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, July 15, 2002
I shouldn't. I really shouldn't. Shouldn't what? Shouldn't quote the text of the Papal Bull Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio right next to Brendan O'Neill's trumpet blast against the monstrous regiment of bloggers. The juxtaposition is so unfair. So disproportionate. Such an ignoble fusion of the sacred and the profane. So trivial a use of a dreadful chapter of history. So - so - so irresistible... "Since the duty of the Apostolic Office has been divinely entrusted to Us, although We are unworthy of it, the general care of the flock of the Lord is upon Us, and thence, for the sake of the faithful custody and healthy direction of it, in the manner of a vigilant pastor, to carefully watch and attentively provide so that those who in this age, sins demanding, relying upon their own prudence, rise up against the discipline of the orthodox faith, more knowledgeably and perniciously than usual, and by perverting the meaning of the Sacred Scriptures with superstitions and false innovations, contrive to tear the unity of the Catholic Church and the seamless robe of the Lord asunder, must be thrown out of the sheepfold of Christ, lest they continue a magisterium of error, who despise to be disciples of the truth."It was that phrase error-prone that set me off. The voices made me do it. (Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio was promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1559 and provided for "The renewal of whatever judgments and punishments promulgated against heretics and schismatics in whatever manner whatsoever; and the imposition of other punishments on prelates and princes of whatever degree and dignity who are guilty of heretical or schismatic perversity.")
Bite the hand that funds you. Neil Dodds clarifies the status of the EU Observer: The EU Observer isn't an official EU magazine, but is the organ of the EU parliament's Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities. The group includes a couple of members of the UK Independence Party (small anti-Euro grouping) and several members of France's Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions party, along with a couple more I've never heard of. Members of the European Parliament often join loose groupings when they share common interests. Amid all the anti-Spanish schadenfreude about Morocco's invasion of the disputed island of Perejil I haven't seen anyone saying that it is probable that Morocco was specifically emboldened by Jack Straw. But it seems clear to me. What better time for them? Morocco sees the British government aching to surrender a British enclave on the tip of Spain. All parties, except those irritating Gibraltarians, seem to agree that this pimple on the smooth chin of a modern European state has to be sqeezed and quick. "Righty-ho," the Moroccans think, "just how het-up can the Spaniards get if we start a little tidying up of our own borders? Not quite ready to take Cueta yet, but let's just establish which way history's going." Saturday, July 13, 2002
The fissile grammarians. Every other time I've posted a query about the correct use of English a wave of unanimous agreement has washed over me. Not for this question, though. Jim Miller's e-mail was typically tolerant: I am not a grammarian, but here's what Fowler (in the second edition) says about problem of two stops at the end of a sentence. Logically, your sentence should end: David Farrer (of Freedom and Whisky, another product of that bloggers' spawning ground, the Libertarian Alliance) takes a slightly different line when he writes: I quote from a useful little book “Write Right” by Jan Venolia: "The 210 youths participating in the Youth Convention, which kicks off officially today on Wednesday, were given an ambitious task for the following days... " Ah, takes you back doesn't it. Those sturdy Young Pioneers, the glorious Komosol. Actually it came from the EU Observer which I am told is an official EU magazine, despite containing the odd bit of token scepticism. Gosh, nearly got distracted from telling you the HOT NEWS! Yes, "The participants in the Youth convention have to be between the ages of 18 and 25, and they come from 28 countries – the 15 EU member states and the 13 candidate countries." Way cool! But - oh no, there's some scandal: "...the Secretariat of the Convention confirmed that one of the participants is over the age of 25. Because of this, Henrik Södermann had to withdraw his candidacy from the post of President." How awful, but I trust you can rest easy. After all, "168 of the youths were chosen by the full and alternate members of the Convention representing national Parliaments or governments, 32 by the representatives of the European Parliament, 4 by Commission representatives and 6 by the Chairman and Vice-chairman." Remember, you heard it here first. Just because you're paranoid... Yep, just after getting in a pother about all that virus stuff, I then found that Blogger wouldn't let me post a warning. Best I could do was e-mail a few bloggers I knew and ask them to pass it on. Dawson did, and says the same has happened to him. Scary, or what? More Mulderesque ranting from me over at Samizdata. UPDATE: I am advised it is probably something called the "Klez worm" or just "Klez". Friday, July 12, 2002
The fearless blogger (it was John Braue of Rat's Nest) who alerted me to the potential virus mentioned below says he prefers to track down and eviscerate spammers rather than hide from them, so he leaves his e-mail address in clear. Me, I'm a coward. My e-mail address hasn't changed but I've now made some attempt to disguise it from hostile robots. Just conceivably there is an innocent explanation. All I can say is, if you want to tell me about it, don't even think of doing so via an attachment.
