Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
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Tuesday, June 24, 2003
I must say, if the picture at the top of the refurbished and re-addressed Harry's Place really is Harry's Place then socialism pays better than I thought. No wonder he has changed his background from austere grey to a sunny yellow colour. Doesn't stop him showing a red rag to the Samizdata bull, though. Iain Murray has an article in the New Republic Online. Subject: the EU constitution. It starts off quiet and ends by calling Valery Giscard D'Estaing the Benedict Arnold of Europe. Do not get into a fight with this man.
Most scary three words? "It [the proposed constitution]... enumerates rights." Think about that. The US constitution enumerated the powers of the federal government. In other words it gave the federal government those powers and no others. The EU constitution enumerates not powers, but rights.
CORRECTION: The National Review, not the New Republic Online. John Thacker, who spotted my boo-boo, very charitably writes, "Yes, it is confusing having two of the big policy mags as NRs. You're not the first and nor will you be the last to make the typo."
George Monibot has changed his mind. He would no longer impose economic sanctions on every country in the world, as the Green party still would. That change is welcome. He still wants every country in the world to run a protectionist regime until it is "ready" - an adulthood that will never come. Monibot claims in the article that it is the "founding myth" of developed countries that they built their wealth on free trade. That's nonsense. Our founding myth was that Britain was settled by a band of Trojan exiles who landed at Totnes, fought the giants until the last and wickedest of them, Gogmagog, was thrown off Plymouth Hoe, and married the surviving giantesses.
Much more fun. And at least as true as Monibot's own myth that developed countries built up their wealth behind tarriff walls. As Milton Friedman pointed out, the Japanese had low tarriffs imposed upon them (to their great benefit but also to their great annoyance at the time) during their crucial years of moving onto the world stage. The actual history of, say, the German versus the British chemical industries involves many policy zig-zags, but let's not fail to see the wood for the trees. Trading countries are rich. Non-trading countries are poor.
I can quote off the top of my head many examples of countries that have got much richer in my lifetime through trade. Just think "East Asia." I can quote off the top of the head many countries that have been "building up" their industries through protection for forty or fifty years now and are scarcely further along than the day they started. Think India, East Africa.
UPDATE: My first paragraph was over-snarky. I should have made clear that the insight that the economic policy he once supported, "localisation", was equivalent to economic sanctions came from Monibot himself, not me. It's a good one.
Why the Third World stays poor. A Bangladeshi man waited 27 years for the state-run telephone company to install a phone. He wouldn't pay the customary bribe. Serves him right for stubborness - if he had paid the bribe he might have had to wait only ten years. Still, at least Bangladesh seems to be free of those rapacious multinational mobile phone companies. Monday, June 23, 2003
You want C S Lewis quotations, Google has plenty. You want C S Lewis quotations integrated into modern dilemmas better than I do it, go to Photon Courier. Funnily enough, this time that wasn't what he e-mailed me about. He asked whether I was interested in project to restore the Medway Queen, a paddle steamer that had its day of glory at Dunkirk and is of historical interest besides. Well, why not? After all, we had a wonderful time going round the gleamingly restored Victorian behemoth HMS Warrior, which my husband remembered seeing as a hulk at Milford Haven, and the only action that old lady saw was when the clapperboard slammed shut and the cameras rolled for another historical drama. Returning to Dunkirk, many people have observed that if World War II had never happened, no one would believe that some of its real episodes could be so, if those who fought in it could forgive the phrase, dramatically appropriate. Operation Dynamo is one of those, yet Photon Courier is right to say it is not as widely commemorated as it should be. I suppose it is inevitable that the very good little "Museum of Remembrance" on the quay at Dunkirk, should be buried in a godawful post-industrial port zone, since that is where the evacuation had the bad taste to occur, but it is poorly signposted and publicised, and with some of the material not yet translated into English. (That said, perhaps the fact that I had to work my limited French to the utmost in order to talk to the volunteer custodian, an older man obviously devoted to keeping the memory alive, was one of the factors that made our visit so memorable. To men like him, "Anglo-French friendship" clearly meant something important and I feel a little stab now when I think what our two nations have come to.) I wonder the fiftieth anniversary of Dunkirk had so much less publicity than the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day four years later? Admittedly D-Day involved forces many times greater, and was a victory rather than a successful retreat, but one would think that the story of ordinary people, from yachtsmen to stokers pitting themselves against the all-conquering Nazi war machine would have enduring appeal. One might almost theorize that the times are not favourable to remember a story of non-governmental war...
...But no, I must contain myself. Scroll up one post in Photon Courier and you will see some hard-hitting remarks against our - and my - modern tendency to fit everything into an overarching theory. Just to show I can disagree with C S Lewis sometimes, I must remember to write a post saying what a wonderful, liberating thing theory can be...
Here's another picture of the Medway Queen. Couldn't fit it smoothly into the post above. Posting it anyway. Stephen Pollard's blind spot. Strange to tell now, upon the first occasion that Stephen Pollard's name came to my attention I called him silly. It was because he wrote that The Lord of the Rings was a book fit only for children. Things change. These days, dozens of columns and hundreds of blog posts later, while it would be an exaggeration to say that I worship the ground he walks upon, I will admit to holding any paving stone touched by the Pollard shoe in the greatest respect. And ditto with knobs on for almost any newspaper column touched by the Pollard hand. It's very odd, though. You'd think a man with his volcanic anger against those who whimper and equivocate when a clear issue lies before them would feel a particular affinity to some of the emotions expressed in epic literature. He doesn't, though, and I felt a twitch (just a twitch) of my old reaction returning as I read this column which claims that the Harry Potter series are books fit only for children. Of course, he has a better case with regard to JK Rowling's books than Tolkein's - for all the vigour of Rowling's books, it doesn't do to kick the scenery of her world too hard, whereas Tolkein's world was the product of decades of meditation by a man steeped in Western culture. A better case, but still not good. The blog review a few posts down was right (I was joking when I said not to read it), and right for grander reasons than its support of a particular political position I support also. Just as history lets you out of the prison of your own time, fantasy lets you out of the prison of your own actuality. Harry Potter lets you look at the clash of good and evil unencumbered by baggage about whether supporting Tony Blair on reform of the NHS might be taken to imply support of his position on the threat of WMD (or reform of the WMD and the threat of the NHS if you prefer): a high-level activity worthy of the human mind. And you get to play Quidditch, try on other people's bodies and face dreadful agents of evil power.
The last bit is important. Fantasy is not allegory: the One Ring was not the Bomb and Voldemort is not Bin Laden, or George Bush either. Yet when the grown-ups say, "There are no monsters," they lie. Nowadays, it's difficult to write stories on courage outside the fantasy genre. True, there are always inspiring adventure stories and historical stories; but not every good storyteller is a good observer or a good researcher. More than that, there is a positive pleasure in an intricate, sweeping and self-consistent act of creation. This pleasure need have no connection with age at all.
