April 20, 2002
The Telegraph does something to restore the tattered reputation of the British Press.
First read this leader on tolerated anti-semitism, then click at the bottom for Mark Steyn's latest column, which asks how many more blind eyes can the UN turn?
Ping-pong
I've added a longer response to Emmanuel Goldstein's response to me. Scroll down three posts to see it. Sorry about the embedded quotes. I did my best to make it clear who was saying what, but I hope this rally doesn't go on much longer as I'm running out of fonts.
Lifestyle necessity: a Tony Blair doll.
Angie Schultz sent me the website of "Herobuilders" dolls, complete with handy "read our hate mail" feature. Angie's accompanying e-mail said, "Dammit, woman, I see you beat me to it *days* ago! Must be the time delay between here and Earth---er!---forget I said that!" I promised to forget instantly. Her secret is safe with me. And you.
"The NHS is not the envy of the world"
, says this Indy leader of a few days ago. It also praises the Tories. I need another coffee.
My pig ate my kitchen...
According to AOL news,"A couple are facing a £5,000 bill after their 12-stone pot-bellied pig ate the kitchen in their two-bedroomed flat. Mike and June Bunter discovered the devastation after leaving Max in the kitchen of their Bournemouth flat while they were out. He had ripped cupboard doors off their hinges and charged at walls and skirting boards. Mike told The Sun: "It looked like a bomb had hit the kitchen. It was smashed to smithereens, with Max sat in the middle of it all. "Once he decided to get stuck in there was only going to be one winner." Now the couple will have to find the money to repair the kitchen themselves as their insurance does not cover damage caused by Max. Mike added: "We have forgiven Max. We couldn't get rid of him because he is a pet and part of the family. He's just very playful and likes attention. The other day he stuck a tusk through the hem of my jeans and dragged me around the room. I suppose he gets mischievous when he's bored." They are now playing Max classical music while they are out in a bid to calm him down. "It's our secret weapon and hopefully it will save him eating us out of house and home," said Mike.Italics added by me. Unsympathetic cackle added by me. Good thing I have better sense than to let such a destructive beast into my home. Excuse me while I clean up some cat vomit.Pot-bellied pig expert Heather Powles said: "We recommend people don't keep them indoors because they're not always well behaved. It's not their fault, they just do what comes naturally."
April 19, 2002
ADDED LATER: According to his latest post, no he doesn't. A slightly fuller response to Mr Goldstein's earlier post follows.
EG: Firstly she claims that one comment about respecting Islam by killing Muslims is actually sarcastic. I doubt she would be so charitable to that piece of excrement Tom Paulin, who would probably claim the same about killing religious American Jews
NS: Firstly, I haven't heard any claim from Paulin that he was being sarcastic. The second difference lies in the likely response of the audience. In this specific case it was readers of a blog vis a vis readers of an Arab newspaper.
EG: Then she says that another piece about killing the bomber's entire family was actually against genocide. Like the bit where he almost, although not quite, calls for the Israelis to clear the West Bank of Palestinians by cutting off their water. Of course this is a more in sorrow than anger piece as USS Clueless says:
I guess I better make something more clear. No, I don't expect Israel to go out and start slaughtering the families of bombers. That's not the point I was trying to make. The point was that when you back someone into a corner and leave them only the alternatives of being killed or lashing out violently, then you better make sure to have plans for violence. If the only way they can survive is to become monsters, then you shouldn't be surprised if they do.
EG: So it's not advocating acting like monsters, its saying they have no alternative. I suppose that's a new twist on things. Gerry Adams didn't advocate bombing innocent civilians, he just claimed that there was no alternative. Sorry, one person doesn't see the difference.
NS: Now you must be kidding. (1) Read again the part where Den Beste says, "I better make something more clear". How much clearer can he make it? To predict likely consequences is not to approve them. Your own side's frequent predictions that, for instance, foreign adventures on the part of the US make terrorism against the US more likely do not in any way approve the terrorism. (NB My own response to that theory is "sometimes." I do not seek to comment on it now.) The Gerry Adams reference is just a tease. It has always been open to those who want a united Ireland to press for one by peaceful means. Nor do you hear a sizeable chunk of British or NI Protestant opinion clamouring for NI Catholics to be killed indiscriminately or driven into the sea.
