's blood was a good match for her older sister. The transplant was performed. Both children are doing well, and the parents are delighted they have two living children instead of the alternative, one dead child." Shark blog has a general theory of left-wing justice. It's a little harsh to say this of all left-wingers; I'd really prefer to describe this as "idiotarian justice" - but by eck it's true of some I could name. Mrs Jenkins speaks. Mrs Jenkins, you will recall, is the Japanese woman kidnapped by North Korea, who while there married a US soldier who deserted in 1965, and is now - this is the woman, not the soldier - being held in Japan while Japan demands that her husband come to Tokyo for his own good, which he says he daren't do for fear of arrest, while what either of them want for their two children, still held in Korea, or indeed what they want themselves is unclear. Confused? It's a bit sick to say this, but I can't help picturing Mrs Jenkins as an oriental version of Jessica from Soap. So why does America have such a high murder rate? It was higher back in the days when American and British gun laws were similar, and it has stayed higher, though declining. I expect it will cross over our rising rate during the next two decades. So after all that, I'm going to sound like Michael Moore. It may have something to do with the fact that America was conquered from the Indians in the relatively recent past, and that the conquest was a struggle - not a walkover as it was in Australia. Other high-crime societies such as Mexico, the Philippines, the Balkans and South Africa also have a history of difficult conquest (or failed conquest) in the last four centuries. Russia, too, sort of.
Yes, I ought to be in bed.
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
Will Warren of Unremitting Verse is retiring. I tried to think of a way of putting that in rhyme. But I couldn't. Will could have, but instead chose to take a very graceful leave of us in prose. God and Caesar. At the Libertarian Alliance Forum Kevin Carson made two good points about Josephine Quintavelle's views. The first I had thought of already: "I don't think these parents are very likely to view their new child as a mere convenience or an organ bank. If anything, the opposite is likely to be true. Both the parents and the brother will be conscious of a lifelong debt that can never be repaid."The second is devastating: "And speaking of Quintavelle, it's really odd to hear a self-described pro-life person making the statement "Only Parliament can decide these things." If you'd expect anyone to understand the difference between God and Caesar, it would be surely be a pro-lifer." What is wrong with this picture? Simon Jenkins blithely repeats the notion put about by Michael Moore that you can always leave your door open in Canada. This review by a Canadian, though generally favourable, observes: "Granted he did test out his theory by jiggling a few unlocked doorknobs in a comfy middle class Toronto neighbourhood and even went so far as to include a shot of what he presumed was a typical Toronto-area ghetto. Why he didn’t venture a few blocks south of the Alliance Atlantis headquarters to Regent Park where he could have gotten a picture of what a real housing project looked like, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was all he could do to show his appreciation to the Canadian film company giant that helped bankroll the film’s production." "Mr Moore", Simon Jenkins says admiringly, "is a reporter who not only asks “what?” but also “why?” Others say that Mr Moore is a reporter who not only asks "what?" and "why?" but "why should I be constrained by trivia like the truth?" Spinsanity's reviewer, hardly right wing, didn't think much of Bowling for Columbine. Ben Fritz says: "And readers who uncritically accept those "facts" -- along with a number of other egregious and sloppy distortions -- will be duped. Good satire also should be grounded in fact. Regrettably, Moore gets his facts wrong again and again and again, and a simple check of the sources he cites shows that lazy research is often to blame." This review is unabashedly anti-left wing, but agrees with the previous one that the film is full of lies and errors. One of the most egregious is one of omission. Moore's portrait of Canada at peace with itself has no mention of Canada's own mass killing, the 1989 massacre of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Even the film's title, it says, is wrong. They skipped bowling.
(Original Times link spotted by Jim Bennett.)
LATER: It's Canada+guns day for me. By coincidence a Samizdata reader sent a Canadian National Post article to that blog. It was about the unbelievable expense of Canada's new gun registration system. He added in passing that "I can say that, in Toronto, there was a series of gang related shooting in October where every weekend (for a month) different gang members ended up dead in different parts of the city." Read more here, including the comments.
An honest reply. Paul Wright replies to an open letter from the father of one of those murdered in Bali. This theme keeps coming up. We must treat those bereaved by crime or disaster with decency and courtesy. But that does not make their opinions right in every case.
LATER: Sigh. If the link doesn't work, go to TANSTAAFL and scroll down. I know, I know. Online polls aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on. But isn't interesting that the Guardian's online poll right now has 61% against the firefighters' strike? Connections and Contradictions. There's a wide ranging and thoughtful essay on the value of blogs, Miss World, the French state's attitude to polygamy, and wife-beating capitalist chic at Body and Soul. I'd like to bounce back with a few points in defence of capitalism. The anti-capitalist part of the essay is not at its core, but being pro-capitalist is fairly close to my core, so that's why I'm going to focus on that aspect.
On sweatshirts and sweatshops. I think that the sweatshop has liberated more women than any law passed in living memory. It takes around two or three generations of sweatshops to go from the ancient pattern of peasant subsistence farming, with its characteristic grinding toil for women, to, well, Taiwan. In 1945 Taiwan was poorer than the Sudan. Now I read somewhere that the Taiwanese goverment felt it necessary to run a campaign against obesity.
Third World women may hate it working in sweatshops, but they hate it less than what they had before. Once the Wal-Mart trainer factory down the road opens its doors, bride-burnings and female infanticide are on the way out. When companies cheat or exploit their workers it is legitimate for concerned customers to boycott them, although I hope they will send someone to talk to the workers first and see what they want given local conditions, just as it is legitimate that companies with a better record should attempt to raise sales by boasting of their relative virtue. And both these things do happen, which takes me to my next point: one of the factors I love about capitalism is its incentives to create and maintain your good name. Likewise one of the things I hate about socialism and statism is that it erodes incentives to respectability. How does wife beating get to be chic? It certainly went on in the London or Los Angeles of 1900* but it was considered disgraceful. What's changed? I'd say that one major thing that has changed is that a man's living no longer depends on his good name. That allowed the cult of the barbarian to resurface. The cult is ever-present in humanity but had been held down in the west by an overlay of chivalry. The gangsta-chic meme (as we can call the latest incarnation of this ancient devil) has been percolating upwards through the income levels ever since.
