“Melanie Phillips” is back!
September 20, 2007 33 comments
The end of summer would be depressing were it not for the fact that a certain joy is kindled in all our hearts by the return to blogging of “Melanie Phillips”. In a post yesterday entitled “A monstrous hurt“, she quotes a Comment is Free post by Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, who takes issue with any comparison between that murder and what he terms delicately “the detention of suspects in Guantanamo”:
There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts. Moral relativism died with Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, on January 31 2002.
Do you agree that “those who vow to end such acts”, ie the good officials of Guantanamo and their masters, are, by the mere fact of so vowing, thereby absolved of all guilt for holding people for years without trial and torturing them, then submitting them to illegal kangaroo courts in which they are not allowed to hear the evidence against them? Then you will agree, too, with the rousing peroration of “Melanie”:
The doctrine of moral equivalence, the default position of the secular west, is the core reason why the west is losing the battle to defend itself against the terrorist and cultural jihad. Equivalence is actually a misleading word in this context, since the notion that violence begets violence and both are equally culpable is not just noxious in itself by failing to acknowledge the moral difference between an act of aggression and an act of self-defence against that aggression; it immediately morphs into a justification of that original act of aggression. It is therefore not only amoral but suicidal. And yet it is the knee-jerk posture of so many western intellectuals and media darlings.
Moral relativism (Pearl) or moral equivalence (“Phillips”)? Who cares? Well, if I may quote myself:
The phrase “moral relativism” is usually reserved in public language to denounce anyone who dares to suggest that the death of an Iraqi human being is somehow comparable to the death of a British or American human being.
The same goes for “moral equivalence”, apparently always something to be despised (as Martin Amis, too, despises it). I’m glad to see that “Melanie”, along with Pearl, is conforming to this well-established usage. What I didn’t anticipate was “her” creativity in recasting the torture of people at Guantanamo as an act of self-defence against that aggression. Splendid work.
But hang on – which aggression? It can’t be the vicious murder of Daniel Pearl, since you can’t defend yourself against the murder of someone else when it has already happened. Is it instead the “terrorist and cultural jihad” in general, against which it is clearly just “self-defence” to round up a bunch of ragheads and torture them? Well, there is a lovelier possibility: that the satirist operating “Melanie”‘s pneumatic tubes is cunningly alluding to the characterisation last year of three suicides at Guantanamo as “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us”. (Both are acts, after all.)
And so let us cherish yet another reductio ad absurdum of the arguments employed by real-life people who talk like “Melanie” (for they do, it pains me to say, exist). How to defend oneself against people killing themselves in one’s torture camp? Put people in the torture camp and torture them!
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On fucking moon
September 19, 2007 2 comments
An antidote to Unspeak: I found something quietly thrilling about the matter-of-fact language of Nasa’s announcement inviting new applications for the position of astronaut:
The open positions require extensive travel on Earth and in space. Possible destinations may include, but are not limited to, Texas, Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, the International Space Station and the moon.
That is extensive.
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Martin Amis, abandonment of reason
September 11, 2007 53 comments
Martin “I am a serious” Amis celebrates the sixth anniversary of 9/11 with a lengthy “analysis“, about which the following things might be said:
i — As richard pointed out with alacrity in comments here, Amis’s attempt at grand irony in claiming that the designation “9/11″ is fitting because “these numerals are, after all, Arabic” is somewhat undercut by the fact that these numerals are not, in fact, Arabic, but Indian in origin. They are called “Arabic” by convention only because they were popularised to Europeans by Arab mathematicians.
ii — This part, I must say, really does read as though it was written by Craig Brown:
The solecism, that is to say, is not grammatical but moral-aesthetic – an offence against decorum; and decorum means “seemliness”, which comes from soemr, “fitting”, and soema, “to honour”.
Why did Amis not want to give the etymology of “decorum” directly before slyly translating it into “seemliness”? Because Latin decorus simply means “fit” or “proper”, with no necessary connotation of “honour”, and so cannot fit into Amis’s heroic-moral scheme of we noble rational westerners v the perfidious insane enemy.
iii — A propos of the perfidious insane enemy: Amis insists, rather boringly now to any aficionado of his previous fatwas on the matter, that Al Qaeda and their ilk are “mad” and “irrational” – indeed, not only are they mad and irrational, but everyone connected to the only possible historical analogies for their actions, viz., Bolshevism and Fascism, was also mad and irrational. They all partook in:
the rejection of reason – the rejection of the sequitur, of cause and effect, of two plus two.
