Category Archives: History

Rants and raves about topics relating to history.

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

Posted on by

It’s the 15th birthday of the release of the source code for the World Wide Web, according to the BBC.

Just 15 years. And it’s already almost impossible to remember how we lived before tinterweb.

The first ever web site was http://info.cern.ch. It’s still there (the site not the same web page…) It is pretty rubbish, which is oddly comforting. (No reasonable menu, you can only find the other pages by going to the sitemap, elements don’t fit exactly, in IE6, and they use style attributes in tags instead of the class definition 🙂 ) There’s some screenshots of Tim Berners-Lee’s first browsers, which could give present-day browsers some serious competition.

It links to CERN’s proper site which is brilliant, although most of it is so far over my head that i might as well be reading an umbrella.

The web itself has become indispensable. Especially for finding out anything you want to know – instantly. It’s true that much of what you get is spurious, but the more of us that develop a built-in bullshit detector the better.

And mostly, it’s great that the web has grown so fast precisely because it was designed to be free and open and collaborative The BBC reported Robert Cailliau:

“We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favour of that.” ………
“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.

(Maybe someone should tell the DRM fanatics.)

A war on peace…

Posted on by

Oh how times have changed since the halcyon days of the first and second world wars (as well as the wonderful Cold War period). Following on from a line of thinking in my previous post, it seems there are some other generalisations you can make about societies that have experienced the horrors of war, and those that haven’t1.

It seems to me that in our current, peace-addled, societies if a month goes by without a government body declaring war on something the world will stop rotating. This week, New Scientist reports2 “Plans drawn up for a war on drink.” Wow. A real war on drink. Amazing. Will people get medals? When will the US invade the ocean? Comically, the online version tempers its headline somewhat, choosing to use the less comical “WHO considers global war on alcohol abuse.” I find the print version more honest though. (I will attack this at a later date)

Even ignoring the sheer comedy of a “war on drink” there are some telling aspects of modern, western, culture here. It seems every time there is a societal “problem” that a government (or international) organisation want to diminish, the only way it can get public attention is by declaring a war against it. In recent years we have mounted a war on poverty, obesity, hunger, want, crime, drugs and the ever comical war on terror. Are any of these real wars? Of course not. They are just victims of the increasing need to over-dramatise everything to get public attention.

Are they “winnable” wars? Again, no. Can they ever end? Still no.

And herein lies the problem I have with all this word-nonsense.

Westerners (at least English speakers) have a strange association with the term “war.” While it has become the norm for a war to be declared on everything and anything, we still have a lingering memory of what war really entails. This creates a strange situation where people will sacrifice their rights and liberties because “we are at war” without realising the term has simply been misused. Giving up an essential liberty for the “duration” of one of these insane wars is foolhardy – the war will never end so the liberty will never return. Even the War on Terror, which at least involves military action, is not a war the traditional sense of the word.

Compare our peace-loving present with the past of a mere 30 years ago. In the mid-1970s most people in the West could remember the War, lots had served in smaller wars (Korea, Vietnam, Borneo, Aden etc) and there was the ever present threat of a REAL BIG WAR with the USSR. Scary times. Genuinely scary.

Into this mix, we throw in a wide set of terrorist organisations who are bombing, shooting and kidnapping all over the place. Planes were regularly hijacked, visitors to the middle east had a 50:50 chance of being kidnapped each day and the IRA were doing their level best to turn the UK into one big fireball. Even Africa was in at least as much chaos as it is today – only instead of the locals killing each other it was mostly lunatics trying to be mercenary kings.

Throughout this crazy time did we have a war on Smoking? Drink? Obesity? Crime? Violence? Drugs? Nope. We didn’t even have a war on terror; western governments understood that declaring “war” on the terrorists gave them a status they didn’t deserve and changed how the state had to interact with them. One of the things the IRA/INLA hunger strikers were campaigning for was recognition of their struggle as being a war. Instead of starving to death, all they had to do was convert to Islam apparently.

What has changed over the world? So far, the Islamic terrorist threat has killed less British people than the IRA did in 1970 but we are a thousand times more frightened. Does this explain why we declare war on anything and everything?

It strikes me, that in the same manner people who have never experienced war sometimes long for it, a culture which has forgotten the horrors of war may start to long for it.

