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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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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Monday, January 09, 2006
Thursday, January 05, 2006
There's blame to go round on this one. Yesterday's Education Guardian reports that Council chiefs admitted today they were considering dropping a controversial policy of not blaming bullies in schools for their actions - following a scathing attack by the prime minister.It's a poor lookout for the country when the national leader sticks his nose into the doings of city councils, and a worse one when they change their policies for fear of him. Nonetheless if one can think of it as Anthony Blair Esq. making the argument rather than the Prime Minister, Anthony Blair Esq. is quite right. The city council revealed today that it was "reviewing" its no blame bullying policy after it was dropped from Department for Education and Skills' guidelines in December.Ah, a "no blame" approach to one's own screwups. The "no blame" approach, which was widely adopted in schools in the late 1990s, originated in Bristol as an alternative to directly punishing bullies.As an alternative to teachers doing the job they are paid for, more like. Understandably few people enjoy the task of sorting out an alleged case of bullying. Where accounts conflict it can be difficult to know if bullying has truly taken place, or to know if just one or both sides are to blame - or even to ascertain (rather than assume) that it was all a misunderstanding and no one is to blame. It can even be frightening. Tough. That's what the "professional responsibility" teachers are always saying they should be admired and renumerated for entails. Instead it encouraged the bully to discuss with their classmates the root cause of their behaviour and to find a way forward with the help of a teacher.Good for Dan Morris. What I always wonder about teachers and education bureaucrats who advocate a "no blame" approach to those who bully children is whether they also advocate it in cases of workplace bullying of teachers and cvil servants by their superiors. If so, I hope they have told their union reps. The MP for Wansdyke described it as "dangerous" and "reckless" and said it did nothing to get the bullies to change their behaviour.How, exactly, can you have "no blame" as one of several approaches? Were the bullies blamed and not blamed on alternate days? "Wide range of advice" is open to the same objection as above. I guess that on Fridays the council tells 'em to kill the bullies, just for variety. "We have always been led by central government's anti-bullying guidelines, which, until very recently, contained references to the "no blame" approach.A fair point. But I think that Bristol city council should not blame the government, but rather strive to identify the root causes of their behaviour. "The schools minister has now announced a review of the DfES guidelines to clarify that the government does not think councils should recommend this approach to headteachers and we continue to follow their advice."Translation: please don't bully us, Mr Politician. She said the council would now begin consulting with parents, teachers and pupils over its anti-bullying policy.And the bullies. You forgot the bullies. Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Hard Times in Brazil. Via The Sharpener I found this article about Latin American politics: "The time of the underdog: rage and race in Latin America." Now I don't know anything much about Latin American politics - shut up at the back there - but one word struck me in much the same way the words "perpetual motion" strike a patent examiner. Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, as he himself admitted, did not eat a solid meal until the age of 7.Admitted? Given that this man is a politician, are you sure you don't mean "trumpeted at every possible occasion"? ...Mr. Bounderby delivered some observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his birthday. He stood before the fire, partly because it was a cool spring afternoon, though the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus took up a commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind. Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Wish I'd been there. Saw a few minutes of Guardian stalwart Polly Toynbee and a bloke from Civitas arguing on the telly about this Civitas report saying that political correctness is a bad thing. BfC said, among other things, that people were afraid of criticising Islam for fear of being labelled an Islamaphobe. If I'd been there I could have added, "as you know from personal experience, Ms Toynbee." C S Lewis must be doing 1,000 r.p.m. Not at the movie. The movie is good. At the - ulp - books of the movie. Glenn Reynolds links to a post from Stuart Buck who asks, "If you make a movie out of a classic and beloved children's book that has sold millions of copies, why on earth would you want to have someone write a book based on the movie?" For a while both Reynolds and Buck were reassured that the "novelization" was but a harmless picture book with stills from the movie. Buck appears to have been disabused of this false hope; Reynolds not yet. For false hope it is – I know from personal experience that there are at least two novelizations-with-words out there because we got one of the things ("Peter’s Destiny") with our Shreddies and another ("Edmund’s Struggle") with our Honey Nut Cheerios. The Emperor over the Sea only knows what horrors the unopened packet of Non Honey Nut Normal Cheerios has hiding in it; probably "The White Witch's Trauma." Something must be done. Breakfast has become a time of fear. I opened one of these books and read the last line and someone’s eyes were twinkling. First we have to find the authors. This is difficult. They appear to have been written by Disney. Just "Disney". Who is this person or persons? The name seems familiar. Whoever they are they must be tracked down and burnt at the stake. What is the point of having a Bush-Blair theocratic axis ruling the world if we never get any fun? I'll catch up with the email in the next few days. But this one from John Costello was at the top of the pile. I work for a store which sells various forms of furniture, most of which we put together, as well as the actual packs that people can take home. Since most of our customers have trucks or SUVs or have relatives with said, there's little problem bringing pre-assembled furnishings home (Remember me? Hessians. Am writing from the US.)Hessians, yes, and the unforgettable Ronco Vegematic.
