Natalie Solent |
|
|
Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
Archives
November 2001
December 2001
January 2002
February 2002
March 2002
April 2002
May 2002
June 2002
July 2002
August 2002
September 2002
October 2002
November 2002
December 2002
January 2003
February 2003
March 2003
April 2003
May 2003
June 2003
July 2003
August 2003
September 2003
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
August 2007
October 2007
February 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
September 2008
October 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
March 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
October 2009
January 2010
March 2010
May 2010
June 2010
July 2010
August 2010
September 2010
October 2010
November 2010
December 2010
January 2011
February 2011
April 2011
June 2011
August 2011
September 2011
October 2011
November 2011
January 2012
February 2012
March 2012
May 2012
|
Monday, July 21, 2003
I'm back. And I have a pile, a teetering, intimidating pile fully two hundred electron-widths high of unread and undealt-with e-mail. I shall ignore it for now - and much of it forever - and get on with saying something. Just let me think a moment.
I suppose it's this. I missed the David Kelly suicide story, and now it has the insubstantial feel common to news that has the effrontery to exist without my validation. All I can think of to say now is: suicide is nearly always wrong. I'm sure the BBC behaved badly, just as I'm sure the Labour government spin machine behaved badly, but neither of them killed him. He killed himself. I'm sure the poor man felt harassed, pressurised, slandered - but he still had a choice and he made the wrong one. Several wrong ones, actually, starting with the decision to give "confidential" briefings to journalists at all. Nothing that could conceivably have happened to him had his leaks been made public in the normal way was worth killing himself over or causing that amount of pain to his family. Friday, July 18, 2003
Sorry for the gap in posting. Turned out that the lack of energy that I simply put down to the heat might actually have been caused by some sort of lurgy creeping through the defences of my immune system. I'm still a bit below par and suffering from earache and sinusy disgustingy thingies. Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
More French perfidy. In Touch, a radio programme for the blind and partially sighted, reported earlier tonight that the French blind football team are accused of fielding a sighted player. The 1960 Penguin Dictionary of Quotations - reprinted 1961, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977 (twice), 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 - and for all I know umptillion times after that - gives four quotations for Harry: - breed again such a king H. 154:254 and one for Hatchet: - did it with my little h. 410:7 ...and not a single one of them are any good for this. Unless he put a beaver on to write the article, of course. Or has been chopping up his fellow Guardianistas. He might have been; anybody might be provoked by Hugo Young on a day like this. Especially if wearing a beaver. *That Shakespeare. Overrated, I reckon. I tried saying "but H., H. 323: 17" in all sorts of dead dramatic voices and none of them sounded any bloody good at all. Long, long ago I was reading my new Brownie handbook. There were pictures of Brownies and Girl Guides from countries around the world engaged in helpful deeds. I enthusiastically told my mother (who, it belatedly occurs to me, perhaps did not fully attend to my constant stream of Junior One wisdom) all about one picture, of an African girl pounding grain. "We. Don't. Say. That," came her response in a very odd voice. I was confused. Why didn't we say that the picture showed a Niger Brownie? OK, so later I figured out that I had innocently said something bad. What I didn't figure out until - er, today, as it happens, was that even my corrected pronounciation of the word Niger was wrong. Being a Francophone country it's said Nee-zhair. Sometimes news junkies, who get their news from text, don't know stuff that ordinary people who watch the News at Ten do Saturday, July 12, 2003
Jim writes: Natalie, I love your column, but when you quote at length Angie Schulz on Fred Hoyle's 'Black Cloud" (one of the seminal sf works of my youth) and I find myself reading her remark, "Hoyle's astronomy stinks in this book, too." ...well, that's just a bit too much. This post by by Oliver Kamm was written to defend his decision to attack Lib-Dem leader Charles Kennedy, and is part of an ongoing argument between him and Nick Barlow. But along the way it has the clearest defence of the recent war that I have ever read. Thursday, July 10, 2003
If you are one of the bunch of people who wrote me such erudite and deeply-felt e-mails about much weightier subjects than how Lucky fooled the Sirians... ...then you, as a serious person, will be above childish impatience.
'Night 'night. The Dark Avenger (His real name, though he sometimes employs a much more mundane one outside the real world of the Blogosphere) writes: I'm afraid to inform you that not only did Asimov know some scientists, but that he was had a Ph.D in Biochemistry, so he knew something about research and how science was practiced. He even wrote a fictional paper about a chemical that had a relationship with time so that if you went to dissolve it in water, it got wet before the H2O had gotten to it.Uh... is there a problem with doing that? Finally, if you read the passage you cite through the eyes of a SF reader who lives in 1950's America, the tattoo reminds one of the Lens in E. E. Smith's The Lensman Series, and it would bring to mind an FBI Special Agent badge, which would have the same power as a KGB ID minus the fear and terror that the latter would induce in a citizen of the USSR.Yep. Kimball Kinnison would be in the Council all right. In fact I did know vaguely that Asimov was a scientist, having read with great pleasure many collections of his factual articles, and a clearly 'from life' non-SF novel of his about a murder in the chemistry department. What I got wrong was how old Asimov was when he wrote the "Lucky Starr" books. I had thought they were written when he was little more than a a kid. Turns out it was the classic (excuse me while I privately address one particular reader here: I DON'T CARE. SAY WHAT YOU LIKE. I STILL LOVE 'EM) robot stories that were produced when he was still setting out on his career. In the Lucky Starr series he was just enjoying writing for kids.
