Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Saturday, April 19, 2003
Blog roll call. A fond farewell, whether temporary or permanent, to one or two blogs from the links column. First Dawson, who tells me that he is retiring from blogging to concentrate on his degree, and because he's been feeling recently that it was too much like work and too little like leisure. Alas, Diane of Letter from Gotham's absence from blogging is not voluntary: she has been obliged to take down her blog for work reasons. In fact I don't know why I even put in the link just then; it no longer works. Perhaps the future may see either or both of them returning to the fray. Meanwhile when I click Joanne Jacobs I get a message saying "check back later." So I will. UPDATE: I did, and she's back online. The Liberty Dragon reports that a Cardiff man who was wrongly convicted of murder will not now have to pay for his bed and board while in prison, an earlier Home Office try-on having been rebuffed. If the Home Office staff keep practising maybe one day they will be as confident as their Chinese equivalents, who will shoot a man then charge his family for the bullet. (If the permalink doesnt work try this general link. That way you get a special bonus article on the trial use of tasers by the North Wales Police in the bargain.) Uday's bizarre punishments of Iraqi footballers who missed a penalty or otherwise failed to please sound like the actions of a comic-book dictator. But they were real. The torture continued, in two-hour sets with an hour's break in between, and the beatings grew more savage as Latif tired. The only relief, if it can be called that, came when he was led outdoors into the winter cold, and doused in freezing water.The team captain, Jaffar, himself beaten and incacerated many times, laments the waste of his talent: "Now that Uday has fled, footballers are hoping those days of terror and humiliation are behind them. But for Jaffar, now 36, it's too late. "I wish I were 20 again so that I could show how well I could play," he said. " Thursday, April 17, 2003
Words of Wisdom. "There is nothing wrong with personal attacks per se, George Galloway for example is made for them"- Harry Hatchet (extracted in an appallingly out-of-context manner from a serious post about something else entirely.) "Animal behaviour" is the title of the admirable leading article carried by the Guardian today. "The targets of the injunction are the Animal Liberation Front and the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. The two organisations have made it clear they are not interested in free open debate, but prefer instead intimidation, coercion and threats." Snap! "Long lines of negro cavalry swept by the Exchange Hotel brandishing their swords and uttering savage cheers, replied to by those of their own color who were trudging along under their loads of plunder, laughing and exulting over the prizes they had secured from the wreck of the stores, rather than rejoicing at the more precious prize of freedom which had been won for them." - a Confederate viewpoint from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 29th April 1865, referring to events in Richmond in the closing days of the US Civil War. Even in daylight, the streets of Nasiriyah are unsafe. Looters line every road, pushing carts laden with all manner of stolen items – furniture, household appliances, jerry-cans and pieces of wood. They do so casually, joyously, as if they are aware that with Saddam Hussein's regime ousted and the US Marines unable to police the entire city, there is no one to stop them. They wave as you pass.- Andrew Buncombe of the Independent, 4 April 2003, referring to events in Nasiriyah in the closing days of the Iraq war. Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Wars on Bad Nouns such as the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs tend to go on forever. Kudos, therefore, to the Thai minister for drugs, General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, who is quoted in the Bangkok Post as saying Thailand's War on Drugs will be over on December 2. Good. That particular war had killed over 1,000 people by late February and many more since, giving it a butcher's bill comparable to that of certain better known recent wars. General Yongchaiyudh is doomed to defeat, obviously. But I really do admire him for coming out with an end date. What real racial hatred looks like. Vandals have desecrated Muslim graves in Saffron Hill, near Leicester. No doubt the criminals think that they are in a different category to their counterparts in France who did this. I have news for them: whatever its creed or colour, trash is still trash. "So sue me." Blogger David Holford is being told by Tower Hamlets Council to remove a story from his website they don't care for. (Remember the banned hot cross buns?) He has decided not to comply. This could be your future, so read the story now. In the interests of exactitude I will say that it is not absolutely clear to me from the words quoted that he is definitely being threatened with legal action. The words he quotes the council's letter could be read as referring to "racial hatred" in the ordinary English sense of the words rather than "incitement to racial hatred" in the sense of a crime in law. I will ask David Holford to clarify that point. However even the most non-threatening possible intepretation of the council's words is still pretty threatening. They know full well that an official letter containing the words "incitement to racial hatred" is meant to put fear into the mind of whoever reads it.
