'Nother Solent

An unprivate death.

Instapundit met with some opposition when he showed the famous photograph of a man falling to his death upside down, having leapt from the burning World Trade Centre.

You can't help wondering: did he know as he jumped that he'd turn in the air and spend his last seconds upside down? Mortal insult added to mortal injury. If he had known, would he have chosen the other death? I had a friend who died when both parachutes failed to open. I think of her when I see that picture. I don't know if she fell upside down. I hope not.

I say, show it. Show it often. I know all about hating to see it: like most of you I can remember first seeing that picture on September 11 - only in my case it was September 11 2002. Out of all the hundreds of hours of film and the thousands of photos taken of the slaughter on September 11 2001, I saw only a few seconds of footage until a year later. On that day I didn't want the children seeing people die on camera (though we talked about it, of course), particularly as I didn't know if there were more attacks to come. My fear of the children seeing it flowed from my fear of me seeing it. I've always disliked even fictional images of modern-day, realistic violence, the sort of violence that can happen to me and mine; and this dislike has hardened into almost a (controlled) phobia since I had children. It's a thousand times worse when the images are real. Yet my hunger to know more about what had happened was as primal, as voracious, as anyone's. That hunger is a survival trait. (Refined and systemised, it is also a victory trait: the defining victory trait of Western civilisation. It will win us this war, too - if a fatal squeamishness more sickly by far than my purely visual queasiness doesn't rot our guts first.)

Five years earlier it would have been impossible to combine finding out about a thing with hiding from pictures of it, but this is the age of the internet. I read, and read and read more. And a year later I was ready to look.

Hoo boy.

Now we have several more correspondents writing in to turn my instant conversion on again. Most, for some reason, have disdained the glory of having their names quoted on this blog. "A" writes:

think you should reconvert. A couple of years on broadband with KaZaa following Napster? I don't find it at all implausible that someone might accumulate 1000 songs. And the way KaZaa is set up, they would automatically be shared unless you made a point of moving them out of the shared folder (which I've just done with the 793 tracks on our home PC!). And the girl wouldn't have to sit in front of the monitor, she'd just have to click the selection she wanted of songs in KaZaa and leave the machine on overnight.

Meanwhile "B" says:

Thought you might be interested in my reply to James Rummel --
Have you ever used KaZaa? Not that I have, of course, but the evil copyright thieves of my acquaintance assure me that downloading 1000 songs over a broadband connection is extremely easy, and could be done in the course of an evening. They also tell me that the default
setting for the program is to allow sharing, whether or not you're aware of it.

Come to that, do you seriously think there are no 12-year-old kids out there who listen to Frank Sinatra or give themselves grown-up-sounding Internet names? Particularly ones who are, err, maybe a bit geeky and fat and not so popular amongst their classmates...?

And if you were a single mom faced with an invoice of $100,000 per song (so a potential $100 million), settling for $2000 might well be a good plan even if you had a rock-solid case. $2000 would barely cover an attorney's advice on how to fight.
--

JR's argument seems to be based on the assumption that the music
industry knows what it's doing. This seems more naive than any of my assumptions above...

James Rummel

says that the story about the 12 year old sued for downloading is seriously misleading. (Scroll down to "Why we love the music industry" for my initial post on this story.)

He says the Telegraph ignored important reasons to suppose that the girl, or more likely her parents, were not innocents abroad but downloaders on a big scale.

My goodness. I think my instant conversion is wearing off.

As the anniversary

of the mass murder in New York approaches to the very minute - the timestamp on these posts is wrong, it's now 1.44pm - I find it difficult to know what to say. This time two years ago thousands of innocent people going about their daily work did not know their lives were about to end, and hundreds of innocent people in planes did know. May they rest in peace.

As well as the innocent there were, of course, the guilty. The Enemy. Glenn Reynolds has linked to an extract from Lee Harris's "Civilization and Its Enemies: the Next Stage of History." It's well worth reading.

And read Winds of Change.

Sing free.

On Radio 4 yesterday morning I heard the end of a discussion about cathedral choirs. Apparently a researcher has shown that pretty well no one can tell the difference between a boys' choir and a girls' choir: all the rivers of gush about the special quality of boys' unbroken voices were just that, gush.

