Daniel

Longtime readers will remember that there was quite an active debate a few months ago on the subject of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the fundamentalist imam, and his visit to London. There have been a few developments since then. Ken Livingstone (mayor of London, for our non-UK readers) has produced a dossier justifying his decision to share a platform with Qaradawi, out of the apparent belief that this is in some way a substitute for meeting the crowds of outraged Londonders who thought he shouldn’t have. Harry’s Place has a lot of material on whether or not this dossier cuts the mustard; they think it doesn’t.

On a number of issues; apologism for suicide bombers, advocacy of killing gays, wife-beating, etc, it seems pretty clear that Qaradawi is possessed of some fairly horrible reactionary views. This isn’t much of a surprise; to be honest, it was free information which could simply be read off the fact that he is a fundamentalist imam. But Ken’s dossier does contain one important point.

That is, that the particular offence which caused us at CT to come off the fence and condemn him – a statement that it was OK or even required for jihadis to kidnap Western civilians in Iraq – is a statement which Qaradawi denies ever having made. In general, while I can’t emphasise enough that he is not someone who I would ever like to see gaining influence in the UK, Qaradawi appears to have repeatedly, consistently, and at some personal cost, maintained the view that fundamentalist Islam does not impose any duty of violent jihad against the West, and that killing infidel civilians is wrong. This raises a quite important issue as to what kind of fundamentalist Muslim we need to be talking to (I’m trying to talk in general terms here to avoid issues specifically related to Qaradawi; I am not yet sure whether his view on suicide bombers is just the general apologism common throughout the Arab Middle East or something more virulent).

There’s a lot of debate in the Harry’s Place comment threads that I’m not going to try to summarise here, but below the fold is the text of an email I sent to the editors (I was having a bit of technical trouble so I decided to summarise my views in an email. I think it makes sense as a standalone, but you’ll probably need to read this to see what I mean by “David makes a good case”).

[click to continue…]

The Iraqis will be going to the elections at the end of the month, so it is unsurprising that the insurgents have stepped up their campaign of blowing up tanks and chopping off heads. The is an awful lot of rubbish talked about the Iraqi insurgents; a simple look at the geographical distribution of their attacks shows that they unlikely to all be Sunnis or Ba’athists, and they are not targeting civilians in much greater proportion to military targets than we are. Whatever Christopher Hitchens thinks, they are the direct moral equivalent of the Viet Cong; they represent much of what is worst about the human condition, and any future in which they gained power would most likely be outright disastrous, but for all that, to take up arms against an occupying foreign army is not an ignoble thing to do, and I can quite understand why lots of people on the left have been sympathetic to them.

But history has passed them by. Iraq is not Vietnam (or more specifically, Iran is not China) and they have no hope of victory. All they can really do is prolong the occupation and therefore the misery. The time has well past by which anyone with brains in their head could reasonably hope for anything other than swift and reasonably democratic elections, a declaration of victory and for the coalition troops to jump in the tanks, start the engines and stop driving when they see the first McDonalds. Whatever happens, this war will have been a collossal waste of money and life; tens of thousands of excess deaths to create a puppet state. (By the way, as part of their debt relief deal, the Iraqis are currently negotiating a program with the IMF which will involve removing the market-distorting provision of subsidised food to the poor. I do hope that the Lancet will do a study into the effects of that, and that war crimes trials will result). But this is by the by as far as supporting the Iraqi resistance is concerned. Below the fold, I’ve posted a poem by Robert Burns that sums it up better than I ever could.

[click to continue…]

This is by way of a followup to Chris’s comment on Nick Cohen’s article on the pointlessness of providing disaster relief to governments who don’t care about their citizens. I’ve never been a big fan of Sen’s dictum that “democracies don’t have famines” – I’ve always regarded it as being a slogan on a par with “no two countries which have a McDonalds have ever gone to war with each other”. I was originally just going to point out that the only African country which has managed to stay clear of famines entirely since independence is Kenya, which has not been a democracy and leave it at that, but I ended up looking up the original quote from Sen’s “Development as Freedom” and this ended up expanding somewhat into a more general piece on the subject of democracies and developmental states. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to Sen on most of the issues he writes about, and I hope readers will bear that in mind, because it is more or less impossible to resist making a few harsh remarks when you find out that the original quote, from page 16 of the paperback edition of Development as Freedom is, verbatim:

“It is not surprising that no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy – be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in postindependence India, or Botswana or Zimbabwe)”

[click to continue…]

With the disgraceful scenes in Birmingham[1], coming hot on the heels of the blow-up over incitement to religious hatred, it is wonderfuly ironic to ponder the following legal hypothetical.

Apostate Sikhs are very definitely a group defined by their religious views. As are apostate Muslims and heretics or blasphemers in general. The Home Office
FAQ doesn’t mention blasphemers specifically, but it does reassure the atheists and says that the proposed Bill “will also protect people targeted because of their lack of religious beliefs or because they do not share the religious beliefs of the perpetrator”.