It's difficult to say anything about this subject that was not said better decades ago by C S Lewis: "You will notice that I have throughout spoken of Fairy Tales, not "children's stories". Professor J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings has shown that the connection between fairy tales and children is not nearly so close as publishers and educationalists think. Many children don't like them and many adults do. The truth is, as he says, that they are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults; have in fact been retired to the nursery as old furniture used to retire there, not because the children had begun to like it but because their elders had ceased to like it."He was making the point that most cultures tell fantasy stories to adults without any embarrassment. Elsewhere Lewis observed that there is nothing so childish as a preoccupation with appearing grown-up. It seems to me that the new openness of adults about that fact that they read books from the children's section may be, not part of our modern western infantilism (and I do agree with Stephen Pollard that there is such a thing), but part of the reaction to it. Finally, repeating a point I have made before, much of the actual action in fantasy stories is very far from wish-fulfillment. All Frodo's courage and goodness was not enough stop him finally giving in to the power of the Ring; it was not his agency that defeated evil but that of a despised, mad creature. I don't know how the present Harry Potter book pans out, but on the evidence of the last one all his courage and goodness - and magic - may simply not be enough to stop the coming war and the deaths of many good people. My final example of non-self-indulgent moralising is Snape. Snape is still a mean, spiteful git despite being on the right side. My husband said that he thought it implausible that a man faced with such awful danger could keep up the animus against an ally, but history furnishes any number of examples. I predict that he'll still be a mean, spiteful git when he dies heroically in Book Seven. The motto of the EU is to be "United in its diversity." Hmmm, not bad. But isn't that one already taken? Hall of mirrors. I was checking out this morning's chicken entrails and I saw a mighty portent that the NHS is doomed. This story from the St Albans Observer is completely incomprehensible. That's the portent. One bit of the NHS owes another bit 50 million quid. What for, you ask? Who knows, who cares, answers the waving grass. The debtors, it seems, have owed the creditors 50 mil for years but believed, with a Christian trust rare in these degenerate days, that they had been forgiven the debt. Now, however, it emerges that the creditors have not fully absorbed the message of the eighteenth chapter of Matthew. Although they do not propose to sell NHS staff in St Albans into slavery to pay the debt, they do propose to only let them off the first half, leaving £25 million to be paid. This unmercifulness is "prompting anger from Hertfordshire's PCT's and hospital trusts." NHS bureaucrats, like the rich, are different from us. If my bank manager were to forgive only £25,000,000 of my debts I would consider a little gratitude more appropriate than anger.
Anyway various dreadful and frightening consequences await. What consequences exactly, you ask? Who knows, who cares, answers the waving grass. Or "The spokesman was unable to specify what services might face the axe," as the article put it. Earlier the same spokesman had been quoted as saying, "There are several options which we are looking at. One is carrying on regardless and another is a reduction in services but obviously neither of those are preferable." Strange indeed is the message (and the grammar) of the oracle: why is "carrying on regardless" even an option? And if it is, the obviousness of its lack of preferability to - er - whatever it is obviously not preferable to is not obvious to me.
I dunno what's going on. And clearly the guy who wrote the article, a Mr Staff Reporter, doesn't either. But don't blame poor old Staffie, because this is only the latest and by no means the largest of a long, long line of stories describing incomprehensible money wrangles between different parts of the NHS, and no one could follow them all. Doomed, I tell you, doomed.
As promised, my considered advice on what steps to take regarding the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. First, do no harm.
What, not good enough for you? It should be. Similar advice made him famous, even though he probably never said those words. It is a testament to the merit of the sentiment that its uncertain parentage has been no bar to its acceptance in the best society. Googling the quotation, I came across this account, fairly old but still shocking, of a medical trial in Seattle where the testers appear to have been so mad keen to get a result that they quite forgot that the subjects of their trial were human beings. It made me see the initiatives for peace in the Middle East as a dodgy clinical trial: great words, great hopes - but the patients did not give their informed consent. Naomi Klein is horrified that US NGOs were told that they were an arm of the US government. I sympathise. How galling to be told that you have been bought and paid for! Especially when it's true.
Fortunately, dear NGOs, I have the solution: give back the money to Bush, then he can give it back to the US taxpayers from whom it was extorted. Then you will be able to walk non-vertically challenged again, knowing that you are non-governmental in fact as well name.
Next problem: Israel-Palestine. Sunday, June 22, 2003
Publisher's hype: department of total surrender. Instapundit reports that the Instadaughter is on page 60 of the latest Harry Potter book. Perhaps assisted by the time difference, my similarly-aged daughter has nudged ahead at page 128, despite having had a pit stop in the neighbours' paddling pool. My husband, working in secrecy at night, shamelesssly violated the Reading The Last Page of Books (Prohibition Of) Act 1876, but has promised not to tell. Anyway, Instapundit links to this blog review which you can't possibly read because, as well as talking about libertarian themes in JK Rowling's work, it gives away minor bits of the plot like some people give away plastic toys in cornflake packets. It may not say Who Dies, but you still mustn't read it. Naughty! Hands away!
If you absolutely must score a dose of analysis of libertarian themes in HP, I can help. Proudly reissued from my first days of blogging, I hereby re-present: Harry Potter and the Libertarian Subtext. Friday, June 20, 2003
Aw, Marduk, one little swerve more and you'd have got the cute furry animal hat trick. (Also featured, if I have the count right so far, on Tim Blair, Damian Penny, Andrea Harris and anywhere else where there be found sickos who probably thought, "yummy, saddle of venison!" when they shot Bambi's mother.) I always said the EU was wet. Dr Duncan Cadd writes: One does not often gain entertainment from EU Directives, but Directive 2002/96/EC may prove to be an exception.This almost looks too silly to believe. You taking the weee? In Order Not to Forget. I was pleasantly surprised - and given the unmitigated horror of the subject of this story I should make it clear that I mean "pleasantly" in an extremely specialised sense - to see that the Guardian has given the bulk of its front page to a story about the mass grave of Saddam's victims being excavated in the Iraqi town of Hilla. It is an honest and powerful article. The title of this post came from something described halfway down: In Order Not To Forget is the title of a secret Ba'ath party book extolling the 1991 massacre and singling out for praise those men who carried out the mass murder. The title of their book has come true in a way the Ba'ath didn't expect. Children threatened with being taken from their home for refusing to take a test. Chris Tame posted a story in the Libertarian Alliance Forum. I can't make the link to the newspaper in which it appears work, but here are one or two highlights. I have added emphasis to passages that particularly shocked me: UPDATE: Frank DiSalle emails to say the situation has eased somewhat. Sight unseen I'll bet that Australian universities, like universities all over the developed world, are amply supplied with professors who advocate every variety of Marxism, Communism, Trotskyism and Maoism - systems that have slaughtered hundreds of millions of human beings. I'll also bet that Australia suffers from no shortage of anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist and "deep green" academics who beaver away to ensure that the world's poor starve in GM-free misery, or die from malaria to keep us safe from nasty DDT. It's a pity that so many academics advocate these deathly doctrines, but, of course, that is their right. It's the cornerstone of the system of academic freedom. A university that curtails academic freedom starts to sicken from that moment; if not stopped, the plague of dishonesty will first cripple obviously controversial departments like politics and economics, and then, so virulent is it, it will go on to infect the teaching of every subject.
