Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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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? |