Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
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Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Adventures on the Internet. I found this useful site about toys for rabbits via Instapundit. Really - scroll down. Die, evil waste paper bin! Know the wrath of my claws, human-thing. Midnight, the Killer Bunny, is happy. Good news from Africa and India. Small, cheap private schools are educating actual majorities of the children in some cities. If this keeps going, in a generation or two the stereotype of the wretched, illiterate African or Indian will survive only in Guardian editorials. So why can't we have this good magic over here? Monday, January 20, 2003
A reader, Nick, writes, regarding the post about Robin Page two down: "I've just seen your blog and agree 100% with you. I'm a Londoner, vote Labour and am not pro-hunting.I replied: "Yes - a point that needs to be made to both right and left-wingers is that "what they do to the people you don't like today they'll do to the people you do like tomorrow."Then I thought, if the point needs to be made, why don't you make it on the blog. So there you are. The stupid Telegraph computer won't let me register. If you are more favoured and want to see a sad story, buy the paper or scan the UK "other news" section for the story of a lecturer, Richard Browning, who was fired from his job as a photography lecturer at Doncaster college. Why? Not drunkeness. Not idleness. Not drug addiction. Not sexual indiscretions with students of the opposite sex, nor indeed the same sex. None of these things.* His offence was that he allowed a student to bring in and use a completely harmless toy plastic rifle - it didn't fire anything whatsoever, not so much as plastic ball bearings - as a prop in a photography assignment. I feel so much safer now he's gone.
*He'd be well advised to claim to have done any or all of them and to be a victim of persecution on that account.
UPDATE: Thank you, Momma Bear, for supplying me with a link to the story mentioned above. (I still can't get in to see it myself - anyone know what I ought to be doing? I don't mind registering, and have even resisted the temptation to put myself down as a three year old male residing in Western Samoa. And I thought I'd done that "enable cookie" thing. My cookies, I said with pardonable pride, had self-esteem as high as any biscuit in the Home Counties. Alas they still seem to be, uh, differently-abled cookies who can't do the job I bought them for but do nonetheless have many meaningful skills and competencies not sufficiently valued by patriarchal and oppressive computer environments.) Robin Page gives his account of what happened to him after he was called in for police questioning after speaking at a country fair to urge support for the upcoming Countryside Alliance march. Readers who think that far too much has been made of this, that Robin Page is bit of a troublemaker, that no one who rights for Right Now! magazine can possibly be deserving of sympathy, that really the police were just doing their job, responding to complaints and all, might like to consider this, the text of an advert in placed in Frampton's local paper by the police:
"Claims that Frampton Country Fair earlier this year was hijacked by the pro-hunting lobby are being investigated by Stonehouse Police. Countryside campaigner Robin Page was accused of bombarding visitors with pro-hunting propaganda during his commentary at the Country Fair in September. Sgt. Geoff Clark of Stonehouse Police would like to hear from anyone who was offended by the commentary. He can be contacted on 0845 090 1234." Well. The first point I'd like to make is that country fairs are, in fact, pro-hunting. That's what they are for, and often what they were founded for centuries ago, to celebrate country amusements including those some consider barbaric. Like that or hate it there is no "hijacking" there. But that is a minor point. What astonishes me is that Her Majesty's Police are placing adverts in the paper trawling for informants to nail a named individual for... for what, exactly? For politicising an event that the other people think should not be political? That's not illegal. It happens all the time on the left; "the personal is political", as they rightly say. For bombarding people with propaganda? That's not illegal either. Happens all the time on TV, with the government and the police themselves propagandists-in-chief. Dammit, are you getting how annoyed I am by this? Some copper sits down at his desk and takes as his task for today in the battle against crime the initiation of an official police investigation of the possiblility that pro-hunting lobby might be getting too much influence at a country fair. (About this "hijacking" - the organisers of the fair must have known Page's views when they picked him as a commentator, and presumably picked him for the job because of them - did they complain of any "hijacking?" If not, then that word, placed on record in an official communication by the police, is close to libel.) Then the copper whips off a little advert looking for narks to come forward over this purely political offence. And the local newspaper, that exemplar and defender of our ancient liberties, prints it, yes Officer, thank you for your custom, Officer, always glad to help the boys in blue, that'll be £17.56 including VAT. And no one very much thinks that this is odd, this is new, this is not what Britain used to be. UPDATE: I am reminded that it was not so many years ago that we did not even have "Wanted" posters in Britain, for fear that the presumption of innocence might be violated. And now the police ape the tabloids by asking, in effect, for any dirt readers can supply on a named individual. Funny how they don't do this for burglary, isn't it? It's almost as if the political offender has fewer rights than the old sort of criminal we used to bother about. Sunday, January 19, 2003
