'Nother Solent

If you want

an upbeat Big Vehicle Disaster story with Religious Overtones, 30% violent, 20% puzzles, 20% to do with feelings and 30% to do with how things work and set in Ancient Egypt you can find it here. You really can, even though I thought I'd chosen a sufficiently ridiculous combination to give no results. Actually, I still got most of the same ones when I specified an aeroplane disaster set in Ancient Egypt with 0% violence and chases, so I guess the poor programme just does the best it can.

Sounds like something from 1984. Julia, Winston Smith's girlfriend, used the next version on of this where you can write novels to spec rather than just find them.

But let's admit it: it is rather fun, isn't it? And it corresponds rather well to the way people do search for "the sort of thing I like." I always used to check the last page at the library to make sure it wasn't one of those grungy life-is-meaningless books. I can depress myself, thank you. I don't want books doing it for me.

Actively enforced and collectively sustained.

Kieran (Healy) of Crooked Timber has posted about walking to school, and very interesting it is too. However I'd like to home in on something he said just in passing:

Neighborhood racial segregation, for instance, has historically been actively enforced and collectively sustained, and is not simply the unpleasant byproduct of innocuous choices.

I assume that Kieran favours laws against racial discrimination and supports affirmative action. (Confession: I have only the vaguest recollection of him ever talking about it. I'm just guessing his opinions based on the fact that he writes for Crooked Timber.¹) Yet here he is arguing for the libertarian view of such matters, though he may not know it. Firstly, what he said implies that people of different races tend to integrate so long as they are protected from coercion and denied the power to coerce. Secondly, once the principle of letting social relations be controlled by force is allowed then, surely, it's just the chance of place and era that decides whether the law demands integration or separation.

Then a few lines later, he does it again. Comes up with a very interesting side-issue, I mean, and one which seems to me to have consequences at odds with the socialist position. Here's the quote:

(In my experience, although they may not describe the empirical process properly, Schelling-type models are good rhetorical tools for motivating people to admit that there might be a problematic pattern of racial or gender discrimination in their organization. This is because they give you the ability to say "There is this collective problem but it wasn't caused by any of us making choices that were racist/sexist/whatever." Very handy.)

This comment is full of insight². Like Kieran I suspect that Schelling's tipping model, though it may be true, would still appeal even if it were not. He has it the wrong way round, though. He thinks that Schelling-style models sell because they allow people to acknowledge a problem without admitting guilt. I think that what is popular these days is whatever allows a gin-like soaking in immanent guilt and keeps guiltmongers in clover.

¹Ashamed by my slackness, I have now scanned back through Kieran Healy as far as December, which sounds like it ought to require a medical consent form. I still don't know what he thinks about affirmative action. However I can fairly say that he has not read many books.

²Characteristically so.

You know your blog has arrived

when someone calls it a farrago of lazy-minded tripe from a milk-toothed boy and that's the nice bit. Robert Hinkley emailed me proudly to say that he'd made it to the blog big time.

Vote Cuthbertson. Will I still be saying that in 2034? In my voting email I told the Guardian votemeisters that if they should suddenly decide to switch - as being Guardianistas they might - from first-past-the-post to STV, my second preference would be for Harry's Place. It was a hard choice, but the prospect of Concom doing a Martin's Law was just too tempting.

A senior policeman says

that drug prohibition does more harm than good.

He said that, despite billions of pounds and thousands of officer hours, the number of addicts and "recreational users" of illegal drugs in the UK has multiplied at an alarming rate.

Mr Brunstrom compared the current situation with alcohol prohibition in the USA in the 1920s, which was an "unmitigated disaster".

I don't approve of senior policemen sounding off about politics even when I agree with them. But since he has, isn't it interesting that he has? I hope that Chief Constable Brunstrom has colleagues who have come to the same painful realisation and are telling their political masters so.

Kris and Iain Murray's son George

is one day old today!

The Luddite's Lament.

First they came for the tiller's job... Madsen Pirie has caught the tone exactly.

It is true that the spinning jenny and other inventions of the industrial revolution caused many families to have a hungry winter after the breadwinner's job was lost. Set against that the hundreds of hungry winters avoided over hundreds of millions of human lives since then, so that nowadays the whole notion of "hungry winters" is of purely historical interest to those of us living in countries where industrialisation has taken hold. Scroll up one post to see Alex Singleton's take on the people who work assiduously to bring them back.

Pour encourager les autres

, says Mark Steyn, that's why I wanted to invade Iraq.

Moi aussi.

Not that it was my only reason for wanting war. I also thought Sadders had WMD and was distinctly surprised to discover he didn't. As was he, apparently. It's a funny old world.* And, completing my trio of reasons for war, I thought it would be kind of neighbourly to pull the modern Caligula's hands off the collective neck of the Iraqi people. Scratch that 'and'. That was number one reason. When your neighbour is killing his wife you don't worry about property rights.

