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But what is this? A former Archbishop of Canterbury daring to criticise Islam?
Muslims claim a former Archbishop of Canterbury who criticised Islamic culture is “recycling” prejudice.
Speaking in Rome, Lord Carey said Islamic regimes were authoritarian and committed to power and privilege.
Lord Carey said not enough moderate Muslim leaders had condemned suicide bombers “clearly and unconditionally”, the Daily Telegraph reported.
But Muslim Council of Britain secretary general Iqbal Sacranie said: “One is dismayed by Lord Carey’s comments.”
I just bet one is.
I cannot find the original Telegraph piece that this BBC report refers to, but I did come across this, from 2001, when Carey actually was the Archbishop. Which is interestingly different from what he is now saying.
The BBC report continues:
BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott said Lord Carey’s speech had probably been more balanced than the impression given by the newspaper.
(Not that the BBC ever gives an unbalanced impression of anything.)
“One of the things that underlines his concern is the growth of Wahhabism – a very radical part of Islam – which is becoming quite dominant in the developing world,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
“There was also a sense when Lord Carey was archbishop, that he was growing increasingly frustrated by the problem in Islam, as he saw it, of there being something of a lack of a hierarchy where leaders could say authoritative things which could in some sense be morally binding for Muslims in general.”
Which would be why President Bush doesn’t rely on “diplomacy” (that is to say, mere promises of future good behaviour from those in no position to keep them), but concentrates instead on hunting the terrorists down in their own back yards, and uses diplomacy merely to pressurise those who get in the way of that process.
The West is learning.
ADDENDUM: In the hilarious first draft of this, I attributed the paragraph about Bush chasing terrorists, as well as the paragraphs above that, to the BBC. The mother of all misplaced html commands, I think you will agree. I do not apologise, because this was too much of a laugh, and laughs are good.
More Tsarism, this time of the Euro variety:
European Union leaders agreed yesterday to rush forward a clutch of EU-wide surveillance measures and created an anti-terror “Tsar” in response to the Madrid bombings.
The list of counter-terrorism measures pushed by Britain, France and Spain at a Union summit in Brussels include plans to retain mobile telephone records, e-mail and internet data indicating the time and address of all websites visited.
White Rose has further EUro-reportage and links about similar EUro-stuff, here and here.
This report also illustrates the point that EUrope is not just a machine to enable foreigners to muck the British around, it is also a machine to enable to British to muck the foreigners around: a sort of universal substitute empire for all the old European imperialists. Having been made to stop tyrannising over their previous imperial possessions, the tyrannising classes have switched instead to tyrannising over each other’s nations. Bad luck on the rest of us, but there it is, these people have to have someone to tyrannise over.
Meanwhile, proof that when the Euro elite wants something, it just beavers away until it gets it:
A new summer deadline for agreement on the EU constitution has been agreed by European leaders, putting renewed pressure on Tony Blair and his non-negotiable “red lines”.
Mr Blair had seemed content for the troubled constitution to slip off the agenda after December’s summit ended in deadlock. But a new deadline for agreement on the document has been set.
Although, when the time comes that the people who want EUrope to fall to bits are finally in the ascendancy, they will have the perfect precedent for saying: “We are going to keep on destroying this thing until we succeed, and will ignore all counter-opinions, of, e.g. voters, because these opinions are anti-historical and do not matter. We are doing what we know to be best. Our opponents are deluded. That’s what the founders of this thing did when they started it, and we are merely following their inspiring example.”
Trouble is, by the time that happens, those people may be even nastier.
I will read this piece by David Carr to cheer myself up.
On the face of it, this is a story about school truancy, and I have labelled it as “education”, because it is indeed in that general vicinity. But I think this is really a story about law. Can it truly be right to send a mother to prison for failing to make her child go to school?
A mother who became the first parent in Britain to be jailed for letting her children play truant was yesterday sent to prison again for the same offence after her youngest daughter repeatedly skipped school.
Patricia Amos, from Banbury, Oxfordshire, was sentenced by Bicester magistrates to 28 days’ imprisonment after failing to ensure her 14-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, attended lessons regularly. She had denied the charge, saying she had made “every effort” to get her daughter to go to school.
Amos was jailed for 60 days in May 2002 because Jacqueline and her older sister, Emma, persistently played truant from Banbury school. She was released on appeal after 28 days and vowed to make her daughters attend lessons, but after initial improvement – including a school prize for Emma – Jacqueline’s attendance slipped again to 61% last autumn.
