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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Tuesday, June 21, 2005
For all I know she is a skilful doctor, but Margaret McCartney, a GP based in Glasgow who has written this Guardian article, comes across as goodhearted but too ditzy for serious punditry. Good thing it's only the Guardian. She writes: Always easier to let folk pay tax and smoke rather than to deal with the nitty gritty problems of inequality that led them to buy fags for their "only enjoyment" in the first place. It sounds suspiciously like a let-them-eat-cake kind of argument, but with a shorter life expectancy instead of icing to top it off.In these lines she seems to be saying that government reluctance to crack down on smoking is caused by a combination of an unworthy desire for tax revenue and a lack of stomach for the fight to enact controversial policies of redistribution. In other words, an anti-smoking crackdown would be a good thing, only the wimps won't do it. Yet earlier she says she resents being nagged about her hair and "feels strongly" that she doesn't want to have to start nagging her patients about their weight. These ideas can be reconciled, sort of, by saying that ending inequality would mean people no longer wanted to smoke, so the government wouldn't need to "let" them, but why that should be is never explained. Nor is it explained where the tax base would come from once the smokers and the rich were out of the picture. A little later, after a smidgin of praise for the website of the smokers' rights organisation Forest, she says: The idea that we all choose our poison with liberty and freedom is entirely wrong. Take a look at the figures on smoking and social class: the lower the social class, the more likely a person is to smoke.And that disproves the idea that we choose our poison with freedom how? It seems that practically no one in Britain is too poor to smoke. Inspiring, really. Dr McCartney continues: In effect, no such freedom of choice exists. My job would be easy if people chose smoking from one of the many pleasures they had the equal choice to pursue.Personally I've always wondered why the long-term unemployed spend so little time on macramé. They could spend the mornings wandering the streets looking for discarded string and the afternoons making useful and attractive pot-holders. Reading and fornication are other inexpensive pastimes. Why the popularity of the former among the poorer classes has declined and that of the latter increased over the last century is an interesting question. It can't be absolute poverty and it can't be inequality. Both of these were greater in 1905 than now. It is also worthwhile to note that as our government has taken a more active role in redistributing income, smoking, once common across all classes, is now concentrated among those who receive state money. Before I digress too far I must say that at this point in the article I had a pleasant surprise. The usual rule is that any statement that people are not really free is immediately followed by a call to give them even less freedom. (Ban macramé now!) Yet in this case the call never came. I warmed to the doctor. However I simply didn't get the next bit: But if you really wanted to make the opportunity to smoke equal, then you would have to start shoving free cigarettes through nice middle-class letterboxes.Um, why? Middle class people already have more disposable income than poor people, right? So it's already easier for them to buy cigarettes, yet in general they buy fewer. Why does Dr McCartney consider (even in jest) that increasing the disparity in disposable income between classes yet further would be a good thing? We already agree that the middle class usually make better health decisions. Arranging for this to be illustrated by equalising the mortality rates across classes (by giving the usually-wiser class worse incentives) makes the point no clearer than it already is. To be fair, in her conclusion she is inching closer towards the same destination as I am (and therefore, naturally, to being correct), although she starts badly: In reality, we don't have equal access to fags,Please drop this, Doctor. In so far as differing wealth gives us unequal access to fags, one would expect the middle classes to smoke more. You can argue that the experience of poverty gives people reason to smoke but that is not the same as access to fags. Some people get so used to defining poverty in terms of lack of access to computers, education, string etc., that they can't stop even when it does their argument no good. The root cause of this addiction is excessive access to the Guardian. ... and we have got so used to health scares that enormous black letters on cigarette packs warning that "SMOKING KILLS" are dismissed with the fatalism that is more rightly reserved for hair dyes and electricity pylons.She is right there. It's not just smoking in public places we should be thinking about; it's why the class divide about smoking persists at all.I blame welfare. Safety first. Zoe Williams writes amiably on a public information films. Regular parents, randomly polled by the Sunday Telegraph, have received the video sceptically. The scenarios don't represent any recognisable exchange that might happen in any recognisable house. They take no account of human factors like personality and familiarity. Writing credible dialogue, it turns out, is really quite hard, and it becomes harder still when you have a proselytising message underpinning it. Plus, the pricey inclusion of Nesbitt pushed the cost of this exercise to 200 grand, money that could have been better spent on almost anything.The last few lines quoted might give you a hint of where my sense of disquiet comes in. Alcholic doctors: a thought. A telephone call from a friend who had some bad news to deliver just reminded me of one reason doctors take to drink: medicine can be a sad profession. Monday, June 20, 2005
Surveillance over ordinary citizens. Dominic Fox wrote a letter to Sally Keeble MP about ID cards. He says, "I think the point raised at the end about coercion is actually the most significant." Here is his letter: Dear Sally Keeble,Bet she answers, "Society has been harmed." Amnesty foolishness. I'm talking about the sort of amnesty mentioned in this story from The Scotsman. Let's not jump to conclusions. Although, as Joel Rosenberg points out, there are many instances of prominent anti-gun campaigners packing guns, Sheila Eccleston's story could well be true: she did not want the shotgun for personal use; it had been handed to her by a repentant gangster and she was waiting for a gun amnesty to surrender it to the police. The fact that she herself told the police about the shotgun - albeit after she had had it for six months - is strong evidence in her favour. Assuming her story is true, what does that tell us about her attitudes to the gun laws?
