March 08, 2003
Pretty good debate between that chap who did the Hitler leadership thing on the telly and another chap.
(It's Saturday and I can do Bertie Wooster-type headlines if I want to.) Our chap Andrew Roberts gets the better of it, but not the last word.Most eerie bits of his programme last night: the series of shots of Hitler smilingly patting kids on the head, interspersed with shots of modern political leaders of every political stripe doing the same, and the film of Saddam Hussein denouncing the "traitors" and roping in his top lieutenants to go outside immediately and shoot their former colleagues.
Going back to the Guardian debate, Roberts dug up this nifty quotation from Aneurin Bevan:
"There is only one motto worse than 'My country, right or wrong' and that is 'The UN, right or wrong'."
Just the facts ma'am.
David Adesnik of Oxblog has up three consecutive posts detailing his research on potential costs of the Iraq war, famine in Afghanistan and civilian casualties of the war in Afghanistan. It's the culmination of an excellent series of posts. Start here, scroll down, and bookmark.
March 07, 2003
UPDATE: Aagh, there's more. Warning: Do Not Read Alone While Eating Biscuits.
A joke made up just now by yours truly:
Q: What's wrong with A-Levels these days?
A: They discriminate against other letters of the alphabet.
Go on, you know you want it.
More about university admissions procedures! Read this post by Frank Sensenbrenner and this one by Iain Murray (the latter including an admissions tutor's view), both to be found at the Edge of England's Sword. Digest what they say and bask in the knowledge that you now know plenty more about the subject than most people. Now you can get back to reading about the war in peace.Unless you are some sort of insatiable education policy wonk and want to hear my two pennorth on a related issue as well? You do? Cool, let us be weird together. Those sweetie-pies at the Demos think tank have suggested more assessment by teachers as their ideal silicone implant to beef up tired, saggy old assessment by A-Levels. There's a problem with this. It's a little-known fact that teacher assessments explode when the plane hits fifty thousand feet.
No. Not true. Sorry. Carried away by my own metaphor there. I made a little boob and it all blew up on me. The problem with this proposal from Demos is that teachers lie. My own husband, who is more realistic about his profession than most, gets a little shirty when I express myself so bluntly. But if it's acceptable to say "politicians lie" when what you mean is "it is frequently observed that some politicians lie when their interests are at stake, predictable that this phenomenon will continue and desirable that external checks exist to control it", then it's OK to say the same about teachers. A teacher's reputation, her merit pay and sometimes her very job might depend on the children in her charge doing well in exams and some of them, at least, getting into university. (True, the education establishment does all it can to dilute accountability but there are limits to even its power to fudge the facts.) Here's today's story about a teacher fiddling exam results. Another story like it will be along tomorrow. And if tomorrow the powers decree that a favourable teacher assessment is what gets a kid into university then "assessment inflation" will be the stuff of tomorrow's headlines just as "grade inflation" is the stuff of today's.
Of course I'm serious.
Mother Shipton said so.A house of glass shall come to passYou see Saddam's a pagan, sort of ("secularist" wouldn't scan), the reference to Turkey is obvious, the house of glass is that gherkin shaped building (I nearly said "gherkin shaped erection" but decided against), and then there's the North-South divide, obviously. The eagle in the lion's mouth refers to US airbases in Britain, Lakenheath particularly. Now do you see, you fools!
In England, but alas!
War will follow with the work
In the land of the Pagan and Turk
And state and state in fierce strife
Will seek each other's life
But when the North shall divide the South
An eagle shall build in the lion's mouth.
March 06, 2003
Laff of the week.
Scroll right down to the bottom of this so-so Rod Liddle article to see it. (Warning: moles of a sensitive disposition may be distressed.)
The new Sodom.
Peter Briffa is on a mission to reveal the rising tide of depravity in the Bishop's Stortford area. As if the parking situation wasn't bad enough.
