Natalie Solent |
|
|
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:
Archives
November 2001
December 2001
January 2002
February 2002
March 2002
April 2002
May 2002
June 2002
July 2002
August 2002
September 2002
October 2002
November 2002
December 2002
January 2003
February 2003
March 2003
April 2003
May 2003
June 2003
July 2003
August 2003
September 2003
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
August 2007
October 2007
February 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
September 2008
October 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
March 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
October 2009
|
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
I was flicking through my "news sources" list while rather guiltily wondering whether any of Peter Briffa, Mrs Briffa or Pejman Yousefzadeh would be mad at me for my little joke when I came across a story that, in its strangeness and sadness, put all that right out of my head. North Korea admits that it kidnapped Japanese citizens twenty years ago. Apparently they were wanted in order to teach Japanese language and customs to North Korean agents. One of the abductees was a child of thirteen, kidnapped on her way to badminton practice. Megumi Yokota is now dead. No one seems to know how she died. What was her short life like, I wonder? Thanks to the miracle of Babel Fish we can find out what on earth Peter Briffa is talking about: "Bonjours, my children! I blogge not today because I and my beautiful wife Mrs Briffa ons go the booze cruise have Calais. We will esperons to buy many wines and beer, and perhaps much of cigarette for the father of my wife. Also, we will esperons to have a dejeuner has Boulogne. If you want to read the blogges, have a look with the homes and women has the sinister. Also, he is a new bloggor, Mr. Cinderella Bloggerfeller, which is very interessant. He contribute much has my sections of how, and has a blogge which is very intellectual are humoureux. Also it know many phenomena Frenchwomen. Goodbye, my pea! At tomorrow! "Actually, as I lament in my comment to him, some strange Blogger process seems determined to deny me the Briffa wisdom and send me to PejmanPundit. I think I had best accept this transformation gracefully. After all, given his interest in phenomena Frenchwomen, one will have to wait a long time before Peter can write as Pejmanpundit does: "I just realized that I am writing this blog in a relatively (if not absolutely) sin-free condition." "...Science Fiction, Sewing..." It's not often that I get to fulfil two of this blog's selling points in one post. Gary Farber of Amygdala says that you can get a lunch tote embroidered by Ursula Le Guin's own hand by donating to SF journal, fiction-bank and general resource Infinite Matrix. (Seriously for a mo', it is actually an admirable venture.) Presumably Le Guin doesn't do all that careful silkwork for just everyone. I believe lesser donors get a pair of socks said to be knitted by Manly Wade Wellman or one of George O. Smith's much-loved crochet doilies. Now that we're all friends... Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings quotes me as saying: Likewise I think, frankly, that most of the "blowback" and "root causes" talk was no better than the bar-room mutterings of the rapist's cronies.and responds in a like spirit: Golly! In the spirit of comity contained in the lines below, I'm happy to aver that while most of the expansive war crowd (the Iraq-plus people) are either opportunists, hysterics or people who first discovered the Middle East on 9/12, some few of them are expressing a legitimate, considered policy preference, though I'm not prepared to say exactly where the distinction lies. Monday, September 16, 2002
Angie Schultz, dark mistress of the Machinery of Night has supplied the url of the Mark Steyn column that was mentioned earlier. Battered Westerner Syndrome. "Poor, sweet, naive Natalie." Angie also wrote about an experience she had when the discussion turned to the rape analogy: I started to blog about that a month ago (just after the column came out), and ran out of steam after quite a bit of blog post. I have several times changed and added to the post below on the analogy between those who say that "the US was asking for it" and "the rape victim was asking for it". So even if you saw it earlier, you might like to take a second look. My first comment on the subject was here. All that "turn on safe mode" Blogger fandoogle doesn't seem to be working, so I can't correct that last bad link. I meant to say ...and in Samizdata. Overwhelmed with material, I must postpone giving these arguments the response they deserve. One quick point: I don't see what was so awful about the actions of the father in the case described. If I recall rightly, neither did the kid concerned. The dentist's waiting room scenario is one where nerves are likely to snap on all sides. The argument that it is as humiliating and traumatic for an eight-year old to be smacked on the bottom in public as it would be for a grown woman strikes me as simply untrue. I was trying to remember if it ever happened to me as a child, and couldn't recall either way. My very vagueness is evidence that such an act is not necessarily that traumatic. Arguably it's wrong for our society to take that attitude, but it does, and that makes a tremendous objective difference to the level of harm done.
I quite see that similar-sounding arguments have been (mis)used by past societies to excuse violence against women and blacks. But that brings us right back to the crux of the difference between the beliefs of the Taking Children Seriously movement and, let it be said, the rest of humanity: are the rights of children and adults the same? Alice Bachini posts on the case of that man in Scotland who was convicted for smacking his kid here in her own blog and Suing an epileptic because of his face. UPDATE: Ampersand of Alas, A Blog writes: Hi! I just wanted to point out that the story you posted last week I am relieved. ("Alas, A Blog" is a head-to-header, i.e. one of those all-too-rare examples where a blogger of one political persuasion gets into substantive debate with his (her?) exact opposites. Also important stuff: cartoons, time travel.)
"Asking for it." I wrote last night about the analogy between those who are quick to say rape victims should blame themelves first and those who say that the United States should blame itself first. Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal writes: "...it's not mine. I think I read it in a Mark Steyn column or it might have been somewhere in National Review. If I remember correctly, whoever the writer was was talking to a friend whose wife worked with rape victims and battered women and she couldn't stand hearing the "What did the US do to provoke this attack?" stuff she heard all over the place. Reminded her of the garbage she heard every day." Chris Bertram of Junius wrote regarding my second, related analogy, concerning women who are attacked by present or former husbands and previous US support for Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. He says: "I don't think your analogy holds up at all. The case is more like someone who has bought a pit bull with the intention of scaring or even attacking people and who then finds they can't control the animal, that it bites them, or their friends, and may kill their kids. Sure, the right thing may be to destroy the animal now, but bystanders are entitled to say that theyI have more to say on this topic - scroll back to this post later. UPDATE: Peter Briffa of Public Interest made a good point: "Surely the better analogy would be: OK. I'm running out of time to blog today, and I haven't said half what I intended too. So, rather than write a connected argument, I'm just going to put down as many thoughts as I can in no particular order.
Kidnapped child rescued from Colombian rebels. Back in the '70s or early '80s, didn't ZANU or ZAPU have a thing about kidnapping bunches of schoolchildren, too? Or was it SWAPO? Worth the wait. When Larry Elliot finally gets some steam up after wheezing through four of five paragraphs of melodramatic scene-setting, he blows a fine whistle on what 'Black Wednesday' ten years ago means for the Euro now. Black Wednesday was the event that led me to formulate Solent's Law of the Lemming: any new law or political decision cheered on by all the parties and all the newspapers ends up splatted at the bottom of a cliff. Test it out with some of the unsuccessful measures of the last decade: Entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, Dangerous Dogs Act, Firearms Act, US intervention in Somalia... And don't bet on Gordon Brown's popular money-therapy for the NHS working. Never thought I'd see this. China meets envoys of Dalai Lama. I didn't know the two sides had met twenty years ago, either. Saturday, September 14, 2002
Two analogies. This may offend. I don't say it lightly. Imagine a woman who has been raped and beaten. The rapist has said that he will return to kill her later. The woman's friends are very concerned. They tell her:
Some friends, huh? I assume everyone reading this can figure out what I'm talking about. I don't know whether this analogy originated from one person, or whether several people saw the correlation independently. I saw it used most recently at MCJ. Though unpleasant, I think the analogy holds true. Furthermore it does what all good analogies should and leads one to new conclusions. For it is possible that the woman's own behaviour made it more likely that she would be attacked - if, for instance, she acquiesced in earlier, smaller assaults. Here's another aspect: all the talk from Nelson Mandela and Fisk et al about how the US once supported Osama Bin Laden so how dare they turn against him now - or how the US turned a blind eye to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, so how dare they attack him now -
How does that logically differ from "He raped you? He's trying to kill you? Tough luck, lady. You shouldn't have married him."
