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2007-07-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

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Coyne, Dawkins, and religion

2006-09-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

Telic Thoughts is predictably unenthusiastic about Jerry Coyne's review of Frederick Crews' Follies of the Wise. Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels is as predictably excited, as is PZ Meyers.

I'll set out my own, all-too-predictable, stance on the review below. Mind you, the review, not the book, which I have not read. Were I too read it, I suppose I would nod along with mirth at Crews' takedown of the poststructuralist theorists, read the sections on Freud with great interest, and the sections on religion with vehement disagreement. Here, I'll deal with the latter.

The first problem which I have with Coyne's review is, well, empiricism. Coyne quotes Crews as below:

The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is, simply, empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith or privileged “clinical insight” or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which all other contenders are subjected.

But this surely is untrue. Taken as such, it would invalidate more than half of academic disciplines, including mathematics - to which modern-day physics owes quite a bit. The devil's in the word "evidence". Mathematical truth is established without any recourse to empirical evidence, and the role of empirical evidence in philosophy and metaphysics would be, I would deem, quite problematic. In the hermeneutic, humanistic disciplines, including my own (historical linguistics), empirical evidence plays a very different role than it does in physics. Of course, the correspondence of propositions with empirical evidence is only one way in which they are measured. Their logical coherence, parsimonity, and other internal criteria are other ways to measure scientific propositions, and they grow more important the less experimental and empirical a discipline is.

And this is where Coyne (at least) goes wrong in as far as religion is concerned:

Regardless of what they say to placate the faithful, most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world. Supernatural forces and events, essential aspects of most religions, play no role in science, not because we exclude them deliberately, but because they have never been a useful way to understand nature. Scientific “truths” are empirically supported observations agreed on by different observers. Religious “truths,” on the other hand, are personal, unverifiable and contested by those of different faiths. Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.

But religion is not completely separable from science. Virtually all religions make improbable claims that are in principle empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science: Mary, in Catholic teaching, was bodily taken to heaven, while Muhammad rode up on a white horse; and Jesus (born of a virgin) came back from the dead. None of these claims has been corroborated, and while science would never accept them as true without evidence, religion does. A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.

There is much to criticize in these passages. Basically:

1) Supernatural events are excluded deliberately in science. This is basically what methodological naturalism is about. Originally the principle may well have been adopted (in ancient Greece) because it was a much more fruitful way to understand the world than supernaturalism. I do not deny it is. But it does have the status of a principle, rather than a pragmatic decision.

This does not mean that supernatural events may not be investigated as science. But science cannot but investigate them as natural, albeit anomalous and perhaps inexplicable, events.

Essentially, the scientific enterprise assumes that the universe is governed by a small set of natural laws. Its success is testimony to the likelihood that this assumption is correct. Of course, it remains a metaphysical assumption, which cannot be ultimately proved by science. I should crankily remark here that this is quite a different thing from saying that "science is just another religion".

"Supernatural" events can be either subsumed under those ultimate laws, or science cannot be fruitfully applied to them at all.

Now, let's come to miracles. I would venture that a putative miracle may be observed but may never be scientifically explained except in a naturalistic fashion. Miracles, as acts of Gods that, for a moment, break the regularities and order of nature that science is concerned with, affirm those regularities as much as they break them. Otherwise, they would not be miracles. It follows that a scientist who understand this can quite well combine a belief in miracles with a scientifically responsible approach to the regularities he is concerned with as a scientist. There is no conflict here.

Mind you, I do not believe in miracles. But my problem with them is theological rather than scientific: I regard the order of the universe, the regularities and lawlikeness of the natural world, as a manifestation of God, rather than as something She has created and She can break at will. I am uncomfortable with the idea of God as a cosmic trickster who needs to prove Her existence by making people walk on water or making statues cry. My agreement with some key religious propositions (notably, the existence of a Deity) does not mean I agree with all manifestations of religiosity, or that I would regard religious narrative as anything else but metaphors - some more apt than others - made by men.

Of course, the above probably means that I am, at bottom, a rationalist rather than an empiricist. Guilty as charged.

2) Religious truths are not necessarily personal, unverifiable, or inadmissable to inspection by others. They may not be empirically verifiable - but neither are the claims of most of theoretical linguistics, or indeed philosophy. That does not mean they are not verifiable. Coyne seems to rely far too much on mystical, personal revelatory experiences, which are not by themselves representative of religion as a whole. There is a whole tradition of Christian apologetics in which arguments not reliant on personal experience are relayed. One can accept or reject the validity of Anselm's ontological argument - but exactly the fact that one can accept or reject it means that it is open to intersubjective inspection, and measurable by the same standards of parsimony, logical coherence, etc. that can be applied to mathematics, philosophy, and other non-empirical disciplines.

And here's the matter in a nutshell. Uncharitably, one could say that Coyne pits a caricature of religion (mystical, revelatory, personal experience) against a caricature of science (empirical, hard-nosed scientists in lab coats testing their propositions against observable nature). What this removes is the middle field of metaphysics, philosophy, etc. in which religious claims as well as scientific claims can be measured, and can inform each other, without either being able to disprove the other.

It is possible to do worse than Coyne, though. Much, much worse:

What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels work! The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything. What makes anyone think that "theology" is a subject at all?

Take a guess. Who wrote this?. Bingo. Richard Dawkins. Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. Let that sink in for a while.

I should start off here that I highly respect Dawkins' witty and appropriate attacks against Creationism, ID, Postmodernist poststructuralist nuclear physics, and similar pseudoscientific field. I must also say that I appreciate Dawkins' combativeness more than Gould's 'seperate magisteria' viewpoint on science and religion. I disagree with his opinions on religion, but I can still respect his intellectual honesty. That, however, does not make the article I quoted the above from anything but an unbelievably Philistine exercise in ignorance.

I have an unpleasant feeling that the reasoning behind Dawkins' diatribe is something like: "Theology studies God. But God doesn't exist. Ergo, theology is nonsense." It should be quite obvious that the proposition "God exists" does not have to be true for theology to be an academically respectable field (with, may I say, about ten times as long a tradition of rigorous and intellectually respectable work than Dawkins' field, or indeed my own). Denying this would be akin to denying the validity of Greek philology because Ulysses didn't exist, and the Trojan war didn't go quite like that. Regardless of the existence of God, the Bible surely does exist, and has had a cultural impact beyond compare. Biblical studies, with its combination of philology, history and literary criticism, is quite an essential part of the theological enterprise.

I can go farther. The subject-matter of theology is, as I understand it, not so much God by itself and for itself, but the relationship between God and the Universe, in particularly, God and Man. And even this is an important field of research regardless of the existence of God. Because many people do seem to believe that God exists, and modify their behaviour accordingly. The relationship does exist, and can be studied with all the methodological rigor of other humanistic disciplines, even if God does not.

Some time ago I read C.P. Snows The Two Cultures which contains a valid criticism of the smug ignorance of science among the literate and art-loving classes - one that has lead directly to the abuses of physics and mathematics in modern-day poststructuralist logorrhea which Sokal and Bricmont so effectively lampooned in their Intellectual Impostures.

My reason for agreeing with Snow, Sokal and Bricmont is not a result of any disdain for the humanistic disciplines - rather, it is the result of my love for them, including my own field. For that reason, I do not believe they are served by vain claims to authority based on abused of mathematical and hard-sciences vocabulary, or indeed the "permanent revolution" and disdain for tradition of Kuhn's second-rate academic epigones. And hence, I would shudder what the Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science would have to say about such disciplines as linguistics, history, philosophy, and the like. As we have indeed no airplanes, computers, whaling sonars or indeed bombs to point to as our achievements.

Lately I more and more begin to feel that the smug, Philistine and ignorant attitude towards the humanities exhibited by some public scientists such as Dawkins has so far escaped a very timely and justified criticism. Perhaps Dylan Evans could step up again?

Grand Inquisitor Merlijn, Witch-Priest of the Forces of Darkness

The Pirahã and the Bicameral Mind

2006-09-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

Currently reading Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's a fascinating and radical book. According to Jaynes, consciousness - what he regards as an "analog space" in our minds in which we can imagine ourselves doing different things than we actually do, weigh probabilities and alternatives, etc. - is a quite recent development. Recent being as recent as 1200 BC. Before that, according to Jaynes, part of what is now our consciousness was "externalized" as hallucinated voices and apparitions (Gods) telling us what course of action to take in times of stress. Schizophrenia would be an atavism - a return to this previous stage, which Jaynes dubs "bicameral" - essentially the right hemisphere of our brain "tells" the left what to do, which is subjectively experienced as hallucinations of voices, of spirits, or gods.

Jaynes builds his case on, among others, examining epic poems such as the Iliad and the Odyssei, pinpointing the former's lack of "mental" vocabulary such as 'to think, to contemplate' and contrasting the actions of the protagonists of the Iliad with those of the much more individualized Odysseus of the latter poem. Without going into whether his case is compelling (it does seem so to me, but I lack the expertise to really evaluate it), a problem does seem to be the fact that human beings essentially spread all around the world tens of millenia before Homer. The ancestors of the Australian aboriginals entered Australia as early as 50,000 BC. Briefly, if consciousness is much the same around the world, the most parsimonious hypothesis would be that it arose while ancestral humans were still living in a restricted area in East Africa, not much later than 100.000 BC. If modern consciousness is as recent an innovation as Jaynes says it is, we would have to find remnant populations with the earlier "bicameral" consciousness somewhere on the planet.

But perhaps now there is anthropological support for something not quite Jaynes' bicameralism, then at least something broadly similar.

A year or so ago, a linguist called Daniel Everett caused an enormous stir by publishing a paper in Current Anthropology called Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the
Design Features of Human Language.. Everett claims that, in many ways, the language of the Pirahã, a small indigenous tribe of the Amazon region, differs from anything else. Notably, Pirahã has no numbers, and no ways of denoting quantity: "one" may be the same word as "small" or "a small pile", "two" the same as "big", "big pile", and that's it. Also, the Pirahã language has one of the simplest phonemic inventories in the world - though the verb system of the language appears to be highly complex. Finally, the language appears to do without colour terms and without syntactic recursion (i.e. "I know that you know that he knows that..." constructions).

So briefly, the Pirahã language would force us to throw out a lot of things that were once thought universal to human languages. For this reason, Everett's research was met with incredulity among linguists - a sample of which may be found here.
Everett defends himself against charges of either being hoodwinked or perpetrating a linguistic hoax here.

I find it hard to believe that Everett was either conned by mischievous natives, or indeed is hoaxing. He lived among the Pirahã for all in all seven years. Quite some investment of time in a hoax. Rather, the incredulity with which his research was met reflects the radical nature of it.

Back to the point: some of the claims Everett makes about the Pirahã culture are even more amazing, in my opinion, than the linguistic claims. The one that gained most media attention was the apparent inability to count: being well aware of the possibility that they were cheated by Brazilian traders, the Pirahã asked fieldworkers to teach them to count - an effort which appears to have been totally unsuccessful. More strangely, the Pirahã have, according to Everett, a strong cultural taboo against talking about anything not within their immediate sphere of experience. No creation myths, or epic stories of any kind - or indeed no art of any kind. And finally entering bizarre territory: according to Everett in his Current Anthropology article, the Pirahã, despite any lack of actual religious belief or myth, do see forest spirits. Meaning, they see forest spirits. Everett recounts being woken from his tent one night by shouting and hollering - and found the whole tribe gathered at the river side, shouting at something on the other side. When Everett inquired what it was they seemed to upset about, the Pirahã incredulously asked whether he could not see the forest spirit that was obviously on the other side.

All of this is far from the "smoking gun" for Jaynes' hypothesis. Jaynes regarded a total lack of deceit as a hallmark for the "bicameral" mind. The Pirahã seem to be well enough aware of the possibility of being cheated in trade, and, by Everett's account, are very humorous, joke-loving people. But the apparent restriction of any communication to the immediate sphere of experience, and the actual, externalized perception of forest spirits, rather than imagining them, or divining their workings from inanimate nature, would, if indeed valid, at least bring to mind Jaynes' thesis.

The controversy that Daniel Everett caused makes it pretty sure that the Pirahã will receive visits from linguists and anthropologists trying to verify his claims. If indeed they are verified, perhaps Jaynes' thesis on the origin of consciousness, or parts of it at least, might receive new attention as well.

Merlijn de Smit

Sympathy for the Devil

2006-08-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

I am strongly considering casting my vote for the already infamous Dutch "pedophile party", the PNVD.

Mind you, I disagree with most of their program. Though I cannot see how the world is going to end if the age of consent is being turned back to twelve - the Netherlands did fine with that for decades, and Spain still does. For me, it's mostly their standpoint on immigration, if you believe it. In this as well as in the rest of their program is well, the PNVD are the true heirs of Dutch Libertine - cum - Anti-immigrationist Pim Fortuyn, as opposed to the hopeless political flotsam that carries his name.

But they do have a point about an out-of-control hysteria against anything even faintly connected with sex and children. A civilization which does not respond with outrage - utter, blind anger and outrage - against a 200-year prison sentence for possessing 20 (twenty) kiddie porn pics can be said to be slightly out of whack on this particular issue. The outcry that the PNVD has caused in the Netherlands and abroad - when what they want is basically to turn the clock back to the 1980s in as far as sex legislation goes - is part and parcel of this hysteria.

Moreover, I cannot have but respect and admiration for the sheer guts of the three-man leadership of the PNVD. To go straight against the populist mainstream like that, at a time when most politicians attempt to score over the lives of pedophiles by exploiting fear and mass hysteria - that takes considerable courage. One of them already lost his job through the actions of some small-brained vigilante, and another is appealing being booted from his study place.

Policy issues aside, if the PNVD somehow succeeds in creating enough of an opening in the current self-sustaining climate of fear, hysteria, and grievous injustice, that, in the Netherlands and hopefully internationally as well, pedophiles can at least be public about their orientation without having lynch mobs descend on their homes - then I would finally be proud of my country again.

Real political courage and uncompromising intellectual honesty - as opposed to opportunism or risk-free idealism - is all to rarely seen in Western politics nowadays. Glory to the PNVD.

Merlijn de Smit

Anti-Semitism and the Left

2006-08-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

Need to get something off my chest.

All the while I'm rationalizing why I left the Left. To what extent my own ideas have become such a confused mixture of traditional leftism, conservatism and libertarianism. But in the end, I didn't leave the Left. The Left did the Left. It was hijacked first in the 1960s by the radical students and the Maoist crazies. I know all about how odious student radicals are. I was one. Then in the 1970s came the Angry Wimmin, the Male Lesbians, the moonbat Radical Feminists and their "the personal is the political crap". Egocentric navel-staring substituted for political action. Then in the 80s the radical Greens, the New Agers, and finally the Postmodern relativists resurrecting nationalism, misogynism, religious fascism under the guise of supporting and understanding oppressed cultures.

And now, this:

(For more loveliness, see here.

So the whole thing has come full circle, hasn't it? From Socialism to what Bebel dubbed the "Socialism of Fools" to National Socialism. From Fanon to supporting totalitarian, religious Fascists. And all that just about sixty years after Cable Street.

If a Cable Street Communist were to meet a supporter of ANSWER, a front for the ultra-Stalinist Workers' World Party, they would be on opposite sides of the barricades.

And I'm pretty disgusted to see how far things have come. To see for example a respected Norwegian writer as Jostein Gaarder suddenly implode in a bombastic piece of anti-semitic rhetoric lifted straight from the 1930s. This blogger (in Norwegian) has got things nailed, and writes that Jostein Gaarder and modern-day anti-semites don't necessarily want to see Jews killed, but believe that "the only good Jew is one who doesn't defend himself, one who willingly goes to the gas chambers, one who will take incoming Zelza-rockets without shooting back, who will embrace suicide bombers without striking back at the terrorist networks. The result will be the same."

The odd hatred for Israel amongst the Left - which is singled out in no proportion to its actual crimes, which bear no comparison to, say, the Russian near-genocidal war in Chechnya, the Turkish campaigns in Kurdistan, etc. - points, I think, to some kind of parasitical relationship of the Left with regards to Israel, or Jewry. (Quoting myself from some other forum) For the modern European anti-semitic Left, the aim is not so much for Jews to be killed or exterminated (as it was for the Nazis and their spiritual heirs, Hamas and Hezbollah), but for the Jews to be noble, innocent victims whom we can empathize with without actually being noble, innocent victims ourselves. There's the whole pathology in a nutshell. Nazis like their Jews dead - Anti-Zionists like them defenseless, so they can show that they are not anti-semitic at all - so Gaarder and his ilk may show their magnanimity once again, and give him shelter or at least not kill him when he's being chased by the pogromist Cossacks or the SS. The existence of a state of Israel is a constant reminder that the Jews have taken their fate in their own hands. That the cliché of the "Wandering Jew" has been consigned to history. They will no longer rely on the good Samaritans that Gaarder and his ilk would fantasize about being.

For as far as I am concerned, the State of Israel - the most democratic and secular State in the region, and thereby a bastion of the Enlightenment values that the Left is supposed to defend - deserve the Left's full support in defending itself from religious terrorists.

Milosevic

2006-03-13T16:31:00.000-08:00

So, the current theory concerning the origin of the antibiotic to treat leprosy and tuberculosis found in Milosevic' blood is that, er, Milosevic took those drugs himself (which counteracted the blood pressure meds he was taking) in order to become really, really ill, subsequently be sent to Moscow for treatment and never come back. Fortunately the Tribunal found out just in time and heroically stopped his going to Moscow. Then he dies. Oops.

Leaving aside for a moment questions about how long the Tribunal knew of the presence of rifampicin (I'm seeing different timescales in different news stories), and how on earth Milosevic is supposed to have gotten hands on those meds (he was supposed to be in prison - wasn't he?) - doesn't this sound like a really convoluted, hare-brained plan? Why not simply spit the blood pressure meds out? Why not, if he got his hands on rifampicin, take something less risky?

Also, if the most high-profile prisoner at the Hague is able to get rifampicin, what stops just about anybody there from simply taking an overdose of sleep medications?

Sorry, but all of this sounds simply too ridiculous to be true.

I don't believe he was deliberately murdered or being poisoned either, mind you. If someone wanted to poison him, why choose such a complicated method?

My guess is that he was handed the wrong medications by accident. Never underestimate simple stupidity.

Meanwhile, the fact that he attended a trial lasting more than five years without getting convicted is a sad commentary on the Hague Tribunal. You can't lock up someone for five years without sentencing him. Not even Milosevic. And courts should act to find whether the defendant is guilty - as speedily as possible. That's their only reason to exist. Not to bring closure to the victims - that should be, ideally, the result of the work of a court of law, but it cannot be its stated aim. Not act as a body of historical research. They should get a truth and reconciliation committee or something for that. And finally. War criminals from the former Yugoslavia should be tried in Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade, not in The Hague, which is thousands of kilometres from where those war crimes were committed. It's the people of the former Yugoslav republics that should preside over the prosecution of those crimes. Not "The International Community", whatever that is.

At least the Americans seem to have learned enough to place the trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where is should be.

Two links on the cartoon affair.

2006-02-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

The British Alliance for Workers' Liberty proves again to be one of the few genuinely interesting outfits on the Trotskyist Left. Kudos for their stance for freedom of speech, in opposition to mealy-mouthed liberal inoffensive navel-staring, or even misplaced solidarity with reactionary Islamism. I may disagree with the AWL on quite some things, but their principled stance for freedom and secularism is what is needed for the Left to move forward.

Take a look at Maryam Namazie's weblog as well.

Merlijn de Smit

You sick, sick bastards!

2006-02-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

I'm talking about this.

And this as well.

I'm not going to waste too much words on the whole affair. Just this:

- If you live in a liberal democracy, you are going to have your beliefs satirized. Deal with it.

- Freedom of speech is [I]not something to be negotiated[/I]. There is no such thing as freedom of speech "within reasonable limits". That's an oxymoron. The West European politicians recently blathering about such a thing should be ashamed of yourself.

- You do not have the right not to be offended. You do have the right to be angry if I offend you, or hurt your feelings. However, this does not entitle you to threaten to kill me, or my family, or my compatriots, or to burn down embassies - just because you got your feelings hurt.

That's it. I am utterly sickened by the reaction to a few relatively innocuous cartoons in a Danish newspaper. I'm not that sickened by the usual gang of would-be martyrs waving about their kheffiyes and kalashnikovs and RPGs in Palestine, mind you. Them wanting to kill Danish is kind of a welcome change from their wanting to kill Jews or Americans. I am, however, sickened by the weak-kneed reaction from European politicians to the affair, including Muslim ones suddenly wanting to negotiate about free speech. They should know better.