What are we going to do about the universities
, as they turn to a system of selection by competitive hard luck story? Boycott them says Tom Utley. I have had brewing a long time a long post about this. It has gone into the limbo of eternal preparation, in a way typical of these long-planned Platonic blog posts intended to consummate months of thought. Perhaps that's a good thing. Brian Micklethwait has not lost his power to surprise and has written a doozy of a post that takes all my initial starting points (that completely decentralised entry would be best but that's not going to happen any time soon; that compared to straightforward selection by academic merit these moves towards selection by class are likely to bring about peverse incentives for failure in schools; that there will be chaos and unpredictability in university admissions, a collapse in academic vigour and reputation for the universities, not to mention coronaries for admissions tutors) and comes to a conclusion that turns my worries on their heads. In short he says, "Let 'em go to pot; so much better for the rest of us."Gosh. I'll have to think about that, as Samson said at Gaza. I can believe that there might be good effects were we to be less obsessed by qualifications. But what about the anti-achievement pressure on the schools in the twenty to thirty years before the good effects work through?
More about C P Scott.
I had known that he was editor of the Manchester Guardian for some tremendously long time (59 years actually) and that he had said "Comment is free, facts are sacred" and that he had been a kind of Liberal patriarch.What I hadn't fully taken on board was that he was a great friend and supporter of the early Zionists, as was the next editor, W P Crozier. They don't stress that much these days.
Photon Courier
sees the Guardian's casual endorsement of Anne Gwynne's murderous views as being a small breach in the protecting wall of civilisation. He takes the view that the Guardian is capable, as an institution, of bearing some small but definite part of the responsibility for the next Palestinian mass murder. Which came, as it happened, an hour or two after he wrote the post.But is that view really tenable? Can one seriously say that a newspaper should be seen as being an instrument of morality, and hence institutionally capable of immorality? Or should we stick with reporter Chris McGreal and say that we're all reading way too much into this - from which we can conclude that the headline written by the paper's own subeditors is 'not part of the paper's position' because it can't really have a position that matters?
McGreal would have not have had the agreement of C P Scott, the Guardian's legendary editor. He once wrote
"...But it [a newspaper] is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces."
Stirring stuff. If you want to read more you can find C P Scott's essay as an appendix to a PDF document I have been reading, namely the Guardian's Editorial Code.
Section 1 of the code, "Professional practice" lists alphabetically several areas where questions of ethics might arise. I found this entry ironic (italics mine):
Suicide Journalists are asked to exercise particular care in reporting suicide or issues involving suicide, bearing in mind the risk of encouraging others. This should be borne in mind in presentation, including the use of pictures, and in describing the method of suicide. Any substances should be referred to in general rather than specific terms if possible. When appropriate a helpline number (e.g. 08457 90 90 90) should be given. The feelings of relatives should also be carefully considered.
The part of the code that asks journalists reporting "issues involving suicide" not to encourage imitative suicides clearly went down the pan in the Anne Gwynne story, unless one wishes to argue that the code is vitiated when the suicide is also murder and the victims Israeli. To praise a woman who praises suicide-murder is to encourage the practice.
However there may be a get-out for the clause demanding consideration of the feelings of relatives. I suppose Messrs McGreal, Rusbridger and the unknown author of the "freedom fighter" headline could always argue that, while the code does not specify whose relatives it is talking about, the implication surely is that it is the relatives of the suicide. There is every reason to suppose that they were very happy with the "Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter" piece. They could certainly argue that the relatives of a suicide's victims, should he also be a murderer, are not covered by the code.
Which is in any case not binding.
Phew! I am sure that is a relief to all concerned. All that matter to the Guardian these days, anyway.
March 05, 2003
Reaching across the referrer logs.