The author of this weblog, Body and Soul, is Jeanne D'Arc. (Sometimes she hears strange, insistent voices that come from invisible people and say oddly compelling things. But if they bother her she turns off the radio.) She sent me a kind e-mail a while ago. Why can't I either reply to e-mails efficiently or ignore them without guilt?
*Whether wife-beating went on then at a greater or lesser rate than at present is also interesting. I suspect, following Charles Murray's Losing Ground, that the problem is worse now, despite the indifference of the police a century ago, for the same basic reason, namely welfare. She should patent her own body. Perhaps that's the only way the woman described in Stephen Pollard's post "They're my medical notes, so why can't I have them?" is going to get some control over - or even sight of - her own medical notes. The hospital couldn’t care less. Its response is classic: "We are sorry that Ms Lawrence is unhappy with the information in her medical notes, but . . . hospitals have a policy not to alter medical records." Well that’s OK then. They have "a policy". It might be the wrong policy. It might mean treating patients with contempt. But, heh, it’s "a policy". And as such, it is utterly typical of the NHS’s attitude to its customers — a patient is just a patient (if only they wouldn’t get in the way of the efficient operation of the consultant’s research), a policy — well, just that, a policy. No matter that it might destroy your life; no matter that it operates against your interests; no matter that it embodies a complete disregard for the rights of you, the patient and the NHS’s wagepayer — it’s a policy, OK? My kids do that. I tell them not to dance in their socks at parties. "Shoes or bare feet," I screech, waving ruined socks in front of them. "Do you know the cost of socks? Well let me tell you, next time you do that, you are going to find out." But the soul of a juvenile sock-abuser is deaf to all decent shame. "We always do that" or better yet "Everybody does that" is considered quite sufficient explanation and justification. I could teach them the word "policy" and set them up for comfortable careers in the NHS. Of course, there is no reason to suppose that NHS spokesmen are in themselves particularly juvenile or complacent. They act that way because it is a strategy well-adapted to their environment. Stephen Pollard goes on to say, explaining why lawyers or doctors despite their many faults would never dare to institute a policy of never changing their records: They provide a service to me, the customer. If I don’t like what I receive, I can take my business elsewhere. The only choice I am given over the NHS is to pay my taxes or go to prison. I can't ever seem to link to individual posts in stephenpollard.net. Never mind. They're all good. He ought to be on my blogroll. Let's look and see if he has already mysteriously appeared there. Yes, he has.
It still astounds me that the first time his name as a columnist ever really sunk in, a year ago, I was terribly, terribly scathing. Anyone can have an off day, and we'll draw a veil over which one of us it was. Tuesday, December 03, 2002
Canada won't ban Hezbollah. Canada will ban the Canadian affiliate of Magen David Adom who provide ambulances to Jew, Christian and Muslim alike. Because they have stars of David on the sides, presumably. Ever-helpful, Alice Bachini offers anti-globos yet more diurnal strategies for offering grovelling apologies for being alive and having fun: Eat Nothing Day "One ring to rule them all, one ring to bind them," said Mr Blunkett. "At last I've got rid of that pesky trial by jury." Mr Chapman has the latest broadcast as the weapons inspectors hit Orthanc. I'm pro-life. It's commonly taken to mean "against abortion", and despite being a controversial term most people of all opinions have no trouble understanding how the phrase arose. But how this woman, Josephine Quintavelle, gets to be described as "pro-life" is beyond me. A child called Zain Hashmi has the potentially deadly blood disorder thalassaemia. His parents want to carry out some procedure involving genes and bone marrow to produce a sibling who can donate cells from his or her umbilical cord to save Zain. They seem respectable people who clearly love the son they already have. There is no reason to suppose that they will not also love Zain's new brother or sister. True, they will use a part of his or her genetic material to help Zain; and they must perforce do so before the child is old enough to consent. But that does not imply - in fact it is fantastic to suggest it does imply - that the parents will therefore only see the new child as a thing to be used. Josephine Quintavelle is launching a court action to stop them. She believes that only Parliament can decide these matters. Please, nobody assume that I am blind to the worrying aspects of recent developments in reproductive science. I don't want Larry Niven's SF stories of organleggers to come true. Same goes for Lois McMasters Bujold's stories involving clones created to serve as organ reserves for their masters. Closer to home, I do have qualms about the consent of children being assumed. Also, the growing ability of parents to irreversibly manipulate the physical form of their children raises all sorts of spectres, although it could also confer great benefits. Maybe I'll write about all these issues in the future, although judging from the fact that I still haven't got round to doing my promised essay on abortion, that future may be farther off than the clones.
Just for today, though, I'd like to stick to one point. Zain Hashmi is likely to die. His parents want to make his early death much less likely by bringing a new life into the world. Josephine Quintavelle wants to stop them, because she believes that reproductive ethics should be under democratic control. She believes Zain's much increased chance of premature death is a price worth paying to preserve democratic control, fearing worse consequences than the death of one child if it is lost. I hope I have not misrepresented her opinion. But whether you like or hate it, it has nothing to do with any possible intepretation of the words "pro-life". She's back. The resurgent Letter from Gotham has up a reply to a post by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax. Read both. Monday, December 02, 2002
Just lookit this. David Janes has created this amazing blog speed-reading tool. It's called Jane's Blogosphere (neat name, too.) See it at Ranting and Roaring. Here's a version tailor-made for my blog. I'm honoured. I had no idea David was working on this, and I don't know whether he's planning to give it away or sell it, but it looks simply fascinating. ADDED LATER: He's planning to give it away. Nice chap. And the Janes-related names almost generate themselves; look for "Janes' Fighting Words". In a minute I'm going to have to surrender this computer to my son in fulfilment of a promise to give him an uninterrupted session on an educational computer game that provides most useful preparation for future life, at least for those of the coming generation whose career plans involve fighting worms armed with Uzis who say "victory" and "oh-oh" in cute squeaky voices. But before I go I'd like to say that the paper version of the Telegraph is just ace today. There is an article by Alan Judd on the right to armed self- defence that is remarkable not so much for anything it says as for the fact that it is an article on the right armed self-defence spread bang over the centre-page of Britain's biggest selling quality paper. And there is a bitterly splendid article by Neil Collins on the number of rail lengthmens' lives that are likely to be sacrificed on the altar of safety. It's more dangerous to work on the railway track than to be a fireman. I'm saying this all from memory as it was my friend who had the paper (I'm far too cool) and she's gone off home. I tried to link to the articles but couldn't, one hopes because so many other people are reading the good word. You may fare better than I. It's certainly worth your while to try at http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/
Okay, gotta go.