Worryingly, does this imply western society will, out of fear of the bogeyman, keep going to “war” on things until a real big war reminds everyone what they were trying to avoid? Crucially, when can we declare war on declaring war?
—
1: I am fully aware that these are generalisations. I am seeking to do no more, and no less, than discuss a trend. There will always be examples which flow counter to this and I wont lose any sleep over them.

2: Unfortunately you need to be a NS subscriber to get full access to this. Buy the magazine or trust me…

Bodiam Castle? Google Is Your Friend…

Posted on by

I have been looking through the website logs to see just what it is that drives people to this site and, while lacking in raw comedy value (unlike some), it has been interesting.

Running a combination of Firestats, Feedburner and Google Analytics it seems this blog is getting around 400 visits a day. From these around 80% are new (which shows just what a non-loyal readership we hold…) and of those around 70% come here from a search engine – nearly all from Google. For the numbers-fans, this translates to about 200 hits a day from Google searches. Given the insanely varied nature of topics here, you would be excused for thinking this was reflected in the search stats. Not so.

Of the top ten search terms used to come here, seven are image searches, and this accounts for about 90 of the incoming hits. Even stranger, of these over a third are all searching for images of Bodiam Castle.

Now, Bodiam Castle is a gorgeous, fourteenth century fairytale castle in East Sussex, run by the National Trust, so I can understand why people are interested in it. In fact, I understand this well enough to have uploaded another photo!

Bodiam CastleIf you have come here searching for Bodiam Castle, I hope you like this, and you can even see more on Flickr. It has been a long time since I have been to Bodiam so please, forgive me for the photos being out of date now. If you have links to other pictures of this gorgeous castle, please let me know and I will be more than happy to link to them from here.

Back onto the search topic, there is the determination issue to consider now. Will my posting of a new Bodiam article increase the amount of hits I get for this? Are people massively disappointed when the Mighty Google sends them here rather than elsewhere? Why dont people use Yahoo to search for Bodiam?

The other common terms people use for an “images search” are:

  • Schwarzenegger
  • Nice Art
  • Fine Houses
  • Holy Wafer
  • Jesus Toast (around 5 people a day come here using that search term… MADNESS)
  • Future Castles

Now, some make more sense than others, but I can only guess at the disappointment people must feel when their searches lead them here.For completeness, the most common search terms that bring people to this site are:

  • HDR How To (use Photomatix)
  • Cool Viking Names (well all of them)
  • Bad Journalist (again, all of them)
  • Firefox Memory Hog (it is)
  • Pipex Download Speeds (almost non-existent)
  • McCanns Blog (wrong place, I didn’t even know they had one)

One last point, a bit of an oddity is a search term Feedburner has identified leading some poor unfortunate here: “blog: I cannot read, feel distracted” – I have no idea what this blog has to offer this poor person.

Nothing new

Posted on by

“Binge drinking” is the fashionable moral panic topic for the UK media. The drunken excesses of youth in UK city centres are presented as evidence of social decline, the evils of youth culture, the dark side of feminism, even.

Agreed, drinking alcohol has some repellent effects. If legality really bore any relationship to social harm and if banning recreational substances didn’t lead to much worse problems than the substance ever caused, there would be a fair case for banning it completely.

As a predictable result of the current coverage of the evils of strong drink, Alistair Darling, the ironically-surnamed UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, greatly increased the taxes on alcohol today.

But experts said it was still not enough to make a “real difference”..(snipped)…
It comes at a time when more and more pressure is being placed on the government to use the lever of price to tackle binge-drinking Britain. (from the BBC)

Well, the media pressure might be recent but the increase in consumption and increase in collateral damage seem a mite illusory. The raising-price-to-deter issue remains unproven (and anyone can travel to mainland Europe and provision their neighbourhood with cheap booze.)

How new is this “issue” anyway? Think of Hogarth’s Gin Lane. Now that was an era with an alcohol problem.

A fantastic (and temporarily free) resource has lots of 19th century newspapers from the British Library, in a fully searchable online version. (The fact that some pages look as if they’ve been eaten by rats just adds to their charm.)

And, wow. Their news was much more action-packed and interesting than the stuff we get to read now. The political news tells you about things like the House of Commons reaction to Bradlaugh’s atheism. You can see the details of major historical events in a sort of reading-based real time. For instance, you can identify the start of the Irish Potato Famine. Even the shipping listings have whole columns devoted to casual lists of pirate attacks.

I mean, that’s what you call serious news. Which I will promptly ignore, of course, and go for the sensationalist stuff, being a true 21st century media consumer.