Let's welcome in 2006 with a return to medieval Jew-baiting. This up-to-the-minute idea comes from His Excellency Presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías: "...the descendants of those who crucified Christ (...) have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands"Here is the Spanish text - see page 18 for the bit about "los descendientes de los mismos que crucificaron a Christo". Normblog bends over backwards to be fair. In his second update he implies that, given the words about Bolivar that follow in Chavez's speech, the phrase "the descendants of those who crucified Christ" might be refer metaphorically to all capitalists, rich people or bad people. One of Tim Blair's commenters, "bobpence", makes a similar point and also cites a phrase of Chavez's about 10% of the people owning most of the wealth. Not even Chavez can believe that Jews make up 10% of the world's population, and a Google search of the words "Bolivar" and "Jews" turned up this reference to the fact that "Mordechai Ricardo assisted Venezuelan freedom fighter Simon Bolivar and his two sisters when they escaped to Curaçao" - along with much I didn't know about the Jewish history of the island of Curacao, where the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere can be found. So it could be that Chavez's use of one of the oldest of anti-semitic tropes was just by the by. Still, he does have a bit of a previous. Spanish-speakers can find out more about Chavez by reading Caudillo, Ejercito, Pueblo: La Venezuela del Comandante Chávez, by Norberto Ceresole (Estudios Hispano-Árabes, 2000). John Lee Anderson, writing in the New Yorker, described this book as follows: This is a curious little how-to-be-a-dictator manual, written with Chávez in mind, by his erstwhile Argentine adviser. The author is an intriguing but odious-seeming fellow: In addition to being a Holocaust denier, he claims to have been a former Montonero guerrilla, a friend and adviser to Perón and other Latin military leaders, and a past member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.Erstwhile adviser. Let's be nice here and remember that "erstwhile". Chavez only used to hang out with Holocaust deniers. Saturday, December 24, 2005
Our water has just been cut off. But you are allowed to have a happy Christmas anyway. It's only the drinking water and we have other things to drink. See you in January. Friday, December 23, 2005
Carnival of flatpack. A little while ago Squander Two* posted about his woes concerning Homebase flatpack furniture, and added to my understanding of Thatcherism in the comments. I emailed my husband about it. No, that's wrong. What did they used to call it again? I spoke to him about it using a vocal protocol. And he wrote a blog post of his own about Homebase flatpack furniture. This is it. A year or so ago Natalie and I went into Homebase for a few washers or something and left having bought two children’s loft beds with study areas underneath. Just the thing when you have a couple of pre-teens with too many possessions. They were delivered a day or so later and we, having evicted the previous beds, got to work. At fist it all went pretty well, although we used our own tools rather than the silly little allen keys in the kit. We assembled one together with no more hassle than having occasionally to drift a couple of misaligned holes together, so Natalie decided she could do most of the second one all by herself. After a certain amount of time she called for help. A screw wouldn’t go in. It was perfectly well aligned but just wouldn’t bite. I tried, full of confidence in my ability to succeed where she had failed but I couldn’t get the thing in either. I examined the offending screw, a ¼ inch or 6mm machine screw with a fairly coarse thread. Its thread was undamaged. I looked at the hole in the tubular steel strut it was supposed to go into; instead of being threaded, it was plain. *I hope poor S2 has got over feeling twitchy about Homebase customer service. No? Oh dear. The innocent have most to fear. Nationwide spy system to track millions of car journeys a day - the Times John K, a Samizdata commenter, says: My sister's number plate was stolen the other day. I think the rise of the congestion charge and gatso infestation has led to a rash of these thefts. If this insane plan goes ahead there will be many more such thefts. Criminals don't give a toss a bout the law. That's why they're criminals, and that's why this is a piece of authoritarian population control disguised as a crime control measure.John K's