Natalie Solent

Natalie Solent

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.)

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Friday, June 24, 2005

They are not even ashamed. Damian Penny writes:

Didymus Mutasa, head of Zimbabwe's secret police, quoted in the Weekly Standard: "We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle."

Zimbabwe has ten million people (down from 13 million a few years ago). And they mey get to six million sooner than expected: in addition to bulldozing homes and businesses in the major cities, the Zimbabwean government is also preventing those left homeless from growing food.

posted by Natalie at 9:39 AM

Boycotts are OK. First Norman Geras posts under the heading "Bigotlist" about "the activities of right-wing Christian organizations in the US who are boycotting companies that advertise in gay magazines and on gay websites, and on 'TV shows the Christian right considers pro-gay or salacious.'"

Then Laban Tall says that

He has every right to disapprove - just as Christians have the right to organise boycotts. This is IMHO the best, most democratic kind of activism - where the decisions of large numbers of ordinary individuals are what's important.

However Laban then himself purses his lips ("First they came for the Christians") at the actions of the Co-op in closing the bank account of Christian Voice on account of that organisation's anti-homosexual line.

Neither Norman Geras nor Laban Tall has said that anyone should be forbidden to boycott, so I am not specifically arguing with them. I just felt the need to say once again that both individual and corporate boycotts are legitimate activities. No one is obliged to buy from those they disapprove of, and no business is obliged to provide services to those it disapproves of. ("It" in the Co-op's case being the majority vote of the stockholders or whatever they call them in Co-op land.)

That does not mean I want any particular boycott to succeed. Boycott-ignoring and counter-boycotts are equally legitimate. I sometimes gleefully scoop up Israeli avocados rather than those from other countries. In normal circumstances it wouldn't occur to me to support Israel's economy, or anyone else's economy, by buying their stuff. However anti-Israel boycotts annoy me just enough that they spring to mind as I pass the avocado display. "Hah," I say, tipping the avocados into a bag and looking daggers at the kiwi-fruit fan and probable terror-apologist in the next bay. "HAH!" She looks disconcerted. My campaign is working.

posted by Natalie at 8:44 AM

Sinful pleasures. Andrew Duffin writes:

Tried to follow the link you provided today, and my company's web filter said that www.gastroblog.com was blocked because it fell into the category of "Swimwear, Lingerie, and Nudity".

Gives a whole new meaning, doesn't it?

posted by Natalie at 8:11 AM

Thursday, June 23, 2005

The Fates reveal the destiny of a nation via bubble gum cards. It will be obvious from this story that ARC was fully literate quite early on in primary school.

ARC writes:

It has always helped my historical understanding that I first encountered the American Civil War when I was too young to know any history at all. During its centennial years, bubble gum cards on the American Civil War were popular: each pack had two cards describing battles, or occasionally other historical events, plus one Confederate dollar bill (and the gum, of course :-). Unlike the more recent U.S. TV series (Quote from friend who saw it while working in the States: "It was easy to tell who won.") the battle write-ups were not biased - this was early sixties, just before PC started to take off - and certainly did not reveal who won to my infant understanding. The 88 cards in the series were released more or less in historical order and when I first decided that I was backing the North, I had no idea whether 'my team' would win or not. Why I chose the North I can't remember; as I said, I don't think it was any special bias in the writing. Maybe I liked the colour blue better than the colour grey. Maybe my Scottish feelings made me assume that north was better than south. I can't recall.

It was many months of collecting, and of being downcast at cards describing victories of Lee or Jackson, before I began to wonder whether 'my team' mightn't win after all? An older child would have deduced something from the presence of Confederate, not Union, dollar bills with the cards, from the occasional mentions of slavery and so on, but I was very young, just starting school, trading cards only with others of my age who had no more idea than I did who won or what it was all about. When something is beyond their mental horizon, children don't even think of asking questions. Literally; the idea of asking my elders never occurred to me. I think I reached card 86 (Petersburg, if I recall correctly) before I felt sure of the outcome.

I had a great 'Aha' of recognition when I read Christine Wedgewood's account in Truth and Opinion of how she saw a play on the life of Lincoln when she was twelve years old. She was accustomed to good triumphing in plays and books, so, unlike me, she guessed well before the end that

"...the admirable ugly man in the funny top hat would ... win the war and liberate the slaves, but nothing had prepared me for the appearance and behaviour of John Wilkes Booth, and for me at least the dummy pistol shot in a London theatre ... came as a shock almost as horrifying as that experienced by spectators at Ford's Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865.

In vain have I longed to recapture that blessed ignorance ..."

"In vain have I longed to recapture that blessed ignorance" - to see, for example, what the policy of William the Silent would look like without knowing that he would be assassinated, unlike Lincoln, with his work only half done. But her histories are better for having once known 'that blessed ignorance'. My historical thinking, likewise, is better from being able to remember what the American Civil War looked like to someone who, for months, cared about the outcome and did not know what it was.

