'Nother Solent

Dwang!

Yes, I know I said I was going to bed, but I just had to put in this bit. Andrew Duffin writes:

You might care to note that up here in Scotland (In the Lands of the North, indeed), what you call a noggin is known as a DWANG.

Now there's a wonderful word for you.

Indeed. But dwang it, do you mean the head, the drink or the joist or... um... the other meaning I have heard from time to time? Or even something obsessive, compulsive and Dutch?

UPDATE: Aha, joist it is, and no I do not mean dewang, buzz off Google. And buzz off me, I'm getting even more dewanged than usual.

"I believe in simple, retributive justice

, which has its roots in the dawn of human history. I will explain why next week."

Thus says Charles Murray, found via his namesake.

Do I believe in simple retributive justice? I'm not sure. Can't wait 'til next week.

While wondering what Murray will come up with I came up with a few thoughts myself. In his survey he called people who had a preference for a "rules is rules" attitude to the law, "cops." Like Iain Murray, I find this label confusing in a debate that will necessarily include many real cops. Instead I will call this group Automators. They favour a justice that automatically dispenses punishment B to crime A.

The first thing to notice is that under an Automatic system judges and lawyers would be de-skilled. Indeed it might be possible for them to be automated in the other sense of the word. While a certain amount of judicial de-skilling would be the Clean Air Act to scrub good British air clean of accumulated pollutants of cant and legalese, a judge that has no scope for mercy (or cannot feel it at all) is to be feared. Still, let's notice one thing: much of the support of the legal establishment for progressivism can be explained by simple self interest. Nuanced, complex, multi-faceted justice requires nuanced, complex and multi-faceted justiciers with salaries to match.

A distinct benefit of Automated justice is that the badness of crimes would be reinforced in the public mind, both absolutely and as a hierarchy. Murder gets you thirty years. Shoplifting gets you six months. We are all Pavlov's creatures to some extent: if the price of a crime is high and dependable we will soon learn to see it as highly and dependably bad. The benefit specific to Automated justice is the dependability. It seems to be accepted in the forensic field that what matters most is not the severity of punishment (though that does matter) but the likelihood of receiving it. Compare the spectacular yet ineffective public executions and tortures of Tudor times to the much more restrained and successful (because organised) late Victorians. Alas, even Automated justice doesn't automatically catch the criminals - but it does mean that a young man wondering whether to accept his mate's invitation to come with him on a "job" has before his mind the clear, graspable prospect of three years in the slammer and not some farrago of second-hand reports of what this or that judge has handed out to this or that bloke and "I read in the Mail as this other bloke got off entirely."

True, these are real benefits, but I am not quite an Automator yet. The grotesque 'zero tolerance' rules in US schools that have seen innocent children expelled as drug offenders for passing an inhaler to an asthmatic friend in distress should serve as a warning against taking the judgement out of judging. However, Murray is an intelligent man and he may have an answer to that.

Before I go, what the devil has happened to the Howard League for Penal Reform? Are they all as addled as one Frances Crook (sic and sick), quoted by Charles Murray as saying this:

You don't want to "punish" either one, says Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform. "Punishment doesn't heal the damage and help the victim, nor does it help transform the offender. What you get is more pain. By punishing the disadvantaged offender or the advantaged offender, you're just making things worse. You're increasing the world's experience of pain." Isn't there any value at all in linking bad behaviour to a punishing consequence? "Absolutely none." Things must be done to an offender, for his own good or for the community's, but punishment in itself has no purpose.

C S Lewis pointed out in That Hideous Strength and elsewhere that taking the notion of punishment out of what society does to criminals does not lead to gentler treatment of them. Far from it: once what the criminal getting what he deserves for his crime is taken out of the equation then there is no limit on what can be done to him. There is no point at which he can say, "I've paid for my crime, had my just deserts; now you must let me go." That decision lies entirely in the hands of those doing things to him for his own good. They will decide if he is 'transformed' enough for their liking.

When John Howard toured the stinking rat-infested prisons of the 1750s, denouncing the arbitrary powers of gaolers, did he envisage that a society bearing his name would campaign for those powers to be increased?

Nah, but I don't suppose the Howard League much cares. They'll trumpet their exemplar's views when he says too much gothic severity hardens the heart, but probably don't care to publicise such statements as this:

The decency, regularity and order that I observed in houses of correction in Holland, Hamburg, Bern, Ghent, Florence, etc., I am fully persuaded, proceeded in a great degree from the constant attention that is paid to impress the prisoners with a sense of RELIGION, by plain, serious discourse, catechizing and familiar instruction from the chaplains, together with a good example, both in them and the keepers.

