'Nother Solent

Muslims having fun. What is your problem with that? A piece for Samizdata.

Here is a Guardian article

on women political bloggers.

"The internet is an unfriendly place for women wanting to write about politics. Ros Taylor asks why - while we profile the British bloggers daring to speak out."

I was nearly in. Exchanged emails with Guardian beings. But in the end I was not worthy.

Begone, hideous capitalist hellbound hellbeasts of hell!

Because why not say it?

A hideous capitalist hellbound hellbeast of hell might be passing.

Sure you can open up shop. Just don't dare sell anything.

Via a blog called Education in India, I found this article in the Hindu from a couple of months back.

Call to ban commercialisation of education

NEW DELHI: Even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is seeking more private investment in higher education, educationists want privatisation to be restricted "to the minimum desirable level." Also, they have called for a tax on the industry to raise resources for higher education.

Such is their angst against privatisation and commercialisation of higher education that the majority view at a recent meeting on the issue — organised by the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration — favoured a law banning such commercialisation. "All commercialisation of education, which should be unambiguously defined, should be banned by a suitable act of Parliament." This was one of the recommendations of the meeting of 64 eminent educationists here earlier this week.

The author of the Education in India blog, Satya, comments:

The State has, over the past 58 years, been unable to create enough opportunities to provide higher education for all through state funding alone and has pretty much abdicated its responsibility to the private sector. How many new state funded higher education institutions have been set up in the last ten years when compared to the number of new institutions set up in the private sector in the same period? Why should privatisation be restricted to a minimum desirable level, when the State is unable to meet the demand?

I think I detected a certain irony of tone in the next paragraph of the Hindu's account of the educationists' views.

However, they are not closed to the idea of private participation. "Private investors in education may be encouraged. However, it must be made clear that this cannot be for profit-making purposes, in however disguised a form.

Thanks, guys. Now you've made that clear, why not just say, "Begone, hideous capitalist hellbound hellbeasts of hell" and have done with it?

It ain't as simple as just walking away.

JEM writes,

While not resiling from Tim Worstall's concerns about the EU, or yours, it really has to be pointed out that our present entirely home-grown government is doing a pretty effective job of ending or debauching "... our juries and the rights bequeathed to us through 800 years of evolution of the Common Law..." in any case, without any help from our continental neighbours. Indeed you could reasonably argue that one of the few constraints that prevent our even more rapid descent into a new dark age is the restrictions on UK domestic legislation imposed by the European human rights conventions.

It is also worth pointing out that differences in legal systems are not necessarily a fatal flaw. For instance, the law of the State of Louisiana is based on the French legal system [Hey, that's my factiod! - NS] but nevertheless works well enough within the United States, as does the French-based system of Quebec within Canada. Indeed, the legal system of Scotland, which is not Common Law but Roman Law, works well enough inside the UK context.

In short, to coin a phrase, the present arrangements here and with the EU are not fit for purpose.

However there is no simple or quick way to fend off these serious dangers to our liberties. Departing from the EU might even make things worse, and it is in fact possible to live with different legal systems within a larger entity. In my view one of the fundament problems with the EU is that despite being a much less homogenous collection of nations and peoples, it attempts to bind them much more closely together in so many ways than does the United States does with its individual states.

I have come to the personal conclusion that the only answer to Britain's real problem is a written Constitution, Bill of Rights and Supreme Court that cannot be over-ruled by Parliament. And a second chamber (which I would rename 'Senate' so that people would take it seriously) that is entirely elected, probably by proportional representation and on longish fixed terms such as six or eight years, and has the power to veto the Commons -- just as the Commons should have the power to veto the Senate.

Paralysis, you say? Laws would not get passed? Government would be less powerful, less effective? Power would pass from whips to individual MPs and Senators? You have a problem with this?

But this would... could not... happen quickly or easily. It would take time.

And it ain't as simple as just walking away from the EU.

JEM

I too wish we had a written constitution - but I am frightened to get one now. If our Constitution had been written when the Americans wrote theirs it would be, as theirs is, a tightly drawn specification for an arena in which politics can take place. If our first few amendments had been made when the Americans made theirs, British schoolchildren would recite sentences beginning Parliament shall make no law ...

A constitution written in these dismal times would be, as the proposed EU constitution was, an attempt to set managed social democracy in stone. The right to a job. Freedom from offensive speech. The right to be protected from yourself.

