'Nother Solent

This letter struck a heavy blow against my self-image.

I always thought I was Mol-ra's evil twin. Now I find out she's mine. Waah, boo-hoo, I want to be the baddie and get all the best lines. Here's the letter:

Your post All Must Have Prizes caused me to think of this post by your Evil Twin, Ms. Breen: [link refers to an article by one Shawna Gale who went to Yale and is cross because she's unemployed - NS] What is the connection? That the letter writer is following the same theory you belabor in your post: she spent a lot of time and effort on her degree therefore it must be worth a lot, only the stupid society around her won't recognize that fact.

Laboriously,
Alan M. Carroll

Indeed so. The same phenomenon was observed by Samizdatan David Carr. During his time in the entertainment industry he developed the theory that the reason why actors, directors and so on are so left-wing was that they all worked their socks off to produce something frightfully meaningful for the Edinburgh Fringe and then played it to an audience of their mothers. If only, they dream, society was so arranged as to ensure them an audience. They worked for it, didn't they?

Sailors and librarians.

Christopher Pastel replies, neatly drawing together several lines of discussion:

"I have my doubts about removing paint to make the ships less flammable. Perhaps that was true for a short time in the aftermath of the Battle of the Coral Sea, but the ongoing reason for removing old paint is to remove the rusty spots before applying a new coat of paint. Have you ever been to sea for an extended period of time? The salt eats away at everything, and only constant cleaning (swabbing the decks) and constant repair (chipping and painting) keep the ships from becoming floating rustbuskets. Yes, it's also important to keep the troops and sailors busy (I was a Marine serving on a ship when enlisted as part of Ship's Company and when an officer as part of the Embarked Troops), but it's even more important to keep the equipment in good shape.

"MCJ brings up a good point, which I can relate to because of my experience as Chief Clerk for the Court. I almaost started a revolution when I began by saying that our purpose was to serve the public. As the librarians know, the public can be downright rude at times. I had an incident where a customer became surly and rude. I could see that my clerk was becoming closer and closer to losing her temper, so I went to the window to handle the problem. There was absolutely nothing we could do to solve the problem without having the state hire 2 or 3 more people for the office (fat chance!), so all I did was smile and agree with the customer that yes, it was a shame that we didn't have more people and that we wished we could help him. He finally left feeling really disgruntled because he never had the satisfaction of a nice row.

"What surprised me was the reaction of my clerks who witnessed the interaction. They were unanimous in their feeling that I should have ripped the customer up one side and down the other because of how obnoxious he was being. I had to call each of my clerks into my office one at a time and explain how what I did actually made the obnoxious guy feel worse. I then told them that they had two choices every time they dealt with a customer. One was to deal with the customer even after the customer became rude. The other was to come and get me to deal with the customer after the customer became rude. By having a choice, my clerks were able to keep their cool even when dealing with rude and obnoxious customers, because they were empowered by me not to have to deal with them if they didn't want to. Too many public servants feel they have no choice but to put up with the rudeness of customers, and that can't help but affect their attitudes.

"P.S. It's much more fun being a patent attorney.

Genocide studies is a deeply weird field.

Well, it would be. Whenever I have dipped my toes in those waters I've whipped them out again quick, not just in recoil from the horrific nature of the subject - I would scarcely have opened a web page with that word in the title had I not had some idea of what the contents were likely to be - but also in instinctive revulsion from the schools of demented little professors and "educators" who scavenge in the wake of the pirhanas.

Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One has caught in his net a document produced by just such people. And it's "Approved by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education on September 10th, 1996, for inclusion in the Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum at the secondary level." He thinks that shows the moral bankruptcy of the Anglosphere. It certainly shows that American Irish historians of the famine are frequently far shallower than their Irish Irish equivalents. But we all knew that anyway.

However, does Mr Goldstein really think that the authors of this course of study have any less hatred for America than for Britain? So long as they are listing an oddly-chosen rag bag of British crimes spanning the last four centuries (to view, try Control F and "British Colonial Policies") then they are full of patriotic anger regarding the treatment of American prisoners in the Revolutionary War. But just wait till next term (semester) when the class does the Indian Wars and see what they say then.

