'Ere, 'ere, wot's all this then?

Muslim bobbies for sharia law and order

I haven't made many entries lately in the "Britain self-destructs" category. No novelty value. Dog bites man. Small earthquake in Chile. Politician denies wrongdoing, says photo of him accepting bribe taken out of context. Yawn.

Still, for old times' sake, let's remind ourselves what happens when a nation convinces itself it must adapt to its heterogeneous colonists. Here's a four-year-old BBC news article, picked up by Dhimmi Watch last Friday:

Chief inspector Richard Varley of the Association of Muslim Police said he hoped staff would be able to pool ideas and experiences at the seminars. Mr Varley said his own force, the Metropolitan Police, had addressed a number of the needs of Muslim staff, but he would like to see that extended across all forces.

"I hope the seminars will result in more improvements in the working conditions and environment for Muslim staff. For example, I'd like to see prayer facilities at work being pretty more universal as they are at the Met where there's a prayer room at New Scotland Yard," he said.

It is not known exactly how many Muslims work for the police service, as no religious monitoring is carried out. However, after the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report in 1999, all forces across England and Wales were set a 10-year target for ethnic minority recruitment. Each force was set individual recruitment targets, which reflect the cultural diversity of the community it serves.

But earlier this year the Metropolitan force admitted it was highly improbable it would meet its target of 25% ethnic minority staff by 2009.

The Met does not need to be bothered about Muslim recruitment targets. Once King Charles the Dhimmi acknowledges sharia law for al-Britannia, it won't be a donkey's age before the police force will be 100 percent Muslim "to reflect community values." I do not believe that there will be a drive to recruit ethnic minorities such as indigenous British.

Do conservatives "rationalize" inequality?

A study funded by the National Science Foundation says conservatives are happier than liberals — because they "rationalize" social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities. The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The article's, or study's, ill-concealed antagonism toward conservatives (or as the reporter puts it, "individuals with conservative ideologies") might be summed up: conservatives are selfish, irrational people who pretend to believe in meritocracy ("in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance") to justify their good luck or privilege. Liberals, however, look around, see inequality and weep for the sheer unfairness of it all, which gashes their hearts and makes them unhappy.

That is how individuals with liberal ideologies view the world. Conservatives, if asked to explain their ideas rather than given prefabricated answers (e.g., "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others") might say something like the following.

Conservatives start from observing the world's realities, rather than demanding that the world live up to an impossible, Utopian vision. They recognize that all people are equal in God's sight, or should be under the law, but not in abilities or any number of other characteristics. A good society tries to maximize the possibilities for people to succeed in their chosen endeavors and to create equal opportunities for all — but that's as far as any society can and should go.

Once past that point, a pseudo-equality can only be enforced by artifice and favoritism. It requires devaluing accomplishment and justifying its lack. Every inequality of outcome must be attributed to prejudice or unfairness. Under this system, everyone has a "right" to whatever they they think is their due, and an endless round of grievance ensues.

Since by this definition all inequality is victimization, it follows that the full weight of the state must be brought to bear so the issue comes out "right." Its authority must level out achievement, overlook incompetence and lower standards. As Melanie Phillips titled one of her books, "everyone must have prizes."

In the real world, not that of egalitarian fantasies, this parody of equality is never the real item. There are always those who rise to the top through some combination of ability, determination, luck, and ruthlessness. They may be called "comrade" or "Director of the Office of Racial and Gender Equality," but they are still the ones who have power over others' lives.

It is a big deal if some people have more of a chance in life than others. But it is self-defeating, and opens the way to tyrannical control, to obsess over the fact of nature that not everyone will end up with equal wealth or power. Maybe that is not what we are on earth for and our souls have quite other purposes for being incarnated. Maybe conservatives tend to understand this to one degree or another. If they are happier, could that be a reason?

Japan celebrates non-diversity

In case you missed it, I recommend Takuan Seiyo's fascinating "Astarte and Amaterasu — The Diverging Destinies of Europe and Japan" at Brussels Journal. (Part One here; Part Two here.)

Seiyo tries to answer the question of why these two civilizations have responded so differently to aspects of the modern world, especially mass migration and the pressure to dissolve the indigenous culture in a multi-national soup.

Inconveniences and differences notwithstanding, there is one overwhelming blessing that makes me glad to be in Japan. It's the daily experience of living in a country that, unlike Western Europe, and increasingly the United States, does not actively pursue it's own extinction.