Meanwhile, urgent Council business awaits! Angie Schultz writes: Your proposed essay sounds very interesting. If you have not done so already, may I recommend reading Fred Hoyle's _The Black Cloud_? I read this for the first time a couple months ago, and was frequently moved to throw it across the room. A Canadian woman may have been beaten into a coma while being interrogated in Iran. Yesterday was busy. I plain forgot to participate in the bloggers' day of coverage of the Iranian freedom movement, so I don't know whether this disturbing story has been widely covered or not. Zahra Kazemi, 54, was grabbed by police after taking photographs of the Elvin prison facility in northern Tehran.Sad to say, the only unusual thing about Zahra Kazemi's story - should she ever recover to tell it - may be that as a Canadian national rather than an Iranian, she has a slightly better chance of ever getting justice. Wednesday, July 09, 2003
This House believes that the influence of grieving relatives has increased, is increasing and should diminish. I don't believe I'm particularly callous in saying this, but the causes that make a person worthy of sympathy and worthy of obedience may or may not coincide. Giving obedience when sympathy is all that is warranted may actually cost lives. After the Hatfield train crash - which everyone called a "disaster", although that word should really be reserved for a tragedy that kills scores or hundreds rather than four - Britain seemed to take a collective decision to prostrate itself at the altar of the god of safety. Millions upon millions have been spent on safety measures. Yet there was another multiply-fatal rail accident yesterday, I notice. Meanwhile an increase in the number of preventable deaths has gone unnoticed - because it occurred on the roads, where there is no corporate body to sue. Many former rail travellers have switched to the car because the safety measures on the railway caused delay and expense. The roads being more dangerous, a predictable number of them were killed who would not have been had the "safety" measures not been instituted. They died for safety but no survivors' group speaks for them.
Now we have this prosecution. No one thinks the six managers charged with manslaughter wanted to harm but not kill the victims of the crash, although that is what 'manslaughter' means. The prosecution will probably fail. Good. But what is not good is that certain rail positions are now known as "go to jail jobs". Now that's going to attract quality applicants to revitalise the rail network...
The other link is to a story about the views of a man whose son was among those murdered at Bali. Tragic, but his political opinions are still wrong, and indeed in so far as they gain influence will make the murder of other Australians more likely. Marx had a point. About class interest, I mean. I grant you an ad hominem argument is never proof in itself, but homines being what they are it gets you in the right ballpark nine times out of ten. I've read a lot of 30s, 40s and 50s SF as well as a fair bit of expository science writing by British scientists of that period, who were usually Popular Front when they weren't outright Stalinists like Haldane. They all just love to posit a future world where The Scientist has taken his rightful place, directing the energies of mankind to peaceful purposes at last. Coupled with that aim is the most withering scorn for the selfish motivations of everyone else. This scorn isn't just a makeweight extra piece of abuse, it is a key charge. The romantics, the obscurantists, the reactionaries all only want what they want because of their class-interests. Only the philosopher rises above it all. Anyway, I lapped up all that type SF for decades before I noticed that the gleaming steel towers of the brave new world seemed to include a suspicious number of vast penthouse offices for... scientists. They, like other men, want a world where they are top of the heap. (Perhaps it would be fairer to say "wanted" as that tendency doesn't seem common among modern day scientists, unless you count some gentle whingeing about money, although the power-lust is rising again among the scientist-bureacrats and health regulators.)
One day I'd like to write an essay called The Council of Science about scientists' power fantasies. I owe a great debt to Isaac Asimov, who widened my world and seems to have been a genuinely nice chap, but his pseudonymous Lucky Starr series (There's a fair-minded review here, if you scroll down, and this is about a comic strip version I'd never heard of) will provide the title and the opening examples.
As the author of the first link above writes: David "Lucky" Starr is a member of the Council of Science, the most powerful branch of the government. (As a scientist, I find this idea rather amusing.) In practice, not only is Lucky an brilliant scientist, he's also six feet tall, extremely athletic, and is a great secret agent. (Perhaps Asimov did not know many real scientists.) Now these books are fun. I bet you'd like to have a tattoo like Lucky's. By mental effort he can bring about hormonal changes that reveal a pattern on his wrist, if I've remembered right, proving his membership of the mighty and benevolent Council. The magic tattoo opens every door and obliges everyone to offer the bearer full cooperation. But there is just a bijoux little hint-ette of the effect of a KGB identity card in Leningrad circa 1955 about it all. Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Sadly, both the Iranian cojoined twins died during surgery. They went under the anasthetic in the full knowledge of the risk they took. I am glad that their last conscious thoughts were hopeful ones. They'll take away my wand from my cold, dead fingers. Layman's Logic has yet more on Harry Potter as libertarian-ish political commentary. The Philosophical Cowboy was kind enough to say that I helped put ideas into his head, although a good many others in the Blogosphere also seem to enjoy this pastime. (Layman's Logic seems to be taking a long time to load, perhaps slowed down by the Instalanche. But it gets there in the end. Minimize it and do twenty adductor lifts while you wait, unless you're in a management meeting.) Crooked Timber is a new politico-cultural group blog. One of its founder members is Chris Bertram of Junius, who has written a splendidly Victorian introductory post: "Nevertheless, such lists, assemblages, diaries, complaints, lamentations, polemics and records of triumph and disaster are now so common and so diverse that new entrants into the field must perforce struggle to be noticed. Notwithstanding such difficulties, we believe that our new enterprise - combining as it does the skills, talents and intelligences of personages of experience and distinction - will assuredly meet with the approval of readers of judgment and taste."And no doubt Crooked Timber will also supply, in the fashion of the best Cyclopedias and Concanetations of All Knowledge, Tables of Tides, Divers Gnomes and Apophthegms and Notes on Forms of Address to Persons of Rank. UPDATE: Cornered your very first day! (The link sends you to a very funny double parody: Molesworth goes to Hogwarts. CURSES! i could hav ritten that if only the thought had entered into my grate brane.
