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 
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Saturday, December 24, 2005
Our water has just been cut off. But you are allowed to have a happy Christmas anyway. It's only the drinking water and we have other things to drink. See you in January. Friday, December 23, 2005
Carnival of flatpack. A little while ago Squander Two* posted about his woes concerning Homebase flatpack furniture, and added to my understanding of Thatcherism in the comments. I emailed my husband about it. No, that's wrong. What did they used to call it again? I spoke to him about it using a vocal protocol. And he wrote a blog post of his own about Homebase flatpack furniture. This is it. A year or so ago Natalie and I went into Homebase for a few washers or something and left having bought two children’s loft beds with study areas underneath. Just the thing when you have a couple of pre-teens with too many possessions. They were delivered a day or so later and we, having evicted the previous beds, got to work. At fist it all went pretty well, although we used our own tools rather than the silly little allen keys in the kit. We assembled one together with no more hassle than having occasionally to drift a couple of misaligned holes together, so Natalie decided she could do most of the second one all by herself. After a certain amount of time she called for help. A screw wouldn’t go in. It was perfectly well aligned but just wouldn’t bite. I tried, full of confidence in my ability to succeed where she had failed but I couldn’t get the thing in either. I examined the offending screw, a ¼ inch or 6mm machine screw with a fairly coarse thread. Its thread was undamaged. I looked at the hole in the tubular steel strut it was supposed to go into; instead of being threaded, it was plain. *I hope poor S2 has got over feeling twitchy about Homebase customer service. No? Oh dear. The innocent have most to fear. Nationwide spy system to track millions of car journeys a day - the Times John K, a Samizdata commenter, says: My sister's number plate was stolen the other day. I think the rise of the congestion charge and gatso infestation has led to a rash of these thefts. If this insane plan goes ahead there will be many more such thefts. Criminals don't give a toss a bout the law. That's why they're criminals, and that's why this is a piece of authoritarian population control disguised as a crime control measure.John K's final line is a slight exaggeration. However his point that criminals, because of their criminality, have less to fear from this sort of measure than law abiding people do is an important one and provides the title of this post. We may end up being grateful to some criminals. I've posted before this post from a Dutch blog on how they deal with such things. I was going to pussyfoot around with one of those "merely academic interest" disclaimers, but I've got a rotten cough and a temperature and I couldn't be bothered. Go Dutch. Brian Micklethwait has been packing heat in his jacket pocket. Michael Jennings speaks of resistance, but ignore such foolish talk. My grandma knew exactly why this sort of thing happened. 'Twas the wickedness working out, I tell 'ee, the wickedness working out! Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Mister Cough is not your friend. Rather than relax with my family, blog, sew, prepare for Christmas or do anything conventional like that I have decided to wander round the house in my pyjamas snivelling and cawing like a crow. Friday, December 16, 2005
On Thursday the Indy led with badgers in peril. EU Rota has the screenshot. For the Seattle Post-Intelligencer it was imperilled polar bears. (Presumably this story, although Jim Miller doesn't say.) Slow news day? I sympathise. For once I am out of smart remarks, as Ed says: Natalie kind of meanders around a bit, like a country walk along the riverside, making allusions which you only get at the end as you reach the vista you were seeking all along; Adloyada picks a thread and then pulls and pulls, taking care to straighten the material so as not to hurt the threads she doesn't object to.Yes, Lachesis is careful in her work. Hallelujah, the THING is gone. I skip, I gambol, I pirouette. I am escorted from Tesco's fresh produce aisle by an assistant manager. But nothing can bring me down; gravity has a ten percent reduction special offer zone centred around me, for I am without the THING. Do you have a THING? My THING was a letter (a proper ink on paper letter) that had gone unanswered for a shamefully long time. Now it is answered, licked, posted and gone. I am free, unless it comes back to me stamped "GONE AWAY" or "DECEASED" in which case it's a ten thousand years in THING thing. Now I need a new THING. Christmas cards. Thursday, December 15, 2005
Today is election day in Iraq. Here are some pictures from the BBC. To mark the occasion, Heirs of Hammurabi has up plenty of new material. I liked this: A young man can find many jobs in today's Iraq, including new ones like selling cars; now widely available to most folks: or cell phones; a true post-Saddam 'must have' item.And this: No American soldier has been killed in the Kurdish safe haven in the north since Saddam was toppled in the spring of 2003.And this In more than one instance — and to the delight of American and Iraqi troops — insurgents have been caught attempting to flee the battlefield dressed as women: Considered a particularly disgraceful act among Iraqis.OK, I don't like the sexism. Sooner than we think perhaps, Iraq will experience the joys of diversity seminars. I believe it was Poul Anderson who said that future SF describes the problems that will arise from the solutions to the problems we have now. May the future when Iraqi politicians and media can afford to get as steamed up about basically prosaic issues as we do here be not long coming. Apparently the Kurdish region is well along that route. Damian Penny links to this scorching piece by a left-wing blogger, Glenn Greenwald, on the true character of the European Left. After saying (in the context of European outrage at the execution of Tookie Williams) that the E.L. displays a "parmaount desire to find fault and evil with the U.S. and thereby adopting that goal as the first and only real principle, from which everything else follows," he continues: This is a deeply dishonest and manipulative syndrome, having nothing whatever to do with the principles to which its adherents claim fidelity. Indeed, their supposed “principles” (human rights, the sanctity of human life, individual liberty) are simply weapons, pretexts, used to promote the only real principle they have – that the U.S. is a uniquely corrupt and evil country. And the reason one knows that to be the case is because these same individuals systematically overlook and even excuse far more severe violations of their ostensible principles when perpetrated by the countries and governments with which they inexcusably sympathize (sympathy which itself can be explained by a desire to sit in opposition to any and every American interest). I felt a pang for Mr Greenwald. The early comments came from left wingers, many of whom were comically shocked ("Why can't we accept that other people do have insight and moral wisdom that we lack?") , then, as word got round, stacks of right wingers commented at his site expressing a level of support that he may have found a little embarrassing. Word getting round included a link from Instapundit, who highlighted a very telling point made by Greenwald: "Somehow, Europeans have managed to transform the atrocities which they committed and which occurred in their countries from a badge of shame (which, arguably, it need not be any longer) into some sort of badge of moral superiority and entitlement to sit in judgment."Follow the link to Damian Penny's introduction too. He himself opposes the death penalty, but links to an informative piece saying (with figures) that it is popular with the people of Europe, just not their governments. Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Testing times. My more old fashioned readers probably think that the driving test is intended to, as it were, test whether a person can drive. Not in Ontario. Over there it is a privilege which the state grants and the state can take away for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you are a safe driver. "It is a privilege to have a driver's licence, and one of the corresponding obligations is to be serious about taking your learning as far as possible," Education Minister Gerard Kennedy told a news conference at Queen's Park yesterday before introducing the legislation.Why Ontario, following the example of nine US states including Alabama and South Carolina, should say that the grant of a driving licence is conditional on staying in school rather than on any of the literally infinite number of other irrelevant criteria is not clear to me. It cannot be an argument of principle. Once the state has declared "seriousness about taking your learning as far as possible" to be a "corresponding obligation" to being allowed to drive there is no reason not to also bring "seriousness about taking your virginity as far as possible" into the test criteria, or "seriousness about taking your ice hockey as far as possible" - or Christianity, fascism or Tantric Yoga, according to the fashion of the moment. The "correspondence" is exactly as good in all of these examples, which is to say nonexistent. It cannot be hard-headed practicality either. There is no reason to suppose or evidence to show that those seventeen year olds to whom it matters most that they learn to drive are also those who would most benefit (if anyone does) from being forced to stay in school. Would-be rural dropouts are penalised heavily, urban dropouts shrug and take the bus. Or drive without a licence. I guess it must be desperate flailing about to avoid addressing the failure of state education, then. Iranian president says Holocaust is a myth - the Times. "The days of denial must end," writes Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. My readers know everything. JEM writes: Call me picky if you like, but in fact 'fistula' is any abnormal passage leading from any bodily cavity to any other that do not normally connect. Indeed it might be a hole in the wall of the vagina, of which there are several varieties covered by the general term 'obstetric fistula' which is what the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital itself tells us it is concerned with. However a 'fistula' might equally well be any one of about a thousand other similar pathological holes in various parts of the body. Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Independent Exclusive: People Do Bad Things. I posted at Biased BBC concerning the coverage of the Sydney riots. I said the Beeb manages to be quite clear about the race of white rioters at Cronulla beach on Sunday but goes all coy about the race of rioters of Lebanese origin who made retaliatory mayhem in Mabroubra and other suburbs on Monday. A commenter, Simo, said, "Incredibly, the BBC might have been outdone in deliberate obfuscation by the Independent." Not that incredible, actually, but Simo's comment deserves a wider audience. It's not about the BBC so I'll post it here. Simo quotes this Independent article: "Violence on the streets of Sydney spilled into a second night as scores of people drove through beachside suburbs smashing windows of shops, homes and flats.Simo observes: These naughty "people" are at it again. Of course, when those people aren't young males of Middle-Eastern origin, the Indy shows no such coyness about calling a spade a shovel, nailing first "5,000 white men, many of them drunk" before raising the spectre of the swastika by condemning the unnamed "neo-Nazi groups" who were allegedly fanning the flames.Now, why on earth would anyone report a story of conflict while refusing to name one side? I can guess why the BBC does it. It thinks a significant chunk of its audience are uncultured whites belonging to socio-economic groups far down the alphabet who would turn on their non-white neighbours if ever they were to learn that some brown-skinned people living on the other side of the globe are capable of behaving badly. Providentially, thinks the Beeb news manager, these brutes can be safely lied to because they are too thick to seek out alternative sources of information. Hey, maybe the Beeb has a point. The BBC's audience is theoretically the entire British nation after all. But it's a little disconcerting that a progressive quality newspaper makes the same assumption about its audience. Still, no doubt the Independent knows its own readers best. UPDATE: Like Simo, Scott Burgess also spotted that the Indy is a "people" paper. If this carries on it'll save a packet on the paper's coverage of the sunnier parts of the world. There were dramatic developments in Basra today, where people did stuff. Meanwhile in Darfur people did peoply things, other people claim. Eventually it might reach a stage where the only person mentioned by name in the entire newspaper was George W. Bush. One would open one's copy to see the Presidential name repeated endlessly, like a mantra. There comes a point in every old codger's life where they hobble out into the sunshine of the modern world and peer about in a bewildered fashion muttering, "I don't understand. It's all changed. I don't understand." I'm forty-one - but it's all changed and I don't understand. When I was a kid the idea that the police would come around and "have a word" with a guest at a BBC talking heads show for the mere expression of opinions that the government did not like, opinions which even the police themselves concede did not include any threat of violence or lawbreaking, would have seemed like dystopian science fiction. Not any more. Remember Robin Page, called in for questioning for remarks made from the commentary box at a country fair - after the police placed an advert in the local paper trawling for narks? Dystopian science fiction never comes without a scene where one of the last few relics of the old regime reminisces. Winston Smith couldn't get any sense out of his old codger but the Aged Informants in earlier stories were more cooperative, or less drunk. I shall try to stay halfway sober when my time comes. Sober enough to thank 'ee for my half litre of watered down beer and say that I first noticed things beginning to change when that Robin Page was arrested and I knew it was no longer the Britain I had grown up in when that Lynette Burrows got into trouble. Monday, December 12, 2005
A long ago war: ...a remarkable man, Epaminondas, one of the Theban generals, (and a Pythagorian philosopher) dreamed of ending the Spartan threat forever. Spartan power rested on the ability of all her citizens to be full-time soldiers, devoting their whole lives to military training. This was possible because they had long-before conquered the large neighboring province of Messenia, and reduced its people to near-slaves, the Helots, held down by brutal totalitarian tactics, including a ruthless secret police. Google giving. This product of Worstallian ingenuity is an effort to get nice Mr Google to pay for (a) assistance to the Fistula* Hospital in Ethiopia and (b) the Send A Cow appeal. The idea is you sign up for Adsense and Firefox with the Google Toolbar. Didn't I do a good job of sounding like I knew what I'm talking out? When I figure out what to do I will have a whirl at doing it. And if the Adsense/Toolbar angle does not appeal, one could always consider giving some money! *A fistula is a hole in the wall of the vagina, an injury often suffered in the course of a stillbirth. The particular tragedy for women who affected by a fistula who live far away from medical facilities is that, as well as having lost their baby, they become unable to control urination and defecation. They are often disowned by their husbands and rejected by the community. Imagine the difference that an operation to repair the hole can make to a woman's life. Friday, December 09, 2005
Breaking the silence. A little belatedly, may I draw your attention to this post by Adloyada on the dilemmas faced by a Palestinian cameraman who secretly filmed a Palestinian boy being killed for collaborating with Israel. Narnia Blogging Central. I am indebted to Jon Barnard, late of Room Twelve, for directing me to Andrew Rilestone's site. This is funny. But don't do it. We need Mr Rilstone alive. This is not as snappy as my own definitive answer ("Duh!") to the question of whether the Narnia series was a Christian allegory, but it is slightly more nuanced. I liked this post, particularly the analogy at the end, for the same sort of reasons as I like C S Lewis's writing: Rilestone isn't afraid to take as long as it takes to be perfectly clear. This is the definitive answer to Philip Pullman's daft view that Susan is damned. Stupid-clever person, now my new standard example of someone so blinded by hate that he can't even read the words in front of him properly. (The opening of His Dark Materials is still brilliant though. No denying he can write.) Oh, and about Note 4... No. No. I cannot speak. Slippery slopes are a very good description of how the world actually works. Via Instapundit I found this post in the Volokh Conspiracy by Dave Kopel. In 1999 Canadian gun owners who feared that the then new gun registry was a first step towards banning handguns were being addressed thus by a "chuckling" justice department spokesman: "We are trying to tell (owners) go to sleep at night, because you have nothing to fear from this government. They like to invent bogeymen, and this is one of them."Six years later the Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin, has proposed a ban on handguns. One of the things I noticed about Northern Irish politics in the eighties was that people were always chiding the Unionists for their absurd, paranoid suspicion that cross-border initiatives were the thin end of the wedge for moves towards Irish unity*. What was funny was that some of the chiders themselves would then move on, in the same speech or article, to say that this or that cross-border initiative would get the Unionist community used to working together with the Nationalists as a first step towards ... well, towards getting them to accept Irish unity, now you come to mention it. *I'm not saying Irish unity is an illegitimate objective, or that it is illegitimate to try and persuade Unionists to drop their unionism. Just that the "paranoid" suspicions of Unionists about the underlying motives of their opponents were frequently correct. Thursday, December 08, 2005