ADDED LATER: Here's the Alan Judd article: "We must be allowed to defend ourselves against burglars." and here's the Neil Collins article: "Spending billions to make railways more dangerous." Islam, Peace, and why I love my referrer log. BoW is on my permalinks for a reason, and I'd have found this Blogs of War post on the phrase "Islam is a religion of peace" eventually. But that beautiful Bravenet software let me find it right now. Seriously, read it. Guaranteed non-mushy, yet also non-racist. Teases out all sorts of points that I had known without knowing, such as this one: It seems to me that, far from being an attack directed at Muslims, the ironic use of "religion of peace" is actually a slap at George W. Bush and others who, no doubt with the best of intentions, have employed the banal phrase to avoid confronting or acknowledging a manifest reality: that the wickedness of those who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11 is inextricably enmeshed with the wickedness of the ideology of the perpetrators, their apologists, their fellow travelers, and their clandestine supporters; and that the ideology arises not out of a void, but from a variety of religious extremism that is propagated by some of our "allies" in the Middle East and their spokesmen and beneficiaries at home. "Christian Missionaries Leading a New Crusade." When I saw the headline to this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald I thought it was going to be yet another desperate attempt to pretend that Pat Robertson was the same as Osama bin Laden. It's a good deal better than that, and contains a prediction of the future that is probably news to most of the SMH's readers. Get real. An Editorial in USA Today tells critics who act as if they think the greatest danger to civilization is Harry Potter and Victoria's Secret to put their energies to more productive use. Britannia Rules the Waves. A Briton of the old school attempts to reclaim a little bit of Empire. The Foreign Office johnnies seem oddly uncooperative. Saturday, November 30, 2002
Dan Dare was cool today. I thrilled to the way that villain-turned-hero White led the enemy fleet to its destruction and his own suicidal redemption; hands firm upon the controls of his ship as the acceleration forces sought to shake it apart, furry dice swinging madly as the ship sped onwards... Friday, November 29, 2002
http://www.meaculpa.com. I also meant to http://www.mention.com that Happy Fun Pundit is now at http://www.happyfunpundit.com. This was one of the more copeable-with elements of my pile of Things To Note, Disseminate, Decide Upon, Reply To And Do Before I Die, Submerged By Their Awful Fecundity. I don't want to note, disseminate, reply to, decide upon or do any more for a bit - there's a letter about a missed dental appointment somewhere in there, and I'd hate to hit it unprepared - so ta-ra, my lovelies. Just checking. I typed http://www.meaculpa.com in the search box. The site exists and claims to consist of photographies érotiques. Might have known it.
Up to speed - transport - moving things at speed - geddit? Oh, go away. I suppose I have to spell it out, then. Patrick Crozier's blog formerly known as "UK Transport" is now a global brand and can be found at http://www.transportblog.com. See, those Volokhs really are taking over. It was The Volokh Conspiracy that pointed out that Amazon still have up Lesley Reed's original admiring review of Arming America as the official Amazon assessment of the book. Clink on the link headed "trying to put it about" in the post below and enjoy the unintentional humour while you still can. It's also interesting to timejump back through earlier and earlier reviews of the book. One courageous chap, by the name of Kieran Healy, comes back in October 2000 to ruefully disagree with an earlier self. Eugene Volokh also presents an instructive account by Am So A Pundit of the way that a policy of expelling all cheats, however mild, defeats its own object as pity or fear of hassle motivates teachers and fellow students to cover up all but the severest offences. There's nothing new under the sun. I was taught at school how early nineteenth century juries would aquit an obviously guilty defendant rather than send him to hang for stealing a shilling's worth of goods.
By the way, if ever Am So A Pundit finds a big blank where his blog name used to be, and the whole blog propped up by bricks, police enquiries will have me as number one suspect. I covet that name and am going to steal it if I can. No penalty is severe enough to deter me. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers. Hey, Yanks! You know why I get so uptight about Michael of the Beautiful Islands trying to put it about that the American colonists didn't know one end of a gun from the other? Because if they weren't all crack shots then it would be - inconceivably - our fault that we lost the late unpleasantness of 1775-83 instead of, as everybody knows, the result being a regrettable consequence of the ability of those ungentlemanly persons to plink at us from miles away, rather than coming up close to fight as Real Men should. "'Fear not', said the Angel." On the radio last night I heard about some feeble headteacher (whose school, name and even gender proved instantly forgettable) who banned parents from videoing the school nativity play for fear that the videos would fall into the hands of paedophiles. If the camcorders had been banned because they put the wee performers off their stride, I'd have said fine, your perogative mate. That would also have been my response to banning them because they blocked the line of sight of the audience, or because they made an irritating whirring noise, or encouraged people to stand up to get better camera angles, or even because they looked naff. If our headteacher had actually banned them because they violated the sanctity of a depiction of Our Lord's birth I would have trembled in awe, knowing that the Real Headteachers (or Headmasters and Headmistresses as die-hard cultists still call them) had at last returned to their thrones.
