Berkshire stabbings: Not terrorism, just a reaction to "social isolation"

Did anyone actually hear the murderer yelling "Allahu akbar!"? OK, wait... Basic facts first. On Saturday evening, yet another BLM "protest" was held in Forbury Gardens, a public park in Reading, Berkshire, about 40 miles west of London. Nice place, or used to be when Walt was last there, a mere three decades ago. The oh-so-PC head of the local council authority told BBC-TV that the event "was a very well conducted peaceful demonstration", not connected in any way with what happened later.

What was he talking about? Some three hours after the "peaceful demonstration" wound up, a man ran into the park wielding a knife [scimitar? Ed.] with which he attacked "a number" of people, killing three and seriously wounding three more before being "detained" by the bobbies.

Inspector Knacker said there was nothing to suggest anyone else was involved and they were not hunting further suspects. Police and the government said the incident did not appear to be terrorism and they were keeping an open mind as to the motive, which they called "far from certain". But then, further details emerged....

The 25-year-old man detained at the scene was identified by "a Western security source, speaking on condition of anonymity" (so as not to be accused of stoking Islamophobia, no doubt) told Reuters that the man, who remains in police custody, is... wait for it... a Libyan asylum-seeker called Khairi Saadallah. His religion wasn't disclosed, but I think we can safely assume he's a follower of the Prophet.

As to his motivation, Nik Adams, the officer in charge of the police's anti-radicalisation programme said (following a similar attack in April) that social isolation during the coronavirus lockdown could make people more susceptible to being exploited by extremists. "Isolation may exacerbate grievances that make people more vulnerable to radicalisation -- such as financial insecurity or social alienation."

So Mr Saadallah, who at the moment is just "suspected" of murder, should not be pilloried for what he did. He's just another victom of corona virus, which, as is well known, is all the fault of Donald Trump. Case closed.

UPDATE ADDED @ 1245: AP reported this morning that British police have changed their minds and say... now... that the attack is being considered a terrorist attack... after all. They did not use words like "Muslim" or "Islamic" or "jihad". Oh my no!

The Press Association, Britain's national news agency, reported that a Reading man of the same name and age as the attacker now in custody was sentenced to two months in prison last year for assaulting an emergency worker. The same man was also charged last year with assaulting a judge who had sentenced him. Just a coincidence, probably. Lots of people named Khairi Saadallah live in Reading.

Further reading (added 22/6/20): Today the jihadi wannabe's brother told the British meeja that the triple-murderer was only defending himself against a racist attack! Don't you wish, racist English, that you could be the judge, rather than one of the liberals who now sit on the bench?

The case of the disappearing library books

Ed. here. Walt returned early this morning from a tear through les Cantons de l'Est du Québec in the company... dangerous company... of Poor Len Canayen. He dropped on my desk a sheaf of scribbled notes which is going to take me some time to decipher. While you wait, here's something to think about....

Have you visited your local public library lately? If so, did you find any new books to read? I know new books are being written, for I see reviews in any number of publications, excluding the New York Times Review of Books, which I never read. And one could, if one were rich, buy them online. (Finding a bricks-and-mortar book store would be more difficult.) But the selection of new books in our public libraries becomes smaller by the week. I asked a librarian last week, "Have you stopped buying books?" Her dismaying reply was "No. It just looks like it."

At the library to which I refer (not "reference"!), the space formerly given to displays of new books has been turned over to displays of low-brow fiction, e.g. the latest works of Danielle Steele, and of new CDs and DVDs. Books, particularly non-fiction, seem to be on the way out. Print isn't dead. It's just not being made as readily available to the public.

I thought at first this saddening phenomenon might be peculiar to out-of-the-way places like Fort Mudge, but complaints are emanating from other, larger burgs. A WWW reader from Idaho sent us the Letters page of the Wall Street Journal of 7/9/18, with a letter from Nicholas A. Vlisides, of Northville MI, highlighted. Mr Vlisides writes:

As a full-time lecturere at a local university in Michigan, I can confirm Danny Heitman's lament on the elimination of books in libraries ("Don't Close the Book on Books", op-ed, Aug. 30). Last year, to my surprise and dismay, I entered our library in search of texts on economics and found half the shelves empty. When I asked what had happened, the librarian told me that the facility was undertaking a program to eliminate all the books that had not been "checked out" in a long time. Books written by Galbraith, Friedman and Sanuelson were missing. Further, I was told that the same procedure was being undertaken for literature, music, science, philosophy and more. I was keenly saddened and voiced my opinion that books need not be sacrificed for technology, but it was too late.

