May 04, 2002
Links update:
You did all know, didn't you that Inappropriate Response has a new URL at http://www.aracnet.com/~dcf/irnew/?And check out a new recruit to the New Model Army on your left, Iain Dale's Diary. Mr Dale is that interesting new phenomenon, a blogger who was a mildly famous person even before he started blogging. Oh lor, now I've probably offended him - who wants to be only mildly famous* - and half the rest of blogdom who are all going to huffily tell me how eminent they were in their various fields long before the Call of the Cybersphere entered their souls.
*Come to think of it, I do.
I coulda sworn
, I mean man, I coulda got right up in the witness box and sworn Dawson.com had said he wasn't back till next Tuesday... but I pressed the link out of sheer habit and it's been up and going for days, with a swanky three column layout. Warning: do not write this man hate-mail; he may bite.
Serious cross-cultural sociological analysis.
Just as I did, MCJ picked up on the MEMRI report on the efforts of Arab Christians to be "more Catholic than the Pope", or, in their own quaint idiom, "more anti-semitic than Hamas". Christopher Johnson homed in on one point I'd passed over, namely the view expressed by one Dr Babawi that"...the madman Sharon, who began to behave like a madman after he was hit in 1948 in a sensitive place of his body by a bullet, leaving him with one testicle only".I can't help wondering whether this rumour was copied from a very similar one current in Britain circa 1940. There was even a song about it. Whether the Arabs think Sharon's other one is in the Albert Hall has yet to be established.
Putin knows his medieval history
, says Yulia Latynina of the Moscow Times."There's no point in comparing Russia to America. And there's no point in creating a tax code that repeats verbatim the advice of Western consultants -- a code in which Western tax rates are combined with the Russian presumption of the taxpayer's guilt. We need to recognize that Russia is essentially a medieval country with a weak social structure, and a low taxation threshold beyond which the state begins to collapse. In the Middle Ages even the desyatina, or 10 percent income tax, was considered an unreasonably high tax rate."It's a fine article, but Ms Latynina is doing her own country down. You don't have to be "medieval" to benefit from a low, stable, simple tax rate. We in the West should throw out our absurdly complex systems and learn plain common sense from Russia.
An exchange of courtesies...
From: gfarber@savvy.comMr Farber's artless pleasure in his own work is positively Asimovian. As I'm a complete softie for that sort of thing, here's the link you're after, Gary. But before you all click, try this quiz: who is Amygdala addressing in this excerpt, and why?To: nataliesolent@aol.com
On Fri, 3 May 2002 NatalieSolent@aol.com wrote:
> Thank you - although, as is the way of such things, I feel as if I have been
> back for ages.Gosh, I'd think you had, but any period without a link to me is no time at all, silly girl. And I've been so brilliant.
love,
gf
"Oh, that's fine. Just set yourself on fire and drop yourself from a mile up, and everything will be even-steven. After all, how could Americans ever be as important as elephants? We're not nearly so cute. Our ears are tragically small. "
May 03, 2002
Sleep tight my darlings....
and just before you close your little eyes, think on the fact that there's yet another MEMRI blood boiler just out. This time we have an Egyptian government newspaper saying, if only you had done it, Hitler. 'Night, 'night.
It's not just the Arabs.
I have had much to say about the way that many Palestinians and other Arabs glorify those who deliberately set out to kill civilians, particularly relishing soft targets such as the five year old girl killed in her bed recently. But as I denounced them something was tugging at my memory, and now I've fished it out. The Arabs are at the present time the world's premier admirers of those who "martyr" themselves while killing children and other civilians. However we must not neglect the Western, nominally-Christian world's own substantial contribution to this field of human endeavour. On October 23rd 1993 the IRA exploded a bomb in a fish shop in the Shankill Road. They used a bomb with a fuse set for eleven seconds: so you can safely assume that the bombers intended to give themselves time to get away but to kill the customers and staff in the shop without warning. And kill them it did, nine of them, including Michelle Baird aged seven and Leanne Murphy aged thirteen. As a matter of fact certain defects in the plan also resulted in the death of one of the bombers, Thomas Begley.I don't care for the explicit Protestant tribalism of this website. I don't think I'd care for it even if I were not a Catholic. But it makes some good points. Next year will be the tenth anniversary of this event. But don't hold your breath expecting Public Enquiries, TV commemorative specials or newspaper retrospectives. And don't hold your breath waiting for any hard questions to be asked of Gerry Adams as to why he chose to be a pall bearer at mass-murderer Thomas Begley's funeral.
Stoppard re-examined
. Reader Brian Brophey took a look at what I'd quoted from Stoppard's views on liberty and comments:I only read what you excerpted, and it is a bit turgid, and I think you're right about what he means. But I'm not sure that he means to elevate "uniqueness" to a virtue or purpose in itself; I think he's just contrasting it with the view in the first paragraph, ie, preferring to say "look at that one tree!", whereas the various collectivist/facist/islamofacist/orthomarxists can't see the tree for the forest and therefore don't mind warping or destroying any number of individual unique trees for the sake of some eventually-ideal Forest.I take the point. By the by, although I can guess what it means, "orthomarxist" is a term new to me.