So should we ditch all those boys' choirs in the cathedrals, then? No doubt there are some obvious arguments pro and con, tradition on the one side and equality of access on the other. You won't be surprised that I am for freedom of association and against social engineering, but it wasn't those arguments that caught my attention. That was done by a point that one speaker in the radio debate just managed to sneak in as the announcer closed the item. "If the girls come in," he said, or words to that effect, "the choirs will die. The boys won't sing with the girls."

Is that really true? On the face of it, no. My daughter sings in a very good mixed-sex choir. Yet I can't help noticing that the girls outnumber the boys at all ages, and by more as the children get older. I assume boys who sing get teased. One protection against getting teased is to be in an all male choir, and also to have a tradition of all male choirs. No one argues with the masculinity of three hundred Welsh miners, and English eleven year old boys can borrow some of that aura of protection when they put on a silly looking surplice to sing in church or when they have all the old dears cooing over them when they sing in an amateur concert. I think the speaker exaggerated, but he had a point.

Let me be clear about what I am and am not saying here. I haven't got anything against girls singing or mixed-sex choirs; as I said my daughter is in one and loves it. And some boys have so strong a desire to sing that they'll do it whatever flak comes their way. However a good many can't take the heat unless they are bolstered by being boys together.

That this is so is very regrettable. Anthropologists have observed that all over the world what men do gets the prestige and what women do doesn't. If men weave baskets, basketweaving is a vital part of our nation's economy and cultural identity. If women weave baskets it's just a little something the wives do in their spare time. It's not fair. I can get quite bitter about it, as my husband can testify.

Should we pander to this tendency? The answer is, of course, that we-as-a-whole shouldn't be doing anything. Those boys who want to band together should be free to do their thing, as should girls, and as should boys and girls who either don't care about mixing with the opposite sex or who revel in the prospect. Unfortunately I suspect that some busybody will not like this idea and will soon be busybodily issuing "guidelines" to demand that cathedral choirs open their gates to girls, and five hundred years of tradition can go join the wearing of wigs, trial by ordeal, hostage-fostering and other outmoded customs.

And that will be a pity, because some boys will thereby lose a pleasure that might have lasted them all their lives. They will also lose an opportunity to become better socialised. For though you can successfully forbid males from excluding females from their clubs and hobbies, what you cannot do is forbid males from excluding females from their gangs.

Although I don't want to pitch my argument too strong I think that one cause (among several) of the decline in civility among boys and men in recent years is that - er - they let the women in. Then, denied their respectable male bonding ceremonies, the guys went off and bonded in the oldest way of all: shared violence. Some of them, anyway.

I'm as embarrassed by that conclusion as you are. No, I don't want to roll back the twentieth century and restore legal barriers to women entering the professions - but I do want to run with the grain of human nature, not against it, and allow space for men to be men alone.

And we, dear sisters, can also have our own lodges and mysteries. Only no one much is stopping us, so it isn't a problem at the moment.

As for the injustice involved in the tendency for male activities to be admired and female activities denigrated; I do not know how to solve it. I do think attempts to impose a solution will breed men who are less likely to be sensitive to the injustice.

Why we love the music industry.

They are going to sue a little girl of 12 for downloading "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." The article mentions fines of up to £95,000 per song. Brianna LaHara says "her stomach is all in knots," and I'm not surprised.

Out of the tens of millions of people who have downloaded music, who did the Recording Industry Association of America decide to go for? Just 261 individuals, including this child. The only explanation I can think of is that they want to make a show of reckless fury in order to terrify other downloaders into submission. "If they even go for a cute little kid," people are meant to think, "then they'll surely go for an unlovable hairy student like me."

I have never downloaded music. Don't know how, and even if I did know, wasn't tempted. My views on the issue of intellectual property in the age of effortless propagation were unclear: complex arguments on both sides, blah blah blah.

The effect on me of reading about this case has been to bring about an instant conversion. I hope that downloaders bleed the entire industry straight into a pauper's grave.

UPDATE: Dave Farrell writes:

The little girl has duly coughed up to the nasty man in the suit. I think her mother paid a couple of thousand dollars in a settlement. The reports I have read quoting Brianna (who says she feels better now) indicate she had no idea what she was doing was actually illegal. I suppose she would say that, but at her age it could be true. She also rather heartbreakingly said she wouldn't dream of depriving the pop stars she loves of a living.

