'Nother Solent

A distant mirror.

This is about the American presidential election... of 1864.

Not even the crisis of a war for the survival of the Union itself could disturb this sacred democratic ritual, but what is really astounding is that the man who opposed Lincoln's re-election was a general - none other than McClellan himself, no longer holding a command, but still adopting an inappropriate air of martial glory. With Grant and Lee firmly locked in their decisive combat, and Sherman shortly to begin his march to the sea, McClellan stood on a platform of negotiated peace, based on the assumption (though he carefully refrained from saying so himself) that the war was a failure.

And

... The soldiers did not, in any significant numbers, try to vote themselves out of the war. Their vote went to Lincoln by four to one - far more than can be accounted for by manipulation or fraud, though both were undoubtedly present. And the Union prevailed in the war, after all.

(From The Smoke and the Fire by John Terraine)

Secrets of the book trade revealed.

The Scotsman is bemused as to why big name media memoirs aren't selling. David Farrer can explain.

Shades of Ann Coulter's Slander.

It shouldn't be our shrouds versus their shrouds.

There was a lot that was relevant to the guns and violence debate in the Telegraph of December 6th.

While it is true that the killers of disc-jockey Tushar Makwana did not use guns, in an armed society the gang probably would not have used the same modus operandi:

The court was told that the four teenagers - Michael McGuire, 18, Ashley Cooksey, 18, Brett Frewin, 17, and Matthew Jeffrey, 17 - were involved in a series of similar raids on houses in the area, which involved kicking down the front door, stealing the owners' car keys and taking their cars.

And

"They acted as a group. They were not scared or worried in any way.

"They were perfectly happy to approach a house with a car parked on the driveway at four in the morning, having their getaway car parked outside.

"They would kick in the front door, march in with masks or balaclavas obstructing their faces and look for the keys to the cars in front of the house."

Since the trial is still in progress I ought to say that the defendants named have pleaded Not Guilty. Still, someone killed Mr Makwana as he tried to stop them taking his car, they having attacked his home in the manner described.

In that day's Telegraph there was also a very widely linked column by Mark Steyn: "An Englishman's home is his dungeon."

Finally there was an article about the Hungerford gun massacre of 1987, quoting several survivors: "Ryan shot at me, then at my mother." A BBC TV programme about the killing was screened the day the article appeared. The article quotes a senior policeman:

"It was a very frightening scenario," admits the commanding officer, Charles Pollard, in the film.

Police communications were so woeful that for most of the operation Pollard (who had to travel 40 miles to Hungerford), had no idea where Michael Ryan was. Pollard says he felt "a ball of ice" in his stomach when he saw there were only two telephone lines at Hungerford police station, which was undergoing renovation.

He received nine separate reports of Ryan's whereabouts – but all the sightings conflicted. "You just hadn't any information," he said. "You hadn't a handle on it. I thought we had completely screwed up. I was powerless for most of the afternoon."

But he, too, was bewildered by the blitzkrieg of separate incidents and only the next morning, when the operation could be assessed against all the logistical frustrations and limitations, could he conclude: "Actually, we did OK."

I think this is right. They did the best they could in a dreadful and utterly unexpected situation. However one reason why, in contrast it must be said to nearly all British survivors of spree killings, I do not agree with the programme's conclusion that the way to prevent these things is to outlaw weaponry can be found in another account of a chaotic and terrifying pursuit of murderous armed men across a wide area.

The Tottenham Outrage of January 1909 made headlines all over the country. Although, as the account from the Metropolitan Police website I have linked to says, some elements of the multi-vehicle pursuit of two anarchist payroll robbers did become "almost farcical", there was nothing funny about the ruthlessness the criminals showed. They were not outright maniacs like Michael Ryan, the Hungerford killer, but they killed a ten year old boy. They killed, at point blank range, a policeman who called upon them to surrender. Before they were cornered Paul Hefeld and Jacob Lepidus injured twenty-one people and fired over 400 rounds. Other versions put the tally of injured at twenty-seven.

What that account does not say, (perhaps deliberately, seeing as its a police site) is that the police borrowed no less than four pistols from passerby. This fact is quoted in Richard Munday and Jan Stevenson's book Guns and Violence, reviewed here. The police account also does not say, though it does hint, that numerous civilians joined in the hue and cry - that ancient tradition was not quite dead then. According to this BBC Notes and Queries page:

By now the pursuing mob had also got guns and a volley of shots were exchanged as the robbers fled over Tottenham marshes.

Here a group of sports marksmen shooting wildfowl and a football team practising in full kit all got involved.

One cannot know, but it seems very reasonable to me that if there had been an armed populace in Hungerford in 1987, as there was in Tottenham in 1909, the death toll would have been much lower.