"The rule of law has had a good day today." Samizdata's Jonathan Pearce rejoices in the decision of the Law Lords that evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable. He is right. But what about the captured terrorist who knows and won't tell where the atomic bomb is held? Torture him and throw yourself on the mercy of the jury. ADDED LATER: Ticking. I meant ticking bomb. You know, like in the scenario everyone always uses. You knew that. Eight Bangladeshis were the latest to die in a suicide bombing. A suicide bomb attack killed at least eight people in Bangladesh and wounded more than 50 on Thursday in the latest in a series of deadly blasts blamed on militants seeking Islamic rule in the country.I keep asking myself why the Islamofascist movement has taken to blowing up Muslims so much. I knew the fanatics were that wicked - they have been killing members of other faiths for years, with the Jews, as ever, involuntarily serving as mine canaries by being the first victims of every new ideology of hate - but I did not know they were that stupid. My guess is that there is some sort of runaway competition in purity going on within the jihadist community. Ever more frenzied displays of loyalty are required: merely killing yourself, or killing women and children no longer sets one apart. This is a reason for believing that the inner circle may be smaller than sometimes thought. OK, so "greater openess to new ideas" was never going to be the first item on the personal goals list for your average suicide bomber, but bigger groups are usually slightly more open to arguments that a strategy is counter-productive. To those in a tight-knit, self-validating group, however, the very counter-productiveness of an act is part of its appeal. They feel that only the chosen few would understand - and since they understand, they must be the chosen few. The Daily Ablution has more on Bush the Enviromental Terrorist. After spending yesterday stoking my misanthropy in the hellish human-infested caverns of the Grafton Centre ("When you step foot in the Grafton Centre, you leave the dreamy spires of Cambridge behind...") it is alwasy pleasant to catch up on one's missed Ablutions (readers will be so good as to note the capital A), especially when they link to oneself. Another Ablution post that I had missed was this one from 6 December. Scott Burgess discussed Polly Toynbee's views about the coming Narnia film. I gather the movie was about as welcome to Ms Toynbee as the Second Coming would be to a person of her views, i.e. annoying on general principles and even more irritating if the rubes turned out to like it. One of Scott's commenters, Ian, writes: With all the attention on Narnia books, I am wondering why no-one has yet pointed at A Horse And His Boy and frothed at the mouth at its blatent stereotyping of Arabic Muslim culture and society represented by the Calormen?"Ask and ye shall receive," says Angie Schultz later, linking to a report that the "5th Narnia book may not see big screen". All I can do* is re-post my own Daily Ablution comment from a while back. The Wharton mentioned is a chap who wrote a letter to the Guardian. That Lewis preferred Christianity to Islam - duh! He made no bones about being a Christian apologist. In his writings for adults I can think of three brief mentions of Islam, two critical - but reasonably so - and one complimentary. But the part I've seen of Wharton's letter suggests he has not read the Narnia books at all carefully. There is nothing like Islam mentioned. *"All I can do" is one of those lying phrases writers love. In truth there are quite a lot of other things I can do. Pat my head while rubbing my stomach with a circular motion, for a start. Although not vice versa. I wish I loved the Human Race I wish I loved the Human Race; Christmas shopping does that to me. Fortunately this piece of revisionist history from Pootergeek cheered me up. Were they at the same event? Here is a selection of reports on the recent Global Peace and Unity conference organised by the Islam Channel and held in Docklands on 4 December. Thousands of British Muslims have turned out in huge numbers for an event promoting global peace, stressing to the world their faith is by no means a threat to any one. Carol Gould writing in Jewish Comment.com: It was advertised as a diverse event to which non-Muslims were invited and the impression one got from the website was of a celebration of Middle Eastern culture, food, music and children’s activities in a London milieu. The BBC: The Muslim Council of Britain secretary general made his comments in a speech to an east London conference focusing on the role of Muslims in the UK. IsraPundit One thing that shocked me most was Imran's comment that poor Germany was so humiliated by Versailles that they could not be blamed for their rage, hence how can we condemn the 9/11 bombers? Even the organisers said into the mike after he had finished that they distanced themselves from his remark that '9/11 was a neocon cosnpiracy to have an excuse to start a new Crusade.' Joanna Bale in the Times: Ken Livingstone, Michael Mansfield, QC, and the former Pakistan cricketers Saeed Anwar and Imran Khan were among the speakers promoting "global peace and unity".I would be interested to know Imran Khan's exact words. Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Blame Bush for everything. What's he done now? Encouraged wind power. A global shortage of turbines and other key pieces of equipment needed by the burgeoning wind power industry is causing delays to many schemes needed by the British government to meet its CO2 reduction targets.The Guardian is quite right to be angry. Real men burn rainforests or uranium. Saturday, December 03, 2005
The much-hyped Sure Start programme, which the Guardian calls a "concept" for some reason, actually sets back the development of the most deprived children. We are assured by the children's minister, Beverley Hughes, that the Platonic or Ideal Sure Start is not at fault; it is but the earthly copy that offends. "I don't think there is anything wrong with the philosophy, but the issue is implementation on the ground." "Makes a change," says Mr Briffa. Friday, December 02, 2005
Dawson writes: this may be ...not up yr current alley, but were I still blogging (and don't we all thank Christ I'm not)Oooh, I dunno about that. Longtime readers - and I'm talking real longtime readers, going back to the misty dawn of the blogging era in 2001 (as he himself said, "blog years are like dog years"), will remember that Dawson's now departed blog was one of the pioneers. Anyway, Dawson continues: I'd...beg somone to read this! Not as good as Mark Steyn or VDH...but a fresh prespective, and damn well said me thinks. This is what he is recommending. A Der Spiegel interview with Robert Kagan: "The War is More Popular than Bush." An extract: SPIEGEL: You were a strong advocate of the Iraq war. Iraq is still unstable, with more than 2,000 American troops dead. Many of the war's supporters are having second thoughts. What's your position on Iraq today? "...The difference between us and the Romans was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue." Discuss. Brian Micklethwait and Samizdata commenters did. Mr Micklethwait is, as he never tires of saying, a convinced atheist. However he is sometimes insightful on Christianity. After lamenting the empty-headed niceness of the current Western zeitgeist, he writes: Niceness was, I suspect, a Roman fact but also a Roman secret. (How else could Christianity have ever caught on?) And then our nice Roman fixer would be back to the Senate to make blood-curdling speeches about the need to suppress with the utmost brutality whatever little challenge Rome faced that week.Among the generally fascinating comments, those by Paul Marks stood out. He argued against Brian Micklethwait, but I think they are both partly right. Trust me to say something like that. It's because I'm so nice. Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Guilty, guilty, guilty. I've been too busy to blog for the last few days. Hope to be back tomorrow, but I'm not actually promising anything. Friday, November 25, 2005