Would Mandela defend that line? Pontifex Maximus A mighty personage writes: My real name doesn't appear on my blog, but I rank #1 for queries for Pontifex, my nom de cyber. No it does not help. Quite the contrary! What would help is for you to give me convincing reasons as to why Portman, Merchant and Imbruglia were mere chaff in the wind and Solent is, in fact as well as Google, Supreme Mekon of the Natalieverse. (Talking of which: Dan Dare. 9am, Channel 5. Unmissable.) Hola Camp. Paul Ibsch writes: "Hola Camp was the final straw for a disintegrating British Empire. In the years 1953-1959 the UK had slaughtered 250,000 Kenyans and hanged Dedan Kimathi, Kenya's Nelson Mandela. My point about Hola Camp was mostly the oddity of choosing that relatively tiny example. It's like citing the village elders that Stalin's minions had shot on one afternoon in 1937 to stand for the evils of communism - with this difference, that by 1959 British colonialism really was a joke contestant in the World Evil All-Comers. To be honest, I very much doubt that figure of 250,000 slaughtered Kenyans. This brief history of the Kenyan Independence struggle, which praises the Mau Mau, speaks of 5,000 guerillas killed and 12,000 civilian deaths. Likewise this Kenyan educational website which also is pro Mau-Mau, quotes a figure of 13,000 Africans killed in the conflict.
Often I distrust figures for the numbers of victims of colonialism because the same sources downplay or ignore the victims of African or Asian despots, or of socialism.
In general, I see little evidence for a denial of history. I admit that the Tasmanian Genocide is too little known, but it has been in my consciousness for at least twenty years. We get the Irish Famine morning, noon and night, and the major denial of history there is that it is presented as the results of laissez-faire rather than of powerful British interests hijacking the power of the State to strangle any potential competition from Ireland. (You know why there is an Irish linen industry? Because that was all that was left them after tariffs had killed off their wool and cotton industries.) We hear a great deal about slavery (and so we should), but very little about how the Royal Navy drove the slave-traders from the seas.
The Opium Wars are an odd case. They were adequately covered in my school history book, but I never dreamed the day would come when I would see them defended on the grounds of the right of the Chinese working man to smoke whatever he pleased.
Friday, September 13, 2002
Smacking update: the TV news reminds me that the teacher who smacked his kid outside a dentist's waiting room was convicted. In contrast, you and I know that in your home town and mine there are children going to bed tonight in pain and justified fear for their lives, and nothing is done about it because securing a conviction would take effort. And that's under the existing law. Scots parents can be very glad that Jim Wallace's little bit of social engineering can be deferred - until the EU get round to it, of course. UPDATE: In fact, so convinced am I that the proposed law was nothing but another piece of make-work and empire building by whatever they call the Scottish Department of Social Security these days, that I wouldn't be surprised to find that even a great many of those who oppose corporal punishment entirely while retaining a libertarian cast of mind are relieved that it will not come to pass. Any of you guys care to comment? OK, OK, I know Google overcounts blogs. And much as Ken Layne deserves to be the very epitome of Ken-ness and Tim Blair, the pattern and exemplar for Blairites worldwide (who on earth is that other chap anyway?), they aren't yet accorded their rightful status by anyone except Google and a rather select group, namely us bloggers. Still. #1 out of 1,900,000. If anyone who understands these things cares to send me one of those stashes or caches or whatever...
Going down my links column: Samizdata doesn't count, England's Sword ditto and there are rather a lot of Iains out there. James Lileks is #3 James in the world - an astounding achievement; Brian comes in at #2, Dawson Third of All The Dawsons, John has no hope under his first name but is Numero Uno Weidner, and Moira, too, is first of all her tribe.
Hot Jiminy Jeepers! My social life having improved, I hadn't carried out an act of self-googlification in simply ages. I must've lost my touch; I hit "search" before typing in my surname. There are one million, nine hundred thousand mentions of the word "Natalie."
Natalies Portman, Merchant and Imbruglia receive many citations.
None of these ladies are number one, however.
I am the most famous Natalie on the Planet Earth. Forgotten Empires. John Weidner writes regarding Seamus Milne's Guardian article yesterday, on the death toll that can be attributed to colonialism: "Funny how when colonialism is mentioned, you hear about Britain, France, Belgium .. but never the empire of the Tsars of Russia, which remained intact until the 1980's..." The anti-Mecca. Teresa Nielsen Hayden remembers. I noticed an odd thing in the days and weeks that followed. You'd see little knots of people standing out on the sidewalks, talking, and as they talked they'd all gradually turn so they could look in the direction of Ground Zero--most of them unconsciously, I think. Even when it was out of sight, even in the outer boroughs, you knew exactly where it was, which direction; it was like you could feel it there, this locus of terrible sorrow and anger.There is more:
Scottish MPs reject ban on smacking. Whatever was the point of the age limit of three anyway? I've scarcely smacked mine since they were three. Children above that age speak the language and understand deferred sanctions. They can be persuaded, bribed, fined, inspired, put to shame, 'grounded' , given merit certificates and be deprived of their GameBoys as the occasion demands. No smacking of children under one year, that I could have understood. But the point of smacking peaks at about two and a half, when there are certain limitations on behaviour that need to be enforced yet the child does not really understand cause, effect, or enough of language to have the reasons for the rules explained.
Some disagree, of course. But even if you oppose smacking totally, don't get sad about this law dying unborn. You see, we were reassured repeatedly that it was never intended to be one of those old fashioned laws, you know, the sort that people are meant to obey. How barbaric that would be! It was all intended as a signal about the "sort of society we want."
However the Committee were wise to this: "...we do not accept that it is realistic to remove an available defence to the charge of assault while at the same time reassuring Parliament that the number of prosecutions will not increase as a result."What would actually have happened is that a small but growing subset of parents would have been sued, and convicted. The subset would have been half-consciously chosen for their otherwise law abiding nature, pour encourager les autres and gradually bring about a better world. (Remember that savage punitive assaults on children are already illegal. We are talking here specifically about those cases where a defence of reasonable chastisement could be offered under present law.) The children of really brutal parents and step-parents would have been passed around between the caseloads of different social workers, as they are now. It is awfully troublesome to get the law on people like that. They resist arrest, they don't turn up to court, then when you fine them they don't pay for five years, then when you finally do get them in court they cry about their childhoods into the arms of their social workers and the judge says how he personally has never been the same since Whiffington-Whiffington Major gave him five with a cricket bat for secretly reading the Beveridge Report after Lights Out and lets them off with therapy. So the growing trickle of ordinary parents being sued for ordinary smacking would indeed have brought about gradual change, but not the sort of gradual change desired. It would have been one more step in the inversion of law. Thursday, September 12, 2002
Mullah Omar speaks! We learn that the Mullah has vowed to drive infidels from Afghanistan. The mullah is made from front- and back-view life size photographs pasted onto two layers of that rigid, blue polysterene used to make "For Sale" signs; the two layers being joined by a waffle or strut construction. He is being pulled along on a string by devoted followers and symbolically tickled by an acolyte holding a hubcap. Mullah Omar may only be viewed by appointment. Seumas Milne in the Guardian thinks that if we're going to compare Stalin to Hitler we have to bring in colonialism, too. Now, contrary to popular belief, I do not yearn for the restoration of the British empire, still less the vile Belgian one. The charge is worth further study. I do not know much about the Bengal Famine, for instance, other than it's some people's favourite famine. Someone else is going to have to analyse this. I'm out of time. One quickie point, though. What's Hola doing there listed alongside Dachau and the Gulag? Eleven Mau Mau detainees were beaten to death in the Hola internment camp in 1959. Eleven is eleven too many. I do not need to be told this. But eleven is a molehill compared to the mountains of deaths caused by Hitler, Stalin or King Leopold. Every dog gets one free bite. Junius and rising star Mark Kleinman are having a fascinating debate over a possible analogy with the proposed war in Iraq and what would have happened if the French had stood up to the Germans (i.e. enforced the Versailles Treaty) when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936. I make it 66 separate posts on Instapundit for September 11 2002. Not counting updates within a post. James Taranto of Best of the Web is among those outraged at the "scare quotes" around the word "heroes" in the headline of this article about the heroes of Flight 93. I'm as annoyed as anyone else about Reuters' spineless policy decision to employ quote marks around the word "terrorist." But are the "scare quotes" here really scare quotes? Much of the article seems to be about what those present in a ceremony honouring them said about the people aboard the flight. The contentious quote marks could be read as really being quote marks. Yes, I know. I'm so nice. Wednesday, September 11, 2002
A gesture of respect. Perry de Havilland of Samizdata walked down the Kings Road in Chelsea with his camera and captured these pictures of shop signs requesting a two minute silence at 1.46pm ( = 8.46am New York time) to honour those killed a year ago. I hesitate to say very much today. No words could be as eloquent as these heart-searing pictures posted on LGF. I urge you to scroll down as far as it goes. If you value this record of what happened, consider supporting LGF with a donation. Finally, I remember Dawson writing this brief, heartfelt paragraph exactly three months after the murders of September 11. It's about the innocent ordinariness of the victims. Brokers, stewardesses, firemen, janitors, policemen, caterers, publicity managers, tourists, secretaries...
