Blog posts here keep randomly losing their UTW tags today. We’ve got used to wierd weekend errors. We probably cause half of them ourselves. Is this the Technorati monster or something I’m doing? Any ideas, welcome.
While your at it, maybe someone can suggest how TW can get openSUSE to work in 64bit. Make command get error 2, as far as I can determine.
Category Archives: General
Do Daily Mail readers write Guardian online comments
Bit of change of emphasis after that rather po-faced last rant. Two posts back, TW put a link to Joseph Harker’s column in the Guardian.
This was a good piece, even echoing my point that slavery was the abomination rather than the slave trade, but going on to say that the legacy of slavery still impacted on British people today, through its effect on people of Caribbean background. This is even moving towards providing a decent justification for the public apology.
However, the comments that it elicited were sometimes bizarre. It’s a serious temptation to point out some of the underlying follies, but why bother? Oh bugger, I’m going to put a few quotes in anway (didn’t you just guess that?) :-
from Haardvark: “I have never read such a pathetic piece of self-pity in my entire life. “ Hmm, even allowing for web hyperbole (the cosmos knows I’m guilty of that often enough) this person has obviously never read a newspaper. (All those confessionals from celebs who find the strain of being impossibly rich and idolised by millions too stressful and have to act like maniacs, then go into rehab, for a start. Now that’s “pathetic self-pity”. Guardian writer talking about society as a whole – it doesn’t quite qualify, does it?)
From CoeurdeLion :I am not sure where Mr Harker gets all this bile – it is difficult to pick out any hard facts from his scattergun approach to writing….. I feel that Britain today is one of the least racist societies in the world today, bettered perhaps only by countries like Brazil. If you break down success in Britain by ethnicity, you actually find blacks (particularly African) doing better even than whites in participation in higher Education, with Asians doing best. Bile? I defy anyone to find evidence of “bile” or a “scattergun approach to writing” in the pretty elegantly written and constructed Harker piece. Did they even read it, or just go off on a rant as soon as they saw a few words that sparked an emotional explosion in them? No answer needed. And Africans doing better in higher education (well, s/he doesn’t even say doing better but participating more)? As I believe I said in my last piece – people of mainly African ancestry, almost by definition, are not the descendants of people enslaved for the Atlantic slave trade. This doesn’t invalidate, or even contradict in any way, what Harker says.
It’s racism that makes people of European/African/Amerindian background seem exactly equivalent to Africans. Insofar as our identities and expectations of life are partly constructed from the cultural values and experiences of our ancestors, there are few points of similarity between the lives of Africans and people from the Caribbean. The histories of their ancestors are very very different. In fact, the main thing they have in common is basically the experience of being on the receiving end of racism.
from sandywinder: When are the whingeing blacks going to start looking to the future rather than constantly harping on about the past? Excuse me, but wasn’t it the government and the Church of England that started this apologising?
from halgeel84: The doozy Perhaps the reasons why blacks have a lower percentage of persons who perform well academically and a higher percentage of persons who commit violent crimes are related, at least partly, to genetics even though it is an unpopular and very politically incorrect explanation.? Bad science alert, even – more precisely – evil pseudoscience alert. I really can’t even start to address this nonsense.
Now, there were plenty of the posts that you would normally expect from Guardian readers, in response to this stuff. So, relax, the Guardian has not yet become the liberal face of the BNP overnight.
All the same, it’s quite instructive to see-
- a more literate version of the Jade-Goody et al vileness.
- a reminder that racism, even pseudoscientific racism, is always happy to raise its ugly head from licking its butt, whenever it’s given the least opportunity
- a reminder to this blog that it’s barely possible to challenge official hypocritical nonsense, without giving aid and comfort to the enemy
On a more general level, the democratisation of discussion, that has started to become possible because of the Internet , can have undesired effects. For a start, there’s always a potential Lord of the Flies-style downside. History shows that there is probably no force more repellently inhuman than a general population that believes its self-identified tribal/cultural/ethnic group is somehow more human than another group. (Slavery, Holocaust, Ruanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and so on.)
If you are looking for a way to stir up a mass of people to support your desire to seize power or take over a piece of land, this is blatantly the way to go. (In your faces, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, you naive rationalists)
I am assuming that these blogistas aren’t frequent Guardian readers – too many long words, for a start, not to mention the existence of a good few other papers that wouldn’t leave them incoherent with rage, every morning. All the same, these views exist and are pretty common. Some people even believe they represent non-politically correct “common sense” are what others are too cowardly to say. I don’t believe that suppressing these views is the solution. It’s better to identify them than to cover them with a layer of pink icing and pretend they don’t exist.