Responsibility for rape is not a pie chart. I see that Amnesty has out a report deprecating the suprisingly high proportion (up to one third) of survey respondents who think that a woman who wears skimpy dresses, is drunk, promiscuous or flirts is partially responsible if she is then raped. The first thing I thought when I saw this report was what I always think when I see Amnesty issuing reports on things unrelated to prisoners of conscience. I remember that when I joined, decades ago, prisoners of conscience were practically its whole reason for being. (It's true that I do remember it opposing the death penalty back then, as did I, but that issue was always treated as an afterthought. I always thought it was a distraction.) Amnesty built up a vast expertise on the subject of campaigning to free or at least mitigate the sufferings of prisoners of conscience. It has no particular expertise on the subject of helping victims of rape, or any of the other causes it has espoused since it decided to become a sort of watered-down political party, patron of audio-visual artistic "imaginings" and whatever else it does now. I look at these multifarious causes and I remember an old Jewish joke. Want to hear it? In the East End - or it could be New York - an old shopkeeper lay dying. His sight dim, he said tremulously, "Sarah, are you there?" So I think: who's minding the store? Amnesty do still seem to have letter writing campaigns, but it seems to be losing its mastery of that trade in its efforts to be jack of all others. Judging from this statement, Amnesty has not mastered the "trade" of contributing usefully to the debate on how to reduce the incidence of rape and help rape victims. In fact Amnesty seems to share some of the same faulty and worrying assumptions about responsibility for rape with those whose responses to the survey caused such concern. The questions asked in the survey (asking whether a woman was "partially or totally responsible for being raped" in various circumstances) pushed the respondents into assuming that responsibility for a crime works like settling the liability for costs relating to a road accident: a pie chart where the responsibility is split between the two sides, where for instance Driver A has to pay 75% and Driver B 25%. Amnesty's view is that the rapist should get 100% liability - but it still implicitly accepts the framework that the more the woman is blamed the less the man should be. Here is the view of Amnesty's Kate Allen: "This poll shows that a disturbingly large proportion of the public blame women themselves for being raped. In some ways I agree with Ms Allen. Long ago I was shocked by a case (I think this happened in Oxford in the late eighties) in which a woman was raped after accepting a lift from a lorry driver late at night. I was outraged - still am outraged - to read that the rapist got off with a fine because of the woman's "contributory negligence." Are we animals, I thought, that anyone who makes themselves vulnerable becomes fair game? Are the laws suspended because a crime is easy to commit? It angered me that that this way of thinking seemed confined to rape. If a rich old woman is murdered by her daughter because the daughter wants to inherit no one says the old woman was guilty of contributory negligence because she foolishly trusted her daughter. If a rich old woman is murdered for her purse by a stranger who calls at the door no one says she was guilty of contributory negligence because she foolishly lived alone. So the misogynist view denounced by Amnesty certainly does exist. However I am not convinced that this view is nearly as prevalent as Amnesty is claiming. Before I explain why I think that, let me state my opinion: there is no pie chart. I see no contradiction between holding that the guilt of rape is not one whit lessened if the victim was drunk, or dressed in skimpy clothing, or has had many sexual partners - and at the same time holding that the woman in the case I mentioned was foolish. Being drunk in a city centre at three a.m. while wearing a miniskirt does increase your chances of rape, predictably so. We should work towards a world where women were as free in fact as they are in law to go where they like, when they like and dress as they like - but that world does not exist at present. One way of working towards it is to have severe penalties for rape and to denounce the view that rape can be excused. I think my "there is no pie chart" opinion, or something like it, is fairly common. When doing surveys it often happens that none of the choices match what I think, so I just have to choose the least bad match. I note that the Amnesty press release spoke of "blame" whereas the poll questions quoted spoke of "responsibility." There is a distinction. Personally, I don't think it's the right distinction to make. I don't like the "pie chart" model for responsibility or blame, but many of the respondents may have been trying to get across the point that in one perfectly defensible sense of the word "responsible", women should be responsible when it comes to the risks they take. If I am right these respondents are now saying angrily, "But I'd have answered differently if they had talked about blame." Another point is that Amnesty's questions spoke of women being "wholly or partially responsible." The word "partially" covers a lot of ground. As I said, I don't think that woman can be even 1% responsible for her own rape in the sense they mean, but a respondent who thinks she is 1% responsible is saying something very different from a respondent who thinks she is 80% responsible. Nowhere in the discussion in the Amnesty press release concerning the prevalence of rape did I see convincing evidence that Amnesty knew any better than the respondents how frequent rape is. (The rising number of calls to the South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centre cited as evidence might just as easily reflect a welcome decline in the once-common attitude that to be raped brought shame upon the woman) There is no logical link between thinking rape very bad and thinking rape common. Some misogynists who wish to make light of rape might want to play down the frequency in order to suggest society need not make a strenuous effort to deal with a crime that affects so few - others might want to play up the frequency in order to suggest that anything so commonplace is really quite normal. Likewise two people who think of rape with equal horror might honestly hold opposite opinions as to how common it is. (I do not know how common it is, or whether it is increasing or decreasing.) Nowhere in the Amnesty press release did I see evidence that what the organisation calls the "dreadfully low" conviction rate for rape actually represented injustice. If guilty men are getting off, that is bad - but if innocent men are getting off that is as it should be. In fact the whole Amnesty statement failed to engage at all with the possiblity of false accusations. That is a serious omission. Many people, including many women, will suspect the organisation of being irrationally unwilling to admit that there are indeed women who make false accusations. I had wanted to talk about that more, and about cases where consent was doubtful - but I've run out of time. Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Heirs of Hammurabi is a new blog similar in concept to Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News from Iraq. The author says he didn't have to look that hard for good news; he just picked up a few stories that floated by. (He obviously knew another secret of appealing to me: historical parallels. Scroll down for a great Lincoln anecdote, in which Lincoln sounds just like Churchill.) I am glad to read that the coming election is shaping up to be more about issues and less about identity politics. For some reason my computer is showing some HTML-style instructions that I presume are not meant to be visible as visible. Never mind; it didn't stop me reading. Sex, disease and blogswarms. Michael Jennings writes: "We are all document experts," says John Weidner:......But would we have been able to get the media to accept our conclusive knowledge? Remember that even as things stand, with the crude forgery done in the default setting of a modern word processing program, Mary Mapes got a large advance and some favourable coverage for her book saying that it was all true after all. This is assuming that they still used a computer. Why they didn't find a 1970s typewriter and use that I don't know. Actually, I think the lead pick for forger was old enough to remember. The real mystery is why neither he nor Mr Rather thought of it. My pet theory is, as I said earlier, that the forger published his forgery before it was ready. As for poor Dan, hope distorted his judgement. He was too excited to think, hey, documents just didn't look like that in those days. Or maybe he did think it for a moment then quickly snatched an explanation out of the air: maybe the Air National Guard had specially fancy typewriters because it was part of the military-industrial complex or something like that. Buckhead could have done what he did with far less knowledge than he had. What all his extra knowledge gave him was confidence to act quickly to raise the initial alarm. I didn't rehash all this now purely to relive vicarious blogospheric triumphs. I was also thinking about sex. I was trying out various analogies to see if I could shed a little light on how a blogswarm worked, and it occurred to me that bloggers are like sperm and and breaking a big story is like fertilising the egg. In part it's a matter of luck, but the lucky sperm had to be strong enough to make the journey first. That analogy isn't quite right. For one thing, the egg doesn't care which sperm connects but we definitely do want to connect a story with the right expert to confirm or deny it. A key part of the blogswarm is our knowledge that the right expertise is out there somewhere, probably in multiple locations. The problem in the past was that one couldn't find the experts quickly, or get them heard, or get them talking to each other. Now the experts find the story. Another way in which the sex analogy does not quite work is that it has no place for cooperation between sperm. Cooperation is a key part of the blogswarm... er, now I think about it the idea of a swarm is, of course, also an analogy. It was just too obvious for me to notice. I sympathise with Mr Rather! Anyway, my second go at an analogy was that of the antibody. The various wrongnesses of the memo in Mary Mapes' story came into the infosphere like an invading toxin into the body. Lots of antibodies fling themselves at the invader. By chance some of them have the right shape to lock onto it and neutralise it. The body "sees" what works and makes more of the successful type. That is better. As a good analogy should, this one leads to new thoughts. The body can become too good at making antibodies; becoming over-sensitive to certain harmless or near harmless proteins that would have been better left alone. Should we be worried by the equivalent possibility in blogging? Nah. As the saying goes, kill 'em all and let God sort them out. It just gave me the excuse to say that blogging is more like having an allergy than sex. Tuesday, November 22, 2005
"We are all document experts," says John Weidner: We are ALL experts in some sort of document. There is some type of paperwork we handle so frequently that a crude forgery would be blatantly obvious to us. "Document examiners" are widely knowledgeable, but every one of us is more knowledgeable than them on something.John's line of thought was started by a post from Power Line that linked to Buckhead's own explanation of how come he knew so much about typefaces. His detailed explanation ought to, but won't, see off all the conspiracy theories being peddled by Mary Mapes and her supporters. But I liked his quickie version too: "The short answer is that I am 47 years old and I am not a blithering idiot." I followed Rathergate in real time plus six hours. I knew something was up at the first mention of proportionate spacing. I immediately thought of the documents I had seen when I was in the Officer Training Corps while at university in the early eighties: typewritten, the lot of them. Monday, November 21, 2005
I have been saving the world with these guys. Allegedly, there are pictures, including at least one of me, but I can't make the link work. UPDATE: the link to Brian's photos works now. I am top left. Thursday, November 17, 2005
Greetings, bitter foes! That's what Angie Schultz said when she was in the Guardian, and what's good enough for Angie is good enough for me, starting with her jokes. (I don't want to be picky, Angie, but are your frogs endangered? Common frogs upset the lining of my stomach.) Nice Guardian-being Oliver Burkeman says I am much-read. I do not see how he can tell, seeing as my hit-counter has gone the way of all free hit-counters, but come the Day he shall be spared. Monday, November 14, 2005
Muslim servants of the Crown. Read this post at Albion's Seedlings by Helen Szamuely arguing that Muslims once had "an honoured place in the narrative of the British Empire and Commonwealth" that has been supressed for different reasons both in the Indian subcontinent and in the UK, read the essay by Mihir Bose it links to, and above all read this comment by David Billington: The role models for the majority of young Muslims in Britain should be the non-conforming religious minorities who played such a powerful role in the British industrial revolution. It is true that these people were mostly Christian but they suffered formal discrimination until the 19th century. They were imbued with Enlightenment ideas about nature, science, technology, and progress and they played vital roles in the abolition of slavery and a raft of other reforms while leading lives of modesty and probity. Although they were active in proselytism abroad, they did not seek religious confrontation at home and tried instead to bear witness to their faith by example.As I said in the comments there, this type of role model offers something more positive than merely fitting in. Would you believe that when I started writing the post below I had intended to apologise for its brevity? I may be too busy to blog much or deal with email in the next few days. However I must say one thing: Never give up! There is always a way! Yes. If however you twiddle the dials the tension on your seam just won't come out right because the fabric is too fine and slippery, do not despair and give your party trousers to the dog for a chew toy. Just sew it all by hand while watching The Two Towers on TV. Internment and alternatives - Patrick Crozier responds. My central point was that internment is essential when dealing with terrorist groups who can find refuge in unassimilated populations such as the Ulster Irish or (as may turn out to be the case) British Muslims. In the case of Ulster the rule seems clear enough; if you use internment (resolutely) you win: if you don’t you lose.Read the whole thing. No one could say that Patrick allows conventional wisdom to dictate his thought. The proposal he makes later in his post reminds me of those divorces one hears of where one partner screams, "I want a divorce!" as an opening salvo before presenting a list of demands and then is taken aback when the other says, "Righty-ho." As such it has a certain immediate appeal. However I see difficulties. What about the non-Muslim population of those areas? What about the assimilated Muslim population, who would be put under the most frightful pressure? Once these enclaves were established how would their borders grow or shrink? The prospect of moving the borders by intimidation might appeal to both those inside and out. It's not going to happen. However there is something about this idea that could be used in dilute form: obliging people to choose, to declare where they stood. For the last few decades the PC ethos has meant that there was no social penalty for British Muslims (and others) if they loudly announced their disloyalty. Meanwhile any member of an ethnic minority who said he was British and proud of it was mocked as a naive fool in the Guardian or Independent or scorned as a sellout in the ethnic press. In this atmosphere Hamza and those like him thrived. The thing that rankled most was that at the very same time there were severe social penalties for anyone who made the slightest suggestion that any British Muslims were less than whole-hearted in their patriotism. I approve of the introduction of citizenship ceremonies and oaths, even if the written test is a load of statist gibberish, as Michael Jennings (who is to take it soon) observed. People who have declared their loyalty tend to feel