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Marriage and Cohabitation.
29 February 2008 .
The UK government has been de-emphasising marriage for years: the word has been expunged from tax and benefit forms, while teachers and foster parents have had to affirm to their charges that the traditional family is no more 'valid' than other ways of bringing up children (and some have been removed from their roles for not doing so).
The Mail, today, reported an Office for National Statistics report that cohabiting women are up to three times more likely to commit suicide than married women. The paper concludes (or reports conclusions?) that this demonstrates that 'cohabitation has made a high proportion of young women more vulnerable to depression'. It adds that it undermines 'Labour's dogma that all family relationships are equally good.'
It's possible that both sides in this argument are mistaken. With regard to the report itself, statistics tells us numbers, but they're not so good on causes. It may be that the sort of women who are more susceptible to depression are also less likely to enter a traditional marriage - and that there is nothing inherently more stressful about cohabiting.
On the other hand, however, the government is certainly on very weak ground. The 'collective decision' that there should be nothing sacred (!) about marriage has been largely based driven by a Left-PC agenda. Of course there were changing social habits, leading to a decline in the number of marriages: whether the government should have endorsed the changes may be a matter for argument but, like so many of the moral arbitrations which they have imposed on us, there was no basis in scientific research.
And that's the point: the decision was purely based on the opinion of political activists - yet all sorts of folk have been forced either to go against their consciences or give up their work.
So no change there, then.
In passing: As a teacher, I don't give a jot on moral grounds what a child's background is - it would be quite wrong to do so. But I'm one of what must be a fair number who have found by long experience that children from traditional family backgrounds, of any religion or none, are very much more likely to be stable, happy, balanced and socially successful than those who are not. (And I will add that I was once told by my line manager that expressing that opinion - to other staff - was 'inappropriate' for a teacher.)
White Season. (BBC from next week).
29 February 2008 .
It's a pity that when the BBC makes a series of documentaries specifically about issues and problems felt by white working classes, including their feelings of marginalisation in the face of immigration, there have already been protests about the focus 'on one ethnic group'.
"It will encourage the far-right parties," on Newsnight and in the Press. "Why aren't there documentaries in the series about white and immigrant working classes cooperating?" on Newsnight - which begs comments, that it's interesting slip to assume that the immigrants aren't white (surely he meant 'indigenous and immigrant'), and that there are already plenty of such programmes and that's not what this series is about.
It Stands To Reason.
28 February 2008 .
The human inclination to assume that we know more than we do, and that experts know everything, can be terribly damaging.
Generations of schoolchildren have been punished or castigated for laziness - or for being thick. As a teacher I found it hard not to be impatient when - having spent forever explaining some simple task that needed to be done 'in terms a six-year-old could understand' - a hand would go up and a voice would ask, 'What do we have to do, Sir?'
Now some research from Durham University, which seems to be reasonable robust, has shown that about 10% of children actually have a genuine, genetic, reason for appearing to under-perform.
Will it make any difference to the way they are treated by their teachers? Or, I ask - still with some resentment after all these years, by their overachieving families? We'll see.
This report, a couple of days after the great Market Rasen Earthquake, reminded me of something which a few years ago I knew for certain... quite incorrectly.
Climate change cannot cause earthquakes. It stands to reason.
Except that it can. The melting of the ice in Greenland is removing so much pressure from the land beneath that the crust is rising - fast enough and over a large enough area that it is causing increased earthquake activity. Another lesson in how profound and unpredictable the consequences of our activities can be.
Market Rasen seems such an unlikely place to be at the epicentre of a 'quake.
Wikileaks.
28 February 2008 .
I tried to access wikileaks.be in connection with National Identity Scheme - Delivery Strategy, ( Classified ID Cards, 27 Feb [yesterday]) and for a moment found I was being denied - and mucked around by strange messages. It turns out that the US side, wikileaks.org, has been ordered offline by a US court (14 Feb). They've been pulled from their servers and the domain name has been locked. I don't know if there's a connection.
http://wikileaks.be has promised that it will continue to publish documents pertaining to illegal and unethical activities.
Pay her to look after children?
27 February 2008 .
A Labour MP posed an interesting question on Newsnight tonight.
Why is it a matter for celebration by the government when a woman gets a job looking after other women's children, but the same woman staying at home to look after her own children is so often seen as a failure?
Policing Skills and the Database.
26 February 2008 .
One Levi Bellfield was sentenced to life, today, for assaults including two murders. It seems that there were over ninety previous reports to the police about his behaviour, mostly involving threatening and aggressive behaviour towards women.
With the best will in the world, and all the skill and determination possible, the police can't solve every murder instantly; this posting is not in any way intended to be a criticism of their work in this case - about which I know nothing. But, prima facie, the reports do seem to support my earlier assertions that what can catch criminals is skillful policing and good lines of communication.
I'm totally opposed to the idea of the universal DNA database, because of the abuse and mistakes that it would facilitate; but, I must admit, I'd like to know what the contribution of DNA evidence in finding the killer has been - or could have been - in each of the recent widely-reported cases (as opposed to confirming the killer's identity once he's found) compared with the contribution of good policing.
