BBC2 broadcast a fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary this evening about France’s Islamic headscarf law. It followed a group of young Muslim women about and had them explain their thoughts and feelings about the law and did the same with the teachers in their school. The teachers clearly sincerely believed that the women were the puppets of fundamentalist groups, though this wasn’t the impression given by the film. Rather, their families urged compromise so that they might finish their education. Obviously, much of the impression the viewer gets will have been shaped by the editing decisions of the film-makers. Nevertheless, the message I took was of the profound unwisdom of the measure. The headmaster tried to be pragmatic (by his own lights) and insisted that the law could be complied with if girls wore a bandana in a colour other than black that left the forehead and ears clearly visible. This upset some of the extreme secularist teachers (who saw this as backsliding from pure Republican principle) but didn’t leave the pupils happy either (though they largely complied). But the image that one was left with was of the hapless headteacher stopping the Muslims one by one at the school gate, singling them out, insisting on minor adjustments to their dress (“A bit more ear please!”). Utterly, utterly humiliating for all concerned. And the women themselves, now convinced that they would never be accepted in France. One had ambitions to be a nurse, but the government has now extended the law to medical service. Petty inspection, endless argument about the tiniest details of the garb worn by “those people”: humiliating and counterproductive.
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Chris Bertram
I spent Sunday afternoon at Bristol’s Memorial Ground watching the Bristol Shoguns demolish the Exeter Chiefs and thereby edge closer to promotion to the Zurich Premiership . Great fun, an entertaining performance, a good atmosphere, a diverse crowd, a chance to stand together on the terraces, home and away fans mixed together and exchanging friendly chat, a programme with the head coach’s telephone number there for all to see, a pint of beer with the game if you like, and a ticket you can buy without having to sell the children into slavery … I could go on. I’ve watched Bristol four times this season, Leicester once and England (v Scotland) once. In the same period I’ve not been to a single game of football (though I’ve watched a few games on the telly). Why? Aggressive atmosphere, crowd segregation, surly stewards, beer illegal, expensive tickets, cheating players, arrogant managers, and, above all, the fact that a Russian billionaire has made sure that the whole competition is sown up before the start. The downside? I think few rugby players can do things quite as breathtaking as Denis Bergkamp or Ronaldinho can (though Geordan Murphy can be exciting). But the bullshit and the money around football have just depressed me too much this season. This could be a long-term switch.
Lenin of the “Tomb” has the funniest post on the European holiday offer from FrontPage Magazine: “Tour London with David Horowitz, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Johnson” !! (Be sure to check out the comment from “Luc” as well.)
Justwartheory.com is a very useful set of resources on just war theory maintained by Mark Rigstad of Oakland University. There’s also an accompanying blog .
Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister defeated by Thatcher in 1979 and, amazingly the oldest living former British PM in history, has died at 92. I’m struggling to think of anything nice to say about his tenure as Home Secretary, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or PM. He was a machine politician rather than someone animated by a sense of social justice, and it is noteworthy that the BBC obituary can’t find a single policy achievement worth listing to his credit. His government collapsed in chaos and recrimination and was followed by bitter civil war with Labour. Thanks to him and his ilk we suffered 18 years of Tory misrule. Still, RIP and all that.
I don’t share Mark Kaplan’s philosophical predilections, but he is a sharp observer of blogospheric rhetoric. At Charlotte Street he announces that his perceptive “Notes on Rhetoric” now have their own site . I particularly enjoyed his latest reflections on the “Turkey” ruse:
bq. Turkey – If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)….
bq. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.
bq. At worst, the ‘Turkey’ tactic can also short-circuit moral universality – the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with ‘but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..’; patient criticisms of the ‘democratic deficit’ in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.
I’m woefully ignorant about the geopolitics of Asia, so I’m not going to offer any opinions of my own here. Harry at Harry's Place has been linking to a piece in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash which expresses relief at the EU’s decision to postpone the lifting of the arms embargo on China. In Garton Ash’s piece, China is cast as the bad guy. A different view is put in a fascinating article by Chalmers Johnson which sees American concern about democracy as being merely window-dressing for a policy which is basically about preventing the emergence of geopolitical rivals. Johnson also warns about US encouragement for the remilitarization of Japan as a counterweight to China.
As CT’s resident Rousseauiste, I’d like to pass on the news to residents of New York City (and parts thereabouts) that the Johnson Theater will be staging the first ever US production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's play Narcisse from 7-10 April:
bq. an utterly contemporary drama that deals with the problem of narcissism and sexual ambiguity. The play is about a man who falls in love with an image of himself dressed as a woman and explores contemporary issues of desire, self-obsession and the difficulty of the relation between the sexes.
Enjoy!
