Chris Bertram

Since the bomb attacks in London there have been a number of polls which, among other things, ask British Muslims whether or not they thought the attacks were justified. This then provides material for op-ed columnists and bloggers to scale up the number so as to argue that there are {insert large number} Muslims who are prepared to back the terrorists. Having looked at the detail of the latest poll, from ICM as reported in the Guardian (pdf), I’m sceptical about any such conclusions given the strange combination of views apparently endorsed by respondents in Table 8.

Out of 500 Muslim respondents, 26 said the bombings were justified. Of those 26 bomb-justifiers, 7 declared they would vote Conservative if there were a general election tomorrow, 12 were potential Labour voters and just 2 backed the Liberal Democrats. Go figure.

The BBC showed a programme the other day about the history of card counting in blackjack and how the casinos eventually defeated the card counters using facial recognition technology. Having traced suspected card counters to MIT, Griffin Investigations, the agency employed by the casinos, then fed the faces from the MIT yearbooks into their databases. When a face appeared in a casino and the software matched it to a suspect, that person was shown the door. The relevant bit of the transcript:

NARRATOR: It was then that Beverley noticed something unusual. Many of the big winners had given addresses from around the same area, Boston. Then she noticed something else, most of her suspects played only at weekends, and they were all around college age. Beverley made the connection. Could these card counting team members be students at M.I.T.? To find out Beverley checked the M.I.T. student year books.

BEVERLEY GRIFFIN: And lo and behold there they were. Looking all scholarly and serious and not at all like a card counter.

NARRATOR: The M.I.T. yearbooks viewed like a rogue’s gallery of team counters. Beverley now realised she was up against some of the smartest minds in America. So the casinos began to develop facial recognition technology, for quick and accurate identification of team play suspects. The basis for the database were the M.I.T. yearbooks. From the moment a suspected counter entered a casino they could be monitored by the hundreds of cameras on the casino floor. Snapshots could then be downloaded for computer analysis.

TRAVIS MILLER: Each time he moves I try to see which shot is going to be the best for him, that we can use to match him up further down the road. This would be the perfect shot, he’s directly in the centre of the photo, all we see is his face, he’s looking straight ahead in to the shot.

NARRATOR: Facial recognition software analysed the relative position of over eighty coordinates on a suspects face. As individual as a fingerprint this information could be run through the Griffin database of suspected card counters, and an identification made.

I’m guessing that if casinos can do this with MIT students then states and security agencies could certainly employ the same technology to keep anyone photographed at a Hizb ut-Tahrir meeting (or similar) off the London Underground or Heathrow Airport. As soon as a match appeared, they could be stopped.

I hasten to state that the civil liberties implications of any such system are horrendous. But my interest here is in whether it would be technologically feasible. Could it work for a large system? How many false positives and false negatives would there be? Any answers?

It is always a mistake to pick fights with people when you are about to be away from a computer and so will be unable to take part in further iterations of the argument. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the position I find myself in with respect to a post from Norman Geras and Eve Garrard responding to my attribution to them of the view that only the immediate perpetrators of bad deeds can be blamed for those deeds. They deny that they hold the view I pinned on them, and say that I should have seen that if I’d read more carefully. I’m happy to receive the correction.

Now comes the “but” bit ….

Nevertheless, my belief that they hold a view like that was not based only on that single post but on many others, especially concerning Iraq. In particular, Norman has often argued against the view that Bush and Blair should be held responsible for the continuing carnage in Iraq, stressing, rather, that the immediate perpetrators of (most of) that carnage, the Iraqi “resistance” should be blamed and that Bush and Blair should not be. Norman and Eve’s latest post quotes an interesting earlier paragraph in this respect, which counts — as they insist — against my attribution.

bq. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it.