So, given that academic freedom is a great and good thing that protects the rights of Australian professors to agitate for any doctrine, however wicked others may think it, how does that rare voice, an Australian professor who thinks that more guns means less crime, fare? The Volokh Conspiracy describes how Gun Control Australia are trying to suppress the right of an Australian professor to oppose gun control. Note I do not mean "argue vigorously against", I really do mean "suppress." Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Sorry. My promise to be back Tuesdayish slipped to Tuenesdayish then Thuridayish. Alas, I. Have. To. Work. While I think of it, be sure to update your links to include Iain Murray's new site. It's still in cut-n-paste latin at the moment, but great things are promised. Hah! Originally this post said almost the same as the one above. After disappearing for hours, obliging me to re-write it, it reappeared to embarrass me. So now I shall embarrass it. Nyah nyah who's a silly post then! Thursday, June 12, 2003
Peter Cuthbertson, making a comment to Nick Barlow's blog takes the lightbulbs out of several bloggers, ranging from Iain Murray to the Green Fairy. This seems as good a point as any to mention that I won't be posting for several days. See you Tuesday-ish. Irritating internet practices #2,523,009. Sheesh. You know that Joyce Marcel piece in the American Reporter that I've been so taken up with? You know how it had today's date in the top left-hand corner? Turns out that The American Reporter uses a misleading template that puts today's date on top of all their articles, however old. The Great Purge of the Poets took place in February. Lileks was on the case. Solved it before I even saw it. Yes, I'm having a Lileks jag. i wrote a blog Bloodthirsty Literatteurs. Turkeyblog has a post about those warmongering French poets, in which he adds The Song of Roland to the roll-call. He writes: What this is about, of course, is that poets are supposed to see revealed truth, so if you can find a pacifist poet, ta da, you've your proof that peace is the way to go. Sigh. I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't lament the decline in deference to politicians. And I have no time for Plaid Cymru. Nonetheless, as I read this story about how a Plaid Cymru politician died in a massage parlour, the arguments in favour of a press "gentlemen's agreement" to keep quiet about such things suddenly didn't seem so bad. There's no hypocrisy issue; so far as I know neither the dead man nor his party had a strong public line on sexual morality. There's no anything issue. He is dead, so the relevation that he went to massage parlours cannot affect his showing at the next election. Nothing is added to my understanding of Welsh Nationalism by showing a photo of the very establishment where he died and labouriously giving its name, street and district. (The more I think about it, the weirder it gets. Since when did Auntie provide publicity for houses of ill repute? The BBC is certainly not alone in doing so, but it seems an odd use of my taxes.) In any case, the BBC would once have waited a few months to give his widow and children a chance to let their emotions settle down.
I posted last July about the unequal treatment by the press of the sexual embarrassments of Conservative and Labour politicians, taking as my examples the death from auto-asphyxia of Stephen Milligan and the adultery of Stephen Byers. I suppose I should be grateful that the BBC seems now to be impartially salacious about all of them. I'm not grateful.
UPDATE: Here's Lileks writing on what could be, you know, a core libertarian subject: the decline of public decency. For anyone who didn't get it: what I want is for our customs to change, not our laws. About war, but not poetry. The Telegraph reports that Hirohito wanted to apologise for his role in the war. It was an apology directed at the Japanese people, rather than the apology to the Chinese and Koreans that has been so notably unforthcoming, but it makes me think somewhat better of him all the same. Following the links to Japanese reports of the same story, I was reminded that now that he is dead the Japanese refer to Emperor Hirohito by his "reign name" of Showa. This practice must be very confusing, even to the Japanese. I noticed that the writers did trouble to insert a little note of explanation, which makes me wonder whether the custom is dying away. Rosie Bell writes: It was Wilfred Owen whose subject was the pity of war, not Rupert Brooke.Good Lord, was it? I carefully checked the spelling of "Aeneid" but it never occurred to me to check that, so certain was I that it was Rupert Brooke. We were taught in my school to compare and contrast Rupert Brooke's patriotic sonnet If I should die with Owen's intensely bitter Dulce et Decorum Est. Rupert Brooke died though before that war was fixed into a bloody stalemate. Culture vultures flash crowd? Just checked my stats. I saw not so much a spike as a mound, and a glimpse at the referrer logs showed diverse addresses rather than one big-name link. I think that finding pro-war poets has become a parlour game. "Shakespeare" says Brian Micklethwait (I thought of him too, particularly Henry V, but hesitated to call it poetry. Does blank verse count?)
Joanne Jacobs writes:
A friend suggests Col. Richard Lovelace's To Lucasta, Going To The Wars The final sentiment, though dulled by repetition of that over-famous line, is a pyschological truth. Dickens, writing about slavery in the southern states of the USA, observed the other side of the coin: that the great evil subtly corrupted every human relationship. Not that I think or Dickens thought that it was impossible for slaveowners to be virtuous or loving, but that, for instance, a man's devotion to his wife could not be unaffected by the knowledge that he could brand and rape other women if he pleased. I digress. Or do I? There's something there that is on-point, something about what is separable and what inseparable in the human personality, being as it is the valley into which so many streams called "culture" and "environment" and "genetics" flow. It's coming, it's coming.... Aha. Character is sort-of separable into packages. That's why people can surprise us, when suddenly the wrapper of a different package from the one we usually see is torn and we glimpse what is inside. But the packages aren't what you think they are. They certainly aren't separable enough to put the "anti-war" bit in the same package as the "poetic impulse" package. It's a parochialism of the last 150 years to think that there's an "artistic temperament" at all, let alone an "artistic" political platform. I think it was James Burke in Connections who pointed out that many of the great visual artists of the Renaissance were notably orthodox sons of the Church (except Caravaggio, a time traveller from from 1930s Bloomsbury) and Clive James who wrote that the old Carlsberg beer ad that showed Schubert never finishing his symphony because he went off for a pint was a thousand times truer to what the man was actually like than a film that showed him as a tormented rebel.