What do we do about this sort of thinking is another question.
Obviously, a brief but necessary culling of people who fail a simple test of worthiness to be “human” – based on their intelligence, rationality and level of goodwill towards other people – is the first thing that springs to mind.
(Note for the hard of thinking, this is sarcasm. I am being sarcastic.. Well, use a dictionary, then. It’s a bit like irony but not as complicated.)
Remorse without retribution
There is something of a global fashion for aplogising for things you haven’t actually done yourself to people who aren’t alive to hear the apologies.
I’m all for Britain becoming aware of the bad parts of its history. All the same, most of our ancestors were peasants or the industrial poor, kicked off the land by Enclosure Acts or thrown out of craft work by emergent industrialisation orbegging in the streets or pressganged into virtual serfdom on ships, while the slave trade was going on. Are we supposed to apologise for being British? Or being white? Isn’t it pretty racist to assume that as “white” people, we are somehow responsible for what other “white” people did. I can pretty well guarantee that my ancestors weren’t profiting from the slave trade, or I’d be a lot better off now.
Racism grew as the ideology to support the inhuman treatment of the enslaved. Are we to internalise this vile belief system and think that we are somehow a different breed of human from the Africans who were captured?
There is no genetic basis for theories of race. How often does one have to keep saying this? There is more genetic variation within any given “race” than between “races.” The whole concept ignores the fact that we are all “mixed race”. Almost no people on earth have lived in isolation, without the benefits of genetic diversity, for any measurable time. The existence of a “white” race is a pernicious myth. Surely anyone with any pretence to education or intelligence knows this. If not, what are we doing in our schools?
We should certainly try to understand the nature of British racism – developed as a justification for slavery, at a given point in time, it evolved into a subtly different justification for colonialism and has continued to evolve throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to support different social forms – e.g. when the UK needed labour in the 1950s and imported lots of “colonial subjects,” it soon had to start to drop most of the racist nonsense. Racism still continues to flourish and to take new forms to reflect our different social and political situation (it’s now mainly directed at Muslims rather than Afro-Caribbeans, for instance.)
I believe that understanding the nature of racism is crucial for the future of the planet.
I also believe that apologising for things we (that is US, as living human beings) didn’t actually do is pretty hollow.
There is plenty more bad around the relations between Britain and Africa.
For example, the profits from engagement in the slave trade made England such a wealthy country that it was able to take the lead in industrialisation. The failure of England to dominate the palm oil trade – so necessary to an important phase of late Victorian industrialisation – was due to the negotiating success of African traders, who consistently got the better of the European traders as soon as they realised palm-oil was crucial – OPEC-style. this led to European colonial invasion of West Africa. Comonial rule in Africa was very shortlived but left a devastating legacy of invented states and collaborationist local elites which still impacts on African politics to this day.
If there are current resonances here, they seem to be in the realm of grabbing control of oil through warfare…… Oh, and supporting it with a belief system…….
Is there any point in apologising for all of British history? A genuine apology should surely include some attempt to make amends. Who should Britain make these amends to? The descendants of the slaves? In what form? Send money to America? Probably not a good idea.
To Africa? Surely, by definition, Africans WEREN’T enslaved. When the European powers messed up Africa, slavery was well over. But Africa could do with some assistance, beyond the adoption of its best-looking babies by female celebrities, the wearing of Red Noses and even beyond lots of people paying to see has-been rock stars.
There were no slave plantations, brutally suppressed slave revolts or Jim Crow race laws in England. These are American evils. Out of them grew a classification of humans as Black or White. This is not just patently absurd – flying in the face of the evidence of one’s eyes – it shapes our thinking in subtle ways. It is not necessarily more or less racist than the multicoloured shades of racial distinction that exist in the many other countries. It is certainly different. Most US black people would be self-evidently “white” to most Africans (outside South Afriica or Zimbawe) or North-east Brazilians. Are we so imbued with US culture that we can’t even look at our own history without seeing it through their eyes?
Here I feel that the uniquely British role in the triangle trade created historical outcomes which are quite distinct from the North and South American legacies, but that we are somehow taking the American guilt on board here and apologising for it along with our own national guilt. But, guess what, we’re not doing anything useful about it.
In fact, the UK government has made racism more or less invisible, for example, by changing the goalposts so that “anti-racism” is now “diversity,” by shutting down the Commission for Racial Equality and by mouthing siilly apologies for things that happened two centuries ago. Social equality is barely advancing. Many times more “black” kids are being excluded from school, for instance. Integration of cities like Bradford is becoming less and less likely.
