'Nother Solent

You've heard of Dances With Wolves.

I'm Skis With Weasles. See you in a week.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about Snell's Law. You put me to shame. I didn't mean derive from first principles, with "Fermat's Principle of Least Time and some differential calculus (plus a sneaky rearrangement and the knowledge that
csc^2(x) = 1 + cot^2(x) )" as David Gillies put it, just the diddy little geometry of how it works.

Wal-Mart and Snell's Law.

I have been reading a fascinating post plus comments in Body and Soul.

The post proper was about why "Jeanne D'Arc" does not go to Wal-Mart. I have never had the pleasure of going to a Wal-Mart, but, oh, for an extra hour to tell you all why I think it is a splendid and moral act to come home loaded with goodies from cheapo British chains such as Peacock's, Lidl (better salmon than Fortnum & Mason) and the one in Bishop's Stortford with the name I forget, Buy-U-Rite or something equally ghastly, where you can get one fleece top for £3 or two for a fiver. So nice for poor people, I always think.*

I haven't got the hour.

... But perhaps I have a few minutes. Jeanne links to a paper from Oxfam arguing that Wal-Mart etc are driving down working conditions. In response, let me also quote Oxfam. In this Observer article, which I urge you to read even though it is in glacial PDF format, Kevin Watkins the head of policy at Oxfam, speaks of "unprecendented progress". His complaint was of gains spread unevenly, not of there being no gains. He was commenting on a UN report that said that since 1970 world infant mortality had halved, access to safe water quintupled, adult literacy risen from 47% to 73% and life expectancy increased by eight years. These changes didn't happen by magic. They started happening when people in developing countries stopped following the model of East Africa and started following the model of East Asia.

My interest in the post was all the greater when the comments veered off into education issues. I found much to agree with. The correspondents, all left-wing, were as angry and frustrated about dumbing down in education as ever a Joanne Jacobs or, come to think of it, a Natalie Solent. One or two talked about their grandfathers' textbooks, full of algebra and Latin. Most of the commenters also showed a disdain for 'education' that is merely intended to turn out workers equal to that of an Alice Bachini or a Brian Micklethwait.

More is spent and less achieved in American education than in past generations. Something must have caused the decline, spanning many decades and both Republican and Democrat administrations. Ever thought of blaming the NEA? This is a serious question. (Although the mention of the the NEA is shorthand for an entire establishment.) Everything I know about British education in the last few decades and all I have read about the parallel history in the US suggests to me the classic story of a special interest gaining and keeping a stranglehold. In time the stranglehold has exhuasted the strangler almost as much as the stranglee, but he dare not let go.

That dumbing-down has happened in Britain, too, I know from personal and family experience as a former teacher married to a teacher. In the course of my current work I have had cause to examine several GCSE, AS and A-Level syllabi (or 'specifications' as they call them now, which avoids the elitist Latin plural), both in my own subject of physics and in the humanities. An example, plucked from the air: when I sat O-Level physics at the age of sixteen one had to derive and use Snell's Law of refraction. Today's seventeen or eighteen year-olds doing AS/A2 level physics need only use it, not derive it.

Perhaps, you may say, the benighted seventeen year-olds, though deprived of their sense of Snell are learning something else of equal or greater use?

They are learning something else. Again, here I select but one example out of many I could have employed. Section 17.1 of the AQA syllab... specificatiabub directs that the aspiring Einsteins shall be examined on the "spiritual, moral, ethical, social and cultural issues" related to physics. Then there is Section 17.2, the European Dimension; Section 17. 3, Environmental Education; and finally Section 17.4, Avoidance of Bias.

Hot diggety damn as our American cousins ought to say even if they don't really. Regular readers will know that I am far from indifferent to spiritual, moral, ethical, social and cultural issues; nor to environmental ones, though my conclusions in all of these areas might not be those approved by the authors of the specification. (I am indifferent to the the European dimension.) These matters are important but they are not physics. In the context of an exam ostensibly about physics they are just easy marks. One can find out the opinions one is expected to reproduce in an afternoon. And reproduction of received opinion it must be; there is no time in an examination mostly concerned with electrons or Hooke's Law to explain original political opinions or justify controversial ones.

What a gift for the middle-class student I once was, tempted to idleness when it came to computation but who could supply unlimited quantities of eloquence without breaking into a sweat. But prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!, - it is a cruel trick to play on the inarticulate pupil who needs physics (real physics, physics physics) a damn sight more than I did. It is unfair to employers, too, whose interests are not overriding but are nonetheless owed common honesty. They think they are getting someone who can select a material to use to clad an optical fibre with a refractive index chosen so as to minimize multipath dispersion and what they actually get is someone who can waffle convincingly about why people tend to pay no attention to warnings about naturally radioactive radon gas in their cellars. (I paraphrase a question from a 2001 paper.) Worse yet, the new employee may think he knows more than he does. (Or she. Bleah, just lost five marks for "avoidance of bias".) That sort of thing kills people eventually.

