'Nother Solent

The Blogging Iceberg

Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.

An iceberg is constantly dissolving into sea water, and the majority of blogs started are dissolving into static, abandoned web pages. Right now, though, this iceberg is moving so quickly into arctic waters that it is gaining mass faster than it is losing it. The key is that an iceberg is never what it appears, and so it is with today’s blogging community.

These guys did a big survey. Lots of facts & figures.

Busy, busy, busy

but I just had to post this:

"Baudrillard described the final stage of "simulation" in culture as one in which the model of a thing no longer even claims to bear any relation to the thing itself. A simulated education, therefore, is one that no long even refers to the process of learning. It refers only to itself, an endless hall-of-mirrors full of self-reflecting concepts that is increasingly remote and disconnected.

"At my university, for example, we hear much of "outcome assessment measures" these days. Do you have such measures, they asked me? My response was to say that I thought "grades" constituted the assessment. No, I was told: learning consists of "skills" that can be measured, tabulated, reckoned up.

"I realized then that in a university consumed by grade inflation, as mine is, one could not possibly speak of learning anymore. But we can speak of "outcome assessment" because it refers to the idea of learning, rather than to the thing itself. In fact, the "thing itself" can cease to exist altogether, since the outcome measurement -- now defined as "skills" -- is different, graspable, and uncontaminated by critical thought.

"Moreover, one can busy oneself almost endlessly in talking about measurement and assessment. All that talk stand in for talk about learning, and ultimately takes its place. Who cares?

"Not the professors, certainly, because they will be simulated, too. The math department hardly even uses them anymore. They use computers to teach math. Tests are given on-line; outcomes assessed; measurements made.

"It is all a great simulation. Of course its consequences are very real. The trouble is, no one will be left to point that out, once the simulated education is fully in place.

"It won't be long."

- posted by Charles W. Nuckolls in the Liberty & Power blog

The injustice of mercy.

The whole compassion debate links in very nicely to a series of posts on the morality of amnesties by Norman Geras.

Links in nicely, but it's not a nice subject. The whole thing comes to a sharp point in Rwanda. I dunno. The world's a wicked place, my masters, a wicked place.

More on compassion

from Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber. I'll reprint my comment here since I worked quite hard on it, but you really ought to read the whole discussion. I'll cry if you don't. Here's what I said:

Micha Ghertner and Iain Murray have already made the two main points I would have made (respectively ‘coercive compassion isn’t really compassion’, and ‘there is a distinction between “tempering justice with mercy” and compassion as an organising principle’) - which is my excuse for the bitty nature of the points that follow.

1) Compassion as a motive for action is a great and good thing. But it cannot of itself tell you what to do for the best, and the pretence it can is dangerous for the reasons already covered. Let me use the analogy of love. Love is good yet people who love each other can still do each other harm. I would even go so far as to say that there are certain sorts of harm that specifically happen when people think love absolves one of having to act sensibly or fairly. “I’m only doing this because I love you” can be said legitimately but is frequently abused. There’s a whiff of power there, too, that also comes into compassion interactions if you aren’t careful.

2) …which brings me to my next point. If I’m an ordinary person dealing with government it is much more dignified for me to claim my rights rather than ask for compassion. Note that this point could be made by people with very different ideas of where rights end.

3) Modern welfare states try to have it both ways. They want to be admired for being compassionate yet also want the recipients to feel that they are only claiming their rights. This makes for oleaginous “givers” and graceless recipients.

4) When it comes to welfare, compassion is one of my main reasons for opposing it. I think in the long term it gives people horrible, violent, futile lives. So I see no contradiction between that and my view that compassion for the Iraqi people was a legitimate motive for going to war. Of course in both areas, war and welfare, policy decisions must also take into account factors of prudence and justice.

Incidentally I think it is a great and rather neglected virtue to be able to both give and receive charity gracefully.

Certain people

- they know who they are - have been asking for more Essex Girl jokes. There is a reason why none have appeared, and you will find it out if you type "Essex girl joke" into Google. In fact I think the great era of the EGJ has passed. The phenomenon depended on one's sense of surprise at rampant promiscuity and boundless ignorance and now that both are pretty well compulsory there doesn't seem much point.

However, I did recently unearth the last cache of clean Essex Girl jokes in the world. Accept no substitutes! This one, for instance, is obviously nothing but an old Irish joke with a paint job:

A builder was speaking with a woman about her decorating job. In the first room she said she would like a pale blue. The contractor wrote this down, went over to the window, opened it, and yelled out "GREEN SIDE UP!"

In the second room she told the painter she would like it painted a soft yellow.

He wrote this on his pad, walked to the window, opened it, and yelled "GREEN SIDE UP!"

The lady was somewhat curious but said nothing. In the third room she said she would like it painted a warm rose colour. The painter wrote this down, walked to the window, opened it and yelled "GREEN SIDE UP!"

The lady then asked him, "Why do you keep yelling 'green side up'?"

"I'm sorry," came the reply. "But I have a crew of Essex girls laying turf across the road".