Our ruling class may feel a bit better about itself for saying it’s sorry. Does this achieve anything to anyone else’s advantage? As a nation, England did a lot more to challenge global slavery, when we started to sink any ships caught trading slaves, not long after the UK ban. This actually achieved something concrete – it started to make slave trading too unprofitable to be attractive.
Saying sorry
Difficult topic this, but at least it is taking my mind off the problems I am having trying to get Linux installed, so I will try to limit the sensibilities I offend here.
I bought the Guardian newspaper today and it has a few news items which revolve around calls for Britain to apologise for the slave trade. Page 12 (or read the online version) is dedicated to an item called “Marching to London to hear a single word … sorry” which is about a group of people on a protest march, the letters page has more than it’s fair share on the topic (“Slavery, abolition and apologies” online) and on the comments pages, Joseph Harker has a piece titled “A shameful open sore.”
All very interesting and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that slavery is a horrific thing for anyone to endure. The activities of those involved in slave trading were (and still are) deplorable and it is shocking that slavery still exists in the world.
However, I do not for one second feel the need to say sorry over this.
It seems to me that we live in a society which is enamoured with public displays of contrition – no matter how irrelevant or empty these may be. It seems to me that it is more important that public figures keep saying “Sorry” about things, than actually being sorry and wanting (and able) to make amends. The western world is still somewhat suffering from “middle class guilt,” in that people who live reasonably affluent lives see the suffering of others (mainly others in different countries – the suffering at home is easily ignored) and create a feeling of guilt about it (I blame Catholics…). Personally, I have two issues with the calls for “sorry” over the slave trade.
The first is that, to me, this furore over the Slave trade is taking it to a farcical conclusion. The trade in African slaves to work on European plantations was horrific. It was deplorable. Sadly it has a precedent in human history. Pretty much all human cultures have practiced slavery in some form. Ancient Greeks did it (Wiki), the Romans did it, the Vikings did and so on (does Exodus ring any bells?). Deplorable it may be, slavery is certainly something which happens a lot. It can be argued that the classical civilisations were a bit less racist in their collection of slaves and that the African slave trade is wrong because it is characterised by nothing more than pure racism – the slaves were not the vanquished after heroic battles, nor were they poor people trying to ensure they didn’t starve. Interestingly, not all the African slaves were “captured” by the evil Europeans – lots were sold to them by other African nations. However, if we accept the argument that the biggest reason to say sorry of the African Slave trade is the racist nature of it, this implies that slavery is OK as long as you keep multicultural slaves…
Now, that minor point aside, if it can be argued that Britain has to say sorry for it’s part in the slave trade, I would also like to call for the Italians (especially the ones living in Rome) to apologise for bringing Carpathian slaves to Britain and forcing them into servitude. I also feel the Germans should apologise for subjugating the indigenous population between the fifth and tenth century AD (I refuse to use BCE/CE), the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians should apologise for their raiding parties killing people and taking away women as slaves, then a big apology from them for steal a patch of what became France from the Franks and invading England, deposing the legitimate king. Thanks to the Normans we have a class society in the UK which kept the majority of the population in servitude, while not called slaves the differences were minimal. In a similar vein, I am sure every world culture can follow this request to a reductio ad absurdum.
This leads me neatly to my second point. I was not involved in the slave trade. No one alive today was. Any apology I, or the PM or any other Brit makes, is meaningless. I might as well apologise for Stalin’s purges, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the Killing Fields in Cambodia or any other of the numerous atrocities in which I had no part at all. When I say sorry, what does it do? Does it mean I feel really bad and wont do it again? (Ok, sorry, I promise to never gun down Chinese students again) Does it mean the people who suffered at the hands of the slave traders three centuries ago will suddenly be free? (No) Does it mean they can rest better in their afterlife? (Meaningless and still No).
It means nothing. Saying sorry for something you had no part in is totally pointless. From my family tree it is unlikely any of my ancestors were even involved. During the slavery years, the average Briton was far from the free thinking member of an open and accountable democratic society as they are today…. It was only in the sixteenth century that Villeinage was removed from Britain (unless you were Catholic…) and even then the majority of people were too poor, too powerless and to subjugated themselves to have any opinions on the slave trade in Africa. This creates the possible argument that the Royal Family / Aristocracy should apologise but most of them are German anyway… If they were going to apologise, then the remaining African nations have to as well – who do you think the slaves were bought from?
All in all, I think slavery is a terrible thing. I feel sorry for all the people throughout history who have been slaves (whatever their skin colour or nation of origin, I dont like to discriminate) and appreciate they suffered terribly.
I am not going to say “I am sorry” though.
Linux Annoyances
Not much online time today, sorry. I am fighting a (losing) battle with my technology.