Buy, yes buy, a paper copy of the Mail On Sunday today. They have a story about some TV chick the German Chancellor is shagging. You care not about the paramours of foreign potentates? Buy it anyway. The point is that it's a test case about whether British courts are supreme or whether the EU can over-rule them. Apparently Lover-boy Gerhart has got an injunction to suppress the story in Germany and is claiming that under EU law that means he can suppress it here too. Friday, January 17, 2003
Your HOT SEXY blog topic of the week. Belgian Trade Unions. According to these guys, one of the confederations concerned, it's not three permitted unions exactly, more three permitted confederations of unions. Not a lot better. How much of Europe thinks this a model for the future, I wonder? Why should I care? Here's why. I have no particular brief for Vlaams Blok, the Flemish nationalist party. They appear to have some racist and anti-semitic currents flowing in their river, and some accounts i have read of their origins are disturbing. (Not that the Socialists can think themselves any better in the murky past department; their then leader De Man called the Nazi victory of 1940 "a deliverance."*) But whatever you think of the party, there is much to cause unease in this account in "The Flemish Republic" of moves by the Belgian state to suppress them. The Belgian trade unions exclude everyone who is known to be a Vlaams Blok member. However, in Corporatist Belgium the unions hand out the unemployment benefits (a task for which the government pays them), so the consequences of such exclusion can be severe. The party is also denied access to the government-owned networks. The Flemish Broadcasting Corporation (VRT) has adopted a charter stating that it does not provide a platform for “opinions that propagate exclusion.”Italics mine. I don't believe in state unmemployment benefits at all. But if you are going to hand them out to anyone, then hand them out to everyone who has no job. The idea of who gets the dole being decided on political grounds is really scary. The article speaks elsewhere of there being only three trade unions allowed in Belgium: a Christian one, a Socialist one and a Liberal one. I was not clear if this is still true or refers to the past. But that pattern is something to fear - the very European pattern of a particular set of permitted opinions being set in stone by vested interests.
And that's not all. Some 15% of Belgians are, it seems, in danger of being forbidden to vote for the party of their choice. On 10 September new judicial proceedings against the party were started in Brussels. Because Belgian judges are political appointees, the Belgian regime of Louis Michel and Guy Verhofstadt hopes to succeed in its aim to designate the party as an illegal organisation, so that it can be prevented from participating in the next general elections, which are due at the latest in June 2003. (Article found via the Libertarian Alliance Forum) *I was sceptical of this claim. But I found chapter and verse in, of all places, this Stalinist website.
Iain Murray is in the Spectator, saying that burglars burgle unless they're in jug. Although one Spectator article won't compensate financially for his being sacked for blogging, it does serve as a reminder that that it's hard to keep a good man down. Hey, just noticed something about the story below. It was a little neglectful of Ackland not to mention that he himself was presenter of Media Watch in 1998-99. Tim Blair once opined that Ackland was the only semi-tolerable presenter the programme ever had. Or is Media Watch so well known that everybody in Australia knows the history of who fronts it without being told? "Plagiarism is to journalists as pedophilia is to the general community." Thus said Richard Carleton who made a documentary on Srebrenica for an Australian TV series called 60 Minutes. He said it in court while trying to sue the pants off the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Media Watch, personified by former presenter Paul Barry. The Sydney Morning Herald's Richard Ackland tells the story. Briefly, Carelton made his documentary about Srebrenica. Media Watch said (or came close to saying in an airy-fairy keep-the-lawyers-happy way) that it was plagiarism of an earlier BBC documentary. Carelton sued. The judge agreed with Carelton. He said that his doc was not plagiarised. He said that ABC's Media Watch, the self-appointed guardian of virtue was itself unfair and lazy - and he's not the first or the only one to say that, either. Nonetheless the judge found for ABC. Essentially he found in favour of free speech even while granting it was unfair speech. The right decision... I think.