The biggest shock – for anyone seduced by a vision of the past as some sort of public order Utopia – is the nature and viciousness of the crimes reported in the local papers. Not to mention the often merciful nature of sentences, at a time when we assume that all “justice” was more than harsh.

Almost randomly mixed in with records of innocent Rose Grower’s Association fetes, you find some really bloodthirsty reports. I won’t retell a selection of 200-year-old crime stories, on the grounds that they would be as interesting as other people’s holiday snaps. Find your own stories by searching the database, if you’re interested.

Scores of knifings, battering, poisonings, drowning babies, muggings and gang robberies – one of which included an 86-year old woman, on the gang side. In one story, a remanded prisoner – whose imprisonment involved living as a guest in a detective’s house, ffs – managed to get a gun and shoot the two accomplices in the murder he was being charged with. (The detective’s wife gave evidence that he was very well behaved in their house and that the shooting was out of character…..)

The theme of alcoholic excess runs through many of these stories. 19th century binge-drinkers could drink today’s urban revellers under the table. For example, the London Examiner (July 7, 1817) reported the story of a soldier who was too drunk to remember having murdered his drinking companion.

The Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh, Scotland), Saturday, March 22, 1800 described the loss of a 64-gun royal navy ship, the Repulse, which had just recaptured a boat that had been taken by French privateers. Among the crew who died in the course of the shipwreck, there were two sailors who drowned “due to drunkenness” and four sailors who were so drunk that they couldn’t even leave the sinking ship.

Drinking to the point at which you become a serious danger to yourself and others is no new invention. It seems to be a centuries-old British tradition. I hope we don’t have to swear allegiance to that.

Do we not bleed?

Posted on by

Some Jewish girls, plainly prevented by the nature of their social values from asserting their religious and cultural identities by just wearing a veil or a promise ring or whatever, have achieved this seemingly fashionable goal by boycotting Shakespeare in their GCSE exams.

Because of his anti-semitism, it appears…..

I assume they are thinking about the Merchant of Venice. Even if you choose to ignore the fact that Shakespeare actually gave Shylock some of the most stirring anti-bigotry speeches ever written, Shakespeare’s views on any topic (if you can deduce what they might have been) were the views of a sixteenth century playwright.

Should we only read or listen to or look at works of art if we agree 100% with the worldview of their creator? In that case, we had better get really brilliant at writing and painting and making music, because, for each of us, there is only one person that we will ever agree with completely. Even then, we must be careful not to change our minds as a result of experience, because we won’t be able to use even our own creations then.

Why stop at works of art? Can I live in a house built by people who are on the other side of the political spectrum? Wear clothes when the person who made them might not agree that we are heading straight towards ecological disaster? My Freya, I suspect that the person who made the cup I’m drinking from didn’t believe the Wire was the best TV series ever made.

Discussing the school students’ absurdity in the Guardian, Seth Freedman argued that this sort of religiously-inspired intervention in education is inherently dangerous.

Policy makers should be joining the dots and realising that they have a tough choice to make when it comes to appeasing religious minorities on the one hand, and making Britain a country that opposes fundamentalism and extremism on the other……
The reluctance of religious institutions to pay heed to secular teaching methods can be found right across the spectrum of faiths in the UK, as well as abroad. Devout Christians are just as unlikely to force their children to learn how man descended from monkeys as ultra-orthodox Jewish parents are, and so too is the case with strict adherents of Islam.

America, you are getting really scary

Posted on by

Stop it now. You were doing so well with your legal system actually starting to work and your advisers starting to tell the truth, and then you just have to go and spoil it, don’t you? You are getting really scary. I really don’t want to be Raptured. Most of the people on this planet don’t. Maybe that’s just us.

These items were on the BBC today:

(Minor insanity) Huckabee saying that Gitmo is too luxurious. Hmm. I would hate to see the neighbourhood that you live in, Huckabee. Even round where I live, which is often seen as a bit rough, waterboarding is not yet considered an everyday occurrence.

Bizarrely, Huckabee (the name invites so many parodies that I’ll resist the challenge) said that the Gitmo prisoners were mollycoddled, considering their crimes. Well, the prisoners in Gitmo haven’t actually been convicted of crimes. They certainly haven’t been tried and found guilty of anything. Isn’t that the whole point of Gitmo? If there was any valid evidence against the prisoners under national and international law it would have been used to convict them. The US, being inconveniently hamstrung by national and international law, delierately stuck this abhorrence on a place that it can represent as beyond any normal constraints.

