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