'Nother Solent

I knew something was wrong

when the house didn't shake under the impact of coruscating beams of power from the descending space vehicles of all those US-based Dan Dare fans. Sure enough, when I clicked "view web page" it turned out that nothing I've posted today is visible on the page.

During my first few months of blogging this no-show phenomenon never happened. Now it happens every few posts. Three times out of four the following sequence cures it: template - save changes. Archive - archive template - save changes. If that doesn't work the first time, it usually does the second. But now I've done it twice and it still doesn't work. What's worse, the "FTP log" has lots and lots of writing on it (don't ask me what any of it is jabbering on about). Hitherto this has always meant that the transfer worked. I find it ominous that this time seems to be an exception.

UPDATE: It's working now. Firmness! Firmness is what these creatures need. If you take a strong line obedience will follow. Good blog, good blog. Er, that's enough. Down, boy! - Down, I say, DOWN...

Youse all remember

how Jim Henley and I had a ding-dong (actually not dingdonging from that far apart) about what was legitimate and what was not when discussing "root causes" of the September 11 massacre? This post of his from November makes some good points.

"The danger lies, and I think this is what bothers Ginger, in the idea that to explain is to excuse - that if we identify Iraqi sanctions or US support for Pakistan's ISI as contributing factors in what was done to us, that that somehow means the hijackers were not evil after all. This danger is more than theoretical - we've read and heard entirely too much from people for whom US policies really do excuse the murders of 9/11. We are not talking about "moral equivalence" either. Neocons abhor what they call moral equivalence, but, properly considered, true moral equivalence is the only acceptable eithical standard for judging foreign policy and state violence. What we get from the anti-American left, at home and abroad, has nothing of equivalence in it; rather, any perceived US transgression from the Arbenz coup to the Kyoto abrogation utterly vitiates any American right to respond to the attacks of September or even to complain about them. It's ethical prestidigitation with "moral equivalance" used for misdirection only."

Dan Dare

is on in 45 minutes. Channel 5. I'm not sure what that is in Venusian ronits, but it's time enough for you to get halfway round the world in a low earth orbit, so if all you Americans jump into your rockets right this minute you can still be here in time.

"That stuff is so 1999."

When I met Claire Berlinski at Perry's Blogger party she wondered whether we shouldn't try to move beyond simple outrage at the outrage at the use of the word "niggardly." She has a point. I still think parent Akwana Walker was spiteful in pursuing her child's teacher even when she knew no offence had been meant, but I have to admit that I would avoid the use of "niggardly" in conversation with non-university educated black people, for reasons of courtesy as well as prudence. Here's John Derbyshire radiating sweet reason on the subject. And, drat him, using up the send off line I thought of, featuring the word "snigger."

Here, though, is a nice question of etiquette. ("Nice" in the sense of... oh heck, you knew that.) At what point does avoidance of that word (or other explosive but innocent words or phrases) by a white talking to a black¹ become not courtesy but stereotyping? Avoidance implies that the listener is too uneducated to cope.

No, I'm not asking this question just to make trouble or to make the whole thing look ridiculous. I've already said that I would avoid the word "niggardly" and similar words in many cases. The problem is that avoidance is, arguably, objectionable itself.

Final point: One reason for my particular downer on Akwana Walker is that the word didn't just come up in conversation. It was introduced as part of a vocabulary lesson. The fact that the word had an innocent meaning was clear from the start. And, shifting the stress, it was part of a vocuabulary lesson: Mrs Walker preferred to douse her child in synthetic outrage rather than have her learn one new word.

¹Come to think of it, the qualification as to the race of speaker and hearer isn't entirely necessary to the argument. A black speaker might fear to look like an "Uncle Tom" to other blacks. A white speaker might fear to inflame racism among other whites.

A can of worms is opened.