The Danish PM has been a welcome exception so far. Glory to Denmark!

Merlijn de Smit

Limits of consent?

2006-01-14T03:45:00.000-08:00

It's time to revamp this blog a bit. And why not by pointing to Shuggy's post concerning consent and its limits?

Shuggy mentions the Spanner case - more here and here - in which a number of gay men in the UK were jailed for consensual s/m activities in the privacy of their own homes. The highest sentence handed out was four and a half years. In a time when things like gay marriage are gradually getting more and more accepted, this stands out starkly as a blatant example of sexual oppression. Notably, all of the "victims" involved in the Spanner case testified that the activities were consensual - they wanted to do it. Unfortunately, as UK law appears to stand, it does not matter: consensuality has no bearing on assault charges. Which may lead to the bizarre situation that a "bottom" or masochist who would testify before court that he consented to and enjoyed whatever was inflicted to him, could well be charged with complicity to assault - on his own body.

Three of the men involved in the Spanner case brought up their case before an European court which, unfortunately, did not overturn the original sentencing. Time for us Europeans to stop pointing fingers at the silly attempts of Bush and co. to stop gay marriage? There are some issues that are much more serious to deal with here at home.

Shuggy also mentions the case of Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal, who is up for retrial after first having been sentenced for eight years or so after, apparently consensually, killing and partially eating another man. The prosecution is trying to get a murder conviction - the original one was manslaughter. Not surprisingly, German law isn't exactly prepared to deal with the case of a guy eating people after having put out a contact ad for slaughter victims on a cannibal fetish website.

I'm in two minds about the whole thing. If people have sovereignty over their own bodies and their own lives, consent is really the only yardstick with which to measure these things, then perhaps Meiwes should not go to prison at all. On the other hand, I am slightly uncomfortable with the idea that someone who has slaughtered and eaten a man, thought it was a jolly good experience and is now writing a book about it should walk the streets. At the very least, one could say he is a bit unhinged in the ethics and empathy department.

Of course, not everyone is capable of consent. Children can't consent to various things. Similarly people who are mentally handicapped, or perhaps disturbed in other ways. It's possible to argue that Meiwes' victim, Bernd-Jürgen Brandes, was obviously in deep psychological trouble and therefore incapable of consenting to be carved up and eaten. How do we know he was crazy, though? Because he wanted to be eaten. There is some circularity in that reasoning.

More importantly, we cannot establish consent really after the fact here - we only have Meiwes' word for it and the appearances of consent (Brandes turning up knowing he was going to be dinner, Meiwes happily videotaping the proceedings, etcetera. But what if Brandes changed his mind at the last moment? He's not going to be able to affirm that whatever went on was consensual. Because he's dead and all.

Of course, this is an extreme and rather distasteful example. The question for me is whether what Meiwes did is not just immoral (because the moral thing to do, if you meet a healthy person with a sincere wish to end up as foodstuff, would be to make sure he gets professional help - and not from a cannibal), or whether it should be illegal as well.

Cases like these do occur. There's the case of Sharon Lopatka, who put out ads on the internet wanting to be strangled and killed - and eventually, found what she wanted. Sexual desires involving cannibalism, death, or otherwise going beyond the safe and sane part of "safe, sane and consensual" are not all that uncommon. Fortunately, people like Lopatka, Brandes, Meiwes and Robert Glass, for whom the border between fantasy and reality fades (and in case of the killers, ethics, morality and responsibility fade) are much rarer.

Yet, I feel the individual himself is solely responsible and sovereign over his life, and his body. I am in favour of legalizing euthanasia if a wish to die is clearly established on the part of the person dying (I am mortally opposed to it when it is not). Assisting suicide of people who are not terminally ill I find ethically extremely dubious. Yet it would constitute a grey area in which I would not want things that I'm highly uncomfortable with from an ethical perspective, outlawed.

But then again, most activities one could "consent" to can be notably ceased anytime one wants. I can decide I'm uncomfortable, don't like what's happening and bail out of whatever is going on. Except dying. If I jump off a roof, safewords aren't going to bring me back on it. It should be possible to make an argument on this basis that it is impossible to establish consent to death. However, such an argument would have possibly consequences for the whole euthanasia issue as well.

I would be happy if Armin Meiwes can be kept off the street for some time to come - but a lot of it depends on the arguments by which this is done. I think it might be possible to poke some holes in the "consensuality" argument, particularly as Brandes is no longer able to affirm his consent.

But I'm unimpressed by Shuggy's "it's just wrong" argument (though I share the gut feeling). Problem is, between the Spanner case - some perfectly innocent, consensual s/m play - and between events like the Meiwes and Lopatka case, which end up in the death of one of the parties involved, there's a potentially very big grey area of possibly much more nuanced cases. I'm not sure if I would support abandoning the consensuality criterion in favour of some less nuanced one ("this action is always wrong"/"it is impossible to consent to this and this").

The fact that in Europe, judges have difficulties distinguishing even consensual activities not resulting in any permanent or even long term-damage to anyone and assault, or fantasy and reality, gives me pause here as well.

Al Capone famously got nailed on a tax evasion. Something similar, metaphorically, in case of Meiwes would be quite welcome.

- Merlijn (who does not eat cuddly things, including kittens, hamsters, and human beings).

2005-09-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

My apologies for long absence. Some minor health issues as well as other offline developments have been keeping me busy later.

Meanwhile, I have become tempted by the dark side. I am thinking of joining the forces of Evil.

I am considering to join the Swedish right-wing liberal/libertarian students.

Rise, Darth Merlijn.

Unite against Terror initiative, again

2005-07-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

If you haven't signed the statement at Unite against Terror yet, please do so. There should be little you disagree with, if you walk on two legs and are in the possession of a neocortex.

The initiative has drawn some predictable ire here and there. I really don't give a damn whether the people behind this initiative are pro-war or anti-war or card-carrying devil-worshipping Blairites. I just submitted the below statement to their "why we signed" section:

I oppose the War on Terror, as it is being waged, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am aware that many who signed the petition with me support it. This cannot keep me from signing, as opposition to the war must not entail indifference and complacency towards the fundamentalist murderers.

The massacres in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, most recently Sharm El-Sheikh admit no rational “explanation”, no distinction between political goals and violent means. The means and the aims are the same – mindless slaughter of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, of people going to their work one morning, or people on vacation visiting a foreign city for the first time. The nature of terrorism shows itself here, naked and grotesque. The response of part of the Left which I consider myself a part of exhibits, by reflexively blaming the West, a worrying insensitivity towards violent islamic fundamentalism – which is aimed, first and foremost, against the very Enlightenment values that gave birth to the modern Left, rather than being some understandable if misdirected strike against Imperialism.

Instead, the unspeakably vile act of blowing yourself, and the strangers and fellow human beings going about their business around you, up in a crowded bus or train is a denial of humanity which should be met with outrage and an assertion of the humanity that unites us, regardless of political or religious differences.

Red herrings

2005-07-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

The Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War and Ophelia Benson at Butterflies & Wheels mention an interview with Christopher Hitchens in which Hitchens disputes that there were no connections between Saddam Hussein and terrorism. Ophelia Benson seems interested in the logic of Hitchens' argument - which is impeccable, to be sure. Of course, it's impossible to prove a negative, but the proposition that there might have been links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda (which there seems to be no evidence for) or that Saddam Hussein might have stockpiled Weapons of Mass Destruction (also, no evidence) is, on the face of it, more reasonable than the proposition that there might have been an armada of invisible pink elephants flying low over central Bagdad last Saturday - and more worthy to discuss.

Still, I'm surprised that Hitchens (as well as more on the pro-war Left) jumps on this. As far as I understand, their case for military intervention does not hinge on Saddam Hussein's possession of WMDs or links to terrorism - but more on the idea that removing a particularly brutal and bloody dictatorship was a good idea. It seems to me as well that the anti-war movement has been similarly led astray by the WMD/terrorism angle. I would have been still opposed to the war even if Saddam was convincingly linked to terrorism or possession of WMDs. I gather the same would go for the bulk of the anti-war movement. Nagging doubts that I had - and have - about the anti-war position had nothing to do with Anthrax or mustard gas but more with the fact that Saddam Hussein was a particularly nasty piece of work and that it's a great thing that he has gone - and the Iraqis may finally have, despite the terrorists that killed 150 people last weekend in an ongoing effort to drag the country to full-blown civil war, an opening to determine their own fate that they did not have before 2003.

I guess that a big chunk of the anti-war movement's focus on the failure to find WMDs, the evidence that some leading politicians may have lied (shock!) or were planning to attack Iraq anyway is pretty much a symptom of totally reactive, lowest-common-denominator politics. Instead of finding a principled basis on which to oppose the slaughter in Iraq, you hack away and hack away at any weakness that shows up in the pro-war narrative. One would wish that the Left had exercised the same criticism back in 1999 more widely - but that was then, and then it was a Democrat president waging war... Galloway's despicable comments after the London bombing are testimony to the same rank opportunism. But you see the same phenomenon in Hitchens' "maybe Saddam did really have links to Al-Qaeda" argument.

What would such a principled opposition be? As usual, I'm seeing two candidates. On the one hand, the Communist position which aims to increase the political strength and political independence of the international working class. The War on Terror indisputably creates an atmosphere of nationalism, political paranoia and increased state powers in the main country that's waging it - and should therefore be opposed (in the way it is currently being waged). The argument would also be that the occupation of Iraq will strangle the opportunities of working class independence that may have sprung up after the removal of Saddam (the slaughter and destruction with which this was achieved would be an argument in itself) - still, there's probably some room for debate here (compare the differing positions of the Iraqi Communist party and the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq).

On the other hand, there is the Libertarian anti-interventionist argument, exemplified by the excellent Antiwar.com and Lew Rockwell. There may not so much distance between the Libertarian and the Leninist on this point: the Libertarians' main fear, which seems to be well on the way of becoming reality, is one of war and everything that accompanies it leading to the voracious state gobbling up more and more potentially oppressive power. But opposition to war seems to be based here on an iron-clad respect of national sovereignty - whereas in the Communist view, borders tend to be as meaningless to socialist tank columns as to the international working class.

But in both positions, no quarter must be given to radical islam - a movement militantly opposed to both Communism and Libertarianism and everything else that traces its roots to the Enlightenment. Regardless of whether we're dealing with strikes in London or with the monotonous, ongoing slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds in Iraq. And here there's a difference with the political mush that goes for the mainstream Left these days - which seems to be drifting from seeking political nuances to outright apologetics for islamic terrorism, and from opposition to the occupation of Palestina to anti-semitism.

Recently, I'm drifting more towards the national-sovereignty position. Because if there's one thing Communists should have learned from the past century, it's that imposition of socialism by armoured columns doesn't really work. And I suppose the same may well go for liberal democracy.

Merlijn de Smit

Unite against Terror initiative

2005-07-16T04:09:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the very light blogging lately to all of the probably two people that actually read this weblog - I have been ill throughout much of June, and currently on holiday in the Netherlands. I'll get back into it a bit later, to be sure, but here's a link to an initiative that I should mention. The petition listed is one that I fully subscribe to and that I think will appeal to many people, on a basis of common humanity and decency, regardless of other political differences.

Merlijn de Smit

London

2005-07-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

A short and late comment on what happened in London. If Ken MacLeod's response, or the reactions described by this article in Sp!ked are any indication (and from my neck of the woods, they seem to be), then at least the scumbags, whoever they are, are failing in their aim of spreading chaos and fear.

The response of part of the left, exemplified here and here and reliable pounced upon by Harry's Place - but see also Butterflies&Wheels here, is inadequate. Not just because it is dubious to the extreme that the Iraq war was a causal factor in all this - violent Islamic fundamentalism was rolling on well before 2003. That's not to say that Iraq may be one of the many causes here - but surely not the main one. But that's a political point, and one that should be met with argument rather than outrage. What is inadequate is that the bombings were not some kind of misdirected strike against imperialism, which happened to kill, goodness gracious, anti-war people as well (would the SWP and Galloway, who stress this point, condemn the atrocities less fiercely if the victims were staunch neocons?). This is not some case of good end + horrible means. The means are horrible, and so is the end. Islamic fundamentalism is a deeply reactionary, downright nasty ideology mortally opposed to the same Enlightenment values that spawned Socialism as well as Bush and Blair. And I would like to see a somewhat stronger position against it among the Left, instead of nihilistic (and dubiously opportunistic) "we brought it down upon ourselves!" hand-wringing.

2005-07-07T05:26:00.000-07:00

Bastards.

Time to fight back

2005-07-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

The line must be drawn here.

For years now, governments around the world have hounded the significant parts of their population which smoke, while gladly accepting ever-increasing VAT taxes on cigarettes. While we smokers gladly take full responsibility for the damage we incur to our own health, we have been made responsible for others' healths on the flimsiest evidence. Accross Europe, smokers have been chased out of clubs and pubs - and a new British government campaign childishly insults smokers' looks and sexual prowess.

Smokers have thus far responded to all this bullying way too passively. Sure enough, many of them want to quit - smoking is addictive, and not good for your health. But far too few have stood up for individuals' basic right to do enjoyable things bad for your health just because you want to without disturbing anyone else.

Now, the fightback has started. Forward the Smokers' Liberation Front!

Disparate thoughts about Pasolini's "Salo"

2005-06-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

This is a film a friend of mine, not a particularly squeamish type, warned me of - but after some doubting I decided to rent it. I'm still a bit shaky, as if the wind is knocked out of me. But not just because of the scenes of cruelty and perversity the film shows. I was prepared for that.

The film, "Salò or the 120 days of Sodom", follows the same pattern as De Sade's book. In the last fascist holdout in Northern Italy, four local honchos round up boys and girls from a nearby village to take them to a remote villa. Mussolini's reign is moribund: as their fate is sealed anyway, nothing prevents the four to do whatever they want to their victims. The film is divided in four parts: an introductory part, "The circle of manias" (not sure of that's translated right - my version was subtitled in Finnish), which details various sexual perversions, "The circle of shit", which obviously focuses on excrement, and "The circle of blood", which sees three of the four torturing and killing their victims in a courtyard, while a fourth looks at the scene through binoculars. Every now and then, the rumble of war nearby can be heard.

Some thoughts, as perhaps later I might post something more structured:

1. This is not a gratuitous film, despite the extreme subject. For comparison, the drawn-out, gratuitous violence in Luc Besson's awful Joan of Arc, or the awkward, hypocritical nudity in Verhoeven's mind-numbingly stupid Showgirls made me feel dirty after seeing it. This film - particularly because of the glimpses of warmth and redemption throughout the otherwise merciless tale - makes me feel human.

2. As a social allegory, the film is incisive. Particularly in the way it portrays how the four fascists (the bourgeoisie?) sow divisions among their terrorized victims to the point they eventually betray each other, the way they co-opt and corrupt the village lads who serve as soldiers, and the way in which the four fascists themselves are portrayed as impotent, empty shells that once, perhaps, were human - as opposed to their youthful victims. At one point, they cajole their victims in feigning joy and merriment - a criticism of totalitarianism, or of the way modern consumer society commodifies joy, sexuality and humanity itself?

3. At one point, one of the "soldiers" is found sleeping with a black girl, which is an infringement of the rules. Before he is shot, he defiantly salutes the four fascists with a clenched fist - and by doing so, he seems to shatter the whole intricate power play that the four fascists have directed in their mansion. While the four fascists successfully manipulate and direct their power on their victims throughout the whole film, their shooting of the disobedient soldier is strangely powerless.

4. In the final part of the film, the viewer watches the torture and killing of their victims through the binoculars that the four use to watch the proceedings. The sound of their screams cannot be heard - instead, classical music is playing. This creates some distance between the viewer and the grisly scenes, both softening their impact and sharpening their edge - while at the same time placing the viewer in the same position as the fascist voyeurs. In the adjoining room, two soldiers at some point turn off the classical music, tune the radio to something more catchy and start to dance. One asks the other the name of his girlfriend. This is for me one of the defining moments of the film: Pasolini shows how humanity, which the four fascists relentlessly try to exterminate throughout the film, continues to smoulder.

A powerful and strangely beautiful film, which I'm happy to have seen.

- Merlijn de Smit

Rhetorical overkill

2005-05-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

Johann Hari takes on "climate change deniers", again (hat tip to Debunkers.org discussion forum):

The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers. Indeed, given that 25,000 people died in Europe in the 2003 heat wave caused by anthropogenic climate change, given that the genocide unfolding in Darfur has been exacerbated by the stresses of climate change, given that Bangladesh may disappear beneath the rising seas in the next century, they are nudging close to having the moral credibility of Holocaust deniers.

Talk about rhetorical overkill.

I'm not a climatologist, and hence loath to speak up about the subject (I will, though, as it seems journalists like Johann Hari obviously want me to have an opinion - namely theirs, lest I end up with the "moral credibility of Holocaust deniers". Trying to do some reading on the subject, recently finished Bryant's Climate Process and Change which the PSSST(KA) hereby recommends). My own field, linguistics, is relatively inoculated against any political or social relevance. That's the way I like it, and that's quite probably one of the reasons I chose it. I like learning for the sake of it, and don't like politics to mix with science. At least taking a certain position in linguistics carries little risk of being labeled a holocaust denier.

Nonetheless, if I were a climatologist, I would be pretty offended by the shrill and more than slightly demagogic way with which Hari describes my field.

An excellent weblog with a wider relevance, but a regular focus on climate-related issues from a Science Studies perspective, is Roger Pielke Jr.'s one here. If I understand Pielke correctly, the whole field has suffered from a merger between science and politics in which political answers (cuts in fossil fuels, Kyoto or no) are seen to flow straight from a scientific position (anthropogenic global warming or not). According to Pielke, the two were better seperated totally (I think Pielke seems to share Lomborg's position in that he believes global warming is happening, and that the cause is human, but that we'd be better off adapting to a changing climate than to possibly futile attempts to avert it).

- Merlijn de Smit

Max Ross and sexuality

2005-05-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

As a certified male sexist pig, I probably should comment on this piece of drivel at the rather unappealing Mens' News Daily, even though it has been comprehensively demolished by PZ Meyers and Sadly No.

In essence, Max Ross sketches a view of the world in which women are waiting around to be raped and ravaged by men merely acting on the imperatives of millions of years of evolution. Of course, he gets evolution wrong:

Hunt, gather, fight, copulate… these are the four basic ‘drives’ of man. Whether you believe in evolution, creation or intelligent design, the human male is uniquely designed and desirous to accomplish these tasks. In human men, sperm production is so ridiculously high that 23 men in a period of one month could produce enough gene juice to impregnate and repopulate the entire planet, currently standing at around 6 billion… Basically, the boys were designed to ‘hit’ as many females in the shortest period of time, whether the women want to mate or not. Through out human history this has been the ‘natural order.’

Because childbearing and infant-rearing is a long-term, physically laborous and, certainly in "natural" surroundings, very risky endeavour, it's generally the women who do the "selection" part of "sexual selection". Whereas men may be genetically predisposed to try and scatter their gene pool over a population of women as large as possible, women are genetically predisposed to say "No" a lot. (A commenter at Sadly, no already made the point that in most hunter-gatherer societies, it's the men that do the hunting and the women that do the gathering).

Max Ross makes a lot about rape fantasies, steering dangerously close to the "no-means-yes" excuse:

In the context of consensual non-consent, both parties are simply acting out what has been programmed into them genetically. Of course, in a modern society all of this interaction requires order… men can’t ‘have’ anyone they want, and women have a way becoming ‘control freaks’ if left to their own desires. In my own experiences, no less five lovers have confessed their desire to be taken and ravaged. Two of them wanted it at random; after work in her parking garage, the other suggested I break into her home and wait. On neither of these requests did I acquiesce. It sounded like a great way to get shot, beat up by some guy wanting to be a hero or (gasp) what if I got the wrong woman? Orange suits, cages and a ‘boyfriend’ named Bubba don’t appeal to me. Sarah and her friends are welcome to their desires and maybe someday this will be alluring, but under the current realities of gender relations, the ‘natural order’ will have to wait.

Of course rape fantasies do not mean women want to be raped. Forced-sex fantasies which are acted out in a consensual relationship have as much to do with rape as a consensual spanking session with physical assault. Max Ross' blurring of the gulf between fantasy and reality eerily mirrors that of the anti-pornography radical feminists.

And just when Ross' piece made me think that, perhaps, the latter have a point, I stumble upon this piece of tedium by one Rochelle Gurstein, which succeeds in blaming Lynndie England's escapades in Abu Ghraib on pornography, and all but excusing poor Lynndie herself. Touching.