Yes, even Hitler and Stalin. They did not believe in cause and effect, or in the fact that two plus two equals four. How Hitler gained power, or how Stalin micromanaged the military defeat of Hitler, all the while rejecting any belief in cause and effect, must remain a mystery to the devotee of Amisian historiography.
Not content, however, with such plain idiocy, Amis further hopes to approach or mime profundity by smashing words together so that distinctions of meaning are burned away:
Reason, moreover, is one of our synonyms for realism, and indeed for reality.
My initial response to which is: “No, it just isn’t, you whiffling sententious dolt”; but perhaps in comments a reader will be able to offer an example of a sentence in which “reason” really could function as a synonym of either “realism” or “reality”, if not both.
But anyway, the poverty and indeed moral as well as analytical cretinism of such claims about the enemy’s supposed madness and irrationality has already been argued here at unspeak.net in past posts such as Functioning insanity and Irrational movements, so it need not detain us again, unless you really want it to.
iv — Perhaps the most startling part of Amis’s screed is the passage in which he wearily laments the moral cowardice of the modern “liberal relativist”:
We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishisation of “balance”, the groundrule of “moral equivalence” in all conflicts between West and East, the 100-per-cent and 360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel).
So in Amis’s view, we actually should be able to pass judgment on an “ethnicity”, tout court and qua “ethnicity”? Should we be allowed do this with regard to “any ethnicity” at all, or are we winkingly being invited to imagine a specific “ethnicity” that particularly invites our contempt? Which “ethnicity”, exactly, might Mr Amis be thinking of, or silently passing judgment on?
Well, so it goes: the contemporary pro-TWAT mind, in its macho abhorrence of “relativists” and its tumescent glee at the idea of a clash of civilisations, slips all too comfortably into implicit endorsements of racism. Happy 9/11, readers.
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Branding disaster
September 10, 2007 17 comments
The New York Times is bad for man, according to the Bee Gees, but on occasion it is a beacon of virtue and light, as when William Safire mentioned Unspeak in his column yesterday. (Any first-time visitors to unspeak.net who have found this place as a result might like to read an extract from the book’s Introduction; or some sample posts: Questioned by experts; Sustainable; Radical cleric; Silly word games; Slower to get it; We call it life.)
Anyway, this came about thanks to Safire’s researcher, evidently a woman of impeccable taste, who approached me by email a while ago asking my opinion about why “9/11″ stuck as the preferred term for the events of nearly six years ago. In case readers find it interesting, here is what I wrote in full:
I remember thinking about what phrase to use when referring to that day
in my book Unspeak, and I usually preferred to write “11 September
2001″ or “the attacks of 11 September 2001″ and so on. I took the view
that this kind of sober precision was more appropriate for a book: that
“9/11″ was the stuff of boldface newspaper headlines, and that the
omission of the year possibly implied parochialism. (Something like
“World Trade Center Attack” won’t quite do, because of course that
wasn’t the only place that was attacked.) I did, though, use “9/11″
once, in a reference to “the 9/11 hijackers”, probably out of a desire
to keep the sentence crisp. Now I check, I see the indexer made the
opposite choice: the index says “September 11th (2001): see 9/11″.
Well, you can’t fight a globe-spanning meme.
Of course, to write “9/11″ takes up fewer printed characters (and so is
particularly useful for sub-editors writing headlines), but I suspect the
success of the phrase has been largely because of its oral rather than
spatial efficiency. What’s made it stick, I would argue, is rhythm more
than anything else (it’s a ditrochee, in metrical terms, like
“topsy-turvy”). The compact and catchy rhythm of “nine-eleven” already
makes it memorable. If the attacks had occured on the 23rd of November,
I don’t think we would still hear people saying “eleven-twenty-three”,
or see “11/23″ written. Too many syllables; not catchy enough. The
chance homology with the US emergency telephone number gives it an
extra frisson, too, as you observe. Also, I think we have to acknowledge the influence of 7-11 convenience stores: there’s already a two-number catchphrase ending in “eleven” embedded in the American (and British) mind.
