'Nother Solent

And, keeping all my blogs fed

, here's something for Biased BBC about when Auntie drops the pretence of moral neutrality.

Dropping the ball.

I posted about a particularly stupid decision in Iraq over at Samizdata.

Fun discussion

of Time Travel movies from Brian of Crooked Timber.

I was just discussing a 70s Czech movie about time travel with a friend. Some baddies were going to give the neutron bomb to Hitler. (Any Czech film made in the 70s required unfavourable mention of this "capitalist weapon".) Title was something like "I'm going to spill my tea tomorrow," but a search for "czech time spill tea film Hitler" is not yielding results. Gosh, I'm glad Google is a robot. Anyone recall it?

UPDATE: Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem. Of course. How could I have forgotten. Oh, if you must: 'Tomorrow I'll wake up and scald myself with tea.' A reader called Richard, who sent me this information adds modestly that "The only reason I happen to know this is because it's a long running in-joke on a board I post on. (Possibly not unconnected with a certain paper famous for its typos)." My goodness, I had no idea that the Harlow and Bishop's Stortford Star-Classified ran to such elevated levels of discussion.

Anyway, here is a brief account of the film with insightful comments from several viewers.

The Prince of Darkness has been thrust from his master's sight.

Matthew Turner

has now said he wrongly accused me of being a racist. Undeniably, that is nicer than what went before. He is having a campaign of niceness on his blog. As part of it he might consider that when one has cause to retract a wrongful accusation one also has cause to apologise for it.

Debate on this important issue continues and should continue whether there is much niceness around or not. Matthew Turner adds as an aside that, of course, what I meant by informed black opinion is black opinion that agrees with mine. Well, no. Being factually informed on the issue of black crime is not at all the same as having similar opinions to mine.

Some writers manage both. Thomas Sowell, for instance, who has influenced me a lot, writes quite coolly that black taxi drivers will (more on this use of the word 'will' later) pass up black male passengers in New York at night – and he, a black man, does not blame them. And the black talk show host and columnist Larry Elder whom I greatly admire, says: "…many blacks demanded that cops ignore reality and pretend that young black men do not disproportionately commit crime."

In contrast, having heard her speak on the radio, I don’t agree with much of what Diane Abbott MP says should be done about the explosion of black-on-black gun crime in her area – but hers is nonetheless informed opinion. She knows there’s a problem.

And I agree with very little of what what the Ligali organisation proposes (they support reparations for one thing), but theirs, too, is informed opinion. On reflection, though, perhaps “informed” isn’t quite the word I should have used throughout this post. The actual distinction isn’t so much between informed versus uninformed as between in denial and not in denial. As a writer on the Ligali website put it: “Gun Crime. No matter if we talk to we're blue in the face, some of us still won't acknowledge there's a problem.”

In general I don’t agree with much that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes, but hers, too, is informed/not-in-denial opinion when it comes to this issue. (Furthermore she is neither black nor white, which in the present climate gives her enviable freedom.) In an article called “Black-on-black violence: there is a way forward” she writes: “…in the US and the UK, black people's lives are being ripped to shreds by drugs, lawlessness, fear and frightful violence plus the endless circle of racism, exclusion and incarceration.” She gives this example:

A black youth worker too frightened to be named tells me: "These kids are vicious. They think bullying and beating each other up is what sissies do. They talk about killing. They are kings when they kill. One even brought me a cat he had shot to show the others they are in command. They love it that everyone is afraid of them, even their own parents."

(I think it was half-remembering this line in her article that put it in my mind to write the sentence about mothers becoming afraid of their sons that was one of the things Matthew Turner quoted as “evidence” of my racism.)

In another of her columns, called “Who wrecks the hopes and dreams of black boys?” Alibhai-Brown wrote:

“After studying 150 black 15-year-olds in five secondary schools, Sewell concluded that peer group pressure was a bigger threat to the progress of these children than racism or a lack of role models. Four out of five interviewees cited this as their main barrier to achievement. It is uncool to get good marks, the hard workers are "dissed" and the leaders of the pack pride themselves on how many girls they can pull and how easily they can threaten teachers, especially women.” Time now, I think, to tackle that other massive problem in our society – black on black violence, external and internal.