There is, I think, doublethink going on here. Norman wants to tell us that the Iraq war was justified because of the many bad things Saddam did and would continue to do to his people if he remained in power. Critics of the war (like me) want to say that we should also take account of the bad consequences of overthrowing Saddam, including the carnage caused by the “resistance”, the many many thousands of excess dead (see the Lancet report …), etc. Norman and Eve’s restrictive clause enables them to argue that, even if things are actually worse, their worseness can’t be blamed on the initiators of the war, because their actions were not in themselves wrong (because justified by stopping Saddam) and don’t serve to justify the Iraqi “resistance” (agreed, they don’t). In other words, Norman helps himself to an essentially consequentialist justification for the Iraq war, but, faced with bad consequences, uses a non-consequentialist discourse of responsibility to filter them out of the consequentialist calculus. At least, that’s what seems to me to be going on.

On Tuesday night I went to see the Bottle Rockets , supported by Romney Leigh Getty , play at the social club attached to my local RC church. Very good they were too (review here ). But I write not to praise the Bottle Rockets but to wonder how the whole thing makes economic sense. Here are four guys, who have travelled to Europe from St. Louis, Missouri (plus the two Canadians in the support act). They have to meet their expenses, pay their entourage, agent, manager etc. They have to pay the cost of travel. The people who run the club have to break even, etc etc., the bar has to sell enough beer. My guess is that there were 50 people in the audience who all paid 10 pounds (and some of them bought CDs for another tenner). Maximum income for the night is therefore 700 pounds. Sure, touring sells CDs and builds name recognition, but how much difference does it make? Enough? This is the sort of thing which Tyler Cowen has probably got an opinion on.

Following the London bombings, the British “left” pro-war sites are busy drawing “battle lines”. The line they are concerned to draw is between themselves and the likes of Seumas Milne of the Guardian. David T at Harry’s Place goes so far as to call Milne a Quisling. (Given who Quisling was, I think this would make David T a Holocaust denier if the argument of this Eve Garrard post at normblog were correct. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t.)

“Dickhead” and “idiot” are two of the politer epithets I’m inclined to apply to the hapless and unpleasant Milne and those like him such as our regular commenter abb1, but since there are lines to be drawn, and it is important that we do so, I’d prefer not to draw them there. We now know, that there are Muslim extremists in the UK who are willing to kill us in large numbers. If we are to stop them we need a politics that isolates them from their co-religionists rather than providing them with an environment to swim in. That means talking to, and trying to include on “our” side, all kinds of figures from within that community. That means doing what the Metropolitan Police have done in inviting Tariq Ramadan to speak. That means engaging with a whole bunch of people who have repellent views on topics from Israel to homosexuality. We should say what we think of those views, but we should talk, we should include. Because an isolated and frightened Muslim community, unwilling to talk to the police, unwilling to engage with wider British society would provide a place for the real nutters to hide and recruit, whereas a Muslim community with whom bonds of trust exist provides our best means of fighting the crazies. Ken Livingstone has come in for a lot of flak for his meetings with Sheikh al-Qaradawi. Maybe some of it was justified. But Ken, with a political sureness of touch that eludes the bloggers I mentioned at least know both that we need to draw some lines and draws them in the right place: between those who are disposed to plant bombs on the tube and those who can help us to stop them.

Addendum:
Norman Geras and Eve Garrard, in the course of treating us to a lecture on drawing battle lines against Milne et al , also attempt a lesson on blame and moral responsibility. Since I agree with them that the terrorists who planted the bombs are responsible for those bombs and that Blair is not, I am reluctant to quibble overmuch. But as a general rule it seems to me wrong to rule out a priori that those who create the conditions under which bad things are done share responsibility for those bad things. One of their examples concerns rape. Of course rapists are responsible for what they do, but suppose a university campus with bad lighting has a history of attacks on women and the university authorities can, at minimal cost, greatly improve the night-time illumination but choose not to do so for penny-pinching reasons. Suppose the pattern of assaults continues in the darkened area: do Geras and Garrard really want to say that the university penny-pinchers should not be blamed for what happens subsquently? At all? I think not.

This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!

The usual suspects are getting exercised again about the fact that the BBC's guidelines tell its reporters not to use the word “terrorist” as part of a factual report unless it is in the mouth of someone else. Melanie Phillips goes one better and accuses them of censoring Tony Blair’s use of the word:

bq. The BBC’s censorship of the ‘t’ word gets worse and worse. In his statement to the Commons today, the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to terrorism. BBC Online’s account of this speech excised those references almost entirely, with only one reference in a quote to ‘the moment of terror striking’.