Why them?
"Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God." - Thornton Niven Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Tuesday, September 10, 2002
In answer to your question... Simon Phipps of The Mink Dimension said what he thought of the murder of that child in Iran. Check out the comment from "Mike" too. What did you think of the case where the Iranian child was beheaded by her father? Here's what Silflay Hraka thought. Best of the Web observed that Reuters appeared to think it kinda cute. The story was listed under "Oddly Enough," you know, where the rains of frogs and the Elvis impersonators go. Solent: Blog Killer. Patrick Crozier made me gulp at the Blogger bash the other day. He said that the moment when he decided to give up on Croziervision struck when I wondered, quite casually, whether he could really keep up three blogs. I feel like I've taken off my shoe and found a butterfly stuck to the sole. On the other hand, Crozier dude, enough of your troubles already! If you want to do good in the world you must, simply must, keep up UK Transport Blog. Indeed, it's time the brand went global. The value of a having a major reference source for transport journalists soaked in libertarian assumptions would be inestimable. Uzi Gal, the inventor of the Uzi, is dead. And the Guardian doesn't know quite what to make of him. His son Iddo does, though: "...if you are good in something, and you are protecting your country, you might as well stick with it". Stolen: one peal of thunder. The Blogger Sex War enters its second day. Godless Capitalist and Mrs Elizabeth Capitalist join forces in Gene Expression to make all my best points before I could in response to this post about sexism by Meryl Yourish. Letter from Gotham fires off a few salvos, too. Scroll up, down and sideways for more highly provocative commentary. (Did you know that in blind auditions orchestras hire more female musicians? That Venus Williams ran a 5:29 mile when she was nine years old?) Though I have to say Diane E misses the point about Stephen Den Beste. Although I am not well enough informed myself about Israeli politics to say which of the two is stronger on that topic, surely a high proportion of his audience consists of technically-minded men to whom what she refers to as an "overlay of wargame theories that look to me as if he got them from science fiction novels" is a feature not a bug. The Tin Ear Award. I nominate myself for this: "If you exceed the normal proportions of sex-talk distribution among the various sex-talk types, as commonly practised in such a group, then you will suffer the normal social penalties for violating accepted norms." I changed the second "normal" to "usual" where those lines appear below. It still reads appallingly. Apologies to all those who e-mailed me with thoughts on abortion. I do intend to get back onto that topic, and a selection of the e-mails will appear when I do. Right now, though, my mind's away running along different pathways. 'Little Timmy Says Hello.' Pub. 1999. 24pp. $4.95. "Certain to please" - Tiny Tots Digest. 'Little Timmy Meets the Silly People.' Pub. 2000. 24pp. $4.95. "Amusing" - Children's Bookseller Magazine.
'Little Timmy Gets Cross.' Pub. 2001.' 48pp. $5.95. "Possibly more suitable for older readers" - Children's Literature Today. (Limited stock available.)
'Little Timmy Kicks Some Serious Butt.' Pub. 2002. 2pp. $0.50. Not reviewed for legal reasons. SOLD OUT. Monday, September 09, 2002
Test. Test. Test. Bogger's bluggered again. Oh, so it's finally condescended to function? In that case, pursuant to the discussion below, may I remind you of the day that Hokie pundit posted the best chick pic ever. Dodgeblog reveals all!!! Since I heard tell of one poor soul who was sued under the Trades Descriptions Act for selling with salacious hints and a parade of secrecy some sealed brown envelopes, which on being opened turned out to contain pictures of sofas and other soft furnishings, I had better admit that what MommaBear actually reveals to the world is her opinion of female bloggers who sell their show with sexy posters and then complain that the punters ogle them instead of applying serious study to their dissertation on the correlation between Mexican interest rates and the eleven-year breeding cycle of the lesser cicadae. More links if you step inside - are you man enough to take it, boys?
Oooooooh, and there's even more goodies from Andrew if you scroll down one. I'm in it, too. And squirmy alien monsters from the dawn of time. Go on, go on, go on.
UPDATE: On reflection, after reading Improved Clinch's useful roundup of the debate, and after reading more of Dawn Olsen's blog Up Yours, I have softened my opinion. This happens to me a lot - if this blog was written with an enforced cooling off period of an hour it would consist of nothing but the pure light of reason and get one hit a week, and that one in the hope of finding sewing patterns.
One thing first. In all of this discussion I use "right" (and "allowed") in the colloquial not the political sense. I support everyone's political right to say damn near anything, up to and including shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre - though I have to be on a roll to make that one stick. If that's understood, let's get on.
There are lots of different types of sex talk. I can discern:
Any of these types can be produced in an intelligent manner, even the dirty jokes. But blogging is a conversation among a group consisting mostly of strangers, along with quite a few aquaintances, the odd enemy and some actual friends. What types of sex talk are allowed in such a conversation? Type (a) is pretty well verboten. The second type is nearly so, partly because the surging hormones you've triggered screw up the social dynamics of the conversation and the flow of ideas, and partly because the failure to gratify expectations isn't always exciting or thought-provoking, sometimes it's just irritating. Type (e) is not forbidden, but a little goes a long way. It can get embarrassing, and, quite genuinely may be of limited interest to persons of different constitution to the teller. All the other types are allowed these days. In moderation. If you exceed the normal proportions of sex-talk distribution among the various sex-talk types, as commonly practised in such a group, then you will suffer the usual social penalties for violating accepted norms. Other people will exercise their right to react unfavourably. Some won't want to talk to you at all. Others will, but they won't take you seriously. Others will tense up not necessarily because they are uptight, repressed individuals (though they might be, and might like it that way), but rather because they feel that they are at risk of being seduced rather than argued into accepting a certain worldview.
Others simply won't be interested. Yes folks, there are people out there who are more interested in Bill Clinton's political legacy than what he did with his cigar. I'm one of 'em. So are most bloggers in this corner of the net. That's why we congregate here. There are plenty of places on the net offering frank discussion of sex, but if we wanted to go there we'd be there not here.