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
The world echoes with praise for righteous war. Laura Bush, it seems, told some poets they weren't welcome to insult her in her own home. Off the poetasters went, pleasantly aggrieved, and had their group hug-cum-poetry reading somewhere else. Joyce Marcel was there. And deeply, deeply moved, so much so that she was inspired to ask this rhetorical question: Throughout the ages, blood in the streets has inspired poets to write passionately against war. Does Mrs. Bush know of any poets who have written enthusiastically in favor of it?Dunno about her, but I do. Try Tennyson (Charge of the Light Brigade - read the last verse if you think it's an anti-war poem, Riflemen Form! and, oh, boy, Ballad of the Revenge will not be reprinted in Peace News any time soon.) Try Macaulay (Horatius at the Bridge). Try Homer. Try the author of Beowulf. Then there's the anonymous Anglo Saxon scribe who wrote The Battle of Maldon. Or Kipling, in some phases (although to say that he was blind to the cost of war, which killed the last of his children, is to traduce him.) Notice that I have strictly adhered to her request for enthusiastic writing about war. However the enthusiast for war is a straw man when it comes to describing the opinion of those who supported the recent war in Iraq. Our position is closer to that of Rupert Brooke. Contrary to popular opinion the fact that he took as his theme the 'pity of war' did not stop him supporting the one he fought in. Almost his last words were the hope that his work would "survive Prussia." Brooke wasn't the only poet to take that position; so did Walt Whitman. In the article Marcel says, "It seems especially odd that Mrs. Bush would honor Whitman, a born rebel." Not if you've read Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, where an old black woman stands to honour her liberators, it doesn't. In fact, the anti-war movement will draft the memory of any poet who mentions that war is horrible (though not the worst of horrors) irrespective of whether said poet showed by his life or words that he sometimes supported it nevertheless.
Frankly, I haven't read more than a fraction of the work of the poets I have named. But that is the point: even a person with my mediocre knowledge of English-language poetry and near to nonexistent knowledge of the poetry of other languages knows that "From the dawn of history down to the sinking of the Terris Bay, the world echoes with the praise of righteous war," as C.S. Lewis put it, in Why I Am Not A Pacifist. He went on, "To be a Pacifist, I must part company with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Zarathustra and the Bhagavad-Gita, with Cicero and Montaigne, with Iceland and with Egypt." (OK, so not all those mentioned are poets, but you get the idea.) Now Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge - but you don't have to be a professor, or to have got very far in your Virgil, to know that the first big name poet in Latin wasn't a conchie: the very first line of the Aeneid is "I sing of arms and the man." And I don't think, somehow, that the Norse sagas were in praise of peace at any price.
OK, so Joyce Marcel is startlingly limited in her knowledge of poetry. It wouldn't surprise me to find that Laura Bush knew more than she does. But maybe she's a woman of wide mental horizons in other respects? Let's see what she says about one poem she does appear to have read:
The poetry reading and President Bush's casual dismissal of the anti-war protests brought to my mind Shelley's poem, "Ozymandias of Egypt," about an ancient statue found in pieces in a lonely desert.Riiight. Shelley wrote about a absolute ruler... who once ruled over a desert country of the east and caused its enslaved people to raise monuments to his own glory... who called himself by vainglorious titles designed to show his might and power... whose statue was cast down... whose fate serves as a warning to tyrants everywhere. The poets know how difficult it can be to break out of an obsession, but perhaps if she really, really concentrates she might think of someone in the news recently who fits that profile better than George W. Bush.
UPDATE. A reader points out (see above) that the "pity of war" quote was not from Brooke. The point remains.
French academics discuss France. You probably think it's a bunch of Post-Coital Debobthebuilderists plugging each other's anti-globo books. Think again. Yes, the Iraqis did have Scuds in residential areas. "After the first marketplace bombing we heard there had been a hit and we were able to go there in our own vehicle. We got lost and a couple of blocks from where the two missiles had hit there was a Scud missile launcher with a Scud on top. With these words, Channel 4's diplomatic correspondent admits self-censorship. Read. I've just discovered Oliver Kamm's blog. "Oh my, oh my, oh my," as Mole said when he came out into the sunshine. Here are some quotes: [quoting Clare Short] ..."The current administration has shown its disrespect for the UN throughout the Iraq crisis." Exactly. Respect is not an entitlement: it is something you have to earn.... Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Redbridge museum - serving the people of the London Borough of Redbridge since AD 503. And don't you just love that "it's keep". The Wanstead and Woodford Guardian needs to shoot it's prufereeder's. "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Helena." "Helena who?" "Helena handbasket." ...has moved. Update your bookmarks. Continuing the theme of 'how much clearer do the lessons of history have to be', Winds of Change has up a good post on the how the EU is not a tyranny but has put into place many of the mechanisms to become one. Few of the links were new to me, but they are assembled in a useful and logical package. One to bookmark if you often get into arguments about this. "The Czech Agression against Nazi Germany" is the title of an anonymous pamphlet from 1969 possessed by Jerusalem Post writer Sarah Honig. No, it isn't a piece of German revisionism. It's a very apt piece of satire that takes some of the world reactions to the 1967 war and transposes them to an alternative history where the Czech forces hurled back the Nazi attackers. Ms Honig describes it thus: The brilliant Czech campaign lasted six days. Chunks of Germany were occupied. Wrathful condemnations were rained upon the aggressor by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, the French Quai d'Orsay, the Soviets, and the League of Nations.Many readers might be surprised by how vague my opinions on what should be done in the middle east actually are. Is this 'road map to peace' going anywhere good? I don't know. What I do know is that millions of Arabs, especially Palestinians, say without equivocation that the Jews should be driven into the sea. The West persists in saying airily that it's "all just political hyperbole, old chap, not to worry, just be nice to them and they'll come round..." All of which was said about the Nazis too. Once I would have thought the point above too thumpingly obvious to need making. No longer.
UPDATE: Interesting link to a presentation on the new anti-semitism found via Libertarian Parent ITC. (Backup link here.) Monday, June 09, 2003
Cat magic and the European Union. Don't blame her for the regrettable use I made of her original insight, but just so you know, what follows was put into my mind by this post from Kris Murray in which she said: The elitists of the EU beauracracy want to create a "superstate" just like the US but they seem perfectly clueless as to what makes all fifty of the US states one. These elites think it is just a process of merging tangibles. That all they have to do to make a unified Europe is create a single set of tangibles such as one monetary unit, one set of laws, one military, etc. and, ta da, Europe is one. But that's not going to work because the intangibles are more important. I think that's quite right. In many cultures there is a ritual of blood brotherhood, where the mingling of blood symoblises a mingling of loyalties - but the EU acts as if you could make me feel that Jurgen Habermas, say, was my soul-brother by taking an ampoule of my blood from the blood bank and mixing it up with a good slosh of his. Sorry guys, but the thing that makes swearing blood-brotherhood meaningful is not the actual blood. If you think the idea of a Solent-Habermas blood exchange was approaching the yukkiness limit, stop reading now.
"Middening" in cats means deliberate defecation in strategic places. According to this website on feline socialisation: The motivation is a cat’s need to enhance its sense of security in its environment. A frequent feline response to stress or conflict is to distribute its scent.Another motive not mentioned in that passage is even more striking. Owners who go away for a day or two leaving neighbours to feed the cat sometimes come home to a nasty surprise. The cat doesn't just poo, it seeks out those places most impregnated with the owner's scent and poos there. Such as in the middle of the bed, or in your shoe. It's cat magic. By mingling my humans' scent with mine, thinks Fluffy, I will mystically call their physical bodies home. The resemblance to the behaviour of the European Union will, I trust, be obvious to all cultivated minds. It explains why EU bureaucrats will sometimes provocatively trumpet some very unpopular measure at the worst possible moment for British Europhiles, just as the latter are trying to damp down resistance to the next step in their delicate schemes. The bad timing is no accident. The very delicacy of their situation is what provokes the attention-seeking behaviour.