Perhaps she should have checked whether Blair speech is reproduced in full on the BBC website , as it is, before sounding off.

From the (not at all anti-American) Daily Telegraph :

bq. All 12,000 American airmen based in Britain have been banned from going near London because of the bombings.

bq. The directive, issued on Friday, indefinitely bans USAF personnel, most of them based at the huge airfields at Lakenheath and Mildenhall in Suffolk, from going inside the M25.

bq. Families of the servicemen and women are being “highly encouraged” to stay away, too.

bq. While Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, was boarding an Underground train yesterday and declaring that “we don’t let a small group of terrorists change the way we live”, a USAF spokesman said the ban was “a prudent measure”. Its aim was to ensure “the security and safety of our airmen, civilians, their families and our resources”.

bq. Westminster city council accused the Americans of playing into the terrorists’ hands.

UPDATE: The ban has now been lifted .

Talking-up the good things about the English national character is all the fashion in the wake of last week’s bombs: stoicism, stiff upper lip, mustn’t grumble, etc. As it happens last week I also read Kate Fox’s pop-anthropology participant-observer account of the English. Funny and well-0bserved in parts is my verdict on the 400-odd pages of Watching the English , though it was getting a bit crass and tedious towards the end. Still, the book has its moments, most of which have to do with class. The most memorable being the ironic-gnome rule:

I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.

But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden—I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….

The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was “ironic” had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or said something like “Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.” and left me to draw my own conclusions.

I had to travel to Oxford last Thursday and stayed overnight, so I was, thankfully, away from a keyboard during the initial reaction to the terrorist attacks in London. Catching up on the online and print commentary, there appear to be just three sorts of response. First, there are the people who point out that, though this was a most terrible day for the victims and their families, Londoners (and the British generally) have put up with terrorist bombing campaigns before, and have managed to do so without launching pogroms. I agree with this and haven’t anything to add to it. Second, there are the numerous people who write variations on the adequacy.org 9/11 standard column : Robert Fisk (an especially bad one in the Indie on Friday morning), Nick Cohen in today's Observer , and so on. Harry's Place is now showering one adequacy-variant with praise for insight and brilliance whilst castigating the other. This is pointless. Finally, there are the “Eurabia”-obsessed nut-jobs who are falling over themselves to tell us that Ken Livingstone, whose speech was excellent , has said and done things of which they disapprove in the past. The Eurabians thereby merely remind us how much they value promoting their nasty agenda above elementary concerns with compassion and solidarity (ditto the egregious George Galloway btw).

[I think the excellent John B probably linked to the adequacy.org piece first]

I blogged the other day about the PledgeBank project, and, specifically in favour of one particular pledge :

bq. I will give 1% of my gross annual salary to charity but only if 400 other people will too.

Time is running out, as this pledge expires on the 23rd of July. So if you thought about it at the time, but didn’t get round to signing on, or would like to now, visit the site.

Surfing around, I found this oldish report of some classes that Steve Earle taught at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago . The class is about the links between traditional music — as found in Harry Smith’s American Anthology of Folk Music — and contemporary songwriting. There are classes on Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Springsteen, Townes Van Zandt, and on Earle’s own songs. There’s also much gossip and general chit-chat. Interesting stuff.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s attempted to write a poem so bad that International Library of Poetry would neither declare semifinalist in one of their bogus contests, nor offer to publish it in an anthologies. She finally succeeded by the device of taking a Miriam Abacha 419-scam letter and introducing line-breaks. The comments thread has now exploded, with the Abacha scam being rendered in many different poetic forms and styles: Shakespearean sonnet, haiku, limerick, Gilbert & Sullivan lyric, Allen Ginsberg ….. Check it out!

There’s been much huffing and puffing in parts of the blogosphere about how development aid always ends up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators, etc. etc. It is good to see, therefore, that (Iraqi) money being spent by the US on the reconstruction of Iraq is being properly accounted for to make sure it isn’t pilfered by nefarious types, that there are proper audit trails, etc. Or rather not. As Ed Harriman explains in the latest LRB . (Hat tip to The Virtual Stoa .)