I don't like your face. Some mean-spirited woman called Yvonne Rennie has successfully sued an epileptic because she was "upset" by the involuntary contortions of his face during a fit. I keep re-reading this one thinking there must be more to it than that; not even our modernized judiciary could be that stupid. So far I haven't found anything to contradict the headline, though. There's something about a car crash too, but as far as I can see it does not come into this award. The epilectic, Edwin Young, really is being punished to the tune of £3,500 because he looked temporarily ugly. There are people in this world who look ugly all the time, can I sue them? And where the fneeb is Political Correctness now we need it? Man beheads his daughter. An Iranian, according to a brief item in The Telegraph, cut off the head of his seven year old daughter, in the erroneous belief that she had been raped by her uncle. Christendom has has also produced cultures (Old Spain and its colonial offshoots come to mind) where girls and women were killed for illicit intercourse, and where rape was seen as "ruining" a woman. But western machismo is practically dead now, and I don't think they killed child rape victims even when it was at its height. David Carr accosted by Spawn of Yog-Soggoth at British Blogger party. Dang. Boringly obliged to catch the last train, I must have left before it arrived; I have long wanted to have a good long chat with a Spawn about their ancient and fascinating culture. Turkish Gastarbeiten in Germany have provided two interesting stories over the last few days: Couple try to name baby Osama Bin Laden and Plot to bomb US bases in Germany on Sep 11 anniversary Saturday, September 07, 2002
A point of etymology. Moira Breen writes: May I make a slight etymological clarification on my obscure slang? "Bawk" does indeed carry the connotation of regurgitation, but I used it to refer to the Globe writers, not my reaction to them. Although, now that I think about it, "bawk" is an excellent onomatopoeic representation of Storm Warning. I have, I learn, been appointed as "site of the week" at the People's Republic of Seabrook. But I don't think "Northstar"(Jack Cluth) is much concerned about arranging my munificent state pension and honorary Order of Seabrook with oak leaf cluster right now. He's in the eye of the storm. Actions have consequences. Alex Bensky writes on abortion: "...the pro-abortion groups often repeat the mantra about a woman's right to control her body. But if the sex that leads to the pregnancy is consensual, hasn't the woman already made a choice about what to do with her body? From that choice certain consequences may flow. At what point should a woman have to take responsibility for her freely chosen acts?"Captain J M Heinrichs writes on abortion: "No problem, except that if a woman is to exercise that control intelligently, then I would expect her to make the decision before rather than after the act. The latter is less a choice than birth control: because she forgot.Brian Linse wrote on abortion: "I found your post on late term abortions very interesting. I was wondering how you would approach the problem of a woman who was seeking a late term abortion for reasons pertaining to her own physical health. Natural child birth and cesarian delivery are both considerably more dangerous to the mother than an abortion (unless there's new theory on this that I've missed) and if we posit a case where a woman is informed by her doctor that he has discovered a medical condition that will make carrying to term dangerous, then at what stage, if at all, does the fetus gain equal rights to the mother? I think this situation illustrates the problem of granting an unborn fetus equal rights to its mother. Just a thought..."I wrote back: "I suppose I would say that the fetus gains rights on a sliding scale from zero at conception to full rights at the moment of birth. Of course, in the heartbreaking scenario you describe, so many other factors are in play (and without time to think about them either) that no such neat solution can be offered. But in human affairs there is nothing particular to abortion about situations where no one can exactly say what they would do."I'm not absolutely sure I agree with myself about that sliding scale. Too neat, as I said, and too mechanistic. I feel I ought to be against abortion full stop, and not only because I call myself a Catholic (albeit one with temptations to indifferentism) - but, as I said earlier I just can't muster the right feelings for very early term abortions. But perhaps it is best not to try and sort these things out during bouts of insomnia. Friday, September 06, 2002
James Lileks seems a generally happy kinda guy. That's why it cuts like a knife when he isn't. "They made sure that her last moments alive were filled with horror and blood, screams and fear; they made sure that the last thing she saw was the desperate faces of her parents, insisting that everything was okay, we’re going to see Mickey, holding out a favorite toy with numb hands, making up a happy lie. And then she was fire and then she was ash." "I lied: I'm not 90% back." I confess I had not come across the blog written by Daniel Taylor, the Dreaded Purple Master until now. When I did come across it I was riveted. You reading this - you're a blogger, right? Or a reader of blogs? Or a news junkie? Anyway, you swim in a river of words. News for you: sometimes that river runs dry. "At the moment, I have a blind spot that covers one third to one half of my field of vision.What does it take to make the spring bubble up again - at least to some extent? "So here I am, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, staring blankly at the front page. God help me if I am intellectually stymied by the AJC.That may just be the most useful thing to come out of Cynthia McKinney's term of office. I very much hope that Mr Taylor's recovery continues. NOTE: Blogger glitch time again. The number in the link is, honestly, that of the post mentioned above. For some reason it currently takes you to Mr Taylor's next post down. From experience I judge that this link will start taking you to the right post in a day or so.
A rare event, but worthwhile: MCJ praises a column by Nicholas Kristof. The Kristof column paints a heart-wrenching picture of depopulation in the Midwest, accelerated by the effects of subsidies. "Yet Stewart Switzer, a 17-year-old senior, says that if he could go back in a time capsule and talk to his great-great-grandpa when he was settling here a century ago, his message would be: Don't stop here. Keep on going." Should we keep just a little bit of snobbery in order to provide material for comedy? Discuss. And while you're thinking about it, here's absolutely the last Essex Girl joke I shall print: An Essex girl goes to the council to register for child benefit.Yes, I live in Essex. And we were very fond of our Ford Capri. Why do you ask? Insight. Rod Dreher writes in The Corner about the way a conscientious initial rejection of bigotry can become entwined with acceptance of the entire liberal (US sense) programme. A similar process happens worldwide. Britain sold its ancient rights in order to get rid of snobbery. While I think that was a devil's bargain that need never have been made, I do not deny that the impulse to jettison class discrimination was good. Blogger wasn't working last night, and in my fury I fell into dark commerce with the Machinery of Night on a closely related subject. Scroll down to the post earlier that started it. I could give you the link to the earlier post, too, but instead I'm going to insist you scroll down yourselves. It's for your own good, you know. "But we didn't go to this Kroger. It might have different things! I like looking at things! Can we stop at this Kroger, Niles?" At last I understand. "The forces wielded by the Joint Chiefs Of Staff at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia are not aligned with the collective good of this Nation, this World, or this Earth. The building is negatively aligned with its ‘head’ facing South. The Pentagon Building needs to be taken down because it is misaligned, because it is not the target of terrorists, it is actually a magical edifice specifically created to wreak the terror of Black Magick on the planet. It is the Global Police Force Station for all ‘stupid white men’ around the planet, the Central Clearing Zone for industrial society’s most advanced and ‘scientific’ machines of death." What a waste of a good mind. You start off as a perfectly ordinary, sensible, workaday Gnostic Astrologer, then you read Michael Moore and look what happens.
