'Nother Solent

The natives are restless.

Damian Penny observes that The Muskeg Lake Cree Nation are seeking to arrange their own lives in a different way from the rest of Canada. The Toronto Star doesn't like it.

So what's the problem? Don't the tribes have considerable self-government and isn't that considered right and just by all enlightened Canadians, seeing as they were the original inhabitants? Furthermore do not all enlightened Canadians respect the fact that the aborigines may have their own beliefs and ways, not always in agreement with those of the white majority?

Nope. As far as Enlightened Canada is concerned all that guff only applies to spirit guides and dream catchers. When the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation want to do something that seriously impacts on their own lives and health (and might make the way the Enlightened do things look bad), such as open a for-profit clinic on their tribal land all that acceptance-of-difference spiel isn't worth a handful of beads.

As Damian comments, "Y-y-you m-mean 'self-government' means they can do things we don't like? No one told us that!"

nick berg video

nick berg

berg beheading

beheading video

nick berg beheading video

nick berg beheading

berg video

berg beheading video

"nick berg"

video nick berg

What is this, a poem for our times? No, it came via Instapundit from a blogger called Jeff Quinton whose site I can't access at the moment. It shows the top ten internet search requests in the wake of... you can guess what. It is a glimpse into the collective mind of the newsbeast. Forgive me for bringing the comic fantasy writer Terry Pratchett into this grim subject*, but I when I see averages of search engine results I cannot help thinking of the attempts made by certain wizards of the Discworld to read the mind of the Great A'Tuin, the turtle who carries the elephants who carry the Discworld. The difficulty was that A'Tuin's thoughts were alien, quite possibly banal and very slow. For our world's great beast it is different - banal its thoughts may well be, but slow they are not. Usually it won't stay thinking any one thing long enough for us to catch the drift. But sometimes it does. In the aftermath of Nick Berg's murder it made a sort of chant of his name.

Yet, as Instapundit points out, you'd never know what was in the collective mind of the English speaking world from the headlines on most of the US and British press. Have a look now and check that out for yourself. The wizards charged with reflecting A'Tuin's thoughts back to the people have their own agenda.

*I rather think Pratchett might forgive me. He is no friend to religious fanaticism. I have sometimes criticised him for tending to paint all religion as fanatical, but he has mellowed over the years.

Queen Isabella of Spain

is said to have vowed not to wash until the Reconquista was complete and the last of the Moors was expelled.

Quite apart from the hot-potatoness of that particular political analogy, I would prefer not to go quite so far as that. But I will be glad to start my Daily Ablution once more.

A Godwinocorollasceptic speaks.

I don't believe in the corollary to Godwin's Law. Godwin's Law itself ("As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches unity") is obviously right up there with general relativity and quantum chromodynamics as part of the basic functioning of time and space. However its usual corollary, "the party invoking the Nazis as a debating tactic in any argument where there is not some direct relevance automatically loses the argument", I will not accept. Partly this is because for many of us the history of WWII is the history we know best, so if we wish to learn from the past at all, that is the bit of the past we are most likely to learn from. It was vast enough to permit many lessons, some of them contradictory.

The other reason is that the position of the Nazis at one extreme of human collective behaviour means that they are the best test case for many propositions even if they are not "directly relevant" in the sense of previous discussion in that thread having been about Nazis or totalitarianism. It's like only way to really be sure a bridge is strong enough is to send the greatest possible weight it will ever have to bear across it. If you believe in free speech even for Nazis, for instance, then you really believe in free speech. If you believe in free speech even for Liberal Democrats the proposition is not so clear.

That said, I'm happy to accept the Godwin corollary in a Sturgeonesqe statistical version: "90% of people citing the Nazis are crap-artists and are deemed to have lost." Here is an example of one such, observed by Iain Murray in an article for TCS called Adolf Lomborg. He quotes Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as saying, "What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's?"

The relationship

between the terrorists themselves and those in the West who are so desperate to see Bush or Blair defeated that they would even agree to give terrorism a free ride reminds me of the fable of the scorpion and the frog.

One day a scorpion arrived at the bank of a river he wanted to cross, but there was no bridge. He asked a frog that was sitting nearby if he would take him across the river on his back. The frog refused and said, "I will not, because you will sting me."

The scorpion replied, "It would be foolish for me to sting you because then we would both drown."