(Major insanity) American warships supposedly threatened by a suicide attack by Iranian speedboats? Argh. Argh. Arch. Must I keep saying “Argh” until more appropriate words come into my head? I know think that all <strike>non-Yanks</strike> Iranians are dumber than a box of Twinkies but, hey, c’mon, dudes. Surely, by the beard of Loki, the US voters aren’t going to swallow this bull excrement. Your faithful allies are never going to fall for the same trick twice.

Iran is a state that you claim (directly in the face of your own intel) is almost a nuclear power. You expect us to believe that it is ready to declares war on the most powerful country in the world by ramming warships with speedboats. (For a start, we all know the torpedo has been invented. )

This WMD stuff and imminent-attack-danger Pearl Harbour stuff doesn’t work anymore. The Iranian nuclear threat didn’t work. You characterised last year’s captured Brit sailors and marines as “spineless” for refusing to act in a mad gung-ho way that would have started a war with Iran. You don’t have a blank cheque that lets you draw on the support of your allies and the compliance of the UN for ever.

Get over it. Just accept that you have to pay more for your oil…

As atheist as it gets?

Posted on by

Sunk in post-holiday torpor, I somehow missed the full flowering of the avowed atheist’s (TM) atheism in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on 30 December.

Bear in mind Brendan O’Neill is someone who introduces his own blog with this blurb:

One of this country’s sharpest social commentators’ (Daily Telegraph)

What country are they talking about? (Although, the Daily Telegraph probably wouldn’t recognise sharp social commentary even if it was poked in the eye by it.)

In the blogpost I’m talking about, O’Neill pours even more scorn on public atheists than he bestowed on the Archbishop of Canterbury.  His victims are Dawkins, Hitchens et al.

The new atheism
There is more humanity in the ‘superhuman’ delusions of the devout than there is in the realism of the hectoring atheists

Blimey, can you plagiarise yourself? Weren’t these pretty well the exact words he used in the Spiked-Online article about Rowan Williams. (Well, except for the “monkeyman” bit. Maybe the Guardian found that too offensive for the subhead? ) He must be really really proud of these phrases.

I am as atheistic as it gets. But I will not be signing up to this shrill hectoring of the religious. The new atheists have given atheism a bad name. History’s greatest atheists, or the “old atheists” as we are now forced to call them, were humanistic and progressive, critical of religion because it expressed man’s sense of higher moral purpose in a deeply flawed fashion. The new atheists are screechy and intolerant; they see religion merely as an expression of mass ignorance and delusion. Their aim seems to be, not only to bring God crashing back down to earth, but also to downgrade mankind itself.

And so on. In so doing, he brings up Darwin and Marx, apparently “old atheists” – whose words must therefore provide the all-wise authority that this “atheistic as it gets” person apparently can’t live without.

Indeed (in the second article of his that I’ve decided to savage) he yet again takes Marx’s words completely out of context, to somehow derive a meaning that is the opposite of what the man was saying. All the same, it wouldn’t matter if O’Neill hadn’t got it wrong. If historic figure X believed the moon was made of paper, their success in another field wouldn’t make it true.

This doesn’t stop O’Neill referring often to Marx, as if some acknowledged wisdom in political philosophy made everything Marx said true. And, most bizarrely, as if Marx somehow agreed with O’Neill that Dawkins et al should just shut up.

For Marx, religion had to be abolished because it made man despicable; for new atheists religion exists precisely because man is despicable, little more than a monkey.
New atheists will continue to ridicule the religious in 2008. But there is more humanity in the “superhuman” delusions of the devout – in their yearning for a sense of purpose and greatness – than there is in the monkeyman realism of the hectoring atheists.

Oh, look, there’s the “monkeyman realism” stuff again. How odd that he hates the whole idea of evolution but seems to worship Darwin.
Here’s the “superhuman delusion” quote again. Again, ffs. Look, Brendan, it just wasn’t that good. Sorry.

And, surely, Marx didn’t believe religion “made man despicable”. Blimey, I doubt that even the allegedly “hectoring” Dawkins and Hitchens would go that far. IMAO, Marx (and other classical social scientists) saw religion largely in terms of its social role of providing ideas that support social relations. (Generally 19th century intellectuals tended to look at how things work in the real world.)

If this is what “being as atheist as it gets” looks like, can we have an atheist competition to see if its possible to get more atheist, please?

