November 30, 2002
Dan Dare
was cool today. I thrilled to the way that villain-turned-hero White led the enemy fleet to its destruction and his own suicidal redemption; hands firm upon the controls of his ship as the acceleration forces sought to shake it apart, furry dice swinging madly as the ship sped onwards...
November 29, 2002
http://www.meaculpa.com.
I also meant to http://www.mention.com that Happy Fun Pundit is now at http://www.happyfunpundit.com. This was one of the more copeable-with elements of my pile of Things To Note, Disseminate, Decide Upon, Reply To And Do Before I Die, Submerged By Their Awful Fecundity. I don't want to note, disseminate, reply to, decide upon or do any more for a bit - there's a letter about a missed dental appointment somewhere in there, and I'd hate to hit it unprepared - so ta-ra, my lovelies.Just checking. I typed http://www.meaculpa.com in the search box. The site exists and claims to consist of photographies érotiques. Might have known it.
UPDATE: Thank you, Captain Heinrichs, for your research in this matter. Disinterested scientific enquiry is, I always think, one of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization.
Up to speed
- transport - moving things at speed - geddit? Oh, go away. I suppose I have to spell it out, then. Patrick Crozier's blog formerly known as "UK Transport" is now a global brand and can be found at http://www.transportblog.com.
See, those Volokhs really are taking over.
It was The Volokh Conspiracy that pointed out that Amazon still have up Lesley Reed's original admiring review of Arming America as the official Amazon assessment of the book. Clink on the link headed "trying to put it about" in the post below and enjoy the unintentional humour while you still can. It's also interesting to timejump back through earlier and earlier reviews of the book. One courageous chap, by the name of Kieran Healy, comes back in October 2000 to ruefully disagree with an earlier self.Eugene Volokh also presents an instructive account by Am So A Pundit of the way that a policy of expelling all cheats, however mild, defeats its own object as pity or fear of hassle motivates teachers and fellow students to cover up all but the severest offences. There's nothing new under the sun. I was taught at school how early nineteenth century juries would aquit an obviously guilty defendant rather than send him to hang for stealing a shilling's worth of goods.
By the way, if ever Am So A Pundit finds a big blank where his blog name used to be, and the whole blog propped up by bricks, police enquiries will have me as number one suspect. I covet that name and am going to steal it if I can. No penalty is severe enough to deter me.
Happy Thanksgiving
to all my American readers. Hey, Yanks! You know why I get so uptight about Michael of the Beautiful Islands trying to put it about that the American colonists didn't know one end of a gun from the other? Because if they weren't all crack shots then it would be - inconceivably - our fault that we lost the late unpleasantness of 1775-83 instead of, as everybody knows, the result being a regrettable consequence of the ability of those ungentlemanly persons to plink at us from miles away, rather than coming up close to fight as Real Men should.
"'Fear not', said the Angel."
On the radio last night I heard about some feeble headteacher (whose school, name and even gender proved instantly forgettable) who banned parents from videoing the school nativity play for fear that the videos would fall into the hands of paedophiles.If the camcorders had been banned because they put the wee performers off their stride, I'd have said fine, your perogative mate. That would also have been my response to banning them because they blocked the line of sight of the audience, or because they made an irritating whirring noise, or encouraged people to stand up to get better camera angles, or even because they looked naff. If our headteacher had actually banned them because they violated the sanctity of a depiction of Our Lord's birth I would have trembled in awe, knowing that the Real Headteachers (or Headmasters and Headmistresses as die-hard cultists still call them) had at last returned to their thrones.
But to turn off the cameras because he, she or it thinks that a bunch of freaks are going to trouble to seek out images of little Kylie Snoggins muffing her lines as Third Angel From The Left, when they have all the wide sewers of the internet to dip into at will? Get real, you pathetic excuse for a leader. If you have actual reason to believe that the physical or electronic audience of your little play includes dangerous criminals then earn your pay and name names to the cops rather than denying Mr and Mrs Snoggins the chance to immortalize their little darling's moment of glory. A head teacher should stand firm like an oak. This one sounds a more like a feather blown around by every passing wind of public panic.
November 25, 2002
Another addition to my list of bloggers
who have taken a break was to have been The Rittenhouse Review. Over the weekend I made a little note in my exercise book to mention this - look, here's proof! (Holds up notebook to screen.) Now I find that (a) he's back and (b) I and others have been bounced from the Rittenhouse blogroll for linking to LGF. It's his blog, of course, to do as he likes with, but......but silence is never a good strategy for getting your opinions across. I think a great deal of LGF's enormous hit rate comes from the fact that violence by Muslims is played down by the media. People read the papers and find stories tucked away in corners that they know perfectly well would be spread across the front page if a non-Muslim person or country did the same thing. Hence when they finally find a site that has a lot of stories they say, "At last!" Someone else who sees it too!" There is a fierce joy in saying what is true but forbidden or supressed, or in hearing others say it. This is really no different from the point I made a few posts down that the usual effect of the supression of free speech is to make people more strident. I'm repeating myself. It bears repeating.
Although I spoke about stridency there, I see little or nothing to object to in the individual posts on LGF. Nor in most of the comments, although as for unmoderated comments anywhere you do see a certain percentage of dross among them. There was a little bit of black humour about "Islamic peacebots" in one recent LGF post, but that was no closer to racism than the joke about dumb Boers in a recent Rittenhouse post - slightly less close, in fact; not that I am at all uptight about either. The thing that gets people angry about LGF is the concentration of posts with bad news about the Islamic world. As far as I am concerned that's intimately connected to the fact that there is an awful lot of bad news about the Islamic world to be told at the present time, for twenty or thirty years in the past, and for an unknown (but not infinite) time to come. And bad news, moreover, that our modern multi-cultis are too prissy to tell themselves.
Bloggers are not obliged to write about stories that they find uninteresting or uncongenial. However since The Rittenhouse Review has taken the trouble to deliberately close off an avenue of debate, I trust it will not be leaving coverage of Islamofascist terror and oppression solely to its ideological enemies? If it does then there are few grounds for complaint about what they say.
The most awful fate conceivable to a blogger
has befallen me. Yep, I've landed some paid work. I don't intend it to stop me blogging, but it might slow me down a little. For a quite separate reason I am going to be blogging very little in the next few days: we have a guest staying in the room where the computer is. Do you know, some pernickerty people seem to find it odd when one bounces into the room at odd hours of the morning to save the world from civil asset forfeiture.