Perhaps, however, we should not push the analogy too far: The only treatment is to make your home more safe and secure. Identify the cause of the marking behaviour and, if possible, remove it or desensitise your cat to it. If your cat’s insecurity is caused by a rival cat outside, chase it away as often as possible, arrange a garden time share with their owners, keep external doors and windows shut, and block your cat flaps. If you are moving house, put your cat in a cattery during the move and then initially confine it to a small area of the house so making it feel secure. Increase access to the rest of the house slowly.(P.S. No one will ever believe me in this, but this analogy struck me as being true before it struck me as being either insulting to my political opponents or funny.) To be European is to be just like me and my friends: The philosopher Jurgen Habermas recently put out a statement or manifesto on what it means to be European. Chris Bertram analyses it here. Those Canadians who use the grand phrase "Canadian Values" as meaning "those areas of public policy where Canada's government happens to be to the left of the last two Republican administrations in the United States" are making the same mistake as Habermas. Even if I agreed with every one of those policies I would warn against making them the test of Canadian-ness. Eventually people who do not share and will never share those values might start taking you at your word. Secessionist feeling is growing in parts of Canada, which I think is sad but understandable. Saturday, June 07, 2003
That dry cleaning case. Letter-writers to the Sacramento Bee don't think much of Rose Fua's and the State of California's heartless and opportunistic decision to prosecute either. Incidentally, I had never heard of Gray Davis eighteen months ago. But now I see without surprise that he's involved in this murky business too. Dave Farrell writes: The response by the noble nations of the UN to the massacres in the DRC would be laughable if it were not having bloodily grim results. The French have cobbled together not much more than a token force (a few thousand) and Kofi Annan is begging for substantial contributions for a follow-up force in, wait for it .. September. That's three months away. Yoy can get through an awful lot of genocide in three months if you're absolutely set on it.Lord, the world has taken a turn for the horrible these last few days. I haven't even covered Burma or Zimbabwe. Joseph Katzman writes about the Congo, giving brief case histories of why similar interventions succeeded or failed, not neglecting the fact that the US (and British) armies are overstretched, but concluding that a determined and sufficient force could turn the tide. Only it probably won't. He concludes: I sense another turning point [in attitudes] on the way - but something tells me this one will owe more to the aftermath of tragedy than the afterglow of triumph.I am not, in fact, that much of an interventionist. Intervention frequently breeds arrogance in those acting and resentment among those acted upon. It is often harder than we admit to simply tell who, if anyone, is in the right when dealing with an alien culture. But we're talking genocide here. Environmental laws are there to help us all. I discovered Zogby blog via this interesting post about Jews flooding into Germany on Instapundit. Then, scrolling down I found a story that, although it involved nothing anyone could call an crime, sickened me. Do you have an elderly relative or neighbour who gets overly distressed at utility bills, official demands and the like? My late grandmother was terribly worried by even so uncontentious a thing as a circular letter from the council asking residents of her block of flats whether they wished to contribute towards having their "unadopted" access road upgraded. Imagine how such a person would feel about being sued by the state for millions. At the ages of 93, 87 and 83 that is the prospect that some elderly former owners of a dry-cleaning business must face thirty to forty years after an alleged pollution offence. The same stress is being inflicted on others who did no more than buy the building without knowing its history. The California Attorney-General's office don't even pretend that the defendants have anything like that sort of money. They don't even pretend that the defendants had a criminal intent. The defendants claim, in fact, that they did not cause any pollution, but whether they did or not, for once I would say, "let the taxpayer pay." Given that we have taxes, that's what the government claim that they are for: to even out the injustices of life. I imagine that even a purely libertarian community might voluntarily pool together an insurance fund for this sort of thing.
There have been recent cases concerning prosecutions of very old people where I have said, throw the book at them. You know, war crimes. Or treason. But this? What did you put on your law school application, Rose, "I want to become a lawyer to serve the interests of justice and the people around me"? Oh, it's all right, she has sympathy for the defendants. One of whom has Alzheimer's disease, I note. Tell ya what, Ms Fua, concentrate on suing just him, he won't notice.
Not that Rose Fua's keen legal brain has made no attempt to grapple with the issues involved in prosecuting very old people decades after the alleged offence. "If somebody was 85 years old," she points out "and they killed somebody, does the law not apply to them?" The answer to that one was given by Lord Lester of Herne Hill, arguing in the House of Lords that while a change in the law - the passage of the (UK) War Crimes Bill in this case - might take the perpetrators of an actual crime by surprise, "it did not take them by surprise as to the criminality of their horrific acts." That is the difference. The law pursues alleged murderers even after decades because theirs is the most serious and obvious crime in existence. The law should not pursue those allegedly guilty of minor, inadvertent or technical crimes decades ago, because to do so is disproportionate and oppressive.
It is bizarre that I should have to put the inoffensive proprietors of a humble business who at most might be guilty of negligence in the same category as murderers even to defend them. How much more bizarre that a trained lawyer who has achieved public office (perhaps even elected office, since this is the US; I wouldn't know) should not see the eternal distinction.
UPDATE: I was fizzing with anger when I originally wrote this post, and so jumped over some steps of the argument. I have therefore slightly expanded and clarified it since yesterday. Friday, June 06, 2003
Cars blocking drives. A correspondent, who wishes to remain anonymous for some reason, writes: Friend had a similar issue, after making heroic and polite efforts to resolve this situation several times he bought a small amount of concrete blocks and borrowed a decent car jack.I gloat. But, being a blogger and thus determined to moralise, I can't help feeling that it's a bad sign that people have to resort to these measures - and of course timid souls won't, and lose badly thereby. John Daragon writes: Hi. Greetings. Yo, Dude. take your pick...I'm tempted to say that since you were being offered to give up one worthless object in exchange for another worthless object plus a whole 50 plump and shiny rounds then, like, how hard could the decision be? However Mr Blair did show determination over the Iraq thing, so... Hmm. This is hard. Were they new or reloads? As for your other question, I haven't the faintest idea. I just shoot the things. I have what amounts to a mental block caused by overexposure to all those letters and numbers and calibres and diameters and brand names. I tell you, when I hear all these guys chatting away in Flemish interspersed with the names of various models of firearm, then I have some hope of understanding the Flemish.