Scroll down the Guardian's weblog for several more stories on North Korea and the abduction plot. These events seem almost too odd, too novelistic, to be true, but they are. Recent developments include:

• We know that the stolen 13 year old, Megumi Yokota, is dead. (The Guardian has a sad story from the day before yesterday detailing the high hopes of her mother prior to the summit where this all came out.) But I learned from the Sydney Morning Herald story posted yesterday that Megumi had a daughter while in captivity. We have yet to discover in what circumstances or who the father was. What should happen to this child? I wouldn't be too keen on saying that she should stay with her father if it turns out that he was Megumi's controller who decided to add the rape of a prisoner to his other crimes. This scenario is just my speculation - but a likely one, for it seems vanishingly unlikely that Megumi was allowed to live freely and choose her marriage partner for love. Perhaps the poor girl, like slave women forced into concubinage throughout history, decided to make the best of her situation, push the great wrong done to her to the back of her mind, tell herself that she welcomed her master's advances, and try to re-create as best she could some semblance of the ordinary domestic life she had once enjoyed.
  

  
  

• South Korea also says that 486 of its citizens have been abducted in addition to the Japanese. Will any now dare dismiss this claim as paranoia or conspiracy theorizing?
  

  
  

• Finally, there is the most ominous ramification of all. According to the Korea Times, one of the other abductees was a Japanese woman called Lee Un-hye. Whether that is a Koreanization of a Japanese name or she was ethnically Korean I do not know. This name under various spellings has been heard before. In 1987 two spies, a man and a woman, blew up a South Korean plane, killing all 115 aboard. They then took poison. The man died; the woman lived, was caught, and sang. This woman, Kim Hyon-hi, working under the Japanese alias of Hachiya Mayumi, said she was taught Japanese by this same Lee Un-hye. However until yesterday there was little evidence to back this up. Indeed this report from 1998 pours scorn on the whole theory of abductions by North Korea, hinting that it was all a concoction by murky forces in South Korea. (That theory's been blown out of the water, of course, but the article does supply a potted history of the disappearances.) In conclusion it seems to me that the admission that Lee Un-hye was abducted is also an admission that North Korea committed an act of war against South Korea.

Unbelievably

, the state-controlled Saudi media is still peddling the blood libel. The link is to Little Green Footballs, quoting MEMRI.

Actually, not unbelievably at all. Question: Given that this sort of indefensible Stürmer-like raving on the pages of government-controlled newspapers really makes the Saudi government look bad, and they know it, why can't they stop doing it? Answer: because the poison has soaked so deeply into Saudi society that they can no longer even smell it on themselves. This article came out of the writer and then was picked out of the pile by an assistant editor and then was selected by the editor and then was passed to the translator and then was typed in by whatever the modern equivalent of a typesetter is called and then was checked by the sub-editor and was seen by the other reporters hanging around in the newspaper offices and no one, no one, saw anything at all wrong with it.

The A-Level mess.

I've got a post on Samizdata with some good advice to Education Minister Estelle Morris:

"I know a breathtakingly simple way for Estelle to get out of this mess entirely. It's this: Get out of this mess entirely, Estelle! "

More over there, edu-fans, including a link to the Telegraph's pretty good coverage of this scandal.

King Akwa's mistake.

Here's an anecdote that may or may not be true, but illustrates a point. Sometime around 1850 one King Akwa, who ruled part of the Cameroon, striving by diplomacy to avoid his country being taken over by the British, French or Germans, wrote to Queen Victoria to apologise for the deaths of some of her agents. He added that he was particularly sorry that his wayward people had eaten them after killing them.

I don't suppose the admission helped his cause. But how was he to know it wouldn't? Someone had explained to him that the whites had this particular aversion to cannibalism and he naturally assumed that it was therefore extra-conciliatory to apologise for that part specially.

A google-search for "King Akwa" reveals a great many entries, but I haven't tracked down that story. I'm told it can be found in Thomas Packenham's "The Scramble for Africa", which I haven't read. Never mind. Keep it in your heads while I turn to a story that happened more recently but is equally shrouded in mystery.

