We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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According to its website the responsibilities of the Scottish government include the economy, education, health, justice, rural affairs, housing, environment, equal opportunities, consumer advocacy and advice, transport, taxation, and ensuring that Shetland only appears on maps of Scotland as an indecipherably tiny smudge in the top right corner.
Ban on putting Shetland in a box on maps comes into force
New rules barring public bodies from putting Shetland in a box on official documents have come into force.
Islands MSP Tavish Scott had sought to change the law to ban the “geographical mistake” which “irks” locals, by amending the Islands (Scotland) Bill.
The bill’s “mapping requirement” has now come into force, although it does give bodies a get-out clause if they provide reasons why a box must be used.
Mapmakers argue that boxes help avoid “publishing maps which are mostly sea”.
A couple of points: (1) Tavish Scott MSP is a Lib Dem, proof that the Scottish National Party is not the only one in contention for a Holyrood Comedy Award. (2) the “ban” only applies to public bodies, so no need to get outraged about free speech. Yet. These “bans” do have a way of being trialled in the public sector before being unleashed on the actual public. For now, however, I think a more appropriate reaction is gratitude for the good laugh Mr Scott is giving us. And his comedy routine is not over yet:
Mr Scott said it was “ridiculous” that he had to change the law to close the box
True, but not in the way that he means.
He said: “There is no excuse now for the Scottish government, its agencies or others to put Shetland in a box. The box is closed. It doesn’t exist, whether that be in the Moray Firth or east of Orkney. Shetland is now in the right place.
This box is no more. It has ceased to be. It is … an ex-box.
To remind us all that the opposition of the Democrats in the Senate to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (or Justice Kavanaugh as he now is) to the Supreme Court of the United States is in accordance with the traditions of that party, allow me to quote the words from thirty years ago of that great defender of women, Senator Ted Kennedy, as he spoke out against the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy … President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.”
Bork was not confirmed, and the verb “to bork” entered the dictionary.
A bunch of lefty protesters are on trial at Chelmsford Crown Court.
Care ye not? You should. I have been banging on a lot about the degradation of norms of justice and law that had once seemed securely established. One particular aspect of these protesters’ trial is a disgrace. See if you can spot what it is:
Activists accused of blocking Stansted flight go on trial over terror charge
Fifteen activists who locked themselves together around an immigration removal charter flight to prevent its departure from Stansted and displayed a banner proclaiming “mass deportations kill” have gone on trial charged with a terrorist offence.
Jurors at Chelmsford crown court heard how the members of the campaign group End Deportations used lock-on devices to secure themselves around the Boeing 767, chartered by the Home Office, as it waited on the tarmac at the Essex airport to remove undocumented migrants to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone.
The activists have said they acted to prevent human rights abuses from taking place and have received high-profile political backing. However, they are accused of putting the safety of the airport and passengers at risk and causing serious disruption to international air travel. If convicted, they could face potential life imprisonment.
Oh, poot, I forgot to hide spoilers. Never mind. You’d have guessed it anyway. Come to think of it, the title of this post was a bit of a clue.
Protesters who mess around with airport security do not immediately gain my sympathy. Not only do they screw over blameless travellers, many of whom will have had to scrimp and save for their holiday, the prosecuting counsel made a decent point when he said,
“In order to deal with this incursion, a number of armed officers already at Stansted had to down-arm, thus reducing the capacity of police to carry out their duties at the terminal,” he said. “Had another major incident occurred at the terminal at the same time, the police resources able to respond to it would have been reduced.”
But to pretend that to give an (imaginary) terrorist attack that might have happened that day (but didn’t) an infinitesimally higher (but still purely theoretical) chance to succeed is terrorism … that is indecent.
Anyone else remember the expulsion of Walter Wolfgang from the Labour party conference in 2005? They chucked him out for heckling Jack Straw. Then it sunk in that he was old and emerged that he had come to this country as a Jewish refugee from Hitler, and Labour fell over themselves in their haste to apologise. I said at the time that I saw no reason why they should apologise for ejecting a heckler. The thing they needed to apologise for was far more serious than that:
Buried in the story and not, at first, attracting much comment was one thing that left me flabbergasted. For this Tony Blair and his entire government should get down on their knees and humbly beg forgiveness, swearing at the same time not to rest until the harm they have allowed to flourish is undone:
Police later used powers under the Terrorism Act to prevent Mr Wolfgang’s re-entry, but he was not arrested.
