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I have always endured a distinctly uncomfortable ambivolence on the subject of the physical chastisement of children. My rational inclinations are to disapprove of it as a whole. The law protects adults from being physically assaulted by other adults and I find the arguments that seek to exempt youngsters from this law to be flawed and unpersuasive.
That said, I know that there are many good and loving parents who sometimes smack their children out of frustration or a temporary flare of temper. It may not be beneficial thing but, rarely does this cause any real harm. Consequently, I view the engagement of the machinery of law enforcement with family life with the utmost trepidation:
Parents in England and Wales who smack children so hard it leaves a mark will face up to five years in jail under new laws in force from Saturday.
Mild smacking is allowed under a “reasonable chastisement” defence against common assault.
The purported distinction is not one in which I have any degree of confidence. Law enforcement in this country is often patchy, capricious and incompetent. I expect that truly serious abusers will slip the net while normally conscientious parents who lash out once in a moment of uncustomary anger will find themselves facing a custodial sentence and ruination.
Even if that were not the case (and it is very much the case) the new laws will result in an entrenchment of a culture of fear and suspicion. Children contrive to harm themselves all the time by flying off of their bikes, falling out of trees and sticking themselves with sharp implements. I have already heard far too many plausible accounts of parents who are scared of taking their wounded charges to a hospital in case they are accused of abusing them
In another age and in different political and legal circumstances, I would not be too concerned about these new laws. I may even (cautiously) approve. But it is not possible to see these developments as anything other than another step in the process of the gradual nationalisation of the family.
Nor will anyone’s life be improved by this legislation. It is enacted, in part, because it serves the interests of the professional welfare classes whose wealth and status is entirely dependent on this kind of state activism and partly because of the unfortunately fashionable view that people cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs in a satisfactory manner without the external discipline of regulatory control.
None of this means that I necessarily approve of parents who smack their children. Generally, I do not. But just leaving matters be is probably the least worst solution. Over the coming years, that object lesson will be driven home.
There is an article in the Spectator which seems a bit complacent to me:
If a violent criminal breaks into my house I, too, may react violently, but if I do so I doubt whether I shall live in fear of ending up like Tony Martin. This is because the law already accepts the right to self-defence and does so in such a way as to take into account an individual’s assessment of the threat in the heat of the moment. Strip away the Tony Martin case, which unfairly dominates all discussion on this topic, and just look at other recent cases. In November 2002 the retired businessman Anthony Spray heard somebody trying to open the door of his Cumbrian home and went downstairs, armed with an air rifle, to investigate. Seeing a figure at the now open door, he shot 19-year-old Paul Evans in the eye from a distance of four feet. Evans, it transpired, was not a burglar: he had mistaken Spray’s house for a B&B where he was staying. As a result of his mistake, Evans lost an eye, yet Spray was not jailed: he was given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay £3,000 compensation.
Riiight. So the author of this piece, Ross Clark, thinks that the case of Tony Martin, the west Norfolk farmer jailed for killing an intruder at his farm and injuring another, is just a freak, a one-off case which need offer no special insights into the rights of self defence. The Spray case, as is clear, still resulted in the householder being convicted, albeit not having to serve a term of imprisonment.
Clark’s piece is not without merit. He argues that the United States has achieved a large fall in crime due, he claims, to such factors as ‘zero tolerance’ policing, tough sentencing and the like. No doubt these have played a part but it is a distortion to suppose that America’s much lower level of aggravated burglaries is not partly linked to widespread ownership of firearms and a different approach on the part of the courts to householders using force to defend themselves.
Clark is correct to state that hard cases make bad law. He is, however, dead wrong to suppose that apart from the Tony Martin case, there are no examples of homeowners having been prosecuted for self defence. And it is abundantly clear that burglars have got the message: raiding a person’s home is a low-risk activity in Britain, as Perry de Havilland’s former neighbour, the late City financier John Monckton, found out last year.
Fortunately, we have the historian Joyce Lee Malcolm to set us straight on the real lessons to be learned from recent trends in British and American policy on self defence and the law. I urge everyone interested in this issue to read her book if they haven’t already done so.
