'Nother Solent

Hearing the echoes of Vietnam.

I wrote two posts for Biased BBC about the BBC's reporting of President Bush's "admission" that there were parallels between the present situation and Iraq and the Tet Offensive. The BBC, of course, is neither the only nor by any means the worst offender among the media organisations that have seized on this.

Those who think that a clueless idiot can get and keep the office of President of the United States may well be good children or pleasant neighbours but there is no need to take anything they say about politics seriously. Whatever criticisms one might justly make of Bush, one thing he cannot be is a simpleton. For all that there is a kind of truth behind it: Bush is a simple man. As I wrote here, precisely because he is a child of privilege "in important respects his values are more normal than is normal in his milieu." Poor guy. Of course he had thought about the similarities to the Tet Offensive. Like some prince letting slip that there might be something to this Copernican system in front of his less enlightened bishops, he just forgot for a moment to keep one of the taboos that it is safer to observe when so many of the intermediaries between him and the populace are either ignoramuses or hostile.

He forgot that so many of them rejoice that the American media managed to turn that offensive, which General Giap viewed as a failure, into "proof" that the war could not be won. He forgot that so many of them view the conquest of Vietnam by a regime so detested by its own people that thousands of Boat People preferred the mercies of the open sea to enduring it any longer, and the deliverance of Cambodia into the hands of the democidal Khmer Rouge, to be their finest hour.

You know, thinking about it, his moment of forgetfulness might make a few people remember these things. It may not do him such harm after all.

(Cross posted to Samizdata.)

It's almost as if they like being different.

This article from Peter Cuthbertson observes that

France and Germany have had no sustained period since the days of Charles de Gaulle in which their leaders represented the same side of their country’s political spectrum.

[...]

The possible resurgence of the left in France is happening as British Conservatives have seized their first sustained leads in opinion polls since the early 1990s. In turn, the revival of the British right in 2006 coincides with the defeat of the Italian right and the return to power of the left’s Romano Prodi.

Not seeing the joke.

Humour from Stephen Pollard.

And what of our own fair isle?

After all this stuff about the Yanks and their troubles it is pleasant to observe that a Bill that will abolish trust between the generations is wending its way through Parliament. Just to show that British paranoia is the equal of any in the world.

More on Iraq.

Read this from Thought Mesh, too.

I suppose one major difference is that I place the blame for all of the killing in Iraq on the people doing the killing, not those trying to prevent it. The USA has spent, bled, and died to minimize the deaths. I feel no shame on behalf of my nation because others are mass murdering scum and so I do not regret my support for the invasion at all.

Jim Miller posts about predictions for the forthcoming mid-term elections in the US.

... I have long thought that Republicans generally gain during a campaign, simply because some voters see their arguments for the first time.

Sounds likely to me. Also I'd guess that the way the Democrat-leaning media big up the Democrats' prospects is one reason that Republican "Get out the Vote" operations work so well: the press scares lazy Republicans out of their front rooms and into the polling station.

All things considered my prediction - tremble as I prophesy - is that the Democrats will gain control of the House of Representatives more narrowly than most people think. Scarcely any change in the Senate. I must admit, though, that what interest I have in this US election arises mostly from the fact that my interest-tank was filled so incredibly full in the 2004 election that it has still hasn't quite run dry even after two years.

Ah, happy memories. I've been to loads of parties that were less fun than that solitary night in front of a computer. In his post Jim Miller quotes Jay Cost extensively (from a most learned document with tables and percentages and little grey boxes in it) and it was to Jay Cost's Horserace Blog that I turned when the first reports in 2004 looked bad. Be of good cheer, he said, 'tis but the loss of a few stupid exit polls. He didn't just exhort, either. He wrote reassuringly hard-edged things like:

In North Carolina, the exit polls show the voting population to be 63 percent women. That is obviously far too large – and it explains why the exit polls have the President up by only one in North Carolina..

Then he and his flashcrowd of commenters got down to comparing the incoming Bush/Kerry results to the Bush/Gore results for individual counties.

