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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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Why raggy pages? Offspring A recently received a gift edition hardback book. "It's very nice," she said, "but I think they didn't make it right. The pages are all raggy at the edges." "They do that with posh books sometimes," I said. "Why?" "Ah," I said, "the answer to that is, um, is a terrifying yet exciting Mystery of Adulthood that will be revealed to you in a secret ceremony on your eighteenth birthday." So I have a few years to find out. Why is it posh to have the edges of the pages uncut? Is it meant to suggest handmade paper? Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Gary Farber writes: Understanding that the following are not your words, but wuzname's, but since you did praise them: [Here Gary quotes this post from "God Save the Queen" (the blog, not the national anthem) which I commented on here. Gary's words are in normal type; Mr GSTQ's in italics. What a lot of quotes-within-quotes I seem to be having.]
"1 - full colonisation (America, Australia); [Back to Gary's opinion now:]
I liked the calm understatement of the last line. Any extended treatment of the subject of empire that does not give full weight to the fact that human beings do not want to be ruled by foreigners is worth very little. Yet there is no inconsistency between thinking conquest a bad activity and observing that it may, through the diffusion of improved technology, institutions or ideas, have good consequences for the descendants of those conquered. May have. In the worst cases the conquered didn't leave any descendants. The wheel makes some strange turns. The descendants of Africans captured by slavers and taken to servitude in America are on average better off than the descendants of their neighbours who evaded capture. Arguably some of that differential was caused by the devastating effects of the slave trade*, but that does not make the observation invalid.
*I'm trying and failing to remember/Google a quote about regions of Africa where no white man had ever been being convulsed and blighted by slave-taking wars. Semiskinned semi-skins the increasingly strange A L Kennedy. Here's an excerpt. Rob's bits are in ordinary type, Alison K's in italics: ...Only 3 sentences in and we already have Tony Blair slithering, words being put in his mouth, "demonic" foreign policies and describing people as "evil enough to provoke spontaneous vomiting in small children". Way to build a solid platform of rational argument, Alison. Sorry for my unexpected absence since Thursday. First one offspring was sick, then the other. Not very sick, which is a relief, and probably not the same sick, which is also a relief as we're going camping the day after tomorrow. But enough to put me all at sixes and sevens. Thursday, July 15, 2004
Unravelling the delicate balances on which freedom and democracy depend. David Green of Civitas writes on how a law against incitement to religious hatred would encourage extremism. (Via Iain Murray.) I think Green, like Hume before him, is unecessarily harsh to religious leaders. Not that many are cynical frauds. Some are honest bigots (and need to be argued against on that account); but these days most Christian leaders - including much of the hierarchies of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England - are merely "professionalised" in a bad sense. Their desks are covered with action plans and mission statements. They spend too much of their time talking to and reading the words of people very much like themselves in politics and class origin and hence erect unconscious barriers to entry for those of different politics and class. They don't get out enough. They don't think out enough.
Don't let that caveat put you off. It's a fine article. Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Read this detailed, link- and quote-filled post on "Iraq Body Count" from David Adesnik of Oxblog. However, the prize for total absurdity goes to entry 'x344' which includes upwards of 1600 deaths described as "violent deaths recorded at the Baghdad city morgue". For details about the morgue reports, see this AP report [link in original], cited by IBC. To be fair, IBC notes (see above) the Occupying Authority is responsible for maintaining law and order. Still, what IBC is basically doing is holding the US responsible for street crime. Do all that many Telegraph readers want to eat insects? One of the little mini-adverts on the Sunday Telegraph leader page for 11 July took me to a teachers' resources website selling insect candy and snacks. It says: One of the highlights of our new bug products is Genuine Farm-Raised Bug Candy. That's right campers... there are real insects in those lollies. Now before you turn up your nose, take a moment to think about teaching the most unforgettable earth science, food science or cultural lessons imaginable! Educational Innovations is very proud to introduce our new line of incredible edibles. Keep reading! All of our insect candy and snacks are hand made with great care, using only completely edible, farm-raised insects (no, we do not catch them ourselves). Try them! If you don't love'em, your students will!The advert below offered Quality Dried Butterflies. Somewhere in the house I have a reprint of a Victorian book called "Why Not Eat Insects?". You can read it here.The philanthropic author is persuasive almost to the point of persuasion in urging all classes of society