I have spent most of today trying to set up my main PC as a dual boot Linux/windows box using openSUSE 10.2 (64 bit) and Windows XPSP2.
Sadly, I have been far from successful.
The problems began with Partition Magic. The PC I have came with WinXP installed on its 180gb HDD. As I had around 100gb free space, I thought putting 20 gig aside for Linux would be next to no problems. I ran diskeeper and checkdisk to make sure everything was fine (it was) then I rank Partition Magic to resize the disk – I planned to make a 1gig swap file and about 14 gig for the linux install.
Sadly, each and every time Partition Magic rebooted (claiming it was going to resize the partitions) it came up with “Error 1513 Bad Attribute Position in File Record” and suggested I looked at the help files. I honestly spent over an hour doing this (reboot, choose partition sizes, restart, get error message, check help files, find nothing, reboot, choose partition sizes…. etc). Nothing I could find in the help files was any use.
Eventually I cracked and went to a web search engine (why didn’t I do this the first time!) and found out my Partition Magic 8 needed an upgrade to 8.01 and then a patch applied. Isn’t software great?
This done, everything went fine. The install interface for openSUSE is easy to use and easy to understand. I did spend about an hour choosing which packages I wanted but that was just because I’d become a kid in a sweet shop at that point. In the end I settled for Gnome and about 4gb of software. Linux is fantastic.
The install went smoothly…right up to the point at which it needed to connect to the Internet. It found my Belkin USB WLAN adaptor and identified it perfectly. It even found the SSID of the network. When trying to connect it (as it should) asked for the WEP key, so I entered it. After what felt like a week, it came up asking for the key again, so I entered it again. This happened five times before the computer gave up and I had to restart the network connection.
After two hours of trying different things (converting the key from HEX to ASCII etc), I had pretty much exhausted everything I could think off. I have been back to windows to check the settings (they are fine) and I have tried the USB device on other linux machines (although it was an Ubuntu machine) and it works fine. Nothing I seem to be able to do will make my openSUSE installation connect to the wireless router. I have hit a complete brick wall now and I am fed up of entering 26 hex characters every ten minutes so I have given up and come back to windows (yes, sad, I know).
I will try a brief google search to see if I can find the answer, but to be honest I dont know if I can be bothered any more. There is more to life than spending almost an entire working day trying to make software do what I want it to do. The idea is that computers (etc) make our lives easier and less stressfull. If people are writing such bad code that I have to give up all my spare time to get their software to work, I am not really interested. The same applies to Symantec and their fundamentally broken Partition Magic.
I love linux. I have two linux machines running fine here (one openSUSE 10.1 [32bit] and one Ubuntu). I used to love openSUSE and hate Ubuntu. Times may be changing.
If any one has had similar problems, or knows and answer, please let me know!
[tags]Technology, Linux, Windows, Software, Operating System, Wireless, Networking, Rants, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Belkin, Netgear, Partition Magic, Error Messages, Symantec[/tags]
McNulty from the Wire confusingly in the 300
The 300 is visually stunning and more than well worth watching.
I’ve got that out of the way. Now I’ll make a few random points, some of which conspired to distract me:
- McNulty from the Wire is in it. I read in the Guardian on Saturday that he’s really English, otherwise this would have been even more of a shock.
I’ve always thought he was the worst actor in the Wire. Now I can see he was labouring under the impediment of having to produce a Baltimore Irish accent, so I ve got more respect for his Wire performance. However, this doesn’t spill over to seeing him as a Spartan, so it’s hard not to keep expecting his chubbier well-dressed partner from Series one to pop up. - Similarly, the actor whose name I have no idea of but who so exemplifies the dorkish English lad in Mike Leigh movies that he’s in a good few is in there as well. Bringing to mind a few Mike Leigh movies.
- The abs are uniformly amazing. OK, all the actors (male or female, leads or extras) are uniformly so perfectly muscled that I began to look for evidence of them wearing muscle suits. Then i realised that maybe they were digitally enhanced…. (well, d’uh)
Cos I can’t conceive of any other form of enhancement that would achieve this level of perfection.
I am pretty sure I saw McNulty with his shirt off in the Wire at some point and I don’t remember him having a chest that knocked your eyes out. (Human superficiality being so deep in me, I would probably have given more mental leeway to his acting shortcomings.) Has the new James Bond raised the bar so high? These people are physically utterly stunning. - I hope nobody does a Braveheart on this and takes it as a true version of history, despite it starting off as a comic.. The Spartans were bastards. Their whole society was so ultra-fascist that a fascist would have cavilled at it.
