'Nother Solent

"... Before dispatching them with the KAVALKAD aluminum non-stick saucepan..."

In this IKEA first-person shooter you can finally give those hostes humanis generis who inflicted wardrobes called BRA and desks called JERKER on the English-speaking world the treatment they deserve.

For some reason the author seems to have neglected WORLD SIX: THE WITLESS PARKING AND LOADING SYSTEM and denied me the great and good pleasure of feeling those barriers that stop you actually taking your products to the car like you can in every other bleeding furniture shop in the world crunch like matchwood beneath my wheels.

I bet the stupid way that IKEA put the product names in CAPITALS gave the author of the game the idea. They always used to put RELEVANT ITEMS IT WOULD BE WORTH NICKING in caps when I last played computer games. This was back when they were all TEXT ("You have reached a secret underground LAVATORY used by gnomes") and the aspiring tunnel jock had to make a lightning-fast decision between typing L and R.

(Via Live from Brussels and, ultimately, Instapundit.)

A seething mass of pirhana-bloggers

are clustered round a tender, juicy essay called "I am Your Public School." Feel free to join the frenzy.

If you want to empathise with the root causes of pirhana anger, just scroll down to this.

Israel should learn wisdom from the Klingons.

I hope there is a secret reason for this apparent folly. The Israelis have freed 400 Hezbollah prisoners in exchange for the dead bodies of three of their soldiers and a kidnapped businessman.

My my, kidnapping Israeli businessmen is a profitable business. And we all know that profitable businesses attract new entrants, don't we?

This rate of exchange is so skewed that I must assume there is more going on than we are being told and that Israel had some reason to think that it would be a good idea in its own right to free its Hezbollah prisoners. Reports say that many of them were due to be released anyway, but it still seems grossly stupid; a repeat of the Western weakness of the 1970s that made hijacking such a successful policy.

In one of the Star Trek novels (I have forgotten which one, but it might have been The Final Reflection) someone asks an honourable Klingon what is his race's policy on dealing with hostage-taking. He answers, "A dead thing has no value." He isn't referring to swapping live bodies for dead ones as in this deal, either.

Yes, of course I'd feel and speak very differently if it was my relative held hostage. Do you think I'm made of stone? But what is that to the purpose?

There's definitely something murky going on about the businessman, Elhanan Tannenbaum. The caption to the seventh of the pictures says he might be facing criminal charges. What charges? Well, this Prophecy Today website, which seems to be connected with US Televangelist Jimmy DeYoung, says (scroll down) that Shin Bet is involved and the word "treason" has been mentioned.

At the top of the same webpage is a link to graphic footage of the human results of the recent bus bombing. I have not viewed it but you can if you feel it necessary. You might be seeing more of the same, courtesy of those released today.

John Weidner:

"God made the 20th Century to teach us that the notion that things work better when experts plan them is a fallacy. It's a pity that a hundred-million or so had to die to illustrate the lesson. But now we got it. Right?"

Sheesh, that just has to be a Samizdata Quote of the Day. Excuse me while I go off and make it one.

Turning to what the post is actually about, it's not just the Soviets who ingeniously make things out of other differently-intended things. I recently made one of those pulley-operated clothes airers out of dowelling and wooden coathangers whose hooks had fallen off. I'm very proud of it. See, it does so pay to keep old broken wooden coathangers. The difference between here-and-now and the old USSR is, I could have bought a jolly nice clothes airer from Argos. That and the hundred million.

Hutton, schmutton

. I know I ought to comment but I don't feel like it. Milksop that I am when the BBC stops being the judge and starts being the accused I go all namby-pamby. "That poor Gilligan boy, badly raised you know, and subject to the most apalling peer-group pressure. You must understand that in that culture it's very difficult to avoid turning to crime." Cue violins...

My fellow posters at Biased BBC are made of sterner stuff.

Retribution is good.

Remember this? The second installment of Charles Murray's article on justice I was waiting for is out now. (Once again the link comes via Iain Murray - who has his own post about crime trends just below.)

Charles Murray has produced a strange but invigorating article. In places it reads like it has been edited with a scythe; I suspect there is a much longer and smoother version in his disk drive.