Time going backwards

Posted on by

Some old photographs on the BBC’s website show the young Benazir Bhutto. She wore standard international 1970s clothes – a vaguely “ethnic” dress in one picture and a silk blouse in another. She didn’t just lack an all-covering tent/veil – she wasn’t even wearing a headscarf. She looked wealthy and confident. Hardly surprising, given that she was the Pakistani Prime Minister’s daughter. You could be looking at a young female member of the Kennedy clan. She could have been a privileged young woman from any cultural background. Becoming Prime Minister in her own right must have seemed an achievable goal, even at that age, with the example of Indira Gandhi in India.

Her assassination was clearly horrific. It even took in a couple of dozen other people, in what could almost be the textbook definition of overkill. That is, Benazir Bhutto had already been shot dead by the time the assassin blew himself and the surrounding crowd up.

I have no knowledge of what the killer expected to achieve or what his beliefs were. The BBC site suggests that similar attacks are being directed against the ruling party and other opposition parties and hence her assassination is indicative of a general regional destabilisation.

However, Benazir Bhutto’s murder still has unusual international resonance, just because of the rarity of her career. A woman Prime Minister elected to power in a Muslim country. Twice. So huge numbers of Muslim voters and Muslim clerics didn’t have a problem with her lack of hijab, her high-powered education, her outspokenness, even with seeing her naked face.

(At least as rare in the non-Islamic world. You can count major female political leaders on the toes of one foot and still have two to spare.)

She was a successful and powerful woman in a country set up as Islamic from its very first day. How likely is it that a Pakistani woman from a similar background could even be photographed in such an innocent way today, let alone that she could achieve political power?

Wasn’t the 20th century supposed to be about progress? It looks as if the world of 40 years ago was much more modern and progressive than today’s world. So why not all vow to devote the next century to returning to medieval values, so that, when we fail dismally to achieve that goal, we might actually find we’ve sparked some advances.

Learning History or Mythology?

Posted on by

I was going to avoid the topic of how recent research identified hardly any one knew the biblical stories any more. Heather has covered it, as has Psycho Atheist. Both of these posts pretty much hammer every point I could think of making on this. Until today, that is.

Today, as I was driving around the freezing, wet, countryside, I was listening to BBC Local Radio. There was some weird discussion (I missed the start of it, so was a bit lost), but it basically boiled down to some lunatics ranting (and I mean they sounded like froth was coming out of their mouths they were so angry) about what a disgrace it was. The general consensus was that this loss of nativity teaching was leading to a complete breakdown of our society.

This did get me thinking a bit. I like history, and historical stories, as much (if not more) than the next person (unless that person is Alun) so I think it is a shame people do not know historical details. That said, there is a much larger gap in the knowledge than this tiny Christian questionnaire shows. To remind you, the questions asked were:

  1. According to the Christian Bible story where was Jesus born?
  2. Who told Mary she would give birth to a son?
  3. Who was Jesus’ cousin?
  4. Where did Joseph, Mary and Jesus go to escape King Herod?

Ok, I have to admit, I had to double check who Jeebus’ cousin was. Shame on me. However, in my defence, this is not a history of my culture. In the modern ages we place a lot of emphasis on people tracing their roots and learning their own cultural history, so as far as I am concerned this is as alien to me as if the questionnaire was about the Jade Emperor. Despite the nonsense I heard on the radio, one caller actually said “like it or not, we are a Christian nation and our children should learn the facts about Christianity” (I suspect he is unaware of the term “ironic”), I live in a Northern European with a celtic-slavic population. With that in mind, I wonder how many people know the proper history about their own culture. If I did a survey of people in the street with the following questions, how many would answer ANY correctly?

  1. What tribe was Beowulf from?
  2. Where did the Scot tribe come from?
  3. Who was Fenrir’s Father?
  4. Where does Heimdal stand guard?

I suspect there will be less than 1 in 3 of the population who can get those correct (at least without resorting to Wiki / Google searches).

If we want to teach our children myths, teach them ones which are interesting a relevant to their culture. If we want them to learn “real” history, then teach them the real history not the biblical variant.

No mad quack

Posted on by

Minette Marrin ranted absurdly against Michael Moore’s new film Sicko, in the Times Online.

Apparently, Michael Moore made the unarguable point that the NHS is free. (Well, almost free, except for prescription and dentistry charges) Free at the point of delivery. Provided according to need, not according to the ability to pay. That’s the principle.

