Sunday, March 21, 2010
Second thoughts
On torture, I remembered waking up this morning that the plains Indians - such as the Sioux - were into torture. In their case - and this a conflation of a film about a mission priest in Canada (filmed, I am reliably informed, in the wrong native American language) and something from a book touching on the plains Indians - part of the idea is to make the subject scream, whereupon you acquire some important part of his spirit. Perhaps the masculine and brave part. With this in mind, Indians were bred to stand a great deal of pain without screaming, so that their spirit went to heaven intact. So torture was nothing to do with extracting information. Somehow, but rather irrationally, this seems to make the practise less obnoxious.
On Weizmann, I have got to a bit where his argument gets into sticky ground. We have got to the late twenties or early thirties of the last century and the Arabs in Palestine are starting to get a bit restive about the volume of Jewish immigration. They are being whipped up into action by agitators and others, such as the English, are starting to worry about their rights. To which the Weizmann response was, how can the rights of a few hundred thousand Arabs be compared with those of a whole people? To which we might respond, how indeed? How do we weigh the rights of the Jews of the whole world against the rights of some Arabs who happen to live in a particular part of it? Of what sort are the rights of the Jews of the whole world?
This day last week, we took our newish kite out for a test drive on Epsom Downs, it being a bright day with a light breeze and the leg being fit for this sort of mild activity. The kite was a regular kite shape, maybe four feet high and three feet across. Went straight up and then more or less straight down. Decided that maybe BH was right and the little black ribbon was intended to tie the two frame poles together and that maybe the addition of a couple of woolly gloves to the end of the tail would give the thing a bit of bottom. Kite then went straight up and stayed up; very pretty thing it was too. Let it out to its full extent and then tethered it to FIL with a short length of our trusty blue agricultural rope. Very easy to let go of kites when concentration slips. He was pleased to be flying a kite for the first time for perhaps 60 years. We found that kites were a big aid to conversation on the Downs, better even than a dog. Every other party stopped to pass the time of day.
We were the most conspicuous kite of the day. Other people might have had more elaborate kites but ours was big and stayed up. On the way back to the car park we found that thoughtful people had impaled a collection of woolly gloves along the railings, against the possibility that a wannabee kite flyer had ventured out without his or her gloves. Which reminds me of the rather impressive occasion when the national formation kite flying team turned out in the mist to mark the death in a road accident of one of their members. 12 kites in formation in the mist was quite an eerie sight, only explained by our stumbling across the widow and asking her what was going on, before we realised what was going on. I don't think we caused any additional upset.
Back home, discovered how difficult it was to roll back up the three ribbons of the tail from the outside in. But managed it in the end. Result reasonably neat.
# posted by Jim @ 2:12 AM 