It is hard for me to see how the people in Birmingham’s gurdwaras who stirred up these crowds could have done so without taking steps which would at least prima facie have given rise to a case that they had incited hatred against the play’s author. I doubt that specific acts of violence could be laid at their door, but this crowd did not assemble spontaneously, nor did its members become enraged entirely as a result of their independent theological scrutiny of the theatre listings.

Therefore, in rank defiance of almost every newspaper editorial this morning, I submit that the Bezhti affair is weak evidence in favour of the draft legislation, as it seems to me that some Sikh elders in Birmingham have behaved in a highly socially destructive and reprehensible way, that they have most likely not committed any offence under current UK law in doing so, but that their behaviour would have been illegal under the proposed legislation. This doesn’t make me a supporter of the Bill itself, but it’s worth thinking about.

Footnote:
[1]Actually, they’re not really that disgraceful. The theatre has a right to put on an offensive play, anyone who is offended with it has the right to stage a demonstration, and the rozzers have the right to protect the public if that demonstration turns rowdy, which they have declared themselves willing and able to do. The only real failure of the system here was that either theatregoers or theatre managements decided to go all namby about a “riot” in which nobody was hurt and only three arrests were made, all for public order offences. Gawd help us if the Premier League decides to adopt this standard of “safety”. However, the playwright has apparently now received death threats, which are genuinely disgraceful whether or not the people making them have the ability or intention to carry them out.

Let’s try and step on this canard before it grows wings … Oliver Kamm is quoting some writer at Fortune saying something that ain’t true about election betting markets.

The reputation of exit polls was perceptibly if unfairly damaged by the US presidential election. But, as a writer in Fortune magazine points out, another predictor was unambiguously accurate. This was the electronic predictions market: the various websites allowing punters to place bets on the electoral outcome.

As anyone who was watching the CT Election Night Special will know, this just isn’t true. The election markets, on the big day, were more or less exactly as bad at providing us with predictive information as were the exit polls. I think that we may have been the only place recording the intraday fluctuations on the prediction markets (which were massive), so maybe it’s important to summarise the facts.

[click to continue…]

I don’t ask much of you lot, but I’m asking you to read this (yes yes, pdf, they’re not exactly uncommon you know) speech by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England. As well as being one of the UK’s best technical economists, King really is uncommonly thoughtful and insightful when it comes to issues outside his direct area of specialisation (I notice that he thanks Tony Yates in the acknowledgements, who is also a top bloke). This British Academy lecture takes on the concept of risk in the abstract, and illustrates it with a number of examples related to the retirement savings industry. It’s really very good. If you take nothing else away from it, there is one point which is extremely well made; that part of the reason why we have a role for public provision of pensions is that it allows us to spread the burden of longevity risk between present and future generations.

With quite a lot of kerfuffle going on in the UK blogosphere over the changes to the law to create an offence of “incitement to religious hatred”, I thought it might be neighbourly to help John Band out in the rather Sisyphean task of trying to ensure that the debate is conducted in a less frighteningly fact-free atmosphere. To that end, I ask the question; have you heard of Dick Warrington? If you’re having opinions about the racial hatred laws, it would probably be a good idea if you had.

[click to continue…]

I have no real post to go with this headline, but as a service to the British journalists with the thankless job of covering our Home Secretary’s love life (sample coverage “Mark, the Home Secretary is currently suing his pregnant ex-lover to force her to take a DNA test so that he can prove that her older child, as well as her current unborn child, is in fact illegitimate and fathered by him. Do you think he’s done anything unwise?”), may I pass on a fantastic old quote from JK Galbraith:

“Anyone who says four times that he won’t resign, will”

By my count, Blunkett currently has a Galbraith score of 1. I think he ends up staying, but that quote ought to be good for a couple of paras if you’re hard up against it. You can return the favour some time in the future.

Gosh, my pet issues are piling up today! George Galloway won his libel case against the Telegraph.

The week before last I suggested that “Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much.” Well, he won, but he didn’t win small – £150k is a lot of money given that UK libel awards are de facto capped at £200K these days. Basically, I suggested at the time that “much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase ‘there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason'” and it did. The judge decided that the Telegraph had crossed the line between neutral reporting of (after all, pretty damning) facts, and putting the boot into Galloway. This more or less amounted to malice, and the word “qualified” in “qualified privilege” is there to indicate that you can’t use this defence to make statements motivated by malice.

If the Telegraph had won this case, we would have the public interest defence for newspapers established, and the British press would have been that much freer from our ludicrous libel laws. So it’s a bit of a bummer all round.

Galloway’s name is not cleared by this (nor could it be; the truth of the allegations was not an issue in the trial because of the Telegraph’s use of the privilege defence). There are still big questions outstanding over the funding of Galloway’s charities, which are being investigated by Parliament. The really irritating thing here is that the Telegraph threw away a potentially very strong story simply because they could not resist the temptation to throw a load of nasty abuse at a prominent lefty and anti-war figure. This is a lesson which I hope that the pro-war side will pick up (and one I’ve commented on in the past ; it’s simply not on to claim that people who disagreed with you about the specific rush to war in March 2003, did so because they were supporters of Saddam Hussein. That’s not an honest way to carry on the debate, it’s unpleasant and it is, apparently, in the strictest sense, malicious.