For the benefit of Americans, that means, for example, that you don’t face bankruptcy at the same time as major illness.

Being sick is bad enough in itself, surely. Free access to competent medical treatment isn’t just one of the best candidates for recognition as a universal human right. It even makes perfect common sense socially, given that the healthy aren’t normally mad-keen to catch TB from the untreated poor.

The infinite superiority of free medical care was made eloquently clear by Richard Titmuss decades ago in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy , original updated 1997, LSE Books.* Titmuss showed that the properties of altruism and social responsibility, on which UK blood banks depended, actually produced a product – blood for transfusion – that was of better quality than that available from US blood banks. (People who sold their blood tended to be hungry, diseased, alcoholic and/or drugged. People who willingly gave blood tended to be healthy. Well, d’uh.)

Moore seems to be making a similar, but updated, point that free healthcare is better for the vast majority of consumers, is cheaper and more effective. (We are English. We aren’t supposed to need telling that.)

It’s hard to see how free health care could seem like a bad thing to anyone except the executives of medical insurance companies. (Not even to doctors, given that they do pretty well out of the NHS and can also run unfeasibly profitable private practices.)

In England, we complacently take the National Health Service for granted. We whine constantly about specific local problems. Plenty of people (including us) rant about crazy high-level decisions to spend billions on computerising bits of it. But, we genuinely cannot imagine what it would be like to live without it.

Well not so Minette Marrin. Her piece has the title “Quack Michael Moore has mad view of the NHS“

Quack? So Michael Moore’s film is peddling crystal aromatherapy for cancer then? I assumed from the reviews that it was about the horrors of US healthcare and the merits of alternative ways to provide it. Silly me.

She claims that Moore showed a rosy view of the NHS, apparently by showing a clean and efficient hospital.

You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

Well, I can only assume that her definition of “deep trouble” is subtly different from mine. Even without referring to years of targets- and cost- and privatisation-driven policies that have been imposed on the NHS (spot the misdirection, yes, I did mention them) I would say that the NHS may face a few problems

These tend to be problems talked up out of all proportion by a biased media, but, wait, that’s what she’s accusing Michael Moore of doing.

Nothing undermines the principle that our NHS is so superior to the US health care system that it can look mockingly over its shoulder at US healthcare and say “Call that a health care system?” Then give a sarcastic laugh.

Even Minette has to acknowledge this, after she’s brought up a selection of NHS failings: prevalence of hospital infections; loss-making NHS trusts and GPs who don’t provide out of hours healthcare.

None of these problems mean we should abandon the idea of a universal shared system of healthcare. It’s clear we would not want the American model, even if it isn’t quite as bad as portrayed by Moore.

I think that is too grudging and it’s way too late to unsay what she’s already said.

The issues she mentioned are all issues of policy. They do not in any way relate to the wider principle of free universal health care. It’s as if Micahel Moore said he liked your house. You say “I hate it”, listing things you hate – like the creaking doors – without considering that this might imply that you believe you would be better off homeless.

* See, I can reference, though granted it’s not Harvard system. The British Medical Journal has a full reference. There’s a Wikipedia article on Richard Titmuss, if you are interested in post-WWII social policies

Anti-Israel does not equal anti-Jew

Posted on by

Atheist defends Dawkins. Shock, horror. (OK, not.) Still the Times has an unpleasant piece by Daniel Finkelstein in which he distorts something Dawkins said in the Guardian in order to misrepresent Dawkins as anti-semetic.

So Dawkins, a liberal hero, believes, er, that Jews control world power. And, judging from the Guardian, it is now a part of mainstream debate to say so. Perhaps you think I am over-reacting, but I am a little bit frightened.

Well no. What Dawkins actually said is that atheists need some organisation analogous to the Jewish lobby, which had proved its success by the fact that it had managed to

more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see.

It seemed obvious to several commentators that
(a) US foreign policy seemed more than a little pro-Israel;
(b) this is not even explicable in terms of the US’s own national interests (oranges versus oil, as one commentator remarked);
(c) it reflects the influence of pro-Israeli American lobbyists and people in power.

This is a huge leap away from saying that Jews monopolise world power, as the blog headline and comments said. However, this misrepresentation of Dawkins was taken by some Times commentators as a given. And stuck together with a self-evidently ludicrous claim that Dawkins wanted to take children away from their parents if the parents taught them religion. To make a general attribution of Dawkins really being a Nazi.

