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 
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Monday, May 06, 2002
Pim Fortuyn has been shot dead. He was the Dutch gay sociology lecturer who had moved into anti-immigration politics. Although this BBC News 24 story describes him as "far right" I had put him in quite a different (much superior) class to Le Pen. God knows what this will mean. There is no news yet as to who shot him or why - but the "hit" sounds professional to me. (UPDATE: apparently not. An animal activist has been arrested, and it appears that he acted alone.) There will undoubtedly be a large sympathy vote for Fortuyn's party in the coming elections. On the other hand, when you lose a charismatic leader, you lose a lot. I never heard that his party had anyone else who came close in star-appeal. Thus I predict that after a while his party will fizzle out. However if his killer is a Muslim there will be a permanent anti-immigrant tilt to Dutch politics.
One thing I do know: things go better if you are allowed to speak freely. Decisions are saner. Passions are calmer. Peaceful people do not get their heads blown apart. Rest in peace, Mr Fortuyn. Ground your heels in any good faces recently? Of the suffering poor, I mean. We capitalist running dogs just love doing that. Last Sunday I finished up a post with the words, "Most of all we need the return of the crap job." In writing that I had naughtily hoped for some outraged e-mails which I could then demolish. Not a peep, though. Either my readers are the aforesaid unrepentant running dogs who just plain get a kick out of exploiting people, or else you, like me, have long realised that there is nothing humane about a welfare system that condemns people to a violent childhood, a parasitical and sordid adulthood and an old age wracked by fear, frequently of your own children and grandchildren.
It doesn't have to be that way. There's an age old solution: crap jobs, McJobs, menial labour. Whenever I say a word in praise of such work (and may I stress I have done my fair share) someone always says, ho, and how would you like to do fifty years as a toilet cleaner, or a road sweeper? My answer is that I'd like it better than welfare. A roadsweeper on his deathbed can look back on a decent, respectable life doing honest and useful work. Most people until only a few generations ago did exactly that. Who at the end of a life on welfare can look back with satisfaction? Furthermore a McJob provides for many the first step into much more exciting work. One reason our social mobility is so low nowadays, lower than in ages of open and explicit snobbery, is that there is no way for a young man or woman without formal qualifications to prove themselves. A fine result for a hundred years of socialist effort, I must say.
Of course, I am not the first to observe this. Here's a chunk from one of Brian Micklethwait's Libertarian Alliance Pamphlets, Economic Notes No. 40: Against Charity: Charity, Favours, Trade & the Welfare State. The first part is all about the pressures tending to make charities wasteful. Many good points, plus one or two I could argue with, but the wastefulness of charities is not what I'm talking about here. Keep reading. In the second half you get to this:
In Praise of Casual Labour If an opinion can't be shouted from the rooftops it will sure as hell leak out through the gutters. Jim Bennett reflects on why Britain has not adopted Le Penism (Perfectly respectable neologism! How dare you suggest otherwise! To the pure, all things are pure.) He argues that in Europe a current of opinion including Euroscepticism, concern about immigration and lack of assimilation, fears about crime by minorities and so on has been excluded from debate. As a result frustrated voters turn to the far right. I agree. The little aphorism up top was invented by me several years ago to express the same idea. Yet sometimes I worry that whatever protective amulet Britain is wearing might be losing its power. Some friends of mine were involved in Eurosceptic politics a few years ago. They met some great people, but also a worrying and incredibly persistent fringe of anti-semites and racists. Real nasties, not just unsophisticates who'd come a-cropper of the latest PC diktat. Trying to keep out the infiltrators was a task not unlike Signourey Weaver's task in Alien: no sooner had you zapped one than another one popped up someplace else. Sunday, May 05, 2002
I keep meaning to tidy up my left hand column, which will involve taking away some of the weird quotes (and replacing them with other weird quotes). So as a sort of farewell to Caliban upon Setebos, here's the whole poem. UPDATE: I just re-read the explanatory note at the end, provided by the Department of English at the University of Toronto. It's pretty good: Their [Victorian Secularists'] favourite theory was that all religion was a projection by man of his own qualities. This is the theory which the text chosen as motto condemns, and which Caliban's musings illustrate. Throughout he looks at his own characteristics, and then ascribes them to his god, Setebos: "So he." What is conspicuous in the poem is that there is no glimpse of what to Browning is true theology: the theology of a God of Love. This comes to man (as to David in Saul) by revelation. The highest conception Caliban can achieve by natural reason is of the Quiet--an indifferent, absentee, Epicurean God. His Setebos is merely a God of arbitrary and jealous power. Saturday, May 04, 2002
Links update: You did all know, didn't you that Inappropriate Response has a new URL at http://www.aracnet.com/~dcf/irnew/? And check out a new recruit to the New Model Army on your left, Iain Dale's Diary. Mr Dale is that interesting new phenomenon, a blogger who was a mildly famous person even before he started blogging. Oh lor, now I've probably offended him - who wants to be only mildly famous* - and half the rest of blogdom who are all going to huffily tell me how eminent they were in their various fields long before the Call of the Cybersphere entered their souls.