Monday, July 07, 2003
4th July fireworks being let off in the comments box at Conservative Commentary. Peter Cuthbertson says that Britons shouldn't cheer Independence Day. Dr Frank has added more on the case of the Cal Poly student in hot water for posting a flyer about C. Mason Weaver's book "It's OK to Leave the Plantation." One of the many good things about Dr Frank's account is that it does acknowledge that Weaver's title is intentionally provocative. Now, I don't object to it on those grounds; uncounted white left-wingers have been praised for provocativeness, so why not a black right-winger? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Still, the fact that Weaver's title does press so many hot-buttons leads me to be more forgiving of the initial outrage on the part of the black students. They may genuinely not have "got" that it was a book title and that the black man shown on the flyer was the author of the book. Looked at in that light one could read the headline of the flyer as some sort of jibe, and think that the black man pictured on it was meant to be a generic figure showing that the jibe was directed at blacks. For their part, perhaps it never even occured to the producers of the flyer that people wouldn't know their headline was a book title. Clearly they all knew about Mr Weaver being a writer and activist, or they wouldn't have invited him to speak in the first place, but perhaps his name and thesis are not universally known. (Incidentally, has the the planned speaking engagement taken place?) There is no more natural mistake than to assume that what is obvious to you is obvious to everyone.
So the whole thing could be an innnocent misunderstanding. If so, as so often, the attempted cover-up is far more culpable than the initial flaring of temper. The Cal Poly authorities could have said, "Oh, we get it now. Tut-tut, you Republicans, you really ought to have said 'Come and hear Mr Mason Weaver talk about his latest book entitled It's OK to Leave the Plantation' - why, if you had, we'd have avoided all this unpleasantness." Rather than do that they chose to come out with this distasteful and doubly-racist notion that the physical presence of a white male with opinions they didn't like constituted harm to the fragile pysches of his black fellow students. Roy Hattersley says that "By definition, antisocial behaviour has to be prevented by society as a whole." If one takes "prevented by society as a whole" to mean "prevented by passing a law against it", as it is clear that Hattersley does, there is scarcely any tyranny over speech, behaviour (including sexual behaviour), association or custom that this sentence would not justify.
Sunday, July 06, 2003
German Harry Potter fans are holding a group translation party on the internet, something in the style of a barn-raising. Lawyers are not invited. [BTW - if you're looking for the post on Lord Puttnam, it's over here at Biased BBC where it should have been in the first place.] "I knew that our African parachute had a chance to open." June Arunga is one of those pulling at the cord. In her first two decades of life she has watched her family's standard of living plummet under central planning, and couldn't understand why the care and benevolence of the officials always seemed to come to naught. Then her brother came home from America excited by some new ideas... I don't presume to say whether the decision of two Iranian women, Siamese twins joined at the head, to risk probable death in an operation to separate them was wise or not. I only pray that the operation, which continues as I write, is a success. There are many pictures about that show Ladan and Laleh Bijani's current physical appearance, but none of them are as heartbreaking as this picture showing a friend of theirs kissing them for what might be the last time. Last night I went to a blogger party hosted by the ever-hospitable Perry de Havilland. Pictures? You want pictures as well? Here they are. Friday, July 04, 2003
Geoffrey Barto writes: I saw a mention of Bright's Disease in this morning's paper and couldn't help thinking that while Bright's Disease afflicts the kidneys, the Brights' disease leads to an excess of gall.Incidentally, Mr Barto observes in his blog, while discussing Mr Berlusconi's comparison of a German MEP to a kapo, that "Interestingly, stereotyping is considered acceptable [among EU politicos] if you're typecasting Bush as a cowboy. " Honey, it's worse than that. Stereotyping is considered acceptable if you're typecasting Bush as a Nazi.
British reticence from Brian Micklethwait: "This is why the lower classes are called "lower". Because they watch this stuff week after week all the way through. Although, a simple "low" would make more sense. Everyone involved in this show is totally disgusting, including me for watching it and writing about it and thus Playing Into Their Hands." On this day... "American Top 40" made its radio debut 33 years ago. Oh, and something else happened as well... To see what, check out this website: Independence and Its Enemies in New York. And if you think that the struggle for liberty in America ended in 1782, take a look at this post, which I'll call: Liberty and Its Enemies in California. "I've done it," said the addict. I've been clear of that stuff for a week. Why, if you put some down right in front of me I don't think I'd even be.... tempted. Thursday, July 03, 2003
Non sto ridendo. Perisca il pensiero! Berlusconi has certainly set the cat among the pigeons. Improper glee isn't confined to the Eurosceptics. According to Liberation, quoted in the second link above, ""Outside, in the corridors, Romano Prodi didn't try to hide his delight. Pinching the cheeks of a Belgian journalist, he told him: 'You didn't believe me, did you? His first day will be his last.'"