That is why I do not think that a tendency I see even in pro-gun writing, namely to count victims of "hot" burglaries etc. on one side and victims of spree killers on the other and then to ask which are the more numerous - the "our shrouds versus their shrouds" I referred to in the title of this post - is helpful. First off, of course, is that all sides of the debate should be equally concerned about all victims. Few would disagree with me in that. Secondly, I think that spree killings are also examples of situations where it would help, not harm, if more people were armed. However the correlation is weak because spree killings are, thank God, at the very extreme of human behaviour. Fatal burglaries are much more common and it is easier to generalise about them.

Few of the arguments I make about Hungerford would have made much difference to the death toll of the Dunblane massacre. More about that in a future post.

UPDATE: Apparently a book has been written about the Tottenham Outrage, by Janet Harris.

Ronco, Ronco, Rah! Rah! Rah!

John Costello writes:

You mean to say you actually had Ronco in Old Blighty! But it was so, so... American! When I was watching Flash Gordon (the TV series, not the movie serial) out of Channel 9 in New Hampshire (I had to hold the antenna in a certain way so I could see it thorugh the fuzz) back in the 60s RONCO brought me Flash and other 1950s series. Remember the Ronco Vegematic? "And now, if you order this today, we'll include this 20 piece aluminum (or stainless steel) set of pans for just $19.99* extra, plus shipping and handeling! Yes, ladies and gentlemen..." It was the alleged owner on the TV (and I read later that it really was him) who did the sales pitch in a New Jersey accent.

What sort of accent did the pitchman use in Britain? The equivalent would be Cockney.

*now worth about $100.00.

A sort of all-purpose southern English accent as far as I recall. A TV accent.

TV was more of a challenge then. My family, wishing to take some sort of middle way between having a TV and not having one, compromised by having the oldest TV on the street. I am sure that this made me a stronger, hardier person. Channels were changed by turning a dial with all the care of a master cracksman opening the safe of the Bank of England. Our TV would only get ITV for about a forty seconds at a time before going wiggly. Good, said my parents with Roman sterness: in those days the BBC was considered more wholesome. As a result for my first few years of viewership I only ever saw adverts at the houses of friends. Gosh, how I adored those adverts. The one for the K-Tel gadget that allowed you to chop off the tops of broken bottles and re-use them as drinking glasses; what artistry! This ad recently featured in one of those "hundred best adverts" programmes. Some guy reminisced with many a chuckle about how his Dad got one and chopped his lips off.

Mr Costello says that Ronco are still going strong in the US. Here are some products. In fairness to what seems to be a family business, I must say that they seem much like anyone else's products.

That is actually my real opinion, although I would say it anyway because I'm afraid of getting sued. (By the amazing, all-new Ligitomatic. Claims, appeals and settles out of court in one smooth action!) This guy isn't.

The deserter's story.

Private Jenkins went over to North Korea the year that I was born. Now he's back.

Jonah Goldberg is right to say "He wasted his whole life, and regretted his decision every day. I was glad to see the army went relatively easy on the guy -- dishonorable discharge, demotion, but only 25 days in the stockade -- while still upholding the principle that what he did was unforgivable. He reportedly had to share as much intelligence as he could as well. If he'd spent the last forty years living it up in a Russian dacha, I would have been glad to see him spend the remainder of his days behind bars. But this seems like the right call to me."

I should have buttoned my lip.

(Wait patiently for the point of this title.)

If you are American and your washing machine says flobadob and widdles all over the floor what do you do?

Blame George W Bush, obviously. But after that? John Weidner (daringly skipping the blame-Bush stage) goes to this site and looks up how to repair it. In the comments he compares the pleasure he gets from working his will on a recalcitrant domestic appliance to the triumph a caveman felt when slaying a mastodon. RepairClinic.com seems to make its money by shipping parts, but attracts customers through the door by offering information. From a Repair Guru, no less. Plenty more use than most gurus.

I am sure there are all sorts of fascinating sociological observations and predictions to be made here.

Here in the UK, EzeeFix and E-spares both offer the parts but not the education - yet.

Google and Ebay do make owning non-standard or obsolete kit less of a problem. Let me tell you an anecdote that doesn't illustrate that at all. I was in the sewing shop yesterday and a lady came in and asked for spares for her decades-old home button-attaching machine - almost certainly the K-Tel Buttonmatic. Ah, K-Tel. Breathe deep, my fortysomething friends, breathe deep and remember when K-Tel and Ronco were mainstays of ITV commercial breaks. As it says in the link, in those innocent days the words "as advertised on TV" carried a glamour of their own.