Sweet FA. In the latest issue of the AA magazine (not online) the AA's legal adviser Iain Murray (moonlighting, Iain?) responded to this question put by John Wotton of Hertford: "If a parked car blocks my drive, is it true that I can't take any action against it?" Here is Mr Murray's reply: It would be hard. Generally the police will not assist in moving it but they can issue a penalty as the parked car is an obstruction (an offence). Local authorities only have a right to remove such a car if it "appears to be abandoned" or is not displaying a current tax disc, but notice periods mean that could take some time. You could try civil law such as a negligence claim against the driver. If you have to arrange alternative transport for an unavoidable appointment but quite frankly, it's unlikely to be successfull and I've certainly never heard of it happening.In other words, what you can do about it is the title of this post. Don't blame Mr Murray for this. He's only the messenger. Funny how legal aid is available at taxpayer expense to sue over every sort of trivial grievance, yet someone who is denied the use of their car has no practical redress. Bjørn Stærk makes a good point: Racism exists, but so does terrorism. I'm less worried about Norway's racists, who we know a lot about, than Norway's terrorists, who we know almost nothing about. We need to accept that Norwegians are smart enough not to be taken in by racists, but also that if there is anything that does contribute to a public perception of all Muslims as fanatics and terrorists, it is ignorance about who the real terrorists are, an ignorance anti-racism wants to preserve. When Muslim spokesmen themselves confidently claim that there are no al-Qaeda supporters in Norway, while it's obvious to everyone that al-Qaeda has support all over the world, it's easy for casual observers to conclude that the problem is much larger than it really is. Trust the people - give it the facts, not assumptions, and it will sort things out on its own. Thursday, June 05, 2003
"The Hema. The Lendu. Cambodia. Rwanda. Bosnia. The Jews. The world watches. The world does nothing." Gary Farber of Amygdala makes a powerful plea for something more than the joke intervention currently planned in the Congo. Jeanne of Body and Soul says the same from a left-wing, pro-UN standpoint. I think the UN dirties good clean New York air, but I agree with her comments. 1,400 men is nothing. Worse than nothing, since it gives the impression that action is being taken when all that is being done is that they are arranging cover for when the foreigners have to run for the airport. The Telegraph report is headed, with staggering optimism, "Euro-army force to stop Congo killing." Would it were so: Chirac looking good would be a small price indeed to pay for stopping the killing. The report also enthuses "They will start moving into action next week, with artillery and fighter jet support, ready to fight pitched battles if necessary." As a friend observed, they mean pitched skirmishes. And somebody tell the Telegraph that Canada and Africa are not in Europe. All the complaining about the Telegraph is just my trying to distract myself from the grim truth of this situation.
Fraser Nelson writes in the Scotsman that the G8 fiddled while Africa bleeds. I'm not as great a believer as he is that Bush's billions of aid will do much good, given the lamentable record of government to government aid. But Mr Nelson is certainly right to say that throwing your money on the table and buzzing off was better than the vapidity of most of the debate: "One Scottish charity sent a delegate to the G8 junket with leaflets stressing how the private sector must not be used to feed the starving. Heaven forbid that professional organisations are hired to bring medicine to the dying, was the implication - as if the starving cared who employs the hand that feeds them."And "Obstacles to helping Africa are written into European Union rule books. Take the moratorium on genetically-modified food research, which ranks our dietary preferences ahead of tackling world food shortage. But the worst single offender is the Common Agricultural Policy, which stops our farmers facing competition from Africa and - therefore - stops agricultural investment reaching sub-Saharan shores. " So where're my archives then? And yes, I am asking in a <strong> manner. Or bold or whatever, but give me back my archives! <em>, what's with this <em>? There's no hestitation about it, pond life, I want my freaking archives! UPDATE: they have reappeared. Journey to Kimland. Scott Fisher, an American living in South Korea managed to wangle a rare visa to visit the North, and produced this travelogue. He speaks fluent Korean, which freaked out the guides and added to the interest of his account. In his place I'd have been tempted to keep secret his knowledge of the language so as to listen for mistranslations and unguarded comments. Still, he comes across as a straightforward sort of chap, taking a mischievous pleasure in sneaking a picture where it was forbidden, but not the type for sustained duplicity; certainly it would be a hard act to keep up. Predictably, Mr Fisher saw and heard many fervent declarations of loyalty for the Great Leader, the Dear Leader and the Juche Idea. Less predictably, not all of them came from North Koreans: The students we saw were part of a North Korea affiliated high school in Japan. While we talked and took pictures they took turns breaking into smaller groups to sing songs eulogizing the two Kims, North Korea, Juche, etc. The singing and, apparently very real, fervor were unbelievable. Even Mr. Baek was giving them some odd looks as they continued their emotional, non-stop singing. To grow up in a place as modern and open as Japan yet still subscribe to this ideology and regime . . . wow. The memory of those earnest young faces fervently singing away is one of the strongest of the whole trip. ...And one small point didn't surprise me at all:
Ever wonder why CNN seems to be the only Western news organization regularly allowed into North Korea? The next room perhaps offered a clue. In the 'Gifts from America' room a whole section of one wall is taken up by gifts from CNN. A few engraved plaques, a coffee cup (yeah, a freaking coffee cup!), a logo ashtray, etc. Probably at most a couple hundred bucks worth of crap that nonetheless get pride of place in the museum - for they reveal obvious signs of respect from a world famous news organization. The people at CNN are certainly using their heads and showing they know how to play the game. Though one wonders how that fits in with journalistic integrity . . . (Via Sound and Fury.)
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Way cool. A reader describes, along with many recollections of the glory days of the Belgian shooting scene when you could buy an FN FAL in 7mm-08 Remington without any sort of license, this seriously couth experience: My final shooting act in Belgium was on the evening of Friday 31st May 1996, when at the invitation of a friend I visited the underground range of the Arbalestriers de Notre Dame du Sablon in Brussels, dating from 1213 and by far the oldest shooting club I have ever shot at. My first time with a crossbow. And the third attempt was a bullseye :-). They cut it out, mounted it on a certificate as proof and it stands now in my living room on the mantelpiece.When I saw that my correspondent was an academic at a well-known university I decided that I had better not say his name, for all that he had not asked for anonymity, since surely he must be living in terror of the thought police discovering his secret life as a shooter... On second thoughts, he doesn't seem that worried.
Basically, Rod, Mars is a big, boring, round rock. Big, boring, round rocks are not an endangered species. Preserving their individual patterns of ice formation is not the first duty of man, not least because 99.9-recurring percent of them will be preserved anyway whatever we do. When the universe is as full of low-gravity retirement homes as it is of rocks - i.e. when there are ten-to-the-googleplex retirement homes out there, then we can worry about preserving rocks. In the meantime I think a place with human beings in it, talking, thinking, playing, living, dying, is far more interesting than a rock, even if some of the human beings are old or Nebraskan. He's good on Ethiopia, though. At the rusk of encouraging some very childish humour, check out the comments to this BBC story of the last days of Farley's Rusks. UPDATE: the story has disappeared, leaving only the frame.
UPDATE: It's because they are not discontinuing Farley's Rusks after all. Phew, what a relief. The grieving crowds disperse. A day of prayer and thanksgiving is declared by all major denominations. The Independent announces the glad tidings in three inch headlines and drops that boring story about how Robert Fisk personally uncovered a vast underground cache of nukes in Baghdad.