I am a European. Ich kann nicht anders. Europe had left my parents long before they left it almost 50 years ago, so now I am a Euro-American and I take this distinction seriously. Still, I don't feel the religious impulse except in a church that's at least 300 years old; and it's only European music that penetrates to my soul, and only European languages in which I can express what I hold dearest, and only European artifacts that satisfy my love of beauty and craftsmanship. Well, not quite – Japanese artifacts do that too.

But Europe is my Beatrice: a pure vision of the past with little resemblance to what she is now. The real, contemporary Beatrice does presume to tread the path, like Dante Alighieri's muse, from Purgatory to Heaven, but the Compass of Reality shows that the path in fact leads in the opposite direction: back to Virgil's guided tour of Hell. This is a Beatrice with a bipolar personality disorder, self-inflicted cicatrices, labial and nasal rings and tattooed breasts, sporting combat boots and a black leather suit with a Palestinian terrorist's kaffiyeh wrapped around her studded dog collar, with a book of onanistic gibberish by an Althusser or Bataille or Foucault in one hand, and a Quranic whip for self-flagellation in the other.

Japan, he argues, has its own social ills, but they don't include inviting non-Japanese populations to come in and take over like the bikers did to the town in The Wild Ones. Nor are they going to dilute their national sovereignty because borders are so 19th century, so un-progressive.

I've read several blog postings and comments lately trying to diagnose why European nations, or at least their rulers and intelligentsia, are culturally suicidal. One popular explanation is the trauma that settled in following two horrendous world wars, or as some historians say, one with a 20-year intermission. The psychological damage is easy to understand, especially for Germany, France, and Britain, which lost huge numbers of people and suffered devastation from air raids and combat.

According to this theory, there was a tendency to blame nationalism for the disaster, and see the cure in erasing boundaries and growing a multi-national Great Brain to replace petty squabbling governments. And a lingering guilt for the atrocities committed during the war, particularly in Germany of course, but even in Britain for bombing non-military targets like Dresden or inflicting dreadful civilian casualties such as in Hamburg.

But it's too glib an explanation. The Soviet Union lost some 10 million soldiers killed, along with 14 to 17 million civilians, about 14 percent of the pre-war population (equivalent to a loss of 42 million in today's U.S.) — simply staggering, beyond conception for most of us. Yet the Soviet Union, needless to say, remained fiercely patriotic or nationalistic (take your pick) during the Cold War, and its constituent nations and the newly independent nations that devolved from it remain completely uninterested in being absorbed in an international, multi-cultural blob.

The same for Japan. While not as much of the homeland was trashed as in Europe, raids in 1945 on Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki attracted some notice. The Japanese armed forces were shredded, the country experienced an unquestionable defeat, and it was ruled by American occupation forces for several years after the war.

Yet, according to Seiyo and other sources, that has not made the Japanese ashamed to be Japanese, although they have every right to feel as guilty as Germans for their conduct in the '30s and '40s. For that matter, Russians have as much reason to loathe the memory of their leaders in the Stalinist era.

Every country, like every person, has events in its past that should cause remorse. But a continuous history is one of the ways that the mistakes of the past can contribute to avoiding them in the future. Respect for human rights and property, the rule of law, and many other benefits of a civilized society didn't spring up spontaneously. They are the fruit of bitter experience.

When you cut the mystic chords of memory you cut out the roots of a civilization. And you can't just replace them with a cultural mish-mash and a Universal Declaration of Rights or sententious propositions. When the local and particular is replaced by a centralized bureaucratic state, it doesn't change the facts of human nature or insure that oil and water will mix. Just because different cultures mingle within the former boundaries of nations can't make them live harmoniously together. Apparently the Japanese understand as much.

Seiyo writes:

Japan … has been preparing for a future with a smaller and older population. Instead of importing Asian nurses, Japan has developed robots that care for hospital patients, or it exports its old and infirm to the countries where the nurses are. Instead of importing window and wall washers, it has developed nano-polymers that repel dust and dirt. Instead of importing street sweepers, it has mobilized retired volunteers to maintain the cleanliness of their own neighborhoods. Instead of opening its doors to primitives who happen to be refugees, Japan donates huge sums of money to refugee organizations.

So that's how. But why do they feel no apparent need to apologize for what the bien-pensants of the Western world would call xenophobia? Whatever it is, I wish we could import some, and Europe needs a transfusion.

