Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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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? |