normblog

Animosities

Labour Friends of Iraq have a transcript of Christopher Hitchens et al in conversation with Andrew Marr on Radio 4 yesterday. Hitchens on Galloway:

What can one say about him that he hasn't said for himself that would cover him in the contempt that he deserves? Being praised by him was much worse I have to say [than being abused]. When he said I was 'a great man of letters' and... 'the best polemicist of our age', I thought, how disgusting! I mean, being praised by him is like being force fed chocolate creams or something. It's more nauseating than abuse.

But read the whole thing, including the fatuous remarks of Germaine Greer. On a completely different subject - the brothers Hitchens (Christopher and Peter) in conversation with Ian Katz:

IK Are you two friends?

PH No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.

CH The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet.

Re-engage

Engage are inviting comments on the direction it should now take after the defeat of the blacklisters - who included Professor Steven Rose and Sue Blackwell.

Mugabe at war

He is at war with the people of Zimbabwe. Please read this report from Andrew Meldrum:

Thousands of families have been made homeless and are sleeping in the open as winter sets in, taking night temperatures down to 4C (39F).

See also here. Trudy Stevenson, MP for Harare North (quoted in both reports), has issued this appeal:

I have spent the afternoon trying to get some humanitarian assistance for the Hatcliffe Extension residents who are now without shelter for the second night and will soon be without food, when they move away from their small kitchen gardens, chickens etc. I am shocked to report that so far, I have not been able to identify a single NGO or other organisation prepared to help, apart from one church - Thank you God for your churches!

International Red Cross reports they only deal with war situations. Zimbabwe Red Cross person in charge of humanitarian assitance forgot cellphone this morning. Zimrights says this is a nation-wide problem, too big for them... and so on.

Please, friends - we need help for about 500 families. We need plastic for shelter and some emergency foodpacks, delivered either directly to residents at Hatcliffe Extension New Stands (opposite SIRDC) or to Northside Community Church - attention Destitute Care - or to my home at 4 Ashbrittle Crescent, Emerald Hill. We doubtless also need blankets and jerseys, since it is much colder if you do not have proper shelter.

Thank you for any help you can give.

Anyone wanting to make a donation, please contact Tirzah L on: tirzahl(at)yahoo(dot)com

80th wedding anniversary

The world's longest marriage:

Percy and Florence Arrowsmith, who are 105 and 100 respectively, celebrate their 80th anniversary on 1 June.

The secret of their long duration:

We don't often quarrel. We never go to bed as bad friends. If you've had a quarrel, you make it up - never be afraid to say sorry.

The previous title-holders had been together a mere 78 years and 296 days. (Hat tip: SdeW.)

Gender and Scrabble

John Tierney in the New York Times:

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.

The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like "khat," doing computerized drills and memorizing long lists of letter combinations, called alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.

Suppose you draw the letters AELNRST. A mid-level player could shuffle the tiles for a while and find one or two seven-letter words. If the T in that rack were a U instead, the player might spend a couple of minutes fruitlessly looking for an anagram of AELNRSU.

A champion wouldn't waste any valuable time in a game. Thanks to the thousands of alphagrams he's memorized, he would realize immediately that there are four anagrams in the first rack (antlers, rentals, saltern, sternal) and none in the second.

Tierney goes on to suggest that the roots of the Scrabble gender difference lie in human evolution. Ann Althouse doesn't buy it. Nor does Echidne.

Only a Rose

There's a report by Matthew Taylor in Education Guardian today about the outcome of the AUT boycott discussion. This has the inimitable Sue Blackwell telling us - 'bluntly' - that it's 'the beginning of the fight, not the end', and that she and her co-thinkers 'have put this issue firmly on the map'. She could have added 'at the end of the day'. I don't know how one might go about making these profound observations unbluntly, but anyway here's something emollient for Sue Blackwell. You lost.

The report also quotes Professor Steven Rose, more unpleasantly, as follows:

Any statement against Israel is seen as a statement denying the legitimacy of Israel. The state of Israel is a fact on the ground. I might regret the fact that it is a theocratic state, I don't like theocratic states of any sort, but the state of Israel is a legitimate fact on the ground. The paranoia displayed by the Zionists in this respect is an attempt to turn the oppressor into the victim and something which I find repugnant. And I say this as someone brought up as a Jew and someone brought up in a Zionist household, as someone who has fought racism and anti-semitism all of my life and indeed from a family of Holocaust survivors.

First, that those opposing the boycott regard 'any statement against Israel... as a statement denying the legitimacy of Israel' is, to speak bluntly, an untruth. Opponents of the boycott don't do that. Rose declines to meet the real point: which is that, not a statement, but a policy of blacklisting the academics of one, and only one country, is making a prejudicial exception of that country without adequate explanation. Since some of the boycott's supporters are on record as regarding Israel as an illegitimate country, it is fair to ask all the would-be boycotters and blacklisters what other reason they might have for making such an exception, until they come up with a persuasive answer.