Next bit. Matthew Turner writes:

Some progress has been made, as she now says [not now says; always did say - NS] she was only talking about a subsection of the black population. And yet I'll quote her original article again:

"This truth is often denied, but you watch the loudest deniers choose which tube carriage to get into late at night and you will get an education. Even black women will avoid a group of young black men. Imagine the tragedy of a black mother who watches her son go from being a lovable kid to being one of those rowdy, threatening youths. "

There's nothing qualifying the 'those rowdy threatening youths' except that they are 'black, young, men'. However if I misunderstood what she was trying to say then that's all well and good.

Well and good for him, maybe. He says that inter-blog wars are confusing and boring. For me the interest level of inter-blog wars goes right up when it's me being called a racist. Try it sometime. So I was motivated to turn to my dictionary. It says of the auxiliary verb "will" that it expresses "insistence, resolve, habit or intention," adding that 'would' is the past tense. Habit or predominating custom is the meaning used in this case. Here are some other sentences using the word the same way.

"Spanish workers will take a siesta in the afternoon."
"Your best friends won't [=will not] tell you, you know."
"On Friday afternoons I will curl up with my copy of Gardening Weekly."
"Blacks will start up their own businesses to sidestep the white-dominated job market." [That last in the sense of an observation of the present, not a prediction of the future.]

This usage is standard English. It's not particularly easy to misconstrue, unless you read with your hand on the trigger.

Moving on to the substantial points, the ones which could have been debated without all this fuss, if I were willing to let being called a racist go by, which I am not:

"Essentially however the point of our disagreement is that Solent believes that black youths try less hard at school because they don't think they'll need qualifications because everything will be made easier for them. I think that's a load of Horlicks."

The point is not that they think everything will be made easy for them. I specifically said in the original article that "the rising generation may never explicitly make the calculation 'I don't have to work so hard because I'm black.'" The point is that they think or, what is harder to cure, they half-consciously feel, that it won't make much difference what they do. Given that the officially sanctioned model of fairness speaks of matching the proportion of blacks in each profession to the proportion in the general population, irrespective of individual merit, it is no surprise they react that way. Any qualifications, reputation or habits of diligence they might gain won't make as as much obvious difference as they should. The scale of incentives is flattened out. The incentive to stay well behaved in class today is that much less. And that, by the diffuse but cumulatively powerful effect of a thousand individual daily decisions to speak or not, laugh or not, listen or not, jeer or not, means the incentive to stay within the law tomorrow is that much less.

He don' like spammers much, does he?

Both John Daragon and the Philosophical Cowboy have written in with explanations of this "returned mail" thing. Mr Daragon writes:

Actually, some spam-emitting bastard is sending out bastard spam with a forged "Reply-to" tag which says it came from you.

Also, take a gander at the Cowboy's post on the London power cut. Victoria to Brixton? Nyah, that's nothing. During an IRA bomb scare I once walked from Victoria to Seven Sisters. When pregnant. Beat that, Cowboy.

Good, balanced post on the hairshirt tendency in foreign aid from Bjørn Stærk:

Doing what's right is not the same as doing what eases your guilt. Morality takes the whole picture into account, guilt fixates on one issue, panics and pulls the hand brake.

Anyone remember the Henry Root letters?

I think he must have a daughter. Read this and hurt yourself laughing. (Via Tim Blair.)

Then finish the job of doing yourself serious internal damage by looking into this tale of entrepreneurial revolutionary scam artists. Unlike Miss Missive mentioned above these people were not harmless pranksters but seeking to gain money by deception. But, like many accounts of ingenious crime, their story has a certain louche appeal and I think that Harry may be proved wrong in saying that it won't appear in the bourgeois press.

Oliver Kamm

is now at http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/

Phil J just emailed

to say that it wasn't Coming Up for Air in the post three down, it was A Clergyman's Daughter. 'Course it was. Since citing the wrong Orwell book adds nothing to my argument I have corrected it below.

BTW did you know that émail is French for 'enamel'? See, I do know some stuff.

The attitudes bred by communism

are well illustrated by this anecdote from Sofia sideshow.

The Craft Service guy is 'old-school' (in Bulgaria, this is a bad thing). A conversation will often go like this:
"This looks good. Wait, where are the candy bars?"
"There are none."
"Why?"
"Billa [a market] was out of them."
"...well, what about Metro [another market]?"
"You said to go to Billa."
"I said to get candy bars."