One thing I do know, which is that now that the definition of child abuse has thus been widened to include achieving a school attendance rate of only 61% for your child, it will inevitably be widened still further, to include such things as smoking in the vicinity of your children, allowing them to eat sweeties and sticky buns, and no doubt in the decades to come, failing to teach them a foreign language or to give them a solid grounding in how to play computer games.
I agree that it lots of cases, forcing a particular child of a particular parent to attend a particular school rather than roam these particular streets and get into that particular sort of bad company may be a good thing, in this particular case. But the law itself is weakend when it is used to enforce something so controversially virtuous as this. Should everything that our rulers think desirable become compulsory? And everything considered improper and uncouth by our rulers illegal?
There is also the beginnings here of the creepy principle that you are legally responsible for the wrongdoings of another. Surely one of the basic ideas involved in the rule of law is that the individual who commits the crime is the one who should be punished for it, not someone else who might perhaps have influenced the criminal. Holding families legally responsible for individual behaviour sounds very collectivist to me.
File under wedge, thin end of.
And watch out, home educators.
A relentless and seemingly unstoppable trend in education in Britain is something which I call, at my Education Blog, sovietisation. This means: desperate quota fulfilment frenzies, and, increasingly, statistical measures of educational success which bear no relation to reality. In a word: cheating. Officially encouraged. With the politicians themselves implicated heavily, because they no more want to face the truth about how well they are really doing than anyone else does.
My latest sovietisation posting contained a big slice from this Telegraph article by Frank Furedi about cheating at university, and David Gillies added this comment by way of confirmation of this disturbing trend. The only thing I have cut from his comment was the brief apology at the end of it for going on at such length, which I have assured him was quite unnecessary.
This corresponds exactly to my experiences in academia. As a doctoral student, I would augment my meagre income by acting as a ‘demonstrator’ (i.e. teaching assistant). I would help guide students in the lab courses through the trickier points of the thing they were studying and give them hints when they got stuck. I also had the responsibility of marking the reports they subsequently prepared.
At the end of one term, I was given the task of marking the results of a fairly major project that one class had undertaken. After about ten of them I noticed an ominous trend. Phrases and in some cases entire paragraphs were copied verbatim between reports. As I proceeded, I started to notice that there were several different, sometimes overlapping variants of the report. I began to be able to discern a sort of taxonomic structure – in the end I was almost able to ascribe a sort of evolutionary tree to the plagiarised reports, rather like philologists do with missing or partial texts of ancient manuscripts.
By now both worried and annoyed, I wrote a detailed memorandum, with copious examples of the suspect work, heavily footnoted and with an explanation of my hypothetical taxonomy (I seem to recall it took me about three days to write). I went to the lecturer who was running the course and said, “we have a serious problem.” He looked at my memo and promptly got the Head of Department involved. The Head sent my report over to Admin, along with some thoughts of his own and the lecturer. And then – nothing. The degree of plagiarism varied from student to student. The most egregious example was one in which, as far as I could tell, two students had run off two copies of the same report with simply their names substituted. For these I recommended expulsion. For the remainder, I recommended sanctions ranging from failing that module of the course to failing the course entirely. Most severe sanction actually imposed: loss of marks for that module and a written warning put on file. Most escaped scot-free.
I was sickened. Just a few years earlier, as part of our induction to studying Physics at Imperial College, we were given an afternoon’s worth of lectures on integrity, ethics and the scientific method. We were told in no uncertain terms that not only would cheating get us kicked out, it would end our scientific careers. And yet, in the mid ’90’s, students at a University in the north of England could plagiarise with near impunity.
The reason? Money. Every lost student was a lost grant. So shackled is the University system to the filthy teat of Government (especially post the hare-brained notion that more than a small fraction of a nation’s youth is capable of conducting study at degree level) that chasing grants is the primary, secondary and tertiary priority of universities. Teaching and research quality is important only inasmuch as it can be used to garner a tick in the right box in the latest assessment exercise. Only a complete divorce of higher education from government can halt and reverse this trend.
UPDATE: See also this confessional memoir by Natalie Solent.
It’s only a little thing, but I regard it as a very bad sign when a country starts advertising for tourists. I’m not against tourism, but I am against national organisations which advertise it. I regard them as evidence that everything else in the country is a mess, but that since the place is at least picturesque and ruined and not being built on everywhere, well, at least we can get foreigners to come and drool over it.
I can remember the shock when, during the Jimmy Carter regime I think it must have been, the USA started begging us on TV to give them a visit.
