Blogging as VBA therapy.

Aaaaaargh!

Busily programming macros in MS VBA for Excel. Well, I say "busily programming". What I am of course actually doing is busily getting pissed off while not programming at all because the bloody language won't let me program in it.

I don't subscribe to any of that "Microsoft are evil" shite because of their business practices. I am, however, perfectly open to the idea that some of their bastard programmers are evil as all hell, for the following reason.

In Excel, start recording a macro. Do some stuff. Stop recording the macro. Put the file back exactly as it was when you started. Make no changes to the macro. Try to run the macro. Usually, it works, doing what you did when it was recording. Usually. Why not always? Why have Microsoft's evil Excel programmers set the application up to automatically record code that doesn't fucking work? Bastards.

And another thing.

Sheets("data").Select
Range(Cells(1, 1), Cells(10, 20)).Select

is supposedly just a slightly longer way of writing

Sheets("data").Range(Cells(1, 1), Cells(10, 20)).Select

Officially, those two bits of code have exactly the same effect. And, most of the time, they do. Just most of the time. Now and then, the second one throws up errors. And it's a total bugger trying to figure out where the errors are coming from, because the last bit of code you try to debug is the bit that you know for a fact must be OK because you used it in exactly the same way a few lines earlier and it bloody worked then.

That's better.

Norm is wrong.

Well, only half wrong, really. The first half of this post, to be precise.

OK, first of all, to understand what we're all talking about, read this.

Why does the sight of wounded and bleeding children hurt so much? Because they summon all sorts of archetypal memories. In their thinness and nakedness, the children look like vulnerability itself.

The small bodies slumped in men's arms, hanging there as loosely folded as a length of heavy cloth, are each of them a Pietà, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V, the cruellest moment in any play ever written.

Each carried body is a bitter parody of a sleeping child cared for in the arms of its father, in which every line is the same as it should be, but the meaning of every line is the opposite of what you hope it might be.

To be fair to Adam Nicholson, there is some much better writing than that in his piece, particularly when he's describing his own real experiences rather than fiction. But my first response when I read the bit I've quoted above was utter incredulity: he was getting so engrossed in his literary references that he was failing adequately to describe real events. I'm sorry, but if you can't manage to convey how awful Beslan was without saying that it was like that bit in that Shakespeare play you really like, then shut up. This isn't a fucking English A level exam.

Anyway, Mark Steyn had, I think, a similar reaction to me.

And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions — each child was "a Pieta, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V" — and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators.

Spot on, as far as I'm concerned, but Norm takes issue with it:

Leaving aside that Nicholson does have a reference in passing to at least some of the perpetrators ('The death and wounding of children - by women terrorists, for goodness sake...'), he writes about what happened in Beslan in terms making it quite clear that he's dealing with a horror inflicted by some human beings upon other human beings ...

'Cruelty', 'wrongness', 'terrible irruption of wickedness' - these words carry upon their face that they are about the actions of human perpetrators, and it is a negligent oversight on Steyn's part to level the criticism he does.

No, it's not, because Steyn never said that Nicholson failed to mention the perpetrators; he said that Nicholson failed to confront them. I don't think mentioning someone in passing is the same as confronting them, I don't think alluding to someone's existence is the same as confronting them, and, given the point Steyn is making, these are relevant distinctions to be drawing: the distinctions between those who wish merely to mope about terrorism and and those of us who wish to destroy it. At no point does any of Nicholson's writing give the impression he's looking for a solution. He goes out of his way, in fact, to make it clear that not only is the world full of evil, but that it's been that way for a very long time:

You only have to read the ancient texts to understand that. Psalm 77, written in the Iron Age, more than 2,500 years ago, stares straight at the dreadfulness of things. It is a lament in the face of unapproachable sorrow. ... There is no consolation in [it]. It simply states the cruelty of things

This is not a man looking to solve problems. He's writing about their eternal existence. He lists other examples — Dunblane, Srebrenica, Vietnam — pounding home the idea that Beslan is another particularly dire example of something that is part of human existence, something that doesn't change, something that will inevitably happen again.

Back to Norm:

As to whether or not Nicholson is in favour of 'do[ing] something about' what happened at Beslan, I have no idea. I would venture to say that unless one has a basis for knowing that he wasn't, the default position ought to be that pretty well anyone writing as he did would be in favour of doing something.

Oh, yes, that certainly ought to be the default position, but, as we've seen again and again over the last three years, it isn't. Grief and suffering seem to be the only things that most decent people can agree on. When it comes to doing anything concrete to prevent these atrocities, far too many people are dead set against any action — that, in fact, is one of the reasons we've ended up living in a world in which terrorism's so popular. Norm has written plenty about this himself. Why can he suddenly not see it?


Update:

Norm has kindly posted a response to my response to his response to Steyn's response to Nicholson's response to Beslan. He makes perfectly fair points, of course, but I'm still going to disagree with him.

There are events which are so terrible that they induce in people a sorrow, and a sense of solidarity in mourning, events to which the right immediate response seems to be either silence or solemn lament. Nicholson was writing about just such an event when its ghastly details hadn't even been fully digested.

