'Nother Solent

"... Each discovering in its turn that there are no checks on its ambitions ..."

Andrew Coyne:

That would be, by my count, the seventh such test the UN has undergone in recent years, all of which it has failed with flying colours: Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq (17 times!), with Iran the next in line. Each time, the UN is warned it risks "going the way of the League of Nations" -- you know, after it failed to prevent Mussolini's annexation of Abyssinia. Huh? It's been one long League of Nations since the start, an endless series of Abyssinias.

And

We simply do not have the stomach for this fight. We will learn no lessons from this latest crisis, as we have learned none from those before. But be assured our adversaries will. In Iran, they are watching and learning from North Korea's example, as North Korea had learned from Iran's, each discovering in its turn that there are no checks on its ambitions, nor any world to stop it. And when, as the wisest heads advise, we abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, and Iraq to al-Qaeda, the nuclear bazaar really will be open.

Still, I don't want to leave you with the impression that all is dark. It could be worse. Just imagine if Saddam Hussein was still in power.

(Via Daimnation)

Peverse incentives again.

Via the Globalisation Institute, a sad post from Tim Hartford.

The view from my upstairs window in Hackney has changed a little now that the beautiful old neighbourhood church has been flattened. The church disappeared almost overnight despite attempts to preserve it - or, more accurately, because of attempts to preserve it. No surprise to an economist, but what's going on?

The story is simple. Hackney Council was discussing the possibility of extending a conservation area to include the church. Once that happened, it would be difficult to get permission to demolish the church and build something else. The developers weren't stupid, and knocked the old building down while they still could.

The heir to Mountbatten.

I fear that these remarks by the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, have made it a little more likely that Iraq will suffer something like the horrors of the Partition of India:

In March of 1947 Lord Mountbatten was sent to take over the viceroy, and encountered a situation in which he feared a forced evacuation of British troops. He recommended a partition of Punjab and Bengal in the face of raging civil war. Gandhi was very opposed to the idea of partition, and urged Mountbatten to offer Jinnah leadership of a united India instead of the creation of a separate Muslim state. However, Nehru would not agree to that suggestion. In July Britain's Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, which set a deadline of midnight on August 14-15, 1947 for "demarcation of the dominions of India." As a result, at least 10 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs fled their homes to seek sanctuary on whichever side of the line was favorable to them. The ensuing communal massacres left at least one million dead, with the brunt of the suffering borne by the Sikhs who had been caught in the middle. Most of them eventually settled in Punjab.

He's now saying that the media blew his comments out of proportion to wrongly suggest there was a "chasm" between him and the government. No doubt they did. But he should have known they would.

Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, I had a lot of sympathy with his views.

Why terms like "climate change denialist" are very bad propaganda.

Brendan O'Neill writes

The demonisation of 'climate change denial' is an affront to open and rational debate.

He quotes someone who wants to make climate change denial an offence and someone else who wants "some sort of climate Nuremberg." The Nuremberger has since retracted it - see here - but there are plenty of other people about using the terms climate change "denialist" or "denier" in an effort to make them sound equivalent to the likes of David Irving. Those who use these terms generally say they don't intend to make this parallel. I don't believe them.

More to the point, I believe in climate change less because of them.

In case you're wondering, I do largely believe in climate change - but that belief is second hand. Nothing wrong with that, most of everybody's beliefs are second hand. We accept the consensus of experts. (I don't really want to get into a discussion of the role of consensus in science, or the issues of whether climate change is happening, is anthropogenic, or might actually be a good thing. Being able to spell "anthropogenic" is effort enough.) The consensus convinces because there is no good reason to suppose that so many eminent scientists are lying or deceiving themselves when they say climate change is happening. But if you give me cause to believe that departure from the consensus gets a person ostracised, then there is a good reason.

I wasn't proud of that.

I am, however, proud to have played some role in inspiring this.

T'on n'y blé?

I could bring together

the themes of the last two posts by saying that none of the British quality papers in their coverage of the latest Lancet study has mentioned that one of the authors, Les Roberts, recently ran for Congress as a Democrat. Until he dropped out of the race in May, he was one of the candidates in New York State's 24th congressional district. Here is his position paper on Iraq and here's an interview with him for a website supporting the left wing of the Democratic party called That's my Congress. Here's another interview, this time with Socialist Worker Online.

Three of the authors of the two general studies of casualties in Iraq (Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta and Gilbert Burnham) are also the authors of The Role of Small Arms during the 2003-2004 Conflict in Iraq. It was produced by the Small Arms Survey. The Survey is a gun control organisation "dedicated to documenting the effects of small arms on social well-being and public health throughout the globe."

From the various links above, I think we can get a picture of Les Robert's politics. He is a transnational progressive.

His politics do not mean that his figures are wrong. [ADDED LATER: I think, however, that his politics make certain types of error more likely. LATER STILL: I keep not making myself clear. What I meant to say was that his politics are not in themselves a sufficient reason to suppose him wrong, although they are one factor contributing to my assessment that he is wrong.] But the fact that he, like me, is a political animal is something I wouldn't mind knowing, and something that we would hear a lot more about if the boot were on the other foot.