My point? Well, I just saw a TV advert for being a tourist in … Scotland, done by, I think, these people. This has been going on for some time now.
Let me be clear. I am not saying that Scotland is not a fine place to visit. I have visited it, and it is very fine. It has the nearest thing in the British Isles to mountains, and lovely lakes ( which they call lochs), and cute fake castles (which I almost prefer to our real ones), and men marching about in coloured skirts blowing pipes you won’t hear anywhere else. Scotland is great. Everyone should see it at least once. What I am objecting to are the TV adverts. They are the sign of bad times up there.
Their rugby team is certainly an embarrassment.
But while the short-term news in Scotland is obviously bad, the long term news is that the Scots are now slowly if painfully learning how to govern themselves, and generally to look after themselves, without having us English to blame. If you tax, spend, regulate, and generally screw around with everything, bad things will follow. If, on the other hand, you cut taxes …, deregulate … I was for Scottish devolution when it happened and I am for it now even more, and I am not averse to the idea of complete Scottish national separation. I genuinely believe that, for all their temporary difficulties, the Scots are just so much less petty-nationalist and whiny and blame-Englandy than they were before devolution. I am confident that they will soon put the bad old days of begging people to come and visit them behind them, and settle down to making Scotland the sort of place where people will just visit of their own accord because it is so interesting and fun to be in.
No doubt commenters will inform us of all the places where England, or worse, my beloved London, is also advertised on TV.
Good news from today’s Guardian, which just goes to show that big news can sometimes come in the form of something bad just very quietly not happening:
Tacit confirmation that joining the single currency is off the political radar until after the next election came today as the “No” campaign confirmed it was ceasing to campaign actively.
The group insists that a “steering committee” will monitor the government’s plans on the euro, but that last week’s budget now means that a referendum would not be before spring 2008 at “the absolute earliest”.
In his budget statement last Wednesday, Gordon Brown announced a “rolling assessment” of the case for euro – but last June told MPs that only one of his “five tests” had been met.
The sixth test – can they get us damn voters to agree to it? – was always the test that mattered. I don’t know anyone who believes that any of the other five matter as much as that one. (Come to think of it, I doubt if I know anyone who knows what all these tests are.) And because those New Labour people didn’t take all the chips they won in 1997 and throw them straight back onto the table and bet them all on the abolition of the pound Sterling, right then, there is a very good chance that Britain will retain its national independence indefinitely, with its separation from the ‘eurozone’ eventually mutating into separation from ‘Europe’ itself. I can hope.
As a libertarian I wish we Brits could cherry pick. I wish we could welcome all these Eastern European immigrants who are about to flood in and who want to work, but not take all the idiotic and mean-minded regulations and ‘harmonisations’. (And maybe history will cherry pick exactly that arrangement for me, eventually.) Which might explain why in other parts of Europe the libertarians are all gung-ho not only for ‘Europe’ but for the very Euro itself. In Brussels last week, I heard tell of a Swedish libertarian who voted ‘No’ in the Swedish referendum and who was damn near ostracised by the rest of her tribe. In Sweden, ‘Europe’ is what is going to dismantle their over-bloated welfare state. ‘Europe’ is Thatcherism.
However, the fact that ‘Europe’ may be a better bet than Sweden for Sweden doesn’t make it a better bet than Britain for Britain, so I am still pleased about the indefinitely postponement of the Euro in these parts.
When I edited pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, our problem was that we could not expect much in the way of immediate distribution. There was no internet in those days, or not that we knew about or could have used. Nor did we have the resources to print our publications and then to market them, and in the meantime store them. So it was that we relied on (a) the photocopier, and on (b) time. If what we said did not instantaneously find a readership, then it would have to get itself around nevertheless, one pamphlet at a time, by its sheer eloquence.
The time angle meant that we needed a different style of writing, a more timeless style, a style that would not date. We had to write in what I now recognise as a French style – more abstract, more theoretical (but free of any technical jargon), not heavy on detailed evidence (because evidence is liable to date) and heavy instead on generalisations with universal (and therefore timeless) appeal.
We were accused of preaching to the converted, and this was true. We were doing that. But preaching to the converted is an important part of any propaganda enterprise. The eloquent statement of that which is good and true, everywhere and at all times, is something to which supporters can rally and declare their agreement. By saying what we believed, we helped to turn what had merely been a silent army of isolated dissenters into an interconnected network of potential activists and organisers and movementeers. And writers, of course.