more of it. Of course these ceremonies only affect new citizens. However seeing new citizens take them is likely to have a good effect on some of our shakier old citizens, especially if the new citizens are the old citizens' relatives. The difficulty arises when I ask myself exactly what level of obligation I had in mind when I spoke of "obliging people to choose, to declare where they stood." A structure that explicitly differentiated between Muslims and non-Muslims would be an outrage. I don't care if it has a differential effect on Muslims; assuming it was the right effect that would be the system doing its job. After the London bombs there is no point denying that a cloud of suspicion hangs over British Muslims at present. They would be the first beneficiaries of a system that dispersed the cloud. Alas, in this metaphor, cloud-dispersing and cloud-generating machines come in boxes that are hard to tell apart. ADDED LATER: Drat. Re-reading this I can see it sounds too much like I'm advocating compulsory pro-government rallies or something. Not what I meant. I don't really know exactly what sort of loyalty-inducing structures I'm looking for, but they would come in two types or families. One would simply be increased social unacceptability for extreme anti-patriotism. The other type of measure would work in a way akin to the way that sales of council houses moved the political centre. People who had bought their council house damn well were not going to vote for anyone who proposed to take it away from them. Or the way (effective politics, much as I loathe it) that the growth of the public sector has created a new class of public employees who will not vote for anyone who proposes to shrink the state. Although in this context I'm not talking about changing the way people vote, that is the sort of mechanism that might work: creating a constituency of self-declared Muslim pluralists. YET ANOTHER ADDITION: ... and/or making it easier, safer and more beneficial for the existing Muslim pluralists to self-declare. Scroll up to see some more optimistic thoughts about Muslims in Britain, courtesy of a link to Albion's Seedlings. Saturday, November 12, 2005
"Collar the lot." In this post regarding the recently defeated proposal to allow detention without charge of terrorist suspects for 90 days, I said that if we didn't need those powers in 1940 we don't need them now. Partrick Crozier writes: We did need (well, certainly use) internment in 1940. Enemy aliens were interned. When asked whether to include Jews and opponents of the Nazi regime, Churchill replied: "Collar the lot".The general question of whether internment has or has not worked in our various wars is too big for me to discuss on a Saturday morning. I will stick to World War II. I distinguish between the World War II internment and current proposals for the suspension or dilution of habeus corpus in several ways. (1) There was a war on in 1940. Hitler was in the process of conquering Europe and had the serious intention of conquering us. I am a supporter of the War on Terror, but it isn't the same. (2) Those interned in 1940 were foreigners, enemy foreigners to boot, not British citizens. Glenn Reynolds is always going on about how much more likely the US is to start falling down the slippery slope when it dilutes the rights of citizens, and he's right. This is not to say that non-citizens are intrinsically less valuable human beings; it is a matter of the implied contract between government and citizens. (3) Apart from Churchill's bad-tempered outburst the British government never denied that most of those interned in 1940 were innocent. Contemporary propaganda was at pains to stress this point (I can't remember it exactly, but I think that the scene towards the end of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp where the nice German, Theo, is interviewed by what we would now call an immigration officer who says something like "these measures are for your protection as well as ours" is an example of the arguments used. Not that Churchill liked the film!) (4) Did WWII internment actually do any good? Many of the accounts written nowadays are infected by a politically correct desire to make the British (or US) governments look bad in any circumstances, and take no account of the real dangers Britain faced or of the fact that the British authorities, being neither telepathic nor clairvoyant, could not know which dangers were real and which not. However, as I'm sure you know, the British policy of general internment of enemy aliens was eventually dropped, partly as a result of the torpedoing of the Arandora Star taking internees to Canada. The fact that the British government did not pursue the policy implies that they concluded that on balance it was not assisting the war effort. The German espionage network in Britain was never very successful anyway, but the accounts I have read do not suggest that it was much disrupted by internment. Friday, November 11, 2005
Can anyone supply the author and title of a history book for kids we have heard about? It was written quite recently by a father who became concerned that his children knew plenty of historical factoids but but had no sense of what happened after what. So this book is strongly chronological. As an extra bonus at the back of the book there are the lyrics of all those patriotic songs that everyone is supposed to know but doesn't any more. Talking of blegs, Michael Jennings has enquired what "modern studies" is, although not in those exact words. To my gloomy prediction of "Little in-passing anecdotes about slavery and witch-burning" he adds, "I am sure the beastliness of the Industrial Revolution will be in there somewhere, too." UPDATE: Tim Worstall (who is tons better looking than Paul Krugman) names the book. Adloyada blogged about the huge demonstration in Morocco against al-Qaeda. There's an even more extraordinary back story, which is that the protests themselves have come out of a wider awakening of yearnings for freedom, democracy and human rights which commentators argue was started off by the Casablanca bombings of 2003.UPDATE: Read the comments discussion about when and if countries should attempt to integrate Islamist political parties into the body politic, too. And read the post above about narratives. Avoid the one about mannequins. "The real difficulty which besets the philanthropist in his endeavour to exorcise the spirit of war is caused, not by the vices of this spirit, but by its virtues. In so far as it springs from vainglory or cupidity, it is comparatively easy to deal with. In so far as it is base, there is room for a bargain. It can be compounded with or bought off, as we have seen before now, with some kind of material currency. It will not stand out for very long against promises of prosperity and threats of dearth. But where, as at most crises, this spirit is not base, where its impulse is not less noble, but more noble than those which influence men day by day in the conduct of their worldy affairs, where the contrast which presents itself to their imagination is between duty on the one hand and gain on the other, between self-sacrifice and self-interest, between their country's need and their own ease, it is not possible to quench the fires by appeals proceeding from a lower plane. The philanthropist, if he is to succeed, must take still higher ground, and higher ground than this it is not a very simple matter to discover." - F S Oliver, Ordeal by Battle, quoted by John Terraine in The Smoke and the Fire. Thursday, November 10, 2005