Reading it, I saw that I had misunderstood what he was saying in the first part. I had thought he was saying that there should always be punishment A for crime B. Twenty years for all murders, for instance. That wasn't quite right, although in his programme all murders would get much more similar sentences than they do now. Now I think he 's saying that the only criteria for punishment should be how bad the crime was. This still leaves scope for the sentence to be lessened in the light of extenuating circumstances to do with the crime itself. So a plea of provocation might get you somewhere but not one of poverty or a broken home. We are so used to thinking of deprivation as an extenuating circumstance that it is difficult to pull the two types apart. What! Not to consider the broken home? No allowance to be made for the prisoner's remorse - even if sincere? No weight to be given to the fact that we have good reason to suppose prison will make the defendant worse? It seems almost indecent, especially when the reader remembers that Charles Murray is not merely saying judges should be less gullible but that they should disallow certain arguments even if they are factually correct. In other words Murray does not just think that false claims of remorse, desperate circumstances or that prison will make the offender worse should be ignored but that true claims should be also.

Startling. I'll have to think about this one.

I did correctly predict one or two of his points: that progressive justice supports the self interest of its practitioners and that one of the virtues of retributive justice is that it reinforces the badness of crimes in the public mind. I was rather surprised that he didn't include one of mine, or rather of C S Lewis's, namely that non-retributive coercion has no natural limit.

One strikingly practical point Murray made that had never occurred to me is that there is just no time to practise progressive justice. You have to know someone for years before you can speak with confidence about his family, history, personality and chances for reform. Twenty minutes on the case notes and whether the guy in the dock looks good and contrite won't hack it.

Murray then veers off into discussion of the rules against self-incrimination and disclosure of previous crimes. He seems to be slightly against the former and very much against the latter. Here I disagree: having praised the traditional conception of justice as practised in these isles until the late 1950s he should remember that these rules were an integral part of the old system; the system, remember, that did deliver one of the lowest crime rates of any human society ever. The reasons for both rules are as practical as a 13-amp fuse. Without the no-self-incrimination rule it's too tempting for the police to use force to get a conviction and without the no-disclosure rule it's too tempting for them to use fraud. A copper's boss gets off his back if, when there's a spate of burglaries, he pulls in a known burglar and frames him. We don't have to imagine the copper is corrupt in a self-aware way for this to happen. Most probably he would just think, oh hang it all, Nobby is certainly guilty of something. But after enough Nobbys were framed the system really would be corrupt.

An amazing fact about a book.

The book concerned is called "The Worlds Most Amazing Battle Facts For Kids". It is part of a series which also contains books of similarly amazing Animal, Crime, Inventions and Monster Facts. It is published by Egmont Books Limited of 239 Kensington High Street. So what's so amazing about it? It's not the fact that General "Stonewall" Jackson used to walk around with his right hand in the air because he thought it balanced the blood flow in his body,because although that certainly is amazing, it is an amazing fact in the book, not about it.

OK, I'll get to the point now. The book was printed and bound in the United Arab Emirates. It is the first Arab product I have ever seen.

A tiny good omen.

ADDED A BIT LATER: D'oh, of course I've seen other Arab products, some of them very beautiful. But they were all either souvenirs or handicrafts or both. What was new to me about this little book was that it could have been physically put together anywhere (unlike a pyramid paperweight or a stuffed toy Bedouin camel, which are both morally obliged have been made in the same country, at least, as the places they are souvenirs of) but someone chose to print and bind the book in the UAE due, presumably, to some competitive advantage the UAE offers. That's hopeful. I'm fond of the little camel but the world needs only so many toy camels. Of the making of books, however, no less an authority than the prophet Ecclesiastes tells us there is no end.

It had to happen one day.

A Gary Younge column full of good sense. It's about religion and militant secularism.

Take France. The French government's motivation appears to be twofold. It says it is defending the secular nature of its republic and, in so doing, facilitating the integration of minority groups. It is wrong on both counts, essentially for the same reason.

