Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
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Saturday, March 18, 2006
A Liberal Democrat councillor says that "There is no England" because they let too many immigrants in. LATER: There was some logical and even angry replies to Mr Arnold's letter the following day, but none of them specifically raised any objection to Mr Arnold's belief that a high proportion of immigrants in a territory makes it incapable of nationhood. You can bet that if a Tory had said that in the pages of the Telegraph, the next day smoke would rise from Independent's letters column, so hot would the indignation burn. Here's another example of the same double standards in a smaller forum. In comment no. 75 to this Crooked Timber post one Anthony says: Are secularists so hardened against religion that they don’t want any prominent religious people in the party unless they are trained monkeys who know their role like black Republicans who get trotted out for various GOP events?Two comments later Brett Bellmore says: See, that’s what I mean by Democratic racism showing up in different ways. I can only imagine Democratic reactions if a Republican refered to blacks as "trained monkeys". LOL And apparently blacks aren’t allowed to genuinely have different opinions.Bellmore, whom I take to be a Republican, raises the issue again once or twice but none of the CT comment-thread regulars seem to find it worthy of censure. Friday, March 17, 2006
Who will hide our shame? You've heard me before on how the columnist Bernard Levin made me want to be a blogger before blogs existed. I thought it doubly sad that a man so eloquent should die of Alzheimer's. I had had no idea. I had noticed that his last few books seemed gloomier, but he wisely withdrew from writing before mental decline became obvious. When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, President Reagan made a dignified announcement and disappeared into private life. That did not mean he become a complete recluse and he was sometimes seen around with his retinue, smiling benignly. At least people understood when they met him. Former colleagues who met Harold Wilson, Lord Wilson of Rievaulx as he had then become, in his last years were very hurt that a man with a famous memory stared straight past them as if he had never known them. But not that many people met him. In the throes of syphilis Lord Randolph Churchill made speeches that were pitiable by some accounts and obviously mad by others. Such was the fraternal solidarity of the House and the deference of the age that the press scarcely breathed a word. Nowadays silence would not be kept, but modern politicians suffering from mental decline have Whips, minders, party leaders and ultimately voters to ensure that their tragedy is not too public for too long. Journalists going senile have editors to do them the last kindness of refusing to print their work. Bloggers have ...? I expect some of us will still be blogging at the age of eighty or ninety or more. In most cases, that will be a fine thing. Society nowadays tends to shove the old out of the discussion. I like to think of some of the names on my links list still gaining readers and influence even though they have been obliged to use a hoverchair for the last twenty years and a brainwave-controlled stylus for ten. And I am sure there is no better way of staying mentally acute than to begin every day with a furious fisking. Some of us, though, will go gaga. It's gonna happen. Three or four of my favourite bloggers at least will go down to senile dementia or Alzheimer's or one of the other Furies that pursue those who commit the crime of living too long. Emails suggesting that the day has already come in my case will be batted aside with a forty-one year old's laugh - but one day the emails might be right and I might refuse to believe it. I'm imagining the sunny, disinfected lounge of a rest home. One of the residents is hunched over a paper-thin computer, typing in the old fashioned way. I'll imagine him as male since I prefer not to imagine my own possible future. His gnarled fingers can still move at a fair pace across the keyboard although the slurred mutterings that come from him would tell any observer that what he publishes no longer makes sense. The nurses think it's sad. He used to be quite famous. But they know, as we do, that it would be outrageous to take away internet access from a person who has committed no crime. In fact, having grown up in the internet age, they feel it more profoundly than we do. They would no more try to stop him from posting than they would physically gag him. It took time for him to reach this state. For several years his writing consisted of rambling but still comprehensible screeds that were a source of burning embarrassment to his friends and glee to his enemies. Because he became so verbose as he grew older, his writing from this period is greater in volume than the sharp, witty posts that once won him admirers worldwide. All sense is gone now. Still he types, adding post after meaningless post to a blog that stretches back through the decades. People still quote the early ones sometimes. Until recently he used to send anyone who gave him a trackback strange emails, alternately hectoring and conspiratorial - but he can no longer manage that process. He can still press "publish" and he does. He laughs sometimes at jokes that only he understands. He always said it would be a wonderful day when there were no more gatekeepers. Better than fair trade. Please don't think I have a blanket objection to "fair trade" products. There is an issue with producers being misled by the fair trade premium into making unwise choices that cannot be sustained. However, so long as buying fair trade does not oblige me to (significantly) contribute to political lobbying that, if successful, would trap Third World countries in failed economic policies, I am happy to pay a little extra to give someone a little extra help. If campaigners wish to use that wonderful capitalist invention, the brand name, to promote ethical behaviour, you won't see me complaining. Alex Singleton has been arguing that primary producers in fair trade schemes would do better to get involved in packaging and marketing their own wares. It seems that some already do: As a country-of-origin roaster, we [a company called "Café Britt"] are challenging conventional coffee wisdom, we believe that producing countries are more than raw