Virus/Spam with my name on it? WARNING: I have not sent anyone an e-mail consisting of two attachments without accompanying text and headed "d*rling". If you get such an e-mail, delete it unopened. The old, old story. The last line of this post was unbearably poignant. Who was it? What was the *******'s name? Elmo? Big Bird? Tell me! UPDATE: Link bust. Sigh. Go to http://blog.davidjanes.com/ There's more on Hitler compared to Stalin at Junius. Is it pointless? Among university educated people the subject has certainly been done to death, since it is the subject of so many late-night gabfests among undergraduates. I do not undervalue those discussions; there's something missing in the young person who does not seek to understand why and how the twentieth century was so bloody. But it does mean that it's difficult to say anything new. Note that one of Chris Bertram's links to me goes to the trivial comment of 10 July rather than the longer one of 11 July. The fault is in the code, not Chris Bertram. I can't make it work either. Pressing "copy shortcut" on the longer piece seems to take you to the previous day. Try it. John Costello writes:
The little corporals. I have belatedly found This Kevin Myers article about Sean Mac Stiofain, aka John Stephenson, sometime leader of the Provisional IRA. Myers' view of his subject is well worth listening to. But I post the article now because of the wider applicability of this paragraph: Gone! Expletive deleted! Yeah, well, if you want to pay for premium content, "Beware the Enthusiast" made some good points about the motivations of fanatics. I seemed to slip beneath the Irish Times's financial radar first time I found it, but now their defences are up. Random Jottings on Iran. Actually, far from random. John Weidner thinks this is an issue where concerted effort could help. The Ninja of the blog-forest takes is pleased to sharpen her shuriken against the tyrants. Manga version coming soon. They are chipping away at all the little things that defined Britain. Straw to cave in on Gibraltar. Of course, it's no little thing to the people of Gibraltar. Christopher Pastel writes (providing another example of the way that scholarly readers use this humble blog as a message board, something like two professors discussing superstring theory at the laundrette): One additional fact: the Supreme Court looked at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals case and decided not to review it. This usually means that they did not think that the constitutional issues were incorrectly decided. (Doesn't always mean this; could just mean that they didn't want to bother since there are no inconsistent Court of Appeals rulings on the issue. As soon as a different Court of Appeals rules contrary to the 5th Circuit, the Supremes are much more likely to hear an appeal.) Since it takes 4 Justices to decide to hear an appeal, we know that at least 6 justices did not see any reason to review the case.The Supremes, now... weren't they a singing group? Cuckoo. Funny, one of the new chicks in the links basket, The Rittenhouse Review seems somehow different from his brothers and sisters.... Come forth, ye grammarians. What is the correct punctuation for a question the last part of which consists of a quotation? Can he be the same man as the one who wrote "Why I don't care about the Palestinians."?What if the title enclosed within the quote marks had itself ended with a question mark? Come to think of it, should there be a comma after "wrote"? Don't blame Islam, writes John Derbyshire. Can he be the same man as the one who wrote Why I don't care about the Palestinians? I suppose he's saying he's got a more of a downer on the Arabs as a race (er, as a culture and a mindset associated with a race. Phew! Skin of my teeth, there. Or do I mean his teeth?) than on Islam per se. Thursday, July 11, 2002
Too big to blog? Blogger has finally condescended to show me Chris Bertram's reply on the Hitler/Stalin thing. And I feel a curious reluctance to get to grips with it. I know why, too. It's happened before. I think, this is a serious issue. I must make a response worthy of it. I think I'll just put another wash on while I think deep thoughts. And the deep thoughts dissipate while I fiddle away. Nor, when dealing with old crimes, however vast, am I fuelled by fury as I have been when blogging about crimes committed only days ago. Not everyone pussyfoots around like I do. Robert Sendler writes:
The Left makes incredibly esoteric distinctions based on the motives of the social planners doing the killing. If you are on the road to an egalitarian paradise it’s okay to kill a few million people (as long as it brings about the "correct" outcome. But if the motives of the centralized experts differ from Leftist dogma, well, it’s evil Fascism.I do think that motive matters to some extent. When a Nazi imagined his future ideal it included, centrally, the Jews gone and the Poles and Slavs enslaved. When a Communist imagined his, it could, in principle, have included happy, reformed Kulaks and bourgeousie as well as the necessary happy peasants. But how much weight should we give this really? About a tenth of a second later our Communist moved his mind on to a much more pleasing subject: how he was going to make the lives of those rich bastards hell for not being reformed quick enough. As he did, though he never came anywhere near making the peasants happy. What good did that tenth of a second do? Very possibly it did harm: as Solzhenitsyn said, 'Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors'.That is why Stalin got such an easy ride. And he did, despite the honourable exceptions Chris Bertram quotes. Plenty of people are still surprised to be told that Hitler killed fewer than Stalin did. For all that, there was a certain unique horror about the Nazis. No actions by the Jews could propitiate them. Was it Roger Scruton or Robert Conquest who, when asked why he thought the Nazis were worse than the communists, said "I feel so"? It was someone impeccably anti-communist, anyway, yet he felt so, and I can feel it too.
But, then again, in the depths of Cambodia in Year Zero or the great purges of the USSR, nothing you could do would save you either. Perhaps the agonized wondering whether some even greater effort at abasement might just save you (because you were in principle damned for sin rather than as a category) made the sufferings of their victims even worse.
Dark waters. I haven't kept to the point, and I haven't come to any conclusion. Best I can do for now. Definition note: By "forced based ideals" I only meant that even at its most benign, the communist and socialist vision included redistributing wealth by force. If you resisted you would go to prison. What a relief to scroll up a post or two and fail to choose between different flowers in liberty's garden. The relief is not all-encompassing, however. Fact is, I've got my troubles. On Sunday I have to go on some ghastly fun run that I foolishly signed up for in the distant days of spring. And I had the curtains at one end of the living room dry cleaned and I'd really like the other end set done too, only I'm running out of kidneys to sell. Until these difficulties are sorted out I am unable to announce my final judgement between Hayek and Nozick. Amnesty International condemns Palestinian attacks against civilians Good. But as Instapundit says, "Took 'em long enough." As someone who only knows what baseball is from the Charlie Brown cartoons of my youth, I don't know why this should make me so sad. But it did. Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Quick, before I go. Check out Oxblog (back soon I trust), Paul Wright's Tanstaafl ("Journalists are unelected, self-selected, insular, unrepresentative, arrogant, untrustworthy, distant, biased, and many smell strange" - not that I'm trying to stir up trouble between him and Tim Blair) and The Rittenhouse Review (snuggled up nicely in alphabetical proximity to Right Wing News), three very different draftees to the New Model Army. No, not here, in the column to your left. You can cope. I know Junius has a reply to my comments in the Hitler vs Stalin debatette, because he wrote and told me so, and I saw it yesterday while feeling too peely-waly to write anything. Alas, today I'm getting "Web Site Not Responding", but maybe you will have better luck. I had two or three e-mails on this subject which I hope to quote from later, but today's blogging time is up and I gotta go do boring things. Another well-educated reader keeps me up to the mark. Anton Sherwood of Plato's Cave writes (about the reference to the "Supreme Court saying the Second Amendment means what it says"): In a couple of cases in the past decade or so, the Supreme Court has mentioned the individual right to arms in passing; but unless I'm more out of touch than usual, you're thinking of a decision at the next level down. The Federal Court for the Northern District of Texas dismissed on simple Second Amendment grounds. The Federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overruled, saying that, although the Second Amendment does indeed declare an individual right, the narrow restriction in question is not excessive - thereby sidestepping the