Basically, I only want a constitution if it can be old. In fact old and dead. Pretty much dead, anyway, the way the captain is in Dark Star, only woken up for important stuff. A "living constitution" is no constitution at all. If I want something that will grow, change, exhibit volition and excrete all over my floor, I'll get a puppy.

Drunken post from Brian Micklethwait.

I know, you don’t care about cricket. I respect that. I despise it, but I respect it.

Weird eh? Unlimited overs: Surrey brilliant. Twenty overs: Surrey brilliant. Fifty overs: Surrey crap. I’m baffled, and presumably they are too.

I put it in italics because they look more drunk.

Mine eyes have seen the hell that awaits

argumentative bloggers. Via Joanne Jacobs, I found this account of a trainee maths teacher's experience at an American school of Education: "There are no wrong answers"

The problem could have many answers, a concept beloved by ed school types who believe that problems with only one correct answer limit students’ critical thinking skills. “Open-ended” problems with many answers, on the other hand, reduce math anxiety because it relieves the pressure to produce THE correct answer. Students are thus liberated to be creative and use “higher order thinking skills”. I pointed out that the problem was not so much open-ended as it was ill-posed.

“Yes, it is ill-posed,” he agreed. There were no arguments in this class; only insights, discussions, and agreement. This is ed school: there are no wrong answers. Just the “greater truth” which will eventually prevail.

Had I been there you'd have heard a fizzing noise: my guts working their way from Uranium to Thorium ...

No such epiphanies occurred that night, however. One student said that the scratch-on-the-floor problem actually made her more anxious because she wasn’t sure what she was doing wrong. The teacher said “Yes, I agree,”

... Protactinium ...

and concluded that perhaps the best way is to tell the students at the outset that there is more than one right answer.

... Radium, Polonium, Bismuth ...

I suggested asking the students what additional information should be provided to make the problem well defined. “I agree,” he agreed again.

... and all the way down to Lead.

There were no comments from the class as the professor told this tale. The future math teachers said nothing and showed no emotion, not even a grimace.

Because they were having a good day.

Quote of the day.

Bringing down the cost of things is one of the things the free market system is great at doing. Socialists used to claim that socialism was more efficient and better at cutting prices than capitalism. Now that has been totally destroyed as an idea, they say that capitalism's cutting of prices in unfair. Whatever.

- Alex Singleton.

As you know, I have no shame

about re-posting my comments on other blogs here. Waste not, want not.

I am a tad ashamed of my comment to this post of Tim Worstall's though. Not the words but the typos. Here's the corrected version. I was replying to an earlier commenter called Alex.

Alex writes, "Or we could just vote against this proposal."

And the next similar proposal. And the next after that, which is also similar but they will assure us is quite different. And the next after that, which comes at a difficult time for the British premier when he wants EU goodwill over some other issue. And the next after that, which is smuggled in as part CCLXVII of something else entirely. And then maybe there's a referendum, and we do vote against it, and so then there's another referendum - only this time round the opposition are right out of money, volunteers and energy, having spent it all campaigning for the last one; while the EU campaign chest is magically refilled by taxpayers' money.

With the EU "voting against it" is not allowed to be final; voting for it is final. I think we need to leave.

Posted by: Natalie Solent | Jun 28, 2006 1:39:56 PM

What was this proposal that all the fuss was about? Oh, only the end of our own laws, our juries and the rights bequeathed to us through 800 years of evolution of the Common Law. Worstall writes:

Indeed, most of those protections were introduced entirely to protect us from that State: something many forget, that the limitations on evidence and trials are not to protect criminals, but to protect the innocent from being proclaimed criminals for political reasons.

Our continental friends have very different legal systems. Very different indeed. No juries, to start with. So if we are to have EU wide criminal law, clearly there will be harmonisation. And it doesn’t take intelligence of the genius level to see that when the UK and Eire are on one side, with our own distinctive systems, and 23 are on the other, with their, which way the harmonisation is going to go.

Now we are to have this without a national veto, now it will be the result of majority voting. That will be the end of it, one of the two great inventions of these Isles. The English language will survive but the Common Law legal system will not.

Interesting picture from "Elder of Ziyon". He writes:

Remember when Israel first mentioned the possibility that the Gaza family had been killed by a Hamas bomb buried on the beach? Pro-terror Hamas supporters scoffed that Hamas would never do something like that - bury explosives in areas that Palestinian Arab children might play.