- It’s filled with extreme comic-book violence, so stylised it looks pretty. The graphics are truly superb. The film uses the washed-out-with-one-dominant colour style – which is red in battles, unsurprisingly – pretty well throughout, I reallly like that. (If you are already bored with that style, then you may get rather annoyed. )
- It has war elephants. They are great
- It has mass battle scenes, mass court scenes, They are all great
The music is great. – Think Black Hawk Down meets that bit in the Fifth Elemnent with the opera singer. Well, without the opera singing, then but you subliminally hear it. Bah, I guess that’s just me then - The characters are coompletely and utterly unengaging. These are comic book characters of course, so you can’t expect any different. I’m not saying it’s a fault, it isn’t. I’m just saying.
- I couldn’t tell one superbly muscled actor from another – unless I recognised them from an old Mike Leigh film or the Wire – so I wasn’t always sure who was saying what to whom or why. Unfortuantely, I am very often incommoded in movie-watching by not being able to tell the actors apart, or follow the plots, so this is no insult to the movie either. Though, in theory knowing something of the tale, as most of us do, I should have made a better stab at understanding it
- Obviously Film Studies 101 would suggest that Xerxes represents Bin Laden, and so on. (OK, he’s not Iranian, but the Persians in the movie aren’t very convincing Iranians. And how many people can tell the difference between Iran and any other middle-eastern country?) I suspect this is a spurious argument. I mean, what sane person would want to identify their country with Sparta?
- Lastly, does there always have to be an evil woman to blame for everything? In Sparta, ffs? Sparta-wise, any woman would seem to have been really lucky to have avoided being left on the hillside to die for being a girl.
Oh blimey, these impressions are totally half-arsed.
Sorry, I’ve only watched it once and lost the thread a bit.
I’ll watch it again in a few days and you might get a coherent blog. (What are the odds of that, you say? Alright, slim.) It really is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen.
Go to see it, if you can.
Virgin (techy) to the slaughter
I am going to take my metaphorical hat off to Virgin broadband customer service here. This is mainly due to a certain amount of guilt at what the poor tech support lad had to go through to serve a customer.
Here’s the picture:
Chirpy lad, who’d look more at home serving coffee in Cafe Nero, wearing his chirpy new Virgin-Media-logoed sweatshirt, not iunlike the primary school uniforms round here, turns up as per spec.
Enters house that is being rebuilt around a woman who is sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a pile of binbags, full of food and mouldy books, osessively tapping at a coffee-covered keyboard. The particular half-disassembled PC at which she is kneeling is only one of a mixture of half assembled PCs, each of which is trailing random colours and shapes of wires. The PC she is using has no sides to the case. All components are covered with a fine coating of brick and wood dust.
The keyboard, mouse and mouse mat are balanced on the top of the case. This is not immediately apparent, given that keyboards, mice, micemats, abound – as well as scanners, three sets of giant headphones, a couple of webcams, a surroundsound set of cube speakers, half a dozen power packs, a few data cables, a digital camera a spirit level, a canister each of Dove deodorant, Safeclens monitor cleaninfg fluid, and Xanto carpet and upholsery mousse (oh, the irony of the last two), a laser printer, 2 coffee cups, a few CRT monitors, a kettle, a huge collection of USB to MP3 cables and far too many other bits of crap to count. Not to mention industrial quantities of ciggarrette stumps and random ash.
He is as yet unaware that the PC has no on-off switch – it being ignited by pressing a clicky thing that was once a component of an off switch.
Nor that the afore-mentioned woman has one major objective apart – from a stable internet connection – which is to hide the lack of an on/off switch at all costs, in case the techy decides that he can’t be expected to connect a pc without an on/off switch to anything except a truck going to landfill. So whatever, he does, she is going to make sure he doesn’t try to make her reboot.
She starts off by apologising for the building work and explaining that the builders (I worship at your shrine, European Community, who made it all possible, by the way) didnt start until after the net connection started to go random. He is now on the spot and has to say “no problem” when he clearly never expected to get drilled and sawed and painted round while he worked. This has now given him no out for when he finds the cable from the cable modem to the wall is being crushed under the weight of a glass door.
She insists that the obviously untroubled online state of the PC is not the norm. He is further stumped – he is here because there is no working internet connection…. When she goes into tedious detail of how she’s got it back, involving messing about at the command prompt and typing in her own IP, he starts to look increasingly panicked.
Thye stare at the PC, willing it to drop its net connection. It doesnt. He fiddles around with obviously blameless cable connections and finds them blameless. He has absolutely no idea what to do, he can’t determine any fault that he can possibly influence. He is surrounded by workmen who are achieving biblical miracles of transformation before his eyes, in times that would shame a microwave, while he is spending half an hour prodding at rock solid connections, reading things off the screen which the aforementioned woman has already written down days ago.
