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It has emerged that the Provisional IRA, rather than its deniable offshoot the South Armagh Republican Action Force, was responsible for the 1976 Kingsmills Massacre. If you do not know about that event, the grim story is here.
On 5 January 1976, the 10 textile workers were travelling home from work in the dark and rain on a minibus in the heart of rural County Armagh.
….
A man asked their religions. There was only one Catholic left on the bus. He was identified and ordered away from his Protestant work mates. He was able to run off.
The lead gunman spoke one other word – “Right” – and the shooting began.
Mr Black was the only one to survive.
It seems almost indecent to let such an event be the starting point for a more general line of thought, but that is the way the mind works sometimes.
I had remembered the Kingsmills massacre. The last question put to the men and the awful choice of what to answer when you did not know whether the terrorists asking were Loyalist or Republican had stuck in my mind. Today I have advanced a little further in knowledge: I now know that analysis of the guns used confirms that it most likely was the IRA after all. The thing is, though, that my level of knowledge, which I tend to think of as average, is actually way above average. I have known for three decades that this massacre occurred. I knew that a few days previously five Catholics had been murdered and that the Kingsmills massacre was carried out in reprisal for this. And here’s the point, I know that there are Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Republicans and Loyalists, and could give you a basic account of which side is which and how that situation came to be.
My own background is Irish Catholic. My family loathed the IRA. So I grew up paying a slightly above average amount of attention to Northern Ireland and I noticed over the years that plenty of people in the world literally did not know that there were any Protestants there. These people thought that that it was a case of “the English” occupying Ireland. Partisans on the Republican side also spoke thus, but selective rather than complete ignorance was their problem, as it was for partisans on the Loyalist side. The way in which those soaked in the history of a conflict can blank out the other side and talk of “the people” when they mean “our people” is tragic but a quite different phenomenon from that of ordinarily well educated members of society who simply have no idea – but not, alas, no opinion.
I have explained the existence of a Protestant population in bad French and worse Italian. I remember reading of angry editorials in American newspapers of thirty years ago that appeared to be unaware that the Republic of Ireland was an independent state. Colonel Gaddafi of Libya – now there’s a name from the past, wonder what happened to him? – at one time was visited by a delegation of Protestant paramilitaries who convinced him that this was not a straightforward anti-Imperialist struggle and got him to cease sending arms to the IRA.
I think a few of the commenters to this article still literally do not know of the existence of the Protestant population. If they do know of it, they ain’t showing it.
The ignorance that is rational for individuals can do great harm.
What are your experiences of spectacular historical ignorance? What effect does that ignorance have? To count, examples should not be the ignorance of the illiterate and semi-literate. There are millions on Earth who do not know the world is round. That is sad but not interesting. What is sad but interesting is the state of those for whom some basic historical fact is an “unknown unknown”, to use Rumsfeld’s formulation.
On second thoughts, why confine ourselves to history? A Scottish friend of mine relates that some of people she talks to in her part of the world literally think that the financial crisis of 2008 arose because bankers took “all the money” for bonuses. They think the government could get all the money back and make everything OK again, had it but the willpower. Discussing the matter, she modified that slightly, and said that if these friends and acquaintances were ever to articulate the idea I have just described they would probably see that it could not be correct, but they never have articulated it. This is in a Labour-voting but by no means deprived area near Glasgow, but I would not bet on the proportion of people thinking thus in my Tory part of Essex being much different, for all that ‘banksters’ keep the local economy going.
These holes in peoples’ knowledge will have their effect in the end. One could call it trickle-up ignorance.
Ever before I wrote this, I was on the lookout for Fixed Quantity Of… theories, and even more since then. Usually these theories are fallacies. Often, changing how something is done, and in particular changing the rules or the overall setting within which something is done can quite dramatically change, for the better or for the worse, both the quantity and the quality of whatever is being argued about.
Here is another such theory/fallacy, the Fixed Quantity of Education fallacy. Toby Young takes aim at it here. He and some friends of his are setting up a “free school”. Their critics in the state education sector object, because this new school will suck educational excellence out of their schools and make it available only to a privileged few.
In particular, it is said that this new school will draw middle class children away from state schools, to the educational detriment of these schools. State educators who talk like this sometimes make it sound as if most of the good teaching that goes on in their schools is done by middle class children rather than by educationally expert adults. Perhaps they have a point.
But the amount of satisfactory educating going on is very variable, depending on how relaxed or restrictive are the rules about how it may be done and who may do it. (For instance, if it were forbidden for parents to educate their children at home, that would, I believe, sharply diminish the supply of good education.) Toby Young says that the real reason the detractors of the educational venture he favours are so vocal is that they fear being shown up as bad educators, by a new school that creates a vast new surge of educational excellence, thereby proving that they could be doing this too. No upper limit on the total amount of available education is stopping them, only their own stupid educational ideas and habits. I am sure that he has a point.