Someone did a search for sewing blog last night, found mine, and was no doubt disappointed. Alas, it is too late to satisfy that person, but let me tell the rest of you about a really pleasing creation of mine. First you have to know that fur fabric has got awfully convincing recently. The expensive sort has every little hair gradated in colour just like the hairs of a real animal, sometimes with semi-random variations between individual hairs. It is also as soft and feathery as the last minutes of a dream. Anyway I made my daughter a pseudo-sable Cushion of Furriness and it was well received - but that was ages ago and not the subject of my story. The bit that really gladdens a sewer's heart didn't come until just recently when I was rummaging through my sewing cupboard, picked up the three foot by one foot rectangle of leftover fabric, folded it in half lengthwise, sewed it together to make a tube, finished the edges thoroughly (don't skimp on that stage with the feathery type of fur fabric or it'll shed worse than a real cat), turned it inside out and - bingo! - had a seriously expensive looking scarf just in time for the cold spell.And I used up a remnant to the last square inch. Joy.
Continuing the education theme,
Joanne Jacobs links to an essay by Thomas Sowell that argues against the cult of relevancy. Now as you know, I am really just an old pinko at heart. When I was a worthy socialist teenager I read worthy (if somewhat over-simplified) socialist accounts of how Victorian education strove to open the minds of upper class pupils yet aimed to keep the labouring classes ignorant of types of knowledge held to be unsuited to their lowly station in life. That's awful, thought I. I still think the same way. I didn't change, they did.Comment number five to Joanne's post is particularly deep, meaningful and - yes - relevant. I shall leave the discovery of who wrote it and what it says as an exercise for the reader.
The proper study of mankind is man.
Brian Micklethwait argues that training is seldom or never just about the skill being trained and gives us a portrait of an "aristocrat of labour" along the way. I rarely have the patience to read whole autobiographies but love to hear snippets.
March 04, 2003
Not a happy pussycat.
I hadn't slurped any of Diana Hsieh's Noodle Food for a while. So I went there. I really ought to second her fine points on free-markets, take issue with her atheism, analyse her Objectivism or something like that. Instead I am going to link to this freaky picture.
"Class-based targets for university admissions... did I say that? "
Higher Education Minister Margaret Hodge leaves skid marks all over the road.
Thirty years on.
Read Israpundit's interview with James Welsh the man who says, in the plainest of words, that he heard Arafat's voice on intercepted communications, personally ordering the murder of two US diplomats.UPDATE: I'm having a little trouble with that link to "Dawson Speaks". The same interview is cross posted at Israpundit.
What will those wacky protestors be up to next?
Most of 'em, nothing out of the ordinary, I'm sure. But Gary Farber wonders whether that part of the crowd who know the ANSWER might go the way of the Weathermen.Further down he quotes "a lion of the left", Leon Wieseltier. Here was a particularly thought-provoking line:
"There is imperialism, and there is assistance from the outside. It is not naive to maintain the distinction, unless one thinks that the imbalance of power is itself an evil; but then one has surrendered the discussion of politics."
Belated test entries are coming in thick and fast, piling into my mailbox in their ...pairs.
Captain J M Heinrichs writes:1. How about twelve? The Apple IIGS of the late '80's had 12-bit RGB colour which, as executed by the system, allowed for highly realistic colour on screen. At the time VGA was the rage with its 8-bit colour via a lookup table with the full spectrum of 254 colours (plus white and black).This answer is elegant, ingenious, logical and wrong. The real answer is far stupider. Next bit's right though:No, I can't draw the requisite model. Just a personal limitation, you know.
2. "Sir Donald Bradman possessed the technique and intelligence that took him to the very pinnacle of the sport. His Test record is the stuff of legends: 52 Tests, 6996 runs, 29 hundreds at
an average of 99.94." (BBC Sport Online)
David Yule also supplied the right answer to Question Two (adding that Bradman is probably the best-loved Australian which is wrong for I and many others will allow no rival to cloud my devotion to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo despite discovering that Skippies were disposable.) Mr Yule also gave the right answer to Question One:
The 'hypercubic root of 4096' is probably 8, but could also be 4 or 2. Hypercubic in general just means 'more than three', so the question is a bit unclear: 8 is the 4th root of 4096, while 4 is the 6th root, and 2 is the 12th root. Take your pick.
I am outclassed. I just meant 8.