As a female citizen of this ancient county with four grandparents born in the Emerald Isle I reject such things with scorn. (Crew of Essex girls laying turf, indeed! They'd split their nails.) These next two, however, are the real thing:

Q: What's an Essex Girl's favourite wine?

A: I want to go to Lakeside.

HAHAHAHA! SLAPS THIGH! Lakeside, geddit? - hahaha - wine and whine and... mmm-kay. It's an Essex thing. You wouldn't understand. This one may have slightly more universal appeal:

An Essex Girl crashes her Ford Ka [EGJs always specify the car with great exactness - NS] on the way back from an evening at the disco dancing round her handbag. She manages to reach down for her pink Nokia and dials 999. Within ten minutes the ambulance is there.

Paramedic: "It's OK. We're here. What's your name?"

Essex Girl: "Sharon."

Paramedic: "And where's your bleeding coming from?"

Essex Girl: "Romford."

Ya hafta say it right. Here's another:

Q: How do you drown an Essex girl?
A: Put a mirror at the bottom of the pool

Finally, here is my last ever Essex Girl Joke. Really last ever, unlike the last last ever one. Enjoy.

Q: How does an Essex girl get pregnant?
A: And I thought Essex girls were dumb!

Dave Farell

writes

I am going to have to take you to task for claiming your version of Wordsworth's lines "scans better". No it don't. It removes the declamatory emphasis of the first line and is two syllables short of an evocative climax in the second, not to mention the bathos of your reversal. Say them as if you were doing a Shakespeare speech, I think you will get what I am on about.

Apropos the Churchill quote, what's most telling for me is that the bowdlerised version now beloved of copy hacks and political grubs is that they actually omit the word "toil" altogether. Just don't mention the work, eh?

"No it don't?" No it don't? I ain't taking none o' that declambulatory amanuensis stuff from nobody. My way has a sort of surprisingness about the last word. "And very heaven to be..." "Yes, yes...?" "And very heaven to be young." As opposed to French, or there or something.

UPDATE: David Farrell writes:

That "no it don't" was satirical, innit? Imagine John Cleese saying it with
a see-through plastic mac on and brandishing a parrot. In fact imagine the whole sentence said by John Cleese with a see-through etc.

PS: It's Farrell, a great Irish name (we were kings of County Clare you know).

I knew it was satirical. That is why I nailed it to the perch. If I hadn't nailed that joke down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!

Talking of environmentalism

, and talking and talking and talking...

Seriously, this is one very impressive comments thread. Global warning meets the nature of evidence meets the legitimacy of ad hominem attacks meets Bayesian probability theory. My own fave guy was "mgl."

Environmentalism Harms Birds And Other Living Creatures.

Iain Murray led me to an article in the Observer about the way wind farms chop eagles to bits by the dozen. If wind power were going to solve all our power problems I might say, "never mind, have some eagle fricassee" - but they're next to useless on a still day. As somebody says in the article:

'Wind farms are an expensive dead end... Ten years down the road they will have to concede that wind is not the answer they thought it was, and we will have a lot of tall white elephants all over our hills.

Indeed. Bet they'll find a way to blame it all on capitalism and "deregulation", too.

Two education stories

from Poland. In this one a video was taken of the sustained humiliation of a teacher by pupils at a technical school. The Poles must like this sort of thing, because they plan to raise the school leaving age to 18 so as to force more resentful older boys to stay in school. This, we are told, is part of a scheme to reverse the deterioration of education that has come about since the end of communism.

Dream on. There was one particularly clear reason why communist countries could and did have pretty effective schools: the prospect of seriously bad things happening to delinquents. The teachers themselves didn't have to be that nasty because everyone knew that in the background there were people who, if push came to shove, would beat you with lead-filled hoses.

Nowadays it's different, but education bureacrats design their systems as if they still have savage force to back them up. Poland's education system, like our own, is one of ineffective compulsion. It was said (I think by Macchiavelli but I can't find the quote) that there is nothing so dangerous as to harm a man enough to make him hate you, yet leave him the strength to get his revenge. That is exactly what imprisoning young men in school does.

No, I don't want the lead-filled hoses back to keep them in order, thank you. I would much prefer education to be a matter of mutual agreement between teacher and pupil, in Poland and everywhere else. I want that so much I could howl like a dog for sheer longing. But, let's face it, perhaps one ten-thousandth of the world's population agree with me. That story reflects the usual opinion all over the developed world when it simply assumes that extending compulsory education for another two years is doing pupils a favour. But even if the consent principle is seen as utopian, you might think that advocates of "realism" might take a lesson from the famously realistic Macchiavelli. The prince must consider ... how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible.

Improving Wordsworth.

A few posts down I quoted Mr W. on the storming of the Bastille: ""Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" I had misremembered this quote as being "Bliss it was that dawn to be alive, And very heaven to be young." I must say, I think my version scans better.

On similar lines, Churchill said in a speech to the Commons in May 1940, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat," which isn't nearly as good as the way it is usually quoted, "blood, toil, sweat and tears." It may be true that, due to the primitive nature of recording at the time, Churchill had to read the speech several times on several occasions; so perhaps he fine-tuned the wording.