I know. I know. This sort of thing doesn’t even bear recognising as a rational discourse. But still, I think it is worth repeating ad nauseam that opposing Israel does not make one a Nazi.

The Jews suffered terribly in Germany. Why didn’t they get given Germany? They didn’t suffer anything at the hands of the Palestinians. Why did they get Palestine? Well, partly because they carried out a prolonged terrorist campaign against the British government to get it.

Terrorist campaign, note. The British government gave in.

If the USA had not been committed over decades to supporting everything that Israel did, ignoring the complaints of the Palestinians as their land was taken and they were turned into refugees in their own country, there would be no insane jihadists now.

The only quarrel I would have with Dawkins in this is that atheists don’t have an agreed agenda beyond removing religious influence from the public sphere. What else would be the point of atheist lobbyists? Remember the herding cats thing? The capacity to think independently is the strength of rational people, not their weakness.

Sorry, dead people

Posted on by

The fashion for apologising for things that happened many centuries ago has now hit the Vatican, which is about to publish a book saying it might have made a bit of a mistake, according to the Times and Telegraph .*

According to the Telegraph,

In 1307, King Philip IV “the Fair” of France, in desperate need of funds, ordered the arrest and torture of all Templars. After confessing various sins their leader, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake.

And the Church quickly declared them all heretics. The new -found paper supposedly shows that pope Clement dissolved the Templar Order but said they weren’t heretics. Though the evidence for their non-heresy seems quite unconvincing, by the standards of the day, considering how little it took for a hedge-witch or a dissenting peasant to get tortured and killed for heresy (by both Catholics and Protestants) over the next few hundred years. It is tempting to suggest that the surviving Templars must have still had a fair bit of that Holy land wealth left with which to buy a relatively favourable judgement.

Now, 1307 is 700 years ago. The Vatican could teach any existing government a thing or two about keeping politically sensitive secrets.

What is the point in this? Given that the Templars were monk-knights, they shouldn’t even have any direct descendants who could accept an apology for wrongs done to their 175th generation-back ancestors. It’s obviously a soundbite thing. The Templars’ much-vaunted “secrets” have been attracting publicity again, in the silly da Vinci Code movie for a start.

Just in case, some people might be put off the Catholic Church because it did wrong in the 14th century, it’s going to apologise and set the record straight. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s not like they are going to make France hand back any of Phillip the Fair’s ill-gotten gains is it?

Much as I hate these ritual apologies to people who don’t exist any more, on behalf of the people who wronged them, but also don’t exist any more, why stop there? Why not apologise for the Crusades and the things the Catholic Church rewarded the Templars for doing? It wouldn’t make any more sense but at least it would show the beginnings of a sense of moral responsibility.

* (Look I don’t read these papers in real life. Honest. But, they are online….)

Old road to ruin

Posted on by

Charges were dropped against 6 people who were arrested in July, when they protested at a council meeting against the remains of the 4,000 year-old Rotherwas Ribbon being buried under a road.

The road building is going ahead. Hereford Council has a site with its news. It seems that, after unsuccessfully and half-heartedly trying to pass it off as a natural artefact, the council’s arguments are:

  • the roadbuilding uncovered it in the first place;
  • they’ve done everything they reasonably could to get it investigated;
  • covering it up won’t do it any harm;
  • moving the road would damage other nearby sites;
  • the cabinet office says go ahead with the road as fast as possible

All reasonable points. It still seems a pity that we have to discard irreplaceable treasures just to make yet another road.

There is interesting information on the Ribbon on the Megalithic Portal written by one of the people in our blogroll at the right, Alun Salt from clioaudio

He says:

Archaeologists believe this major find may have no parallels in Europe, with the closest similar artefact being the 2,000-year-old serpent mounds of the Ohio river valley in America.

Fairy godfather

Posted on by

Who is the godfather of the Internet?

Today’s Guardian Technology page identifies him as Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf, aka the godfather of the net, predicts the end of TV as we know it
Web guru foresees download revolution

But wait. What about

Mark Joyner, often referred to as the “Godfather of the Internet”

according to Articles about cable, dsl, etc?

Or Imperial College’s candidate,

… Imperial College alumnus, Donald Watts Davies, the Welsh computer genius regarded by many as the godfather of the internet.

Or Al Gore?

…Earlier today, Xeni spoke with former Vice President Al Gore, internet godfather and co-founder of Current TV,

(Phew, at least I know who Al Gore is. I have heard of Vint Cerf, but a name so unremittingly stunning would stick in the brain anyway, after one hearing. I have never heard of the others.)