The elimination of books for internet research is a Faustian bargein and I am sorry for those who may never know the pleasure in the discovery of a book not cited by an internet source. I'm reminded of a Mark Twain quote: "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." Internet literacy isn't a substitute for book knowledge, and our society is the poorer for it.

Well said, sir! I trust you have made your opinion known to your local library board, and encourage Walt's readers to do the same.

Footnote: I hope readers will appreciate my self-restraint in not making a pun involving a two-syllable word for a piece of furniture in which books are kept.

Bad English - Who cares?

In reviewing Michael Savage's Stop the Coming Civil War, Walt complained that the book is poorly written. I called it "not so much a piece of writing as a collage of transcriptions of Mr. Savage's radio rants." That doesn't mean it's hard to read. Quite the opposite. It's written and edited (?) to a level which is comfortable for a reader of the New York Post or National Enquirer. You know. The ones whose lips move as they read.

If I were to calculate Stop the Coming Civil War 's Fog Index, I'd bet that the book would prove to have been edited to a reading ease level of Grade 7. That, sadly, is about right for your average American or Canadian. (It's hard to tell about the Brits. The gap between the educated and uneducated in the UK is much wider than that of English-speaking North America.)

Thoughtful people like Dr. Rudolf Flesch have been bemoaning the decline of educational standards in general, and reading in particular, for decades. Dr. Flesch's seminal work Why Johnny Can't Read appeared in 1955. He argued for a return to the phonetic (as opposed to ideographic) method of learning to read. But instead of teaching people to read better, our "educators" are now teaching people to write worse!

This thesis is put forward -- with qualified approval -- by Dr. John H. McWhorter, of UC Berkeley (where else?) in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham Books, 2003) -- winner of the Walt Whiteman Prize for Longest Book Title of that year.

Dr. John (as I'm sure he'd like to be known) is a musician cum linguist, or linguist cum musician, take your pick. He makes a good case that, in the hippy-dippy 60s, American English changed from being a written language to an oral language, written down the way it's spoken.

An extreme example -- Walt's, not Dr. John's -- would be the comparison of Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960 with Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail `72. Just the style used to denote the year in the two titles makes the point. Since 1965 -- Dr. McWhorter is very precise about the year -- authors have started to write the way Americans talk... for better or worse.

Dr. McWhorter pinpoints 1965, the year following the passing of the Civil Rights Act. That landmark legislation made it suddenly not just OK, but cool to be black. "African-Americans" (a term which would only come years later) no longer had to "act white" or "talk white" to be successful, particularly in the field of popular music. Nat King Cole was out; Aretha Franklin was in. "Black English" or "ebonics" (as progressives like Dr. John would have it) became not just acceptable but emulated by the white majority.

The result? People stopped trying to write stylish, grammatical English and started writing as they talk. This is particularly so with popular music. Try writing down the lyrics of hit songs of the last two decades, and comparing them with the words turned out by even the poorer Tin Pan Alley hacks of yesteryear.

Dr. McWhorter flirts with the notion (if not the word) of the degradation of American English. Walt would say "blackification", but of course that's not politically correct. The fact remains that even educated people, like the Prez, have adopted a less grammatical, more folksy style of speech -- "We's all jes folks heah in Nawlins!" -- and that style is reflected in much American writing, including that of Michael Savage, Ph.D.

Dr. McWhorter does not condemn the degradation of American English. He merely identifies the trend and predicts that it will continue. He's all, like, wassup wit dat? He's OK with it, y'know? Walt is not. Walt doesn't speak (or write) WalMart.

Footnote: Like Michael Savage (Ph.D.), John McWhorter (Ph.D.) could do with the services of an editor and fact-checker. "Dr. Suess" should be "Dr. Seuss", but then, "Suess" sounds more like the way the name is pronounced. Dr. McWhorter doesn't write very well either, but he would probably say that just proves his point.

Further reading: "Book Review: John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing", Wordorigins, June 2004.