'Nother Solent

It's ALIVE!!!

What happens when a Constitution gets out of control.

More on sick jokes.

I was going to send Anne Cunningham of One Sided Wonder a note saying, "you might be interested in this post." Then I saw I didn't need to - she had already commented and recounted an experience of her own. (Given that her blog often touches on the ins and outs of human behaviour this is not a particularly amazing coincidence.)

Perhaps I can tempt Anthony Cox back into his triangular arena (see post below) with a few thoughts on when it is and when it is not beneficial for people to have an accurate perception of how common forbidden behaviour is. As he has often observed, we really, really, really want doctors to 'fess up about mistakes. That way we get a chance to put the healthy kidney back or whatever and, just as important, we can predict likely mistakes and hence forestall them. Only honesty isn't likely if the reward for it is crucifixion in the press, four different malpractice suits and an exemplary jail sentence.

I have been told on good authority that the late night conversation of pilots has more near misses than the dodgems at the fair. Openess about that might be helpful, too. But how about when we move away from honest error and into misbehaviour? Do we want pilots to confess to each other when they fly drunk? OK, OK what we really want is for them to come to the flight deck sober as I'm mostly sure most of them do. But given that drunken flying does sometimes occur, do we want them confessing it? Might that not remove some of the inhibitions that stop Captain So-and-so reaching for the whisky bottle? "What the hell," he might say, "everybody's doing it."

Sexual behaviour is enormously influenced by people's guesses as to what is normal. The promiscuous and the abstinent each believe the other group to be lying.

[Oh, drat. I was going to bring this back round to taboo-breaking humour and cheapening public discourse, but I've just remembered I've got to go off and do stuff. To Be Continued if I don't forget what I was going to say. ]

Black Triangle to close?

Say it ain't so!

Come the glorious day

when David Farrer sweeps in as Scottish First Minister this is what he will do.

Today is National Doodle Day.

Honest, I heard it on Radio Essex. Normally I do not concern myself with National Excuse for a Press Release Days of any sort, but this one is the perfect excuse for a blog post and that's quite different.

Isn't this page of doodles by Engels lovely? As I say in the comments, I have more in common with him than I ever knew: I always doodle heads facing left as well. "I always doodle" is no exaggeration; I must have drawn tens of thousands of leftward-facing faces over the years. Mostly female, perhaps because it's a female face I see in the mirror. Mostly young, or coming out as looking young, which is not quite the same thing. Not all are beautiful or happy looking by any means - though, again, this is probably because one tremor of the pen can make a smile come out as a smirk or disrupt the eveness necessary for beauty. A slight majority of my faces are non-white, either black or Oriental or unclassifiably mixed-race. I don't think there is any deep political or psychological reason for this. I have always liked drawing faces and can still remember my flush of pleasure when I first got the epicanthic fold right. There is great pleasure in tracing the curve of an upper lip that is different, but not utterly different, from one's own. Sometimes while drawing what I know is essentially the same doodle as I have done on dozens of past occasions I wonder why I am not bored. The answer is that we are deeply programmed to find the human face interesting.

Good riddance.

I see that Ann Winterton has lost the Conservative party Whip after making a heartless and racist joke about the recent drowning of twenty Chinese cocklers at Morecombe Bay.

Serves her right. I've lost the link where I read it, but someone present said that the contrast between people waiting to drown and the bright comfort of a dinner party was horrible. He was embarrassed for their hosts. (The occasion was a dinner meant to foster better Anglo-Danish relations. If the Danish Press is reporting all this, I rather think it failed in that aim.)

You know what? Sicko jokes fill a void. Once upon a time sex jokes were what we did when we wanted to prod at taboos. Now that sex is no longer shocking enough, jokes about murder and tragedy have replaced sex jokes in that role. I'd prefer some return of the sex taboos.

The first sicko joke I ever heard was about the IRA murder of Lord Mountbatten; more precisely it was about the simultaneous murder of a fourteen year old relative in the boat with him and another boy. That was in 1979. I suspect that that was an early one, i.e. that the sick joke phenomenon is relatively new. (I distinguish it from black humour, honoured since ancient times.)

Child though I was, I was genuinely and bitterly outraged by Mountbatten's murder. Yet I laughed at the joke. I've laughed at similar since. So have you, probably.

Late at night, in the warmth of the circle after a party or a night at the pub, I have heard humane and respectable people of both left and right repeat and laugh at really atrocious sick jokes and racist jokes. (If I have more often been the audience than the comedian that is mainly because my memory for punch lines is poor.) The worst racist joke I ever heard came from a Labour councillor who did, I am convinced, genuinely strive against racism in the other 99.99% of his life. That was the point. He laughed most at what was most forbidden.