EG: And then there was the piece de resistance, that the call for bombing Mecca "promotes moderation rather than the reverse". It's quite neat, if a bit implausible, so you could read it. You see it was just putting out a meme, or an idea to think about. Which would not explain Rich Lowry's follow up posting:
Lots of sentiment for nuking Mecca. Moderates opt for something more along these lines: “Baghdad and Tehran would be the likeliest sites for a first strike. If we have clean enough bombs to assure a pinpoint damage area, Gaza City and Ramallah would also be on list. Damascus, Cairo, Algiers, Tripoli and Riyadh should be put on alert that any signs of support for the attacks in their cities will bring immediate annihilation.” Then there are those who think we really can't do too much differently than what were doing now (my original proposition).
EG: Note the absence of any "hey that was just an idea to play with, not to take seriously" or "jeez, I was only joking".
It was a serious thought. He may prefer that we keep bombing - although the term "original proposition" seems to show that he was wobbling, but that's perhaps deconstructing it too much.
NS: Actually the reference to moderates going for Baghdad or Teheran first (and more explicit statements later) does tell me that Lowry was half-joking. I'm not, though, when I say: it is good that the bulk of the Arab world should know that in the event of them using weapons of mass destruction against us it is quite likely that we will do the same against them. Having that made clear might well, by a familiar process of deterrence, save many lives, theirs and ours.
A kinder, gentler France?
I would have thought that all the enforced free time would have meant more political activism, not less. But Philip Delves Broughton says that the either the times or the 35-hour week is tending to ensure that the French lose their passion for power and politics
April 18, 2002
Here I make my stand.
You know, there is something admirable about the way Gordon Brown has dropped all pretence in his latest budget. The Guardian's Hugo Young gives a fair description of how the night's fog has lifted. Now the battle lines are clear. Brown and his chronicler Young believe pouring a river of money down into the NHS will help people. It won't. Here's why...You guessed it. I'm going to post that Anthony Browne Observer article about the harmful results of a command economy in health yet again. Cry all you like, I don't care. I'm going to keep on posting it until every British boy and girl can recite it like you yanks do the Pledge of Alleigance.
They'll sing it at football matches: "'ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go, the failure of the politically controlled, state-funded NHS is sadly as inevitable as the failure of the politically controlled communist economies, 'ere we go..."
They'll joke about it in the playground: "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Sophie" "Sophie who?" "Sophie noble ideology behind the NHS should be ditched because it costs lives. We should ditch the ideology and ditch the NHS"
And so we should. When we do, I'll shut up about it. Odd though it may seem, yesterday's Budget was a step in the right direction.
Blog watch.
Mind over what matters is back, although sounding sore in need of a party. Fortunately one is in the post. England's Sword has been slashing merrily for a couple of days. Dawson hasn't posted since last Friday,but must be home because the blue header strip along the top is subject to mysterious transformations, in tune with who knows what currents of Dawsonian thought. The current currents (don't bake them in your cake) sound romantic and exotic.... Inappropriate is still Inappearing.
April 17, 2002
This is what they call having a bad day.
The PM's official spokesman is feeling harassed."Asked to explain the logic of publishing the Report on the morning of the second busiest day in the Parliamentary calendar, the PMOS said..."Peter Mandleson wants an Ethics Commissioner?"Put to him that the timing of publication wasn't a 'cock-up' but had been planned deliberately because we had something to hide, the PMOS said..."
"Pressed further, the PMOS said..."
"Asked for a reaction to Peter Mandelson's proposal for an 'Ethics Commissioner', the PMOS said he hadn't heard..."
