Sound essential, and preferably loud.

Via Centripetal Notion. Related. And.

Theodore Dalrymple on the mellifluous flummery of Rowan Williams.   

British intellectual life has long harbored a strain of militantly self-satisfied foolishness, and the present archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a perfect exemplar of the tendency. In an interview with the BBC on February 7, the archbishop said that it “seems unavoidable” that some aspects of sharia, or Islamic law, would be adopted in Britain: unavoidable, presumably, in the sense in which omertà seems unavoidable in the island of Sicily…

Rarely does philosophical inanity dovetail so neatly into total ignorance of concrete social realities: it is as though the archbishop were the product of the coupling of Goldilocks and Neville Chamberlain. Those more charitably inclined point out that the archbishop is an erudite man, a professor of theology who reads in eight languages and who was addressing a highly sophisticated audience, employing nuanced, subtle, caveat-laden arguments. He was not speaking in newspaper headlines, nor did he expect to make any headlines with his remarks.

Charity is a virtue, of course, but so is clarity: and it is the latter virtue that the archbishop so signally lacks. He assumes that the benevolence of his manner will disguise the weakness of his thought, and that his opacity will be mistaken for profundity.

Over at B&W, Ophelia Benson also trawls through the verbiage.

At last. Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, Japanese style.   

(Via Samizdata.)

Update:

Our resident Archivist of Such Things, Dr Westerhaus, writes to inform us that Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water was inspired by a Frank Zappa concert at Montreux Casino in December 1971, during which the venue’s velvet ceiling caught fire, thanks to a fan’s recklessly aimed flare gun, leading to the complete destruction of the venue. Other accounts suggest the fire was caused by the rubbing together of the wrong notes. The quite literal ‘smoke on the water’ can be seen here. 

More of that presumptuous “we” so favoured by Guardian columnists, this time courtesy of Jackie Ashley.

As we have grown richer, we have become less confident and optimistic about the future. Our increased material competitiveness has not made us happier. Our frenzied activity leaves us stressed. The days when free-market theorists believed we would be liberated and happy through privatisation seem a world away. The answers are the same as they ever were. To adapt the famous slogan, the government needs to be tough on pill-popping, and tough on the causes of pill-popping.

Echoing the assertions of her chronically sorrowful colleagues, Madeleine Bunting, George Monbiot and Oliver James, Ashley rushes with undue confidence to the claim that,

People get depressed because they don’t have enough money to keep up in a materialistic and competitive society.

Setting aside the question of whether optimism and happiness per se are legitimate goals of any government or policy, or indeed of capitalism, it isn’t at all clear that Ms Ashley has in fact established that the above is the primary cause of unhappiness, or even that unhappiness is, as she implies, a remarkable new phenomenon, at least in its prevalence. Perhaps, like her colleagues, she speaks of her own feelings and presumes “we” must feel as she does for reasons that escape me. Either way, it’s interesting to see just how readily the most tendentious things are asserted, based on nothing much.

There’s this general misconception that there’s a right not to be offended, and that it’s okay to punish students and faculty members for engaging in speech that offends someone, even if that speech would be entirely constitutionally protected.

Samantha Harris, FIRE. 

Evan Coyne Maloney, director of Indoctrinate U, and Andrew Marcus have produced a short film about FIRE, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The film outline’s FIRE’s principles and highlights some of the PC follies and coercive unrealism with which the organisation contends. Watch it here.

The case mentioned in the film is discussed here.

Related. And. Also. Plus.

Further to this, the Devil’s Kitchen highlights a bold welfare proposal. 

