'Nother Solent

A Liberal Democrat councillor says

that "There is no England" because they let too many immigrants in.

LATER: There was some logical and even angry replies to Mr Arnold's letter the following day, but none of them specifically raised any objection to Mr Arnold's belief that a high proportion of immigrants in a territory makes it incapable of nationhood. You can bet that if a Tory had said that in the pages of the Telegraph, the next day smoke would rise from Independent's letters column, so hot would the indignation burn.

Here's another example of the same double standards in a smaller forum. In comment no. 75 to this Crooked Timber post one Anthony says:

Are secularists so hardened against religion that they don’t want any prominent religious people in the party unless they are trained monkeys who know their role like black Republicans who get trotted out for various GOP events?

Two comments later Brett Bellmore says:

See, that’s what I mean by Democratic racism showing up in different ways. I can only imagine Democratic reactions if a Republican refered to blacks as "trained monkeys". LOL And apparently blacks aren’t allowed to genuinely have different opinions.

Bellmore, whom I take to be a Republican, raises the issue again once or twice but none of the CT comment-thread regulars seem to find it worthy of censure.

Who will hide our shame?

You've heard me before on how the columnist Bernard Levin made me want to be a blogger before blogs existed. I thought it doubly sad that a man so eloquent should die of Alzheimer's. I had had no idea. I had noticed that his last few books seemed gloomier, but he wisely withdrew from writing before mental decline became obvious.

When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, President Reagan made a dignified announcement and disappeared into private life. That did not mean he become a complete recluse and he was sometimes seen around with his retinue, smiling benignly. At least people understood when they met him. Former colleagues who met Harold Wilson, Lord Wilson of Rievaulx as he had then become, in his last years were very hurt that a man with a famous memory stared straight past them as if he had never known them. But not that many people met him.

In the throes of syphilis Lord Randolph Churchill made speeches that were pitiable by some accounts and obviously mad by others. Such was the fraternal solidarity of the House and the deference of the age that the press scarcely breathed a word. Nowadays silence would not be kept, but modern politicians suffering from mental decline have Whips, minders, party leaders and ultimately voters to ensure that their tragedy is not too public for too long.

Journalists going senile have editors to do them the last kindness of refusing to print their work.

Bloggers have ...?

I expect some of us will still be blogging at the age of eighty or ninety or more. In most cases, that will be a fine thing. Society nowadays tends to shove the old out of the discussion. I like to think of some of the names on my links list still gaining readers and influence even though they have been obliged to use a hoverchair for the last twenty years and a brainwave-controlled stylus for ten. And I am sure there is no better way of staying mentally acute than to begin every day with a furious fisking. Some of us, though, will go gaga. It's gonna happen. Three or four of my favourite bloggers at least will go down to senile dementia or Alzheimer's or one of the other Furies that pursue those who commit the crime of living too long. Emails suggesting that the day has already come in my case will be batted aside with a forty-one year old's laugh - but one day the emails might be right and I might refuse to believe it.

I'm imagining the sunny, disinfected lounge of a rest home. One of the residents is hunched over a paper-thin computer, typing in the old fashioned way. I'll imagine him as male since I prefer not to imagine my own possible future. His gnarled fingers can still move at a fair pace across the keyboard although the slurred mutterings that come from him would tell any observer that what he publishes no longer makes sense. The nurses think it's sad. He used to be quite famous. But they know, as we do, that it would be outrageous to take away internet access from a person who has committed no crime. In fact, having grown up in the internet age, they feel it more profoundly than we do. They would no more try to stop him from posting than they would physically gag him.

It took time for him to reach this state. For several years his writing consisted of rambling but still comprehensible screeds that were a source of burning embarrassment to his friends and glee to his enemies. Because he became so verbose as he grew older, his writing from this period is greater in volume than the sharp, witty posts that once won him admirers worldwide.

All sense is gone now. Still he types, adding post after meaningless post to a blog that stretches back through the decades. People still quote the early ones sometimes. Until recently he used to send anyone who gave him a trackback strange emails, alternately hectoring and conspiratorial - but he can no longer manage that process. He can still press "publish" and he does. He laughs sometimes at jokes that only he understands.

He always said it would be a wonderful day when there were no more gatekeepers.

Better than fair trade.

Please don't think I have a blanket objection to "fair trade" products. There is an issue with producers being misled by the fair trade premium into making unwise choices that cannot be sustained. However, so long as buying fair trade does not oblige me to (significantly) contribute to political lobbying that, if successful, would trap Third World countries in failed economic policies, I am happy to pay a little extra to give someone a little extra help. If campaigners wish to use that wonderful capitalist invention, the brand name, to promote ethical behaviour, you won't see me complaining.