Warblogger Watch
has all the comedy of a stereotypical tourist in some foreign city making cutting remarks about "all these dreadful tourists". He slags off Asparagirl for using a pseudonym while using one himself. He slags off Reynolds et al for "mediocre" and "third-rate" writing while proclaiming that his many errors are just examples of his vigour and spontaneity. He affects outrage at Peter Briffa's obviously humorous lament that he didn't have a stick of dynamite handy when he met Paulin (to alert even the thickest readers that he is joking Briffa goes on to console himself that at least the world wasn't deprived of his weblog); yet you can be sure he'll shriek "only joking" if anyone ever sues him for accusing named individuals of crack addiction or sexual peversion.And I assume he is indeed joking. These hysterical ravings, however, I think he takes seriously:
"...that Reynold's and his sick ilk believe in, where Arabs are savages who don't deserve basic human rights and can be rounded up like cattle, exterminated like vermin."The contrast between that baseless accusation and the sudden gooey outbursts where he reaches out the hand of love to the benighted ones is really quite something.
Goldstein strikes back
with some quotes designed to prove warblogger genocide-lust. Here's the link. I'm unconvinced. As one of the comments says, Swift did not really wish to eat Irish babies. The quote from the brothers Judd can far more naturally be read as an sarcastic attack on the adulation by the Muslim press of anyone, however evil, who is killed by the Israelis, and on the many fervent expressions of desire to be martyred. "You wanna be martyrs? Happy to oblige" is a completely obvious and frequently made black joke.Moving on to the second quote, click the link and you'll find that Goldstein did not get the words direct from USS Clueless but via Warblogger Watch, who himself got them from someone else. Had Goldstein or Blair troubled to get his facts from the source the pair of them would have read something a few lines later that made put a very different complexion on matters: "Can we outside the region prevent this? We in the US can do so by quietly letting the Israeli government know that it would be a step too far. But we can do that, because Israel still has something to lose by antagonizing us." It goes on to make quite clear that Den Beste's point was "don't push Israel into a corner where they have nothing more to lose." At the bottom of the entry there is what ought to be superfluous further clarification, presumably added as a result of being quoted in Warblogger Watch.
The third quote, from NRO's Corner, is self-evidently a call to think about what act merits what retaliation now rather than in the heat of outrage. Hence it promotes moderation rather than the reverse. Yes, it mentions the possibility of flattening Mecca - as a retaliation if their side were to use weapons of mass destruction. It is an example of the widespread Warblogger meme of applying the lessons of the Cold War to the Arab Street. Deterrence, Mutual Assured Destruction, Balance of Terror, all that. You may approve or disapprove of this scheme but its adherents don't want Armageddon in Saudi or Iraq any more than their fathers wanted to nuke Moscow.
BTW "genocide" means the destruction or attempted destruction of an entire race.
I'm not sure which way the joke is meant to run in the second comment.
I could get to like this man.
Rod Liddle on why Paulin is a twat, why the Jews weren't kidding about anti-semitism, and why we should not censor the British National Party.I've just seen that Peter Briffa has both this op-ed and the Osama dolly thing. He also alerts the world to the dangers of surgery. He is quite wrong, though, to say, "this could happen to anyone." It couldn't happen to me.
UPDATE: Dodgeblog had unerringly homed in on the same story, charmingly described in culinary terms.
But after all that is said, the accounts given are not disproved by being multiply reported. Or proved either.
April 16, 2002
I gotta go.
I am slowly working through the mail pile, and expect to reach Base Camp C soon. From there I shall launch my assault on the summit.
Do you knit too, or just sew?
The brothers Judd asked me that question (the answer is aaaaagh!) and sent me this link to this USA Weekend article by Michele Hatty on an unlikely form of "therapy with a takeaway" in the wake of September 11."In the days following Sept. 11, young people retreated to an unlikely place in their search for solace: a yarn store. The shop in question, Los Angeles' La Knitterie Parisienne, quickly became a haven for gathering, comforting and -- not incidentally -- knitting.Read the rest. Apparently there is a resurgence of knitting among young US urban professionals, some of them male."Customers collected their yarn and anchored themselves to spots around the big wooden table in the store's back room, the gentle clicking of the needles lending a bit of peace to each person there. "They needed to get away from the television and just to talk to each other," explains owner Edith Eig, who relocated the cozy shop six years ago after 20 years in New Jersey."
