'Nother Solent

Disaster strikes - massive death toll - fissures in society revealed.

According to the BBC the World of Warcraft has been hit by a virtual plague.

The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.

Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing "hundreds" of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.

The first place hit was the Orc capital, Ogrimmar. (My local expert tells me that Orcs are by no means necessarily bad guys in Warcraft.) Some say the plague was started deliberately. I blame G W Bush.

It would be interesting to see if the virtual plague mutates into a less instantly lethal form, as in the real world syphilis did. The hypothesis is that a disease that has a long incubation period has an evolutionary advantage, in that the carrier has years of life in which to infect others. The experiment will not take place: those in charge of the game don't want to lose vast swathes of their customer base and are trying to edit the disease out of the software that runs the game. Deus ex machina indeed.

UPDATE: More on this story from Black Triangle.

My daft dog.

Enough politics, on to the important questions in life. I often take my dog for walks down the old railway track in the company of a friend of mine and her dog.

On the outward leg of the walk the two dogs get along fine. On the return leg, however, my dog gets embarrassing. He, um, exhibits dominance behaviour. I don't need any explanations about the behaviour itself, but why does it only happen on the return journey?

Unbelievably stupid.

Thanks to EU-imposed "safety" restrictions on the use of MRI scanners some of us - perhaps you - will be denied potentially lifesaving treatments or early diagnosis. Read The Scotsman and EU Serf for more.

Another thing: children will be exposed to more X-rays.

More bishop-bashing

from A Progressive Viewpoint. (Hat tip: Laban Tall). The writer, Paul Dennett, concentrates on the report of the working group itself and leaves the apology stuff as a coda. He says he's read all one hundred and one pages. Strong man. So far I have but skimmed it.

It isn't so bad. Much of it I would praise if it came served in bite-sized chunks from some liberally inclined blogging collective. One wouldn't want to make them lose confidence... What? Curse that Dennett knave, he has already bagged the absolute prime bit of nonsense that I had reserved for myself. The bishops said:

The Strategy emphasises providing security for the American ‘Self’. This ‘Self’ should not be compromised either by institutional arrangements, or by ‘Other’ states’ understanding of security. This policy of American exceptionalism reserves for itself the right to determine who are its friends and enemies.

Dennett writes:

It is truly remarkable how a statement wreathed in academic and quasi-psychological terminology can be so completely facile. If the right to determine America's friends and enemies does not reside with America, then with whom precisely does it reside? What about the UK? Who gets to choose our friends and enemies? What about Russia? What about any other country in the world? But no, let's single out America.

All he's left me with is that bit from page 13:"Although the Church has no direct contribution to make in the field of intelligence..." You don't say? Father Unwin won't be on the case, then?

The teacher's tale.

Ah, I had heard of "Shuggy's blogspot" after all, just yesterday. Laban Tall linked to this tale from the trenches. It seems that Shuggy's colleague, "Fred", who like him teaches in a school in Glasgow...

Stop right there! Just because you heard the words "school in Glasgow" you needn't just assume you know how the rest of the story is going to go. OK, in this case your assumption would be right, but I'm sure it isn't always.

(Outraged Glaswegians, do feel free to write in with examples of why "school in London" is about as good a bet that a tale of mayhem unpunished is about to start.*)

An update gives the flavour:

The offender hasn't been excluded but simply shifted from one section to another. The reason? Fred has been informed that this is because the allegation concerning the swearing cannot be disproved since there were no witnesses! Fred said to his head of department, "So that means I can give you a slap and get away with it if I claimed you swore at me afterwards?"

*Come to think of it, I'll save you the trouble. When I taught at a school in London I remember the headteacher (an energetic man who had considerably improved the school) frankly confessing that there was little point in excluding pupils as they would only be shunted off to another school, and that other school would then take revenge by shunting its troublemakers our way. Sometimes, just sometimes, the mere move would improve the child's behaviour but that was unusual.

How pirates really talked.

Odious of Odious and Peculiar has posted what I think is the constitution of a pirate company.

XI. The musicians to have rest on the Sabbath Day, only by night, but the other six days and nights, not without special favour.

I am glad that the musicians' need to have an acceptable work-life balance was respected to some extent. Not to mention the Sabbath.

Article VI suprised me.

At least it brought people together.

Folk of many faiths and none agree what twits bishops can be:

me,
Midwest Conservative Journal,
Normblog, Normblog again,
Leading article in the Telegraph,
Daimnation!,
Stephen Pollard (appeared in the Times),
Harry's Place,
Dodgeblogium

That was just a morning's surfing; skewed, naturally, towards my blogroll. But I thought it was significant that so many of these posts were not triggered by other bloggers. Quite a few people independently saw reports of the bishops' proposal for an apology to Muslims for the Iraq war and were annoyed enough to write about it.

