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, March 06, 2004
Polio and the tragedy of the commons. Anthony Cox writes: Thanks for the links, I would respond if I was still blogging. But why bother when someone else has already nailed it....Den Beste's link has some good arguments against libertarian ideas. I have a feeling that there are some good responses out there, but I don't know them. I hope this doesn't give the impression that all I'm interested in is defending my little ideological group. Perhaps a slightly more accurate statement would be that I can see the dim shapes of good responses to Den Beste but right now I cannot answer him. I don't despise my own ability to see dim shapes of arguments: usually I do manage to reach clear arguments in the end. It takes and should take quite a lot to make a person renounce their axioms. But for now, he has an awfully good point, doesn't he? LATER: The phrase "Right to exclude" is going to be a large part of any answer I might come up with. But not tonight, I'm turning in. "This is pompea last day sort of place." Awesome. A twenty-five year old Ukrainian biker girl has produced this unforgettable photo-essay about her distinctly unusual hobby. "I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl "dead zone" It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite? because one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes. "Not to mention ghost towns across which looters, scientists and tourists of the macabre each make their own trajectories through the empty land - and through which this free spirit rides with a dosimeter at her hip and the wind in her hair. Thanks to Damian Penny and a long chain of equally awed bloggers which I traced as far back as Jessica's Well. Friday, March 05, 2004
It's been a while since I had a good old-fashioned anti-socialist rant. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Guardian's David Walker for this good old-fashioned socialist rant that reminded me of forgotten pleasures. Walker has been reading a report by the Treasury's Derek Wanless (who pops up everywhere these days) that says the poor are more unhealthy than the rich. Here's Walker's solution:
But wouldn't it be even cheaper to address the causes of the income disparity that in turn correlates so strongly with ill health? It would be, but where is the physician to recommend the progressive taxation that would underpin such a health-giving redistribution of income?Where indeed? On a Saturday night at about this hour I reckon he's just about reached the petits fours and will be calling for coffee and the bill any minute now. Good thing too, he's been moving left all night and one more drink would have had him recommending the massacre of the bourgeoisie. (The tamarind sauce was a little bitter, I thought. ) Getting back to Mr Walker, we'll start with his sloppy language. Nothing that Walker quotes from Wanless's report suggests that income disparity causes the ill-health. If you literally believed inequality caused ill-health the best policy would be to make all the rich, healthy people poor. Oh, I forgot, that is the policy.
Come to think of it, though, Walker missed a trick. Inequality does cause ill health, among baboons anyway. I read somewhere - oh, you Google - that baboons are more unhappy on a given ration of bananas when they are at the bottom of the social hierarchy than when they have the same banana allowance but are nearer being Top Baboons. That's another reason for not having socialism, say I. Ain't nothing more hierarchical than a socialist society! Without the entropic flow of money they stratify; and one of the ways they stratify is by access to health care. The elite have the skills to make sure their problems are first on the consultant's list; the lumpenproletariat do not.
But I digress. It is not inequality that should outrage but poverty. We have to get rid of poverty. So let's have more of the method of poverty-zapping that's worked for hundreds of millions of people worlwide.
Oddly, Mr Walker says quite a lot about the way poor people smoke more than rich people without explaining why giving the poor more of other people's money to buy ciggies would help. Free fruit and veg? I don't see it working, mate. Carrots, for instance are damn near free already. In the developed countries most of the health problems of the permanently poor class are behavioural.
A hypothesis Walker doesn't suggest but I do is that welfare makes you unhealthy. Welfare people spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, and that is bad for your health. (The fun thing about that last sentence is it presses all the outrage buttons while remaining perfectly defensible.) Inactivity, low morale and passivity are the hallmarks of welfare and are also the hallmarks of ill health. Getting folk off welfare would save lives.
I had a sort of preparatory proto-rant to this one over in the comments to this post at Freedom and Whisky. Some BBC report said that poorer people couldn't afford healthy food and couldn't afford exercise. Can't the BBC conceive of exercise outside a gym?
