Was Alfred really Great, was Aethelred really Unready?

I have to say that I'm very attached to the very pro-Anglo-Saxon history I grew up with. I tend to side with Voltaire when he says that History is a "pack of lies we play on the dead". But if we're going to deal in lies, we may as well make it a patriotic

Yep, Mr Logic, Mr look-for-evidence, and I'm happy with a patriotic history. I'm afraid it's a reflection on how much contempt I have for the academic study of history, as compared with Mathematics and some of the sciences.

But we all still love a well-told piece of history. You can still find Michael Wood's "In search of the Dark Ages" on Youtube (why is there no DVD??) and it's an absolute treasure. This evening, my partner and I watched the sorry tale of Aethelred the Unready, and I found myself reading more about this much-maligned King.

It's interesting stuff but it was the work of a few minutes to find yet more examples of historians' woolly thinking. Around the same time as Michael Wood was making this program (and wondering out loud why on earth didn't Aethelred think of doing something other than trying to pay the Vikings off) a historian named Simon Keynes started publishing books trying to resurrect Aethelred's reputation. I came across an excerpt from a book hotly contesting Keynes' view.

The argument is a strange one. It seems that "one popular explanation advaced for Alfred's victory, and Aethelred's defeat is that the two kings faced quite different threats. This would seem a simple case of comparing the evidence for the sizes of the armies faced by both kings. But the ensuing argument in the book doesn't look at any evidence given by Keynes, but says that if we go by the sources, the armies were of similar size, if we discard the sources as untrustworthy, then we are left with "mere speculation".

At which point I start to think that someone has messed up here. Has a whole book been written using mere speculation? Or did the second author simply fail to read it? HE goes on to say

"Alfred's victory, and Aethelred's defeat cannot be explained simply by ... differences in the forces arrayed against them. Rather, we must return to the kings themselves"

And right there we've hit another piece of nonsense. Why must we return to the kings themselves? The story of Aethelred's reign is the story of appalling internecine struggle, which must have crippled any attempts to form a united front against the Vikings. Of course, Aethelred may have been a failure at keeping his various leaders on-side, but once again we're left with the phrase "mere speculation" - which seems to be the hallmark of every piece of academic history I ever study. There is endless listing of "supporting" evidence and not very cogent argument at all to explain why anyone should take this view rather than the other.

Never trust history.

One day busking

Recently I started busking regularly, and after some ups and downs I'm in the middle of a time when every day is a story in itself - a week's worth of interesting events massed together in a morning's work on the street.

Today there was the man trying to sell pyramid schemes, who clapped loudly and alone for about a minute after all my pieces, then the lady with the most beautiful smile of all - reminiscent of someone I loved and lost - came with her son and I played her favourite tune (Ricuerdos del Alhambra) then his (twinkle, twinkle little star) and how she beamed...It felt like the high point of my life. At some stage I played Radiohead's Creep and entirely lost myself in it. After that a man who looked a little like a 40-something rocker walked towards me looking fixedly - I wondered if there was half a chance he was going to throw a punch for some reason - but smiling, who said "Absoutely beautiful! That's years of practice"...and walked off again.

Then my friend Tim, who plays lazy jazz improvisations of hymns and songs on the piano, saying he'd had his best morning ever - pondering whether it was because he'd prayed that morning. The seeds from the tree coming down and pelting me and my guitar case as I played Bach - the German tourist who appreciated same (the Bach not the tree)

The whole month of playing has been full of little stories - a woman who told me In My Life was her wedding song when I played it. Girls probably too young for me leaving notes and phone numbers, waving at me the next day when they see me. My family doesn't make me smile, but these fleeting friends who will many of them go back to China, Korea, Spain, France and Italy next week, these are the ones I think about with a happy smile - for our shared moments.

(post was actually started and mostly written on the 19th July)

Why we don't need feminism

So recently I was talking to a woman who told me about some incident, explaining to me that "this is why we need feminism". Now she's repeating an idea she's seen on the internet, "reasons why we still need feminism" is something of a meme on Twitter and Facebook. In one case, a bunch of naive students from Oxford University decided to have their pictures taken infront of the Radcliffe Camera with placards hung round their neck giving their own handwritten notes on why feminism was still needed. They looked exceptionally foolish.

No doubt men's rights activists have already responded in their own, inimitable fashion. But I'd like to give my own little rebuttal if I can. Here's why we don't need feminism.