*Come to think of it, I do. I coulda sworn, I mean man, I coulda got right up in the witness box and sworn Dawson.com had said he wasn't back till next Tuesday... but I pressed the link out of sheer habit and it's been up and going for days, with a swanky three column layout. Warning: do not write this man hate-mail; he may bite. Serious cross-cultural sociological analysis. Just as I did, MCJ picked up on the MEMRI report on the efforts of Arab Christians to be "more Catholic than the Pope", or, in their own quaint idiom, "more anti-semitic than Hamas". Christopher Johnson homed in on one point I'd passed over, namely the view expressed by one Dr Babawi that "...the madman Sharon, who began to behave like a madman after he was hit in 1948 in a sensitive place of his body by a bullet, leaving him with one testicle only".I can't help wondering whether this rumour was copied from a very similar one current in Britain circa 1940. There was even a song about it. Whether the Arabs think Sharon's other one is in the Albert Hall has yet to be established. Putin knows his medieval history, says Yulia Latynina of the Moscow Times. "There's no point in comparing Russia to America. And there's no point in creating a tax code that repeats verbatim the advice of Western consultants -- a code in which Western tax rates are combined with the Russian presumption of the taxpayer's guilt. We need to recognize that Russia is essentially a medieval country with a weak social structure, and a low taxation threshold beyond which the state begins to collapse. In the Middle Ages even the desyatina, or 10 percent income tax, was considered an unreasonably high tax rate."It's a fine article, but Ms Latynina is doing her own country down. You don't have to be "medieval" to benefit from a low, stable, simple tax rate. We in the West should throw out our absurdly complex systems and learn plain common sense from Russia. An exchange of courtesies... From: gfarber@savvy.comMr Farber's artless pleasure in his own work is positively Asimovian. As I'm a complete softie for that sort of thing, here's the link you're after, Gary. But before you all click, try this quiz: who is Amygdala addressing in this excerpt, and why? "Oh, that's fine. Just set yourself on fire and drop yourself from a mile up, and everything will be even-steven. After all, how could Americans ever be as important as elephants? We're not nearly so cute. Our ears are tragically small. " Friday, May 03, 2002
Sleep tight my darlings.... and just before you close your little eyes, think on the fact that there's yet another MEMRI blood boiler just out. This time we have an Egyptian government newspaper saying, if only you had done it, Hitler. 'Night, 'night. It's not just the Arabs. I have had much to say about the way that many Palestinians and other Arabs glorify those who deliberately set out to kill civilians, particularly relishing soft targets such as the five year old girl killed in her bed recently. But as I denounced them something was tugging at my memory, and now I've fished it out. The Arabs are at the present time the world's premier admirers of those who "martyr" themselves while killing children and other civilians. However we must not neglect the Western, nominally-Christian world's own substantial contribution to this field of human endeavour. On October 23rd 1993 the IRA exploded a bomb in a fish shop in the Shankill Road. They used a bomb with a fuse set for eleven seconds: so you can safely assume that the bombers intended to give themselves time to get away but to kill the customers and staff in the shop without warning. And kill them it did, nine of them, including Michelle Baird aged seven and Leanne Murphy aged thirteen. As a matter of fact certain defects in the plan also resulted in the death of one of the bombers, Thomas Begley. I don't care for the explicit Protestant tribalism of this website. I don't think I'd care for it even if I were not a Catholic. But it makes some good points. Next year will be the tenth anniversary of this event. But don't hold your breath expecting Public Enquiries, TV commemorative specials or newspaper retrospectives. And don't hold your breath waiting for any hard questions to be asked of Gerry Adams as to why he chose to be a pall bearer at mass-murderer Thomas Begley's funeral. Stoppard re-examined. Reader Brian Brophey took a look at what I'd quoted from Stoppard's views on liberty and comments: I only read what you excerpted, and it is a bit turgid, and I think you're right about what he means. But I'm not sure that he means to elevate "uniqueness" to a virtue or purpose in itself; I think he's just contrasting it with the view in the first paragraph, ie, preferring to say "look at that one tree!", whereas the various collectivist/facist/islamofacist/orthomarxists can't see the tree for the forest and therefore don't mind warping or destroying any number of individual unique trees for the sake of some eventually-ideal Forest.I take the point. By the by, although I can guess what it means, "orthomarxist" is a term new to me. Did I read that right? Adrian Hamilton writing in the Independent says that, "Real peace is not possible in the Middle East until the Palestinians are allowed back their pride, or seize it back for themselves by acts of violence."Emphasis mine, and, yes, I did read it right. Hamilton follows in the steps of George Bernard Shaw worshipping Stalin or Jean Paul Sartre glorying in the indiscriminate murder of French settlers in Algeria. You can always trust a certain sort of "liberal" to descend into the violence-worshipping morality of the street gang. Oh, for the days when we still had park keepers. In two successive posts Iain Murray talks about the need for authority figures. Like him I think that submission to legitimate authority is quite compatible with liberty. (In some moods I go further than he does and make a case that it is compatible with anarchy, at least when the authority derives from contract, but that's one for another time.) Park keepers are properly constituted authority. So are train guards. So were beadles, probably, although I'm not sure exactly what they did when not keeping Oliver Twist from the horrors of welfare dependency. I would feel safer and freer if such archaic offices as park keeper, train guard and night watchman were once again to become commonplace. And floor-walkers in department stores, like Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served, remember him? To get to this happy state of affairs we need various cultural changes, it is true; a reining in of the sansculottes, a reassertion of the right to self defence, several prominent human rights lawyers to be made to walk the plank, and sundry other humane reforms. Most of all we need the return of the crap job. Le Pen comes to Burnley. Two British National Party local councillors have been elected in the aftermath of race riots. The numbers of votes for the two councillors are not that earth-shattering, 898 and 751, and it is reassuring to note that "Turnout in such areas was much higher than the national average, as it appeared that voters were mobilising to keep them out."- but, still, a bad omen. Thursday, May 02, 2002
And you thought the Christian Church in the West had an attitude problem.... MEMRI on Arab Christians. (Hit the link and then scroll up.) "Father Manuel Musalam compared the armed Palestinians in the Church of the Nativity to Jesus on the cross: "...We kneel before the Palestinian in the besieged Church [of the Nativity]. He hungers, but he is steadfast; he thirsts, but he is steadfast. "and "The Jew has a principle from which we suffer and which he tries to impose on people: the principle of the 'gentiles.' To him, the gentile is a slave. They [the Jews] give the [Palestinians] working in Israel only a piece of bread, and tell them: 'This piece of bread that you eat is taken from our children, and we give it to you so you will live not as free men on your land, but as a proletariat and slaves in Israel, to serve us…' The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are based on this principle, and anyone who reads the Protocols feels that we are in this period with the Jews..."Is there anyone still living with experience of the denazification programme? Someone has to clean these people up. Moppets & Martyrs update. I forget which month we were up to in the calendar. Never mind. Just read Lileks. This month's Moppet is at the end, but by the time you get there you'll have forgotten all about my little running joke. Did you enjoy and benefit from school trips as a child? I did. A pity that litigious freeloaders are steadily making it no longer worth a school's while to organize them. I'd like £3,000 for not going skiing, wouldn't you? Here a diabetic brat and his scheming father make his illness pay. The 16 year old is called Tom White. Employers, remember that name. And if you daren't keep a proper blacklist, steer clear of diabetics generally: they are trouble. No, silly, don't say you're doing it - you can always think of some reason for not hiring anyone. Then in ten years when the trend is established all the diabetics will whine that they are under-represented in the labour market. But don't feel bad about any possible injustice here. People brought up to milk their victimhood at the udders of the courts, the Rights Industry and the NHS will already have had tremendous privileges at your expense, and will whine whatever you do. It's a pity that they will have all the petulance and spitefulness common to gilded youth throughout the ages, rather than the qualities of self-reliance and providence they might have had, but that's how it goes these days. Tom Stoppard on the meaning of liberty. Sparkling as Stoppard's dialogue is - I must re-read or better yet re-see Every Good Boy Deserves Favour - I found this essay rather heavy going. He writes "The question asked by the Romantics was - what does it mean to be a human being? Does it mean, to be subordinated to some enormous campaign to discover our common purpose, in which our part is individually insignificant and in which success will be achieved long after we're dead, if ever?I think he's saying that the Romantics said the latter, and that Stoppard says it too. To which I would respond that uniqueness is not a virtue or a purpose in itself. Still, his heart's in the right place.