Good luck to them. So why the aaaaaagh? Because knitting is topologically impossible. (Like sewing machines. When does the needle come up through the fabric, eh?) All knitters have the secret of extra-dimensional finger movements, which could easily be developed into an FTL drive. They are keeping it from the rest of us for fear that the rest of the galaxy wouldn't be able to cope were humans unleashed upon the defenceless stars.
The Sorceror's Apprentice.
I rather think Emmanuel Goldstein is away. Someone really ought to tell him that in his absence his naughty little apprentice has been playing with the spell book and posting inflammatory comments."Do they [the warbloggers] not realise that the biggest obstacle in the way of their dream of a genocide on the Euphrates.... "The italics are mine.
Twenty years ago I was sympathetic to the peace movement. Such was my concern that I sent off for a handy pack of cards containing useful facts and debating points. A great many of these dealt with reasons to suppose that nuclear war might well happen and the horrors that would be unleashed if it did. Although I did not get many converts with my little cards no one accused me of wishing to have a nuclear war merely because I warned that it was not impossible and would be a fearful thing. Perhaps standards of charity in debate have declined, or perhaps my different experience these days is merely a function of having different opponents. Goldstein (if it is he) says "the warbloggers" - not "some" but "the" - actually want to commit genocide. What evidence does he have for this dreadful charge? I read a lot of warblogs and I have not seen even one statement remotely resembling such a wicked desire.
UPDATE. Re-reading my own post, I see I have left myself open to misinterpretation. Warbloggers do, by definition, want the war on terror to be waged. They do not merely warn against it, they advocate it as better and safer than alternative strategies. My analogy with my time in CND does not hold when considering the "basic war". In making that analogy, I referred to a common additional belief held by many but not all warbloggers. (I myself sometimes do and sometimes do not convince myself that it is a probable outcome.) Namely that if terrorism is seen to succeed then there will be more of it, and in return more and more indiscriminate reprisals, until you might end up with mutually catastrophic, intentionally genocidal war between Islam and the West/Israel. Were this to happen the West would "win", for lack of a better word, but that would be small comfort indeed. The point I was making was that I haven't come across any warblogger who wants this nightmare to come true. They want to fight before the monster grows too big.
April 15, 2002
Moppets & Martyrs (international section).
Our latest cutie, found at Don McArthur's blog, shows a child dressed up as a suicide bomber at a march in Berlin.UPDATE: Instapundit comments on the same picture. As does Damianation! As does Lileks. (It's looking as if all I need do is direct you to the links on the left hand column.) (I wasn't kidding. Now it's LGF)
Earlier Moppets can be found here, here and here.
Notice this?
"....His message jarred with a poem by Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to London published on the same day. It saluted an 18-year-old woman bomber who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29.The praise for Ayat Akhras and criticism of the White House by Ghazi al-Gosaibi, the veteran Ambassador who was supported by Britain as a candidate to head Unesco, was published on the front page of Al-Hayat, a newspaper based in London. “Tell Ayat, the bride of loftiness . . . she embraced death with a smile while the leaders are running away from death,” Dr al-Ghosaibi wrote. “Doors of heaven are opened for her.”
(From a Times story. Emphasis mine.)
Truly, it seems as if the world has written "Not To Be Resucitated"
at the foot of Zimbabwe's hospital bed. But sometimes medicine might do more harm than good. This story details how food aid is being used as a weapon against the children of MDC supporters. Would more aid get them fed or just prolong the regime that denies them food? I do not know.
It brings down a curse to kill a king.
At least that's how it seems for poor Nepal since the heir to the throne massacred his own family last June. Now we learn that 164 people have been killed during a Maoist attack on a police post.Predictably there are those who think the killers just need some love and attention:
Siddhi Lal Singh, a Communist Party central committee member, said: "After so many killings, and with the economy shattered completely, the government should start talking immediately."We in Britain know that you should never reward terrorism with immediate surrender. We wait thirty years and then surrender.