ADDED LATER: A thing I didn't bring out in this rant was that when I talk about health problems being behavioural problems nine times out of ten I think that harmful behaviours are made a lot more likely by bad incentives in society. In that respect I haven't changed much since my pinko days - although my views as to what constitutes a bad state of society have changed.
Yeah. I'm still a wimp.
Sulli has up two funny stories about politically correct editing. Here's my contribution to the genre, which I actually heard in a sermon: worried that he might hesitate or stumble over the deceased's name while reading the words of a funeral service, a Catholic priest got into the habit of using the the "Replace All" function of his word processor to print out the text with the correct name inserted every time. All went well until he had to conduct the funeral of a lady called Mary, closely followed by another funeral for a man called Joe. "Hail Joe, full of grace..." Thursday, March 04, 2004
More on polio vaccination in Nigeria. I'm putting this follow up to my Biased BBC post here rather than there because it's more about the story itself rather than the BBC presentation of it. There's plenty to say. Anthony Cox of the late lamented Black Triangle blog writes: You are making me all nostalgic about my blog, I've been covering this for And here's a link plus discussion from Gene Expressions: link One of the commenters ("bbartlog") to the Gene Expressions post brings up some reasonable arguments against vaccination. I concede that when liberty meets public health, sparks fly. Here are some of the issues:
OK, so I've raised all these questions and shown what a reasonable person I am. I've told the BMA to get their noses out of my life on this blog before now and no doubt I will again. Now let's get back to the immediate case before us. None of these points, thought-provoking though they are, seriously challenge the point I made on Biased BBC. The myth that "the Americans are lacing polio vaccine to make Nigerian women infertile" is baseless. While it lasts, it kills. If the BBC talk about "public service" means anything at all, it means educating people not to believe such rubbish.
UPDATE: Gadaffi believes similar conspiracy theories. This account comes via Noah of Africapundit. Wednesday, March 03, 2004
If you are at peace with the world, read Laban Tall and the reinvigorated Peter Briffa and they'll soon set you right. On Biased BBC I have up an angry post about BBC reporting of the conspiracy theory that is stopping many Nigerians from being vaccinated against polio. Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Cass Brown saw my piece on sick jokes, and now writes:
The website is here. Now, as it happens, Blog City is being upgraded so I haven't actually seen it. But the email struck me as straightforward and up-front so I'm taking it on trust. That sort of humour that I expect to see there isn't going to appeal to everybody, but there is a big difference between grim humour about your own position and mockery of someone else's, as members of the Guinea Pig Club could tell you. UPDATE: I'm afraid I still haven't been able to get the first link (http://cancergiggles.blog-city.com/read/472766.htm) to work. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong
Important Environmental News. Bjorn Lomborg looks like Harrison Ford. Bet that explains some of his success - and some of the fury against him. Monday, March 01, 2004
Sorry, too busy to blog today. I'll just mention that while desperately trying to hack down a few of the hydra-heads of email I found one offering me effort-free academic qualifications which came from a netscape email address starting with the characters "nataliesolent" and which had in the text the phrase "real name: natalie solent." Gosh, what an amazing coincidence, I don't think. I am definitely not offering fake MBAs for money, and so far as I know there is no other Natalie Solent on the net. May all spammers die a lingering death in the depths of space. Saturday, February 28, 2004
Friday, February 27, 2004
More on sick jokes. I was going to send Anne Cunningham of One Sided Wonder a note saying, "you might be interested in this post." Then I saw I didn't need to - she had already commented and recounted an experience of her own. (Given that her blog often touches on the ins and outs of human behaviour this is not a particularly amazing coincidence.) Perhaps I can tempt Anthony Cox back into his triangular arena (see post below) with a few thoughts on when it is and when it is not beneficial for people to have an accurate perception of how common forbidden behaviour is. As he has often observed, we really, really, really want doctors to 'fess up about mistakes. That way we get a chance to put the healthy kidney back or whatever and, just as important, we can predict likely mistakes and hence forestall them. Only honesty isn't likely if the reward for it is crucifixion in the press, four different malpractice suits and an exemplary jail sentence.
