'Nother Solent

Did I dream the whole thing?

I'd have thought that yesterday's mass killing of children was news enough to be plastered over every outlet, even these days. But it's not on the front page of the BBC website*, the Telegraph front page*, the Independent front page*...

At least the Guardian has this and the Times has this.
The Times story describes another reason why the terrorists chose this particular target:

“It was the Americans who did it, because the blast happened after they left. None of them were killed,” said Mr Yassin, ignoring his son’s insistence that the vehicles were only just leaving when the first explosion hit. “They want to create and atmosphere of terrorism so they can stay here,” he said.

*All links to front pages will have changed by tomorrow.

Back to School.

Just after Belsan there was a cartoon in the Independent or the Guardian, I forget which, that showed the slogan "Back to School" written on a blackboard and Putin standing in a corner. The point was that we have to learn again that terrorism happens because of prior oppression.

I thought at the time that the cartoon was the usual poisonous attempt to shift blame from the child-killers to those who tried to stop them, but I'm coming round to the opinion that there was some merit in the cartoon after all. I just think very little of its merit was put there by its creator.

First let me acknowledge that there is some substance to the point the creator made intentionally. It is true in many cases that atrocities spark counter-atrocities. "Cycles of violence" do exist despite the great frequency with which the phrase is used as an attempt to equate a bombing on Monday with the death of the bomber in a shootout with the law on Tuesday. (They even exist despite the fair frequency with which the term is used to describe completely uni-directional violence where the last time the victims fired a shot in anger was generations ago.) I don't have the knowledge to say anthing useful about the history of the Chechen rebels other than it is common knowledge that the Russian forces have been brutal and that some female Chechen suicide bombers are widows of men the Russian soldiers killed. Going back further, the Russian army was sent back into Chechnya as a result of the Moscow apartment bombings. It looks to me as though the metaphor of a cycle of violence is more nearly true for the Chechen conflict than for many others in the world today.

No, I have not joined the Appeasers. To claim that an individual killing takes place as part of a cycle of violence is not necessarily to excuse that killing. The claim usually is made as an excuse but it doesn't have to be. Long ago I saw a picture of a ten-year old boy lying shot through the head somewhere in Southern Italy. He had been the last surving child of a Mafia family that had gradually been extinguished in a long-running vendetta between it and another Mafia family. His murder was part of a very clear cycle of violence but he was still innocent and it was still murder.

Now back to the points the cartoonist made unintentionally. Yes, Beslan sent us back to school. It sticks in my craw to call terrorism a process of "education", but it certainly does involve the transfer of information, both intentional and unintentional. It involves countries and cultures communicating with other countries and cultures, teaching, learning and re-learning things they have forgotten.

Like a great deal of modern education it involves video cameras.

The biggest lesson the Islamic fanatics wished to teach the world at Beslan School No. 1 was: this is the sort of people we are. There is nothing we will not do. No one is safe.

The slaughter of 35 children and 7 adults by the Iraqi "resistance" also conveys several lessons. Here are some of the unintentional ones that might or might not be learned by the watching world:

These killers are not the "Iraqi resistance". They cannot conceivably have thought that their victims, either as individuals (mostly children, remember, and accounts say that the cars were deliberately driven alongside the crowd of children before being detonated) or as members of a class (ordinary residents of a Baghdad suburb pleased at getting clean water), had ever done them any harm. The killers are not working for the Iraqi people; they are preying on the Iraqi people. They do not care in the slightest that their victims are Muslims.

In fact it is rather important for the purposes of the Islamo-fascists that a great many of their victims are Muslims and are in every way typical Iraqis. The terrorists must not allow the idea to spread around that you are safe so long as you are neither an unbeliever or a foreigner. The intended lesson to the people of Iraq was: submit to us, or this is your future.

A damned shame

. My parents gave their time and money to support Christian Aid. As a child I delivered Christian Aid collection envelopes door to door and helped my father collect them a few days later. I also helped count the money. Though there was always a depressing crop of halfpennies, pfennigs and centimes, many more people were kind enough to give a reasonable sum. Three hundred pounds we had one year; I remember looking at the pound notes stacked in wavy air-filled layers like filo pastry and thinking ... there may be a Hell and if there is then people who take food from the mouths from the starving go there.

Read this from Stephen Pollard and think on what Christian Aid has come to.

Tony Blair says

, speaking of the kidnappers of Kenneth Bigley, "If they made contact with us, it is something we would immediately respond to." He also says that his government will not negotiate. I don't understand. If they won't negotiate - as they should not - then what form of response had they in mind?

We've already had pleading. I do not blame anyone for trying it. But if the terrorists would not soften their hearts in response to the pleas of the captive's family, are they likely to bend for Tony Blair? It might be enjoyable for them to listen to the Prime Minister of Britain pleading, of course, but if he is not going to give them what they want, as Mr Blair himself says he will not, then I don't think the loss of dignity is worthwhile. And it adds to the suffering of the Bigley family to raise false hopes.

This Times editorial, quoted by Oliver Kamm, says why Blair is correct not to negotiate.

Bush: The Missing Years. Now that the truth is known can he put his past behind him?

Next question: did David Aaronovitch at the Guardian read a summary of this article (rather than the whole thing as a conscientious quoter should) and get the impression that it was deluded but sincere investigative journalism?