I posted the other day about the unexpected admission from the North Koreans that they did, as suspected but never proved, abduct several Japanese citizens twenty years ago. Around half of them died in captivity. I am very glad that the unfortunate survivors will soon be able to return to their families. (And what's this 'next month' lark? Why hasn't it happened today?) Glad I may be, but I am also mystified. Putting aside for the moment all issues of morality, it was, from the point of view of the North Koreans' own interests, a dangerous thing to admit. If I were a North Korean ruler and were as wicked as a North Korean ruler, I would have killed the Japanese once they were of no more use and never said a word. Didn't they know that the people of Japan were going to be bitterly, righteously angry? I can only surmise that the North Koreans, living in they do in a tyranny where one or two innocent people disappearing is neither here nor there, have no idea that public opinion can matter. Like King Akwa they must have thought that since the foreigners seem to have a thing about this particular practice then it might look well to apologise for it nicely.

I have a good deal more sympathy for the late king than the Dear Leader. Akwa, if I have the same man, forbade slavery. North Korea has yet to do so.

No news was good news in Israel.

After six good weeks the suicide bombings have resumed. Alert police observed a man acting suspiciously and approached him, whereupon he detonated the bomb, killing himself and one policeman. Since the killer's target was almost certainly a crowded bus, this officer literally died that others might live.

Even the appearance of a holiday was an illusion:

But Israeli officials denied yesterday's violence had anything to do with Israel's rejection of the Palestinian ceasefire offer. They claim they have captured would-be bombers during the past six weeks, but that one finally got through.

UPDATE: And now, of course, another bomber did get through, killing five commuters on a bus.

I'm not telling you

who those new recruits into the New Model Army are, because I'm pretending they've been there for ages. You just didn't notice. The one exception is The Machinery of Night, because it's new and so I can't possibly be blamed.

Testing, testing

. If this has worked there should be some new names on the blogroll.

Now I'm here I had better talk about something. A friend of mine is very worried about the Axis of Evil. She's worried about the way they can't seem to get the hang of cool missile names. The Iraqi "Scud" for instance. Scud. Is this (a) a relative of the tuna, found in the Bering Straits, (b) a Scots dialect word for a potato, or (c) the noise made by a missile scudding harmlessly into the sand, like the Seed of Onan. Oops, gave that one away, didn't I? The Iranians, not to be outdone in their stern avoidance of vulgar machismo in missile names, have purchased a Scud redesign from the North Koreans called the "No Dong."

Brendan O'Neill has a new home. Unqualified Offerings thinks the property is generally sound, but doesn't like the wallpaper. He is dead right about anchor lines placed so that it is not clear to which post they refer. England's Sword is another offender!

I ought to adjust my template, a task I find irritating and fiddly beyond measure. I ought to argue with Brendan O'Neill about his idea that highlighting news items of barbarism in far off lands is pornography, a task better fitted to my talents. I ought to argue with Iain Murray about legalising drugs, another job which would be engrossing once begun. I shall do none of these things. Bye bye for the rest of today.

The silent majority voices its sympathy for America. The Telegraph's Janet Daley wrote a column bitterly denouncing British media schadenfreude about the September 11 attacks. She found herself knee deep in letters of support.

"They were, with only one or two exceptions, unanimous in their disgust at the "America got what it deserved" refrain that I had described. More than half of them began with uncannily similar words - "I am so sorry" - and went on to say how ashamed they were of the media (particularly the BBC), which presumed to represent their national perspective. Several asked the question, "What planet are these people on?" I wonder if the incestuous media club, which so ostentatiously despises the views of ordinary people and believes that it has succeeded only if it has angered them, realises quite how much it is loathed."

This has also been my experience. I haven't been following the polls, but I'd be surprised if a majority of the British public supported a war on Iraq. But I am pretty damned sure that the vast majority of them were burning with sympathy for the victims and anger against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.

Incidentally, that same distinction provides a serious answer to Jim Henley's neat retort to me the other day. When I hear the "America had it coming" theme tune play I want to wash out my soiled ears. When I hear people say we shouldn't attack Iraq I just want to disagree.

I was flicking through

my "news sources" list while rather guiltily wondering whether any of Peter Briffa, Mrs Briffa or Pejman Yousefzadeh would be mad at me for my little joke when I came across a story that, in its strangeness and sadness, put all that right out of my head. North Korea admits that it kidnapped Japanese citizens twenty years ago. Apparently they were wanted in order to teach Japanese language and customs to North Korean agents. One of the abductees was a child of thirteen, kidnapped on her way to badminton practice. Megumi Yokota is now dead. No one seems to know how she died. What was her short life like, I wonder?