Alex Singleton has been arguing that primary producers in fair trade schemes would do better to get involved in packaging and marketing their own wares. It seems that some already do:

As a country-of-origin roaster, we [a company called "Café Britt"] are challenging conventional coffee wisdom, we believe that producing countries are more than raw material suppliers to intermediaries in other countries, we believe that these developing countries can export the finished product with all its value added in the country of origin.

And

Café Britt isn’t all that keen on the Fairtrade mark: in fact, they decided that, despite paying premium prices, the complexity and cost of being on the scheme would be greater than the benefits. In Costa Rica, Café Britt produces some of the raw coffee on its own plantation, but buys the rest from a large number of small farmers. In order to be Fairtrade certified, each of these farmers would require individual auditing and certification (as they don’t belong to a co-operative or to Café Britt directory). That’s just not practical.

Not everyone wants the same level of academic freedom.

Tim Worstall has up a post about Frank Ellis, an unashamedly racist lecturer at Leeds. There is a campaign to oust him. I'd like to post the comment I made there over here, too:

Universities ought to be able to compete as to the degree of extremism they will tolerate on the part of the teaching staff. Some could offer as their selling point that students will have their horizons widened by hearing every view from racism to Stalinism. Others might offer the students, "no crackpot professors here."

Unfortunately, state funding of higher education tends to make such competition difficult, if not forbid it absolutely.

I am not clear on whether the protestors against Ellis seek to change the rules to prevent him working anywhere. That would be out of order in my book, whereas telling Leeds that it would be better off without him is allowable. (Though hypocritical, I bet. Pound to a penny the same NUS protestors defend extreme left-wing professors with ringing declarations on the value of freedom of speech.)

Funnily enough, all this ties in with an earlier TW post arguing that its untrue that markets force you to have too much choice.

While it may actually be true that too much choice causes anxiety, markets in and of themselves help to solve this. An iPod actually does less than many other MP3 players and is by far the most popular.

Let the chips fall where they may.

Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard reports on the vast backlog of captured documents from Saddam's Iraq now being released onto the web.

Released, it should be noted, untranslated, unanalysed, unauthenticated, unmediated.

There is something wonderfully anarchistic about all this. I'm rather thrilled by the thought of every amateur with a copy of Teach Yourself Arabic diving into the documents in the hope of striking gold. Er, pearls. You dive for pearls.

But is it a good way to fight terrorism? On balance, yes. (Brian Micklethwait wrote a pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance about this) There is a risk that information will reach the public that would be more useful shared among six operatives prior to laying an ambush for an Al Qaeda leader - but the fact is that the CIA or whoever hadn't translated it. Too much paper, too little time. No one can lay an ambush based on information held in a crate for three years.

Simply in terms of getting public support for the War On Terror, the Bush administration should have done this long ago. Their credibility suffered a major blow when no WMD turned up. The anti-war side had every right to point out loudly and often that Blair and Bush got their facts wrong. "So did a lot of people, including Saddam's own generals" is a mitigating factor but it doesn't quite wipe the egg off the presidential and prime ministerial faces.

But then, at least in some cases - about two trillion - those who opposed the war went on to proclaim with a certainty way in excess of what the evidence or a reasonable cynicism about the ways of the world warranted that there could not possibly have been cooperation between the religious fanatics of Al Qaeda and the secular regime of Saddam Hussein.

That was always nonsense. It has always been risky to hitch your prestige to a negative assertion. For one thing, Saddam's regime wasn't so secular as all that. Saddam put images of himself taking part in the Haj on postage stamps. And for another, "My enemy's enemy is my friend" has been said in every tongue. I read somewhere about some Word War II British naval types delivering a batch of submachine guns to Communist Chinese guerillas fighting the Japanese. The writer had commented to the other man that the weapons seemed crudely manufactured. "Just as well," said the other. "They'll be using them to fight us in a few years." This would make a better anecdote if I could name the book, but stuff it, strange alliances are ten a penny. Pope Alexander VIII ordered lights to be lit in the Vatican in thanks for King William's victory over the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne.

Many of the miners digging into these documents will be motivated by a desire to score partisan political points. Nowt wrong with that; it makes sense to harness one of the most powerful motives known to man to the public good. The potential benefits, however, are wider. It will help Iraq to know more about its own tortured history. It will help the world to know more about how Saddam's rule functioned in order to better restrain future Saddams. And some of those amateurs may find information that may yet be of help in laying ambushes.