I have been told on good authority that the late night conversation of pilots has more near misses than the dodgems at the fair. Openess about that might be helpful, too. But how about when we move away from honest error and into misbehaviour? Do we want pilots to confess to each other when they fly drunk? OK, OK what we really want is for them to come to the flight deck sober as I'm mostly sure most of them do. But given that drunken flying does sometimes occur, do we want them confessing it? Might that not remove some of the inhibitions that stop Captain So-and-so reaching for the whisky bottle? "What the hell," he might say, "everybody's doing it."
Sexual behaviour is enormously influenced by people's guesses as to what is normal. The promiscuous and the abstinent each believe the other group to be lying.
[Oh, drat. I was going to bring this back round to taboo-breaking humour and cheapening public discourse, but I've just remembered I've got to go off and do stuff. To Be Continued if I don't forget what I was going to say. ] Come the glorious day when David Farrer sweeps in as Scottish First Minister this is what he will do. Today is National Doodle Day. Honest, I heard it on Radio Essex. Normally I do not concern myself with National Excuse for a Press Release Days of any sort, but this one is the perfect excuse for a blog post and that's quite different. Isn't this page of doodles by Engels lovely? As I say in the comments, I have more in common with him than I ever knew: I always doodle heads facing left as well. "I always doodle" is no exaggeration; I must have drawn tens of thousands of leftward-facing faces over the years. Mostly female, perhaps because it's a female face I see in the mirror. Mostly young, or coming out as looking young, which is not quite the same thing. Not all are beautiful or happy looking by any means - though, again, this is probably because one tremor of the pen can make a smile come out as a smirk or disrupt the eveness necessary for beauty. A slight majority of my faces are non-white, either black or Oriental or unclassifiably mixed-race. I don't think there is any deep political or psychological reason for this. I have always liked drawing faces and can still remember my flush of pleasure when I first got the epicanthic fold right. There is great pleasure in tracing the curve of an upper lip that is different, but not utterly different, from one's own. Sometimes while drawing what I know is essentially the same doodle as I have done on dozens of past occasions I wonder why I am not bored. The answer is that we are deeply programmed to find the human face interesting. Thursday, February 26, 2004
Good riddance. I see that Ann Winterton has lost the Conservative party Whip after making a heartless and racist joke about the recent drowning of twenty Chinese cocklers at Morecombe Bay. Serves her right. I've lost the link where I read it, but someone present said that the contrast between people waiting to drown and the bright comfort of a dinner party was horrible. He was embarrassed for their hosts. (The occasion was a dinner meant to foster better Anglo-Danish relations. If the Danish Press is reporting all this, I rather think it failed in that aim.)
You know what? Sicko jokes fill a void. Once upon a time sex jokes were what we did when we wanted to prod at taboos. Now that sex is no longer shocking enough, jokes about murder and tragedy have replaced sex jokes in that role. I'd prefer some return of the sex taboos.
The first sicko joke I ever heard was about the IRA murder of Lord Mountbatten; more precisely it was about the simultaneous murder of a fourteen year old relative in the boat with him and another boy. That was in 1979. I suspect that that was an early one, i.e. that the sick joke phenomenon is relatively new. (I distinguish it from black humour, honoured since ancient times.)
Child though I was, I was genuinely and bitterly outraged by Mountbatten's murder. Yet I laughed at the joke. I've laughed at similar since. So have you, probably.
Late at night, in the warmth of the circle after a party or a night at the pub, I have heard humane and respectable people of both left and right repeat and laugh at really atrocious sick jokes and racist jokes. (If I have more often been the audience than the comedian that is mainly because my memory for punch lines is poor.) The worst racist joke I ever heard came from a Labour councillor who did, I am convinced, genuinely strive against racism in the other 99.99% of his life. That was the point. He laughed most at what was most forbidden.
Once a group of us were discussing sick humour. Some subjects, we all agreed, were beyond the Pale - the Holocaust, for instance. Someone promptly told a joke (despite its setting, less cruel than most of those I have discussed here, being some way along the road to that fine destination, the true political joke) about a German commandant letting one prisoner go free from a concentration camp. We laughed. Of course we did.
