normblog

Sleeping pilots don't shock anyone shock

Last night Adèle and I watched Flight. (Spoiler follows.) It starts out with Denzel Washington piloting a passenger plane that hits a storm and then goes into a steep nose dive, and because it's Denzel you know you're going to be OK while simultaneously fearing for your safety. It's like one of those runaway train movies we need more of. But after he turns the plane upside down and flies it like that for a while, Denzel manages to land in a field and all but four of the lives on board are saved. The film then ambles along for the rest of its course before turning into a disquisition on the perils of alcoholism.

It put me in mind of recent reports in the national press about pilot fatigue (£):

More than half of all airline pilots have fallen asleep on the flight deck and one in three has woken to find their co-pilot asleep, according to a survey raising new fears about safety.

Eight out of ten pilots think that their flying abilities have been compromised by lack of sleep in the past six months, the poll showed.

Almost half, 49 per cent, said that tiredness was the biggest threat to airline safety, more than three times more than any other risk.

The poll, commissioned by the British Airline Pilots' Association, was released as it emerged that both pilots on a Virgin Atlantic flight from Orlando to Manchester last month fell asleep at the controls of their Airbus A330.

I do not find this at all reassuring. You might even say it's counter-productive:

The CAA [Civil Aviation Authority] report warned of aircrew suffering from symptoms of severe fatigue which one of the pilots ascribed to "longer duty periods with insufficient opportunity to sleep".

What is the point of the elaborate measures designed to foil terrorist plots that are targeted against air traffic if the airlines aren't letting their pilots get enough sleep? The British Airline Pilots Association argue 'that new leeway to land a plane after 22 hours without sleep would mean a level of tiredness that equates to being four times over the legal alcohol limit for flying'. Yikes. Why isn't there more public concern? Why is there calm rather than alarm? I mean, one day the sleeping pilots might not be Denzel Washington.

The sources of apologia

Howard Jacobson takes a dim view, and rightly so, of the style of apologetics that have been befouling Western liberal media with supposedly more complex perspectives on acts of mass murder than the simple truth that murder is what they are and they're unconditionally wrong. In that context, however, I was slightly disconcerted by the following remark.

For Allah will no more forgive him [the shooter of the innocent] than Jesus will. Marx on the other hand... but then that's why no man of feeling should be a Marxist.

It's not that, being a Marxist myself, I begrudge Howard the judgement that no one of feeling should be a Marxist. He's perfectly entitled to it, given how many Marxists, past and present, have used Marxist categories for precisely the kind of excuse-making on behalf of the killing of the innocent that he laments. For my own part, I happen to think that this isn't the only kind of Marxism possible, since like any other tradition of ideas Marxism is capable of change. There are Marxists who understand the necessity of embodying human rights norms at the heart of any morally acceptable political outlook today and who reject absolutely the violations of civilized constraints in the interests of some highly speculative future good. Still, as I've argued at some length before, there are different meanings of being a Marxist, and Howard won't be short of material in finding ways to justify his own expressed preference.

What surprises me in the above-quoted judgement of his is how lightly, by implication, it lets off other doctrines and their adherents. Allah and Jesus would not forgive. As if that ever stopped anyone from adapting religious belief to suit their murderous or oppressive purposes. Fanatical commitment, or what Howard himself identifies as 'an unswerving conviction of rectitude', finds many different homes.

And as if the purveyors of excuses for modern terrorism were confined to ever-smaller groups of Marxists, rather than coming - as they do - from practically every shade of so-called progressive opinion and beyond: liberals, greens, anarchists, Guardianistas of every stripe, anti-imperialists, anti-Zionists, and plain fools by the cartload.

What is the correct score? (updated)

I don't believe I've ever used the word 'bleg' before but I'm going to use it now. This post is a bleg.

One of the things I've been doing since early this summer - and, I'd better emphasize, only one of the things - has been poring over Ashes Test scorecards. Why, you might wonder, would a person want to do that? But let's keep things simple and just proceed.

I've come across a discrepancy which I'd like to try and resolve. For the third Test between Australia and England in the 1881-82 series, Bill Frindall in The Wisden Book of Test Cricket gives Australia's two innings totals as 260 and 66 for 4. The volume Wisden on the Ashes, edited by Steven Lynch, has instead 262 and 64 for 4.