broader issue.This from a man who also dashes off "A few results from my explorations into Fullerene topologies." Cool. 1776 And All That. Jim Bennett writes: Philosophical/SF digression: Interesting phrase there, "the only real possible outcomes." As in many sentences (e.g. "five bricks piled on top of one another") the actual words are philosophically indefensible while conveying their meaning perfectly well. Some counterfactuals strike us as less counterfactual than others even though there are no degrees of didn't-happen-ness. And if I had not read Godel, Escher, Bach I would not be writing this now. End of digression. Of course, we forget that the actual outcome was a compromise as well. Congress had to forego their ambitions on Nova Scotia, Quebec, Florida (for a while) and the Caribbean, which were quite real. (See Kevin Phillips' The Cousins' Wars, which goes into this in some detail.) We think of Nova Scotia as not-American today, but that was not at all obvious in 1776. Southern Nova Scotia was heavily settled from New England and before 1783 was generally considered part of New England. America kept trying, too, and eventually it did bag Florida (after the British gave it back to Spain), and failed at the second attempt at Canada in 1812. Next time you are making a bunny suit for your kid, reflect on the fact that you are far to big to try on the tabard yet the furry hood with sticky-out ears fits just fine. The adult brain has not outgrown a set of bunny ears. This, too, is a metaphor for life. The sight of a woman wearing bunny ears while trying to sew said tabard and read a serious political pamphlet also gives vast amusment to Belgian guys on ferries, although the allegorical meaning of this fact has not yet been revealed. Don't get mean with fabric. How many times have you been put to endless trouble just because you wanted to save five centimetres of fabric? So what if it's jacquard-woven and £27 a metre - big deal, that's £1.35. Hey, I've even wasted time trying to save five centimetres of that white binding tape that's practically given away free. Sometimes you just gotta face the facts and get out that unpicking tool. This is a metaphor for life. A tiny bit more on profiling before I talk about sewing for three posts in a row. Here's another excerpt from that John Sullivan column mentioned below: "...He was an educated middle-class Egyptian citizen with family connections to people in the national establishment. If the FBI were still allowed to profile, it would have noticed that he fit the profile of the September 11 hijackers with almost embarrassing exactitude." Can your brain hold these two ideas? (1) Airport staff should look extra-hard at guys fitting this description. (2) It still isn't OK to assume that any educated middle-class Arab with family connections to people in the national establishment (a useful clause, that last) are terrorists. Mine can. That wasn't the point I started out to make. This was. Islamofascist ideas are passively held by some Arabs of all classes. But the Arabs who act upon them by becoming terrorists tend to be educated and Westernised. Why? The Westernised Arabs of a hundred years ago did no such thing, despite the fact that their countries were actually run by Westerners which you would think would annoy them a good deal more than the wicked things we do to them now like, er, buying their oil and stopping them overrunning Israel. Could it be that the difference lies in the sort of Western ideas the educated Arabs hear? Statistical analysis from David Janes: "...So, they're willing to tell you that if you don't smoke, you massively reduce your odds of dying by heart or by lung cancer. However, they neglect to mention that if they don't randomly fuck people in the "at risk" population, the odds of a 55 year-old woman dying of AIDS is reduced by about one-zillion times." Strongly put, but I get the point. The National Post writer quoted by Janes assumes that although he has a brain large enough to hold the following two ideas simultaneously - - no one else does. The same lack of trust makes the authorities afraid to state the obvious fact that an Egyptian anti-semite who shoots up the El Al counter on the Fourth of July ain't doing it in support of the aims of the Victorian Society. It's well put in the John O'Sullivan column linked to by Instapundit: But the American public is an unknown beast which the political and media elites long ago decided was racist, sexist and homophobic. Our betters fear us. If not guided and controlled, they believe, we will hit out in dangerous spasms of violence at minorities, immigrants and anyone who looks like "The Other." We cannot be trusted with inconvenient truths. In particular, we have to be prevented from launching discrimination and attacks on Muslims and Arabs in bigoted response to terrorist outrages. . . Yeah, loads better, thanks. That old healing adrenalin was helped along by a Damianation-powered rollercoaster of reactions to his last half-dozen posts. "...Here's the catch: they didn't send the invitation to Moellemann, but to Stefan Sharkansky, a pro-Israel Jewish blogger who runs a website tracking Moellemann's anti-Semitic utterances..."Go there and follow the links. Tuesday, July 09, 2002
No blogging today. I just had a (harmless) cyst removed under local anasthetic. They warned me I might feel lousy afterwards, and, by gum, I do. Monday, July 08, 2002
About that little misunderstanding back in 1776... Jim Bennett speculates on what would have happened if the colonists had lost. Typically, though, he recasts it as "what would have happened if Britain and America had compromised?" I also think that a politically unified Anglo-American bloc would have been too big for its boots. Still would be, as a matter of fact. America defines itself as the land of liberty. This has been of great benefit to the world. One of the benefits was Britain was motivated to say, "nyaah, we're the land of liberty - you own slaves, for God's sake." Eventually America sorted out that one, not without a little bother, and got back to the fun with "oh yeah? So what's the problem with universal suffrage then?" And a benevolent game of ping-pong has gone on ever since. France also gets to play on occasion... A point of precedence between a louse and a flea. Unusually for him, Junius confuses several issues when talking about the perennial question of whether Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR was worse.
I certainly did agree with the post above the Hitler/Stalin one. It describes the Observer as "beyond parody" and is a rich mine of fisking material. All in one issue you can read calls for state regulation of search engines, University entry and the end of the world. Oh sorry, force of habit. Correction: The Observer does not actually want the state to regulate the end of the world. It just announces, quoting the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace, that it will happen in 48 years because of George Bush. Meandering, but right is how I'd describe this Barbara Amiel opinion piece on Ken Livingstone and David Blunkett. This line is rather odd: Mr Livingstone's real crime is that he couldn't muster his fabled honesty to say that his domestic arguments are his own business and, if people don't like it, they can take the consequences."What consequences? What bad thing happens to nosy people who don't like Mr Livingstone talking about his domestic arguments? The consequences of folly, though, will be taken by those Londoners who thought it would be a laugh to give Tony Blair the ol' two fingers and vote for Ken. And, unfortunately, those who didn't. Both groups will end up paying £1,260 per annum as his new "congestion charge". How this squares with the desperate efforts to build cheap housing to attract policemen, nurses and other public service workers I don't know - as so often, one effort of statist interference is at war with another. Meanwhile here is a picture of a rat sleeping on its own head. If that is the way that http://www.zilberhere.com announces its new location, can you blame me for quoting? Saturday, July 06, 2002
John Weidner has finally flipped. The strain of having to process those Pythonesque remarks from Gray Davis was just too much. Cards to: Bide-A-Wee Nursing Home, Rue des fous étrangers, Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Friday, July 05, 2002
Off with his head! Alex Bensky writes: "Glad to see there are no hard feelings. None on this side--you started up with us, we won, happens to a lot of people, we're cool now. No disgrace to lose out to Americans, of course.It's worth remembering, when reading the description of the poverty, hopelessness and inertia that characterize the alternate America of Bring the Jubilee, that the current relative vigour of life in the West is unusual in history. The LA Examiner says (a) that the witness who said that the airport killer shouted "Artie took my job" was actually a prankster, and (b) quotes an AP story that the killer was actually an Egyptian called Hesham Mohamed Hadayet. The LA Examiner is Ken Layne and Matt Welch's new baby. Although the story is a grim one, I am glad to see that they are quick off the mark. The BBC website has now caught up.
