January 17, 2003
Your HOT SEXY blog topic of the week
. Belgian Trade Unions. According to these guys, one of the confederations concerned, it's not three permitted unions exactly, more three permitted confederations of unions. Not a lot better. How much of Europe thinks this a model for the future, I wonder?
Why should I care? Here's why.
I have no particular brief for Vlaams Blok, the Flemish nationalist party. They appear to have some racist and anti-semitic currents flowing in their river, and some accounts i have read of their origins are disturbing. (Not that the Socialists can think themselves any better in the murky past department; their then leader De Man called the Nazi victory of 1940 "a deliverance."*) But whatever you think of the party, there is much to cause unease in this account in "The Flemish Republic" of moves by the Belgian state to suppress them.The Belgian trade unions exclude everyone who is known to be a Vlaams Blok member. However, in Corporatist Belgium the unions hand out the unemployment benefits (a task for which the government pays them), so the consequences of such exclusion can be severe. The party is also denied access to the government-owned networks. The Flemish Broadcasting Corporation (VRT) has adopted a charter stating that it does not provide a platform for “opinions that propagate exclusion.”Italics mine. I don't believe in state unmemployment benefits at all. But if you are going to hand them out to anyone, then hand them out to everyone who has no job. The idea of who gets the dole being decided on political grounds is really scary.
The article speaks elsewhere of there being only three trade unions allowed in Belgium: a Christian one, a Socialist one and a Liberal one. I was not clear if this is still true or refers to the past. But that pattern is something to fear - the very European pattern of a particular set of permitted opinions being set in stone by vested interests.
And that's not all. Some 15% of Belgians are, it seems, in danger of being forbidden to vote for the party of their choice.
On 10 September new judicial proceedings against the party were started in Brussels. Because Belgian judges are political appointees, the Belgian regime of Louis Michel and Guy Verhofstadt hopes to succeed in its aim to designate the party as an illegal organisation, so that it can be prevented from participating in the next general elections, which are due at the latest in June 2003.
(Article found via the Libertarian Alliance Forum)
*I was sceptical of this claim. But I found chapter and verse in, of all places, this Stalinist website.
Hey, just noticed
something about the story below. It was a little neglectful of Ackland not to mention that he himself was presenter of Media Watch in 1998-99. Tim Blair once opined that Ackland was the only semi-tolerable presenter the programme ever had. Or is Media Watch so well known that everybody in Australia knows the history of who fronts it without being told?
"Plagiarism is to journalists as pedophilia is to the general community."
Thus said Richard Carleton who made a documentary on Srebrenica for an Australian TV series called 60 Minutes. He said it in court while trying to sue the pants off the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Media Watch, personified by former presenter Paul Barry.The Sydney Morning Herald's Richard Ackland tells the story. Briefly, Carelton made his documentary about Srebrenica. Media Watch said (or came close to saying in an airy-fairy keep-the-lawyers-happy way) that it was plagiarism of an earlier BBC documentary. Carelton sued.
The judge agreed with Carelton. He said that his doc was not plagiarised. He said that ABC's Media Watch, the self-appointed guardian of virtue was itself unfair and lazy - and he's not the first or the only one to say that, either. Nonetheless the judge found for ABC. Essentially he found in favour of free speech even while granting it was unfair speech. The right decision... I think.
The rest of the article talks about sloppy reporting of a was-it or wasn't-it paedophilia case to which I do not know the background, but writer Ackland does manage to slip in the cruellest aside I have heard in a long time: "Journalists believed they had sufficient evidence to support an accusation that the Campbelltown solicitor was a pedophile, which you'll appreciate is akin to calling a journalist a plagiarist." (Italics mine.)
January 16, 2003
Synchronicity
"...So there’s Richard, walking east on Q Street, N.W., carrying a massive framed photograph of Miss Dietrich under his arm and toward his home just six blocks away.Despite having been busy at work all day and being behind the curve on the day’s headlines, Richard, when confronted by a pedestrian walking in the other direction who said, “You know, she died today,” quickly gathered his wits and said, “I know, isn’t that sad?”