The Sudeten Germans? Remind me, who were they? Jim Bennett has unfortunately allowed himself to be distracted from his real work of dissecting the historico-cultural minutae of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. I blame the influence of that Iain Murray myself, who is just as frivolous, going on about how Britain can really help Europe when he could be compiling the Most Cruel and Tragick Historie of My Lorde the Bishop of Sodor. Instead of concentrating on the Great Task, Mr Bennett too, has been writing on world affairs of all things. In 'What were they thinking?' he starts off by discussing the Titanic and then moves on to an interesting parallel: the Palestinians seen as Sudeten Germans. Of course, it's also worth remembering the fate of the Sudeten Germans. After World War II, they were forcibly expelled into Germany, and nobody really cared about them at that point.May I make clear to my more critical readers that I do not want the Palestinians to share the fate the Sudeten Germans. I want them not to. There are two more Bennett UPI columns up as well. One widely-blogged one about Tranzis and one about, surprisingly, folk songs. Here's a byway of history:
... Cultural nationalists steeped in Turner expected to find a body of work shaped by two centuries of life in the highland frontier. To their amazement, they found that the Appalachian Borderers had preserved perfectly a body of hundreds of ballads from the British Border region, singing most un-republicanly of lords and ladies, knights and minstrels, many little changed from centuries before they were brought over. Bawk! "Bawk" is a term new to me. Moira Breen wanted to do it, whatever it is, all over a Boston Globe article. It said: The ambassador talked about how the Arab world has "tried to learn so much from the United States." But he wondered what could be learned from a country "where there are complaints about the ability to hold fair elections, where elections are decided by the judiciary, and where there are issues about ballot boxes as well." Moira said:
Mugabe lobbyist Ari-Ben Menashe has abruptly severed all connections to the tyrant. I hope that he has decided to reform his wicked ways and return to respectable employment as a spy. Greek terror suspect gives himself up. Remarkable what one can do with a little effort. For years these November 17 guys killed with impunity. Eventually it became an international embarrassment. Someone leans on the police and zap! The wily terrorists fall like cards, even going so far as to catch themselves so as to save the police further trouble. One more thing. What was a painter of religious icons doing among these Marxist fanatics? Thursday, September 05, 2002
The same bug has struck again. So I can't correct that bad link below. Here's the real Indian Express story. I don't know whether Tamil Nadu has better or worse statistics for infants killed by water-borne infections than the rest of India. I assume most mothers there use cloth nappies, but perhaps disposables are beginning to penetrate that market. Either way, both washing and disposal are going to impact the water system somehow. In either case the impermeable quality of plastic would be very useful in keeping soiled stuff separate from clean stuff. This might save lives. The dreaded inability-to-edit lurgy has struck down the previous post. I continue here. Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board Chairperson Sheela Rani Chunkath says brightly, "The only inconvenience for the public may be that they will have to carry their own cloth bags while shopping.Doing this is not something new for Indians; we used to do this 20 years ago and we can do it again now." So no nappy sacks or rain hats for the people of Tamil Nadu. Nappy sacks matter; a major cause of infant death in India is water-borne infections, as this Indian Express article mentions. Old bags. Libertarian Parent in the Countryside describes with pride the many-sided relationship of the Briton and his carrier bag. Citizens of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu have no opportunity to show their igenuity in a similar manner. The state government has banned certain types of plastic bag. Lost in translation. Have you ever wondered how to really get across the nuances of an Essex Girl joke to a speaker of Hausa or Cantonese? Help is at hand from this page on intercultural joke translation from a delightful site discussing half-baked ideas. I have changed pointy brackets to square ones to avoid getting Blogger in a tiz. [joke type="q&a" form="essexgirl"Go on, laugh. Simpson, guns & videotape. I've posted some comments on Biased BBC. Here's a sample: "Even anti-gun organizations acknowledge the fact that New York with its decades of tight gun control has a very high murder rate is something that their side must explain, not ignore. The prestigious BBC that boasts of its many researchers and its 'mission to explain' ought to know and ought to tell this highly relevant fact." Hello me. Just put in a new hit counter. I'm miles behind on the e-mail. Why not visit repeatedly to see if I've got to yours yet? The deaf student rejected by Oxford describes her experiences. First she gains my sympathy: "Why Oxford? First university I heard of in Russia. I fell under its magic spell." Then she loses it: "Public-school boys are much better coached and prepped than state-school ones – don't let them win!" A strange clarion call. Are there really Oxford candidates who are unmoved by love of knowledge or worldly ambition when applying for a place, but who will leap up and put their heart and soul into their task when reminded that the real reason for all this effort is to deprive some rupert of the place he would otherwise have had?
It's very odd to hear a former resident of the Soviet Union coming out with what I would have thought was a specifically British-bred type of class-envy. I wonder how and when she picked that up, and how deep it runs. Perhaps she's just supplying the Indy readers with what she thinks they want to hear. I hope so; there's an undercurrent of better humour running under the most of the article, and it would be a pity for this to be submerged forever by the bad effects of sudden fame.
Final quick question, Anya: how about public-school girls? Must we work as hard at stopping them winning?
"Well, it destroys the value of almost all of their hardware investments." David Janes on Ultra Wide Band, and why makers of wireless, LAN and WAN equipment are trying to kill UWB while they still can. Wednesday, September 04, 2002
There's stupidity. I don't know whether Mrs Akwana Walker is stupid or not. Clearly she is sufficiently well adapted to modern state education to play the system, but as "well adapted" is a description that can justly be applied to a tapeworm, adaptation cannot be proof of intelligence. If she is stupid, that would be sad, but not her fault. There's simple ignorance. Undoubtedly, Mrs Akwana Walker is ignorant. But that, too, might be through circumstances that are cause for regret rather than censure. Nor need we exaggerate the extent of her ignorance. Many English-speaking people do not know what "niggardly" means. Many English-speaking people might balk when they first hear the word for fear that it has something to do with the rightly-shunned racial insult "nigger". So far it's all quite understandable.
And there's wilful ignorance. Malicious ignorance. Pig-ignorance, the country people used to call it, the self-satisfied ignorance of a pig wallowing in mud. It is a description that is most unfair to pigs. That innocent creature might like mud-wallowing but he doesn't try to drag others down into the mud with him, and he bears no malice to those with different tastes. In contrast Mrs Walker strives to ensure that her child grows up as addicted to victimhood as she is, and even though she now knows "niggardly" is not a racial insult, still does her best to get the teacher who tried to widen her child's vocabulary fired.
Brendan O'Neill weighs into the abortion debate. Late term abortions are certainly very unpleasant, but they are also extremely rare. Surely we can assume that any woman who would put herself through a late-term abortion must have very good cause - rather than denouncing her as a murderer.The ordinary, uncontentious crime of murder is also extremely rare. Can we therefore assume that any man or woman who would put themselves through the unpleasantness and mess of committing one and then avoiding or facing the courts must have very good cause and should be left undenounced? But Solent raises an interesting question - the difference between the 'bundle of cells' that few of us sympathise with and the well-formed fetus that could possibly survive outside of the womb. However, in her distinction between these two 'potential humans', Solent misses the crucial thing they have in common - both are still part of a woman's body. The idea that a developed fetus is part of a woman's body in the same sense that her kidneys are is completely untenable in medical terms, a fact which any doctor, however pro-abortion, would admit instantly. Your argument rests on the attempt to fit a situation into a language-category that does not cover it. I quite see that a fetus is a good deal nearer to being part of her body than St Paul's Cathedral is, but the fact is that a fetus cannot be neatly described as "part" or "not part" of her body, except by the crudity of the law. The law often must employ crude dividing lines as a matter of practicality. The question is where they fall. Many anti-abortionists claim that late-term abortion is unadulterated murder because the fetus could survive outside of the womb. After all, they argue, crassly, we wouldn't kill a one-day old baby just because his mother didn't want him - so why would it have been okay to kill him or her just weeks earlier? What's crass about this argument? Is it not cause for questioning when a life and death decision depends on a difference of external circumstances, unrelated to the deservingness of the one to be killed?
