July 03, 2004
Yes! It is PROPER and ACCEPTED to refer to 19th century Americans as
Victorians, since the term defines the era and sets of attitudes which were even more prevalent in the US than in Britain.Did British chairs and tables have 'limbs?" That four letter word, ahem, 'legs,' was simply, simply far too risque!
In fact British commentators of the time, Mrs Trollope among them, commented on American prudishness.
As to the poster, I'd say it was standard fare for the day. In fact, I've seen it before in a history book (as well has having to read Frederick Douglass's exerpted memoirs during college. Much more interesting than Eldridge Cleaver's meanderings. Douglass captured the psychological traumas of the slave owners, the incessant guilt, etc. The multiplicity of fonts was normal for the time as well-- they were all put together by hand, and you made do with what you had.
As well necessity, exuberance. You know how neophyte webpage-designers or poster-makers will have six fonts on one page? I think that the whole society was like that; still thrilled with this printing thing.
Eldridge Cleaver is an interesting figure. I don't know whether this is true in the case of Mr Costello's college, but I suspect a great many colleges quietly removed his memoirs from the syllabus when the one-time Black Panther icon became an anti-communist, Republican and born-again Christian.
July 02, 2004
"Somebody upstairs cares."
Black Triangle isn't too amused by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and still less so by Seamus Milne, who unlike Yasmin Alibhai-Brown doesn't even have the decency to be ashamed."...the media and commentators still carry a responsibility to the society they live in, and to those they report on. In the highly connected world we inhabit, news spreads quickly. For example, a Michael Meacher column in The Guardian was quickly propagated onto extremist websites, and used to re-enforce their ideology.Quite. We live in a milieu where if I were to criticise a writer on the grounds that what he or she wrote is bad for morale the response would be a refusal to believe that I could mean it anything other than ironically. If I were to say that a piece of writing was bad for the morale of the troops the response would be peals of laughter.
Prediction: if this carries on, we won't live in such times for long. There is a familiar pattern whereby the inability of pseudo-pacifist Western liberals to admit that war can ever be legitimate makes war when it comes longer and all the more terrible.
"The will to win, to continue through periods of intense crisis, stalemate or defeat, to keep the prospect of victory in sight and to mobilise the psychological and moral energies of a people under threat, proved to be inseparable from the ability to fight better. There is no doubt that at times in the war moral confidence was badly dented; in each Allied state enthusiasm for war had to be actively maintained."- Richard Overy, from the chapter headed Why the Allies Won in the book of the same name.
I'm not joking. John Ashcroft was right. One should think before one speaks. Note to my fellow libertarians: this is not a call for censorship. We of all people ought to be able to tell the difference between moral suasion and compulsion. Nor do I want crimes by our side such as at Abu Ghraib to be supressed - reporting of crimes by each side in proportion to the frequency with which they occur would be just fine, thank you. Note to left-wingers: before you assume that any appeal to watch what you say is absurd, remember you have already accepted that similar appeals have moral force in the case of racism, sexism and homophobia.
Heigh-ho, Seamus Milne is going to step back from the abyss when he reads me (as he does daily) quoting stuff about WWII, yeah, right.
[ADDED LATER: Re-reading what I wrote, and the last sentence from Richard Overy that I quoted, I think I have come across as wishing to see more active government propaganda in favour of the war. I don't. We have quite enough of that on the subjects of smoking and obesity. Better if the government were forbidden by custom from making any public pronouncements at all outside the Houses of Parliament. What I am saying boils down to the rather banal statement that individuals who basically support Western values shouldn't fixate on the motes in our eyes to the exclusion of beams in non-Western eyes. And I will say that some of my writing and linkage on this blog has been done with the conscious intention of raising my own morale and that of others, and I see nothing wrong with that. One example is when I have tried to use examples from history to show that the struggles of previous generations seemed as arduous and uncertain to those living through them as ours does to us. Every word is meant, every word is my best guess at the truth, but it is written to propagate a more positive or resolute emotional state, and to that extent is propaganda. What a hostage to fortune that sentence is. Over to you, Seamus.]
Changing the subject from the WoT, but staying with "Somebody upstairs cares", many rifle shooters of my acquaintance have noticed that pretty well any planned change of technique, be it position, breathing, focussing or trigger-pull will temporarily improve performance. In other words if the coach persuades half the team to place their bodies at a steeper angle to the rifle and half the team to line up more nearly parallel to the rifle both groups may well find their scores increasing at first. It makes deciding which changes of technique have intrinsic value a long term project. You mustn't jump the gun.