Or this candidate on interandom

.. Carnegie Mellon Professor and “Godfather of the Internet” David Farber

Or this from some sort of podcast scraper list:

Thomas Prendergast, CEO of Inetekk & creator ot the Veretekk Automated Lead Generation & Online Marketing System. .. Thousands know him as “The Godfather Of The Internet”…

From MQ magazine

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is considered by many to be the godfather of the internet.

There are loads more Internet godfathers but I got too bored and stopped collecting them.

How many godfathers does the Internet need?
What does it mean to be an Internet godfather?
Do they insist on being called don and putting horse’s heads in the beds of adherents of traditional media?
Or do they grant wishes, like fairy godmothers? I’ll take health, wealth and happiness if they’re still going. Though I’ve never heard of fairy godfathers. Obviously shoudl have paid more attention to the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson and Andrew Lang’s vari-coloured Fairy books. (That’s a link to Project Gutenberg if you want to make a liar of me and find fairy godfathers aplenty.)

There are so many questions here and I’m a bit stumped by not knowing what even a traditional godfather does. I have a fuzzy impression thay promise to bring up the child they are godfathering as a Christian or mafia member, or both, according to context Give a few gifts in exchange for the family’s votes in some Latin political systems? That’s about it.

Is there a godmother of the Internet? On safer ground here. I know what a godmother does. They grant wishes and turn pumpkins into coaches.

Well I found a paltry two candidates,

Takeaway media says

…according to Esther Dyson, the godmother of the internet, we may even see by 2100 the end of life’s only two certainties, death and taxes.

Well, surely a half-decent fairy godmother should be able to sort those little inconveniences out.

Flash Goddess names Lynda Weinman, although she seems unsurprisingly reluctant to claim the title, possibly because she’s not confident about her scullery-maid-to-princess skills.

Q How do you feel about being referred to as the “godmother of the internet”?
A. I’ve never heard myself referred to as that! It’s an uncomfortable and inaccurate label.

Rose-tinted rearview mirror

Posted on by

From the BBC’s new department of rose tinted glasses:

At 6.30pm, when in times gone by most kids would be sitting round the dinner table, it is not difficult to find a group of teenage drinkers gulping vodka in a quiet corner of Leeds.
At the side of an old cricket pavilion, I found seven young girls and two older boys sharing cigarettes and alcohol. It is hard to imagine stumbling across such a scene 40 years ago.

Well, no it isn’t hard to imagine it at all. In fact, anyone who has been alive for more than about ten years would probably recognise that as a pretty normal scene to stumble across at any time. Or even, to have partaken in.

“Times gone by” when “most kids would be sitting round the dinner table?”

The natural reaction to this sort of bilge is to mention a bit of history. I am trying to rein this in and not go back to the Viking berserkers. I’ll just say, hmm, 40 years ago? Wasn’t that the approximate time of massive “mods” and “rockers” battles every Bank Holiday? They would never have smoked or drank while they were setting about each other with hammers and axes and bike chains, then….

Are we a nation of amnesiacs?

I can’t claim to have read this – too scholarly for light reading and way too costly to buy, but this book that I spotted on Amazon could put the subject in perspective
Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 (Advances in Criminology) Pamela Cox, Dartmouth.

Note that its time span RUNS OUT in 1950. The blurb says it shows

“.. how certain themes have dominated European discourses of delinquency across this period, not least panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability.”

Where are we now? Oh yes, 2007. So when was this golden age when all young people were playing Cluedo with their chums, camping with the Scouts or Guides, going to bell-ringing practice and volunteering to visit the housebound elderly?

Oh, that must have been in an Enid Blyton book, sorry. So, maybe we should all move to live in 1950s children’s literature.

There are indeed some places in England where the lucky teenage offspring of the rural middle class live like this. But even they are likely to be smoking and drinking when they get together. It goes with the territory of being a teenager.

I am not denying there are some seriously dangerous kids. Three men have been killed in a matter of weeks, just for doing the sane adult thing of speaking up when kids are acting badly.
But that doesn’t mean that every kid with a bottle of cider and a ten-pack of Benson and Hedges is a murderous moron.

Most of them are just normal teenagers, who will learn wisdom partly through doing some moderately stupid things, as we all do. And then forget it all again, of course, when they airbrush their own life history to conform to the Enid Blyton world image that even the BBC feels it has to present to the next generation.