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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( '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.)


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Saturday, October 26, 2013
 

Saturday night strangeness - Hitler before his Downfall

The bloke who posted this describes it as,'The same scene everyone knows, except it is from a film called "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" starring Alec Guinness.' Presumably both this film and Der Untergang followed Traudl Junge's diaries quite closely for this scene.



Tuesday, October 15, 2013
 

"Damn you Mrs Clinton. You have just made me like a traffic warden."

Thus laments commenter James Primavesi to this Times story (paywalled, but the title tells you all you need to know):

Do you know who she is? Hillary Clinton gets a ticket despite protests of her security detail.



Sunday, October 06, 2013
 

"I thought Racism was illegal."

The Daily Mail reports:

Lord Sugar faced police racism probe after joking on Twitter that crying Chinese boy was upset 'because he was told off for leaving the production line of the iPhone 5'
How far we have fallen.

In speaking of our fall, I do not refer the belief of the complainant, Nichola Szeto, that Lord Sugar's joke was racist: stupid people have always been with us. The joke was not remotely racist. Apple might have cause to whine, at the implication that the company employs child labour, but Apple Inc. probably has enough sense to refrain from going to law at a joke and getting a tidal wave of bad publicity. Poor Ms Szeto herself nearly had the sense to refrain from going to law at a joke and getting a tidal wave of bad publicity. It did take Merseyside’s Hate Crime Investigation Unit two tries before they could get her to ruin her business and reputation:

She was contacted by police on Wednesday but declined to give a statement. At 8am the next day, she was again contacted by officers who said they wanted to visit her home. Instead, she agreed to attend a police station in Central Liverpool later that day, where she spent an hour giving a statement to two officers.

I do not refer to the mistaken belief of Ms Szeto that racism is both illegal and a proper noun. State schools are often not very good, and in all fairness how far can we blame someone for thinking that an opinion might be illegal, when the police evidently thought so too? Or perhaps Merseyside Hate Crime Investigation Unit thought no such thing but was just anxious to drum up trade in a slow market. You know times are hard in the hate biz when you get sales calls at eight in the morning. Funny, though, when I have once or twice called to report the old sort of crime it took Plod ages to answer the phone. Why Merseyside police seem keener on home visits to well-toned ladies upset at what someone said on Twitter than on home visits to Toxteth amphetamine addicts beating their women is just one of those unfathomable mysteries.

How far we have fallen when this can be part of the normal operation of the care of a state for its citizen, in a country that once had something like freedom:

However, the remark was in the end classed as a ‘hate incident’ – which means no further action will be taken, although details will be kept on file.

Got that? Not even the zealous young commissars that they send to work in the Hate Crime Investigation Unit could find a enough of a crime to give the boys in the CPS something to work with. What a scalp that would have been: a Labour peer and a TV celebrity. All would have trembled at the power and reach of the law if such a man were brought down. Alas for the Hate Crime Investigation Unit, this time it was not to be. But it is still a "hate incident". Not an alleged hate incident, or a complaint of a hate incident, an official hate incident. On file, for use if need be.



Saturday, October 05, 2013
 

That's not an insult to your parents. THIS is an insult to your parents.

That.

The man who hated Britain: Red Ed's pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country.
- Geoffrey Levy, in a hit piece in the Daily Mail aimed at Ed Miliband.

This.

I am at no loss for information about you and your family; but I am at a loss where to begin. Shall I relate how your father Tromes was a slave in the house of Elpias, who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck? Or how your mother practised daylight nuptials in an outhouse next door to Heros the bone-setter, and so brought you up to act in tableaux vivants and to excel in minor parts on the stage?
- Demosthenes, in a hit piece aimed at Aeschines.


 

Discussion point: circumcision

Circumcision ruling: European bureaucrats are effectively banning Jewish boys, argues Brendan O'Neill, quoting the Jerusalem Post and unintentionally supported in his argument by the creepy quote from the Council of Europe in which it calls for "debate" and in the same breath announces what the result of said debate is to be. And this was put forward by a German rapporteur. I am not usually one for endless digs at modern Germans for evil done before most of them were born, but, Frau Rupperecht, do you have any idea of what that must look like to some of the Jerusalem Post's older readers?

And yet - irreversible modification of a child's body without the child's consent. Gulp.

And yet again - parents irreversibly modify their children's bodies by surgery all the time.

We have discussed this several times before, acrimoniously. Any new thoughts? Any constructive reformulations of old thoughts?

I have a question for medically knowledgeable readers. I gather that a far higher proportion - 79% in 2002 - of men in the US are circumcised than in the UK, yet the number uncircumcised is also huge. There must therefore be scope for large scale comparisons of outcomes. Have these been done? Does male circumcision make much difference?



Thursday, October 03, 2013
 

Samizdata quote of the day

We are the ones, we militants without a strategy of emancipation, who are (and who have been for some time now) the real aphasics! And it is not the sympathetic and unavoidable language of movementist democracy that will save us.

- Professor Alain Badiou, in an article arguing that "We need to rediscover the language of Communism."