The wisdom of crowds or not?

'The print era is irretrievably over. And with it, we can wave goodbye to the ideal of ‘objectivity’ — and also public support for mass democracy.'

This article has a very interesting idea. The crowd knows its power now because of social media and this will weaken belief in democracy, argues Mary Harrington. She bases her argument, surprisingly, on bad reviews for a TV series loosely based on Tolkien, with a multiracial cast.

Tweet by Matteo Salvini yesterday

Those who have been sanctioned are winners and those who put the sanctions in place are on their knees.

Tyranny and incompetence

The version I read when a sixteen year-old was that [Czarist] Russia was an autocracy tempered by assassination.

"A British historian (can't recall which) called the Habsburg empire "tyranny, tempered by incompetence" (a bit unfair on both counts). Biden is a tyranny tempered by dementia." David P. Goldman

"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination." Voltaire, who seems to have thought of the joke first.

"France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams." Carlyle

"Russia is an autocracy moderated by alcohol". Balzac

"The British Empire ran on alcohol." George Orwell, who used to spend his Friday and Saturday nights in the bar of the Strand Hotel, Rangoon.

Trying to find out what is happening in Ukraine

People send me articles contradicting the Western narrative about the Ukraine and often they seem to me to be very misguided.

The idea that Putin did not intend to capture Kiev seems very unlikely. Most people expected him to take most of the country in a couple of weeks. 

No-one knows for sure. David Goldman says Putin was being opportunistic about attacking Kiev. That could be. Fighting street by street is terribly hard.

We really don't know.

Here is a story someone sent me from a left-of-centre blogger called Moon of Alabama. He says that the purpose of the Kherson offensive is to encourage Nato countries to keep giving Ukraine money. I can easily believe that.

It says the offensive has failed, very great numbers of Ukrainian soldiers were killed and what's left of the Ukrainian forces are trapped. I don't see any evidence for that in the blog post, just some links to pages that tell you very little, including one to the Russian Rybar Telegram channel.

Sir Lawrence Freedman says this is the line pushed by Russian bots and I'm sure that's true. 

Presumably if there is any truth in it it can't be kept from us.

Or perhaps it will. Reading between the lines of the latest news the silence about the Ukrainian offensive might mean that the offensive failed and the Ukrainians have gone back to doing what they were doing before. 

I don't trust contrarians but I don't trust the news coverage in the Times, Telegraph and BBC. They repeat Ukrainian press releases without critiquing them. I shall cancel my subscriptions this month to the first two.

Their stories all follow the MI6 line and make it clear that what the reader is meant to feel. Losing faith in sanctions or wanting a negotiated peace is a big danger, readers are told.

Why not let readers make their own judgments?

Because the media are political actors.

And, we know, very unreliable sources of information, even in peacetime.

Here is a very interesting analysis from someone studying for a doctorate in philosophy about the war and how it will end.

First, even with Western support, I don't believe that the Ukrainian armed forces can force the Russians to leave Ukraine or even go back to pre-February 24 lines.

There are many people who know more than me about modern warfare, which is not difficult since I know almost nothing about it, who disagree and think Ukraine will eventually pull it off but that's a case where I choose to dismiss what experts say because it makes no sense.

My argument for this view is very simple, but so far I haven't heard anything in reply to it that didn't sound like magical thinking. The gist is that I don't think Ukraine has enough offensive weapons to do large-scale counteroffensives, nor that it will any time soon.

Russia has turned out to be much less strong than we thought, but is very, very slowly winning at present and is too strong to be driven out of the territories she has gained by Ukraine.

I realise that many experts like Sir Lawrence Freedman are emotionally involved in what they understandably see as a battle between good and evil. I suspect that this affects their judgment. The wish is father to the thought.

Anyway, people have had enough of experts.

As Henry Kissinger said in the Washington Post on March 5th: 

"For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one."

Putin is a wicked man but he isn't Hitler, any more than Saddam, Milosevic or Nasser were. I am not sure that Hitler originally wanted to conquer the whole of the continent, but Putin is concerned simply about Ukraine. 

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Nazism, and the thing about spectres is that they probably don't exist.

Like most wars (think the original Crimean war) this one is happening by mistake, big mistakes by Putin but not only by him.

Gorbachev on Putin’s wars

Vladimir Putin repeatedly blamed Gorbachev for failing to secure written commitments from America that Nato would not be expanded eastward, but such commitments would have been made to the Soviet Union, a country that ceased to exist on Christmas Day 1991.