The fact is that there is a whole class of minor academics who were once moved and outraged by the suffering of the Irish at the hands of the British, or by the suffering of other races at the hands of whites. But that motivation has long ago ceased to interest them.

They'd hate Ireland too, if they stayed there long enough to hear the church bells ring.

The librarians have not yet begun to fight.

Christopher Johnson of MCJ defends the honour of his much maligned tribe.

Potemkin China.

The Washington Post pierces China's Economic Facade.

The Navy Lark.

Reader Jim Miller said that Myria's experiences in a semiconductor plant, and the general discussion of mindless and mindful adherence to Policy put him in mind of The Caine Mutiny.

"In the book, a cynical, experienced officer explains to a new one how the US Navy worked. It is a system, he says, designed by geniuses to be run by idiots."

As ever policy sometimes lagged behind reality:

"...the WW II Navy systems drove the new competent people nuts when they encountered them. And many had to be altered to cope with the actual war conditions. My favorite example: For years, to keep the sailors busy, the Navy had had them paint everything on the ships, over and over. This turned out to make them much more flammable, as they learned at the battle of Coral Sea, and so the sailors were then set to scraping off the paint they had applied earlier."

Yet I read this (and I have no reason to suppose that Mr Miller thinks otherwise) as more than just another "top brass are all twits" story. "Keeping the sailors busy" was not such a bad objective - the evil consequences of idleness in an army or a navy are well known.. Just so long as the bull does not become a substitute for readiness and ability to fight.

All I need are clicks, clicks. Clicks are all I need.

With a little help from my friends the hit-counter should hit forty thousand today. But will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty four?

Link to this.

Google caves in to pressure from the Church of Scientology. However Instapundit, where I found this Microcontent News story, later reports that Google has got back its nerve.

Ethnic politics: don't play with fire.

And that's about all I know of the rights and wrongs of the conflict in Sri Lanka, but these lines from an editorial in the ColomboPage: Sri Lankan News and Daily Reports struck a chord:

"....It is a reasonable point of view, considering that the US has itself declared a war on terror and has banned the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] within its shores. It is, in any event, almost unprecedented for the US to issue a warning while a peace process is in progress. Obviously there is a change of heart in the US as far as its policy on the LTTE is concerned. The US government did not raise a whimper when there was LTTE aggression of much meaner and destructive proportions several years back into the conflict. There have been several documented instances where the US government issued statements that the Sri Lankan government should “enter into a negotiated settlement” soon after the Tigers had carried out bombings in Colombo city, for instance."

The witchunt.

Let's get one thing clear. The child's torso found in the Thames was all too real. The police are working with grim seriousness to find those who murdered and dismembered a child for purposes of witchcraft. So such things can happen. That said, I welcome this blast of cold reason on the subject of Satanic abuse from Damian Thompson in the Telegraph. (A pound to a penny the panic-mongers are reading hideous mystic significance into the fact that he's called Damian. You know, The Omen.) In truth, Thompson is too restrained. He writes:

"...village gossip about satanic practices led to the removal of nine children from their homes; after a £6 million inquiry, all charges were dismissed and social workers criticised for planting ideas in children's heads."

Stuff the six million pounds. Some of those children were removed from their homes as toddlers and kept by the State for five years. Parents, think about that.

Transcripts of the original interrogations - no other word will fit - show not merely leading questions, but a remorseless verbal pummelling of the children from which only one answer would free them. We are so used to seeing the word "witchunt" as an allegory for McCarthyism that we forget how the word arose, how it came to be feared. The widening circle of denunciations that fuelled the frenzy followed a pattern already old before Salem.

All must have prizes.

My dears, such a quaint letter has appeared in the Times Educational Supplement. It quite brings back old times.

Where therefore, has the idea come from that only C grade and above is "good"? To imply therefore that those who are below the "norm" are "failing", is to decry the effort they put into achieving their D to G grades.