In short, we wanted people to write more like this:
Law is justice. And it is under the law of justice – under the reign of right; under the influence of liberty, safety, stability, and responsibility – that every person will attain his real worth and the true dignity of his being. It is only under this law of justice that mankind will achieve – slowly, no doubt, but certainly – God’s design for the orderly and peaceful progress of humanity.
→ Continue reading: Frédéric Bastiat looks at the entire world
Yesterday evening I was channel hopping by way of relaxation and chanced upon a UKTV History programme about the Cold War, and in particular about the doings and sayings of the rocket scientists. (Here is the UKTV History home page, but I can find no internet reference to this particular programme.)
The programme seemed fairly good, on the whole, but towards the end of it there was one glaring – not to say outrageous – non sequitur. → Continue reading: The UKTV History channel – underestimating Ronald Reagan and his rocket men
I was and am a devout anti-Communist. I rejoice that civilisation won the Cold War, detest the evil folly that was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-decrepitudism, and regret that the Russian Revolution was not strangled at birth. But (and you could hear that coming couldn’t you?) as far as I am concerned, Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was almost certainly a better composer after Stalin had given him his philistine going-over following the first performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, than he would have been if Stalin had left him alone. Although both are very fine, I prefer Symphony Number 5 (“A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism”) to Symphony Number 4.
 Had Shostakovich continued unmolested along the musical path he was travelling before Stalin’s denunciation of him, I don’t think he would merely have become just another boring sub-Schoenbergian modernist. He was too interesting a composer for that already. But I do not think his subsequent music would have stirred the heart in the way his actual subsequent music actually does stir mine, and I do not think I am the only one who feels this way. → Continue reading: Dimitri Shostakovich was a very nervous man
This article by young Freddie Sayers in the latest Spectator can be simply summarised. The EU is boring, and it is especially boring to Youth.
The youthfulness of Freddie Sayers is not something I am pointing out gratuitously. He makes much of it himself, when he writes things like this:
Sooner or later, the EU institutions will realise that they cannot shape trends, but are in fact subject to them. I believe the European Union will gradually become less relevant: the lack of interest in my generation practically guarantees it. The passion that the romantic vision of a united Europe once provoked was the result of a world-view which we cannot understand. When Michael Howard spoke in Berlin in February, he recalled how in 1963 he had been ‘one of the half million people who thronged in front of the Rathaus Schoneberg to hear President Kennedy give his famous address’; Sìle de Valera also told me how influenced she had been by General de Gaulle’s vision of Europe.
But these memories mean nothing to us. The old view of Europe, formed by a memory of intra-European war and the prospect of a new power block to counterbalance the US and Soviet Russia, is simply no longer relevant. I can’t remember the Berlin Wall falling down; the second world war seems ancient history. Sìle de Valera pondered why it is that young people feel ‘active and engaged in global politics, but it is harder to engage them at a more local level’. Perhaps we feel more like citizens of the world than citizens of Europe? The European Union has had useful and constructive results — freer travel and trade, cultural exchange programmes — but there is no reason for young people to get excited about it. We see these as the quite normal modern activities of any friendly civilised states, whether America or Italy. The whole idea of a particularly European vision is out of date, passé.
The trouble with Sayers saying all this, but not saying any more than this, is that however much the EUropean Union becomes less “relevant” in the eyes of its younger victims, it is still in fact in business. The EU boring? Well, so is a steamroller. But if the steamroller is steamrolling all over you, merely calling it boring is hardly the response that will actually stop it, now is it?
What is needed is a generation who have become sufficiently excited about the EUropean Union, to the point where they choose to stop it, and perhaps even reverse it.
Of course the EUro-enthusiasts would rather that the youth of EUrope shared their EUro-enthusiasm. But in the absence of support, they can proceed with their project in the absence of enthusiastic opposition.
I am not accusing Freddie Sayers of having foolish feelings, still less of reporting on the feelings of others inaccurately. On the contrary, that he is interested enough in the EU to write this piece about it, even – as he most entertainingly reports – travelling to a fatuous EUro-junket in Ireland that nobody else gave the slightest attention to, suggests that he at least is not indifferent to the progress of the steamroller.
So on the contrary, I think we should keep our eyes open for what else this young man writes.
And I wonder, is he the same Freddie Sayers as the one in this?
Surprise surprise:
The renewable energy industry suffered a setback today with the publication of a report showing that electricity from offshore wind farms will cost at least twice as much as that obtained from conventional sources.