material suppliers to intermediaries in other countries, we believe that these developing countries can export the finished product with all its value added in the country of origin.And Café Britt isn’t all that keen on the Fairtrade mark: in fact, they decided that, despite paying premium prices, the complexity and cost of being on the scheme would be greater than the benefits. In Costa Rica, Café Britt produces some of the raw coffee on its own plantation, but buys the rest from a large number of small farmers. In order to be Fairtrade certified, each of these farmers would require individual auditing and certification (as they don’t belong to a co-operative or to Café Britt directory). That’s just not practical. Not everyone wants the same level of academic freedom. Tim Worstall has up a post about Frank Ellis, an unashamedly racist lecturer at Leeds. There is a campaign to oust him. I'd like to post the comment I made there over here, too: Universities ought to be able to compete as to the degree of extremism they will tolerate on the part of the teaching staff. Some could offer as their selling point that students will have their horizons widened by hearing every view from racism to Stalinism. Others might offer the students, "no crackpot professors here."Funnily enough, all this ties in with an earlier TW post arguing that its untrue that markets force you to have too much choice. While it may actually be true that too much choice causes anxiety, markets in and of themselves help to solve this. An iPod actually does less than many other MP3 players and is by far the most popular. Let the chips fall where they may. Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard reports on the vast backlog of captured documents from Saddam's Iraq now being released onto the web. Released, it should be noted, untranslated, unanalysed, unauthenticated, unmediated. There is something wonderfully anarchistic about all this. I'm rather thrilled by the thought of every amateur with a copy of Teach Yourself Arabic diving into the documents in the hope of striking gold. Er, pearls. You dive for pearls. But is it a good way to fight terrorism? On balance, yes. (Brian Micklethwait wrote a pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance about this) There is a risk that information will reach the public that would be more useful shared among six operatives prior to laying an ambush for an Al Qaeda leader - but the fact is that the CIA or whoever hadn't translated it. Too much paper, too little time. No one can lay an ambush based on information held in a crate for three years. Simply in terms of getting public support for the War On Terror, the Bush administration should have done this long ago. Their credibility suffered a major blow when no WMD turned up. The anti-war side had every right to point out loudly and often that Blair and Bush got their facts wrong. "So did a lot of people, including Saddam's own generals" is a mitigating factor but it doesn't quite wipe the egg off the presidential and prime ministerial faces. But then, at least in some cases - about two trillion - those who opposed the war went on to proclaim with a certainty way in excess of what the evidence or a reasonable cynicism about the ways of the world warranted that there could not possibly have been cooperation between the religious fanatics of Al Qaeda and the secular regime of Saddam Hussein. That was always nonsense. It has always been risky to hitch your prestige to a negative assertion. For one thing, Saddam's regime wasn't so secular as all that. Saddam put images of himself taking part in the Haj on postage stamps. And for another, "My enemy's enemy is my friend" has been said in every tongue. I read somewhere about some Word War II British naval types delivering a batch of submachine guns to Communist Chinese guerillas fighting the Japanese. The writer had commented to the other man that the weapons seemed crudely manufactured. "Just as well," said the other, "They'll be using them to fight us in a few years." This would make a better anecdote if I could name the book, but stuff it, strange alliances are ten a penny. Pope Alexander VIII ordered lights to be lit in the Vatican in thanks for King William's victory over the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne. Many of the miners digging into these documents will be motivated by a desire to score partisan political points. Nowt wrong with that; it makes sense to harness one of the most powerful motives known to man to the public good. The potential benefits, however, are wider. It will help Iraq to know more about its own tortured history. It will help the world to know more about how Saddam's rule functioned in order to better restrain future Saddams. And some of those amateurs may find information that may yet be of help in laying ambushes. Thursday, March 16, 2006
"There were eight of us." Six men are fighting for their lives in North London after a drug test went horribly wrong. This BBC interview is with one of the two men who got the placebo. In the introduction the lawyer of one of the victims is quoted: Ann Alexander, whose 29-year-old client is on a life support machine, said: "There is confusion about whether the drug had actually been tested successfully and safely on animals before the tests on these volunteers."Things can go wrong even if drugs are tested on animals. But there is no denying that animal testing makes tragedies like this less likely. So argues James Panton, towards the end of this article by Jennifer Cunningham in the Herald. James Panton, an Oxford politics lecturer, became a founding member of Pro-Test, a group which has organised demonstrations against animal rights extremists, after witnessing the intimidation of scientists and construction workers in Oxford. He believes that the incident in London actually adds weight to his case. Did you notice his background? I must say that ensuring that a group of people known both for its articulacy and its disproportionate representation in the media and government are personally annoyed with you and your cause was one of those strokes of tactical genius that give me confidence in the future of modern activism. Tuesday, March 14, 2006