The rest of the article talks about sloppy reporting of a was-it or wasn't-it paedophilia case to which I do not know the background, but writer Ackland does manage to slip in the cruellest aside I have heard in a long time: "Journalists believed they had sufficient evidence to support an accusation that the Campbelltown solicitor was a pedophile, which you'll appreciate is akin to calling a journalist a plagiarist." (Italics mine.)
Thursday, January 16, 2003
Synchronicity "...So there’s Richard, walking east on Q Street, N.W., carrying a massive framed photograph of Miss Dietrich under his arm and toward his home just six blocks away. - Jim Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review, reminiscing about his friend and hair stylist, who died recently. It is one of life's underrated pleasures to progress down the public street carrying, pushing or rolling some bizarre item with an air of nonchalance. The spirit of the thing requires that there is some perfectly sensible reason for for your behaviour. Armed with that reason you can muster the right air of courteous puzzlement at being addressed by a stranger when someone asks about the dalek. I was shocked to learn this morning that Iain Murray of The Edge of England's Sword has been sacked for blogging. I simply don't know what to say, except that Edge's many loyal readers will share my acute sympathy for Iain's situation. Now would be a good time to hit the tips jar, too. Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Who cares about care workers? In today's Guardian Polly Toynbee has a heartfelt piece about working in an old people's home. She eloquently describes the sad sights of old age: incontinence, drooling, paralysis, dementia. She then asks, passionately: "The standard week here was 42 hours. That earned just £203.70. Of all the jobs I did, none made me so outraged at the pay. How could such good work be worth so shamefully little? Whenever anyone accuses me of naivety in imagining that these things can be changed, if anyone lectures me on the immutable laws of the market, I just ask them how they can justify paying £203.70 a week for work such as this?"Well, she'll never read this and so she'll be spared my lecture on the immutable laws of the market. And you, reader, can get away from my lecture with just a click. But for anyone still listening, here goes. One short answer to why such good work can be worth so shamefully little is because if it was worth more (by which she means "if it was paid more") then fewer bums would get wiped. Old ladies stuck on the loo would go longer calling and calling for the nurse. Old men who had lost control of their bladders would go longer without their catheters being changed. What Ms Toynbee wants, I assume, is for the minimum wage to go up. If it does, care homes take on fewer staff. (Market, immutable laws of: No. 1) She'd have an answer for that, of course: what she really wants is for the state to run care homes and/or for the state to raise a special or general tax the proceeds of which would go to paying care home staff, so just as many could be taken on and all would be well. But the bad news is fewer bums would still get wiped. Because truth will out. If it costs more to hire staff at Government Care Home #35409 then one way or another fewer staff will be hired, and the fact that the employer is the state makes no difference to that at all. Except, perhaps, to how honest the employers are about their motives. They'll call it "budget constraints". They'll call it "reassignment of priorities" and just by coincidence they'll discover that their priority this year is A&E or preventative medicine, and anyway the latest medical research reveals that bums don't need to be wiped as often as once thought - "it's called Just In Time Care Management, doncherknow." This will happen because a whole bunch of bureacrats' jobs will depend on targets being seen to be met, so it makes sense for them to move the targets. They have the power to arrange these things. The care workers, still less the ex-care workers now unemployable at the new rate of pay, do not.