But to turn off the cameras because he, she or it thinks that a bunch of freaks are going to trouble to seek out images of little Kylie Snoggins muffing her lines as Third Angel From The Left, when they have all the wide sewers of the internet to dip into at will? Get real, you pathetic excuse for a leader. If you have actual reason to believe that the physical or electronic audience of your little play includes dangerous criminals then earn your pay and name names to the cops rather than denying Mr and Mrs Snoggins the chance to immortalize their little darling's moment of glory. A head teacher should stand firm like an oak. This one sounds a more like a feather blown around by every passing wind of public panic. Monday, November 25, 2002
Another addition to my list of bloggers who have taken a break was to have been The Rittenhouse Review. Over the weekend I made a little note in my exercise book to mention this - look, here's proof! (Holds up notebook to screen.) Now I find that (a) he's back and (b) I and others have been bounced from the Rittenhouse blogroll for linking to LGF. It's his blog, of course, to do as he likes with, but... ...but silence is never a good strategy for getting your opinions across. I think a great deal of LGF's enormous hit rate comes from the fact that violence by Muslims is played down by the media. People read the papers and find stories tucked away in corners that they know perfectly well would be spread across the front page if a non-Muslim person or country did the same thing. Hence when they finally find a site that has a lot of stories they say, "At last!" Someone else who sees it too!" There is a fierce joy in saying what is true but forbidden or supressed, or in hearing others say it. This is really no different from the point I made a few posts down that the usual effect of the supression of free speech is to make people more strident. I'm repeating myself. It bears repeating.
Although I spoke about stridency there, I see little or nothing to object to in the individual posts on LGF. Nor in most of the comments, although as for unmoderated comments anywhere you do see a certain percentage of dross among them. There was a little bit of black humour about "Islamic peacebots" in one recent LGF post, but that was no closer to racism than the joke about dumb Boers in a recent Rittenhouse post - slightly less close, in fact; not that I am at all uptight about either. The thing that gets people angry about LGF is the concentration of posts with bad news about the Islamic world. As far as I am concerned that's intimately connected to the fact that there is an awful lot of bad news about the Islamic world to be told at the present time, for twenty or thirty years in the past, and for an unknown (but not infinite) time to come. And bad news, moreover, that our modern multi-cultis are too prissy to tell themselves.
Bloggers are not obliged to write about stories that they find uninteresting or uncongenial. However since The Rittenhouse Review has taken the trouble to deliberately close off an avenue of debate, I trust it will not be leaving coverage of Islamofascist terror and oppression solely to its ideological enemies? If it does then there are few grounds for complaint about what they say. The most awful fate conceivable to a blogger has befallen me. Yep, I've landed some paid work. I don't intend it to stop me blogging, but it might slow me down a little. For a quite separate reason I am going to be blogging very little in the next few days: we have a guest staying in the room where the computer is. Do you know, some pernickerty people seem to find it odd when one bounces into the room at odd hours of the morning to save the world from civil asset forfeiture. Friday, November 22, 2002
The judgement of history. John Weidner provides the minority report. And I'd add that the Royal Navy covered itself with glory under the good old system of prize money. Take another look at the post below. Some of you will bridle at any diminuition of its harshness. I am going to add a softening note in a minute, but, still, I don't think there's a lot wrong with it. Various opinion polls show that a majority of Palestinians support suicide bombings of civilians like this one - I'll track down the link in Daimnation if anyone wants to argue. Therefore the use of the general word "Palestinians" is justified. When Hamas and Al-Asqua claim that the people are with them in their struggle, they speak the truth. Our history books are full of passages saying that the Germans or the British or the Indians massacred people at this or that site, so there should be no objection to statements that the Palestinians massacred people at this or that bus shelter. The fact that Palestinians habitually celebrate the deaths of innocents, including children, is well chronicled in words and photographs in LGF. I picked Nablus because this was the town with the best publicised public delight at the destruction of the World Trade Centre.
I would say that if you pick a randomly chosen Palestinian, the odds are greater than with any other people on earth (except perhaps the Rwandan Hutu, unless that's been beaten out of them since 1994) that he or she supports the massacre of innocents. I say so only because more than half of them say they do, loudly, proudly and often. Again I would say that if you pick a randomly chosen Palestinian, the odds are greater than with any other people on earth (with same possible exception as before) that he or she supports the genocidal extermination of their enemy race, although here I would guess that the percentage supporting wholesale extermination is much lower than that which merely(!) supports the killing of large numbers and the expulsion or subordination of the rest. It seems a reasonable and sober guess, in the light of their own statements, that the percentage of Palestinians supporting extermination of the Jews is at least as high as the percentage of Germans supporting it in the Nazi era. The main difference between the two groups lies in the presence or absence of power to carry out their desires.
Little sign so far of that promised softening of my heart, you may be saying to yourselves. Here it is: I generally share the modern squeamishness about group judgements. They cannot be avoided if we are to make sense of the world in our limited lifespans, but, of course, it is in individual souls that good or evil is decided. Furthermore as a Christian I must believe that all individuals are capable of redemption, and as an observer of the world I see that is true for groups as well. I don't have a strikingly high opinion of the Germany of 2002, but it is a million miles from the Germany of 1944.
And now we come to the thought that started off this post. I don't like group judgements, particularly racial ones. I am usually fairly careful to slip in some qualifier to avoid them; "present-day Palestinian culture is full of hatred for Jews" rather than "Palestinians hate Jews." Why didn't I this time? Answer: because of the post about Robin Page further down the page. It made me think, "**** you, tranzis, see how you like this."
