'Nother Solent

Mondo reads a lot then blogs about it.

There are brief, crisp reviews of Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About and Mil Millington's second book over at Mondo's Info.

Jim Bennett writes regarding foxes and hedgehogs:

There is a great book by the Chilean-Australian historian Claudio Veliz called "The Gothic Fox in the New World" that extends the metaphor as a comparison of English- and Spanish-speaking civilization in the New World. The Anglosphere are the foxes, and as he tells the story that is not bad. Civilizations run by hedgehogs tend to have a fetish for uniformity; those run by foxes are more tolerant of diversity. Cf the European Union.

Ah, yes. Now I come to think of it I had seen mention of this right at the end of the Anglosphere primer.

Some Welsh Nots.

I would like to make a couple of petty-minded, carping, negative quibbles about some things people say in this Guardian special report about the wonderfulness of the Welsh Assembly while totally ignoring the important points it makes. Why? 'Cos I'm a blogger, that's why.

..."It has been an effective assembly," counters Morgan. "Since Labour came to power in 1999, unemployment, which was much higher in Wales than the UK, is now lower. Infant mortality rates are lower, GCSE A to C grades are higher. These simple facts show the assembly has been worthwhile."

Well it could be Labour rather than the assembly that caused any or all of these improvements. Or Bush's presidency. Or sunspots. Or the closing of one gyre and the opening of another.

"I think things have moved on in the past few years and now a lot of the Cool Cymru ethos is about pride in the assembly," says Janet Ryder, a Plaid Cymru assembly member for North Wales. "There's a real sense that we can stand on our own two feet. I don't think you'd find any people in Wales now who would want the assembly to be scrapped.

What, no one at all? Get out more. I have no strong opinion either way, but I've met undeniably Welsh people who say it's a black hole for taxpayers' money.

The threat to Welsh isn't quite so brutal as it was in the 19th century, when speaking Welsh was regarded as offensive by Anglocentric educators. "In the days of the "Welsh Not" in the 19th century," says Huw's friend Elaine, "if I said something in Welsh at school, the teacher would put a piece of string with a board around my neck with the legend "Welsh Not". If Eifion then said something to me in Welsh, the board would be hung around his neck. Then if Elaine said something in Welsh to me at playtime, it would be hung around her neck. At the end of the day, the one with the Welsh Not would have their hand spanked."

One little point you will rarely if ever see mentioned in accounts of the Welsh Not - but will hear from talking to old people who remember their parents telling them about it - is that this procedure was supported by nearly all the parents of the pupils involved. They saw the English language as the key to prosperity and Welsh as confining its speakers to low status. It may be regrettable that they had this perception, even more regrettable that they were rational to have it, and still more regrettable (though typical for the times) that they were willing to use such harsh methods to mould their children in the desired direction, but have it they did. You can hear the last echoes of this attitude in the opening pages of Alan Garner's The Owl Service where Gwyn's mother says, "You know I won't have you speaking Welsh. I've not struggled all these years in Aber to have you talk like a labourer. I could have stayed in the valley if I'd wanted that."

Some of you may be saying that's three quibbles, not two. Hah! Three is a Welsh couple.

(This post has grown gradually over the afternoon.)

Reverse the polarity.

In this post, Innovation and Poverty, Photon Courier links to a Business Week article about innovative products in India and goes on to argue that:

It seems very likely to me that: product and process innovation in less-developed countries will result in ideas which will eventually make their way to the U.S. and Europe...the opposite direction from the flow of innovation which is typically assumed. For example: the Tata car in its original form will certainly never be sold in the U.S....but, a strong focus on cost-reduction is likely to result in design and manufacturing innovations which can be incorporated in a car which is suitable for U.S. conditions--not a $2200 car, but, perhaps a $5500 one. And solar power technologies may well develop more rapidly in areas without strong grid systems--resulting in designs and manufacturing scale economies that will later find markets in the U.S. and Europe.

The love birds' song.

I followed this CrozierVision link to find a page called Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. Apparently it's a book now. Might get it to plan ripostes to my husband. Has lines like this:

I stayed here with the kids; if they asked where she was, I had planned - to avoid inflicting on them the psychological damage of knowing their mother was at a hen weekend - to say that she was simply away serving a short sentence for shoplifting.

You know that the state of the world is getting to you

when you get to the bit in Return of the Jedi where R2-D2 and C-3PO pretend to surrender to the Imperial Stormtroopers just before the Ewoks attack and you shout, "That's a war crime C-3PO! You deserve to be shot!"

Dismantled. Whatever.

Thanks to the European Union's deep concern for the enviroment

most of the toxic waste disposal sites in Britain have been closed. Thanks to that fly-tipping has become a profitable business. If someone dumps fifty tons of absbestos on your private property, who pays for its removal? You do.

Pulling the petals from a daisy while waiting for the next election.

Tony Blair. I love him not. Tim Worstall, linking to the Telegraph, says why not.

Tony Blair. I love him. (Metaphorically, guys, metaphorically.) Why?

Well, Isiah Berlin famously quoted the Greek poet Archilochus to make a distinction between foxes and hedgehogs. His purpose was literary criticism but the metaphor can be used more widely.

"For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision."

Blair is like a fox who has grown spines. He is all fox inside but when it came to the central struggle of his times some unguessed-at dormant hedgehog gene sprang into action. In this context comparisons to his great predecessor in office do not seem to me absurd. Blair is a less important figure in a less desperate struggle but, like Churchill, he knows one big thing.

Michael Howard does not know the one big thing.

UKIP? Hedgehogs to the tips of their spines, I grant you, though about another issue. But remember that Berlin's comparison was more than hedgehog good, fox bad.

Solent's law

of peverse incentives strikes again. The aforementioned Squander Two has just linked to me in a flattering context. Now I appear to be little more than Monkey B grooming Monkey A in return for Monkey A's grooming services of five minutes ago.

Ook. I defiantly offer yet another Squander Two link, responding to the much quoted report by Dr Christie Davies saying that Science is the new Latin. This post argues that "... one of the most surprising things I learnt from it [his study of the history of mathematics] was just how highly mathematically educated most people today are — even those who flunk maths."

He backs this contention up with powerful examples. However I don't think that his argument that most people nowadays have absorbed mathematical ideas so thoroughly that they no longer even recognise them as such is necessarily incompatible with what Dr Davies said. It's great that six year olds are happy with the idea of negative numbers. Does that mean that they must go further?

As always my Zeroth law is that the best policy is no policy. Different strokes for different folks.

If the government won't give us speed cameras we'll make 'em ourselves!

So say, and do, the folk of North Yorkshire according to a Times article garnered by the Philosophical Cowboy.

As the Cowboy says, it does seem odd - but only at first sight.

Back in August Squander Two discussed this issue in a post memorably entitled Speed cameras don't piss people off, people piss people off. Down in the comments Andy Wood disproved the charge that proper libertarians anathematize speed cameras at all times and all places by linking to his Transport Blog piece of a few months ago, Speed cameras - let's privatise them.