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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I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.)


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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.

If Messenia could be freed, the basis of Spartan power would be destroyed. This is what Epaminondas persuaded the Thebans to undertake. And it was the rise of democracy and freedom in Thebes that gave the Thebans the upsurge of energy and courage to accomplish what no one had dreamed of before. They were fighting for practical reasons, to destroy a threat and to have revenge for past wrongs. But they were also fighting to free the most wretched and oppressed people in Greece.

- John Weidner



 

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.



 
Quote of the Day.
Reality bites eventually. Better sooner than later.

- Joanne Jacobs

Widely applicable.


 
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.

Police said two bombs exploded on a crowded street within the space of a few minutes during the morning rush hour in Netrokona, a town 360 km (220 miles) north of the capital Dhaka.

They said the wounded included three policemen. Many of the victims were people on their way to work at offices, colleges and markets, witnesses said.

No one claimed responsibility for the blasts, but police blamed Islamist suicide bombers fighting for the introduction of sharia law in the mainly Muslim democracy.

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.

You could have a mild dig at Lewis by today's [standards] for a not-entirely respectful take on Carlomen culture (that's the fictional pseudo-Ottoman empire in the books.) But they are clearly described as polytheists.

I don't think the books are racist at all. Emeth in The Last Battle is an appealing character and when I was a kid I wanted to be the aristocratic, daring, dominant Aravis from The Horse and His Boy. (Lewis could be sexist but his sexism was taking a break when he created her.)


*"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;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"

- Walter "Stupid Parents" Raleigh (1861-1922)



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.

Islam Online:

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.

Over 20,000 Muslims flocked into the ExCel arena in Docklands Sunday, December 4, for the first annual Global Peace & Unity Event.

...

Organizers of the event chose the theme of global peace in order to unite Muslims of all backgrounds, and bridge the gap between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities.

The amalgam of thousands of people from a multitude of backgrounds and religions helped achieve that aim, says IOL correspondent.

“When we first approached ExCel about hosting our event there, they did not agree. They thought, ‘Islam, Peace, Unity – They don’t go together,’” Mohamed Ali, CEO of Islam Channel said at a press conference. “Islam is a religion of peace and unity, and these are the teachings of our Prophet Muhammad.”

The choice of speakers and artists embodied the theme of the event, with prominent figures attending from India, South Africa, America, Kuwait, and many other countries.

...

Former Pakistani cricketers Saeed Anwar and Imran Khan drew many people to the event, as did world-renowned scholar, Dr. Zakir Naik.

Other speakers promoting peace and unity included Dr. Tariq Suwaidan, a Muslim scholar from Kuwait, in addition to national speakers such as Yvonne Ridley, George Galloway, MP, and Sir Iqbal Sacranie.

Song artists lightened up the atmosphere in the main arena with performances by Dawood Wharnsy Ali, Zain Bhika and Ahmad Bukhatir, while children enjoyed an indoor funfair of rides and games.



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.

To my utter horror -- and I should have written this report two days ago but my physical and emotional shock have rendered me nearly inert -- it was a seven-hour call to Jihad by a succession of ranting and shouting rabble-rousers.

The eminent barrister Michael Mansfield QC, wearing black and white keffiyah scarf, shouted into the mike about the heinous crimes of the Western coalition countries. The crowd chanted and thundered its appreciation.

The terrifying demagogue George Galloway ascended the podium and exhorted the crowd to stand up for the redemption of the oppressed Muslim world or else the nation had better get ready for ‘rioting in every street in Britain.’.

The ‘slaughter in Palestine and Iraq’ being only part of the equation, Chechnya, Bosnia and Kashmir were also mentioned all day by every speaker including a crazed, chador-clad Yvonne Ridley, who at any moment I expected to self-immolate, such was her fury at the Zionists, the Americans and her fellow Britons. To my utter disbelief, she condemned the British police force as some form of fascist brigade in ‘jackboot Britain.’

To all of these exhortations came cries of ‘Alllahu Akhbar’ from the enormous, simmering crowd of what looked to me like the angriest gathering of young men and women with whom I have ever had the misfortune to be seated in my lifetime.

It must be noted for non-British and non-Commonwealth readers that legendary cricketer Imran Khan’s arrival from Pakistan to give a speech would be the equivalent of a sporting megastar doing similar in an American arena. The crowd of some 20,000 adoring, mostly young British Muslims went mad with joy when he ascended the stage and took to the dais. What followed was a stream of invective about his own leader, Parvez Musharraf, Egypt’s leader Hosni Mubarak, and of course the ‘axis of evil’ Bush, Blair and allies. (It must be noted here that in May, when the controversy arose about American soldiers allegedly flushing a Koran down a lavatory, Khan’s power over world Islam was such that he gave one short speech and riots ensued across the globe, including the horrifying flag-burnings in London’s Grosvenor Square. )

Khan actually said we should feel the degradation of modern Muslims in the context of Hitler and the Germans after Versailles. He used this example to accentuate the reason for ‘Muslim rage’ -- there was poor Germany belittled and humiliated, like the Muslim world today. He recounted being confronted by a fellow Pakistani after 9/11 who asked, ‘Do you not feel ashamed?’ and he told the adoring crowd he did not see what there was to be ashamed of, and anyway, 9/11 was an excuse for the criminal Washington neocons to start a New Crusade against Islam.