The NHS is the envy of the world. Do you envy this man? Not the actors in the black and white still at the top; the man pictured further down. The hospital sent him home. They sent him home on a Friday evening. Home in a worse state that he went in. They sent him home to his eighty year old wife with one of the worst pressure sores I have seen in years. He has now developed intractable diarrhoea, and it coats the pressure sore. He needs round the clock intensive nursing therapy, including being turned regularly. We cannot do this at home. They cannot do it in hospital it seems either. The nurses are too busy eating pizza or pretending to be doctors. (I found the link to NHS Blog Doctor via Tim Worstall. As he says, "You want to go and read this. Yes, you’ll really want to read this on our Glorious NHS," although the sense of the word "want" he uses is specialised.) I once said I'd post this article by the Health Editor of the Observer, a man who was once a committed supporter of the NHS, every few months until the NHS went away. I've let that resolution slip in the last year or two. Wrongly. Too long have I written about the tragedies and cruelty of the National Health Service; too long have we as a country accepted it. The Government can fiddle with it as long as it likes, but the very structure of the NHS ensures it will never be world class. The noble ideology of communism had to be ditched because it didn't work. So the noble ideology behind the NHS should be ditched because it costs lives. We should ditch the ideology and ditch the NHS. I've put the What Killed Slavery discussion here to bed, wished it night-night and turned off the light. Yes, even despite some eloquent letters from regular correspondents. I felt it was time for one of those editorial decisions - I'm played out on that subject. (I will just observe that the estate of the late Barbara Tuchman must be doing well: absolutely everyone seems to have read A Distant Mirror.) However, if any participants in the debate on this blog still want to read or comment about a closely related matter, why not go over to this post by Ginny at Chicago Boyz? Jim Miller already has. This is where being a science fiction fan gets you. The recent lethal outburst of gang warfare in Salford is no laughing matter, as I should be the first to say having posted thus the other day. But I have to admit that for a moment the mental picture created by one particular word in this Times account of the Salford violence had me gasping in something close to delighted wonder. The two men, wearing beanie hats, walked into the pub and then pulled the woollen rims over their faces to reveal home-made balaclavas. Some drinkers dived for cover beneath pool tables as the pair produced automatic weapons and fired at least four shots.I'd misunderstood, of course. My years of going to SF conventions where funny costumes are commonplace had put it into my head that the phrase "beanie hat" usually implied a propeller on top. Monday, March 13, 2006
A deep well of strange delights. Via the estimable Odious and Peculiar, I have discovered Laputan Logic. This post is about the kakure kirishitan, the "hidden Christians" of Japan. They remained faithful through centuries of persecution... but the faith they kept changed. ...for example, of the young Holy One debating with Buddhist priests, as 12-year-old Jesus was said to have done with the Jewish elders. Two men, Ponsha and Piroto (ie, Pontius Pilate), are told to kill all children of five and under, an echo of Herod's order. Mary gives birth in a stable, but the innkeeper who had spurned her then takes her in: in a wonderfully Japanese touch, he offers her a hot bath. Friday, March 10, 2006
Happy libel fun. Looks like Neil Clark is threatening to sue Oliver Kamm for libel. I ain't saying nuffin. Except that this is a good book and you should buy a copy. Possibly several copies. My favourite libel story concerns the actor, playwright and director, Steven Berkoff. In 1996 Berkoff successfully sued Julie Burchill of the Times after she wrote that Berkoff was "hideously ugly." In fact he's not ugly at all. Berkoff's action in going to the funeral of Reginald Kray and eulogising that sadistic criminal was ugly, but his face is OK. Here's what the Sunday Herald said: And the respect that Reggie engendered? Actor and utter twit Stephen Berkoff, who had apparently attended the ugly spectacle, was allowed a long and ponderous epitaph to the pathetic old lag in the gaudy coffin. Anyway, despite the rather witty dissent of Lord Justice Millett ("it is a popular belief for the truth of which I am unable to vouch that ugly men are particularly attractive to women"), the gangster-admiring (but tolerably handsome) Berkoff won and Burchill lost. Before then it had been generally assumed that saying someone was ugly did not tend to lower them in the esteem of right-thinking members of society. Afterwards, hmm, depends on the context, be careful. Robertson & Nicol say that Article 10 of the Human Rights Act might change things, but for the time being Berkoff v. Burchill is still a precedent. Victory for Berkoff, then. Only... the information that someone wrote that Steven Berkoff was "hideously ugly" is in every book on modern British tort law. It did set a precedent, after all. Since courts all over the Anglosphere refer to each other's judgements, I would imagine it is also cited in Australian, Canadian, South African, Indian, New Zealand, West Indian and some American books of law. Law students will learn about it for for decades. Maybe even centuries. ADDED LATER: The news of the death of Slobodan Milosevic made me regret being so harsh on a mere actor. To praise a killer, torturer and extortioner for providing an interesting show, as if Kray's victims were not real, was shameful behaviour on Berkoff's part. But if I'm going to describe Berkoff's behaviour as "hideously ugly", as I originally did, what words are left for an actual killer? So I've toned down the post above. I still think that it's a hoot that the end result of Berkoff's libel victory has been to propagate the two words concerned to the ends of the earth and set them on course to outlive his dramatic accomplishments as claims to fame. Nazi buildings. I have in front of me a book of extracts from Signal, the colourful magazine extolling the virtues of Nazi Europe that Goebbels had distributed all over occupied Europe and elsewhere. Signal had an English language edition aimed at the US and Ireland and also sold in occupied Jersey and Guernsey. I'm looking at an article called "The New Reich Chancellery". It says On 11th January 1938, the Führer commissioned Prof. Speer, Inspector-General of Building Construction, with the erection of the New Reich Chancellery ... During the remaining 9 months fixed for its completion, the Inspector-General and his staff of architects, artists, workmen and artisans from all provinces completed this work, which represents the Reich in modern classical form.Copious illustrations are provided. This website shows similar pictures. You can find more pictures by doing an Image Search but not all the websites hosting them are as respectable as this one, produced by Professor Randall Bytwerk of Calvin College, Michigan. The crimes of the Nazis are such as to make one hope there is a hell. They can be made not one whit worse by the fact that I don't care for the skimpy square pillars at the front of Speer's project (the overall effect is a bit like Walthamstow Town Hall, only not as impressive.) Nor are their crimes made one whit less dreadful because Speer's "Long Hall" (called "the marble gallery" in the Calvin College link) looks rather nice. If it hadn't been dismantled by the Red Army it might have made a pleasant place for a cup of tea in the afternoon - and Speer was still a willing tool of tyranny. Although there are interesting things to be said about the way dictatorships build, in moral terms it doesn't matter how good or bad Nazi architecture was. To condemn a style because Hitler approved of it is as cheap a shot as to condemn vegetarians because Hitler approved of vegetarianism. I can see why they sandblasted out the swastikas in 1945 but if by any chance they missed any, I'd say leave them in place on grounds of historical interest. Although the juxtaposition of the words "Nazi" and "architecture" can still stir passion and controversy sixty years on, I thought that none of this would disturb my Olympian cool... ...but even I was disturbed by the idea of a Nazi church. The photo is not online but the print edition of the Times shows a carved font with a stormtrooper standing next to Jesus. Apparently the church was in use until a few years ago, so I presume babies were baptized in it until recently. Thursday, March 09, 2006
Demise of slavery - another installment, possibly the last. JEM writes: I've found it!I hope I don't unduly annoy JEM, whose emails I value, but I don't think so at all. This is not because I disbelieve the information quoted from A Distant Mirror, which I also own. It's a fine book. Rather it is because I think that what ARC has been saying is not invalidated by the evidence Tuchman provides. Re-reading some earlier posts by JEM, ARC and others, it seems to me that although there are significant differences as to points of fact (for example, was the Black Death more or less severe in Britain than elsewhere, was serfdom significantly different from slavery), nonetheless neither side disputes that serfdom had gone by around 1500 and that this was not brought about by moral scruples or religion. Correspondents differ as to how big a role various non-moral causes such as the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, various wars or the invention of the horse collar played. JEM then goes on to say that, whereas this or that economic or environmental cause could end slavery in this or that country, only for the institution to rise again later, it was the Industrial Revolution that put the stake through its heart wordwide. Short term it may not have done, but long term it did. But whereas ARC agrees (I think) that the Industrial Revolution and its Siamese twin, capitalism, had the long term effect of finally making sure slavery did not pay, he says that one of the reasons that the Industrial Revolution happened in England was that England had been a non-slave society, until it was "re-infected" with the slavery virus via the African trade. Mere circumstances had taught them that a non-slave society could work just fine. Then they had the moral choice whether they wanted that sort of society or not. It is true that eventually mechanical inventions would, in Adam Smith's words, produce "their legitimate effect, that of abridging labour" and "effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish". It is true that this destiny was widely predicted, as evinced by the famous prediction from Smith himself that I just quoted. But it wasn't obvious to everyone. And the prospect of just allowing this outrage to continue for decades or even centuries while the glacier of economic necessity inched its way to the sea was unbearable to good men. This brings me to a recent Samizdata post by Johnathan Pearce, "A good man who made a difference." It is about the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson. Pearce writes: But even though there is some truth in ascribing changes to these things [economic forces], as this Wikipedia entry accepts, it still requires the energy and commitment of actual people to force the pace of change. We do not know, for instance, how long slavery might have persisted under the British Empire had people like Clarkson not bothered to campaign against it. It is fair to assume, however, that it ended a good deal sooner than otherwise and hence millions of people probably owed what freedoms they had to people such as this fellow.I am conscious that I have, perhaps, both put words into the mouth of ARC (whose opinions on this are close to mine but not identical to mine) and given a slightly rough ride to the words of JEM. It is clear from many other emails of his that JEM has no desire to denigrate those who campaigned against slavery, he just thinks that economics came first. Guys, I just don't think we are going to agree. Unless anyone feels really hard done by I think the destiny and futurity of this thread is to be put to bed for a while. To get me back in the mood for blogging here are some posts made over the last couple of weeks that caught my eye. Robert Hinkley is inspired by David Irving to open up new lines of historical research. Most of what Patrick Crozier posts at the moment comes out in Q&A format to fit his Wiki. It all reads as if it has been written to be easily translated into foreign languages. Am I complaining then? No. It's very clear style, and that is exhilarating. I have just noticed I am copying it. Here is an example. The post argues that the proposed new law to prevent assaults on nurses will do no good. AOG of Thought Mesh links via Michelle Malkin to pictures of the placards carried by Muslim demonstrators, placards that said "Behead those who insult Islam" and "Europe, you will pay, your 9/11 is on it's* way." Famously, the police took no action