The "any change helps temporarily" effect can be attributed to the fact that any change of procedure increases concentration. Thinking back to the days when I shot for university teams I do remember that happening, but another factor almost certainly is that the shooter's morale is raised because of the extra interest and care shown by the coach.
Jump goes my grasshopper mind to the way that so many pilot schemes show promise that is not fulfilled. I have blogged about this before but had not until now come across such a neat phrase to explain it.
July 01, 2004
In defence of Yasmin: everybody does it.
In this post Norman Geras censures Yasmin Alibhai-Brown for wishing for more violence in Iraq in order to prove to herself and others that the war was wrong.I have to admit that I have found myself doing the same thing as Yasmin quite often. Not about the war, obviously. Being a supporter of it, my passion to be proved right (the Grand Vizier of passions, always present, always powerful but content to let others seem to rule) and my desire for peace in a liberated Iraq could run in tandem. In fact so strong was my desire and so weak my ability to do anything to bring it about that I reverted to a childhood habit and wished for magic powers.
When I was a kid there was a TV series called The Invisible Man starring David McCallum. I used to fantasize about getting a similar superpower, then sneaking on to an aeroplane heading for some unhappy land, and once there freeing captives and killing tyrants. My ideas as to the exact means of tyrannicide were distinctly vague. Indistinctly vague. Whatever; fast forward to the aftermath. "But Minister, I swear," the terrified chief of police would wail, "No one - absolutely no one, was in the room with the Maximum Leader. Aieee, surely it is They Who Walk who have done this!" Then the two confrères in evil would flee by helicopter (with me in the back seat, did they but know it) from the top floor of the Presidential Palace as the jubilant mob broke down the door and stormed up the stairs.*
Er, yes. Back to the point. Entering now my fifth decade, I find myself wishing for minutes at a time that I could broadcast a loving tolerance ray from a secret base in Baghdad and make all the suicide bombers go home and hug their mothers.
If you wish to laugh, do so quietly or you might just find your knicker elastic being pursued by a floating pair of scissors. The morally troubling case is when one is proved right, as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown thinks she is, not by the repentant tears of a terrorist but by the success of horrible deeds. I have sometimes thought that, by gum, the history of the last three years would have been very different if Osama's boys had actually attacked whatever EU building it was that they originally planned to blow up. True, I do not entertain this thought seriously or for long. If - having visitied La-la land once this post, I might as well stay there - if I had a time machine that put me in a position to stop or allow the EU attack, I'd stop it. But, oh hang it all, says a little voice in my head, it's so important that we win this one, and if it wasn't just Yanks getting killed but European bureaucrats too then the chances of that might be improved... save lives in the end...
Next stop, Yasmin's country.
Traditional morality is very hard on all this. It is a sin to wish evil in order to puff up your own pride. Traditional morality is right.
Still, my guess is that similar feelings are common all over the political spectrum. Now that Yasmin Alhibai-Brown has seen her own inner demons I wish her strength in controlling them.
*That git Ceausescu set the dogs on me, but they got him in the end.
June 30, 2004
And this year's winner is...
The Islamic Human Rights Commission has issued a press release stating the "winners" of its annual Islamophobia Awards. These awards, says the press release, are an "annual comedy event aimed at highlighting prevailing prejudices and subverting them using humour." A sure-fire starter for a Guardian article denouncing the stereotype of Muslims as dour and humourless, while getting in a few well-placed words about the institutional racism of Western society, you might think.Well it's been four days since the ceremony on 26 June and no such article has yet appeared. I can't understand it. C'mon guys. Al Jazeera had the story the very next day (quoting Trevor Phillips, too.) Did the IHRC not properly name Nick Griffin, Ariel Sharon, the Daily Telegraph, the Metropolitan Police and George W. Bush as the leading Islamophobic persons and organisations? True, Jacques Chirac was in there too, which is awkward, but you must remember that the French ban on headscarfs in schools is a bit of an embarrassment, but still... Ah. Yes. Now I see.
Coming in ahead of Barbara Amiel and Daniel Pipes, the award for Most Islamophobic Media Personality went to... the Guardian's very own Polly Toynbee.
Polly's very much the infidel, and presumably that's what annoyed them.
(Via the Libertarian Alliance Forum.)
June 29, 2004
You are hereby respectfully cautioned and advised...
to take a look at this poster. It was posted in response to the US Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Judging from the phrase "most unfortunate of your race" it was written by whites to be read by blacks. Blacks, moreover, who would for the most part have had little formal education. Yet the language used is complex, even florid. Now that may just have been a peculiarity of the times, like the OUTBREAKS OF CAPITALS and multiple typefaces. Those Victorians (can one call Americans Victorians?) did love a bit of bombast. Think of music hall posters addressed to a British working class audience that I doubt on average had many more years of education than was typical for free blacks in contemporary Boston. Odd though their style seems to us, the writers of these posters were not stupid. They wouldn't have gone on putting all those fancy words onto posters if scarcely anyone could read them and come and see the Infant Phenomenon or whatever. The fact of a taste for polysyllabic grandiloquence in posters addressed to the nineteenth century poor demonstrates that many of the poor could digest meaty words.
