December 12, 2003

No Title

France is wrong to ban the veil. Marjane Satrapi's argument is inconsistent in places (if it is wrong for France to ban the veil now, surely it was also wrong for Reza Pahlavi's father to ban it decades ago) but is fundamentally correct and convincing, particularly when she relates her own experience of being forced to wear the veil to the experience of French Muslim schoolgirls forced not to.

BTW the Guardian's subediting is of the standrad that made it famuos, and the translation from French looks as if it could do with better hand-finishing after going through Babelfish. In "Now these schoolgirls are going to wear the viel just because it will be forbidden," for example, we must draw a viel over the way that "it will be forbidden" is put in the future tense in the French fashion rather than in the present tense as seems more natural in English.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 10:00 AM

Nice line

from Freedom and Whisky.
I note that Network Rail says that: "Looking to apportion blame helps no-one." Nonsense. Apportioning blame is just what's needed.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 09:53 AM

There's a post

by me about Africa's past and coming famines over at Biased BBC.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 09:26 AM

December 11, 2003

LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

I'm too young to remember that taunt of the Vietnam protest era. I don't know much about the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War and don't intend to comment on them here. It's safe to say, though, that most of the protestors of that time, like today's anti-war protestors, had as their motivation a sincere horror at the slaughter of war. Then as now, one might challenge the protestors as to whether war was really the worst of evils or whether certain types of peace might be worse than fighting - but one would do so within a common understanding that the death of innocents is sad.

Imagine what it would say about our society if those words had been chanted not to reproach Lyndon B Johnson for the deaths they held to his account but to accuse him of not having killed enough kids?

Imagine if his response had been to say, "I have so killed a lot of kids. Just check my record and see."

That is the degraded state of Palestinian society today. In this article, by a Muslim, please note, the author describes the student elections at Bir Zeit university. We learn that:

At a debate, the Hamas candidate asked the Fatah candidate: ``Hamas activists in this university killed 135 Zionists. How many did Fatah activists from Bir Zeit kill?''

The Fatah candidate refused to answer, suggesting his rival ``look at the paper, go to the archives and see for yourself. Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades have not stopped fighting the occupation.''

Fatah set up models of Jewish settlements and then blew them up with fireworks. The display was meant to emphasize the group's focus on attacking settlers and their communities - considered by Palestinians to be one of the most provocative elements of Israel's occupation of territory they claim for a state.

Hamas countered by blowing up models of Israeli buses, a tribute to the dozens of suicide bombings its members have carried out in the past three years, killing hundreds of Israelis.
For a while, there, I had a flicker of hope over this Geneva thing. Not that an unofficial peace treaty negotiated without the backing of the majority of either Israelis or Palestinians was ever going to solve the issue, but it did seem to speak of a willingness to live together. But who can set that flicker against the raging fire of race-hate?

I've been reading (in secondary school textbooks as it happens) about another great struggle in which Lyndon Johnson played a role: the battle for black Civil Rights. I've come round to an opinion put forward by Charles Murray and quoted here by Peter Cuthbertson: that the various Civil Rights Acts had little to do with the eventual dismantling of segregation.

That does not change the distaste I feel when seeing photographs of the white anti-Civil Rights protestors of that time. Pretty girls in swirly skirts have their faces contorted by hate as they scream at the bespectacled Elizabeth Eckford walking to school in Little Rock. Crew-cut young men jeer as they pour food over the stony-faced black protesters and their white allies who dared to sit at segregated lunch counters.

Nasty. But largely gone, thank God, and not because the blacks started asking themselves "Why do they hate us?" either. It went because the blacks, or African-Americans as the usual American term now is*, demanded justice, and the whites started to ask themselves "Why do we hate so much?" It helped that the rest of the world was pushing in the right direction. I have read how American tourists in Europe didn't care to mention that they came from Selma or Little Rock for fear of seeing friendly faces go cold. Unfair, perhaps, since those particular tourists might have been sincere supporters of Civil Rights, and one should not blame the sins of a nation on an individual, but the knowledge of the world's disapproval did provide another impetus to reform.

Never despair, I tell myself. Change is possible, and the US South is an example. (I'm not saying they are all the way there yet.) But Palestinian society in 2003 is vastly more hate-soaked than the South in the 1960s and much of the rest of the world smiles at and flatters the visiting student from heroic Bir Zeit.

*It's good manners to call people by the term they prefer, so long as it isn't made into a stick to beat those who have no ear for changes of terminology.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 01:33 PM

Here is a plug

for Last Night's BBC News. Read this blog.