Another short answer, one that Ms Toynbee has heard and didn't like, judging from the fact that she demanded of those who gave it, "how they can justify paying £203.70 a week for work such as this?" is that a great many people can do the job. A care worker needs a kind heart, patience, common sense, the conscientiousness to stick to procedures and maintain standards, a certain amount of physical strength and the ability to overcome physical distaste. These qualities are admirable but not rare. Ms Toynbee's wording implies that confronted with her "how can you justify..." everyone falls silent in shame. I don't see why. Rarity does influence price. Polly Toynbee gets a high salary as a Guardian correspondent because the skills needed (of writing to time and theme, research, eloquence and self-promotion) are comparatively rare. If she thinks that is so outrageous, will she voluntarily reduce her pay to that of a care worker?
Rather than the hated supply and demand, Ms Toynbee blames low pay on "the low value society places on women's work." The qualities I have listed are indeed more often found amid women than men. And, unlike many of my readers, perhaps, I quite agree with her that society does place an unfairly low value on women's work. I gather that in nearly every society, whatever the women do is valued less than what the men do. In some African tribes the women do all the farming while the men hang around the village and talk local politics, and guess which they regard as important. All very regrettable - but where best to look to defeat this deep-seated trend common to all humanity: state bureaucrats as deeply imbued with it as anyone else or the impersonal market? I'd go for the market. In the long run it plays no favourites as to race, class or sex. The market nowadays says that the humble plumber, a working man, is paid more than a university lecturer: a transformation to amaze and delight any nineteenth century socialist. The market says that an honest and reliable cleaning lady can choose her own customers once her reputation is established, and nothing about the low value placed on women's work by society stops this happening. In the ruthlessly capitalist world of sport, black athletes rise to the top whether white sports officials like it or not.
There's another side to the question, one that is rarely made explicit. Many women and some men would rather work in a care home than be a company director, or, more accurately, start the long process of self-education and jockeying for promotion that might result in being made company director and certainly would result in promotion to lower or middle management. It is considered outrageous to even suggest that anyone who works in a low-paid job has any choice in the matter, but they do, and, please note, I am not criticising their choice. There are good things about working in a care home. You have the satisfaction of being useful, and, in many cases, of being loved. Your hours may be long or inconvenient, but you don't take the job home with you. You don't have to sack anyone. You don’t have to give anyone a telling-off. You don’t have to give presentations in public. You don’t have to wade through reams of reports or write them yourself. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to understand National Insurance or company law. You don’t have to do any maths. You don't have to sell anything or put yourself forward. (You reading this! Which would you rather do today, change an adult nappy or cold-call five households in your area and try to flog them double glazing?) You have access to free meals and to an enormous industrial washing machine and tumble-dryer. (Don’t knock it: one care-worker I know hasn’t done a wash at home in years.) Finally, everybody thinks that you are a good person by virtue of your job. All in all, I'd rather work in a care home than be a swanky company director. Before you ask, no, I've never done either. But I have had personal experience of the sometimes distasteful jobs involved in looking after old and confused people, and I've lived on as little as a care worker does.
I haven’t even covered the question of state control versus the market in deciding whether old people go into care homes at all – and how long they stay at one institution. Many, perhaps most, old men and women, would have preferred to grow old in their own homes. There could have been scope for literally millions of people to be employed as carers for them. The terrors and indignities of old age would be softened by a personal relationship and familiar surroundings. There is evidence that the onset of senility is actually delayed for those old people who live in their own homes. Of course a raft of government regulations make this impossible for all but those with well above average incomes. So we send ‘em to care homes, and even then, the government can’t keep its paws off. Many, many private care homes have been closed down in recent years when the cost of complying with absurd “safety” regulations and “standards” became too much. So the old people are shoved into the hospitals at the age of eighty-five and die, disoriented and miserable, by the thousands. Some safety. Some standards. But why wave their shrouds in front of Ms Toynbee’s face - what's she got to do with all that? Because it was brought about by people of exactly her cast of mind; well-meaning, passionately caring people who wanted the best standards for our old people. They decided that the (yes) immutable law of the market that if you make running something one long hassle and expense then people won’t do it anymore could be overridden by mere act of benevolent will.
