'Nother Solent

Trick or penny for the guy?

Post about Halloween versus Bonfire Night over at Biased BBC.

Italians have demonstrated

against the Iranian president's threats to Israel. I started to chug my way through what I thought was an account of the demonstration in La Repubblica:

Together. For the first time, mixed up under the banner "Ahmadinejad proposes: shall we erase Israel?" The "No" - written in three dimensional [?] letters will be bipartisan. To articulate it this evening, illuminated by five thousand torches in front of the Iranian embassy in Rome, there will be...

Then it belatedly dawned on me that the report was in the future tense and was written to explain what was due to happen that evening. Never mind. It said that half the Berlusconi government, opposition parties, trade unionists, a delegation of ex-deportees, and Jewish and Muslim community leaders would be present to demonstrate contro l'odio, "against hate". And so they were, and so they did.

Michael Leeden writes on the same topic, and in English so it's easier for me. Note the name of Magdi Allam, the Muslim deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera. I will try to make my next attempt at translation from Italian the editorial quoted by Leeden, in which Allam argues that if the Muslim world had recognised Israel's right to exist the Palestinians would have their state by now.

Is this reaction to the French riots typical?

I found out about this one from "Ritter" in the Biased BBC comments. The "underprivileged youth" angle that the BBC took regarding the riots was predictable, but of equal interest to me was the very different reaction from readers of the BBC website.

Some background: the BBC website's Have Your Say feature, which used to function like a newspaper letters column, has now moved over to a forum structure. Readers can send in comments and recommend those of other people. My impression is that now that the published comments are no longer selected by editors (although they are still moderated) their average character has changed.

When arranged in order of numbers of recommendations, the most recommended comments were overwhelmingly hostile to the rioters.

I am well aware that comments fora can become skewed by a vociferous minority. (This is not necessarily good or bad in itself - that all depends on the minority concerned.) This is particularly true when the forum is fairly new and may not yet have been discovered by a wider public. Another reason for questioning whether this response is typical is that being in English it will be skewed towards Anglophone respondents. There were quite a few Americans comparing, some with good grace and some with ill, the French view of the exaggerated accounts of mayhem in New Orleans with last week's hitherto downplayed events in France. Furthermore it seems likely that more white than North African-descended Frenchmen and women will speak English well enough to wish to comment to the BBC.

All good reason to wonder it if means anything at all. And yet ... just look how far you have to read before you come to any suggestion that the grievances of the rioters justify riots. One way in which consensus opinion changes is when scattered individuals become aware that many others share their opinions.

UPDATE 7 NOV: Also see this post.

Jim Miller

:

And Americans should take no satisfaction in the French predicament, for there are close parallels here to all these phenomena. We learned the hard way that, first of all, our cities need law and order and that talk and dialog must wait until riots have been suppressed. We have learned, also the hard way, that welfare corrupts those who receive it. But we have still to grasp the danger of that combination of Islam and crime that afflicts France — and is beginning to appear here.

And here.

That was from yesterday. In today's post he links to an account by Viking Observer of similar riots in Denmark.

I liked the urbane reply that commenter "zeppenwolf" made to an inflammatory remark by "CP".

Squander Two writes:

Self-antonym"? Wouldn't "synantonym" be better? You probably have readers fluent in Greek who can point out what's wrong with that, but, damn it, it sounds better.

I could tell you more news too : Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs off Caesar's images, are put to silence.

Incidentally, if you follow that Squander Two link instead of just gawping you can read about an entertaining nutter who thinks he is God. (The nutter is not Squander Two, I hasten to add for the benefit of anyone who still hasn't clicked the link. As I recall S2 is an atheist even when contemplating himself, a rare thing among bloggers.) Anyway, the divine Mr Christopher Roller is suing David Blaine and David Copperfield for siphoning off his godly powers.

"Making it real" doesn't always help.

This post from Joanne Jacobs links to a report in Science Daily that says students were

"more successful in applying what they learned to new situations when they were taught with abstract symbols rather than concrete objects." In one of the experiments the subjects "were separated into four groups, each of which learned from a different set of symbols, from very abstract and simple to intricate photos of real objects. In general, even though the learned material was otherwise identical, students who used the most intricate, concrete symbols did poorer on testing than those who learned using the most simple, abstract symbols."

The report suggests that the almost instinctive educational practice of helping children understand by making the abstract more concrete or "human" might not be such a good idea after all. However one of Joanne's commenters makes the good point that the subjects for the experiment were college students, and things might be different for young children.

Yet I must say that as soon as I saw Joanne's headline, it seemed intuitively convincing (with caveats, including the distinction between younger and older learners). The whole usefulness of numbers comes from their being abstract. We are intrigued by but do not envy the pointillist vision of the man described in Borges' Funes the Memorious.

In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.

In, out, in, out, you shake it all about.

A private and very cynical act led to David Blunkett's second resignation, says Stephen Pollard. I can't keep track of the whether Blunkett is in the Cabinet or out of it any more. And the man seems to have given himself over to women in nightclubs and to have a positive obsession with DNA testing. What is Tony Blair running, a government or a round of the hokey-cokey?

Poor old Mandy must be asking himself if his European job is safe.