In a sense there's nothing more to say about the killer. Just another one of the enemy. Good shooting from the El Al security guy, though. But I do hope they catch the "prankster" and reduce him to poverty. New kids. Ain't No Bad Dude welcomes some new left wing bloggers. Of the four he lists, I liked the Rittenhouse Review best, in particular the spiky responses to readers' letters. Sadly this blog won't be coming out until further notice due to a death in the author's family. Also mentioned were Max Speak, whose focus on individual senators and Congressmen meant that a non-American like me felt rather lost, Lean Left and Vaara. Welcome, boys. Nats says come on in and join us. Tony Harnden admiringly profiles US gun-control advocate Sarah Brady in the Telegraph. It's certainly OK by me if for the writer to record that she and her husband are brave and determined people who have overcome many trials. But an article about US gun control that ignores the passing of concealed-carry laws in many states, and the success of these laws, and the recent Supreme Court decision that the second amendment means what it says, and the rising trend of gun ownership coupled with falling violent crime; that talks as if the argument is all over - well, that's a disgrace to the profession of journalism. LATER. I was too harsh there. Harnden is no worse than many. It is a disgrace to the profession of (British) journalism that they are ignoring one of the biggest social stories in the last ten years, but the disgrace falls to the whole profession and not to Harnden in particular. Every other criminological trend that comes to us from America is reported. Zero-tolerance, they know about; tagging they know about. But to find out about the justified popularity of concealed-carry you have to be a gun nut to start with. Thursday, July 04, 2002
If you'd all had proper afternoon tea, none of this mess would have happened, as 1066 And All That so wisely observed. Just teasing. I know it was A Good Thing, really. So, to celebrate Independence Day, here's a little essay by Harry Harrison about his "A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!" , an alternative world where the American Revolution met its proper end. ;-). In recompense to his US readers, Harrison later wrote another very pro-American one called the Stars And Stripes Forever where Prince Albert died too soon to use his tact to defuse a confrontation with Lincoln, but I am far too patriotic to read the ones where Britain loses. In any case my husband says it ignores the existence of HMS Warrior which at that time would have wiped the sea floor with any other ship in the world. Actually, according to Evelyn Leeper's list there are six what-if books that have the Colonists losing. One I liked is The Two Georges. It's set in a present so felicitous as to have a diner on an airship remark, concerning these newfangled aeroplanes, that if travellers are in that much of a hurry they probably have not properly thought out the reasons for their journey. The plot concerns a not-very-credible racist/aristocratic conspiracy to kill the King while he visits his loyal American subjects, but the joy of the book lies in the cute touches. For instance Royal American Mounted Police flags fly at half mast outside police stations over the whole North American Union whenever one officer is killed. Sadly, that wouldn't be practicable in either the America or the Britain of our sorry excuse for a reality.
But perhaps things aren't so bad after all. Evelyn Leeper, in the link above, quotes Mark Keller as saying: The most popular in French was "What if Napoleon had not been defeated?" which Keller said usually resulted in a better world than we have, while most American alternate histories show things as being worse. When someone in the audience asked why, Mark Olson replied, "We look at this as the best of all possible worlds, but the French know it isn't, because most people speak English." Oops, a Blogger glitch meant that the above post appeared twice. The same duplication seems to have struck Junius's case against the Euro and Public Interest's musings on Hugo Young. My turn to tell that Briffa man about his bugs, hah! Update: bug now stomped on in the Public Interest. I'd just like to pick up on one point from Moira Breen's fisking of Anatole Kaletsky. She writes: "Reviled red-zoners never have creditable reasons for holding opinions contrary to a Clintonite or a Kaletsky. Support for Israel, for example, is never a reasoned support, it's "unstinting", entirely without reservation on any point whatever of Israeli policy, utterly mindless. "That woman's been reading my mind again. Back when I wrote this post on British gun control I had, I really had, originally finished it with something very like this: "Ah, she would say that. She's an American, and everyone knows what they're like." While it is conceded that even Americans might hold their opinions on tort reform, the Moldavian National Debt, or the care and feeding of lemurs as a result of argument or observation; it is well known that the only possible reason for supporting gun ownership is genetic. The Second Amendment is considered to be a part of American culture in the same sense of the word "culture" that describes ritual scarification and female circumcision.Then Blogger ate my final edit, and I was in a hurry and let it go. Wednesday, July 03, 2002
Are you worthy to read Patrick Crozier's other blog, This Blog Has No Title, Just Words And A Loon? It is very select. You can't even get there from UK Trasport Blog, although, mysteriously, the converse is not true. Voice of hope. I don't agree with every word written by Omar Karsou in this Telegraph opinion column. In particular, the writer persists in skirting round the morality of terror killing. Mr Karsou's heart is in the right place. He regrets the fact that Palestinians have become synonymous with suicide bombings and violence, and says "we have to put our house in order first," yet seems to mean by this no more than the acquisition of a liberal democratic government: an admirable proposal in itself, certainly, and a means of prizing the coming generation free from the clutches of the death cult - but denouncing and stopping terrorism comes waaaay before all that. Nor, sadly, do I belive believe there is anything like a silent majority of moderate and peace-loving Palestinians.
But, perhaps there might be one day. This is a start: "Our legitimate cause was eventually hijacked by the despotic rule of the Palestinian Authority and by those who want to speak through violence." Read. Hope. Think good thoughts about post World War II Germany. The Great Open Source Giveaway! As someone who barely knows what an operating system is, let alone whether Lunix or whatever you call it is a good one, I do not want to involve myself in technical discussions. Back, back you fiends! Go and join the Libertarian Alliance Forum which is full to the brim of people steeped in such lore, although the way they keep grading each others' papers as C++ is a little schoolmarmish. I am, however, delighted to participate in spreading this meme; an "open source" article about open source products. Here is the recursive bit that really caught my interest: "And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist and AlterNet have agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and conditions in the licence. We also ask that you inform us of any use you make of the article, by e-mailing copyleft@newscientist.com.Won't it be interesting to see how far it gets? How far would this model be replicable, once the novelty has worn off? The parallels with blogging versus newspapers are obvious. Tuesday, July 02, 2002
And now for the News. Dodgeblog reports: "Tony Blair has decided to send government "hit squads" to take over and "improve" under-performing blogs. It involves setting up a well-funded (at taxpayer expense) commission to determine why UK blogs are not performing well in the tables. This will involve MPs, ministers, and "experts", while not including any bloggers. They need to have hearings, "fact-finding" trips to successful blogging nations, and a full-time staff. Funds needed for this project will be in excess of £50 million over a 5 year period. Rumours that this commission is Peter Mandelson's way back into government have been denied by Alastair Campbell." "Change and decay all around I see..." Running down my links list, Ken Layne, Matt Welch, Glenn Reynolds, Bjørn Stærk and now Damian Penny have all gone off for longer or shorter periods. Jay Zilber, and Iain Dale have not posted for weeks; Myria and Muslimpundit have not posted for months. Aha! Now is my chance to take over the world. I just hope there's someone left to listen to my victory speech. Courage, mon brave. Paul Wright on the endurance demanded of a devoted dad. Tim Blair, look to your laurels, there's a another turbo-charged and very funny Ozblogger coming up behind. There is a serious point to be made about the way that treatment of Conservative peccadillos when they were in power was harsher than their treatment of Labour peccadillos now. There is. Really. Does anyone remember Stephen Milligan? He was a Conservative MP who accidentally killed himself while practising Autoerotic Asphyxia, back in February 1994. He certainly behaved oddly, and, as it turned out, with fatal foolishness. But, since his sexual behaviour concerned himself alone, the nearest he came to betraying a trust was in failing to present all sides of his character in his election leaflets. Few MPs would pass the test if the bar were set that high. So Stephen Milligan was not unfaithful to wife or partner, and was an ordinary MP - being Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then Arms Minister, Jonathan Aitken, scarcely counts as cabinet office. Yet we all knew about him and his plastic bag before his body was in the coffin. No privacy for him. Normal practice in these cases is to await the inquest before releasing details of the death; but some copper wanted a moment of fame and spread the word by issuing an absurdly coy note that spoke of "unusual circumstances" and acted like a magnet to the press.