Perhaps I’ve said more than enough about care workers. In the latter half of her article, Ms Toynbee turns to social anomie among her neighbours in her block of flats. (I'm a little surprised that she appears to live in a council block. Surely she can't qualify for a council flat herself? Perhaps it's one of those mixed blocks where some of the flats have been bought from the council under Right To Buy legislation and some haven't. Quite a few journos live in surprisingly tough areas for the easy access to London.* - see explanatory update at base of this post.) Once again she should ask herself which is crueller, “the immutable laws of the market” or her preferred system, government control. It seems one of her fellow residents, “Mr B”, is is a drunk and worse who consorts with crack dealers. She mentions other disreputable and violent neighbours who have made life a misery for the decent people around them. She mentions, all innocent of the implications, how hard it is to evict people. The rest of the tenants really thought they had seen the last of Mr B after one episode, but, no, he was given yet another warning and remains in place. She should ask herself how long would that situation be allowed to last in a privately run building, unencumbered by Rent Acts and other meddling? And how much of Mr B’s behaviour was caused by the fact that he has always known that little short of murder would get him thrown out. Ms Toynbee laments the fact that society ignores the decent people living in council flats, striving to maintain respectability amid the decay. Society does indeed ignore them. The market doesn’t. That's why what the market provides for the respectable black family she mentions - clothes, furniture and so on - is so much better than the housing the government provides.
*UPDATE: Peter Briffa has explained, "the reason she's living among the hoi polloi is that this is an excerpt from a forthcoming book whereby she leaves her capacious house in Clapham to slum it with the underclass, George Orwell-style."
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Friends of Bill. If The Hindu is right about Bill "Zipper Problem" Clinton's rivals for the Oxford top job being Shirley Williams, Hezza and Chris Patten, then I'm all for Bill. After all, "a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke." Hullo Pot, meet Kettle. Once upon a time there was a thing called "The Language of Flowers". The sight of ambrosia in your beloved's nosegay would tell you that, yes, your love was returned. Some of the citizens of Northern Ireland have their own equivalent, the Language of How Everything But Everything Reduces To Our Favourite Conflict. In this language "Muslim" = "Catholic" and "Jew" = "Protestant". That is the most likely intepretation I can find for the events in the story relayed here by Slugger O'Toole. He quotes the Times as saying that some Unionists in Northern Ireland are worried that a (small) proposed mosque will be a source of "wailing noises" and be a breeding ground for extremists. Er, while I'd be the last to deny that we should all keep an eye on Muslim extremists - where there is actual evidence of extremism - just listen to yourselves, guys. The rest of you, keep your eyes peeled for Catholic objections to a proposed synagogue. Another left winger not overly impressed by Bowling for Columbine The author, a Canadian, says that Moore has preferred to romanticize Canada rather than do the hard work of research. Ah, what entertainment this film has given me. I really ought to be more grateful. The justice system: a car no-one is driving. Layman's logic puts some numbers to the Met's abrogation of its duty to investigate crime. "Now this is a S U V !!! And it's ALL MINE !!" Momma bear discreetly lets it be known that she is fond of her car. I am told it's a 1999 Dodge Ram 2500 Quad-Cab Pick-up with a 5.9l Cummins Diesel, 8' bed, 6.2m long, but I confess these technical details don't mean much to me. I think a rough translation would be "big tough car." Monday, January 13, 2003
How To Win Friends And Influence People A one-day teachers' strike in Olympia (in Washington State) in order to demand more funds for public education prompted this response from a reader: "Every time I need new equipment, my medical goes up or my IRA goes down, I go to my clients' houses with a bullhorn, some big signs, my kids and dog and all my neighbors. But it's funny how ineffective it is." - From Jerry Moore's School Talk. Sunday, January 12, 2003