(Like my foray into Babel Fish Italian. Let him {he?} who understands the subjunctive write to me and I will put all right. It has been a frighteningly long time since I was taught by an Italian lady married to a Scot who once became annoyed with a classmate by the name of Rosa. In tones of rising Scots-Italian outrage she flung out an arm and cried, "Rosa? Rosa! You ar-e not a rosa! You ar-e a nettle!")
Actually, I have better cause to be gleeful than Prodi. He can rejoice in the discomfiture of a political enemy. I can rejoice in the sight of a crack in Humpty's shell. The EU is held together by its claims of historical inevitability. Part of that seeming inevitability comes from its greyness, its decorum. Anything that widens the space of what might happen there weakens it. Moira Breen writes: Re "acting like you owned the place". I seem to recall Dawkins (in Climbing Mount Improbable?) wittily mocking the pretensions of certain physical scientists who sprawl all over the sofas in Biology's living room and think their hostess is the maid: knowing themselves to be the cleverest fellows of all, they condescend to correct the biologists' confusions. They then proceed to throw out a biological howler or two before they're past the first couple of paragraphs of their tutorial. Let's hope the Blogger blug sends you to the right place for this Oliver Kamm quote. He says he's a left-liberal. He understands one aspect of conservative tradition better than many conservatives: If I suffer emotional hurt, a democratic - but epecially a conservative - government ought to have no interest whatever in my emotional state. I do not want to live in a 'caring society': I would settle for one that disinterestedly sets the rules we live by and seeks equity (not compassion) through some measure of economic redistribution.Personally, I don't want the redistribution or the compassion, but at the moment I fear the compassion more. Even in school I didn't like teachers being nosey. Leave pastoral care to the pastors. I cannot agree, though, with Oliver's (if I may so call him) argument that Bush is really a left-liberal, though I hear that he has started spending like one. I would say that he has embraced anti-tyrannical and internationalist principles that have always had a left and a right-wing strain. At the moment left-wing internationalism is weak, so Bush is doing duty for both.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
Oliver Kamm, writing on Oxford professor Andrew Wilkie's rejection of an Israeli student solely because of his nationality, says that.... Oh, blast Blogger! Read about Rachel Corrie instead. This post from the Dissident Frogman is going round the world, sped on its way by outrage, denials, reassertions, claims of malfeasance, retraction of said claims and everything else that accompanies a story that perfectly captures the zeitgeist. The facts are these: the American flag is absent from the collection of flags flying at the Bayeux Memorial Museum in Normandy. Smaller US flags are also not present where one would expect to see them on a display case and a pedestal elsewhere in the museum. This may be a result of anti-Americanism on the part of someone, at the museum or it may, it really may, have an innocent explanation. Tuesday, July 01, 2003
The Thunderer speaks. And it's not just the thunder in Stephen Pollard's poor, aching head. UPDATE: Oh, all right Americans: the Times is talking about this. What hopes for suffering humanity were raised, only to be dashed to the ground! I've got about two minutes left to say that it's Canada Day. (Ignore the stupid timestamp below this post. I have withdrawn my whip from it and am not responsible for its mad pronouncements.) Damian Penny muses on his country's birthday, and in the post above remembers something that happened on this day in 1916. Kevin of Lean Left has toothache. My sympathies, and I hope that 'has' has now become a 'had'. He gives a first person account of unsatisfactory treatment and denounces private medicine. On his comments I give a first person account of unsatisfactory treatment for a member of my family and denounce the NHS. And so it goes, each of us with our own worm's-eye view. However this man had a clear bird's-eye view of the NHS for two years, as part of his job as health editor for the Guardian's Sunday sister, The Observer. It convinced him that the system could never work. I said I'd re-link to this article every few months forever until the NHS goes away. It hasn't yet, so here it is again. The Philosophical Cowboy has a few tart points to make about Berlusconi. "It was at the liberty of the long post-war coalitions to free up media ownership. Berlusconi built a free media presence, the state didn't opt to offer competition, and now they're unfortunate enough to find themselves with commercial and state television in the hands of people they don't like."He also links further down to this story, about the people marching in Hong Kong against the [quote heavy irony] normalisation [unquote heavy irony] of Hong Kong's law on subversion. The authorities want to bring HK's more liberal law down to the level of mainland China's. These protesters have something in common with the Countryside Alliance protestors: they are "virgins" who have never been on a demonstration before. The political institutions that permit freedom are, historically, a western invention. No, that's not quite right. There has been freedom of speech inside happy families, among friends and among good neighbours of all nations since time immemorial. Nor do I mean to denigrate China's ancient legal system which had open hearings with every word recorded when we still practised trial by combat and ordeal. However the purely political concept of freedom is largely a western invention. But when you hear people say that it is irrelevant to Asians or Africans, think of these marchers. One of the nice things about the world of ideas is that you can adopt any one you fancy and make it your own, just as we did in the West when we copied our numerical system from its Hindu inventors via the Arabs. I hope that Hong Kong will keep and mainland China will adopt the laws that permit its people to discover new insights that the whole world can use. We already have a non-Communist China in all but name (and the habit of repression), and it is burning its way out of poverty in a generation. Imagine a free China. Imagine it. "As long as we don't see how the foxes are killed, you're OK." Read the comment about 'lamping' to this Samizdata post on the hunting ban. Not that I think 'lamping' is particularly cruel either. It's just necessary. The point is that the anti-hunt lobby are plenty more enraged by the red coats than by the actual deaths of foxes. An infallible test is to examine how the same activists react to the hunting lore of Amerindians or Aborigines; usually it's with a respectful word about how those peoples know and love the animals they kill, as if a high level of melanin in the skin were a necessary condition for any such emotion.