Don't misunderstand me. I do not wish that children or adults should not be taught about ethics, philosophy or politics. But since circa 1950 it has not been the case that we have gained a golden age in the teaching of political philosophy at the cost of a decline in physics. Or a golden age in history and geography teaching at the cost of a decline in maths. Teaching of all these subjects has become less rigorous. Why that is so is a post in itself, but broadly I think it's because teachers themselves pushed for and got 'reforms' that turned out to be harmful and now they can't admit it. There's a point here about national systems having too much inertia, too.

*And if you are wondering, yes, there have been times in my life when I was poor. Of course, education makes poverty less of a hardship, as do warm fleece tops for £3; and likely to be temporary, as does a job making them for 20p.

EU investigators say EU money used by Arafat for terrorism.

Via Gene at Harry's Place.

Does racial segregation arise naturally

, or does it have to be enforced? Read this post on the subject from David Bernstein of Volokh Conspiracy

That ties into Kieran Healy's email in reply to my earlier post, which if I were not so vague and disorganised I would have posted days ago. Here it is:

You might be reading a bit too much into my post ... It's not really about affirmative action. The main point was fairly simple --- just that there's a tremendous amount of empirical evidence that, the elegance of the tipping model notwithstanding, racial segregation in housing markets has been driven by different mechanisms from the one Schelling identifies. I've known people to become entranced by tipping explanations with lovely emergent outcomes even though the empirical data suggests, e.g., that there's a well-entrenched system of redlining by realtors that prevents minority buyers from being shown houses in predominantly white neighborhoods, or that bank managers consistently assess the mortgage prospects of otherwise identical white and black families differently. And so on.

The question of what to do about this issue is difficult.

[Italics indicate that Kieran is quoting me] 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.

I'm not sure that's true, actually. I don't think my view of people is quite that optimistic. In any event, it's a context-sensitive point. It
depends partly on the kind of beliefs people have about race, say.

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.

I'm not sure I understand your point here. Are you saying that whether the law substantively demands racial integration or segregation is morally irrelevant and what really matters (and what's bad) is that we're allowing ourselves to have laws of this kind in the first place?

[No. My argument was a version of the one that says, "Don't allow Tony Blair / President Bush any powers that you would not also be willing to see in the hands of Michael Howard / President Kerry." - NS]

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.

Hmm. I don't know. I had a particular case in mind when I wrote that comment. Being a devout ex-Catholic myself, I'm not much of a fan of guilt. I suspect that pitching policy debates in terms of guilt and guiltmongers isn't very productive --- either for the guiltmongers or those who might want to shrug off responsibility by giving others that label.

Cheers,

Kieran

Lots of food for thought here. Both Kieran Healy and David Bernstein provide some good arguments from different directions against libertarian ideas. I don't know enough about US history to answer (Though "that was then, this is now" might be a start.) This humble blogger is, as ever, gloriously and supremely right, but she can't summon up arguments to prove it just yet.

On another point, as a ramshackle Catholic of sorts (actually I think I might be turning Anglican, but that's another story) I must correct the impression I gave that I am always against guilt. Guilt is good when you have something specific to be guilty for and when it leads to repentance, restitution if possible and better ways in future. Wallpaper guilt is a waste of life.

So shall I stop henceforth all this self-obsessed agonizing about how awful I am at answering emails? Heavens, no. You must allow me my little hobbies.

PolitiX has moved.

Anne Cunningham has issued a second post on the drawbacks of being adored.

Where escapes me, but somewhere I once came across a very good article about how awkward it can be for very small children to have an over-devoted friend at playgroup or in the reception class of school. Unlike Anne, I'm not talking about crushes here, and certainly not about anything sexual; just a little chum who follows you about all the time.

Saying "I don't want you around me so much" without being cruel is hard enough for an adult or teenager. Anne commented earlier on the feeling of not having an approved script for such occasions (unlike bereavement, for example). It's twice as hard for a little kid who can draw neither upon personal experience nor upon the examples provided by fiction or popular culture, meagre though they are.

"Why I Left the Anti-War Right."

Anthony Gancarski explains how he finally chucked his column for Antiwar.com after months of weird emails from anti-semites right and left. The last straw was when his column dissing Michael Moore was spiked because it might annoy the left.