That is the usual effect of the suppression of free speech.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Another day, another Palestinian massacre. Many schoolchildren killed, so much to celebrate in Nablus. So this is what they mean by "hate speech." Telegraph columnist arrested, held in cell, for saying the rural minority should have the same rights as blacks, Muslims, and gays. Not, mind you, more rights than blacks, Muslims and gays, but the same rights. I did not know we had fallen so far. Remember the line peddled by Blunkett that these powers are to be used against thugs and Nazis - you can trust us to act with discretion, old chap - the innocent have nothing to fear - remember that as you read this: Mr Page duly attended the meeting with two officers, but when he refused to answer questions without his lawyer present he was arrested and taken to Cambridge police station, spending 40 minutes in a cell. Wednesday, November 20, 2002
Now is the time for the world to fall silent at the mighty power, the zen-like subtlety, the laser-guided precision of my awesome forensic intellect. This business everyone's getting so excited about, of whether the criminal or society is to blame? Bit o' both, I reckon. Diana Mertz Hsieh updates me via her blog on the issue of Aquinas, Aristotle and the Nature and Classification of Lies, and via e-mail on the names issue: "I don't mind being in the "Names Which Are A Pronounciation Minefield, So Watch Out" category with Bellesiles, so long as that's the only category we share! :-) And I must admit that having the last name "Beautiful Islands" is better than my last name, which is half a thank you (hsieh hsieh)!" It's not just Chinese that produces such patterns; this family has a surname that is half a farewell. Dunno when you'll get to read this. Blogger publishing is temporarily unavailable. Why can't it be spatially unavailable, then I could drive somewhere else and publish from there?
Stop the presses! I wuz wrong. Once-sinful man has forsaken his wicked ways in at least one place on this earth, namely the State of Illinois. There is no crime in Illinois. I know that's true, because why else could the cops spare men and squad cars to harass home schoolers? Read all the articles listed below the factual panel to see an astonishing story of malicious officialdom. I found the link via Bedblog and Samizdata. (Which will hit 400,000 today. Be there.) I see Brian hasn't yet got the hang of contriving that his own blog and Samizdata should re-inforce each other with the correct mix of modesty yet effectiveness. In other words, he still has some modesty in the mix. Be more shameless, Brian, you're making me look bad. News, news, yer actual news. Little of it good, I'm afraid. Venezuela's going down. The same issue of the New Zealand Herald that had the Chavez story also has this cartoon which leads me to suppose that NZ's decision in May 2001 not to have a combat air force any more because once-sinful man had forsaken his wicked ways may have been judged premature. As a young contributor to the opposition National Party's defence forum put it some five months later: I'm a 16 year old New Zealander. I am sick and tired of the labour government especially them scrapping the airforce. We're an island nation, if anyone's going to attack us its gonna be by either air or sea, and our army cant fly, and cant swim that well so what are we gonna do? The airforce could take out ships and planes. I'm back, but still a little pressed for time. So, what do I need to catch up on? Dawson Speaks and Inappropriate Response have both celebrated blirgdays in the last few days. When I started blogging I naively thought that everyone except me had been doing it for ages. "What," you say, "couldn't you tell they hadn't from the absence of archives?" No, because I hadn't yet figured out archives. I just assumed that all these folk must know their way round Hogwarts and play for the Quidditch team because they all looked so authoritative when flicking their wands to dismiss boggarts, poltergeists, cornish fiskies and other pests. It took me quite a while to figure out that some of them were ickle firsties just like me. Dawson has a vintage anniversary post, covering apologetics, corn bread, and reasons to love Israel. Then there's an intensely detailed review of Blanchard's Does God Believe in Atheists? which, as a review should, tells us about a good deal more than the book.
Only I was brought up short by these lines a little way above: "Not to whine, but w/o some fundage, this blog goes dark Thursday at midnight. Hosting fees and all. Not to fear, we'll prob be back in a month if this happens, but it ain't been raining pennies from heaven here..." So I shall be visiting the tips jar when I've posted this, to help ensure the spaghetti recipe comes my way. (Not, alas, that I would do it justice. My husband does the proper cooking in our house, as he is one who thinks nothing of watching tenderly over a simmering pot for an hour in case it bubbles wrong or something. I'm more your doigts de poisson avec pommes frites style of culinary artist.)
Above that, there's a picture of Moira Stern, the harpist, who before her marriage was known as Moira Breen. Now before you rain down compliments on Inappropriate Response for Moira's modesty in not revealing her talent as a musician, be advised that that would be an inappropriate response - they are different people. (Though for all I know, Inapp's Moira may also be a musician.) You'll just have to rain down compliments on her for something else.
Meanwhile over at Junius, Chris Bertram has returned to the fray with this post responding to mine responding to his... He describes himself self-deprecatingly as a "wishy-washy social democrat," which had my ever-distractable mind wondering about the origin of the term "wishy-washy." Chinese laundries? I shall have to think up a more substantive response later. No, not about wishy-washiness, about the role of the state. (Very quickly: homogenization? Hah! Baby, you don't know you're born. It's the force of state law that enforces homogenized solutions onto education, housing, even freaking bananas for the love of mike...)
Finally, Thank you, Israpundit, for appointing me one of the Israpundit sites of the week. I'm proud to be listed in the company of Asparagirl, Oxblog, GedankenPundit and Mind over What Matters. Monday, November 18, 2002
No blogging for a couple of days, as I have to do mighty deeds. May I leave you in the hands of singing superheroes with sauce dispensers for heads. If you want to see who to blame, follow this link. Saturday, November 16, 2002
Diana Hsieh has an update on her lawsuit here. Arthur Silber is more free to comment, and does so here, and scroll up and down for more. BTW I am told that her last name is said like the French chez i.e. "shay" but sort of quicker and flatter. She probably won't be thrilled to hear this, but that puts her in the same category (Names Which Are A Pronounciation Minefield, So Watch Out) as Michael Bellesiles, which apparently comes from the French belles îles and is said "bell eel." Lest anyone take offence, I must add that I find "Hsieh" a pleasing syllable, and as for Bellesiles, he may not be the History Monthly centrefold I would put on my garage wall, but a last name meaning "Beautiful Islands" is pure poetry.