They also know that the charge is absurd. I don't agree with all Mr Holford's opinions, and if you scroll down a bit you will see that he is not one to hold back from frank speech when he is mad at some group. But racial hatred?!? The news story quoted incited scorn and ridicule of council officials, not Muslims. The only reference Mr Holford made to Muslims in the post under dispute was to quote certain sensible opinions offered by Muslim representatives and state that he agreed with them. Like all enemies of free speech the council are seeking to protect themselves from deserved scorn by lying about what their critics say. Goons.
UPDATE: I've now seen more of the text of the council's letter. It is phrased in lawyerese but it clearly is designed to secure the action the council want through inducing fear of legal proceedings. I claim no knowledge of legal matters, but I thought I detected in the phrasing a slight reluctance to state the threat in so many words. I suspect that they dare not make the threat plainly because they know they would be laughed out of court. They are relying on Mr Holford being intimidated. He doesn't seem to be.
I say again: this has nothing to do with preventing hatred against Muslims. Tower Hamlets council are taking advantage of the general and correct sentiment against real hate speech to cover their own tails. This is what always, always, always happens under a regime of censorship. You've heard Cocteau's saying: "The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight." Here's my saying to match: "The purity of a hate-speech law can last a week, so long as it's a week when the council are on strike." Sunday, April 13, 2003
Amoral and utopian multiculturalism. These thoughts also stem indirectly from the Jim Bennett article linked to in the post below, but I couldn't fit them in the right place there so I offer them as a separate post. Our present multiculturalism is amoral and utopian. The two qualities go together more easily than you might think. To see why, look at relationships between people.
Churchill described Lenin's sympathies as being "...cold and wide as the Arctic Ocean, his hatreds tight as the hangman's noose. His purpose to save the world, his method to blow it up." Those who love all mankind have frequently been ruthless: I would prefer to trust a man or woman who has loved well a few precious others. Such a person is more benevolent even to a stranger.
One of the distinguishing features of love (whether family love, or the love of deep friendship - romantic or marital love doesn't come into this analogy) is indistinguishable levels of love for the people within the circle. The very phrase "levels of love" sounds odd: the relationship simply is not scalar. A loving mother cannot choose between her children; a loving child cannot chose between his parents, a friend cannot choose between his friends, a family member cannot choose between the others in his family. It would be like choosing between your lungs and your heart. This ideal is not always attained, but it is attained far more often than most of our other ideals.
Trying to love a crowd is impossible. No one man can begin to know them all, yet alone know them well enough to love. One can and should, of course, have goodwill towards the crowd. And as time goes by a person who was once in the crowd can become better known, better liked, until, perhaps, that person becomes loved and loves in return. But note that there is no way to reach get inside the circle except by a process of choice and assessment, of admiring this and disliking that. You don't pick your closest friends at random. You don't pick your husband at random.
It is a sham to detatch one aspect of mature love, its reluctance to say that A is loved more than B, and and try and bolt it on to something way short of love, mere goodwill. Worse than that it is a barrier to friendship; if you are forbidden to assess you can never get through the middle stage of wishing to know a person better.
As for people, so for cultures. We dream of a utopia where all the world's cultures will be cherished equally. It is impossible. It's like trying to love the crowd. But a person, and a culture, is the richer for having loved one or two others well.
The death of the Judeo-Germanosphere. Jim Bennett has written an important article. When I first thought about the Holocaust I focussed on asking how could the Germans, with all their accomplishments, do such a thing.
I did consider the ancient evil of Christian Jew-hatred, and the bitter irony whereby the laws excluding Jews from 'respectable' professions such as soldier or farmer brought them first prosperity then death. In general, however, the picture uppermost in my mind was that of the resentful Germans seeking any vulnerable group to blame for their troubles. They picked the Jews, I thought, mostly because they were available.
There is truth to that, of course. But as time went on and particularly after the attacks of September 11 2001, I came to see that there was another half to the question. As well as "Why the Germans?" it is necessary to ask "Why the Jews?" A large part of the answer to that is because in the last flowering of German civilisation before WWII there were German Jews excelling in every art and science.
Millions of words have been written to try and understand both questions, "Why Germany?" and "Why the Jews?" Given that torrent, it is rare to be able to add anything to our understanding. This article does. "No war, no lies" was the chant on the anti-war protest yesterday. Someone better tell them that upping their claim as to numbers to ten times the police estimate is not credible. Oh, someone has. How odd if The Observer of all papers should break the story that Saddam Hussein's regime was concealing information about WMD from the UN... |