UPDATE: In thinking through the Spray case mentioned above, I do accept that it was right for the householder to compensate a man mistaken for a burglar, but the suspended jail term strikes me as quite wrong although I have not studied all the particulars of the case, including whether the householder had been the victim of multiple burglaries in the past, like Tony Martin.
The New Labour administration has provided a worthy example of how governments mess up systems of accreditation, especially those established by themselves. Since these are designed to mirror the political biases and triumphs of their founders, rather than provide an objective appraisal of developments, governments begin to tinker with the tables when they produce the wrong results.
One example of this is the education league tables where the government has recently introduced the recording of vocational qualifications in order to offset the academic predominance of private and grammar schools. This has the additional consequence of downgrading academic performance even amongst state schools which are run on an adequate basis.
Under the new system, a distinction in a certificate in cake decorating is worth 55 points – more than a GCSE grade A in physics.
And a City and Guilds progression award in bakery was worth more than five GCSEs at grade C.
The public sector professionals thought this was a terrific wheeze.
But John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads’ Association, said the added complexity gave parents a better picture.
“In the past the tables have been too simplistic.
“The new tables give parents a broader view of the achievements of schools,” he said.
The more complex the better. No doubt parents prefer complexity since this makes those important decisions so much easier. Time for the market to provide an alternative.
This government hopes to cut its cake, cook it and eat it. However, although Britain is ending up like Golgafrincham, we cannot offload the cake decorators or the telephone earpiece cleaners, so all of the skilled workers and the professionals are emigrating, leaving the Golgafrinchams behind.
This post is will ultimately turn into a photo-essay about visiting a Japanese supermarket and having a very fine Japanese lunch in London, but before that it will be long and rambling in my preferred way. People who are just here for the sushi should go directly below the fold and scroll down
One peculiar thing about the novels of Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson is that he has often felt the urge to set large portions of his novels in two cities: London and Tokyo. I have one or two ideas as to why this is so, because, as it happens, these are my favourite two cities as well. Why is hard to describe, though. One aspect of it is that these are cities with tremendous amounts of fine detail or structure. Looking carefully at a street and the buildings on it, and what is sold in shops, in both cities one can see legacies of hundreds or thousands of years of history. (In Tokyo’s case, the fact that much of the city has been covered with concrete has somehow failed to destroy this. In London, the builders of 1950s public housing did do a good job of eradicating it in certain parts of the city, but a great deal none the less still remains) Both cities are collections of villages that have gradually merged into greater agglomerations, a process which was completed by a period of rapid urban railway building. But in both cases all these villages retain very distinct characters of their own and it is very hard to describe precisely where the centre of the city is. Visiting Camden in London or Harajuku in Tokyo on a Sunday afternoon somehow feels similar (although Camden is much grimier). There is a feeling that global youth fashion is somehow emanating from here, and in both places there is an interesting mix of the spontaneous and the commercial, as street markets sit right next door to international brand names, and the relationship is somehow a beneficial one to both parties. Both cities have a media hipness about them – for some reason London and Tokyo are the two cities in the world that produce the most interesting television commercials, although the programming itself on television in both places has rather less to recommend it.
And there is just a buzz that I get when I am in London or Tokyo that I don’t get elsewhere. (I get it to some extent in New York and Hong Kong, but not quite to the same extent. And not quite in the same way). And this buzz goes deep. When I am in a foreign city I like to visit suburbs as well as the centre of the city, and in both London and Tokyo I still find the buzz almost everywhere I go.
I am not going to speculate any more why these two cities are like this. (Well, not much. Both are great ports which are the capitals of Island countries separated from their continents. That must have something to do with it?). In any event, though , I am not the only person to feel this. And I don’t think Gibson is even the only cyberpunk novelist. (Neal Stephenson has just written The Baroque cycle, an immense three volume novel, much of it set in London in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in which he is trying to figure out the same thing, I think. Stephenson has written less about Tokyo and Japan, although come to think of it there is a fair bit of Japan in both Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, and even a little in the Baroque Cycle.
But, anyway, in early 2001 I was living in Sydney, Australia. Although Sydney has great weather, wonderful food, beautiful scenery, and many other attractions, I was a little bored. Life was a bit lacking in buzz. I found a link (probably from slashdot) to this article, in which the London Sunday newspaper The Observer had asked Gibson to describe his fascination with Japan. In it he writes as much about London as about Tokyo, both cities being in his eyes being the world capitals for the otaku – the passionate obsessive.