However, returning to reason two, the encouragement of the others. If I were arguing against Steyn I would now gleefully point out that the phrase as originally used by Voltaire referred to the execution of Admiral Byng; an innocent man cynically killed to make those in power look tough. And Saddam was innocent of the charge that he had WMD, wasn't he? And George Bush had to look as though he was doing something tough against terrorism, didn't he?

Enough already! I had better drop that role before I start talking about Halliburton and the Caspian Pipeline and tying up my trousers with string.

With the execution of Byng we see the strategy of looking tough at its worst. His execution rebounds "To the Perpetual Disgrace of Public Justice" as his memorial says. However I do not believe that strategy is necessarily wrong. It depends on the time and place. It depends on whether the victim of the policy is personally decent like Byng or personally monstrous like Saddam. It depends on whether there is any Public Justice to be perpetually disgraced. Among civilised people living under the laws the man who thinks that his prestige demands that he respond to a blow with equal or greater force is a boor and quite possibly a criminal. Among savages or noblemen, wolves or sharks, the very same actions may be a vital necessity. As far as they are concerned not to respond to assault is to declare yourself prey. A supine daimyo in medieval Japan, like his counterpart in medieval England, was not just dishonoured but probably doomed.

There is a sense in which all the players in the Great Game of Nations are savages (or noblemen if you prefer). Despite recent pretences most of them, when push comes to shove, recognise no law higher than themselves. In some ways I think that's a good thing. However the savagery I had in mind was not that nominal matter of functional anarchy among nation-states but the literal savagery of Islamofascism, a belief-system inseparably bound up with contempt for weakness. Once they had drawn blood, as they did in 2001, there was a moment of supreme danger. Would the pack attack? If the response had been as feeble as it was to earlier outrages then, exhilarated, first one wolf then another would have joined in. Well, though we will not pass out of danger in my lifetime, that first test has been passed. Put crudely, militant Islam has been part-way shocked back to its senses. Looking round at Afghanistan and Iraq now, its average supporter will not feel that the attacks of September 11 2001 advanced their cause. The frenzy having passed we are back to ordinary lawlessness.

ADDED LATER: I covered some of the same ground in a posting last September.

*Now that everyone takes perfectly seriously the hypothesis (advanced from first principles on this blog by my regular correspondent ARC before it became fashionable) that Saddam thought he had WMD because his scientists found it prudent to keep saying, "Yes Excellency, the weapons await only your word" rather than "Awfully sorry Mr Prez, but I personally haven't got two spare uranium nuclei to rub together", am I the first to suggest that some of said scientists may have deceived their master in the hope that events would turn out as they have?

The facts don't demand that explanation: given that Uday would torture footballers who missed a penalty, it's easy to see that the simple desire to live until morning would keep Iraqi scientists lying to Saddam. However a scientist is alert to cause and effect. Some of them may have perceived that the best hope of rescue lay in (a) making the Americans think Iraq had WMD so that they invaded (which entailed making Saddam think Iraq had WMD) and (b) making sure that Iraq did not really have WMD, to ensure that when the invasion came Saddam lost.

Go, Ryanair, you scumbags.

I am no friend of Ryanair. Yet I'm with the airline on this case, blogged by Perry de Havilland, where a man suffering from cerebral palsy and arthritis sued them for charging him for use of a wheelchair.

Ryanair is a low cost airline, the IKEA of the skies. That's what they do. Their service is crap. Who but a fool doesn't know this, and know that the low cost and the crap service are two sides of a single extremely low denomination coin? Who but a fool, said I, but in this case the fool had his case backed by the powerful fools and the foolishness has become the law of the land.

You and I might prefer to travel with an airline that didn't dump you with a yawn when you miss a connection, and which had sufficient class and flexibility to provide wheelchairs, not to mention sufficient acumen to see a customer who has hit a difficulty or who has requirements slightly out of the ordinary as an opportunity to make future sales rather than as a piece of dirt fouling the production line. However the world clearly contains enough cheapskates to keep Ryanair going and that's their decision, daft as it is.

Disability is indeed a misfortune. Here are some other turns of fortune that may make international travel more irksome or expensive: being old and doddery, being poor, living far from transport connections, hating airline food, being frightened to fly, being very fat, being busy, having several young children. Should the State equalise travel costs, for instance, between those living all too near an airport like me and those in the Outer Hebrides? I jest but somewhere out there someone is drawing up a plan for just that. (The Back End of Nowhere Discrimination Act 2007: ending the postcode lottery in air travel!)

Ryanair lost. However it has taken a sweet little revenge: they are to impose a 50p levy for wheelchair provision on every ticket and, crucially, they are going to make it explicit. You know if I didn't hate Rynair so much I'd quite like them sometimes. The BBC says, "By so publicly linking the cost of assisting disabled travellers to increased ticket prices, it is a decision that is likely to anger disability campaign groups. " Indeed, though disability campaign groups might feel a certain embarrassment when stating their exact objection to Ryanair's small gesture towards educating the public on costs and stimulating better-informed debate.