final line is a slight exaggeration. However his point that criminals, because of their criminality, have less to fear from this sort of measure than law abiding people do is an important one and provides the title of this post. We may end up being grateful to some criminals. I've posted before this post from a Dutch blog on how they deal with such things. I was going to pussyfoot around with one of those "merely academic interest" disclaimers, but I've got a rotten cough and a temperature and I couldn't be bothered. Go Dutch. Brian Micklethwait has been packing heat in his jacket pocket. Michael Jennings speaks of resistance, but ignore such foolish talk. My grandma knew exactly why this sort of thing happened. 'Twas the wickedness working out, I tell 'ee, the wickedness working out! Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Mister Cough is not your friend. Rather than relax with my family, blog, sew, prepare for Christmas or do anything conventional like that I have decided to wander round the house in my pyjamas snivelling and cawing like a crow. Friday, December 16, 2005
On Thursday the Indy led with badgers in peril. EU Rota has the screenshot. For the Seattle Post-Intelligencer it was imperilled polar bears. (Presumably this story, although Jim Miller doesn't say.) Slow news day? I sympathise. For once I am out of smart remarks, as Ed says: Natalie kind of meanders around a bit, like a country walk along the riverside, making allusions which you only get at the end as you reach the vista you were seeking all along; Adloyada picks a thread and then pulls and pulls, taking care to straighten the material so as not to hurt the threads she doesn't object to.Yes, Lachesis is careful in her work. Hallelujah, the THING is gone. I skip, I gambol, I pirouette. I am escorted from Tesco's fresh produce aisle by an assistant manager. But nothing can bring me down; gravity has a ten percent reduction special offer zone centred around me, for I am without the THING. Do you have a THING? My THING was a letter (a proper ink on paper letter) that had gone unanswered for a shamefully long time. Now it is answered, licked, posted and gone. I am free, unless it comes back to me stamped "GONE AWAY" or "DECEASED" in which case it's a ten thousand years in THING thing. Now I need a new THING. Christmas cards. Thursday, December 15, 2005
Today is election day in Iraq. Here are some pictures from the BBC. To mark the occasion, Heirs of Hammurabi has up plenty of new material. I liked this: A young man can find many jobs in today's Iraq, including new ones like selling cars; now widely available to most folks: or cell phones; a true post-Saddam 'must have' item.And this: No American soldier has been killed in the Kurdish safe haven in the north since Saddam was toppled in the spring of 2003.And this In more than one instance — and to the delight of American and Iraqi troops — insurgents have been caught attempting to flee the battlefield dressed as women: Considered a particularly disgraceful act among Iraqis.OK, I don't like the sexism. Sooner than we think perhaps, Iraq will experience the joys of diversity seminars. I believe it was Poul Anderson who said that future SF describes the problems that will arise from the solutions to the problems we have now. May the future when Iraqi politicians and media can afford to get as steamed up about basically prosaic issues as we do here be not long coming. Apparently the Kurdish region is well along that route. Damian Penny links to this scorching piece by a left-wing blogger, Glenn Greenwald, on the true character of the European Left. After saying (in the context of European outrage at the execution of Tookie Williams) that the E.L. displays a "parmaount desire to find fault and evil with the U.S. and thereby adopting that goal as the first and only real principle, from which everything else follows," he continues: This is a deeply dishonest and manipulative syndrome, having nothing whatever to do with the principles to which its adherents claim fidelity. Indeed, their supposed “principles” (human rights, the sanctity of human life, individual liberty) are simply weapons, pretexts, used to promote the only real principle they have – that the U.S. is a uniquely corrupt and evil country. And the reason one knows that to be the case is because these same individuals systematically overlook and even excuse far more severe violations of their ostensible principles when perpetrated by the countries and governments with which they inexcusably sympathize (sympathy which