He doesn’t know what to do, so that he can have done SOMETHING, so he can bring the job to an end.
Inspiration. There is a loose piece of plastic missing on one end of the cat5 going to the PC. His face, near to despair at this point, lights up. He gets a piece of fresh cat5 with no broken ends and replaces the tired cat5. (Aforementioned woman has already tried about 6 different piece sof cat5, cannily hiding the ones that looked frayed so he didn’t falsely blame the cat5)
He incomprehensibly removes a bit of the tv box – which isnt even on the same cable from the point at which the signal comes into the house – and prepares to escape.
Get effusive thanks from woman, as she has been spared the ignominy of having to reboot by rubbing two sticks together. He then confides that the last house he went to has the exact same problem. He has no idea what caused it there either…..
(It has been pointed out to me since that the issue is almost certainly due to dchp not being properly set up on the server, after the outage at the time of the changeover. So, there really was nothing he could have done here, anyway)
So, given that the apparently bizarre woman was me – caught at an eccentric moment – I have to say – “sorry, tech support, you did everything you were supposed to, when you were supposed to and you remained helpful throughout the process and resisted what must have been the overwhelming temptation to run or, at least, blame me. Thanks for the cat5.”
Veil of tears
Sorry, couldn’t resist a lame veil pun. There’s something about the veil that brings it out. I defy you to find many newspaper articles about the latest veil story that aren’t going down that route for a headline, so I felt obliged to join in.
I don’t feel obliged to join in the nonsense debate about Muslim schoolgirls wearing the veil to school or not. See story on today’s BBC. It’s just more islamophobia as far as I can see.
What is about the veil that gets everyone’s backs up? OK, I find the whole belief system behind it to be dire and depressing. The combination of extreme sexism and religious fervour is always a winner.
However, it’s just an item of clothing. Teenage girls who choose to wear it are trying to establish some sort of identity, in the same way that the girls who dress as footballer’s wives, crack hos, goths or girls next door are. It’s part of being a teenager. The veil lets them annoy their schoolteachers (always a winner) while believing they have the moral high ground (different type of winner, but just as much a part of adolescence.) Is it really more offensive to people that soem girls choose to cover themselves in tents than any other things.
In most cases, people grow up and see things differently from the way they appeared to their teenage selves. You would think that a few years living in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia would probably quench the desire to be veiled as much as anything.
The only reason I can see for banning the veil in schools is that it would deprive those girls who want to resist cultural pressure to wear it of an unarguable excuse. This is the strongest argument for such a ban, indeed the only one worth considering.
The deeper problem is the issue of why veils stir up such passions in the non-Muslim population? Is it more in your face (really poor pun) than a Jesus loves you t-shirt. Do we have a problem with people wearing crosses?
Dare I say that it’s an ugly combination of sexism and religious prejudice that leads everyone to treat veiled women as somehow the representation of evil? (Women in the veil are now often considered to be really disguised male terrorists.) Jack Straw’s notorious rant about his constituents removing their veils was the Trojan Horse that allowed in a free-for-all demonising of muslim women.
(I wouldn’t argue about teachers, certainly not the teaching assistant who seems to have taken the job just to make some comedy political point about the veil and what would happen if a male teacher came in… Small children can’t be expected to understand instructions from someone when they can’t see their movements and expressions. Not to mention being a really poor role model for little girls.)
If we consider that women are often oppressed in Islam – and I certainly do, although Islam has no monopoly in this noble tradition – doesn’t that make us the worst type of bullies- picking on the already victimised.
In any case, how can suppressing the expression of belief advance the cause of rationality? Making martyrs always brings more converts to fanatical world views. Is this the objective?
BBC Trap
Here’s a link to the BBC site for the Trap.
I hate things that say they might change your life, as one of the intro pages says. (I am sure your life changes pretty much all the time, but not very much change is set off by TV programmes. Though I suppose switching from Discovery Machinery +2 to BBC for an hour on a Sunday might consitute a change of something, I hope your life isn’t that circumscribed.)
Apart from that, the BBC2 site is a good coherent introduction to the issues in the programme. Even the best TV is better if it’s supported by something you can read and think about at your own pace. And the Trap certainly requires some serious thinking.
Curtis’ Trap
This week’s programme was the second of the 3-part series. It was really well-argued. It wasn’t as engaging as the first one – the clips were a tad duller, but the logic was much clearer
Good points:
The way that public service targets have become straightjackets, undermining standards of service rather than improving them.
Blair and Brown have taken the Tories’ projects and run with them, taking them to levels that Major and even Thatcher would never have got away with.
