'Nother Solent

Wannabes.

A very small silver lining to the very large dark cloud that overshadows these violent times is that the war on drugs - that is to say the "war" on a particular form of unhealthy behaviour - no longer gets the prestige it once did. I think someone is feeling left out.

Police have claimed new successes in the war on drugs in central Scotland.

Officers have swooped on nearly 20 homes in the Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannanshire areas in the past week as part of Operation Overlord.

They called it Operation Overlord?

ADDED 11AM: This morning I gave this post a catchier title and cross-posted it to Samizdata.

George Galloway doesn't know

what the internet can do. This blogger does. Making use of WHOIS list of domain names and the Wayback Machine internet archives, "Seixon" relentlessly examines one claim of Galloway's senate testimony, that he "emblazoned" on the Mariam Appeal website that Fawaz Zureikat was doing vast amounts of business with Iraq.


Via Damian Penny and LGF.

A good thought

from Thought Mesh:

A question that frequently arises among those with a clue is “why doesn’t anyone imitate the founding of the USA, given its remarkable success?”. Instead, the founders of new governments seem to prefer to follow the lead of failed and failing states, such as the USSR or Old Europe. Why? The American Founding Fathers, to their immense credit, managed to do a very good job without an example or prior validation of their view on government. Now, centuries later, when their vision has been proven right so dramatically, why is the style and structure of the USA Constitution still almost unique?

I have to interject that I believe that several South and Central American countries do have constitutions closely based on that of the USA. Unfortunately they didn't "take", almost as if the donor and recipient societies were too far apart for an organ transplant to work. However that does not detract from the persuasive argument that AOG puts forward next:

I think that that answer is simple. The USA Constitution, while it has been very good for the USA, wasn’t particularly good for the Founding Fathers. Except for Washington, they had to fight for public office afterwards. They fought vigorously over important policy issues (see the history of the First National Bank for an example). In contrast, the non-American style constitutions tend to be very good for the authors, either directly, politically or ideologically.

Mesh thought good.

Stuff happens.

Yesterday after school I was getting my swimming things together when an explosion went off in the cupboard by the cooker. I was put out. I have enough to cope with in my life - the swimming pool closes at 6.30 for a start - without having to clear up after what appeared to be the in-cupboard martyrdom of an alien suicide bomber with glutinous brown blood.

OK, it was a small alien suicide bomber, but the determined fellow had projected himself over the walls, ceiling and contents of the cuboard with an enthusiasm that more than compensated for his lack of inches. The blast had knocked down the balsamic vinegar, completely taken out the rock salt and the Extra Virgin olive oil had brown gloop all over it. Wrong cupboard for the raisins though, ha-ha!

I dare say some people will find all this tasteless. In contrast, the mixture of gravy browning and ginger beer dripping down the cupboard wall smelled quite tasty. I decided not to try a lick on account of the broken glass.

The whiff of ginger beer did suggest an alternative explanation to that of the Jihad of the Borrowers. Reminder to self: next time get ginger beer from supermarket that is chock-full of safety-tested cyclamates, sodium benzoate and spent nuclear fuel rods, rather than Real Traditional Ginger Beer of Mass Destruction from farmers' market.

This is getting silly.

Two quotes illustrating the steady progress of the modern world towards a parody of itself, both found via David Carr of Samizdata:

If the French and the Dutch reject the EU Constitution on Sunday and Wednesday, they should re-run the referendums, the current president of the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker, has said.

"If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No, would have to ask themselves the question again", Mr Juncker said in an interview with Belgian daily Le Soir.

And, moving up a post:

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

"President Bush's drive for absolute power

has momentarily stalled. In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government."

Absolute power? Coup? To the barricades, comrades! ¡No pasaran!

On second thoughts, don't worry. It's only Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian. Talking about filibusters rather than the Last Days of American Democracy, although you wouldn't guess that from lines like "sheer force would prevail". Here he is:

Historically, it [the filibuster] was used by southern senators to block civil rights legislation. In the first two years of the Clinton presidency, the Republicans deployed 48 filibusters, more than in the entire previous history of the Senate, to make the new Democratic chief executive appear feckless. The strategy was instrumental in the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994. By depriving the Democrats of the filibuster, Bush intended to transform the Senate into his rubber stamp.