Thanks to the AP photographers/terrorist groupies, we see that perhaps they would

- Hat tip, Archduke of The Devil's Kitchen in Biased BBC comments.

Bleeding-heart New Statesman style twaddle on page 20 of today's Times

from a column by John Kampfner:

That we have one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the developed world seems lost on the bellicose "prison works" lobby.

It's not lost on them. They know and they don't care. The per capita incaceration rate in Britain relative to some other countries is a matter of indifference to them. Kampfner is trying to say - or rather jumping straight over saying - that if prison is so great how come Britain has a high incarceration rate and yet still has quite high crime? But his assumption that those who disagree only disagree because they have failed to understand is annoying in a way I associate with Mr Blair. Scarcely anyone in the "prison works" lobby can have got as far as being in a lobby without meeting that argument and getting over it. Getting over it is not hard. "Prison works" is a more modest claim than "incaceration rate x will result in crime rate y." "Prison works" merely says that crime rate y would be higher if prison were not used. It says nothing about the multifarious causes that can make crime rate y high or low to start with.

Incidentally, something I've never understood is why the "prison does not work" lobby never seem to come out and advocate that all the prisons be dismantled. You'd think it would follow.

Populist Daily Mail style twaddle on page 21 of today's Times from a column by Valerie Grove:

And it is good to hear Lord Falconer of Thoroton recognising the “aching” pain of murder victims’ families, and promising to allow them to make statements in court about how their loss has affected them. Perhaps he has forgotten that he (and Mr Blair) belong to the profession that has always turned the knife in bereaved families’ wounds by mouthing murderers’ defences, traducing the characters of murder victims, while their families have listened helplessly.

Because everyone accused of murder is guilty. Because never in all history has anyone been had up for murder through mistaken identity, or when all they were trying to do was defend themselves from attack, or when the killing was accidental. Nor has there ever been a justified defence of provocation or manslaughter or extenuating circumstances in legal history. Furthermore even if by some impossible chance any person ended up in the dock for murder who was not fully a murderer then obviously all he has to do read a few law books and jolly well speak up for himself. Who could possibly be so ignorant or inarticulate as to need some steenking lawyer to tell him what the law is or to "mouth" his defence? These things being so, we should only have prosecution lawyers. On second thoughts, why bother with trials at all?

Polly Toynbee's columm on Jerry Springer the Opera is right to defend the freedom to insult religion. If you read the column you will find such admirable sentiments as:

Meanwhile, free speech is increasingly squeezed by the demands of Muslims for more religious protection, silencing most of the usual voices who should defend the right to cause offence. The Jerry Springer story is small potatoes in comparison - but it's the harbinger of a cowardly culture shift that lets religious intimidation win.

And

Of course an elderly couple of evangelicals shouldn't have had the police summoned by the council for expressing homophobic views. Of course Sir Iqbal Sacranie should be allowed to say homosexuality is harmful without getting a call from police under the Public Order Act: thanks to Blunkett, if a public-order breach is "religiously aggravated" it can get a seven-year sentence. Not satisfied with blasphemy laws, the Vatican wants a new offence of Christianophobia. Sikhs want the right to ban the play Behzti, militant Hindus want naked pictures of a goddess banned. At a free-speech rally recently, an Iranian dissident was charged for holding a placard with one of the Danish cartoons.

Unfortunately one does have to duck a barrage of cheap shots to get to the good stuff. The first paragraph says:

It will have made a hefty loss for its producers, who toured it despite knowing that trouble would dog it and that it would lose money. But they were determined not to let the evangelicals win.

There are hundreds of millions of evangelicals in the world. The percentage of them that were not picketing outside British provincial theatres (although that is a legitimate exercise of free speech) is high. The percentage that were not sending death threats or performing other acts of criminal intimidation over the issue is found by typing nine nine dot nine and then having an episode of narcolepsy with your finger still in place. Ms Toynbee goes to some lengths to say that the show is not mere "schlock and shock", citing good reviews in the Church Times and the Catholic Herald. I myself don't know and don't much care whether the show is good or bad, but it clearly has convinced many that it has merit in itself. So why describe performing the show in such a limited, carping way as "not letting the evangelicals win"?

This will be the last chance to see it, as its co-author Stewart Lee says glumly that he doubts it will ever be performed again. It shows how insidiously the tentacles of religious zeal invade every sphere of national life, despite the very small number of religious practitioners in this most secular of nations.