Once a group of us were discussing sick humour. Some subjects, we all agreed, were beyond the Pale - the Holocaust, for instance. Someone promptly told a joke (despite its setting, less cruel than most of those I have discussed here, being some way along the road to that fine destination, the true political joke) about a German commandant letting one prisoner go free from a concentration camp. We laughed. Of course we did.

Am I saying sick jokes are OK then? No. It would be better to turn away. I am saying that in some circumstances they present an all but insurmountable temptation. All sorts of motives flow together: braggadocio, peversity, the heady liberation of a temporary Saturnalia, the exchange of tokens of intimacy ("we can trust each other not to tell"), the commission of a shared crime as an initiation rite. And, that great corrupter, the fear that if you don't laugh you will be seen as a prig and a killjoy.

I can't quite analyse or defend this but I feel that Mrs Winterton's offence was substantially worse because she was not, whatever she says, in a truly private situation. I don't merely mean that she was more likely to get caught; there was something actually worse about that sort of joke made outside the magic circle. For one thing, the relatives of the dead might get to hear about it, but as well as that it breached some primal wall.

(Everyone, please note: though I am interested in the phenomenon I truly don't want to hear or repeat the actual jokes.)

ADDED FRIDAY: after a night's sleep I have hit upon the reason why I find it nastier that such jokes are made in a speech. When people huddle close and make that sort of joke in whispers they acknowledge the wrongness of what they do even in the act of doing it. If one makes that sort of joke sitting up and smiling brightly, it is as if you are saying that it is all right to mock the recently dead; that the taboo is pointless.

My spies are everywhere.

Continuing the university theme, a former pupil of A C Grayling at Oxford saw my criticism and has leapt - well, walked languidly - to his defence, saying that he was a good tutor and adding, "He was actually quite popular - being generally thought a good talker with a lovely voice! That doesn't prevent him being an idiot of course."

The same correspondent adds Van Eyck to the list of famous Belgians.

About that article in Jewbusters, formerly known as Adbusters...

It brings back memories of the "No platform" debate in British universities in the late 1970s and early 80s. It started off as a movement whereby Student Unions, overmighty in those days, bound themselves to deny racists and fascists a platform to speak at university meetings. That was, of course, very much against the spirit of freedom of speech that once prevailed in the universities (mock not, my children, for this was long ago), but at least it originally referred to real racists and real fascists. Not for long, though. Soon R & F was taken to include Zionists. Soon after that Zionists was taken at some universities to include any Conservative MP who supported Israel and, if I recall correctly, some Labour ones as well. Yet worse, it included societies of Jewish students.

That much is common knowledge. What follows is my speculation, for I certainly wasn't involved in such matters, never having being a hack in the British university sense of the word. Whatever the details, a practical question must have arisen: how do you find out which Conservative MPs support Israel? I remember that the decision was made locally for each university, some going further than others, which means the decision-makers for each university would have been committees of student politicians, usually aged between eighteen and twenty-one, few of whom would have had the time or desire to follow the careers of individual MPs. A common consequence of their excusable ignorance and inexcusable arrogance was that, since Jewishness and support for Israel overlap, their first step in their task was often to find out which MPs were Jews. They didn't have the internet to help them but they did have Vacher's Parliamentary Companion which gives potted biographies of each MP. Messrs Vacher and Dod neglect to tell us who the Jews are, but I assume - how else can they have done it? - that someone in each committee was given the task of combing the list and putting the traditional asterix next to each suspect.

Sit you back. Imagine the dialogues that must have taken place when an invitation to speak was submitted to the young guardians of morality:

"The Conservative Students' Association want Davidson to speak."

"Davidson? Never heard of him. But he sounds a bit... you know. Damn, why can't they show his picture in profile? Better check him out against the list."

Eventually it got to the stage where to save themselves the trouble and possible embarrassment of putting little stars next to certain names the students doing the deciding in some universities would just ban all Conservatives, or all manifestations of Jewish identity. This step belatedly awoke the slumbering sense of fair play of the left-wing but moderate mass of students and the whole 'no platform' movement was gradually dismantled in a series of referenda and votes at various universities, and where not formally reversed, quietly allowed to lapse.

So they all lived happily ever after, then?

What do you think this is, a fairy tale? The saga of "no platform" might make a heartening story were it not for the fact that the baton of censorship was not dropped but merely passed on, from students to university authorities, who nowadays enforce speech codes with all the enthusiasm of their student predecessors and with more power at their disposal. In many cases the censors are probably the same people, wretches who became addicted at an early age to the delights of exercising power in a small closed world and have never broken free. I have the impression that the "no platform" policies have come back as well.

Liberty is indivisible. Freedom of speech and freedom from persecution for minorities are not antithetical but supporting concepts. Freedom of speech is "the merciless confessional that a people makes to itself, and it is well known that confession has the power to redeem" as Karl Marx, engine of destruction though his other ideas turned out to be, argued so well.