We didn't actually see the Mekon die, did we? Excalibur, which follows Dan Dare, is also good. I just saw an advert for a doll called "Baby Wee-Wee." Now when I was little I had Tiny Tears. You could give her a drink and she'd do a wee-wee immediately afterwards, poor thing, which suggests renal failure. But for some reason it was always little girl dolls who did that. There's progress for you. In these happy days we have Baby Wee-Wee, who evinces his masculinity in the most plastic fashion. But I don't think he'll grow up happy with that name. Friday, November 15, 2002
Things Your Mother Should Have Warned You About, Part II: As Blair so sensibly puts it, "...my elevated fear of Yorkshiremen and circus performers will help protect me against their menace. " Things Your Mother Should Have Warned You About, Part I: Chapman warns: "Inside every such songsmith is a totalitarian monster trying to get out." Rumsfeld on root causes. Peter Regas writes: "I thought you'd appreciate this response by Sec. Rumsfeld to a question at the 11/11/02 Fortune Global Forum. Like a lot that Rumsfeld says, I found the response both refreshing in its candor and its insight." It was, too. Q: ...In order to defend prosperity in some parts of the world is there not a need to attack poverty in addition to all the other steps that you've taken? Source: link With friends like these.... You'd think a guy from the Cato Institute would see the danger to civil liberties in national databases, wouldn't you? Arthur Silber heard an interview with Cato's Charles V. Pena which suggested that things may be blacker than we thought, when even those with a pro-freedom background concede crucial aspects to the statist side: "Pena started out correctly, stressing the massive invasion of privacy that this plan entails. But then he spent the last few minutes of the interview saying that the burden of proof should be on Poindexter: that Poindexter needed to show that this plan actually could prevent acts of terrorism -- and that if he could demonstrate that, then it would be fine. To be absolutely fair, he didn't explicitly say that "it would be fine" -- but the whole way in which he structured his argument led inevitably to that conclusion: if Poindexter proved that the plan would prevent future terrorist acts, then the plan should go into effect... [snip] I'd add that once a government has such power it is damn near inevitable that they will kill more than the terrorists would. I'm not making light of the terrorist threat, just giving the correct weight to the overmighty state threat. They've killed tens of millions so far. Also scroll down for a detailed post about abortion, which presents a view I don't agree with extremely well. It had attracted 23 comments last time I looked. "Blog years are like dog years, only longer." Dawson remembers the sights and smells of his puppyhood, and links to John Weidner remembering some of the cars and postmen he chased back in them days. LATER REFLECTIONS: Dawson was saying, rather wistfully, that he couldn't seem to find the same enthusiasm at the moment. There's a lot of it about - Joe Katzman has taken a break, and Bill Quick decided he'd had enough the other day, though he later changed his mind. Dr Frank took a break and has come back zinging, as has David Janes.
UPDATE: As if to put my sanguine attitude to the test, I find that Dodgeblogium and Letter from Gotham are shutting up shop. The former team are to go to other blogs, but the latter is not - Diane E says, "To those of my readers who have flirted with the idea of starting their own blog I’d recommend it heartily. Give it a go. Go until you reach the end. Then stop." Nonetheless I hope we'll hear her voice again. My e-mail basket is always open for a start. Thursday, November 14, 2002
Heated debate in Denmark over female circumscision. UPDATE: I think the link works now. Thanks to all those who let me know.
Answers! We got answers! To Eugene Volokh's quiz on colonies in the Western Hemisphere, wherein all the answers are absolutely true, except No. 11. In contrast Snopes lists the horse's ass/rail gauge story as "false." Bah. However, when you read the Snopes account rather than just the status indicator it seems as if the author actually backs up the theory in some cases: "Horse-drawn vehicles, whether they were chariots or carts or carriages, all served similar functions, so practical considerations (e.g., the speed at which horses could travel, the amount of weight horses could pull, the number and arrangement of horses that could be controlled by a single driver) required that they be relatively similar in size as well.The Snopes author does not so much deny the theory as think it wrong in detail, prosaic and uninteresting. He adds at the end that not many people would be interested were it not for the mention of a horse's ass. Well, I don't know about that - I liked it, there are millions of railway enthusiasts in the world, and railway gauges also come up in military history (see the mention of the US Civil War in the Snopes account), not to mention in discussions of whether standards should evolve or be imposed. Snopes is a wonderful institution, but I wonder if researching for the site, and seeing the full range of human folly and credulity, runs the risk of making its veterans a little bit grouchy. Thanks to reader Robert Dammers for the link.
UPDATE: Brian Micklethwait liked it too, and he didn't even mention horse's whatsits. There is something appealing about the idea of tracing the effects of seemingly inconsequential decisions through history. James Burke wrote a whole book and TV series, Connections, doing just that.
What's wrong with welfare. Steven Chapman puts it very well. "Then the State comes along, and tells you that, when the going gets tough, you can rely on it to get by. This new state of affairs relieves you of the 'burden' of maintaining the high degree of goodwill and mutual self-interest which maintains a community/society, and furthermore, because the state is a system rather than a person, no expenditure of goodwill on your part is necessary to get what the State is offering."Scroll up for a killer piece of research about UN Resolution 242, too. Sheesh, I wish I could come out with that sort of detailed knowledge. Puzzleaholic. Fresh from his victory re Sherlock, Guillermo de Jevenois has another go. He writes: I am afraid I can't resist a puzzle. My chips for the Malaysian competitionHmmm. I'm not sure about this. It doesn't seem to fit the actual wording of the clue, as quoted in UK Transport. To be fair, I should have quoted the wording more exactly myself. But could be, could be, and the explanation of its vital connection with the railway system is so funny that it jolly well ought to win anyway:
You never know what the dice will bring. The EU may just have rolled for sanity and passed, on one small issue at least. Not possible, you say? Then take a look at this from Layman's Logic: "The Times Online has spotted an opportunity to potential get rid of some European legislation:I wouldn't actually bet on the abolition of the CAP by electronic vote any time soon. But we might as well give this a go. Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Congratulations to Guillermo de Jevenois who was first with the correct answer: The Naval Treaty, written in 1893. He found the answer in http://www.sherlock-holmes.com/ Tough luck, Peter, you were pipped at the post. No cuddly toys, I'm afraid. Tell you what, how about a real life pet mouse as a consolation prize? Oh, I forgot. You already have some. Oh, and while you're suffering, tell me which Sherlock Holmes story it was that mentioned the Bertillon classification system. A small prize will be awarded* for the first correct answer. *By someone else in another competition altogether. Trivial pursuits around the world. See if you can find a word fitting this pattern: [ - - r - e] in a way that has something to do with unpunctual trains. If you can you will be able to help win a crossword competition for a Malaysian reader of UK Transport. The story of Patrick Crozier's mysteriously rising hit counter charmed the socks off me. Future generations won't be able to understand this at all. Or rather, they will be bemused that anyone thought such everyday events worth mentioning. Progress spoils a lot of good stories. I used to tell a little anecdote about that time a group of us holidaying together in France became accidentally split into two sub-groups and each sub-group had to work out who the other sub group would be most likely to phone in Britain in order to get back in communication. If you are over 30 you can stop nodding your head and telling the computer about that time in Lanzarote, I understand that you understand. If you are under 30 the point is that mobile phones have not always existed.