Finally, as the dawn's new light dimmed my screen by comparison, I went over to Andrew Sullivan who linked to a real time counter of the Ohio vote spinning its way from possibility to certainty. I slipped downstairs to the TV to flick between ITV and BBC. How doggedly the presenters reported the Republicans' celebrations. The British stiff upper lip is not dead. As for me, it felt strange the next day, being boundlessly, secretly, sleepily happy about a result that depressed most people I knew, in so far as they cared at all.

Enough reminiscing. Though they may just contrive to get themselves into a position where they can manage a sigh of relief, Republicans are unlikely to do much partying after this election. One reason why I am not too unhappy about this - apart from the fact that it all matters much less - is that giving the Democrats a taste of victory might do something to cool down the conspiracy theories.

Just look at the comments to this BBC blog post by Justin Webb. I featured in Biased BBC under the heading "On the other hand..." because - seriously - I felt sorry for him.

While there are plenty of right wing conspiracists around as well, the left wing ones have been stoked to a frenzy by repeated disappointments. And by the media, of course.

Sterling's lucky escape. David Smith of the Sunday Times writes:

This chimes with my view that the euro will not survive in its present form for the next 10 years. I am glad, despite the irritations, that we are part of the EU. But when it comes to the euro, it is a case of better off out.

In 2002 Milton Friedman, then aged 90, said (jokingly, I think) that he expected to outlive the Euro. May he have the last laugh.

UPDATE: Read Madsen Pirie, too.

Standing aside.

In this sad post Norman Geras says why he now feels that if he had known the human cost of the Iraq war he would have stood aside from supporting it.

Measured, in other words, against the hopes of what it might lead to and the likelihoods as I assessed them, the war has failed. Had I foreseen a failure of this magnitude, I would have withheld my support. Even then, I would not have been able to bring myself to oppose the war. As I have said two or three times before, nothing on earth could have induced me to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime. But I would have stood aside.

(To head off fruitless debate, he says that this change of mind predates the Lancet report.)

There's a subsequent, related post here.

Well, you can't get much more honest and heartfelt than that. But it seems to me that the course of action Norm now says he wishes he had taken founders on the difficulty of distinguishing between acts and omissions. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

As for the rest, in which Norm touches (inevitably) on World War II, I have sometimes been haunted by the thought that the Holocaust would not have happened if appeasement had continued. Maybe a smirking, confident Nazi Germany would have been just another hateful dictatorship, making an accommodation with the British Empire eventually, and with the Soviets as they did, and expelling the Jews to Uganda. Maybe, if it makes any sense to assign a probability to a counterfactual, that is a fairly probable counterfactual.

But then I let my counterfactual imagination continue into the evolving future of a world where Hitler's aggression is rewarded and the democracies are humiliated (not least in their own eyes). In this world the dictators, not just Hitler, know that they have but to push and their fantasies can become real. When that is so, why not kill all who offend you? Why not conquer your neighbour? It worked before. And now those who might have stood against you are weaker. Part of that weakness is shame.

One of the few things differentiating the international structure of our world from from the early stages of that world is that the Iraq war took place.

(I slightly expanded and clarified this hastily-written post on Wenesday evening.)

Hatemonger's Quarterly reviews its mail.

"A little bit broken hearted."

Does anyone know what's happened to the space cadets since?

The Tin Drum has up a post commenting further my post from yesterday on "constructivist instructional techniques". He writes:

By way of a final whinge about it, I remember very few, if any, taught sessions on the PGCE [Post-Graduate Certificate in Education] which actually followed the constructivist ideal. Most were good old fashioned "chalk and talk" sessions, in which we made copious notes and then afterwards went and learnt the notes. We were rigorously assessed, our learning was not "scaffolded", some of our tutors were very harsh, and we all worked damn hard, often doing a day at school and then four or five hours work in the evening, which might be preparing an assignment, doing the reading, or just preparing more lessons.

this have the HIT folk song Throw the Rock at the Jew!!!!

Jagshemash! This is nice story even more funny than one about homosexual Uzbekh man. A Reuters camera-man has been caughtings on camera telling people how best way to throw rocks at Israeli vehicles. The accused, it say linking Arutz-Sheva, is heard on movie-film the shouting, "Throw, throw!" and later, "Throw towards the little window!"

On other hand says J-Post which I think name is suspiciously hiding JEWS, Reuters mans best ambition is NOT just tellings but really throw Rock.