The fact remains that James Baker did give this assurance in very certain terms, as Jack Matlock, the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, recalls in an article well worth reading, published just before the invasion this year arguing that American policy precipitated the crisis. 

'After the fall of the Soviet Union, I told the Senate that expansion would lead us to where we are today.'

Mr. Gorbachev supported Mr. Putin’s war with Georgia in 2008, which Georgia started (pace Wikipedia), and his invasion and annexation of the Crimea in 2014, condemned American behaviour towards Ukraine but disagreed with the invasion of Ukraine in February.

"It really crushed him emotionally and psychologically," said his former aide Pavel Palazhchenko, in an interview with Reuters days ago.  

They won in the end - this summer Great Britain was full of even elderly men wearing shorts

An enthusiast for Men's dress reform walking down the Strand in London.




The Men's Dress Reform Party (MDRP) existed from 1929 to the start of the war and aimed to increase the variety and choice in men's clothing. 

I suspect it was a harmless offshoot of the malign interwar enthusiasm for eugenics (improving the stock). Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter wore 'reformed clothing'.

Anne Fernie wrote this.

Strange to realise that adult men really did not wear shorts before the mid1920s. These formed a key health feature of the Men’s Dress Reform Party founded in 1929 by Alfred Jordan, an internationally renowned radiologist. He was famous for wearing shorts in his professional life, something that in this period was sufficiently unusual to generate press interest.

The MDRP was open to all classes of men, from the ‘working chap to the peer’s son’ and it was not a ‘crank or a faddist’ organisation but lobbied to end the tyranny of men’s dress away from heavy, hard to clean woollens and tweeds, sock suspenders, restrictive collars and in the case of heavier men – corsets.



Members included the artist Walter Sickert and lady members Barbara Cartland and the physician Stella Churchill. The ‘Tailor & Cutter’ journal however, thought it ‘odd’ for middle-aged and elderly men to be dressing like boys & the National Federation of Merchant Tailors labelled the |MDRP ‘ dress quacks’ who were ‘monkeying’ with men’s attire.



By the 1930s the movement held regular events: 1,000 people attended the ’31 rally at the London Suffolk St. galleries including H.G Wells & Alfred Jordan who appeared in a knee-length tunic, cape and sandals. Baden Powell (also an old friend of Caleb Saleeby) was interested in the movement & noted to them that his designs for Boy Scout uniforms largely met the movement’s ideals. The movement was also adroit at publicising itself through the media. Their 1937 Coronation design competition was one of the first events ever to be televised although only 50,000 people were able to receive the transmission.

Obviously, gun laws are not the cause of America's high murder rate

Common sense tells us that if Japan had US gun laws it would not be violent.

I completely agree with Lord Hannan

He meant to say 'gave us the energy crisis', of course.

Daniel Hannan

@DanielJHannan

Shall I tell you the worst thing about this law-breaking? It’s not the flagrant vandalism. It’s not even the idiocy of demanding a citizens’ assembly in the world’s preeminent assembly of elected citizens. It’s that humouring these fools is what gave the energy crisis.

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Comparing child abuse by Catholic priests, Protestant clergymen, sports coaches and schoolmasters

Andrew Brown, the former editor of the religious section in the Guardian, is a brilliant writer but does not believe in God and is certainly not sympathetic to the conservatism of (or in) the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, he wrote an article in 2011 that said:

The most detailed statistics on child abuse for the Catholic clergy that I can find come from the John Jay Institute's report drawn up for the American Catholic bishops' conference. From this it emerges that the frequency of child abuse among Catholic priests is not remarkable but its pattern is. Although there are no figures for the number of abusers in the wider population, there are figure for the number of victims. These vary wildly: the most pessimistic survey finds that 27% of American women and 16% of men had "a history of childhood sexual abuse"; while the the most optimistic had 12.8% of women and 4.3% of men. Obviously a great deal depends here on the definition of abuse; also on the definition of "childhood". In some of these surveys it runs up to 18, which is a couple of years above the age of consent in Britain.

The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18. In this country, the figure was a 10th of that: 0.4% But whereas the victims in the general population are overwhelmingly female, the pattern among American Catholic priests was quite different. Four out of five of their victims were male. Most were adolescents: two out of five were 14 or over; 15% were under 10.