It's very sad and leaves a nasty taste. I note that Universal has slashed the prices of CDs to around $10 to try to recoup its losses from
downloaders. They are apparently the last to know people turned to
downloading in large part because of the outrageous and unjustifiable
prices of CDs. If the record companies can afford to do this, why did they put the prices UP earlier this year, blaming downloading?

Long live Naxos.

UPDATE: For another update on this, which puts a very different complexion on what happened, scroll up to Sep 12th.

Local boy made good.

Our very own Peter Briffa graces the pages of the Times. It's all about cinema, and very enjoyable. Now that he has appeared in the Times a second time, I feel free to say that in his first article he was a bit, just an eentsy bit, too overawed and respectable. In he reverts to the - how shall I put it? - Johnsonian robustness that so many know and love or loathe, as appropriate.

"And this is really what Mr MacShane is about, when he tells us, in that revealing phrase, that American culture is “reducing everything to consumption”. Which is liberal-speak for “giving the public what it wants”."

and

"But the sad fact is that if all the film cameras in Europe simultaneously combusted and no more films were made here for the next ten years, a bunch of paper- pushers at the European film councils would notice, but not those queueing for tickets on a Saturday night."

UPDATE: Peter Briffa writes:

twice??

Fair cop, guv. More like fourth time. See here and here.

I was saddened to hear

that Warren Zevon has died at the age of 56. I am not very musical, and only really knew him as someone whose music was liked by people I like. But it is very striking how many people come into that category. This obituary by John Rogers has some great quotes.

"A magnificent plan, Baldrick, except for one slight difficulty..."

Much discussion over at Harry's Place about Michael Meacher's attempt to fill the Cynthia McKinney slot for British politics: he is peddling 9-11 conspiracy theories in the Guardian now.

I liked this comment by "JZ":

If the PNAC people willfully ignored warnings over 9/11 then i must applaud Rumsfeld for having balls of iron. If i was to willfully ignore warnings over 9/11 i'd make damn sure that i wasn't sitting in my Pentagon office at the time.

For benighted readers not familiar with the true history of these islands, both Harry's heading and mine refer to a Blackadder catchphrase.

Over in California

there's been a lot of fuss about gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante's youthful membership of a militant Latino organisation called MEChA. It has a slogan "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada" that may or may not be racist. Brian Linse of Ain't No Bad Dude argues here for "Not" - or, more exactly "Not Proven."

Now I don't speak Spanish. I do speak some Italian, and must say that fuori, which is surely cognate to fuera, definitely does mean "outside." and Per la razza tutta. Fuori della razza, niente obediently Babelfishes into "For the race, all. Outside of the race, nothing." However I acknowledge that even closely related languages can differ in the meaning of cognate words. For instance regarder in French does not mean the same as "to regard" in English. My comparison to Italian doesn't really prove anything, though I'll leave it up because I like playing with languages and assume you all do too.

Getting back to the slogan, I offer this observation tentatively - but it does seem to me that even Brian's corrected translation suggests an undesirable attitude on the part of MEChA. It suggests that everything should be mediated through the prism of race.

If one wants to defend Bustamante, I can think of two better lines to take. One is to follow
Joanne Jacobs who is no fan of Mr Bustamante but nonetheless argues that La Raza does not mean just the Latino Race but "the people." [Drat, I can't raise her archives on the net. But I'm sure she said something of the sort.]

The other is to say that if "twit" and "twenty" aren't cognate words they jolly well ought to be, given how many of us are twits at twenty.

Mind you, if Mr Bustamante is standing for office in the United States of America he ought to make clear if he has changed his views since the days when he belonged to an organisation that wanted to secede from that nation.

FRIVOLOUS UPDATE: I never can resist doing this. "For the race, all. Outside the race, nothing" taken through Japanese and back again gives, most unsportingly: "For competing, everything. Outside competition, what. " What indeed?

NON-FRIVOLOUS UPDATE: I've just discovered that Glenn Reynolds has commented on the Dude's post. Several other correspondents, some of them native Spanish speakers, have also said that the obvious translation is a fair rendering of the meaning.

Peter Cuthbertson's

Conservative Commentary site has a temporary home at http://concom.blogspot.com while his server problems are sorted out.