Thanks to the miracle of Babel Fish

we can find out what on earth Peter Briffa is talking about:

"Bonjours, my children! I blogge not today because I and my beautiful wife Mrs Briffa ons go the booze cruise have Calais. We will esperons to buy many wines and beer, and perhaps much of cigarette for the father of my wife. Also, we will esperons to have a dejeuner has Boulogne. If you want to read the blogges, have a look with the homes and women has the sinister. Also, he is a new bloggor, Mr. Cinderella Bloggerfeller, which is very interessant. He contribute much has my sections of how, and has a blogge which is very intellectual are humoureux. Also it know many phenomena Frenchwomen. Goodbye, my pea! At tomorrow! "

Actually, as I lament in my comment to him, some strange Blogger process seems determined to deny me the Briffa wisdom and send me to PejmanPundit. I think I had best accept this transformation gracefully. After all, given his interest in phenomena Frenchwomen, one will have to wait a long time before Peter can write as Pejmanpundit does:

"I just realized that I am writing this blog in a relatively (if not absolutely) sin-free condition."

"...Science Fiction, Sewing..."

It's not often that I get to fulfil two of this blog's selling points in one post. Gary Farber of Amygdala says that you can get a lunch tote embroidered by Ursula Le Guin's own hand by donating to SF journal, fiction-bank and general resource Infinite Matrix. (Seriously for a mo', it is actually an admirable venture.) Presumably Le Guin doesn't do all that careful silkwork for just everyone. I believe lesser donors get a pair of socks said to be knitted by Manly Wade Wellman or one of George O. Smith's much-loved crochet doilies.

Now that we're all friends...

Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings quotes me as saying:

Likewise I think, frankly, that most of the "blowback" and "root causes" talk was no better than the bar-room mutterings of the rapist's cronies.
But not all of it was. I can't specify any exact dividing line between legitimate and illegitimate "root causes" talk. (Such talk could be legitimate but mistaken.)

and responds in a like spirit:

Golly! In the spirit of comity contained in the lines below, I'm happy to aver that while most of the expansive war crowd (the Iraq-plus people) are either opportunists, hysterics or people who first discovered the Middle East on 9/12, some few of them are expressing a legitimate, considered policy preference, though I'm not prepared to say exactly where the distinction lies.

Angie Schultz,

dark mistress of the Machinery of Night has supplied the url of the Mark Steyn column that was mentioned earlier. Battered Westerner Syndrome.

"Poor, sweet, naive Natalie." Angie also wrote about an experience she had when the discussion turned to the rape analogy:

I started to blog about that a month ago (just after the column came out), and ran out of steam after quite a bit of blog post.

Poor, sweet, naive Natalie, thinking that people might wake up and see dimly the error of their ways when confronted with an apt analogy.

On a Usenet group I *used* to read, a fellow made a similar point. He said that this "we had it coming" crap made him think of battered women, who sought to find some flaw in themselves that would justify their attackers. This analogy has a number of problems, but it is human nature to search out causes for things.
Something must have caused this, therefore we must have done something... I got the idea, from his post, that this unseemly schadenfreude had been troubling him greatly, and he was relieved to catch at an explanation for it.

But the other posters were on to him like flies on Fisk. How DARE he make this connection between poor, innocent women and the big bad evil US! One woman said she had worked in a rape crisis shelter (just like Steyn's friend, note) and that the man's comments were So! Offensive! and she was So! Outraged! that she was thinking of putting him into her killfile. (Note that the man in question was one of the sweetest, mildest posters on a contentious group, and did not have a history of being a jerk.)

So the poor, attacked SPINELESS WORM retreated in confusion and tears (if a Usenet post can be said to have tears), and announced his retirement for a few days. When he came back, he apologized for violating RightThink and said he was better now. (I'm sure the re-education camp was loads of fun.)

In the meantime, I wrote to him privately, encouraging him in his original point. I never heard back.