For many senators the fate of the filibuster was only superficially about an arcane rule change. And shameless hypocrisy was the least of the problem. (Frist, like most Republicans in favour of the nuclear option, had enthusiastically filibustered against Clinton's court nominees, 65 of which were blocked from 1995-2000.)

Shameless hypocrisy, eh? Look again at the first line of the quote above: the filibuster "... was used by southern senators to block civil rights legislation."

Now what party might these "southern senators" have belonged to, Mr Blumenthal? Maybe we could ask some venerable senators:

Over the weekend, two elders, Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, pored over the federalist papers, written by the constitutional framers, to refresh their thinking about the inviolability of the Senate.

I don't know how much John Warner needs to "refresh his thinking" but Senator Byrd, in particular might be jogged into remembering...

Yeah, yeah. It was a long time ago. If I am to remind everyone that the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 was opposed by Southern Democrats, let it also be said that it was initiated by Northern Democrats (and passed with the help of the Republicans.) Byrd himself is quite reformed now, I hear, and popular with many black voters.

My complaint is this. If you are going to talk about hypocrisy regarding filibusters, don't leave out your own party's hypocrisy. (Mr Blumenthal was once President Clinton's senior adviser.) Yet a lot of people seem to go oddly vague on what party Byrd and his ilk belonged to despite being more than happy to talk about the great days of the Civil Rights era generally.

In fact my complaint is that I could without effort find the material to write a post like this around once a month - and that's just from the British media. I wrote a very similar post for Biased BBC earlier this month. Same basic situation: the BBC's Justin Webb indulged a bunch of folksy filibusterin' reminiscence from Senator Byrd without ever mentioning what Byrd was trying to do by speaking for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes, or what the filibuster is best known for.

Most British people have only heard of the filibuster at all in the context of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964. I've read, as it happens, many UK GCSE textbooks on twentieth century history. One of the popular options for study is the Depression, another is the Civil Rights struggle. Maybe I'll supply quotes in a future post, but let me tell you now one thing they all have in common: no kid leaves the chapter on the Depression without knowing that President Hoover was a BAD president and he was a REPUBLICAN. Yet when it comes to the Civil Rights struggle in the next chapter a certain coyness comes over the same writers. They don't exactly conceal that Robert Byrd or Strom Thurmond were Democrats (no need to tell me that Thurmond changed to Republican later) but a kid needs to be attentive to pick it up. The books prefer to dwell on Byrd and Thurmond's geographical origin. Southern senators.

Here is some knockabout fun

from the comments to this post on Peter Cuthbertson's Conservative Commentary. Consider it a companion piece to the repartee from Harry's Place I posted a while ago.

Peter, isn't it about time for a bit of Conservative Commentary about, you know, the general election? Are these snickerings all you can muster?

This site has often been absurd, and occasionally offensive, but up to this point it has never been boring. You're disappointing people.
Alan | 05.19.05 - 3:26 pm | #

————————————————————————————————————————

By contrast, Alan, you've always been absurd, offensive and boring. I want to post a great deal on the election, and to do justice to the subject, that will have to wait until my exams finish on the 26th.
Peter | Homepage | 05.19.05 - 5:22 pm | #

The meaning of a work of literature is intrinsic.

JEM writes:

I'm not sure that a discourse on biblical scholarship is relevant to meaningful consideration of the Rahila Khan/Toby Forward/Virago saga.

If Mr Forward was not a vicar but a social worker or dustman, would this discussion ever have strayed into matters eisegesic, exegesic or even hermeneutic?

If the author of the Merchant of Venice had been a Italian Jew rather than an English Protestant or indeed entirely unknown, would it really have changed the intrinsic meaning and value of the work? I think not.

What do we really know about Homer? At the end of the day does it matter? Such works as the Odyssey would remain a great work no matter what we do or do not know about its author.

I was first confronted with a discussion in this general catagory when I came to study Hamlet in school at about thirteen or so, and was expected to write an essay setting out what Hamlet's thinking was as he uttered his famous soliloquy. My objection that the question was meaningless because Hamlet was a figment of Shakespeare's imagination and so by definition could not be thinking anything was not popular in the English department at my school.

This confrontation merely confirmed my determination to concentrate on a scientific career where as a general rule, if something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, then absent contradictory evidence it is a duck.

Therefore I disagree fundamentally with Harry Powell. The Rev. Forward did not change meaning by misinterpreting himself to Virago. The meaning of this work, or any other, is intrinsic to the work itself. Full stop. Everything else is highfalutin' hot air.