Which is why I maintain that Kalle Lasn, peace hero and Jew-baiter, has the political right to write as he does... and I have the right to marvel at a living mind so dead to to history that it could plod through the process of filtering out the Jews from "a carefully researched list" of neocons (word has it that the Jew part was more carefully researched than the neocon part); necessarily involving the scrutiny of every name for Jewishness - the ferreting out of family details - the adoption of some policy to decide the case of mischlings; and not pull back from sheer shame. Did his finger even tremble as he typed his little stars?

...Not Hercule Poirot, he's fictional, but you can have half of Mark Steyn.

Mark Steyn is half Belgian. This is so weird. Not that I dislike Belgium: some benign blind spot in their overarching regulatedness allows them very liberal gun laws, so we go there to play bang bang. Furthermore, (ignore me if I've said this before) happy the land where if one should faint from hunger in the street one would find one had landed on a café chair and a waiter was even now bringing croque monsieur and an amusingly shaped glass of the best beer in the world. But, gun laws apart, the Country of the Good Europeans is somehow not the place I had envisaged as supplying 50% of Mr Steyn's genes.

Incidentally: Van Dyck, Bruegel, Eddy Merckx, Hergé, King Leopold (the Congo one), Rubens, Jean-Claude Van Damme... I did that without checking here. Except for the spelling of Merckx, of course.

You say this guy is a professional philosopher?

A.C. Grayling sits in for Richard Dawkins in this Times article about how triff science is compared to nasty religion. I gather foreign readers will be unable to access Grayling's article after a week, so I shall summarise it. Science = cool stuff about remote galaxies, sensawunda, happy cooperation. Religion = Bible belt Americans, Afghan child brides.

Blimey, the rot in the universities must be worse than I thought. Are his students or his colleagues or whoever is supposed to argue back at him when he tries out next week's column at High Table permanently drunk or what? Because for some reason he thinks this sort of thing constitutes conclusive argument:

It is said that we shall know a thing by its fruits. A striking fact about the adventure of science, whenever it escapes the attentions of those who pervert it to making war rather than progress, is how well it serves mankind.

Think of X-ray machines, social science research into human welfare, the appliances of leisure that fill our homes with colourful entertainments and music: it is hard not to make comparisons between a world ameliorated by these things and any world shaped by taking as true the bleak and desperate ignorances of ancient legends.

Wowee, what an amazing conclusion: when the most spectacularly nasty warlike uses science has been put to are defined out... there are only nice peaceful uses left over!

Just don't mention the war. On second thoughts, stuff Godwin's Law: I will mention the war because it is thunderously relevant. Anyone who can write a sentence like that and leave his flank wide open to the mention of Zyklon B isn't being argued with enough. And did he really never stop to consider the pyramid of skulls left behind by a certain well-known political philosophy officially dedicated to scientific atheism?

As it happens I wholeheartedly agree with Grayling's view that science has brought us many benefits, and broadly agree with his view that "Everywhere that religion has ever held temporal power, the result has approximated Taleban-style rule." So why can't I re-write his last paragraph thus:

It is said that we shall know a thing by its fruits. A striking fact about the adventure of religion, whenever it escapes the attentions of those who pervert it to an instrument of power rather than faith, is how well it serves mankind.

Think of the origin of the concept that the welfare of strangers should matter, the great ideas of free will and and moral choice that underpin our culture, the religously-inspired art and music that permeate our lives: it is hard not to make comparisons between a world ameliorated by these things and any world shaped by taking as true the bleak and arrogant ignorances of modern materialism.

QUICK UPDATE: Andrew writes:

Hmm, you don't REALLY think that the only reason I try to be nice to people is because of some old guy up the sky with a big white beard? Do you?

Perhaps you are not being argued with enough...

As I said to Andrew, I meant "historical origin" and there will one day be a full post on this, and it will deal with Christianity vs Paganism as well as religious vs atheist. Two quick points in the meantime:

- I'm not claiming that no Stoic or Buddhist ever saw the need to be nice to strangers or that no atheist sees it now. I am claiming that the reason our modern Western society is saturated with the idea of universal basic benevolence (so much so that we can hardly believe that people can think otherwise even when they say so clearly) is, historically, Christianity.

- My re-write of Grayling's paragraph wasn't meant to be the whole of my own view. It was meant to show that I could make a case no worse than his by swapping a few nouns.

The remorseless Davids Medienkritik

tracks the Forbes/Lewincamp affair into German waters. For those of us who didn't know our Forbes from our Lewincamp, Tim Blair explains. I guess the German media will be telling us how the Pentagon suppressed the truth about global warming some time next week.

The Pile of Washing That Ate Milwaukee

is in my room.