to eat insects: ...I foresee the day when the slug will be as popular in England as its luscious namesake the Trepang, or sea-slug, is in China, and a dish of grasshoppers fried in butter as much relished by the English peasant as a similarly treated dish of locusts is by an Arab or Hottentot. There are many reasons why this is to be hoped for. Firstly, philosophy bids us neglect no wholesome source of food. Secondly, what a pleasant change from the labourer's unvarying meal of bread, lard, and bacon, or bread and lard without bacon, or bread without lard or bacon, would be a good dish of fried cockchafers or grasshoppers. "How the poor live!" Badly, I know; but they neglect wholesome foods, from a foolish prejudice which it should be the task of their betters, by their example, to overcome.but, rightly in my opinion, draws the line at spiders: Even Spiders have been relished as tid-bits, not only by uncivilized nations, but by Europeans of cultivation. For Reaumur tells of a young lady who was so fond of spiders that she never saw one without catching and eating it. Lalande, the French astronomer, had similar tastes; and Rosel speaks of a German who was in the habit of spreading spiders, like butter, upon his bread. This taste I do not in any way uphold, for the preying spider, which devours his fellow-insects, whether foul feeders or no, should be avoided, as are carnivorous beasts in our animal diet. Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Something NOT so rotten in the state of France. Remember that awful story about the Frenchwoman who was beaten up for looking Jewish while the passengers watched? Well, it seems she made it all up. Stupid lying cow. Antoine Clarke directs me to this story. Headline and first paragraph says The young woman admits to having lied. She has a history of hysterical fantasizing; Antoine compared her to that woman who claimed to have been raped by Neil and Christine Hamilton. Kalahari Bushmen, New Age Travellers and the paradoxes of state welfare. I have a gigantic post bearing that title up over at Samizdata. Monday, July 12, 2004
Something rotten in the state of France. [CORRECTION ADDED 13/7 - The woman whose ordeal I describe below turns out to be a liar and a fantasist. Scroll up to read more. I hope the general comments about bystanders and criminals are still of interest. ] This, from Gene at Harry's Place, is particularly disturbing (as Gene says) because of the passivity of the onlookers. Politically the reaction of passerby to a crime is often more significant than the crime itself. I do not imply by this any lack of sympathy for the actual victim; for her, the devastating thing is the assault and the lack of help merely a depressing coda to it. What I mean is that the behaviour of the non-criminal onlookers is likely to better correlate to social or political trends than the behaviour of the criminals. There are more of them and they are more typical. In a similar way I find the success of Thierry Meyssan's 9-11 conspiracy book in France more damning to the reputation of France as a whole than the wave of anti-Semitic violence there. Being a racist thug or an arsonist is a much worse thing morally than buying a foolish book, but the wave of violence could conceivably be the result of the actions of a few highly atypical fanatics. (On a related subject I gather that many terrorist campaigns affecting whole nations involve mere dozens of operatives. Much is made of the need for passive support among the people for terrorism, but surely technology has made the need for such support less than it was.) In contrast getting onto the bestseller list can only be the result of broad support among the people.
Anti-semitism is not the same thing as believing in 9-11 conspiracy theories. But I suspect the Venn diagram of the two sets would be mostly overlap.
"Colonialists against imperialism." "Who," asks Laban Tall, "is this erudite blogger at God Save The Queen? Posts about the Saxon kingdoms, the differences twixt empire and colony - and he doesn't seem to be a Robert Fisk fan. If s/he keeps up the opening standard none shall be happier than I." Seconded. Here are a great many lines from the anonymous author (I started by saying "a few lines" but found myself unable to stop quoting): But consideration of the different levels of imperial activity leads one on to a curious phenomenon. If we sort the countries of the world by their imperial experience we can see five levels, not that these have strict boundaries:I'm not entirely convinced. Iran is a sort of cruel half-democracy and Thailand is no hell-hole. I think Mr - er... What do we call him? (It can't be Mr Save-the-Queen because that would make his first name disconcerting. Him, anyway. (Or her, but I don't think so.) I think he should bring the effects of rule by non- or half-European ruling powers such as China, Japan, or Russia, or even the Zulus into the equation. May I recommend Sowell's Conquests and Cultures, if he hasn't read it already? Saturday, July 10, 2004