Stephen Byers, however, was unfaithful, was a big league minister when he shagged this woman, and is in every respect a better candidate for press attentions and serious discussion of What This Says About The Level of Judgement Expected From Those Entrusted With High Authority. But in this case, only the tabloid readers get any fun. Either publicize them all or none of 'em.
Captain Heinrichs gives Byers the benefit of the doubt: "Byers left his socks on till last" Monday, July 01, 2002
Scandal! Peter Briffa learns from The News of the World that Stephen Byers had his wicked way with a Labour party activist in a Cardiff hotel room. The deed took place at a conference devoted to Local Government and Women, and Stephen took the last half of the title literally. It's a good thing Peter braves the papers that more sensitive bloggers avoid, because we certainly heard nothing about it from the quality press. Yet whenever a minister, or even an ex-minister, erred in the days of Major's government, even the qualities would be on the case in no time flat. Odd, that. Perhaps it is their firm and unbending views on the sacredness of the marriage vow that leads to this peculiar omission: Mr Byers and the lady with whom he shares his life are not married, and hence his crime was (as Mr Briffa, ever just, pointed out when I e-mailed him on the subject) infidelity, but not adultery. Mr Briffa's commentary on the News of the World's story is frank. But even he could not bear to allude to one particular detail. A thing so cheap, so tacky, so sordid that I scarcely dare sully these pages with an account of it.
Byers left his socks on till last. Lies, damned lies and statistics. The headline to this Sydney Morning Herald article on child abuse distorts the facts, so anxious is it to avoid even seeming to criticize the working class or the unemployed. You will often see the same distortion elsewhere - I first noticed it on a series of British posters purporting to have been written by a policewoman and condemning child abuse that ran sometime around 1994. The Sydney Morning Herald headline reads, "Children at risk: rich suburbs no protection, figures show." That is what they would like you to think: that middle/upper class and working class/unemployed parents are equally likely to abuse their children. However the actual state of affairs is stated in the very first line of the article: "A surge of child abuse reports in some of Sydney's wealthiest suburbs has dented the stereotype that child attacks and domestic violence are the sole province of the poor or disadvantaged."In other words, the incidence of child abuse among upper/middle class parents is not zero, and we are told that it is rising in the Sydney suburbs. The fact remains that, in Sydney as elsewhere, child abuse is rarer among richer than among poorer parents. As the article says, "...And while most of the more affluent areas started from a relatively low base compared with traditionally difficult or disadvantaged areas..."To fight child abuse you must understand it. Any serious discussion of child abuse must acknowledge its correlation with one parent families, with unemployment, and with poverty. You don't have to be against welfare, as I am, to make this connection: many honest socialists quite see the point and, indeed, centre their arguments upon it. This headline-writer prefers delicately to close his or her eyes. Building working scale models of steam engines and steamboats is a solitary, creative, practical, typically British pastime. So of course the EU want to destroy it. "I love work. I could sit and watch it for hours." Join in the hypnotic pleasure of watching the Scottish Parliament building go up via The Scotsman's webcam. As I type this the crane on the right is swinging round. Funny way your clouds move up there in Scotland, though. All jerky. I reckon the earth rotates in a specially wobbly way that far north. Something to do with the way they precess their equinoxes, you know. If you prefer to people-watch, the street scenes from Glasgow and Edinburgh also provide addictive fun. This is Buchanan Street. Dawson is 39 today! His first birthday greeting of the day almost certainly came from the protean wisdom of Protein Wisdom, who is the latest to acquire one of those swanky new domain things and does not appear to need sleep, judging from the time he sent the e-mail. "Blair will quit if Britain backs Euro." Did I read that right? Yes, but it was said by Roy Hattersley, so I don't have to believe it. While England Slept. Alan Judd expresses my befuddled, yet slowly waking outrage over the way the European arrest warrant has become law by stealth. Saturday, June 29, 2002
Advantage: blogosphere. I was shocked to hear the BBC claim that the Israelis were shocked by this photo of a baby dressed as a suicide bomber. The Israelis who were surprised must have been living somewhere else other than Israel for the last few months. Or perhaps it was just the BBC who were surprised, seeing that they are so out of touch as to have only just noticed this child re-enacting a lynching, and not yet to have noticed this three year old girl coached to say on TV "why we kill the Jews", this little girl dressed as a suicide bomber at a Palestinian rally in Berlin, this whole archive (look under "kids dressed as suicide bombers"), and this boy dressed as a suicide bomber and surrounded by masked adults (scroll down), and several more circling around the blogosphere. Those are just the ones I linked to. The link to the "Jerusalem Post" picture of a child dressed as a suicide bomber, headed "Child's Play" is unavailable. In fact, as such pictures go, this latest is one of the least offensive. The kid is too young to remember the obscene thing that was done to him. If someone buys the child off his Palestinian parents in time he might yet be saved. (Link and further discussion of the suicide-baby picture found in Damianation.)