Mind you, I don't agree with the Countryside Alliance's view, expressed on Radio 4 at lunchtime today, that the Parliament Act 1911 is being misused. It's being used exactly as it was designed to be used: to force through the will of a Commons majority against Lords delaying tactics. The question is whether a Commons majority gives anyone a right to ban hunting.
And while we're on the subject of the Parliament Act, the question of whether a Commons majority gives anyone the right to take A's money by force in order to pay B a pension is also overdue for reexamination. "As long as we don't see how the sausage is made, you're OK." Mark Steyn on the Supreme Court's message to America. You know, I am easily embarrassed and I like things to be nice. That's why I will often defend the right to fudge, to blur harsh distinctions, to not rock the boat and to generally act like you are at a vicarage tea party for a congregation riven by schism. Mankind needs more vicarage tea parties.
Good thing I am not a judge solemnly charged with intepreting the laws according to the Constitution of the United States of America. 'Most everybody sends me bright stuff. Bloggers like all this because we're pedants and proceduralists and proud of it, and because, like Browning, "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things, The honest thief, the tender murderer..." In other words both Atheist and Christian bloggers like exploring their own complicatedness. Anyway, here's Andrea Harris and commenters and Val Dorta on the 'bright' meme, the latter quoting Jonathan Gewirtz. Val Dorta is an American who used to be a Venezuelan. Read this post on racial discrimination to see an immigrant's view of affirmative action and the wider culture of grievance. "The social-engineering mindset is infinitely creative and the last century saw worse things, starting with the war to end all wars. Think about it." Talking of pedantry, I did a google search on "most everybody", thinking it was a quote from Uncle Tom's Cabin and found loads of entries showing that it is accepted American usage for "almost everybody." I had thought it was only used jokingly. Monday, June 30, 2003
Odious of Odious and Peculiar suggests a new meme. (Peculiar is having a lie down at the moment.) It isn't stepping out of your area of expertise that's the problem. It's stepping out of your area of expertise but still acting like you own the place.
P.S. It's not Dumbledore. He's joking. It's Harry. "Press on with the wounded. I'll keep the savages at bay." I'm reading "The Happy Warrior" - the life of Sir Winston Churchill in picture strip as told in Eagle magazine. They really, really don't write them like that any more.
Quick thought: we didn't invent embedded journalists. Churchill's life hung by a thread as a bunch of irritated Boers held a five minute confab to decide whether they ought to shoot their prisoner, a war correspondent who had taken part in the fight. They let him off, according to the comic strip, because you don't catch the son of a lord every day. See, the aristocratic principle saves the world again.
[UPDATE: Val Dorta reminds me that Churchill was an embedded journalist in the Cuban War of Independence, too. As well as reporting it, he fought in it, on the Spanish side. The comic strip, like the young Churchill, cheerfully ignores the rights and wrongs of that war, regarding it as nothing more than a "good scrap." Churchill changed along with the world.]
"It seemed a good idea at the time" is a valid argument. So argues Blugle: "Sambrook is implying a distinction between being justified in taking a certain action at a certain time, given the available information, and that action subsequently seeming to have been the correct one, given how things have turned out. It is a distinction I heard Dr Reid attempting to articulate on the radio a few weeks ago.Fair point. But what's a blugle? Saturday, June 28, 2003
I had a little joke about US right-wing TV pundit Michael Savage a few posts down. Over at Biased BBC a reader spotted that a speech by a BBC bigwig, reprinted in the Guardian, had misrepresented something Savage said in a way that wasn't funny at all. Basically, he was wrongly portrayed as having advocated genocide. A coroner in New Zealand has said that the NZ agency responsible for health and safety in the workplace was partially responsible for the suicide of one of its own employees. Work-related stress drove him to it. The agency has sued itself for corporate manslaughter and the agency bosses face jail. I made the last sentence up. It would never happen really. You knew that. Friday, June 27, 2003
[The post below was another one that "just growed" like Topsy as I added new thoughts. It has changed quite a lot since I first posted it. You might want to read it again if you're following the topic.] Dean Esmay likes 'bright'. Most of his commenters don't. Good analogy from David Foster of Photon Courier: If Dawkins wants to present arguments for his worldview, that's fine. But it's not intellectually honest to associate a word with positive associations ("bright") with a topic it has nothing to do with. It is if the religious people adopted the word "honorable" to mean "belief in God," and went around saying "I'm an honorable."Dean Esmay himself raises a fair point: Does that [the use of the word "gay"] mean that heterosexuals are "gloomies? I think not."I think the answer to that one is that nobody else thinks so either. Perhaps because 'gay' was once a code for an unpopular and at that time illegal minority the question of what was its opposite did not come to the forefront for a long time. They were just "everybody else" or "normal people." The origin of the term we now use as the opposite of 'gay', namely 'straight', reflects this. I assume it had its origin in a denunciation of homosexuality. Both terms are now overlain with multiple layers of irony, not to mention history, and are no longer fighting words. But imagine if 'straight' were to be coined new today, as a non-ironic term for heterosexuals to describe themselves. Then it would be quite close in intention to 'bright.' Thought experiment. 'Bright' has been in use for decades. 'Straight' is new. Excerpt from newspaper article promoting the 'straight' meme: "Oh, I get it. [says your imagined interlocutor at a dinner party] It's a bit like 'bright'. So, what's the opposite of a straight? What would you call a homosexual person?" Obviously, words like 'bent', 'twisted' or 'crooked' would immediately come to mind, and that's the whole idea. OK, some of you reading this are going to say, we can go with the analogy. Many Christians do indeed object to homosexuality on religious grounds and might well use exactly those words. The Anglican Church is likely to schism on this very issue. Why do I act as if pointing out that 'straight' (used un-ironically) follows the same pattern as 'bright' discredits 'bright'? To answer that, I'd like to explain exactly what would I would find objectionable in the behaviour of the guy who introduces this new word 'straight' at your party. It is not his opinions per se. (In real life I know, socialise with and respect people with drastically different views on this question.) You can allow for openly held opinions. One strategy is not to mix incompatible people at all if it's going to generate more heat than light. Another is to make clear whether yours is the sort of gathering where vigorous argument is encouraged, like a political salon, or the sort where it's verboten, like your grandparents' Golden Wedding party. What is objectionable is that this word new word 'straight' is used, and is intended to be used, to slip in a highly contentious assumption over the canapés at the Golden Wedding, when those with differing views are going to be too 'thrown' or too polite to fight back, or, worse, too naive to spot what's being done. I hope it's clear that this objection actually goes wider than just parties - it's the same thing that so harmed the New York Times: editorial comment hiding in the news stories. It's the same reason, come to think of it, why I get so vastly more riled by the snide bias of the BBC than the open ideological commitment of the Guardian.