Breathe it in, my loves, breathe it in. That Marxian whiff of the Labour Theory of Value. That Eau de Staffroom 1970, tinctured with patronage. The children of the workers may not be able to read, write or add up, but the poor lambs did their pitiable best.

Who is this Stupid White Man Moore anyway?

Lileks knows. Great thing about blogging, it gets you kulcha. Had I not blogged I might very well have lived and died in ignorance of the works of Ted Rall, Michael Moore and Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Remind me, why do I do this?

Expect more of this.

Peru car bomb kills nine in an act of terrorism connected with the forthcoming visit of President Bush.

The Minstrels' song.

I've had a couple of e-mails from those wandering troubadours of the internet (note totally inoffensive metaphor this time, which as an additional bonus makes me a sort of chatelaine who doth invite the noble bard to singeth a new lay unto this right worshipful company. Cool and I dig the wimple), Alex Bensky and Myria.
Alex writes, regarding yesterday's lion & oryx story:

On the other hand, when I lived in Israel I heard the following story:

An American minister is touring Israel and happens to pay a visit to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. There he is astonished to see a lion and a lamb in the same enclosure.

Unable to contain himself he rushes to the zoo director's office. "Sir," he exclaims, "this is the most remarkable and hopeful thing I have ever seen. Here in this holy land that is torn by hatred and conflict I see a lion and a lamb sharing the same enclosure. How have you accomplished this wonderful thing?"

"Easy," says the zoo director, "every morning we throw in another lamb."

Now I ask you, is that nice? Turning to the Lileks-inspired discussion of "it's company policy", Myria writes:

I used to run a semiconductor plant. For obvious reasons we had policies, lots and lots of policies - two big thick books full of them, to be exact. Most of these covered manufacturing issues. You did X, Y, and Z at step such-and-such. If something deviated from the norm you did H, I, and J. But of course no policy can be written such that it allows for every possibility, not to mention that semiconductor manufacturing can sometimes
be as much a black art as a science. The people following those policies by and large had no idea why they were doing the things they were doing. You could tell them to sit in front of a machine that tested Ir, for instance,
and look for a number on the display between X and Y, but good luck trying to teach them what Ir even was or why it was important. To even begin to understand the "whys" would require a background in math, semiconductor physics, and electronic theory that one could simply not reasonably expect out of a high school graduate making $10 an hour to sit in front of an Ir tester all day.

So they were supposed to do a job following a policy, they had no idea why the policy was what it was and you could not expect them to learn. Inevitably things would happen that were not covered in the policy or were sufficiently outside the norm, even if they were covered somewhat in the policy, to cause them to be suspect. They could, if that happened, continue to blindly follow the policy no matter what. That would be the easy answer, but mistakes could end up costing thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on how many lots were involved, or, worse yet, could result in bad product getting shipped to customers. Neither of those things we could afford, so everyone was trained from day one to, if something didn't seem to be covered by the policy or flat didn't seem right, to go alert their supervisor who would then go to someone who was qualified to make a determination of whether there was a real problem or not and how to fix it if there was. That usually meant me, and it was a massive pain in my behind because it meant that I had to deal with a lot of little problems that really didn't matter. But that was why they paid me the big bucks and it also meant that a lot of big problems were caught before they could become big problems.

Now obviously we weren't dealing with the general public at all and not directly with customers that much (we had an outside sales department for that). But frankly I don't see how the principle is any different.

You go into a bank or a library and there's a problem. The teller or librarian has a policy but you're saying things aren't correctly covered under the policy. Your correspondent says that you should then go to someone who is qualified to make that determination, but my feeling is that responsibility should not be on you. The bank teller or the librarian should be the one to *automatically* go to someone who is qualified to make that determination, not sit there and stonewall you till doomsday. It's their policy and their responsibility to not blindly follow it no matter what, putting the burden on the customer. The uber-policy should be that if there is a problem with a policy you should go and find someone who can resolve it, not just set it aside or try and ignore it.