All they get is pap nowadays. As Thomas Sowell put it in a brief paragraph:
A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like "arraigned," "curried" and "exculpate" meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.(Via Joanne Jacobs. And read the personal anecdote with which she finishes her post.)
Loospeak.
I found this wonderful example of bureaucratese on the Uttlesford District Council website. There I learned that:Uttlesford District Council Officers commissioned the East of England Tourist Board to produce a Mystery Shopper Audit in 2003.Et in Arcadia ego... I too have "experienced" the ambience of the public toilets of many of these fair towns, though if you're in Saffron Walden you'd be better off with the private sector. (Top floor, ladies, opposite the café.) What are those scare quotes doing around the word "experienced"? Do they imply that the secret agent only claims to have experienced the actual loo / car park/ shopping environment (a claim that Uttlesford District Council can neither confirm nor deny at this time), or that something other than mere experience was going on but that UDC is too polite to say what? I pay council tax to these guys and I say I have a right to know.The aim of the audit is to provide information useful to those involved in destination management and it covers areas under the control or influence of the local authority that are important to the quality of the visitor experience (a visitor may be a tourist on holiday, a day tripper, or even a shopper).
However, the audit does not assess the quality of the actual tourism product, rather the standard of amenities and infrastructure that visitors can expect when they arrive.
Categories are determined by the size of the population: Great Dunmow, Stansted Mountfitchet and Thaxted were assessed under category A (towns with populations up to 7,500) whilst Saffron Walden was assessed under Category B (towns with a population size of between 7,500 and 15,000).
The audit involved four visits to Saffron Walden, Stansted Mountfitchet, Thaxted and Great Dunmow at weekends and during the week at different times in 2003 and they were carried out by an assessor acting as a visitor. During the visits facilities such as toilets, car parks and the shopping environment were “experienced” and the quality of the ambient and built environments assessed. The assessor was required to mark each town on a range of indicators, based around the core criteria and best practice guidelines. For each indicator scores were provided based on their presence, quality and their suitability to the surrounding environment.
June 28, 2004
A bad week for British Jews.
This morning's Thought for the Day was presented by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. (The transcript isn't yet available but you can listen.) It was about recent anti-semitic vandalism and violence. He says there has been rather a lot of it. I haven't heard much about it.LATER: Correction (to my slight bout of anti-media paranoia)- the Guardian had this.
A cultural observation.
Saw a big weatherbeaten builder-y sort of bloke in a pink sweatshirt today. (It was probably described in the catalogue as cerise but that's pink to you and me.) A few years ago the price for wearing such a garment - not that you could have purchased a man-size one at all easily - would have been getting beaten up every year or so.I don't know or care whether the bloke was gay or not and I am very happy for him to wear any colour of sweatshirt he likes. The point is that so is he happy to wear any colour of sweatshirt he likes, whereas only a few years ago certain colours were forbidden.
Meanwhile kids' clothes and lunchboxes and stuff display ever more extreme sexual differentiation. My Little Fowever Fwiends Pink Pony for the little girls and Killer Ninja Football Deathbot for the little boys. Why?
Britain just can't do big public sector projects
argues this Telegraph opinion piece by Niel Collins, in which he reminds enthusiasts that London's Olympic bid will, if successful, be built and managed by the same system that brought us the Millenium Dome. Collins' tone is one of good-humoured self-admitted incompetence, suggesting that the British public sector is full of the lovable bumbling daddies so often portrayed on TV commercials. I don't think that's quite right. Unlovable bloody-minded jobsworths is more like it, made that way by a system that rewards adherence to rules above all else. Collins himself gets nearer to the truth when he says that one reason that London is even less likely than Athens to have its Olympic Pillage completed to cost and to time is that British Health and Safety inspectors are not so amenable to political pressure as their Greek counterparts. The thought of the vainglorious authors of grands projets being stymied by the H&S brigade is pleasing to me. Let us feast as the villains bring each others' plans to naught.So Britain just can't do big public sector projects? Banish all doubts: guardian angels do indeed sing Rule Britannia.
Grovelblog.
That "normal service tomorrow" thing didn't really happen, did it? Sorry. I now really, truly, utterly have my computer back.