'Nother Solent

World Conquest the nice way.

"Dr Johnson is endlessly quoted here, because he is so incontestably right. A man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is making money. Just think what benefits Hitler or Stalin might have brought the human race if their vast energies had been devoted to making profits. "

Dennis O'Keefe, Capitalism and Corruption: the Anatomy of a Myth.

IKEA boss Ingvar Kamprad has overtaken Bill Gates as the world's richest man. As a young man Kamprad went to several pro-Nazi meetings in Sweden in the three years after the war ended.

Isn't it nice that he turned to taking over the world via flat-pack furniture instead?

Iraqi gunmen

of the Mujahideen Brigades, a previously unknown group, have taken three Japanese citizens captive and say that Japan must pull out its troops or the prisoners will be burned alive.

Well, it worked in Spain. It worked in Somalia. The question is, do we keep it working?

I say, no. Kill the Muhajideen brigades. God willing the hostages might be saved, but if they are killed too, better a bullet than being burned alive and better a world where they die thus than one where the tactic of threatening hostages with death by torture works. As I said in January when Israel more-than-foolishly released many terrorists in exchange for an Israeli hostage, "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?" Think not only of the hostage we see now but of the next, and the next, and the next - because unless war is waged and won on this tactic, that is what there will be.

I've changed my mind on something. With the example of the wrong and unwinnable War on Drugs before me I used to be very scornful of wars on phenomena rather than on nations or groupings of men. I didn't like the name "War on Terror." However, as Mark Steyn has pointed out the Royal Navy fought a War on Slavery, and won it, too - if not for all time then at least for many generations.

During that "War On" it would often happen that the crew of a slave ship, seeing that they were about to be overhauled, would throw the slaves overboard to destroy the evidence that they had been slave trading. This dreadful and predictable result of the War on Slavery did not stop it from being worthwhile.

So much - save them if possible but do not bargain for them - for the victims of the Mujahideen Brigades. What of their audience? I think that Iraqi public revulsion at such tactics (one of the hostages is a woman, two of them are aid workers) will work against the hostage-takers. My impression that the majority of Iraqis, and Arabs generally, would indeed be repelled is backed up by this post by Iraqi blogger Zeyad. Zeyad writes:

I found it particularly interesting that while Al-Jazeera displayed most of the tape, it did not display the part where the masked men held knives to the neck of the wailing Japanese woman while screaming "Allahu Akbar!". What? too hard for Arab feelings?

That very significant omission reflects slightly better on Al-Jazeera's audience than on Al-Jazeera itself. The station evidently thought that even its hardened audience might sympathise with the wrong people.

For others, sadly, contemplation of any situation where Arabs are the active agents and non-Arabs the victims gives pleasure.

This is one effect of the glorification of suicide bombers. Once you have glorified people who target civilians in buses or pizza parlours you are fairly safe from feeling the unpleasantness of ethical revulsion ever again. Many Westerners, too, have extended their obsessive quest for safety to include safety from ever having to condemn anything. The self-loather amours himself against rejection by forestalling it. Unlike the Arabs these people do not have the excuse that they have been brought up in a culture of fanaticism or that they would face violence if they ever said, "this is wrong."

The world turned upside down.

While His Worship Comrade Mayor Livingstone warms every neocon's heart, a former Blair-appointed Cabinet minister enthuses over appeasement.

Wait a minute... No. Surely not. AOL News, from whom I took this link, are famously liberal in the US sense. Furthermore it would be in appalling taste, but, but... there couldn't possibly be an implied comment in the last line, could there?

"Some people couldn't conceive of Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness getting to the table but they did."

She added: "If you go in with guns and bombs, you act as a recruitment officer for the terrorists."

Mowlam, who stepped down as an MP in 2001, said she was ready to criticise the Government she once served in her new one-woman show, particularly about its policy on Iraq and the Middle East.

She also confirmed on the programme that she has completely recovered from a brain tumour.

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira / Les aristocrates à la lanterne! Dear old Red Ken says he wants to see the Saudi Royals strung up. I assume he doesn't mean it literally. I mean, not all of them. There's thousands of 'em. Can't have that. Just the one or two who hired Bin Laden would be fine.

Scarcely a week into the holidays

and I'm whacked. Exhausting stuff, this here leisure. Maybe that's a good thing. I'm slightly depressed about the situation in Iraq and I'm pretty sure that I'd be more than slightly depressed if I had the slightest energy left to be depressed with.

John Weidner and Andrew Sullivan both stress the need for resolve. Listen to them, not me.

My internet connection has been acting coy.

After playing hard to get for half the evening it has finally decided to allow me in on sufferance. Naturally, my mind has gone blank and I can think of nothing to say. Er, hello, Internet Connection, do you come here often?

Here's something I posted earlier to White Rose, Samizdata's sister blog concentrating on civil liberties. It quotes from a couple of letters to the Times written during World War II on the subject of identity cards.

Judging from his letter, I like the cut of Baron Quickswood's jib; I hope he doesn't turn out on further research to have been a loony, serial wife-murderer or Municipal Socialist. Not that that is likely - anyone called (even without the Baron bit) Lord Hugh Richard Heathcote Gascoyne-Cecil (a) has too many names for his sins or eccentricities to matter, and (b) is obviously related to him.

An anti-anti-semitic Google bomb.

Apparently the top site for the word "Jew" on Google has been coming up as some nutjob screed. Quite a few bloggers are linking to this straightforward, unpropagandistic Wikipedia entry for the word Jew so as to correct the situation. Good idea.

(Via Normblog, Sporadic Chronicle and others.)

David Gillies

writes:

It might be pertinent to point out to your readers that the WWII ID card did not even have a photo, merely the bearer's signature. It's a far cry from a flimsy bit of nondescript cardboard to the all-singing, all-dancing biometric database that Britons will be required to carry.

It is pertinent indeed.

Incidentally, David Gillies was the one mentioned at the bottom of my March 24 post who was writing his own account of discovering student cheating while I was writing my account of being a student cheat. I am relieved to see he is confident enough of my rehabilitation to keep writing to this blog!

How I search through different mental libraries to remember things.

Very busy today, so all you get is this quick meta-thought which doesn't require any links or reading.

In this post from March 24 I wrote this:

There was one particular experiment designed to teach us about statistics where you had to let a small ball drop out of a funnel and mark where it hit or something like that about a thousand times over.

You can probably guess from the "or something like that" that I can't really remember what I did. When it came to the events of slightly later in the story my memories were locked in by sheer terror; however there was no reason for the nature of the run-of-the-mill experiment that started it all off to stick in my mind.

I am always hitting "Post & Publish" when I mean to hit "Post" and then having to frantically correct the unformed version that is exposed too soon to public view. I did it this time. Early bird readers will have read a version of this that described the experiment thus:

...where you had to throw a ball and mark where it hit...

I wrote that then I stopped. I knew it wasn't right but my visual memory was simply not giving me any more. What interests me is the way I tested my memory-hypothesis that I had thrown something: I mimed throwing something at the computer. After a second or two my kinetic memory library came up with "no matches found" for the active throwing motion + my visual memory of that experiment. I was quite confident in that negative, but less confident of the weak feeling I had that I might have let the ball drop.

I still don't know what I did. But now I am more fully aware that the kinetic memory library and the visual memory library are in different locations in my mind and that the former, at least, can work by elimination rather than positive assertion.