So, had enough yet of wasting the finite processing power of your brains on idle puzzling that is no good to man nor beast? If you crave more, I can help. Eugene Volokh has hinted to me that my mini-team entry to his recent historical and geographical quiz was creditable but not all-conquering. So far as I know entries are still open. I'll make it easy for you - on second thoughts, no I won't. Suffer. Dem bones. Did you know what they did before fingerprints? James Rummel does. They measured bones. He finishes by wondering what all the police departments and detective agencies did with all the Bertillon records after fingerprinting rendered them obsolete. If someone does unearth them it would give us a fascinating statistical picture of the state of health of our ancestors. Those among them who came to the attention of the police, anyway. UPDATE for anyone who had trouble with that link. James Rummel writes: "Re the Case of the Shifting Handbasket...
Blogger was sending people who clicked on the link you put in your blog to a post I had made earlier that had nothing to do with Bertillon. I republished an archive or two and posted a blank page. All to confuse the bedeviled computer and convince it to sit up and fly straight. The link, which I just tested, is now sending people to the correct link."
(My bold type.) That's the way to deal with 'em. Let 'em know who's master.
More about Kibbutz Metzer. Diane E of Letter from Gotham has pointed out that the Guardian did eventually report that horrifying story of the murders of children and adults at Kibbutz Metzer. This account appeared at 6.40pm on their website on the day after the massacre. It stresses the mildly socialist idealism of Metzer's founders. This was the image of Israel I - and many Guardian readers - grew up with. And this, alas, is an all too typical image from that part of the world these days: ``I will have to say Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for two little kids. It's an entire family,'' the father said, fingering two pacifiers that belonged to Noam. The boy would fall asleep with one pacifier in his mouth and one in his hand. ``How can a man - if you can call him a man - shoot a boy with two pacifiers?'' Ohion said. The Iranian professor condemned to death for "blaspheming the prophet" (i.e. challenging the ruling clerics) has decided not to appeal. His quoted statement does not suggest a death wish, but refers to "letting the judiciary handle it." I presume this means that there is some advantage of tactics or principle to be gained by not appealing. Even the Islamic Republic News Agency concedes that there is widespread public anger at the death sentence. Blunkett's re-writing of history. In an article for the Telegraph yesterday, our dear Home Secretary said dismissively that the right to trial by jury dated back to 1855, not Magna Carta. Peter Lilley MP wrote back. UPDATE: It's like a horror movie. SEE a computer disintegrate before your very eyes! If the link doesn't work for you either, read this:
Talking of blirgdays, I have learned that I share mine with Brian Linse's next door neighbour on the Instapundit blogroll, Listen Missy. I have always liked the look of this blog, what little I could see of it behind the Internet Explorer Script Error sign that always, always, always pops up and completely freezes the computer every time I try visiting it. Say hi to Missy from me, someone. (I would myself, only her e-mail address is somewhere under the ice.) I shall now have to take the utmost care not to click on one of my own links. Honestly. You let these blogs out for one minute, and there they are, breeding all over the place. Shocking, I call it. You may recall that I mentioned the Dude's first birthday a couple of days ago. Now he has posted some birthday reflections. I assume "cute as a bug's ear" is an American or Tennessee-an term of endearment. Like the French "my little cabbage" these things often appear quaint in translation. Tuesday, November 12, 2002
One in forty. Jim Miller has a timely reminder of what France went through in the First World War. As a proportion of men of military age the ratio was even higher; it was rare to meet a person who had not lost a father, son, husband or brother. Let slip the blogs of war... I should really have had that as my headline for the previous post, but 'tis here I ride forth to battle. I've been meaning to respond to this post by Junius for a couple of days. After describing why he sees himself as being on the left despite some common grounds with non-lefties, he says: Natalie's reaction to the facts Dalrymple adduces is helpfully summarised by her thus: This has some justice to it, though an admirer of Dalrymple I would eventually have found the article myself, I am pretty sure. As I said in an e-mail to Chris Bertram, I was put in a bad mood by a column that same day by Hugo Young where he launched an ad hominem attack on free-market conservatives, speaking of them as putting "compassion in the dustbin where it had always belonged". I actually meant to blog about him first, then hit on the Dalrymple article as a perfect example of the things his compassion would prefer not to see, then quite forgot about Hugo Y's sins while absorbed in Dalrymple's bleak vision, then had to do something else and finally came back to post about Young after Dalrymple, despite having thought of what I wanted to say about Young before seeing Dalrymple. Phew. Returning to the main argument, Chris writes:
In any case, the libertarian reaction to the Dalrymple-facts is actually significantly like the (smart) leftist one: namely, to accept the description but refuse the prescription. Dalrymple wouldn't accept the "drug war" item on Natalie's list and is usually inclined to cite cultural factors alongside and often ahead of the institutional ones she mentions. Like you I quote Dalrymple approvingly without going aong with his entire mindset. Actually I do usually agree with him on the cultural factors as well, but I'm inclined to think that they often follow on, with a time lag of a decade or so, from the incentives that a society or physical reality puts in place. I don't claim that the causation is inescapable. There is always scope for individual moral choice. But since no one objects to the observation that the Japanese are a generally polite people because Japan is crowded, no one need object to the observation that a seventeen year old single girl on a council house waiting list, who knows having a baby will get her a house, is not generally a person you expect to wax eloquent on the sacred crown of virginity. But Natalie's list encapsulates a pretty standard libertarian reaction. And it also raises several questions in my mind. Libertarians often push the line that state intervention makes worse the problems it purports to solve or creates worse problems as unintended consequences. That's often true, though to assert it as a universal law rather than looking at the facts of each case strikes me as dogmatic. I do not assert it as universal, and I