- Jim Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review, reminiscing about his friend and hair stylist, who died recently.
It is one of life's underrated pleasures to progress down the public street carrying, pushing or rolling some bizarre item with an air of nonchalance. The spirit of the thing requires that there is some perfectly sensible reason for for your behaviour. Armed with that reason you can muster the right air of courteous puzzlement at being addressed by a stranger when someone asks about the dalek.
I was shocked
to learn this morning that Iain Murray of The Edge of England's Sword has been sacked for blogging.I simply don't know what to say, except that Edge's many loyal readers will share my acute sympathy for Iain's situation. Now would be a good time to hit the tips jar, too.
January 15, 2003
Who cares about care workers?
In today's Guardian Polly Toynbee has a heartfelt piece about working in an old people's home. She eloquently describes the sad sights of old age: incontinence, drooling, paralysis, dementia. She then asks, passionately:"The standard week here was 42 hours. That earned just £203.70. Of all the jobs I did, none made me so outraged at the pay. How could such good work be worth so shamefully little? Whenever anyone accuses me of naivety in imagining that these things can be changed, if anyone lectures me on the immutable laws of the market, I just ask them how they can justify paying £203.70 a week for work such as this?"Well, she'll never read this and so she'll be spared my lecture on the immutable laws of the market. And you, reader, can get away from my lecture with just a click. But for anyone still listening, here goes. One short answer to why such good work can be worth so shamefully little is because if it was worth more (by which she means "if it was paid more") then fewer bums would get wiped. Old ladies stuck on the loo would go longer calling and calling for the nurse. Old men who had lost control of their bladders would go longer without their catheters being changed.
What Ms Toynbee wants, I assume, is for the minimum wage to go up. If it does, care homes take on fewer staff. (Market, immutable laws of: No. 1) She'd have an answer for that, of course: what she really wants is for the state to run care homes and/or for the state to raise a special or general tax the proceeds of which would go to paying care home staff, so just as many could be taken on and all would be well. But the bad news is fewer bums would still get wiped. Because truth will out. If it costs more to hire staff at Government Care Home #35409 then one way or another fewer staff will be hired, and the fact that the employer is the state makes no difference to that at all. Except, perhaps, to how honest the employers are about their motives. They'll call it "budget constraints". They'll call it "reassignment of priorities" and just by coincidence they'll discover that their priority this year is A&E or preventative medicine, and anyway the latest medical research reveals that bums don't need to be wiped as often as once thought - "it's called Just In Time Care Management, doncherknow." This will happen because a whole bunch of bureacrats' jobs will depend on targets being seen to be met, so it makes sense for them to move the targets. They have the power to arrange these things. The care workers, still less the ex-care workers now unemployable at the new rate of pay, do not.
Another short answer, one that Ms Toynbee has heard and didn't like, judging from the fact that she demanded of those who gave it, "how they can justify paying £203.70 a week for work such as this?" is that a great many people can do the job. A care worker needs a kind heart, patience, common sense, the conscientiousness to stick to procedures and maintain standards, a certain amount of physical strength and the ability to overcome physical distaste. These qualities are admirable but not rare. Ms Toynbee's wording implies that confronted with her "how can you justify..." everyone falls silent in shame. I don't see why. Rarity does influence price. Polly Toynbee gets a high salary as a Guardian correspondent because the skills needed (of writing to time and theme, research, eloquence and self-promotion) are comparatively rare. If she thinks that is so outrageous, will she voluntarily reduce her pay to that of a care worker?
Rather than the hated supply and demand, Ms Toynbee blames low pay on "the low value society places on women's work." The qualities I have listed are indeed more often found amid women than men. And, unlike many of my readers, perhaps, I quite agree with her that society does place an unfairly low value on women's work. I gather that in nearly every society, whatever the women do is valued less than what the men do. In some African tribes the women do all the farming while the men hang around the village and talk local politics, and guess which they regard as important. All very regrettable - but where best to look to defeat this deep-seated trend common to all humanity: state bureaucrats as deeply imbued with it as anyone else or the impersonal market? I'd go for the market. In the long run it plays no favourites as to race, class or sex. The market nowadays says that the humble plumber, a working man, is paid more than a university lecturer: a transformation to amaze and delight any nineteenth century socialist. The market says that an honest and reliable cleaning lady can choose her own customers once her reputation is established, and nothing about the low value placed on women's work by society stops this happening. In the ruthlessly capitalist world of sport, black athletes rise to the top whether white sports officials like it or not.