over this incitement to murder until after an enormous public outcry. AOG argues that this type of failure to act makes a blanket opposition to immigration more rational and more likely. But when you see pictures like this, you are forced to consider the fact that not all immigrants can or will assimilate, by which we mean accepting the fundamental values of the host nation. What is to be done about such people? Stephen Pollard says he is mystified as to what the fuss was about when Tony Blair said God would be his judge over invading Iraq. Surely people already knew Blair was a Christian? Surely they already knew that even the wishy-washiest Christians believe God will judge the actions of men? (Sorry, "people", as Tony would undoubtedly prefer I said.) I think they did know. But having a happy rant about the imaginary Christian peril of Tony Blair is as close as some people dare go to mentioning more pressing problems. *I always said they were ignorant fanatics. Friday, March 03, 2006
Sorry I've been too busy to post recently. Hope to be back soon. Blimey, that was boring. Unfortunately MI6 would be after me if I tried to tell you the truth about Tuesday, February 28, 2006
News? You want news as well? Sorry. There isn't any. The Times front page today was about fat kids. That's the modern equivalent of "Two of the clock and all's well." I will now blame myself for every awful thing that does happen. "Nanoscale replicators already exist." Our other debate was on nanotechnology. Kent Peterson does not agree with JEM's views as expressed in the second half of this email. Mr Peterson writes: Nanoscale replicators already exist. The surface of this planet is thoroughly infested with them, the oceans are soggy with their gunk, and their byproducts have effected permanent changes to the climate. They accomplish surprising tasks in timeframes of a few days. That reference to geological timescales is just completely wrong.[Because this email was fairly short I left it on the main blog. Why, oh why, does Blogger oblige me to manually remove every line break if I try to post some emails? It happens for about 40% of the emails I get. If the answer is at all complicated, kindly regard the question as rhetorical.] Strange to think that when Johnson was writing there would have been nothing unusual about meeting people who remembered being a slave. Regular readers will be aware that several of my regular correspondents have been continuing a debate here on what factor killed slavery - was it moral decisions, or economic and technological developments? I have three emails from readers that I think you will enjoy. However, as these mega-debates can rather break up the flow of the blog, I have dug out the password to my old Tripod website and re-invented it as "Natalie Solent Extra." It now has a page called http://nataliesolent.tripod.com/whatkilledslavery.html Some sample paragraphs to tempt you in. ARC writes: France and Britain were not the areas worst affected by the black death even in Europe, still less in the world. Italy and the Byzantine empire were worse affected in Europe. That they had more and larger cities at that time may have been a factor. Another was the greater speed and volume of maritime communications in the Mediterranean; it's a commonplace of epidemiology that epidemics tend to strike hard along lines of communication. JEM writes (under a most apt title): Excepting Blitzkrieg-like situations--Germany's invasions of Poland, France, etc., Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and similar events-- what seems to decide the outcome of longer wars--at least conventional ones--is ultimately the relative economic strength of the two sides.And Jim Miller writes: So it [manumission] was rare, but not as rare as winning a lottery. And, since it was cumulative, over 20 years, assuming the 1850 rate is typical, a little less than one percent would have gained freedom, either through grants or their own work. "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man." Via Mitch Townsend in Chicago Boyz I found this astonishing story from close to a hundred years ago, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. My eyes slid past the part where Mitch Townsend said it was a piece of fiction, so at first I thought it was fact. It is not, but it is still a fascinating document. The author was James Weldon Johnson, a major figure in the Harlem Rennaissance. Even before I reached the note at the end saying it was a work of fiction, I began to feel that too much happened to the narrator to be entirely plausible, and too much of it seemed illustrated to make political points - albeit political points that desperately needed to be made. James Weldon Johnson was field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and I assume that his work was written to advance that organisation's work. I don't know whether the Autobiography was initially presented as fact; but a great deal of fiction of that era was written in the first person and there would have been nothing unusual about something called "Autobiography of ..." being understood by all to be fiction. Never mind. The Edwardian conventions (such as the treatment of the narrator's courtship, his marriage, and the eventual death of his wife) add to the interest. I found myself seeing the scenes described with three pairs of eyes, those of the narrator (a fair-skinned black man who could "pass" as white, at a time when almost imperceptible distinctions of skin colour regularly blighted lives), those of the author (an educated and politically aware black man writing at the nadir of black fortunes between the US Civil War and the Civil Rights movement) and my own. While on the subject of that book, I would like to highlight a quote from it that is far from being the most important topic discussed, yet did grab my attention because of its prescience. As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs. The educated classes are rather ashamed of them, and prefer to sing hymns from books. This feeling is natural; they are still too close to the conditions under which the songs were produced; but the day will come when this slave music will be the most treasured heritage of the American Negro.That was written in 1912. Monday, February 27, 2006
Perfect, in its way. I commended this post by the American Expatriate over at B-BBC. Here I'd like to take a moment to admire the one comment it has garnered so far. 1 Comments:Admit it. This one is a perfect ten.