I started to quibble about this "very small number", then had a biscuit. It's irrelevant. Unless Ms Toynbee wishes to argue that "religious practitioners" will gain the right to tentacular invasion should they ever again become a majority, she should not have brought their numbers, or their tentacles, into the discussion.

There were other bits best ignored, such as the silly boasting about how "only the National Secular Society doesn't blench". But if you value your liberties, believer or atheist, don't ignore this:

The tour was planned for 39 cities, but the furore panicked many venues, especially those run by local councils. Christian Voice wrote to every theatre, warning of prosecution if they put the show on. If it wasn't the blasphemy law then it would be the new, untried "incitement to religious hatred" bill then progressing through parliament.

Note that the Christian Voice organisation didn't have to win any prosecutions in order to get its way. It didn't even have to launch them. In the case of the incitement to religious hatred bill it didn't even need to have the law actually pass Parliament. The mere existence of a hazily defined legal apparatus to suppress free speech that someone might use was intimidating enough.

ADDED LATER: Sometimes I like to come back to my own stuff and argue with it. I imagined myself up a reader who said, "What right have you to say that numbers are irrelevant? You yourself went on about the large number of evangelicals and the small number of protestors and even smaller number using intimidation. That's numbers, isn't it?" "Aha," I answered the upstart, "but the cases are different." When Toynbee spoke of keeping Jerry Springer the Opera going in order not to let "the evangelicals" win, it was disproportionate and petty. Disproportionate because the vast majority of "the evangelicals" were unaware of or indifferent to their alleged participation in any contest, and petty for the same reasons that it is petty to support the right to publish the Danish cartoons merely or mainly to stop "the Muslims" winning. Incidentally, here in Britain "evangelical" has usually just meant the Low Church party of the Church of England. I gather that Evangelicals in the US lay more stress on the inerrancy of the Bible. Polly Toynbee seems to use it in the US sense.

Numbers really are irrelevant, I maintained to my imaginary self, when defending concepts like state secularism (which Britain has, a few relics notwithstanding) or freedom of speech. These concepts attempt to provide a neutral framework in which incompatible views can coexist, so you sell the pass if you concede that numbers of adherents are what count. The whole idea is that you should refrain from imposing the will of the majority.

Will these slanders against the son of Sweyn Forkbeard never end?

The latest traducer is Adam Sage, writing in the Times:

However, M de Villepin’s determination to buck the markets is proving futile and damaging — futile because he does not have the power to do so and damaging because it prevents his compatriots from accepting the reality of globalisation.

After the French Government announced its opposition to Mittal’s offer, ministers realised their powerlessness. The decision lay not with them, but with Arcelor’s shareholders. They were acting like King Canute.

Canute commanded the waves knowing they would not obey, as a rebuke to flatterers. I suppose it could be that M. de Villepin is engaged in a self-abnegating campaign to persuade the French that even an énarque and a poet cannot buck the market, but I doubt it.

"How many Moslems are there in India?" asks John Weidner.

There are two other "fronts," on both of which we have made substantial and fairly measurable progress. First, the roots of most of the terrorism are found in the despotism and hopelessness that exist in many Moslem countries. When people don't have personal opportunities, and can't vote out bad leaders, this combines with certain other frustrations common in the Moslem world into a dangerous brew. It is easy to assess this by asking: How many Moslems are there in India? (about 130 mil.) And how many have joined al Qaeda? None that I've heard of.

Hence the second front, the Administration's push for democracy and better government in the ME. It's not only a good thing, it is an effective war weapon. (Unfortunately our efforts have been sabotaged and undercut by people who claim to want "peace," and many a brutal murdering tyrant is digging in his heels and "waiting Bush out," hoping for his friends to gain the White House.)

But none the less, we are making clear progress. It is important to remember that, in its capacity as a weapon, democratization does not have to work very well. It doesn't have to be like New Hampshire town meetings. Even if the political battles get murderous, they still mean that the focus is internal and political. Even with the violence in certain parts of Iraq, we don't hear of Iraqis heading off to terrorist training camps or madrassas elsewhere. They are focused on their own political scene. And thanks to our friends at al Jazeera, the whole Arab world is watching. This movement isn't going to stop.

Rape, Hamas and development funding.

I have a post up at Biased BBC that discusses this paragraph from a BBC story:

Sexual violence has also been linked to development funding. Cases in Gaza and the West Bank have increased significantly since the EU and the US cut funding after January's election of Hamas, Luay Shabaneh of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics says.