Hmm! Now I've written enough letter to make the blog post I didn't write. (I didn't have a conclusion; the best I could do was to warn Steyn's friend that she should be careful what she said, lest she disappear for a while, only to turn up with a suspicious scar and a vacuous smile.)

I have several times changed

and added to the post below on the analogy between those who say that "the US was asking for it" and "the rape victim was asking for it". So even if you saw it earlier, you might like to take a second look. My first comment on the subject was here.

All that "turn on safe mode" Blogger fandoogle

doesn't seem to be working, so I can't correct that last bad link. I meant to say

...and in Samizdata.

Overwhelmed with material, I must postpone giving these arguments the response they deserve. One quick point: I don't see what was so awful about the actions of the father in the case described. If I recall rightly, neither did the kid concerned. The dentist's waiting room scenario is one where nerves are likely to snap on all sides. The argument that it is as humiliating and traumatic for an eight-year old to be smacked on the bottom in public as it would be for a grown woman strikes me as simply untrue. I was trying to remember if it ever happened to me as a child, and couldn't recall either way. My very vagueness is evidence that such an act is not necessarily that traumatic. Arguably it's wrong for our society to take that attitude, but it does, and that makes a tremendous objective difference to the level of harm done.

I quite see that similar-sounding arguments have been (mis)used by past societies to excuse violence against women and blacks. But that brings us right back to the crux of the difference between the beliefs of the Taking Children Seriously movement and, let it be said, the rest of humanity: are the rights of children and adults the same?

Alice Bachini

posts on the case of that man in Scotland who was convicted for smacking his kid here in her own blog and here in Samizdata.

Overwhelmed with material today, I shall have to postpone giving her arguments the attention they deserve. One quick point, though, I don't see what was so awful about the case described. Neither did the kid herself, if I remember rightly.

Suing an epileptic because of his face.

UPDATE: Ampersand of Alas, A Blog writes:

Hi! I just wanted to point out that the story you posted last week
appears to have not quite been true. See this link to Epilepsy Action Scotland.

I am relieved.

("Alas, A Blog" is a head-to-header, i.e. one of those all-too-rare examples where a blogger of one political persuasion gets into substantive debate with his (her?) exact opposites. Also important stuff: cartoons, time travel.)

"Asking for it."

I wrote last night about the analogy between those who are quick to say rape victims should blame themelves first and those who say that the United States should blame itself first. Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal writes:

"...it's not mine. I think I read it in a Mark Steyn column or it might have been somewhere in National Review. If I remember correctly, whoever the writer was was talking to a friend whose wife worked with rape victims and battered women and she couldn't stand hearing the "What did the US do to provoke this attack?" stuff she heard all over the place. Reminded her of the garbage she heard every day."

Chris Bertram of Junius wrote regarding my second, related analogy, concerning women who are attacked by present or former husbands and previous US support for Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. He says:

"I don't think your analogy holds up at all. The case is more like someone who has bought a pit bull with the intention of scaring or even attacking people and who then finds they can't control the animal, that it bites them, or their friends, and may kill their kids. Sure, the right thing may be to destroy the animal now, but bystanders are entitled to say that they
shouldn't have bought the thing in the first place.

"Now you might say to the woman, "you should never have married him", but the presumption has to be that however unwise the decision was it was not guided by evil intent. Not so in the cases of the pit bull, Osama and Saddam."

I have more to say on this topic - scroll back to this post later.

UPDATE: Peter Briffa of Public Interest made a good point:

"Surely the better analogy would be:

A woman buys a pit bull. It scares away her horrible neighbours and
potential burglars. But then it turns around and attacks her.

She knew it was bad. But she didn't know it was that bad."

OK. I'm running out of time to blog today, and I haven't said half what I intended too. So, rather than write a connected argument, I'm just going to put down as many thoughts as I can in no particular order.

• The rape analogy is intended to persuade as well as merely illustrate. Many of those who most strongly think that America "asked for" September 11 are the same people who would most strongly reject the idea that any woman could be "asking to be raped." I would imagine that the use of that particular analogy is very effective indeed at bringing such people face to face with an inconsistency in their own thinking; and that is how minds are changed. It would be contemptible to use the analogy for tactical effect if I did not believe it, but I do believe it.
  