There is of course already a tradition of remembering certain dates
primarily as calendar dates, like the Fourth of July or, in Britain,
for example, the fifth of November. But we don’t write or say those
dates as “7/4″ or “5/11″ (we Brits put the day before the month, which
of course makes more sense if you are including the year as well). So
why “9/11″? I think it’s a perfect storm of the above variables:
rhythm, emergency, and shopping.
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Yes, metablogging is rather tedious
September 5, 2007 18 comments
Blogging is a terrible danger to English prose, “argues” Robert McCrum in the Observer, whose own finely wrought prose nonetheless somehow manages to survive the onslaught. But for how much longer? McCrum offers all kinds of pseudo-proofs that blogging is bad, of which the best is that it’s bad because people do it for free:
There’s another thing that Orwell the great freelance would have been quick to identify: in the blogosphere, no one gets properly paid; its irresponsibility is proportionate to its remoteness from the cash nexus.
Worthy of Orwell himself, that sentence, no? But you know, if I may quibble, I think Orwell the great freelance might have pointed out somewhere that in the freelance book-reviewing world, no one gets properly paid either. And yet that didn’t seem to him a reason to reject all the work done therein. Anyway, as a service to unspeak.net readers, I have translated the above quote from McCrum into plain Orwellian English:
Despite all appearances, this article must be brilliant, because I’m getting paid for it!
Quite so.
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Feeling the rodent love
September 4, 2007 9 comments
On the train last week, I was listening to the August 2 edition of the always-excellent Nature podcast, and I learned the exciting fact that scientists have now sequenced 15 different lab-mouse strains, mapping DNA differences to traits. As paper co-author Kelly Frazer explained to the host:
I think that this is an excellent resource that we have generated for the mouse community.
Ahhh. All the little mouses are scurrying around in glee and gratitude at this new resource they’ve been given. Heartwarming!
I found this a particularly cute’n'furry extension of the strange uses in our time of the word community. The mouse community here invoked isn’t the “community” of mice, mice in lab-cages around the world who keep in touch, as it might be, through email and text-messaging using their tiny paws on miniature BlackBerrys. No; it’s the “community” of people who use mice in scientific experiments.
I am not about to set up a campaign on this blog and e-petition the prime minister to liberate all lab mice from their horrid doom. Still, you mightn’t guess from the happy-sounding phrase “mouse community” that scientists quite often, if not mainly, do things to mice for which the mice themselves wouldn’t necessarily volunteer — like, you know, this:
I doubt he minded, though, if it was for the good of the mouse community as a whole.
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‘Nature’ and ‘incentives’ in economics
August 30, 2007 24 comments
While unspeak.net has been quiet recently, global financial markets have been very nervous, which I can’t accept is a mere coincidence. Anyway, my eagle eye did notice that George W. Bush said, of the US subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent stock wobbles: hey, it’s just “the nature of the market“, and there is no need to fear “a natural adjustment“. Now, IANAE, but it strikes me that appeals to what is “natural” in such contexts are somewhat troublesome. A financial market is not a phenomenon of “nature” but is an aggregate of many human decisions, bound by rules and laws that some people made up, and some people want to defend from alternatives. So I am tempted to suspect that a description of some or other market phenomenon as “natural” cannot help but be a coded defence of a particular economic ideology. It is “natural”, therefore trying to alter it would be hubristic, playing God, et cetera. To be consistent, Bush’s attitude to his own health should run along similar lines. Rather than interfering with nature by having some polyps removed, he ought surely to say to himself: “If I get colon cancer, well, it’s only natural.” Nature knows best. Why worry?
That was also the suspicion I had when reading Steven E Landsburg’s More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconvential Wisdom of Economics, of which I wrote a brief review in the Guardian. Landsburg, too, appeals to a concept of what is “natural” and so shouldn’t be contested. Noting that child labour existed in mid-19th-century England and America, and that it no longer does very much in the more prosperous modern England and America, he argues that child labour is perfectly normal and goes away after a while. Thus campaigners against child labour in the contemporary “third world” are stupid:
Evidently, child labor is a natural response to a certain level of poverty. [p 67]
That’s not “evident” at all. It may be evident that child labour is often found in societies at a certain level of poverty, but to call it “natural” is not only to pretend you have a sample size much bigger than the one Landsburg actually invokes, it is also to make an extra, ideological claim: that it’s okay and shouldn’t be resisted. But IANAE. Perhaps some readers more familiar with economics can suggest some economic usages of “natural” that are not Unspeak, or even argue that these ones aren’t.