There was a wee fuss about the role of anti-terror powers against Wolfgang at the time, but the point about the blatant abuse of powers that we had been assured would only be used against dangerous fanatics out to commit mass murder was lost amid all the other issues. Because this tactic was not challenged strongly when it was first tried, it became widespread. We have reached a point where half of councils use anti-terror laws to spy on ‘bin crimes’. I don’t recall that possiblity being mentioned in the Parliamentary debates about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Now this bloated definition of terrorism threatens life imprisonment to people who are not terrorists.
Of the many stories of science fiction, fantasy and horror that I have read in my time, the one – I think the only one – that for years afterwards I wished I had never seen was It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby. That Wikipedia link contains spoilers, obviously, but it is a story some of you might prefer to have spoiled. If not, the full text of the story is here. It is, of course, one of the greatest science fiction/horror stories ever written. If it were not it would not have had such an effect on me when I came across it concealed like a tarantula among sweet fruit in an anthology of science fiction stories for and about children that I got from the library.
Most of the horrors described in the story belong solely in the realms of nightmare. But there is one aspect of life in Peaksville, Ohio, that like all the best fantasy tropes, derives its power from the way it resonates with certain situations in real life. They, the forty-six inhabitants of Peaksville who might or might not be the last remnants of the human race, dared not be unhappy. “Oh, don’t say that, Miss Amy … it’s fine, just fine. A real good day!”
This is the first paragraph of an article by Hugo Rifkind in today’s Times:
Besides the red face, and the shouting, and the hurt indignation, and the mad howls about still liking beer, one thing was very obvious last week about the US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. With a litany of legal achievements behind him, this was not a man who had expected, at 53, to be answering for his behaviour as a teenager.
They really do want to extract the last drop, don’t they? It is not enough to demand that Kavanaugh prove where he was thirty-six years ago when he was seventeen. Correction, approximately seventeen, since Christine Blasey Ford cannot even specify the year in which the alleged crime took place. It is not enough to demand that he defend himself against a baying claque who joyfully proclaim abandonment, not just of the presumption of innocence, but of the very possibility of innocence when the accusation is sexual assault and the accused is male. (Just one example via Instapundit: Students demand professor fired after he champions due process, says ‘Accusers sometimes lie’). That does not sate them. They also demand that the man in the dock must suppress his emotions as utterly as must the slave of a cruel master. Indignation is not permitted him. His voice must remain low and humble. And woe betide him if the involuntary reactions of the body send blood rushing to his face.
Perhaps too much science fiction has addled my brains, but when I read that I really did think of the scene in It’s a Good Life where poor Dan Hollis suddenly can’t find it in him to be happy any more. And I also thought of what followed soon afterwards, not in the context of Judge Kavanaugh this time, but in the context of all those “liberal” journalists like Hugo Rifkind who once upon a time would have been all for due process and the presumption of innocence, but whose courage nowadays – though tested infinitely less than that of the people of Peaksville – stretches only to not being the loudest in the mob:
Some of the people began mumbling. They all tried to smile. The sound of mumbling filled the room like a far-off approval. Out of the murmuring came one or two clear voices:
“Oh, it’s a very good thing,” said John Sipich.
“A good thing,” said Anthony’s father, smiling. He’d had more practice in smiling than most of them. “A wonderful thing.”
We girls do get ourselves in a tizzy sometimes. Even me, and I’m an unusual girl, being into boy things like science. As a sixth former my dream was to become an astronaut, or, failing that (edit: or in addition to that), a particle physicist who would unlock the secrets of the universe at CERN. Those dreams weren’t so crazy, either. I did go to Oxford to study physics, and I did make some use of my degree in parts of my subsequent career. I never made it to CERN but I know people who did. For these reasons I have a motherly concern for the future of science, with particle physics being particularly close to my heart. When my old college and the Oxford Department of Physics send me their respective begging newsletters I throw them both away but I never fail to commit the physics one to the depths of the recycling bin in a respectful manner.
That is why I was so worried when I read this report from the BBC:
Cern scientist Alessandro Strumia suspended after comments
A senior scientist who said physics “was invented and built by men” has been suspended with immediate effect from working with Cern.
Prof Alessandro Strumia, of Pisa University, made the comments during a presentation organised by the European nuclear research centre.
Cern issued a statement on Monday suspending Prof Strumia pending an investigation.
You can see why I was worried for a moment: there was no accusation of scientific misconduct by Professor Strumia. It seemed almost as if CERN were punishing unconventional political beliefs. But then all became clear. Why did I not see it before? Like true scientists, CERN proposed to investigate the Professor’s hypothesis. He has said, “People say that physics is sexist, physics is racist. I made some simple checks and discovered that it wasn’t, that it was becoming sexist against men and said so.” Obviously CERN would dispassionately examine the relevant data and draw conclusions as to how well it aligned to his hypothesis.
