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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Friday, July 26, 2002
Gibraltar plans to hold a referendum whether or not the British government approve. We all know what the result will be, but is this wise? Eventually one can imagine Hain himself moving to the strategy of attrition by referendum, as practised on the Danes and Irish. "Wrong answer. Try again." "Wrong answer. Try again." "Wrong answer. Try again." "See, we knew you wanted to be good Europeans really." Anyway, here's a link to 'Panorama', a Gibraltarian online paper, and one to "Infrequently Asked Questions about Gibraltar."
Do you ever ask yourself why Jack Straw is so keen to give Gibraltar to the Spanish? I don't suppose his constituents bombard him with letters demanding that he Surrender Now. There doesn't seem much of a clamour for it even from Spain. Perhaps he thinks about it while shaving. I see him pause, razor in hand. "Now, what do I have to do today? Clip nose hair, yes, but what else? Got it! Must ask Tony to tell me again why we have to give Gibraltar to the Spanish. I know it was something to do with being modern. I like modern things. I didn't like Europe when it was all old stuff but I like it now it's modern. Good thing I changed my mind just in time for Tony to make me Foreign Secretary, ha! ha! Old things are so snobby. That treaty from the seventeen-hundreds Dunks keeps going on about, sounds like a sneeze, it makes me sick the way they pretend that things like that could possibly matter. Still, really ought to read up on it all, I suppose. Gosh, it was a close one when I couldn't remember whether Gibraltar was in the EU or not. Good thing that Palacio chick was able to tell me. She gets up my nose a bit though. Talking of which, bzzzzzzzz, clip, gotcha! Hey ho, it's just one of those things a really hot Foreign Secretary like me has to do." Thursday, July 25, 2002
Guess who else has an interest in The War To Save the Empire? History News Network reports that controversial anti-gun historian Michael Bellesiles has been teaching in the Emory at Oxford program this summer. His course: History 341, The American Revolution from the British Perspective. None of the Samizdata guys would believe me when I said I felt sorry for Bellesiles. Every morning he must wake up and see the axe a little lower. Being sorry for him does not mean I would spare him. What he did was much worse than the plagiarism scandals that were in the news at about the same time, even taking a harsher view than I do of those particular plagiarists' guilt. A plagiarist steals the words and work of another. That's not nice, but it is a crime that can exist as a black mark in an otherwise worthwhile lifetime of achievement. But a historian who lies about history betrays his whole reason for professional existence. Worse, Bellesiles intended his distortions to affect the making of present day policy. Eventually a policy built on lies costs lives. But I really do feel sorry for him. Even he must sometimes wish the axe would fall.
(Link via Instapundit. It's notable that Professor Reynolds, who presumably is well aware of the law of libel, does not seem worried about discussing the case in the plainest terms.)
Just booking my place in the bunker. Er, about this asteroid. This previously undetected asteroid. This previously undetected asteroid that's heading straight for Earth. It's not being... you know... piloted... is it? I expect a place on the Threat Team for this. Poetry in the modern world. An outraged e-mail has burned its way along the ether from Will Wilkinson. Yes, this time I really do mean Wilkinson. It says, I should inform you that I go in for poetry plenty. I read poetry. And yes, yes poems make me cry. And I'm a PRETTY DAMN GOOD POET, thank you very much. True, I do not write clunking light verse about the events of the day, Do I detect a note of criticism? Two of a trade never agree. ...but we're all limited in our own way.
It's a pain to reach Iain MacWhirter's hard-hitting article on drugs policy in the Glasgow Herald. First you have to click "Opinion" among the blue options to the right. Then click the same word inside the frame. Then choose Mr MacWhirter's head from among the decapitated columnists offered. INSERT UPDATE: No need to trouble yourselves. I can now offer no less than two separate direct links to the article: this one from Iain J Coleman of Why Do They Call Me Mr Happy and this one, from Patrick Crozier of This Blog Has No Title Just Words and a Loon. How Messrs Happy and Loon know these black arts I prefer not to enquire.
Persevere. It's worth it. Did you know that the prison authorities sometimes have to retox addicts who have succeeded in quitting drugs in prison, simply because their de-habituated bodies would be overwhelmed when they take the first dose the day after getting out, as they certainly will? I didn't know, and I am shocked.
I hate the way that the law on drugs is being changed. The authorities seem determined to simply declare the Lambeth experiment a success, irrespective of the complex actual results. The whole idea of treating the law as an experimental variable*, to be enforced or not at the whim of the government, is a debasement of our liberties, not to mention a standing invitation for citizens to take the same attitude. The "magnet" effect of a no-law zone on druggies for miles around is undoubtedly causing harm to local people.
Nonetheless Blunkett is right, albeit for the wrong reasons. The war on drugs was immoral to start with and disastrous in practice. It demanded a debasement of our laws and liberties that makes the Lambeth effect look puny. And of course the law on drugs will collapse in a chaotic and harmful manner. "Wars on drugs" are like drugs themselves: one of their major evils is that they can't be quit without a vast traumatic spasm, and they leave behind them harmful effects that go on long after you quit.
