Society – Page 33 – Common Infirmities

Helicopter parents avant la lettre

I’m always intrigued by the eternal present of “nowadays”: Trends that rise and rise like an Escher staircase. Just now I was coming to the end of Anna Karenina — which I had expected would be just Madame Bovary on the steppes, but it was vastly more — and found this passage:

“He assures me that our children are splendid, when I know how much that’s bad there is in them.”

“Arseny goes to extremes, I always say,” said his wife. “If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it’s true, as papa says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.”

“Well, what if they like it better?” Lvov said, with his beautiful smile, touching her hand. “Anyone who didn’t know you would think you were a stepmother, not a true mother… Well, come here, you perfect children,” Lvov said to the two handsome boys who came in…

The time when children knew their place, and parents could enjoy themselves, is just a generation past, and apparently it always was.

Metric overlap

big ben face I was just reading this article about the failure of the US to convert to the metric system in the 1970s — a review of the book Whatever Happened to the Metric System? by John Bemelmans Marciano. (About whose title I wonder, whatever happened to the phrase “what ever”? Isn’t “whatever” a completely different word? Whatever.)

It reminded me of my school days, when the units unit — the unit on converting between English and SI units — was a regular feature of every year’s math lessons. We were told that this would be important for the future, since everything was going to be converted to metric. Something to justify a lifetime of skepticism toward those

At the time, I thought it strange that so much time was being spent on converting between the old and the new units. Once you start using new units, you rarely need to convert to the old ones; and most of the conversion can be done with double-marked measuring utensils, like the measuring tapes that were then and still are ubiquitous. (I was fascinated when I first saw the 18th century clock faces that have the hours subdivided simultaneously into fours and into fives, the latter to accommodate the new-fangled minute hands, the former for the old one-handed system, where a single hand showed the time on a 12-hour or 24-hour scale (or 10-hour, if it was late 18th century Paris), with each hour subdivided into quarter hours. An example, from a much later date (mid-19th century, pictured above) is the face of Big Ben in London.

Emphasising conversions made it seem like metric requires hard math, as well as remembering things like 3.28 feet in a metre, or 454 grams in a pound, whereas it actually means you can stop remembering things like 5280 feet in a mile, or 4840 square feet in an acre, or 4 pecks in a bushel. But I remember being particularly struck at the time (the time being about 1980) by an argument I read, claiming that metric conversion would impose untold costs on the US economy, requiring the replacement of everything from shot glasses to wrenches. I found this claim very odd. Surely, I thought, the fact that we measure the size of drinks in millilitres rather than ounces doesn’t forbid us from making a drink have an odd number of millilitres, at least until the old glasses break.

It reminds me of when Deutsche Telekom, in the pre-competition days, proposed changing the basic unit of charging for local calls from three minutes to half a minute, or maybe it was even less. I remember listening to a call-in show on the radio where this was being discussed, and an elderly woman called to express her outrage. “Who would make a half-minute call? What can you discuss in so little time?”

Anyway, metric didn’t happen in the US, except for the 2-litre pop bottles, and gram bags of cocaine. But even where it did happen there remains an overlap of older units. In Britain, which has been metricated by law since EEC accession in the 1970s, house sizes are in square metres, petrol sold by the litre, and fruits are priced in pence per kilo, but beer is sold by the pint and distances between cities are generally measured in miles. People’s weights seem to be given equally in pounds, kilos, or stones (14 pounds). Commonly imperial units are given as alternatives to officially required metric units, suggesting that at least some portion of the public has a better intuitive grasp of the imperial units. But even in Germany, which had the metric system imposed by Napoleon more than 2 centuries ago, people still talk of “Ein Pfund Butter”, even if this “pound” of butter is a metricated pound, rounded to 500 grams.

“For he is an Englishman…”

For, in spite of all temptations

to belong to other nations

he remains an Englishman.”

Bringing together my posts from last year about cases of US citizens being expelled from or denied re-entry into their country, with my recent remarks on a senior UK politician’s suggestion that British citizens who fight with Islamists in Iraq and Syria have their citizenship revoked. This is of a piece with my earlier observations that xenophobic excesses which would be confined to the tub-thumping fringes in other countries, very quickly find resonance in the British political establishment, with the major parties falling over themselves not to be outflanked in expressing their hostility toward the alien.

To be fair, though, some moderately senior German politicians have made similar statements. The German constitution makes it absolutely explicit that citizenship cannot be revoked (except when a new citizenship is acquired, or when citizenship was acquired by fraud), which may make the belligerent exploitation of anti-Islamist chauvinism in these terms more or less despicable, depending on your perspective. (The US constitution is slightly less explicit, but reasonably clear on the subject.) By contrast, the UK — lacking both a written constitution and the clarifying experience of Nazi and Communist dictatorships — clearly makes revocation of citizenship a live option: 20 British dual nationals had their citizenship revoked last year, and the law — originally a 2006 Labour government product — was recently amended to allow the Home Secretary to deprive even single-nationals of their citizenship, rendering them stateless, showing blatant contempt for the 1961 UN Convention on Statelessness.

