'Nother Solent

Was meant to be packing.

Got ranting instead, over at Biased BBC.

Public Interest is back, which is all to the good as I'm off for a few days. See you June 2nd.

UPDATE: Calm, calm. Count to ten. Deep breathing. Enhance your calm. No, the first chapter of Peter Briffa's novel wasn't that bad. It's Blogger going bolooger again that is sending my blood pressure into regions that qualify it for astronaut's wings. Click this second link if the first one didn't work.

If anyone else

is new to blogs, this glossary of blogging terms might help.

I have arrived.

I have finally had a (an?) hostile e-mail. Ian MacFarlane writes, and I answer in italics:

Visited your website because Mark Steyn had given it the nod.

1. It takes forever to open your page. I don't suppose there's a sensible reason for this?

Depends whether you count "the internet is crud sometimes" as sensible. My page is usually very quick to open; about half a second. But yesterday I had trouble browsing, too.

2. The site is mass confusion. What is a BLOG? And what does it do?

Blog is short for "Web log". It is an internet journal composed by one person or several, containing links to other websites, and usually self-consciously diverse in subject matter. Those that concentrate on politics are a minority of all blogs but are the most widely read.

Perhaps you embrace avant-garde internet terminology to feel superior to those of us who haven't heard them yet?

While it is no disgrace not to be aware of this particular subculture, there are several million blogs out there. Newspapers now feel free to use the term without explanation. Perhaps you impute to me motives that have never entered my head because your granny made you eat semolina pudding when you were three. Amateur psychology via the internet is a notoriously unreliable proceeding, but that's my diagnosis.

3. If a blog is a forum for twits like Ken Mcleod to ramble on about his useless doings, then some people (make that most people!) should just shut the fuck up!

You don't have to read it, chum.

4. One dare not follow a link from your site because once again, it takes forever to go back to the main page.

See answer to your point (1) above.

5. All in all, a general waste of time and effort. Maybe Steyn is losing his marbles!

He looks okay marble-wise to me.

Most sincerely,

Ian Macfarlane.

Have a happy week.

Selective political myopia.

Joanne Jacobs led me to an entertaining account from a US academic describing how he carried out a sociological experiment. He deliberately violated university policy by posting a "Clinton/Gore '96" sticker on his office door.

"After two years without any complaints, I decided to replace the sticker with one that said "George W. Bush for President." Within a few weeks I heard reports from two faculty members and one staff member saying that someone was preparing to file a complaint about the Bush sticker."

He didn't want to get fired, so he quickly sent round an e-mail beginning: "You have all been involved in an experiment in tolerance which, unfortunately, some of you have failed . . ."

Eventually his door became a sort of free-fire comment zone:

After one animal rights activist heard about my little prank, she came by the office for a laugh. I put up an "I Love Animals. . . They're Delicious" sticker just for her. Some liberals really do have a sense of humor, you know.

Of course, others don't. After one of my feminist colleagues came by to say that she didn't mind my stickers as long as I didn't post anything "pro-life," I had to respond. That explains the picture on my door showing a newborn baby with "Is this the face of the enemy?" printed above his forehead. If you come by my office, you can't miss it. It's in bold letters.

All in fun, lady, all in fun.

However the admirable Dr Mike S. Adams was wrong - or at least not necessarily right - in saying that his colleagues had failed an experiment in tolerance. After all, he was breaking university rules, and he did not suffer any penalty in the end. One can imagine a devoted supporter of free speech who would, without inconsistency, object to political stickers where they were forbidden by an agreed-upon local rule. Even the glaringly obvious discrepancy in how the two different stickers were received does not necessarily point to a failure of principle. Perhaps his embarrassed colleagues can stand before their Maker and claim that they believe in free speech equally for all opinions. They just... didn't see the Clinton sticker. It was part of the air they breathed, platitudinous, not really politics at all...

I have written elsewhere about how the decision as to what does and does not count as political is deeply political. The Left is right in one thing; there is a sense in which everything is political. That is a horribly dangerous truth. It can lead to the totalitarian vision of Robert Ley, chief of the Nazi 'Strength Through Joy' movement, who said, "Only sleep should be provided as free time, " adding that private amusements had no value for Germany. But even dangerous truths are still true: deciding what is and is not a subject for a discussion isn't just an argument but often the key argument.

I first became aware of this melancholy truth while watching, dumbly, the progress of the Firearms Act 1997. Again and again I heard politicians and citizens of all parties declare with complete sincerity that "this is beyond politics," as if the question of whether to arm the polis were not the very quintessence of politics.

Yet, very often the argument about what is arguable is an argument that never takes place. Sometimes that is because conscious hypocrites carefully plan that it should not. However the most innocent and the most common reason for this just the sort of selective short-sightedness suffered by Dr Adam's colleagues. Did they - could they - finally see the point when he reminded them about the invisible Clinton sticker? Did they say, "Oops"? If so, they passed the experiment in tolerance, though not, perhaps, with distinction.