I had better not say what this piece from Dash Riprock is actually about. If you need to know you already do. And so, our Eye wandered towards new projects. After sitting on the sidelines for a while, most of us were flush with new ideas, bubbling with excitement over the possibilities. After all, with unlimited funds, absolute control of the world media and every government on earth dancing like puppets on our strings, the problem was thinking up something we couldn't do.Incidentally, guys, where's my cheque? I've given up on the satrapy now but I do need something to cover my expenses. You lucky people. Via Britblog Roundup I found "Liberty? You have no idea how lucky you are," a post from perfect.co.uk deconstructing Tony Blair's article in the Observer. The prime minister also seems to believe that liberty is a zero-sum game: you can’t have more of it, you can only shift it around. In his view, it’s all about achieving the right ‘balance’. Waiting for a good time to speak. Certain European newspapers have put their British counterparts to shame by publishing The Cartoons. But the European Union, as represented by Freedom, Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini, true to form, appeases. It was 'unwise' for European papers to republish the cartoons just three days after the victory of the militant Islamist group Hamas in Palestinian elections and following recent remarks about Israel and the Holocaust by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.But don't get the impression that Mr Frattini is not in favour of free speech, no sir! In fact we learn that: The former Italian foreign minister also made an impassioned plea for the right to free speech and expression, saying they were non-negotiable.All Mr Frattini wishes to negotiate about is when would be a good time to exercise this non-negotiable right. We mustn't recklessly do it within days or months of anyone on earth doing anything fanatical. EU Serf says that when free speech is threatened, that's when you must most defend it, stupid. Surely the time when freedom to discuss the threat to our way of life from extremists is most important is when the threat seems to be growing. It is precisely because the Iranian President is a psychopath and The Palestinian Government is a group of terrorists, that this issue of free speech is so important. Saturday, February 25, 2006
Planetary Autarky: Planetary Autocrat Annoying Old Guy responds. I have a few good emails on that topic lined up. But transcribing them is too much like work for a Saturday. You guys are an embarrassment even as enemies. Damian Penny links to a MEMRI translation of an the views of a "cultural advisor" to the Iranian education ministry. Professor Hasan Bolkhari thinks that Tom and Jerry was made by Walt Disney (!) as part of a Jewish conspiracy to improve the portrayal of mice. As a commenter, Rick McGinnis, says: I don't know what's worse - that a regime this ignorant very nearly has nukes, or that this sort of metastasized stupidity is what we have to fight. Or, worst of all, that it's actually possible to lose, in real world terms, against this sort of monstrous inanity. Who are the masters, the bureaucrats or the electorate? Tim Worstall argues against the suspension from office of Ken Livingstone, a politician whom he "dislikes intensely". Should Ken be suspended because he breached the "code of conduct"? No. There shouldn’t be such a code of conduct in the first place. That’s giving far too much power to the bureaucracy that writes said code and far too little to the people who are allowed to elect anyone they damn well please. "Allowed" may be too weak a word there. Friday, February 24, 2006
"The limits are one's own integrity and one's own beliefs." The speaker is Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell. (Bush having relations with a camel symbolising Iraq, yes. The Prophet Mohammed, no.) Let Mr Timothy Blair guide you through a garden of elevated sentiment, as (in Mr Blair's apt words), "British cartoonists reflect on their courage and decency." Bush-friend Hughes: "A wonderful Führer." Davidsmedienkritik discusses what appear to be politically-motivated discrepancies beween the English and German versions of an interview in Der Spiegel with US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes. The title of this post is the caption Der Spiegel gives to a photo of Hughes in the German version. The English version has a different photo and a different caption. Some of the commenters say, hey, "Führer" is the German for leader. So it is. I barely speak German but I know that much. And I also know that the German for "Der Spiegel respects its readers' intelligence" should be prounounced as "eye-ner grow-sir shy-sir." UPDATE: Well, I was told it meant "a load of crap" and wasn't so bad in German. Rest of world: do not write in. "I hope to God they all stay safe" - Damian Penny on Iraqi bloggers reporting the violence after the bomb at the Golden Mosque. The tragedy is that if destroying shrines is what gives the destroyers what they want, they will do more of it. Do I hear the dam breaking? Logic Times quotes General Georges Sada, late of Saddam's army as saying that WMD were moved to Syria. Pajamas Media has a whole WMD blog. I've never quite figured out - possibly because I have only given three seconds thought to the subject - how that PMJ aggregation thing works. Does a machine or a person select what goes in? However it works, the subject of WMD is probably an ideal one for the treatment. Having had their noses rubbed in their own mispredictions once, many people who are now beginning to think that WMD were there after all don't want to stand up on their ownsome and say so. This cocky so and so Andrew McGuinness goes and recommends himself for the Britblog Roundup on the strength of this post. (Emphasis added.) Therefore, the effect of this bill [the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act] is not absolutely to hand over legislative power to the executive; instead it is to give Parliament the same role as the European Parliament has in the EU - the role of an observer whose aquiescence, rather than approval, is needed for laws to be passed.See thou to it, Tim. I've never seen the point of simpering, "Oh, this old thing?" when someone admires my dress at a party. Gary Cruse of The Owner's Manual liked my Dorothy Parker joke. You know what? So did I. "Time on the Cross." As he promised, Jim Miller emailed me the summary of conclusions from a book called Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman The following are some of the principal corrections of the traditional characterization of the