So Arafat's out of there. Palestinians - and journalists - celebrate Israeli withdrawal from Ramallah. What a strange episode it has been. I suspect the Israelis had had enough of the whole thing weeks ago, but were waiting for a week or so without bombings so that it would not look as if terrorism was working. A perfectly sensible motivation. Geoffrey Barto of Turkeyblog, or Gæøffrey Bårtô as he should be known for his expertise in the mysterious art of Hut Mul, writes regarding why scabs itch: "The brain perceives small pains as itches. Scabs pull on the healing wound, creating small pains which we feel as itches. Well, I prefer the traditional explanation, beloved of cackling old crones worldwide: It's the wickedness working out, I tell ye! The wickedness working out! Ahem. Returning to current affairs, Geoffrey Barto also points out that France is doing some things right: "Nonetheless, while Germany suffered violence, while Spain reels from car bomb attacks, the much mocked French - we'll repeat it again - marched 400,000 people across Paris without significant incident (and for that matter the Lepenistes marched 10,000 strong without creating problems either)." Wednesday, May 01, 2002
Hamas kindergartens. When you sign up your little mite in a Hamas kindergarten can it really be a surprise that the children are taught to hate? (Found in Oxblog.) There's nothing funny about this story concerning a "fruitarian" couple who got most of the way towards starving their baby to death. (Found at The Corner.) Fruitarians or fructarians, in case you hadn't yet met any, will not even kill plants, confining themselves to fruit and seeds that drop to the ground naturally and are thus, they deduce, lawfully assigned to human consumption by Nature or the Goddess or whatever. However it did bring to mind the entertaining adventures of a mate of mine. This chap was in Government employ. He wanted to get out of attending a work-related week-long course in a distant city. To this end he claimed to be a fruitarian, assuming that this would put insuperable obstacles in the way of his employers catering to his dietary needs while on the course - as they were obliged by official policy to do. His department got a fine revenge by actually locating for him a genuine fructarian boarding house miles out of town but just within technical range of the course after an arduous journey. Each morning my friend, a beer and steak sort of man, would face the sandled beardies while eating his scanty breakfast. Conversation languished. Did you know that a Google search for "Arab News" and "beyond parody" only yields two results, both blogs, and both on my links list? (Samizdata and Blogs of War.) Why so few? It's not like the writers aren't hard at work. Look at the glorious fluffuvium* they are producing! This is from an editorial claiming that the Zionists are behind newfound US hostility to The Kingdom Formerly Known as Saudi Arabia: "This is not the first time that the governments in Riyadh and Washington have not seen eye to eye on particular issues. They have had their differences before. They parted company concerning the recognition of the Taleban government in Kabul and concerning Iran. Riyadh has resumed full diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran while the United States has refused such recognition. Never, however, did these types of divergent Saudi-American views cause a media upheaval in the American press against Saudi Arabia. So, the question becomes, why now? It would be quite difficult to figure it out if it were not for Israel’s intervention in American policy-making and American internal affairs by distorting America’s enlightened national interests." Emphasis mine. "Why now?" they ask. What these men need is a mug. Fill it full of whisky and their drinking pleasure will be complete. *the substance found in the interiors of keyboards and sewing machines.
Why do scabs itch, and the places from which you have just lost a scab? What biological purpose does it serve? Excuse me, I have to go and vacuum out the bedclothes. Somewhere in there is the scab I had last night. That was your yeuch moment for today: brought to you by Natalie. When I was a child and the sun always shone, only I didn't know about that nasty bright stuff because I was inside with my nose in a book or the paper, I could always be persuaded to change my mind by trenchant newspaper editorial. My opinions were those of the last columnist I read. Since the veins in my brain hardened that is no longer the case. But a column in today's Telegraph has succeeded in changing my mind on at least one subject. Along with ten million other grumpy grown-ups I opined that Mr Blair was quite right and the parents of delinquents jolly well ought to have their benefits dropped. (Even though I parted company with the other 9,999,950 in thinking that the parents of cleanly, obedient and virtuous children also ought to have their benefits dropped.) I hadn't thought it through. Janet Daley had. Naturally I already knew that the proposal was no more than tinkering while leaving the central problem unfixed. As Ms Daley says, "That is because taking responsibility - particularly in the way that Mr Blair means it - is essentially a civic and economic act. That is, it requires civic self-determination and an ability to accept economic consequences, neither of which are possessed by people who are entirely supported by the state."However in thinking that a little tinker might even so have some good result I had forgotten this: "As you would expect with such an Orwellian concept, its implementation would involve teachers and neighbours informing on parents, and the state having to decide whether people were making enough of an effort to live up to their societal obligations. (And what kind of bureaucratic star chamber would be required to investigate the relationship between a parent and a child, and adjudicate on the precise degree of the former's responsibility for the latter's behaviour?) " All human life is here. Knowing that some of you come here to get stuff about Al-Qaeda, the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement and suchlike heavy intelligence rather than being agog to hear the adventures of my A & S keys, I shall keep this brief. My Keyboarde, A Historie: keys stuck so badly that could not use AOL password that contained forbidden letters - cheapskate that I am, got a second hand keyboard - wrong socket, had to take it back - husband prized apart old keyboard with fury of desperation - swabbed out indescribable Coca-Cola saturated fluffy effluvium - success! - dived into cybersphere - saw e-mail basket overflowing. Observed with pathetic middle-class guilt kind donations towards new keyboard, now rendered unecessary - found with certain relief that A-key still sluggish and wonky in socket, so keyboard surely destined to die again soon. Hoped I could decently keep the money. Saturday, April 27, 2002
I c8n't believe thiz. Two of the keyz on my keybo8rd h8ve ztuck. It'z the letter before b & the one before t. I c8n juzt 8bout lever them up with 8 h8irpin, zo I m8y be 8ble to link to If the im8ge doezn't work - zometimez it doez, zometimez it doezn't, I don't underztand imaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagez - fe8r not! You c8n go zee it @ (...oh-oh, h8irpin time, though I c8n do zome of it with cut & p8zte...) hiz webzite, & t8ke 8 look @ the weird ze8rch requeztz while you're there, ezpeci8lly if you ye8rn for 8 f8t g8y terrorizt of your very own to love & c8re for forever. Or zhould it be "f@ g8y terrorizt"? Th@ z8vez on the typing.
Friday, April 26, 2002
Instajustice, Palestinian Authority-style. The paragraph below is from a story in yesterday's Times concerning Zuhair al-Muhtesseb whose mutilated body was hanging head down from a pylon yesterday, and presumably still is today. He was killed as a collaborator by the Tanzim, the military wing of Fatah. I keep getting ejected from the Times registration process so I can't give you a link, but you can get the flavour of the whole from this final paragraph: "In Ramallah a month ago, 22 year-old Raed al-Liftawy was beaten and hanged after his sister reported him to the Tanzim because she had heard him speaking to an Israeli officer." News roundup. 18 students were killed in Germany in the latest in the worldwide series of school shootings - the globalisation of madness? British and Dutch plane-spotters found guilty of espionage by a Greek court, and soon they'll be able to come and get you over here courtesy of the European Arrest Warrant. All the papers are hinting like mad that the boys acquitted of murdering 10 year old Damiola Taylor did in fact do it. Finally, Natalie Solent still has too much to do and too little time to do it in. Expect limited posting for the next few days. Amygdala told me I would want to hear what Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had to say about anti-semitism in Europe. He was right. Thursday, April 25, 2002
Talking of the fallibility of my memory, I never did find the TV clip of toddlers dressed as suicide bombers to which I referred on April 10. Though I have ample evidence that the phenomenon occurs, I now think that my mind conflated two separate film clips or one film clip and one still photo. I meant to say this earlier, but forgot. Further proof of my mental decline. Les schadenfreudes d'antan... I went over to England Shamed Again to see if there were any "Britain most racist country in Europe" stories I could jeer at in the aftermath of Le Pen's surprisingly strong showing over in France. There weren't, though. I had been almost sure I remembered one or two, but perhaps I saw them somewhere else. I will nonetheless permit myself a little topical jeer at the blog's motto, "Learning from our European cousins." Le Pen's day of victory is something like finding out that one member of the household of one's goody-goody neighbours who are always being held up as examples of virtue is actually a thug long known to the police. (In fairness to my pleasant and peaceable real-life neighbours I must stress the similie is purely fictional.) There is a certain amount of pleasure at seeing the tables turned, but it is pretty soon outweighed by realizing that the thug is only a wall away.