I don’t know — and neither do you — if Glenn Reynolds is trying to murder his wife (or if Bill Hobbs is trying to murder his) …. but I do know that I find it gratuitously offensive just to leave the possibility open, just hanging there, for rhetorical purposes. But, whatever … if they can dish it out, they can presumably take it. Read the whole thing.
Watching from the UK, the Terri Schiavo case makes the US look like a very weird and deeply troubled polity. All those homely and patronising sermons about “government of laws not of men &c”, and then the US Congress passes a law to deal with a particular case and to subvert a prior decision of the judiciary, just so that Republicans can grandstand to their Christian fundamentalist base (see Obsidian Wings for the best commentary so far ). And all this signed into law by a President who, when governor of Texas, approved a measure to switch off life support where people didn't have the money to pay any more . I note, by the way, that the so-called “right-to-life” brigade have been pretty free with their use of Nazi analogies on this one. Since any Nazi-comparison (however casual) involving George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, Daily Mail journalists or Abu Ghraib elicits instant howls of outrage from the British-based neocon cheerleaders, I expect we’ll be hearing from them shortly. Or not.
bq. Something the Iranian government and I agree on : I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.
And there’s more …..
bq. I should mention that such a punishment would probably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. I’m not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it’s cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.
Those, like me, who are startled and upset to read Volokh writing like this, might want to visit the website of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty or visit David Elliot’s Abolish the Death Penalty blog .
This post is in Estzter territory, and probably just reflects ignorance on my part, but I’d be grateful for the information from those in the know, anyway. Following one of Eszter's posts recently , I signed up to Movielens and have been dutifully entering my ratings in various spare moments. Like Amazon, Movielens tells me that based on the movies I like I should check out various other ones. Presumably, the program checks the database to see which movies I haven’t seen are highly rated by other people who like the same films that I liked (ditto Amazon for books, dvds etc).
Now here’s my problem. When we all come to such systems “cold” (as it were), the links between our choices provide genuinely informative data. But once we start acting on the recommendations, even chance correlations can get magnified. So, for example, suppose we have three movies A, B and C. Perhaps if we showed these films to a randomly chosen audience there wouldn’t be any reason to suppose that people who like A prefer B to C or vice versa. But if the first N people to go to the expert system happen to like both A and B, then the program will spew out a recommendation to subsquent A or B lovers to follow up their viewing with B or A. And those people in turn, having viewed the recommended movie, will feed their approval back into the system and thereby strengthen the association. Poor old movie C, excluded by chance from this self-reinforcing loop, will not get recommended nearly so often.
I guess the people who design these systems must have considered these effects and how to counteract them. Any answers?
Julian Baggini, writing in the Guardian, reports :
bq. In the newly revised, more accessible edition of the New International Version of the Bible, “stoned” has been changed to “stoned to death” for fear that modern readers may get the impression that the reward for adultery is a big spliff.
Gwydion the Magician (whom I’m guessing from his title must be some kind of pagan) has “issues” with Alaskan Airlines (and quite right too):
bq. Alaskan Airlines, I discovered, does not deign to serve its transcontinental passengers anything resembling a full meal. All we got on a 6 hour flight was a crappy sandwich. The IFE comes as a small portable DVD player that costs 10 bucks. But the particular feature of the Airline that pissed me off was the little Christian verse they include on each meal tray. I know this is America, where God-fearing zealots control the government. But inflicting Christianity on a captive audience of fee-paying passengers is just too much.
Indeed.
This post contains a valuable commercial opportunity for someone, but I’m giving the advice for free. If I were a publisher of art-books, a commissioner of programmes for a channel like BBC4, or the editor of an art magazine or a Sunday supplement, I’d be desperately trying to do something on the photographs of Gustav Szathmary. Szathmary was the lover of the well-known German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany currently has an exhibition of his work. (He was a composer and an inventor of photographic equipment too.) I toured the exhibition yesterday with another academic (and anonoblogger) who, like me, was there for the Social Justice Conference at the GSS at the University of Bremen. We were both stunned by the Szathmary’s portraits of his friends. The pictures, from about 1905, are so natural and lively that — allowing for changes in clothing in some cases — they could have been taken at any time up to last week. There’s hardly anything about Szathmary on the internet (8 hits on google and 9 on allthweb) and the only way you can see any of the photos is by downloading the German catalogue (only a small selection, right at the end of this enormous PDF) or by visiting Bremen. There’s also an html-page on Szathmary , linking to the catalogue, but without any of the relevant pictures.
(BTW, if anyone actually is a commissioning editor etc., reads this page, acts on it, and something comes about, I’d appreciate a free copy or an invite to the opening etc.)
Update: See also Gwydion the Magician’s take on Gustav Szathmary and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler .
UPDATE: See the link from Andrew’s comment below: Szathmary appears to be a spoof character wholly invented by artist Dirk Hennig. Doh!