The dependably dismal Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who thinks his god favours a massive force backed regulatory state which takes one person’s wealth implicitly at gunpoint and gives it to someone else, get a well phrased hammering by Graeme Archer:
It is obscene, Dr Williams, that some people choose not to work, and are better off as a consequence than those who do not make such a choice. Such people are less deserving than others. If there are no jobs available, what are all these Polish men doing on this bus, at 6.30am? They deserve more than to be viewed as taxable cart-horses.
And you? On an average salary? Trying to raise a child and thinking about having another? Coming to the conclusion that you might be able to balance commuting against mortgage costs, if you moved to an unpopular area farther out than you’d like? It must be hard for multiple houseowners such as Mr Cruddas, or the Archbishop in his palace, to understand: this is life, for most of us. And we’re not fascists because we make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving when we see where our tax is spent.
Read the whole thing. My only regret is Archer does not follow the moral argument to its logical conclusion.
I tend to have a “half empty” view of the world – but even I do not believe that the British population contains no pro freedom people. Indeed I believe that there are millions of pro freedom people in Britain – and basically the British book trade was telling us all to bugger off, that we were not welcome in the book shops.
Well we got the message – it is not all “the internet” that is the reason for the decline of the British book trade, basically they were telling non-socialists that our custom was not wanted.
– Paul Marks
As a BBC news announcer gave out the round of story headlines this morning on the television, I heard this particular classic of its type connected to this story about extremism and universities:
“Government money is no longer going to be given to Islamic extremists”.
First of all, there is, as readers of this blog know, no such thing as “government money”. All money spent by government is, despite what some might believe, owned by you, the taxpayer, or lent to it, by other people. Second, it is not just appalling that money levied on pain of imprisonment (taxes) is then transferred to people who want to impose a particular worldview on their fellows; it would be just as bad if the money were to be given to the forces of sweetness and light. No such groups, whether it be Islamic Jihad, The Women’s Institute or the Worshipful Company of Bald People, should receive a penny from the taxpayer. End of subject.
The ineffectiveness of modern government is a great blessing. It means that proposals like this – “Cameron-backed report to protect children from commercialisation” – will almost certainly come to very little.
For the record, like Tim Worstall, I think T-shirts for five year olds that read ‘Sexy Tart’ are not the most tasteful of fashion statements. My opinions are rather more hostile than that, as it happens. But my hostility to chav parents is mild compared to my hostility to the governing classes, who first bred the problem (by ensuring that two generations have grown up who had no need to be respectable), and now step forward to “solve” it by giving themselves more power.
Mercifully, the modern Big State is made of fat, not muscle. Listed below are the key proposals of this report, and next to each what will actually happen.
• Retailers to ensure magazines with sexualised images have modesty sleeves. Measurable, enforceable, provides work for council busybodies. Might happen.
• The Advertising Standards Authority to discourage placement of billboards near schools and nurseries. Discouraging noises will be made.
• Music videos to be sold with age ratings. Measurable, enforceable, work for busybodies. Will be about as effective as the age ratings for computer games and films. (I have nothing against manufacturers giving an age rating for a product voluntarily, by the way – but see the final sentence of this post about “voluntary” self-regulation.)
• Procedures to make it easier for parents to block adult and age restricted material on internet. Could be dangerous, since procedures to make it easier for parents to block adult material on the internet are necessarily also procedures to make it easier for governments to block any material on the internet – but fear not, they can’t afford the people who can write the program.
• Code of practice to be issued on child retailing. OMG, a code of practice!
• Define a child as 16 in all types of advertising regulation. Presumably they mean “under 16”. If the current regulation allows scope to define a child as “under 13” this might make a difference. Or it might not. Probably all concerned will work very hard to find all the clauses and sub-clauses in fifteen different laws that refer to this, harmonise them all, then sit back and contemplate the beautiful consistency of the result. No one else will notice.
• Advertising Standards Authority to do more to gauge parent’s views on advertising. Colourful website to be set up. Two comments will be left a week, in Chinese.
• Create a single website for parents to complain to regulators. Colourful website to be set up. 45,000 comments will be left a week, often in something resembling English. Government will promise to clear backlog by 2021.
• Change rules on nine o’clock television watershed to give priority to views of parents. Will be acclaimed by all until someone who is not a parent threatens to sue.
• Government to regulate after 18 months if progress insufficient. Although I do think it most unlikely that the government ever really will send out inspectors to measure the amount of black lace on pre-teen bras, I still find this type of sickly-sweet concealed threat, so common nowadays, nauseating. “Voluntary change is so much nicer, don’t you think? So much more meaningful. But, of course, if you don’t change voluntarily…” It always reminds me of Dolores Umbridge early in her career.
Never mind he is debasing the currency and starting us on the road to runaway inflation, is functionally indistinguishable from Tony Blair and his ‘savage cuts’ are a fiction simply parroted by a mainstream media seeming unable to do simple math… he has ‘Ease and authority’
Well, phew, good to know! I guess we’ll be ok then!