UPDATE: This post appears here by mistake, having been intended for Biased BBC. It now does appear there. So I was just about to delete it from here, but, on second thoughts, I won't.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 11:12 AM

There's always time

for important stuff like the names of the Asterix characters in lots of different languages. I never knew the US versions were different from the UK ones.

(Via Odious and Peculiar.)

Posted by Natalie Solent at 09:33 AM

December 10, 2003

I might not have time

to post for the next couple of days. I'll leave you with this.
One mark of what Andrew Sullivan calls “eagles” (but I think are better called “coots”, because otherwise you’re falling in to the “bright” trap of propagandizing via an putatively neutral term) is respect for the fundamental of thrift while not worry so much about quotidian details of life. The coots are now a big factor in the rising political dominance of the conservatives.

In contrast, the liberals (and again, the Europeans and patricularly the EUlite) seem to be willing to adopt any basic ideology as long as the quotidian details (long vacations, welfare payments, government jobs) stay the same. If that means switching from supporting human rights to funding brutal tyrants then so be it.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 04:02 PM

In a quiet way it's beginning to be a little bit frightening

the way minor miscarriages of justice don't seem to get fixed nowadays. I'm thinking of the fact that Michael Moore still has his Oscar despite the fact that someone must surely have made the Oscar-givers aware of the tricks he used. I'm thinking of some of those "zero-tolerance" cases you hear about in US schools where some kid is expelled and given an official record as a delinquent for obviously innocent acts. I'm thinking of the prison officer sacked for insulting Osama Bin Laden. I'm thinking of the Metric Martyrs. It used to be that you'd hear stories like that, sure, and everybody would have a burst of pleasurable outrage, but then a few days later you'd hear that the situation was "under review" or somesuch: code for "we know we boobed but we're putting it right, or at least settling out of court." One's very confidence that the chorus of outrage was doing some good was part of what made it pleasurable. These days I don't seem to hear those corrections so much. The Metric Martyrs case is still rumbling on somewhere. Scarcely anyone defends the use of vast quantities of public money to persecute two street vendors... yet no one actually seems able to stop it happening. I realise this is very vague. I realise that much worse things happen and have always happened than any of the cases I mention. (And I realise that I haven't put in any links. Sorry, no time.) Yet I do sometimes think that there our society's repair robots, the ones that say "hey, you can't do that," are beginning to break down.

You may be saying, my goodness, I knew about that from far more spectacular and violent evidence than Michael Bloody Moore or the Metric Bleeding Martyrs. I agree with you. Dreadful crimes go unpunished and serious miscarriages of justice abound. Even so, I think that the sort of example I have given is ominous. It's like the way a few broken windows left unfixed can presage the decline into squalor of a whole neighbourhood.

(Added later.) I've homed in a little on what all the examples I mentioned had in common which makes me more annoyed and disturbed by them than their apparent triviality seems to warrant. They all could be put right perfectly easily. There is a loud consensus that they should be. Only it seems they are not going to be.

It's like when you say to someone in a pub, "Excuse me, but your car is blocking mine - could you move it, please?" and they just look at you cooly and make no response.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 03:59 PM

Moore on deceit.

Dot Comrade, one of the posters at Harry's Place first joined and then left the ranks of those taken in by Michael Moore's editing tricks in Bowling For Columbine. I think the comment by Peter Cuthbertson is right: Dot Comrade should put a correction in the main body of the post, since not everyone will read the comments.

If you haven't yet seen http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html, it describes in painstaking detail how Moore took several film clips showing snatches of dialogue from the same speaker but which in reality originated from different parts within the same speech, or even different speeches, and then spliced them together so that "sentences are assembled in the speaker's voice, but which were not sentences he uttered." But which were, of course, sentences that appeared to reveal the speaker (Charlton Heston) as being a callous monster. David T. Hardy also documents other types of deception used in the documentary. Bowling For Columbine is a conscious fraud.

These, it seems, are the type of filmaking skills that are honoured with an Oscar.

Dot Comrade is far from stupid. Yet, as Alene Berk comments, "two of Moore's intentional misrepresentations are taken at face value by a viewpoint-sympathetic observer [i.e. Dot Comrade] and cited to prove a point." (Emphasis in original.) I think that shows how powerful and clever Moore's technique is, and how far it is from the harmless comedy that many allege. If you think it's harmless, imagine how you'd feel if the same techniques were used against your cause. Imagine if they were used against you.