Nuke the whales. I went to Greenpeace's website and read this: "Morality and what's deemed acceptable behaviour by states and their leaders is also a perception, and one which changes over time. As we move toward a globalisation of civil society, we need to build a world-wide moral deterrence against the possession of nuclear weapons. The cornerstone of any state's claim to moral authority, and any leader's, must be based on their accountability to civil society. They must abide by global agreements for the global good, they must conform to the most global definitions of acceptable behaviour."There were several expressions in that that had me thinking wistfully of how cool I'd look as a Mom from Hell scattering peons before me as I sat impregnable at the wheel of my SUV. This, for instance: Morality and what's deemed acceptable behaviour by states and their leaders is also a perception, and one which changes over time. As Peter Briffa would say, "Discuss." But the bit that really had me reaching for the phone to order it with extra lights and a bull-bar was this: They must conform to the most global definitions of acceptable behaviour. Huh? Did I hear you right, greenpea? Five thousand years of thought and argument about morality, and you think that what's right is whatever the biggest gang says is right. Scrolling a little further down Clayton Cramer's blog and you will find something about the latest controversy concerning John Lott, author of More Guns Less Crime. Is this a mirror to Bellesiles? Probably not, as, if I have correctly understood the account given on Instapundit, even the person raising doubts about a survey Lott carried out thinks it peripheral to the main argument. I'm back. First I was busy, then more telephone line trouble then yadda yadda you really want to hear my troubles don't you? I will just say that, come Der Tag, "Mike" of the AOL helpdesk will be spared. Here's a place where no-one's busy. North Korea is dark. Found via Clayton Cramer. Thursday, January 09, 2003
Sorry for the dearth of posts. I've been running around like the proverbial fly with a blue derrière. And now I'm going to do it some more, much as I'd prefer to be blogging. I hope to be back with you in a couple of days. Friday, January 03, 2003
Do you ever worry about homeschooled Muslim children being indoctrinated? Even some homeschoolers do, let alone mere fellow-travellers such as I. In this post Brian Micklethwait offers cogent reasons why homeschooled Muslim children are less likely to be taught by extremists than state-schooled children. But look at it this way. If Muslims don't get - or are somehow not allowed to exercise the right to – home education, then they are more than ever likely to insist on having Muslim schools. And what is more likely to be taken over by Wahahbi maniacs? Muslim families or Muslim schools? I'd say Muslim schools. And I'd especially say publicly funded Muslim schools, in which consumers (i.e. parents) can be kept at arm's length and lorded over by the externally-funded producers, the people running the place. "Ease up on Nasser!" I had a well-argued e-mail from David Yule. I've been reading your weblog for a while now, enjoy your comments and generally find your posts interesting and well informed. I nearly sent you an email about your original comments on Nasser Hussain and Zimbabwe (link), My twenty year old Penguin English Dictionary tells me that "Boxing Day is the first weekday after Christmas, on which Christmas-boxes are traditionally given." Makes perfect sense, of course; one wouldn't be giving the between-maid her box on the Sabbath. Yet in all my life I had never even heard of Boxing Day ever being anything other than Dec. 26th whatever the day of the week. Thursday, January 02, 2003
John Weidner is working to redeem himself for the crime of befuddling my brain by publishing an explanation of why that Dean Esmay brain bamboozler thingy works out the way it does. Dean Esmay himself suggests that there is no proof so effective as personal experience: "Don't feel bad. This puzzle nails mathematicians, engineers, computer programmers, etc. all the time. And it nailed me the first time. The easiest way to prove this to yourself is to get a friend and play the game with them. You be Monty. Play with an open-minded friend, and just get your friend to agree to either always switch or never switch. Within 20 iterations or so of the game, the light will go off in your head, I guarantee. ;-)" The power of positive thinking. Capt. Heinrichs writes, Well done: 0C today. Please hold on to those warm thoughts for tomorrow as the weather report is making noises like '-17C'. On the garage roof front, though, I have to report that your collective mental efforts were completely ineffective. It had to be done by tedious physical means. Junius has his libertarian instincts tested when reading about what some sicko will do under the pretence of it being art. Me, too, my old son, me too. It does imply a challenge to opponents of censorship. Two points in reply - (1) I would expect and hope that in a society where people were no longer in the habit of delegating their moral reactions to government (e.g. Nasser Hussain seeking "guidance" from the government as to whether he should play cricket in Zimbabwe*) that social disapproval would regain much of its lost force. C S Lewis wrote somewhere that the decline of the custom of houding a cad and a bounder out of decent society was not because of any increase in charity: wretched, poor disgusting sinners are still as scorned as ever they were in Victorian times, but nowadays successful, rich disgusting sinners are lionized.