What a relie…
It stated that his presentation was “unacceptable”.
How do you know in advance whether it was acceptable or not, CERN? OK, I was being a sarcastic cow as per usual when I pretended to think that you ever had any plan to investigate whether what he said was true, but you haven’t even done your wretched little thoughtcrime investigation yet.
And so it goes on:
“Cern always strives to carry out its scientific mission in a peaceful and inclusive environment,” the statement reads, calling the presentation “contrary to the Cern Code of Conduct”.
The organisation said it was “unfortunate” the views of the scientist, who works at a collaborating university, “risks overshadowing the important message and achievements of the event”.
Prof Strumia, who regularly works at Cern, was speaking at a workshop in Geneva on gender and high energy physics.
He told his audience of young, predominantly female physicists that his results “proved” that “physics is not sexist against women. However the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside”.
He produced a series of graphs which, he claimed, showed that women were hired over men whose research was cited more by other scientists in their publications, which is an indication of higher quality.
He also presented data that he claimed showed that male and female researchers were equally cited at the start of their careers but men scored progressively better as their careers progressed.
Carelessly, the BBC let us see a glimpse of a graph of one of his slides which did seem to kinda sorta suggest that… I will say no more. He may well be wrong. When scientists make confident pronouncements about matters outside their area of expertise they often make fools of themselves. But fair play to him, he did put the ball in his opponents’ court by publishing his data. In an older tradition of reporting this might have been the prompt for the BBC to provide an analysis of the figures. But the modern BBC prefers to outsource its analysis to semi-random people on Twitter. Some woman who must be listened to because her twitter handle is “DrSammie” tweets, “I don’t even have any rage left for the whole CERN sexism thing because, truth is, I’m not at all shocked or surprised knowing some of the attitudes of people I have met. It aint unique to any one scientific discipline.” I do hope she is able to find a new supply of rage soon; a modern female scientist must never be without rage.
Just to top it off, the BBC finishes by this charming little lie of omission. The article says:
In 2015, Nobel laureate Prof Tim Hunt resigned from his position at University College London after telling an audience of young female scientists at a conference in South Korea that the “trouble with girls” in labs was that “when you criticise them they cry”.
Way to go, BBC. Don’t let the readers know that the next words Hunt said were,
“Now seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt an important role in it. Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”
Emphasis added. It was a joke. But it is not wise to joke against the dominant religion, as Sir Tim Hunt’s subsequent treatment demonstrated. Nor is it wise to put forward for discussion ideas contrary to that religion, as Professor Strumi’s treatment demonstrates. Perhaps it is a still too early to bring up Galileo Galilei’s dealings with the Holy Office. But when I read that the first reaction of some of the most prominent scientists in the world, endlessly lauded for their “scientific daring”, to new ideas from one of their number is to is to deem those ideas “unacceptable” – not “wrong for the following reasons” but unacceptable – I cannot help remembering that Galileo complained to Kepler that those who denounced him would not even look through his telescope.
The New European justifies its reputation as a great organ by running this story by Jonathon Read:
‘Snowflake’ minister Raab blocks anti-Brexit groups on Twitter after this photograph emerges
Brexit secretary Dominic Raab has blocked two anti-Brexit groups on Twitter after a photograph emerged of him with a campaigner wearing a sign saying “he has no idea what he’s doing.”
Raab has previously styled himself as a free speech champion, hitting out at the culture of offence in the United Kingdom, and claiming in an interview that “we’re seeing a salami slicing of free speech.”
The photograph was taken by a young campaigner from the anti-Brexit group Our Future, Our Choice and has been widely shared on social media.
The group’s co-founder, Richard Brooks, has hit out at the Brexit secretary for blocking the young anti-Brexit movement on Twitter and acting like a “snowflake.”
“Young people and students across the country are legitimately concerned about their future’s because of the disaster that is Brexit,” Brooks explained. “We were always told that young people should try and engage more in politics and debate, but obviously the Brexit secretary doesn’t want that to happen.”
There is nothing inconsistent between wishing to champion free speech and blocking people on Twitter. A belief in free speech does not oblige you to listen to everyone in the world, particularly not to those who have played nasty little playground tricks in an effort to humiliate. To claim that if you believe in free speech you must never block anyone on social media would be like claiming that if you believe in free speech you must never turn off the radio or the TV when a speaker you dislike comes on, or must keep it permanently tuned to a channel sponsored by your political enemies. Even the idols of Our Future, Our Choice in the European Commission have not demanded the compulsory installation of 1984-style Telescreens, though given the way the thoughts of the European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers, and Gender Equality, Věra Jourová, are tending perhaps I should not be giving them ideas.