Bang goes my reputation as a schoolmarm.
Should it be "ran" or "run" in that last post?UPDATE: opinion - er - ran 100% with "run".
Even a sports duh-brain like me
sat up and took notice of Paula Radcliffe's performance in the London Marathon. Not only was her race the second fastest marathon of all time for a woman but it was also her first competitive marathon, and it was ran without clocks or pacemakers. She had no means of telling how she was doing. A fantasy come true.
April 14, 2002
"...Palestine saves death for its civilians, little boys and young women. This is why Arafat lives and Ayat Akhras is dead."
Read the rest at Turkey Blog.
MKultra = MK Ultra
Matt Johnson writes:"...the level of conspiracy mindedness of Ray Vaughn, he's probably talking about the MK-Ultra program. CIA Mind control. Most of what you read about it seems to be crap, like this. (Of course supermodels must be involved!)Not to mention telepathic instructions to submarines. Way cool stuff.
Steve Bodio is a five-star natural history writer.
(He didn't ask for the plug; but he is very complimentary to me at the bottom of the page. I trust his profession will ensure that he will take it as a compliment if I employ another of my famously robust metaphors from natural history and describe this as "mutual grooming behaviour") This is what he has to say about museums:The recent post about the "modernization" of museums touched something close to my heart. I grew up in the Boston area (I now live in New Mexico) and have fond memories of the vast collection of stuffed birds and mammals in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. They have now been replaced by dioramas, and I doubt anyone could gain an appreciation for the diversity of creatures on the planet by looking at dioramas and playing video games. I remember spending hours there, dreaming about the places these animals came from and hoping I would get there one day.Today, it wasn't such a bad bet.Such people as Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, and my friend, the English zoologist and artist Jonathan Kingdon have all written essays about the superiority of old-style museums to the "interactive", shallow displays that have replaced them. All say that they were attracted to the sciences and to their fascination to the whole natural world by wandering through institutions like the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the London Museum. In 1994 I had a chance to visit the Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology at Oxford (at the suggestion of Kindgon). It was an incredible place, full of the real objects, collections, detritus, and notes of generations of British Colonial officers, administrators, and scientists. I could have spent a month there. It was decidedly un-PC: I wonder if it is still the same.
One more note: when we were at the British Museum that year we saw a dinosaur exhibit. It was full of electronic dinosaurs. There were a huge pair of plastic casts of Deinochierus arms hanging down from the ceiling, with a stern warning not to touch them. No real bones were in evidence anywhere, nor did I see any stuffed skins of anything else. Years later on my first visit to Ulaan Bataar (one of my secret favorite cities in the world) I saw the actual arms. They were surrounded by swarms of children touching them, as I did myself. The rest of the collection included real bones found by Roy Chapman Andrews on his expeditions to the Gobi in the 1920s, which I had read about since I was a child. Which museum do you think would inspire a child to further dreaming?
I don't know about those numbers -- I check your site twice a day on the off-chance you've added something else.
Along with Samizdata (to which I contributed a slogan a couple of months ago) you're among my top five blogs.Best always,
Steve Bodio
Magdalena NM
PS FYI, I am a cradle-Catholic, Kipling-quoting, Churchill-admiring, science fiction reading, gun-loving, libertarian natural history writer, for what it's worth. I also enjoy going to Central Asia and collect books about it and the Great Game. All of which might explain my affection for your blog, Perry deHavilland's comments. etc.
A quickie reflection from me along the same lines: all these animal activists who think zoos - all zoos, however spacious the enclosures, however important the breeding programme - demeaning ought to think ahead twenty years. A generation might grow up who have never looked in wonder at a tiger. If all a child has ever seen is film of rare animals then maybe it will seem as unreal and unimportant as a film that the tiger should depart this earth.
We have "Children in Need"; they have this.
Fox News have an article about the Saudi telethon The Saudis have assured the US that it is just about helping Palestinians generally and not about rewarding death cultists. Obviously they aren't quite getting the message across."A 6-year-old boy, with a plastic gun slung over his shoulder and fake explosives strapped around his waist, walked into a donation center and made a symbolic donation of plastic explosives, according to Al Watan daily."Naturally the shocked authorities hastily told the wee one to stop this disgraceful behaviour, and reported his parents to Social Services. Yeah, right.