We'll see how this one pans out. She might be right in both assumptions. ADDED LATER: I thought I'd just add an explanatory note. If you find your grandpa's old pistol in the loft you can hand it in to a Registered Firearms Dealer without penalty. You must sign his register when you do so, but he there is no onus on him to even check that your signature is real. The ordinary course of the law acts to make it as easy as possible to hand in an illegal weapon. That is the law on firearms as I understand it; I can hardly believe that the law for shotguns would be more strict. In other words Ms Eccleston did not need to wait for an amnesty to protect the guy who gave her the shotgun. Firearms amnesties administered by the police are presented as being a special, and usually a final, chance to legalise your position, but this is not true. Furthermore if your grandpa's pistol turns out to be worth a lot of money and you, being a law-abiding citizen, have given the dealer your true details, he can sell it for you on commission. Police amnesties do not publicise this fact. Quite a few widows have handed over their late husband's valuable property to the police, practically weeping with relief at being spared prosecution, when had the police properly advised them on the law they would have known that they were in no danger anyway and could have realised considerable sums from the sale of the guns. "For none of woman born shall harm Macbeth." So said the Second Apparition - and every word was true. The first link in Tim Worstall's latest Britblog roundup is to this article by TalkPolitics on ID cards. The author carefully analyses a Parliamentary answer given by Home Office Minister Tom McNulty, and demonstrates that the Minister said no untrue word. MACBETH: Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests ; Saturday, June 18, 2005
Lancing a boil. A bunch of eminent scientific johnnies have slagged off the Lancet for "desperate headline-seeking". They do not appear to have included the famous Iraqi casualty study in their list of complaints. I don't know whether they didn't include it because they agreed with it, or because they had no opinion about it, or because the individual boffins had different views. However even if one agreed with every word there is no doubt that the timing of that article, and the way it was given an accelerated review process so that it would appear days before the US election, was indeed "desperate headline-seeking." Friday, June 17, 2005
Physician, heal thyself. Making a trio of booze-related posts here is a BBC article asking, Why do doctors drink so much? They do, you know. In the same way, plenty of lawyers die intestate (they all think that they will get round to making a will sometime when not busy) and a financial adviser told me that the financial affairs of financial advisers are frequently a mess. Michael Jennings writes, "Management consultancy firms are notorious for being badly managed, too." The Enablers. Here is the Make Poverty History manifesto. Some of it is good: the call for the EU to unilaterally put an end to its damaging agricultural export subsidies, for instance. There is room for doubt in my mind on debt cancellation (peverse incentives and loss of future creditworthiness versus the unfairness of making people suffer for the sins of their thieving leaders). Nor am I always against foreign aid per se; I see it as like opium for an injured person, addictive but sometimes a lifesaver. But when I saw this ... it ["trade justice"] means ensuring poor countries can feed their people by protecting their own farmers and staple crops; it means ensuring governments can effectively regulate water companies by keeping water out of world trade rules and it means ensuring trade rules do not undermine core labour standards. I thought of the role of MPH as being something like that of the "enabler" in the household of an alcoholic. An enabler is “a person who unknowingly helps the alcoholic by denying the drinking problem exists and helping the alcoholic to get out of troubles caused by his drinking” (Silverstein, 1990, p.65). The enabler will clean up the alcoholic’s vomit and make excuses to his or her boss, teacher, or friends. The enabler lies for the alcoholic, and thus enables the alcoholic to continue drinking.For drinking read "ensuring poor countries can feed their people by protecting their own farmers and staple crops." You don't need two separate books to read about the history of agricultural protectionism and the history of famine! Over the last twenty years the countries that have followed (even imperfectly) what MPH calls the "disastrous" policy of opening their markets have suffered... unprecendented rises in prosperity. Those that have kept doing what MPH want them to do have stayed poor. (Added later: "want them to do" might be better phrased as "give them permission to do," in the same sense that an Enabler gives an alcoholic "permission" to carry on drinking.) I was especially struck by questions two and three in this quiz called Are You an Enabler? But the metaphor resonates for all of them. 1. Have you ever "called in sick" for the alcoholic, lying about his symptoms? Thursday, June 16, 2005
Only Nixon could go to China. I was aware that Lal Kirshnan Advani, the president of the BJP, was recently sacked and then re-instated for saying nice things about Jinnah on an official trip to Pakistan. What I didn't know was that Advani, the prime mover behind the razing by Hindu zealots of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, now regards that day as "the saddest in his life." Or that for their part the Pakistani authorities are going to restore the Katas Raj temple, a Hindu sacred site in Pakistan. Archbishop warns against "unpoliced conversation" peril. Peter Glover of Wires from the Bunker writes: Dr Williams, who was speaking to an audience of media professionals, politicians and church leaders at his Lambeth Palace, London residence, went on to describe the atmosphere on the worldwide web as "a free for all" which produced something "close to that of unpoliced conversation."Dr Williams' speech is reported in the Times: Archbishop hits out at web-based media 'nonsense' In a moment of madness I had an unpoliced conversation with my husband only yesterday. It was about strawberries. The horror lives with me yet. UPDATE: Peter Glover asks me to say that, having now seen the full text of Dr Williams's speech, he thinks that the Times report was not entirely fair, although the fact that Dr Williams did not make his meaning clear did not help. "Wires from the Bunker" does not have permalinks, but go to the main link above for more. Wednesday, June 15, 2005
