'Nother Solent

Do you ever worry about homeschooled Muslim children being indoctrinated?

Even some homeschoolers do, let alone mere fellow-travellers such as I. In this post Brian Micklethwait offers cogent reasons why homeschooled Muslim children are less likely to be taught by extremists than state-schooled children.

But look at it this way. If Muslims don't get - or are somehow not allowed to exercise the right to – home education, then they are more than ever likely to insist on having Muslim schools. And what is more likely to be taken over by Wahahbi maniacs? Muslim families or Muslim schools? I'd say Muslim schools. And I'd especially say publicly funded Muslim schools, in which consumers (i.e. parents) can be kept at arm's length and lorded over by the externally-funded producers, the people running the place.

Also, if the only way to get a Muslim education is to send your kids to a Muslim school, that might reinforce the tendency of Muslims to live in separate communities, in order to get into the right school catchment area. But if they are the masters of their own houses, no need for them to move house to get the sort of lives they want for themselves and their children.

"Ease up on Nasser!"

I had a well-argued e-mail from David Yule.

I've been reading your weblog for a while now, enjoy your comments and generally find your posts interesting and well informed. I nearly sent you an email about your original comments on Nasser Hussain and Zimbabwe (link),
and so after your followup (link), I thought I would try to defend Nasser.

I can understand your desire for people to make their own moral decisions, and not to abdicate responsibility to the government, but in this case I feel it is the government's responsibility.

Whatever Nasser Hussain decides to do, he would be making a political decision on behalf of not just himself, but also the English cricket team, and by extension the whole of England. To put it another way, if this was the football world cup (instead of the cricket world cup), would you really want David Beckham to be responsible for the most visible foreign policy decision of England on Zimbabwe?

Aside from that, his job is a professional sportsman - and as such he is being ordered by his employers to go there and play (and could even be held in breach of his contract if he doesn't). If his decision only affected him, then fair enough; he would have to weigh his moral position against the possibility of it terminating his career as anyone else would. However, I would expect anyone making a decision on behalf of his country to be balanced and unbiased; how can he be that when one option has the possibility of being career ending, while the other has the possibility of being the highlight of his whole career.

You mention a "... society where people were no longer in the habit of delegating their moral reactions to government". It seems to me much more of a case of the government delegating its moral reaction to one person.

Incidentally, I believe the situation reflects very badly on the two bodies whose jobs are to make policy decisions like this: the English Cricket Board, and the Government. Both of them have known this will be a problem ever since the Zimbabwe situation got worse (the cricket matches have been scheduled for over a year now), and done nothing. They are now both complaining loudly to the media about how terrible the situation is - and blaming the other. The idea that they could sit down together, and agree a policy jointly doesn't seem to have occured to them.

A final point (I've already written more than I intended!): the situation is more complex than the South African apartheid sports boycotts in the 80s. Then, the South African sports teams were part of the problem; in Zimbabwe, the cricket team is healthily multi-racial (with a disporpotionate number of players from white farming backgrounds), and they want England to visit.

So, please ease up on Nasser. He's currently facing the hardest job of his career, and really doesn't deserve criticism for asking the people who employ him to do their job properly.

My twenty year old Penguin English Dictionary

tells me that "Boxing Day is the first weekday after Christmas, on which Christmas-boxes are traditionally given." Makes perfect sense, of course; one wouldn't be giving the between-maid her box on the Sabbath. Yet in all my life I had never even heard of Boxing Day ever being anything other than Dec. 26th whatever the day of the week.

John Weidner is working to redeem himself for the crime of befuddling my brain by publishing an explanation of why that Dean Esmay brain bamboozler thingy works out the way it does. Dean Esmay himself suggests that there is no proof so effective as personal experience: "Don't feel bad. This puzzle nails mathematicians, engineers, computer programmers, etc. all the time. And it nailed me the first time.

The easiest way to prove this to yourself is to get a friend and play the game with them. You be Monty. Play with an open-minded friend, and just get your friend to agree to either always switch or never switch. Within 20 iterations or so of the game, the light will go off in your head, I guarantee. ;-)"

The power of positive thinking.

Capt. Heinrichs writes, Well done: 0C today. Please hold on to those warm thoughts for tomorrow as the weather report is making noises like '-17C'.

On the garage roof front, though, I have to report that your collective mental efforts were completely ineffective. It had to be done by tedious physical means.

Junius has his libertarian instincts tested

when reading about what some sicko will do under the pretence of it being art. Me, too, my old son, me too.

It does imply a challenge to opponents of censorship. Two points in reply - (1) I would expect and hope that in a society where people were no longer in the habit of delegating their moral reactions to government (e.g. Nasser Hussain seeking "guidance" from the government as to whether he should play cricket in Zimbabwe*) that social disapproval would regain much of its lost force. C S Lewis wrote somewhere that the decline of the custom of houding a cad and a bounder out of decent society was not because of any increase in charity: wretched, poor disgusting sinners are still as scorned as ever they were in Victorian times, but nowadays successful, rich disgusting sinners are lionized.