Getting back to the original BBC story, anyone have a clue what Palestinian "legislator" Hanan Ashrawi was on about when she described the photo as a "painful image" and said, "To me it is a... strange heroism" ? Huh? Who was being heroic where? Even by the peverted lights of her society I didn't see any heroism going on. Sheesh, anyone would think those were real sticks of dynamite.... Friday, June 28, 2002
The tinnitus will go away after a minute. And you had plenty of time, so you can chain up your lawyers again. When your mouse went to the link it showed up http://dawsonspeek at the bottom, didn't it? that meant you had at least a tenth of a second to realise it was Dawson and, give me a break, just how likely was it that he was going to do the "quietly" bit? However this really is quietly persuasive on the same issue. As is this, albeit persuasive in a different direction.
It's all right. Click them. Don't you trust me? Paul Wright of TANSTAAFL described this post about a Palestinian state as "anger management." Great post, great blog, but it didn't assuage my anger at all. (No kidding on the "great blog" bit. Read this passionate denunciation of Tim Blair's bête noir Margo Kingston. Put up or shut up, Margo.)
And on the ironing - what's with giving away our secrets, male scuzzball? Scepticism from reader Angie Schultz about the John Sweeney report mentioned here. I didn't see the "Correspondent" program you mentioned on your blog, but I did see BBC World's brief little segment on the faked child funerals. You can't expect any better from them, can you? Here is a classic Joanne Jacobs post on the treatment of disabled students. "In other words, special education doesn't mean educating students to function in the world. It means letting them grow up without self-control, manners or, inevitably, academic skills and knowledge. These students are being treated like animals."Read the rest. You Are All Guilty. Racial harassment officer sends libellous letter to every single resident of a street. (Via Libertarian Alliance Forum.) Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Busy day tomorrow (Thursday), so no blogging for me. And light posting for the next few days. Yup, gonna post that light all over the place. I'm stuffing some ultra-violet into envelopes right now. "Those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush." At least one reader, Mitchell Porter, didn't believe in the Chinese classification system that was featured in Teresa Neilsen Hayden's Making Light and wrote, "I have never seen this anywhere, except as a Borges quote.I'm pretty sure he made it up." But my regular correspondent, A Regular Correspondent writes:
"Some Chinese classification info: And there you have the answer that makes the classifications practical, given the formal style of Chinese art. For (a) one assumes that Imperial creatures must be drawn in a special style that shows their Celestial nature. This, naturally, is Lesson One. Conventions cognate to those we use in cartoons would cover the trembling of category (i) and the "innumerable ones" of (j). Category (m) would make a fetching study, suitable as a Mother's Day project to take home.
Much as I want to believe in it too, the tedious demands of honesty compel me to state that Foucault got the quote from Borges. Perhaps acknowledging the Higher Necessity of charm in relation to truth, my correspondent moves on to the ideal China of Kai-Lung.
Fiddlesticks! Chesterton never checked his quotes, so why should I? Also, where is your gamesmanship? Don't you want the fact that you can extensively quote Edmund Burke from memory advertised?
Yes. Small coffee table, centre-left pile, under the copy of Bulbasaur's Big Day and the letter from the school about the Easter holidays. Can't think why you didn't notice it before.
Oh, phooey. All these brainy people also think Borges made it up. Gagrind, thy name is Google.
Great White Telephone time. Instapundit is rude about an absolutely puke-worthy fan article idolizing (I choose the word advisedly) Cornell West. Ferrari awaits a ruling on whether they are allowed to bore motor racing fans to death by sublimating all individual ambition in their team members. Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Talking of Junius, read his latest post which incorporates an Observer article by John Sweeney describing how far the Iraqi government will go in its propaganda. I didn't see Sunday's "Correspondent" programme to which the article refers. Does anyone who did have any comments? Faster than a speeding blog... Literally within minutes of my posting the mention of Brendan O'Neill below, I had two e-mails. The first hit the mat at 11.21 and came from Chris Bertram of Junius and said: I was thinking of posting something on Boneill's latest too, (though am currently busy trying to disentangle all the various ways Rousseau talks about freedom). I take it that when you say that you agree with him about 4.5/6, you don't agree that the rights of states to non interference (as embodied in the UN charter) should trump individual rights, since that would be an extraordinary thing for a libertarian to agree to.and the second came at 11.24 and was ex anima Brendan himself . It said, So...which one-and-a-half do you disagree with?I am put to shame. I plucked the figure of 4 1/2 out of the air as approximately expressing my agreement-level. The extra half sounded um, you know, sort of humorous. Bloody hell, that's lame. Next time anyone asks I will be ready with a complex sum involving 0.15 agreement with point one, 0.8 agreement with point two and so on, which will all most certainly add up to 4.5 exactly.
Talkboardfightin' man. Tal G in Jerusalem had a link to a Guardian chatroom where the subject up for discussion was the Middle East. That link will keep changing as more comments are added, so I'll preserve a notable exchange below. Look at the speed of response from "reality1948". Remember, if you want to rule the talkboards, you gotta keep reading those blogs. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It ain't chance. Joe Katzman links to and comments on a compelling article by Ralph Peters about what makes a country unsuccessful. I have meaning to capture the Winds of Change and set them blowing for the New Model Army for ages, and now I've finally got round to it. Also welcome Brendan O'Neill, writing from a very different (or, to use the technical term, wrong) perspective but nontheless managing to have broadly the same opinion as me (what we in the trade call being right) in 4½ out of his six shibboleths of received opinion.
Monday, June 24, 2002
The worst yet. You should read this. Link to it. Pass it on. "Avishai, 5, the family's youngest, began shrieking, after he awoke from the commotion. The terrorist soon opened fire on his tiny body. " God knows, I've said this before, but the defining feature of the Palestinian terrorists is that they seek out civilians, women, children and old people to kill, and the defining feature of Palestinian culture is that they like it that way. In this case the terrorist deliberately murdered three children and their mother. One by one.
A few days ago three Palestinian children, two of them from the same family, were killed by the Israeli army. They weren't harming anyone; they were going to market in Jenin, thinking that a curfew had been lifted when it had not. Someone panicked and opened fire. Those children's lives are not worth less than Avishai's and his two brothers. But they weren't murdered.
