The Verse

Sometimes I’m able to complete The Times cryptic crossword, and sometimes I’m not. Yesterday was okay, but I was far from sure about 22 Down:

Sort of sound was weirdly going round the church (5)

“was weirdly” looked like an anagram, and church is likely to be either CH or CE. And anyway, the solutions to other clues gave me the pattern S – H – A.   So it looked very much as though the answer was going to be SCHWA. But I’d never heard of a schwa. Could it be some sort of Inuit fjord, or something like that? And so I looked it up. The schwa, I have learned, is an indistinct vowel.

And that brought back a whole load of stuff, going back to the days when, as a 12 year old, I was drilled in the scansion of Latin verse. I hated learning Latin, and was not very good at it. In fact, I was terrible at it which was bad news for my father.  When I sat for

The Voice

Australia’s Labor government is proposing to hold a referendum on what is called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. We do not know the details of how it is supposed to work, save that it is supposed to “provide a permanent means to advise the Australian Parliament and Government on the views of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on matters that affect them”.

But there are a couple of things that we can say with confidence. The first is that it is an initiative designed to provide very considerable benefits to the aborigines (sic) – a hundred or so in number – who purport to represent aboriginal people generally:

As for the far greater number – ¼ of a million or so – who are more typically aboriginal:

well, not so much.

We can also say with absolute certainty that the whole scheme is, by its very nature, racially discriminatory. There are some who say, of course, that racial discrimination is absolutely fine as long as it is white people who are discriminated against. That is a view. And given the undoubted fact that aboriginal people do, on the whole, find it much harder to do well in the context of a modern Western democracy, there is a moral case to be made for it. But it does make a mockery of Australia’s racial discrimination laws.[1]

Scottish Hum

Views vary about Humza Yousaf, who has just been appointed as First Minister of Scotland.  But on one thing, there seems to be pretty widespread agreement: he is utterly incompetent.

His election by the Scottish National Party – by very slender margin – appears to be a question of the least of other evils. Kate Forbes is a social conservative, and Ash Regan is as mad as a March hare.

Bust

Dominic Frisby is an interesting fellow.[1] He recently liniked a post by someone called J Saranac called Dispelling Beauty Lies. Trusting Dominic Frisby’s judgement, I had a look.

It is indeed interesting, although I think many will find it challenging. There are really three aspects of what is being argued:

• that the considerable majority of men feel the most sexual attraction to women with large breasts;
• that society, both men and women, regularly lie about this;
• that women with small breasts who undergo surgical enhancement achieve significant increased happiness as a result.

For the first proposition, the post relies upon a surprisingly wide catalogue of evidence. The idea that men prefer busty women has always been around, of course, as a bit of a joke. But the post suggests very good evidence that it is far more than that. There are around three quarters of men hanker after women with at least a D cup breast size. Including men married or partnered with women with a much more modest breast size. The evidence presented covers stuff about which I know precious little. I did not know, for example, that sex dolls were real thing. I knew, of course, that they used to be blow-up dolls: wholly unrealistic balloons. But now, I see, there are much more realist options on the market, including models with a certain amount of AI. I will not go into details here; you can look it up yourself if you want to. Other evidence covers everything from thousands of years’ old sculpture to modern porn.  It may not be your thing. But like it or not, it seems that there is indeed really quite a lot of evidence that what men want is women whose breast and hip measurements are quite a bit bigger than their waist measurement.

In and Out

Migration policy is complicated, of course. In the past, nations like the UK and Australia have benefited hugely from immigration from all sorts of people, sometimes fleeing bad stuff, and sometimes simply looking for good stuff. Then again, excessive immigration is clearly disastrous.

Will the UK follow suit? The blob says that rejecting – out of hand – everybody who arrives by small boat is unworkable. They are clearly wrong in fact: it worked for another island. Australia. So, like it or not, it clearly is workable.

But here’s a simple point. A while ago, Australia (under centre-right government) cracked down on small boats carrying migrants to Australia, sent them back saying that if they tried it, they would never be allowed to live in Australia. It worked. The people smuggling trade was destroyed and the boats stopped. Australia is now governed by Labor government. This new government has shown no signs of wanting to reverse what turned out to be a very successful policy. Australia accepts many refugees, but on terms set by the government elected by the people. Not by the people smugglers.

Ladies’ Sport

If, in 19^th-century England, it was women who had invented rugby, football[1] and cricket, and if since then, men had hijacked those sports, preventing women from participating in them, then women would have a justified complaint about male domination in them.

But in fact, those sports were invented by men, in order that they could play them themselves. And if women want to have a go, that’s fine (although IMHO it is hardly ladylike for women to play rugby).  Unsurprisingly, the best players, as in pretty much any other sport you can think of, are all men. And so if you want to watch those sports being played at the top level[2], you’re going to be watching men playing them.

Personally, I find it tiresome to hear feminists whinge on about women’s rugby, football and cricket not being afforded equal status with the men’s games.