I was particularly struck by the fact that ARC did not think to ask. It was as if the gradual release of information, in order, and and at a rate that, if not quite as agonisingly slow as the rate at which events really happened, was much closer to it than a two-hour film, made the long-dead conflict as real, and its outcome as unknowable, as the present.

posted by Natalie at 6:50 AM

War concentrates the mind. A little while ago I posted about Senator Robert Byrd's infamous statement just after WWII that he would rather die a thousand times and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt than serve in the military with a Negro at his side. When ARC and Mrs ARC visited us recently, we talked about changing racial attitudes in the Southern states of the USA, and we ended up talking about the American Civil War. Mind you, us four could turn a conversation on the price of geranium to the American Civil War.

I persuaded ARC to look me up some quotes when he got home. He writes:

The senator you quote seemed surprisingly out of touch with the attitudes of Confederate soldiers of eighty years earlier, let alone more recent views.

General Lee was at first very much in the minority when he told the president "often and early in the war" of the need for general emancipation and recruitment of negro soldiers; as he remarked, "Davis would not hear of it". But when he began advocating the idea in public at the end of 1864, it emerged that most Confederate soldiers were ready to agree with him:

"When in former years, for pecuniary purposes, we did not consider it disgraceful to labor with negroes in the field or at the same workbench, we certainly will not look on it in any other light at this time when an end so glorious as our independence is to be achieved." (Summary of attitudes of the men of the 49th Georgia infantry regiment).

"The officers and men of this corps are decidedly in favor of the voluntary enlistment of the negroes as soldiers. ... The opposition to it is now confined to very few, and I am satisfied it will soon cease to exist in any regiment of the corps." (Major-General John B Gordon, commander of II Corps, Army of Northern Virginia)

"What do you think of the question of negro soldiers now? It makes me sad ... to reflect that this time-honoured institution will be no more, that the whole social organisation of the South is to be revolutionized. But I suppose it is all right and we will have to be reconciled." (Walter Taylor, staff officer to General Lee, in letter to his fiancée).

You can easily find Confederates, more often civilians than soldiers, who would have agreed with the senator, but his had become the minority view by the start of 1865. Most Confederates had changed their views under pressure of necessity of course, but necessity also applied in WWII.

Defeat overtook the Confederacy before it could enact these measures for its main armies, although there were a few instances of black soldiers fighting for the South as part of militia units.

What motivated them is a fascinating question. Look out for a future post.

I find the American Civil War interesting because it was the first modern war, yet its cause was a revenant from the ancient world: slavery. (The most recent, although not the last, modern war also represents a conflict where archaic patterns of society look to modern weapons as their instrument of rejuvenation.) I never quite got over the suprise I had when I first twigged that chattel slavery had coexisted with steam trains. Either something on TV or a book made some mention of "slave carriages" and I thought, that can't be right! My childhood imagination could cope with the idea of slavery in association with togas and temples and chariots, but people who had trains and telegraphs and newspapers should have known. And so they should.

In the rest of his email ARC turned to the subject of the unusual way in which he became interested in the American Civil War as a child. That story touched on so many ideas that I want to talk about more that I felt it deserved a post of its own. Scroll up.

posted by Natalie at 6:49 AM

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Name and shame II. Michael Jennings. He writes:

Redirection
I have a piece on visiting Italian gourmet food shops and bringing cheese back from abroad over at gastroblog.

Well, unlike the criminal Worstall, at least he deigns to tell the reader what the post is about, but, I ask you, that title? "Redirection." As if we care what direction it is in! When one thinks of the riches on offer one could weep. He could have called it For Some Reason my Mind Started Thinking of Goats.

Both Worstall and Jennings are regular offenders. Anti-Social Blogging Orders have been applied for.

posted by Natalie at 12:30 PM

Name and shame bloggers who have totally boring redirection notices.

First culprit: Tim Worstall. He writes:

TCS
Piece up at Techcentralstation today.

Woop-dee-doo. This assumes that the reader, panting for Worstall wisdom as the hart panteth after the water brooks, will click the link no matter what the topic. I might, but why make it so hard?

Why not admit that the piece concerned was called Paul Krugman Needs to Buy Paul Krugman's Textbooks? Much more appealing. We all want to slag off Paul Krugman.

posted by Natalie at 12:14 PM

Long hours culture. Good letter in the Independent from a Mr John Scott:

"These proposals [Some state schools to offer childcare 8am - 6pm] will have two very harmful side-effects. The line between education and child-minding will be blurred, to the detriment of education. It is openly admitted that this is a policy driven by the fact that for many children both parents work full-time. Secondly, the state will control more of the upbringing of the children. Since the state is already failing to educate so many of these children adequately, the idea that it can now also socialise them is entirely unrealistic.