A Jacobite plot. Today is Buy Joanne Jacobs' book day. I did. It's all part of a plot to drive up the Amazon rankings. I bought Tim Worstall's Blogged too, but not as part of a Timmite plot. Ancient liberties. Here is Nick Cohen writing on the un-Englishness of torture. Sir Edward Coke, Bodin’s English contemporary, was adamant that “there is no warrant to torture in this land”. [Quoted elsewhere as "no law to warrant tortures in this land" - NS] He meant in the common law courts. It could be authorised by the monarch or the privy council, and practised under the royal prerogative by the Court of Star Chamber. James I had to sanction the torturing of Guy Fawkes personally. If his interrogators did put him on the rack, they would have done so in the Tower, which held the only rack in England.I found this article via Google. The author is concerned to defend King James for reasons linked to the King James Bible. He makes the valid point that whatever the common law said, the "exceptions" authorised by Royal Prerogative or Star Chamber were not in fact that exceptional, and that Sir Edmund Coke himself authorised at least one of them. Nonetheless "no law to warrant tortures in this land" is a tradition worth preserving and celebrating, and the celebration will help the preservation. But Cohen's article is honest. He also says, If the Lords go against the government, all evidence from, say, Egypt will be inadmissible because the Egyptians may have used torture. The result will be a paradoxical inversion. The authorities will be able to deport a harmless Egyptian cabbie who came to Britain as an economic migrant, for breaking immigration rules. But they won’t be able to send back a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad as he “may” be tortured on return. If there is evidence from Egypt that he is plotting an attack on the Underground, they won’t be able to use that against him either because it “may” have been collected by torture. In other words, the greater the alleged threat a foreign suspect poses to the country, the harder it will be to deal with him.It seems to me that the problem lies in the way that whole countries are either declared free of torture or declared to be torturing countries. Judges must do their job and judge individual cases. On a similar theme, the MPs whose votes defeated government's proposal to grant itself the power to hold terrorist suspects without charge for 90 days are worthy of their predecessors. Many observers, including plenty of bloggers who I generally agree with, say that the length and complexity of terrorism investigations that must cover several continents and deal with foreign languages and information held on computers are so great that ninety days is needed. To them I say
Perhaps I can suggest a compromise? A great deal of my opposition to this proposed measure stemmed from the fact that it could and would be applied far beyond its original purpose. My husband suggested that if we must take extraordinary measures it would be better policy to revive the Act of Attainder. At least the accused was allowed to present evidence, provide witnesses, and speak before both Houses during the proceedings. UPDATE 12 Nov: Patrick Crozier raised the issue of the internment of enemy aliens in 1940. Scroll up to see my response. I see them here, I see them there, I see yankee war crimes everywhere. Yankee war crimes in the Independent - read Scott Burgess on the White Phosphorus Scandal that rose into the sky like an illuminating flare, appropriately enough, and just as quickly sank. [Added later: I did not make quite clear enought that Scott's role in all this was to supply the gravity.] Yankee war crimes in the Guardian - see this column by George Monbiot called "The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq" What struck me most about this article when I had stopped laughing long enough to read it was its reliance on cheap stunts. It starts with the line "We were told that the Iraqis don't count." Because by means of a wearisome pun on two possible meanings of the word "count", Monibot could give you the momentary impression that the Americans have said that the Iraqis are worth less as human beings .... yawn, you guessed right, Monibot does give you that impression. He doesn't keep it up because he can't. With a certain reluctance he turns to his actual, quite different complaint in the next few lines. He writes: But then do you know what those warmongering Pentagon scum did? (Sensitive readers may prefer to look away at this point.) They made a bar chart. Yes, a bar chart. In a report to Congress. It was labelled "average daily casualties - Iraqi and coalition. 1 Jan 04-16 Sep 05". Sternly, Monibot says, "The claim that it kept no track of Iraqi deaths was false." First point: two of Monbiot's supposedly damning quotes (by Franks and Rumsfeld) date from before the beginning of the offending bar chart. (The first of them dates from before the war itself, and pretty clearly was talking about battle casualties among Saddam's army.) If someone claims not to be on a diet in 2003 it doesn't make her a liar if she then starts one in 2005. Second point: who cares? So someone came out with a bit of bravado designed to lay the ghosts of Vietnam (a war in which "body counts" of enemy dead were widely condemned both for their dishonesty and because they can act as an incentive to massacre) and then the Pentagon changed its mind about its record keeping? Big deal. Third point: if you look very, very carefully you will see that the unnamed Evil Pentagonian quoted third said, "The only thing we keep track of is casualties for US troops and civilians." And then if you look equally carefully further down the page you will see Mr Monbiot says, The report does not explain what it means by casualty, or if its figures represent all casualties, only insurgents, or, as the foregoing paragraph appears to hint, only civilians killed by insurgents.It's all very vague, but it looks to me as if the Evil Pentagonian and the Evil Bar Chart might have been talking about the same thing. The next bit of the article is about Iraq Body Count and the Lancet study. Now, the internet isn't exactly short of discussion of the Lancet figures. For the record I think that they are way too high to be credible for that sort of war and that the source of error will turn out to be exaggeration by survey respondents for political reasons or in the hope of getting compensation. Given that the phrase "two independent news agencies" impresses me very little when I consider possible pairs, my guess is that the Iraq Body Count estimate will also turn out to be too high. But I don't want to attack Monbiot here for believing differently. The point is that even on his own account, so far the article has had practically nothing to do with its stated subject of British and American war crimes. First he talked about, at worst, the US keeping records it had said it didn't keep. Then he talked about how to count numbers of deaths due to the war. He is of course aware that the Lancet and Iraq Body Count figures include things like higher incidence of disease, not to mention* the victims of the spectacular and unashamed war crimes committed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Finally he claimed that the US foolishly assumes all the people it blows up are insurgents. The last two issues are important (the first isn't), but I can't help feeling sorry for all those Guardian readers who clicked the link hoping for some juicy US war crimes action and this is all they got. False advertising, I call it. Still, I suppose it sells papers. *As indeed Mr Monbiot doesn't. Wednesday, November 09, 2005
I greeted all the other self-antonyms (or synantonyms) that I have posted on this blog as old friends whom I had not seen for a while. But the one Alex Bensky has provided is entirely new to me. He writes: Well, some years ago, after I managed to pass the Missouri bar examination, I went to the state capital, Jefferson City, where I stood up with the others and solemnly promised to "demean myself in a manner befitting an attorney and member of the bar." Why you should never, ever have a national curriculum. I was directed to this story from Scotland by Freedom and Whisky. A radical review of the curriculum could see history disappear as a separate subject to avoid "overloading" pupils in the early secondary years.The value that he gives history can be assessed by the fact that sees no irony in making the study of the past a part of "modern studies." No piece of information must be allowed to reach the pupil without being filtered through the prism of modernity - which means, in practice, the prism of the views of the current Scottish educational establishment, a fairly narrow sect even within the Left. The article also says: But it is believed that history would be taught "in passing" when elements of other subjects touched upon issues of historical interest."In passing", as one would speak of something embarrassing. History is like uranium to "progressive" educators: the last thing they want is for people to bring the separate pieces together. So long as the proles have no opportunity to perceive either that people of other times had quite different assumptions than those of today (a perception that inevitably suggests that current obsessions may be wrong or unimportant), or that they could be the equals or the superiors of moderns when it came to intelligence and virtue, so long as both these dangerous extremes are avoided a peppering of isolated historical grotesqueries serves the progressives very well. Little in-passing anecdotes about slavery and witch-burning briefly thrill the child while confirming the idea that nothing could possibly be learnt from people who said "thee" and "thou". It takes a deeper study to say anything coherent about, say, the role of Protestant or Enlightenment values in Scottish history, and