the greycat blog

In a deeply stupid move Birmingham City Council has blocked its vast army of employees from accessing atheist websites. The atheist sites are blocked under a policy that prevents staff access to ’sites that promote witchcraft, the paranormal, sexual deviancy and criminal activity’, says the BBC. It’s not quite clear into which of these categories atheism is deemed to fall.

The National Secular Society says the move is discriminatory (and it does look that way, given that sites relating to ’Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions’ are apparently not being blocked, but atheist sites are) and they intend to fight the Birmingham ban. However, this quote from National Secular Society President Terry Anderson caught my eye:

It is discriminatory not only against atheists but they also are banning access to sites to do with witchcraft. Witchcraft these days is called Wicca, which is an actual legitimate and recognised religion.

It’s nothing of the sort: everything about ‘wicca’ from its name downwards is a load of made-up tosh. But then the opinion of a professional secularist on what is or is not a legitimate religion is bound to be a little warped.

An excellent puncturing of the great empty bubble of awe with which the West surrounds China these days: John Pomfret’s ‘A long wait at the gate to greatness’ at the Washington Post. Pomfret is a former Peking bureau chief for the Post and knows what he is talking about.

So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China’s becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China’s missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.

But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.

Too many constraints are built into the country’s social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons — dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn’t travel well — China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

It’s a balanced, realistic, well-informed view, the kind of thing you almost never get from the Western media when it comes to China. Highly recommended. If I may pick up my own trumpet and send forth a few muted notes for a moment, some of my own thoughts about China can be found here: ‘China’s future is not Europe’s past’.

By the way, I see that the Washington Post has underlined certain words and phrases in its online stories: these, of course, are links, but of a particular kind. The idea is that you, poor feeble-minded reader who needs to be led by the hand through everything, can click upon them and be taken to a page giving a list of resources (on washingtonpost.com, of course) related to the word or phrase in question - oh, and you’ll get a nice pop-up ad too, unless you’re careful. Thus, Pacific Ocean is linked in this way, in case you don’t know what that is. This is presumably the web’s wonderful version of the obsolete mind-broadening exercises once known as thinking for yourself and doing your own research. Take warning from any page scattered with those inviting underlinings: guided in everything you do by the notions of pedantic twats, you will ultimately become one of them.

I found Pomfret’s article thanks to a link from a post at Alan Sullivan’s fine Fresh Bilge blog. My thanks to him.

Very occasionally the World Wide Web throws up a jewel of a site; even more rarely, a jewel of a blog. I came upon one such today, the genuine sparkling precious article: JSBlog, ‘The weblog of Joel Segal Books - on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop’.

The secondhand bookshop concerned is Joel Segal Books in Topsham, Devon, and it looks to be a wonderful place (I speak as someone for whom an hour in a good secondhand bookshop is nothing less than an anticipation of paradise). What drew me to JSBlog was a fascinating article on ‘Trains in literature’ which discusses an extraordinary range of rail-related topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including my old favourite, ‘Railway Spine’. Everything’s fully referenced and linked to aid further exploration - start following the links from this article, or any other on this blog, and you’ll be engrossed for hours.

There’s much, much more at JSBlog: to list just a few articles which caught my eye, ‘Further beyond the woodshed’ (on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm), ‘Encyclopaedic thoughts’ (very good on Wikipedia), ‘Predictions’ (on c19th views of the future, and has interesting things to say about Anthony Burgess’s 1985), and ‘Bizarre historical affectations’ (from the Alexandra Limp to the Bush/Blair Power Walk).

Blog Of The Year.

Two new essays are published at greycat.org today (well, the model railway essay is a revised version of a draft that has been around for some time, but the revisions are so extensive that it counts as new).

‘Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950′ - a study of the sociocultural history of railway modelling in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, examining issues from philosophical and historical questions of the nature of leisure to the presence of modernism and nostalgia in model railways.

‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ - in June 2004 Marvin Heemeyer used an armoured bulldozer to stage a destructive assault on the town of Granby, Colorado. Taking this incident as a starting point, ‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ explores the significance of the bulldozer as a weapon, ‘simultaneously tank and tractor, tool and weapon, creator and destroyer’.

Theodore Sturgeon’s short story about a killer bulldozer, published in 1944, is the origin of the term ‘killdozer’. The story was turned into a film in 1974. This flash game is much more exciting than the film. Make sure you have your sound on.

Reporting on the arrest of the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot in the Netherlands, the Wall Street Journal reveals that the Dutch Government certainly has its priorities right in the fight for free speech and liberty against obscurantism and religiously-inspired totalitarianism. Officials from the intelligence service, the interior ministry, the prosecutor’s office and other high-powered state bodies, under the leadership of a senior counter-terrorism officer, to create the top-secret …

Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons.

The title hardly sounds ominous, but the existence of this body is deeply troubling to anyone concerned about free speech (not to mention the priorities of government). The group is intended to alert Dutch officials to any cartoon-related dangers the Netherlands may face (unfunny Garfield strips? No, I don’t think that’s what they mean) and has no censorship role, we are assured. But then, no imposition of censorship is needed when an entire culture is bending over backwards to censor itself.

More at Greenspiece and Gates of Vienna.

‘Dreams’ is the theme of the July 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, the world’s favourite freely-available PDF magazine. I’m in it, as usual, writing about the dark dreams of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

And what fills the author’s dream? Behind his figure gather the monsters of the image’s title: owls, bats, cats, nameless creatures with wings and horns. Creatures of the shadows, half-glimpsed, cluster at his back and flutter about his lowered head. Eyes glow in the dimness, beaked mouths open to utter cries that we cannot hear but the dreamer, perhaps, can. Bats that seem horned like devils circle menacingly, an oversized cat or lynx crouches on the floor, head raised and eyes staring. On the author’s right an owl raises a pen in its talons, inviting him to continue with his work, to make new images, filled with the shapes that emerge from his dreams.

Much more excellent content can of course be found in the July 2008 issue (PDF), available now from the All The Rage website.