Added later: I expect more commentary as bloggers do pass the story on. The interest this has generated is of interest in itself. Some more posts follow. I may keep adding to the list for a while:

Talking Hoarsely,
UK Commentators,
Shuggy's Blogspot (a blog new to me, kindly pointed out by a reader),
A Progressive Viewpoint (more about that here),
Social Affairs Unit blog (Hat tip: Laban Tall),
Nick Cohen (Ditto)

All this business in Basra is very odd.

Stuff is going on. Some of this story seems ominous (the reported infiltration of the Iraqi police by the Mehdi army) and some of it, frankly, is funny. That wall coming down will be in a film some day.

I suppose I shouldn't say that if reports that two or three rioters were killed are correct. If. They seem curiously nameless.

Many people were shocked by TV pictures of the riot that showed soldiers in burning uniforms abandoning their Warrior fighting vehicles (sort of APCs with knobs on.)

The rioters paid the British Army quite a compliment: they relied on the basic decency of the people they were attacking. My husband talked for forty-two seconds on the stuff for killing people that a Warrior fighting vehicle has on it. Can't quite recall it all, but stuff like "30mm RARDEN cannon" and "7.62mm chain gun" was in there. Not that they needed it; they could have escaped by pressing the accelerator if they had been willing to drive over a few human bodies to do it. Instead they got out and ran. Doesn't look as cool but doesn't kill anyone either. Since as far as I can tell that section of the rioting crowd threw stones at them but didn't try to kill them, their judgement call was vindicated.

Not killing people is nearly always a good idea, if one can decently avoid it.

I denounce them and curse them! Blogger people!

Here are some bloggers I have been jealous of recently:

Bilious Young Fogey. He has the ability to coin aphorisms. See here ("Special treatment always backfires - equal treatment never does") and here ("Transcending one's own nature to do something is admirable, but transcending human nature to do something is heroism").

Tim Blair documents the explosive memoirs of Mark Latham. Scroll up down and sideways for more and more and probably more to come. I am rather glad Mr Latham did not become the Prime Minister of Australia in the recent election. So is nearly every member of his own party with whom he has ever had dealings.

Sporadic Chronicle reports on how Robert Fisk in the Independent has switched from saying a civil war in Iraq was imminent due to American machinations to saying that a civil war in Iraq is unthinkable and anyone who says different is an American puppet. The Chronicle also knew that I needed to see a picture of a cat stuck to a wall and linked to the supremely funny reaction to Team America from which I took the title of this post, although the person quoted, a correspondent to a pro-North Korean forum, did not actually say "blogger."

Not with a bang but a simper

is the way the Church of England will end. I learn from the BBC that a new report is out in which some Church of England bishops suggest that Christian leaders should apologise to Muslim leaders for the war in Iraq. The BBC story says:

A report from a working group of bishops says the war was one of a "long litany of errors" relating to Iraq.

As the government is unlikely to offer an apology, a meeting of religious leaders would provide a "public act of institutional repentance", it said.

Here are my objections, in no particular order.

• Let's face it, the bit of the apology addressed to the Iraqis would be ticklish to write. "Dear Iraqis, we are so sorry we in the West didn't spend even longer leaving you to the care of Saddam Hussein. [Look at the size of those body bags.] In our ethnocentric arrogance some of us failed to realise that massacres like this and this and this have to be allowed to continue in order to preserve world peace. Had we truly, humbly listened to those who speak for you we would have realised that people in your culture accept being treated like that and that you consider democracy an imposition."

  
  

• OK, forget all that. Let's shovel all those dead Iraqis back into the sand and imagine for a moment that I and everyone else whose backside ever warmed a pew have unanimously decided that the bishops are right: the war was a bad thing.
  

  The bishops making a public apology for it would still be deeply dishonest. They didn't support the war. Everybody knows they didn't and they know everybody knows it. It's a fine bargain - you pay in a penny's worth of pseudo-repentance for someone else's alleged sins and get back a pound's worth of plaudits for your humility. Even better than that, you get to jab at your political enemies in circumstances where they can't jab back.
  