But judea judge major Maj Dahan, feelings quite sorry for Reuters camera-man because he lives at home in same Village as Rocks. You now see the thing what judge writes in his descision:

"That village is a constant source of conflict and the respondent should not again be placed in such a dilemma, lest he again, Heaven forbid, disgrace himself."

Yes, sadly true, he might miss with rock with all wifes seeing.

Then judge wrotes that the criminal act in question may have perpetrate

"out of the desire to mollify the villagers who know him, rather than acting as he normally does, as has been preliminarily proven, as a purely objective cameraman."

Now joke really is FUNNY!!!

Arutz Sheva, what sound like Uzbekistan people to me althoguh they also do good deal cell-phone rental, give Reuters mans name as Boghnat. others in Jew-Post say his Name as... my goodnes! Borat like me!!!

Re-naming it every ten years hasn't made it work.

Read Joanne Jacobs linking to Ken DeRosa linking in turn to an article in Educational Psychologist magazine called Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark.

These three links all have worthwhile stuff to read in them, so I'm telling you to read all three. OK, I'm also admitting that I have only skim-read the paper itself - but I've always said that "Do as I say not as I do" has a lot more going for it as a teaching strategy than it is given credit for.

Anyway. It's been called discovery learning, experiential learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning and now (heaven help us) "constructivist instructional techniques".

Whatever you call it, it gives worse results for most people most of the time than just telling them. So why do people keep coming up with new discovery-learning programmes decade after decade? Why do they keep getting it wrong? (I'm not saying that getting students to discover stuff for themselves has no place in a teacher's repertoire of techniques. Ultimately, it is true, all teaching should give the student tools to discover things for themselves. I am saying that teachers should spend more time on direct instruction and less time on discovery learning than they currently do.)

My take: the sort of people who think these programmes up are unreasonably generalising from their own experience. Here are three reasons why they do this:

Reason #1: the sort of people who become teachers and devisers of learning programmes did well in school. Their own memories of learning are the memories of successful students. Geeks, nerds and brainboxes are the ones who are most likely to be able to make the leap, to discover the next step for themselves. They wrongly assume that what worked for them works for all. They forget that most students are less successful (or as we teachers like to put it, "thicker") than they were.

Reason #2: in one's study of any subject the times when one is most likely to learn by discovery come later, when one is already firmly grounded in the subject. (The section early in the paper on "Cognitive Architecture" deals with why this is so. See, I have read some of it.) When teachers and devisers of learning programmes remember their own experience of learning, their later, discovery-heavy memories are clearer than their earlier, instruction-heavy memories. They give the way they learned more recently too large a weighting compared to the way they learned in early childhood.

Reason #3(a): the moment of discovery is glorious. Remember? Of course you do. You laughed, you gasped, you punched the air. Unfortunately that was not, and could not be, how you learned most of the time. The people who devise these programmes give too much weight to the extra-memorable moments of discovery compared to the weeks and months of forgettable slogging that lay between. Furthermore, they are kindhearted. They want to multiply these happy "light bulb" moments. Sadly, in doing so they also multiply those "I feel completely lost, please God let the bell ring soon" moments. Or, conversely, those "hey, this is better than working" moments - see the section in the paper headed "Knowing Less After Instruction."

Reason #3(b): we humans like to flatter ourselves. When recalling (even after minutes rather than days) the moment of discovery we overestimate how much of that discovery was our own independent genius and how much of it was really the teacher telling us all but the last step. Teachers go along with the deception. How often, teachers, have you happily acquiesced in your pupil's pleasure at having "thought something out for herself" when you know perfectly well that your lips and tongue had practically formed the first sound of the answer? Don't discontinue this practice. Sugar helps the medicine go down. (On a related track, one of Ken DeRosa's commenters, "steveh", recalls that he had a light-bulb moment while being directly taught. So have I.)

However, having read over my list of reasons for the unshakeable popularity of discovery learning, all of which revolved around people drawing mistaken conclusions from their own memories, I can't help feeling that I have not covered something more basic. When physicists discovered that there was something more rock-bottom than any of the first, second and third laws of thermodynamics, they called it the "Zeroth Law". On the same pattern I shall have a Reason Number Zero.