Tranquilising the masses is creating a population who treat normal emotional variation as illness. (Surely the argument of the anti-psychiatrists who Curtis blames for the whole thing in the first place. Thoough I guess this argument is moreThomas Szasz than RD Laing)
There are apparently some clips on the BBC site, so you can catch up with the arguments even if you missed the shows.
Virgin broadband service ….
My house is getting brought into the 21st century. (I’m typing this on the floor, with a mouse mat and keyboard wobbling on top of the PC box, surrounded by binbags full of mouldy books, dishes and raw food detritus) This has wreaked havoc with my capacity to even switch on my PC, let alone comment meaningfully on the Virgin Media service, but I’m going to do it anyway.
It may be that the random moving of cables and the cable modem are to blame. So, I’m still not confident enough that I can justifiably phone up and berate the relentlessly chirpy Virgin Customer Service operatives.
All the same, I’m going to badmouth the service here. 10 Mbit seems to being interpreted as 10 Mbit amonth, as far as I can see. The connection keeps randomly going off. This is so irritating because it makes everything I try to do on the Internet – like post to this blog – depressingly unpredictable. I am reconnecting to Microsofdt messenger at least two or three times an evening, and whole days have passed without me being able to connect at all. Grr.
If anyone else has had a similar experience, I’ll suspect it’s not just me. So please can I have some comments? Also, if every other ex-Telewest customer has perfect service, I’d like to know so I can sort it out here rather than embarrass myself complaining about faults that turn out to be mine. (Tech support in work would probably say there was no surprise there)
The Faust in faith schools
The BBC reported on some research on faith schools this week. LSE researchers supposedly found that faith schools got better results where there was competition for pupils. This isnt exactly surprising, league tables of exam results being so crucial now. Any school that needs to attract pupils has got to show it gets good results – something of a circular process.
This competition thing confirms that a lot of people aren’t sending their kids to “faith schools” because of faith.
It makes me think about the concept of selling your soul. Parents are selling their children’s souls to the highest bidder – the religion that can offer the best GCSE and A level results wins the prize. These must be the cheapest Faustian deals ever recorded. Didn’t the going rate used to be lordship of the earth or eternal life or something of that magnitude?
There were two interesting paragraphs, one encouraging and one depressing.
The research is published as the ATL teachers’ union attacks faith schools for a lack of accountability – and calls for them not to “discriminate” in their admissions process.
Conservative leader David Cameron and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne have recently said they intend to send their children to faith schools – a choice also taken by Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The first paragraph indicates some opposition to the apparent increasingly widespread supportfor religious schools, in our generally pretty godfree society. The second one shows how politicians – who can certainly afford to send their children to the most sought-after secular private schools -feel that it’s a better vote – winner to choose the religious option.
They know that people resent them buying their kids a “better” education. So they don’t want to be seen to send their kids to Eton any more. But, they are not going to risk their precious little Cressidas and Julians in the target-driven qualification factories that all parties are keen to turn state schools into. The faith school thing gets them off the hook, plus it hints at hidden depths of religious belief and morality.
That is, they are painting themselves of people of such deep faith that they won’t risk their children’s moral upbringing in non-religious state or private schools.
They must feel that this will make us trust them more.
It just makes them look even shadier and more hypocritical.
Everything about diets seems to be bull
Damp down your instinctive feeling that statistics are really boring for a few moments and bear with me. On the UK Office of National Statistics web pages there is some fascinating evidence that the diet we are constantly told is good for us is probably making us fat. (Fatness being the current manifestation of everything bad that there could possibly be about a human being of course.)
Basically the ONS summary of its data says that British people are getting fatter at a rate of knots. At the same time they are eating less fat and sugar and less calories 🙂 I just have to quote some of it.
“The prevalence of obesity in England has increased markedly among both adults and children since the mid 1990s. In 2002 it was similar for both sexes; the rate for boys and girls was 17 per cent and for adults was 23 per cent. In 1995 the equivalent figures were 10 per cent for boys and 12 per cent for girls, 15 per cent for men and 18 per cent for women.
There is no evidence that the average calorific intake or consumption of foods rich in fat and added sugar has increased in the UK since the mid 1980s. Men aged 19 to 64 in 2000/01 reported a daily energy intake of approximately 2,323 kcal (a reduction of 6 per cent since 1986/87). Women in the same age groups reported 1,642 kcal, a reduction of 3 per cent.
Reductions over the same period were also observed in the contribution of total fat to total energy intake (from 38 to 34 per cent in men and from 39 to 34 per cent in women) and saturated fat (from 15 to 13 per cent in men and from 17 to 13 per cent in women).”