Am I saying sick jokes are OK then? No. It would be better to turn away. I am saying that in some circumstances they present an all but insurmountable temptation. All sorts of motives flow together: braggadocio, peversity, the heady liberation of a temporary Saturnalia, the exchange of tokens of intimacy ("we can trust each other not to tell"), the commission of a shared crime as an initiation rite. And, that great corrupter, the fear that if you don't laugh you will be seen as a prig and a killjoy.
I can't quite analyse or defend this but I feel that Mrs Winterton's offence was substantially worse because she was not, whatever she says, in a truly private situation. I don't merely mean that she was more likely to get caught; there was something actually worse about that sort of joke made outside the magic circle. For one thing, the relatives of the dead might get to hear about it, but as well as that it breached some primal wall.
(Everyone, please note: though I am interested in the phenomenon I truly don't want to hear or repeat the actual jokes.)
ADDED FRIDAY: after a night's sleep I have hit upon the reason why I find it nastier that such jokes are made in a speech. When people huddle close and make that sort of joke in whispers they acknowledge the wrongness of what they do even in the act of doing it. If one makes that sort of joke sitting up and smiling brightly, it is as if you are saying that it is all right to mock the recently dead; that the taboo is pointless. My spies are everywhere. Continuing the university theme, a former pupil of A C Grayling at Oxford saw my criticism and has leapt - well, walked languidly - to his defence, saying that he was a good tutor and adding, "He was actually quite popular - being generally thought a good talker with a lovely voice! That doesn't prevent him being an idiot of course." The same correspondent adds Van Eyck to the list of famous Belgians. About that article in Jewbusters, formerly known as Adbusters... It brings back memories of the "No platform" debate in British universities in the late 1970s and early 80s. It started off as a movement whereby Student Unions, overmighty in those days, bound themselves to deny racists and fascists a platform to speak at university meetings. That was, of course, very much against the spirit of freedom of speech that once prevailed in the universities (mock not, my children, for this was long ago), but at least it originally referred to real racists and real fascists. Not for long, though. Soon R & F was taken to include Zionists. Soon after that Zionists was taken at some universities to include any Conservative MP who supported Israel and, if I recall correctly, some Labour ones as well. Yet worse, it included societies of Jewish students.
That much is common knowledge. What follows is my speculation, for I certainly wasn't involved in such matters, never having being a hack in the British university sense of the word. Whatever the details, a practical question must have arisen: how do you find out which Conservative MPs support Israel? I remember that the decision was made locally for each university, some going further than others, which means the decision-makers for each university would have been committees of student politicians, usually aged between eighteen and twenty-one, few of whom would have had the time or desire to follow the careers of individual MPs. A common consequence of their excusable ignorance and inexcusable arrogance was that, since Jewishness and support for Israel overlap, their first step in their task was often to find out which MPs were Jews. They didn't have the internet to help them but they did have Vacher's Parliamentary Companion which gives potted biographies of each MP. Messrs Vacher and Dod neglect to tell us who the Jews are, but I assume - how else can they have done it? - that someone in each committee was given the task of combing the list and putting the traditional asterix next to each suspect.
Sit you back. Imagine the dialogues that must have taken place when an invitation to speak was submitted to the young guardians of morality:
"The Conservative Students' Association want Davidson to speak."Eventually it got to the stage where to save themselves the trouble and possible embarrassment of putting little stars next to certain names the students doing the deciding in some universities would just ban all Conservatives, or all manifestations of Jewish identity. This step belatedly awoke the slumbering sense of fair play of the left-wing but moderate mass of students and the whole 'no platform' movement was gradually dismantled in a series of referenda and votes at various universities, and where not formally reversed, quietly allowed to lapse. So they all lived happily ever after, then?
What do you think this is, a fairy tale? The saga of "no platform" might make a heartening story were it not for the fact that the baton of censorship was not dropped but merely passed on, from students to university authorities, who nowadays enforce speech codes with all the enthusiasm of their student predecessors and with more power at their disposal. In many cases the censors are probably the same people, wretches who became addicted at an early age to the delights of exercising power in a small closed world and have never broken free. I have the impression that the "no platform" policies have come back as well.