I know of a few abandoned islands which seem like just the place for both the Max Ross-type troglodytes and the Rochelle Gurstein-style "censorship is good for you" feminists. I'd sell tickets.

- Merlijn de Smit

British Elections

2005-05-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

So Blair has won a third term - but with the smallest of majorities. Tories and Liberal Democrats have been gnawing at his majority, whereas the Tories seem to have weathered Lib Dem challenges well.

The Respect Coalition have done amazingly well. Far-left electoral initiatives tend to start off with high hopes, only to be squashed come the election result. Yet this time around, George Galloway won on the Respect Ticket (albeit narrowly) in Bethnal Green and Bow, and other Respect candidates have put on a very strong show - Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham coming in second with 10,498 votes or more than 27 percent (three thousand votes more and she'd have won it), Abdul Khaliq Mian coming in second in East Ham with 20,7% and Lindsey German coming in second in West Ham with 19,5%.

Can't say this result would dismay me. I dislike Galloway - though it is hard to accurately assess the man as his detractors of the left have a, shall we say, loose relationship with facts - but quite a lot of my objections to the current far left are such that his Labour opponent, Oona King, might be worse (academic boycott of Israel, etc. - and on top of that, support for the mass slaughter in Iraq).

Results from Northern Ireland are dripping in at this moment, and it seems that Sinn Fein is doing well, despite the recent controversy over the McCartney murder - probably Brendan O'Neill's take that Sinn Fein would suffer less electoral damage than predicted by the media was right.

Enemy of the State

2005-04-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

Matthew Barganier at Antiwar.com found these nice T-Shirts being sold, containing the acronym ACLU (where the C is, of course, you get it, a hammer and sickle) and the subtext "Enemy of the State".

As Matthew Barganier writes:

Since when is communism anti-state? And since when do conservatives, much less self-styled libertarians, consider "enemy of the state" a pejorative?

(One could argue about the communism bit). Once being an "Enemy of the State" becomes a pejorative, it's time to prick up your ears and listen to those marching boots, slowly coming closer. Thump thump thump thump.

...

2005-04-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

Antiwar.com and Arthur Silber describe what probably can be only defined as the total collapse of all elementary decency and moral sense among the U.S. pro-war right. The result is quite hideous.

Thus Arthur Silber describes radio host and right-wing piece of human flotsam Rush Limbaugh's celebration of Abu Ghraib day:

CALLER: How you doing Rush?

RUSH: Pretty good, Kevin.

CALLER: Love to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I just want you to know that we are going to have our Abu Ghraib barbecue party tonight and we are going to be playing nude Twister.

RUSH: (Laughing.) How many people you got coming?

CALLER: Well, I figure we only need 8 or 10 to make it a rip roaring time. I thought that would be kind of fitting.

RUSH: Yeah. Nude Twister? Big Abu Ghraib barbecue. (Laughter.) Okay. And that’s from Oregon. Progress here.

And Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com savagely takes down Debbie Schlussel's gloating over the death of Marla Ruzicka, an aid worker, at Frontpage magazine. Marla Ruzicka, whose organization aids civilian casualties of the ongoing war, was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq. Apparently, drawing attention to the fact that, when you bomb a country back to the mesolithic, innocent people will get maimed and killed, provoked the proto-Fascist American right to reveal all of its utterly ghoulish tendencies, such as here at Freerepublic.com.

The big price for its heroic endeavour to descend to the moral level of the army ant must probably go to the ultra-right Little Green Footballs, gloating about the death of Rachel Corrie, an American pro-Palestinian activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in March, 2003. Here is the LGF post in all its hideousness - more on the naked bloodthirstiness of the American right confronted with Rachel Corrie's death here by Antiwar.com, here and here by Arthur Silber, and here by Harry's Place.

The two-faced nature of the U.S. pro-war right - going on about fighting terrorism, liberating Iraq, and so on, while revealing themselves as bloodthirsty monsters when they think nobody's watching them, was captured brilliantly by this cartoon of the Idleworm. But perhaps the cartoon does little justice to reality, which seems much more bleak.

- Merlijn de Smit

A Plague on Both Your Houses!

2005-04-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

Added Harry's Place and SIAW to sidebar. Reason being that, while I disagree with them, rather strongly, about the progressive, humanist, Enlightenment nature of bombing cities to rubble, their criticisms of the anti-war left seem to be quite often justified.

Take this item, for example. More here. The student organization of the British Socialist Workers Party joined in a walkout together with the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, in protest against a speech by Houzan Mahmoud. Houzan Mahmoud happens to be an activist of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, which condemns both the occupation and, rightly, in my view, the sectarian and reactionary resistance. Here's an interesting article by Houzan Mahmoud on the deteriorating situation for women in Iraq and the resurgence of political Islam. The homepage of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq is here. One might think it's opportunistic for the pro-war Harry's Place to point this out - after all, the WCPI resists the occupation as fiercely as they resist political Islam - but that does not make the SWP students' behaviour in this any less nauseating.

And then there's this infernal "Academic Boycott" of Israel, which, unfortunately, passed in case of two Universities (scroll down from here if the link doesn't work). Let me be absolutely clear on this. I am as disgusted by Israel's policies in the occupied territories as I am with, say, Russia's policies in Chechnya. But academics supportive of this thing should be tarred and feathered, as far as I am concerned. A University is not the place for political sandbox games and playground logic. Academic Boycotts are a betrayal of the universal values academic work should serve. And don't come to be with postmodernist bullshit about academic research being always political or ideological in nature - if I were to believe that, I would leave University immediately, and do something else.

There's two points in which the detractors of the Anti-War/Pro-Palestinian movement are right on. There's doubtlessly more. That does not mean that the sliver of the left supportive of the war in Iraq is any more fertile a ground for a resurgence of the left as the SWP or the Respect Coalition or similar organizations in other countries are. World-weary moderate Social Democracy has been as gutted by the downfall of the Soviet Union as the more radical left and reached its political bankrupcy when the "progressive" babyboomers - Joschka-Fischer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Susan Sontag, you name 'em - supported bombing Yugoslavia to ashes. Watching them and their anti-war opponents slagging it out is a bit like watching a deathmatch between T-Rex and Spinosaurus after the big comet hit.

A plague on both their houses.

Against academic boycott of Israel

2005-04-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

I'm gritting and gnashing my teeth as I write this, but Harry's Place has a worthwhile petition up against an academic boycott of Israel, proposed by the teachers' union of the University of Birmingham. If the link doesn't work just surf to the main site.

I'm no fan of boycotts in general, but academical boycotts I find downright offensive. Regardless of what country is in question. The idea of science and academia, to me, is that they should be unpoliticized, as internationalized as possible and generally working towards the betterment of humanity as a whole. Academic boycotts negate all of this - by depriving academics of other nationalities of knowledge and the possibilities to exchange knowledge, and by making academia into petty political playgrounds.

Let's hope this infernal boycott proposal ends up in the paper bin where it belongs.

Merlijn de Smit

Quo vadis, vermis desidiosus?

2005-04-16T07:47:00.000-07:00

But more on the wayward ways of the Idleworm in a bit...

I think there's cracks beginning to appear in the politico-scientific construct of Global Warming... One of the reasons is that one of the most prominent models of changing climate over the past millenium or so - the famous "Hockey Stick" model, which showed a nearly constantly downward climate curve until a sudden rise at the end of the twentieth century - seems to be pretty definitely broken, reinstating a picture of a much more variable climate, with a Medieval Warm Period, a subsequent Little Ice Age, etc. More here, and here. At the last-mentioned link, McKitrick and McIntyre essentially claim that the methodology used for the original "hockey stick" model basically creates hockey stick models out of red noise - random data.

Now, this does not cast doubt on the issue of man-made global warming itself. What it does cast doubt upon is the effectiveness of peer review of for example the IPCC - which failed to turn up the flaws unearthed by McKitrick and McIntyre. It also means that there is significant natural variability in climate - but that does not mean recent climate trends are not anthropogenic.

Why do I nevertheless speak of cracks beginning to appear?

First of all, the question of Global Warming is politicized to an enormous extent. Both the viewpoints of sceptics about the issue as adherents to the idea that Global Warming is man-made, dangerous, and providing a necessity for action such as the Kyoto protocol are inextricably tied up with political questions (whether we can or can not consciously influence such a complex issue as climate in a specific direction, whether transnational political action should have the day, or the mechanisms of the free market, etcetera). All too often, extremely uncertain possible trends are augmented into alarmist worst-case-scenarios in the media, more about that here.

As an example of brazen dishonesty, see how the topic of the declining snow cap of Mt. Kilimanjaro is connected to the issue of man-made climate change, for example here, or here, or this BBC report:

The United States has opted out of the climate change protocol and other countries, including Japan, have said they are only prepared to ratify the agreement if the Morocco conference agrees constructive guidelines. Delegates at the conference have been watching a live videolink with environmental activists on Mount Kilimanjaro - Africa's highest peak.

They were warned that the ice-covered summit of the mountain could have disappeared completly within the next 15 years.

In the past century, Mount Kilimanjaro has already lost 80% of its snow and ice.

Or look here:

MOUNT Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, has been photographed stripped of its millennia-old snow and glacier peak for the first time, in a move used by environmentalists to show the perils of global warming.

The picture is the first time anyone has caught the Tanzanian mountain's dramatic change, according to the Climate Change group which led a project to document the effects of global warming across the world.

The launch of the photo project NorthSouthEastWest coincides with a meeting of environment and energy ministers from 20 countries at a British-sponsored conference on climate change that opened today in London.

It also comes ahead of a further meeting of G8 ministers in Derbyshire, north England, later in the week.

Or do a google search. Now, the problem with this is that, as this article points out, the retreat of Mt. Kilimanjaro glacier has been going around for quite some time - a century, at least - before anthropogenic global warming could have taken off, and cheerfully continued during the period between the 1940s and 1970s - a period of "global cooling". The retreat of the icecap seems mainly connected to changes in local precipitation patterns.

This article on the whole controversy has more than a bit of a taste of sour grapes, particularly in the last paragraph:

We are entirely against the black-and-white picture that says it is either global warming or not global warming," said Prof. Georg Kaser, the paper's lead author and a glaciologist at the Institute for Geography of the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. "As a scientist I'm happy it's more complex, because otherwise it's boring."

Other authors of the new study said they were particularly dismayed that the industry-supported group had portrayed their paper as a definitive refutation of the idea that melting from warming was involved.

"We have a mere 2.5 years of actual field measurements from Kilimanjaro glaciers, unlike many other regions, so our understanding of their relationship with climate and the volcano is just beginning to develop," Dr. Douglas R. Hardy, a geologist at the University of Massachusetts and an author of the paper, wrote by e-mail. "Using these preliminary findings to refute or even question global warming borders on the absurd."

In short, Kilimanjaro may be a photogenic spokesmountain — no matter what the climatic agenda — but it is far from ideal as a laboratory for detecting human-driven warming. The debate over it obscures the nearly universal agreement among glacier and climate experts that glaciers are retreating all over the world, probably as a result of the greenhouse-gas buildup.

Fair enough, but the blame for Mt. Kilimanjaro becoming an unfitting icon for the global warming debate lies wholly with the environmental activists trying to pull a quicky with striking photographs of a retreating glacier.

Anyway, prophecies of impending doom have a typically short shelf-life. The bandwagon may easily run to the other extreme. A Dutch television program, Netwerk, dedicated an item to McKitrick's and McIntyre's research which can be found online here. Now, Netwerk is not a particularly good program. I generally find them to be moralizing and shallow to the extreme. Their item on Kyoto and Global Warming was not one-sided in favour of alarmism, though, but one-sided in favour of the view that the Kyoto protocol is absolute bunk. This surprised me greatly, and perhaps it indicates which way the wind blows.

But my main reason for thinking that within a few years, the world will have moved on to a new armaggedon scare is that some among the more alarmist left seem to have already found one. Particularly the Idleworm has been going on about peak oil the last weeks, for example, here, here, and here. The last link contains an ominous sign that the Idleworm is cocooning into Yuppie Green New Age Worm:

Whether or not we're going to end up like Mad Max in that Mad Max movie, it's a good idea to get off your arse and walk more, eat less, consume less, switch off lights when you leave a room (duh), try to cut out red meat (your fart-stench will decrease by 5000%), buy food grown closer to home (no more wines from Chile, unless you live in Chile), grow some veggies if you can, etc. etc. etc. I'm healthier and happier since I began doing more and eating less - my 34 inch lardo waistline is now a hunkerific 32, I've lost 25 lbs in 2 months, never felt better. I no longer need to "wash mahself with a rag on a stick". I'm having to take a baseball bat to work in the morning, to beat away the hordes of women.

How deep have the mighty fallen! Anyway, I partially blame this on the understandable shock of having seen Bush re-elected in November. The idea of aforementioned low-browed hominid in charge of the world's largest nuclear arsenal makes armaggedon look surprisingly desirable. The Daily Kos seems to suffer from this symptom a bit, too.

The idea behind "Peak Oil" is that, as fossil fuels are a finite reserve, oil production will peak long before we have actually run out of fossil fuels - as remaining oil fields will be progressively harder and more expensive to pump as we are nearing the end. Idleworm believes this time is nigh. What will happen if we do run out of cheap oil is a big question mark. Oil is used in lots of products. And where you can heat homes and so on with nuclear energy, for example, we can't make a car run on uranium quite yet.

Whether we run out of cheap oil in the envisionable future depends first of all on whether oil is really a fossil fuel. Recently, an abiotic theory of petroleum origin has been proposed by the late astrophysicist Thomas Gold. Gold basically argued that hydrocarbons constantly bubble up from really deep below the earth's surface, and that organic remnants - causing it to have an apparent fossil origin - are really caused by a "deep hot biosphere" of extremophile micro-organisms who, basically, like to swim around in the stuff. Tests of this idea seem to have been inconclusive. Upon Gold's suggestion, the Swedish government drilled deep into the granite bedrock and did, indeed, strike oil - though no commercially viable amounts - but as I understand (which is not much), fossil oil could have basically seeped down through cracks and pores. So let's assume that the current consensus - that fossil fuels are really fossil fuels - is correct.

If so, then at some point we will run out of the stuff. The question is when. There are alternative sources for oil such as shale oil, and tar sands, the exploitation of which is pioneered by the Canadian government. At the moment, though, the price of exploitation is too high to make it a viable commercial alternative to "normal" oil. However, it would be a big mistake to assume the price would always remain that high. If indeed we will run out of cheap oil sources, investing into shale oil and tar sands, would become attractive - and likewise, investing into research leading to more economically viable ways of production.

The optimistic oil scenario would assume that the market will do its work in stimulating creativity at a time of need. The earth's resources are not finite, as what counts as a resource or not is dependent on technological factors. Uranium was not a natural resource a century ago. Similarly, shale oil might become one, yet. The pessimistic scenario, argued by Idleworm and James Howard Kunstler, argues that particularly the United States, with its urban sprawl, non-existent public transport, and concomitant serious oil addiction, would not be able to adapt to changing circumstances without some serious social upheaval.

I'm opting for the optimistic scenario. The main reason is that the imminent prediction of the end of cheap oil is nothing new. Predictions have come and gone since the early 20th century. As many more doom scenarios - such as the overpopulation predictions of Paul Ehrlich during the 1970s. Most of these predictions seem, to me, to be seriously underestimating mankind's capability of adapting to changing circumstances, and utilizing new technologies and new resources, finding new life and new civilizations, and to generally boldly go where no one has gone before.

Finally, I think that at least part of the peak oil discussion on the left is tied up with the idea, current among the anti-war movement, that the war in Iraq was basically a desperate grab for resources. A kind of Command & Conquer Marxism, if you like. I think, and it pains me to say that I am, for once, in agreement with Harry's Place, that the "blood for oil" theory is crap.

Picture the following train of thought:

Question: Peak oil is imminent, and we are running out of cheap oil. What do we do?

Answer: Invade one of the primary oil-producing countries in the world, bomb it to rubble, overthrow a cruel but stable dictatorship with no real plan for what we put in its place, and see the country descend into a low-intensity civil war which could last for a decade.

See the problem here? No competent oil company would support the invasion of Iraq. Particularly as probably Saddam would have been happy so sell of some of its oil fields for lifting of the sanctions and perhaps US support for his regime. I think there's a variety of rational and irrational motivations behind the war in Iraq, and oil isn't one of them. First, I think that the American neoconservatives are serious about imposing liberal democracies with military might. They genuinely believe it works that way. And I think that they agree, though they may be loath to say it, with some of America's detractors on one count: that 9/11 was at least partially a blowback resulting from, for example, US arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The neocons in the US probably do believe that liberal democracies in the Middle East are the best guarantee against islamic terrorism.

Also, Iraq was invaded because it didn't have WMDs and didn't seriously support terrorism. But three of its neighbouring countries - Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, did support terrorism, and one of them, Iran, is quite serious about Weapons of Mass Destruction. A successful war in Iraq would put American troops on the borders of all three of them. Of course, Iraq is not as stable a bridgehead as the Americans probably expected.

But the left antiwar movement will have to scuttle the ludicrous blood-for-oil argument. It's not even vulgar Marxism, it's something quite worse than that. Marxism does not mean all policies must have secret economical motivations behind them. Historical materialism does not mean that ideal motivations, rational or irrational, can start to live a life of their own and influence policy decisions, for better or for worse. The 20th century has seen enough of the latter, one would think.

Merlijn de Smit

Off the deep end...

2005-04-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the recent quiet here - but I haven't gone anywhere.

Until recently, one of my favourite political parties on the Dutch scene was the left social democrat Socialist Party. Reason being, despite their statism, environmentalism (they're very anti-GM) and moldy taste of lifestyle conservativism, they're just about the only serious outfit on the Dutch left these days, with the burned-out yuppies of the Green Left not going anywhere.

Anyway, one of the more decent of the SP's members of parliament used to be their foreign policy expert, Harry van Bommel. Very well-spoken and active in opposing both the bombing of Yugoslavia and the war against Iraq.

However, unfortunately, it seems that Harry van Bommel has gone crazy. Bananas. Gaga.

Apparently, Harry van Bommel has recently quit smoking and has found a new goal in life: badgering smokers. Recently, he proposed that smoking in front of animals be banned.

Really, he did propose that.

Somehow I must have missed the epidemia of emphysemia among cats, dogs suffering of lung cancer, goldfish coughing their lungs out...

One also wonders, what counts as an animal? Does a fly count? A spider? What of the birds outside? Bed mites? Bacteria?

Harry van Bommel, do your party a favour and leave it, and join, for example, the rest of the lunatic asylum at Partij voor de Dieren.

And one final word, which I am going to repeat with all the tenacity of Cato speaking about Carthage: the health risks of passive smoke have not been established.

Merlijn de Smit

PS: Harry van Bommel presented his anti-smoker claptrap in a column on the late Theo van Gogh's site. He received the column after Theo van Gogh's death. I am sure the great master is rolling on and on in his grave - and it must be quite a big mound by now, what with his size...

PPS: We used to have this cat, who lived to the ripe age of 26, and that with my mother, my father, and most of our relatives smoking in its presence. An equivalent of the well-known "My grandfather smoked and became ninety"-story...

Stockholm anti-war demonstration

2005-03-19T13:06:00.000-08:00

DN has it slightly more than thousand people gathered in Stockholm today. I'd have estimated the crowd a bit more. The local branch of the Committee for a Workers' International had a very visible presence. Speakers included British MP Alice Mahon and a guy from the eurocommunist Vänsterpartiet - very good speaker, he was, actually. Nice music (ska band, quite good but trumpettist a bit undisciplined). Slogans ranged from quite reasonable to stomachable. Crowd generally young, significant number of punkrockers. Bitter, bitter cold which made standing through the speeches waiting to finally get to march quite taxing.

The number Harry's Place mentions - 300 - is merely indicative for the grain of salt one needs to take anything emanating from that blog with.

- Merlijn de Smit

World Without End (1)

2005-03-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

On the terminal point
Of the cul-de-sac
Patients are dying
The horses are dazed
From the glare of stars
The starry wisdom
Owned by the Baron
And he's got the cure

- "The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein's Castle at Weisseria"
Blue Öyster Cult

REVIEW: Frank J. Tipler: The Physics of Immortality. Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York 1994.

There's a religious argument known as Pascal's Wager. If I understand it, it goes like this: If you believe in God, and you're wrong and God does not turn out to exist at all, you're going to end up as wormfood, you'll be munched upon by beetles - but you won't notice anything because there isn't really anything after death. Just the great big black hollow of Nothingness.

If you don't believe in God and you turn out to be right, you're going to end up the same. But you were expecting that anyway.