Did I read that right?
Adrian Hamilton writing in the Independent says that,"Real peace is not possible in the Middle East until the Palestinians are allowed back their pride, or seize it back for themselves by acts of violence."Emphasis mine, and, yes, I did read it right. Hamilton follows in the steps of George Bernard Shaw worshipping Stalin or Jean Paul Sartre glorying in the indiscriminate murder of French settlers in Algeria. You can always trust a certain sort of "liberal" to descend into the violence-worshipping morality of the street gang.
Oh, for the days when we still had park keepers.
In two successive posts Iain Murray talks about the need for authority figures. Like him I think that submission to legitimate authority is quite compatible with liberty. (In some moods I go further than he does and make a case that it is compatible with anarchy, at least when the authority derives from contract, but that's one for another time.) Park keepers are properly constituted authority. So are train guards. So were beadles, probably, although I'm not sure exactly what they did when not keeping Oliver Twist from the horrors of welfare dependency.I would feel safer and freer if such archaic offices as park keeper, train guard and night watchman were once again to become commonplace. And floor-walkers in department stores, like Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served, remember him? To get to this happy state of affairs we need various cultural changes, it is true; a reining in of the sansculottes, a reassertion of the right to self defence, several prominent human rights lawyers to be made to walk the plank, and sundry other humane reforms. Most of all we need the return of the crap job.
Le Pen comes to Burnley.
Two British National Party local councillors have been elected in the aftermath of race riots. The numbers of votes for the two councillors are not that earth-shattering, 898 and 751, and it is reassuring to note that"Turnout in such areas was much higher than the national average, as it appeared that voters were mobilising to keep them out."- but, still, a bad omen.
May 02, 2002
And you thought the Christian Church in the West had an attitude problem....
MEMRI on Arab Christians. (Hit the link and then scroll up.)"Father Manuel Musalam compared the armed Palestinians in the Church of the Nativity to Jesus on the cross: "...We kneel before the Palestinian in the besieged Church [of the Nativity]. He hungers, but he is steadfast; he thirsts, but he is steadfast. "and
"The Jew has a principle from which we suffer and which he tries to impose on people: the principle of the 'gentiles.' To him, the gentile is a slave. They [the Jews] give the [Palestinians] working in Israel only a piece of bread, and tell them: 'This piece of bread that you eat is taken from our children, and we give it to you so you will live not as free men on your land, but as a proletariat and slaves in Israel, to serve us…' The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are based on this principle, and anyone who reads the Protocols feels that we are in this period with the Jews..."Is there anyone still living with experience of the denazification programme? Someone has to clean these people up.
Moppets & Martyrs update.
I forget which month we were up to in the calendar. Never mind. Just read Lileks. This month's Moppet is at the end, but by the time you get there you'll have forgotten all about my little running joke.
Did you enjoy and benefit from school trips as a child?
I did. A pity that litigious freeloaders are steadily making it no longer worth a school's while to organize them. I'd like £3,000 for not going skiing, wouldn't you? Here a diabetic brat and his scheming father make his illness pay. The 16 year old is called Tom White. Employers, remember that name. And if you daren't keep a proper blacklist, steer clear of diabetics generally: they are trouble. No, silly, don't say you're doing it - you can always think of some reason for not hiring anyone. Then in ten years when the trend is established all the diabetics will whine that they are under-represented in the labour market. But don't feel bad about any possible injustice here. People brought up to milk their victimhood at the udders of the courts, the Rights Industry and the NHS will already have had tremendous privileges at your expense, and will whine whatever you do. It's a pity that they will have all the petulance and spitefulness common to gilded youth throughout the ages, rather than the qualities of self-reliance and providence they might have had, but that's how it goes these days.
Tom Stoppard on the meaning of liberty.
Sparkling as Stoppard's dialogue is - I must re-read or better yet re-see Every Good Boy Deserves Favour - I found this essay rather heavy going. He writes"The question asked by the Romantics was - what does it mean to be a human being? Does it mean, to be subordinated to some enormous campaign to discover our common purpose, in which our part is individually insignificant and in which success will be achieved long after we're dead, if ever?I think he's saying that the Romantics said the latter, and that Stoppard says it too. To which I would respond that uniqueness is not a virtue or a purpose in itself.Or is the point of being a human being that we allow the full flowering of our personality? The present is our one chance to be human, they answered; to be a human being is to be unique, and to be unique is to be free."
Still, his heart's in the right place.
So Arafat's out of there.
Palestinians - and journalists - celebrate Israeli withdrawal from Ramallah. What a strange episode it has been. I suspect the Israelis had had enough of the whole thing weeks ago, but were waiting for a week or so without bombings so that it would not look as if terrorism was working. A perfectly sensible motivation.
Geoffrey Barto
of Turkeyblog, or Gæøffrey Bårtô as he should be known for his expertise in the mysterious art of Hut Mul, writes regarding why scabs itch:"The brain perceives small pains as itches. Scabs pull on the healing wound, creating small pains which we feel as itches.So says: Malarky.