Yes it can. Do nothing and it's cared for fine. The insertion of needles, hands, knives, and vacuum cleaners into a woman's body is necessary to kill the fetus, not to leave it alive. You object to inteference in a woman's body against her will. There is no interference.* All that remains is her will, and the question of whether her will should be granted. If we give rights to the fetus, if we talk about fetuses having souls (such nonsense), then we reduce women to little more than vessels.It's her soul that makes her more than a vessel - as it is every man and woman's soul that makes them more than a temporary assemblage of biological components. If the reader does not believe in immortal souls then replace the words with a phrase such as "humanity" or "human ability to possess rights" or "potential to make moral judgements" and the argument will do as well. A pregnant woman is a vessel. Tough on her sometimes, but that's the deal biology offers. She is not, of course, just a vessel. But the very thing, whatever you call it, that makes her more than a vessel is the same thing that makes the fetus within her more than just her property. We rob women of their rights in the name of granting rights to the fetus.This talk of "robbing women of their rights", and the next two sentence too, assumes what you set out to prove, that hers are the only rights that matter. Yes, if a female is killed before she can grow up then she is denied the chance to a reproductive life, and a more basic right even than that: the control and continuing existence of her own body. It is equally scandalous that aborted males are denied their chance to ever make any choices whatsoever, never mind basic ones. *I talk about "interference" because Brendan does. I'm not getting into the Acts versus Omissions debate here. The Dutch don't hate the Euro so much as all that. Paul Ibsch writes, "It looks like the Telegraph doubled the 44% mentioned below and added 10% for good luck. The 38% mentioned in the last paragraph of this Telegraaf report refers to the April figure." - That last sentence just has to be something about 44% of the respondents missing the Guilder -
And it's no use hoping that the two stories refer to different polls. Even without speaking Dutch, I can see that the two articles both speak of a sample of 4,431. Sheesh. 44% disliking the Euro up from 38% in April still shows an interesting trend, but it isn't nearly as exciting as 98%. An embarrassing slip on the part of the Telegraph. Can we charitably assume that their correspondent at The Hague had been making a commendable but overenthusiastic attempt to immerse himself in Dutch culture? Tuesday, September 03, 2002
Monday, September 02, 2002
I can spell "ninety". But I can't edit that last post. I was going to wonder some more about the fact that Holland is prosperous, stable, at the heart of Europe geographically, historically and philosophically, and still ninety eight percent of the Dutch (if the poll is valid) don't like the Euro now they have it. They nearly all speak perfect English. Honorary Anglosphere? Ninety Eight . A Dutch poll finds that's the percentage of Dutch respondents who would like their Guilders back. Anyone miss that? Nintey eight per cent. Why isn't this bigger news? Sleep easy, dear friends. If you can. There is an illuminating debate at Post Politics in response to Susanna Cornett's graphic comparison of terrorists to "ordinary" sadistic killers that I posted earlier (linked to within the PP post also). Ram Ahluwalia writes, "it is precisely the fact that the pleasure derives from a goal and a specific enemy that sets the terrorist apart from the remorseless sociopath." Follow the link to see Susanna Cornett's reply. The Champion of Fun! That's how Hunter S. Thompson describes himself. Talk about cool, writing for Rolling Stone magazine and all. And all that 'gonzo' stuff - don't you feel a little thrill inside because you know what it means? Now Tim Blair says he's even more of a cult figure than we thought. Just not a very nice cult. On a point of theology, a gentleman called Ossian writes to correct me: In "olden days," it was not assumed that the souls of the unbaptized infant went to Hell but to a theologoumenon which was termed Limbo, where they enjoyed at best a natural happiness but not the Beatific Vision. The Roman Church taught that one was not condemned to Hell if through no fault of one's own one had not heard and accepted the Gospel.Point taken - but the fear that the unbaptized would go to hell was widespread, even if it the official doctrine was and is that we don't really know what happens to unbaptized innocents (but we do know that God is merciful). Many an inquisitor or persecutor has convinced himself that he was doing good because of this fear. More discussion back where it started, on the Edge of England's Sword.
"Brick Dust In the Wind" John Weidner does something unusual: he thinks about the people of Iraq and Iran. He argues that the West's history of surrender to terrorism has not just - not even mostly - harmed Westerners, but has killed thousands upon thousands of Iraqis and Iranians. The rot didn't start with Jimmy Carter, though. It started when Edward Heath capitulated to hijackers by freeing Leila Khaled.
Blogger ate a previous version of this post, and then devoured a whole series of posts marked "test" for dessert. If it ever spews it up again, you'll see two similar posts, and you'll know why. Tsujigiri. . Mark Sloboda used to translate Japanese for a living. He writes, I wasn't familiar with the term (it doesn't come up naturally in computer science or robotics) so I checked my giant general purpose Japanese-Japanese dictionary, and to my surprise the term was there, with a brief comment about the practice being outlawed at the beginning of the Edo period. It's hard work, this getting older business. As soon as I get used to repeatedly finding that much that I thought history is myth I start finding out that my favourite myths are history. Sunday, September 01, 2002
Cutsey anecdote true after all? Alan McCallum of Amax weblog writes:
Scroll down Amax for discussion of the awfulness of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ("If his guests get any colder Mr Fregus will be into resurrections") , the prospect of a new force in Australian politics ("The new Democrat off-shoot party could be called The DemoCats. Think of all the fence sitting they do"), and yet more theology, but this time from the atheist point of view. Though Mr McCallum does admit, and even provide evidence for, the existence of hobgoblins and faeries. His examples seemed pretty conclusive to me. Saturday, August 31, 2002
Swarms of souls, reprise: Iain Murray replies: I have often used myself the argument that we mortals cannot hope to comprehend the workings of an omnisicient, omnipotent, infinite mind (although "mind" seems to me too little a word to describe what's going on), and so I see your point, although the same argument also applies to your argument about baptism and hell. How can we be sure that we know what is just and unjust? (But that's a quibble, and I'm pretty sure you're right on that issue.)My reply (and Ian's, I am sure, had he cared to pursue it - the whole debate is well-known) to the argument sometimes put forward by terrorists and wacky cults both Christian and Islamic that it is OK to kill babies because they die innocent and go straight to heaven is that God has made it clear by scripture (as the Onion put it, "Which bit of thou shalt not kill don't you understand?' "), by tradition, and by providing the vast majority of mankind with instincts to cherish life and protect infants that it is very much not OK. The cliché-monger in me now wants to say, "From the sublime to the ridiculous" and start talking about Thomas the Tank Engine. But the transition is not so ridiculous as all that; theology is useless if it does not lead to and reinforce the perception that love (exemplified by child and parent sharing a storybook) is good and hatred and malice bad. I am suffering cruelly from Thomas withdrawal systems. Time was when I knew every cranny of the Fat Controller's realm like the back of my hand. I knew what number Boco was. Man, I knew what number Bear was. The Thomas duvet cover passed from older to younger child in the manner of the Olympic torch. Then a dreadful day came when even the youngest said firmly, "I'm too old for Thomas now." And we came unto Pokémon and Power Rangers. O tempora! O mores!
Rice among the skyscrapers. Jim Bennett writes: No discussion of eminent domain is complete without reference to Japan. Basically, they have no almost no eminent domain or planning and zoning. They deal with hold-outs by paying them more, or in extreme cases by building around them. Read Tokyo: The City at the End of the World, by Peter Popham (1985) for a discussion of this and a great photo of a tiny rice farm surrounded by skyscrapers -- a holdout resolved in the Japanese manner. How they dealt with railways, the book didn't say."Japan, the great anomaly. It's a pity that my knowledge of Japan has focussed the quaint at the expense of the relevant. Did you know that there is a single Japanese word meaning "to try out one's sword by taking the head of a passing stranger"? No, neither did I know it, because it is just the sort of cutsey anecdote that is likely to be completely fraudulent. But Japanese accomplishment is not fraudulent, for all their recent troubles. I will track down that book! If the Japanese have managed to raise mighty cities without denying the rights of the holders of the land then they are an example to us all. I do hope they managed the same trick with their famously efficient railways. However I recall violent struggles in the 60s and 70s over the building of Narita airport, which, if I have correctly understood this 1999 statement by farmers in the area, do seem to have involved government force. The smell of government force was in the air in '99, too, as another runway was planned, though the wording suggests the use of it is not so accepted among the Japanese as among us.
A second "temporary" runway was indeed built in time for the World Cup this summer. My fellow-feeling for the farmers of Toho hamlet is so acute that not even the fact that their plight was sympathetically recorded by Palestine Indymedia can diminish it.
Friday, August 30, 2002
Why doesn't the Labour party behave the way that they want Oxford University to? They would oblige the University to take on a candidate because she has coped admirably with her disability. But this disabled woman is suing the Labour party for discrimination. For once, my sympathies are with Blair and his team. The woman sounds a drip. Given that she spent five years in a state of nervous prostration because she didn't get the job she wanted, then just how likely is it that she would have been up to facing Matthew Parris on a roll? (Alas the full withering blast of Parris's article on Blair's visitation to St Saviour's and St Olave's Primary school is muffled by the fact that the Times demands a subscription to read it. But it contained lines like this: "When the Prime Minister told them that he had come to win not just votes but hearts, one girl, drawing her blouse up at her midriff, placed the collar over her head. It was an eloquent response.")
The deaf girl rejected from Oxford sounded a far more competent and resilient character. Even so, Labour dudes, irrespective of the merits of this particular case it looks as though you don't apply the principle that 'the best poster-child must get the position' to your own affairs. Thanks for getting sued in such a timely manner and making me look prophetic. A swarm of souls. Iain Murray has a post about the scientific and theological aspects of abortion. Abortion is one of the many subjects about which I may never fully sort out my opinion. I am broadly against it, certainly. Late term, and particularly "partial-birth" abortion is clearly murder, and will one day be classed with the Aztec sacrifices in the record of human barbarity. At the other extreme, the microscopic bundle of cells that is all there is in the first days after conception just does not engage my sympathy, potential human being or not.