The whole problem comes down to one of attitude. When something went wrong in the plant I ran it could cost big bucks. If it resulted in bad product being shipped out the door it could cost millions in lost orders at worst and loss of customer good will at best. But we were dealing with a physical product and obvious consequences to mistakes created by blindly following policies. When dealing with people those consequences are less obvious and you may even have the feeling that they're near nil. If you're a bank teller and you anger a customer by blindly following policy, so what? Likely you already have their money anyway. If you're a librarian or a civil servant it's even worse. You're virtually immune to any consequence so blindly following a policy - in reality, using it as a shield to any kind of thinking - becomes very attractive.

When I ran a plant our policies were designed to be guides for people who didn't really know why they were doing things to know what to do. They were not substitutes for thought, and they were not excuses not to try and resolve problems by saying "well that's the policy!". That's the problem, in both Lilek's bleat and your bank example the policy is used as a shield, as an absolute. If the bank teller or the librarian is not capable of resolving a problem with the policy, that's fine, neither were most of the people who worked for me. But the people who worked for me were trained to then find someone who was capable of resolving the problem, not just blow it off.

EU yet more sneaky evil alert.

David Carr at Sammy's Data* should drop a line to Christopher Booker on this one. Or write the Telegraph column himself. Any way you want, man, but make people listen.

*This is what my kids call it. Who is the mysterious Sammy?

I found this Washington Post editorial

via The Corner, which also ran a hilarious selection of results from their "Define 'Oprahfication'" competition. The editorial, however, wasn't funny at all: They Died for Lack of a Head Scarf

The door of the animal rescue centre opens.

Out comes a cute little moppet, NATS, and bounding at her side is a loveable doggie, BLOGWATCH. Suddenly a little boy, TIMMY, rounds the corner. He appears to be basically a fine, manly little chap, but shows signs of having fallen into bad company lately, perhaps even that of editors.

TIMMY: Hey! That's my dog!

NATS: Not any more. You wuz crool to Blogwatch. You left him shut inside while you went off places.

TIMMY mutters something about having a living to earn and then says, "I'll prove he's mine. Here Blogwatch! Here boy!"

BLOGWATCH bounds forward... but then stops. He pauses, looking back and forth. His tail thumps the floor once. Then he turns and scampers off to join NATS. The two new friends go off into the sunset without a backward glance. TIMMY turns for home, shedding bitter tears of remorse. "If only," he sobs brokenly, "if only I had taken him out more when I had the chance..."

Could this scenario (which is of course purely fictional) ever really come to pass? Watch this space.

Am I so shameless?

Here is an example of a blog even more tightly focused than Patrick Crozier's UK Transport Blog. It is UK Shamed Again, a site entirely devoted to newspaper stories wherein the UK is revealed as the 'worst' in Europe at this and that. The quote marks round 'worst' are mine, for around five-eigths of the supposedly shocking facts revealed leave me indifferent or actively cheering (So French workers are hard to dismiss? Yes, and does anyone sane fancy being a French employer? Thus the poorest section of French society, the unemployed, pay the price for the featherbedding of their richer neighbours.)

The motto of the blog is "learning from our cousins in Europe." The entries for which I have most sympathy are those on health. Here we could learn from Europe, but not, I suspect, in the way the author of the blog wants us to. My husband was in and out of a French casualty ward in about fifty minutes, including X-ray. (Let me propose a bargain: don't tell me the stories of your families' awful experiences in British hospitals and in return I won't tell you mine. Let this courageous article by Observer Health editor Anthony Browne, which I will keep posting at regular intervals, stand for all our horror stories.) The secret of this efficiency? A bill.

Yet I cannot leave without saying that the author is dead right on cooking. No great cook myself, even I am depressed to see that kids these days do "food technology" and design a pizza on a computer rather than handle real cheese and real mushrooms. "Yeuch, Miss, we don't fancy that."

In defence of policy.

Chris Pastel writes so reasonably as to quite take the wind out of my sails.