Liberty is indivisible. Freedom of speech and freedom from persecution for minorities are not antithetical but supporting concepts. Freedom of speech is "the merciless confessional that a people makes to itself, and it is well known that confession has the power to redeem" as Karl Marx, engine of destruction though his other ideas turned out to be, argued so well.
Which is why I maintain that Kalle Lasn, peace hero and Jew-baiter, has the political right to write as he does... and I have the right to marvel at a living mind so dead to to history that it could plod through the process of filtering out the Jews from "a carefully researched list" of neocons (word has it that the Jew part was more carefully researched than the neocon part); necessarily involving the scrutiny of every name for Jewishness - the ferreting out of family details - the adoption of some policy to decide the case of mischlings; and not pull back from sheer shame. Did his finger even tremble as he typed his little stars?
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
...Not Hercule Poirot, he's fictional, but you can have half of Mark Steyn. Mark Steyn is half Belgian. This is so weird. Not that I dislike Belgium: some benign blind spot in their overarching regulatedness allows them very liberal gun laws, so we go there to play bang bang. Furthermore, (ignore me if I've said this before) happy the land where if one should faint from hunger in the street one would find one had landed on a café chair and a waiter was even now bringing croque monsieur and an amusingly shaped glass of the best beer in the world. But, gun laws apart, the Country of the Good Europeans is somehow not the place I had envisaged as supplying 50% of Mr Steyn's genes. Incidentally: Van Dyck, Bruegel, Eddy Merckx, Hergé, King Leopold (the Congo one), Rubens, Jean-Claude Van Damme... I did that without checking here. Except for the spelling of Merckx, of course. Monday, February 23, 2004
You say this guy is a professional philosopher? A.C. Grayling sits in for Richard Dawkins in this Times article about how triff science is compared to nasty religion. I gather foreign readers will be unable to access Grayling's article after a week, so I shall summarise it. Science = cool stuff about remote galaxies, sensawunda, happy cooperation. Religion = Bible belt Americans, Afghan child brides. Blimey, the rot in the universities must be worse than I thought. Are his students or his colleagues or whoever is supposed to argue back at him when he tries out next week's column at High Table permanently drunk or what? Because for some reason he thinks this sort of thing constitutes conclusive argument: It is said that we shall know a thing by its fruits. A striking fact about the adventure of science, whenever it escapes the attentions of those who pervert it to making war rather than progress, is how well it serves mankind.Wowee, what an amazing conclusion: when the most spectacularly nasty warlike uses science has been put to are defined out... there are only nice peaceful uses left over! Just don't mention the war. On second thoughts, stuff Godwin's Law: I will mention the war because it is thunderously relevant. Anyone who can write a sentence like that and leave his flank wide open to the mention of Zyklon B isn't being argued with enough. And did he really never stop to consider the pyramid of skulls left behind by a certain well-known political philosophy officially dedicated to scientific atheism?
As it happens I wholeheartedly agree with Grayling's view that science has brought us many benefits, and broadly agree with his view that "Everywhere that religion has ever held temporal power, the result has approximated Taleban-style rule." So why can't I re-write his last paragraph thus: It is said that we shall know a thing by its fruits. A striking fact about the adventure of religion, whenever it escapes the attentions of those who pervert it to an instrument of power rather than faith, is how well it serves mankind. QUICK UPDATE: Andrew writes: Hmm, you don't REALLY think that the only reason I try to be nice to people is because of some old guy up the sky with a big white beard? Do you?As I said to Andrew, I meant "historical origin" and there will one day be a full post on this, and it will deal with Christianity vs Paganism as well as religious vs atheist. Two quick points in the meantime: - I'm not claiming that no Stoic or Buddhist ever saw the need to be nice to strangers or that no atheist sees it now. I am claiming that the reason our modern Western society is saturated with the idea of universal basic benevolence (so much so that we can hardly believe that people can think otherwise even when they say so clearly) is, historically, Christianity.