It is Anzac Day. Elitist links to a fascinating story in the Sydney Morning Herald, about a man who may be the last survivor on Earth of the Gallipoli campaign. Canadian Shenanigans. One thing that really gets my goat is politicians who get their way by the substitution of tricks of procedure for honest debate. I forget exactly why the Northern Ireland Alliance party became "unionists for a day" - to fulfil some criteria or other, or win some vote - but they were cheats and liars whatever their reason. It's the same story worldwide. This post, appearing in Lawrence Garvin's What Fresh Hell, exposes a sly bit of work in the Canadian Parliament. This time a party called the Alliance, or at least one of its MPs, Dr Keith Martin, is the injured party. Dr Martin forward a private members' bill to decriminalize cannabis in some circumstances. It never had a hope of passing, but you might have thought that the decent thing would be to give it its run of debate in the time-honoured fashion. The Liberal party thought otherwise. Having shown their own disregard for Parliamentary convention they then affect outrage when the original sponsor got understandably irate and - oh horrors! - touched the Mace, the naughty little Oliver Cromwell that he is.
I found that link in Ranting and Roaring. David Janes shares my dislike of trick laws. I dislike them even when they further causes of which I approve. I'm pretty much pro-life, but you won't find me supporting anti-abortion measures being sneaked in under the cover of social benefits to pregnant women. Wednesday, April 24, 2002
And now for the weather: Light posting in the Solent for the next few days, due to high pressure readings on the work barometer. Medium to heavy posting elsewhere. Gales possible from this newly discovered Antipodean cyclone, even if he is a wicked Republican-in-the-Australian-sense. UPDATE: David Morgan informs me that he's a Republican for Australia and a Monarchist for Britain. In recognition of this principled stance I suggest that the secret agents of the Royalist International chop off his head in Australia but let him have it back should he visit these shores. Sports column from the Dude. He makes some suggestions for improving socker* "First, shrink the field down to about half. Second, put some flashing lights up on the goals so that when the one or two actual goals per game are scored, ya got yourself a little light show to spiff things up a bit! Third, don't let these guys take their clothes off when they celebrate. I mean, come on... Fourth, cheerleaders, yeah that's right, girls with big bresteses in tight sweaters. Fifth, make the coaches wear suits and cool hats like Tom Landry used to do. It will still be a boring game with all those 1-0 scores, but who knows, it just might become the most popular team sport in the world..."*Note for those surgically connected to their computers: socker, along with crickett, is a popular sprot. Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Dawson.com says he's going offline for a while due to deadline pressures. And some other sad stuff, so spare him a prayer tonight. But even though it's a sad post, he did get a smile out of me with a simply marvellous top line. Beats "edit your blog" any day. The sun shines. I blog not, neither do I sew. Never write things like that. As soon as you do, you spot something like this and just have to blog it. Peter Beaumont, writing in the Observer, see-saws madly between condemning Israel for brutality and loss of control in Jenin and flatly stating that no massacre took place. The see-sawing may not say much for his literary style but it does give a strong impression of sincerity.
That Tom Paulin pops up everywhere. In this Times story, concerning an Oxford student who has lost his racial discrimination case, our man is "excitable and may have had his own axe to grind", according to the judge. Ooh, look! I'm the lucky visitor! ... Hey, who are you calling a cheater?! - Dave Not you, Dave! Just as the click was about to come in, Real Life intervened and I had to go off and do stuff. So I did not reply immediately, alas. You win a... um... free endorsement of whatever T shirt, baseball cap or coffee mug you happen to own anyway. It is now an official nataliesolent.blogspot.com shirt, cap, mug or other promotional article. Tell all your friends! There, isn't that easier than all this micromanufacturing lark? Monday, April 22, 2002
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. When five more visitors have popped through the system I will have had 48,888 hits. Send me an e-mail if it's you. No cheating. At bloody last the sheeplike British public and the Judas-goats of the British Press seem to be waking up to the fact that gold-plated rail safety systems cost more lives than they save. It occurs to me that the times being what they are I should explain that sheep will ordinarily try to run away when being driven to slaughter, but will willingly follow a trained "Judas goat" into the slaughterhouse. But if it slags off Krugman, who cares who wrote it? I'm not sure whether this was written by John Weidner himself or one of the cabal of Deep Cover Economists he mentions. "Another problem is healthcare rationing. This is a biggie! What we refer to is the following: If the government is going to sponsor the delivery of expensive health services through Medicare at prices substantially below the providers’ costs then either the government must fund the difference, or providers will engage in some form of non-price rationing, e.g., refusing to offer services or turning patients away. The financial capacity of the government to do the former is in serious question. This is not just a matter of changing a few percentage points in marginal tax rates. As Krugman points out, the numbers here are bigger than the defense budget. The top tax rate could be raised to 100 percent and still be a drop in the bucket. Beat me to it. Everything I wanted to say about Jean-Marie Le Pen reaching the second round of the French Revolution, er, I mean French Election, has already been done for me in a series of posts over at Samizdata. Sunday, April 21, 2002
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars..." Well, I choose to believe that the conjunction of the planets is a sign that a thousand years of peace and harmony are about to descend. We had the whole family plus cheapo Argos telescope (ain't capitalism wonderful!) out on the front lawn at about half past eight. Don't worry, the neighbours are used to us. Magic. Saturday, April 20, 2002
The Telegraph does something to restore the tattered reputation of the British Press. First read this leader on tolerated anti-semitism, then click at the bottom for Mark Steyn's latest column, which asks how many more blind eyes can the UN turn? Ping-pong I've added a longer response to Emmanuel Goldstein's response to me. Scroll down three posts to see it. Sorry about the embedded quotes. I did my best to make it clear who was saying what, but I hope this rally doesn't go on much longer as I'm running out of fonts. Lifestyle necessity: a Tony Blair doll. Angie Schultz sent me the website of "Herobuilders" dolls, complete with handy "read our hate mail" feature. Angie's accompanying e-mail said, "Dammit, woman, I see you beat me to it *days* ago! Must be the time delay between here and Earth---er!---forget I said that!" I promised to forget instantly. Her secret is safe with me. And you. "The NHS is not the envy of the world", says this Indy leader of a few days ago. It also praises the Tories. I need another coffee. My pig ate my kitchen... According to AOL news, "A couple are facing a £5,000 bill after their 12-stone pot-bellied pig ate the kitchen in their two-bedroomed flat. Mike and June Bunter discovered the devastation after leaving Max in the kitchen of their Bournemouth flat while they were out. He had ripped cupboard doors off their hinges and charged at walls and skirting boards. Mike told The Sun: "It looked like a bomb had hit the kitchen. It was smashed to smithereens, with Max sat in the middle of it all. "Once he decided to get stuck in there was only going to be one winner." Now the couple will have to find the money to repair the kitchen themselves as their insurance does not cover damage caused by Max. Mike added: "We have forgiven Max. We couldn't get rid of him because he is a pet and part of the family. He's just very playful and likes attention. The other day he stuck a tusk through the hem of my jeans and dragged me around the room. I suppose he gets mischievous when he's bored." They are now playing Max classical music while they are out in a bid to calm him down. "It's our secret weapon and hopefully it will save him eating us out of house and home," said Mike.Italics added by me. Unsympathetic cackle added by me. Good thing I have better sense than to let such a destructive beast into my home. Excuse me while I clean up some cat vomit. Friday, April 19, 2002
Airstrip One gets back to me. I shall have to return the serve at some time when I am not harassed by trivial but urgent tasks and the internet is not oozing like treacle. As a sort of taster, I think he has mixed up my responses to two of his quotes. Also can he really think that Peter Briffa retroactively lamenting his own failure to suicide-bomb Paulin while watching a bad Spielberg movie is quite the same as someone saying "Jews should be shot" to an Arab newspaper in a time of rampant Arab terrorism against Jews? ADDED LATER: According to his latest post, no he doesn't. A slightly fuller response to Mr Goldstein's earlier post follows. EG: Firstly she claims that one comment about respecting Islam by killing Muslims is actually sarcastic. I doubt she would be so charitable to that piece of excrement Tom Paulin, who would probably claim the same about killing religious American Jews NS: Firstly, I haven't heard any claim from Paulin that he was being sarcastic. The second difference lies in the likely response of the audience. In this specific case it was readers of a blog vis a vis readers of an Arab newspaper.
