'Nother Solent

Independent journalists

get new insights from exotic herbs. I always suspected something of the sort. Scott Burgess has more.

A government task force

is going to specify exactly what they mean by good school behaviour and advise on how to bring it about. Jacqui Smith, the new schools minister says: "A culture of respect, good behaviour and firm discipline must be the norm in all schools, all of the time."

It must be. All schools, all of the time. What weakness, what years of disappointment, what nervousness lie behind those martial words. It sounds like a failing teacher talking tough to the Friday afternoon class she most dreads.

Brian Micklethwait says the way to get rid of bad behaviour is much easier to specify than the committee think. Easy to specify but politically impossible, for the moment. The heart of the impossibility is the minister's demand that yobbery be banished from all schools, all the time - when what is needed is the power to banish particular yobs from your particular school this afternoon.

Gerard Baker on George Galloway:

Perhaps in the end, if you’re a cynic you may find Mr Galloway’s asymmetrical approach to authority — a lapdog in the hands of the one who likes to watch as his victims are tortured; a lion in the face of those who threaten with questions and subpoenas — simply the familiar mark of the coward. If you’re an optimist, you might find it oddly comforting The Mother of Parliaments clasps him to her bosom. The world’s greatest deliberative body sits in embarrassed silence as he lectures it on its shortcomings. Nothing surely illustrates better the absolute superiority of the West’s system and what underpins it that we tolerate and even reward such lèse-majesté. We know what Saddam did to those who were brave enough to utter much more cogent critiques of his rule.

Me, though I’ll celebrate my opponent’s right to be wrong, I can’t suppress a slight regret that the price of our liberty is paid in the deference we give to men who excuse tyranny.

My sympathies are with those men, women and children who died because of Saddam’s indefatigable affection for torture and murder; with those who today are suffering still because of his successors’ indefatigable affection for the suicide bomb in the marketplace or at the mosque.

It is the tragic but hopeful people of Iraq who have shown us how to defy power and misery, and who, if we stand firm against the Galloways of this world, will one day get the Respect they truly deserve.

The Times used to be called "The Thunderer." It thunders still.

Grand strategy

"...the real strategic danger to the cause of freedom and democracy isn't from the noisemakers of the Left but from the temptation to betray principles for tactical gain. It lies on the very same path that Galloway, Martin and Newsweek, in their cunning, have taken. The Left hitched its wagon to the worst men of the 20th and 21st century and it is dragging them into the dustbin of history. Let's go the other way."

- Wretchard of the Belmont Club, talking about the alliance with Karimov of Uzbekistan. Read the whole thing, as Instapundit does say. Also read the extremely informative post from Winds of Change quoted within the Belmont Club post.

Good stuff I read today.

Yeah, can't think of a better headline.

Photon Courier on why it is a bad idea for university libraries to dispense with books.

The Blitherbun takes the metaphor of the political balance literally and does some sums. Suggestions as to the S.I. units of condemnation should be directed to him. Getting back to his main topic, I wonder how or if his interesting model could be tied into this article by Mark Steyn, also quoted by the Bunny a few days ago.

As a general proposition, the Heseltine thesis is doubtful: successful conservatives don’t move towards the ‘political centre’. They move the political centre towards them. That’s what Thatcher and Reagan both did. Whereas if you move towards the political centre, all you do is move the centre. If Labour is at 1 on the scale and the Tories are at 9, and their focus groups tell them to move to 5, they have ensured that henceforth the centre will be 3, and they’ll be fighting entirely on the Left’s terms and the Left’s issues.

Let me add to the mixture another quote from the same piece on my own account:

So Lord Heseltine may simply be providing further evidence that he’s yesterday’s man when he drones on about the ‘centre ground’ being where elections are won. In Northern Ireland, it’s where elections are lost; the centre ground is where parties go to die.

Both the Steyn quotes appear to contradict Scott's model. But I have a feeling they might be reconciled by someone more awake than I. (UPDATE: With one bound he was free! Visit the link again to see Scott incorporate the Steyn quote as supporting evidence for his model)

Richard North of the EU Referendum blog sardonically asks why the European Union Election Observation Mission (EU EOM) presumes to instruct the Lebanese media on the fairness of its election coverage when "when virtually every member state holding a referendum is attempting to rig the media to ensure a "yes" vote for the EU constitution."