Dominic Raab is in no need of me to defend him. Given that he is a successful politican who has achieved ministerial office he probably has a thick skin and given that he is a successful politician who has achieved ministerial office he probably only defends free speech after running it past the Chief Whip. However Richard Brooks’ pretence at the pretence of girlish innocence in the line “We were always told that young people should try and engage more in politics and debate, but obviously the Brexit secretary doesn’t want that to happen” is still revolting. European Youth is back to its usual more openly bullying form with the tweet from another “activist” approvingly quoted by Read: “You might not like listening to @OFOCBrexit or our friends @FFSake_ but it’s pretty clear you can’t keep hiding from us…”
Simple question: when reading about any accusation of rape or sexual assault, compared to five years ago, have you become more or less likely to believe the accuser?
To ask the question is to answer it. I can remember a time when if I saw a rape trial reported in the newspaper I had as few preconceptions as I now have in a case of murder. Stop for a minute and think how strange it is that in cases of murder nearly everyone would still say that the guilt or innocence of the accused is the very thing we have a trial to decide, and with the onus being on the prosecution to prove it.
For the information of younger readers, rape trials used to be like that. Of course I had heard that in some far-off times and places a woman accusing a man of rape was automatically believed. Everyone thought of this as an evil we had outgrown. The usual example cited was the southern states of the United States during the era of racial segregation. In those days a black man accused of rape by a white woman was presumed guilty. Anyone who even raised the possibility of his innocence was denounced as being indifferent to, or even wanting, the rape of white women.
One of the books I studied for English O-Level was To Kill a Mockingbird in which an innocent black man is accused of rape by a white woman. One of the books I studied for English A-Level was A Passage to India in which an innocent Indian is accused of sexual assault by a British woman. The lesson was clear: beware the human tendency to let rightful outrage at how evil rape is overwhelm rational assessment of whether a particular accusation of rape is true. Although I believe that To Kill A Mockingbird is still fairly popular as a set book, that lesson is no longer fashionable. I write this just after Professor Christine Blasey Ford has finished giving her testimony. Until a minute ago the Guardian headline was that “Christine Blasey Ford has been hailed as a hero”. And unless I’ve missed it, you will not find any hint in its pages that anyone other than pantomime-villain Republicans has failed to join the acclamation. In this the Guardian is, as ever, copying the US press.
And thus the #MeToo movement died. It did some good while it lived. Some sexual predators were exposed, some rapists brought to justice. We should not be surprised at how many of them were left wing icons: they were the ones who were being allowed to get away with it. Remember how Harvey Weinstein’s first reaction when it came out was to try to buy off the anger by saying he would “channel his anger against himself” by fighting the NRA and President Trump. He tried that trick because it had always worked before.
But it’s over now, though the corpse may kick for a while. Senator Dianne Feinstein killed it off by sitting on the letter that accused Kavanaugh all through the nomination hearings only to release it at the last minute. That is not the action of someone who has a disinterested concern for justice. Frankly, it is not the action of someone who actually believed in the accusation they were passing on.
Whatever the results – whatever the truth – of the testimonies of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, from now on half the US (followed after a short delay by the rest of the developed world) will assume until it is proven otherwise that similar accusations in the future are just another tactic in Dems vs Repubs. Even those who strive not to assume anything, those whose horror at the way Kavanaugh has been treated is rooted in a belief in the old fashioned principles of impartial justice, will find it almost impossible to avoid that fatal twitch of cynicism. The burned child fears the fire.
If nothing else, we are getting a show. There have been so many weird developments in this case today that I cannot keep up. I gather that someone else accused Kavanaugh of rape and then recanted, and that two separate men have accused themselves of being the person who assaulted Christine Ford.
We in the UK blazed the trail. Read about Operation Midland for a demonstration of how once the idea of “believe the victim” is in the air it inevitably attracts liars and fantasists from miles around. Never forget that in addition to bringing misery to those they falsely accuse and their families, liars and fantasists such as “Nick” are parasitical on genuine victims of rape.
Is to the disgrace of the feminist movement that it insisted that rape victims should no longer be entitled to justice.
Instead they have the dubious privilege of being forced into the same category as “Nick”. Their testimony will be heard all right, but only on the understanding that it doesn’t matter. Its hearers are forbidden to believe it, because they are forbidden to assess it at all.