Congratulations really go to Tim Lambert, who has been playing a fine game of whack-a-mole with respect to Lancet study denialists. The state of the game, as far as I can see it is pretty much as we left it at the last CT summary; the Lancet editors mischaracterized the 100K excess deaths as civilian, but the study itself is sound science. The only methodological critique I regard as currently having any validity is that the clusters were selected based on 2003 census data without adjusting for population movements since the war; this could have resulted in an overestimate or an underestimate; what I’d call an “unknown bias in an unknown direction”. By Sod’s Law (a statistical regularity), this critique was made in the CT comments thread about five minutes before the post fell off the front page; I’d be very interested in continuing that discussion.

But anyway, another party not usually associated with the blogosphere has entered the fray; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. And their critique is … to be honest, not very good. Detailed comments below the fold.

[click to continue…]

With kids being questioned by the Secret Service over Bob Dylan songs, probably better enjoy this one while’ it’s still legal. It’s a version of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” by Oui 3, the only good British hip-hop band ever[1], a track that I’ve been looking for for about five years and finally found on the Splendid website. “A Break From the Old Routine” is actually their best track, but I haven’t found that.

Footnote:
[1]That is, unless someone on the Lazyweb can point me in the direction of a copy of “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” by Definition of Sound

Lots of fun and games coming out of the Telegraph / George Galloway libel trial, so I thought I might as well dig up the second ever post I did on CT, handicapping the race a bit. I’m not sure that I’ve got much to add to that post, to be honest; even the links seem to still be alive. The Telegraph is going for a defence of qualified privilege, and Galloway isn’t trying to suggest that the documents were fakes, so it is likely to all turn on the question of whether the Telegraph’s journalism at the time was “responsible”. In which case, my guess is that much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase “there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason”. Charles Moore’s trash-talking of Galloway during the period when he thought GG wasn’t going to sue might also come into the equation. My guess is that Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much. A bit disappointing for free speech fans, because it maintains the irritating state of affairs arising from Times vs Reynolds; while the House of Lords has hung out the tantalising prospect of a generalised public interest defence, nobody has actually won a case on one yet.

Well, the Lancet study has been out for a while now, and it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the state of the debate and wrap up a few comments which have hitherto been buried in comments threads. Lots of heavy lifting here has been done by Tim Lambert and Chris Lightfoot; I thoroughly recommend both posts, and while I’m recommending things, I also recommend a short statistics course as a useful way to spend one’s evenings (sorry); it really is satisfying to be able to take part in these debates as a participant and I would imagine, pretty embarrassing and frustrating not to be able to. As Tim Lambert commented, this study has been “like flypaper for innumerates”; people have been lining up to take a pop at it despite being manifestly not in possession of the baseline level of knowledge needed to understand what they’re talking about. (Being slightly more cynical, I suggested to Tim that it was more like “litmus paper for hacks”; it’s up to each individual to decide for themselves whether they think a particular argument is an innocent mistake or not). Below the fold, I summarise the various lines of criticism and whether they’re valid or (mostly) not.

[click to continue…]

I promised I’d have plenty of unsolicited advice for the Democrats this week, and I do. However, after reading round the web about all the things that are wrong with “the Left” and how they’re not in touch with the “real America” (no links provided, they’re not exactly hard to find), I got a bit depressed. So I invented this game to cheer myself up.

I call it “Six Degrees Of This Googlewhack Is A Serious Problem For The Left”.

It kind of combines the fun of the Kevin Bacon game with the fun of Googlewhacking, and at the same time helps you generate yet more self-flagellating theories about the election results, which must be fun or people wouldn’t do it so much.

The idea is that, it seems, you can connect almost anything to the phrase “this is a serious problem for The Left” in much less than six steps of argument. So the name of the game is to start with a googlewhack from the site and end via a chain of fairly close reasoning with an argument that the Democrats need to consider your googlewhack in depth.

Thus, gesticulate tatties is a googlewhack (or at least it is until this page gets indexed), and it links to the Life and Opinions of Sir Andrew Wylie. On page 14 of this document, there is the line:

No man in his senses would ever expect to see an ignoramus bush, far less a doddered holly-bush, take up a pen to write a book

which is clearly an example of an aristocrat, who is British, referring to President Bush as an ignoramus. This is the sort of high-handed patronising attitude that the Real America hates, and is therefore A Real Problem For The Left

Meanwhile, liposome yarmulke not only has undertones of anti-semitism, but the actual googlewhack is to a spam page pushing cheap Viagra. As long as the Democrats don’t have a credible healthcare plan or a definite policy on parallel importation of pharmaceuticals, they will always be the party of Hillarycare and this is therefore A Real Problem For The Left

And so on. There is perhaps some small kudos for any CT reader who can find a Googlewhack so obscure and nonpolitical that it can’t be used as a stick to beat the democrats with. There is also slightly more kudos for anyone who spots an “in the wild” application; a breast-beating “death of the Left” essay that looks like its original kernel was a googlewhack. Have fun.