"I used to feel the same way as you and James Lileks until I became the Chief Clerk for a court here in the States (before I became a patent attorney). I discovered early on that I did NOT want my clerks varying from policy, simply because they had no understanding of why the policy existed and therefore could not be trusted to deviate from the policy only when appropriate and in a manner that did not violate the reasons for the policy in the first place. Only my deputy chief clerk and I could authorize deviations from policy, which we did whenever the circumstances made such an approach the right thing to do.

"There is a place in every organization for the lower level people who simply follow directions. Believe me, I have seen enough potentially catastrophic situations occur when someone tries to be accommodating regarding a policy without understanding the underlying reason for the policy.

"So, what to do? The answer is take the request for deviating from "the policy" to someone who has the authority to permit the deviation. In a library, that person is the head librarian. At a bank teller window, that person is the head teller or possibly the branch manager. Just as every organization has people who only can follow policy, every organization has a person who can authorize deviating from policy.

The nearest thing to a little puff of wind to keep my rant moving is that bit about "not understanding the reasons." The fine point of my whinge about banks was that the tellers said, "it's our policy" and implied "and that's that, now go home." I shall come clean and admit that on one of my complaints the bank was actually being quite reasonable, had I but known the reason. So the moral is, tell her about it. (Cue Billy Joel song of same name (and sub-cue 245 e-mails saying that the song was actually written by The Dinosaurs in 1956, vocals: Fred Flintstone.))

A friend wondered aloud yesterday whether the end-time has arrived.

No, not the usual apocalyptic fears. But the lion has lain down with the lamb - or at least a lioness has lain down with an oryx calf. We are inured to the daily cruelties of the animal world, but this story is both sad and strange.

So true.

Lilek's Bleat today has a librarian bleating "but it's policy." Been there. You ever tried complaining to a bank? No, of course not, like you never tried breathing. The last three times I did it the first response was always some version of "but that's what we do." And nothing else. Just "it's standard procedure" or "following our normal policy." Nothing on the lines of "and the reason for this, of which you may not have thought, is so-and-so." So I'm meant to say, "Oh, pardon me do. Now I know that you mess about another 3.2 million people in just the same way as you do me, I am restored to happiness."

The Blood Libel, and a little surprise.

As was widely reported everywhere but the newspapers, the Blood Libel was calmly and lengthily reported as fact in a Saudi newspaper, which necessarily means a Saudi government newspaper. One of the best views of this I read was to be found in Electrolite. Apparently the Saudi article was a bit much even for the State department smoothies in the US. Hence this, found in Ken Layne's blog.

Well and good. But one little word surprised me. See if you can spot it here: "...helps to make her lies sound credible."

See, there are opportunities for employment and public position for women in Saudi after all. It's just what you have to do to get 'em.

Why is there so little interest

in the Marines being sent to Afghanistan? This is a war we're in. It is a big step up from peacekeepers at Bagram airbase, or strolling round Kabul with an Afghan chum the way they used to have those four-man English/French/Russian/US patrols in post-war Berlin. I think the war is just and necessary, but it is disconcerting to see so little discussion.

No comment.

Patio Pundit has taken away his comments facility. No, this is isn't because he wants to rename his patio "Zimbabwe". Some computer glitch meant that I couldn't link to him at all and several others also reported problems. They are problems no longer, and you can always send him an e-mail. Oh, and be sure to read the bit that comes after this intro. It starts by disclaiming any intention to make a habit of takedowns. But...

...former State Department sophisticate Dennis Ross has written an op-ed [on Arafat etc.] in the Washington Post that is just begging for a Fisking. I am not in Lileks' league by any means, but I'll do my best. Here goes:

And go he does. Read it.

"Blair, stuff your bribe,"

says Gibraltar, according to this report in The Scotsman.

For no particular reason

I wondered what the New York Times made of the moves towards a hunting ban over here. It had this straightforward account. Although I don't suppose your average NYT reader is a hunter or likes hunters, there were a suprising number of purely factual hunting stories. In my youth I would have been on the side of the hunt sabouteurs, although I was never much bothered over the issue. Now I see the ban as Blair throwing a crippled victim to the hounds on the left of his party. Unsporting. All the same people who oppose hunting in Britain go into a swoon of admiration at the thought of say, South American Indians, having a mystical relationship with the animals they hunt.

