'Nother Solent

"Clouding debate" by providing a clearer picture.

Tuesday's Times says that "New foetal scans 'clouded debate on late abortion'"

Sophisticated ultrasound scans that show foetuses as early as 12 weeks appearing to “walk” in the womb have had a dangerous impact on the public debate over abortion, leading doctors and scientists said yesterday.

I think we can assume that none of these leading doctors and scientists are Roman Catholics. But perhaps their discomfort with the availability of raw information to an ignorant and excitable public, unmediated by the explanations of a priestly caste, will give them a sympathetic historical understanding of the views of the Catholic hierarchy during the reign of Mary Tudor?

I jest. Mostly. Given that the Catholics themselves are so frightfully dull nowadays, I am sure that "leading doctors and scientists", progressives to a person, will not seek to imitate the robust methods of information control practised in the reign of Bloody Mary. However I will keep a lookout for efforts to make these scanner pictures not too easily available, or to ensure that they are only available with bucketfuls of commentary.

Senator Feingold,

co-sponsor with the Twelfth or 'Hidden' President of what they called the reform of US campaign finance, would permit free speech without restriction ... to telepathic ghosts.

There have always been those who contend that regulating how money may be spent on speech is a far cry from directly censoring speech. But this would be true only in a fantasy world of telepathic ghosts, in which universal communication of any message to all parties were immediate and costless. In the real world, the one in which ends cannot be achieved without recourse to some means of achieving those ends, if a newspaper is prohibited from paying its bills, and/or all vendors are prohibited from providing the newspaper with any services -- well, the newspaper is just not going to be able to convey its news and views as it had done before.

(Via the Laissez-Faire Books blog.)

The internet brings us nearer to being telepathic ghosts capable of immediate, costless communication. So they'll reform that next if they can.

"You're better than Hitler,"

I told a friend of mine recently.

She was showing me her watercolours at the time, and this Times article about an auction of Hitler's paintings was open on the table. Here's a quote from the article:

Frank van Leemput, a lawyer who travelled from Antwerp for the auction, said: "These paintings are truly awful. If they are from the hand of the monster they explain some of the frustration that led to him becoming what he did. He wanted to be a painter, but had no talent. The result was one of the occasions the Devil truly did show his face on Earth."

It's quite possible that Mr van Leemput's vehemence was prompted by either he himself or members of his family having suffered terrible things at the hands of the Nazis - but he is still wrong. Hitler's hands did the Devil's work all right, but when he was signing orders for mass extermination, not when he was painting these unaggressive little pictures.

Hitler the watercolourist wasn't bad, writes Ross Clark.

The fact is that Adolf Hitler's artistic career followed the same trajectory of those of tens of thousands of perfectly ordinary people who have failed at the easel, and gives us absolutely no explanation for his subsequent deeds.

Is there some doubt about the evil of these deeds, such that a makeweight insult is needed to tip the scale downwards? I don't think so.

Count no man happy until he is dead.

Sheridan 'confession' on tape

Two months after the socialist politician won libel damages of £200,000 from the News of the World over claims that he took part in orgies, fresh questions were raised about his courtroom victory yesterday when the newspaper published the transcript of a conversation in which he appears to admit to the allegations.

Far be it from me to comment on what really went on behind Cupid's pink-painted shutters, but I cannot help thinking that this latest development is a disappointment in terms of narrative structure. As things stood yesterday the whole drama oozed - er, given that this is all about a libel trial, I had better make that potentially oozed - tragic inevitability. Sheridan's star seemed set to traverse the arc that many have seen as the dramatic ideal. Sheridan's victory contained - potentially contained, I mean, like the oozing - the seeds of his eventual defeat. If only he could have quit while he was ahead! But the same law that gave him his victory would not let him quit: if he was telling the truth then the witnesses against him were lying. Lies in court are perjury. Perjury must be pursued in law. And that pursuit might lose him all.

This videotape reduces the plot to a mere reversal of fortune. Don't you see that to keep the proper form the dénoument must come in court? Short-circuiting the plot like this brings it down from Oedipus Rex to one of the later, tireder episodes of Tales of the Unexpected.

But the fat lady has not sung yet.

Britblog roundup is here again. You knew I wouldn't be able to resist the post by "Barbie's Worst Enemy" showing the first ever Barbie ad, didn't you?

As a child I rejected Barbie in favour of Sindy on the grounds that Barbie's boobs were too big. Then I rejected Sindy in favour of Daisy on the grounds that Sindy looked like a real woman whereas Daisy had an an enticing combination of neoteny and aspirational sex-appeal: an enormous head and teeny hands combined with a torso that looked like it had been passed through the machine that makes ice-cream cones. Three times in two different directions.

Nor should we forget that Daisy's oversized head popped off and rolled around the floor when she was upset. A little girl really bonds with a doll when that happens.

Ask the people on one side of the story for their opinion. Report it as uncontested fact.

When it comes to workplace surveys, that seems to be some newspapers' idea of ground-breaking reporting.

The Independent says that "Nearly half of pregnant women are treated unfairly by their bosses."

The survey, carried out by the Equal Opportunities Commission, in fact says in Section 2.1:

"It is worth noting that in all cases, these definitions arise from women’s perceptions of the ways in which they were treated and, sometimes, their view of what motivated their employer’s behaviour. The survey was not an objective assessment of their treatment. Nor does this treatment necessarily fall under the legal definition of discrimination. Only an employment tribunal can determine whether unlawful sex discrimination or unfair dismissal has occurred. However, the results indicate the widespread nature of what may be termed ‘pregnancy discrimination’, whether a narrow definition relating purely to dismissal or a wider, more inclusive, view of adverse treatment is accepted."

(Italics in original.)

The Independent is not the only paper to do this. Last year I posted about a Telegraph report of a survey on workplace bullying that likewise assumed every accusation was true.

"I have a problem with the language of 'yobs'. It sort of sets up and defines too much a 'self' and 'other'."

Cindy Butts of the Metropolitan Police Authority wishes to become a yob.

That is what she said, isn't it?

That slippery slope to hell.

Instapundit links to this thought-provoking comment by Tom Holsinger to a post about torture by Eugene Volokh.

Claims that torture is not an effective interrogation tool are often made but have no basis in fact. Rather it is an assertion of secular faith.

The real problem in use of torture for interrogation (coercion is not torture) is that torture is so effective at that, and easy to use, that there are powerful incentives to keep on using it in less and less important interrogation situations, followed by a drift to using torture for other purposes, first for intimidation and then to express personal and group power issues.

The French went all the way down that slippery slope to hell in the Algerian War of Independence. Their misuse of torture had strategic consequences.

I think Mr Holsinger may be overstating the ease and effectiveness of torture as a means to get information: surely many victims will say anything, true or false, to make the pain stop. But he is correct to say that the idea that torture is never or rarely successful is wishful thinking. Such is the temper of our times that some who really oppose torture on moral grounds feel the need to claim, or to believe, that it is ineffective as well as wrong. Would that it were so.

Those uppity Danes.

"The question everyone is asking is has Denmark learned its lesson?" Someone should ask Thomas Buch-Anderson of the BBC exactly which lesson he had in mind. (Via Ed Thomas at Biased BBC.)