The blood of the Solents runs hot. I am meant to be attending to more urgent priorities than blogging - but when directly challenged in this post by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber I had to respond. Monday, June 13, 2005
Busy time coming up. So the world may just have to turn without me for a few days. Before I go, let me recommend this. John Weidner pointed me in the direction of a fair-minded and touching article by David Asman, describing the experience of his wife, who unfortunately suffered a stroke, in both the British and US health care systems. Asman says: Neither system is without its faults and advantages. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions to modern health care problems, only trade-offs.That is true, and in an emergency it can be a great blessing that under the British system one does not have to worry, or even think about costs (though one may have to worry rather more about outcomes because one doesn't have to think about costs). However, many of the disadvantages of the US system that Asman mentions are not inherent to private healthcare; rather they are the results of defensive medicine, itself the result of bad tort law. Thomas Sowell has good sense to offer on that subject, too, in The Vision of the Anointed. Excessive, unpredictable and illogical awards of compensation could as easily be associated with a public as with a private system - and the way things are going in Britain they soon will be. Some of John Weidner's commenters mention the French system. Although it slightly spoils my free-market rant to say so, I must say that when my husband bashed his leg on holiday we were extremely impressed by the kindness and efficiency we saw. The doctor, who came out to the roadside where my husband was sitting unable to walk, refused payment. Not worth his while to do the paperwork, or just a nice guy? I don't know. Actually he was an exceptionally nice guy whatever. The hospital was clean and relatively uncrowded. Waiting time for an X-ray: twenty minutes. (Waiting time in Blighty for an X-ray of my daughter's broken arm: six hours. She had to go without food and water for all that time in case they had to operate.) After our return to England were billed by the French hospital for about £30. To be that low the fee must be heavily subsidised, but I suggest that the fact that there is some fee does great good. I paid it with gratitude. Sunday, June 12, 2005
Britblog roundup at the usual place. Among the various posts there is a distinct theme of opposition to the Religious Hatred Bill. Friday, June 10, 2005
Darth Vader, Republican. Meryl Yourish has the interview we have all been waiting for. While I'm on the subject, why exactly didn't Obi-Wan just kill Anakin while he had the chance? Leaving him there lying on the lava wasn't prudent and wasn't even merciful either. (Dr Who spoilers coming up. Presumably you had already figured out that Anakin survives.) Just goes to show. Never let wimpy liberals into space. A trillion life-forms fried because Tom Baker wouldn't exterminate the Daleks when he had the chance, but does Dr Who learn from this? Oh no, Christopher Ecclescake is still at it with the Slitheen chick. Apparently the only options open to him are (a) to let this intermittently repentant mass-murderer and mayor of Cardiff skip away to wreak xenocide and municipal socialism without penalty, or (b) to take her back to Slitheeny Prime to be tortured to death in acetic acid in accordance with Slitheen folkways. Yes, it's another Russell T. Davies fake dilemma. Davies is a good scriptwriter - there mere mention of his name lines our entire household up in front of the TV - but some kind friend needs to take him to one side and gently eviscerate him with a sonic screwdriver until he gets a grip on this issue. There are other options, friend. One could call upon Jack whatsisname, for instance; the guy from the future masquerading as an American volunteer pilot with the RAF. Does he not have upon his person as part of the accoutrements of an officer a nice chunky Browning 9mm service pistol? Perhaps not, my husband tells me. It might be an Enfield .38 revolver. Let us not quibble. Enough rounds from either would extinguish life in a relatively quick and painless manner, even eight-foot tall green life. Failing that, the Doctor could have slipped her an avocado vinaigrette. And since when has the Doctor been one for "we must obey the law no matter how cruel" anyway? If he's taking that line, Jack has deserted from the forces of the Crown in time of war. Foreign national or not, future national or not, it is the Doctor's solemn duty to escort him to officers of the military police so that he can be court-martialled and shot. Thursday, June 09, 2005
I have a post up at Samizdata asking why G8 protestors don't give their all their spare money to the poor. Self-regulation has not worked. The Guardian has still not yet reported that John Kerry had worse grades at Yale than George Bush. UPDATE: Eventually. Wednesday, June 08, 2005
I have been infected by a horribly contagious virus that ordinary medicine is helpless to cure. Yes, that one. Number of books I own: Um, several thousand. I can't count properly because they are in complete disorder and half of them are in boxes in the loft. Last book I bought: The Storage Book by Cynthia Innons. Because I know I have a problem. I got this at a garage sale for 50p. Now I have find somewhere to store it. Last book I (re)read: 'Conciliation with America' by Edmund Burke. Despite sounding so swanky this is really true. Five books that mean a lot to me: I assume it's like Desert Island Discs and one excludes the Bible and Shakespeare. Which leaves... 1) 'Free to Choose' by Milton and Rose Friedman. Obvious or what? 2) Wow. One of the choices of my source of infection would also be mine and for practically the same reasons. Scott said, "'Godel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid' - After about 10 tries, I've never been able to read it straight through, but with every effort I learn a bit more. I'm trying again right now."OK, unlike Scott I am not trying again right now. But I will. 3) Most of the books that mean the most to most people are books read in childhood. They have proportionally more effect. So one of my choices simply must be C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles. I'm sure they have been published in one volume somewhere, so I claim they count as one book not seven. 