itself can be explained by a desire to sit in opposition to any and every American interest). I felt a pang for Mr Greenwald. The early comments came from left wingers, many of whom were comically shocked ("Why can't we accept that other people do have insight and moral wisdom that we lack?") , then, as word got round, stacks of right wingers commented at his site expressing a level of support that he may have found a little embarrassing. Word getting round included a link from Instapundit, who highlighted a very telling point made by Greenwald: "Somehow, Europeans have managed to transform the atrocities which they committed and which occurred in their countries from a badge of shame (which, arguably, it need not be any longer) into some sort of badge of moral superiority and entitlement to sit in judgment."Follow the link to Damian Penny's introduction too. He himself opposes the death penalty, but links to an informative piece saying (with figures) that it is popular with the people of Europe, just not their governments. Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Testing times. My more old fashioned readers probably think that the driving test is intended to, as it were, test whether a person can drive. Not in Ontario. Over there it is a privilege which the state grants and the state can take away for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you are a safe driver. "It is a privilege to have a driver's licence, and one of the corresponding obligations is to be serious about taking your learning as far as possible," Education Minister Gerard Kennedy told a news conference at Queen's Park yesterday before introducing the legislation.Why Ontario, following the example of nine US states including Alabama and South Carolina, should say that the grant of a driving licence is conditional on staying in school rather than on any of the literally infinite number of other irrelevant criteria is not clear to me. It cannot be an argument of principle. Once the state has declared "seriousness about taking your learning as far as possible" to be a "corresponding obligation" to being allowed to drive there is no reason not to also bring "seriousness about taking your virginity as far as possible" into the test criteria, or "seriousness about taking your ice hockey as far as possible" - or Christianity, fascism or Tantric Yoga, according to the fashion of the moment. The "correspondence" is exactly as good in all of these examples, which is to say nonexistent. It cannot be hard-headed practicality either. There is no reason to suppose or evidence to show that those seventeen year olds to whom it matters most that they learn to drive are also those who would most benefit (if anyone does) from being forced to stay in school. Would-be rural dropouts are penalised heavily, urban dropouts shrug and take the bus. Or drive without a licence. I guess it must be desperate flailing about to avoid addressing the failure of state education, then. Iranian president says Holocaust is a myth - the Times. "The days of denial must end," writes Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. My readers know everything. JEM writes: Call me picky if you like, but in fact 'fistula' is any abnormal passage leading from any bodily cavity to any other that do not normally connect. Indeed it might be a hole in the wall of the vagina, of which there are several varieties covered by the general term 'obstetric fistula' which is what the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital itself tells us it is concerned with. However a 'fistula' might equally well be any one of about a thousand other similar pathological holes in various parts of the body. Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Independent Exclusive: People Do Bad Things. I posted at Biased BBC concerning the coverage of the Sydney riots. I said the Beeb manages to be quite clear about the race of white rioters at Cronulla beach on Sunday but goes all coy about the race of rioters of Lebanese origin who made retaliatory mayhem in Mabroubra and other suburbs on Monday. A commenter, Simo, said, "Incredibly, the BBC might have been outdone in deliberate obfuscation by the Independent." Not that incredible, actually, but Simo's comment deserves a wider audience. It's not about the BBC so I'll post it here. Simo quotes this Independent article: "Violence on the streets of Sydney spilled into a second night as scores of people drove through beachside suburbs smashing windows of shops, homes and flats.Simo observes: These naughty "people" are