Getting back to the real world where 'bright' is the issue rather than 'straight', if you want an wide-ranging, self-chosen, positively-defined neologism for "non-supernaturalist", fine, but coin one that isn't deceptive. (And please don't co-opt 'freethinker'; it means 'rejects authority in matters of religion' rather than 'has no religion', and the distinction is useful.)
For those interested in what has become quite a widespread blogging debate, there's another post about 'bright' immediately below this one, and my first one from Wednesday can be found here. A bright new law of politics. "In the modern world, there is no minority group so oppressed, so marginalized, that the creation of an advocacy group cannot worsen their plight."- A. Schulz, 2003. That's for starters. For the main course the Machinery of Night grinds up a dawkinsburger. At that point I had yet to meet an atheist who wasn't narked by the whole thing - Chris Cooper had certainly not been impressed. However Google opens all doors, and Craig Ceely liked the idea, as did Wickens.ca. But a commenter called "N" on Reason magazine's blog trumped us all with this intriguing suggestion: You folks are missing the point: this "bright" thing is just a way of testing the meme theory of idea propagation. They know the source, and they have all the tools (thanks to modern technology) to track the spread of the term, making this an ideal scenario for lazy scientists.For the record, I was more nearly sympathetic to the first part of Dawkins' article, where he objected to the phrases "Muslim child", "Christian child" etc. than to the bright idea. It's no bad thing to remind oneself that children are not appendages of their parents. Only I won't be taking up the habit of saying "how dare you!" when I hear the phrase "an XYZ child", any more than I will leap up to defend the identity rights of millions of baseball-indifferent Americans every time someone says "the Americans play baseball." Unless the speaker has given evidence that he or she is culpably neglecting the possibility of exceptions to the shortcuts of common speech, it is better to refrain from being a schoolmarm to your dining companions. [Like I ever have any. Can't get the babysitters. We're due to go to one of those murder mystery parties and every teenager in town is booked, I tell you, it's driving m-]
Where was I? Oh yes. Dawkins, no less than his opponents, can be accused of lacking respect for the autonomy of children. Firstly, even an uneducated assent is still assent. The description "Muslim" or "Christian" will, for most Muslim or Christian children, be simply true. They believe in those religions. They may not be well-informed about them, or about the alternatives, but neither are many adults. Or many atheists. An atheist child may be only an atheist because he has never heard of God, but that doesn't make him not one. It doesn't seem quite respectful to say that a Buddhist girl, for example, cannot be described by the term she uses to describe herself just because she hasn't yet attained a full adult understanding of the Eightfold Way.
Secondly it runs counter to all observation to assume that a child is incapable of independent religious belief (or atheism). For a fourteen year old that is downright insulting and even an eight year old may have plenty to say on his or her own account.
Some of it in their prayers. Happy Smoking Fun. Liberty Log's Christopher Berry has discovered the antidote for the increasingly strident "Smoking Kills" / "Smoking Causes Fatal Lung Cancer" / Smoking Gives Satan The Victory In The Coming Apocalypse" warnings they stick on ciggie packets these days. Irresponsible? Scroll up one post for a restatement of libertarian principles on smoking that's very responsible. In an astonishing move, the former Ain't No Bad Dude has become a Michael Savage tribute blog. Our reporter, Blayson Jair, interviewed a slightly bashful Brian Linse on his porch overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures of Los Angeles yesterday. "I know it seems odd," said the well-known liberal blogger, "But I just can't keep quiet about my admiration for this marvellous man any longer."