don't think I've ever read an explicit declaration that the rule holds true in literally every case. Not that I've done a survey or anything, but I always assumed that when Libertarians say "the state always screws up" they were employing conversational exaggeration, such as when I say, "I can never remember how to spell exaggerate." The state usually screws up because it has no incentive to find out what people really want and what really works. Libertarians also oppose things like "subsidised housing projects" because they are subsidised and because this requires raising money in taxes.Tocqueville said that "Any man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave." At rock bottom, I agree, and hence would oppose them anyway, but fortunately - and not coincidentally - I can escape his harsh choice by observing that your "if" is an extremely rare one. We are always being told that we must swap freedom for safety, social mobility, compassion or military success, just as fifty years ago they told us we must swap freedom for prosperity. (Government advisers were still whiffling on about the superior efficiency of planned economies right up to the time of Wilson.) That turned out to be a load of old cobblers and so will this. In general, free countries are safer, less caste-bound, more compassionate and win more wars than non-free. A second, more directly Dalrymple-article-related question would be to ask why you are confident in asserting that the welfare-state is at the root of these problems when he also mentions, specifically, questions of urban design. Though the design of large housing projects is also a matter of state control, we can pull it apart, analytically, from the welfare issue. We can, but I prefer not to! They are closely linked. The housing blocks that everyone hates were nearly all put up by local or national government because a developer who tried to sell homes like that to people who could choose otherwise would go bust in no time. Oh, fashion might decree them for a while, and there is always room for differences of style, but in general the block of flats is the home of last resort. Left to themselves most people buy houses like kids draw, houses with front doors and gardens. They may be tiny, shoddy little houses with front doors and gardens because the people are poor but they won't have multiple walkways so the mugger has fifteen different escape routes, and you won't only be able to reach your living room by a lift or fifteen flights of stairs and your little castle and its plot will be yours and your family's and no-one else's Furthermore, I've heard tell that, like racehorses, modern blocks of flats all have one great-great grandaddy. Architects all over Europe admired the Karl Marx Hof (spot the hidden political clue in that name) when it went up in Vienna, and cheered when the Socialist Schutzbund defended it against Dolfuss's militia. Whether Otto Wagner himself consciously or unconsciously intended this of the original design, one of the things that its successors were actually built to do was to facilitate violent revolt.
Third, the welfare states that exist in the West vary fundamentally in design and rationale (one helpful set of labels distinguishes among Beveridgian, Bismarckian and Scandinavian models). Do you want really to say the same things about all of them? Broadly, yes. Of course one may be a good deal less bad than another. I do not know much about this subject. Fourth, since all these states have welfare-systems, they are all clearly responding to a set of problems: poverty, social insecurity, social exclusion and so on. What would you put in their place? One possible answer is, of course, "nothing". But that rather raises the issue of dependence in a different form since those unable to fend for themselves will have their fending done for them by others (such as family) - if they are not to perish - and so will be dependent on those very fenders. Often intra-familial relations are benign, but not always.... My answer echoes similar answers I give elsewhere. I can't claim (any more than can a socialist) that my way would be better in every case, just generally. In the absence of the state I wouldn't see the family as the only hope of the paralysed, mentally deficient, or those too old to work. There would be charities, churches, trade unions, neighbours, swanky gits who wanted to look good by endowing almshouses, companies who wanted good publicity. And there'd be more money to spare, and a greater sense of responsibility. Question: would you donate in such circumstances, assuming there were no state welfare? You would? So would I. But, you say, what if someone falls through the net? To which I say, they are falling through the net now. People die in blocks of flats and no one notices for weeks, because they all assume it's the State's business.
It's a bit like parents sending their grown up children out into the world. The parents know that they will suffer and err. Yet they accept that their sons and daughters have to stand on their own two feet; to keep on bankrolling them and buying them out of trouble is almost to ensure that they grow up unsatisfied, incapable and quite probably vicious.
I think universal basic income (or a negative income tax) would be better than the mess we have now, but not ideal, as taxes would still be raised by coercion. Likewise I cheer when I read about court decisions that smooth the path of vouchers, despite thinking that no state provision at all would be better still. Like many a quiz show, life and politics often present us with a choice between a small but safe prize now and the big wager for higher stakes. Which should you go for, your principled ideal or a makeshift that is very far from it, and which may delay or discredit it, but that would be some help to suffering people and does have a realistic chance of being enacted? That dilemma is scarcely unique to Libertarians. I can give no general answer.
There is, in addition, something really scary about vouchers that has sometimes tipped me right over into opposing them. It is this: vouchers would give the government even more power to decide what education is. At the moment private schools are financially independent of government. Yes, there is some regulation of private schools even now, but it is not too onerous. Under a vouchers regime an enormous chunk of a private school's income would depend on its continuing status as a recognized school. How easy, how terribly easy, it would be for the bureacrats to politely "suggest", and the schools to politely accept, a single government approved ethos. Ye gods, I'm talking myself back into opposing vouchers as I write.
I try to restrict the reference-dumping in debates like this, as most people don't really have time to embark on a course of reading at my say-so, but I'm surely allowed to mention one or two books. They would be Charles Murray's Why I am a Libertarian, which is so short you could read it in your lunch hour, and for the architecture, Dr Alice Coleman's Utopia on Trial. |