I shall demonstrate my healthy self-esteem by including two acrimonious comments threads at Shot By Both Sides in which I participated under the heading of this post.

Upstanding newspapers

. Jake writes:

"Have you tried the IHT? or maybe our FT?

You have a point, there. I'd prefer a British paper - as I said I have a preference for taking a paper that at least some other people around me are reading too. (In my next life I'd like to be a lemming.) Will definitely consider the FT. Not only would it be educational, the pink pages in the recycling would impress the neighbours as well.

Alex Bensky writes:

I see the British papers from time to time and everything you say, and more, is true. And yet...one day wander over to one of our excuses for a local paper, the Detroit Free Press, at www.freep.com.

Within the last two days it has had two large front page stories on the new "Star Wars" movie, not to mention exhaustive coverage elsewhere. Last fall some high school students played a cruel prank on a fat classmate and got her elected homecoming queen. She handled it with dignity and the Free Press had six stories on it, including two major front page articles with photographs.

I could go on and on...I'll confine myself to mentioning that about a year ago a columnist wrote that she was going to write about her sex life although she thought many of her readers would be disinterested in it. I wrote to ask if she thought the distinction between "disinterested" and "uninterested" was no longer worth maintaining. She hadn't known there was one.

The paper is written in fairly simple, easy to read prose, lots of short paragraphs, and everything is personalized, no matter the subject matter: "Housewife Betty Jones of suburban Ferndale is worried about the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs..." They've also managed to gut what used to be a pretty good comics section.

The papers are so bad that since I like a morning paper I get the NY Times, and you might be surprised to see what their arts section now thinks is worthy of cultural coverage. So count your blessings.

Mildly hypocritical, mildly prudish reader seeks newspaper for fun and possible long term relationship.

From the age of ten onwards I read the Times every day and learnt a lot from it. I was the sort of child who instructed her elders and betters on any complexities of the situation in South Africa that they might have missed. Having survived being strangled I was on course to be the well-informed person you see today. I remember the Times, and particularly the columns written by Bernard Levin, with gratitude.

Decades have passed. My oldest child is twelve. You might think that I would make sure to have a quality newspaper hit the mat each day. We do not. Why not? Several reasons, but to my suprise I find that one of the most important is that they are all too salacious.

Since I am complaining about that I had better mention that there will be some discussion of sex in this post. Nothing the average twelve year old hasn't known about for years, but probably mutually embarrassing for parent or child to know the other has read. That's the whole point, actually.

When I was a kid I learned much the ways of the world - sex, drugs, crime and so on - from reading the paper. The information came in gradually, casually and mixed up with other topics. Good.

However, thirty years ago an article about prostitution, for instance, would be wrapped up in a package of high-minded concern for a social problem. Possibly this concern was fake, mere cover for a way of giving readers a thrill while allowing writer and reader to pretend to be respectable. More likely motives were mixed. Certainly I frequently read such articles in the spirit of one looking up the rude words in the dictionary. But if hypocrisy it was, then so much the better for hypocrisy. It compares well with the crassness of today. A month or two back the Sunday Telegraph had an article about that countrywoman who became a prostitute to pay for her daughter's riding lessons. It wasn't the fact that the story was covered that I objected to but the detailed descriptions of her encounters with various clients, including clients who took pleasure in violent abuse. I would rather not have that topic for family discussion over breakfast, thank you.

And that was the Telegraph - once upon a time written by respectable Tories. The Independent and the Guardian are full of writers anxious to assert how comfortable they are with various fetishes. Quite apart from the explicitness, I do not wish my children to grow up to be bores. Should I then go back to my old friend, the Times? It's probably the best bet of the qualities, but I find it ominous that David Aaronovitch has joined the staff. I greatly respect Aaro's writing on the Iraq war but every fifth article he wrote for the Guardian concerned his relationship with his right hand and I have no reason to suppose he will be any different in the Times.