Truth to tell, I reacted to his sudden conversion with some suspicion. Many people, I said to the page, had their moment of truth when the rubble of the World Trade Center hit the ground - and yours came when a rejection slip hit the mat?

Still, changes of heart do happen that way sometimes: after months of vague doubt, some trivial little thing brings it all into focus. That's why we have the metaphor of the straw that broke the camel's back.

Antiwar.com is, well, Antiwar.com, a place where Buchanan and Pilger are literally on the same page.

Read Airstrip One for sharp anti-war argument and correct anti-EU argument.

(Starting link via NZ pundit who also links to Justin Raimondo's reply.)

Look who

the Guardian chose to pronounce on complex issues of public governance.

Look how little comment it all caused.

Anyone can and everyone should lambast lefties for groupthink,

and the subject of this post by Bjørn Stærk, one of those tiresome psychiatrists who dresses up his personal political opinions in a psychiatric robe that's too big for them, can consider himself well and truly lambasted. However the post doesn't stop there. It makes more general observations about politics -

I would expect to find a high level of groupthink in any government. It's the nature of politics to separate people into groups that think alike. At the top of the hill, with enemies on the outside and enemies on the inside, forced as you are to make unpopular and risky decisions, prestige, greed and fear combine to create excellent conditions for groupthink.

- and about how to learn -

At the very least it's good sense to ask someone to explain their views in simple terms before you yourself attempt to explain their views in complex terms.

- that you may find useful however you vote. You might even find ammo for a few well-aimed shots at me and my blogging buddies.

The heirs to Hogarth.

I'm told today's Independent cartoon shows George Bush with his knuckles dragging on the ground. How challenging. Speaking truth to power fearlessly as ever, eh, Indies? But maybe they are a little bit fearful of speaking truth to internet because I can't find it at the Independent's website. Anyone out there seen it?

If the cartoon turns out to be a lovable gem of wit and good-humoured raillery, containing, moreover, a subtle political message well-calculated to gently tease the settled assumptions of the average Independent reader, I'll take all my nasty sarcastic comments back. But, just guessing, I think it will turn out to be a 2004 version of the sort of thing that was already stale when Bernard Levin visited an exhibition subtitled "Artists look at contemporary Britain" back in 1987:

Would you really believe ... that, asked for a comment on contemporary Britain, Alain Miller and Keith Piper can offer nothing but huge pictures of Mrs Thatcher? Piper portrays her with a kind of halo made of missiles; ooh, the originality of it, the wit, the courage, the trenchancy!

... Sandle shows us a kind of Gestapo cellar where the police (no doubt instructed by Mrs Thatcher) torture everybody in sight and then has the wonderful cheek to say 'I'm exposing myself, I'm leading with my chin', as though he didn't know that he will have every poodlefaker in the business swooning, cheering and commissioning.

- from All Things Considered.

Hony soyt moi.

I am horribly behind on the email again. Rather than pretend to be out so as to avoid guilt feelings, I shall do something more positive. I shall tell you about another sensible copper. Following on from Chief Constable Brunstrom who said the drug war was a waste of time, we now have Peter Joslin, former Chief Constable of Warwickshire, who says a surfeit of speed cameras is losing the police the support of the public. That's one way of putting it. They express themselves more freely in Emborough.

A right ful wlonk post

from Sasha Volokh reminding me of the wonky glories of Law French which I think should be revived immediately. Also worthy of revivification is the fourteenth century dialect of Cheshire, so unfairly eclipsed by the boring London speech of Chaucer. One of my favourite* passages from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is this, starting at line 2020:

...To thonk.
He had upon uch pece,
Wypped ful wel and wlonk,
The gayest into Grece;
The burn bede bryng his blonk.

It's something about each piece of our hero's armour being polished full and nobly until he was the best-looking knight this side of Greece. Then some chap brings his horse, which is what "blonk" means, not "white" like all you clever-clogs thought.

And what of "wlonk" you cry? (If sober. If drunk "whlat of wonk" or "lot of plonk" is the best you can manage.) It means noble, fine, glorious. A wlonk blonk is a splendid horse, but this admirable adjective cries out to be used in a modern context. For instance a wlonk wonk is a person whose excessive studiousness does not detract from his essential nobility. A wlonk wonk would never bonk anyone...

...Listen, chum, it was a humorous word meaning "hit on the head" until I was eighteen. HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE as the poet puts it in rather peculiar French and not Latin like these guys appear to think.

*Thus I imply that I know more than one. And so I do. I know the whole next line: While the wlonkest wede he warp on himselven.