The injunction to believe the “victim” – that is, the accuser – in all circumstances cannot be obeyed. Belief does not work that way. If you are forbidden to even consider the evidence in an accusation then you can never come to believe it. Oh, you can be made to say you believe it. You can be made to scream that you believe it. You can be made to scream that you believe it so loudly that you can no longer hear yourself think, which is the aim of the process. But that is not belief.
Related post: If you don’t care whether a rape really happened, you don’t care about rape.
That was the title of a request for legal advice submitted to Reddit by someone with the user name “HelpfulButterscotch2”. Here is the whole post:
[CA] A student at the preschool I work at is only being taught a fictional language
I’m twenty, and I work part-time as an assistant at a small daycare in California.
There is a four year old who speaks very very little and poor English. Knows the most basic of words but is at the level of maybe a two year old English-wise compared to the other kids, including several who are both native Spanish/English speakers. Basically knows “yes”, “no”, “juice”, etc.
He’s only been here for less than a month and I’ve seen his incredibly limited vocab double in that time. I’m embarrassed to say it but I’m very uneducated about this type of thing and I thought he was speaking Portuguese or something similar up until last week. The kids are split into small groups by age and I’m usually not in charge of his group unless it’s at the end of the day, in my defense.
The hosts of the daycare are very into nerd culture and some of the daycare is very decorated with (child friendly) sci-fi and fantasy stuff. I’m not too into it myself but I like listening to them and I (usually) like their passion.
One day I was curious what language the child was speaking so I looked up what Portuguese actually sounded like and realized it wasn’t that. Looked up a lot of languages and for the life of me could not identify it. The single dad who picked him up looked like a nice dude and one day he was one of the last people to pick up that day so I asked him what language his kid spoke.
The bosses of the daycare were there too when I asked and they all suddenly got big smiles on their faces and explained to me in depth that the guy was a linguistics hobbyist who was trying to recreate an experiment where he raises his kid to speak a language from the tv show Star Trek (klingon.)
He explained how at home he only has spoken Klingon (which is apparently a real full language) to the kid and that’s all he knows. My bosses LOVE that he is doing this and he does too, he told me to look up the experiment and read about it. My bosses even learned a small bit of the language themselves so that when they talk to the kid they don’t say it.
It sounded kinda cool at the time but I didn’t really think about it too much. When I looked it up I found out that the guy who did it taught his kid Klingon AND English at the same time. I assumed that this guy was doing the same and I just misunderstood but when I clarified next time he confirmed that the kid was ONLY being taught Klingon on purpose and he was going to try and continue the “experiment” for as long as possible.
He also told me about his blog and I checked it out where he describes this all and he basically states in it that he is fully aware that this will make it “slightly” hard for the kid to speak english later but that the experience is worth it. He even has limited the kids intake of media very severely so far to avoid shows with a lot of speaking/words.
The kid is fairly isolated and generally acts a bit socially “off”, if I can say that without being mean. Not like misbehaving but he clearly has small issues interacting with kids his age who all talk a lot already.
I’ve brought it up casually with my bosses but they basically love this dude and what he is doing and don’t see a problem with it. I feel terrible but I feel like I should report this? Is this child abuse? This guy basically is mispurposely not teaching his kid to how to interact with other people for the level of “it’s just a social experiment bro”, it’s nuts to me.
If I’m wrong and this isn’t dangerous I apologize. It feels awful to me though. I like my job otherwise but if I had to lose it for this i could find another one, have some savings, i feel too bad for this kid.
That is eerily similar to the scenario I imagined a couple of years ago in a post called “The morality of not teaching your child English”. I started by asking whether it would be wrong to raise your child to speak only Welsh. No, I answered. “Welsh has over half a million speakers and a magnificent corpus of poetry, literature and song. Speaking Welsh alone does not remotely count as linguistic imprisonment”. Then I asked the question again for languages with smaller and smaller numbers of speakers. 50,000? 5,000? 500? That last figure is about the number of Cornish speakers. I wrote:
Very recently the Cornish language has been revived. 557 speakers claim it as their main language, 20 young children are native speakers. Let me stress that in real life all of these children are being brought up to be bilingual in Cornish and English. But when you get down to a group of that size and imagine its children being brought up monolingually, the mental walls do begin to close in.
How small would the village be before it became a prison?
The specific example of Klingon was brought up in comments by William H Stoddard. He cited the fairly well-known case (also mentioned by “HelpfulButterscotch2”) of another child who was taught Klingon from babyhood by his father back in the 1990s, but – and this is a crucial distinction – that child’s mother spoke to him in English. As I said,
…when the child began to notice that the people he met outside didn’t speak this language he began to stop talking in it (a common way for attempts to raise bilingual children to break down, as I’m sure you know), and the father did not persist and risk damaging his relationship with the child. It was getting to be a pain for the father too, as Klingon doesn’t have equivalents for a lot of the everyday English words that the boy was meeting as his world expanded. Given that the child also learned English, the only ethical issue, and a much smaller one, was whether one should make one’s child mildly famous as an experiment.
