November 09, 2002
The gulf between monsters and men.
This article by Katharine Viner about catching rapists buzzed around making something close to worthwhile points every now and then. I, too, want rapists caught speedily and rape victims treated with sensitivity. (Alongside strict adherence to the presumption of innocence, which Viner says nothing about.) But in so far as this line made sense at all, it was vile:The Trophy Rapist has already been turned into a "monster" - thus separating him from ordinary men - even though apparently ordinary men are the most common rapists.It's always instructive to switch a few terms and see how the logic of such a thing holds up. How would she like this line, which is as true as what she says:
The Washington Sniper has already been turned into a "monster" - thus separating him from ordinary blacks - even though apparently ordinary blacks are the most common perpetrators of gun attacks.There is nothing illegitimate about the transposition. The Trophy Rapist and the Washington Sniper are two of this year's icons of evil. "Man" and "black" are both descriptions of biological characteristics held involuntarily. Factually, the statement about "ordinariness" of the respective crimes is a lot closer to the truth in my example artificially created to prove a logical point than in her statement which she presumably meant; the proportion of gun criminals among blacks is higher than the proportion of rapists among men generally. Yet if I or anyone else were to say anything similar there would be howls of outrage.
Not that I do say it. There is a vast separation between the Trophy Rapist and ordinary men. There is a vast separation between the Washington Sniper and ordinary blacks. Is Katharine Viner saying she can't see the difference between the rapist and the men in her own family, her own partner if she has one, or her male colleagues at the Guardian?
A Zimbabwean bishop,
Pius Ncube, has called on Mugabe to resign. Brave man. Predictably he has been slandered as mad by "information minister" Jonathan Moyo. (In an interview with the BBC, which seems odd. I thought Mugabe was refusing access to the Beeb, which is the most creditable thing to the latter that I'd heard for years. Has Zimbabwe made up to them, or does the ban not extend to government men?) Further down the story it says that the US has threatened "intrusive" measures if food aid is not delivered to opposition areas. I doubt they mean it.I held off saying this for along time, but food aid should stop.
English immersion works.
It has much the best record of any teaching strategy in raising immigrants to the level of employment and prosperity reached by the host population. Bilingual education raises the employment and prosperity levels of a host of teachers and classroom assistants, which is not the same thing at all. How do you fight such a neat, obvious idea? This way.I keep seeing the headline on US blogs "If they were Republicans, this would be hate speech." I see why.
November 08, 2002
The village of Shertson, Wiltshire had a really safe bonfire this year.
This splendid editorial, Why we must ban all fun now, takes the principle of safety a little further.The authorities missed a trick, though. Won't the degenerate rustics of Sherston, so clearly in need of protection from themselves, go back to their ancient uncouth ways? Won't they revert to letting off their own rockets in their back gardens, hence endangering, traumatizing and exploding their offspring/guinea pigs in even greater numbers than before? Hmm, better get to work on banning that.
LATER: Chris Bertram, who is obviously keeping an eye on me to ensure that I don't get away without making a more substantive reply than the one below, reminds me that he covered this (knew I'd seen it somewhere) and adds that the article is the work of the ever-surprising Rod Liddle, currently running two-up one-down in my files. Goodman Liddle is up for a baronetcy at least, come the Glorious Day. But do you take care, fellow, for the headsman awaits those who fail me.
Huh. The original Junius wouldn't have worried about ad hominem attacks. The nineteenth century historian Leckey said that "no writer ever excelled Junius in condensed and virulent invective, rendered all the more malignant by the studied and controlled deliberation of the language, in envenomed and highly elaborated sarcasm, in clear and vivid statement ..."
No, that wasn't my considered and nuanced response to major points of philosophical principle. You get that later, if you're good and eat your greens.
Don't know much about history...
Somebody called Clive Hamilton tossed off a remark in The Age that the Australians lost at Kokoda. Bernard Slattery of Brain Gaze ventured to differ. (Link via Tim Blair.)LATER: It seems Blogger may be doing strange things to the first link. The title of the post in question starts with the words "Sensation! Stupid Wa-" Ahem. You had better find the rest of it yourself.
November 07, 2002
And they say our side lack compassion (II):
"They" being people like Hugo Young. The sort of brutal world order he works for is described below. But here he is, still self-righteously droning on. He is happy to praise the "compassionate conservatism" of any era but the present (this acknowledgement would have been more courteous had he offered it at the time) yet he and his fellows are strangely silent about the single most successful law ever signed - albeit reluctantly - by his hero Clinton, namely welfare reform. Thousands of black children lifted out of poverty. You wouldn't know it from this:"Compassionate conservatism, coined by Bush and lifted by Duncan Smith, was for a time a phrase graced with truth and common relevance. Pumped out often enough, the mantra helped Bush defeat the legacy of the Clinton years without entirely disowning their tender side. Tuesday's victories in the Senate and the House were, by contrast, triumphs for the right, paving the way for an unequivocally rightist programme, in which compassion will be consigned to the wastebin of political artifice where it probably always belonged."