The only requirement for a naturalised British citizen — which includes many people born in the UK — to be deprived of his or her citizenship is that

the Secretary of State is satisfied that the deprivation is conducive to the public good.

Of course, “public good” is a pretty flexible concept, particularly when the Home Office is required to present neither an explanation nor evidence, and invariably takes the step when the individual is travelling outside the country, sending the notification to the home address in the UK (from which the person is known to be absent), allowing 28 days for appeal. Certainly the Nazi Home Secretary was satisfied that allowing Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann to return home would not be conducive to the public good. The GDR had the same trick of revoking citizenship when troublesome individuals were temporarily out of the country.

Lest anyone think the UK is recapitulating the march of tyranny, though, the Home Secretary has promised that this power will be used “sparingly”. That should be enough of a bulwark against fascism to satisfy anyone. And unlike the Nazi law on deprivation of citizenship, property is not confiscated, so it’s something completely different.

Creative destruction (Updated)

Headline on the NY Times website:

TV Chief Takes 2-by-4 to a Proposed Cable Merger

I was at first confused by the reference. Having grown up around my father’s lumberyard, I naturally think of a 2-by-4 as a basic element of house construction. For those whose experience of lumber is shaped by Mafia films, it’s an implement of destruction. (It’s interesting how the pop-culture image of organised crime has been shaped by the somewhat coincidental situation of the New York-New Jersey crime families who largely laundered their money through construction firms. Think “cement overshoes”.) I am reminded of the period in the early 1990s when skinhead mobs in Eastern Germany and Berlin suddenly started attacking foreigners, particularly but not exclusively asylum-seekers. The favoured weapons were baseball bats. I remember an article from around 1993, where a police expert was interviewed about why it was that baseball bats were ideally suited to be used as weapons, in addition to their advantage of having a legal use that endows carrying them with a superficial legitimacy, despite the fact that, as the German association of baseball enthusiasts admitted, the total number of baseball players in Germany was estimated at just a few hundred, substantially smaller than the number of baseball bats that had been sold in the past year. In any case, baseball bats (“Baseballschläger”) have become routine emblems of violence in German newspaper headlines, with no further explanation required, specifically xenophobic neo-Nazi violence. For example, when Der Spiegel reported on a government-sponsored youth music initiative with a CD of songs opposing neo-Nazi violence, the article was titled

Tonträger gegen Baseballschläger (Recordings vs. Baseball Bats)

Interestingly, when Bill Gates handed over control of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer, Der Spiegel covered press reports with a headline “Baseball bat in his hand”, referring to an LA Times report that said

Ballmer, der dafür bekannt ist, dass er bei internen Besprechungen herumbrüllt und manchmal Anordnungen gibt, während er einen Baseballschläger in der Hand hält… (Ballmer, who is known for screaming during internal conferences, and sometimes holds a baseball bat in his hand while giving orders…)

It sounds much more menacing in German.

Update: Somehow I forgot the famous lyric from the gospel song Oh Mary Don’t you Weep (what I take to be Pete Seeger’s revised lyrics; at least, it’s clearly not part of the original spiritual, and does appear on Pete Seeger’s recordings, and later versions):

Moses stood on the Red Sea shore

Smotin’ the water with a two-by-four.

Pharaoh’s army got drowned.

Oh, Mary, don’t you weep!

Betrayal

After the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many physicists felt that their discipline’s principles had been betrayed. Oppenheimer said that physicists had “known sin”. Their abstruse subject, seen as a pure source of enlightenment, had revealed its enormous destructive potential. The healing arts, the quintessence of noble pursuits, have also been showing their dark side, as the power to cure disease is inseparable from the power to cause disease. An Oath Betrayed was the title of a recent book on the role of U.S. physicians and psychologists in facilitating torture in Guantanamo. And now, yet another betrayal: The BBC reports that

What of goodness and purity remains in the world, when even English accents may also be deployed for nefarious ends? (Of course, in Hollywood films they are used for almost nothing else.)

More profoundly, two thoughts occur to me: Continue reading “Betrayal”

The tragic contradiction of rooting for the underdog

Everyone loves stories of plucky individuals, beaten down by circumstances but working hard to get ahead. Dickens made a career out of them. It’s a noble sentiment, but it’s a terrible basis for public policy, which is unfortunate for the US, which has persistently put that heart-warming story at the centre of its social welfare policies. I was reminded of this recently when reading an article in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel about the push in some American cities — Seattle, in particular — to raise the minimum wage substantially. (The article doesn’t seem to be available online, but a related interview with activist-entrepreneur Nick Hanauer is here.) I am all in favour of these proposals — there’s no better way to help poor people stop being poor than to give them more money — but it’s clearly not going to solve all of society’s problems. In particular, the Spiegel reporter talks to a single mother of two children, working 32 hours a week for Domino’s Pizza, whose apartment is too small for both children, only manages to get enough to eat by taking home leftover pizza, and has to admit shamefacedly that she never can afford to buy her children any sort of gift. It’s wonderful that she will be earning 60 percent more in a few years (unless she loses her job), but the reporter adds in the sort of detail that German reporters inevitably include in reports on US urban misery:

She lives in a suburb of Seattle. Not a good neighbourhood, she says, lots of drugs and crime. Once someone was shot to death in front of her house.