There's another side to the question, one that is rarely made explicit. Many women and some men would rather work in a care home than be a company director, or, more accurately, start the long process of self-education and jockeying for promotion that might result in being made company director and certainly would result in promotion to lower or middle management. It is considered outrageous to even suggest that anyone who works in a low-paid job has any choice in the matter, but they do, and, please note, I am not criticising their choice. There are good things about working in a care home. You have the satisfaction of being useful, and, in many cases, of being loved. Your hours may be long or inconvenient, but you don't take the job home with you. You don't have to sack anyone. You don’t have to give anyone a telling-off. You don’t have to give presentations in public. You don’t have to wade through reams of reports or write them yourself. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to understand National Insurance or company law. You don’t have to do any maths. You don't have to sell anything or put yourself forward. (You reading this! Which would you rather do today, change an adult nappy or cold-call five households in your area and try to flog them double glazing?) You have access to free meals and to an enormous industrial washing machine and tumble-dryer. (Don’t knock it: one care-worker I know hasn’t done a wash at home in years.) Finally, everybody thinks that you are a good person by virtue of your job. All in all, I'd rather work in a care home than be a swanky company director. Before you ask, no, I've never done either. But I have had personal experience of the sometimes distasteful jobs involved in looking after old and confused people, and I've lived on as little as a care worker does.
I haven’t even covered the question of state control versus the market in deciding whether old people go into care homes at all – and how long they stay at one institution. Many, perhaps most, old men and women, would have preferred to grow old in their own homes. There could have been scope for literally millions of people to be employed as carers for them. The terrors and indignities of old age would be softened by a personal relationship and familiar surroundings. There is evidence that the onset of senility is actually delayed for those old people who live in their own homes. Of course a raft of government regulations make this impossible for all but those with well above average incomes. So we send ‘em to care homes, and even then, the government can’t keep its paws off. Many, many private care homes have been closed down in recent years when the cost of complying with absurd “safety” regulations and “standards” became too much. So the old people are shoved into the hospitals at the age of eighty-five and die, disoriented and miserable, by the thousands. Some safety. Some standards. But why wave their shrouds in front of Ms Toynbee’s face - what's she got to do with all that? Because it was brought about by people of exactly her cast of mind; well-meaning, passionately caring people who wanted the best standards for our old people. They decided that the (yes) immutable law of the market that if you make running something one long hassle and expense then people won’t do it anymore could be overridden by mere act of benevolent will.
Perhaps I’ve said more than enough about care workers. In the latter half of her article, Ms Toynbee turns to social anomie among her neighbours in her block of flats. (I'm a little surprised that she appears to live in a council block. Surely she can't qualify for a council flat herself? Perhaps it's one of those mixed blocks where some of the flats have been bought from the council under Right To Buy legislation and some haven't. Quite a few journos live in surprisingly tough areas for the easy access to London.* - see explanatory update at base of this post.) Once again she should ask herself which is crueller, “the immutable laws of the market” or her preferred system, government control. It seems one of her fellow residents, “Mr B”, is is a drunk and worse who consorts with crack dealers. She mentions other disreputable and violent neighbours who have made life a misery for the decent people around them. She mentions, all innocent of the implications, how hard it is to evict people. The rest of the tenants really thought they had seen the last of Mr B after one episode, but, no, he was given yet another warning and remains in place. She should ask herself how long would that situation be allowed to last in a privately run building, unencumbered by Rent Acts and other meddling? And how much of Mr B’s behaviour was caused by the fact that he has always known that little short of murder would get him thrown out. Ms Toynbee laments the fact that society ignores the decent people living in council flats, striving to maintain respectability amid the decay. Society does indeed ignore them. The market doesn’t. That's why what the market provides for the respectable black family she mentions - clothes, furniture and so on - is so much better than the housing the government provides.