"Nearly all the education initiatives of the last 40 years have been introduced to help those who are gaining least from the education system. Despite this, all the evidence is that the educational gap between the two nations - correctly identified by Ms Alibhai-Brown - continues to grow. The group which achieves least in our education system is those young people "in care"; a group for whom the state takes total control."

Read the whole thing. And the one below on the reaction to the recent attacks on Jewish cemeteries.

posted by Natalie at 8:57 AM

Oh, great. This is just so great. A person who shall remain nameless but wasn't me uses downstairs loo. In haste to get to school, doesn't flush. Just as party leaving house, something goes CR-ACKK! All rush back in to observe that light bulb has spontaneously detached from socket and fallen straight down into toilet bowl, where lying smashed into pieces. In among the contents if you see what I mean. The not-so-bad-as-it-might-be contents but still pretty bad.

If I flush, little bits of glass released into sewage system. Even assuming mysterious filtration processes at the skank farm will protect humans, it will probably kill the useful little worms who eat stuff. I don't want the little worms to die!

Wubby-dubby-gluvvy time then. Joy. Be. Unconeffingfined.

posted by Natalie at 8:27 AM

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.

posted by Natalie at 3:22 PM

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.

Even if it had been free, though, this film would have raised questions about the acceptable remit of public service broadcasting. Where this is directed at children, there's no tension at all. They are numbnuts. The youngest of them can't even tell the time. So green cross codes and cats called Charlie can say whatever the devil they like, and everybody's happy.

Where these things are directed at adults, it's always about driving or fire. Don't go too fast. Or drunk. Or, more sophisticatedly, don't be an amber gambler. Don't set fire to yourself. Don't set fire to things too close to your house. Don't set fire to other things, then smoke them. If you must smoke, don't go to sleep. If you must go to sleep, have a smoke alarm, then at least you'll wake everyone else up. This is also fair enough, since adults in charge of cars, or, for that matter, fire, are effectively children.

The last few lines quoted might give you a hint of where my sense of disquiet comes in.

posted by Natalie at 11:08 AM

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.

posted by Natalie at 9:22 AM

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,

I am writing to you because I am very concerned about the government's plans to introduce a nation-wide identity database, supported by compulsory fingerprinting, the tracking of individuals' movements and the issue of ID cards.

The implications for civil liberties of these proposals seem to me to be very much graver than their supporters in Parliament wish to acknowledge. While I do not share the fear of some opponents of ID cards that the UK is on the brink of turning into a "police state", I do wonder at the readiness with which our government is prepared to extend its own powers of surveillance over ordinary citizens who have neither been convicted, nor are suspected, of committing any crime. The potential abuses of such surveillance are many and alarming; the proposed safeguards of the personal information the government wishes to collect - and share, promiscuously, with an ever-widening circle of third parties - are inadequate and few.

I have two additional concerns. The first is over the technical feasibility of the scheme. In my professional life as a software engineer, I am often confronted with the shortcomings of large-scale database systems. A combination of human error and the inherent complexity of their own design makes such systems prone to severe degradation both in the quality and reliability of the information they contain, and in the readiness with which that information can be accessed, updated or - in the case of error, which arises frequently - corrected.

The proposed national identity database is more complex and ambitious by an order of magnitude than even the largest of the systems I have worked with. It will cost huge sums of money to implement - the costs seem to rise with each new estimate - and require the co-ordination of massive human and technical resources. Such a project risks becoming an expensive failure: a large-scale transfer of public money into the hands of IT contractors, with potentially little to show for it at the end. If the project does run to its conclusion, and the system is delivered, it is highly likely to be late, over budget, and functionally delinquent.

My last concern is over the kind and degree of coercion that will be required to implement the scheme. Those who refuse to sign up are to be heavily fined, as is anybody who fails to notify the authorities of a change of address. Possession of an ID card will be made a prerequisite for access to basic and essential services. It does not seem to me that either the moral or the practical case for such coercion has been established. Whom will those who refuse to be fingerprinted, registered and tracked have harmed by their refusal? What principle of social fairness will they have violated? By what right does the government propose to confiscate the property of those who disagree with it about the utility and acceptability of ID cards?

I intend to refuse to register for an identity card, and will not vote for the electoral candidate of any party that believes it has the right to compel me to do so.

Yours sincerely,

Dominic Fox

Bet she answers, "Society has been harmed."

posted by Natalie at 4:04 PM

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?

She thought they did not apply to her because she was a prominent anti-gun activist. ("If people see a person like me being arrested despite all the work I do...") The law demands that you hand in unregistered weapons immediately, amnesty or no amnesty.
She thought that weapons amnesties were like No.72 buses: another one along in a minute. Once that expectation is established, amnesties lose their purpose. In fact they become a means for gangsters to dispose of inconvenient evidence safely.

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.

posted by Natalie at 1:12 PM

"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 ;
I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born.

MACDUFF: Despair thy charm ;
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd
Tell thee Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd.

posted by Natalie at 8:06 AM

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