4) Another (slightly later) childhood favourite that I shall defiantly count as one book is Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. The part about Arkady Darell starts when she was two days past fourteen - and I was two days past fourteen when I got to that point, having read like mad in every spare moment since opening the boxed set on my birthday. 5) The fifth one is really difficult. Whatever I choose, I will think of something better five minutes after pressing "publish." A science book? Something from the classics? A book about history? All of these are pipped at the post in terms of meaning a lot to me by the first collection of Bernard Levin's articles I ever bought, 'Taking Sides.' As I have said before, it made me heartily wish there was a way that I, too, could write my opinions about everything down and find someone to read them. Tag Five More: Aagh, I like playing these games but I hate doing this. The process of choosing hits some social inhibition that probably dates back from childhood when I was always chosen second last for netball. As usual, I think I'll say that anyone who wants to play should just nominate me as having chosen them. More snapshots of Zimbabwe from Normblog. My God, what will we be saying a year from now about these events? That they were just one more torment in that country's continuing agony - or that they were the darkest hour before the dawn? Also read this post commenting on a Guardian article about foreign Jihadis in Iraq. A stray thought: why do I talk more about Zimbabwe and Iraq than about Darfur or the DR Congo? Because there is more to say when, despite all the suffering, there is more hope. A voice from inside the storm. I discovered The Zimbabwean Pundit via this comment at Samizdata. There are near daily posts on "Operation Murambatsvina", the ruthless government "cleanup" that Mugabe has ordered of makeshift homes and street traders. Some people are so sensitive. Tim Worstall reports that he, along with Alex Singleton, has been accused of being a "reactionary individual" and peddlar of a "mixture of lies, stupidity and prejudice" by Owen of Owen's Musings who, oddly, says in the comments that he did not mean to insult TW personally. Well, yeah, I can go with that. Owen actually says that a category of reactionary individuals are peddling the mixture of lies, stupidity and prejudice and names Worstall and Singleton as individual members of this category, adding for good measure that Singleton is "posing as an Institute". How anyone could take that as personal insult is beyond me. ADDED LATER: I should have added that both parties' arguments about development are well worth reading. Not surprisingly, I agree with Tim Worstall's more, but, as I said in an earlier post Owen (whose surname I do not see stated) is a development professional who obviously knows the subject. Pity he shoots his mouth off. STILL LATER: Owen has amended the post and appended a note saying that he wrote in anger and apologising to those he offended. Tuesday, June 07, 2005
The fiscal theme park. Stewart writes: In your Monday posting about VAT you quote the Telegraph as saying: "the Vat-men decided that a "profit" and a "loss" are the same thing". Messages of support have been coming in for my mission statement. Graeme writes: Power to your elbow, blog-babe!Captain Heinrichs writes: Well, one out of two can be considered an adequate level of achievement.Gentlemen, I shall strive to be worthy. Amnesty International. You gotta laugh. First they see a Gulag that isn't there. Then they puff an interview with the man who refused to see the genocide that was there. Also see this post from Chicago Boyz. Oh, and according to Nick Cohen Amnesty aren't so much into prisoners of conscience any more. Anti-poverty campaigning must come first. (Via Stephen Pollard.) Sheesh, I once volunteered for these guys. Spent the day licking envelopes. Give me back my spit! Gordon waives the rules. Brett Taylor thought up that title and responded to yesterday's post on the waiver of VAT for the Live 8 concert with this email: I have been wondering today whether our Charitable Chancellor has any right to waive VAT on an organisation. Even your good self seems to accept it readily. I mean, if he took a fancy to some floozie walking down the street could he waive her income tax? Could Lamont have waived the duty on his purchases from Threshers? I always assumed that all those details in the budget are written into each year's Finance Bill and guillotined through parliament, but maybe I'm mistaken and he does in fact have arbitrary power.That's Lamont's alleged purchases from Thresher's, Brett. But seriously, does our present Chancellor actually have the legal power to exempt those he likes from VAT? Anyone know? Monday, June 06, 2005
In contrast to Zimbabwe, Australia has been peaceful, prosperous and democratic for more than a century. Michael Jennings praises the Australian constitution, which combines elements from the British and American systems. Whether the "lucky country" is lucky because of its constitution I do not know. Still on the subject of constitutions, JEM wrote: In short, the fundamental difference between the American Constitution and virtually all others is that it was not attempting to change the status quo but merely to affirm it and set it in stone. Indeed the entire American Revolution/War of Independence (select title to taste) was not a revolution at all but simply a fight to retain the existing "rights of Englishmen", as the 'revolutionaries' themselves put it; really it was a civil war. Tim Worstall's Britblog roundup is rounded and up. Including the post about, ah, Parisian social history that everyone's talking about. Zimbabwe's Year Zero. Perry de Havilland says violence is the only answer left. I read this and then sort of waited to feel shocked. Still waiting. Perry quotes the Telegraph: Across Zimbabwe, the United Nations estimates that 200,000 people have lost their homes, with the poorest townships bearing the brunt of Mr Mugabe's onslaught. "The vast majority are homeless in the streets," said Miloon Kothari, the UN's housing representative.I have no doubt this policy will find its admirers in the West, as Pol Pot's forced exodus did. That was really a roundabout way of saying that I've had a busy half term and I am not up with the news. I gather someone said something or other about the EU referendum. Fine, whatever. I also gather that the Chancellor has decided to waive the VAT for the Live 8 concert. How fine to be Bob Geldof and not have to pay tax on your