*UPDATE: Peter Briffa has explained, "the reason she's living among the hoi polloi is that this is an excerpt from a forthcoming book whereby she leaves her capacious house in Clapham to slum it with the underclass, George Orwell-style."
January 14, 2003
Friends of Bill.
If The Hindu is right about Bill "Zipper Problem" Clinton's rivals for the Oxford top job being Shirley Williams, Hezza and Chris Patten, then I'm all for Bill. After all, "a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."
Hullo Pot, meet Kettle.
Once upon a time there was a thing called "The Language of Flowers". The sight of ambrosia in your beloved's nosegay would tell you that, yes, your love was returned. Some of the citizens of Northern Ireland have their own equivalent, the Language of How Everything But Everything Reduces To Our Favourite Conflict. In this language "Muslim" = "Catholic" and "Jew" = "Protestant". That is the most likely intepretation I can find for the events in the story relayed here by Slugger O'Toole. He quotes the Times as saying that some Unionists in Northern Ireland are worried that a (small) proposed mosque will be a source of "wailing noises" and be a breeding ground for extremists. Er, while I'd be the last to deny that we should all keep an eye on Muslim extremists - where there is actual evidence of extremism - just listen to yourselves, guys. The rest of you, keep your eyes peeled for Catholic objections to a proposed synagogue.
The justice system: a car no-one is driving.
Layman's logic puts some numbers to the Met's abrogation of its duty to investigate crime.
"Now this is a S U V !!! And it's ALL MINE !!"
Momma bear discreetly lets it be known that she is fond of her car. I am told it's a 1999 Dodge Ram 2500 Quad-Cab Pick-up with a 5.9l Cummins Diesel, 8' bed, 6.2m long, but I confess these technical details don't mean much to me. I think a rough translation would be "big tough car."
January 13, 2003
How To Win Friends And Influence People
A one-day teachers' strike in Olympia (in Washington State) in order to demand more funds for public education prompted this response from a reader:"Every time I need new equipment, my medical goes up or my IRA goes down, I go to my clients' houses with a bullhorn, some big signs, my kids and dog and all my neighbors. But it's funny how ineffective it is."
- From Jerry Moore's School Talk.
January 12, 2003
Nuke the whales.
I went to Greenpeace's website and read this:"Morality and what's deemed acceptable behaviour by states and their leaders is also a perception, and one which changes over time. As we move toward a globalisation of civil society, we need to build a world-wide moral deterrence against the possession of nuclear weapons. The cornerstone of any state's claim to moral authority, and any leader's, must be based on their accountability to civil society. They must abide by global agreements for the global good, they must conform to the most global definitions of acceptable behaviour."There were several expressions in that that had me thinking wistfully of how cool I'd look as a Mom from Hell scattering peons before me as I sat impregnable at the wheel of my SUV. This, for instance: Morality and what's deemed acceptable behaviour by states and their leaders is also a perception, and one which changes over time. As Peter Briffa would say, "Discuss." But the bit that really had me reaching for the phone to order it with extra lights and a bull-bar was this: They must conform to the most global definitions of acceptable behaviour. Huh? Did I hear you right, greenpea? Five thousand years of thought and argument about morality, and you think that what's right is whatever the biggest gang says is right.
Scrolling a little further down
Clayton Cramer's blog and you will find something about the latest controversy concerning John Lott, author of More Guns Less Crime. Is this a mirror to Bellesiles? Probably not, as, if I have correctly understood the account given on Instapundit, even the person raising doubts about a survey Lott carried out thinks it peripheral to the main argument.
I'm back.
First I was busy, then more telephone line trouble then yadda yadda you really want to hear my troubles don't you? I will just say that, come Der Tag, "Mike" of the AOL helpdesk will be spared.Here's a place where no-one's busy. North Korea is dark. Found via Clayton Cramer.