• We don't need another rabid political group of resentful crazies selectively picking statistics and then misrepresenting them, claiming they show discrimination when close analysis shows just the opposite, or talking about "patriarchical violence" whilst suppressing research showing symmetry in partner/domestic violence
• We don't need young women to be told that if any man criticizes them, ever, then it is ok to call him a "misogynist" and to never listen to a single thing he has to say - and then to claim innocently that they weren't  implying that he hated women when that is precisely what they were doing.
• We don't need good science undermined by people stupid enough to thing that if you want men and women to be the same psychologically, then the real world will magically be that way.
• We don't need an army of amateur theorists on YouTube finding hidden (actually non-existent) patriarchical subtexts in TV drama, or making the ludicrous assertion that toy-manufacturers would rather sell to just boys, halving their profits, rather than marketing to girls (when the manufacturers have made strenuous efforts to sell to girls). We don't need the same theorist to baldly turn around 30 seconds later and find an example of hitherto invisible marketing to girls, and then complain about how it's being done, without offering any alternative
• We don't, in short,  need every discussion, every aspect of life viewed from the narrow political point of view of writers whose only talent is to foster the maximum resentment between men and women - simply to acquire political support for a divisive, selfish cause.

BBC racial hypocrisy

The BBC seem to have an odd policy of reporting crimes. If the suspect is black or Asian, they will either not report it at all, or not give a description, even until a suspect is arrested, when they might give a name. If the suspect is white (as with the Shipley stabbings recently) they will assiduously report this fact, even after arrests have been made, so there is no need for people to phone in with information.

Look at the grooming scandal, but also a recent case of an Asian girl who was killed (decapitated as it turned out much later). This was reported around the same time as the BBC were making a fuss about attacks on Muslims in the wake of the attack on soldier Lee Rigby. So it may have been taken that this was another such revenge attack - you may have continued to think this until finally the bulletins finally started to give the very obviously Muslim name of the man charged.

Specious justifications

The justification I've heard for this nonsense is that saying "the police are searching for a Muslim seen near the crime-scene" might incite racial tension. There are some obvious problems with this:

• if you apply this rule, you must apply it across the board, otherwise you are discriminating against whites, which is great if you've been lecturing people for years about racial discrimination
• there is assumption that if you one-sidedly describe suspects as "white", there will be no chance of racial hatred. 

Let's take this last point apart. Firstly there is the imbecilic canard that only whites are racist. Secondly, consider the fact that one of the problems with the Muslim community in the UK is the feeling - held by many young Muslims - that white Westerners hate them for their religion, either secretly or openly. It is precisely this impression that makes some Muslims vulnerable to the arguments of radical jihadists, and more likely to join extremist groups.

So in the name of avoiding ethnic tensions, there is every reason to suppose that the Beeb could be making them worse.

Egalitarian hypocrisy

The justification above, of trying to avert racism by not describing suspects as black/Muslim, is initially persuasive for some people. It's the sort of thing that makes my partner nod sagely in agreement*. But bear in mind that it is the same people whose lives seem to revolve around the ideal of equality (a “mirage” anyway, as recently deceased Kenneth Minogue rightly put it) who then start making different rules for Muslims/Christians, or men/women. In other words, they care about equality for specific groups, chosen in a very political way. 

If you wanted a single, succinct argument for leftist hypocrisy then this would have to be it.

* have you noticed the power of giving plausible reasons for things? Some in the pick-up community claim that this is very powerful tool in seduction, and I'm ready to believe them

Technology and insidious authoritarianism

Here's a comment I made on a recent Guardian story about bugging etc. As soon as I used the word "bugging" I recognized that this is not an absolutely new phenomenon. I worry about what happens when you put two trends together:

a) the authoritarian impulses of ordinary people. This includes the impetus to make more and more laws, and more criminal offences (I think 3000 new offences were created under New Labour), but also modern attempts to control what people say and think, which seem to be in vogue in recent years.

b) at the same time, advances in technology mean that it is a thousand times easier to do things far more intrusive than bugging phones. Security services can look at emails, texts, records and content of phone calls, on a massive scale. They can certainly amass more information about the people of the UK than a thousand spies and analysts would ever have the time to look at.

This is why the discussion is even more relevant today. It would be quite easy to put in place a database of information about people that could be plundered at will.  All we then need is a sufficiently authoritarian government - and they could misuse it horribly. We'd instantly have something worse than the frightening Stasi of East Germany.

We've been quite confident that such a thing couldn't happen in the UK. But the further the Cold War recedes into history, the less people remember about the benefits of free speech (and one or two other freedoms), and the less we teach our children, the more political of whom now enthusiastically spout about what kinds of speech we should forbid - lest particular victim groups be offended. We have ridiculous new "hate speech" laws, as though hate were something that could even be defined, let alone measured or verified.