Every newborn child should have a ‘personal welfare’ fund opened, into which the government should pay, say, £5,000 each year until the child reaches 18. The fund should be private, like a pension fund, and thus invested, not a state operated fund financed from present tax receipts. The fund would accumulate £90k in static terms and should provide well over £100k after investment returns on maturity… This fund should be the only handout from the state, ever, to citizens. No more child benefit, no more unemployment benefit, housing benefit, tax credits, etc. The fund can be used [by] the individual as they see fit…

The advantages of such a system are many. Easy to administer, no perverse incentives/disincentives caused by benefits, promote personal responsibility, equal start for every individual, eliminate poverty trap, and it’s fair and reasonable. Even though at 18 you are effectively being handed £100k of ‘free’ money, it is now yours to spend as you wish. If you are ill or unemployed would you spend it so freely compared to current benefits when you know you will receive them month after month? When it becomes your own money you become more careful how you spend it. The fund would give people a lift up, whether to buy a house, start a business, go to university, start a family, etc.

The key to the concept is that beyond the initial payment there is no other help from the state. It would help pay for the expense of children, but not distort decisions by paying benefits per child, for example. It would totally remove distortions inherent in a ‘real time’ benefit system (week to week, month to month, year to year).

To which, the Devil adds,

[Nationmaster] gives the total population as 60,609,153 and the percentage of those aged 0–14 as 17.5%. This gives us 10,606,602 (to the nearest whole person). Next, the total number of those aged 15–19 is 3,992,998. This gives us a rough total of 14,599,600 (to the nearest whole person). Therefore, 14,599,600 x 5,000 = £72,998,000,000 or £72.998 billion.

So, how does that compare to current welfare spending? Well, I worked this out some time ago, from the government’s own statistics [PDF]. The most massive single item is, indeed, social security benefits at £134,463,000,000 for 2006/07 and £140,900,000,000 projected for 2007/08. When you add up all of the different sections, however, the total figure for benefits is somewhere just north of £200 billion. So, Vindico’s idea does actually compare pretty favourably in terms of government spending. Plus, of course, it has all of the other benefits that he listed.

Economists among us may have clearer views than mine, but a few initial thoughts occur. Perhaps the most obvious practical problem is one of transition. The advantages of a scheme like that above would be deferred by, say, a generation or so and would become clear only gradually – while (presumably) running in parallel with the existing welfare system. This may well be prohibitively expensive. Those employed by the state to run the existing benefits system would no doubt have issues of their own, and a generation of 18-year-olds with a sudden £100,000 windfall could have serious effects on, for instance, the property market. (To say nothing of sales of alcohol and scratch cards.) There are also issues of political expedience – of whether one generation of voters would be happy with a change of this kind benefiting the next.

Still, it’s a provocative idea.

Yes, I know it makes me a bad person, but I sometimes visit Monkey Fluids.   

I’m not proud of it, but it happens.

Hand held fireballs. Caution advised. // MIT sketching. With gravity and marbles. // Octopus amour. // 100 beauties of Tokyo. A bevy of geisha. (h/t, Coudal.) // A hitchhiking photo-diary. New York to Alaska. // World’s smallest dice. // Online craps. // Tank mishaps. // Rebecca Bynum on Yvonne Ridley. // Andrew Bostom on European anti-Semitism. “Muslims are responsible for half of the documented Anti-Semitic incidents on the European continent.” // Ibn Warraq on why the West is best. // Robert Bussard on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. (h/t, Samizdata.) More. // Birth of the microwave oven. // Why Study Science? (1955) // “Cloverpuppy want to live!” // Cloverfield synopsis. // Science fiction versus the Statue of Liberty. // Manhattan, unmolested. By Matthias Sanne. // A compendium of science fiction timelines. // Turkey, seen from a height of 1000ft. (h/t, Dark Roasted Blend.) // Industrial culture photography. (h/t, Mick Hartley.) // Plants and typography. Together at last. // Alarming bugs. // Bugs that fight. // Canned cheeseburger. A miracle breakthrough. // How to get an egg inside a small bottle. // Derren Brown’s subliminal advertising. // And, via The Thin Man, there’s witchcraft afoot.