An Asian man, a retired London Transport Engineer, a widower and a father, was kicked to death in Walthamstow, where I used to live. This report says that two men have been arrested. "Blowback". We hear a lot about how the Arab street is angry with us. Why so angry? Our riches, our Coca-Cola, our free women, our racism, our support for Israel, our failure to give them enough money, our not being Muslim, our meddling intelligence agencies, and past colonial oppression are all cited as causes with varying degrees of truth. One you will not have heard much about until now is our denial of the right to bear arms. The Independent reports, with a surprising degree of sympathy, that the attempts to disarm the Iraqi population may have had a role in starting the riot that ended with six British Mililtary Policemen dead. There is acknowledgement among defence staff that a lack of understanding of the local people contributed to the fatal confrontation on Tuesday in which six members of the Royal Military Police died.And A defence source said: "There is a realisation that asking people to give up their guns while the law-and-order situation does not improve is impractical and has led to a great deal of dissension. The idea of removing guns from the population is a sound one, but this has affected ordinary people who are not criminals, and we need to look at this whole matter very closely." Fine. I still want the people who slaughtered our troops to be found and punished. Have pity on this old grey head. Poor old Comical Ali now looks about ninety. What did for his youthful good looks? The stress of a sudden inrush of reality, or was he just unable to send out for his usual supply of Grecian 2000 while under the floorboards? Should we care? This man had Goebbels' job. Thursday, June 26, 2003
Inappropriate Response and Hell In A Handbasket have both commented on the atheism/"bright"/Dawkins meme-cluster. I hereby announce my belief in James Rummel's newly-mown lawn. Now if I could only believe in mine.... Sad to say, Mrs Lileks was sacked suddenly. Given that she was the spouse who went out to work and he the one who looked after their daughter during the day, I get the impression that they have suffered a big financial blow. Worse yet, various hints in yesterday's column suggest that her dismissal might have had something to do with her husband's writing. As you can imagine, this has ushered in a period of worry and disruption for the Lileks family, just as a similar situation did for the Murray family when Iain was sacked for blogging a few months ago. (On a happier note, congratulations to Kris and Iain. All being well their second child will be born in a few months' time.) Wednesday, June 25, 2003
A bright shining lie. I was rather surprised to see Instapundit quote approvingly (I think it was approvingly) a lady who has adopted this deliberately created meme whereby the word "bright" equals "non-religious". Not that Reynolds gives any indication of being a believer, but he's not usually explicitly hostile or, one would think, an admirer of Richard Dawkins, who has been pushing the meme in the Guardian. Steven Chapman certainly isn't an admirer of Dawkins. Nor was Dr Frank, talking about an earlier article: "Yet more supercilious Bush-whacking blather from Richard Dawkins. As Jeff Jarvis points out, Dawkins appears to be putting his own sentiments in the mouth of Osama bin Laden." Still, let us be logical. One could despise Dawkins' Chomsky-lite quagmirism and admire other aspects of his work. I did. Man, I got The Blind Watchmaker in hardback - this is cheapskate me we're talking about! And I turned the pages of The Selfish Gene until three in the morning on first reading. I distinctly remember that one of the minor pleasures of his books on evolution was the way that he had imaginative sympathy with some of the people whose ideas he was arguing against. Somewhere he said that if he'd been a Victorian he too would have believed the Argument From Design, and you felt he believed it. So convincing was The Selfish Gene that I ended up as an amateur Assistant Hammer of the Group Selectionists, and so I have remained. It took a while for me to realise that my idol had feet of mush. When I first read a letter from him in a newspaper that, ridiculously, condemned some religious group for thinking that they were right and other people were wrong, as if the same claim were not part and parcel of every opinion that ever was, I convinced myself that I was reading the clumsy hand of some sub-editor rather than the man himself. But as the years went by, evolutionary biology dropped right off the radar. Now he's, what is it, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of How To Land a Guest Column. Like blogging really, but makes more money, and most bloggers try to maintain a wider repertoire than an unvarying 85% the awfulness of religion, 5% the stupidity of America and 10% the unique wickedness of Israel. (To be fair, Dawkins backed off from the racist boycott of Israeli scientists - but he drove into that swamp before he backed out of it.) Anyway, returning to the "bright" meme. It's meant to be like "gay," sort of allusive and self-chosen and cool. But whatever you think of "gay" (and I can't help regretting, as does Dawkins, the loss of an old and useful word) one thing it does not do is include in itself a derogatory description of heterosexuals. The whole point of "bright" is the sneer within it against the "dull" or "stupid" or "dark" religious people. It cannot be used without signing up to that agenda. "Oh, I get it. [says your imagined interlocutor at a dinner party] It's a bit like 'gay'. So, what's the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?"Ker-lunk. Yes. We get it. Dawkins might reply, well, so he does sign up to that agenda. That's what his figure about 93% of top scientists being atheists is all about. (Did he ever wonder if the pressure to conform in order to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences might be at least as great as the pressure to conform in order to be elected to the US Senate or Congress? Probably greater: the electorate is less diverse.) But the word "bright" doesn't honestly argue for the opinion that atheists are clever, it sells it by the colloquial association of the word "bright" with cleverness, the way a sexy woman on the bonnet sells a car. In the abortion debate it's a cliche that "pro-choice" and "pro-life" are propaganda-in-a-pan, just shake out the package and you get a whole plateful of attitudes in one go. Yet both are true. I am pretty firmly pro-life but I can see why the English words pro-choice do express why some people think that abortion should be allowed. I would like myself to give women that choice if only I didn't think that her interests cannot override another life. Likewise a pro-choice person can probably see what I'm on about with the pro-life mallarkey. They do not deny the foetus has some sort of life, they just don't think it has enough to override the woman's right to choose. "Bright," in contrast to "gay", is intended to deceptively gain acceptance for an idea by other means than argument, and in contrast to "pro-choice" and "pro-life", its emotional sugar-coating has no redeeming core of explanatory power. (May I note here that even if you accept the "atheists are cleverer" argument you are miles away from proving atheism true. It is, I suppose, a sort of indirect argument from authority, the collective authority of clever people... a militant atheist turning to argument from authority: it has its funny side. The fact that the "bright" meme is to be used in a sneaky fashion to bolster what was a poor argument in the first place makes it doubly removed from intellectual honesty.) The first people to use the word "gay" did not intend to cut off the modern reader from appreciating many lines of poetry and phrases from literature; the people who spread the word "bright" boast that their meaning will take over. Worse, Dawkins makes a big joke of how "we" will at first scrupulously insist that it is a noun not an adjective, hoping and expecting all the time that the adjectival and propagandist meaning will take over. In other words, hoping and expecting that others will do the dirty work for you. Elsewhere in the article Dawkins makes a telling point that we should challenge language that presumes too much; how odd then that he advocates a term that presumes an unproven superiority in order to spread an opinion by snobbishness. "Bright" is not illuminating. (I pressed "publish" too soon on this post. Some of you will therefore have seen it evolve. Hope you enjoyed the process.) New one on me. In my first post today I linked to this list of happenings in 1955 in order to make the point that it was a long time before the Soviets let their German POWs go. But look at the item two lines above:
July 27: An Israeli plane is shot down over Bulgaria killing 57 people.