- My re-write of Grayling's paragraph wasn't meant to be the whole of my own view. It was meant to show that I could make a case no worse than his by swapping a few nouns.
The remorseless Davids Medienkritik tracks the Forbes/Lewincamp affair into German waters. For those of us who didn't know our Forbes from our Lewincamp, Tim Blair explains. I guess the German media will be telling us how the Pentagon suppressed the truth about global warming some time next week. Friday, February 13, 2004
You've heard of Dances With Wolves. I'm Skis With Weasles. See you in a week. Thanks to everyone who wrote in about Snell's Law. You put me to shame. I didn't mean derive from first principles, with "Fermat's Principle of Least Time and some differential calculus (plus a sneaky rearrangement and the knowledge that csc^2(x) = 1 + cot^2(x) )" as David Gillies put it, just the diddy little geometry of how it works. Thursday, February 12, 2004
Wal-Mart and Snell's Law. I have been reading a fascinating post plus comments in Body and Soul. The post proper was about why "Jeanne D'Arc" does not go to Wal-Mart. I have never had the pleasure of going to a Wal-Mart, but, oh, for an extra hour to tell you all why I think it is a splendid and moral act to come home loaded with goodies from cheapo British chains such as Peacock's, Lidl (better salmon than Fortnum & Mason) and the one in Bishop's Stortford with the name I forget, Buy-U-Rite or something equally ghastly, where you can get one fleece top for £3 or two for a fiver. So nice for poor people, I always think.* I haven't got the hour.
... But perhaps I have a few minutes. Jeanne links to a paper from Oxfam arguing that Wal-Mart etc are driving down working conditions. In response, let me also quote Oxfam. In this Observer article, which I urge you to read even though it is in glacial PDF format, Kevin Watkins the head of policy at Oxfam, speaks of "unprecendented progress". His complaint was of gains spread unevenly, not of there being no gains. He was commenting on a UN report that said that since 1970 world infant mortality had halved, access to safe water quintupled, adult literacy risen from 47% to 73% and life expectancy increased by eight years. These changes didn't happen by magic. They started happening when people in developing countries stopped following the model of East Africa and started following the model of East Asia.
My interest in the post was all the greater when the comments veered off into education issues. I found much to agree with. The correspondents, all left-wing, were as angry and frustrated about dumbing down in education as ever a Joanne Jacobs or, come to think of it, a Natalie Solent. One or two talked about their grandfathers' textbooks, full of algebra and Latin. Most of the commenters also showed a disdain for 'education' that is merely intended to turn out workers equal to that of an Alice Bachini or a Brian Micklethwait.
More is spent and less achieved in American education than in past generations. Something must have caused the decline, spanning many decades and both Republican and Democrat administrations. Ever thought of blaming the NEA? This is a serious question. (Although the mention of the the NEA is shorthand for an entire establishment.) Everything I know about British education in the last few decades and all I have read about the parallel history in the US suggests to me the classic story of a special interest gaining and keeping a stranglehold. In time the stranglehold has exhuasted the strangler almost as much as the stranglee, but he dare not let go.
That dumbing-down has happened in Britain, too, I know from personal and family experience as a former teacher married to a teacher. In the course of my current work I have had cause to examine several GCSE, AS and A-Level syllabi (or 'specifications' as they call them now, which avoids the elitist Latin plural), both in my own subject of physics and in the humanities. An example, plucked from the air: when I sat O-Level physics at the age of sixteen one had to derive and use Snell's Law of refraction. Today's seventeen or eighteen year-olds doing AS/A2 level physics need only use it, not derive it.
Perhaps, you may say, the benighted seventeen year-olds, though deprived of their sense of Snell are learning something else of equal or greater use?
They are learning something else. Again, here I select but one example out of many I could have employed. Section 17.1 of the AQA syllab... specificatiabub directs that the aspiring Einsteins shall be examined on the "spiritual, moral, ethical, social and cultural issues" related to physics. Then there is Section 17.2, the European Dimension; Section 17. 3, Environmental Education; and finally Section 17.4, Avoidance of Bias.