Anyway, this lady wanted to use her Buttonmatic for some sort of charity garment-making sewathon in which she was to participate. Good idea, when you think about it. It may have taken four decades but eventually an occasion finally has arisen when this so-called timesaving gadget really would save time, if only the right spare parts could be found.

The sewing shop man didn't have them, but "go to the internet," he helpfully advised, "you can order all sorts of funny things there."

"Oh yes, that's true," I said. And winced. Indeed he spoke sooth. In days gone by I would have ordered the non-standard bobbins my sewing machine uses from his shop and got them in mere weeks. Instead I had that very day got a bunch of them direct from the Singer website, ordered two days previously.

Sadly I think that the charity button-fixing lady is going to be out of luck. (Hence the title of this post! You waited patiently. Well done.) Apart from two 70s nostalgia sites the internet is clear of K-Tel Buttonmatics. I have just now tripled the number of times the device is mentioned. Come to think of it, it occurs to me that for that very reason it is highly probable that, assuming she followed advice and looked it up on the internet, she is reading this. Um, hello. Forgive me for using your ingenious and charitable idea as a peg for my meanderings. Unfortunately I have to tell you that although both this and this bear the sacred name "Buttonmatic", the former is an industrial machine designed for clothing manufacturers and the latter a sewing machine foot. It's not nearly as cool as finally using the K-Tel, an anecdote upon which you could dine out for years, but if you do have a sewing machine with a button foot your best bet is probably to lug that along to the charity event.

So there are still markets that internet commerce has not yet reached. A pity. Surely there must be many dozens of people out there yearning for spare parts for the true K-Tel Buttonmatic. Tens of pence are waiting to be made by a young man or woman with vision.

Rogue vacuum pockets peril.

As Rob at the Sporadic Chronicle observes, this story is far too good to check.

The Last Train.

Sad to see, like the Britannia class Pacific 70013 Oliver Cromwell pulling into Liverpool Lime Street Station for the last time and bringing the era of steam trains on British railways to an end, Transport Blog is to cease operations. Patrick Crozier writes:

I have said more or less everything I have to say on the topic. OK, we never quite got round to finding the "why doesn't vertical fragmentation work on the railways?" Holy Grail and "Beeching II - no more Mr Nice Guy" will have to remain unpublished for a little longer but my views on road pricing, rail "privatisation" and positive externalities are, at least, out there.

Phrases like "Beeching II - no more Mr Nice Guy" were one of the many reasons that Transport Blog was well worth looking at. There were more serious reasons as well - discussion of safety issues, economics and even aesthetics relating to transport from a libertarian angle. Nonetheless, it is true that the limited nature of the topic meant that I was only an occasional visitor.

It strikes me that the archive is a valuable resource to have online - so much so that when I clean up my sidebar (real soon now) the link will stay there with some sort of a note to say it's no longer an active blog. Finally I hope that Patrick uses the excellent two-column format with longer pieces on one side and "in brief" items on the other in his future work.

The Home Secretary's private life is none of our business, I just wish he'd think the same about ours.

I owe that devastating point to this post by Chris Lightfoot: "Someone had blundered."

He had other points to make as well. You know, of course, how law-abiding people have nothing to fear from identity cards? How about fearing this:

Hilariously, they haven't even fixed s.12(4) in which

The things that an individual may be required to do under subsection (3) are--

(a) to attend at a specified place and time; [...]

-- this is the same as in the draft, and they haven't even bothered to add `reasonable' as many responses to the consultation suggested. Presumably if some bored Crapita employee does send out a notice of the form,

You are required to attend the summit of Mt. Snowdon at 0300h tomorrow morning so that we can take your fingerprints; failure to attend will be punished by a civil penalty of £1,000. Do not pass `go'.

the courts will eventually tell him to go fuck himself, but we have to wait to find out.

BTW, I linked to Chris Lightfoot in a slightly less admiring fashion when replying to John B in an earlier post. Probably it was no coincidence that John B then linked to this new post by Chris Lightfoot, and certainly it was no coincidence that I found it by looking at John B's blog. I expect that if one follows the link trail closely enough it will turn out that one or both of them is actually my grandfather.

Yet more quick thoughts on self-defence.

Don't get excited that the commissioner of the metropolitan police and the Conservative party have called for reform of the law. People call for this, that and the other all day long. So do the blackbirds.

Oh, I'm a cheery little thing.

On the same subject, John B. of Shot By Both Sides writes back:

Thanks very much for replying to my mail.

Oddly enough, I agree quite significantly with much of your new post - especially the orders 1-6 for causes of crime (although perhaps I'd subsititute 'due to welfare' with 'due to governments' belief that creating welfare ghettos is a viable substitute when one destroys single-industry communities'. All this society breakdown was worse under Mrs T than any other PM, after all).