Nonetheless, I hereby award you my second grand prize of up to one hundred thousand dollars, secure in the knowledge that you as a maths geek will not be able to deny that the phrase "up to one hundred thousand" obviously includes zero.
Anne Gwynne, 'freedom fighter'. Want to see what the Guardian had to say for itself?
So did I. So did a correspondent of Stephen Pollard's, Oliver Kamm, who wrote to the Guardian and asked them. The correspondence that ensues actually borders on being funny. You just have to visualise it as a 50s cinema poster:- See Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Year, Man of Rubber!
- See him CLAIM not to get what the problem is!
- Watch him PRETEND to think that Oliver Kamm was objecting to the Anne Gwynne story being reported at all!
- GASP in AWE as Chris McGreal KEEPS A STRAIGHT FACE while saying that the Guardian was not even expressing a position at all!
This is the permalink but for some formatting reason it is much easier to read on Stephen Pollard's main site, though you may have to scroll down.
In the interests of strict justice I was ready to say that Chris McGreal should not be held responsible for the headline, as headlines are written by sub-editors not reporters. Then I saw that he had said, 'Neither the headline nor the views as expressed by Ms Gwynne are the "paper's position", as you put it.'
What the ....?
Whose position are they then?
Are the Guardian's subeditors not its employees? Are they not chosen, trained and bound by custom and contract to work according to Guardian rules and Guardian traditions? Is their performance not part of the paper's reputation and part of Alan Rusbridger's responsibility?
Or does the Guardian run an 'open house' in the headline department? If so, can I pop in off the street and have a go?
For reference, my earlier post on this subject is here.
March 03, 2003
Drug war indeed.
Many friends of mine hold the view that the problem with drug prohibition is not its existence but its weak-willed and patchy enforcement. Nobody could accuse the Thai authorities of applying insufficient force; an astonishing 1,000 people have been killed in a recent crackdown.All that, and it still won't work. That is the double tragedy.
Alex Bensky
wins my test. He writes,"Don't worry boys, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist---" are the famous last words of Union general John Sedgwick. It was in 1864, I think in May, at the battle of Spotsylvania.Why does he win a magificent prize with a value of up to $1,000,000, you ask, tears pricking at the corners of your eyes, despite not having got the one about the hypercubic root of 4096 or who scored 6996 runs in 52 Test Matches? Because, dear readers, his was the only entry.And I imagine Julie Burchill's colleagues will talk to her, if only to try to help her understand the error of her ways and realize that Harold Pinter and Julia Roberts are truly the moral arbiters of our times.
Talking of telepathy
and related phenomena, you are predestined to try this so you might as well get it over with. I know, I simply know that you will be amazed. (Via The Corner.)
I've gone green.
No, not politically. With envy. Mark Steyn's latest column in the National Post mentions Peter Cuthbertson's blog Conservative Commentary.
March 02, 2003
Can you see this post?
If you can, could you e-mail me at nataliesolentATaol.com and tell me so? [UPDATE: Someone just has - thank you, Mr Richardson.] The reason I ask is that although the FTP log is telling me that Blogger has published I cannot see my last few posts when I view my own weblog.When I started Blogger nothing like this ever happened: I could see the new post as soon as I pressed "View web page". However in the last few months it has become increasingly common that there will be a delay of between a few minutes and a few hours until the new posts become visible TO ME on the blog. I have deduced that the posts concerned may well be visible to at least some other readers, since they send me e-mails on them. (Alternative hypothesis: telepathic readers.)
Usually I can establish whether the posts have truly been published or not by examining the FTP log. If there is lots of writing ending with the words "transfer completed", then it has worked. If there is only a modern poem sprinkled with worrying words suggestive of failure, then it hasn't.
If the latter, what I usually do is save the template and the archive template then press publish again. Sometimes I do this twice. This procedure still doesn't allow me to see my own weblog - that will only happen in its own sweet time - but it does seem to get those reader e-mails going.