The frog saw the logic in the scorpion's words, and agreed to carry the the scorpion across. But when they were halfway across the river the scorpion stung the frog. The stunned frog asked, "Why did you sting me? Now we will both die!"

The scorpion replied, "Because I'm a scorpion... and that's what scorpions do."

Two pictures.

I just found out about the latest Al-Qaeda beheading. I haven't seen the video. Probably I never will.

I thought of Daniel Pearl. I wondered how and when the murdered man's family learned of the manner of their son's death. I wondered if he himself knew what was about to happen, as Fabrizio Quattrocchi did.

And such is the unalterably tactical nature of the human mind that mixed in with all that I thought:

Thanks for the reminder, Hellspawn. No thanks for the killing; we've had enough of that, but thanks for the reminder. In all this agonized talk about what we are, we were beginning to forget what you are. What you stand for.

What your pictures show.

Andrew Sullivan thought the same way, evidently:

And they [Al-Qaeda] are as stupid as they are evil. Iraqis now have contrasting images. Do they want to be run by people who cut innocent people's throats at will or by people who have removed a dictator and are investigating unethical abuse of prison inmates? Zarqawi has now done something for our morale as well as his. He has reminded us of the real enemy; and he has reminded the Iraqis. One simple question: will CNN now show these video stills?

LATER: Though I really want to go to bed I'm going to take a few minutes to cross-post the above post on Samizdata first. Brian Micklethwait had innocently signed off for the night there with a cheerful collection of photographs he'd taken in London. I feel a compulsion not to leave things on that note given that a lot of American readers will be accessing the site now with the "execution" uppermost in their minds.)

Splash in.

I found this blog via Instapundit. I'm reading it. See ya later.

Agamemnon's dream.

The former editor of the Telegraph, Charles Moore, has written a long and important opinion piece on Iraq.

... what is needed above all is consistent political and military willpower, publicly demonstrated and explained. Without this, the media will create the future. Mr Bush and Mr Blair need serious speeches about why it matters so much to get it right and what getting it right means.

They will, from now till polling day, be tempted to slide away from what is happening in Iraq, but they should, in fact, do the opposite, challenging their opponents to back them.

On the Iliad theme, I hope Moore does not prove to be a Cassandra. Correction: I hope he is, since her prophesies, though fated never to be believed, always came true, and Moore is prophesying eventual victory.

So Bush is Agamemnon and Blair is Nestor. Saddam had better be Priam (despite the libel to the old king) so that Uday can be Paris. But who would be Hector? Iphigenia? Helen?

Some mild SATs paranoia.

My daughter took her Key Stage 2 Writing Test today. (I was almost certain it was really called something posher than "writing test"; "literacy task graded functionality assessment" or something like that, but my husband says, woman, it's just a writing test.

Where was I? My blogging functionality self-assessment is dysfunctional owing to a mind/new Blogger interface adjustment timelag situation. Oh yes, I remember now: SATs.

The children were asked to write their opinion on a proposal to have the school day shifted earlier. Luckily for my daughter she had seen an item on the Children's BBC programme Newsround making the same proposal a few days ago and had sounded off about it then. This meant she had no trouble thinking of things to say in the test.

However she has advanced a theory about why this topic was chosen which at first I pooh-poohed in the way of a parent ever anxious to portray the world as full of Nice People (remind me - why do we do that again?) but which has begun to seem more believable as the hour grows later. It is this: the government are using the SAT test as the world's biggest unpaid focus group. She didn't put it quite like that, but you get the idea. And you know... it begins to add up. Consider:

• The Newsround item was placed as a primer.
• This would be a chance to take a snapshot of the opinions of an enormous sample - all the eleven year olds in Britain bar the small proportion at private schools.
• The sample, or rather cohort, already has the right profile of social class and so on.
• It surely wouldn't be hard to somehow get the markers to tick a box stating whether each kid was for or against, even though one assumes that a well-argued case for either side would get equal marks.

The main arguments that I put to my daughter against her theory were, "Why should they bother for such an unimportant issue?" and "Why bother with eleven year olds who are years away from being able to vote?" - but now as she sleeps I've come up with the answer to both: it's a trial run.

So if she's right we should expect to see future public examinations for near voting-age students asking questions about Europe or Iraq.

Incidentally, my campaign to convince my daughter of near-universal worldwide benevolence does not seem to have worked.