So, maybe the increase in the minimum wage is going to help her and her sons move to a better neighbourhood. But it’s not going to make the neighbourhood better! The only way to reduce the number of people who have someone shot in front of their house is to reduce the number of people who are shot. If all the people earning minimum wage decide to use their raises to move to a better neighbourhood, the rent in the better neighbourhoods will just go up. Their negotiating position for housing will be improved relative to retirees, nonworking poor, students, etc. But the number of sad stories of people who can’t afford to move out of their run-down crime-infested neighbourhood will not change, though possibly the people suffering will be less sympathetic, which might seem like an improvement.

Continue reading “The tragic contradiction of rooting for the underdog”

Return address

From a recent article in The Guardian about the rise of antisemitism in Europe.

A similar normalisation may be under way in Germany, according to a 2013 study by the Technical University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses – something she felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

That sounds very convincing. “Unafraid to give their names” sounds like an impressive fact, showing how socially accepted antisemitic threats have become, in contrast to 20 years ago. But then it reminded me of an interview given by Ignatz Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, almost exactly 20 years ago (14 December 1992, to be precise):

SPIEGEL: Mr Bubis, have you received any antisemitic letters today?

BUBIS: Yes. They range from threats to ridiculous pamphlets explaining that Jews meddle in everything, to insults. A man wrote to me recently to say, he saw me on television, and was greatly impressed by what I said — until it occurred to him, that I belong to another race, and so everything I said was terrible.

SPIEGEL: What is new about this antisemitism?

BUBIS: The only thing that is new, is that the letters now come with name and return address. Antisemitism is now socially acceptable. It is once again permitted.

(original German below the break)

Perhaps it is just wishful thinking, to suppose that there must have been a brief shining moment when anti-Semites were ashamed to sign their names to their threatening letters.

Continue reading “Return address”

Imprisoning rich criminals is mindless populism…

… says rich journalist/politician-felon Chris Huhne in the Guardian.

Just in case you haven’t been following this, Andy Coulson masterminded a criminal conspiracy to eavesdrop on private conversations and bribe public officials. His minions basically vandalised a police investigation into the murder of a 13-year-old. Now, his culpability as director of the operation has been difficult to establish in court, so unlike those minions he has been convicted only on a single relatively minor charge. He has been sentenced to just 18 months in prison, of which he will likely only serve one quarter.

But Huhne thinks the fact that the sentence is so short proves that he shouldn’t go to prison at all. He compares current penal practice to “the 1723 Black Act, which introduced 50 new hanging offences, including one for “hiding in a forest while disguised”.” He seems to think that the only proper purpose of prison is to restrain violent criminals. The rest is just playing to the tabloid-aroused bloodlust of the crowd. It’s one thing to lock up the evil people — BBC star pedophile Rolf Harris is his favoured example — but normal upstanding rich people like Coulson (and, by implication, Huhne himself) are much more useful on the outside. Merely being labelled criminals is enough suffering for their tender egos, unlike the hardened chavs who need to be sent to prison for looting a bottle of water, or receiving a single pair of looted underpants from a friend.

It’s depressing to be reminded of how primitive the thinking often is of people at the highest levels of government. Continue reading “Imprisoning rich criminals is mindless populism…”

Politicians who bring home the bacon

I commented before about the weird obsession of journalists with photographing Labour leader Ed Miliband eating bacon sandwiches. Here’s another one. It’s genuinely unclear to me whether this is about demonstrating some kind of general average-Brit bona fides — like when American politicians eat deep-fried corn dogs — or whether it’s more specifically about demonstrating that he’s not too Jewish.

La planète des singes

Imagine a French cartoon showing a scene from “‘Batman’ à l’américaine”, showing a portly Batman stuffing his face with a cheeseburger, demonstrating how an American Batman would differ from the normal French Batman that everyone is familiar with.

The most recent (28 July, 2014) issue of The New Yorker has a cartoon, showing two figures trudging along a beach, from which the top of the Eiffel Tower can be seen poking through the sand; the woman holds the reins of a horse, the man has hurled himself to the ground, crying “Non!” The caption is “‘Planet of the Apes’ in French”.

So, I found myself wondering how this is supposed to be understood. Do most people know that Planet of the Apes was originally a novel (in French) by Pierre Boulle (author as well of The Bridge on the River Kwai), and that the Eiffel Tower does play an important role in the end of the novel? Does the author know? Does he expect the readers to know that? It very much affects how you read the cartoon, and what the humour is (which I’m having difficulty discerning). If he knows, then it’s presumably supposed to be some sort of comment on Hollywood appropriation of other countries’ icons. If he doesn’t know, then the joke is supposed to be about how ridiculous it would be for space explorers to be exotic Gauls, rather than normal Americans. Hence my thought above about how a comparably ignorant French cartoonist might “americanise” a normal French character that he doesn’t realise was already American to begin with.