(2) So far as I know the "artist" in this case is not publicly funded. But Channel 4 certainly is. I do think there is a link between the whole idea of shock value in avante-garde art and state funding. The usual fault of popular art, art people pay for, is sentimentality not brutality. (I even think that some of the extreme war-type violence of typically capitalist types of art like computer games is validated by the cult of épater le bourgeoisie which is itself sustained by state funding. Victorian popular war fiction was full of little drummer boys dying heroically; why isn't ours?)
*In fairness to Mr Hussain the whole 'guidance' thing may have been a coded plea for state money to pay the cancellation fee. The fact that he has hopes of being bailed out in this way is also not a desirable state of affairs, but does absolve him of being unable to make his own moral decisions.
Well done Muslim News. They too sometimes publish contrarian stories. For instance they have re-published this Telegraph story about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics - an crime of which a few of their readers will approve, but of which the more peaceable majority will not even have heard, seeing as crimes against Israel are rarely mentioned in the Muslim press. (Foreign readers may be asking themselves why this decades-old story is news now. The explanation is that in Britain certain official papers are classified as secret for thirty years. Then they are released by the Public Record Office to be pounced upon by historians. Thus we are now seeing records of, for instance, cabinet deliberations in 1972 for the first time. Some even more sensitive records will not be revealed to the public for a hundred years after their creation.)
I was going to write what a revelation it is of the ambivalent, etiolated, excuse-making decadence of certain Foreign Office mandarins, effete themselves yet finding a secret delight in abasing themselves before men of violence.
But I knew all that anyway, so it isn't a revelation at all. Well done the Guardian. Sometimes they do give an airing to views very different from their own. Six months ago, for instance, they published this article about the futility of the British gun ban and now they have rep-published it as part of their special report on gun violence. Calling this a "Special Report" is something of a cheek; it is more a compilation of previous articles than a report containing new material, but perhaps an overview of just how many gun violence stories there have been recently is what we need. Wednesday, January 01, 2003
Many a true word said in jest. Minutes after making my little quip about convenience being the world's favourite guide in assigning blame, I came across this essay by Larry Elder. Seems my joke wasn't original: Elder writes Aristotle once said, “Anyone can become angry — that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not easy.” Don't blame me for this. Blame John Weidner. Uh, no, blame Dean Esmay. And he says, don't blame him, blame Jerry Pournelle - but since his original link is long gone, I think I'll blame you, John, after all, since you're available and convenient.* It's all your fault that my brain is going round and round like a fairground horse. I still can't quite accept it. Are you penitent yet? *The world's favourite reason for choosing whom to blame for anything. You know you're getting old when you get all stroppy about the mistakes on the karaoke lyrics for "Grease". Happy New Year. Think warm thoughts at Captain Heinrichs in Canada "Current temp is -6C; 30cm snow; last night was -20C) Of course I am hard-done-by, and looking for sympathy outside the dictionary (between 'sin' and 'syphilis').
While you're at it, think 'repair the hole in the garage roof' thoughts in our direction. Also some 'neighbours don't get mad at us for the fireworks' thoughts would be good.
Tuesday, December 31, 2002
Why don't I just automatically redirect you to Joanne Jacobs and save you the trouble of coming here before linking to her? She has another story you shouldn't miss, all about the Oakland School for Social Justice, Community Development [and Creating Habitual Malcontents Destined For a Rotten Life.] Lots of laughs there. The students get to go to "culture and resistance" class. More laughs yet to come when they apply for a job.