slave economy:Having sent me that, Jim Miller added a note of his own: My own caveats: I am not an economist, much less a cliometrician, as Fogel and Engerman like to call themselves, so I can't easily judge the quality of their work. I do recall that "Time on the Cross" received enormous praise and criticism when it was first published. I haven't followed the controversy since the late 1970s, so I don't know the status of the debate. I found this review of Time on the Cross by Thomas Weiss informative. Some of the book's conclusions have been knocked awry, others remain standing. All this remains quite a challenge to the views I expressed in a piece for Samizdata a while ago: Life is still tough for the owners of lazy slaves. In order to get to a certain conclusion about AIDS research I quoted Seneca and various Victorians to the effect that slave work was ill-done and inefficient. When visiting the antebellum South the British writer William Makepeace Thackeray said, "In a house where four servants would do with us ... there must be a dozen blacks here, and the work is not well done." When searching for quotes for that piece I found others I could have used as well. Such quotes are also evidence. Well, I guess it's another book to add to my reading list. Thursday, February 23, 2006
Huffing and puffing. The Times has a roundup of how politicians reacted to the Prince's letters. Technically, I agree with the first few. Impartiality of Head of State, et yadda cetera. But c'mon. He wrote a few letters to ministers - who cares? Long ago I used to draft replies to certain letters sent to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, those that concerned our little tentacle of the Treasury's octopus-like body. It was always a pleasant break from real work. My boss would have a good loud laugh as he deleted all my best sarcastic quips, his boss would have a gentle chuckle as he deleted those few that my boss had left in, and no doubt the FST smiled slightly as he wrote out the insipid missive that was actually sent. "Now these are the questions we want answered. It is important to remember that we need a technical / legal answer to these. A mere assurance that it wouldn't be used in a particular way is worthless." Via Tim Worstall, who calls it the "Abolition of Parliament Bill", Right Links has a page you should visit regarding the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act. Do more than just visit. Rather desperate. Bill Adams of Idler Yet examines a disingenous attempt by Tim Noah in Slate to claim that there is still room to doubt that the Rathergate documents were forgeries. I watched that one unfold almost real-time, and feel a proprietorial interest. Keith Windschuttle writes about the results of the intellectual fashion for Western self-loathing. Hat tip: Mark C at Daimnation. Stand Well Back. Here is the email from JEM that I promised. I've added titles to each of the two sections for ease of reading. He is referring to this post. The Auschwitz complex: a holocaust denier takes one part for the whole. JEM writes: "Before I move on to nanotechnology, I fear I cannot just "ignore the author's more outre political opinions" as you put it. "He concedes the possibility of gas chambers (as I understand his ramblings) at Birkenau, as if it was another camp far away and unconnected to Auschwitz. In fact, the full name of that camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, and it was built specifically to be the extermination "department" within the whole Auschwitz complex. Four gas chamber and crematorium units were part of the design of this camp from day one (the engineering drawings and equipment procurement orders and construction contract paperwork is all preserved: these people were bureaucratic Germans, after all) and these facilities went into "business" as soon as the camp opened its doors in the spring of 1942. Exact numbers are not known, but it's now reckoned between 1 and 1.5 million Jews died in these "non-existent" gas chambers of Auschwitz. Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Tonstant Gardener Fwowed Up. The director Don Boyd is ever so cross that The Constant Gardner didn't get nice prizes! Nasty Americans got prizes instead. "But as it came to its conclusion I realised what I had been seeing in microcosm: the triumph of American cultural imperialism. A sad reminder that we live in the modern equivalent of a Roman-occupied Britain." "Deary me," says Stephen Pollard. All sympathy, him. So sad. Yes, the dome can be rebuilt as the human lives destroyed by the same evil cannot be. But you don't have to be a Muslim, or even a theist, to feel the sacrilege. When I said "getting back to the 'what killed slavery debate'" I didn't necessarily mean "everyone get back to the 'what killed slavery' debate." Apart from anything else there is a whopper email from JEM coming up on something else entirely! (Hint as to contents: I wondered why the name Lyle Burkhead, who wrote the 'Nanotechnology without Genies' piece quoted in a previous link was familiar, but just assumed it was part of the cloud of half-remembered names that buzz in my brain.) You may have noticed that other people are writing my blog for me at the moment. Atishoo, atishoo, you get the idea. No more of this isolationist nonsense! Doug Sundseth writes: JEM wrote: "So long as humanity is confined to one planet, planetary autarky is economically feasible right now. In fact there is no alternative." Getting back to the 'what killed slavery' debate, Jim Miller writes: Natalie - I was following the discussion on your site for some time before I remembered that I have a pair of books that treat the question directly, Fogel and Engerman's "Time on the Cross". (The first volume has the exposition, the second the evidence and the math.) Here's the 4th conclusion (of ten) from the introduction to their economic study of slavery in the pre-Civil War American South:I haven't seen this book, but I would guess that the apparent greater efficiency of slavery may have been an unsustainable effect of specific improvements. The test that David Irving set me: do I really believe in the power of truth? There is a powerful article in today's Times by Daniel Finkelstein. "Must-read" is an overworked description, but you must read this. Yesterday my mother told me of the day, as a young girl in Westerbork concentration camp, she said goodbye to her aunt and uncle and to her 14-year-old cousin, Fritz. These much-loved family members had been listed for the Tuesday transport train to Auschwitz. My mother still has the pitiful letter from her aunt promising that “we will meet again”. But, of course, they never did. David Irving presumably thinks that Fritz and his parents survived and are living in Israel. In which case, the joke is over: they can come back now, don’t you think? Tuesday, February 21, 2006