  Perhaps I am being too harsh. When in 1940 C. S. Lewis wrote a still relevant essay called "Dangers of National Repentance", he was kinder. (This post from Photon Courier describes how the essay came to be written.) Here is a quote from it:

  The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing - but, first, of denouncing - the conduct of others. If it were clear to the young penitent that this is what he is doing, no doubt he would remember the law of charity. Unfortunately the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature. By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the Government not 'they' but 'we'. And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government which is called 'we' is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice. You can say anything you please about it. You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practising contrition.

  
  

• Have these "working groups" of bishops no other work to do? Is the Gospel so widely followed in this realm that the Lords Spiritual can spare the time to waffle on about matters about which they are no better informed than the average middle manager? "The harvest is plenteous but the labourers few." Yea verily, and the few we have can't be with us at the moment because they are discussing sustainable energy, or the Ghanaian agricultural subsidy regime, or whether Jacksonian nationalism is a good influence on American foreign policy.

  
  

• Which brings me to the next one. It's not obvious, guys. Even leaving out every other question about the Iraq war, it's not obvious that the deaths caused will outnumber the lives saved. It's not obvious that the Christian Aid/Oxfam line will actually help the world's poor. It's not obvious that the Kyoto accords matter. Not everyone agrees. Quite often, you know, even people of great goodness and wisdom disagree on this sort of thing. Quite often, looking back after a few years have gone by, propositions that seemed obvious to almost the entire educated class turn out to be wrong. I suspect, my lords, that sixty years ago a majority of the bishops of the Church of England believed in the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. I suspect that a few centuries earlier the vast majority of your predecessors believed in winning souls to Christ by force. I am pretty sure none of you hold the latter proposition now.

  
  

• "Not in my name" is a slogan we hear much. Now it's my turn to use it. Jesus gave almost no specific guidance on politics. Christians are obliged to assume that He didn't just forget, He knew what He was doing when He left us to figure out what loving your neighbour as yourself meant in practice. The particular guesses some bishops make shouldn't dress themselves up as the voice of the church. With every pronouncement the bishops make in support of sectional and temporary currents of opinion a few more Christians decide that the bishops don't speak in their name and walk out through the doors of their local Anglican church for the last time. Some of them might find another church to go to; others won't. Is the faith of the latter group weak, that they drop away for such a peripheral reason? Yes. But where faith is weak the Church should be in the business of strengthening it, not weakening it further. This aspect would be as bad if the sectional opinion the bishops happened to hold was in perfect agreement with mine.

  
  

• Be warned. This institutional repentance stuff is dangerous. When you proffer your apologies to the Muslim leaders (which ones, by the way?) for things that other Christians did, are you going to ask them to apologise for things that other Muslims did? If not, why not?
  

  I do not say there is no place for institutional repentance. It was a good thing, as the report says, that the Catholic Church apologised for the Inquisition and for pogroms against Jews and others, because these acts clearly were evil, were done in the name of Christianity, and in many cases were ordered by the direct predecessors in office of those giving the official apology. By all means say that a special duty falls on Christians to keep their religion free of inquisitions and pogroms in the future, just as a special - and presently more urgent - duty falls upon Muslims to get and keep their religion free of terrorism.
  

  But if you set a precedent of apology for acts not your own you also set a precedent that apologies can be demanded for acts not your own. You will encourage people to demand that their Muslim co-workers and neighbours must not merely disavow but apologise for 9/11 and 7/7 and whatever other pairs of numbers the Islamofascists are yet to give the world. Group repentance implies group guilt. That could get ugly.
  

ADDED MONDAY EVENING: I have added one or two connecting sentences to the post above. And here is a story in the Guardian about the same report. It said the working party consisted of four diocesan bishops, all from the liberal wing of the C of E.

Later post here.

The Britblog roundup

awaits you here.

Just explain already!

The lesson in church today was the parable of the workers in the vineyard. For years I didn't understand that parable, until someone explained to me that it meant that people who have striven to be good their whole lives have no right to say to God, "Hey, you owe me first-class heaven after all I've done for you! That reprobate over there who repented on his deathbed should only get eighth-class heaven."

On the subject of needing to have things explained, someone sent me a very angry email about this post. I shot them back a reply just saying "read the last line again." However, while still under the good influence of church, I have reflected that if I didn't get this famous parable until it was explained to me, despite millions of others having understood it without difficulty, maybe it would be better if I simply stated what I was trying to say in my possibly rather obscure post in explicit terms.

So here's the explanation. The post was intended to use irony and understatement to lead the reader to the opposite conclusion to the meaning the words held at first sight. The intended moral was that one should judge by other criteria; that to be an innocent person who dies in agony, or to be a brave person who dies in an unsuccessful attempt to help others, is infinitely better than to be an evil person and triumph in your goals.