The deserving poor. Joanne Jacobs tells a sad story in a post on public and private charity. Follow the link to find her starting point, a post by Jane Galt, which is itself followed by a great discussion in the comments. Question from me: why do so many people hate the idea of dividing the poor or the rich into deserving and undeserving groups, yet nearly everyone is quite happy to assess the middle class by their deserts.
(Nice dictionary, good dictionary. I came very close just then to asking why everyone is quite happy to judge the middle class by their puddings. Mind you, this too is a profound question. When were you last served jam roly-poly by anyone of your own age or younger? Cultural cleansing, I call it.)
Producer trying to sign up Amartya Sen for Bollywood role. Honestly, that's what it says. And for a film called Wild Noise, too, not for my own private project Confessions of a Teenage Welfare Economist. Monday, December 30, 2002
Sorry for the silence - I didn't get a chance to say a formal farewell before going off to visit computerless relatives. Blogging will be light over the next few days while I catch up with life... ...and with the news. You know how the minute you stop looking the world goes and throws a triple-somersault? My husband certainly boggled when he saw a headline in the AOL news page reading "Hussain appeals to Blair for help." Boringly the Hussain in question turned out not to be Saddam but England cricket captain Nasser Hussain-with-an-a. He is seeking political guidance over whether the England team should play in Zimbabwe. Make your own decisions, Nasser. Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Heya, life ain't so bad. Most people mean well, do all right, get along. Happy Christmas everyone. Meanwhile.... 5 June 1944 And that's how much chance I have of doing any more blogging for the next twenty four hours. Horrifying. Every implication of the story cited here by Amygdala left me sick at heart. A black American victim of terrorism in Africa was left to die because he was mistaken for an African. (NB free registration for Washington Post required to read Amygdala's link.) Part of the horror is that one can see why it happened. Ach, I don't want to go into it. CORRECTION: Gary, it was very charitable of you in your e-mail not to put forward the obvious explanation for my confusion; namely that I was drunk. I might well have been, you know. Just 2cc of dry sherry and I'm murmuring 1980s pop songs from a corner of the sofa. My New Year's resolution is going to be if you want to blog it, blog it immediately. With this story I posted the url then went away and did Christmas stuff. Later I came back, wrote the commentary, and published it. Somewhere in the intervening period I imagined or picked up from another story a terrorism connection which isn't there. Mea culpa. In a spirit of Christmas thoughtfulness, it seems David Trimble is reviewing the sometimes surprising history of Northern Irish unionism. Letter to Slugger points out a review by Mr Trimble of 'The Secret History of the IRA.' David Irving & Mona Baker. The relationship* that dare not speak its name? Diane E of the newly reborn Gotham2003 has been tracking the story, which, like everything to do with Mr Irving, is more twisty than a piece of fusili trying to impress the teacher at pasta school. Scroll up from the link above for more updates as they come. *Note to Mr Irving's ever-busy lawyers. Don't bother. Relationship can mean many things. Monday, December 23, 2002
No, you haven't had one sherry too many. You keep seeing Iain Murray's name over at the Volokh Conspiracy because it is really there. He's acting as a sort of locum conspirator. In this post he reports on figures suggesting the UK is less anti-semitic than either the US or Europe. I read somewhere that the UK also has one of the highest rates of mixed-race marriages in the world. So perhaps we don't all hate each other as much as we keep hearing we do. Someone has not forgotten the Korean kidnap victims. John Costello writes: Today's New York Times has a full page ad on page A11. It starts with "This is a Fact," below which is a photo of Megumi Yokota, it then provides more information on the situation than I have read in the Times news sections. For example, the North Koreans claim the remains of the dead Japanese were "washed away by a flood," also: the one set of remains they did provide belonged to someone else.(I can't make that link work, but it may just be busy - NS.) |