What a gift for the middle-class student I once was, tempted to idleness when it came to computation but who could supply unlimited quantities of eloquence without breaking into a sweat. But prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!, - it is a cruel trick to play on the inarticulate pupil who needs physics (real physics, physics physics) a damn sight more than I did. It is unfair to employers, too, whose interests are not overriding but are nonetheless owed common honesty. They think they are getting someone who can select a material to use to clad an optical fibre with a refractive index chosen so as to minimize multipath dispersion and what they actually get is someone who can waffle convincingly about why people tend to pay no attention to warnings about naturally radioactive radon gas in their cellars. (I paraphrase a question from a 2001 paper.) Worse yet, the new employee may think he knows more than he does. (Or she. Bleah, just lost five marks for "avoidance of bias".) That sort of thing kills people eventually.
Don't misunderstand me. I do not wish that children or adults should not be taught about ethics, philosophy or politics. But since circa 1950 it has not been the case that we have gained a golden age in the teaching of political philosophy at the cost of a decline in physics. Or a golden age in history and geography teaching at the cost of a decline in maths. Teaching of all these subjects has become less rigorous. Why that is so is a post in itself, but broadly I think it's because teachers themselves pushed for and got 'reforms' that turned out to be harmful and now they can't admit it. There's a point here about national systems having too much inertia, too.
*And if you are wondering, yes, there have been times in my life when I was poor. Of course, education makes poverty less of a hardship, as do warm fleece tops for £3; and likely to be temporary, as does a job making them for 20p.
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Does racial segregation arise naturally, or does it have to be enforced? Read this post on the subject from David Bernstein of Volokh Conspiracy That ties into Kieran Healy's email in reply to my earlier post, which if I were not so vague and disorganised I would have posted days ago. Here it is: You might be reading a bit too much into my post ... It's not really about affirmative action. The main point was fairly simple --- just that there's a tremendous amount of empirical evidence that, the elegance of the tipping model notwithstanding, racial segregation in housing markets has been driven by different mechanisms from the one Schelling identifies. I've known people to become entranced by tipping explanations with lovely emergent outcomes even though the empirical data suggests, e.g., that there's a well-entrenched system of redlining by realtors that prevents minority buyers from being shown houses in predominantly white neighborhoods, or that bank managers consistently assess the mortgage prospects of otherwise identical white and black families differently. And so on.[No. My argument was a version of the one that says, "Don't allow Tony Blair / President Bush any powers that you would not also be willing to see in the hands of Michael Howard / President Kerry." - NS] Lots of food for thought here. Both Kieran Healy and David Bernstein provide some good arguments from different directions against libertarian ideas. I don't know enough about US history to answer (Though "that was then, this is now" might be a start.) This humble blogger is, as ever, gloriously and supremely right, but she can't summon up arguments to prove it just yet. On another point, as a ramshackle Catholic of sorts (actually I think I might be turning Anglican, but that's another story) I must correct the impression I gave that I am always against guilt. Guilt is good when you have something specific to be guilty for and when it leads to repentance, restitution if possible and better ways in future. Wallpaper guilt is a waste of life.
So shall I stop henceforth all this self-obsessed agonizing about how awful I am at answering emails? Heavens, no. You must allow me my little hobbies. Anne Cunningham has issued a second post on the drawbacks of being adored. Where escapes me, but somewhere I once came across a very good article about how awkward it can be for very small children to have an over-devoted friend at playgroup or in the reception class of school. Unlike Anne, I'm not talking about crushes here, and certainly not about anything sexual; just a little chum who follows you about all the time.
Saying "I don't want you around me so much" without being cruel is hard enough for an adult or teenager. Anne commented earlier on the feeling of not having an approved script for such occasions (unlike bereavement, for example). It's twice as hard for a little kid who can draw neither upon personal experience nor upon the examples provided by fiction or popular culture, meagre though they are. "Why I Left the Anti-War Right." Anthony Gancarski explains how he finally chucked his column for Antiwar.com after months of weird emails from anti-semites right and left. The last straw was when his column dissing Michael Moore was spiked because it might annoy the left. Truth to tell, I reacted to his sudden conversion with some suspicion. Many people, I said to the page, had their moment of truth when the rubble of the World Trade Center hit the ground - and yours came when a rejection slip hit the mat?