By pulping his book, Virago is as guilty of an act of 'racial' censorship as the Nazis ever were. But that should be no surprise. Political correctness, called Gleichanschaltung back then, was a Nazi invention after all.

And what's more Virago have exhibited a lamentable lack of self-deprecating humour. Which is no surprise either.

As with Mr Powell's comments, I partly agree and partly disagree with this. I am nearly always interested in learning more about an author even though I firmly believe that it is the glory of fiction that one can (albeit imperfectly) use it to walk a mile in another's shoes, and that a work of fiction should be judged in its own right.

What I think happened with Down the Road, Worlds Away was that Virago
bought and published the book 50% because it was good (they would have been ashamed to have poor material published under their imprint), 25% because the author appeared to be an authentic voice of the Muslim community saying things that Virago hoped the Muslim community would say, and 25% because it demonstrates their non-racism to have some minority names on the list of authors. If asked, Virago would have liked the public to believe that they were publishing it 60% because it was good, 40% because it portrayed life among the marginalised Muslim community and 0% because the author had a Muslim name. (Of course my ludicrously exact numbers are just tools for getting an idea across, but you know what I mean.)

For their part the members of the public who bought the book would, I think, have claimed to have bought it with their motives split 60/40/0 but, again, would actually have bought it 50/25/25. This unspoken conspiracy between publishers and readers was wide open to be exploited by Forward. Yes, he did misrepresent himself - I do not know whether explicitly or implicitly - but few condemn George Eliot for pretending to be a man in order to get published in the conditions of her day, so few should condemn Forward for doing what it takes to get published in ours.

Most observers agree that his stories were good. (In Virago's case, they had better!) The interesting question is, were they an authentic portrait of the British Muslim community of the Midlands? Forward thinks yes. Dalrymple thinks yes. I would be interested to know what Midlands Muslims think, althought there is the perennial difficulty that intellectuals who comment on such things are highly unusual people in any community. The question is complicated by the fact that Rahila Khan's portrait of the Muslims living in the Midlands included the implication that this community had produced her. It had not. Has it produced anyone like her?

Another thing I can never remember

is the exact meanings of and distinction between "second cousin" and "first cousin once removed." Don't bother telling me; I can always look it up. The point is, I always have to.

What Bible criticism tells you about "Rahila Khan".

This is the email my computer ate out of malice for humankind. The alternative explanation, that I filed it in completely the wrong place, is fit only for those craven souls willing to submit to the Silicon Peril.

Harry Powell writes:

The article you quote by Theodore Dalrymple on the
Rev. Forward's literary labours got justifiably wide comment on the right wing of the blogosphere, much of it taking delight in the embarrassment of Virago but which missed a subtler point that Dalrymple glides over. The money quote is this: "Was he not in fact telling us, as presumably a good Christian should, that mankind is essentially one, and that if we make a sufficient effort we too can enter into the worlds of others who are in many ways different from ourselves." Well on that thread hangs a great deal of biblical scholarship and controversy dating back at least to Dilthey and Schleiermacher and which turns on a carefully drawn distinction between meaning and interpretation.

If we confine ourselves to asking what a text says there can be no room for misunderstanding; that understanding must be either true or false and therefore there can be no account in differences of interpretation except in terms of error and wanton accusations of stupidity. What hermeneuticists, however, claim is that meaning is construed out of methodologies of interpretation and as such knowing who says what, where, when and in which cultural context is crucial.

Much of contemporary literary theory is the heir to this kind of biblical eisegesis and is by no means an intellectually dishonest position to hold. Imagine if we learnt that the Merchant of Venice wasn't written by a protestant actor from the Midlands but a jewish businessman from the Veneto surely it would profoundly change our view of the play, yet how could we be expected to derive that biographical fact from the text alone? This seems to be what Dalrymple is condemning Virago for, the book in question purports to have the authenticity of lived experience, indeed Dalrymple is at pains to point out that Forward's life parallels the lives of his characters, yet inescapably Forward's work is an act of imagination - he is not an Asian teenager. Forward did change the meaning of his work by misrepresenting himself to Virago and if it had no literary merit beyond social documentary they were quite right in pulping it. Dalrymple's position is untenable one unless he means us to make a bonfire not just of Dilthey but Nietzsche and Heidegger too.

I want to get back to this subject, partly agreeing and partly disagreeing, when all the ideas sloshing around my head have had a chance to settle down.