I think he is right. I think the reason I love it is that I can be a passionate obsessive myself.
And (back in 2001) looking carefully at the Observer article, I noticed that the newspaper’s magazine had put out an entire “Japan Issue”, an entire magazine full of articles looking at Japan (and mostly Tokyo) from the perspective of London. (The entire magazine is all still on the web, although there doesn’t seem to be an index. The URLs are fairly easy to guess though).. And reading this magazine in 2001, it was a big thing in making me realise how much I was missing my favourite cities – and as it happened I couldn’t hold out very long and before a year was out I had got on a plane for London. (Tokyo was more culturally daunting without knowing the language, and anyway I have visa issues there. There was nothing whatsoever stopping me from just hopping on a plane for London and looking for a job when I got there). In London I did find the obsessive compulsive Japanese-ness I was looking for, in the places Gibson described such as Portobello markets, and elsewhere. (I have a particular memory of sitting in a London cinema in 2002, watching an animated Japanese homage to a great German expressionist surrounded by an audience of very earnest young Japanese people).
And in particular, I followed the advice of this article from the Observer magazine Japan Issue, and made a visit to the Oriental City shopping centre, a place of amazing Japanese-ness in the unexpected location of Colindale in north London. Where I go from time to time, and where I went again last Sunday.
(Click on for the story and photographs of last Sunday).
→ Continue reading: Searching for Japan in North London
Baseball player Andres (“Big Cat“) Gallarraga is fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and making a new name for himself by writing a book about how non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma can be fought. As the Baby Boom gets ever older, expect more relatively young celebs to make their diseases public in order to appeal to this disintegrating demographic.
India’s Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT has been busy ensuring that ladies trying to become constables do not get unfair treatment in Chandigarh.
UPI has this, about Cat Stevens:
Washington, DC, Jan. 13 (UPI) – The singer Cat Stevens was denied entry to the United States because of money he had given to terrorist linked groups, a U.S. official said.
“If you contribute to terrorist organizations, I’m sorry, but you’re not welcome in the United States … And that’s what happened to Cat Stevens,” Robert Bonner, customs and border protection commissioner told United Press International Thursday.
Mystery has surrounded the case of the singer since federal officials diverted a Washington-bound flight he was on to Bangor, Maine, last September. He was deported after being questioned.
Jaguar’s Big Cat is best in show.
WYTV reports that CAT scanning is old hat:
With today’s medical technology, it’s possible to see pain, to stand outside the body and examine the tiniest muscles and thinnest tissues inside us.
Thank the magic of magnetism or MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, a technology developed about 20 years ago as a new way to see inside ourselves.
…
As the CAT scan exposes bone, the MRI looks at softer targets. The MRI shows two kidneys; the left one has one artery feeding it, its twin has two.
Hacienda Luisita’s CAT is Luzon’s biggest sugar refinery, but, says Tarlac News, there is trouble brewing there. At the mill, I should say. That would be in the Philippines, right?
A high speed cat, the WestPac Express, is helping out with the Tsunami relief effort in Thailand:
US military officials also said the shallow draft and speed of the vessel allowed it to ferrying relief supplies quickly and efficiently to many different types of ports.
WestPac’s captain, Ken Kujala, said it took only minutes to begin to unload cargo, using the vessel’s roll on, roll off ramp.
“Most of our missions support training … but we’re doing something different this time,” said Captain Kujala. “Everyone …will jump through hoops to get the job done.”
Imagine it, a catamaran jumping through a hoop.
BMS-CAT is a Texas based recovery firm, and it has been busy in Hawaii, after the flooding there.
This story evidently started out with a misprint in its headline. Google has the original link as “USA Today Highlights iPod’s Importance to Cat Stereo Makers”. But they meant car. Jaguars especially?
CAT news from Kolkata:
KOLKATA, JAN 7: The Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, has decided to accept Common Admission Test (CAT) and Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores from candidates seeking admission to its one-year post graduate programme in management.