But if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong, then you're in deep trouble, at least according to Jack Chick cartoons. I read one of them once, and it was very frightening. First, you'll be examined by a really large guy with this featureless, luminous face. A bit like a lightbulb. Like that one Walt Disney character, what's his name, has running around. Only, this one is ten feet tall and dressed in robes. If, then, your name is not in a book that some angel is holding there (and if you don't believe in God, your name is not going to end up in that book), you're sent off to the lake of fire. Livid flames will lap at your skin - for all eternity. Ouch. Aawww. Ooh, that hurts.

However, if you believe in God and you happen to be right, you'll end up in Heaven, where you can look forward to being pleasured by tender-skinned angels for all eternity! (My idea of Heaven differs somewhat from that presented in Jack Chick cartoons).

So, the idea is that it's a rational choice to believe in God. At least you'll not end up being roasted alive and sodomized by awful hairy little devils with red-hot pitchforks for all eternity. And if you happen to be right, the payoff is very big.

Of course, it's not a very good argument. For once, the coldly rational calculation of Pascal's Wager may not be what the Church has in mind when they talk about "belief" and "faith".

Anyway, here's Frank Tipler, who starts off right on the first page by asserting:

(...) that theology is a branch of physics, that physicists can infer by calculation the existence of God and the likelihood of the resurrection of the dead to eternal life in exactly the same way as physicists calculate the properties of the electron.

On the first page of the introduction, Tipler announces:

I shall describe the physical mechanism of the universal resurrection. I shall show how physics will permit the resurrection to eternal life of everyone who has lived, is living, and will live. I shall show exactly why this power to resurrect which modern physics allows will actually exist in the far future, and why it will in fact be used. If any reader has lost a loved one, or is afraid of death, modern physics says: "Be comforted, you and they shall live again."

No maybe's and perhapses here. This is the real stuff. Not only is a resurrection possible, it will happen - and what's more, you don't have to go to Church or to actually have to believe for it to happen!

The biggest free lunch in history.

Anyway, if this was any mush-headed New Age tract, I'd have returned the book to the library there and then, because if there's one thing I detest, it's New Age. New Agers hate the body, they hate the flesh and blood and itches and hair and dirt that comes with being human. With them, it's all about becoming one with the Cosmic Consciousness or being rocked like an infant at the ample bosom of Gaia the Earthmother, or some such crap. They're anti-humanists. New Agers would not talk about resurrection as much as about being reincarnated as a fiery ball of pure cosmic energy circling Sirius. Now, I'd be pretty pissed off if I would find myself being a shimmering orb of energy circling some stupid star in the next life. I'd probably collide with the surface of Sirius over and over again, in the slight hope that I could make it go Supernova through some weird quantum effect and be done with it.

What made me not return the book immediately was Tipler's apparent interest in
Christian dogma rather than mush-headed New Age fantasies. Now, Christian dogma is something I know and respect.

Anyway, this book is sure to infuriate theologians and skeptics alike. There's been some kind of armistice between the natural sciences and religion, defended by for example the late Stephen Jay Gould and also Michael Ruse, in which both field would have their own domain, not impinging upon one another. Physics deals with how the world works, Theology and religion with the meaning of it all.

Tipler's book does not as much break down the barrier as plants his fist in its face, spits in its mouth, jeers at it and humiliates it and finally kindly informs it that it has just returned from a drawn-out session of buggering a close member of the barrier's family. You get the idea.

As the quotes at the beginning make clear, Tipler is very blatant about the possible religious significance of his ideas. An uncharitable reader would say that he's trying to make a profit out of selling his ideas to the religious. A charitable reader would say that Tipler is being very sincere and up-front.

So what is the gist of the theory Tipler presents in his book?

Start out with the observation that, in a few billion years, the Earth will be gobbled up by the expanding outer shell of the Sun, now gone Red Giant. Oceans will have boiled away long before as the Sun grows hotter. In order to survive as a species, we would need to leave the Earth long before then.

However, manned space-travel in a strict sense is not going to help us. Tipler sticks to the speed of light being an absolute barrier beyond which information cannot be transferred; but even at a fraction of the speed of light, the crew of a spacecraft would be squished by inertial forces like a snail being stepped upon. A survivable trip to a nearby star system would take ages.

Tipler finds a solution in so-called Von Neumann machines. A Von Neumann machine is a conscious, intelligent machine that is able to replicate itself and basically construct anything, given the raw materials. We humans are Von Neumann machines, in a way. However, mechanical Von Neumann machines would have the advantage of great longevity and, more important, possibly a very small size. A nano-engineered Von Neumann machine a few centimetres big would not need that much energy to get from here to Proxima Centauri. So, Tipler envisages Von Neumann machines leaving the Earth in search of habitable systems pretty soon, actually. The Von Neumann machines would contain the information needed to re-create whole colonies of virtual human beings (Tipler assumes that the total content in bits of human memory is immense, but finite) in their tiny memory banks. Once this process has started, it is irreversible; once a few Von Neumann machines have founded colonies on other planets and sent their replicated counterparts forth to seek on, the human race (or, the combined human/machine race) is essentially indestructible.

With me so far? Good.

Now, Tipler invokes a version of the Final Anthropic Principle, the Eternal Life Postulate.

Basically, in its weakest form, the Anthropic Principle states that our observations about the universe should be in accord with the fact that we are observing it. What this means is that out existence places limits on the age and expanse of the universe. We are carbon-based creatures, but the carbon in our world has been spread across the Galaxy by an exploding Supernova. So, the Universe must be at least old enough for stars to develop, go Supernova, and so on; the gravitational constant must be such that some stars are able to go Supernova, etc.

This version of the Anthropic Principle is uncontroversial, the question is whether it is interesting, or merely trivial.

In a stronger sense, the Anthropic Principle states that life is not merely a contingent possibility of the development of the Universe, but is in a way hard-wired into the Universe itself. This based on the fact that many of the fundamental constants in the physical sciences seem to be 'just right' to support a living Universe. If the gravitational constant was slightly stronger, for example, we would have a universe with tiny galaxies and tiny stars kilometres across - however, they would go through their life-cycles so quickly that there would not be enough time for life to develop. A weaker gravitational force and matter might not clutter together tightly enough to even form stars.

As far as I understand, this version of the Anthropic Principle tends to make at least those scientist of a more atheist/skeptical persuasion feel a bit itchy. Because it's a relatively short way from arguing that the emergence of life was somehow part of the "purpose" of the universe, in a more-or-less teleological fashion, and from saying that the fundamental laws of nature are the product of design.

Note, by the way, that a "design" interpretation of the stronger Anthropic Principle is incompatible with "Intelligent Design" as the most recent 'respectable' incarnation of Creationism. For what such an interpretation would state is that the evolution of (intelligent) life is hard-wired into the laws of Nature. However, if we were to accept Intelligent Design/Divine Creation (same thing) in biological evolution, most of the anthropic arguments would become vacuous. If God can create a beetle and an orang-utan and cacatoo and Mongolian death worm etc., then surely he can create the Earth with carbon and gold and iron and all without needing first to waste a whole star to create a fiery Supernova to belch forth all those precious materials! It's one or the other: anthropic design or ID, you can't have both.

Anyway, the problem with the stronger anthropic principle - which, by the way, I find a halfway respectable argument, as opposed to Intelligent Design in biological evolution - is that we're really hovering on the edge of what we know and cannot know. How sure can we be of the chances that our life-supporting Universe, instead of some other uninhabitable one, would emerge from the Big Bang? More to the point, a counter-argument has been levelled to the extent that there may be many universes, some life-supporting, others hostile. If that were true, the fundamental laws in our universe would be not more surprising than the fact we're finding ourselves on Earth instead of on the surface of Jupiter.

One interpretation allowing for many universes which apparently is popular to some extent among physicists is the many-world hypothesis of quantum mechanics. If I understand it - and I very much doubt whether I do (some physically more astute reader should enlighten me) - the status of quantum particles is often indeterminate. They could be waves, or particles. At the moment they are observed, though, they "choose" one of the two possible states. What the many-world interpretation would say, if I understand, that actually both possibilities are realized - the universe branches in two daughter universes.

Anyway, quantum processes have been going on for some time, and what this hypothesis would lead to is that there is, in fact, a near-infinite (or infinite?) number of parallel universes. There's a parallel universe where a certain head of state gets hit by a flaming meteor at the moment of pronouncing the State of the Union speech. There's a parallel universe where the PSSST(KA) rules visible space with an iron fist from it's fortified headquarters on Olympus Mons. Not: there may be such universes, but there are such universes.

Tipler does, in fact, subscribe to the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I do not know to what extent it would invalidate a stronger anthropic principle, as I do not know to what extent variable constants and fundamental laws of nature are allowed in the alternate universes of the MWI.

In any event, purely as an explanation of anthropic "coincidences", without taking other issues into account, I am not at all sure whether the postulation of alternate universes is less outlandish than the postulation of the existence of God. I wonder whether any of the alternatives would be preferable on the basis of Occam's razor - I'm not sure whether such a thing would be calculable in the first place.

Tipler's theory is based on not merely the stronger version of the Anthropic Principle, but on a Final one: Intelligent life, once emerged, must continue forever.

In short, the rest of the idea is that slowly but inexorably, the Von Neumann machines would colonize the Galaxy and, basically, make it a "living" Galaxy. Then they move on to the Magellean Cloud and Andromeda. Eventually, all of space, the whole universe, would be inhabited by Man and his machine descendants.

An important part of this reasoning is that the Universe does not merely go on to expand forever, as some have suggested (for example Freeman Dyson). At some point, it will start to contract again. Intelligent life cannot exist forever in an eternally expanding universe - eventually, all stars will have burned out, leaving only neutron stars and black holes, and even protons might start to decay. Tipler's anthropic postulate does, of course, support an eventually contracting universe - but you see how much a leap of faith this kind of anthropic reasoning is, tantalizing as it may be.

But now the Universe is contracting, the fun starts. Tipler believes that the universe may be manipulated not into contracting at an even rate in all directions, but to contract faster in one direction while staying the same size in others. This would create stupendous heat differences, and thereby a potentially enormous source of energy. Note that we're dealing with some pretty hostile circumstances at the end of the Universe: intelligent life would need to adapt to the volatile, hot circumstances that exist then.

Eventually, though, Tipler believes that the contracting, living universe would attain an infinite information-processing capacity. Here, Tipler bases himself on a model of the late universe in which there are no event horizons - boundaries beyond which light and information cannot pass, such as the "shells" of Black Holes. When that happens, briefly before the Big Crunch, essentially the living, human universe would become God. As Tipler subscribes to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, all world-lines in all parallel universes would converge upon the Omega Point.

After Teilhard the Chardin, Tipler names this event the Omega Point. It is odd that Tipler stresses that this concept is the only contribution of Teilhard to his thesis, even if he, rightly, defends Teilhard's vague vitalism as the consensus position of evolutionary biologists of his time.

All of this, of course, depends on whether one accepts Tipler's anthropic assumption, his Eternal Life Postulate. If one does, the hypothesis is quite interesting. If one does not, all bets are off.

Now, the Omega Point, being omnipresent - it is the living, contracting universe, will also want to become really omniscient. To do that, Tipler argues it will recreate every possible, imaginable human being. As we are basically an immensely complex, but finite pattern, recreated patterns would be identical to us. They would be us. Of course, we'd be resurrected in intricate virtual worlds, which is probably a blessing considering what the real universe will look like seconds before the Big Crunch.

Now, I'm hearing you: "So, Tipler says we're all going to be resurrected and then informs us that it's going to happen seconds before the End of the Universe? This is a bit of an anticlimax." However, as the universe is basically a giant computer with infinite processing capacity, it can do an infinite number of calculations within those few last moments. Subjective time would slow down to virtually nothing. For all intents and purposes, we'd have an eternity ahead of us.

That's the idea in a nutshell. A big nutshell.

As a non-physicist, I cannot really evaluate Tipler's physics. He might be pulling my leg - but let's assume he doesn't. In that case, the weakest link in the argumental chain, in my opinion, would be that it crucially hinges on an anthropic assumption.

The weakest part of the book is where Tipler insists on searching support for his hypothesis from various world religions. Thus, Tipler is quite happy with the burning bush telling Moses "I will be who I will be" in the original Hebrew, rather than "I am who I am." See?, says Tipler, that fits nicely with the Omega Point theory! Ummm... yes, it does, but we're not actually assuming that God literally spoke to Moses in the shape of a burning shrub, do we?

The biggest redeeming feature of the book is Tipler's guns-blazing no-holds-barred scientific optimism. Kuhnian epistemic relativism is dealt with with the terseness that the junk in question deserves. Not only can we go to space, not only should we go to space, we will go to space! (Albeit as bytes in the memory banks of a dwarf-sized Von Neumann machine). No nonsense about the Precautionary Principle here!

Tipler's writing style is occasionally terse and jumpy. Sometimes, arguments that really would needed to be worked out a bit more are dealt with way too briefly in my opinion. Though most of the equations and such are mercifully banished to an "Appendix for Scientists", I quite often feel that Tipler does not take enough time for what is a dazzling chain of arguments. Doubtlessly the publisher placed restrictions on the size of the book - but twice as big would have been nice.

Finally - does Tipler's argument convince me?

I am not religious, but have been teetering on the brink of religion for quite some time, and have been fascinated by the idea of God ultimately emerging from Mankind for a long time. It seems to me that God as emerging from our collective labours, thoughts, knowledge, emotions, love and hate is far more appealing than a constant, distant Creator.

However, in perhaps too many ways Tipler succeeds in replacing a "maybe" or a "perhaps" with a "will" by his usage of the Final Anthropic Principle. Though anthropic reasoning of this kind interests me greatly, I think there are also problems, as I mentioned (particularly the conundrum of, overtly or silently, comparing the make-up of our universes with other possibilities the existence of which we cannot be sure about - as I said, it all borders at the edge of knowability).

Does Tipler's vision of the Universal Resurrection comfort or reassure me? That's difficult to say. Perhaps it's better to die in the knowledge that it's remotely possible that it's remotely possible that it's remotely possible that there is a remote possibility that you'll be resurrected - I am not convinced enough to go any farther.

So, for now, it's Pascal's Wager all over again.

- Merlijn de Smit

PS: As the Omega Point is omniscient, It will of course be able to read this. So, I have a special request. On page 256-257, Tipler writes that after the resurrection: "(...) it would be possible for each male to be matched not merely with the most beautiful woman in the world, not merely the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, but to be matched with the most beautiful woman whose existence is logically possible." Tipler subsequently provides calculations proving that the psychological impact of meeting the most beautiful woman whose existence is logically possible is roughly 100,000 times greater than that of meeting the most beautiful woman currently existing (p. 257).

As you are omnipotent and all, well, ummm... could you, ummm... match me with two of the most beautiful women whose existence is logically possible?

War, Hitchens, etc.

2005-03-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

The post-facto justifications for the clusterfuck that the war in Iraq turned out to be are slowly beginning to become a little wild.

First of all, the war in Iraq is retrospectively justified by events in Lebanon. You see, the Lebanese are inspired by the fledgling democracy in Iraq to dispose of the Syrians. (Nevermind that the street protests were induced by the murder of a former prime minister, that Lebanon has always been politically quite lively, that some of the largest street protests have been organized by Hizbollah - that's something only the - what was it again? "Reality-based community"? - would worry about). And this is just the beginning: soon, the whole Middle East will become a vibrant, flowering meadow of democracy.

However, even more bizarre is a line that Christopher Hitchens is taking in Slate. Referring to an article in the New York Times in which two reporters, it appears, interview the Iraqi Deputy Ministry of Industry, Hitchens reveals the scoop. Iraq had WMDs:

How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."

Of course, there's a small detail. All the sites where these supposed faculties for the production of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, anthrax weapons, anti-matter weapons, what have you were located have been systematically looted. So right know no one has even a clue where they are.

If the American army actually had gotten those weapons of mass destruction, instead of letting whoever took them run away with them (supposing of course that this story is true), Christopher Hitchens' point would be, well, a lot stronger than it currently is. I am reminded of the quip involving one's homework and one's dog.

There's an interesting political phenomenon which for an odd reason seems to be virtually confined to the British islands - namely that of a part of the left in support of the Iraq war and the subsequent occupation. I've been wondering why this seems to be a particularly British phenomenon. Part of the reason may well be the stranglehold that the ghost of the Tory Party still seems to exert on the British left, and the way a big swath of the left tries to ward the spectre off by supporting the Labour Party - which of all European social-democratic parties seems to be the one in the most advanced state of decline. The most interesting exponent of the pro-war left must be Socialism in an Age of Waiting, which quaintly combines the time-honoured Trotskyist/Stalinist/Maoist tradition of unrestrained pompous self-important vituperation against any perceived opponent with remarkably sensible positions on, say, animal experiments, environmentalism, etc. - anything but imperialist wars.

SIAW is waxing lyrical over a tearful article of one Robin Cook, commenting in the Guardian on the surrender of Ramus Haradinaj. Robin Cook, if you remember, was the hysterical Foreign Secretary of England during the Kosovo War. As the war in Iraq was clearly less politically correct and salonfähig to the moderate left than that in Yugoslavia, Cook resigned from Blair's cabinet in protest at British involvement in Iraq. Quoth SIAW:

Cook, amusingly, risks arousing the incoherent rage of his new-found friends in the anti-war/pro-dictatorship movement, as well as fervent Serbian nationalists (of whom there are probably as many in the West as in Serbia itself these days), and all the other vociferous but, happily, ineffectual fans of “stability”, “sovereignty” and the rest of the tired liberal/right-wing shibboleths of international relations that the pseudo-left so stupidly and revealingly upholds. Unlike most of them, of course, Cook has actually met Milosevic and many of the other players in the Yugoslav tragedy, and he has at least a residual awareness that the real world is not as pure or simple as the Manicheans of the anti-war crowd would like it to be. Accordingly, we look forward, with puerile but (oh, go on) forgivable glee, to the ritual denunciations of the Cookie monster that will shortly pop up all over the internet.

For clarity's sake, I would oppose Haradinaj's surrender to the Hague Tribunal - just as I oppose Milosevic's. The reason being that I don't have much faith in a Tribunal designed and directed by one of the main participants in the Balkan wars, and current occupier of large swaths of former Yugoslavia. Such a thing has been and will be used for ulterior political motives. Both should have been tried by their own people. The chance that Milosevic would have been convicted of war crimes in Serbia may be slim, that of Haradinaj convicted in Kosovo absolutely laughable, of course. Then again, neither the conflict in Bosnia nor that in Kosovo has seen a stable peace yet.

But the very fact that a group (?) calling itself "Marxist" and thereby supposedly on the left of the Labour Party will praise a Labour politician when involved in an imperialist war (yes, I am going to stick to using that word, primitive and unsophisticated anti-imperialist that I am), and denounce him when he repudiates his support for the next one, convinces me that monikers such as "left" are beginning to become meaningless.

I've long felt I have a lot more in common - at least on issues of war and peace - with libertarian outfits like Lew Rockwell than with leftist ones like SIAW or the whole bunch of "progressives" - from Susan Sontag to Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the odious Joschka Fischer - that became the most vociferous supporters of imposition of peace and democracy by cluster bombs in the nineties. In the Netherlands, we had Mient Jan Faber, who was a driving force behind the anti-cruise missile protests during the eighties, then began to issue blood-curdling cries for the levelling of Belgrade only to come to his senses almost immediately after the bombing began; and the (ex-?)anarchist Roel van Duijn. Oh, and most of the burnt-out empty shell that the Communist Party regrettably decided to liquidate itself into in the early nineties, known as the Green Left party.

During the bombing of Kosovo, the anti-war left either bent over backwards to disassociate themselves from Milosevic to such an extent that it was sometimes difficult to see whether they were actually opposed to the bombings or just wanted slightly different bombings; or they supported Milosevic's supposedly "socialist" regime wholeheartedly (this excludes of course some Trotskyist groups who have admirably pushed their own political program just as they have been indefagitably pushing that boulder up that mountain ever since 1938). The anti-war right often steered way too close to wholehearted support of Serbian nationalism. Nonetheless, parts of the libertarian anti-war right at least came up with internally consistent rationales of opposition to imperialism that sounded extremely refreshing to me.

Far as I am concerned, the division between "left" and "right" is dead and should be shovelled under the ground as quickly as possible. There are only two notable political poles right now: that which opposes imperialist military ventures and the expansion of the state, erosion of civil liberties and ultimately militarization of society that is inevitably, inextricably connected with war - particularly totalitarian wars against vague concepts such as the War on Terror; and that which supports them.

- Merlijn de Smit

Evolution and FredOnEverything.net

2005-03-14T14:20:00.000-08:00

FredOnEverything has a column up about evolution here which raises some very interesting points.