charity concert because it is for a good cause! Less well-connected promoters of charity concerts aren't so lucky. Hundreds of charities will learn with shock of the recent ruling by a VAT tribunal that HM Customs and Excise are right to demand up to £100,000 from a country house opera company, which thought it was exempt from VAT because all its profits go to charitable causes. The case arose because, in their interpretation of EC law, the Vat-men decided that a "profit" and a "loss" are the same thing. The tribunal has now agreed.And As a trustee of the charity, Mr Graham's mistake, in the eyes of the Vat-men, was to write a letter to his fellow-trustees confirming that, in the event of any losses, he would meet them out of his own pocket. HM Customs swooped on this to argue that this gave him a "financial interest" in the charity.Perhaps the opera guys should threaten to call down a million-strong yoof swarm on little Longborough? That seems to be the way to get exemption from the law. To succeed in the dog-eat-beetle world of the blogosphere, each blog must have its own unique "take" on the news. There's plenty of hot shots out there aiming to be first with the instant punditry. There are not a few who endeavour to supply more considered commentary after taking time to reflect. As I see it, my niche is to combine both these roles. To be shallow-minded and late: that is my mission. Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Fair Trade 4 Kidz Part II. I have a post up at Biased BBC about how Children's BBC treats trade issues. Pedantry. John Band writes: Now that the Routemasters have nearly all been scrapped or sold off to bus geeks, buses' "rear exits" are generally in the middle of the bus (link), so it's quite likely that first would still be foremost in the situation you describe...Thanks for sharing, John. If we ever meet I'll leave you out for the bin-men in a carrier bag. Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Governed by men, not laws. (Part the Zillionth.) In this post from James Bartholemew's blog a correspondent describes the arbitrary rule of the inspectors of care homes for the elderly. The above was found via CrozierVision. Patrick Crozier also bounced me over to The Road to Euro Serfdom where I read this entertaining post about what to call the killing of the unborn EU constitution. The EU Serf seems full of the joys of spring for some reason. In turn, EU Serf tempted me to perform an act that seemed curiously inappropriate for this sunny half-term day in which the air rings to the boing of the trampoline (£99.99 Argos special offer) and the merry cries of children ignoring safety regulations: I read the paper. Mark Steyn. The alleged incompatibility of our dissatisfactions makes the point: all politics is local; despite the assiduous promotion of the term, electorally speaking there is no such thing as a "European". I will stop adding extra bits to this post and go away now. Glossing over what Southern Democrats used the filibuster for, again. Rand Simberg spotted a prime example from ABC News. It started off as: The filibuster has been used historically by the minority party, which can't win with a vote count. Democrats have opposed the filibuster before — in the 1960s, they accused Republicans of using it to block civil rights legislation.Someone noticed and it was altered to: The filibuster has been used historically by the minority party, which can't win with a vote count.There follows the same paragraph about Thurmond as before. Simberg comments, "Still no mention of Thurmond's political affiliation at the time, but at least they're not explicitly blaming Republicans for blocking the CRA." Several of his commenters observe that the observation about the "minority party" is still wrong in the context of the CRA. Another commenter, Charlie from Colorado, says: By the way, isn't it interesting that the party affiliation was important in the first version of the story, but went away in the next? More about Charlie's very perceptive comment later. First some of you may wonder why I have devoted three posts to a misunderstanding about events in a far country that took place coming up to half a century ago, particularly given libertarian opposition to abridgements to freedom of association. Well, first and foremost, it is because I am a pedant. Of course there are situations when to be first would not be foremost, for instance when passengers are leaving a bus by the rear exit, but on this occasion it is both. By this I mean pendantry as a factor is indeed first and foremost in an imaginary hierarchy of factors in my mind. Not literally, you understand! I do not claim that pedantry has a physical location in the frontal lobes of the brain. I suspect it is a distributed phenomenon. This particular distributed mental phenomenon has the unfortunate effect of making me want to seek out people who mis-state particular historical facts and rip their arms and legs off. Secondly, getting back to my individually-targeted downer on Senator Robert C. Byrd, it really ought to take most of a lifetime to live down having said this: "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."After seeing that quote mentioned in the Biased BBC comments I had to check before I believed it. It is fair to cut Byrd some slack for holding racist beliefs at a time and place when such beliefs were common. But that particular quote becomes more, not less, strikingly offensive when placed in historical context. It was written shortly after World War II. The thing that Byrd would rather see his country's flag trampled in the dust than do was serve in the military "with a Negro by my side." Thirdly, and in this I am seconding Rand Simberg's commenter Charlie, it's funny how it is always this particular little factoid - that Byrd and, at that time, Thurmond were Democrats - that is fudged. One could argue that the whole thing doesn't matter: the uses to which filibusters are put, both the US parties, and the US itself, are all very different now. But if you are going to have a paragraph heading called "Historical Perspective", then have all the historical perspective. If you are going to have all that admiring stuff about Byrd being so learned in the details of Senate procedure, then say how he got that way. How did the authors of the ABC piece come to make their howler in the first place, despite being confident enough to submit a "primer" on judicial nominees and the filibuster to the public? My guess is that they simply passed on the faults of the source material they used in order to research their article. It is possible to be generally well-informed yet miss the fact that the Civil Rights filibusterers were Democrats because of dozens of separate, uncoordinated decisions by generally left-leaning authors of textbooks, newspaper columns and news websites to slide over the one part of the Civil Rights story they don't like telling. (I re-wrote and expanded the final paragraph at about 6pm BST.) Saturday, May 28, 2005