I'm certainly not advocating censorship, just saying that a paper that went back to offering all the news that's fit to print would have my subscription sewn up. I would like it to be a major paper, though. I have nothing against the various Christian papers - I am always happy to learn of a successful Alpha Course in Cheam - but that isn't what I want as a main news source. Too sectional. Too wholesome. Too admiring of Christian Aid. I want the cosmopolitan feel of a newspaper that I know is also read by several hundred thousand of my compatriots at least.

How many other readers are there like me? My guess is that quite a few parents who don't particularly care about sex in the papers on their own account suddenly develop prudish tendencies when their child reads about it. As a result many children may not be getting started on the newspaper habit.

The Guardian repudiates the Nanny State.

In this leading article, "The Limits of Politics", the Guardian is referring to the recent banning of "hoodies" and baseball caps by Bluewater shopping centre, which for some reason the government felt compelled to comment upon.

But in 10 years of raising the issue, we are no closer to seeing a bigger picture, or solutions that involve anything more than crackdowns, anti-social behaviour orders, or more police out on the beat. Not that the opposition parties have been any better on the subject: the Liberal Democrats recently changed its tack on Asbos and dispersal orders, while the Conservatives had their micro-policies aimed at yobs. In all cases the politicians' reflex is to take actions that they think will influence the tide of society.

But the policies of both government and opposition combined fail to approach the central truth regarding mutual respect: that there is very little any administration can usefully do. Politeness cannot be legislated. Social capital is something that is built and dissolved over generations, a rather longer term than the span of parliaments. Yet that does not mean that genuine issues cannot be identified and dealt with - and it is certainly neither useful nor correct to say in response that public outcries and media scares are always overblown.

What can politicians do in the face of genuine shifts in cohesion and cooperation? In reality, very little. In fact, politicians are not always the best placed to provide answers. The underlying issues are frequently too complex and do not lend themselves to setting targets or crackdowns.

Now they tell us.

It would have been nice if the Guardian had discovered the wisdom of limited government earlier. Like, say, 1945. As it is the leader writer has had his or her epiphany about the wrong subject. There may be indeed be little that politicians can do to actively legislate for civic virtue but there are enormous harms that politicians could stop doing. They could stop paying people to raise their children without virtue, social skills, chance of employment, or fathers. These "genuine shifts in cohesion and cooperation" the editorialist writes about did not arise from an inauspicious conjunction of the stars. If there is one insight (actually there are several) I owe to my time as a socialist it is that bad states of society are not unalterable. How the old-time socialists would have despised the Guardian today, as it sighs like a medieval peasant woman paying to grind her corn at the Lord's mill: "It's just he way things are. There's nothing the likes of us can do." The only problem is that the present weakness of civic society largely arises from the very measures those old-time socialists enacted with such determination. Admitting that and beginning the process of reversal is very painful but it is not complex. The pretence that it is complex is usually just an excuse to avoid the admission.

As for the ban itself, fine, if that's what Bluewater thinks will make the majority of its customers happy. Why shouldn't it operate a dress code? Lots of pubs and clubs already do. If you don't like the code, shop elsewhere. Bluewater will keep it if it works and drop it if it doesn't.

"If there is a workshop of the world today

the way there was in the north of England in the mid 19th century, then this is it." Michael Jennings went to Shenzen, China. He took both literary and literal snapshots of a society steaming away from the Third World and into the First. Or do I mean Second World to first?

I liked this:

I quite genuinely would not want to live in a world that does not contain giant bowling pins with writing on them in languages I do not understand: But that is because my metacontext is fundamentally cosmopolitan.

Fish enjoying new cylindrical home.

I thought that the Huffington Post would be nothing but clueless leftebrities telling us that they are emigrating to Canada after the Oscars and whales are, like, so spiritual.

Perhaps not. This post surprised me. The writer is the CEO of three charter schools in Los Angeles.

There are four special interests that have blocked, clogged, and undermined reform for decades. It is all about money, control, and power. It is diseased value system that leaves our kids uneducated, exposed to violence and drugs, and with too few or zero opportunities to pursue the American Dream. Who are the four? Emphatically, I name names: the teacher's unions, the University Schools of Education, the bureaucracies, and (unbelievably) the PTAs.

Via Joanne Jacobs.