Fred seems to want to stress that he is not a Creationist, regarding Creationism as basically too absurd to merit much of a response, and wondering why evolutionary scientists spend so much time trying to debunk Creationism. He's right - I think the point on which I disagree most with him is that Fred is a hard-core positivist.

Natural sciences like physics, chemistry, astrophysics etc. are blessed with immutable constants and laws, which apply regardless of time and space. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the gravitational constant, the speed of light all apply regardless whether we are here, on the surface of Jupiter, or at the other end of the universe. That's what makes experiments in physics and chemistry possible - an identical experiment should always have an identical results. Experiments are repeatable, and hence empirical science (using empirical in a strong sense of the word) is possible.

Problems arise when you try to transpose this scheme of science on disciplines like evolutionary biology, or my own subject, historical linguistics, where events do not happen necessarily as a consequence of the workings of natural laws, but contingently - they might just as well not have happened. Quoth Fred:

Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can’t see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn’t have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But…is any of this established?

In evolutionary biology, contingency is built in the fact that evolutionary changes are the product of random genetic mutations. A mutation darkening the wings of a butterfly would raise the changes of survival for that butterfly (provided it lives in a dark environment) but that does not mean all light-coloured butterflies, or other light-coloured animals would have turned dark in the same circumstances. If that were the case, there would be no evolution proper: there would be no genetic diversity, since a the first mutation happening in the population of whatever primordial organism we're descended from would necessarily apply to the whole population, and so the next, etc. Same with the history of language. A change from the consonant group /mt/ to /nt/ has happened often in many different language families, and the reasons of it may be easily seen: it is easier to pronounce /nt/ because of the greater similarity between the two sounds than /mt/. Nevertheless, that does not explain all the cases where this change has not occurred.

The situation for historical linguists is, in a way, much more dire: any "explanation" of a linguistic change must necessarily refer to actions by intentional agents - speakers of languages. Sound changes occur to make the language easier to pronounce, or to get a message easier across - all explanatory models much, much more fuzzy than the random genetic mutations of biologists, which are at least grounded firmly in the physical world.

So when Fred argues:

Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. (And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.) Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.

He is right, I think, but I don't think that needs to be much of a concern to evolutionary biologists. Plausibility - the most compelling account given the facts we have at hand - is as much as one can attain in many "historical" sciences. That doesn't make them any less than physics or chemistry - but the subject matter itself makes the posivist methodology of those disciplines inapplicable.

Fred continues:

As an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them.

Here I disagree - first, the origin of life itself has no bearing upon the validity of evolution. Evolution deals with DNA sequences that are already reproducing and mutating. Many evolutionary biologists probably have their own ideas on how those came about (Dawkins presents some in The Selfish Gene), but I don't think that "chemical accident" is as much as a consensus position as Fred assumes. There's one English biologist who has actually proposed that life originated as replicating crystals, only to have been taken over later by strands of DNA.

I think Fred takes race/intelligence arguments way too seriously when he writes that:

Black sub-Saharan Africans (say many evolutionists) have a mean IQ somewhere near 70, live in wretched poverty, and breed enthusiastically. White Europeans, reasonably bright at IQ 100 and quite prosperous, are losing population. Jews, very bright indeed at a mean IQ of 115 and very prosperous, are positively scarce, always have been, and seem to be losing ground. From this I conclude either that (a) intelligence does not increase fitness or (b) reproduction is inversely proportional to fitness.

I might want to post on these ideas in more detail later, as they are vigorously popularized in Finland by one Tatu Vanhanen (father of the current Finnish prime minister) - and vigorously debunked by almost everyone else. Just for now:

- Before theorizing on any relationship between "race" and "intelligence" you must first define "race" in terms of genetics. The old categories like Blacks, Jews, Caucasians, Asians are not going to do: superficial similarity may mask enormous genetic diversity (and as for that, "Jews" aren't even a racially particularly homogeneous group, many of them having genetic roots from all kind of populations all around the Eurasian continent). The problem is that genetic research of this kind (studying, for example, mitochondrial DNA - which happens to mutate at a regular, clocklike rate, as mitochondria are actually the vestigial remnants of independent organisms, now present in our cells) is just beginning, and often you see large syntheses drawn on the basis of preciously little material. But it seems to me that the research of, for example, Cavalli-Sforza makes short work of obsolete racial divisions.

- Modern man arose about 200.000 years ago in the Rift Valley in Africa. One should expect significant genetic/racial diversity to arise no later than 100.000 years ago, when the first modern humans entered Eurasia. Recall that Native Americans are racially quite similar to Asians, even though the first Native Americans must have entered the new world as long as 30.000 years ago at least (the old date of 16.000 BC doesn't fit with a lot of things, among them the enormous linguistic diversity among Native Americans). Also, there's a lot of mention in the literature, valid or perhaps not, about similarities between various "archaic" populations in South-East Asia (for example, the Wedda's of India, the Andamanese indigenous population, etc.) and Australian aboriginals. The forefathers of the aboriginals may have reached Australia as long as 60.000 years ago.

In any event, if there was a correlation between race and intelligence, particularly one as big as quoted by Fred, you would find such a thing to result in significant cultural differences within the world. Yet - the first significant such difference arose only 10.000 years ago with the advent of agriculture, independently, and roughly synchronously, in East China, New Guinea, the Middle East, Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Real, significant cultural and technological differences between, say, Europe and Africa are astonishingly recent. Perhaps one would have to place the breaking point as late as the renaissance. Sub-Saharan Africa did have elaborately organized city-states in modern Ghana, Zimbabwe and along the Eastern coast during the Middle Ages. Writing was not developed in these - but writing is an innovation which happened independently only three times in history (Sumer, China and the Mayans).

If there was any real correlation between race and intelligence, one would expect this to become manifest in culture, technology and civilization sooner than during the last 5-1% of genetically diverse human history.

- The number of a mean IQ of 70 for Black Sub-Saharan Africans sounds, well, plain bullshit to me. An IQ of 70 would pretty much mean you're disabled. Note that it is the average IQ we're talking about: half the population would need to be even dimmer. Encounters I've had with Black people of Sub-Saharan origin convince me that this, well, just can't be right.

When IQ tests give you such results (I should try to dig up where that number comes from), the correct response would be to question the validity of your IQ test.

Fred divides evolutionary theory into three conceptual parts:

The first, chance formation of life, simply hasn’t been established. It isn’t science, but faith.

The second proposition, that life, having arisen by unknown means, then evolved into the life of today, is more solid. In very old rocks you find fish, then things, like coelacanth and the ichthyostega, that look like transitional forms, and finally us. They seem to have gotten from A to B somehow. A process of evolution, however driven, looks reasonable. It is hard to imagine that they appeared magically from nowhere, one after the other.

The third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation, though sacrosanct among its proponents, is shaky. If it cannot account for the simultaneous appearance of complex, functionally interdependent characteristics, as in the case of caterpillars, it fails. Thus far, it hasn’t accounted for them.

On the first, I agree. On the second, I would put things actually stronger: the fossil record is no longer the only piece of evidence that some kind of evolutionary process occurred - the fact that DNA sequences seem to correspond so well to time-depths established by those must count as another. We seem to have 99% of our genes in common with a chimpanzee - but only 40% or so with a wheatplant.

The third one goes, to be honest, beyond my knowledge of evolution. But there's one very strong argument to stick with natural selection and random mutations: namely, it can produce evolutionary change without either violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics (I know, the sun in the sky provides us with a continuous stream of energy - but also, unsuccessful mutations can be regarded as "chaos" offsetting what appears to be increased order; of course, only successful mutations survive in the long tun) or without proposing some kind of goal-directed process, some sort of vitalistic "energy" of the kind that Teilhard de Chardin proposed. Which would be tantamount to leading us into the realm of the supernatural. In that sense, random mutations and natural selection does not seem to me to be merely "plausible", but, to my knowledge at least, to be the only plausible mechanism, as it is firmly based in what we know about the physical world.

- Merlijn

How to destroy the Earth

2005-02-28T17:12:00.000-08:00

This brilliant article made my day:

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

(...)

For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet. Such forms include, but are most definitely not limited to: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a quantum singularity; a dust cloud.

I'm partial to the "Eaten by Von Neumann Machines" method. It's almost poetical in it's simplicity and beauty.

Anyway, read the rest.

- Merlijn

Give us real Christianity - no protestant shit!

2005-02-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

I am not a Catholic - I've never been baptized - and neither were my parents until my father converted when I was well into my teens. Nevertheless, I attended Catholic primary school and every now and then - not every sunday - I would attend mass. Now, my hometown is a pretty dreadful backwater and perhaps it is because of that that I found the Church absolutely beautiful. And terrifying. During mass, I used to stare at the chiseled demons - depicting the seven sins, I believe - underneath the pulpit, wondering if they were real and hoping they were not, and at the stern faux-medieval imagery of penance and hope in the stained-glass windows, the grim-faced statues of saints, the panels depicting Jesus on the Via Dolorosa... Compared to the Catholic Church, the protestant churches in my town looked like the cafetaria of the local football club. But the Catholic Church let you into a world very different from the rest of the town - one so much bigger, so much more beautiful, and so much more frightening.

I have since been trying to read the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament. I found it to be a generally boring archive of names and generations punctuated by moments of absolute brilliance. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden is a beautiful metaphor for the way language, and self-awareness makes us human but also seperates us from the comforting fog of infancy and animalhood. But my favourite part must be the story of Abraham and Isaac. Anyway, why am I telling this?

I read on the Swedish tele-text - I haven't been able to confirm it through any internet source - that two of the main Danish parties are intending to make an introduction to Christianity and the Bible an obligatory part of primary education.

If this means supplanting Godless Evolution with some or another more Bible-friendly, theory - I'd be dead against it, obviously. If it is a desperate attempt to salvage the "Judeo-Christian" roots of Western European civilization from the non-abating flood of dark-skinned people heading our way - I'm against it, too. If the Abendland is to survive, it will only based on considerably more universal foundations. But if this measure has been taken because the Bible, and Christianity in general, has had such a stupendous, founding role in Western civilization that it is impossible to understand quite a bit of art and literature - not to speak of real, historical events, without a cursory knowledge of the Bible, I'm all for it.

The reason I'm ambivalent is that I don't think these three reasons are so neatly seperable.

Anyway, I'd have one condition. Any Biblical incursion into primary education must not be of the Protestant variety - whether we are talking about bleak, pallid "we're doomed anyway" Calvinism (ever wonder why it takes only roots in countries known for their terrible, nasty weather? The Netherlands, Scotland, Northern Scandinavia?), or the softie humanistic Dorothee Sölle-version of protestantism. If you're going to religion up your education, take a religion with priests who look like real priests - big and terrible and awe-inspiring. Not one where the priests look like social workers. Instead it should be founded upon Catholicism - meaning, the terrible and beautiful daemon-exorcising, incense-laden, ham-fisted-nun version of Catholicism. Not any of its odious decaf derivatives.

- Merlijn

Update: pornography

2005-02-28T14:09:00.000-08:00

A short update on the previous post about pornography.

On a panel about Inside Deep Throat, leading, erm... light of feminist wing of the Neo-Victorian stormtroopers, Catherine McKinnon, hilariously demonstrated her, may I say, modest amount of factual knowledge:

Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. "What's so funny?" she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff's hand shot up - "I can do it," he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going "me too!" (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.

Funny as this may be, one could ask how much distance there really is between the way women are portrayed by such activists as McKinnon - as asexual, innocent, wide-eyed creatures perpetually preyed upon by men - and between the idea, prominent not so long ago, that there was no such thing as a female orgasm, or further down, the medieval idea that women had no soul, the way the ancient German laws made the relatively humane punishment of beheading a male privilege, since a woman, fickle creature as she is, would not be able to keep from fainting before it, and essentially, all the noxious crap handed down through the ages ever since the serpent preferred to seduce Eve rather than Adam. Is there such a long way from all that to the eerily familiar second coming of all those clichés within contemporary difference feminism? Sorry, I am indulging in rhetorical questions here.

Via God-knows-where I ended up at the Anti-Porn resource center. I am not going to waste time to deal with the many instances of spurious argumentation and tortured logic found on this site, particularly as the maker of it, one "One Angry Girl" makes very clear in the disclaimer that it is meant only for the True Believers anyway. Most of it seems to consist of context-less (and reference-less) quotes designed to show how hideous pornographers are, such as the following howler from Larry Flynt:

"Women are here to serve men. Look at them, they got to squat to piss. Hell, that proves it."

Which forms all of the "On Biology" section. Ummm, would One Angry Girl have taken into account the distant possibility that Flynt was, well, perhaps not entirely serious? That he even might have been engaging in a, perhaps slightly self-deprecating joke?

Anyway, I note with some amusement, though, that she helpfully provides a pocket-sized cheatsheet full of ready-made anti-pornography arguments. This reminds me of the odious way I used to unimaginatively rote-learn arguments when I was sixteen years old or so. Four legs good, two legs bad! The Anti-Porn resource center is hereby going to the sidebar under the heading "Know Thy Enemy", together with FreeRepublic, the main virtual gathering place of the U.S. proto-fascist yeehaw right, and the unimitable GodHatesFags. Warning: do not try to ingest any fluids while visiting last-mentioned page. The PSSST(KA) won't cover the costs of a new keyboard.

Merlijn

Updates

2005-02-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

Some new links that are going to the sidebar: FredOnEverything, a brilliant libertarian columnist; Thomas Knapp's blog, an eminently readable anti-war libertarian blog, Dead Men Left, a socialist blogger who does a nice job of skewering the bizarre phenomenon of a "pro-war left", among other things, as does Apostate Windbag.

I am also adding the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom which I should have added long ago had I heard about it, and Feminists for Free Expression.

East of the Sun, a feminist friend from Finland who just started her own blog, is going to the "Other Sensible" category.

Freedom, pornography, De Sade, etcetera

2005-02-17T17:07:00.000-08:00

NOTE: Slightly edited and expanded on Feb. 18.

Warning: this is going to be a long, rambling post.

One of my favourite novels is Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. In it, he presents a profoundly unsympathetic protagonist, Alex, who is deeply into extreme violence, rape, you name it. Eventually Alex gets arrested and treated in a novel fashion: an experimental medication removes all his violent, dark impulses. However, in doing so, it turns him into something less than human: unable to enjoy the bad things in life, he is also unable to enjoy the good things. He cannot listen to classical music anymore, and is defenseless and vulnerable. Alex eventually gets “cured” but, at the end of the book, when his mates want to go on the usual rape/violence/plunder spree, he makes a conscious decision not to. He conquers his own impulses by himself in a rational fashion. To me, the book is one of the most beautiful statements of Enlightenment values like individual autonomy and liberty: not the liberty to commit crimes, but the liberty to be in control of our own minds, of the light sides as well as the dark.

Why do I mention this? I'll get to that. Essentially, there were a number of news items that drew my attention lately, among for example:

That, apparently, porn company Extreme Associates has the state on its back again. Extreme Associates, as far as I know, publishes flicks with humilation, simulated rape, etc. Alberto Gonzales, the man behind the appeal against Extreme Associates, is co-responsible for the very real humilation, rape, torture and murder of largely innocent prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. He was the one that advised George Bush to flaunt the Geneva Conventions. And this miscreant believes the kinky movies of Extreme Associates to be obscene! News like this makes me want to go outside at night to wait for the spaceship to come and pick me up, since it's obviously I'm on the wrong planet.

In CounterPunch, Chyn Sung writes an article about Gonzales' censorship drive, but, while criticizing it (fortunately) she also is deeply concerned about the supposed degrading, anti-woman nature of porn:

Most of the women and men I interviewed first watched pornography in their early teens or even younger. In other words, pornography is sex education. In an already male-dominant society with epidemic levels of sexual and intimate violence, pornographic messages help further solidify and normalize male supremacy in the bedrooms and elsewhere.

Three decades ago, radical feminists began to raise concerns about pornography's link to sexual aggression and violence, and despite the ways in which the culture avoids the issue, it is still crucial. But pornography and a pornographic culture also affect "consensual sex," sexual identities and relationships.

Pornstar and progressive activist Nina Hartley writes a spirited response:

Professor Sun's reportage dwells at length on the most distasteful aspects of what she saw and heard, but makes no mention of any attempt to establish direct communication with any of the women who work in the adult video industry. No wonder she finds it so effortless to ignore our opinions and dismiss our perceptions of our own lives. It's that much easier to characterize all female sex workers as degraded, humiliated and unhappy if you've never talked to any of us. That we might be involved in constructive, effective efforts to improve our own working conditions, and that our employers might take our concerns seriously, clearly doesn't fit Professor Sun's pre-cut template for who we are.

Final news item: the internet provider which hosted the website of MARTIJN, the Dutch equivalent of NAMBLA, has removed that webside in order to get a takeover deal done. Here, I'm ambivalent. I think it's extremely important that organizations like MARTIJN are able to exist, for reasons I'll come to speak to below. But, I also believe that a website provider does not have to host material that it finds objectionable. It's their server space, after all.

Now, I can hear you groan. Two items about legal pornography and one about pedophiles. Surely I'm not painting with too broad a brush here? Be patient – I'll explain below.

My own ethics basically boil down to the simple “If it harms no-one, it's not morally objectionable or legally sanctionable” line. Applied to pornography, it means that I believe that everything except non-virtual child pornography (the production of which involves the very real harming of children), pornography involving animal abuse, or “real” snuff movies (the existence of which seems to be dubious) should be permissable. So-called virtual child porn I would probably find offensive – I do not exactly know, since I do not intend to expose myself to it – but as it “harms no-one”, it is outside of my moral judgement. Same with pornography involving animals but no animal abuse – not my cup of tea, but not morally objectionable. And definitely not a matter for government intervention.

An objection one could make to this is that by being a consumer of pornography, one reinforces a sex industry in which women get exploited; that pornography reinforces the attitudes that lead to oppression and abuse of women in real life; or that pornography may tempt the watcher to commit violent acts against women – therefore, it “does” cause harm.

The first objection first. There's most probably a big seamy side to the adult industry. However, there is massive exploitation in most of every industry, and I think one could seriously question whether a woman working in the porn industry is worse off than one spending her days in a poultry factory or in a clothes sweatshop. Most of the world economy is built upon the exploitation of labour – and often a pretty vicious exploitation at that. Why pick out the adult industry? I suspect that the real issue here is still sex and society's schizophrenic attitude towards it. As Nina Hartley points out in the linked article, the answer to exploitation would be to unionize and organize, and to work for the betterment of the conditions women have to work in there. Not to call for government bans supported by an unholy alliance between the Christian extremist right and sections of the feminist left.

The last reason can be countered with the fact that there seems not to be much evidence to support a causal relationship between consumption of pornography and sexual violence. As the Feminists for Free Expression point out:

No research, including the Surgeon General's report, finds a link between "kinky" or "degrading" images and violence. Exposure to such material does not cause people to change their sexual preferences or commit acts against their will. The derailed impulses of child abusers and rapists are caused by childhood traumas. ''They are not," wrote leading researcher John Money, "borrowed from movies, books or other people."

Studies on violent pornography are inconsistent. Some find it increases aggression in the lab; some find it does not. Research also finds that aggression will be increased by anything that agitates a subject (that raises heart rate, adrenaline flow, etc.), not only violent movies but riding exercise bicycles. Agitation will boost whatever follows it, aggression or generosity.

Dr. Suzanne Ageton, measuring violence out of the lab, found that membership in a delinquent peer group accounted for 3/4 of sexual aggression.

Studies in the U.S., Europe and Asia find no link between the availability of sexual material and sex crimes. The only factor linked to rape rate is the number of young men living in a given area. When pornography became widely available in Europe, sexually violent crimes decreased or remained the same. Japan, with far more violent pornography than the U.S., has 2.4 rapes per 100,000 people compared with the U.S. 34.5 per 100,000.

The same points are echoed by Arne Hoffman in a provocative defence of violent pornography, pointing out that (my translation):

In 1991 Professor Kutchinsky presented a study at Copenhagen University, which showed that between 1964 and 1984 non-sexual violent crime rose with about 300 percent in Danmark, Sweden and Germany, but the number of sexual crimes decreased. This effect could not be related to other factors such as less reporting or less attention on the part of the police.

And the Kinsey-Institute, which questioned 1.356 convicted sex offenders, found out that these men were even less interested in pornographic literature than the rest of the population. So it is not surprising that pornography is actually used in the therapy of sex offenders. Marcia Pally is convinced of the cathartic effects of such literature. Pornography, she argues, is for adults what fairy-tales are for children: a possibility to express their most primal emotions, desires and fears.