"There were eight of us."

Six men are fighting for their lives in North London after a drug test went horribly wrong. This BBC interview is with one of the two men who got the placebo.

In the introduction the lawyer of one of the victims is quoted:

Ann Alexander, whose 29-year-old client is on a life support machine, said: "There is confusion about whether the drug had actually been tested successfully and safely on animals before the tests on these volunteers."

Things can go wrong even if drugs are tested on animals. But there is no denying that animal testing makes tragedies like this less likely. So argues James Panton, towards the end of this article by Jennifer Cunningham in the Herald.

James Panton, an Oxford politics lecturer, became a founding member of Pro-Test, a group which has organised demonstrations against animal rights extremists, after witnessing the intimidation of scientists and construction workers in Oxford. He believes that the incident in London actually adds weight to his case.
"This news illustrates just how serious the situation would be without animal testing," he says. "We need to test drugs as completely as we can before we get to the point of human trials."

Did you notice his background? I must say that ensuring that a group of people known both for its articulacy and its disproportionate representation in the media and government are personally annoyed with you and your cause was one of those strokes of tactical genius that give me confidence in the future of modern activism.

Don't read

this, you'll only feel bad about yourself for laughing.

Via Infinitives Unsplit.

The NHS is the envy of the world.

Do you envy this man? Not the actors in the black and white still at the top; the man pictured further down.

The hospital sent him home. They sent him home on a Friday evening. Home in a worse state that he went in. They sent him home to his eighty year old wife with one of the worst pressure sores I have seen in years. He has now developed intractable diarrhoea, and it coats the pressure sore. He needs round the clock intensive nursing therapy, including being turned regularly. We cannot do this at home. They cannot do it in hospital it seems either. The nurses are too busy eating pizza or pretending to be doctors.

I have no alternative but to send him back in. He bursts into tears. I am getting very stressed about all this. I cannot do my job. I advise the family to see a lawyer and I take a copy of the photo.

(I found the link to NHS Blog Doctor via Tim Worstall. As he says, "You want to go and read this. Yes, you’ll really want to read this on our Glorious NHS," although the sense of the word "want" he uses is specialised.)

I once said I'd post this article by the Health Editor of the Observer, a man who was once a committed supporter of the NHS, every few months until the NHS went away. I've let that resolution slip in the last year or two. Wrongly.

Too long have I written about the tragedies and cruelty of the National Health Service; too long have we as a country accepted it. The Government can fiddle with it as long as it likes, but the very structure of the NHS ensures it will never be world class. The noble ideology of communism had to be ditched because it didn't work. So the noble ideology behind the NHS should be ditched because it costs lives. We should ditch the ideology and ditch the NHS.

I've put the What Killed Slavery discussion here to bed

, wished it night-night and turned off the light. Yes, even despite some eloquent letters from regular correspondents. I felt it was time for one of those editorial decisions - I'm played out on that subject.

(I will just observe that the estate of the late Barbara Tuchman must be doing well: absolutely everyone seems to have read A Distant Mirror.)

However, if any participants in the debate on this blog still want to read or comment about a closely related matter, why not go over to this post by Ginny at Chicago Boyz? Jim Miller already has.

This is where being a science fiction fan gets you.

The recent lethal outburst of gang warfare in Salford is no laughing matter, as I should be the first to say having posted thus the other day.

But I have to admit that for a moment the mental picture created by one particular word in this Times account of the Salford violence had me gasping in something close to delighted wonder.

The two men, wearing beanie hats, walked into the pub and then pulled the woollen rims over their faces to reveal home-made balaclavas. Some drinkers dived for cover beneath pool tables as the pair produced automatic weapons and fired at least four shots.

I'd misunderstood, of course. My years of going to SF conventions where funny costumes are commonplace had put it into my head that the phrase "beanie hat" usually implied a propeller on top.

A deep well of strange delights.

Via the estimable Odious and Peculiar, I have discovered Laputan Logic.

This post is about the kakure kirishitan, the "hidden Christians" of Japan. They remained faithful through centuries of persecution... but the faith they kept changed.

...for example, of the young Holy One debating with Buddhist priests, as 12-year-old Jesus was said to have done with the Jewish elders. Two men, Ponsha and Piroto (ie, Pontius Pilate), are told to kill all children of five and under, an echo of Herod's order. Mary gives birth in a stable, but the innkeeper who had spurned her then takes her in: in a wonderfully Japanese touch, he offers her a hot bath.