Second, Rose talks of 'the Zionists', as if he might be unaware that many of the opponents of the boycott were not Zionists, that there were people moved to oppose it on elementary grounds of academic freedom, or because they thought their union had been hijacked, or because they had a different view from Rose's about what is the best way forward for Israel and Palestine, a non-boycotting view; and as if he might be oblivious to the way that expression ('the Zionists') is used today as a poisonous code word for Jews.

Third, that Steven Rose is Jewish and from a family of Holocaust survivors has as much bearing on the validity or otherwise of his views about Israel as the fact that I once had a cat named after Hugh 'Toey' Tayfield lends authority to my views about cricket. These views have to make their own way in the world, and my cat of yore, Toey, is no help to them - though neither is he any hindrance, of course. Rose exemplifies the contemporary posture of certain leftist Jews - of which this book and its author are an egregious paradigm - that denies to others in argument about Israel the use of either the Holocaust or their own Jewishness, as being illegitimate and exploitative, but strangely relies on the very same things as if they might give greater force to the views of those whose posture it is. Posturing is in fact all it is, in this case posturing for want of a cogent argument.

Do you do it?

You may have no interest in cricket, but don't be deceived by the way this post begins. It's only about cricket by way of preamble. You could find the subject dull even so, but gimme a break, why don't you? I didn't invent human suffering.

There are essentially three types of one-day international (ODI). 1) From early on the team batting second begins to fall way short of the runs target set by the team batting first, and all the interest goes out of the game. 2) From early on the team batting second scores at a rate which renders the (too modest) runs target set by the team batting first too soft, and all the interest goes out of the game. 3) The team batting first sets a reasonable target, the team batting second keeps in touch with the necessary run-rate, and there is a runs chase towards the end, which either succeeds or fails.

This, in my ever so humble opinion, is why ODIs are so intrinsically unmemorable. They're like Maltesers. Can you remember the best Malteser you ever ate? In the whole history of ODIs, I have a clear memory of two of them. One in 1984 at Old Trafford (and at which I was present), when Viv Richards scored 189; and the Australia-South Africa semi-final in the 1999 World Cup.

Aaaanyway, this is also my provisional conclusion about Sudoku. For some weeks I resisted the temptation calling out to me from every corner, although it had the appearance of the kind of thing I'm a sucker for: involving numbers, a logical puzzle, that sort of thing. I have now given in to the temptation, but I find so far that tackling a Sudoku is a very limited and mechanical experience, with only three modes. 1) You fill in the possible numbers for each square until the information you have enables you to eliminate, to narrow the possibilities, and this eventually and more or less smoothly leads to a successful completion. 2) Exactly as in 1), except that you get stuck somewhere; but not too badly stuck, so that a little reflection finds the breakthrough and you get there. 3) You get stuck permanently and after a while throw the thing away. It's not very rewarding, not in any of the modes. Still, I have one here which I have to finish.

Do you Sudoku? I bet you do.
Don't say you don't unless it's true.
You don't Sudoku? You never would?
Just try it once. It might be good.

Jonathan goes to Damascus

It seems that Jonathan Steele may have had his Damascene moment. He writes of...

a shout of defiance at intellectual Stalinism, masquerading as liberalism, which recognises only one side of an argument as respectable and pays serious attention to no one but those it already agrees with.

But is he speaking only for himself or for everyone at that august organ by which he is employed? I'll go back and take another look. Oh dear... it isn't about Iraq; it's about Europe.

Non

That's non as in I'm not posting about it. This one was my lot. I'm loosely in favour, but not very well-informed. And my philosophy of blogging doesn't require me to post about anything at all - for support on which see the Stoa - particularly where I don't feel I have anything useful to add to what's out there. Anyone wanting to offer a (well-informed) guest post here on Europe, the 'non', etc., please feel free.

The battle not lost

In yesterday's Sunday Times, Sarah Baxter talks to David Selbourne about the thesis of his new book The Losing Battle with Islam. The thesis is pessimistic. It's the West that is losing: 'flagellat[ing] itself for its alleged shortcomings while rushing to understand its opponents' point of view'; underestimating those opponents; succumbing - the Europeans - to anti-Americanism, and falsely blaming George W. Bush for the advance of Islam. According to Selbourne, Islam is advancing as a 'moral force' supposedly representing 'the politics of the underdog, the marginalised', while western society is ill-equipped to meet this challenge because of its own fragmentation, lack of an animating idea or belief in civil society and community.

I'm sympathetic to elements of Selbourne's argument, as Sarah Baxter reports them: the 'rushing to understand' and the underestimating; what he says about anti-Americanism and the Bush-fixation. And I'm not given to wild political optimism. But I think Selbourne himself underestimates one of the strengths the West holds in this battle: namely, the intrinsic appeal to millions of people - in the West and elsewhere - of secular, democratic pluralism and the civic culture that goes with it. The peoples of Afghanistan and Iran, for example, don't appear to show great affection for Islamic rule. There is certainly no room for complacency about threats to democracy, given how much of democratic opinion is indeed now soft. But the 'moral force' available to the West (to say nothing of its economic and military resources) is not insignificant either, and it shouldn't be disregarded or lightly conceded.