Posted by Natalie Solent at 02:49 PM

A new home for Normblog

at http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/
Posted by Natalie Solent at 02:23 PM

Chomsky nailed.

The Sporadic Chronicle reports other deceits besides the Owusu hoax. Rob Hinkley has published his email correspondence with Noam Chomsky. At issue was whether Chomsky did or did not predict a "silent genocide" of millions of deaths in Afghanistan. (Summary: he did, dodge though he may.)

As well as publishing his correspondence Rob links to this transcript from Counterpunch of the speech where Chomsky made the "silent genocide" prediction. You may have to scroll down past lots of spurious characters before you get to text you can read. Someone do one of those screen captures, will ya? I have a feeling that it may disappear. Even more tellingly Rob Hinkley also links to the streaming audio recording of the same speech at MIT. I'm listening to it now. You can skip the welcome speech by Amy McCreith. Move on to Chomsky. I have caught Mr Hinkley and the Counterpunch transcribers in one small error (which will no doubt be grasped like a lifebelt by some of Chomsky's disciples): Chomsky actually said "...looks like what’s happening is some kind of silent genocide." That's kind of silent genocide. Not sort of silent genocide.

Yeah, I know, so what. Forget the exact words. Listen to the whole broadcast if you can (there's quite a lot about Nicaragua and then how terrorism is really a weapon of the strong, then Nicaragua again, then something about US military aid making its recipients poor and Turkey and lots of other stuff), but if you are short of time, don't worry: the part about Afghanistan is only a few minutes in. Chomsky says more or less the same thing again and again. Phrases like "the [US] demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people" turn up repeatedly. He could genuinely be in doubt as to whether he had said the exact words "silent genocide"; he could not be in doubt that he had repeatedly claimed something of the sort was being inflicted by the US on Afghanistan.

Liar.

Stupid liar. There is little in this world more pathetic than the stupid lies of a clever man. He could with little cost to himself or his cause have said, "Fortunately, I was wrong in that prediction, but the US is still wrong to act as it does because..." Instead he dodges and weaves. It's like watching a drunk making a fool of himself in public. Blessed with great gifts in the field of language, he writes tortuous screeds full of lines like "Note first that it is not what I said, therefore a terrible source. But OK here because it is quite accurate."

Last time I reported that an inhabitant of the Blogosphere was in acrimonious correspondence with Chomsky, I cited the wrong person. I checked more carefully this time. Noam Chomsky is really, truly in a ding-dong with our very own Rob Hinkley.

It appears that the blogosphere is coming to the great man's notice. Expect fireworks.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 10:53 AM

Phew!

The only reason that I didn't write a post mocking Elsie Owusu for telling the Guardian that she was thinking of returning her MBE because she objected to the "vainglorious" celebrations over the rugby was that I forgot. Thank goodness for my poor... where was I? Oh, yes, according to the Sunday Times' gossip man she never wrote that letter.

The Guardian are always being hoaxed, but this time I don't really blame them (on the excellent principle that I fell for it too) What was the prankster's motive? The pursuit of a grudge against Ms Owusu, the Guardian or both, or sheer devilry? Both left and right fell for it and now look silly for different reasons.

(Via The Sporadic Chronicle)

Posted by Natalie Solent at 10:21 AM

December 09, 2003

Does anyone have the faintest idea

what my web counter said when it stopped working? The only thing I can remember about it is that recently I joked that whereas Glenn Reynolds used to get more hits in a day than I've ever had, now Glenn Reynolds gets more hits on a good day than I have ever had.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 11:08 PM

No Title

Moonbat party manifesto.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 03:08 PM

Joanne Jacobs lacks soul

. Philistine that she is, she doesn't see the beauty in things being hostile, coercive, distracting and dangerous.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 02:16 PM

I wondered

what had been posted on One Sided Wonder lately but the internet won't let me see. Blogspot seems to have gone out for the day, so maybe Anne Cunningham is wondering what I've posted lately. That would make two-sided wondering.

UPDATE: It's come back. Thoughts on being hassled in Paris, why we accept that powerful men can have mistresses, and a post about a woman called Sally Hemmings who may have been both slave and mistress to President Jefferson.

I read somewhere a persuasive case that it may have been Jefferson's brother who slept with Hemmings.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 01:47 PM

No Title

Only Connect is a blog to watch. Stuff to entertain and sometimes annoy just about anybody. He has found an email address where you can ask UNESCO why they provide money to refurbish the Alexandria library so that its director can place a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion next to the Torah and say that it's more important to the Jews than the Torah.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 01:38 PM

An Italian Muslim cleric

who supports Israel is not something one reads about every day.