(Link found in Dawson, original report by Harvey Tannenbaum.) Bizarre as it may seem, given their "Free Country" campaign, the Telegraph website has hidden away this important story under a catch-all link title in tiny, tiny print. You see if you can find it. Now that you've failed miserably, I will show my irritating superiority by waving a careless hand and saying, "Here it is: 'Blunkett adopts EU arrest warrant.' " "More moppets, if you can stand it" was John Weidner's comment about this story covering the Palestinian 'Sesame Street'. I don't blame them for the adding the disclaimer, either. Jim Henson, a man who gave innocent pleasure to millions, would reach out from the grave to sue the **** out of them if they omitted it. And here, courtesy of Little Green Footballs, is a five year old re-enacting a lynching as part of a kindergarten class. Saturday, June 22, 2002
Who said this? "And it is necessary to reflect that the Palestinian suicide bombers don't even ask these questions. For the suicide bombers are executioners, the executioners of whole Israeli families. The immolation of their own lives does not excuse the fact that, in their last moments, they are able to see the Israeli child in the pram who will die with its mother, the Israeli family eating its pizzas on a hot Wednesday afternoon, the old folk celebrating a Jewish religious festival who will be his or her victims. The 17-year-old Palestinian girl who blew herself up to kill a 16-year-old Israeli girl remains an awesome symbol of youth destroying youth."Click here to find the surprising answer. Among their other crimes, the North Korean regime won't even tell their own people about South Korea's sterling performance in the World Cup. UPDATE: Given the outrageous incompetence of the referee in Korea's game against Spain, I'd correct that last phrase to "won't even tell their own people about South Korea's peso performance in the World Cup." The sad story of British gun control. The Financial Times carried this Joyce Lee Malcolm article. Not the FT's usual fare, but not nearly so surprising as if the ordinary Times, let alone the Guardian or Independent had carried it. I look to the day when we start seeing newspaper columns by British writers saying this same message. Unfair it may be, but many of her readers are going to spot the reference to Bentley University/MIT on the bottom line and say, "Ah, she would say that. She's an American, and everyone knows what they're like." (Link via Instapundit.) Friday, June 21, 2002
Back to the real world. The Palestinians: working towards statehood. JERUSALEM — Hours before her death in a suicide attack, 5-year-old Gal Eizenman was jumping around, a blond bundle of joy at a children's musical performance organized by her grandmother Noah Alon, 59. I've got a little running joke on this blog. I put up pictures of Palestinian kids dressed up by their loving parents in suicide belts and make a little play on the notion of a "Moppets and Martyrs" calendar. It's a way of dramatizing my belief that Palestinian society is sunk in barbarism. Well, just now I saw a picture of the little girl mentioned above who never got to play being blown up. They blew her up for real. Perhaps it would not be strictly accurate to call her a martyr. She didn't want to die, any more than did her grandmother. But in a way she was martyred. I can't cry now because it's a training day at the school so the kids are home. They are running about all over the house, my children and another little kid who's visiting, having a fine old time. I hope they don't come in here.
One day I'm going to make it out of TV and into the blogs.... Happy Fun Pundit on the sad tale of the Canadian cable TV channels who discovered "...their prime time audiences measured not in the hundreds of thousands, but in the hundreds. Or dozens. Or one guy named Old Joe who watches 'CanoeTV' religiously for the portaging tips." Blair still has not admitted the bad news. A scandalous cover-up. Typical spin and news management. When will Blair learn to come clean? Why aren't we tracking these things? Not to mention reducing them to their component atoms with cleansing nuclear fire. Asteroid came this close to hitting Earth. Good morning everyone! I now commence on a 48 page analysis of trade policy, Third Way economic macro-management and its correlation with underlying trends in-- My neighbour just drove in to the street like a bat out of hell. Whatever was she doing out of reach of a TV? Thursday, June 20, 2002
Watch patiently. If nothing happens after several seconds, twiddling the mouse may correct the problem. This... thing is my gift to you all. I got it, and the "thing" description, from MCJ who got it from Transterrestrial Musings. It needs Flash to work. Those that resemble flies from a distance. This comes from Teresa Neilsen Hayden's blog. It is unlikely to the point of impossibility that Teresa Neilsen Hayden resembles a fly from a distance, or, indeed from close up. (Indeed she doesn't. Just found her picture. Ignore me when I whiffle on like this.) But she does quote a passage from Borges that itself quotes an interesting Chinese classification system. I had come across this before - I seem to remember that Voltaire described it as "sublime", though Google gives me no reference. Anyway, quiz for you, with a provisional answer to be revealed in a few days. A friend of mine thought up an explanation of how this system came about, under which the classifications are eminently practical. Can you? Fat chance. Moira Breen observes the battle between two different PC sects: health fascists and fat activists. It sure pays to have a lifetime of double fries: you can sue MacDonalds for over-feeding you, then reinvest some of the proceeds by suing Southwestern Airlines for having too small seats. Click the comments, too. One lady, self-described as a "fat chick", takes charge of her own affairs well: she buys two seats. Patrick Neilsen Hayden of Electrolite makes some fair points and then finishes up most engagingly with "You know all this. I'm engaged in the process described on rec.arts.sf.fandom as "arguing in order to be polite." Except when it's good news. Then I'm not written out. Lots of people have commented on the Al Ahram/Independent article from Edward Said. OK, so I did make one of those atonal hums through the nose while reading it. No one would call it a clarion call to morality. But it's an advance on the time when Mr Said's idea of a good answer to "When are you [Palestinians] going to stop killing people?" was "That's an American question." Here is Junius's take on the article. There's more to come. InstaPundit led me to this excellent news in Zachary Barbera's blog. He links to a Sydney Morning Herald article saying that 50 notable Palestinians have taken out an advert condemning suicide bombings. Their quoted statement still seemed to dwell overmuch on the pragmatic inadvisability of the tactic, rather than its evil. But, again, it's a start. And they risk much more than Said does in speaking out. I'm written out for a while on the subject of suicide bombers. Iain Murray isn't. Also note spot-on comments from Kris Murray. And I see Iain, too, has a jeer about spoilsports Perugia. "For the Italian team, the whining noise doesn't stop when the plane touches down." That, from memory, was the unwontedly witty signing off line given to us by a BBC reporter on the news last night. Perugia sacked the Korean player whose goal pushed Italy out of the World Cup. La Bella Perugia! City of Raphael, Urbino, wine, truffles and babies in a sulk. Learn from us. The man behind "Rogernomics" in New Zealand says you can't fix the NHS with money. Compared to Gordon Brown, Roger Douglas is a paladin of economic good sense. Not everyone is a fan, though. Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Check out Eric Raymond's Armed and Dangerous. Not afraid to follow the thought through to any conclusion, is he? Go rant and roar someplace else! "OK," says David Janes, now at http://blog.davidjanes.com/ Update links time again. Honourable mention. Sorry, Basmallah. You may be cute, you may be three and a half, but you don't get a slot in the Moppets and Martyrs calendar because your Mummy hasn't said in so many words that she wants you dead. Yet. But getting coached to say that "we kill the Jews because they are apes and pigs" is a really good start, so keep trying, Basmallah! I ought to say that Medical Aid for Palestinians seem fairly respectable, and I am quite happy to see Palestinians get medical aid. (What with UNRWA looking after them, Saudi killathons and Yasser Arafat crisps they must be the most medically aided people in the world, but they don't seem to be getting any less sick. Sorry, meant to say, any healthier. Perhaps some of the money slips through the cracks.) What I object to is all the talk that implies that the Israelis shoot the curfew-busting husbands of women in labour for fun. They do it because murderous suicide bombers have given them ample cause to believe that they might have 0.02 seconds to get a bullet through the brain of the Palestinian driving very fast in their direction. What is it with ex-ambassadors to the Saudi Entity? Just re-read Matt Welch's demolition of the onetime US ambassador to the place, "Saudi lapdog" Wyche Fowler. Now update the scene to the floor so recently hit by Cherie's little dropped brick. The carpet so abused belonged to a charity called Medical Aid for Palestinians. And who is the guiding spirit of this body? ...What she got from Sir Andrew Green, a former British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and MAP's chairman, was a gruesome slide show of the inhumanity he claimed the Israelis had carried out in several Palestinian villages... The whole Times story can be found - drat!, can be found on page 12 of the Times. Buy a paper for once. Every time I link to the website my computer freezes. If you want to risk it the story is headed "Slide show developed into a political sideshow."