After the “obligatory five pieces of fruit a day injunction – an old moan on this blog – (for which it produces no evidence but shows how many people at different ages eat it) the food page says that people are eating less saturated fat and replacing red meat with chicken.
Now, this stuff bears a good few explanations:
First, it seems a fair guess that many of these people were lying. I think people are more likely to lie about what they eat now than they were fifteen years ago, as we have all got more and more neurotic about our food. So, I wouldn’t becessarily take this at face value.
However, if it’s even partly accurate, the majority (the MAJORITY) of people are clinically obese or overweight*. I don’t know what it’s like where you live but I can’t see that around me.
But, taking the definition of clinically obese as having come to mean a bit plump and above – doesn’t this suggest that eating less fat and eating fewer calories are utterly doomed strategies for staying slim? Eating chicken with the skin and fat trimmed off appears to be more likely to be associated with fatness than eating old-fashioned meat. And so on.
Let me repeat – eating less fat doesn’t seem to make you thin. Now I know fair amount of the blame here goes with the use of hydrogenated fats that are stuffed into all those “healthy low fat” spreads that people still choose over butter, in the belief that they are better for them.
Eating fewer calories doesn’t seem to make you thin.
The website mentions that people eat many more prepared ready-meals and get less exercise. Well, hmm, now that seems more like it.
** Men were more likely than women to be overweight (or obese), 67 per cent compared with 58 per cent. This compares with 58 per cent of men and 49 per cent of women ten years earlier.
The Wire Series 4 so far, on FX
In case you think that this series of the Wire is straying a bit from the central strands of Wire, here’s your half-time peptalk (a couple of episodes too soon, granted.) If you are getting a bit bored with the politics, I’d have to agree. The election has been dragged out too long, with the same (albeit crucial) points about the corruption being made too often, for my taste. I suppose it’s important, in terms of the overall meaning of the series. I agree with the points, I think it’s very well done. I’m not really complaining….. It’s just that the nature of American politics is both too familiar to us from many other films and tv series and, to be honest, a little boring if you’re not a Yank.
The four lads are the central focus throughout this series and they’ll continue to be so. The first programmes should have already established their characters but there are some surprises in the way they develop, although the clues to where they are going are pretty deftly placed already (with the benefit of whatever the opposite of hindsight is, given I’ve already seen the rest of the series.)
Other strands worth paying attention to, because of how they’ll develop include Marlo’s setting up of Omar; Rawls’ shameless doubledealing with Carcetti and the Mayor; Bubs getting battered because of his nephew’s involvement with the corners; the exposure of the impact of race in the political system, exemplified by the white cop who is increasingly adopting the language of the corner and who is actively campaigning for the Mayor, (largely because his luck in catching the mayor in flagrante has got him made sergeant); the ineptly hidden camera, which will have repercussions for the same cop; the kid who breaks into Prez’s car when he locks his keys inside..
Extra-good things in tonight’s episode were Naimond’s visit to his dad in jail. The conversations between Naimond, his mother and his father were brilliant. His dad expresses the male “soldier” values that he is convincing Naimond underpin the street trade. Naimond listens avidly, trying to learn the male role, both impressed and fearful that he won’t be able to live up to his father’s expectations. The fact that these values are demented propaganda doesn’t occur to any of them. The mother is busy manipulating Naimond to start working for her benefit. She is the most uncompromising advocate of the successful street dealer “soldier” and “family” values, being in the advantaged position of profiting from them without putting herself at any risk. This stuff is just brilliant, so subtly written, with great depth so well conveyed through what appears to be completely natural speech. Of course the writing is brilliant, but the acting is superb as well. (plus the costume design, the sets, and everything else, but one thing at a time here, hey.)
The last crucial bit I have to mention is the kids finding out that the bodies are just dead people not transmuted zombies. The “If animal trapped, call…” message stencilled on the door of the empty building that serve as tombs for Marlo’s enemies has infinite resonance. The whole incident is really subtle. Duquon shows much greater adult understanding of the difference between real bodies and fantasy tales. He introduces the more naive kid to the reality in really gentle way. When the naive lad realises that these are just bodies, he expresses an awareness of the ubiquity of violent death in their surroundings which seems so world-weary, when set against his previous insistence that the people were being transformed into zombies. It’s a big growing-up moment for him, soon to be followed by a very adult realisation that the killers know that he’s the one they got to trick Lex to going to his death.
Unaccustomed shortage of blogs
Sorry for the slackness in posting. A combination of events, including a foreign trip, a house refurbishment and a randomly broken net connection have stopped us blogging at all until Saturday, with minimal service since then. Normal service will be resumed later in the week. (Is that a threat or a promise?)