Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Another day, another horror. Suicide bomber massacres children in Iraq. Think of it as an opportunity for the people of Iraq to meet their future rulers, if trainee Guardian journalist Dilpazier Aslam has his way. Tuesday, July 12, 2005
A farewell to arms. England's Sword has been laid down. That's Iain Murray's fine blog, not the armed forces of the Crown. (Those aren't scheduled to be disbanded until circa 2015.) Iain says that another blog with an as-yet undisclosed theme may spring up in its place. In case you're wondering - the paucity of posts over the last few days does not mean I am thinking of following suit. It's just a minor case of blogger's block, compounded by in-tray returnitus. Saturday, July 09, 2005
Hostes humanis generis. ...the innocent, the old, the young, people of any class, any faith, any colour, with only the common feature of being in the wrong place when the appointed time comes, and of being human beings - with their lives, with their hopes, with the people they love and who will grieve for them. The murderers strike regardless. Count the ways...- Normblog I have not had time to post recently, for quite mundane reasons - the sort of workaday preoccupations that, for an unknown number of Londoners, abruptly ceased to matter on Thursday morning. I am behind on my email. Theirs will be read by other eyes. I haven't got done all I wanted to do. They never will. Friday, July 01, 2005
Apologies. I'm having a busy few days. No time to blog. If your time is valuable, or you do not like kamikaze watermelons, do not go here. Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Fighting the last war. The Bunster himself - to whom I denied a link in that last post on the grounds that too many links would spoil the aesthetics - has a neato quotable line: I also expect that many leftists have had the psyches shaped by the battles of their teenage years, and for many of them hard-core Christianity was the enemy in those days, whereas Islam hardly figured, and they’re still fighting those battlesTalking of old battles¹, I have been thinking recently of all the harm done to Iraq by French Resistance movies. Go back one generation further than the one mentioned by Blithering Bunny, and you find teenagers who grew up in the shadow of WWII. The fact that their fathers saved the world² naturally put them in a bad mood, but they didn't go so far as to wish the Nazis had won. The next best thing was thinking that the uncool Dad-like way of fighting Nazis was to do it in itchy uniforms. The cool way was to wear neckerchiefs and excitingly tight black sweaters and ambush German patrols. (Don't take this as slagging off the French Resistance. France did have to pass through a period of reassessment in which the myth of a nation united in defiance was exploded. However I think the cynicism has gone too far, and we are in danger of forgetting real heroism.) The end result was that all the soldiers vs irregulars movies made after 1945 have uniforms on the bad guys. All very understandable, but the effect on the impressionable minds of our intellectual class has been deleterious. On the subject of world affairs³, Normblog writes: I think many who say they think better of China than of the US wouldn't put their money where that part of their mouth is if it was a matter of where they had to live, or if they had to seek redress for an injustice done to them, or if they were to be tried for something they didn't do, or in terms of their opportunities for free expression and political association, and so forth. ¹This phrase was awarded an Honourable Mention in the 2005 Golden Paperclip Award for Most Tenuous Connecting Text. ²Does not apply to Germans. ³First Prize. Monday, June 27, 2005
What's wrong with compulsory purchase? US bloggers are up in arms regarding the Kelo case which appears to allow local governments to use compulsory purchase, or eminent domain as they call it in the US*, to grab land not for roads or railways but to increase tax revenue. Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy had a post up that quoted Marx in an almost entirely irrelevant way. So what is wrong with compulsory purchase? After all, the householders are paid, aren't they? I was impressed by the explanation in the comment to Kieran Healy's post made by "g": It’s not exactly theft (or the abolition of property) either, though. Perhaps it might be illuminating to consider other cases in which (1) sometimes someone does X to someone else and pays for it, and that isn’t a crime; (2) sometimes someone does X to someone else uncompensated, and that is a crime; and see how it looks when (3) someone does X to someone against their will but compensates them (presumably at what some third party determines to be the market rate).*I fail see to where eminence comes into it. Read Tim Worstall's Britblog roundup or you won't have read it. Staying with TW, yes, this is better. |