At the time I had reservations about naming the child, but without need. The story of how d’Armond Speers tried to raise his son to be bilingual in Klingon and English is all over the internet. Stephen Fry interviewed him. The son is grown up now, speaks English normally, and has forgotten his Klingon.
But the child described by “HelpfulButterscotch2” has not been raised to speak a conlang alongside English. He has only been exposed to the artificial language and, if the post is to be believed, has been prevented from learning English. Though to be fair that isolation from English has now ceased, given that he now goes to a normal US preschool.
In principle it should make no difference whether the language the child is being raised in is a conlang or a natural language. Esperanto is a constructed language, but it has had quite a few native speakers, usually the children of parents from different countries who met at Esperanto conferences. Apparently Esperanto was the mother tongue of the financier George Soros. It does not seem to have held him back. However one problem with Klingon that d’Armond Speers mentioned in his interview with Stephen Fry is that, compared to Esperanto which has been going for well over a century and has several million speakers, Klingon is the work of one man and has a limited vocabulary. That point was made even by the conlanging enthusiasts who discussed this story when it was cross-posted to the subreddit dealing with constructed languages, /r/conlangs. The general reaction there was disquiet. The top comment is by “chrevs” and reads,
It’d be different if he was being raised as bilingual, but he’s stunting the kid’s ability to to get on where he lives. Not to mention that if things were to be going horribly wrong at home, like his father decides he also needs to be practicing the kind of ritual combat the Klingon do, the kid can’t express that he’s in danger to teachers or other trusted adults. It’s not okay
Another commenter called “Esosorum” says,
I worry that, from a biological perspective, this child’s brain isn’t experiencing language-acquisition the way it was meant to. I just don’t think conlangs have as much to offer as natural languages. I don’t disagree that conlangs can be wonderfully expressive and complex, but natural language is rooted in culture in a way that a conlang can’t be.
It could be that the post by HelpfulButterscotch2 is not to be believed. It was submitted under a pseudonym and the author joined Reddit one day before submitting it. That means that we are not in a position to get a feel for their sincerity (and sanity) by looking at their comment history. I find it curious that there is no link provided to the blog where the father of the boy is claimed to describe what he is doing. Some people do take an odd pleasure in passing off bizarre fictions as truth just for the buzz. On the other hand having joined Reddit one day ago is not inconsistent with a person not knowing who else to turn to for advice about a situation that worries them deeply. Equally, HelpfulButterscotch2 may be sincere but have misunderstood the situation. I hope so.
But assuming that this is really happening as described, it does raise some sharp questions for Libertarians. When do we get on the phone and send the state sweeping in to “save” a child from their parents?
The Shadow Education Secretary, Angela Rayner MP (Lab), has called for a ban on anonymous online accounts.
The education spokesperson also called for social media companies to ban anonymous accounts, complaining at a fringe event organised by the Guardian in Liverpool that most of the people that abused her online did so without using their real names.
Rayner said that social media firms should take greater responsibility for their users and complained in particular that Facebook seemed to have indicated that politicians should accept a higher level of abuse.
When asked what she thought about social media, Rayner said: “One of the first things they should do is stop anonymous accounts. Most people who send me abuse me do so from anonymous accounts and wouldn’t dream of doing it in their own name.”
Rayner conceded that using real names would not stop abuse but “it would certainly help a little bit. I think they should do more, they do have a responsibility for online”.
As I mentioned earlier, Angela Rayner is the Shadow Education Secretary. That ought to mean that she is aware that teachers, like MPs, are often subject to harassment. The Times Educational Supplement had an article on that very subject just a few days ago: “Why your social account is not as private as you think”. It began:
The teacher’s Facebook account was set to private. She was certain of that. Yet, in the past week, she had received four friend requests from former pupils. She could not work out how they had found her.
So, as I am a researcher at the Greater Manchester Police – and her friend – she asked me to take a look. Within 10 minutes, I had not just found her, but I also had her full name, her partner’s name, the school she worked at, the name of one of her children and multiple images of the street she lives on.
The writer, Chris Glover, proceeded to give ten tips that teachers should employ to protect themselves: 1. Keep accounts separate. 2. Vary usernames. 3. Check posts about you. 4. Beware of public posts. 5. Review privacy settings. 6. Don’t follow your school account. 7. Avoid using your real name. 8. Change the friends-list setting. 9. Switch off location. 10. Delete dormant accounts.