EG: Then she says that another piece about killing the bomber's entire family was actually against genocide. Like the bit where he almost, although not quite, calls for the Israelis to clear the West Bank of Palestinians by cutting off their water. Of course this is a more in sorrow than anger piece as USS Clueless says:
EG: So it's not advocating acting like monsters, its saying they have no alternative. I suppose that's a new twist on things. Gerry Adams didn't advocate bombing innocent civilians, he just claimed that there was no alternative. Sorry, one person doesn't see the difference. NS: Now you must be kidding. (1) Read again the part where Den Beste says, "I better make something more clear". How much clearer can he make it? To predict likely consequences is not to approve them. Your own side's frequent predictions that, for instance, foreign adventures on the part of the US make terrorism against the US more likely do not in any way approve the terrorism. (NB My own response to that theory is "sometimes." I do not seek to comment on it now.) The Gerry Adams reference is just a tease. It has always been open to those who want a united Ireland to press for one by peaceful means. Nor do you hear a sizeable chunk of British or NI Protestant opinion clamouring for NI Catholics to be killed indiscriminately or driven into the sea.
EG: And then there was the piece de resistance, that the call for bombing Mecca "promotes moderation rather than the reverse". It's quite neat, if a bit implausible, so you could read it. You see it was just putting out a meme, or an idea to think about. Which would not explain Rich Lowry's follow up posting: Lots of sentiment for nuking Mecca. Moderates opt for something more along these lines: “Baghdad and Tehran would be the likeliest sites for a first strike. If we have clean enough bombs to assure a pinpoint damage area, Gaza City and Ramallah would also be on list. Damascus, Cairo, Algiers, Tripoli and Riyadh should be put on alert that any signs of support for the attacks in their cities will bring immediate annihilation.” Then there are those who think we really can't do too much differently than what were doing now (my original proposition). EG: Note the absence of any "hey that was just an idea to play with, not to take seriously" or "jeez, I was only joking". It was a serious thought. He may prefer that we keep bombing - although the term "original proposition" seems to show that he was wobbling, but that's perhaps deconstructing it too much.
NS: Actually the reference to moderates going for Baghdad or Teheran first (and more explicit statements later) does tell me that Lowry was half-joking. I'm not, though, when I say: it is good that the bulk of the Arab world should know that in the event of them using weapons of mass destruction against us it is quite likely that we will do the same against them. Having that made clear might well, by a familiar process of deterrence, save many lives, theirs and ours.
A kinder, gentler France? I would have thought that all the enforced free time would have meant more political activism, not less. But Philip Delves Broughton says that the either the times or the 35-hour week is tending to ensure that the French lose their passion for power and politics Thursday, April 18, 2002
Here I make my stand. You know, there is something admirable about the way Gordon Brown has dropped all pretence in his latest budget. The Guardian's Hugo Young gives a fair description of how the night's fog has lifted. Now the battle lines are clear. Brown and his chronicler Young believe pouring a river of money down into the NHS will help people. It won't. Here's why... You guessed it. I'm going to post that Anthony Browne Observer article about the harmful results of a command economy in health yet again. Cry all you like, I don't care. I'm going to keep on posting it until every British boy and girl can recite it like you yanks do the Pledge of Alleigance. They'll sing it at football matches: "'ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go, the failure of the politically controlled, state-funded NHS is sadly as inevitable as the failure of the politically controlled communist economies, 'ere we go..."
They'll joke about it in the playground: "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Sophie" "Sophie who?" "Sophie noble ideology behind the NHS should be ditched because it costs lives. We should ditch the ideology and ditch the NHS" And so we should. When we do, I'll shut up about it. Odd though it may seem, yesterday's Budget was a step in the right direction. Blog watch. Mind over what matters is back, although sounding sore in need of a party. Fortunately one is in the post. England's Sword has been slashing merrily for a couple of days. Dawson hasn't posted since last Friday,but must be home because the blue header strip along the top is subject to mysterious transformations, in tune with who knows what currents of Dawsonian thought. The current currents (don't bake them in your cake) sound romantic and exotic.... Inappropriate is still Inappearing. Wednesday, April 17, 2002
This is what they call having a bad day. The PM's official spokesman is feeling harassed. "Asked to explain the logic of publishing the Report on the morning of the second busiest day in the Parliamentary calendar, the PMOS said..."Peter Mandleson wants an Ethics Commissioner? Warblogger Watch has all the comedy of a stereotypical tourist in some foreign city making cutting remarks about "all these dreadful tourists". He slags off Asparagirl for using a pseudonym while using one himself. He slags off Reynolds et al for "mediocre" and "third-rate" writing while proclaiming that his many errors are just examples of his vigour and spontaneity. He affects outrage at Peter Briffa's obviously humorous lament that he didn't have a stick of dynamite handy when he met Paulin (to alert even the thickest readers that he is joking Briffa goes on to console himself that at least the world wasn't deprived of his weblog); yet you can be sure he'll shriek "only joking" if anyone ever sues him for accusing named individuals of crack addiction or sexual peversion. And I assume he is indeed joking. These hysterical ravings, however, I think he takes seriously: "...that Reynold's and his sick ilk believe in, where Arabs are savages who don't deserve basic human rights and can be rounded up like cattle, exterminated like vermin."The contrast between that baseless accusation and the sudden gooey outbursts where he reaches out the hand of love to the benighted ones is really quite something. Goldstein strikes back with some quotes designed to prove warblogger genocide-lust. Here's the link. I'm unconvinced. As one of the comments says, Swift did not really wish to eat Irish babies. The quote from the brothers Judd can far more naturally be read as an sarcastic attack on the adulation by the Muslim press of anyone, however evil, who is killed by the Israelis, and on the many fervent expressions of desire to be martyred. "You wanna be martyrs? Happy to oblige" is a completely obvious and frequently made black joke. Moving on to the second quote, click the link and you'll find that Goldstein did not get the words direct from USS Clueless but via Warblogger Watch, who himself got them from someone else. Had Goldstein or Blair troubled to get his facts from the source the pair of them would have read something a few lines later that made put a very different complexion on matters: "Can we outside the region prevent this? We in the US can do so by quietly letting the Israeli government know that it would be a step too far. But we can do that, because Israel still has something to lose by antagonizing us." It goes on to make quite clear that Den Beste's point was "don't push Israel into a corner where they have nothing more to lose." At the bottom of the entry there is what ought to be superfluous further clarification, presumably added as a result of being quoted in Warblogger Watch.
