'Nother Solent

Learning by minor suffering.

Talking of anarchism, I totally failed my libertarian parent badge yesterday. Offspring A wants to go to a certain secondary school. Said school gives percentage of places to those who pass an aptitude test. School claims that aptitude test cannot be prepared for. "Disbelieving Expletive B," says Mother C (me) when presented with this claim. "That's just to discourage pushy middle class parents like yours, my sweet, from doing what I am about to do and coaching you for the test to within an inch of your life." And so I did, way beyond the point when Offspring A was sick of it and me. Did it work? I won't know for weeks. My guesses as to what the test would involve seem to have been quite accurate. Was it a good idea in the long term? I won't know for years.

The problem was that Offspring wanted to have been prepared for the test, but not to prepare for it then and there. But then and there were where we were. Time had slipped by, like the sneaky little so-and-so it is.

I do have a lot of respect for Alice Bachini's philosophy of learning without coercion. The statement "I have respect for opinion X" is almost always accompanied by a coda saying that said respect doesn't actually extend to implementation, and I suppose I've demonstrated that by my actions.

Enough of the guilt already! On from the personal to the political - always a relief, I find.

One of the ways human beings learn is by suffering reverses and disappointments. Your clay pot has a crack: you should have dried it more slowly. You miss the bus: you should have left the house earlier. What should happen is that one gets the opportunity to fail in small doses as one grows up, so that you really internalise the idea that actions have consequences. It's a dangerous thing to reach adulthood and still think that someone will always make it OK. My habit of procrastination stems from not being able to bring myself to believe that bad things would happen to me - to me, the star of my show - if I didn't speed up. I've known one or two people who have been fired from their jobs; they have all said that to some extent they saw the axe falling but didn't quite believe it would ever land.

[Pause. Goes away from computer for a bit. Comes back later. ]

You know, I've lost track of where this post was heading. It was all the fault of schools and welfare somehow. And coercion. Like I just did. Oh well, worse things happen at sea.

ADDED SUNDAY: As luck would have it, Alice linked specifically to two websites with which she was involved on the subject of non-coercive parenting today and I've had a rare moment of sympathy with pro-Communist intellectuals of the forties and fifties.

Yes, you read that right. The two halves of the previous sentence are linked despite appearances to the contrary. The link arises because I've just realised what I am: a "fellow traveller"; a non-coercive parenting/education fellow traveller. I don't really believe in it myself, but I'm curious about it and I wish it well. My moment of sympathy with the communist fellow-travellers arises because I had always assumed that when they said they were not communists themselves they were simply lying on the orders of their master, Stalin. OK, so now I know from my own experience that such an attitude is possible. That ends the moment of sympathy. They were still cosying up to a mass-murderer.

It's been a blugger bomming recently...

Sorry, I'll say that again. It's been a bummer blogging recently. And I'm not at Perry's Blogger bash due to circumstances unforseen. So wah. However my mood was lightened by this post from Andy Duncan. There is something mood-lightening about discovering a new idea that ought to have been obvious but wasn't. Have you ever wanted to see a libertarian society in action? You can. Every Saturday.

Free Unread E-mail Guilt Available Here.

I have a guilt surplus and will happily send some of mine to anyone who asks. Limited supplies of Missed Opportunity Paranoia also available.

Let's have higher crime figures for ethnic minorities!

That seems to be the thinking behind the decision by the Welsh authorities, specifically the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH), whoever they might be, to launch a new War on Ethnic Food Without A License. When Welsh farmers start a new line catering for West Africans' desire for a taste of home you'd think they'd get a nice write-up in the local paper praising their enterprise and multi-cultural awareness, wouldn't you? But the BBC seems to regard it as a problem - indeed, a whole new category of crime, "meat crime":

Mafia-like criminal gangs are making huge profits from the illegal meat trade with little risk of being caught and punished.

Could the huge profits be because of the illegality and the smallness of the risk be because nobody but a few busybodies cares?

Wales is becoming the centre for the illegal production of so-called smokies - a delicacy made from carcasses which are primitively blow-torched.

Mmm, smokies sound pretty tasty to me, and I don't see what's so primitive about the carcasses being blowtorched; a thoroughly modern culinary technique if ever there was one. (How exactly does one blowtorch meat sophisticatedly, anyway?) It is odd to see the BBC, usually so careful to avoid any association of Africa with primitiveness, throwing in the word merely as insult, and illogical insult at that.

The final horror is yet to come:

Julie Barratt, CIEH director for Wales, said people resorted to meat crime - in particular producing smokies - as a means of "supplementing their incomes".

Evil, evil. We must put a stop to that immediately.

We're not sad, just organised.

Me: "Why, O husband, are you dissassembling that old central heating pump on the kitchen floor, seeing as it is old and destined for the dustbin and is, moreover, exceedingly dirty?"

Husband: "I'm getting the screws out."

Me: "O Light of My Life, is it not the case that in yonder garage you have screws of every possible thread and pitch, both of the normal and the Phillips head, even unto the number of several million?"

Husband: "These aren't just any screws. They're cap-headed. Extra strong. There's 50p's worth of screws here."

Me: "Oh... right. You'll want something to keep them in, then. Fortunately I've got just the thing in my plastic bag collection. "

How To Be Kulchured: close mind, open mouth.

ARC writes:

...we sometimes watch the BBC's 'The Big Read', in which 3 books each evening are defended by afficionados and viewer votes gradually determine a supposed top twenty one ('The Lord of the Rings' and 'Pride and Prejudice' currently occupy slots one and two). Last night we heard David Dimbleby and Alan Tichmarsh defend 'Great Expectations' and 'Rebecca', after which there was an amusing display of pride (or arrogance) and prejudice (or sheer asinine stupidity) from Jo Brand on '1984'. The little I've heard of her previously suggests she is not very funny when trying to be, but she was richly unconsciously comic last night. While the others talked mostly of their book, she divided her 15 minutes more evenly between the book, some events in her past, and her current political concerns, chiefly the Iraq war. Now, I can imagine someone claiming that although Saddam's regime had certain resemblances to that in '1984', and although Orwell damned the 'flabby pacifism' of the left of his day in telling phrases, yet his approval of using war to end totalitarian regimes would not have extended to the Iraq war; it would be a difficult argument but perhaps an honest opponent of the war could make something of it. She, however, gave a very convincing impression of someone to whom this elementary thought had simply never occurred. In an amusing example of double-think, she appeared to have avoided, but without ever letting herself be consciously aware of it, the thought that some in her audience might perceive more resemblances between the '1984' regime and Saddam's than between it and George Bush's. I was reminded of those intellectuals who were angered by Reagan's 'evil empire' remark, the fact that the Soviet Union was an empire, and by historical standards an evil one, never having been allowed entrance to their minds.

Forgive me for quoting myself, but I was immediately reminded of this post from June 11, about an American anti-war writer by the name of Joyce Marcel who had blithely quoted Shelley's Ozymandias in support of her position:

Shelley wrote about an absolute ruler... who once ruled over a desert country of the east and caused its enslaved people to raise monuments to his own glory... who called himself by vainglorious titles designed to show his might and power... whose statue was cast down... whose fate serves as a warning to tyrants everywhere.

The poets know how difficult it can be to break out of an obsession, but perhaps if she [Marcel] really, really concentrates she might think of someone in the news recently who fits that profile better than George W. Bush.