at it again. Of course, when those people aren't young males of Middle-Eastern origin, the Indy shows no such coyness about calling a spade a shovel, nailing first "5,000 white men, many of them drunk" before raising the spectre of the swastika by condemning the unnamed "neo-Nazi groups" who were allegedly fanning the flames.Now, why on earth would anyone report a story of conflict while refusing to name one side? I can guess why the BBC does it. It thinks a significant chunk of its audience are uncultured whites belonging to socio-economic groups far down the alphabet who would turn on their non-white neighbours if ever they were to learn that some brown-skinned people living on the other side of the globe are capable of behaving badly. Providentially, thinks the Beeb news manager, these brutes can be safely lied to because they are too thick to seek out alternative sources of information. Hey, maybe the Beeb has a point. The BBC's audience is theoretically the entire British nation after all. But it's a little disconcerting that a progressive quality newspaper makes the same assumption about its audience. Still, no doubt the Independent knows its own readers best. UPDATE: Like Simo, Scott Burgess also spotted that the Indy is a "people" paper. If this carries on it'll save a packet on the paper's coverage of the sunnier parts of the world. There were dramatic developments in Basra today, where people did stuff. Meanwhile in Darfur people did peoply things, other people claim. Eventually it might reach a stage where the only person mentioned by name in the entire newspaper was George W. Bush. One would open one's copy to see the Presidential name repeated endlessly, like a mantra. There comes a point in every old codger's life where they hobble out into the sunshine of the modern world and peer about in a bewildered fashion muttering, "I don't understand. It's all changed. I don't understand." I'm forty-one - but it's all changed and I don't understand. When I was a kid the idea that the police would come around and "have a word" with a guest at a BBC talking heads show for the mere expression of opinions that the government did not like, opinions which even the police themselves concede did not include any threat of violence or lawbreaking, would have seemed like dystopian science fiction. Not any more. Remember Robin Page, called in for questioning for remarks made from the commentary box at a country fair - after the police placed an advert in the local paper trawling for narks? Dystopian science fiction never comes without a scene where one of the last few relics of the old regime reminisces. Winston Smith couldn't get any sense out of his old codger but the Aged Informants in earlier stories were more cooperative, or less drunk. I shall try to stay halfway sober when my time comes. Sober enough to thank 'ee for my half litre of watered down beer and say that I first noticed things beginning to change when that Robin Page was arrested and I knew it was no longer the Britain I had grown up in when that Lynette Burrows got into trouble. Monday, December 12, 2005
A long ago war: ...a remarkable man, Epaminondas, one of the Theban generals, (and a Pythagorian philosopher) dreamed of ending the Spartan threat forever. Spartan power rested on the ability of all her citizens to be full-time soldiers, devoting their whole lives to military training. This was possible because they had long-before conquered the large neighboring province of Messenia, and reduced its people to near-slaves, the Helots, held down by brutal totalitarian tactics, including a ruthless secret police. Google giving. This product of Worstallian ingenuity is an effort to get nice Mr Google to pay for (a) assistance to the Fistula* Hospital in Ethiopia and (b) the Send A Cow appeal. The idea is you sign up for Adsense and Firefox with the Google Toolbar. Didn't I do a good job of sounding like I knew what I'm talking out? When I figure out what to do I will have a whirl at doing it. And if the Adsense/Toolbar angle does not appeal, one could always consider giving some money! *A fistula is a hole in the wall of the vagina, an injury often suffered in the course of a stillbirth. The particular tragedy for women who affected by a fistula who live far away from medical facilities is that, as well as having lost their baby, they become unable to control urination and defecation. They are often disowned by their husbands and rejected by the community. Imagine the difference that an operation to repair the hole can make to a woman's life. |