To illustrate the level of extremism to which this event had degenerated, one of the organisers actually took the mike and said the event team wished to distance themselves from Khan’s 9/11 views.



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.

But he added loyalty to the UK was not incompatible with the Muslim faith.

Met Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur and the Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer are among the other figures addressing more than 20,000 people at the Global Peace and Unity conference.




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.'

A sheikh said that the greatest atrocity of the 20th century was 'Jews from eighty countries being brought in 1947 to Palestine to drive Muslim brothers and sisters from their homes and to kill and torture them.' He added that he can barely say the word 'Israel,' as such a country does not exist. All of this to ecstatic cries from the audience of mostly British-born young Muslims.

Galloway exhorted the crowd to 'riot on every street of Britain' and Ridley defamed our fine British police force in 'jackboot Britain.'


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".

Tariq Suwaidan, a Muslim scholar from Kuwait, echoed many of those who addressed the conference when he insisted that Muslims did not support the terrorists behind the 9/ll attacks in America and the London bombings in July.

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.

Part of the problem is blamed on the US president, George Bush, who has agreed on a raft of tax credits for the American wind industry, which is causing a construction boom when suppliers are already overstretched.

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.


 
A modest Thanksgiving.


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?

Kagan: Not only do I not think that we should be pulling out, I don't think we should be reducing our forces. And I think we're going to be in Iraq five years from now, if not longer. The consequences of leaving Iraq are really very bad.

SPIEGEL: But will voters appreciate the abstract dangers of a withdrawal at a time when very real body bags are returning from Iraq every day?

Kagan: We will sustain this. We stayed in Vietnam for quite some time, suffering 50,000 casualties. It is true that the United States, like all democracies, is sensitive to casualties, but not as sensitive as people think. And Sept. 11 did have an impact on the amount of casualties Americans are willing to tolerate.

SPIEGEL: You really think the American public would accept 50,000 casualties?

Kagan: 50,000 at the present rate would take 50 years. We're not talking 50,000 casualties in Iraq. Or 50 years.



 
"...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.

I said above that "we" aspire to the virtue of kindness. Maybe that is a rather European view. Americans may be wondering quite where they fit into this dichotomy. In particular, they may be noting that it is precisely in the Christian bits of the USA that the semi-Roman virtue of cruel-to-be-kind foreign policy precision is still aspired to, and in the non- or anti-Christian bits of the USA where the kind of incompetent niceness I have been complaining about is most popular. Maybe Christianity has its own built-in safeguards against Christian and especially post-Christian feeblemindedness and sentimentality.

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?"
"Yes, my beloved, I am here with you."
"Benjamin, are you there?"
"Yes, father, I am here."
"Sarah? Little Aaron?"
"Fear not, father, all your family are here."
"So who's minding the store?"

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.

"It is shocking that so many people will lay the blame for being raped at the feet of women themselves and the government must launch a new drive to counteract this sexist 'blame culture'."



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:......

I find this web page amusing. It is devoted to pointing out historically inaccurate typography in period movies: link

While on that, I know one or two people who could be described as "typography geeks" myself. These are normally techies who responded to the invention of the laser printer and home typography software that goes with it by becoming amazingly obsessive about getting their fonts and spacing absolutely right. (It's also worth observing that this stuff was pretty much entirely invented at Apple in the 1980s. Possibly the big reason why Macs are popular with creative types to this day is because beautiful typesetting was possible on Macs about a decade before it was on PCs. The commencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford recently (link) is interesting in that he tells some of how he became interested in it). The truth is that there are guys out there on the internet with amazing amounts of expertise, who could tell you a document was forged just by looking at it even if the forgers had gone to some trouble to get the fonts historically right, use old paper etc etc, rather than just printing something with Microsoft Word and photocopying it a few times. Even if the forgers of the memos had gone to some trouble, we would still have known conclusively that the documents were forged within hours, and this would have been the case without any conspiracy.

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.

Or perhaps I do. I suspect that the forgeries were possibly produced by someone who doesn't remember typewriters and believes that fonts were ulways proportionally spaced. This is making me feel old.


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.



 
This computer is getting up my nose.

Not really. Perish the thought.



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.