Its secular traditions were secured after the revolution. The monarchy had held absolute control with the active assistance of the clergy, but in 1789 the monarchy was abolished and the church sidelined. However, a lot has happened in 215 years. After a brief spell, the French decided the universal rights of man did not apply to non-white people. Instead they built and lost an empire, and millions of former subjects came to the metropole to make their home as citizens. In the meantime there was the Dreyfus affair, the Vichy regime which collaborated with the Nazis and of course the Holocaust.

So today the target of these secularist ideals in France, and in much of western Europe, is not a section of the ruling class (the US is an entirely different matter) but groups who are ethnically and racially marginalised.

Unfairnesses of Life #1658: The Way No One Empathises With Unfashionable Crimes.

Normblog asks why Jenny Tonge is willing to walk a mile in the moccasins of a suicide bomber but not in those of a child abuser or a racist thug.

This afternoon I was imagining, as is not my wont, the circumstances in which I, had I grown up in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, would have done as 12 year-old Pavlik Morozov did and informed on my own father to Stalin's secret police.

I took no harm from this process. I was only doing what many have done before me: putting imaginative form to the great and terrible question of how people turn to evil.

How come I'm allowed to do that without censure yet Jenny Tonge isn't allowed to do the same for suicide bombers? Because this debate isn't really about what most people say it is. It certainly isn't about free speech; Ms Tonge is more free to speak off a party Front Bench than on it. Nor is it about the moral legitimacy of imagining how it feels to be a mass-murderer; eminent thinkers have been doing that for centuries, with particular intensity in the wake of the spectacular crimes of the one just ended.

Even though many of Tonge's critics attacked her on the wrong grounds - i.e. they claimed that it was illegitimate per se to imagine oneself as a suicide bomber, or they claimed that suicide bombers were utterly unpredictable kooks - I think they correctly sensed that she was condoning them, whatever she says.

There are two ways in which a person can say, "I'd do the same myself." One way, the most common one in conversation, is to say it as a defence of whatever act is being discussed. You are implying that you yourself are a reasonable person (this assumption may or may not be true) and that a reasonable person would, could or should act in that same way under that same stimulus. For example, "When she saw the two of them snogging, well, she had to tell his wife. I'd have done the same myself."

The other way assumes, not that the speaker is as reasonable and virtuous as the common run of humanity, but that he or she shares humanity's weakness and/or propensity to sin. Example: "I'd have gone a bit mad myself if I'd suddenly become world famous the way Diana did."

Jenny Tonge is now claiming that her comments were the latter sort but, if so, where is the acknowledgement that these acts are not merely "desperate" (a weasel word; good acts can also be desperate) but wrong? Her words are woefully unclear, but all that trading on her nurturing status as a mother and a grandmother doesn't read as a condemnation to me. And why does she say, "Many, many people criticise, many many people say it is just another form of terrorism, but I can understand" if not to set up herself in oh-so compassionate opposition to those who criticise?

There is another, even more serious lack. When I imagined myself betraying my father, a crucial part of my imagining was the unceasing barrage of lies, censorship and twisted values to which young Pavlik had been subjected. In other words I didn't just imagine my actual self (an educated product of Western tranquility, as is Jenny Tonge) I imagined the profoundly ignorant and brutalised self I would have been if I had grown up in a totalitarian state convulsed by one of the bloodiest purges in history. Judgement of the culture that produced Pavlik Morozov is more important than judgement of his own scarcely-formed character.

If Jenny Tonge's words had acknowledged that the society that produces suicide bombers is presently in thrall to twisted values then I'd have not merely defended her but cheered her. I can allow her view that his or her past experiences must be considered when you judge a terrorist - but why must the salient experiences always be assumed to be those imposed by the West or Israel?

National Car Parks fake photographic evidence.

I'm surprised that this story isn't getting more play. Never mind his five hours of wasted time, the victim of NCP's attempted peversion of justice ought to sue for libel.

That's cleared that one up

then. A reader of the Corner observes:

Mr. Goldberg:

To say Christ was killed by Jews is akin to saying Lincoln was killed by Americans or Gandhi was killed by Indians. Gandhi was killed by Indians because he was an Indian living amongst Indians. It would be difficult for him to be killed by a Papua Guinean. Just a thought.

Pity the point wasn't made earlier.