Scott Burgess says it appears so. I say, hmmmnnnnah. Nah. Nope. Don't think so, anyway. Here's what Aaronovitch said:

I have to report here that - according to GQ magazine - all this is wrong. They published an article claiming that Bush was seen in Saigon at the same time he was supposed to be wetting the Mustang and swinging on the light-fittings in Alabama, and that he was really a member of a covert and courageous outfit, the Special Undercover Missions Service (Sums). And presumably it was so secret he was never, ever allowed to talk about it, and I am the lost czarina of All The Russias.

Something about that "I have to report" whispers to me that Aaro gets the joke.

Correction & Apology.

Never let it be said that this blog does not promptly put errors right. In a post of yesterday I wrote, "... if I had been born a cat I would be able to jump eleven times my own height."

In fact I would not be able to, because I would have been a dead cat for at least the last fifteen years.

Squander Two, Laban Tall and Dumbjon (links within) are debating whether watching or linking to videos of terrorist murders is legitimate.

Somehow the way I wrote that sounds rather as if the debate is mere entertainment, a display of verbal fireworks. It isn't. All the parties know it isn't.

I can see the force of Laban Tall's argument - that it's like watching a snuff video, that we are doing what the terrorists want them to do, and that we are encouraging more on-camera killings - but I find still greater force in Squander Two's:

The more we hide the true nature of the enemy, the less we challenge the Huggers. [There was an earlier reference to Hollywood types who wanted to win over Osama bin Laden through love and hugs] And they need to be challenged, because there's no way we can lose this war through military inferiority but every chance of losing it through public resistance. Gradually, people who used to want to appease terrorists are coming round to James Woods's point of view: witness the Israeli Left. The reason they're changing their minds is that they're coming face-to-face with what the enemy are really like.

It can happen in war that, temporarily, both sides want the same thing, both believing it will contribute to their eventual victory. One side is wrong.

Past the margin.

Finding this blog, "Marginal Revolutions" made me sad. Why? Because there isn't time left in my life to study any subject deeply enough to become expert. If I had chosen economics in 1982 I could have been like these guys...

And if I had been born a cat I would be able to jump eleven times my own height. I wasn't remotely interested in economics then. Now is what counts. The marginal cost in time of reading Marginal Revolutions is amply compensated by the enlightenment you will receive.

Via the same blog, I found this post from Jane Galt on smart growth. Why haven't I been reading Jane Galt for as long as I've been aware of her? Dunno. Not being into economics in 1982 permanently blighted my brain. Here she is:

Smart growth is great if you can afford to have everything you buy delivered, or are in excellent physical condition with a physically undemanding job; it is not so great if you have to come home from your shift at the nursing home to lug groceries a quarter-mile down the street, and then up three flights of stairs. Smart growth is great if you can afford to eat in the plethora of restaurants; it is not so enjoyable if you have to scrape up an extra 20% for the ingredients in tuna casserole. Smart growth is great if you have a nanny to take the kids to the park during the day; it is not so terrific if you have to choose between wasting several precious hours standing around the playground, or letting your kids languish inside.

Needs must when the devil drives.

Over at Samizdata I have a post arguing proper libertarians can so support the war in Iraq. It all got started by a series of posts in Crooked Timber of which this is one.

Life's too short. Literally.

Yet more wisdom from the Guardian. Following a link from Public Interest I found this article by Joanna Moorhead. Just look at the title and wonder: 'For decades we've been told Sweden is a great place to be a working parent. But we've been duped.'

In the article Ms Moorhead quotes approvingly (as will I in a moment) an London School of Economics. sociologist called Catherine Hakim. Yes, A lioness hath whelped in the streets; And graves have yawn’d and yielded up their dead and I am about to cheer on a sociologist from the LSE. A quote:

What has happened through the years of family-friendly policies, she says, is that private companies have reduced their number of female employees because they can't afford the cost of the generous maternity packages.

That, of course, is exactly the argument being voiced angrily this week by employer organisations, in the midst of claims by Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt that a third Labour term would see an enhanced commitment to better parental rights (and hence, more emulation of the kinds of policies that have already been adopted in Scandinavia). Hakim, for one, can see precisely where they're coming from: as far as she's concerned, the story of Sweden over the past two decades is the story of a country whose small industries couldn't foot the bill for the ideological parental-rights packages being embraced, and who have largely taken avoiding action when it has come to employing women of childbearing age.

When the bloke from UKIP said something like this he was pilloried. There's more. This is one clear-headed woman.

The unpalatable fact, she says, is that there are only so many hours in the day and only so many days in the week and whatever else we expect of the UK and EU the one thing their legislation cannot give us is the one thing that working mothers so desperately crave: more time. "The bottom line is that as far as investment in a career is concerned, policies actually don't make that much difference," she says. "The major investment required is one of time and effort: if you are seriously interested in a career, you don't have time for children and if you are seriously interested in bringing up more than one child, let's say, you don't have the time, effort and imagination for getting to the top of a career.

"The fact is that children are a 20-year project and a career is a 20- to 40-year project and there is an incompatibility there." Over the past eight years, Hakim has written six books and she says, "There's no way I could have done that if I had had children."

As the Spanish proverb has it, Take what you want and pay for it, says God.