And they say our side lack compassion.
Glenn Reynolds describes the wretchedness described in this article by Theodore Dalrymple as the result of appeasement. Very true. But I'd like to focus on the old immigrant couple mentioned later on in the article. Trapped by the financial and spiritual dependency induced by welfare, they look on with despair as their unemployed and unemployable children and grandchildren become alien, frightening brutes who either cower before crime lords or seek to join them. The article is about France, the country that UK Shamed Again would have us imitate, but it describes the results of trends visible in every country in the Western World.
This is the life that welfare brings about.
This is the life that minimum wage laws bring about.
This is the life that subsidised housing projects bring about.
This is the life that the drug war brings about.
This is the life that cringe-multiculturalism brings about.
This is the life that moral relativism brings about.
As Dalrymple said in an earlier article:
...as usual, neither pols nor pundits wish to look the problem in the face or make the obvious connections. For them, the real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: “How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?” Needless to say, the first imperative is to avoid any hint of blaming the victim by examining the bad choices that he makes. It is not even permissible to look at the reasons for those choices, since by definition victims are victims and therefore not responsible for their acts, unlike the relatively small class of human beings who are not victims. One might extend La Rochefoucauld’s famous maxim that neither the sun nor death can be stared at for long, by saying that no member of the modern liberal intelligentsia can stare at a social problem for very long. He feels the need to retreat into impersonal abstractions, into structures or alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of this need to avoid the rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering.
I just read your reply to my and Randy's Email to you. One of the things I found interesting was when you said that I didn't have "any objection to a savage end for savage people."Whoa! Hold the phone! Massive straw man consctruction here.
I object in the strongest possible terms to savge ends for anyone, whether they be savage themselves or not. My whole point is that a little pigskin in the grave isn't savage at all, and is in fact a much gentler (and more persuasive) arguement against Islamofascist terror than just plain killin' folks.
Though killin' folks works as long as it's the folks that want to slaughter innocent people. That's the whole crux of our disagreement here. I want these people to STOP, by fair means or foul. A piggy shroud? Even though those of Islam will react with horror? Well, so what! Beats killing more people. Not only is it less savage than simply hunting down all of the terrorist's cells and jailing or killing them all, I don't see it as being savage at all!
I only meant to use the word "end" in the same colloquial sense as you might say of a dissolute peer "after a life of scandal, he ended up buried in Westminster Abbey." The ambiguity didn't occur to me.
Some kind thoughts James added about that baby stuff lead me to think that I may have inadvertently given a more alarming picture than the circumstances warrant. Nothing has happened - er, that's the whole point. I am getting more jumpy from miles away than I was with my own kids' births, which both turned out OK despite being punctuated by more delays, false alarms and deceptive climaxes than a [insert generic joke appropriate to your country's anti-terrorism effort here]! I think my family must have an inherited tendency to pop out late. Doesn't change when we're out of the womb, either.
The link is to Arthur Silber's Light of Reason blog; Diana Hsieh's own account is here.
(Heads-up came from MommaBear of Dodgeblog.)
LATER: I had wondered if the fact that Diana Hsieh is legally constrained from talking about the case meant that it might somehow be harmful to her legal position to go from fact to opinion. I am informed that this is not so. That frees me to say that, although I have on occasion defended the free speech rights of Scientologists on the grounds that speech ought to be free however foolish and sinister it is, Scientology is foolish and sinister. That this bizarre goulash of second-rate notions, made up for a bet, should outlive its forgettable author and grow like a cancer until it has funds and pet lawyers enough to bully decent people is thoroughly depressing. I am only glad that some courageous people stand up to them. Good luck, Diana.
November 06, 2002
I'm a bit distracted at the moment.
A family baby (no, not mine!) is ignoring his or her scheduled time to come into the world.
November 05, 2002
Pigskin pittas: the arguments for.
Neither James Rummel or regular correspondent Randy has any objection to a savage end for savage people. To take the former's e-mail first:Just read your post RE wrapping the corpses of Islamofascists in pork products to deny them their 72 virgins. You said that it's barbaric.The "demean our society" part is what I was thinking of. I have no trouble seeing that their murders are a hundred, a thousand, a million times more barbaric than the Russian pigskin pitta proposal. So maybe our standards are a hundred, a thousand, a million times higher. One of the strongest weapons of civilization is its sense of calm, overarching, unshakeable inevitability.Well, I'm not so sure about that. See, the way I look at it, they slaughter our innocent civilians (people just going through their day and who aren't a threat to anyone) because of some religious philosophy. If we threw some bacon in the coffin when we were burying the victims then people would object to a lack of respect, but few would actually consider it barbaric.