This is true. But I have a problem with it. Atrocities every bit as shocking and disgusting occurred in the Second World War. Contrary to what many Germans claim, the concentration camps and death camps were known about: my grandmother, in England, certainly knew about them: she promised my father and my aunt that she would slit their throats before she'd let the Gestapo have them. And people regularly woke up in London or Belfast or Birmingham to discover that half their neighbours had been killed during the night's blitz. And the response of my grandparents' generation was, pretty much universally, "Let's destroy the bloody Nazis." That attitude is how they won. Nicholson's attitude is how they could have lost. Nicholson isn't wrong or unreasonable, and his attitude certainly isn't inexcusable: of course we can all understand how he feels. But his attitude, especially insofar as it's shared by a significant chunk of the population, is problematic.

Between us, J and I have already set out more than enough by way of textual exegesis on this single newspaper column.

Ain't that the truth.

Deportation.

Supporters of immigration (or, more accurately, opponents of any sort of immigration control) often claim that immigrants are a great benefit to the culture of the nation. And, as it happens, I agree. Which is one of the reasons why I think that deporting those people who aren't is such a good idea: by allowing these bastards to stay in the country, we undermine the case for immigration for everyone else.

Omar Bakri Mohammed, the spiritual leader of the extremist sect al-Muhajiroun, said that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.

...

"As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be okay."

It's OK to use children as shields, then. This man believes that British troops have been practising terrorism in Iraq. Can he point to a single instance of British soldiers firing at Iraqis from behind children, I wonder? If he could, would he say that it was OK?

If we don't chuck such people out of the country, and soon, the electorate will, rightly, succeed in persuading Parliament to shut our borders. And then we'll be in the lovely situation of turning away refugees because our immigration officials are too damn stupid to distinguish between them and the people they're running from. I mean, look:

The father of seven came to Britain in 1985 after being deported from Saudi Arabia because of his membership of a banned group. He has since been given leave by the Home Office to remain in Britain for five years but the Government is reviewing his status.

What? What? Saudi Arabia is the world's chief exporter of militant Islamist terrorism. They have gangs of religious police roaming the streets to make sure that no-one ever breaks any extremist Islamic rule, even if that means dying. They cut off the hands of thieves; they give people the lash for drinking alcohol; they treat women as property. And they regard Omar Bakri Mohammed as such a dangerous extremist that they deported him. You'd think that this fact might give our immigration people a teensy bit of a clue about what he's like. Nope. They reckon it's such a tough call that they're giving themselves five years to work it out.

He gave an interview yesterday to promote a "celebratory" conference in London next Saturday to commemorate the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Keep immigration alive: chuck terrorists and their supporters out of the country.

"But what about British citizens who support terrorists?" I probably hear you cry. Yeah, chuck them out too.

A secret society that I wish to join.

These guys look like my kind of people.

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement.

... the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

OK, admittedly, I know virtually nothing about these guys. They're probably French, they might be maniacs, and I don't much like Paris. But, then again, looks like they don't, either: if Paris were so great, they'd stay above ground and enjoy it. I like darkness, I like caves, I love the cinema, I love restaurants. So, if any of you wonderfully creative troglodytes are reading this, well, I'd love an invite. Discretion guaranteed.

This is an interesting detail, I think:

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

Then:

[A group,] identifying itself as the Perforating Mexicans, last night told French radio the subterranean cinema was its work.

Those two bits of behaviour just don't tally, do they? "Don't try to find us," and "Here we are! It's us!" I don't think the Perforating Mexicans have anything to do with this cinema. Cool name, though.

Justice.

This is just fantastic.

A bag of rubbish that was part of a Tate Britain work of art has been accidentally thrown away by a cleaner.

The bag filled with discarded paper and cardboard was part of a work by Gustav Metzger, said to demonstrate the "finite existence" of art.

Looks like it succeeded.

Seriously, this is a publicity stunt. The artist intended his work to be thrown away, and, if it hadn't happened by accident, would have arranged it. Who, if not for this news story, would ever have heard of him?


Update:

Come to think of it, even having read the story and blogged about it, I've still barely heard of him. I have to read my own post back to remind myself of his name.

The media and terrorism.

As far as I can see, The Guardian's editorial line is still determined to avoid the word "terrorist", though the atrocity is actually so bad that a few of their columnists are using the word. The BBC have come up with "hostage-taker": factually accurate, of course, though I wonder why they couldn't use "killer", which is equally accurate and, when you think about it, morally ambiguous. If you're willing to use the word "gunman", why not acknowledge what the guns were used for?

So it's good to read this:

One feels ashamed to be an English-speaker. More that 330 innocent people are dead. Most of them are children.

Some were shot in the back as they fled. But the children were not yet buried before much of the media in the United States and Britain began their pointless and predictable ritual of second guessing, and then blaming, the Russian authorities. The same stale misconceptions and misinformation were once again rehearsed. All so easy, all so mindless.

... where is the elementary decency of our media?

Quite.

Timing.