Following the above advice should help ensure that teachers can enjoy participating in life online while minimising the very real risk of being tracked down by former or current pupils bearing a grudge, or simply by people whom it is best to keep at arms length for professional or safeguarding reasons.
Until a Labour government gets in and makes Nos. (2) and (7) illegal outright, and demands that all of your personal details are held in one place by a social media company so as to be conveniently available for hackers and identity thieves.
The Guardian reports,
John McDonnell: Labour wants to push ahead with Brexit
On eve of conference, shadow chancellor defies calls for party to promise second referendum
Labour would fight a snap general election vowing to press ahead with Brexit, but it would secure better terms, John McDonnell has said, defying demands from party members to include a second-referendum pledge in any manifesto.
Read the comments to that Guardian piece to get a sense of how well that goes down with most Labour members. The current top comment is:
Fine, well you do that Labour, and enjoy being in permanent opposition when remainers like me stop voting for you.
The next most recommended comment is:
For gods sake Labour. This was your chance and you’ve blown it. You’ve completely misread the way the wind is blowing and put your desire for hard-line socialism in front of taking care of the most vulnerable, which Brexit will hit the hardest. I despair with the state of things right now.
In all matters but one I am much closer to sympathy with folks like “ArchNemesis666” and “Stimpers” than with Corbyn or the self-proclaimed Marxist McDonnell. So why do I find myself beginning to wonder if it might not be best for the country that he and his see-no-evil “present but not involved” boss Corbyn retain the affections of their student fans in the Labour party for the foreseeable future?
For the UK as a whole, for many months now polls have given a slight majority for the idea that leaving the EU was a bad decision. We should expect this. After any vote there is usually a sense of buyer’s remorse. Those who got the result they wanted move on with their lives. Those who did not dwell bitterly on their loss and as a result dominate the conversation, prompting a switch by the least committed supporters of the winning side. This is why after most elections the new government has only a short honeymoon before it is overtaken in the polls by the Opposition. That can flip back quite fast if another election is called, as the general election of 2015 demonstrated.
So I am not moved by arguments that the few percentage points by which the answer “wrong” leads “right” to the question “Was it right or wrong to leave the EU?” in opinion polls means that “the people have changed their minds” and Brexit has lost its “democratic legitimacy”. On those grounds scarcely any government’s democratic legitimacy would last longer than a few weeks. It would become impossible for any government to get anything done… whoa, I could get into that idea. But I want it applied to equally to all sides.
So, as a matter of fact, if another EU referendum were held I would have good hope that Leave would win again on those grounds alone. Only a very small part of my visceral hatred of the idea of another referendum comes from the odds I give for my chosen side to win. There is more at stake.
The EU referendum was no ordinary vote. Its supporters waited forty years. They were not meant to win; in large part they were the disillusioned and disaffected who do not usually turn out to vote. But les miserables awoke from their slumber, an outcome the Left has always claimed to be its dearest desire. And they won.
Imagine a football game. The underdogs play the game of their lives and against the odds win the cup. Only the referee is in league with the favourites and finds a way to disallow the victory and force a rematch. There is consternation. “My dear chaps, no need to get so worked up,” says the chairman of the other team from his VIP box, “it’s not as if we are being given the cup without another match. You will have another chance.” And he smiles, because he knows that his side only has to win once.
We forget. Nations vote because civil war is expensive. Referendums are used when the sides are entrenched, well matched in size and compromise is impossible.
Does that seem melodramatic? Remainers are fond of pointing out that the Leave vote skews old. What are they gonna do, rise up in revolt from their Zimmer frames?
What people do not take into account is that the lesson that the result of a referendum will only be honoured when the government side wins will not only be learned by the Brexiteers. It will also be learned by supporters of any cause who are tempted to violence. In Northern Ireland, the IRA have accepted that Irish reunification can be striven for by the ballot rather than the bullet. What would be the effect on them of a demonstration that a majority vote will not necessarily be honoured by the British government?
John McDonnell is quite right:
“The debate around the next manifesto will go on, but I really worry about another referendum,” he said.
“I’m desperately trying to avoid any rise of xenophobia that happened last time around; I’m desperately trying to avoid giving any opportunity to Ukip or the far right. I think there’s the real risk of that. We’re not ruling out a people’s vote, but there’s a real risk, and I think people need to take that into account when we’re arguing for one.”