People are getting more and more confident in the intensely enjoyable game of policing language and thought.  And the technology is there ready to spy on us. Unfortunately, this isn't paranoid, it's the way things are going.

Lego for girls scandal!

You will think this is a small matter, and you will be wrong.

For years, it seems that more boys than girls have played with Lego, especially after the age of 4 or 5. This desn't seem like the most earth-shattering news, nor does it strike me as an urgent problem to be solved. But for some people it is. I wonder if you can guess who?

Feminists.

Lots of girls begging their parents for Lego would of course mean a huge increase in sales for that company, and make its owners very rich indeed. They have tried 5 or 6 times to make new ranges that will appeal to girls. These tend to come in pink coloured packaging, to be easier to build, and are centred around the social play that girls prefer. (feminists will have to get angry about the continued gender stereotyping if and when girls actually buy the stuff)

Yet members of the sisterhood are so busily looking for signs of patriarchy everywhere that they SERIOUSLY believe that the makers of Lego don't want to sell their products to young girls. These are probably the same people who think it is insidious social programming of some sort that is forcing young girls to choose My Little Pony instead of Star Wars toys.

I think these people belong in a secure psychiatric ward. Many of us laugh it off as an unimportant piece of lunacy. But this kind of thinking is everywhere. The sad fact is that not only women but also many men accept this sort of nonsense and repeat it with a straight face (then wait for approval like a good dog). Women 'harness the power of Twitter', destroy free speech on Facebook, get YouTube videos that they don't agree with banned on dubious grounds. They want to control the language we use, they are even starting to suggest in some countries that anti-feminist writings be censored. What I'm writing could one day disappear from Google searches, because a deeply stupid group of individuals feel threatened by my not agreeing with them.

This is how free speech dies. It's all justified by the same political rhetoric that persuades grown adults that toy manufacturers are more interested in maintaining a mythical 'patriarchy' than they are in selling more toys or keeping their shareholders happy.

Trying to understand the EDL

This is one of those things that one feels afraid to talk about - therefore we probably should do so.

We've seen some ugly behaviour, from people associated with the English Defence League, in response to the Woolwich murder a few weeks ago. There has been anger in the UK press about this. But I wonder if members of the EDL may in fact have a good deal in common with those who are seduced by radical Islamism.

  a) they are often poor, young men with a grievance,
  b) they think that society has sold them down the river,
  c) they have a prejudiced fear of each other, which is encouraged by politicians

When you start to look at the differences, you realise they are actually just different kinds of alienation. Young Muslim men have become or been made so conscious of their religion, and of the colour of their skin, that they sometimes don't know whether they are imagining prejudice, or whether it's really there. Perhaps they resent this effect on their lives as much as any single, mindless act of racism.

Having talked to many Muslims, I can't escape the impression that some cultivate a 'seige' mentality, this old and rather dangerous idea that the Christian (or godless) West has got it in for them, so Muslims have to stick together. It's dangerous because, as we know, us-and-them distrust tends to breed the same attitude in reply*

We're lectured by the Guardian newspaper on a nearly daily basis about how this must feel. But, oddly, noone bothers to imagine what is fuelling EDL members' feelings. These are humans beings, after all, and it won't help anybody to just dismiss them out of hand. Indeed, it's rather strange that we're told to sympathize with hackers-off-of-heads and to vilify another group for prejudice. I can't speak for EDL members, but here's a first attempt.

• They and their fathers and grandfathers never agreed to the huge influx of immigrants into the UK, and those without work may wonder why so many are being brought in to do the few remaining jobs. Around 2.5 million people are unemployed in the UK, and there are apparently around half a million job vacancies.
• They also have a perception that the immigrants have brought a whole lot of trouble with them, and many headlines about grooming scandals, bombings, failed bomb plots, and now beheadings just reinforce that belief. They've seen a way of life crumble and die, replaced by uncertainty and fear. They are then told that even to mention any of these feelings in connection with immigrants is disgusting racism. It's not surprising that they feel abandoned by the UK ruling elite.

These are just different reasons for both groups feeling alienated. Politicians know that if they encourage these feelings of alienation, they will be able to exercise influence over these young men. 

I will never join either group, but to self-righteously understand one group and vilify another is to take sides. It is not impartial journalism or analysis. If anyone reads this, I imagine I will most likely be accused of 'hatred' for even daring to think about the EDL, but that would just be an indication of how stupid we're being about this issue.

*after 9/11, an angry young man went on Channel 4 news saying that an attack on one Muslim, was an attack on all his brothers - perhaps as justification for what had happened. The presenter, Jon Snow asked what about the Muslims who had been killed in the twin towers, but the young hot-head ignored him