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.