No, no, not the comfy chair!

A few years ago it was common for members of the chattering classes to praise France's inquisitorial system of justice, usually for no better reason than to show off that they knew that the word "inquisitorial" did not necessarily refer to the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. Here is a more considered Indy leader which, as well as illustrating the saying "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence", looks at the defects and benefits of the two systems.

Welcome to the war.

A bolt from the blue: Tony Blair has announced that 1,700 Royal Marines are to be sent to fight - none of your peacekeeping - in Afghanistan. This is what I thought the British Government were going to do in late September; given that they did not do it then I am taken by surprise to see them doing it now. The troops are trained in mountain warfare.

Brit Blogs.

Dan Hartnung writes:

One of the very first (ca. 1999) Brit blogs: Bifurcated Rivets - Which is definitely left wing, although his style is a link with a comment of rarely more than a short sentence, and less than 10% political. Mostly it's what another blogger calls "shiny things". And Interconnected which has been around since 2000. So has plasticbag.org which is occasionally political as well.

Plenty more here: GBLOGs. As usual 90% will be mainly personal journals, not punditblogs.

[Note from NS: the last one seems to be a listing of Brit Blogs of all types. Very interesting.]

Martin Devon a.k.a. Patio Pundit

quotes me as saying "... the fact that Google does this [can be googlebombed, shows Tim Blair as ruler of the galaxy etc.] shows its deficiencies as a search engine." and then goes on to respond thus:

It pains me to disagree. A search engine looks for web pages that are most relevant to a given set of words. The fact that due to a googlebomb Marc Herold's article comes up 2nd, after the googlebomb is not a deficiency in google. In order for the googlebomb to work, many independant bloggers have to conclude that a given googlebomb is relevant to his/her readership. Additionally, the weblogs that participate have to have a significant readership. I participated, but my meager readership would not have made any difference in the google results.

Finally, what gogglebombing does in practice proves my argument. Iain Murray's article debunking Herold is totally relevant to anyone researching Afghan civilian casualties. Herold can still be found as the 2nd link. If the google user is getting better, more relevant information how is that a deficiency of google? May all my tools be as deficient.

If Blogger is working properly, my original post on the topic should be here. [Update: link to blog generally (see above) now works fine. Specific link to this post doesn't, but, hey, you can read it below. - NS]

In case it isn't I've reprinted it below.

Kind Regards,

Martin Devon

————————————————————————————————--
But why would they want to
Stephen Green asks if Googlenews can be Googlebombed. Jeff Jarvis (scroll a down a bit) worries that perhaps Googlebombing could be used by for evil, and not just for goodness and niceness. He also links to a slashdot post explaining that the Goggle engineers have factored the technique into the search engine by examining breadth of a link circle.
I don't worry about this at all. I don't think Googlebombing is a nefarious tool, and I don't believe it can be misused. Google is measuring how widely read a web page is. If Instantman or LGF or Megan decide to link to something, I may or may not do so myself. I decide what my reader(s) will see. So if I want to help debunk Marc Herrold it is my choice. The extra 2 people (hi mom and dad!) that see my post are added to Glenn's 10,000* readers, Megan's 3,000* readers and Stephen's 2,500* readers who actually learn about the issue. The fact that goggle finds a post that 15,502* people have actually read is not bogus. It is a good thing. Since all this plays out within our own little Bloggeritaville, we think -- oh it is only us, it is not "legit." But it is.

* I made those numbers up. Seemed like the thing to do when discussing old Marc, even in passing.

Speedblog championships: shock result.

Here is a chance for some raw young blogging talent. Mighty front-runner and hot favourite Natalie Solent has crashed into a writhing knot of blogs and e-mails all requiring intelligent responses. It is all too much. She has limped off the field to get some retail therapy. Now is your chance to zoom smoothly past and claim the gold.