Time, I mean. Tomorrow will mark one year since I started this website, during which close to 400,000 visitors have paused to look around. Both of these things amaze me. Feedback has been surprisingly positive and, inspiration permitting, I’m hoping to spend more time working on it in future. As regular visitors will know, the content is pretty eclectic (by disorder, not design) and includes essays on art, academia, Islam and politics, along with interviews, news commentary, over 1,000 bits of ephemera and quite a few short films, some of which are touching, while others are just peculiar or in questionable taste. 

Suggestions, comments and corrections are, of course, welcome. As are PayPal donations, which help keep this place running and make me feel important. 

That is all. Carry on.

More Dalrymple, via NER, from an interview in the American Spectator:   

Many young people now end a discussion with the supposedly definitive and unanswerable statement that such is their opinion, and their opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s. The fact is that our opinion on an infinitely large number of questions is not worth having, because everyone is infinitely ignorant. My opinion of the parasitic diseases of polar bears is not worth having for the simple reason that I know nothing about them, though I have a right to an opinion in the sense that I should not receive a knock on the door from the secret police if I express such a worthless opinion. The right to an opinion is often confused (no doubt for reasons of misplaced democratic sentiment) for the validity of an opinion, just as the validity of an argument is often mistaken for the truth of a conclusion.

The “democratic sentiment” behind this flattening of truth claims is sometimes made explicit, as when Frederique Apffel Marglin railed against smallpox vaccination – and “science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge” – while romanticising the Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox, as an equally valid “narrative”. Or when Madeleine Bunting sprang to the defence of Islamic theology and confidently informed her readers, “We are profoundly irrational and… rationality is a social construction.” Bunting is, it seems, happy to conflate knowledge and fairness, and can be counted on to do so on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately, such pretensions are not uncommon and are typically expressed as a belief that no one epistemological position – at least not a “Western” one – can be “privileged” above another, especially one deemed more colourful and “authentic”, supposedly in the interests of resisting “cultural imperialism.” This kind of epistemic egalitarianism may seem quite thrilling to a subset of leftist ideologues, particularly those who resent the functional pre-eminence of Western societies and who feel it is somehow wrong that so-called “Western ways of knowing” are also pre-eminent in their accuracy and effectiveness.

As I wrote in one of my first posts,

Cultural equivalence underlies the current fashion for religious protectionism, whereby reason and scientific methodology are depicted as equivalent to faith and merely a matter of lifestyle choice, as if logical enquiry had no attributes that set it apart from religious ideology and a priori belief. But to equate these very different phenomena requires one to flatten values and empty the mind in the ostensible interest of ‘fairness’ – perhaps to spare the blushes of the less capable among us.

In one recent discussion I was told that, “science is based on assumptions; an assumption is essentially a belief, so science is based on belief.” But the scientific method is based on the testing of formal hypotheses, as opposed to beliefs, which are not the same thing at all. Strictly speaking, a scientific hypothesis must be self-consistent, must explain existing observations and must predict new ones. These formal obligations and restraints are not comparable with the unquestioning acceptance of unverifiable assumptions as a priori truth, which is the signature of religion. There is a profound epistemological difference.

The scientific method is one of the best practical lessons in intellectual humility and one can only wish a few clerics – and a few Guardian columnists – would avail themselves of this tool. As the mathematician Ian Stewart pointed out: “Science is the best defence against believing what we want to.” And the willingness to defer to evidence – as opposed to one’s own wishes and beliefs – is the antithesis of fundamentalism…

Curiously, the person who so adamantly equated science with belief also maintained that the theories of relativity (the details of which escaped him) are “beliefs” and thus in no way “vulnerable to the scientific method.” When I drew attention to evidence to the contrary, the subject was swiftly changed and other things were asserted with even greater adamance. This is one of the incidental rewards of cultural equivalence; it blunts the critical senses and levels all values until people who know nothing about any given subject feel entitled to assert things about that subject with great confidence and a whiff of righteousness. One can, as Ian Stewart warned, believe whatever one wants.