Slaughtering people for religious differences, now THAT'S barbaric. Slaughtering INNOCENT people who are no threat to anyone, double barbaric. Why did they do this barbaric act?
Because they didn't like the way the West prospered while they lost relevance and influence. They weren't very sympathetic to our way of doing things, to our way of view, or to the desire of the people they killed to simply survive.
So why is the pork thing barbaric? Because THEY think it's barbaric! To us it's a waste of good food.
Seems kinda weird to me, worrying about the prejudices of people who want to kill us because of those prejudices. Now there's a good point about how ignoring these religious leanings and adopting a "Screw you!" attitude will demean our society or change it for the worse. But the idea about how it's barbaric doesn't seem to me to be very honest.
Randy wrote on the same lines as James Rummel, expressing himself even more strongly:
You hold the scales of justice. On one side you have the evil of the world incarnate, and on the other how to deal with the detritus of humanity, and YOU CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHICH ONE IS RIGHT? You are forthwith instructed to watch a continuous loop of "Apocalypse Now", until you develop some clarity of thought on the subject of good and evil.The denial of Christianity line was a non sequitur.We're going to drop fire on these people, and turn their earthly world into hell. In fact, according to our Christian faith, we're going to send their nasty asses there. Weakness on this issue points to something deeper.
In the first place, you don't seem to understand war with all of its imperfection and confusion. As the good Captain observes as he heads up river to kill Kurtz, "Charging a man with murder around here is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500". This all dovetails with your "Law of War" nitwitery. Sure you have rules that say what's right and wrong, but when the balloon goes up, the rulebook goes in the shitcan. Good and evil is a struggle in the heart of every man. To take young men, lead them into violence, and let old women judge them afterwards is, in a word, evil.
Likewise, dithering over how to dispose of the bodies is egregiously stupid.
Secondly, one either accepts the truths of one's faith, or one denies God. How can one reason, when one dismisses what is known as truth, or is it your position that Christianity is a fairy tale that you wish to pass to your children? To believe that there is something wrong with sewing pagans in pigskin is to deny one's faith.
Finally, if the thought of mistreating these sons of allah makes you squeamish, perhaps you'll be so kind as to avert your gaze, while the men do the work. Before it's done, we'll be loading the spray tanks on our A4's with rancid liquified pig byproducts, and hozing down whole battlefields. Hmmm, I wonder how they feel about a sprayon plasticized pork product?
There's lots more to say about this, but my mind isn't on the job, for reasons referred to in the post above. One quick point: whatever we do, let's avoid being sneakily glad the Russians do stuff like this while being too pure to do it our wonderful English-speaking selves. Either it's right or it's wrong. The best argument in favour is that it once stopped a similar death cult in its tracks. The best argument against is - still - "it is barbaric", and the existence of other, far greater barbarities on the part of our enemies does not change that.
One year and still going strong.
Thanks to mes enfants de blogue AintNoBadDude and Random Jottings, authors of the first and second e-mails to my blog, both of whose own blirgdays are coming up on the 10th and the 12th respectively.
November 04, 2002
How to dispose of swine.
There's some discussion on Instapundit as to whether this Russian idea of wrapping the corpses of the theatre terrorists in pigskin is something our side ought to be doing. According to the reputed beliefs of jihadis, this defilement will stop them going to heaven, and even if the Mullahs can talk them out of that belief, the prospect of being the filling of a pigskin sandwich will most certainly give them the willies.I've been thinking about this for a few days, and have come to no firm conclusion.
On the one hand, it might well work. This fascinating link sent to Instapundit a few days ago by Terry Oglesby describes how it stopped a similarly-motivated Islamic death cult cold close on a century ago in the Philippines. (Read about the elaborate binding of the body that the juramentados practised before going out on a suicide mission in order to see the similarities between the two cults.) Don't we want to save lives?
On the other hand it is barbaric. We are stooping to their level.
On the other hand, who cares? How much credit has being above their level gained us in the famous "Arab street"? Let us terrify those whom reason cannot reach.
On the other hand, they will retaliate and defile the corpses of our casualties.
On the other hand, we have far less to fear from that than they do. Westerners get upset when they see the corpses of our people dragged through the street, but those of us who believe in immortal souls would consider the belief that God's judgement on the soul could be changed by what was a mob did to the dead body infantile.
On the other hand, maybe mothers seeing their dead sons being dragged through the street by a mob will shake our resolve to carry on with the war. Remember Somalia.
On the other hand, maybe it won't. That sort of thing in a remote and incomprehensible conflict made people ask, what are we doing here? After September 11 2001 an awful lot of them have a very clear answer.
And on the other hand, we already have seen them dragging the corpses of our people through the street, haven't we? We needn't worry about them doing it as retaliation if they do it anyway.
I've given more words to the pro-pigskin side, which does not reflect how undecided I am. The three words "it is barbaric" carry a lot of weight.