(Added later.) I gained from this interview a small but significant correction to my view of Islam. I have often heard quoted lines from the Koran and the hadiths that raised my hackles. One excerpt appears to forbid friendship with Jews or Christians. Another passage speaks of a time when the very rocks will tell Muslims to come and kill the Jews hiding behind them.

Since I am not a Muslim it would be presumptuous of me to say that the more agreeable interpretations that Shaykh Palazzi gives for these passages are the true Islam. However they certainly seem to make sense.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 01:00 PM

David Gillies

writes:

I assume you know [To be honest, no I didn't - NS] that Marie Antoinette made her famous quip ("s'ils n'ont pas de pain, qu'ils mangent de la brioche") in response to an ordinance that if the city bakers had run out out of bread they were duty bound to offer cake at the same price. A better way of engineering famine has yet to be found than to offer a good at less than market price. The poor dear didn't understand the Law of Supply and Demand, and it cost her her head. A similar blind spot did for the kulaks and countless million African farmers.

As for the humanitarian aspects of deposing Saddam - they're good bargaining chips when debating lefties - but not, heaven help us, why we went in. No matter how awful Saddam was, it would have been grossly derelict of Tony Blair to commit British forces (or GWB US forces &c.) solely to get rid of a bad guy. They did it because Saddam was genuinely a threat. So it's not a case of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. It's not a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (as Peter Cuthbertson inter alia seems to think). It's a case of doing the right thing for the right reasons, and then telling the great unwashed that the reasons were other than which they were in order to keep them onside. My kind of realpolitik, in other words.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 11:02 AM

No Title

Steyn makes himself plain.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 10:55 AM

December 08, 2003

Na Suwt?

The teachers' union NASUWT used to be written NAS/UWT, the reason being that it was formed by the amalgamation of the National Union of Schoolmasters and the Union of Women Teachers. This fact is terribly hush-hush. I couldn't find mention of what the letters NASUWT stood for anywhere on the union magazine, "Teaching Today". There was one mention of the full name of the union on their own website, but it was buried in an official submission to the School Teachers Review Body.

I think they are embarrassed at their name, poor loves. "Schoolmasters" has the non-egalitarian word "masters" in it, besides being far too St Cuthbertsy, and Union of Women Teachers is an unpleasant reminder of the savage days before the Sex Discrimination Act when female teachers had to curtsey whenever a male came near.

It's not the only way that NASUWT, which used to be the union you joined when you'd finally had enough of hearing about the NUT's long love affair with the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, has gone PC.

There is an article in the October issue of "Teaching Today" called "What Lies Beneath". The article explains that NASUWT have commissioned a research study from a company called PRCI. The study is about violence and indiscipline in schools, an issue that worries many teachers sick (it also worries many teachers bruised, some teachers broken boned and quite a few right out of the profession.) Parts of the article are pretty thought-provoking from which I infer that parts of the study are pretty thought-provoking. For instance it is pointed out that mainstream schools don't always take enough notice of the accumulated wisdom of special schools. That sounds very plausible to me. But - you knew there was a but, didn't you? - but the study's claim to be "gaining a grasp of the myriad causal factors" rings hollow. This extract, quoting a co-author of the study, suggests that the researchers are not exactly digging deep.

The moral of the story, according to Wright, is that attempts to tackle the problem late in a child's schooling is [sic] the educational equivalent of closing the barn door after a troop of horses has galloped to freedom. Set against rising inequalities in much of the free-market West - leading invariably to more pressure on schools to react to social problems - the challenge is to manage behaviour early as part of a concerted attack on the problem.
Gosh. Judging from that passage a company hired to research the fundamental causes of violence in schools has discovered that the correlation between social inequality and violence is not merely positive but, judging from the use of the word 'invariably', is actually 100%. You'd think that would be huge news. Unless, of course, Mr Wright is talking through his hat. Here are some questions I'd like to ask:

  • Are there rising inequalities in much of the free-market West? If so, which bits of the West aren't in the much, and are behaviour problems worse or better there?
  • Is the correlation (if any) between behaviour problems and inequality or behaviour problems and poverty? There's a report just out by the left-leaning Joseph Rowntree foundation that says Britain is moving up the poverty league (i.e. getting less poor). I have no idea if it's true or not, but does Mr Wright and his co-author?
  • How does he account for the fact that early in the twentieth century levels of both poverty and inequality were higher than today, and there was more of a free market, yet violence in schools was far rarer?