– Perry de Havilland commenting on a Telegraph blog article claiming that “Ease and authority make David Cameron hard to beat“
… no, I am not talking about his, er, other talents but rather the clarity of his economic analysis…
Ladies and gentlemen, Guido presents the Great Inflation Swindle, we have just seen the second-biggest one-month increase on record and a record high in core CPI yet the Governor of the Bank of England has told us for 3 years inflation was a blip and that the real danger was deflation. It was a deliberate lie to excuse the most reckless monetary loosening since… well actually monetary policy has been too loose globally since back to 1998 when Greenspan “saved the world” after Long Term Capital’s financial theory geeks had a close encounter of the reality kind. The loosening up of monetary policy to smooth the aftermath of that hedge fund collapse told financial risk takers to rack up the risk because central banks would step in if you got in to trouble. Everyone was “too big to fail”. Central bankers turned capitalism from a system of profit and loss into a system of private profits and socialised losses. Taxpayers had their chips put on the gambling table without even being asked.
Read the whole thing.
The Business Secretary, and member of the Liberal Democrat Party, Vincent Cable, likes to let us know he supposedly predicted the recent credit crunch (I am not sure he did, actually), and still manages to be presented as a sage voice on current affairs. Never mind that many of his views are nonsense.
Anyway, the Daily Mash satirical website has nailed him.
Here is one of those quotes where you add “read the whole thing”:
But next time you are told that Osborne is imposing savage, reckless cuts on the UK, remember that the figures tell a different story. So far, spending is still going up. The plan is for total spending to go up in cash terms overall this financial year and to fall by 0.6 per cent in real terms (the measure that really matters). This will hurt, especially given that debt interest payments are soaring, reducing the funds available for public services by a lot more than the 0.6 per cent overall cut. But this should also be put into context. Barack Obama, who was in London yesterday, wants to cut public spending by 3.8 per cent next year, more than the 3.7 per cent pencilled in over four years by Osborne. In other words, Obama’s cuts – which many in the US want to make even larger – are four times larger than the average annual cuts proposed by slowcoach Osborne.
So it is no wonder really that the UK’s credit rating was downgraded yesterday by (wait for it) Chinese rating agency Dagong, which cut the UK by one notch to A+, from AA-, and placed it on a negative outlook. You may snigger – but unless the UK is able to deliver on its fiscal austerity not just this year but for the next four, our creditors will soon start panicking again, with good reason.
That’s Allister Heath, writing in the London giveaway newspaper, City A.M., which he edits. His point being that the journey in question has only just begun.
Read the whole thing. The above quote comes at the end. Before that come a few of the facts and the figures.
I suppose the optimistic take on all this is that you can’t wrench a graph that is going up onto a downward path, just like that. But how much wrenching is actually going on?
So, Ken Clarke hamfistedly but correctly says there are degrees of seriousness in rape and the law reflects this – and causes great outrage. Not just from the avowedly feminist Guardian either. The Sun says he’s a danger to women, no less.
Interestingly, both the the Guardian’s and the Sun’s commenters seem to take a more nuanced view than their respective papers. As they should. Clarke was attempting to make a valid distinction. Sure, he messed it up, particularly when he appeared to confuse date rape and statutory rape, but of course there are degrees of seriousness in rape as in any other crime. To say that is not to say that any form of rape is trivial. Whoopi Goldberg’s much derided comment that Roman Polanksi was not guilty of “rape rape” was not outrageous because she attempted to distinguish between statutory and actual rape, but because Polanski had committed rape rape.
It distresses me that so many of those who seek to help to rape victims seem to act all the time as if they were a politician on the radio. By this I mean that they have always ready in their heads one idea, one sound bite, that they must express. Nothing must detract from that message; no ifs, no buts, no side issues. I agree entirely with the One Idea in this case: all rape is serious. But when one sees what trouble a real politician on the radio got into for merely touching upon the reasons for a sliding scale of sentences one also sees why most politicians try so hard to stick with the pre-prepared One Idea. Meanwhile Lara Williams in the Guardian (linked to above), a woman whose real-life experience of helping rape victims would lead one to hope that her views were rooted in observation, comes out with the sort of mindlessly simplified slogans that have given politicians a bad name:
Through distinguishing “serious” and “less serious” rape, Clarke assumed a perverse gradient of suffering, a warped taxonomy of perceived victimisation.
No one actually believes that. If called upon in court to state what impact a particular rape had had on a particular victim, I have no doubt that this writer would recoil in horror from saying, “Oh, the usual. All rapes have the same impact. All rapes are equally bad.” Yet that is the logical implication of what she has written. She is not the only such commenter. It is sad to see obviously intelligent and compassionate people with so little faith in the public that they make themselves believe that the only way to put forward a true idea – all rape is bad – is to coarsen it into falsehood.
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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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