What is not true, however, at least according to this, is that he got the Larry the Lamb actor to read them for him. Apparently the claim he did comes from the actor himself, who was a bit of a scallywag, and was popularised by David Irving. Yeah, him. Enough said.

You can always spot an arrogant ruling power

by the way it hates old buildings. From eighteenth century earls forcibly ejecting whole villages so as not to spoil their classical gardens to twentieth century slum clearances that cleared social cohesion along with the slum, there is nothing a power-freak likes better than replacing a muddle with a slab. China is busily smashing the Uighur quarter of the city of Kashgar. The ghost of Nicolae Ceausescu is cheering them on. Unlike his, this is one "modernisation plan" that is unlikely to be cut short by an uprising against the moderniser.

That said, however

, any billionaire philanthropists reading this need feel no hesitation in experimentally testing the effects of sudden moderate wealth on this blogger. Tips button to your left.

Proverbial wisdom.

Whenever I say anything along the lines of "money doesn't buy happiness, you know," as I did in the last post, someone chirps up with an offer to field-test this assertion. (On themselves, not me.) On occasion I myself have been known to selflessly volunteer as an experimental subject for a scientific test of the effects of great riches. I needn't bother, though. The experiment has already been done. The family of Kim Jong Il, the "Dear Leader" of North Korea, are worth $4bn, worshipped as gods and utterly miserable.

Imagine Michael Jackson with power of life and death.

You can stick yer filthy compassion...

Harry quotes, with implied disapproval, the following passage from some Tory called Barry Legg:

"I believe compassion is a very fine virtue and characteristic for an individual, and many in the Conservative Party show their compassion by working for voluntary organisations and helping people in need.

"But governments should not express compassion. The amount of pain is unlimited - governments cannot create happiness and if you pursue the agenda of compassion in government you are pursuing unlimited government.

I don't know enough about Mr Legg to know if I would agree with him about much else, but I agree with him on this. The emotion of compassion has no little beeper to tell you when it's cooked enough. I am sorry for the suffering people in Liberia and the family of that woman murdered in the jewellers shop and ugly people who despair of finding a lover and parents whose kids die and homeless people in B&B whose lives seem like a dead end and that woman I saw in Waitrose who smelt of pee and the boy down the street whose rabbit ran away and the little nest of baby mice squeaking for their mother who got eaten by an owl so they're going to die now.

The emotion of wishing to do justice does come equipped with a beeper. Harry and I might disagree strongly on what governments ought to do in order to be just in their dealings with homeless people, say, but we can both agree that the demands of justice can in principle be known and met.

In contrast, as Mr Legg observes, there is no limit to what you would have to do to take away someone's pain. A new mansion wouldn't do it; many a lottery winner is miserable in his new mansion. More subtly there is no limit to what you'd have a right to do once pain-removal is accepted as an overriding good. A homeless person tranquilised to the eyeballs would also not be suffering.

I was playing around with the idea that compassion on the part of government is unwelcome as compassion in a referee. Poor little Middlesbrough. It must have hurt when Chelsea won the match. I feel your pain, Middlesbrough! Here, I award you an extra goal to make up for it. However that analogy drags in distracting questions of egalitarianism. The point I wanted to make was not "life's no fun without winners and losers" (that's a matter of taste), but that compassion can harm even its objects if it subverts an agreed framework of rules.

UPDATE: read the comments to Harry Hatchet's post to see a post from Oliver Kamm that probably unconsciously influenced me. Also there's this from Stephen Pollard, and, if you scroll up, Harry himself responds.

Raised from mediocre to fascinating by a lack of research.

John Costello emailed in an example:

Another story might be of the British mystery writer who also did some westerns, but got confused. At one point a character is lost in the desert, dying of thirst. Overhead, holding themselves aloft on the thermals, the coyotes circled....

'"We live in a post-clubbing era", apparently. Well thank God for that. Leave the seals alone.' - Peter Briffa

A reader* writes:

I spotted this story on the BBC website this afternoon (Saturday). It's the first section of their report on the latest suicide bombing.

A suicide bomber has killed at least 18 people and injured up to 50 in an attack at a restaurant in the northern port of Haifa, Israeli police say.

The explosion occurred in the Maxim restaurant near Haifa's beach promenade on the southern edge of the city.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, which comes on the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday.

"There was a security guard outside but the attacker managed to enter and blow up," Israeli police chief Shlomo Aharonishky said.

"There was a very big explosion, which blew out the windows. It was horrible," a witness told Israeli TV.

Three children are reported to be among the dead.

It is the first such attack since 9 September, when 15 people were killed in twin suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Is it just me, or do others also find that headline misleading? Notice too, that the "P" word is missing from this part of the report. I suppose the Beeb cannot bring itself to admit that its Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs' heroes could even contemplate harming Jews. Even in the final paragraph, which discusses the back-to-back suicide bombings in August, they omit to mention that they were carried out by Palestinians. With any other organization, I'd attribute this simply to bad journalism. In the case of the BBC, however.....

*Let us know if you want your name used.

UPDATE: Okay. Kudos to any reader who spotted that this post belongs to Biased BBC yet for some mysterious reason ended up duplicating itself on this site. Consider it a free sample.