Reason #0: they don't want to look bossy. They don't want to look authoritarian. As it says at the end of the paper, "current constructivist views have become ideological."

Back in the fold.

Indy's main story today was How Government flights pumped out 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

Environmental groups went on the attack last night over the huge scale of the emissions. The figures starkly underline the fact that, although the Blair Government is talking ever more loudly about the problem of global warming, it cannot itself get to grips with its fastest-rising cause - emissions of greenhouse gases from aircraft engines.

This ties into a question from Paul Zrimsek, one of the commenters to the Tim Blair post linked to below, who asks:

Say, does this mean that instead of looking down on us Yanks as non-traveling rubes without passports, the Europinks are going to start looking up to us as non-traveling rubes without passports?

No. To the sugar caves with you.

I decline

to post the various emails about climate change I have received following the Blairite Instalanche-at-one-remove I got from this post, yet I post this link to a discussion of climate change, Thomas Kuhn, and paradigm shifts in Freedom and Whisky. Why I am so horrible? It can't be from drinking kitten blood, that stuff is 100% natural.

(Afterthought: I don't actually know if I had a Blairite Instalanche-at-one-remove, having failed to resuscitate my BeSeen hit counter after its tragic seizure. It matters not. I, for one, welcome my alien overlords on the off-chance that they might exist.)

"Have terrorists struck the United States? I admit, I felt tickled."

Damian Penny flagged up a sickening column by one Michael Downey in Canada's Western Star. Downey writes:

My first instinct is buried beneath subdued excitement. Have terrorists struck the United States? I admit, I felt tickled. Since it's clear that US paranoia over invisible terrorists and threats fabricated from the soiled material that is white trash ignorance aren't going to disperse anytime soon, then I may find an ounce of comfort if some of the US's fears are substantiated.

Unfortunately the Western Star site doesn't let you see individual articles without downloading the whole paper.

One door closes, another door opens.

At first I thought I had me a post about the hypocrisy of rich socialists here. Today's Independent reports:

A former pit worker is to bring Cuban-style health care, administered by Arthur Scargill's daughter, to Grimethorpe ... The Oaks Park primary care centre, built at a cost of £3m, is the phoenix that has risen out of the ashes of the closure of the Grimethorpe colliery in South Yorkshire ... The Primary Oaks scheme is the brainchild of Jim Logan, Arthur Scargill's son-in-law and the one-time Grimethorpe colliery manager, who made a study of the Cuban health system.

Then the story finishes:

At the root of the project is a belief in uniting the provision of health and social care. Mr Logan suggested to Barnsley Health Service and Barnsley Council Social Services Department a proposal to amalgamate the two care sectors. But his ideas were turned down.

Undeterred, he went ahead and drew up plans for such a centre, deciding to fund the project himself.

Aha, I thought, as I added the bold tags fore and aft of the last three words, this admirer of Fidel Castro's "health reforms"* has £3m to spare, does he?

Alas for my hopes of a snarko-opp. This Yorkshire Post article dated 9 October tells the story a little differently:

At the root of the project is a belief in the need to unite provision of health and social care.

He took proposal [sic] to amalgamate the two care sectors to Barnsley Health Service and Barnsley Council Social Services Department. But this was turned down, department chiefs saying budgets must remain separate.

Undeterred, he went ahead and drew up plans for such a centre, deciding to field the project himself.

Throughout the development of the plan he worked closely with the six doctors and staff who were to work at the centre, including his own wife. Once it was complete he sought and won the funding.

Emphasis added by my own fair hand. Seeking and winning funding, presumably government funding, leaves one's socialist credentials untouched.

But I think I may still have something to post about. Look at the very similar wording of those two extracts, one from the Yorkshire Post and one from the Independent. The only significant differences between the two sections beginning "At the root of the project..." and ending "...the project himself" is half a sentence about separate budgets. And of course the fact that the Independent was wrong about the funding.

The Independent can't even copy out someone else's story right.

*Reforms? The only changes in the Cuban healthcare system that I have heard about recently are the ones that have led to allegations of "tourist apartheid" between foreign visitors and Cubans. Or is the Independent talking about Castro's health reforms vis à vis the healthcare system of the Batista regime, which fell in 1959, forty-seven years ago?