According to research carried out by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), the cheapest electricity, costing just 2.3 pence per unit, will be generated from gas turbines and nuclear power stations, compared with 3.7p for onshore wind and 5.5p for offshore. The Academy also emphasised the need to provide backup for wind energy to cover periods when the wind doesn’t blow. The study assumed the need for about 65% backup from conventional sources, adding 1.7p to the cost of wind power, bringing its price up to two and a half times that of gas or nuclear power.
The other alternatives are: coal, which is about to get blamed for frying the planet and to be made illegal, here anyway; and: nuclear power, which is horrid horrid horrid and will never be allowed no matter how sensible they manage to make it.
Accordingly, it won’t be long before we all freeze to death. And since there will not be any electricity, we will not even be able to blog about it.
Prediction: the idiots who between them achieved this will then blame capitalism, for, er, exploiting people’s desire to stay warm, that is to say, not exploiting it enough, er, drivel drivel, shiver shiver, …
Actually, this is not all bad news. The bad news would be if there was no news about it all, and it was just happening. The story here is not merely that environmentalists are driving us all enviro-mental with their idiotically contradictory policies. It is that boring sounding people like the Institution of Civil Engineers are starting to get nervous, and even rather angry.
Nuclear engineers are getting in on the act too. Here is a bit lower down in that Guardian story:
RAE vice-president Philip Ruffles acknowledged that the findings may sound surprising, especially as the cost of nuclear decommissioning had been included in the research.
“The weakness of the government’s energy white paper was that it saw nuclear power as very expensive,” he said. “But modern nuclear stations are far simpler and more streamlined than the old generation and far cheaper to build and run.”
But the mad hippy lunatic scumbag tendency has no time for talk like that:
The British Wind Energy Association, who last year gave full backing to the government’s wind, questioned the reliability of the data which the RAE used: “BWEA assumes that the figures quoted for nuclear power are based upon reactors that are yet to be built and is not aware of any market experience that proves the costs claimed by the Royal Academy of Engineering,” it said.
But the reason there is no market experience of wind farming, surely, is because no one has yet expressed any desire for its product, give what it costs. With talk like that, the more lunatic your entrepreneurial scheme, the more it would be entitled to government money, so that it could acquire ‘market experience’. But maybe I have misunderstood the man.
Be that as it may, the real reason I included that last bit was the presence in it of the glorious phrase (from which a word must surely be missing): “gave full backing to the government’s wind”.
Here at Samizdata, we never give full backing to the government’s wind.
I’ve just done a rather long posting on my Education Blog about a teacher called Francis Gilbert, who has written a book highly critical of government education policies. Put it this way, I classified the post under one of my most frequently used headings: “Sovietisation.” The guts of Sovietisation is when the measuring system imposed from the centre completely overwhelms the activity it is supposedly measuring. In the old USSR, people spent all their time fulfilling quotas, by hook or by crook, as opposed to doing useful work. Now, more and more teachers are pushing, and faking, children through exams. And as also happened in the old USSR, everyone knows that this is happening, but nobody except a few very unusual dissidents can afford to go out on a limb and admit it.
While I was linking to articles by and about Gilbert, and to his recent book, Kit Taylor was simultaneously emailing me, twice, about a radio performance that Gilbert did today.
Email one:
Teacher Francis Gilbert was on Radio2’s Drive Time programme this evening (wednesday 10th March), promoting his book “I’m a Teacher Get Me Out of Here!”
Though he described himself as being of the left and wanting equality, he delivered a tirade against a crushing bureaucracy he likened to something out of 1984, and said that he was disillusioned by “what the left had done.” Notably, as questioned why schools weren’t free to devise their own curriculums, something utterly uncontroversial as far as I’m concerned but seemingly unthinkable in today’s political climate.
Host Johnnie Walker even chipped in agreeably, pontificating that anything the government tried to run it messed up!
All this on primetime national radio. Cause for optimism?
And then, just as I was going to press (having included email one at the last minute), in comes email two:
Actually, now I think on Francis Gilbert something even more interesting in the interview.
It was along the lines of –
“I can go to the corner shop, and I can buy a good quality jam or a cheaper one. I have that option. But if I want my daughter [aged three] to learn french or classics, the choices aren’t available.”
If advanced by the Tories, I’d be unsurprised if such a notion were attacked as Thatcherite extremism. What’s interesting is that Gilbert’s comments were not apparently derived from ideological dogma, but the product of a “man in the street” intuitively questioning why a system that was working well in one aspect of his life wasn’t being applied in another that wasn’t.
As I think I may already have been quoted here as saying, we do have one rather big advantage over our opponents, which is that reality is on our side.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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