Incidentally, for a moment I "corrected" Mr Powell's 'eisegesis' to 'exegesis'. Fortunately some good instinct caused me to check. This site explains both words, and 'hermeneutics' besides. That last word falls into a special mental category: words for which I can never remember the definition however often I look it up.

Use old AOL disk boxes for celestial navigation.

It doesn't actually have to be a box from an AOL disk sent to you in the post, but, let's face it, no other type of disk box will give you quite the same pleasure. James Rummel spotted this admirable project: The CD-Sextant.

... This small instrument is built using a CD and box. As in the X-Tant Project, I used a few Lego blocks and glass mirrors. No electric tools are necessary to build a CD-Sextant. It's a good science project.

...The design takes advantage of the dimensional precision of CD parts and Lego bricks. The sextant arm is the CD itself and the sextant frame is the CD box. The angle is changed by turning the CD.

The sailing world really changed when the answer to the question "What if my GPS breaks down?" became "Buy two." If both break down, have a CD case handy.

I was equally interested by the post below. Soon the US Navy may be putting its sextants away forever. Not only its sextants, but its paper maps.

The Ticonderoga was navigated using the most advanced methods of the time but it wasn’t anywhere near automated. The navigator needed to really know his stuff to make sure that the ship got to where it was supposed to be and didn’t run into anything on the way. Every ship had a few chart lockers, cabinets which contained the detailed maps by mariners since the first ships sailed out of sight of land. Every single ship in the US Navy which put to sea would have their own set of 12,000 paper maps, adding more than a ton of weight and taking up a great deal of space. Not only that, but it was a logistics nightmare to keep all those charts up to date and current.

There is sadness in the passing - or, at least, the drastic mutation - of two technologies that have served since the Elizabethan age.

Somebody sent me

a longish email about the "Rahila Khan" / Toby Forward book. It was very interesting, and my computer liked it so much that it ate it. Please send it again. UPDATE: Found it! See above.

The dragon eats its own tail, again.

The goverment of Zimbabwe persecutes flea-market traders desperately trying to scratch a living in the wreckage of Zimbabwe's economy. These people, selling individual bags of maize meal from the side of the road, are the ones keeping Zimbabwe fed.

When the capital city starves, revolution is near.

(Via the Globalization Institute news digest.)

Added later: The last time I referred to events in Zimbabwe as "the dragon eating its own tail" was in this post that referred to Mugabe damaging the education of the children of the his own government ministers by arresting the heads of private schools. Brian Micklethwait commented about that story here and about the same phenomenon as it applied to the Zimbabwe cricket team here. (The sporting example is more important than it seems: prestige matters to quasi-dictatorships.) These earlier posts referred to Mugabe angering his own elite. Yet another sign of the same thing is that it has been admitted that even the people who were rewarded for loyalty by being allowed to take the farms expropriated from whites and prosperous blacks are now unable to profit from them. In today's story we see how Mugabe is angering the populace as well.

I came across this quotation from Bacon that is relevant:

The matter of seditions is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment ... And if this poverty and broken estate in the better sort be joined with a want and necessity in the mean people, the danger is imminent and great. For the rebellions of the belly are the worst.

Down the Road, Worlds away, but one can go there in imagination.

Via R C Dean at Samizdata I found this marvellous Criterion article by Theodore Dalrymple. If I say that it is about the Church of England vicar who collected rejection slips for his short stories until he submitted them under the name Rahila Khan, then I will tempt a few anti-PC readers to go there for a laugh. But it is far, far more than that. Dalrymple says explicitly and the Rev. Forward (the author's real name) says in his work something important about literature.

Academics and intellectuals found the affair painful to elucidate. If it were true that the balkanization of literature was justified by the supposition that only people who belonged to a certain category of people could truly understand, write about, interpret, and sympathize with the experiences of people in that same category, so that, for example, only women could write about women for women, and only blacks about blacks for blacks (the very careers of many academics now depending upon such a supposition), how was it possible that a Church of England vicar had been able, actually without much difficulty, to persuade a feminist publishing house that he wrote as a woman, and as a Muslim woman of Indian subcontinental origin at that? Was he not in fact telling us, as presumably a good Christian should, that mankind is essentially one, and that if we make a sufficient effort we too can enter into the worlds of others who are in many ways different from ourselves? Was he not implying that the traditional view of literature, that it expresses the universal in the particular, was not only morally and religiously superior, but empirically a more accurate description of it as an enterprise than the view of literature as a series of stockades, from which groups of the embittered and enraged endlessly fired arrows at one another without ever quite achieving victory?