When is racial abuse acceptable from a bishop?

To find out, read this article by Joyce Milton in which lambasts the Episcopalians - with a brief word from our own dear C of E to show that it too is full of men who can't say the word "evil" without scare quotes.

(Via Random Jottings)

Talking of matters ecclesiastical, no one noticed my deliberate mistake, perhaps because it wasn't deliberate. John Wycliffe wasn't burned at the stake. He died of a stroke. I was thinking of William Tyndale.

Ain't No Bad Dude has moved to http://www.aintnobaddude.com.

Ain't No Bad Address.

Ken MacLeod

has a blog. Found via Amygdala, now posting every day.

No, I don't do interesting posts after midnight. Nothing personal, Gary, Ken, it's my fault not yours that that was just about the most brain-rotting gut-decomposing benzadrinic post I have ever written.* Everything about it was substandard. The utter lack of an arresting headline. The bland, uninformative link text - just the name of the blog linked to, "Amygdala", although heaven knows even that was better than "blog." The lazy failure to provide a permalink. The smug, complacent way that I offered no explanation of who Ken MacLeod was; I just assumed my readers would know. I couldn't even manage the basic courtesy of proper English: "Found via Amygdala, now posting every day" attains all the linguistic dignity of a cinema poster advertising Confesssions of an Accountant: Full Frontal Falsified VAT Returns. For the right to do this my forefathers fought and died, for this John Wycliffe was burned at the stake. O tempora! O mores! I almost deserve this.

Oh well. Isn't it nice that Ken MacLeod has a blog and Amygdala is posting every day?

*Oh no, tell a lie. I may have written a slightly more boring post in October or was it November last year. Wait a minute, it must have been November because I was eating the flapjacks I made for the halloween party, the awful ones that nobody ate, and I was eating them, well more chewing than actually eating, while writing this post (the one I'm talking about I mean not this one I'm doing now) at the same time; and I remember thinking, gosh, this is a pretty boring post. Unless that was the other boring post I did in...

&aelig

Thanks to everyone who sent me HTML advice. I still think that there ought to be a general "ignore this" command. I could put all those louche posts that let down the tone of this weblog in between two ignore tags and deny that they were my responsibility at all.

For instance, this website is a mildly interesting example of the oddities to be found on the internet, although I must caution that the banner ad at the top sometimes contains obscene language and images. <ignore> But this is a deeply, deeply sick example of the pathologies rampant in our society. </ignore>

Rescues. Snacks. Dangerous re-fuelling. Logistics. Conventions of Theft. Shooting. Big guys going through little hatches.

James Rummel of Hell in a Handbasket recently spent several days aboard the USS McFaul and discusses all of the above. Many pictures.

"Not yet, you fool" part II.

Captain Heinrichs writes:

Partially true, but the greater danger is after one throws the grenade -

"No, that's not what I said!"

The instruction is to watch until the grenade lands, then duck behind the protective wall and watch through the armoured glass. However, the tendency is to see the grenade land, bounce, and then wonder what happens next. At this point, hopefully, the supervisor takes hold of a handful of shirt and pulls vigourously downward. The thrower immediately remembers the post-throw instructions, and dives for the viewing port, to see his throw missed "by that much". It has happened to me, umm, several times. (An interesting but semi-salacious memory intrudes, but I resist the
temptation.)

Continue to resist. Be strong!

It's what they call an "encore presentation."

You know, I'd be happy to ask why on earth Mark Steyn has the impudence to put up this article from 2000 again, when everyone knows that the situation is completely different now. I'd be delighted to chide him for going on about yesterday's problems, now happily well on their way to being solved. "That's sooooo 2000," I'd say. It would be nice to be able to do that.

If only. In the real world matters now are as bad or worse as when he wrote this article on crime in gun-free Britain. It's as relevant today as when he wrote it. Bummer.

Andrew Bolt, writing in Australia's Herald Sun, puts it perfectly:

Islamic terrorism has been like a Rorschach blot of the Left: into every suicide bombing you can read your favourite cause, and demand your favourite solution, whether it is winding back American influence, curbing globalisation or destroying Israel.

(Via Tim Blair, who made a different choice from mine as to which passage to pick as best quote. There were plenty of good contenders.)

"On the one hand, there are limits to what the government can do. On the other hand, they [the Algerian government] found a lot of resources awfully quickly to put on a nice show when Chirac's visit was arranged, making one wonder why buckets and shovels were the tools of first resort in this disaster. That we do differently over here is a testament not only to our technology, but to having a truer free market system that can generate the wealth needed to do this right and reinforce the value of individuals enough to have it taken as a given that doing so is worth it. "

- Geoffrey Barto. (Also a Secret Master of Hut Mul, by the way. General link here.)