...Actually, I said to get candy bars, and he asked which ones, and I said I didn't care, and that stunned him, and he asked again which ones, and I said to choose himself (I'm not Craft Service...), and he asked which ones, and I said go to Billa or somewhere and get candy bars...
...so he played it safe ('somewhere' could be a trick or test of loyalty, and so it was Billa or nothing)...

Unbelievably cute, and useful too.

Or do I mean 'unbelievably useful, and cute too'? Both. Yesterday I linked to John Weidner of Random Jottings when he was speaking in combative mode. Today, however - aaaaaaaah.

Evil computer update.

I keep getting messages saying "returned mail, user unknown", referring to emails that I am meant to have sent on days when I did not turn on the computer at all. I assume it's a virus.

And it's telling me I have to do something to the counter. Free counters aren't worth the money you don't pay for them.

Fie unto the lot of them. Intermittent blogging only until the end of the school holidays.

It's a small blogosphere when you're a "racist" and writer of "foul articles" - like me.

Just after putting the finishing touches to the post below I came across the comments to a post in Conservative Commentary where Peter Cuthbertson directed his readers to my post called "The Ratchet" of August 16. A great many of the same points as I made two hours ago also came up in the 32 comments the post has so far generated - ranging from mention of John H. McWhorter's recent article to the unpleasantness and genius of Richard Wagner. However if you have to choose between reading my post and these comments, read the comments, because there is no denying the same ingredients gain extra zing from being spiced with acrimonious disagreement. A commenter called Matthew* writes:

"If Natalie Solent believes the institutional and social setup in this country is such that black people think 'I don't have to work so hard because I'm black' then frankly god help her. Her assertion that the biggest problem faced by British blacks is crime by other black people is -particularly stupid. At one point in her foul article she gets perilously close to asserting -- well basically she does assert that all young black men are thugs. ('Even black women will avoid a group of young black men. Imagine the tragedy of a black mother who watches her son go from being a lovable kid to being one of those rowdy, threatening youths'. and 'Black youths who have never had to take that lesson [that they should be punished for being less educated] to heart cannot fail to be dimly aware that they are sadder, cruder, less accomplished and complete people than they might have been.')

Thugs of course who have life so easy they know they don't need to work hard.

It is simply -- and I don't use the phrase lightly -- racist rubbish."

Somewhere in Orwell's A Clergyman's Daughter, the heroine ends up teaching at a particularly oppressive girls' school. Her attempts to enliven the girls' lessons come to an abrupt end when, while studying Macbeth, one of the pupils comes across the line "was from his mother's womb untimely ripped", asks what "womb" means and then repeats the teacher's explanation to Authority or her parents, I forget which. The teacher is promptly threatened with the sack for corrupting young minds and, to keep her job, must retreat into rote-learning and platitude.

It's like that with much discussion of racial issues. Upon the mere mention of certain forbidden subjects a good portion of the audience literally become unable to read the ordinary meaning of English words, so great is their passion that taboos not be breached.

The only estimate I made of the ratio of criminality among young UK blacks to criminality among equivalent whites was that it was greater than one. How Matthew transmuted that into an assertion that all black young men are thugs is beyond me. As a later commenter (James Hamilton) observes, the fact that there is a deeply worrying culture of crime among black youths is scarcely news to the black community. The issue has been tackled repeatedly in Britain's leading black newspaper, The Voice. He writes:

Matthew, you didn't really read my comment, and I'm going to have to say 'as usual'. So, let me repeat: the black-on-black crime issue has been raised here in London by the (black) Voice newspaper. They have also thrown their support behind the Met's Trident operation which is directly targetted at black gun crime. The black on black crime issue has been raised by leading black political figures in London. I'll name two for you: David Lammy and Trevor Philips. Now, a third point: in London schools, steps are being taken to do something positive about the underachievement of, specifically, young black men. I actually work in one such scheme.

Informed black opinion, both in the UK and the US, has moved on from the days of denial. I am no admirer of Jesse Jackson, but even he has candidly said as long ago as 1994, that "There is nothing more painful for me than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery and then look around and see it's somebody white and feel relieved." That doesn't differ in intent from what I said about young black women veering away from groups of black youths on the tube late at night. I have seen this happen. Who knows - perhaps those particular women were mistaken in their perception of those particular men. But my experience and many like it point to a widespread problem.