There is also a compassionate account of the two differently blighted but mutually contemptuous cultures that "Rahila Khan" described. Many of the stories describe ultimately tragic liaisons between Muslim girls and white boys living in depressed Midlands towns. "Khan" had claimed to have been one and know the other well. The only thing that was untrue in that claim was which half was which:

But from the moment I started to read the stories in Down the Road, Worlds Away (and the title itself should have given a clue to the book’s serious intent, capturing in five words a very important element of modern social reality), I understood that the author was not in any sense perpetrating a hoax, much less a fraud. He was writing in earnest, and not satirizing anyone. For what he described in his stories was only too familiar to me from my work as a doctor, and no one could write so clearly of such matters without a deep sense of purpose.

The Reverend Toby Forward, as it happens, is not the scion of privilege, even of privilege in decline; his biography in outline followed that of Rahila Khan’s very closely. He was born in Coventry in 1950, and did live for many years in the cities of the English Midlands. He did marry in 1971, did have two daughters, did start to write in 1986, and did live in Brighton at the time the book was published.

The Reverend Forward’s knowledge of the kind of people I have been treating as a doctor for many years came to him by a different route from my knowledge of them. It so happens that I have worked in the very same area that the Reverend Forward writes about, where his father was a publican. Both his parents, who were working class, left school when they were fourteen years old. They lived in slum areas of the unlovely cities of the Midlands, and he himself went to schools in which half the pupils were of Indian or Pakistani descent. His early life was lived in precisely the social environment depicted in Down the Road, Worlds Away ...

I hope to read it one day. Sadly, it is difficult to get hold of as the copies not yet sold were pulped by the publishers when the "fraud" was discovered.

Number gut. Shannon Love writes about estimates of dead in the Iraq war.

For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?

Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that's only dead, not dead-and-wounded).

So, with the Falluja cluster included, LIMS asks us to believe that Iraq has suffered a worse proportional aerial bombardment than did Japan during WWII. Common sense compels us to ask: does Iraq look like it suffered such a fate? Where are the mass graves? Where are the leveled cities? Where are the hundreds of thousands of walking wounded? Where are the millions of refugees that such intense fighting must have inevitably produced?

Worse still, given the known geographical areas where the fighting occurred, most of the deaths would have had to be concentrated in an area of 100 klicks or so from Baghdad, which would have meant an even higher percentage of the local population killed and the physical evidence even more obvious. (After the recent publication of the ILCS, it also means that the deaths would have to been compressed in time as well. The ILCS reported only 24,000 war related deaths up until May 25, 2004. For the LIMS to be true, the additional 200,000 deaths would have to have occurred between then and early Sept 2004 when LIMS was conducted. That comes out to roughly 2,000 deaths per day.)

Click, click, click.

That's how often a life is lost by the policies that Make Poverty History wants to entrench. Stephen Pollard says the Make Poverty History campaign would be better called Make Poverty Permanent.

The engine of growth, without which countries remain in poverty, is trade. Tariff protection keeps resources in unproductive, low-return activities such as the type of farming which Make Poverty History seeks to entrench. Free trade shifts resources to more productive uses. Take Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea and India: while they maintained their tariffs, they remained stuck in poverty, the only thing which tariffs protect. As recently as the early 1980s they were poor countries. Their incomes per head ranged from $700 (£350) to $7,000. Today they range from $2,000 to more than $21,000. Even India, one of the world’s poorest nations in the 1960s and 1970s, is on the road to prosperity. In 1991 the Indian Government reacted to a financial near-collapse by cutting forty years of bureaucratic control in seven hours. Its economy now grows much faster than its population and India is becoming one of the leading exporters of computer software and services. There is a vast new middle class of 250 million.

Lee Moore

writes:

I was amused to see that what you describe as the Guardian's belated conversion to the idea of limited government, to which you linked on 16 May, concludes with a complaint about the government's reluctance to ban people from working more than 48 hours a week. I think we can rest easy - the Guardian is still on the side of those who would guard us from ourselves.

Oh, the relief. Actually, though my understanding is that the directive concerned will mostly stop shop and factory employees from such predatory behaviour. Creative types like Guardian writers will find all sorts of let-outs.