I really should not have laughed out loud when reading an article by regular Times columnist Jenni Russell entitled “Women victims still can’t get a fair hearing”. These are serious matters. Judge me not; this bit would get a laugh out of a stone:
Even men without high standing tend to be seen as more credible than the women they attack. That’s why grooming gangs in Rochdale, Rotherham and many other towns could rape girls with impunity over years, as police and social services dismissed it. “Believe the men,” has always been the instinctive, effective, protective response of the male-dominated power structure.
The grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham had an “identity” trump card all right, one that sent the police and social services scurrying away with their tails between their legs. And it did begin with M. Perhaps Ms Russell could ask her Times colleague Andrew Norfolk what the following letters were?
The rest of the article is about US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, recently accused of attempting to rape Christine Blasey Ford thirty-six years ago when he was seventeen and she was fifteen. She made this claim a couple of months ago in a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D). However it seems to have slipped Senator Feinstein’s mind to bring the issue up during the weeks of nomination hearings convened for the express purpose of assessing Kavanaugh’s suitability to be a Supreme Court judge. As this letter (Hat tip: Instapundit) from the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley, says,
There were numerous opportunities to raise the serious allegations made in the letter during the course of this nomination process.They could have been raised in your closed-door meeting with Judge Kavanaugh on August 20.Sixty-four other senators also met with Judge Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation hearing. These senators could have asked Judge Kavanaugh about these allegations if you had shared the letter.
Your staff could have raised these allegations during routine background investigation phone calls in late-August. Questions about these allegations could have been asked of Judge Kavanaugh during his more than 32 hours of testimony before the Committee over the course of three days. You could have asked him about these allegations during the closed session of his confirmation hearing, where sensitive material can be discussed. But you did not attend the closed session. Finally, these allegations could have been addressed in one of the nearly 1,300 written questions issued to him after the hearing-more written questions to any Supreme Court nominee than all prior Supreme Court nominees combined.
Fortunately Senator Feinstein did eventually remember to bring up this allegation, just in time. Funny how that happens, isn’t it? It’s like the way I only just remembered to tell you about the rest of Jenni Russell’s article in the Times for the benefit of those who don’t have a subscription. It did make one point with which all should agree. Professor Ford has been subjected to harassment and threats. These should be treated like the crimes they are. Apart from that, well, let us say that the evidence for Jenni Russell’s instinctive, effective, protective response being “Believe the women” is a great deal stronger than the evidence that the Muslim grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham raped with impunity because they were men. Russell writes,
Dr Ford’s life has been shipwrecked. She has had so many death threats that she has had to go into hiding, take leave of absence from work, send her children away and employ security guards. No such danger has troubled Kavanaugh, who has a security detail provided by the state and whose wife has been giving out cupcakes to the camera crews outside their house.
No such danger has troubled Kavaugh? Given how close left winger James T. Hodgkinson came to killing House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in his attempt to massacre as many Republicans as he could at a charity baseball game between politicians, I would not dismiss the danger so lightly. And of course, Kavanaugh’s wife handing out cupcakes shows how untroubled she is at having her husband accused of rape. Why should that trouble her? Why should it trouble him? How can they be treated unjustly? They’re Republicans!
Following on from Johnathan Pearce’s recent post about the EU Copyright Directive, I found this comment by a user called Ask_Me_Who in Reddit Europe. It dates from the first turn of the ratchet, back in June, but in the light of what has happened since it is more relevant than ever:
MEP’s can not create, amend, or reject proposals. They can act as a method of slowing them, requesting changes or rethinks of proposed policies, but if the other (unelected) parts of the EU want to force through a proposal they can just keep pushing it until it gets through in the knowledge that elected MEP’s will not have the power to propose future updates, changes, or abolition of legislation.
The European Commission only has to win once and it can never be repealed without the European Commission wishing it so. The people, as represented by elected MEP officials, have to win every time as they do not even have the option to vote in representatives to reverse a decision. This is the ‘democratic deficit’ that even pro-EU supporters widely acknowledge when they call for democratic reforms to the MEP system.
If you want to bring up the UK, the European Parliament works similarly to the House of Lords. The difference being that the Lord’s have been deliberately striped of much of their power specifically because they do not represent the people, while the MEP’s have never been given the power needed to actually represent the people.
EDIT- And if you think that’s depressing, since the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) lobbying has been an officially recognised and encouraged part of MEP’s decision process under the re-brand “European interest representation”. 30% of former MEP’s go on to work as lobbyists for major industries. Yeah, the people who only have to slip up once can accept weekly fancy dinners and then go on to make €€€ working for companies who give zero shits about what general public’s well-being.
Another example of the EU ratchet in action. No wonder they adopted the use of the neverendum so readily.
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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.
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