More significantly, in crying 'racist' as soon as I stated some unpleasant facts about crime levels among black men, Matthew blinded himself to the resolutely environmentalist tone of everything I wrote. (Another commenter, 'Guessedworker' is mistaken in thinking that I do not talk about racial difference because I am too scared of the PC police. I do not talk about it because I don't believe in it, except in a trivial sense.) Getting back to Matthew's views, they, again, reflect in miniature the conduct of a far larger debate. If I - or conservatives and libertarians generally - thought that all black men were forever foredoomed to criminality just by being black then why the hell would we bother to go on and on about incentives and cultural changes and suggest changes to the law and other schemes of improvement?

I can certainly tell why the purveyors of the established view (that the only significant cause of black underachievement is white racism and the only solution more laws and exhortation against it) might hate to hear about schemes of improvement. For a proposed scheme of improvement is an acknowledgement that the present scheme isn't working. There is an enormous amount of political self-identity tied up in the presently dominant model of race relations. Its adherents thrilled to the story of the Civil Rights struggle in the fifties and sixties, as did I. They see themselves as the heirs to the Freedom Riders. But they aren't. These people honour Dr Martin Luther King's name but they can't have read his words very carefully. He said, "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. "

Yes. Judge not by skin colour, but by character. That's why I'm against affirmative action.

ADDED LATER: Something was sparked in my mind by another of Matthew's charges, namely that writing 'Black youths who have never had to take that lesson to heart cannot fail to be dimly aware that they are sadder, cruder, less accomplished and complete people than they might have been' was racist. I've just remembered what it was.

But before I get to that, the wording of Matthew's interpolation to explain what I meant by 'that lesson' was misleading in effect if not intention. It is customary when inserting explanatory text in square brackets to keep it purely factual, lest you appear to put words into the author's mouth - yet he inserts the words "[that they should be punished for being less educated]" in such a way that it could easily appear that I held to this absurd and cruel sentiment. Giving someone a C in Mathematics because he or she has scored 50% in the maths exam and that is listed as a C in the mark scheme does not constitute punishment. Nor does holding black applicants for jobs or higher education to the same standard as white or Asian applicants constitute punishment.

Now on to the thing that's been nagging at my mind. I'd have thought that the first things anyone would notice if they cared to analyse my sentence were (a) that it referred to a subset of black youths - the most natural reading of a phrase starting "black youths who XYZ" implicitly allows for the existence of black youths who don't XYZ, and (b) that it is contingent in nature. The whole point of it is that the black youths didn't have to be this way - that's the very opposite of racism, I submit.

Yet I think that a lot of progressive folk are very much wedded to the idea that present day black problems are inevitable, all but insoluble and certainly insoluble by any actions that black people could take for themselves at a personal level. For a perfect example read entry #128 of this LGF comment thread. One guy had said something like "if black crime levels were brought down to such and such a level then such and such a consequence would follow" and from that this second guy jumps straight to the idea that the first one was wishing the blacks out of existence. Now, that visceral inability (on the part of a person who did not wish blacks ill) to imagine black people existing without their present anomalously high level of criminality is pretty well the opposite of Matthew's error, which is to deny that the anomaly is there at all. Yet behind both there is the same near-religious attachment to the current model and the same over the top denigration of anyone who does not hold it.

Perhaps I shouldn't have devoted so much time to this, though I enjoy the combat in a slightly guilty way. Robert Martin has just e-mailed to say:

The easy resort to accusations of racism and the term racist has so debased these words as to rob them of meaning or impact. They are not used to contribute to the conversation. The intent is to end the conversation.

*ANOTHER UPDATE: Peter Cuthbertson has just alerted me to the fact that Matthew has posted his comments on his own blog, here. He, Peter Cuthbertson, adds:

What I find truly ingenious about the post is the way he manages to interpret every piece of evidence in the post that you are not a racist as confirming his views, all being part of a cover-up scheme.

Rap, rock and alpha males on the rampage

. Ice-T , Bone Crusher, Lil' Kim, Fabolous, Lil' Jon and the East Side Boyz and Eminem can all sleep easy. They will not have to live - assuming they are all still living and haven't got themselves shot as so many seem to - with the awful knowledge that I have criticised their music, for the excellent reason that I have never knowingly heard it. I know them only by reputation.

That reputation, so far as I can see, is not good, but for all I know their music might be. Alice Bachini seems to like Eminem and she hasn't turned into a gun-wielding gangsta yet.