Still, changes of heart do happen that way sometimes: after months of vague doubt, some trivial little thing brings it all into focus. That's why we have the metaphor of the straw that broke the camel's back.
Antiwar.com is, well, Antiwar.com, a place where Buchanan and Pilger are literally on the same page.
Read Airstrip One for sharp anti-war argument and correct anti-EU argument.
(Starting link via NZ pundit who also links to Justin Raimondo's reply.) Look who the Guardian chose to pronounce on complex issues of public governance. Look how little comment it all caused. Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Anyone can and everyone should lambast lefties for groupthink, and the subject of this post by Bjørn Stærk, one of those tiresome psychiatrists who dresses up his personal political opinions in a psychiatric robe that's too big for them, can consider himself well and truly lambasted. However the post doesn't stop there. It makes more general observations about politics - I would expect to find a high level of groupthink in any government. It's the nature of politics to separate people into groups that think alike. At the top of the hill, with enemies on the outside and enemies on the inside, forced as you are to make unpopular and risky decisions, prestige, greed and fear combine to create excellent conditions for groupthink.- and about how to learn - At the very least it's good sense to ask someone to explain their views in simple terms before you yourself attempt to explain their views in complex terms.- that you may find useful however you vote. You might even find ammo for a few well-aimed shots at me and my blogging buddies. The heirs to Hogarth. I'm told today's Independent cartoon shows George Bush with his knuckles dragging on the ground. How challenging. Speaking truth to power fearlessly as ever, eh, Indies? But maybe they are a little bit fearful of speaking truth to internet because I can't find it at the Independent's website. Anyone out there seen it? If the cartoon turns out to be a lovable gem of wit and good-humoured raillery, containing, moreover, a subtle political message well-calculated to gently tease the settled assumptions of the average Independent reader, I'll take all my nasty sarcastic comments back. But, just guessing, I think it will turn out to be a 2004 version of the sort of thing that was already stale when Bernard Levin visited an exhibition subtitled "Artists look at contemporary Britain" back in 1987: Would you really believe ... that, asked for a comment on contemporary Britain, Alain Miller and Keith Piper can offer nothing but huge pictures of Mrs Thatcher? Piper portrays her with a kind of halo made of missiles; ooh, the originality of it, the wit, the courage, the trenchancy!- from All Things Considered. Monday, February 09, 2004
Hony soyt moi. I am horribly behind on the email again. Rather than pretend to be out so as to avoid guilt feelings, I shall do something more positive. I shall tell you about another sensible copper. Following on from Chief Constable Brunstrom who said the drug war was a waste of time, we now have Peter Joslin, former Chief Constable of Warwickshire, who says a surfeit of speed cameras is losing the police the support of the public. That's one way of putting it. They express themselves more freely in Emborough. Sunday, February 08, 2004
A right ful wlonk post from Sasha Volokh reminding me of the wonky glories of Law French which I think should be revived immediately. Also worthy of revivification is the fourteenth century dialect of Cheshire, so unfairly eclipsed by the boring London speech of Chaucer. One of my favourite* passages from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is this, starting at line 2020: ...To thonk.It's something about each piece of our hero's armour being polished full and nobly until he was the best-looking knight this side of Greece. Then some chap brings his horse, which is what "blonk" means, not "white" like all you clever-clogs thought. And what of "wlonk" you cry? (If sober. If drunk "whlat of wonk" or "lot of plonk" is the best you can manage.) It means noble, fine, glorious. A wlonk blonk is a splendid horse, but this admirable adjective cries out to be used in a modern context. For instance a wlonk wonk is a person whose excessive studiousness does not detract from his essential nobility. A wlonk wonk would never bonk anyone...
...Listen, chum, it was a humorous word meaning "hit on the head" until I was eighteen. HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE as the poet puts it in rather peculiar French and not Latin like these guys appear to think.
*Thus I imply that I know more than one. And so I do. I know the whole next line: While the wlonkest wede he warp on himselven.
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