"A public but not a cynical act"

was how I described Nelson's last prayer in this post. In this Samizdata review of several books on naval history in the time of Trafalgar, Findlay Dunachie discusses Nelson's paradoxical character. He quotes an extract from an account by the Duke of Wellington (as he then wasn't) of his only meeting with the other great British commander of the Napoleonic wars, a meeting that happened by chance in a waiting room of the old Colonial Office in Downing Street...

He entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody,

"I happened to say," indeed! I yield to few in my admiration for the old buzzard, but he cannot seriously have expected anyone to believe that Arthur Wellesley would let any man alive go long under the misapprehension that he was not somebody. But we were talking about the Admiral rather than the future Duke. Wellington's description of his meeting with Nelson continues:

and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All I had thought was a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact he talked like an officer and a statesman.

Brian Micklethwait's site seems to be only intermittently available at the moment, but it is worth your while to keep trying. He recasts Nelson's instant transformation in modern terms.

Tony Blair is a lot more like Nelson than like Wellington.

Yes, I'm going to try to pull modern politics into it. Lightly, dear friends, only lightly. Napoleon was only somewhat like Saddam Hussein. They had being vicious, blood-soaked tyrants who got a ridiculously good press in common, but Napoleon's relatives whom he raised to brief power were a lot nicer than Saddam's. (Poor Joseph Bonaparte, who would have liked to have been a reforming monarch, died an exile in the States, but he did get to see the Jersey Devil before his time was up. Not everyone can say that they have been King of Spain and seen the Jersey Devil. Uday never managed it.)

There are better parallels with the modern day when one looks at the eloquent revolutionary aristocrats who gave Napoleon that ridiculously good press and who have had a ridiculously good press themselves. Call yourself a radical and you can get away with anything.

I dunno. Perhaps I am making the same mistake that Findlay Dunachie indentifies in one of the books he reviews. Some writers at the start of the twenty-first century unconsciously try to pull people living at the start of the nineteenth century into a very twentieth century pattern.

Nicolson [one of the authors reviewed] ignores upper-class "Napoleonists", such as the Hollands, Fox, Whitbread, Byron et al, but makes much of ineffective proletarian unrest, to some extent fuelled by millenarian fantasies. Unmentioned are the Christian Evangelicals, more middle and upper class, a far more sober lot, the founders of what became Victorian morality, concerned rather with individual than mass behaviour, their social goals piecemeal, such as the abolition of the slave trade and boy chimney-sweeps and other ameliorations, rather than utopian. But religion seems to be rather marginalized in historical studies, perhaps as an unacknowledged, or even unconscious legacy of Marxism, whose believers could not credit that people meant what they said, but were "really" motivated by other, economic reasons.

Perry de Havilland

rang to remind me that my secret child is four years old today. His own offspring (and mine, although that child has many parents) is also four today.

Up to the minute news commentary

can be found elsewhere. I have up to the century news commentary. Nearly. Around the middle of the last century - 1944 to be precise - the Directorate of Army Education published the following work:

The British Way and Purpose
Consolidated Edition of B.W.P. Booklets 1-18

With
Appendices of Documents
of Post-War Reconstruction

In these days of rediscovered official interest in promoting an ideal of Britishness, it seems appropriate to see how our grandfathers tackled the job. All human life is in there, from "You and The Empire" to whether separate sculleries are a good idea. More on this illuminating book in future posts. Some of it is tosh, some of it is splendid and some of it is splendid tosh.

As is usual

when I get back from being away I have a pile hundreds of electrons thick of individually fascinating but collectively intimidating emails. One reader says she likes my blog and can show me images of herself and her friends having fun. Thank you, dear lady, but I must decline. By the way, despite your familiar greeting, I must state that I do not recall ever making your acquaintance.

But there were several emails from people I genuinely did know (even if only internetally) on the subject of self-antonyms. (I knew that word really.) One reader writes:

I see you've discovered self-antonyms, a word type I've tried to collect but have found only a few examples. One you might particularly like is the verb "dust", which means both "remove small particles" and "add small particles". One might also consider "bad", which now also means "good" in certain slang dialects, but I don't think the usage is sufficiently common.

An archaic choice is "let", which used to mean "hinder" as well as "permit", although the former has fallen in to disuse.

Not entirely into disuse. My proper blue British passport with its reassuringly stiff cover may have been replaced by a floppy, burgundy-coloured (how suitable those two adjectives are) euro pseudopass but the inside front cover still contains, if only in mockery, the following words:

Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.

I don't know whether Michael Greenspan (who gave his address as "Bronx, NY, The Colonies") knew that I had to be afforded assistance because my passport says so, or whether he just wrote out of the goodness of his heart, but he too has a self-antonym to add to my collection. He wrote:

"Possessed." It can mean "calm" or "frenzied."

Now that I have been reminded of the word "self-antonym" I could just Google it. But I won't. That's cheating. I shall stand... fast.

No luck this year.

My pumpkin patch was not quite sincere enough, evidently. Perhaps a little more existence would help.

It's odd to think that when I first read Charlie Brown cartoon books at the age of seven or so, I was equally ignorant of the customary vigil in honour of the Pumpkin and of the (now entirely Anglicized) practice of trick-or-treating. For a little while I was not clear whether either of these pieces of Americana existed outside the fictional Brown and Van Pelt households.

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!

I meant to get back to blogging today.

But a more important task takes priority. I await the Great Pumpkin!