The third quote, from NRO's Corner, is self-evidently a call to think about what act merits what retaliation now rather than in the heat of outrage. Hence it promotes moderation rather than the reverse. Yes, it mentions the possibility of flattening Mecca - as a retaliation if their side were to use weapons of mass destruction. It is an example of the widespread Warblogger meme of applying the lessons of the Cold War to the Arab Street. Deterrence, Mutual Assured Destruction, Balance of Terror, all that. You may approve or disapprove of this scheme but its adherents don't want Armageddon in Saudi or Iraq any more than their fathers wanted to nuke Moscow.
BTW "genocide" means the destruction or attempted destruction of an entire race.
I'm not sure which way the joke is meant to run in the second comment. I could get to like this man. Rod Liddle on why Paulin is a twat, why the Jews weren't kidding about anti-semitism, and why we should not censor the British National Party. I've just seen that Peter Briffa has both this op-ed and the Osama dolly thing. He also alerts the world to the dangers of surgery. He is quite wrong, though, to say, "this could happen to anyone." It couldn't happen to me.
PejmanPundit talks about what he calls suspicious similarities between accounts in several British papers of the claimed Jenin massacre. I have to say that I don't find the links particularly suspicious. It is obvious that the reporters travelled in a pool. (Who can blame them?) It shows the habitual low standards of the British press that not one of them says so. Each of them would rather we think he alone was Out There In Search Of The Truth, just one heroic pressman and his trusty tape recorder on a lone mission to bring the story home. All of them lack the habitual honesty shown by most bloggers, who say how they found the story (I caught this link to Pejman at Instapundit.) But after all that is said, the accounts given are not disproved by being multiply reported. Or proved either. Tuesday, April 16, 2002
I gotta go. I am slowly working through the mail pile, and expect to reach Base Camp C soon. From there I shall launch my assault on the summit. Do you knit too, or just sew?The brothers Judd asked me that question (the answer is aaaaagh!) and sent me this link to this USA Weekend article by Michele Hatty on an unlikely form of "therapy with a takeaway" in the wake of September 11. "In the days following Sept. 11, young people retreated to an unlikely place in their search for solace: a yarn store. The shop in question, Los Angeles' La Knitterie Parisienne, quickly became a haven for gathering, comforting and -- not incidentally -- knitting.Read the rest. Apparently there is a resurgence of knitting among young US urban professionals, some of them male. Good luck to them. So why the aaaaaagh? Because knitting is topologically impossible. (Like sewing machines. When does the needle come up through the fabric, eh?) All knitters have the secret of extra-dimensional finger movements, which could easily be developed into an FTL drive. They are keeping it from the rest of us for fear that the rest of the galaxy wouldn't be able to cope were humans unleashed upon the defenceless stars. The Sorceror's Apprentice. I rather think Emmanuel Goldstein is away. Someone really ought to tell him that in his absence his naughty little apprentice has been playing with the spell book and posting inflammatory comments. "Do they [the warbloggers] not realise that the biggest obstacle in the way of their dream of a genocide on the Euphrates.... "The italics are mine. Twenty years ago I was sympathetic to the peace movement. Such was my concern that I sent off for a handy pack of cards containing useful facts and debating points. A great many of these dealt with reasons to suppose that nuclear war might well happen and the horrors that would be unleashed if it did. Although I did not get many converts with my little cards no one accused me of wishing to have a nuclear war merely because I warned that it was not impossible and would be a fearful thing. Perhaps standards of charity in debate have declined, or perhaps my different experience these days is merely a function of having different opponents. Goldstein (if it is he) says "the warbloggers" - not "some" but "the" - actually want to commit genocide. What evidence does he have for this dreadful charge? I read a lot of warblogs and I have not seen even one statement remotely resembling such a wicked desire.
UPDATE. Re-reading my own post, I see I have left myself open to misinterpretation. Warbloggers do, by definition, want the war on terror to be waged. They do not merely warn against it, they advocate it as better and safer than alternative strategies. My analogy with my time in CND does not hold when considering the "basic war". In making that analogy, I referred to a common additional belief held by many but not all warbloggers. (I myself sometimes do and sometimes do not convince myself that it is a probable outcome.) Namely that if terrorism is seen to succeed then there will be more of it, and in return more and more indiscriminate reprisals, until you might end up with mutually catastrophic, intentionally genocidal war between Islam and the West/Israel. Were this to happen the West would "win", for lack of a better word, but that would be small comfort indeed. The point I was making was that I haven't come across any warblogger who wants this nightmare to come true. They want to fight before the monster grows too big. Monday, April 15, 2002
Moppets & Martyrs (international section). Our latest cutie, found at Don McArthur's blog, shows a child dressed up as a suicide bomber at a march in Berlin. UPDATE: Instapundit comments on the same picture. As does Damianation! As does Lileks. (It's looking as if all I need do is direct you to the links on the left hand column.) (I wasn't kidding. Now it's LGF) Earlier Moppets can be found here, here and here. Notice this? "....His message jarred with a poem by Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to London published on the same day. It saluted an 18-year-old woman bomber who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29. The praise for Ayat Akhras and criticism of the White House by Ghazi al-Gosaibi, the veteran Ambassador who was supported by Britain as a candidate to head Unesco, was published on the front page of Al-Hayat, a newspaper based in London. “Tell Ayat, the bride of loftiness . . . she embraced death with a smile while the leaders are running away from death,” Dr al-Ghosaibi wrote. “Doors of heaven are opened for her.” (From a Times story. Emphasis mine.)