It's academic

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From The Valve — A Literary Organ:

Some Uneducated Speculations on "The African Novel" in Tanzania, by Aaron Bady:

… Which leads me back to continuing fascination with the ways the “Africa novel” is conceptualized through reference to states of immaturity (which I’ve been going on about here and here). In the case of Oyono and Abrahams, the “boy” of the title is a member of the first generation to leave the traditional home, the first to learn to read, and the first to have a conception of the outside world. This plot, in which the (inevitably male) protagonist becomes modern and literate at the same time as he becomes alienated from the “traditional” world, is a common plot structure among the writers of the late colonial and early independence era. Yet it’s also a very common way that African writers conceptualized their status as writers. In Achebe’s own uber-canonized Things Fall Apart, for example, the novel’s thematic center is the decision by Okonkwo’s oldest son to reject his father, convert to Christianity, and go to school. Yet this decision is also, in a very direct way, a formative event in Achebe’s own family history, which he was loosely fictionalizing: in the trilogy as he originally imagined it (he changed his plans soon after) the first novel would be about his grandfather’s time, the second about his father’s, and the third about his own. In other words, Things Fall Apart is not only a story about colonialism and traditional Igbo life, but it narrates the first branch in the genealogy of Achebe as writer, an originary moment defined by the rejection of the “traditionalism” that Okonkwo is taken to represent.

Things fall apart, all right. Like the ability to write good English. Especially after a few years in academia.

First they came for the language, but because I was not an English major, I said nothing. Then they came for popular culture, but because I was a PBS viewer, I said nothing. Then they came for me, and who was left to speak for me?

Erroll Garner on DVD

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One thing I try to call attention to every so often is how much good music is on DVDs. Many music enthusiasts, I am convinced, think DVDs are strictly for movies, and miss out on music performances on video.

This disc, which I rented from Netflix, is said to be the only filmed performance of Garner available on DVD. It's from two episodes (obviously shot at the same session) of a British TV program broadcast in 1964.

I gather Garner isn't quite held in the highest esteem by some alleged jazz connoisseurs. In his time he was very popular among audiences across the board, not just jazz specialists. That counts against him. If he belonged to any stylistic category, it was probably swing, with (on this recording) an occasional touch of stride piano. Yes, he was old-fashioned: he seems not to have been influenced in the slightest by bebop, and played the kind of straight-ahead, melodic jazz that he and his audience loved.

Well, I do too, and more than ever after hearing and seeing him on this DVD. His playing is brilliantly imaginative, if never quite taking flight at the altitude of Art Tatum. One characteristic that sets him apart is the sheer joyousness of his music making. It sparkles. It uplifts. Right from the get-go, on Cole Porter's "Just One of Those Things," the performance is happy — not in a corny, emotionally manipulative way, but naturally and infectiously.

Those who are used to modern jazz concerts might be a little disconcerted by the short songs and the lack of solos by his able bassist and drummer. I feel pretty sure this was not Garner's choice, but was determined by the director. Each show was only half an hour, and the director probably felt that the mass TV audience wouldn't relate to long solos.

Thank goodness someone cared enough to digitize these old films so they could be preserved on DVD. The mono sound is fine, and the video quality isn't bad, considering the vintage and the TV provenance (it's black and white, of course). The film stock had degraded a bit with age, but not enough to interfere with your pleasure at watching this great artist.

The quite decent direction includes a variety of close-ups and camera angles. The close-ups of Garner's face as he was playing are unfortunate, though, designed as they were for over-the-air broadcast and small screens; with DVD resolution and a large screen, it's only too apparent that he was perspiring under the hot lighting needed for the cameras.

How I wish I could have heard Erroll Garner at a live concert, except that if I had, I'd be very old now.

UPDATE 5/2

What was I thinking of? " … I'd be very old now." I was in college in 1964! I could have heard Garner in concert and be exactly the same age I am.

I guess I am old now. But I don't feel old. Either that, or I am losing my marbles from age-related dementia.

The new look

Notice something different? Yes, I thought you would.

The beautiful new banner above was designed by Fresh Display Studio. I wholeheartedly recommend them for Web design — they are imaginative, technically proficient, reasonably priced, and very good at client relationship (the last is something I found sorely lacking among many talented designers when I requested bids for the job).

Expect further changes from time to time. One of my aims is for Reflecting Light to be one of the best-looking blogs around.