'Nother Solent

Not content

with apologising for Palestinian support for Saddam's invasion of Kuwait (see this post), now Mahmoud Abbas has said publicly that the Intifada was a mistake.

If you had asked me a year ago when I might have a good word to say about that holocaust denier, I'd have said, "on a cold day in Hell." In the absence of an official weather report from the Infernal Regions, I'll have to assume the demons put their winter woolies on today.

Free debate at St Andrews

is not yet dead, despite the previous post. I followed a link or two from the St Andrews Student Union website and found this article in a different student newspaper: 10 Reasons Why Iraqis Would Have Voted for President George W. Bush.

I thought it would be good to offer an Iraqi perspective regarding the current events taking place in Iraq with the war aftermath and reconstruction efforts. Born and raised in Iraq until I was 15 years old, the views I have about what is happening in my country reflect those of the majority of Iraqis.

I find that many people are uninformed about the true Iraqi opinion and they depend mostly on what the media shows as their source of information. Furthermore, there are people who give their opinions as being those of the Iraqi people when they are not. Specifically, I am referring to people from Iraq's neighboring undemocratic Arab countries.

The facts are that the majority of Iraqis were in favor of the war that took place in March 2003.

Two snapshots of British state education today

(1) The Students' Union at St Andrews has banned a student newspaper, The Saint, because, in the words of the Union, "The Saint's last two issues have included a number of offensive comments as well as misleading statements concerning amongst other groups, the University's LGBT students, dyslexics and the Welsh".

Lots of good jokes about dyslexic Welshmen in the Samizdata comments. None about bisexual dyslexic Welshpersons yet, although there is one about a leek.

(2) Via Joanne Jacobs, Kimberly Swygert and Manchester Online, I found a splendid example of Object Fetishism. Manchester Online says that:

PENCIL sharpeners have been banned from a primary school after a pupil dismantled one and used the blade to slash another child's neck. The victim was attacked in the playground at Waterloo Primary School in Ashton under Lyne.

He was taken to Tameside Hospital where he had butterfly stitches placed on the wound. The attacker was suspended for two days and is now back in school.

Kimberly Swygert comments:

A two-day suspension for deliberately striking near someone's jugular with a razor-sharp object? And the offender is allowed to return, while the sharp objects are not? You have got to be kidding me.

'Fraid not. You must understand that pencil sharpeners disrupt the flow of mana. Things with unbalanced mana are tabu. (Mind you, that website says that one of the ways in which you can dissipate or unbalance your mana is "agreeing to be a teacher for a student who did not want to learn." Since slashing a classmate's neck does not suggest a thirst for learning, maybe the Waterloo Primary staff ought to declare themselves tabu.)

...the decision to allow the boy to return to school has angered parents. Some have signed a petition calling on the school to permanently expel the youngster. One parent, who did not wish to be named, said: "Are our children safe when we send them through those gates every morning? The lad purposely took the blade out of the sharpener. In my eyes that is a pre-meditated attack. My children know the difference between right and wrong. To suspend that boy for just two days is no punishment at all."

There are some good comments to the Manchester Online article, a lot of them from the US. My guess is that many of them came via Joanne Jacobs and Kimberly Swygert.

The story made the Sun and the BBC. Also the blog Zero Intelligence - "Fighting school board inanity since 2004" -
has helpfully archived its British stories, including this one, all in one place. Happy reading!

Representation.

Tim Worstall called his post on this article by would-be MP Hannah Pool "Gi's a job." Fair enough. Most of the article consists of her plaints about the reluctance of Labour selection committees to select her. She is cross that she, a black woman, doesn't score double on the shortlist.

My opinion of Labour selection committees has just gone up. Unless and until Ms Pool stops talking like an eighteenth century Tory oligarch in a rotten borough, the committee would be ill-advised to pick her as a candidate. She speaks of "stealing each other's seats" as if the seats concerned had been assigned to black female representatives of the Labour Party party by God and the only problem lay in unseemly squabbles between His representatives on Earth, Operation Black Vote and the Fawcett Society. Hey, lady, these seats we're talking about are not mere property like Jasper Conran dining chairs! The voters have some role in this, remember?