That isn't what I want to talk about today. To me this post was most interesting where it touched on the nature of souls and heaven: Yet this argument does not account for multiple births, as the individuals do not split until several days after conception. Is it one soul until the split? Or two souls attached to the single embryo? This is not an easy problem to solve.and All told, only about one-third of sperm-egg unions result in babies, even when abortion is not a factor. Do each of these embryos have a soul too? If so, then (using down and dirty simplistic renditions) heaven is going to be occupied by a lot of souls that have never heard Christ's teachings. That's pretty weird theologically speaking.I have no idea what the actual answer is to either question. But it strikes me that both your worries hinge on what the human mind finds hard to imagine. The human mind is limited. A believer can rest assured that the Divine mind is not. The question as to the souls of twins is fascinating, but not any more of an obstacle to belief than the question as to the point at which any soul begins. (That being the question, you will recall, that I could not answer.) God's book-keeping, however it is managed, does not slip up; he already sees the lives of those twins in their entirety.*
It may or may not be the case that heaven is full of the souls of embryos - but if so, the question it raises is not new to theology. We all already knew that in most ages up to half of all babies die before reaching the age of five. Such souls are not denied Christ's teaching; they are getting it direct! The real mystery is why God chooses to have some of us run the obstacle course of life first.
What happens to babies and/or embryos who are not baptised is a related issue. In olden times it was believed that they went to Hell. I find it absurd to suppose that God, the origin of all goodness, would be so unjust, or unjust at all.
This is all rather similar to recent debate as to whether God can cope administratively, so to speak, with people being revived cryogenically. Don't worry. He can.
*To see from a standpoint outside time is not to control. They still have free will. One thing I love about the internet is the way that you can reach straight through the layers and get a response from the person you - er - referred to unfavourably in your blog this morning. Dawsonians versus Scoobie. Thursday, August 29, 2002
Freedom and Whisky said, read this. And in turn I say it. It is an unflinching examination of terrorist motives from Cut on The Bias. Not one to read with the kids looking over your shoulder. Words and deeds. Hokiepundit started thinking about languages and ended up discussing the the European/Anglo divide. "...English solves the problem by simply appropriating or creating words to fill in the gap (English has over twice as many words as any other language, with second place going to German), while Latin tinkers with what's already extant. It then occurred to me that this can also be applied to the Anglospheric (I really would like a better term for that, by the way) and Western European ways of thinking (actually, I think that the Germanic people are still somewhat awkward in their acceptance of Romance thinking, but that could be a whole post in and of itself). Anglos value economy over conservation, though if conservation is efficient, it becomes economical. Europeans are more inward-looking and tend to go more by what they already know.When I saw this, I thought, "Wow, yes, true!" Then I wasn't so sure. Mind you, Hokie himself might say the same. His style is to put down his thoughts as they strike him and then reconsider later if need be. I'm not complaining; it's a blog not a doctoral thesis. UPDATE: A gentleman called Gene 6-pack (a name which surely must caused him some embarassment at school) wrote: The Germans do not have a whole lot of words. They have just a few gutturals that they repeat and repeat.That is a very naughty thing to say. School's out. The Telegraph says let 'em go at fourteen if they want to. Dang. I should have written this one. It's right up there in my rant rankings at #3 or #4. I was a teacher for one strange year, and I well recall how one of the dull-eyed youths to whom I failed to impart any physics would suddenly become lively and talkative when he discussed his ambition to be a hairdresser. If he had been free to leave that day and commence cutting hair, he and I would have parted friends. Alas, I was obliged to hover over his shoulder nagging and threatening him. Pity. Wednesday, August 28, 2002
BeSeen no more. Oh, frabjuous day. Not. They've closed down BeSeen free web counters. Does anyone, by any chance or mysterious working of caches, know where I'd got to on my counter? And Blogger won't post.
Life's hard for us scroungers. Do I ask a lot out of life? All I want is air, warmth, food, water and effortless free access to marvels of technology unknown to even the emperors of yesteryear. And those incompetent multinational fat cats can't manage even that.
On the other hand a comforting burst of Google Self-abuse gave me 9,250 mentions. Go on. Make it ten thousand. Quote of the Day: "Time and again, the Arabs spit in the face of the West, and the West pretends that it’s raining." - Joseph Alexander Norland, writing in Dawson Speaks. "Exam success doesn't qualify you for any of the great positions. If you're very clever, the Treasury isn't obliged to take you on, whatever Gordon Brown has said about Magdalen and Laura Spence," was a marvellous argument-clincher from Simon Carr in the Independent. I love turning the tables. Carr makes a good point that Oxbridge selection, like all personnel selection, is often and justly more concerned with how the selector will get along with the selectee than with actual cleverness. Let's insist that all Gordon Brown and Tony Blair's political advisers (with whom the politicians must rub shoulders daily) must be multiply-qualified, disabled, ethnic and sexual minorities, irrespective of any flair the candidates might have for the work. BANANA DOT COM. Iain Murray writes, When I worked at the DOT, planning rail lines that needed compulsory purchase powersOh, so it was you, was it? Right mate, you'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes. we called it BANANA -- Build Absolutely Nothing, Anywhere, Near Anyone.I agree. Long ago I was chugging towards the Channel Tunnel with a bunch of Treasury guys. Someone (conceivably it was me in a foolish moment) made the then-commonplace observation that it was an absolute disgrace that the journey from Dover to London took however-many hours while that from Coquelles to Paris took three and a half minutes. Yup," said one man proudly. "I did that." For the next half hour as we meandered through the leafy stations he would make such comments as, "That's one town that won't be ripped to bits. Saved three million pounds, too."
I saw a sad thing that day when we got over to France. Reaching into the French entrance to the tunnel is a vast loop of road. And sitting in the middle of the loop, just visible in the dip of a hill, is an untouched but half-abandoned village. There were then still some old people living there, surrounded by the roar of the road, looking as if their entire hamlet had been wrapped in a force-field by car-shaped aliens and transported to the See The Wild Humans safari park. Thanks also to Robert Martin and David Gillies who also supplied BANANAs. Mr Gillies added, As for the controversy of whether new airports are justified - that's classic Coase theory, which of course is neatly derailed by compulsory purchase/eminent domain, whathaveyou - one of the most (if not the most) pernicious measures in the power of government in supposedly free-market societies. The trailing colon is not a medical condition but the result of some glitch preventing me from editing the previous post. What I wanted to ask was, how exactly does one get "duped", as Prince Ahmad bin Abdul-Aziz tactfully described the plight of our hapless military official, into firing an anti-aircraft missile? Did the Al-Qa'eda sympathiser pretend it was all a prank he was playing - "go on, press the button, I abjure you, for assuredly it will make much smoke and my American friend up there laugh so jolly!" - or did the Al-Qa'eda boy make out this nice box with all the buttons was the latest Nintendo GameCube, perhaps? After all, one can't expect a Saudi official to know the ins and outs of all those infidel geegaws strewn all over his office; what else are Pakistanis for? Seems like everybody's so sensitive nowadays... Now the Americans have got in a huff just because a Saudi military official tried to shoot down one of their aeroplanes. Fuss about nothing, really. The poor chap was just an innocent sucker: Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Wot, No Moppets? This is terrible. It seems the Palestinian authorities have gone and taken offence at the way not everyone likes the Moppets & Martyrs™ piccies and aren't going to let us see them no more. LGF reports. (If the link doesn't go straight there, scroll down to "Harming the Cause"). Bring back our Moppets! Write to your Palestinian Authority TV station now! C'mon guys, we did it for Star Trek!