"Your children will have a library card that is close to the one the angels have in their wallets." When I saw it, this post from ChicagoBoyz in which Mitch Townsend remembers going to his local library as a kid, and discusses Coase, transaction costs and the joys of the internet seemed so relevant to the end of trade stuff that I marked it up. Maybe it isn't relevant. Read it anyway. Food isn't free, hence neither is nanotech. Jamie Young also had thoughts on the End of Trade. Dear Natalie, In the original. JEM writes: Natalie,Actually, I had a splendid time and everyone I met was very nice. You just didn't meet any people doing service jobs at odd hours. UPDATE: I just had another grin at "planetary autarky is economically feasible right now", and thought I ought to record that fact. This blow struck true. Amygdala writes: I've despaired of hoping many bloggers will blog much on Darfur. It's only genocide.Gary Farber then offers sample partisan reasons for pro- and anti- Bush bloggers and other political groups to mention Darfur. As I've said before, despair is indeed the reason for silence. It's not just that there seems to be no partisan advantage in talking about it, it is that there seems to be no advantage full stop. My hopes rose when I found a press release on the website of the Department for Education and Science that began Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes today set out the next steps in delivering a world-class children’s workforce, including the development of an integrated qualifications framework.At last! Get the little blighters out of the box and back to work as God intended. Have we not mines? Have we not chimneys? OK, fewer than we did in both cases, but still, a world-class children's workforce ought to be able to manage some job-sharing so that every child got to have a go. The rest was a bit of a let down. For one thing it appears to be about social workers. For another it's in German. No, really. I can tell because all the nouns have capital letters. There's the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge, something called Options for Excellence, something else called the Children’s Workforce Strategy, the Early Years Professionals, and, most wondrously, the Transformation Fund that will transform the bog standard Early Years Professionals that appear throughout most of the document into the much classier Early Years' Professionals-with-an-apostrophe that appear once the Fund is mentioned. The thing ends oddly. This press notice relates to 'England'Why the scare quotes? The end of trade. AOG of Thought Mesh writes: My recent post on the ChiComs dilemma of accepting destabilizing technology made me think more about autarky and interstellar trade (two things I am sure sprang in to your mind as well).But of course. As nano-tech advances and we become ever more a society which manufactures information while our robots deal with the physical world, the need for actual trade will decrease. At some point, probably within the next century, robotics and nanotech will be even cheaper than overseas sweatshops. This is bad enough for planetary trade (what happens to that when autarky becomes economically feasible?), but one wonders what exactly would be traded between star systems. One might say information, but if progress remains possible, I expect that a local star system would generate it about as fast it the society could handle it, the the limits would be the ability of the society to consume information, not acquire it. Monday, February 20, 2006
So David Irving has been jailed. He should not have been. I can see why laws against Holocaust denial in Germany and Austria seemed like a good idea to the occupying Allies in 1946. The metaphor I use is that of a man who has just managed to fight off a maniac. After a dreadful struggle the citizen has finally wrestled his assailant onto the floor and held him down. It must have seemed like madness to even consider letting him rise again. I use that metaphor to understand the motivations of those who passed that law, not to say that they were correct. When I start to type the numerous reasons why Irving should not have been jailed a great weariness comes over me, but here they are again. Freedom of speech is indivisible: the fact that an odious man is free to say odious things protects those who wish to say things that are not odious but are unpopular. Lies should be fought with truth, not manacles. Once the precedent is set that wrong historical opinions can be criminalised, it becomes easier for the powerful to censor historical opinions that are inconvenient to them. Even where jail is never mentioned there will be a chilling effect on historical debate. Jailing Irving will make a martyr of him and give credence to his theories. Islamofascists will say that if Holocaust denial can be criminalised why not depiction of their prophet? Their fellow-travellers among the EU hierarchy will be happy, for their own reasons, to agree. How ironic if the very forceps made ready to kill one evil ideology in the womb before it could be reborn to trouble Europe were to be used to assure a safe birthing into Europe for another. Back from France, land of cheese, wine and self-service petrol pumps that don't like British credit cards. Heading back towards Calais early in the morning we thought it would be clever to get off the motorway and fill up cheaply at an Auchan in one of those industrial estates that my children think make up most of the French landscape. But the heirs of Citizen Chauvelin were wise to that one: not only did a little screen flash a message that our card was not acceptable, a robot speaker said it aloud as well, alerting any passing Frenchmen to our shame. They didn't have a human being at the kiosk because all the kiosk attendants were expelled from France in the great purge of 1292. We were well used to having our weary feet turned away from French credit-card operated doors. At a late hour the previous night Formule 1 had declared the Solents unfit to enter. However this turned out to be because my husband had booked the wrong date. Ah, but then we were between two beautiful sheets! as the French really do say. Except that our problem was that we weren't. No chance of asking the concierge if they were really truly complet or just pretending because trying to type in "pretty please" to those machines doesn't work; they are as a class truculent and supercilious to a regrettable degree. |