To me, Les Roberts comes across as somewhat more politically congenial - or less uncongenial - than the editor of the Lancet, Dr Richard Horton. In the Socialist Worker Online interview Dr Roberts doesn't sound particularly happy about it when he says that most of the interviews he has had in America were with "marginal" left wing magazines - a bit of an "ouch" moment for Socialist Worker's Joseph Choonara, perhaps.

In contrast Dr Horton appeared passionately happy to be on the same stage as Galloway and friends in Manchester last month. Harry's Place has up a couple of videos showing Dr Horton. The first was filmed at the Stop the War rally in Manchester on September 23. Horton tells the crowd:

"As this axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease."

The second video is less moonbatty - being unashamedly to the left of the Labour party is not the same as moonbattery - but I am not sure how Dr Horton reconciles

"Values and ideas are, of course, worth defending"

with

"We have got to avoid the suggestion that we in Britain are somehow superior, better and more civilised; that our values somehow trump the values of other societies."

There is a paragraph near the end of the article from the Socialist Worker Online which says,

Speaking at a special lecture at London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine last week, Les Roberts said that the Lancet was chosen because it was the most highly regarded medical journal in the world, with the tightest peer-review procedures.

Something tells me that another reason the Lancet was chosen was that Dr Richard Horton was its editor.

Talking of the US mid-term elections

, somebody asked me how the Foley scandal was playing here.

Don't worry. We all know by now that he's a Republican. How standards of reporting have improved!

Good heavens, election time already

over the Pond?

The Lancet has published a new study of deaths in the Iraq war.

My comments from last time stand.

I believe I am qualified

to give you a satisfactory "hand-wavy" explanation of this latest scientific development: Quantum information teleported from light to matter. Leaving out some rather tricky mathematics, it's like this:

(Waves hands eloquently)

The article above prompted Glenn Reynolds to speculate on the effects of teleportation.

But as with many technological prognostications, this extreme example is really just a more exaggerated version of what's already happening. Virtual communities in some ways already mean more than real ones, and physical borders are increasingly overmatched by the porosity brought about by changes in technology and culture, well short of any matter transportation devices.

Leaving the realms of theory, here is some practical safety advice from Wired: How to dismantle an atomic bomb. (Via Dodgeblogium, who reminds us to dispose of waste bombs in an environmentally friendly manner.)

I don't like Daniel Davies' politics

and I don't like his behaviour as a blogger or a debater. I like this article of his a good deal.

Obviously, the idea that enthusiastic laymen can bluff their way into an form of understanding of a subject that is equally as valid as that of experts in the field is so powerfully attractive to bloggers that it probably ought to be shot down simply on grounds of being too good to be true. But it's a question that's really worth thinking about: what, if anything, is it about gravity waves that Harry Collins doesn't really understand?

With one hand New Labour giveth, with the other hand New Labour taketh away.

Samizdata's Thaddeus Tremayne reminds us that Jack Straw of the oh-so courageous comments about Muslim veils is the same Jack Straw who forced the adoption of the definition of a racist incident proposed by the Macpherson report. Officially a racist incident is

“any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

When in December 2000 William Hague claimed that the effect of the Macpherson Report had been to lower police morale, Jack Straw called it "disgusting and disgraceful". Even a left winger like the late Hugo Young of the Guardian said that all Straw was doing was playing the race card in a different suit.

Back in the present, the Times reports that a male terror suspect evaded arrest by disguising himself under a Muslim veil. May I remind you again again that the government wanted to make it illegal to suggest that an Islamic veil might be used to conceal terror activities? That suggestion was the very example Home Office minister Paul Goggins gave, when arguing in favour of the Religious Hatred Bill, of speech that would be caught by the Bill.

The title of this post was inspired by this excellent comment to the Samizdata post.

The Anchoress posts about all abortion, free speech and school massacres. A man called Brian Rohrbough, whose child was killed in the Columbine school shooting, said that such massacres were caused in part by abortion diminishing the value of children. The Anchoress comments:

What I found interesting was that some on the left were very angry that Rohrbough dared “politicize this tragedy.” Well, I agree, sort of. I hate it when anyone uses a tragedy to advance their own agenda. But the folks on the left, so “appalled” by Rohrbough’s statement, indicate by their own comments that if only he’d talked about “gun control,” why…that wouldn’t be “politicizing” the event at all…that would just be talking sense!

Squared up.

Via the Britblog roundup here comes the Eurosceptic roundup.

Question: would there be enough pro-EU British blogs to manage a Europhile roundup? Being of the Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam tendency myself, I'm not best placed to judge: my idea of a moderate is someone who would let an EU commissioner out of the Schandmantel eventually.

The wonderfully-titled A Fistful of Euros probably counts as one, although it doesn't exactly fizz with enthusiasm.