July 25, 2003
No one seems to have paid much attention
to the fourteen year old son of the late Qusay who died along with his father and uncle.I don't blame the US troops who killed him. In that culture, boys become men early, and I can well believe that he was firing at them - and bullets from a fourteen year old can kill you quite as dead as bullets from an adult. Furthermore it is, sadly, probable that he was trained to ruthlessness and quite possible that he was a murderer in his own right. (They say that Caligula's daughter was a monster of cruelty by the age of five, and no one is recorded as having mourned when a legionary bashed her brains out against a wall in the first hours of Claudius's reign.)
Still, it is a pity that he had to die too. Somewhere C S Lewis notes that the smallest act of kindness, or restraint from cruelty, on the part of a person raised to vice may count as much in the final reckoning as great heroism on the part of someone raised to virtue. I hope that in his short life he was not quite as bad as his family wanted him to be.
Greetings, Samizdata readers
: if you've come by while following Brian Micklethwait's link to me, the post of mine you are looking for is headed "If an opinion can't be shouted from the rooftops it will sure as hell leak out through the gutters" and can be found here.
I didn't even know
that US states had bond ratings. But the discovery that California's is two notches above 'junk' doesn't surprise me.
July 23, 2003
Robert McNally
has the mother of all links compilations on the subject of "the Brights". It's called "Tracking the Bright Idea", and it does what the name says. He writes, "The purpose of TTBI is to collect commentary both supporting and criticizing the Brights movement." Look here.
John Costello
writes:Surely you are not going to allow the French to determine the pronunciation of English words! Are you going to say 'Par-ee' as well? Non! Non, madamme! The proper pronunciation in English -- both the British and American dialects -- of Niger, both river and country, is"Nigh-gher." Stess on the first syllable.
July 22, 2003
Read this
fascinating debate between Dr Tony Sewell and Lee Jasper about black underachievement. Both are black; Sewell is an academic and Jasper a professional anti-racist. (Strictly accurate description.) I was really cheered by Tony Sewell's contribution - I think I had heard of him before, but had mixed him up with Thomas Sowell. I'm glad to discover that at least one British black writer is arguing passionately for a culture of responsibility: until now I'd only really come across American equivalents. Here's something he said:The real poverty that our children face is a poverty of aspiration - they have linked themselves with the prevailing anti-learning culture of their white working class counterparts. The sin that you commit is to give this "mentality" credence by reducing it solely to white racism.
I was struck by one startling admission in Lee Jasper's response:
Tony, Levels of racial inequality have grown in education, health, criminal justice and public sector employment over the last 20 years. This indicates that racism has increased over this time. The greatest weapon in the hands of an oppressor is the mind of the oppressed, and your blind refusal to correctly assess the impact of racism lets all white people off the hook.So after twenty years of vigorous coercive anti-racism, racism has increased. Maybe one day Lee Jasper will make the connection between his own daily work and its results.
My husband's impression from schools is that racism of the crude kind is decreasing among children. Partly this is the result of the good use of anti-racist propaganda (please note that both adjectives and the noun in that sentence were chosen deliberately: racism is bad, being anti it is good and propagating that meme effectively is good - however much the anti-racist fanatics debase the coinage), and partly because more white children and more black and brown children share the same playgrounds and find that they get along OK, after all. People often do.
Yet racial inequality is increasing, according to Lee Jasper, who ought to know. I think the hook he is so keen to keep white people collectively skewered on has something to do with it. People on hooks are apt to be bad-tempered. People who consciously hold other people on hooks are apt to neglect opportunities for self-improvement.
Yup.
Gottem. How long you reckon before someone who didn't give a flying f*** about leaving them in power to torture and murder thousands of Iraqis starts moaning about due process?As I exulted my husband quoted John Donne with a hint of reproof in his voice. Any man's death diminishes me. Hum. Yeah. I really ought to hope that the murderous pair repented before they died. OK. I hope it. I just don't think it's terribly likely, and my mind is more on the suddenly improved prospects for the healing of Iraq.
And when I think of the brides raped on their wedding day... No man is an island, but some men are extremely exposed peninsulas, and they dug the channels themselves.
Just die already!
I couldn't find a link for this one either, but on Radio 4's News Quiz yesterday it said that some safety officer at an old peoples' home had forbidden the residents to grow pot plants on safety grounds. Ostensibly he was worried they'd constitute a "tripping hazard", or maybe he thought the Venus flytrap would develop a taste for human flesh - but who cares about the official reason? The real reason is that it is pleasant to control other peoples' lives, the more so when one can reassure oneself that one acts from the most benevolent of motives.Pity the institutionalised old folks, though. Already forbidden dogs, cats, and sex as a solace for their declining years, now they cannot even care for a plant. Protected from dangerous flowering shrubs they can get on with staring at the wall undisturbed. Conveniently, their premature deaths from boredom and uselessness will not show up on anyone's safety statistics. This is our future.
Zipp-a-dee-doo-dah, zipp-a-dee-day,
My oh my, we got Uday...
.... Or maybe it's all just another rumour. No link, 'cos my readers can click Google news all on their ownesomes.
I say tomayto,
Qusay... nothing 'cos you're dead.
July 21, 2003
I'm back.
And I have a pile, a teetering, intimidating pile fully two hundred electron-widths high of unread and undealt-with e-mail. I shall ignore it for now - and much of it forever - and get on with saying something.Just let me think a moment.
I suppose it's this. I missed the David Kelly suicide story, and now it has the insubstantial feel common to news that has the effrontery to exist without my validation. All I can think of to say now is: suicide is nearly always wrong. I'm sure the BBC behaved badly, just as I'm sure the Labour government spin machine behaved badly, but neither of them killed him. He killed himself. I'm sure the poor man felt harassed, pressurised, slandered - but he still had a choice and he made the wrong one. Several wrong ones, actually, starting with the decision to give "confidential" briefings to journalists at all. Nothing that could conceivably have happened to him had his leaks been made public in the normal way was worth killing himself over or causing that amount of pain to his family.