I know what you are thinking. Cats are not machines or acronyms, they are, first, last and always, four legged mammals. So I will end with news about Tropical Storm, son of Storm Cat:
Maiden winner Tropical Storm, a four-year-old son of Storm Cat, has been acquired by Roger and Jane Braugh’s NewLife Stud and will stand stud the 2005 season at a Central Kentucky farm yet to be determined.
Catisfied?
The Guardian reports today on an announcement from Tom Ridge, to the effect that a quick fix has been put in place by the US government to allow low risk passengers to get on and off their airplane’s more quickly:
Acknowledging that travellers resented the stringent security checks at US airports, he announced that “low risk” flyers to John F Kennedy New York would be allowed to register their fingerprints and other biometric details so that they could avoid the long queues at Schiphol by stopping at a fast check kiosk.
The Guardian complains only about how it is Schiphol that is getting the benefit of the new arrangements, rather than Heathrow, making the story a hook for another cheap gibe about American geography knowledge.
This is a perfect example of the way the world now works. This register is voluntary, but the process is now well in hand to enable the authorities everywhere in due course to demand such information from everyone, as a condition of international travel. How long before it starts being claimed that an unwillingness to register is an admission that one is a high risk flyer?
If you doubt this, read the rest of the story:
He said the system was based on that used for frequent flyers on US domestic flights.
He told Associated Press in Amsterdam: “The main advantage to the United States will come if this program successfully and efficiently moves traffic through and other countries say: ‘We ought to apply this on a much broader basis.'”
Precisely. We are rapidly entering a world in which the world’s various Big Brothers know our every move. Our best hope will be that, on the whole, Big Brother does not care.
It is entirely my fault. Because I have failed to read the Dave Barry blog as regularly as I should, I can only now tell you of the link to this crucial news story, published as long ago as last Saturday:
Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the “flat-top crew cut,” “middle hairstyle,” “low hairstyle,” and “high hairstyle” – variations from one to five centimetres in length.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.
It stressed the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence development”, noting that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Good to see that comb-overs will still be allowed, within reasonable limits.
A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of “long-haired” men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.
In a break with North Korean TV’s usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.
The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.
Typical media. Why can they not show good news, instead of harping on about bad stuff all the time?
“No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one’s personality will be downgraded.”
For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.
“People who wear other’s style of dress and live in other’s style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin,” it says.
Some people evidently do have long hair in North Korea, despite the danger of their personalities being downgraded, and the nation definitely is coming to ruin. But might they not be confusing correlation with causation?
Personally I suspect that this robbed North Korea of a lot more energy than long hair does.
And the North Korean government campaign to stamp out smoking has apparently not worked very well, so I expect long hair in North Korea to go on being an official worry for some time yet.
Via Natalie Solent, I got to this Guardian report that Waterstone’s has sacked one of its staff, for blogging:
A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his “sandal-wearing” boss.
Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone’s in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for “gross misconduct” and “bringing the company into disrepute” through the comments he posted on his weblog.
Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog he writes in his spare time.
My main opinion about this case is that, in a form of wording that I often use on these occasions, an employer should have the right to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes, provided there is no contract which between them which says otherwise. It is their money. If they want to stop giving it to an employee, fair enough.
But what you are, or should be, entitled to do legally is not the same as what is managerially advisable. Which leads me to my second opinion about this case, again a generic one rather than specific to it, which says that there may be more to this case than meets the eye, and more reasons for the Waterstone’s decision than have so far been made public. This is also (in connection with my opinings here) what I think when I hear that some child has been chucked out of a school for flicking a rubber band at a another pupil. Maybe there was more to it than that, and the rubber band was just the final straw, so to speak. And maybe this blogger has been a pain in the arse to his bosses for years, and a useless bookseller, and they finally said: get rid of the tosser.
(And maybe – just maybe you understand – this chap really does need therapy.)
For me, one of the big arguments in favour of the free society is that people are allowed to make their own decisions about who they associate with, instead of having such decisions made for them by a mob, or by a tyrant, acting on the basis of more or less misleading scraps of information about the case that the contending parties have squirted into the public realm. As part of the mob, we in the blogosphere can beat our drums and argue about cases like this in loud voices, but in the end, we should not be deciding these things.