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious. The concentration on boys makes the Catholic pattern of abuse stand out... it is nowadays very widely reported. It may be the best reported crime in the world: that, too tends to skew perceptions.

Conservative Catholics often say that the problem of child abuse by priests is mostly a problem of pederasty (attraction of men to boys who have reached puberty). Unfortunately girls and pre-pubescent boys are also victims, however.

An American Catholic catechist, now retired, called Emmett Hubarth said this on Quora. I read this elsewhere too.

Actually, the number of cases within the Catholic Church is about the same or slightly lower than other Christian Churches. However, since the other churches have no real central authority, they don't get the attention that the Catholic Church does. Also the incidence of sexual abuse in any of the churches is far lower than that of the secular world. There are far more cases in our public schools, athletic teams, and involving family members.

I posted this on Facebook 6 years ago

'Google News a list of articles showing Trump ahead /catching up in polls + articles saying he can't win. Wish father thought. Bias palpable.'

But I allowed a clever American Democrat to persuade me that Trump would probably not win, against my instincts.

Things I learnt from Robert Tombs' wonderful book The English and their History

Victory at Agincourt and the consequent capture of Rouen caused dancing in the streets of London, just like the armistice on November 11, 1918.

Scott coined the phrase Wars of the Roses. They lasted thirty years but there were only a few weeks of intense conflict.

Life went on as normal. Strange to think the house I used to live in before I came to Romania was already built by then.

The Tudor monarchs called themselves Plantagenets, never Tudors. It was David Hume who first called them Tudors.

Ukrainian Pravda said on 5 May that Boris Johnson persuaded Zelensky not to continue negotiations with Putin

The Ukrainska Pravda article is here. I quote from it in translation, via Zero Hedge.

Possibility of talks between Zelenskyy and Putin came to a halt after Johnson’s visit - UP sources

IRYNA BALACHUK, ROMAN ROMANIUK —  THURSDAY, 5 MAY 2022, 13:32

Following the arrival of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Kyiv, a possible meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin has become less likely.

The Russian side…was actually ready for the Zelenskyy-Putin meeting.

But two things happened, after which a member of the Ukrainian delegation, Mykhailo Podoliak, had to openly admit that it was "not the time" for the meeting of the presidents. 

The first thing was the revelation of the atrocities, rapes, murders, massacres, looting, indiscriminate bombings and hundreds and thousands of other war crimes committed by Russian troops in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories…

The second "obstacle" to agreements with the Russians arrived in Kyiv on 9 April."

According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The Cold War, a Very Short Introduction, Robert C. McMahon (2021), pp.148-9. I reread this short book over lunch.

 

Almost half of children in England are raised by one biological parent

A new report finds that 44 per cent of children born in 2000 in England were raised by one biological parent. 

For black Caribbean families that figure is 57 per cent.

Almost a quarter of families are headed by a single mother or father. 

In EU countries on average it's 12.6 per cent. 

In Romania it's 7 per cent.

Stockholm syndrome and Prince Harry

From Freddy Gray's article ‘Drama queens: the return of Meghan and Harry’ in The Spectator.

“ In the podcast, he appears for about 15 seconds. He is allowed to compliment Serena on her hair -“great vibe” - and then shuffles off not to be heard again ‘Thanks, my love,’ says Meghan, with the sort of tenderness a Taliban warlord might reserve for his prettiest wife."

This is Tina Brown:

"Meghan got angry so fast, and that’s what’s rocked the family. They’re still reeling and just baffled why it seemed to go wrong so quickly... For them, it’s like Diana’s son is continuing the campaign to disrupt Charles’ future reign, and the “War of the Wales” continues."

Rebecca English in the Daily Mail:

"But there is an undertone of cool menace in the Duchess of Sussex’s latest extraordinary interview with American lifestyle magazine The Cut.

"‘It’s interesting, I’ve never had to sign anything that restricts me from talking,’ she notes at one point, adding: ‘I’ve really made an active effort [to forgive], especially knowing that I can say anything.’

"Even the interviewer notes that her voice is ‘full of meaning’. Meghan goes on: ‘I have a lot to say until I don’t. Do you like that? Sometimes, as they say, the silent part is still part of the song.’"

Prince Harry married his mother, though the Duchess might be much darker. At least Diana tried hard to be and succeeded in being a much loved Princess of Wales.

A friend of mine pointed out that the look in Diana's eyes reminded him of those of child murderer Myra Hindley. I saw it too, once he pointed it out.