Thanks for the thanks, Chris. Chris Bertram just dropped me a nice e-mail. So what am I going to do to maintain my reputation as the Wicked Witch of West Essex? Bash out a whole screed of argufying about an earlier post in which Prof. Bertram is a little unfair to Stephen Den Beste and to a libertarian subspecies, that's what. Here's the relevant quote: "For what it's worth I see Den Beste's position as being a rather typical example of a rather unattractive ideology: libertarianism within borders, authoritarianism outside. Individual rights are to be protected against the coercive power of the state, just so long as the right-holders are fellow citizens. Outsiders are legimate targets for coercion so long as that suits "national interest". "Libertarianism within borders" is a recognizable strand of opinion, but I doubt if any but its least thoughtful proponents hold it on the grounds described there. I am not quite sure whether I am or am not a within-borders Libertarian, but certainly some of my opinions end up with results that can sound rather similar, despite my firm belief that every human being has the same basic rights. Here's how I and some others end up where we do: The key point for most would be that a world government - any world government - would be fatal for liberty. Liberty is kept alive by diversity of jurisdictions. Even if you can't physically flee to another, freer country, the mere knowledge of its existence keeps the flame burning among the oppressed and takes the heart out of oppressors. So we sort-of like borders, not because we like people being stopped from moving across them, but because we like the fact that no prince can extend his arm across all of them.
Competition among countries is good for scientific and cultural progress, too. A commonly cited example is the way that that Imperial China's ocean going fleets were mothballed as the result of some instantly forgettable power struggle at Court. Click! One bad decision in a unified state was enough to write China out of the "Winners of History" chapter in the textbooks of the next several centuries. Compare Columbus in fragmented Europe, going from king to king until he found someone to fund his voyage of exploration. We fear that the Chinese stagnation might overtake the whole world if the UN gets its way: without the competitiveness and mere difference provided by there being many different countries some ideas will never be taken up and some ideas will never even be conceived.
A third point is that you can be a messianic libertarian for all mankind, wild as a wolf and an inveterate enemy of every state on earth and yet still feel yourself rooted in history. If you are American that means that you will not merely observe from on high that this or that aspect of the US Constitution or American history generally has been benefical to libertarian ideals. You are much more likely to see the relationship between the American people and their Constitution as a something close to an epic of faith, with overtones of the Book of Exodus. I am not even American and yet I feel real outrage when the Constitution is (note the word) violated. Because of the special place in history held by the Constitution it really is worse, more dangerous, when it is violated than when other countries' less epoch-making constitutions are violated. This would be an easy attitude to mock, but I do not mock it. I share it (while thinking that Mr Den Beste overstresses the extent to which America is different and better.) I also hold to the British equivalent: I see the latest moves to end the double jeopardy rule not merely as bad in themselves but also as Blair betraying the hard-won rights of Englishmen, squandering his inheritance.
Advantage blogosphere! Disadvantage The Independent, and anyone who wants freedom of education. The Indy has an article today headed "Pioneers of education at home toast their 25-year revolution. I keep getting "gateway timeout" every time I try link to it. Those cursed Goa'uld, always plotting! When I do finally defeat the alien machinations you will see that it is a workmanlike article sympathetically reporting Iris Harrison's long struggle to be allowed to educate her children at home, as 50,000 UK children now are educated. A side panel describes, again sympathetically, a case history: "When Jan Price's bullied son tried to kill himself she knew school was not for him." As soon as I saw the words "home education" I homed in. I assumed that the Indy had heard of the latest threat to home schooling, as described by Brian Micklethwait and was on the case. Not so. Blissful Indy ignorance suffuses the whole article. No doubt the letters column tomorrow will let them know that even such quintessential Independent readers as the average British home-schooler will not be left alone by Brussels.
The Ignorant. It is. Are you?Monday, August 26, 2002
NIMBYs of the world, unite! Oops. My thanks to the 1,029,561 readers who pointed out that NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is certainly heard all over the English speaking world, and probably originated in the US. I really should have guessed that it did not originate in the UK as we usually say "back garden", not "back yard", even if it clearly is a yard with not a blade of grass to be seen between the antique fridges and fashionably "distressed" Vauxhall Carltons left there For Display Purposes Only. We have just acquired a Vauxhall Carlton. It does go, except when it doesn't.
NIABY (Not In Anyone's Back Yard), though, is my own coinage. Feel free to spread the meme. More Catholic than the Pope. I preen. I adjust my whiskers with a self-satisfied paw as I bask in the sunlight of being more libertarian than the Libertarian Alliance's transport spokesman. The prolific Patrick Crozier (he of the three solo blogs, UK Transport, This Blog Has No Title and Croziervision - can he keep it up?) apologetically comes out in favour of compulsory purchase. Patrick, have you been playing with those nasty statist kids down at that trainspotter's newsgroup again? You have picked up some very naughty phrases.
Nope, this line-of-joke is getting too snotty. Think I'll do the job seriously, as it deserves. Patrick, you correctly point out that our modern world was built by compulsory purchase - even going back to the canals and the pioneering railways - and incorrectly infer that we should therefore go on doing it.
Before I charge off on that argument, though, I must add one small historical note - you are no doubt aware of this, but I think it needs to be brought to the foreground. Although the the early railways were built on the strength of compulsory purchase it was a less bad sort of compulsory purchase than we have today. The initiative for the creation of railways came from entrepreneurs not from the executive, and there was no use of an executive power of purchase. The purchases were carried out by private Acts of Parliament and these were argued for and against in Parliament acting almost as a court in which the Bill finally enacted could be seen as a judgement in a court of law. (The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Act had to be presented three times before it was passed.) The same was true of the Enclosure Acts. I am far from admiring any sort of compulsory purchase, but at least in these days the arguments revolved around specific proposals rather than an amorphous and unarguable notion of "public interest".
Back to the main theme. Patrick writes: With all but a few minor exceptions every canal, every railway and for all I know every road and every airport built in the UK was built with compulsory purchase powers.True. And every country in the modern world was built upon conquest, yet we eschew it now. Dr Benson does give the example of pipelines that have been built without compulsory purchase. Which is interesting. But I am forced to wonder if the only reason they succeeded is that pipelines can go from A to B via just about any route you like while roads etc have to go from A to B via C, D and E.That "have to" is unjustified. Just as roads sometimes divert around physical obstacles such as mountains, or political ones such as national borders, or environmental ones such as the nesting sites of Great Crested Newts, so let them sometimes divert around people-obstacles. It is pleasant to dream about the world we would have had if they had always done this. Imagine, the nesting-sites of mere humans might be considered as sacrosanct as those of newts! What I think this debate boils down to is this: I believe that railways, roads and airports are essential and if that means riding roughshod over a few libertarian principles then too bad. I did not enjoy writing that one little bit.Even if I conceded that compulsory purchase was once necessary, there's a big difference between railways, roads and airports being essential and more railways, roads and airports being essential. We could very well live with what we've got. (I mean compulsorily-purchased ones; anything built without the use of force is fine by me.) Does the dividing line between a guilty past that can nonetheless be lived with and a sudden change in behaviour starting now sound arbitrary and self-serving? It's only the same dividing line that comes up in any discussion of morality; it's the present and the future that we can change. As I said before, all the world employs some sort of dividing line when talking about conquest. The Americans don't give back America to the Indians; but they don't - whatever some twits say about Iraq - go in for the conquest business any more. We don't have to start digging up the runway at Heathrow in order to move towards an ethical system of procurement of land for future airports. (I haven't even started on the effects of the internet on transport, which I had intended as the second major rant in this post! Is Your Journey Really Necessary? More another day.)
Thursday, August 22, 2002
Nifty tow trucks those AA guys have. The extending bar thing is really interesting, as are the giant carabiners that they use to fix the front wheels of your car. And the real-life patrolman was as helpful and knowledgeable as any you might see in an advert. Yes, when it's not messing about appointing itself as a lobby group, the Automobile Association is a fine organisation. Yes. I'm back. Our chauffeur-driven return was greeted with an enthusiasm not seen since the last time we broke down and, that time, delighted the neighbours by being driven home in a passing police car. But don't expect to hear much from me tomorrow. I have to unpack, and sort out a car. |