Possibly, however, that is because she has non-gangstaness to spare, so to speak. The pacific and consensual qualities of her style of life, which I assume is rather similar to the pleasantly intellectual style of life practised by the writer and most of the readers of this blog, allow room for a little play violence. Other people living nearer to the bone might not be so lucky. Brian Micklethwait writes about this tension between good music and bad attitudes as it applied to an earlier generation of music:

I never took to all that sex drugs rock and roll lifestyle stuff. It frightened me back then and it frightens me still. For many of my contemporaries it felt like a personal liberation. To me it looked like the alpha males on the rampage, and alpha males are always scary to all the gamma and delta males, and I was a timid little creature way down the Greek alphabet, plenty of brain but no hormones to speak of. Everyone has their ideal age, and nineteen was absolutely not mine. I think that those who said that all that stuff was a threat to social decency and social order were quite right. But then there was that beautiful music.

While catching up on my Iain Murray I found an article by a black American commentator (the Manhattan Institute's John H. McWhorter) who believes "Rap only ruins":

The attitude and style expressed in the hip-hop "identity" keeps blacks down. Almost all hip-hop, gangsta or not, is delivered with a cocky, confrontational cadence that is fast becoming - as attested to by the rowdies at KFC - a common speech style among young black males. Similarly, the arm-slinging, hand-hurling gestures of rap performers have made their way into many young blacks' casual gesticulations, becoming integral to their self-expression. The problem with such speech and mannerisms is that they make potential employers wary of young black men and can impede a young black's ability to interact comfortably with co-workers and customers. The black community has gone through too much to sacrifice upward mobility to the passing kick of an adversarial hip-hop "identity."


For those who insist that even the invisible structures of society reinforce racism, the burden of proof should rest with them to explain why hip-hop's bloody and sexist lyrics and videos and the criminal behavior of many rappers wouldn't have a negative effect upon whites' conception of black people.


AT 2 a.m. on the New York subway not long ago, I saw another scene that captures the essence of rap's destructiveness. A young black man entered the car and began to rap loudly - profanely, arrogantly - with the usual wild gestures. This went on for five irritating minutes. When no one paid attention, he moved on to another car, all the while spouting his doggerel. This was what this young black man presented as his message to the world - his oratory, if you will.


Anyone who sees such behavior as a path to a better future - anyone, like Professor Dyson, who insists that hip-hop is an urgent "critique of a society that produces the need for the thug persona" - should step back and ask himself just where, exactly, the civil rights-era blacks might have gone wrong in lacking a hip-hop revolution.

I don't know quite what conclusion I am walking towards here, except that the Muse exercises no political discrimination in deciding to whom she will grant her favours. Look at Richard Wagner.

Des res.

Mugabe's retirement palace costs vastly more than his official lifetime earnings.

The worm turns.

There is something wormlike about all this "why do birds hate us?" squirming to accommodate the feelings of mass murderers. Random Jottings favours a different approach:

We are no longer going to "adjust" ourselves to this problem, we are going to bear risks and endure pain to solve it. We can solve it.

Oh, I remember

. You whiffle on about anything that strikes your fancy or that it is important the public should know. Such as the important fact that there is stuff they won't tell you about putting in zips. Secret knowledge. Oh sure, the books will tell you some of the techniques of the lesser illuminati - for instance how it pays to start with a paradox: before doing anything else, sew together the two halves of fabric that the zip is going to open. Only when the zip is in place do you unpick the seam. That way the line of division runs straight down the middle, with the two halves neither gaping nor overlapping but just abutting nicely and making you smile.

What they don't tell you is that, like all techniques, this doesn't always work when you try to do the whole job on the machine. When you sew through several layers of fabric the needle always goes a little bit diagonal, whatever you do. That's why the zip on my stripy canvas clothes cover came out asymmetrical. Looked perfect from the back, wonky from the front. So don't kid yourself. Sew in the end points by hand first and baste the rest. Firmly baste, too; none of your enormous floppysloppy basting stitches that look like someone left a skipping rope lying around. You need little stitches that would almost do in their own right, so that if you are struck dead before you finish inserting the zip (as might happen to any of us) the preacher will have something nice to say about you in the eulogy.

Back again

, and as sometimes happens after a hiatus, struck dumb. Blogging. How do I do that again?