• The left-wingers and feminists who originally stamped on the "she was asking for it" meme were right to do so. We owe them a debt. There is an uncrossable chasm between observing that certain actions may increase a woman's risk of being raped and making light of the crime of rape.
  
• Those who want to do the latter will often pretend they are doing the former. Likewise I think, frankly, that most of the "blowback" and "root causes" talk was no better than the bar-room mutterings of the rapist's cronies.
  
• But not all of it was. I can't specify any exact dividing line between legitimate and illegitimate "root causes" talk. (Such talk could be legitimate but mistaken.) Again the rape analogy is actually helpful in distinguishing. After a decent interval a person of goodwill could bring up, with extreme tact, the subject of whether past actions on the part of the victim were wise or right, and whether different actions should be taken in future. But, by God, you wouldn't do it while she was still bleeding. Nor, Mr Chretien, would you take the opportunity of the anniversary of the event to shoot your mouth off.
  
• While I concede that not all those who talk of "American oppression" as being a root cause of September 11 attacks are malign, I do not concede that any of them are right. Personally, I think America's main fault with respect to the terrorists was in not killing them earlier. I think that Islamofascism is, getting back to the analogy, equivalent to a rapist who picks as his target to attack and humiliate the woman of his aquaintance who is most confident, successful and rich. Of course the rapist has a whole spiel on how it is somehow her fault that he is so poor, miserable and twisted, but it's baloney. As for the woman, she may not be a saint - let's say she once had some political dealings with this guy, disreputable though he was - but her main mistake was in making too many excuses for him when he first showed signs of becoming violent.
  
• Anyway, now we know what he is. The analogies converge. He must be stopped.

Kidnapped child rescued from Colombian rebels.
Back in the '70s or early '80s, didn't ZANU or ZAPU have a thing about kidnapping bunches of schoolchildren, too? Or was it SWAPO?

Worth the wait.

When Larry Elliot finally gets some steam up after wheezing through four of five paragraphs of melodramatic scene-setting, he blows a fine whistle on what 'Black Wednesday' ten years ago means for the Euro now.

Black Wednesday was the event that led me to formulate Solent's Law of the Lemming: any new law or political decision cheered on by all the parties and all the newspapers ends up splatted at the bottom of a cliff. Test it out with some of the unsuccessful measures of the last decade: Entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, Dangerous Dogs Act, Firearms Act, US intervention in Somalia... And don't bet on Gordon Brown's popular money-therapy for the NHS working.

Never thought

I'd see this. China meets envoys of Dalai Lama. I didn't know the two sides had met twenty years ago, either.

Two analogies.

This may offend. I don't say it lightly. Imagine a woman who has been raped and beaten. The rapist has said that he will return to kill her later. The woman's friends are very concerned. They tell her:

"You must humbly ask yourself what you had done to be raped. Promise to mend your ways."

"You shouldn't have dressed so prettily, so expensively. It made him feel bad."

"He only did it because he was poor."

"Well, OK, not personally poor, but he was very concerned about the poor. He thought raping you would help them."

"He employed a lot of skill and resolution in the way he tracked you down and raped you. Really, one has to admire that."

"Don't try to go after him. You can only do that if we say you can. We might, one day, when we're good and ready. If you are nice to us."

"We don't care if he says he's trying to kill you. You can only strike at him if he's actually here in the room, attacking you again. You'll just have to wait."

Some friends, huh?

I assume everyone reading this can figure out what I'm talking about. I don't know whether this analogy originated from one person, or whether several people saw the correlation independently. I saw it used most recently at MCJ. Though unpleasant, I think the analogy holds true. Furthermore it does what all good analogies should and leads one to new conclusions. For it is possible that the woman's own behaviour made it more likely that she would be attacked - if, for instance, she acquiesced in earlier, smaller assaults.

Here's another aspect: all the talk from Nelson Mandela and Fisk et al about how the US once supported Osama Bin Laden so how dare they turn against him now - or how the US turned a blind eye to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, so how dare they attack him now -

How does that logically differ from "He raped you? He's trying to kill you? Tough luck, lady. You shouldn't have married him."

Would Mandela defend that line?