Tim Worstall quotes her as saying:

There are just two black women MPs, both Labour (Diane Abbott and Oona King), of 13 black MPs, 119 women and 659 MPs in total. That's right, two. Given that there are well over 2 million ethnic-minority women in this country, that's an awful lot of representation left to Abbott and King.

He comments:

MPs represent their constituents, not some class, race or sex. That’s why we have constituencies, see, instead of national voting lists and such. Sheesh.

I have it on good authority that Ian Paisley, who once scornfully called the Catholic Sacrament "a biscuit", faithfully works to solve the daily problems of his Catholic constituents. From her words here, can you imagine a future Hannah Pool MP doing as much for her white, Asian or male (including black male) constituents? Selection committees know that these are the people she must appeal to. There aren't enough black females to elect an MP on their own in any seat in the UK, especially given that some of them may fail to agree with Ms Pool's advanced views on the nature of representation and vote for someone else on political grounds.

Her logic takes us to some ugly places. By Hannah Pool's arguments we can never have a black Prime Minister in the UK. Or ever again have a Prime Minister of a minority race or religion. (Tough luck, Michael Howard. And we'll have to airbrush out Benjamin Disraeli.) We cannot even have any more black MPs once the number equal to their proportion in the population has been reached. By Hannah Pool's arguments the existing black female MPs, Diane Abbott and Oona King, do not represent their white, brown or male constituents. I know little about Oona King (other than that she'll be fighting George Galloway in the next election, best of luck to her) but I bet that wasn't what she said on her election leaflets to the citizens of Bethnal Green & Bow. As for Ms Abbott, I am no admirer of hers politically but I can testify she knows her duties better than that. I once spent a morning sitting a few feet from her in a Parliamentary Committee. The questions she put, while sometimes based on wrong assumptions, flowed from her role as an overseer of the UK's public spending, not from her role as a black woman. She talks about that role a lot but is not limited to it.

It's a bit rich, Hannah Pool complaining about how horrible it is to have everyone pre-judging your responses because of your race or gender

If the debate is about women's equality, we are expected to agree with white women because they are women; if the debate is about race, we are expected to agree with black men.

and then demanding to go to the front of the queue because of her race and gender.

As I have said elsewhere, I take "democracy is the least worst form of government" literally. I am a democrat faute de mieux. I would like to see a world where people put serious matters to the vote rather in the way that they now sue a neighbour: reluctantly, embarrassed that it has come to this bitter juncture, and that not merely because the law is expensive and uncertain, but from a perception that fundamentally, this is not how relations between people should be. Force should be a last resort.

Thus it makes me smile in a sardonic way when Ms Pool writes:

What I resent most about the current debate is that, once again, someone is making decisions on my behalf: Labour women are assuming I'd rather be represented by a woman, OBV is assuming I'd rather be represented by a black man.

And you, Ms Pool, are assuming that the voters would rather be represented by you. Perhaps they would, perhaps they wouldn't. But if you so object to people making decisions on others' behalf then how do you justify your desire to stand as a elected representative? Isn't that what they do?

The terrors of old age.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are in the news. My opinions on this aren't completely black and white. If one concedes, as I, wincing, do, a right to suicide, then it seems logical to concede a right to assisted suicide for those too incapacitated to kill themselves.

However, here is an anecdote, told to me first-hand, which demonstrates that legalised euthanasia on the Dutch model affects the quality of life of old people in ways that the "beautiful death" campaigners did not anticipate.

A decade or so ago a member of my family was living in Holland and working as a care assistant at a Dutch old people's home. (She speaks Dutch.) She told me that when the time came to give some of the old men and women their medicine they would occasionally react with terror. "No, no," they would cry, "not the pill!"

What some cried aloud many more, particularly those whose minds were failing, must have feared in silence.

He ain't changed.

Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman came out in 1980. I first read it in the late eighties. Back then the name of the fellow mentioned at the end of this passage meant nothing to me:

Few businessmen regard President Carter's so-called voluntary wage and price controls as a desirable or effective way to combat inflation. Yet one businessman after another, one business organization after another, has paid lip service to the program, said nice things about it, and promised to cooperate. Only a few, like Donald Rumsfeld, former congressman, White House official, and Cabinet member, had the courage to denounce it publicly.

Random Jottings comments on Rumsfeld today.

"The normal person shouldn't have to bother with it. That's what we pay government ministers for."

In a post about fishing and the tragedy of the commons the EU Serf found that damning quote from a Guardian writer. In fact, as the Serf had already pointed out earlier in the post, there is a way in which the normal person can make nuanced and environmentally-appropriate decisions about which fish to buy without spending hours in study or passing the buck to an authority figure:

I know that it is a heresy in the hallowed corridors of liberalism, but consumers are empowered by a form of knowledge transfer known as pricing. If a real market existed in fish, the rare ones would cost more. Thus someone whose knowledge of fish stocks was zero, would make the right choice as to what to buy. Controversial I know, but it seems to work everywhere else.

The Kuwait Times

reports that Abbas apologised to Kuwait on behalf of the PLO for Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Palestinian support for the invasion of Kuwait managed to be grossly cynical and grossly stupid at the same time. I don't suppose one Palestinian in a hundred cared one way or the other about Iraq's territorial claim on Kuwait prior to the invasion. Kuwait had, as far as I know, never done anything to them other than give them piles of money. The piles of money probably didn't do their politial culture any good, but somehow I doubt that a sophisticated realisation of this fact was what drove crowds of Palestinians onto the street to cheer the invader on. The best excuse I can come up with is that the cheering mobs were no better informed and no less dangerous not to join than the cheering mobs of China's Cultural Revolution.

And what did Saddam Hussein offer them in exchange for this slavish display? The Right of Return? Not exactly. A handful of missiles. A handful of dead Israelis. It's as if a man helped a mugger beat up his rich uncle in exchange for the mugger spitting at his enemy.

Yeah, I know. Some Kuwaitis can put on an impressive display of ingratitude themselves. However "some" is obviously far from "all".

(Via, indirectly, The Corner.)

Did you know

that in 1805 half the population of Gibraltar was Jewish? Neither did I.

Tim Blair

has a new place at http://timblair.net/weblog.php. You have to register to comment. "This is intended to cut down on insidious anony-trolling. All you need do is provide a genuine e-mail address, a birth certificate, and a vial of spinal fluid. "

Not too good to check after all.

Sam writes:

Here is the likely original, by that mainstay of rec.arts.sf.* groups, John Schilling: link.

Yes, but is it true?

Anti-Tsarist revolutionaries in Britain.

Nigel writes:

By a coincidence I've just finished reading the revised edition of Donald Rumbelow's 'The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street'. This starts off with a chapter on the Tottenham Outrage before going on to the perhaps more famous events two years later that form the core of the book.

There are two remarkable things to come out of it. First, the extraordinary "culture clash" between the various revolutionary terrorists on the one hand - most of them were Bolsheviks and not anarchists, and in any event some them were never conclusively identified even when brought to trial - and British society on the other. They'd come from a society - Tsarist Russia - where the authorities were to all intents and purposes at war with some of their own people. Many of them had been tortured in Tsarist prisons and had certainly witnessed mass murder (albeit not to the scale that the Bolsheviks would inflict). Virtually all of them were prepared to use any level of violence whatsoever. Even many of the non-revolutionary émigrés from the Tsarist empire - e.g. Latvia where many of the terrorists came from - so little understood the difference between Russia and England that in the days after the attempted Houndsditch robbery and the murders of the policemen they expected the authorities to unleash a pogrom in the East End of London and were baffled when it didn't happen. Al-qaeda et al have a lot to learn!

The second thing was what a triumph of "British fair play"the subsequent trials were. Although plainly guilty, some of them were discharged by the courts before they ever came to trial and - from memory - all but one were later acquitted of all charges. (One went on to become a notorious NKVD leader in the post-1917 Soviet Union.) In any other country, they would either have been killed or tortured into confessions.

A remarkable story!