Truly, it seems as if the world has written "Not To Be Resucitated" at the foot of Zimbabwe's hospital bed. But sometimes medicine might do more harm than good. This story details how food aid is being used as a weapon against the children of MDC supporters. Would more aid get them fed or just prolong the regime that denies them food? I do not know. It brings down a curse to kill a king. At least that's how it seems for poor Nepal since the heir to the throne massacred his own family last June. Now we learn that 164 people have been killed during a Maoist attack on a police post. Predictably there are those who think the killers just need some love and attention: Siddhi Lal Singh, a Communist Party central committee member, said: "After so many killings, and with the economy shattered completely, the government should start talking immediately."We in Britain know that you should never reward terrorism with immediate surrender. We wait thirty years and then surrender. Bang goes my reputation as a schoolmarm. Should it be "ran" or "run" in that last post? UPDATE: opinion - er - ran 100% with "run". Even a sports duh-brain like me sat up and took notice of Paula Radcliffe's performance in the London Marathon. Not only was her race the second fastest marathon of all time for a woman but it was also her first competitive marathon, and it was ran without clocks or pacemakers. She had no means of telling how she was doing. A fantasy come true. Sunday, April 14, 2002
"...Palestine saves death for its civilians, little boys and young women. This is why Arafat lives and Ayat Akhras is dead." Read the rest at Turkey Blog. MKultra = MK Ultra Matt Johnson writes: "...the level of conspiracy mindedness of Ray Vaughn, he's probably talking about the MK-Ultra program. CIA Mind control. Most of what you read about it seems to be crap, like this. (Of course supermodels must be involved!)Not to mention telepathic instructions to submarines. Way cool stuff. Steve Bodio is a five-star natural history writer. (He didn't ask for the plug; but he is very complimentary to me at the bottom of the page. I trust his profession will ensure that he will take it as a compliment if I employ another of my famously robust metaphors from natural history and describe this as "mutual grooming behaviour") This is what he has to say about museums: The recent post about the "modernization" of museums touched something close to my heart. I grew up in the Boston area (I now live in New Mexico) and have fond memories of the vast collection of stuffed birds and mammals in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. They have now been replaced by dioramas, and I doubt anyone could gain an appreciation for the diversity of creatures on the planet by looking at dioramas and playing video games. I remember spending hours there, dreaming about the places these animals came from and hoping I would get there one day.Today, it wasn't such a bad bet. Along with Samizdata (to which I contributed a slogan a couple of months ago) you're among my top five blogs. A quickie reflection from me along the same lines: all these animal activists who think zoos - all zoos, however spacious the enclosures, however important the breeding programme - demeaning ought to think ahead twenty years. A generation might grow up who have never looked in wonder at a tiger. If all a child has ever seen is film of rare animals then maybe it will seem as unreal and unimportant as a film that the tiger should depart this earth. We have "Children in Need"; they have this. Fox News have an article about the Saudi telethon The Saudis have assured the US that it is just about helping Palestinians generally and not about rewarding death cultists. Obviously they aren't quite getting the message across. "A 6-year-old boy, with a plastic gun slung over his shoulder and fake explosives strapped around his waist, walked into a donation center and made a symbolic donation of plastic explosives, according to Al Watan daily."Naturally the shocked authorities hastily told the wee one to stop this disgraceful behaviour, and reported his parents to Social Services. Yeah, right. Jenin. There's a BBC radio debaters' programme called "The Moral Maze". Trying to steer the right course when writing about the claims and counter-claims of a situation like that in Jenin, where the Palestinians claim the IDF has massacred hundreds, is very like negotiating your way through a moral maze. Someone trying to stick to the right path is Damian Penny. His writing on the Independent's reporting of the situation at Jenin should be an example to the Independent. Closing the doors of history. Robbyn Kenyon writes: When I was growing up there was a museum in New Hampshire called the Morse Museum. It was small, private and, for a child, absolutely wondrous. Originating in the 1920s or 30s, it contained such incredible marvels as actual, real lions and cheetah cubs (stuffed, of course) and the skins of many other animals (mostly elk and deer of various types) decorated the walls. There were displays of incredibly complicated, carved ivory (the real stuff) and chests and tables of teak, mahogany and brass. There were a couple of cases of human remains, one male and one female which, far from being frightening or ghoulish were remarkable and fascinating. And there were lots of glass cases containing the money of various countries, clothing of various types (ie: the shoes that the women of China who had their feet bound wore), pictures and various other cultural artifacts like bowls, knives and spears.How indeed. In the last year of primary school I noticed that when black or brown-skinned characters (or even black or brown-haired white characters) appeared in some of the older books I read, they never seemed to be the heroes. I was saddened because for some reason I had decided that they were the "team" I supported. I won't say my outrage had much of a moral basis; it was only on about the same level as my irritation that cats, which I also liked, never seemed to get a good press either. Nevertheless I had discovered for myself something about the world that helped me later decide that racism happens and is wrong. In contrast, the modern system seems to be to present to little children a sanitized present where every second white mummy is a car mechanic and every second black mummy a judge. Then, suddenly, the children are held to have reached the age to Know The Truth about "a society irredeemably soaked in unconscious and conscious racism." The past, of course, is shown as nothing but one long act of predation by whites against blacks. Kids all over the world like to dress up. LakeFXDan sent me a link to this picture archive. It took me a while to work out how to see the pictures. Press the number after the description and then scroll down to the frame below. Now take a look at "Kids as suicide bombers" picture No. 3. It has to be said that the two earlier pictures in that category show teenagers rather than actual "kids". (So that's all right then.)
A note: not all the links work - for instance in the category "Armed kids with their fathers" only number 4 works. Saturday, April 13, 2002
Flattery will get you everywhere! The bodaciously excellent Patio Pundit writes to express doubt in the nice direction as to my figure for hits: "I find that hard to believe - I got a whole bunch of hits when you linked to me (100 or so), so if it is true (I believe you, but maybe your counter is in error?), you have devoted readers. I have gotten less referrals from bloggers who claim higher numbers than you do."I had said that my maximum ever daily hit total was 878. Could it be simply that I usually post in the morning GMT whereas most of my readers visit in the afternoon PST? Hence it is usually not worthwhile to hit "refresh"; I may have devoted readers (it's nice to think I do) but even their devotion does not extend to repeated visits while I sleep.
Continuing the theme, this post by Diana Hsieh of the deliciously-named "Noodle Food" starts off by talking about the likely effect of reparations and then describes how Ms Hsieh feels that she was intellectually saved by moving from public (in the US sense, i.e. state-provided) school to private school. In fairness to my own state school, I must say that I experienced there no more than the pessure to conform inevitable when you assemble an age-cohort. Mind you, it was all girls so perhaps the reflexes of the baboon-troupe didn't fully cut in. The Black World Today, black university students yesterday and My Falklands Memoirs. Regarding my earlier post about a dismal column in The Black World Today, John Costello writes:
I can speak from personal experience of the high motivation and willingness to make friends from all races shown by African and Asian nationals who have come to the West to study. At the age of 17 I spent a year as a scholarship student at a private college, of which I have happy memories but which could unkindly be called a "crammer". The students fell into two main groups. The first group consisted of whites who were repeating their A-level year. They weren't for the most part over-keen on learning for its own sake but pressure from their parents who were footing the bill kept the kids' noses to the grindstone. My tuition still came free as God's good air, as it had at school, and so it wasn't until years later that it penetrated the mildly socialist mousse in my head that the hard work and the school fees had some connection with each other. (There were also a few rich white deadheads who had Video Recorders. Money could no longer motivate them.)