Further research I leave to you."
Well, I prefer the traditional explanation, beloved of cackling old crones worldwide: It's the wickedness working out, I tell ye! The wickedness working out!
Ahem. Returning to current affairs, Geoffrey Barto also points out that France is doing some things right:
"Nonetheless, while Germany suffered violence, while Spain reels from car bomb attacks, the much mocked French - we'll repeat it again - marched 400,000 people across Paris without significant incident (and for that matter the Lepenistes marched 10,000 strong without creating problems either)."
May 01, 2002
Hamas kindergartens.
When you sign up your little mite in a Hamas kindergarten can it really be a surprise that the children are taught to hate? (Found in Oxblog.)
There's nothing funny
about this story concerning a "fruitarian" couple who got most of the way towards starving their baby to death. (Found at The Corner.) Fruitarians or fructarians, in case you hadn't yet met any, will not even kill plants, confining themselves to fruit and seeds that drop to the ground naturally and are thus, they deduce, lawfully assigned to human consumption by Nature or the Goddess or whatever. However it did bring to mind the entertaining adventures of a mate of mine. This chap was in Government employ. He wanted to get out of attending a work-related week-long course in a distant city. To this end he claimed to be a fruitarian, assuming that this would put insuperable obstacles in the way of his employers catering to his dietary needs while on the course - as they were obliged by official policy to do. His department got a fine revenge by actually locating for him a genuine fructarian boarding house miles out of town but just within technical range of the course after an arduous journey. Each morning my friend, a beer and steak sort of man, would face the sandled beardies while eating his scanty breakfast. Conversation languished.
Did you know
that a Google search for "Arab News" and "beyond parody" only yields two results, both blogs, and both on my links list? (Samizdata and Blogs of War.) Why so few? It's not like the writers aren't hard at work. Look at the glorious fluffuvium* they are producing! This is from an editorial claiming that the Zionists are behind newfound US hostility to The Kingdom Formerly Known as Saudi Arabia:"This is not the first time that the governments in Riyadh and Washington have not seen eye to eye on particular issues. They have had their differences before. They parted company concerning the recognition of the Taleban government in Kabul and concerning Iran. Riyadh has resumed full diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran while the United States has refused such recognition. Never, however, did these types of divergent Saudi-American views cause a media upheaval in the American press against Saudi Arabia. So, the question becomes, why now? It would be quite difficult to figure it out if it were not for Israel’s intervention in American policy-making and American internal affairs by distorting America’s enlightened national interests."
Emphasis mine. "Why now?" they ask. What these men need is a mug. Fill it full of whisky and their drinking pleasure will be complete.
*the substance found in the interiors of keyboards and sewing machines.
Why do scabs itch
, and the places from which you have just lost a scab? What biological purpose does it serve? Excuse me, I have to go and vacuum out the bedclothes. Somewhere in there is the scab I had last night. That was your yeuch moment for today: brought to you by Natalie.
When I was a child and the sun always shone,
only I didn't know about that nasty bright stuff because I was inside with my nose in a book or the paper, I could always be persuaded to change my mind by trenchant newspaper editorial. My opinions were those of the last columnist I read. Since the veins in my brain hardened that is no longer the case. But a column in today's Telegraph has succeeded in changing my mind on at least one subject. Along with ten million other grumpy grown-ups I opined that Mr Blair was quite right and the parents of delinquents jolly well ought to have their benefits dropped. (Even though I parted company with the other 9,999,950 in thinking that the parents of cleanly, obedient and virtuous children also ought to have their benefits dropped.) I hadn't thought it through. Janet Daley had. Naturally I already knew that the proposal was no more than tinkering while leaving the central problem unfixed. As Ms Daley says,"That is because taking responsibility - particularly in the way that Mr Blair means it - is essentially a civic and economic act. That is, it requires civic self-determination and an ability to accept economic consequences, neither of which are possessed by people who are entirely supported by the state."However in thinking that a little tinker might even so have some good result I had forgotten this:
"As you would expect with such an Orwellian concept, its implementation would involve teachers and neighbours informing on parents, and the state having to decide whether people were making enough of an effort to live up to their societal obligations. (And what kind of bureaucratic star chamber would be required to investigate the relationship between a parent and a child, and adjudicate on the precise degree of the former's responsibility for the latter's behaviour?) "
All human life is here.
Knowing that some of you come here to get stuff about Al-Qaeda, the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement and suchlike heavy intelligence rather than being agog to hear the adventures of my A & S keys, I shall keep this brief. My Keyboarde, A Historie: keys stuck so badly that could not use AOL password that contained forbidden letters - cheapskate that I am, got a second hand keyboard - wrong socket, had to take it back - husband prized apart old keyboard with fury of desperation - swabbed out indescribable Coca-Cola saturated fluffy effluvium - success! - dived into cybersphere - saw e-mail basket overflowing. Observed with pathetic middle-class guilt kind donations towards new keyboard, now rendered unecessary - found with certain relief that A-key still sluggish and wonky in socket, so keyboard surely destined to die again soon. Hoped I could decently keep the money.