Ralph Barker and Irving Rosenwater, England V Australia and David Frith, England versus Australia: A Pictorial History... are in line with Frindall on this, giving 260 and 66 for 4. On the other hand, Sydney Smith, History of the Tests, Cricinfo and Wikipedia all favour 262 and 64 for 4.

To cap it all, there are at least three sources that offer a compromise, going for 260 and 64 for 4. These are: B.J. Wakley, Classic Centuries in the Test Matches between England and Australia; William P.H. Sparks, Test Cricket: A Unique Record...; and James Rivers, England versus Australia.

How am I to find out the truth of the matter?

Update on 1 October. Thanks to my friend Harriet Monkhouse and her fellow deputy editor at Wisden, Steven Lynch, I now have what I take to be an authoritative answer on this: Australia's scores in that Test were 262 and 64 for 4. The source is Ray Webster, First-Class Cricket in Australia, Volume 1 1850-51 to 1941-42.

On defending Western values

Back in October 2007, there was a debate put on by Intelligence Squared for which the motion was 'We Should Not Be Reluctant to Assert the Superiority of Western Values'. Participants included David Aaronovitch, Ibn Warraq, William Dalrymple and Charles Glass.

And making a point from the floor there was also me. You can hear what I had to say just after an hour and seven minutes in:

(Thanks: UJ.)

Better-known knowns in Iran

And this belongs in the department of I spoke too soon. It seems that Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, wasn't engaging in Holocaust-evasion when he pleaded to not being a historian. In fact he's ready to condemn the Holocaust:

"I've said before that I am not a historian, and when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect," Rouhani told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

"But, in general, I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn."

All I can say is that, without the elaboration, his original statement looked mighty like an evasion. This one is clearer, albeit still hedged somewhat by the 'whatever'.

Update: Or maybe not. See the report here. This one may still have some way to run. (Thanks: CT.)

He writes, therefore what does he know?

This belongs in the department of when you get yourself into a hole, stop digging. David Gilmour is a writer and a literature professor at the University of Toronto. I have to confess to not having heard of him before yesterday. Here's the hole:

I teach modern short fiction to third and first-year students. So I teach mostly Russian and American authors. Not much on the Canadian front. But I can only teach stuff I love. I can't teach stuff that I don't, and I haven't encountered any Canadian writers yet that I love enough to teach.

I'm not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she's too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren't any women writers in the course. I say I don't love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

And here's the continued digging:

... I'm also extremely sorry to hear that there are people who are really offended by it... these were very much tossed-off remarks. They weren't written down... It was a careless choice of words. I'm not a politician, I'm a writer. We throw out tens of thousands of words every day. We usually rewrite them. In this particular [case], I didn't get a chance to re-speak the sentence before it was printed. And so I've apologized. I said I'm sorry for hurting your sensibilities, but there isn't a racist or a sexist bone in my body, and everyone who knows me knows it.

Of course, Gilmour is free to love the writers he loves but if there are no women amongst them, he's shutting out a large chunk of human experience; hard to credit, then, that he doesn't have a sexist thingumebob in his body. As for a writer pleading that he isn't as good with words as a politician would be, that is digging of the highest order. (Via Marina E. on Facebook.)

Nairobi victims

Two of the dead in the terrorist attack in Kenya, Ross Langdon and Elif Yavuz:

Tasmanian architect Ross Langdon and his partner, Harvard-educated Elif Yavuz, were passionate young people dedicated to helping the people of East Africa... and they were expecting their first child in two weeks' time.

Now they are gone, their lives and that of their unborn baby blown away in the terrifying attack by Somali Islamist militants in a shopping centre in Kenya's capital Nairobi, in which at least 68 people have been confirmed killed and more than 200 wounded.
.....
It is unclear where Mr Langdon and Ms Yavuz were when they were killed.

Mr Langdon's family in Tasmania was told on Monday that he and Ms Yavuz had both died in the terrorist attack.

Mr Langdon, 32, was a founder of the prize-winning architecture firm Regional Associates, which has offices in Melbourne, London and Uganda, where they first met.

A committed conservationist, he led all the firm's projects in East Africa; was completing an HIV-AIDS clinic in Uganda - which he designed without charge - and was about to start on a $35 million museum telling the story of the earliest fossil record of walking humanoids in Kenya.