Jenin.
There's a BBC radio debaters' programme called "The Moral Maze". Trying to steer the right course when writing about the claims and counter-claims of a situation like that in Jenin, where the Palestinians claim the IDF has massacred hundreds, is very like negotiating your way through a moral maze. Someone trying to stick to the right path is Damian Penny. His writing on the Independent's reporting of the situation at Jenin should be an example to the Independent.
Closing the doors of history.
Robbyn Kenyon writes:When I was growing up there was a museum in New Hampshire called the Morse Museum. It was small, private and, for a child, absolutely wondrous. Originating in the 1920s or 30s, it contained such incredible marvels as actual, real lions and cheetah cubs (stuffed, of course) and the skins of many other animals (mostly elk and deer of various types) decorated the walls. There were displays of incredibly complicated, carved ivory (the real stuff) and chests and tables of teak, mahogany and brass. There were a couple of cases of human remains, one male and one female which, far from being frightening or ghoulish were remarkable and fascinating. And there were lots of glass cases containing the money of various countries, clothing of various types (ie: the shoes that the women of China who had their feet bound wore), pictures and various other cultural artifacts like bowls, knives and spears.How indeed. In the last year of primary school I noticed that when black or brown-skinned characters (or even black or brown-haired white characters) appeared in some of the older books I read, they never seemed to be the heroes. I was saddened because for some reason I had decided that they were the "team" I supported. I won't say my outrage had much of a moral basis; it was only on about the same level as my irritation that cats, which I also liked, never seemed to get a good press either. Nevertheless I had discovered for myself something about the world that helped me later decide that racism happens and is wrong. In contrast, the modern system seems to be to present to little children a sanitized present where every second white mummy is a car mechanic and every second black mummy a judge. Then, suddenly, the children are held to have reached the age to Know The Truth about "a society irredeemably soaked in unconscious and conscious racism." The past, of course, is shown as nothing but one long act of predation by whites against blacks.My parents and I visited it several times when I was growing up. It was a taste of the rest of the world and it was one of my favorite places to go.
When I last tried to find some information on this museum, I discovered that it no longer existed.
I know that by today's "enlightened" standards the whole thing was terribly un-PC. One doesn't go big game hunting any more - it isn't acceptable. One doesn't show off artifacts like the tiny Chinese shoes because they reflect the unacceptable practice of crippling women. One doesn't display intricately carved ivory because of both the nastiness attached to the harvesting and the low-paid (or unpaid) labor that was likely used to create the statue.
While I might agree that any of these things shouldn't go on, or at least not as they did in the last part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, I can't for the life of me understand what it accomplishes to pretend they never happened. Nor can I see why it's better for anyone (children included) not to know about it. I would no more shoot a lion than I would shoot my cat! I cannot condone harvesting ivory with the attendant decimation of the elephant population - but that splendid, spectacular museum piece was created in a time when this wasn't a consideration and it cannot be regarded apart from that. As for the little Chinese slippers (also a product of their time and culture), I have never seen them anywhere else. They were silken, exquisitely embroidered and about 4 inches long. It was my first exposure to the notion of arrogant cruelty and I never forgot it.
I know it's not quite the same issue as your piece presents, but Gabb's article had the same regret and anger about the Maritime Museum that I feel about the Morse Museum. We are setting aside, hiding or outright destroying the cultural and sociological signposts to our past. When they are all gone, how will we ever figure out how we got from there to here?
Kids all over the world like to dress up.
LakeFXDan sent me a link to this picture archive. It took me a while to work out how to see the pictures. Press the number after the description and then scroll down to the frame below. Now take a look at "Kids as suicide bombers" picture No. 3.It has to be said that the two earlier pictures in that category show teenagers rather than actual "kids". (So that's all right then.)
A note: not all the links work - for instance in the category "Armed kids with their fathers" only number 4 works.