(2) So far as I know the "artist" in this case is not publicly funded. But Channel 4 certainly is. I do think there is a link between the whole idea of shock value in avante-garde art and state funding. The usual fault of popular art, art people pay for, is sentimentality not brutality. (I even think that some of the extreme war-type violence of typically capitalist types of art like computer games is validated by the cult of épater le bourgeoisie which is itself sustained by state funding. Victorian popular war fiction was full of little drummer boys dying heroically; why isn't ours?)

*In fairness to Mr Hussain the whole 'guidance' thing may have been a coded plea for state money to pay the cancellation fee. The fact that he has hopes of being bailed out in this way is also not a desirable state of affairs, but does absolve him of being unable to make his own moral decisions.

Well done Muslim News.

They too sometimes publish contrarian stories. For instance they have re-published this Telegraph story about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics - an crime of which a few of their readers will approve, but of which the more peaceable majority will not even have heard, seeing as crimes against Israel are rarely mentioned in the Muslim press.

(Foreign readers may be asking themselves why this decades-old story is news now. The explanation is that in Britain certain official papers are classified as secret for thirty years. Then they are released by the Public Record Office to be pounced upon by historians. Thus we are now seeing records of, for instance, cabinet deliberations in 1972 for the first time. Some even more sensitive records will not be revealed to the public for a hundred years after their creation.)

I was going to write what a revelation it is of the ambivalent, etiolated, excuse-making decadence of certain Foreign Office mandarins, effete themselves yet finding a secret delight in abasing themselves before men of violence.

But I knew all that anyway, so it isn't a revelation at all.

Well done the Guardian.

Sometimes they do give an airing to views very different from their own. Six months ago, for instance, they published this article about the futility of the British gun ban and now they have rep-published it as part of their special report on gun violence. Calling this a "Special Report" is something of a cheek; it is more a compilation of previous articles than a report containing new material, but perhaps an overview of just how many gun violence stories there have been recently is what we need.

Many a true word said in jest.

Minutes after making my little quip about convenience being the world's favourite guide in assigning blame, I came across this essay by Larry Elder. Seems my joke wasn't original: Elder writes

Aristotle once said, “Anyone can become angry — that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not easy.”

Don't blame me for this.

Blame John Weidner. Uh, no, blame Dean Esmay. And he says, don't blame him, blame Jerry Pournelle - but since his original link is long gone, I think I'll blame you, John, after all, since you're available and convenient.* It's all your fault that my brain is going round and round like a fairground horse. I still can't quite accept it. Are you penitent yet?

*The world's favourite reason for choosing whom to blame for anything.

You know you're getting old

when you get all stroppy about the mistakes on the karaoke lyrics for "Grease". Happy New Year.

Think warm thoughts at Captain Heinrichs in Canada "Current temp is -6C; 30cm snow; last night was -20C) Of course I am hard-done-by, and looking for sympathy outside the dictionary (between 'sin' and 'syphilis').

While you're at it, think 'repair the hole in the garage roof' thoughts in our direction. Also some 'neighbours don't get mad at us for the fireworks' thoughts would be good.

Why don't I just automatically redirect you to Joanne Jacobs

and save you the trouble of coming here before linking to her? She has another story you shouldn't miss, all about the Oakland School for Social Justice, Community Development [and Creating Habitual Malcontents Destined For a Rotten Life.]

Lots of laughs there. The students get to go to "culture and resistance" class. More laughs yet to come when they apply for a job.

The deserving poor.

Joanne Jacobs tells a sad story in a post on public and private charity. Follow the link to find her starting point, a post by Jane Galt, which is itself followed by a great discussion in the comments.

Question from me: why do so many people hate the idea of dividing the poor or the rich into deserving and undeserving groups, yet nearly everyone is quite happy to assess the middle class by their deserts.

(Nice dictionary, good dictionary. I came very close just then to asking why everyone is quite happy to judge the middle class by their puddings. Mind you, this too is a profound question. When were you last served jam roly-poly by anyone of your own age or younger? Cultural cleansing, I call it.)

Producer trying to sign up Amartya Sen for Bollywood role.

Honestly, that's what it says. And for a film called Wild Noise, too, not for my own private project Confessions of a Teenage Welfare Economist.

Sorry for the silence

- I didn't get a chance to say a formal farewell before going off to visit computerless relatives. Blogging will be light over the next few days while I catch up with life...

...and with the news. You know how the minute you stop looking the world goes and throws a triple-somersault? My husband certainly boggled when he saw a headline in the AOL news page reading "Hussain appeals to Blair for help." Boringly the Hussain in question turned out not to be Saddam but England cricket captain Nasser Hussain-with-an-a. He is seeking political guidance over whether the England team should play in Zimbabwe. Make your own decisions, Nasser.