Ms Yavuz, a specialist in malaria, worked with the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Kenya. Last month she was paid a visit by former US president Bill Clinton.

The couple had returned to Nairobi from their respective projects to ensure Ms Yavuz got reliable medical care for the birth of their child. Melbourne-based Regional Associates partner Ben Milbourne said Mr Langdon and Ms Yavuz both had a deep passion for helping people, particularly in highly disadvantaged areas, through different means.

"They greatly believed in the power of their work to assist people," he said.

Artist Peter Adams, of Nubeena on the Tasman Peninsula where Mr Langdon was born, wrote on his website that he had burst into tears when he heard of Mr Langdon's death. "He was a colleague and friend who went out into the world as an architect doing wondrous things," Mr Adams wrote.

"Yet Ross always returned to his family and cultural roots here on the Tasman Peninsula and we all took immense pride in both his architectural abilities and his very generous, positive, and loving personality. There just was no dark side to Ross that I ever saw in the 20 or so years I knew him."

Sir Simon Junkins

From the home of excuses and by one of their leading exponents:

Sometimes we should stop and ask why terrorists commit outrages like that in a Nairobi shopping mall. The answer is the west always over-reacts to big, sensational gestures of extreme violence.

Gee, how did I know this was going to be the West's fault?

Unknown knowns in Iran

It's been good to note the progress made by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as measured against his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the matter of Holocaust awareness. When it was put to Rouhani that Ahmadinejad had said the Holocaust was a myth, and how did he feel about this, his reply was: 'I'm not a historian. I'm a politician.' From this you might want to infer that non-historians in Iran, and the politicians among them in particular, don't consider themselves able to say whether or not the institution of slavery ever existed in the United States of America, or whether there's a monarchy in Britain, or whether chemical weapons were used against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, or whether indeed there was an Iran-Iraq war and whether Andy Murray won Wimbledon in 2013.

This represents not only progress from Holocaust-denial to the much more salubrious Holocaust-evasion but also a giant step towards national state-sponsored ignorance for the non-historian population of Iran, unable to know anything without doing first-hand historical research.

Update: see now here.

Cuddles for Kant

While I am a staunch partisan of the cuddle and its close companions, I am bound to say that I'm against the misappropriation of cuddling to disparage the Kantian ideal of freedom. And this - I kid you not - is what Giles Fraser today uses the cuddle to try to bring off. Successful folk, he maintains, are comfortable with the notion of self-determination, independence, individual authorship, responsibility and so forth, but they tend to downplay their own background origins in some or other community. Now look at this:

[I]t's a thrilling anything-is-possible existence when all is going well. But when the wind changes and the weather gets cold, you look left and right and find that you have no one to cuddle up to for warmth or solidarity [my italics]. In such circumstances, the Facebook existence, with its chosen "friends"[,] doesn't quite cut it as a nurturing community. The Kantian self is all very well for those who have high levels of material prosperity or deep resources of ingenuity. But even these are less sustaining [than] one often thinks. In adversity, one needs something stronger, deeper, longer-lasting than the isolated self that has detached itself from its background in order to be free.

From the mid 20th century onwards, freedom has become the west's dominant morality – freedom from fascism, free trade, free love, free speech. But when we seek freedom from the things that bind us together, then we are not free. We are lost.

First off, the idea that only rich or successful people care to be self-determining is a bit of an insult to everyone else; autonomy is a much-prized asset across the human species. Second, Fraser sets up a false antithesis: one can prize individual autonomy and human solidarity both. Naturally, that means they then need to be set in some kind of balance, but so do many other values without their being ruined by it. To put it another way, the autonomous self doesn't have to be the 'isolated self', and indeed I would say that healthy autonomy generally depends on integration within some supporting network of others. Third, 'freedom from the things that bind us together' is just a rhetorical trick; you can always tack on to a list of valued freedoms one that doesn't look so good. Thus: freedom of belief, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement and - freedom from the protections of the rule of law; or freedom from adequate nourishment. Lost we would well and truly be if authentic moral and political freedom could be so easily discredited by the addition of a bad 'freedom'.

Remember: autonomous individuals are also free to cuddle.