[It's being suggested that Bellfield may be in the frame for up to another twenty killings, the first when he was just fourteen.]
Apologia Pro Su' Website (or something...) after Four Weeks Online.
25 February 2008 .
Perhaps I should probably start doing some market research, because I'm not sure who I'm writing to in these postings and as I reread some of what's here I still suspect that it shows. I hope I'm not in the Blair Babe school of New Labour pedantry, which seems to assume that none of you are quite as clever as I happen to be; but sometimes I don't know quite what level to write at - not everybody knows about London, or for that matter about, say, banking, but on the other hand I don't want to seem patronising. I been thinking about this because I've had a steady trickle of visits in the month I've been online, some of which give their country of origin (UK, Europe, US, Canada, Seychelles and Brazil so far, which seems pretty good for a first month and which, for me, is quite exciting) and some of whom have returned. [My only visitor from Russia, who I don't think came back, asked me what all this rubbish was - but I think (and hope) it turns out that he thought it was a music site. I trust that's not what everybody else has been looking for, too...]
Anyway; as for my thinking, I'm trying to find a balance: for the time being, since I've taught teenagers in a few countries, I'm sort of pretending that I'm trying to aim the content at a bright teenager.
I'm thinking about my research, too, which I'm afraid is pretty well none. This writing is supposed to be a hobby, albeit to a serious purpose, rather than an obsession, and I do have a life to lead: but I'm not sure how clever it is to express opinions on all sorts of topics which may be doing little more than betraying my own ignorance. But then, it is my site.
On Balance.
25 February 2008 .
Capital punishment, identity cards and the databases which go with them, DNA databases, whole-population databases of children, secret trials in the family courts, torture of terrorists when there is a real and imminent danger of an atrocity against civilians, police 'creativity' in response to known (by the police) but unprovable major crimes, surveillance cameras, phone-tapping, entry to people's homes.
These all have this in common, that for each 'procedure' there is a body of society which wants it imposed, allowed or tolerated. This is because they also have in common that their implementation brings or would bring benefits - greater security and safety or more fully informed and therefore (hopefully) appropriate action.
Only the secrecy of family courts and the widespread use of cameras are accepted and substantially implemented at present. At least some of the databases are likely to become so before long. Phone-tapping and entry to private homes have taken place under strictly controlled circumstances, but those controls are disappearing fast.
Unfortunately, what these procedures also have in common is that they are all dangerous - too dangerous to be left in the hands of individuals, too dangerous to be 'disseminated' in such a way that individuals can take advantage and/or too dangerous to be left in the hands of small groups or lobbies without very powerful supervision. [The family courts scandals which keep popping up, such as that of Ms. Mason (On Secret Trials, Classified - Justice, 23 February) are the terrible result of the lack of external supervision].
There has to be a stable balance point for any of society's sanctions. Sometimes, as with the death penalty, torture, police creativity, that point is at one extreme of the spectrum of options; I hope we stay there. Sometimes, as with the family courts and surveillance, I think we've failed to find a workable balance.
My point? Only that these procedures all have a positive and a negative side to them, and as many people as possible have to show an interest or they will sooner or later be abused.
Just as we have to show an interest in the balance between liberty and security - or risk losing both.
I Don't Think I'm Into Dirigisme...
23 February 2008 .
A couple of times in these postings, I've called myself a collectivist. Now I've been told this means that I must therefore be dirigiste.
In a recent article I saw, which I wish I could dig up now, there was a suggestion along the lines that liberalism without social democracy becomes licence, and that social democracy without liberalism leads to a suffocating regimentation - in other words, that we need both in balance.
We need labels, I suppose, to give us some common framework to understand what we're each talking about; the problem is that they so quickly move from being descriptions to being definitions. I don't like the way that one label then comes to imply either the inclusion or exclusion of ideas which may be differently labelled. I've always thought of myself as a liberal, I've always thought of myself as being a social democrat, and I've never seen the two as being anything but elements of my self-image - supporting, balancing and moderating each other. I also think of myself as a socialist, but with more care, since socialism in the flesh is so often antipathetic to freedom of thought - I'm certainly not a Marxist, regarding Marxist thinking as flawed in its most basic premises, and I just don't like the SWP or Old Labour 'party discipline'. But the moment I forget myself and say, 'I'm a socialist,' or, 'I'm a social democrat,' I find that conversations become constrained because assumptions are immediately being made about me; of course, although I try not to, I do the same to other people, some of whom don't mind and some of whom do.
So, just for the record: I don't think that a belief in a collective society automatically implies massive state direction. I dislike and distrust the idea of dirigisme intensely - and New Labour's inclination to exactly that is one of the reasons why I'm so inclined to protest against them so much in these postings. Having said which, I also admit that it's too easy to become complacent about one's own political world-picture; perhaps collectivism does imply a degree of dirigisme. I'll think on it.
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