*There are circumstances in which I would approve of treating the law as an experimental variable. If at some future time there were to arise many different, competing micro-societies, each of which allowed free migration, it would then be both permissible and fascinating to discover by experiment which laws work and which don't. Such laws would be contracts, freely entered into and honoured equally by all sides. That is very different from David Blunkett saying that he can suspend the universal status of British law whenever he fancies but we can't. The War to Save the Empire. Take cover! It's Hessians again. John Costello writes:
The summer holidays have begun, and blogging may become more sporadic. We have been reclaiming the trackless wastes of the garden for civilization, muttering "Pioneers! O pioneers!" all the while, except when I cut myself on a thorn and changed the words to "****! O ****!" Jim Bennett points out that he described the trend towards no-big-deal Republican interracial marriage in an article for American Outlook last year. It doesn't seem to be on the web, alas, and I'm not sure whether I ought to quote from it without permission. The subject is of particular interest to me since I am of mixed race myself. Now you may have seen pictures of me that show me as white, or more accurately and unfortunately, pink with freckles. But that's just the body I got by mistake. Inside I'm really a mixed race African / Chinese, and svelte as a Bond girl. Somewhere out there there's a milky coffee-coloured lady who has always yearned to blush easily and have a little round tummy. (I'm being funny, but I'm not entirely joking. Since childhood I've been running a sort of alternative self-image of a different race. When black kids run a white self-image program it is usually regarded as sad, but maybe some of it is just exploratory, like mine.) 'Til the doctors' minds are changing. / Once again. The changeable views of health fascists get the treatment from Will Wilkinson. CORRECTION: Warren! Will Warren. As several people have observed, including Will Warren himself, Will Wilkinson does not seem to go in for poetry much. Pity.Think what treasures are lost to literature because of the lack of a decent rhyme for the word "epistemology." Wednesday, July 24, 2002
The Gallipoli Order of Battle. Reader Akaky Akakyevich has kindly directed me to The Gallipoli Association website, where the complete Allied order of battle can be found. Nail those terror-knitters! Decades ago the Telegraph's Way of the World column used to have a running joke about devoted female activists making balaclavas for SWAPO. It - was - a - joke, airport twits. I can't seem to link to this letter that a lady called Pam Weale wrote to the Telegraph, so here it is in full: Sir - As a registered Frequent Flyer, I am pleased with the security system at Heathrow. However, as a knitter of nearly 50 years' unrelenting production, I was disappointed to find knitting needles on the list of dangerous items no longer permitted on commercial aircraft. Not exactly, Pam. It's another case of public and irrational discrimination against a completely harmless group so as to better pretend that rational discrimination against a sometimes-dangerous group is not taking place. Ha'aretz reports on the rising death toll of innocents in Gaza. The report implicitly approves of this quote from a Labour MP: "Democratic countries generally do not do things of this nature, and the price we are paying today among the best of our friends is very, very high, and is superfluous."I have to say it: where is the equivalent in the Palestinian and Arab press when it is Israeli innocents who die? The Hamas man needed killing. An F-16 was too indiscriminate a weapon to do it. Gallipoli: fires still burning. A bunch of crisp bullet points from Patrick Crozier's This Blog Has No Title... Some quick responses.
Just yesterday my husband brought three books about World War I and one about World War II. (Guess what he's teaching next term.) They were John Terraine's To Win A War, Gary Sheffield's Forgotten Victory and two children's books, Terry Deary's Horrible Histories , one dealing with each World War. I was interested to see how the Horrible History jokey cartoon version of history would deal with more recent horrors than the Terrible Tudors. In fact the tone is not offensive and the jokes are relevant and revealing. It's a pity that the World War I book falls hook, line and sinker for the Blackadder picture of the war. Which brings me to one of the grown-up books. The Oxford Times review of Forgotten Victory, quoted on the inside cover, states: [Forgotten Victory] must be the first serious study of the Great War to begin with ... an analysis, not of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or the Schlieffen Plan, but the impact of Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie and company in Blackadder Goes Forth.There is an alternative universe quite close to ours where I wrote the first chapter of that book. Giscard D'Estaing calls for a whole new layer of Euro-MPs. He says "democratic legitimacy of the Union will not be fully accepted by its citizens until there exists a forum that unites the two elements of legitimacy in the Union – the national and the European one". Be still my beating heart! No one in their right minds would actually link to a D'Estaing story as boring as that. Here's a a much hotter story revealing how D'Estaing conspired with the Americans to kill British soldiers and sailors. Monday, July 22, 2002
So you want news as well? OK. Here's some They finally got Van Hoogstraten. I don't say that everyone who attempts to ingratiate himself with Comrade Mugabe is guilty of manslaughter.