Pity. Some good jokes have now gone wherever dead jokes go. There was one about rusk assessment. There was a comment that puported to be from a baby and said goo ga do gaa. Out, out, brief candle. Better go now. I'm farley pooped and at rusk of sounding maudlin. This trial balloon floats like an overweight brick excluded from the NHS. My, this health contract idea has struck a raw nerve. Stephen Pollard blasted off an angry article for the Times, copied to his own site, beginning It seems Tony Blair forgot a critical sentence in his foreword to the NHS Plan. From the NHS’s creation in 1948, he wrote, “no longer would wealth determine access to healthcare; need, irrespective of ability to pay, would be the criterion”. What he should have added was this: “None of this, however, will be available to you unless you have muesli for breakfast, grilled Dover Sole and broccoli for lunch, and tofu and bamboo shoots for dinner.”and ending with the question "What did John Prescott have to say?" Indeed. Old Two Jags may have his faults, but I can't imagine him truckling and saying, "thank 'ee kindly for the lesson, Doctor." Iain Murray says, "...the ideal of universal free healthcare funded by general taxation is revealed as a myth. Health rationing reaches its obvious conclusion, and the case for it crumbles. The case for opt-outs for private insurance is made by this very policy." And, in a later post, "Labour has actually produced a policy that speaks directly against many who are in its core vote, telling them that they're second class citizens because of their lifestyle."
He also links to Medpundit* (who makes the point that homosexuals, single mothers, drug users and adulterers might also be subject to such measures by a future government), to Layman's Logic* ( who says, "And presumably the logical counter-point is that if you don't get the service you've contracted for, or decide to opt for another provider, you don't have to pay the NHS.") and to Harry Hatchet* who strikes blows from the left as mighty as those from the right.
(The asterisks show "drabbled" links in case the Blogger Blug renders the archives inaccessible. Furthermore it allows you to read some excellent other posts. Try out Harry Hatchet, for instance, writing about a book review by William Leith in which Leith wheedles ingratiatingly away about how "clunky" male brains are: What's really sad about this article is that Leith seems to believe that discussing relationships is in some way superior to talking about traffic. Both can be done with wit and style, both can be utterly dull and suicide-making. The sub-heading of this review states that the inescapable conclusion is that "All men are nerds". By this I assume Leith is alerting us to the propensity for the "male" brain to concentrate on detail and it's capacity for discerning spatial relationships which he at least refers to in his otherwise silly article. He presumably puts Michaelangelo, Da Vinci et al in the "nerds" category because of their single-minded pursuit of reflecting reality in forms different to the original. I suspect he would sneer "trainspotter" at their dedication. I'm almost certain he thinks the inventors of the jet engine, spinning-jenny or tumble-drier would have better used their time discussing their next-door neighbours relationship.Now, what have I forgotten? Oh, yes: )
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
He who pays the piper calls the tune. The Times reports that new proposals want to make fat people promise to diet in return for medical treatment. Quite soon now two equally absurd trends regarding fat people will cross over. The private sector is being gradually forced by anti-discrimination law and lawyers to treat fat and thin equally however unfair the results, so that, for example, there is pressure to give airline passengers who fill two seats the legal right to force other travellers to pay for the extra seat. Meanwhile the public sector becomes ever more judgemental, interfering and, er, discriminatory about the decisions people make as to what they eat and their resulting weight. I predict that the very day that it becomes illegal to use fitness as a criterion in selecting fitness instructors will be the same day that a government minister signs the order to have refactory and incorrigible fatties excluded from the NHS and named and shamed in the local press. Returning to the theme below, when medicine is private and our bodies our own, well-mannered people are spared the necessity of making rude and personal remarks. Oh, the relief of not having to decide for anyone but oneself.... One of the nicest things about being a libertarian and a supporter of privatised everything is that one is spared all these Lines To Take, as we used to call them in the Civil Service.
Now, pity the poor statist. If he is a powerless statist he has to absorb a whole raft of discussion and diktat as to Current Best Practice: circulars, reminders, reprimands, checklists, with the threat of litigation if he gets it wrong. (Admittedly, libertarians frequently have to do the same under force majeure, but we don't have to pretend to love our chains.) If he is a powerful statist such as a government minister he has to find Best Practice. Not for him the elevated ignorance of a Socrates or scepticism of a Popper; he is obliged to decide, however complex and incomplete the evidence - for does not the education / health / cycle safety / driving safety of millions depend on it, not to mention his next performance review? Indecision is political death, so he must go for some policy, right or wrong, but he's conscientious and he really would like to get it right. Send me a sign, he cries, send me a a sign! And his civil servants do send him signs, but too many, and they contradict each other. "Then came in the magicians, the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers: and I told the dream before them; but they did not make known unto me the interpretation thereof." And his head lies uneasy where mine sleeps sound.
I know, I know, only last Thursday I was saying that everything is political. Now I'm saying, what fun to be able to take the politics out of many decisions. As Walt Whitman said, I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. I'll reconcile the two statements when I have refined my thoughts on the matter. (Translation: figured out how I can wriggle out. I'm sure there's wriggle room there somewhere.) Monday, June 02, 2003
In praise of the stip upper lip. "I also believe that the good god of evolutionary biology gave us brains to judge, repress, distance ourselves and generally keep control over our emotions. This is because our emotions conflict with each other. Indulged in without thought or judgement, they lead us to catastrophe. If they control us, instead of us controlling them, situations that would merely be situations become instead emotional battlefields, and can do incalculable damage and cause incalculable pain. I associate emotional incontinence with poor, unhappy people, and I believe that their emotional incontinence is, above all else, what makes them poor and unhappy. They don't live their lives. Their lives live them." - writes Brian Micklethwait in Brian's Culture Blog. I agree. There is hope that the sentiment is becoming general. Women's magazines, always a barometer of culture, have started running articles saying that it's OK to repress your feelings. How deep the "let it all hang out" rot has spread was illustrated by one article I read which repeatedly used the phrase "deny your feelings" when it clearly meant "decline to express your feelings." However this was in the context of arguing that survivors of disasters who just soldier on seem to recover better than those who re-live every blood-splattered moment from the psychiatrists' couch, so all is forgiven the author.