I feel a whole new post coming on about the good and bad aspects of Muslim prison chaplains, but the hour is late.

"Root Causes version 2.0"

I like that. From the caustic pen of David Carr regarding Jenny Tonge's sympathy for suicide bombers. Incidentally, I can't figure out how to show you the page but AOL's news headlines screen - the thing that comes up when you sign on - says, "Jenny Tonge sacked for sympathising with Palestinians." Not "suicide bombers", just "Palestinians."

Awful, dreadful, devastating, heartbreaking, funereal, unhappy and melancholic news.

Not only is the parrot story dead but Black Triangle has already made the Dead Parrot Sketch reference.

The first question does not bode well

but some of the others are interesting. You can post a question to Ursula Le Guin at the Guardian. She'll answer them in a couple of weeks. Hope and pray there isn't too much about Iraq. My great work All You Need is Profit: a Handbook for the Disgruntled Annaresti is in preparation, as it has been for the last twenty years.

Of noggins.

I was laying flooring panels in the loft most of yesterday and didn't have time to blog. However I did rediscover one of the world's cutest words. Noggin. I always thought it was a person's head, and that is the only meaning given in the AOL online dictionary. However my 20 year-old Penguin dictionary holds that it is "a mug, cup; small quantity of liquor; (US) bucket." I sort of knew that one, too.

Yet a third definition, and one new to me, came courtesy of Kronoloft, those purveyors of chipboard panels to the well-appointed home. As they put it in their leaflet: "if the ends of the boards do not meet at the centre of the joist, please ensure that noggins (additional joists) are installed for support."

This last definition may not be known to the Secret Masters of AOL, but readers would be prudent to accept it even so. Without this knowledge the aspiring DIY-er might come across sentences like this one, from the "DIY Doctor" website: "... a noggin fixed in between the floor joists to stop the twister", and carelessly assume that modern loft-laying practice demanded that his own or another's head be fixed between the joists. The custom of strengthening a building's foundations by human sacrifice, though of respectable antiquity, is not in accord with BS EN 312-4 ['requirements for load-bearing boards for use in dry conditions'] and may jeopardise your BSI Kitemark if employed.

The true Nogginophile, though, knows a truer and more ancient meaning than any of these. For is it not said that "In the Lands of the North, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale..."

Three improbable, appropriate and delightful things before bed.

Did you know that -

• Britain's oldest bird is a 104 year-old parrot.
  
• It happens to be Winston Churchill's parrot.
  
• And he taught it to say "*** the Nazis"?

True! All true, at least according to the Mirror.

Thinking about it, perhaps Charlie isn't really Britain's oldest bird, just the oldest bird whose age and provenance can be proved as a result of the fame of its onetime owner. I expect there are older parrots around, living out their longer-than-human lifespans unrecorded, having been inherited from seagoing uncles.

Parrots are, I gather, extremely intelligent birds; intelligent enough to go nuts if they have too boring a life. With an owner like Churchill that probably wasn't a danger Charlie ever had to face.

(Via Samizdata - and while you're there have a laugh at David Farrer's comment.)

Depressing.

Details are scarce but this story reports that police are investigating an alleged assault on Professor Stephen Hawking. Since he is confined to a wheelchair by motor neurone disease this appears to be a crime contemptible even by the standards of the British thug.

Vanity, thy name is Woman.

With this spectacular picture, Myria of It Can't Rain All the Time says, quite unjustifiably, that she has taken "vanity publishing to new lows."

Interestingly only a few posts down she mounts a defence of vanity while explaining her reasons for wanting cosmetic surgery. Her sister at A Little Sarcasm looks like her. Can you see the potential for conflict here?

Actually, the conflict doesn't happen and my last line was a shameless attention-seeking device akin to taking all the forty-three seconds where someone is shouting in a generally philosophical ninety-minute movie and putting them all into the promotional clip. Myria's Sister responds with an evolutionary take on why people are so down on those who want cosmetic surgery.

I don't myself. But to spend money on beautifying your own body to your own standards is no sillier than spending it on beautifying your house or on beautiful art for your walls.

It's funny how some ways of parting with your money in exchange for aesthetic pleasures are respectable when other ways aren't. A few years ago I was in the audience for a big free firework display put on by a bunch of SF fans including my husband. They paid for the fireworks themselves. Most people loved it, but one old woman was grousing away (while still watching, mind you) at all those hundreds of pounds being wasted. I was too polite to correct her "hundreds" to "thousands, actually" or to ask why the many luxury cars parked nearby (possibly including hers, as she appeared quite well off) did not arouse her ire.