So, the relationship between pornography and sexual violence is a dubious one at best. As for the second reason, that's the only one that has me in a bit of trouble. Some people would argue that any depiction of a naked woman is inherently misogynistic and sexist. I disagree, of course, and even the lion's share of hardcore pornography does not seem, generally, misogynist to me. A subset of it does, however, seem to me to have a misogynistic streak in it. However, that does not mean that there is a causal relationship between the consumption of pornography and sexism in society, in that removal of the first would lead to less of the latter. Or that simplistic equations of pornography, sexism and racism as made by some of the anti-porno wing of the left have any value. Things are not that simple at all.

Between amoebe and modern man, about 600 million years have past. The human brain, that most complex material object in the known universe, has been cobbled together during those millions of years in a rather haphazard fashion. Some of the deepest structures in our brain do not differ much from that of a modern crocodile, and indeed, have been inherited in a relatively unchanged fashion from the time our ancestors walked on all fours and had scales. And also a lot of things relating to sexual drives, to our perception of the other sex, etcetera, is inherited straight from the animal kingdom.

Racism, however, is a political construct not that much older than the colonial age. The ancient Greeks were xenophobic – but they did not care much for the skin colour of various barbarians. The pragmatic Romans were not particularly racist at all.

What I mean by this is that a lot of the stuff that makes us human is detritus inherited from pre-human times, which is not going to go away by government bans, Politically Correct language, diversity training, etcetera. And this evolutionary flotsam may also quite well include the drives that cause some men to find degradation, humiliation of women or the infliction of pain sexually arousing.

(Small excursus, as if this post isn't becoming long enough: it is very much regrettable that the left, during the 1970s, chose to ignore or even to oppose evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, leaving it to the right to interpret their results. I, for one, do not believe that the fact that a lot of our behavioral patterns may be explained through biological evolution makes the struggle for Communism futile. I could add that the biologist Richard Dawkins, who has often been inaccurately presented as a crass genetic determinist, regards modern history partially as a struggle to liberate ourselves from the necessity imposed upon us by our genes. Dawkins is a passionate opponent of social darwinism).

In any event, I am not convinced of the argument that pornography perpetuates oppression of women through attitudes and convictions it installs in (male) consumers of it. I think the relationship presented here between outside stimulus and behaviour or consciousness is far too simplistic. Moreover, pornography is more a product of our society, which includes gender oppression and sexism, than the foundation of it.
That does not, in my view, invalidate the struggle against sexism, social and economical inequality between men and women, etc.

Finally, even if the second reason were valid, it would not be an argument for a government ban, for the simple reason that it is not the business of the government to change people's attitudes or opinions by forceful measures. If you wish to fight misogyny, fight the social causes at the roots of it – but respect the right of the individual to be a misogynist or a feminist, to be a nice and gentle person or to be a cold bastard, to be a liberal, a communist or a conservative.

Getting back to the main issue: I do not believe sexual fantasies as such to be open to any moral judgement, no matter how brutal, degrading or sick they are. The same would go for pedophilia – as long as it is not translated into actions. The reason why I do believe child porn should remain illegal is that children are abused with the express purpose of producing child porn, and consumers of child porn perpetuate this wretched industry. Most other (visual) pornography, however, is produced with the consent of anyone featuring in it – a consent as valid as anyone's consent is, in a society where inequality and exploitation reign.

The problem pedophiles have to deal with, I think, is that a) it is not that hard to think up rationalizations to sexually abuse children and b) opportunities abound. Compare that rape fantasies seem to be common with both men and women. However, it takes a lot to actually make the step to rape someone – it is an act of violence, which negates our humanity and alien to most normal people. A pedophile, however, might easily come up with such arguments as that the age of consent is much higher in today's society than it used to be, that sex with adolescent boys was common in ancient Greece, that perhaps in the future the sexual nature of children will be “discovered”, etcetera. You get the picture. Also, children are relatively defenseless, may easily “consent” out of fear – don't forget that most child molesters are father or uncle to the victim - whereas a rapist usually needs brutal force to gain control over an adult victim.

This is the challenge that society poses to pedophiles. They must, much like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, make an ethical decision not to act out their fantasies or desires in real life. There is a popular and well-intentioned notion that pedophilia is a "disease" - and that, instead of the usual hanging or disembowelling that Jow Public generally proposes when asked about pedophilia, we should "cure" pedophiles of their disease. However, I feel extremely uncomfortable with talk about pedophilia being a “disease”, as it seems to me to externalize, in a way, something that the person in question should try to master and put under control as a part of himself.

I do not believe the attitudes of current society towards pedophilia to be very helpful in this. Particularly laws like “Megan's Law” in some parts of the US, which make the residence of released sex offenders a public matter, effectively prevent any possible reintegration into society. Essentially, convicted child molesters have not much of a life inside jail - where every local hoodlum will project his own unresolved feelings of guilt upon him ("I may be a murderer, but at least I don't hurt children!"). With the current atmosphere being as it is, a released convicted child molester will have not much of a life outside of jail either. Child abuse is a very grave crime - depending on the specifics, arguably graver than rape of adults - but worse than murder? I don't think so.

I do believe the unhindered existence of organizations such as NAMBLA and, in the Netherlands, MARTIJN to be of enormous importance here, in that they may help pedophiles to deal with their desires without them actually harming children.

And as a fantasy, I do not believe fantasizing about children to be more open to moral judgement than fantasizing about rape, which is, as the following article reports, very common in both men and women:

Dominance and submission fantasies. In these, sexual power is expressed either ritualistically - in sadomasochistic activities - or through physical force, as in rape fantasies. Such fantasies are surprisingly common. Person reports that 44 percent of men have had fantasies of dominating a partner. Other studies found that 51 percent of women fantasized about being forced to have sex while a third imagined: "I'm a slave who must obey a man's every wish."

Which does not mean, of course, that women want to get raped. There is a big line between finding something arousing to think about and between actually wanting something. But the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for men as well. In my understanding, the BDSM scene acts as an opportunity for many people with non-consensual fantasies to act them out in a consensual manner (by which I do not mean that all people into BDSM have such fantasies).

I think such fantasies are extremely common, though. Even imagery of eroticized torture and eroticized death are common in our culture, from medieval passion plays which had a tendency to, over time, grow much more gruesome and bloody than the legend originally was, to, according to this page by, of all people, the Satanists, a recent movie such as The Passion of the Christ. But there is a taboo on enjoying such imagery for its own sake. As John Dolan of The Exile describes his dissertation on Marquis De Sade in a brilliant article:

You could write on Sade, but only if you tricked him out in borrowed jargon. Jane Gallop was the model: she wore boots to conferences, which was considered wild and daring, and was about as far as anybody was willing to take Sadean studies. As I discovered when I read her book, though, she had never read Sade. This was my disadvantage: I had read Sade, all of him, several times. Sometimes with one hand, sometimes with two. Well, as Nurse Hardcastle says, "You won't find anybody any good at this job who doesn't enjoy it."

Well, to make a bitter decade short: the dissertation went down badly. It sounded like I was a Sade fan, instead of an embroiderer. Which I was. It all seemed so natural; how could anybody who went through puberty uncool not think of every torture Sade listed? It was, I can't avoid the word, "obvious."

And, in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with such fantasies either, or with pornography depicting them (meaning, in a fantasized or simulated way). I'd not be surprised if these things, too, are a result, ultimately, from the many millions of years we have spent as minor predators hiding in trees or hunting in the savannah. The big gulp between fantasy and reality should be upheld here as well.

Of all people, it's that cartographer of the dark sides of the soul, Marquis de Sade, himself, who has brilliantly depicted an atheist ethic which I would hold myself to as well, in his short piece Dialogue between a priest and a dying man, widely available on the Internet. The dying man has just rejected the concept of an afterlife, a final judgement, or the reality of the Christian God:

PRIEST - Then we should not shrink from the worst of all crimes.

DYING MAN - I say nothing of the kind. Let the evil deed be proscribed by law, let justice smite the criminal, that will be deterrent enough; but if by misfortune we do commit it even so, let's not cry over spilled milk; remorse is inefficacious, since it does not stay us from crime, futile since it does not repair it, therefore it is absurd to beat one's breast, more absurd still to dread being punished in another world if we have been lucky to escape it in this. God forbid that this be construed as encouragement to crime, no, we should avoid it as much as we can, but one must learn to shun it through reason and not through false fears which lead to naught and whose effects are so quickly overcome in any moderately steadfast soul. Reason, sir - yes, our reason alone should warn us that harm done our fellows can never bring happiness to us; and our heart, that contributing to their felicity is the greatest joy Nature has accorded us on earth; the entirety of human morals is contained in this one phrase: Render others as happy as one desires oneself to be, and never inflict more pain upon them than one would like to receive at their hands. There you are, my friend, those are the only principles we should observe, and you need neither god nor religion to appreciate and subscribe to them, you need only have a good heart. But I feel my strength ebbing away; preacher, put away your prejudices, unbend, be a man, be human, without fear and without hope forget your gods and your religions too: they are none of them good for anything but to set man at odds with man, and the mere name of these horrors has caused greater loss of life on earth than all other wars and all other plagues combined. Renounce the idea of another world; there is none, but do not renounce the pleasure of being happy and of making for happiness in this. Nature offers you no other way of doubling your existence, of extending it.

I do not believe in an afterlife – except in the memories and feelings of those we leave behind, and in the traces, big or small, that our work has left on earth. And the way I would like to be remembered is the basis of my own ethics and morality.

Marxism is “merely” one statement of a worldview which regards history as a long, protracted struggle for freedom – freedom of the necessities outside circumstance poses us, freedom of the necessities our own evolutionary heritage poses us, the freedom to control our own destiny, to become masters of our own history. A similar view has been expounded by the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin in his The Phenomenon of Man, and, brilliantly, in Dan Simmon's magesterial science fiction novel Hyperion and successors, which is partially based upon de Chardin's works, who regarded the whole of natural evolution, including human evolution, as a directional process, ultimately culminating in the emergence of God itself.

Whatever the specifics, freedom within one's own mind is a precondition to any freedom relating to the outside world. I mentioned earlier that Marxists should be unconditional defenders of free speech as any infringement on it serves to strengthen the bourgeois state. The same goes, obviously, for pornography as an expression of free speech (and one that, usually, is the earliest to be challenged). But that is not the only reason. The main reason is there are no prospects for human liberation without, as a first principle, the autonomy of human reason over any extraneous force – religion or state - that would impinge on it. It is only by that that we, much like Alex, gain control over ourselves – all of it. The "The personal is political" navel-staring that took over the left probably sometimes in the 70s or so is inimical to that end.

- Merlijn

Strange weather - PSSST(KA) keeps head cool

2005-02-04T14:43:00.000-08:00

(You got the pun in the title, J.? "Keeps head cool"? Har, har)

Johann Hari put up a somewhat overheated (I'm on a roll! Har, har) column on impending catastrophical climate change. This after a new computer simulation suggested temperature increases of around a whopping eleven degrees celsius (as it is, the 11 degrees celsius number is the high end of a range whose low range is at a very modest 1.4 degrees celsius). Now, as a linguist by trade, I shouldn't really be commenting on issues like climate change. And I would have gladly kept my mouth shut, were it not for the fact that Greenpeace and other professional environmental lobbies want me, and everyone else, to have an opinion on climate change - preferably theirs. So I'll present my opinion.

First off, to enable the reader to form an accurate opinion about my objectivity, I should probably mention that some members of my family have owned shares in an oil company - but only a tiny number, and I think they may have sold them off by now. Furthermore, two of my uncles, my sister and my brother-in-law all happen to be bus drivers, providing me, of course, with a vested interest in the continuation of our fossil-fuel based economy. Oh, and my dissertation research on 17th century Finnish verbal syntax is funded by Exxon-Mobil.

The last sentence is a joke. But it does point me to a red herring used annoyingly often by environmentalists of the "shout-em-down" school of debate. As anyone with any basic schooling in the scientific method knows, in deliminating what is good research and what is crap, the funding sources of the individual scientist are as irrelevant as his religious or political convictions (they may become relevant once it is established that we are dealing with crap). Science consists in the transparent application of methods to a given subject - which should be repeatable and therefore controllable - in which factors like the identity of the scientist have no meaning. Only in the bizarre twilight zone of Postmodernist "Science Studies" and some such manure are political preconceptions and values irretrievably thought to colour the results of research.

So when Johann Hari claims that:

So I talked to dozens of distinguished climatologists seeking confirmation - and I have to tell you: it's not good news. They all agreed: the sceptics have no more scientific credibility than the people who insisted for decades that there was no relationship between smoking and lung cancer. There is legitimate dispute about the extent of climate change, but - as one climatologist told me off the record - "find me a scientist who denies the link between the actions of man and the changes in the climate, and I'll find you money from the oil, gas and energy companies."

He has been told something irrelevant, regardless whether it is true or not (as it probably is not).

My apologies for banging on about this - but there is a point here. There seems to me to be a strange prejudice that privately funded research - and particularly by commercial outfits from Monsanto or the tobacco companies - is crap by definition, whereas state-funded research is, of course, a selfless search for truth. I think there is no reason at all to assume such a thing. At root is a naive supposition that the private sector is only interested in misleading the public (as opposed to, say, the government, which as we all know, is always interested in the truth). To wit, they would not be particularly successful capitalists if that were true.

And as an ultimate example of the independence of funding sources and scientific results, I might mention that a fair share of Noam Chomsky's research has been funded by... the Pentagon. And it is not invalidated by that fact at all.

But I was going to give you my opinion on climate change:

1) Surface temperatures seem to have been warming over the last few decades. But even that is not the whole story: satellite records seem to indicate a far slighter warming, whereas observations from weather balloons even indicate a slight cooling.. The satellite records have been criticized on the grounds, if I recall, that slight changes in the height of their orbits caused anomalous readings. However, the surface temperature records suffer from such uncertain factors as quality of maintenance of individual weather stations and environmental changes (if the area around a weather station got urbanized during the last few decades, you will notice this in temperature records).

2) The climate has always been changing - with high temperatures around 800-1300 (the colonization of Greenland!), low temperatures during the "Little Ice Age" from 1400-1800, and a gradual rise since then. More here. During the last century, however, temperatures have been falling from about 1940 to well into the 1970s. This probably contributed to the Allies winning the Second World War: German troops went into the Soviet Union in 1941 way too lightly dressed and were confronted with an unusually cold winter. Needless to say, this does not correspond with a drop in atmospheric CO2.

These variations in climate over the past millenium have recently been ignored in a model - the so called "hockeystick" - which basically suggested a steadily cooling climate until a dramatic rise in temperatures at the end of the 20th century. Critique on this model here.

3) Atmospheric rise in CO2 is far from the only factor acting on climate change: there are many, and they typically interreact (a rise in CO2 could unleash mechanisms that strengthen temperature increase, or that dampen it). There seems to be a fascinating correlation between temperature (in this case, mean Northern Hemisphere temperature) and the length of solar cycles which does seem to fit in well with the 1940-1970 cooling and subsequent warming - but the causal mechanisms that could underly such a correlation are, as I know, not really known. More about that here and here.

4) Most of the predictions of warming are based on computer models, which are about as good as the data fed into it. In climate change, this seems to me to be a problem - as the number of variables involved is very high and some of them (remember the sunspot cycles) poorly understood.

5) I think there is no basis at all for Johann Hari's alarmism. Human influence on the climate probably precedes the industrial revolution by more than ten millenia, as Philip Stott points out:

Secondly, do humans influence climate? Again, the answer is: 'Of course they do.' Hominids and humans have been affecting climate since they first manipulated fire to alter landscapes at least 750,000 years ago, but possibly as far back as two million years. Recent research has further implicated the development of agriculture, around 10,000 years ago, as an important human factor. Humans influence climate in many ways, through altering the albedo (the reflectivity) of the surface of the Earth, through changing the energy balance of the Earth, by emitting particles and aerosols, as well as by those hoary old favourites, industrial emissions.

Here we encounter the second major difference between the science and the myth. In fact, human influences on climate are multi-factorial. Unfortunately, we know precious little about most of them. My own instinct is that our ability to change the reflectivity of the Earth's surface will, in the end, prove to have been far more important than industrial emissions. After all, if Lex Luthor covered the Tibetan High Plateau with black plastic sheeting, even Superman might have problems dealing with the monsoons.

I strongly doubt future climate change to be any more catastrophic than the past. A new ice age is probably waiting in the wings at some point in the future, though.

6) Mick Hume has a good column on the issue of consensus in science and the "all climate change deniers are in the pay of Exxon-Mobil" crap, and mentions a pretty shocking government-funded advertisement:

The most shocking advert today is the one about the apocalyptic dangers of climate change from the government-funded Carbon Trust. Unlike the other two ads it has not provoked public controversy, but to my mind its message is as crude as a Tory pig or an amphibian flasher.

The Carbon Trust advert on television begins with an actor playing Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the A-bomb”. The portentous voiceover tells us: “One man has been where we all are today. When he saw what he had done, he said, ‘I am become the destroyer of worlds’ (cue shot of atomic explosion). Now we all have to face up to what we’ve done. Our climate is changing . . . ”

Patronizing and despicable. It's not important, but it's even misquoted. Oppenheimer, in fact, quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: I am death, the destroyer of worlds. He wasn't saying that he (Oppenheimer) was Death, but that a personified atom bomb was death.

7) Finally, here I found a quote that Johann Hari should perhaps take to heart:

"Journalists often confuse science with philosophy," says Steve Ross, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. "Whether you believe global warming is happening now or is centuries away has less to do with science--we don't really know--than our own personal philosophy regarding political and environmental issues," he explains.

Oh Nice!

2005-01-27T13:28:00.000-08:00

In addition to the risible Geert Wilders, another Dutch politician has decided to fish in the murky waters of the post-Pim Fortuyn, post-Theo van Gogh Netherlands, hoping to reap electoral gains from the wave of xenophobia that gripped the country since the murder of aforementioned filmmaker. This time, it's Hilbrand Nawijn, former Christian Democrat who at first made common cause with the intellectual flotsam that got into the House of Parliament on Pim Fortuyn's tailcoats, and now, apparently, tries to get out before the Lijst Pim Fortuyn ends up in the ashtray of history that that party deserves. Just recently, Hilbrand Nawijn decided to attend to the New Year Party of the Flemish brownshirts of Vlaams Belang.

By the way, it is touching to see Vlaams Belang rhapsodizing over Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This for a party whose leader used to sing to the following little tune:

Ne amadees, ne Marokkaan
Ne raller en ne nikkeriaan
Ne communist, ne vreemde tist
Die zwieren we allemaal in hun kist
Ne rode hond met ne grote mond
Die boren we in de grond!

(Free translation: the referents of a variety of racist slurs as well as communists are being killed).

Hmmm... Would their ways have really changed? Or are they just making an exception on the nikkeriaan part? My bets are on the latter.

For our German readers, here's an excellent article by Simon Kuper on the current political situation in the Netherlands.

UPDATE ON PREVIOUS POST: The rap group DHC has been sentenced to a 150-hour work order and two months conditional jail punishment because of their "Hirshi-Ali diss". I'll use the occasion to explain once again why I think this is a terrible decision. The point is, there is no difference between the freedom of DHC to write rap lyrics in which Hirshi Ali gets killed in various ways, the freedom of fundamentalist maniacs to fantasize about gays being tortured in the afterlife, the freedom of Rob Black to produce movies like Cocktails and Forced Entry, or the dramaturgist Gurpreet Bhatti's freedom to write and stage plays without having to buckle under mob vigilante pressure. That does not mean I have to like the way that freedom is exercised - in case of Bhatti's play, I have not seen it; neither have I seen video nasties from Extreme Productions; the lyrics of DHC's rap song I find, as I mentioned, quite disgusting and I'm not a sensitive person; and while I believe the people behind GodHatesFags.com are hideous, revolting psychoes probably too terrified of their own sexuality, I do not believe any of them ought to appear before the courts for that - one can't get worked up over Britain's proposed law against religious hatred but support the sentencing of the The Hague hiphop kids. It's not an issue of taste.

I would tend to argue for near-total free speech (barring only the odd fire-in-a-crowded-theatre case) because I think it's an intrinsic human rights - but socialists should support it also because any infringement on it - no matter how hideous the target - will strengthen the bourgeois state. If socialists allow the courts to go after the Brotherhood of Aryan Troglodytes (BAT) or the Association of Beady-Eyed Christian Gay-Bashers (ABECGB), then the state will be much stronger once it decides to go after the workers' movement.