Ah, timing. I rant away about Ikea's dreadful attitude to their customers, not realising that I should have waited a couple of weeks for them to demonstrate just how much worse they can get.

Yes, I went to Ikea last Friday. Why, when I hate them so much? Well, I've always maintained that Ikea is an utterly dreadful shop that sells really excellent products. Unfortunately, I want those excellent products, and no-one else sells them. Grr.

Anyway, first of all, they're introducing a 70p charge for paying by Visa or Mastercard, in an attempt to get more people to sign up to the Ikea credit card. (Amazingly, they are trying another tactic to complement the extortion: some bright spark has realised that one of the reasons no-one was taking their card was that it had an interest rate of about thirty zillion percent, and they have actually lowered it to something normal. Frankly, I can't see someone who displays those sort of thinking skills lasting long in the organisation. Anyway.) Fair enough, you might say, and I'd agree: it may show a startling lack of commercial nous, but they're free to take whatever type of payment they like in whatever way they like. No, what gets me is the way they're advertising it.

As you approach the store, there are teaser posters. "70p! Find out more inside!" "70p. What's it all about?" I paraphrase, but you get the idea. "What 70-pence bargain could be awaiting me inside?" you wonder. Once you're in, you're assailed by an announcement over the tannoy about every five minutes, shouting at you how wonderful it is that you can now pay 70p for the privilege of giving money to Ikea, an activity that was previously free. And the disconnect is bizarre: they're trying to sell this like it's some sort of benefit — at one point, the dreadful announcer says that, as well as the new charge, there are "even more savings" — but they still use the phrase "Ikea imposes new credit card charge on customers." Imposes? Isn't that a bit negative? Weird.

And then I got stuck in the lift. That's a first for me. It was only for a few minutes, so I can't really fault Ikea's emergency lift-opening response times, but there was a rather telling little detail. The security guard who got us out of the lift didn't speak to us. She spoke into her radio, telling someone that the lift was now open and we were out of it, but she didn't say a single word to any of us; not even a "Hello," let alone an apology or an "Are you all right?" She even avoided eye contact. Something fundamental is missing in Ikea's staff training. They just don't like their customers.

Regret versus solution.

As ever, Mark Steyn says it best:

Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use.

...

The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.

But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.

...

The good news is that the carnage in Beslan was so shocking it prompted a brief appearance by that rare bird, the moderate Muslim. Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined, "The Painful Truth: All The World's Terrorists Are Muslims!" "Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," he wrote. This is true. But, as with Nicolson's prettified prose in London, the question remains: So what? What are you going to do about it? If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you're going to have to take a stand.

What happened in one Russian schoolhouse is an abomination that has to be defeated, not merely regretted.

 

Evolution.

Many centuries from now, will there be a distinct species of spider that lives exclusively on car wing-mirrors?

The response to terrorism.

Being, despite experience, a bit of an optimist about human nature, I assume that not all Chechens approve of what happened in Beslan. I'm sure many Chechens would have gladly helped kick one of the terrorists to death. It wouldn't surprise me at all to discover that some Chechens don't even want independence, and rather like being part of Russia, and I'm sure many Chechens want independence but don't want it to be achieved through these sorts of methods. And I hope, I really hope, that very few Chechens want to be ruled over by the sort of people who would do this.

And that's what it comes down to, now. It's no longer simply a matter of whether Chechnya should be independent. It's about what sort of people should be in charge of nations. We've just fought a war to get rid of a leader who was, I think it's fair to say, a very similar type of person to the Chechen terrorists in Beslan. He had no compunctions about killing innocent people for political purposes, and we've seen the mass graves and heard the eye-witness accounts of the atrocities that resulted from his rule. And I hope that even the idiot sovereignty-fetishists who don't believe we should ever take power away from evil men who control nation-states can at least agree that we shouldn't give evil men power over nation-states in the first place.

Is it possible to give Chechnya independence without handing it over to these bastards? Well, yes: we could kill them all. But, short of that, no: they're far better armed than your average Chechen civilian. Try to create an independent Chechnya with any sort of reasonable, civilised government, and it would be immediately overthrown and replaced by the terrorists.

This, I think, is what needs to be understood by the usual appeasers who think that there is some sort of solution to this problem that involves Russians being nice to Chechens. Yes, there is, but it is not an alternative to violence. Since the character of Chechnya's would-be leaders is what it clearly is, there is no possibility of peace for Chechnya until those would-be leaders have been destroyed. As long as the bastards are still alive, the only choices you can make concern which group of civilians you want them to target.

In short, the only way for Russia to make genuine peace with Chechnya now (and handing the country over to be run by a bunch of murderers is not peace) is to kill every last Chechen terrorist. Best of luck to them.


Update:

Matthew Yglesias writes interestingly on these matters:

One assumes that, were Chechnya to gain its independence or autonomy, that the vast majority of Chechens would have no interest in fighting a broader conflict. And yet, the jihadis would still be there, and unless the independent/autonomous Chechen state were to demonstrate both the capacity and determination to root them out, the resulting situation would be very dangerous indeed. During the mid-nineties period of de facto Chechen independence, neither capacity nor determination was demonstrated.