Ironically, I think Mr Wright has touched on part of the answer to violence in schools himself, if only he knew. Instead of closing the barn door after the horses have galloped to freedom and grouching about the loss of your property... why not open the barn door and let them bound free? If they love you (metaphorically, Mr Wright, metaphorically) they will come back.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 09:10 PM

A daring stroke.

Let this be a warning. Just today I found myself holding a bottle of milk in my hand but my cup of coffee, my nice hot cup of coffee that I was really looking forward to, had disappeared. "Socialism," I roared in fury, "Socialism, what have you done with my coffee?" (I blame Socialism for everything.) Eventually I discovered that Socialism had crept into my house, spirited my coffee out of my very hand and hidden it in the fridge. Having recovered my property, I shook my head, partly in rueful admiration and partly because cold coffee tastes disgusting. Friends, be vigilant. The Enemy's reach is long indeed.
Posted by Natalie Solent at 02:10 PM

Tony Blair smiled at the newspaper today.

Two stories in the news today seem to have drifted out of a pro-war debater's wish-fulfillment dream. Both Ed Thomas of Biased BBC and Jim Miller have links to reports about the Iraqi soldier who says that he was the source for, and stands by, the contentious 'WMD in 45-minute' paragraph in that dossier, and about Czech Intelligence claims of evidence that Saddam Hussein really did have a hand in September 11.

If proven - and with cloak 'n' dagger stuff like this it's always a big if - these two developments will provide much scope for those who supported the late war in Iraq to say "told you so" to their anti-war opponents. I like saying "told you so" as much as the next gloating warmonger but I can't help feeling it would be as well not to push these ones too hard.

In the end I think the most important reasons for supporting the war were bigger: to depose a tyrant who had killed hundreds of thousands and to make damn sure that the attacks of Sep 11 visibly did not pay out well for the necrophiliac faction trying to take over Islam.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 12:06 AM

December 07, 2003

Let them eat cake.

Hamas leader says that there can be no two-state solution.
"Hamas founder and spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin has told a German magazine that a Jewish state could be established in Europe. In interview excerpts slated for publication on Monday in Der Spiegel, Yassin opposed a two-state solution in which a Palestinian state would coexist next to Israel. "
One cannot complain that Yassin does not make himself clear. No over-tactful pussyfooting about from him. He says to a German magazine that the Jews should hop it back to Europe.

I wondered whether this admirable clarity would convince Reuters to change their tune. Back on 26 September Reuters were sure that all the Palestinians¹ wanted in exchange for peace was for the settlements beyond the 1967 border to go. So sure were they that in order to explain why a Palestinian went to the house of a family celebrating the Jewish New Year and opened fire on them, killing a baby girl, they could write this ever-memorable paragraph²: [Emphasis added]

"Palestinians regard Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as major obstacles to peace and have regularly attacked them."
Has anything changed in the light of Yassin's remarks? Here's how Reuters reported it:
Another complication arose when Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual head of Hamas, a militant group that has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings, said he remained firmly opposed to Israel's existence in the region.

"We are against a Jewish apartheid state on the land of Palestine," Yassin told the German weekly Der Spiegel. He suggested that the Israelis "found a state in Europe" instead.
This report gave me fuel for some sarcastic remarks. 'He suggested' - like Marie Antoinette with her suggestion about what those without bread might care to eat, he was just trying to be helpful. 'Another complication arose' - it arose, did it? It was just today, was it, and a big surprise all round, that Yassin took it into his head to eliminate the state of Israel? I must have been dreaming when I thought I'd read in Hamas's charter that "Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors."

Yet for all my sarcasm, Reuters did report it. Yassin's crack about a Jewish state in Europe was so striking in its contempt for the remaining shreds of German and international sensitivity about the Holocaust that it might, just might, have an effect he didn't expect.

¹ When first writing this post I echoed Reuters in speaking as if all Palestinians want the same thing. They don't. Whatever one thinks of the terms of the unofficial peace treaty being circulated, those Palestinians who put their names to it have risked their lives to show that they do want to coexist.

² Sorry no link for the first Reuters quote - I assume it's expired.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 10:25 PM

Today everything seems in shadow.

When I first came across them, prayer requests in blogs seemed very strange. Certainly not bad or anything, just not something I had ever thought of doing.

Now I have one. A young boy we know has been seriously injured in a car accident. If you pray, please remember him.

Posted by Natalie Solent at 10:15 PM