On second thoughts, yes I do. A word on my links policy. The word is "inconsistent". Truthful joking apart, I do want you all believing I operate some sort of filter, otherwise I can't be as lazy and lacksadaisical as I want to be. So what I try to do is notice when a site "just keeps coming up" in my blog. When typing out your name starts to bug me, then you get a permalink. Clearly chance plays a role as to whether this happens this week, this month or ever - but hopefully that very capriciousness casts down the proud and comforts the really bad spellers. It does give a peverse incentive to have your blog name difficult to type, but the easy names have compensating advantages. I hope that keeps everyone reasonably happy. If I keep quoting you but haven't linked it's because I'm stupid today. Just hit me round the side of the head with an e-mail.
Let us turn to examples. Jim Miller on Politics has a really fiddly and irritating web address. So if he keeps on coming up with this sort of interesting observation - which is original to him - "One thing both he [Mickey Kaus] and the AJC miss: Republican politicians have been leading the way in interracial marriages. Among elected Republican white men who have married non-white women are Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, married to a Chinese-American, Senator Phil Gramm, married to a Korean-American, former Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen, married to an African-American, and Governor Jeb Bush, married to a Hispanic-American. I don't know of any similar marriages among equally prominent white Democratic men. "- then he's in double quick. But not today. Because I'm pretending I don't do that. Much the same goes for Post Politics. (The Turing dialogue was sublime.) Yeah, and another thing. I have typed the stupid hyphen in yadda yadda Uncommon hyphen Sense blogspot for the last freaking time. And I've had it up to here with remembering that Jim Henley is called Unqualified Offerings but you have to type highclearing, whatever that's got to do with anything, too. There. Permalinks as punishment: how do you like that, malefactors! To pay yet more for your typographical crimes I'm putting you both in right at the bottom of the column. Serves you right for being alphabetically behindhand.
Mail round-up. You'd all given up on seeing your carefully composed missives on this blog, hadn't you? Some of you were quite right to give up. Your letter came sandwiched between a mortgage offer and a HOT TEEN (a terrible fate for an innocent young e-mail) and my deleting finger just couldn't break the rhythm. Or I meant to reply but didn't, and the moment passed. Guilty, guilty, guilty. But these happy few escaped the common fate: First, Jim Miller, writing about quote marks, prowlers, and Gallipoli:
After I had sent my email on quotations to you, I noticed my mistake.
Should have sent you a correction immediately. By way of penance, I have given a fuller explanation on my new site, at this web address: http://www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics
According to Moorehead's "Gallipoli", there were also 79,000 French troops in the Gallipoli campaign. They suffered 47,000 casualties, which, proportionately, is a little worse than the British losses, 205,00 casualties of the 410,000 soldiers engaged.
Now for "prowler". In the US, the primary meaning is, indeed, criminal. But there is a secondary meaning attached to the word, often used with cats, and sometimes with people. For example: Your cat is quite a prowler, isn't he? Or: I think I'll just prowl around the neighborhood a bit. In the case you mentioned, the name comes from a column in the original American Spectator. It was anonmymous and devoted to political gossip, so "prowler" wasn't completely inapt.
"Curate's egg", on the other hand, has me baffled.
It's from a moderately famous Punch cartoon of about a century ago. An overawed young curate is having tea with his vicar. The curate obviously has been served an egg which has gone bad. When questioned, the poor man says, in a ridiculous attempt to be polite yet halfway truthful that the egg is "good in parts." So it ought to mean "something that is plainly bad yet people try to find something good to say about it out of politeness." Any BBC presenter under the age of thirty will serve as an example. In fact, though, the phrase is more commonly and generously used to mean a thing that really is good in parts.
Michael Kielsky of Uncommon Sense admits to not having come across the Kingdom of Mercia in his studies. "I had no idea, but then, I had a mere one year of schooling in England. You might as well throw in a link, such as this one, to satisfy the curious readers.
Ben Sheriff of Layman's Logic (and also of Rugby Round-up for all you mud-wrestlers out there) took up the Gallipoli story:
The site you link to says the French were generally accepted to have lost circa 10,000 men. Another site says "Fighting bravely against the Turks the two French Divisions were reduced to 13,000 men by diseases and high casualty rates." So the French casualty rate was 43.4%. (From this link about winners of the "Simpson prize.")
Link to a homepage for the Dorreen family says "Of the 8,556 New Zealanders who served in Gallipoli 2,721 died", a 31.8% casualty rate
Several sites seem to suggest about 20,000 Australian troops made up the 1st Australian Division. 8520/20k = 42.6% casualty rate
To have the same casualty rate as the Aussies, Britain and Ireland would have had to send only 68,390 troops. There were probably many more. But the French seem to have suffered higher proportional losses. However, the real impact of Gallipoli on the Aussie mind-set is as a proportion of the population of only 5m at the time (and note that 23,000 Australians died around the Somme and other Western Front battles) .
More details from Ben came in a second e-mail:
So France had more injuries than Australia, but staggeringly fewer than NZ.
And I bet Ram Ahluwalia of Post Politics really had given up on me ever getting back to him. Post Politics describes itsef as - a few guys (management consultant, econ PHD, aspiring English PHD) who have libertarian philosophies, good writing skills, and a sense of humor. Postpolitics is a good mix of political economy, philosophy, science, and contemporary political debate...
It's an accurate description.
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