Wannabes. A very small silver lining to the very large dark cloud that overshadows these violent times is that the war on drugs - that is to say the "war" on a particular form of unhealthy behaviour - no longer gets the prestige it once did. I think someone is feeling left out. Police have claimed new successes in the war on drugs in central Scotland.They called it Operation Overlord? ADDED 11AM: This morning I gave this post a catchier title and cross-posted it to Samizdata. Friday, May 27, 2005
George Galloway doesn't know what the internet can do. This blogger does. Making use of WHOIS list of domain names and the Wayback Machine internet archives, "Seixon" relentlessly examines one claim of Galloway's senate testimony, that he "emblazoned" on the Mariam Appeal website that Fawaz Zureikat was doing vast amounts of business with Iraq. Via Damian Penny and LGF. A good thought from Thought Mesh: A question that frequently arises among those with a clue is “why doesn’t anyone imitate the founding of the USA, given its remarkable success?”. Instead, the founders of new governments seem to prefer to follow the lead of failed and failing states, such as the USSR or Old Europe. Why? The American Founding Fathers, to their immense credit, managed to do a very good job without an example or prior validation of their view on government. Now, centuries later, when their vision has been proven right so dramatically, why is the style and structure of the USA Constitution still almost unique?I have to interject that I believe that several South and Central American countries do have constitutions closely based on that of the USA. Unfortunately they didn't "take", almost as if the donor and recipient societies were too far apart for an organ transplant to work. However that does not detract from the persuasive argument that AOG puts forward next: I think that that answer is simple. The USA Constitution, while it has been very good for the USA, wasn’t particularly good for the Founding Fathers. Except for Washington, they had to fight for public office afterwards. They fought vigorously over important policy issues (see the history of the First National Bank for an example). In contrast, the non-American style constitutions tend to be very good for the authors, either directly, politically or ideologically.Mesh thought good. Stuff happens. Yesterday after school I was getting my swimming things together when an explosion went off in the cupboard by the cooker. I was put out. I have enough to cope with in my life - the swimming pool closes at 6.30 for a start - without having to clear up after what appeared to be the in-cupboard martyrdom of an alien suicide bomber with glutinous brown blood. OK, it was a small alien suicide bomber, but the determined fellow had projected himself over the walls, ceiling and contents of the cuboard with an enthusiasm that more than compensated for his lack of inches. The blast had knocked down the balsamic vinegar, completely taken out the rock salt and the Extra Virgin olive oil had brown gloop all over it. Wrong cupboard for the raisins though, ha-ha! I dare say some people will find all this tasteless. In contrast, the mixture of gravy browning and ginger beer dripping down the cupboard wall smelled quite tasty. I decided not to try a lick on account of the broken glass. The whiff of ginger beer did suggest an alternative explanation to that of the Jihad of the Borrowers. Reminder to self: next time get ginger beer from supermarket that is chock-full of safety-tested cyclamates, sodium benzoate and spent nuclear fuel rods, rather than Real Traditional Ginger Beer of Mass Destruction from farmers' market. This is getting silly. Two quotes illustrating the steady progress of the modern world towards a parody of itself, both found via David Carr of Samizdata: If the French and the Dutch reject the EU Constitution on Sunday and Wednesday, they should re-run the referendums, the current president of the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker, has said.And, moving up a post: A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing. Thursday, May 26, 2005
"President Bush's drive for absolute power has momentarily stalled. In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government." Absolute power? Coup? To the barricades, comrades! ¡No pasaran! On second thoughts, don't worry. It's only Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian. Talking about filibusters rather than the Last Days of American Democracy, although you wouldn't guess that from lines like "sheer force would prevail". Here he is: Historically, it [the filibuster] was used by southern senators to block civil rights legislation. In the first two years of the Clinton presidency, the Republicans deployed 48 filibusters, more than in the entire previous history of the Senate, to make the new Democratic chief executive appear feckless. The strategy was instrumental in the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994. By depriving the Democrats of the filibuster, Bush intended to transform the Senate into his rubber stamp.Shameless hypocrisy, eh? Look again at the first line of the quote above: the filibuster "... was used by southern senators to block civil rights legislation." Now what party might these "southern senators" have belonged to, Mr Blumenthal? Maybe we could ask some venerable senators: Over the weekend, two elders, Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, pored over the federalist papers, written by the constitutional framers, to refresh their thinking about the inviolability of the Senate.I don't know how much John Warner needs to "refresh his thinking" but Senator Byrd, in particular might be jogged into remembering... Yeah, yeah. It was a long time ago. If I am to remind everyone that the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 was opposed by Southern Democrats, let it also be said that it was initiated by Northern Democrats (and passed with the help of the Republicans.) Byrd himself is quite reformed now, I hear, and popular with many black voters. My complaint is this. If you are going to talk about hypocrisy regarding filibusters, don't