Here's, courtesy of B&W again, a well-written but at the very least incomplete article by Christopher Hitchens on the Dutch mess. Hitchens, commenting on the letter that was pinned to Theo van Gogh's body with a knife, argues that:

The open letter is full of lurid and gloating accounts, lifted from the Qur’an, of the tortures that await apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in hell. It refers to her throughout as “Miss Hirshi Ali,” a mistake that has baffled some observers but which I think is obviously intended to make her sound more Jewish.

It's not important, but it's wrong. Searching Dutch pages, "Hirsi Ali" turns out 57,600 hits, "Hirshi Ali" 1,260 hits - many of them unrelated to the letter in question - and even "Hirschi Ali" turns up 290 hits. The reason for the spelling "Hirshi Ali" is ignorance - including my ignorance, since I must have used both "Hirshi" and "Hirschi" Ali quite often. The idea that the spelling is used to make Hirsi Ali "more Jewish" is a bit ridiculous, to be honest (though Hitchens is right that the letter is otherwise quite anti-Semitic) - I don't want to sound particularly pedantic, but I think it is rather well known in the Netherlands that she is, in fact, of Somalian origin.

Hitchens ends the article with the following:

Any thinking person can see that we will soon be facing jihad on the streets of Germany and France and England as well. A secret army has also been formed within our borders in the United States, though its triumphant first operation did not alert as many Europeans as it might have.

The Dutch are friendly and tolerant, but they do not like having this mistaken for weakness. A strong and hard reaction of decided outrage has set in. At first, the authorities misunderstood this. They sandblasted a mural that had been painted near the scene of the crime, which featured only the words “Thou shalt not kill.” (The imam of a local mosque had of course complained that such a display was “racist incitement.”) But people are now rightly fed up with having their own pluralism used against them, and the protest at this capitulation was almost as strong. I myself think it was the wrong mural to begin with. You cannot fight Islamic terror with Christianity, whether of the insipid or the crusader kind. The original commandment actually says “Thou shalt do no murder,” thus making it almost the only one of the ten that makes any sense. But we do not prepare for murder when we resolve to defend ourselves and when we take the side of people like Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Bousakla in the Islamic civil war that seeks to poison our society and enslave theirs.

This seems to me to be a rather myopic view of what is going on - or, in other words, Hitchens is half right. One could add, though, that the "strong and hard outrage" in the Netherlands has materialized as a wave of firebomb attacks on Mosques, islamic schools and other targets - including some Christian schools, in the meteoric rise in opinion polls of radical rightist Geert Wilders, and a general extremely unpleasant political atmosphere. All of these are not part of a defence of secular, tolerant society - they are the other front on which it is being attacked.

A lot of the unpleasantness of the past decade or so - from the erosion of academic rigour to postmodernist pulp, the unfortunate resilience and in some cases undeserved respectability of superstitions like belief in Angels or astrology, and the generally pale, anemic safety-obsessed, health-obsessed, precaution-obsessed culture we're living in, to, indeed, the threat of islamic terrorism - can be seen as attacks on core Enlightenment values such as the autonomy of reason, or indications that the Enlightenment's job is not complete. But radical islam is not the only threat here - the other is, putting it bluntly, fascism - from a gradual erosion of civil liberties in the name of the all-important "War on Terror" - the defence of the Western Enlightenment, no less - to what intelligent right-wingers like Paul Craig Roberts and Llew Rockwell describe as respectively The Brownshirting of America and Red-State Fascism, and its European varieties that are doubtlessly waiting in the wings (see above).

Christopher Hitchens is one of the more fiery supporters of the invasion of Iraq and the War of Terror on the left (using the term loosely). Not surprising, since he also supported the bombing of Yugoslavia - only, back in 1995 or 1999, it was politically correct to do so on the (moderate) left, whereas right now, it is not. One cannot blame Hitchens for inconsistency, anyway. Hitchens also, like others on the more principled wing of the pro-war left and right, did not mince his words in denouncing the widespread use of torture by American forces in Iraq, without stooping to weasely excuses as "Yes, but at least Saddam was worse".

But can you really rely for a defence of Enlightenment values on a military machinery that has repealed the Geneva Accords, that has justified and encouraged the use of torture?

- Merlijn

Assorted stuff

2005-01-24T13:33:00.000-08:00

Pornographers vs. Neo-Victorian Prudes 1:0 - a Federal Court has dismissed an obscenity lawsuit against porn company Extreme Associates. More here..

Meanwhile, The Hague rappers DHC are prosecuted for their "Hirshi Ali Diss" which was spread through the internet last summer. Link in English (courtesy of B&W) here.
The prosecuter demanded a 150-hour work order because the lyrics of the rap song were seen as constituting a death threat:

The court in The Hague was also asked on Thursday to impose a four-month suspended sentence on the rappers.

In a dis — a rap song written to criticise a person — DHC sang about wanting to break the Somali-born MP's neck. The number also suggested an assassination was being prepared in which she would be killed by a bomb attack.

The lyrics of the song in question are viewable here. Briefly, it's a compilation of rather crude racial slurs and even cruder sexist slurs. It's not, by any reasonable definition, a death threat. Not this side of cloud cuckoo land.

As the Expatica article noted, there is indeed a line in the lyrics about breaking Hirshi Ali's neck, as there is one about a bomb attack - there is also a line about cutting Hirshi Ali in two (in tweeën) and throwing her into the seven seas (de zeven zeeën). A demonstration of rather poor mathematical skill, yes, not to speak of poetical skill - a serious death threat, no way.

The fact that there is even a trial about this (and by Christ I hope that the judge in question sees some sense and throws out the charges) is probably testimony to the rotten atmosphere in the Netherlands today. After Pim Fortuyn got offed by an environmentalist crazy, every verbal fart from the left or the right (and particularly from the left) is taken literally with deadpan seriousness. When football commentator Jan Mulder spoke last summer about hanging the coach of the national team (and no; he wasn't serious) everyone fell all over him, with the Prime Minister sending a ridiculous open letter, etc. Something of an inverted political correctness - an rightist one instead of an leftist one - has taken root with the right seeing either islamic terrorists or shades of Volkert van de Graaf everywhere.

I remember that a few years ago, radical Moloccan groups in the Netherlands attempted to push the government into firmer action against Indonesia. One of their representatives came on TV to announce there would be "arson attacks" (brandaanslagen) if the government would not move, and then, well, maybe there would be "murder attacks" (moordaanslagen). The guy in question didn't even bother to mask his face. Yet I believe that the police let him go after a good talking-to. And indeed, the promised attacks never materialized. And, the Moloccans showed in the late seventies and early eighties that they're quite prepared to walk the walk as well.

And now there's all this hubbub about some acne-ridden hiphop kids from The Hague.

As one Theo Van Gogh commented the affair (my translation):

Two weeks ago I already wrote here that I hope the The Hague rappers would not be prosecuted, 'since their freedom of speech' is mine too. Even if I am not impressed with the 'free expression' of hitmen who, how telling, only dare to be caught on camera with their faces hidden (...) Hirshi Ali has every reason to feel threatened, but I do not understand how a judge is going to tell which rap does and which one does not cross the boundaries of the law."

Titan!

2005-01-14T17:23:00.000-08:00

More Huygens images, including a beautiful one from the surface, here.

The Huygens has landed

2005-01-14T16:16:00.000-08:00

And it's sending back images from Titan!

The StWC are right! Well, partially at least...

2005-01-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

I'll confess to having no particular love for the British Socialist Workers Party and their sister organizations elsewhere. I don't particularly like their overly simplistic slogans, their quaintly prefab placards, their horrid tabloid three-words-filling-a-whole-page newspaper style, or, indeed, their analysis of the former Soviet Union, with which I disagree strenuously. The same goes for mass organizations strongly influenced by the SWP or their international co-thinkers, such as the Stop the War Coalition.

That does not mean I agree with whatever shit is being flung at them from the right.

On January 4, the international secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, Hadi Saleh, member of the Communist Party of Iraq, was brutally murdered. Subsequently, a number of progressive individuals and organizations both anti-war and pro-war, signed an open letter at Labour Friends of Iraq criticizing the Stop the War Coalition for their perceived silence on the murder of Hadi Saleh, as well as arguing that the Stop the War Coalition's perceived blanket support for the Iraqi resistance prevent them from unequivocally condemning Hadi Saleh's murder. The same criticism has been argued elsewhere, here by Johann Hari, here by Harry's Place.

Now, I must agree that the statement issued by the StWC's chairman Andrew Murray, readable here, isn't nearly as strong as I would have liked to read, whereas another statement linked to on the StWC's website, by one Sami Radamani here, succeeds in condemning the murder while all but painting Saleh as a quisling collaborationist, and leaves a slightly odd taste in my mouth.

This said, a lot of the criticism levelled at the StWC recently seems to me to be fundamentally misguided. The statement by Labour Friends of Iraq starts with a statement by the otherwise admirably principled Peter Tatchell:

“The StWC reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends”. Statement issued by the officers of the Stop the war Coalition, signed by Lindsey German, Convenor, and Andrew Murray, Chair of the StWC.

“Right now, the STWC supports “the resistance” in Iraq by any means necessary – a tacit endorsement of the suicide bombing, hostage-taking and execution of innocent civilians, including brave, selfless aid workers, election supervisors and ordinary Iraqis on their way to school and work. The STWC justifies this carnage in the name of “national liberation” (sic). Motivated more by hatred of the US and British governments than by love for the Iraqi people, many so-called leftists support a “resistance” that, if victorious, would bring to power Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists and pro-al-Qaeda militants. Is that what the left now stands for? Neo-fascism, so long as it is anti-western?”

The problem is here, that, as Lenin's Tomb have pointed out here, and Dead Men Left have pointed out here, the Stop the War Coalition never endorsed a statement supporting the resistance by any means necessary. The phrase in question entered into a proposed motion which was never, in fact, passed by the Stop the War Coalition. Now, whereas Lindsey German or Andrew Murray may be hold personally accountable for that particular phrase, the StWC as a whole, of course, cannot. Politics would become quite funny indeed if every proposed motion would be taken as representative of the group as a whole.

The actual statement of the StWC is this:

The StWC reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of the Iraqi people to secure such ends.

This seems to me to be an eminently agreeable position. I do believe that the military resistance against the US, British and allied military is fully justified - for crying out loud, Iraq is under a foreign military occupation; is armed resistance is not justified under such circumstances, when indeed would it be? That does not mean I believe blowing up hundreds of Shi'a pilgrims in Kerbala is justified, or that shooting Iraqi policy and army recruits is justified, or that the beheading of foreign aid workers is justified, or that the murder of Trade Union activists is justified. As Dead Man Left quite rightly points out, even the statement by whatever means they find necessary does not imply such a blanket endorsement of atrocities - since, after all, there are a few guerilla wars going on at the same time in Iraq currently, and obviously the murder of Saleh is not conductive to the liberation of Iraq.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If sincere pro-war progressives like the ones at Harry's place or Johann Hari want to support the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein without necessarily approving of the use of cluster bombs, the razing of Fallujah, the shooting down of unarmed demonstrators, and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib (and I accept that position), then they must allow the same leeway of opinion among their anti-war opponents. Anything else would be intellectual dishonesty.

And hereby, the opponents of the StWC seem, to me, to fall in the same trap where they would believe the StWC fell. There's a range of "resistance" groups currently active in Iraq, with probably (in case of, say, Al-Sadrs Mehdi Army and the Sunni Baathists, definitely) contradictory purposes. A blanket condemnation of the "resistance" as being responsible for Saleh's death seems to me to make as little sense as blanket support of the "resistance" despite the murder of Saleh and so many others.

So, I'm quite at a loss on how to gauge the recent criticism at the StWC. Is it simple intellectual dishonesty, is it a question of some people having jumped the gun after which the story got a life of its own; or is it a question of people cutting some corners in terms of accuracy because of other beefs with the SWP or the Stop the War Coalition? I'm betting on the last one, for now.

After the toppling of Saddam Hussein, there may have been an opening to create the conditions for an Iraqi trade union and workers' movement to arise. That opening was progressively narrowed by the actions of the armed resistance (which Juan Cole believes to be largely Baathist), and by the actions of the occupying forces (such as shooting into a crowd in Fallujah). I think that, technically, a respectable position could have been possible in which the US invasion would be supported until the toppling of the Hussein regime, after which it would have been strongly opposed. But I haven't seen such a position among the "pro-war" left (though some of them, not all, unfortunately, are admittedly critical enough of US excesses).

But the ideology of military humanism, the idea that one can rely on the cruise missiles and cluster bombs of the great powers to defend Enlightenment values, is dead, anyway. It died at Djakovica, the Grdelica Canyon Bridge, Varvarin Bridge, and let's not forget that multi-ethnic eldorado of contemporary Kosovo... Oops! Kosova. The idea of humanitarianism by cluster bomb - never much to begin with, as propagated by such "progressives" as Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair and Susan Sontag was torn asunder there and then, and there is no way it can be sewn back together - but I've been told lobsters can crawl on for some time after having been torn in two, and I'm sure so will the idea of the US Army defending Enlightenment values in Mideastern deserts (while repudiating the Geneva Convention and practising torture of prisoners).

The Stop the War Coalition, and, more widely, the anti-war left can be blamed for a lot of things. For not stopping the war, for instance. For having neglected such matters as the Kurdish question in the ten or so years before the war. And, doubtlessly, for showing too much solidarity with clerical obscurantists and not enough with secular leftists and trade unionists when it mattered. But what they cannot be blamed for is for the war having turned out into an absolute fiasco. When all is said and done, the pro-war left will have issues to think about at least as serious (OK, much more serious, really), than the anti-war portion of it.

- Merlijn

Going down....

2005-01-11T13:30:00.000-08:00

You have to hand it to him. Probably few people thought that George Bush could come up with a worse choice for Attorney General than a religious fundamentalist maniac like John Ashcroft - but he did it anyway. As White House counsel, nominee Alberto Gonzales requested a memo from the Justice Department justifying torture practices during interrogation of prisoners, and argued that the War on Terror made the Geneva Conventions obsolete. And now it seems indeed this creep will be confirmed as Attorney General. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sickening.

The nomination seems to have sparked some interesting debate, with one Jonah Goldberg supporting Gonzales:

As for the Geneva Convention and al Qaeda, you'd have to be higher than a moonbat to treat them as signatories to it. Everything they do is a violation of the convention. It may be fun to mug for the cameras and criticize Gonzales for saying that the Geneva Convention is "outdated" when it comes to al Qaeda. But unless you think Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed deserves an allowance in Swiss francs that he can spend at the local canteen, you have to concede Gonzales is right

Well, Al Qaeda may not have signed the Geneva Convention - but the US has (this aside from the question how much of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are actually Al Qaeda-members). Earlier, Goldberg argued that the photographs from Aby Ghraib should have been kept secret.

Mention should be made, of course, of those pro-war writers who have spoken out against torture practices in Iraq, notably, and very eloquently, Christopher Hitchens here.

A favourite argument of those supportive of torture or "extreme interrogation techniques" or whatever is the simplistic fantasy situation in which an impending, massively murderous terrorist strike can be averted by roughing up the prisoner a bit. Justin Raimondo makes short work of this argument on Antiwar.com, arguing, correctly of course, that there is no way to know if information extracted under torture is correct. At Reason, Jeff A. Taylor offers another, interesting counterargument, arguing that the scenario in which a terrorist attack is avoided by a suspect confessing under physical duress is unrealistic:

This premise continues to escape any serious examination. For in addition to the rather mundane fact that the extra-legal status and treatment of terror detainees has not produced significant, actionable intelligence to anyone's knowledge, it may just be that playing rough is not a sound long-term strategy for the United States. In addition to being tactically ineffective, torture may be a bad grand strategy for the United States to pursue.

Finally, Llew Rockwell has produced a brilliant article, arguing that the main enemy for US libertarians is no longer the left, but a "Red State Fascism", as he dubs it:

The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting an ideology – even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of the change – that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our time? It is not from the left. If anything, the left has been solid on civil liberties and has been crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses of the Bush administration. No, today, the clear and present danger to freedom comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use a messianic and belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

- Merlijn

Irish no longer what they were; Italians soon to give in

2005-01-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

Italy seems set to introduce a smoking ban in bars and restaurants. More on Italian anti-smoking decadence here. I don't expect any of the rows predicted in the BBCs first article to materialize, unfortunately. The Irish seem to have given in to similar nonsense earlier last year - though there are signs that pubs are slowly emptying. Nonetheless, I had expected better from the Irish. Then again, I recalled this morning that Ireland is the country of Bono and Bob Geldof as well as that of Brendan Behan and Shane McGowan - and it seems the first side is winning, for now.

The most pathetic of it all is how some smokers actually welcome the ban. As one commentator to the first linked article says:

The ban on smoking is a great way to give up the habit. I was smoking for 13 years prior to Ireland introducing their ban. I admit that I was very much against the ban before it was introduced. However, I soon got tired of having to nip outside for a cigarette. Two weeks after the ban, I got patches. Now nine months later I haven't had another cigarette. I feel great, and I don't have to stand out in the rain!

Gee, I'm very happy for you! I would have been even happier if you had been able to quit without other smokers having had to be chased about by the government for it to happen.

A smoking ban in bars and restaurants is set to be introduced in Sweden in the summer. Swedes won't be bothered that much about it, since chewing tobacco is legal here, and nicotinists will probably massively shift to chewing tobacco in the pub. I've tried out the stuff myself, but it doesn't beat a cigarette. Still, I may partially switch to it over the summer.

And of course, I believe non-smokers have a right not to inhale cigarette smoke. They also have a right not to enter a bar or restaurant where people smoke. But both of these, for me, are trumped by the bar or restaurant owner's right to determine what goes on in his bar. If there is such a market for smokeless bars as proponents of bans argue - why do they need the government to enforce one? Why not start a few non-smoking bars?

Oh, and before someone mentions the health risks of passive smoke, read here, and in particular this. Short answer: yes, a lifetime of inhaling second-hand smoke increases your chance of lung cancer or heart disease, but by such a minute amount that it hovers on the edge of statistical significance, if even that.

Merlijn

New Year

2005-01-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

The PSSST(KA) wishes everybody a better new year than the last one was.

New link to sidebar: Biogeographist and environmental skeptic Philip Stotts EnviroSpin Watch which has some excellent commentary on the recent tsunami disaster in South Asia.

Exile on Ukraine

2004-12-27T06:16:00.000-08:00

The Exile has an incisive article on the Ukrainian elections (where it looks now Yuschenko is winning) and the response of (part of) the left. Quote:

The protesters in Ukraine did not travel to Kiev from every corner of the country because they wanted to hear rock concerts or to wave orange flags designed by American PR firm Burson-Marstellar. They came out because they are sick of living in a vicious kleptocracy. They came out because the election was blatantly stolen by Yanukovich. This is not an "alleged truth" based on American financed exit polls, as Steele would have it, but a fact. There are over 10,000 documented cases of violations, such as election observers being severely beaten and of districts where 103 percent of the population voted for Yanukovich.

Happy New Year,

Merlijn

Barbarism in Iran

2004-12-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

B&W refer to this article dealing with the murderous misogynist travesty of "justice" in theocratic Iran. Currently, a nineteen-year old girl with a mental age of eight is awaiting execution for "actions incompatible with chastity" (she was sold in prostitution since early childhood). Another young women is awaiting execution by stoning for adultery, as is a thirteen-year old girl. As the article reports:

Even Iran's chief justice has seemed to recognise that, although stoning is prescribed by Sharia law as the punishment for women who have sexual relations with men to whom they are not married, pelting a woman to death with rocks counts as excessively cruel.

Two years ago, he ruled that, while stonings should still be the nominal punishment for adultery and pre-marital sex, that sentence should be routinely commuted to execution by hanging.

It appears from the fate in store for Zhila Izadyar, however, that his commitment to the de facto abolition of stoning was about as sincere as the Iranian government's commitment to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. There are no plans to change any of the provisions of the Penal Code that relate to children, and which state that girls as young as nine can be executed (boys have to reach the age of 14 before they can be killed).

More on the niceties of "divinely ordained justice" in Iran here, here and here, by Amnesty.

- Merlijn

Political correctness reaching new heights

2004-12-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

The apex of political correctness gone mad must be the Sitzpinkler movement, an attempt to get men to sit down while peeing, instead of standing up. Here's
more, and here's a quote from Michael J. Bower's , an American rightist who nevertheless for once has excellent reason to have fun with Europeans:

A newspaper called The Australian quoted a young woman named Jessica, a biologist, from the Swedish city of Uppsala: "All my friends demand that their husbands or boyfriends sit down," said Jessica."I think it shows respect for the women who clean.

"My brother, for example, would not dream of standing up. Among the young, leftish intelligentsia, there is also a view that to stand up is a nasty macho gesture."