Nevertheless … (and you saw that coming a mile away, did you not?) … nevertheless … if a bookshop chain is not the kind of enterprise which ought to have employees blogging up a storm, about books, about the pleasures of literacy, and about anything else on their minds, with all the arguing and occasional public rows that this would inevitably involve when the storminess got too stormy … what I am saying is: bookshops and blogging ought to go very well together.
Maybe Waterstone’s regard employee bloggers as a menace to their interests far more profound any menace to their interests presented by this one blogger, and they made a huge decision of principle here. Maybe, but I doubt it. My guess would be that they had no idea what a s***storm would explode around them. I think they have no conception of what a force the Internet could be, for their business or against it.
I hope the blogosphere gets Waterstone’s to think through – rethink through – what they really think about blogging, and about the Internet in general. If they do not, they could find themselves at war with the Internet out of sheer carelessness. And thus miss a big chance to sell lots of books.
As it is, I can see a lot of people switching to Amazon because of this, and that too would be their perfect legal right.
Well, a couple of weeks have gone since the usual festival of excess generally known in these parts as Christmas. When I turn on the television, the radio, or look at the adverts plastered on the walls of the London Underground, it is hard to escape the messages urging us all to lose weight, give up X or Y, go to the gym, blah, blah. Well I do my best to stay in some form of shape by attending a gym fairly regularly, but I must admit there is almost something rather reassuringly predictable about this annual burst of puritanical preaching about the need to turn over a healthy leaf and get into shape. It is like the passing of the seasons.
However, I realise that many of the fine Epicureans who read and write for this blog take a more robust view of these matters and have no time for such asceticism. Well, I have great news. Medical research reveals that you can lose weight by sleeping longer.
That is what I call good news.
We have said it before, but it bears repetition, that the coming EU referendum campaign will be the first internet campaign in our history and I remain convinced that the material on the net will have a decisive impact on the course of the campaign.
– Richard North, already quoted and linked to by Patrick Crozier as a response to my gloomier posting here
One of the current controversies around the war on terror is how to treat the prisoners. Dale Franks at the excellent Questions and Observations blog gets it pretty much right, I think.
My preferred method of dealing with these terror prisoners would be to get two captains and a major together as a tribunal, declare them to be unlawful combatants, and put them in front of a firing squad. Now, maybe, because we’re nice guys, we could let them know that if any of them give us verifiable, useful information, then we’ll commute their sentences, and won’t shoot them. Otherwise, however, it’s a blindfold and a last cigarette for the lot of ’em.
The difference of course, is that doing so would be legal. It would be part of the accepted customs of warfare that have been generally agreed upon for over a century. Torturing or beating them to death, without even the convenient fiction of legality, is not.
I found very little to quibble with in his excellent essay on the subject.
Nothing gets the political class to lying their faces off like the chance to spend your money on their legacy.
I saw it in Madison, Wisconsin when the new Frank Lloyd Wright convention center was being pushed through. The lies included (a) we will not build a new hotel next to this facility (it was built a year or two later (b) this facility will not block views/access to the lake it is built on (it does, in spades), and (c) this facility will not be a drain on the public purse (it requires a taxpayer subsidy ad infinitum.
I am seeing it again in Dallas, where the legacy project revolves around the Trinity River that runs through downtown Dallas. Jim Schutze, the excellent political writer for Dallas’ alternative newsweekly (the one with the sex ads) details the lies now on offer from the City of Dallas and its allies and puppets.
For example, recently arrived on my desk is the slickly produced special D magazine Trinity River edition, just out, called “The Trinity: How the river will change Dallas forever.” This magazine–a collection of preposterous whoppers, fibs, prevarications, exaggerations, subterfuge, propaganda and Orwellian doublespeak–is an omen of things just ahead.
The D magazine special edition goes on and on about the recreational amenities the Trinity River project will create: “…the Trinity River will accommodate small sailboats and paddle boats,” the magazine tells its readers. “More interestingly, a reverse-flow lake is planned with a 17-foot drop where it curves back to the river, creating rapids and a perfect whitewater course for winter kayaking competitions…
“But the most visible benefit will be on the Oak Cliff side, which will have easy access to downtown, great views and–most important of all–along the levee, direct entry into the country’s largest urban park.”
All of this is a lie.
Read it and weep.
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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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