As you may have expected, however, I'm going to nitpick.

The bracketed link cited counts 'all unlawful killings' as murders, which doesn't make much sense. It's nonetheless very interesting - I had, as the writer suggests, fallen for the Agatha Christie-esque assumption that all murderers were topped in those days.

Brett Osborn went to jail partly because the CPS were idiots, partly because his lawyer was an idiot, and partly because he was misguided: he would have stood a 9/10 chance of beating a murder conviction, but pleaded guilty to manslaughter anyway. It was a travesty that he was prosecuted, but he would not have been convicted had he defended himself.

I'm glad you see no reason to doubt my horror at the murder (my dad lived on Oakley Street [i.e. round the corner from where the murder occurred - NS] for some years; I suspect my 'this is far too close to home' reaction wasn't far from yours or Perry's), but I think you miss my point on Perry's conculsions: the belief that the state won't protect you from murder isn't plausibly justified by data (as I said on Samizdata, as many Brits die from burglar-murder as Americans die from hitting deer in their cars), and Perry appeared to be using this anecdote as a substitute for statistical evidence.

Well, yeah, in the end statistics, properly used, do trump anecdote. I am the first to argue that an incorrect opinion does not become correct because it is deeply felt, or because the holder of the opinion has suffered, or because the holder is a good person. But even if I were to concede (I don't) that we have the State to thank for the day-to-day survival of Britons from general mayhem, it is undeniable that the British State has protected its citizens from murder less well since the right to self-defence has been eclipsed.

What are blogs for

if not to point out possible errors in a Religious Studies textbook published in 1991?

I've been reading a lot of RE textbooks for a worky sort of reason. Now quite a lot of the propaganda has been chased out of history and geography textbooks - stop laughing. Disregard your own fading memories, you crinklies, and look at, say, a recent schoolbook treatment of British generalship in World War I: John Terraine's point of view is well and truly represented, albeit by people who clearly needed a nice cup of herbal tea afterwards.

However RE, RS, or whatever they call it this week, is unreformed. I may highlight some of the funnier things I've found in future posts. Or I may be found slumped lifeless at my computer, an expression of unearthly terror stamped indelibly upon my features. I tell you, to have opinions like mine and yet open a Key Stage Four Religious Thingies book is to stare into the abyss.

I quite liked the oldish textbook I shall look at today, Moral Issues in Six Religions, edited by W. Owen Cole and published by Heinemann Educational. Its format, in which each religion is written about by an author who believes in that religion, avoids the anonymous blah-progressive editorialising that mars many modern textbooks on religion. Most of the authors do display background anti-capitalism (for instance V P Kanitkar, who wrote the section on Hinduism, says, "... greed for money is a social evil which is spreading among the Hindu society. It is made worse by the increased advertising and availability of luxury consumer goods"), but a personal opinion stated as a personal opinion arouses my disagreement rather than my ire.

The section on Christianity was written by Joe Jenkins. The factual stuff is competently done. As for opinion, I nodded at "The State in its oppression of the people makes use again and again of the name of God," although Mr Jenkins and I probably had different States and different oppressions in mind. When I read "The self-interest and greed that seem to motivate a free capitalist market economy ... hardly fit in with the teachings of Jesus about selflessness and generosity", I growled, so the stratification and unequal power relationships that motivate an unfree non-capitalist non-market economy fit better, do they?

But for the life of me I did not know what attitude to take to this line from a "box" about the German theologian, resistant and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Bonhoeffer helped form the 'Confessing Church' which opposed the Nazis. He also became involved in helping groups of Jews escape the death camps.

In 1940 he joined the Abwehr, an organization that secretly worked to overthrow the Nazi state.

Emphasis added. I think that's a howler. The Abwehr was German Military Intelligence. The funny thing is, though, that the description of the Abwehr as an organization that secretly worked to overthrow the Nazi state is nonetheless quite defensible. Still, the form of words used does seem a little compressed.

Another thing that might be an authorial mistake or authorial secret irony is his choice of quotations to illustrate sexism in Christianity. After quotations which, fair to say, won't get St Paul and Martin Luther any prizes for embracing gender diversity in the workplace, the author supplied the following quote from Samuel Butler (the earlier one): "The souls of women are so small that some believe they have none at all." One of Butler's less amusing ditties, I'll admit, but I do think it ought to be pointed out that Butler was joking. Odd how simply putting the line breaks in makes it plain that it is meant to be funny: The souls of women are so small, / that some believe they have none at all; / Or if they have, like cripples, still / They've but one faculty, the will.

UPDATE: this GCSE revision page is clearly based on the sexism double page spread from Moral Issues in Six Religions, and has the same quotes.