that is why the Peacocks of this world would prefer no such study be made. I blame Margaret Thatcher. She was enraged by excessively trendy schools churning out PC semi-literates who knew about whale song but not Waterloo. "I'm not having this," she said to her officials, "Get out there and make me a national curriculum." She imagined it as being written on one side of a piece of paper: reading, writing, 'rithmetic. A key point was always to include major kings-n-battles. Stories of spectacular historical ignorance on the part of schoolchildren were a major factor motivating supporters of the national curriculum. Inevitably, this mildly repressive tool turned in her hand. Sure as eggs is eggs the national curriculum was taken over by the educational establishment, made monstrously detailed, and suffused with its values. Thatcher herself later admitted that the nationalisation of the curriculum was one of her biggest mistakes. Time went on. Maggie went, the Conservatives went, Scotland was devolved. The idea of a national curriculum stayed. And because of that if this proposal comes to pass it won't just affect a few of the most faddish Scottish schools. History will be shunted to the sidelines in schools all over Scotland. UPDATE: Stop the presses! Mrs Thatcher not to blame after all! Andy of Don't Hold Your Breath writes: I was interested to read your comments on teaching history in Scotland on your blog.It is. But I take it there is some sort of Scottish national curriculum, or else how come the views of the Education Minister of the Scottish Executive carry any weight? The news story I quoted did not gave me the impression that Mr Peacock's "radical review of the curriculum" was purely advisory. Sticking with the subject of education, having taken a look at his blog I am happy to say that Andy's views on truancy are sound: In my experience (and I did go to school, so this is not some airy-fairy theoretical analysis based on consumer utility functions and labour supply curves), the pupils most likely to play truant were the same pupils who, when present, would be most likely to knife the teacher. A class full of truants is, when the truants are doing their truanting, a peaceful class. When the truants weren't there, we would discover that the teacher would often have interesting things to say. I am firmly in favour of truancy. It is a much under-rated educational innovation. Tuesday, November 08, 2005
(A) Legislative Creep. On the Adam Smith blog Tim Worstall warns that Blair hasn't even unwrapped his shiny new anti-terrorism powers yet and already he wants to use them to go after not terrorists but pimps and Yardies. Worstall writes: Quite seriously the Prime Minister has proposed that the law should be changed so that every suspected pimp in the country can, at the instigation of the police, be locked up for three months without being charged or convicted of anything. Again, you may say this is just fine, exactly what they deserve. But what happens when there's another crime that the new law is applied to? Tax dodging? Dangerous driving (which after all kills far more than terrorism or drugs each year)?"The way we used to deal with it" was successfully. Part of the reason for this success was that the generality of policemen, politicians and ordinary people gave their proud consent to the rule of law. Once that rule ceases to apply to anybody it ceases to apply to anybody. Random thoughts (on the Sowell model) I like cheese. Expect to hear a lot about how the French riots are a result of their policy of laïcité or secularism - refusing to label a French citizen with any other category than "French". There will be many calls to get down to the work of giving everyone a religious or ethnic group tag so that an army of survey takers, equal opportunities trainers, race equality officers and lawyers specialising in discrimination cases can get to work - and get work. The tranzis claim that they are deeply attached to laïcité. I doubt this is anything more than a bargaining ploy - all that stuff is too much wrapped up with embarrassing Gaullism and La Republique and those diagonal tricoloured sashes that French mayors wear to appeal to a modern European. They just say they like it in order to pretend they are giving up something of value in exchange for not having their cars burnt. Anything rather than give up something they really value, such as the European Social Model. When exchanging beads for Manhattan one pretends to value the beads. It's not jobs for the racism co-dependents that France needs, it's jobs for the fighting cocks - the young men on the dole who take on the role of warrior to give their lives meaning. Only one-third of Britons see benefit in continued EU membership, says the Eurobarometer survey as reported by Fraser Nelson in The Business. Unfortunately every time I try to call up the PDF of the Eurobarometer survey it gets stuck on "2 items remaining", so I can't read it. I'll have to go on the Business article and this post in EU Referendum (which is where I got the story). Richard North comments: For the Tory leadership contest, the report has some considerable significance. Compared with the tentative steps suggested by the candidates to effect a selective withdrawal from the EU, the survey shows that public opinion is way ahead of what is on offer. Arguably, the two Davids are misreading public opinion and risk missing the boat. Anything that brings the day we get out of the swamp closer is good news, including evidence that might convince politicians that getting out is good politics. However the survey does not, alas, give me the impression of either a Europe, or even a Britain, of suppressed free marketeers and liberal internationalists. Um, nooo. One of the paradoxes of debate about the EU is activists for withdrawal are usually far less prone to security-blanket nationalism than the general public. Although The Business says: The survey had much to support Blair’s theory that voters are ripe for liberalism. Of all various words tested, “monopoly” solicited the most hostile reaction (69%). Next came “protectionism” (49%) and then “globalisation” (46%). Concern for unemployment was he highest in its 30-year history. Some 47% of respondents said the EU should prioritise fighting unemployment. Blair wants the EU to liberalise to meet this goal.I fear that the first and last sentences of the paragraph above are wishful thinking on the part of The Business. Hostility to the word "Monopoly" may signal hostility to corporatism, rent-seeking and big business in bed with the State to the sophisticated writers of business-oriented journals but to most people it signals hostility to capitalism; hostility to "globalisation" needs no further explanation; and I have a feeling that when they say the EU should prioritise fighting unemployment they are more likely to mean the introduction of a compulsory 35 hour week than its abolition. Still, it was nice to see "protectionism" in the list of hostility-arousing words. I wish I knew the overlap between those respondents who didn't like protectionism and those who didn't like globalisation. If large, it means there are a lot of idiots out there who oppose globalisation in the same way that Defoe said the country fellows of his time opposed popery - without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse. If the overlap is low it tells me that there are some right-minded and some wrong-minded folk: a more optimistic scenario. However this next set of figures from Eurobarometer did not dispel my gloomy feeling that the ideology that will really capture the hearts of Europeans is one that will allow them to support both Naomi Klein and Jean-Marie Le Pen: The 440-page Eurobarometer report offers several other insights on the EU, especially the growing hostility towards the United States, which a majority of 55% consider to be a “negative force” for peace. Only 25% consider it a “positive force”. Britain is found to be little different, with 47% seeing the US as a negative force, and only 23% disagreeing.Seeing or not seeing the US as a "positive force for peace" is code for "Do you support the Iraq war?" While I am sorry to see so many of my countrymen would prefer tyrants to stay in power, I suspect this opposition does not, especially in Britain, translate into growing hostility to the United States per se. (Tried to see the actual survey again. Nope. Still jams up.) Never mind, never mind. Dank November it may be, but Spring is in the air when I read words such as these: Particular dismay with the EU was found in Britain, where a majority – 42% to 40% – believe the UK has not benefited from its 30-year membership and only 36% of those questioned considered membership “a good thing”. |