While I’m on the subject of Landsburg’s book: it also contains one example of the rigorous restriction of vocabulary to its narrow economics sense that is really disturbingly bizarre:
Every midsummer day, at approximately 6:03pm, the setting sun makes the traffic light on my street corner essentially invisible to westbound traffic. As a result, I’ve gotten to know the local police officers fairly well. We meet on my front lawn every week or so, where I’m delivering water, blankets and cell phones to the latest accident victims while the police file their reports.
It is an astonishing triumph of modern safety engineering that dozens of cars have been totaled on my front lawn [...] without a single serious personal injury. And it is an astonishing failure of the legal system that I have absolutely no incentive to step out my front door at 6:02pm with a big red flag, directing traffic until the sun moves a little lower on the horizon. [p 114]
Here, Landsburg complains pathetically that he has no “incentive” to save people from traffic accidents outside his house for an hour or two once a year. Would a concern for their welfare not count as an “incentive”? Ah, don’t be naive. An incentive is money and nothing else. Landsburg, nothing if not a rigorous homo economicus, won’t do anything at all unless the state is promising to pay him for it, or give him a tax break, or throw him some other kind of legal bonbon.
Okay, fine. So why exactly does he deliver water, blankets and cell phones to the victims after they have crashed? Where is his “incentive” to do that? Would he not save a bit of money in water, cellphone and blanket costs if he did actually go out with a big red flag and prevent the accidents in the first place? Would those savings, indeed, not count as exactly the sort of “incentive” he dreams of?
Well, as I must repeat, IANAE, and there is probably some good theoretical reason for Landsburg’s annual decision to let people get hurt and then heroically minister to them, rather than to prevent the predictable hurt in the first place. Maybe it boils down to the fact that these accidents are caused by the sun – and, you know, that’s natural.
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It makes you think
August 8, 2007 6 comments
As they say in the exciting new language of the internets, I’ve been “tagged with a meme”. Actually it first happened a few months ago, but I forgot about it, possibly having decided to take a stand against Meme Fascism, and possibly also because I don’t believe in memes anyway, since arguably the idea of a “meme” encodes a denial of individual agency and creativity, shored up by an annoyingly defective analogy with evolution. “Meme” is just another pseudoscientific attempt to explain culture (or rather to explain it away), destined (I hope) for the garbage bin of terminological fashion just as soon as William Gibson stops using it. You can imagine how it only compounds my irritation to realise that I used it myself in the post immediately below this one. It’s almost like the word “meme” is some kind of evil virus of the mind.
But then it happened again, so I decided to chill out and start loving the meme, irritating and nonexistent though it may be. The meme in this case is “Five Blogs that Make You Think”. I am happy to admit that I never think unless actively reading a blog. The meme, I should warn my nominees, actually has rules, which seems very Meme Fascist to me, if not actually Islamofascist. Everyone tagged by the meme is thereby considered to have won a “Thinking Blogger Award”, and that did make me think. It made me think of adapting Dr Johnson:
Sir, a blogger thinking is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
But without further ado, here is my list of five blogs that make me think, and what they make me think:
Jeff Strabone is an eclectic blog about politics, hip-hop and cinema, among other things. It makes me think that Jeff approaches blogging exactly as he does karaoke: without fear.
D-squared Digest is a blog about economics, somehow made entertaining, and other stuff, which seduces the reader into long-term dependence by endlessly deferring promised texts. It makes me think that dsquared’s anti-design design is itself a design statement.
Dennis Perrin is a blog about politics, and comedy, and the comedy of politics, scripted none more black. It makes me think that his next book will be very good.
3 Quarks Daily is a quotidian gallimaufry of all things interesting. It makes me think that there is no need to read the entire internet myself.
Cosmic Variance is a fascinating blog about cosmology, so lucidly written that it makes me think I actually understand some of it.
There you are. Consider yourselves “tagged”, people, somewhat in the manner of Lindsay Lohan’s anti-alcohol ankle-tag. Modern technology is a marvellous thing. Now, what makes you think, readers?
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