The second main group were foreign nationals; Indians, Singapore Chinese, Africans and others. Nearly all my friends came from this group. One Indian girl shocked me by saying that, although she had been told in India that all the British were racist, she had experienced no hostility at all. I stopped short of telling her to go get some in order to please me, although I did say (an opinion I still hold) that if she were mixing with poor whites who felt threatened by her presence it would be a different story.
So 99% of the time the little multi-racial group with whom I chatted away my lunch hours got along fine. There was only one thing that made me feel utterly apart from them: the Falklands war. It wasn't that they were hostile, it was just that they were indifferent. No business of theirs, chum. Some mild "anti-colonial" feeling against Britain was tempered by equally mild opposition to the dictatorship in Argentina. And there me and my sister were, scanning the shortwave dial at half past midnight and up again for more of the same again at six a.m. Please God, don't let any of our ships have been hit overnight. Friday, April 12, 2002
"Oh, you're still alive then." Twenty years ago Iain Dale learned that a young man of his age and bearing his name had just been killed in the Falklands. Scroll down to March 29 to read his memories. Moppets & Martyrs update. Robert Martin writes: Mr. Alexanian’s strained effort to explain away the photographs is fascinating. It so perfectly illustrates one of the most frustrating aspects of any issue arising in the middle east, the mind-numbing capacity of Palestinians, Arabs, and their supporters to evade the obvious and refuse to deal with facts. Thus the denial that the photographs mean what they clearly do. I assume Mr Martin was referring to this. Layman's logic justifies its name when Mr Sheriff sets out the reasons for war in Afghanistan, and the reasons why Real IRA fundraising should be stomped upon. And our "Moppets & Martyrs Calendar" picture for January shows little Ahmed. I don't actually know the kid's name. I post this picture because I had an e-mail asking me to cite a reference for what I said here about Palestinian toddlers. This still picture is not the TV clip I remembered, just an example of the same sort of thing.
Does anyone else remember seeing a TV news clip showing older youths crawling under ropes meant to show a minefield while what looked like very little kids dressed in white looked on? The kids dressed in white were wearing things that looked like the floatation belts used by learner swimmers, but painted black.
BTW The letter surrounding the picture makes some fair points about the need for accuracy, and for preserving the safety of reporters and photographers. But I don't really think the question of whether one of the masked figures was or was not the child's father is that important. (Nor does the fact that at least one of the masked figures was either a teenage boy or girl rather than an adult necessarily mean that they were not "for real". Many suicide bombers have been teenagers.) Does anyone think that the child shown was there without the consent of his family and his society? Which do you think is the better description of what was being done to him: "training to be a suicide bomber" or "just dressing up"?
UPDATE: February's picture can be found in this Christian Friends of Israel website. Use control-F and search for "Palestinian child". The small picture on the extreme right appeared originally in the Jerusalem Post under the heading "Child's Play", and shows a Palestinian child dressed as a terrorist at a Hamas rally to celebrate that organisation's 12th anniversary.
In November 2000 Justus Reid Weiner wrote this essay on the use of children in the Al-asqua intifada. It is particularly useful in that it is fully footnoted. Here are some excerpts: Television broadcasts frequently include what in many Western countries would be deemed "hate speech." On July 2, 1998, in derogation of its commitments to combat incitement under the interim peace agreements (discussed below), a Palestinian television children's show called "The Children's Club," similar in its basic structure to "Sesame Street," aired an episode in which young boys with raised arms chanted "We are ready with our guns; revolution until victory; revolution until victory."35 On the same show, an 8-year-old boy announced to the audience (a group of children), "I come here to say that we will throw them to the quiet sea. Occupiers, your day is near, then we will settle our account. We will settle our claims with stones and bullets."36 Also on the Children's Club program, on February 8, 1998, a girl who could not have been more than ten years old declared that she wanted to "turn into a suicide warrior" in Jerusalem.37(That last is the sort of activity I think I remember seeing on film.) ANOTHER ONE: This article by Ibrahim Hazboun describes children dressing as suicide bombers. Children, not toddlers; but it does show that the practice occurs.
My opinion of Jonathan Freedland has gone up. The man flies his flag. This column begins, "These are days for republicans to walk humbly...", talks plainly about his own misjudgement of the country's mood and then goes on to say why he thinks a connection with the past could be maintained even were the monarchy to go. It's called The story of us, not them. For my part I am pretty sure that the sort of Britain to ditch the monarchy would also be the sort of Britain where the teachers and education bureacrats would ensure that only the story of an extremely select subgroup of "us" reached the history books. The New Class are already well on the way to wiping out certain memories. Look what they did to the Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Thursday, April 11, 2002
"The Bush Administration Plays The Daniel Pearl Race Card." is the title of a commentary by Ray Vaughn in The Black World Today. An admirer of whatreallyhappened.com, Common Dreams C-Span and a Harry Browne voter (presumably because of the drugs angle; I can't imagine Mr Browne's views on racial preferences would meet with Mr Vaughn's approval), Mr Vaughn gives his inimitable views on... everything that pops into his head, really. He tells us all about "the Reichstaff fire" and "How The Leader's is joined by his parrot Tony Blair" [the spare apostrophe represents the parrot, I suppose] and how "We also know about MKultra and COINTELPRO" [I don't], interspersed with randomly generated comments like "with two you get egg rolls" and "It also provides a cover for carrying out racist agendum." I know nothing about the status of The Black World Today. It has an authoritative name, claims to be big and boasts a swanky website, but that proves nothing these days. I sincerely hope that the claim made elsewhere in TBWT's website, that "The professionalism and experience of our world-class team of editors, writers, columnists and correspondents is unmatched in black publishing," is either a lie or true in an unintentional direction.
Echoes from Algeria. I found this excerpt in John and Antonio's Inside Europe: Iberian Notes: From Modern Times by Paul Johnson, pages 497-98: John and Antonio also give the Republican side in and before the Spanish Civil War a less easy ride than is customary. You mean - we have to pay for this? UK Transport Blog's Patrick Crozier reprints and expands upon an Independent article about the Government belatedly waking up to the idea of "you nationalize it - you pay for it, chum" and safety. Crozier is going to be famous. He has the knack of coining ideas linked to physical facts. For instance, somewhere he talks about how the reason that rail travel cannot be split up admistratively in the way that air travel can is that the train is continually touching the rail. This constant friction in the literal sense produces all sorts of friction in the Clausewitzian sense. Constant non-catastrophic repairs, constant knock on effects, you need a unified system. (Which does not and should not mean a State system, so all you hopeful Guardian readers who rushed up to embrace me for having seen the light can go home again.) Whereas air travel is nodular both literally and figuratively. You can break off a bit and work on it separately because you can wield the scissors in some of that empty space.
Another Crozier idea is the "rhythm of an enterprise." Once punctuality is lost it is very difficult to regain it. Which links in somehow with the daily tasks that employees perform. I'm not expressing this very well, which is why I am impressed with them as can. |
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