My personal unfavourite among the fashionable emotional spasms is the "cry for help" - i.e. acting out suicide in order to get attention or outside intervention in one's problems. I'd imagine this directly kills dozens of people every year who get the dosage wrong or misjudge the breaking strain of a rope. I won't dwell on the devastating effects of a person committing suicide on those he or she knew best, partly because it would only depress me and partly because I'm more intellectually interested in the less severe but still harmful aspects of the "dramatic gesture = cry for help" meme. Great numbers of people try out this strategy in the course of marital or family rows. I am fairly sure most have cause to regret it afterwards. They may get help, but they lose the trust of their fellows. What I Did In My Holidays Shot pistols. Some Observations of Belgian Life And Manners
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Public Interest is back, which is all to the good as I'm off for a few days. See you June 2nd. UPDATE: Calm, calm. Count to ten. Deep breathing. Enhance your calm. No, the first chapter of Peter Briffa's novel wasn't that bad. It's Blogger going bolooger again that is sending my blood pressure into regions that qualify it for astronaut's wings. Click this second link if the first one didn't work. I have arrived. I have finally had a (an?) hostile e-mail. Ian MacFarlane writes, and I answer in italics: Visited your website because Mark Steyn had given it the nod. Selective political myopia. Joanne Jacobs led me to an entertaining account from a US academic describing how he carried out a sociological experiment. He deliberately violated university policy by posting a "Clinton/Gore '96" sticker on his office door. "After two years without any complaints, I decided to replace the sticker with one that said "George W. Bush for President." Within a few weeks I heard reports from two faculty members and one staff member saying that someone was preparing to file a complaint about the Bush sticker."He didn't want to get fired, so he quickly sent round an e-mail beginning: "You have all been involved in an experiment in tolerance which, unfortunately, some of you have failed . . ." Eventually his door became a sort of free-fire comment zone: After one animal rights activist heard about my little prank, she came by the office for a laugh. I put up an "I Love Animals. . . They're Delicious" sticker just for her. Some liberals really do have a sense of humor, you know.All in fun, lady, all in fun. However the admirable Dr Mike S. Adams was wrong - or at least not necessarily right - in saying that his colleagues had failed an experiment in tolerance. After all, he was breaking university rules, and he did not suffer any penalty in the end. One can imagine a devoted supporter of free speech who would, without inconsistency, object to political stickers where they were forbidden by an agreed-upon local rule. Even the glaringly obvious discrepancy in how the two different stickers were received does not necessarily point to a failure of principle. Perhaps his embarrassed colleagues can stand before their Maker and claim that they believe in free speech equally for all opinions. They just... didn't see the Clinton sticker. It was part of the air they breathed, platitudinous, not really politics at all...
I have written elsewhere about how the decision as to what does and does not count as political is deeply political. The Left is right in one thing; there is a sense in which everything is political. That is a horribly dangerous truth. It can lead to the totalitarian vision of Robert Ley, chief of the Nazi 'Strength Through Joy' movement, who said, "Only sleep should be provided as free time, " adding that private amusements had no value for Germany. But even dangerous truths are still true: deciding what is and is not a subject for a discussion isn't just an argument but often the key argument.
I first became aware of this melancholy truth while watching, dumbly, the progress of the Firearms Act 1997. Again and again I heard politicians and citizens of all parties declare with complete sincerity that "this is beyond politics," as if the question of whether to arm the polis were not the very quintessence of politics.
Yet, very often the argument about what is arguable is an argument that never takes place. Sometimes that is because conscious hypocrites carefully plan that it should not. However the most innocent and the most common reason for this just the sort of selective short-sightedness suffered by Dr Adam's colleagues. Did they - could they - finally see the point when he reminded them about the invisible Clinton sticker? Did they say, "Oops"? If so, they passed the experiment in tolerance, though not, perhaps, with distinction. Wednesday, May 28, 2003
When is racial abuse acceptable from a bishop? To find out, read this article by Joyce Milton in which lambasts the Episcopalians - with a brief word from our own dear C of E to show that it too is full of men who can't say the word "evil" without scare quotes. (Via Random Jottings)
Talking of matters ecclesiastical, no one noticed my deliberate mistake, perhaps because it wasn't deliberate. John Wycliffe wasn't burned at the stake. He died of a stroke. I was thinking of William Tyndale. Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Monday, May 26, 2003
Ken MacLeod has a blog. Found via Amygdala, now posting every day. No, I don't do interesting posts after midnight. Nothing personal, Gary, Ken, it's my fault not yours that that was just about the most brain-rotting gut-decomposing benzadrinic post I have ever written.* Everything about it was substandard. The utter lack of an arresting headline. The bland, uninformative link text - just the name of the blog linked to, "Amygdala", although heaven knows even that was better than "blog." The lazy failure to provide a permalink. The smug, complacent way that I offered no explanation of who Ken MacLeod was; I just assumed my readers would know. I couldn't even manage the basic courtesy of proper English: "Found via Amygdala, now posting every day" attains all the linguistic dignity of a cinema poster advertising Confesssions of an Accountant: Full Frontal Falsified VAT Returns. For the right to do this my forefathers fought and died, for this John Wycliffe was burned at the stake. O tempora! O mores! I almost deserve this.
Oh well. Isn't it nice that Ken MacLeod has a blog and Amygdala is posting every day?
*Oh no, tell a lie. I may have written a slightly more boring post in October or was it November last year. Wait a minute, it must have been November because I was eating the flapjacks I made for the halloween party, the awful ones that nobody ate, and I was eating them, well more chewing than actually eating, while writing this post (the one I'm talking about I mean not this one I'm doing now) at the same time; and I remember thinking, gosh, this is a pretty boring post. Unless that was the other boring post I did in... æ Thanks to everyone who sent me HTML advice. I still think that there ought to be a general "ignore this" command. I could put all those louche posts that let down the tone of this weblog in between two ignore tags and deny that they were my responsibility at all. For instance, this website is a mildly interesting example of the oddities to be found on the internet, although I must caution that the banner ad at the top sometimes contains obscene language and images. <ignore> But this is a deeply, deeply sick example of the pathologies rampant in our society. </ignore> Rescues. Snacks. Dangerous re-fuelling. Logistics. Conventions of Theft. Shooting. Big guys going through little hatches. James Rummel of Hell in a Handbasket recently spent several days aboard the USS McFaul and discusses all of the above. Many pictures. Sunday, May 25, 2003
"Not yet, you fool" part II. Captain Heinrichs writes: Partially true, but the greater danger is after one throws the grenade -Continue to resist. Be strong! It's what they call an "encore presentation." You know, I'd be happy to ask why on earth Mark Steyn has the impudence to put up this article from 2000 again, when everyone knows that the situation is completely different now. I'd be delighted to chide him for going on about yesterday's problems, now happily well on their way to being solved. "That's sooooo 2000," I'd say. It would be nice to be able to do that. If only. In the real world matters now are as bad or worse as when he wrote this article on crime in gun-free Britain. It's as relevant today as when he wrote it. Bummer. Andrew Bolt, writing in Australia's Herald Sun, puts it perfectly: Islamic terrorism has been like a Rorschach blot of the Left: into every suicide bombing you can read your favourite cause, and demand your favourite solution, whether it is winding back American influence, curbing globalisation or destroying Israel. (Via Tim Blair, who made a different choice from mine as to which passage to pick as best quote. There were plenty of good contenders.) "On the one hand, there are limits to what the government can do. On the other hand, they [the Algerian government] found a lot of resources awfully quickly to put on a nice show when Chirac's visit was arranged, making one wonder why buckets and shovels were the tools of first resort in this disaster. That we do differently over here is a testament not only to our technology, but to having a truer free market system that can generate the wealth needed to do this right and reinforce the value of individuals enough to have it taken as a given that doing so is worth it. " - Geoffrey Barto. (Also a Secret Master of Hut Mul, by the way. General link here.) |