UPDATE: ... but before I go, what has Lancashire ever done to deserve this terrible fate? It has not got me in it. I don't know, first Ken Layne puts me in San Francisco, and now this. On mature consideration though, perhaps those black puddings of theirs count as weapons of mass destruction and merit a pre-emptive strike.

A declaration of non-intent to injure Benjamin Kepple!

There I was, reorganizing my links column and deciding to have a list of twenty old standbys at the top, the numerical limit being chosen arbitrarily. And into my mind popped this sweetly appropriate bit of Browning, despite the fact that it is years since I read the whole poem - I had to check the quote. I'll leave it there for a bit because I like it, but it'll have to go in time because it does rather give the impression that I want to stone Benjamin Kepple.

I do not. His name begins with "B", that's all. Amygdala would be in that slot if it hadn't squeaked into the twenty for reasons alluded to in an earlier post. I have several reasons for wishing naught but good to Mr Kepple. For one thing, getting serious for a minute, it seems that he has had rather too many brushes with death already. For another he runs a good, thoughtful blog. But I might just "stone" him with something embarrasing but harmless, marshmallows or celery for instance, for getting libertarianism so wrong in "Libertarians crack smile."

1. There's little I'd like better than to see the planet, and other planets one day, covered with many different societies, each with its own code of law. The one common rule would be, "you are free to leave." Certainly I would then expect them all to evolve, stimulated by competition and example, but always retaining diversity because that's how human beings are.

Meanwhile, the world is as it is. There is no state that I know of unambiguously better than the one I'm in now, flawed as it is. Nor am I indifferent to the ties of history and family. Nor am I indifferent to the suffering that happens because my own country's laws are so stupid sometimes, which makes me want to change them. Nor have I a green card. These motivations for staying put (well, not the last) would, of course, always apply even in my micro-states but it wouldn't be nearly such a wrench to leave freewheeling Norlonto (=North London Town, a Libertarian in-joke) for the Godly Enclave of Islington (London in-joke).

2. There was a (2), (3) and (4) but they'll have to wait for another time.

Thinkers versus feelers.

There are two deeply-considered posts in Mind Over What Matters. The first gives Jay Zilber's response to the question "Israel vs the Palestinians - why should we care?" Much of the practical argument is spot on. But I'd quarrel with the titles he gives to the two eternal factions. He appears to put the intellectuals indisputably on the side of good, which, to put it mildly, has not always been the case. It is, of course, true that our side is the intelligent side. But, to take his Star Trek analogy further, the Vulcans sometimes have something to learn from the humans, and even, eventually, the Klingons.

The post immediately below "Thinkers versus Feelers" was its inspiration, I'd say. He wonders why, when Bush had called some action of Israel's that had killed innocents while not being aimed at them "counterproductive", no one had the guts to ask the President, "When will America's forces end [their] own "counterproductive" assault on Afghan civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

Plenty of people holding a quite opposite opinion as to what should be done in Afghanistan and Israel to Mr Zilber's would make exactly that parallel. This post made me realise that the mere making of the parallel does not tell you anything as to what you should do next - a fact that both sides should note.

Returning to "thinkers" and "feelers", though, the inadequacy of those titles is shown by the fact that Zilber reproaches Bush Senior for "callous indifference" to Israel. Surely, that is the sin of the Thinker.

There is vanishingly little

that is good to say about affairs in Zimbabwe. I can't bear to read any more about Mugabe celebrating his victory. The thief gloats over his spoils. The nearest to good one can see in the situation is that at least the cowardice and cronyism of most African leaders stands plain for all to see.

Can't they think more than a few years ahead? Mugabe is old. Even if he does die in bed rather than in a noose, his last day is not far off. Then the people of Zimbabwe will turn round and ask, where were you? Now, it's arguable whether faraway countries such as Britain should do anything active regarding Zimbabwe. Perhaps it's even arguable whether their next door neighbours should. But, by God, it isn't asking much that they should refrain from giving the oppressor aid and comfort.