leave out your own party's hypocrisy. (Mr Blumenthal was once President Clinton's senior adviser.) Yet a lot of people seem to go oddly vague on what party Byrd and his ilk belonged to despite being more than happy to talk about the great days of the Civil Rights era generally. In fact my complaint is that I could without effort find the material to write a post like this around once a month - and that's just from the British media. I wrote a very similar post for Biased BBC earlier this month. Same basic situation: the BBC's Justin Webb indulged a bunch of folksy filibusterin' reminiscence from Senator Byrd without ever mentioning what Byrd was trying to do by speaking for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes, or what the filibuster is best known for. Most British people have only heard of the filibuster at all in the context of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964. I've read, as it happens, many UK GCSE textbooks on twentieth century history. One of the popular options for study is the Depression, another is the Civil Rights struggle. Maybe I'll supply quotes in a future post, but let me tell you now one thing they all have in common: no kid leaves the chapter on the Depression without knowing that President Hoover was a BAD president and he was a REPUBLICAN. Yet when it comes to the Civil Rights struggle in the next chapter a certain coyness comes over the same writers. They don't exactly conceal that Robert Byrd or Strom Thurmond were Democrats (no need to tell me that Thurmond changed to Republican later) but a kid needs to be attentive to pick it up. The books prefer to dwell on Byrd and Thurmond's geographical origin. Southern senators. Here is some knockabout fun from the comments to this post on Peter Cuthbertson's Conservative Commentary. Consider it a companion piece to the repartee from Harry's Place I posted a while ago.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
The meaning of a work of literature is intrinsic. JEM writes: I'm not sure that a discourse on biblical scholarship is relevant to meaningful consideration of the Rahila Khan/Toby Forward/Virago saga.As with Mr Powell's comments, I partly agree and partly disagree with this. I am nearly always interested in learning more about an author even though I firmly believe that it is the glory of fiction that one can (albeit imperfectly) use it to walk a mile in another's shoes, and that a work of fiction should be judged in its own right. What I think happened with Down the Road, Worlds Away was that Virago For their part the members of the public who bought the book would, I think, have claimed to have bought it with their motives split 60/40/0 but, again, would actually have bought it 50/25/25. This unspoken conspiracy between publishers and readers was wide open to be exploited by Forward. Yes, he did misrepresent himself - I do not know whether explicitly or implicitly - but few condemn George Eliot for pretending to be a man in order to get published in the conditions of her day, so few should condemn Forward for doing what it takes to get published in ours. Most observers agree that his stories were good. (In Virago's case, they had better!) The interesting question is, were they an authentic portrait of the British Muslim community of the Midlands? Forward thinks yes. Dalrymple thinks yes. I would be interested to know what Midlands Muslims think, althought there is the perennial difficulty that intellectuals who comment on such things are highly unusual people in any community. The question is complicated by the fact that Rahila Khan's portrait of the Muslims living in the Midlands included the implication that this community had produced her. It had not. Has it produced anyone like her? Another thing I can never remember is the exact meanings of and distinction between "second cousin" and "first cousin once removed." Don't bother telling me; I can always look it up. The point is, I always have to. What Bible criticism tells you about "Rahila Khan". This is the email my computer ate out of malice for humankind. The alternative explanation, that I filed it in completely the wrong place, is fit only for those craven souls willing to submit to the Silicon Peril. Harry Powell writes: The article you quote by Theodore Dalrymple on theI want to get back to this subject, partly agreeing and partly disagreeing, when all the ideas sloshing around my head have had a chance to settle down. Incidentally, for a moment I "corrected" Mr Powell's 'eisegesis' to 'exegesis'. Fortunately some good instinct caused me to check. This site explains both words, and 'hermeneutics' besides. That last word falls into a special mental category: words for which I can never remember the definition however often I look it up. Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Use old AOL disk boxes for celestial navigation. It doesn't actually have to be a box from an AOL disk sent to you in the post, but, let's face it, no other type of disk box will give you quite the same pleasure. James Rummel spotted this admirable project: The CD-Sextant. ... This small instrument is built using a CD and box. As in the X-Tant Project, I used a few Lego blocks and glass mirrors. No electric tools are necessary to build a CD-Sextant. It's a good science project. The sailing world really changed when the answer to the question "What if my GPS breaks down?" became "Buy two." If both break down, have a CD case handy. I was equally interested by the post below. Soon the US Navy may be putting its sextants away forever. Not only its sextants, but its paper maps. The Ticonderoga was navigated using the most advanced methods of the time but it wasn’t anywhere near automated. The navigator needed to really know his stuff to make sure that the ship got to where it was supposed to be and didn’t run into anything on the way. Every ship had a few chart lockers, cabinets which contained the detailed maps by mariners since the first ships sailed out of sight of land. Every single ship in the US Navy which put to sea would have their own set of 12,000 paper maps, adding more than a ton of weight and taking up a great deal of space. Not only that, but it was a logistics nightmare to keep all those charts up to date and current.There is sadness in the passing - or, at least, the drastic mutation - of two technologies that have served since the Elizabethan age. Somebody sent me a longish email about the "Rahila Khan" / Toby Forward book. It was very interesting, and my computer liked it so much that it ate it. Please send it again. UPDATE: Found