So what gives? It could be that irresistible charm exercised by the class of Saudis who mix with Western diplomats, I suppose, that turns their heads, but Daniel Pipes thinks it's the consultancy fees. (When I started writing this post, I knew I wanted the earlier Matt Welch post on Wyche Fowler and googled straight to it. I had not yet seen this more recent Welch / Charles Johnson posting on the subject.) So there you are. Sir Andrew Green was amassador to the Saudi-Controlled Place from 1996 - 2000, overlapping with his US colleague Wyche as it happens. He's also guest speaker for Swan Hellenic cruises. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just one of those human interest details.
Like a pound coin found down the back of the sofa, this editorial saying that the post office needs competition sparkles brightly among the fluff, broken bits of toy and old lollipop sticks surrounding it. It's a poor memorial to the 19 innocents killed in Israel that much of what the British papers can find to say about them is what a clanger Cherie has dropped. However it was interesting to see the BBC Television news assuming that it was a clanger when all she was doing was repeating their own line of a few days ago. Last night's ten o'clock news was the most anti-bomber I have heard yet. Something has changed, and if the change sticks it will will save a few lives down the line. It might cut down the flow of EU money to Arafat for a start. BBC News 24 is quite separate editorially, but it too is beginning to feel the see-saw tip. No equivocation about this story: Child heroes of bus bomb rescue. On the other hand, BBC News 24 keeps to its old habit of putting quote marks round "terror attacks" in the introduction to the story about Israel re-entering the West bank, as if the terror attacks might be something else; friendly pats on the back for instance. (That link will only be good for today, Wednesday.) Can I make myself believe that the quote marks merely show that Sharon is being quoted? No.
Why blog? I posted a fortuitously-found quote from Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Macaulay over at Samizdata. Tuesday, June 18, 2002
As promised, I'm coming back to Brendan O'Neill's question "Why is blogging a right-wing thing?" As I said to him in a private e-mail, after his calling all my readers "easily shocked ladies who lunch" I would dearly love to rend his gobberwarts.* But there's a problem. I agree with him. He says, "I have always suspected that the right-wing blogging phenomenon is a result of the right's increasing isolation from the mainstream - from mainstream politics, mainstream journalism and mainstream debates. Over the past 10 to 15 years, traditional right-wing views have become ever-more unpopular, as Third Way and consensus politics have take centre stage. The Reaganites and Thatcherites who were in the ascendant in the 1980s have found themselves out on a limb in an age where we're all supposed to be caring, sharing, non-argumentative, environmentally-aware centre-lefties. "
You can't say truer than that. It's like being a sheepdog on a sensitivity training course these days. Pah. But after this strong start the limitations of Mr O'Neill's mindset soon become clear:
"And rather than build an effective and coherent opposition to the new political orthodoxies, some on the right seem happy to retreat into the 'Blogosphere', from where they can throw insults at their enemies without having to challenge them fundamentally."
Huh? Just what sort of fundamental challenge do you think I was putting up before the blog? Cleaning the toilet in a right-wing way? Non-multicultural clearing up after breakfast? The point about blogging is that it costs next to nothing, anyone from housewives to executives can do it, and you don't need to go through an editor. Mr O'Neill's disdain for such low-intensity warfare comes through in his repeated use of the word "challenge": "...the very nature of the Blogosphere ... means it is best suited to poking fun or poking holes in the mainstream media, rather than actually challenging it at a serious level."
Er, yes. Such a relief. As I write this post now I know that it is well short of the serious and weighty response that I could be composing were I Gladstone reborn. How nice that I'm not, and it's just a blog post that I can get done before nipping round the shop for some more milk. For all his romantic attachment to the spirit of 1798, Sir Brendan the Serious has all the attitudes of a nobleman demanding that these oiks put down the longbows and fight properly (with the very important caveat that first they have to buy the horse and the armour i.e. get a journalism degree and a proper job.)
"...it's safe to say that The Guardian - now the most mainstream, pro-government paper in Britain - won't be quaking in its boots."
No, but it's turning red and shuffling about. Did I ever tell you the story of Matthew Engel's column that was laughed right out of the Guardian archives?
"...it means that many on the right will end up simply talking to themselves, rather than building a real opposition to the Blairs, Clintons and Schroeders of this world. That is one of the reasons I have a lot of time for Iain Murray. Iain and I disagree on many things, but his Conservative Revival weblog was a good stab are thinking about actual alternatives to New Labour and how such alternatives could be reconstituted as an opposition."
He means proper politics again. Join a party. Become activists or local councillors or journalists. Get a proper job. Not that I have the slightest objection to Iain Murray (May his sword arm be ever strong!) or anyone else doing these things. But it all boils down to play nicely! To which I say, "Shan't!"
"In short, I think blogging is a right-wing thing as a result of the right's increasing isolation - and as a result of right-wingers' fancy for short, sharp, pithy attacks on an enemy that, in fact, they don't feel like they can take on. "
Classic guerilla tactics. And a classic guerilla error is to be tempted before you are ready into full scale battles that you are certain to lose. Whoah, brakes on. Perhaps I'm in danger of letting my military metaphor push me into conclusions I don't really believe. Although I do think the right wing three quarters of the blogosphere does indeed do much of its work by pinpricks, it may have its greatest effects through conventional means. As Brian Micklethwait says, 'Blogging is going to impact seriously on all this, by identifying non-left and libertarian journalistic talent, giving it a start, training it, and then feeding it into the mainstream media.' So come on Brendan, gis a job.
*As Terry Pratchett fans will know, not as much fun as it sounds.
For reasons I explain over there, this post also appears in Libertarian Samizdata.
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