It's not every day I cheer on anti-corporate direct action. But doday I will. Go, Rob! Show those presumptuous capitalists the limits of their power. The unorganised doily-making militia. Odious of Odious & Peculiar spends a flight contemplating how to commit on-board anti-terrorist mayhem with his crochet hook. I'm surprised they let him in with a crochet hook; I don't think they would at Stansted. The Stansted/Charles De Gaulle tendency appears to have kiddies in costume and wielders of craft yarn more to the forefront of their minds than actual terrorists as the sort of person they wish to thwart and annoy. Given the real peril, what an astonishing example of the human tendency to elevate doing something easy over doing something useful. Mind you, if I may say so without offence, I can see why Mr Odious might appear to the jaundiced eye of a security man as being a teeny bit closer to the statistical profile of the average terrorist than a silver-haired granny half way through a baby blanket. He thinks things like this:
Am I the only one who, as I shuffle forward in my socks, waiting to retrieve my belongings, dreams of challenging them all to an iaijitsu duel? "Taste my watered steel, you dim-eyed troglodyte! I shall send you to the Land of Wind and Ghosts, that your intestines may be eternally devoured by wild boars! Yes, I have two forms of ID." Friday, July 09, 2004
Short-term future. There is much controversy and confusion over whether Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who said: “Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation.”is to speak at a forthcoming educational conference sponsored by the Metropolitan Police. The title of the conference? Our Children, Our Future. Every time a child says, "I don't believe in fairies" there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead. They certainly have grown up at Charles de Gaulle airport. Stay away, Tinkerbell. These guys would shoot you down for violating French airspace. Shall I be very, very naughty? I shall. I don't believe in officious airport security. Thursday, July 08, 2004
Eat my thread tail, Babylockers! The preliminary checks had been done. Tension, balance, position - all were perfect. Time to go. With a practised touch of her foot on the pedal, Solent eased the mighty machine into action. This was not the gentle Sewland that she had trained on; the hard-pumping Janome engine could spew out twenty yards of thread in ten seconds. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty: the pattern repeats flashed by like milestones. Now she was flying, the knife cutting through the fabric with slick, contemptuous ease, the upper looper a blur. Yet some instinct warned of trouble ahead: external corner coming up. A curse escaped her lips, but already she was adjusting to the threat, reining in the plunging needle. At that, habits learned and honed from hundreds of hours on a conventional machine almost let her down with this beast and its different ways. She almost stopped too soon, the way she had learned in the old days, needle still in the fabric. Somehow, though, her first teacher seemed to be by her side speaking directly to her mind: Go further. Right outside the fabric. Don't be afraid. In that instant she regained control and cooly brought the needle to a halt that crucial three stitches on. In a fraction of a second the presser foot had been flicked up and the fabric yanked round by ninety degrees. Once more the pedal moved beneath her foot. Once more the MyLock motor gave voice. "Okay, honey," Solent muttered through clenched lips, "let's see what you can do." This time there was no holding back. Blades and needles seemed less to cut the surplus fabric than to vapourise it. Solent was no novice but it was all she could do to hold the seamline flat as the twin HA-1 SP needles ate up the yards. There was no time to wonder at the marvels of engineering that kept loopers, needles and blades dancing without a misstep even as the speed hit maximum.
Yet the end was in sight. As the pressure on the pedal eased the roar of the machine dropped to a purr. She gently brought it to a halt a precise two centimetres past the end of the seam. Presser foot up - thread on the cutter - snap! Securing the thread-tail could wait. For now the job was done.
"Coffee?" said a voice. Her trusty groundcrew was at her elbow.
"Coffee," she confirmed, flicking closed the power switch and leaning back. "Shaken, not stirred." Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Alice Bachini is back! And in Texas, planning to stay there. And I didn't know, until she commented on one of my posts and sent me a courtesy note. I've OD'd on WWII references recently. But the fixed quantity of bombing hypothesis did get a trail of thought started about the way British Intelligence deceived the Germans into thinking that their bombs were falling north and east (or was it south and west? I can't remember) of where they actually were falling. This involved getting people killed in Walthamstow who wouldn't have been killed without the deception. But fewer people.
No time to search out links now. Gotta go to a riding lesson.
Naming Names. Black Triangle points out an inconsistency of policy over at the Independent. What next, Mr Fisk? Revealing the names of people on Witness Protection programmes to demonstrate the futility of the War On Drugs?
Someone else can bring up Valerie Plame. I'm too disgusted to raise the energy. Dic Lit. Jo Tatchell writes an interesting piece in the Guardian about fiction and poetry by dictators, concentrating on Saddam's romantic oeuvre. It says at the bottom that the article is abridged from a longer one in Prospect. I hope the Prospect version includes mention of "The Hundred Days," a play about Napoleon written by Mussolini and someone called Giovacchino Forzano. I seem to recall it was reviewed - favourably - in Signal magazine. Jim Bennett writes: Yes, I have had that thought myself over the last few years when I see websites with a profusion of typefaces, colors, etc. |