The point, you ask? My latest period of inability to see my own stuff has gone on for longer than ever before. Following the links in my referrer logs (purely in a spirit of scientific enquiry, you understand) leads me to no mentions of any post of mine more recent than 9.50am on Saturday morning.
I'm getting paranoid. And sick of Blogger. It may well be that in the next few weeks or months the mighty resources of Google will solve all its server problems, but I don't think I can wait until then. Steps Are Being Taken.
Meanwhile.... is anyone out there?
LATER: Peter Briffa tells me (non-telepathically) that he is having the same problem.
After all that
, here is a good article in the Guardian about the attempted suppression of dubious Flemish Nationalist party Vlaams Blok by means of the courts. It finishes thus:Such policies should clearly solicit a robust response from mainstream politicians and must be challenged in the strongest possible terms. But pretending that such views do not exist would be foolish.In a democratic society the Blok's detractors would do better to spend their energy and time demolishing the party's policies in the debating chamber and on TV instead of trying to suppress such views.
Or as one Flemish journalist wrote recently: "The battle against the Blok is not going to be won or lost in the courts but rather in everyday politics."
Perhaps it is time the Belgian establishment took note - before it is too late.
"Such lovely families and very proud of their sons."
I urge you to read a post by Stephen Pollard. He links to a Guardian article headed, breathtakingly, "Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter". Why do I say "breathtakingly"? Because the freedom-fighting of the woman profiled by the Guardian, Anne Gwynne, consists of the fact that she went to 'Occupied Palestine' the better to be chummy with the families of two suicide bombers who killed twenty-three Israeli civilians. Or who "went on the mission to Tel Aviv" as she winningly puts it, before adding, "They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons."The woman herself is of a recurring though despicable type: the White Liberal Murder-Groupie. OK, you've seen her like before, swooning over the Khmer Rouge or the Black Panthers. We are up to about Mk VIII by now, with Improved Extra Gush Factor. Let us wash our minds of her and move on.
But the Guardian's commentary hits a new low, and the Guardian once had some honour to lose. Did you know that it was once the Manchester Guardian, provincial in the best sense, standing for a tradition of Nonconformist self-improvement? Think on that and then re-read that headline describing a woman who pants to to further help the killers in their bloody work: Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter.
Then look at the first sentence: Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. Mrs Gwynne did not write that, the reporter, Chris McGreal wrote it. Probably didn't think about it much.
Did I say "the Guardian's commentary" just then? Silly of me, it isn't a commentary. The nearest it comes to an effort at any of that "dig deeper, ask the tough questions" stuff reporters and analysts are meant to do is this:
Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?
The answer given, pretty quickly, is "Nah, 'course not." Note how McGreal had to drag in that fact that many of the victims weren't Israelis in order to make even a debating-point case for sympathy. Beyond that one limp line there is no justification offered for the term "freedom fighter" or for calling Anne Gwynne's activities "her own war against terrorism." In contrast great detail is offered of the sufferings of the Palestinians (which is as it should be) - but not the slightest scepticism as to whether Anne Gwynne is telling the whole truth. Could McGreal not have made some interjection, asked a few challenging supplementary questions, for instance, when confronted with lines like this: "I used to think it was all excuses, but they [Israeli soldiers] actually believe this shit. We have nothing to kill them with, just a few AK-47s."? Perhaps he was never going to give the answer I would have given, namely, "Your pals with the bomb-belts seem to slaughter well enough, dearie," but one would think that the traditions of the Guardian would demand some note of distance, of qualification, of un-acceptance?
An apologia, even when desperately, heartbreakingly wrong, is a sort of bridge between evil and good, an acknowledgement that there is something here that needs explaining. But Chris McGreal saw no necessity for any elaboration. Tip-tap-tip went the swiftly typing fingers and out came the words "freedom fighter", "her own war on terrorism", praise as easy and insouciant as a local reporter putting in a good word for the latest charitable efforts of the Womens' Institute or Rotary Club. As Stephen Pollard concludes, "Ms Gwynne's evil views are not merely presented without criticism or proper questioning; they are endorsed. And that is, in its own way, also evil."