I'd never heard of this. Google isn't helping much but I did find this account and this one.
Er - come to think of it, this post isn't going anywhere. I just felt odd that this rather large number of people were blown out of the sky in time of peace - at best a colossal blunder, at worst mass murder - and I'd never heard of it. I'd heard of KAL 007 shot down by the Russians in 1983, the Iranian civil airliner shot down by an American warship in 1988 and the downing of a Russian airliner by a stray Ukrainian missile in 2001 but not this. The Journal of Comparative Fisking. Marxist relic Eric Hobsbawm hasn't had so much attention paid to his delusions in years. This is what Nelson Ascher (backup general link here) made of a Guardian article he committed the other day. Ascher's fisking inspired Angie Schultz to produce her own (backup general link here) in which she finally puts a name to the philosophy behind all those die-hard believers in the overthrow of all existing power structures who have so suddenly discovered the joys of international law: Revolutionaries for the Status Quo. (Ruddy confusing, that Europundit site. I originally had Ascher's piece down as being by John Chappell, since he posted it.)
Burgled Pensioners die earlier. To be precise, they are twice as likely to be dead within two years as people of a similar age who have not been burgled. This finding "took researchers by surprise." I wonder how that burglar is getting on in his legally-aided case against Tony Martin? Boobs want to ban boobs. The Telegraph, with a fine eye for what will catch your attention, has chosen the example of Page Three grils to show what will have to go if a Euro-directive against sexual stereotyping becomes law. One trusts that the Telegraph is not appealing to the concerns of its own gentlemen-readers in this instance. One trusts. I rather think the Telegraph is being public-spirited. Their aim is for other newspapers with a different demographic to pick up the story. Never mind if our competitors pinch our headline, says the Telegraph, the threat will be publicised and that's the main thing.
Whatever. It's not really that funny. There used to be a story like this every month or so. Now there are one or two each week. Is this what it feels like as a country begins to slip down into repression? There's no law of nature that says it can't happen to us because we speak English.
The Americans speak English, yet over there an alliance of religious kooks and tranzis already have control of textbooks.
(Yes, I know I said "grils". Figure it out.)
UPDATE: A reader from Florida by the name of "erp" writes to ask, what are tranzis and Page Three? and to say: "You may be sure that anything, and I mean anything having to do with the ed biz is in the full control of teachers' unions which are themselves fully controlled by people who are far to the left politically and bent on making public education conform to their ideology.Too true. The National Educational Association, a collection of Luddites who make our own dear National Union of Teachers shine in comparison, are a subset of tranzis. The abbreviation is blogger slang rather than British slang, was coined by David Carr and is itself short for a term coined by John Fonte in an essay for the Hudson Institute: "transnational progressives". As for page three - oh, it's all quite harmless really. You click on the "page 3" link and see what you see.
In the cavern of the lost-emails there were quite a few saying that I was wrong in saying that the Japanese themselves must find it confusing to refer to the late Emperor Hirohito as "Showa". A work deadline bore down on me and I quite forgot to post them. Mark Sloboda's was typical: You wrote that 'now that he is dead the Japanese refer to Emperor Hirohito his "reign name" of Showa' and posited that this must be confusing. So, six British soldiers were killed by a mob in Iraq. There's an argument that says we're doing this all wrong and Iraq should be more clearly occupied. All the Ba'ath party in prison, only letting out the POWs in dribs and drabs, and so on. Hey, the Soviets kept some German prisoners until 1955. I don't think so. I think that the more relaxed berets-not-helmets strategy is more or less the right one. The Iraqis didn't have anything like the complicity in Saddam Hussein's crimes as the Germans did in Hitler's. We owe them for not fighting. Sadly, even the best strategy available isn't proof against everything.
I don't want to make too much of the fact that the violence started as a result of weapons searches. The most devoted supporter of the right to bear arms might still cavil at the thought of arms caches under the beds of active enemies.
UPDATE: Patrick Crozier does want to make something of it. 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. |