it! See above. The dragon eats its own tail, again. The goverment of Zimbabwe persecutes flea-market traders desperately trying to scratch a living in the wreckage of Zimbabwe's economy. These people, selling individual bags of maize meal from the side of the road, are the ones keeping Zimbabwe fed. When the capital city starves, revolution is near. (Via the Globalization Institute news digest.) Added later: The last time I referred to events in Zimbabwe as "the dragon eating its own tail" was in this post that referred to Mugabe damaging the education of the children of the his own government ministers by arresting the heads of private schools. Brian Micklethwait commented about that story here and about the same phenomenon as it applied to the Zimbabwe cricket team here. (The sporting example is more important than it seems: prestige matters to quasi-dictatorships.) These earlier posts referred to Mugabe angering his own elite. Yet another sign of the same thing is that it has been admitted that even the people who were rewarded for loyalty by being allowed to take the farms expropriated from whites and prosperous blacks are now unable to profit from them. In today's story we see how Mugabe is angering the populace as well. I came across this quotation from Bacon that is relevant: The matter of seditions is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment ... And if this poverty and broken estate in the better sort be joined with a want and necessity in the mean people, the danger is imminent and great. For the rebellions of the belly are the worst. Monday, May 23, 2005
Down the road, worlds away, but one can go there in imagination. Via R C Dean at Samizdata I found this marvellous Criterion article by Theodore Dalrymple. If I say that it is about the Church of England vicar who collected rejection slips for his short stories until he submitted them under the name Rahila Khan, then I will tempt a few anti-PC readers to go there for a laugh. But it is far, far more than that. Dalrymple says explicitly and the Rev. Forward (the author's real name) says in his work something important about literature. Academics and intellectuals found the affair painful to elucidate. If it were true that the balkanization of literature was justified by the supposition that only people who belonged to a certain category of people could truly understand, write about, interpret, and sympathize with the experiences of people in that same category, so that, for example, only women could write about women for women, and only blacks about blacks for blacks (the very careers of many academics now depending upon such a supposition), how was it possible that a Church of England vicar had been able, actually without much difficulty, to persuade a feminist publishing house that he wrote as a woman, and as a Muslim woman of Indian subcontinental origin at that? Was he not in fact telling us, as presumably a good Christian should, that mankind is essentially one, and that if we make a sufficient effort we too can enter into the worlds of others who are in many ways different from ourselves? Was he not implying that the traditional view of literature, that it expresses the universal in the particular, was not only morally and religiously superior, but empirically a more accurate description of it as an enterprise than the view of literature as a series of stockades, from which groups of the embittered and enraged endlessly fired arrows at one another without ever quite achieving victory?There is also a compassionate account of the two differently blighted but mutually contemptuous cultures that "Rahila Khan" described. Many of the stories describe ultimately tragic liaisons between Muslim girls and white boys living in depressed Midlands towns. "Khan" had claimed to have been one and know the other well. The only thing that was untrue in that claim was which half was which: But from the moment I started to read the stories in Down the Road, Worlds Away (and the title itself should have given a clue to the book’s serious intent, capturing in five words a very important element of modern social reality), I understood that the author was not in any sense perpetrating a hoax, much less a fraud. He was writing in earnest, and not satirizing anyone. For what he described in his stories was only too familiar to me from my work as a doctor, and no one could write so clearly of such matters without a deep sense of purpose. I hope to read it one day. Sadly, it is difficult to get hold of as the copies not yet sold were pulped by the publishers when the "fraud" was discovered. Number gut. Shannon Love writes about estimates of dead in the Iraq war. For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland? Click, click, click. That's how often a life is lost by the policies that Make Poverty History wants to entrench. Stephen Pollard says the Make Poverty History campaign would be better called Make Poverty Permanent. The engine of growth, without which countries remain in poverty, is trade. Tariff protection keeps resources in unproductive, low-return activities such as the type of farming which Make Poverty History seeks to entrench. Free trade shifts resources to more productive uses. Take Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea and India: while they maintained their tariffs, they remained stuck in poverty, the only thing which tariffs protect. As recently as the early 1980s they were poor countries. Their incomes per head ranged from $700 (£350) to $7,000. Today they range from $2,000 to more than $21,000. Even India, one of the world’s poorest nations in the 1960s and 1970s, is on the road to prosperity. In 1991 the Indian Government reacted to a financial near-collapse by cutting forty years of bureaucratic control in seven hours. Its economy now grows much faster than its population and India is becoming one of the leading exporters of computer software and services. There is a vast new middle class of 250 million. Lee Moore writes: I was amused to see that what you describe as the Guardian's belated conversion to the idea of limited government, to which you linked on 16 May, concludes with a complaint about the government's reluctance to ban people from working more than 48 hours a week. I think we can rest easy - the Guardian is still on the side of those who would guard us from ourselves.Oh, the relief. Actually, though my understanding is that the directive concerned will mostly stop shop and factory employees from such predatory behaviour. Creative types like Guardian writers will find all sorts of let-outs. |