I suppose that's the problem in the nutshell. Because we European men are progressive, equality-minded, perhaps a bit feminist even - we must show respect for the women who clean the toilet. Unbelievable.

Of course, I for one know how to clean a toilet - but then again, I wouldn't be caught dead with what goes for the "young, leftish intelligentsia" these days.

(Link courtesy of Andrew Sullivan)

- Merlijn

Ukraine, dogmatism and reality

2004-12-19T08:32:00.000-08:00

I'm somewhat mystified by the standpoint of the British Workers Revolutionary Party about the events of the Ukraine. The link I posted earlier doesn't work - the webpage of their newspaper Newsline doesn't seem to have an archive of any kind - but their statement can be read here as well. Shortly, the WRP believe that the former East Bloc and Soviet Union states are still proletarian states, and that the fight between Yanukovich and Yuschenko is a fight between the stalinist bureaucracy and encroaching counterrevolution. I suppose it's a nice example of where dogmatism can lead you.

The clinch here is that Trotsky stated that restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union (and by extension the East Bloc states which would later come into existence) would not go about without a civil war: part of the Stalinist caste which presided over the bureaucratized but fundamentally working-class state would be moved to defend the socialized economy, and, of course, the working class itself would. The line of thought behind the WRPs standpoint is that since there has been no civil war in the former SU, there has been no counterrevolution: the East Bloc and former SU states are still working-class states.

First remark that should be made here is that, though there has been no all-out civil war on the whole territory of the SU and the East Bloc states, the political changes leading up to the restoration of capitalism in the early 1990s have been accompanied by armed conflict at various points. Ceaucescu and his apparatus did not go down quietly in Romania. Gorbachev attempted to smother independence movements in the Baltic States - which were really the first signs of the whole unravelling of the Soviet Union - by the use of force. In the former Soviet Union itself, both the coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991 as well as the defense of the Russian parliament by Rutskoy and Chasbulatov against Yeltsin in 1993 can be seen as desperate attempts by parts of the Stalinist bureaucracy (in case of the 1991 coup, a very pathetic attempt) to forestall an all-out restoration of capitalism.

Second, the Party leadership, and the Party bureaucracy, at the time of Trotsky was a slightly different animal than that of the East Bloc states at the end of the 1980s. In the 1930s, a rather big portion of the Soviet leadership consisted of people who had been active themselves in the October revolution - even as the "Old Bolsheviks" such as Bukharin and Zinoviev were killed off. A rather big portion of the bureaucracy consisted of workers. Yezhov, Stalin's secret police chief, was a former steel worker, and there were many like him. Decades later, the Party bureaucracy had turned more and more into a dyed-in-the-wool caste of its own. Where Trotsky could identify both a "Reiss" faction - which would, when push comes to shove - defend rather than sell-out the workers' state - and a "Butenko" faction which would throw in its lot with the restoration of capitalism, it's much more difficult to pinpoint a possible "Reiss" faction in the 1980s (Markus Wolf in the DDR, probably, but there were much too few Markus Wolfs in the DDR at the end).

This all while Trotsky did not expect the Soviet Union and its leadership to survive the expected invasion by the Nazis intact. So, the Party leadership which would, in Trotsky's expectation, face the choice between capitalist restoration or a fight to defend the working-class fundaments of the state would be roughly the same that Trotsky knew in the 1930s. Instead, the Soviet Union proved more vital than expected against the Nazi onslaught and generations of Party bureaucrats would come before the Soviet Union would be finished. This of course created an immediate split within the Trotskyist movement - part of which believed Stalinism to be an essentially less transient phenomenon than Trotsky expected and braced for centuries and centuries of Stalinism to come, part of which believed Trotsky's analysis of the former Soviet Union to be fundamentally working-class to be mistaken and instead argued that they constituted a particular form of capitalism - state capitalism.

Either answer is quite healthy (though I personally disagree with both) in that if the theory does not predict or rule out event X, and event X obviously occurs, the theory must be modified. A less healthy reaction is to argue that event X does, in fact, not occur - and that anyone who says that event X has, in fact, occurred, must be a defeatist or a revisionist who has given up on the vitally necessary defense of the situation pre-event X. For examples of this, visit the newsgroup alt.politics.socialism.trotsky at Google Groups.

The most intelligent defense of the idea that the restoration of capitalism in the former Eastern Bloc might have been a somewhat gradual process, with various phaes of a pro-capitalist government and a socialist economic base in between, is this long article by Ted Grant and Alan Woods, The collapse of Stalinism and the Russian state. At the moment, I guess the only case where a debate on the class nature of the state is possible would be Belarus, whose economy the CIA factbook (granted, not the best of available sources), described thusly:

Belarus has seen little structural reform since 1995, when President LUKASHENKO launched the country on the path of "market socialism." In keeping with this policy, LUKASHENKO reimposed administrative controls over prices and currency exchange rates and expanded the state's right to intervene in the management of private enterprises. In addition, businesses have been subject to pressure on the part of central and local governments, e.g., arbitrary changes in regulations, numerous rigorous inspections, retroactive application of new business regulations, and arrests of "disruptive" businessmen and factory owners. A wide range of redistributive policies has helped those at the bottom of the ladder. For the time being, Belarus remains self-isolated from the West and its open-market economies

Another, perhaps more dodgy case might have been rump Yugoslavia until Milosevic's ouster in 2000 (if so, and I'm not saying it is so, this would have massive consequences for the position one would have to take, retrospectively, towards the Kosovo war). But surely no others. To argue, for example, that the former DDR, after having been incorporated into the German Federal Republic for some 13 years, is still a proletarian state - as I've seen supporters of the WRP do - flies somewhat in the face of reality. Likewise, the current conflict in the Ukraine is one of conflicting geopolitical orientations, rather than a question of the restoration of capitalism - when it comes to that, the cow has drowned a long time ago, and it's no use draining the canal anymore.

- Merlijn

2004-12-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

I'm sure that Bush, while speaking at the panel on "Financial Challanges for Today and Tomorrow", inspired the audience with a lot of confidance in America's futare. Of course, I know it's a bit childish to make fun of spelling mistakes - though I think it's a bit disconcerting that the many, hopefully educated, people involved in the preparation of the forum didn't correct this mistake. And really, a leader of the Free World who can't keep his zipper closed while meeting foreign heads of states, it's getting mighty embarrasing.

However, the sorry bastard award of the month goes to the British National Party, who accidentally hired a black DJ for their Christmas party. So the party was a bit disappointing since the gathered BNPers had to watch what they said in order not to offend the black guy. As a BNP spokesman said, quoted in the article linked to above:

"There was a bit of a cock-up. The chap who booked him didn't realise. The DJ sounded white on the phone."

You wonder what it takes to 'sound black' in these guys' books. Something like Jar Jar Binks, maybe? Which brings to mind, it seems Joan Baez is totally losing it. As Reason's Ron Bailey wrote, at a concert Joan Baez decided to let one of her multiple personalities speak, this time a fifteen-year old black girl from the Southern United States:

"Baez decided to share with us Alice's views on the election. Amazed and horrified I watched a rich, famous, extremely white folksinger perform what can only be described as bit of minstrelsy—only the painted on blackface was missing. Alice, the black teenager from Arkansas Baez was pretending to be, spoke in a dialect so broad and thick that it would put Uncle Remus and Amos and Andy to shame. Baez' monologue was filled with phrases like, "I'se g'win ta" to do this that or the other and dropping all final "g's." Baez as Alice made statements like, "de prezident, he be a racist," and "de prezident, he got a bug fer killin'." Finally, since Bush won the election with 58.7 million votes to Kerry's 55.1 million, Alice observed, "Seems lak haf' de country be plumb crazy." Since Baez was reading Alice's notes, it is evident that she thinks that Arkansas' public schools don't teach black children to write standard English"

The British interior minister Blunkett has resigned, which is welcome news for opponents of authoritarianism - though it is doubtful whether his successor will be any better, and, as Johann Hari points out, he resigns for the wholly wrong reasons.

One of Blunkett's latest moves was to propose making incitement to religious hatred a criminal offense. Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels has been blogging incessantly about this, pointing out, quite correctly, that religion is a body of ideas, which should be open to criticism. Race, sexual orientation or sex itself is not open to choice, deliberation or argument - but religion is. As Ophelia Benson noted in her latest post on the subject, it's not that simple of course - since religion can be extremely fundamental towards one's own identity. Nonetheless, I believe that the law should be opposed - even in case of crypto-racist or not-so-crypto-racist "critiques" of religions. First of all, I'm against banning even incitement to racial hatred (unless the question is about very specific threats against specific people which have a good change of being actually followed up, i.e. the populist equivalent of crying fire in a crowded theatre). Second, while such laws might be initially applied to quite odious views such as, say the BNP's or the Vlaams Bloks', they'll not remain restricted to them. Here is a good opinion piece by Rowan Atkinson about the subject, and here a good article by Nick Cohen in the Guardian, with thanks to B&W from whose newssite I grabbed them.

Incidentally, Nick Cohen refers to a bizarre hit piece on Theo van Gogh, in, of all places, the Index on Censorship, which, one would think, opposes censorship. Nonetheless, one Rohan Jayasekera succeeded in penning down the following bile:

Van Gogh's juvenile shock-horror art finally led him to build an exploitative working relationship with Somalia-born Dutch MP Ayann Hirsi Ali, whose terrible personal experience of abuse has driven her to a traumatizing loss of her Muslim faith.

Together they made a furiously provocative film that featured actresses portraying battered Muslim women, naked under transparent Islamic-style shawls, their bodies marked with texts from the Koran that supposedly justify their repression. Van Gogh then roared his Muslim critics into silence with obscenities. An abuse of his right to free speech, it added injury to insult by effectively censorsing their moderate views as well.

Fortuyn and van Gogh freed the Dutch from responsibility to rationally debate the country's cultural crisis. So without fear of further disturbing already ravaged public sensitivities, applaud Theo van Gogh's death as the marvellous piece of theatre it was.

A sensational climax to a lifetime's public performance, stabbed and shot by a bearded fundamentalist, a message from the killer pinned by a dagger to his chest, Theo van Gogh became a martyr to free expression. His passing was marked by a magnificent barrage of noise as Amsterdam hit the streets to celebrate him in the way the man himself would have truly appreciated.

And what timing! Just as his long-awaited biographical film of Pim Fortuyn's life is ready to screen. Bravo, Theo! Bravo!

Notice the patronizing description of Ayaan Hirshi Ali - "traumatized" by her loss of religious faith - and the bizarre description of what Van Gogh did as "abuse of free speech". The article rightfully drew enormous criticism, to which the Index on Censorship board responded here, and Rohan Jayasakera responded here. Neither responses are particularly satisfying - of course it is wholly within Jayasakera's free speech rights to demand limitations of free speech, but on a website supposedly dedicated to free speech? I, for one, believe it is wholly within someone's free speech rights to call for a reintroduction of slavery, or for a fascist police state, or for Christian or Islamic theocracy - but neither I, nor no-one else, is thereby obliged to provide that person with a platform. This all notwithstanding, Jayasakera makes one good point in his rebuttal:

I do though regret making presumptions about Ayann Hirsi Ali. The film Submission was probably the best thing that van Gogh ever did, provocative or not, so that should be taken into account. To me something seems not right about her association with a political party with policies that are so inimical to her fellow Somalis in the Netherlands, as well as to so many others. But in speaking for her for the purposes of my own argument, I think I was treating her no more fairly than van Gogh did.

I have wondered about the association between Ayaan Hirshi Ali and the VVD, which is a political party I quite intensely dislike myself. This notwithstanding, Hirshi Ali has taken a generally very independent position inside Dutch parliament.

As for a case in point what defending free speech should be about, take the ACLU's defense of the North American Man/Boy Love Association. As the ACLU states:

It is easy to defend freedom of speech when the message is something many people find at least reasonable. But the defense of freedom of speech is most critical when the message is one most people find repulsive. That was true when the Nazis marched in Skokie. It remains true today.

Hats off.

Some new links in the sidebar: the Plaid Adder, a leftist feminist serpent with a good sense of humour and an excellent taste in movies; Long Road to Paradise, containing "comments on politics, technology and current events from a vegan transhumanist socialist perspective" (I'm a hopeless carnivore, but I like the "socialist" and "transhumanist" parts. "J" is at least a vegetarian, though); Karin Spaink's website, mostly in Dutch but with English material as well (Karin Spaink is an eminently reasonable Dutch writer, as well as one of the most eloquent opponents of censorship in the Netherlands); and a few smokers' rights sites, namely FORCES, FOREST, another American pro-smoking site, Smokers United, and Smokinglobby.com.

- Merlijn de Smit

Trudging towards a police state...

2004-12-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

After the murder of Theo van Gogh early November, it seems the Dutch government wants to start its own sandbox version of the War on Terror. Minister of Justice Donner has announced that the Dutch secret police, the Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst, will endeavour to sabotage "extremist" websites. Link in Dutch. In the magazine Web Wereld, the opposition social democrats have made it clear they're not going to be seen as soft on this issue, with some idiot MP arguing that the government should hire hackers to sabotage these sites. Quoting, my translation:

"The PVDA MP does not believe that shutting down websites constitutes a threat to freedom of speech. "It is more a question of protecting society against the poison of wrong ideas.""

He actually says that. I'm not kidding here. Sounds like our MP just came back from a fact-finding mission to China or North Korea, and got all inspired, doesn't it?

Oh, and the social democrats have taken their diversity training, and make clear that itä's not going to be just Muslim sites: "The PVDA would like to broaden that. We must fight other forms of terrorism as well as islamic terrorism."

So, what's an 'extremist' site, then? Left-wing extremist? Right-wing extremist? Islamic extremist? Extremist atheists? People who believe that such measures are only going to be employed against people "who really deserve it" are naive. Government bureaucracies have an unpleasant tendency of over-employing any powers and privileges that are put into their hands.

I'm not surprised that the social democrats are all over this. After all, all old European social democrats are looking towards New Labour as a model, and New Labour is probably the worst nanny-state dystopian political outfit on its hemisphere. I'm more disappointed (though not very surprised) that the Green Left seems to be howling with the wolves on this issue, and am waiting anxiously to see what the Socialist Party will do.

- Merlijn de Smit

Iraq news roundup

2004-12-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

The US seem to be serious about "pacifying" Fallujah. As Dahr Jamail reports:

"Another example of the winning of hearts and minds of Iraqis is being formulated for the residents of Fallujah. The military has announced the plans it is considering to use for allowing Fallujans back into their city.

They will set up “processing centers” on the outskirts of the city and compile a database of peoples’ identities by using DNA testing and retina scans. Residents will then receive a badge which identifies them with their home address, which they must wear at all times.

Buses will ferry them into their city, as cars will be banned since the military fears the use of them by suicide bombers.

Another idea being kicked around is to require the men to work for pay in military-style battalions where these “work brigades” will reconstruct buildings and the water system, depending on the men’s skills.

There will also be “rubble-clearing” platoons."

More here
on Dahr Jamail's blog, and here
in the Boston Herald. As Dahr Jamail points out, making Fallujah into a model city is all good and nice, but meanwhile guerillas seem to roam freely about in Baghdad killing suspected collaborators:

"They executed a man they suspected as being a collaborator in Tahrir Square, and then they moved on to Mathaf Sqare, just 3 blocks from the “Green Zone” where the interim government and US embassy are located." More about that here.

In other news, the Pentagon has published a frank and bleak report, conceding that the "war for hearts and minds" in Iraq has been lost and that the invasion in Iraq has broadened support for radical islam. Kos has a link to the PDF file up and running. As the Sunday Herald reports:

"On “the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds”, the report says, “American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended”.

“American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies.”"

Paradoxically?

The CIA isn't any more cheerful either. A report by a field agent states that the security situation is likely to deteriorate.

In case some draft-age American progressives are secretly gloating at this news, David Hackworth has bad news for you. The army is overstretched and undermanned, and Hackworth is sure that: "Unless a miracle happens and the new Iraqi security force decides to stop running and start fighting, we’ll be in Iraq for a long time. Most likely with a draftee force."

For the sceptics among you, the US military has recently called up a 53-year old Vietnam vet to serve in Iraq. Apparently setting your life on the line in one senseless war wasn't enough.

Meanwhile, it seems the US Army is not just short on men. Here's
an article about a National Guard training camp in Mexico. Quoting:

"Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.

More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.

(...)

Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, said in two dozen interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, had scant contact with their families and that morale was terrible.

"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.

Several soldiers have fled Doña Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that surround the small camp, the soldiers interviewed said. Others, they said, are contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families for Thanksgiving."

So, if you're an American and of draftable age and condition - which apparently means between eighteen and sixty and being able to walk - well, I've heard that Pitcairn island suffers from an acute shortage of labour. Hint.

Oh, did I forget to mention that November has been the bloodiest month so far in Iraq for US soldiers?

As National Review editor James S. Robbins grumbled at the beginning of last month - why don't we see more good news from Iraq? For fairness' sake, Andrew Sullivan - who has tenaciously blogged in recent weeks about torture abuses by US forces - still finds reason for optimism in the New Republic.

In other Iraq-related news, a Dutchman was arrested today for having delivered tons and tons of the raw materials for mustard gas and other chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. He's being charged with war crimes and being an accessory to genocide. Good riddance to this dealer of death.

Of course, there's another sinister figure from about that time who hush-hushed news about Iraq using chemical weapons against the Iranians, in order not to disturb lucrative arms deals.
Guess who.

- Merlijn

Short book review

2004-12-05T13:29:00.000-08:00

Hans Mühlestein: Die Verhüllten Götter. Neue Genesis der italienischen Renaissance. Verlag Daniel Andres, Biel 1981 (First edition by Kurt Desch, München, 1957).

In this fascinating and ambitious book, the Swiss art historian Hans Mühlestein attempts to trace the roots of what is basically the idea of the autonomy of the human mind - the humanist conception of there being no authority, religious, moral, political, above individual reason, the modern birth of which Mühlestein sees in the Italian renaissance of the 14th century. In Mühlestein's own words (p. 27):

"Wenn wir also tief genug zu den Ursprüngen des gewaltigen Genie-Ausbruchs von Kunst und Dichtung vordringen, der bislang den so gut wie aussliesslichen Gegenstand der Renaissance-Forschung gebildet hat (selbst Jacob Burckhardt greift, wie gesagt, nie hinter das Jahr 1250 zurück!), so stossen wir zuletzt auf das oberste Prinzip aller revolutionären Sekten des Mittelalters, das mit der Kunst- und Literaturgeschichte direkt überhaupt nichts zu tun hat (obwohl es indirekt auch darin natürlich ein grosse Rolle spielt) - um so mehr aber mit der Moral und Geisteshaltung der ganzen Renaissance-Epoche. Es ist das Prinzip des "inneren Lichtes", d.h. die - wie wir sehen - bis zur Todesbereitschaft entschlossene Überzeugung, dass einzig das eigene Gewissen und die eigene Einsicht darüber zu entscheiden haben, was wir glauben und was wir wissen dürfen und was wir offen bekennen sollen."

The title of the book, Die Verhüllten Götter, "The Hidden Gods", refers to the Etruscan religious concept of an anonymous council of hidden, unpersonalized deities, metaphorically used for the main subject of the book - the historical processes by which Mühlestein regards the principle of human autonomy to have survived from its ancient (Ionical) Greek and Etruscan precursors until the renaissance itself. The book itself consists of four main chapters. In the first one,Neues Weltbild - Neues Geschichtsbild, Mühlestein sets the stage for the rest of the book, departing from the modern conception of time and space, and tracing the roots of a scientific worldview to the work of the Pre-Socratic natural philosophers, such as Anaxagoras, Anaximander and Heraclitos, whom he compares to Plato and Aristoteles (a comparison extremely unfavourable to the latter). The second part, Die Verhüllten Götter concerns itself with the genesis of Etruscan culture in Italy - the last large non-Indo-European culture of the mediterranean area. The third part, Das "Innere Licht" deals with the Christian "underground" of the first and early second millenium A.D., and the influence from various dualistic Iranian religious currents which Mühlestein regards as crucial in their formation. The fourth part, Der Genie-Ausbruch Der Renaissance, finally, deals with the great cultural revolution of the renaissance itself.

When dealing with the genesis of the naturalistic/scientific worldview of today, and the concept of the autonomy of human reason, Mühlestein does specifically not differentiate between religion and science, rather, he contrasts an individualist audacity to think and conceptualize - both in religious and early scientific issues - a Traumkraft to use Mühlestein's words - to a dogmatic acceptance of ideas. Notably, Mühlestein regards this Traumkraft exemplified particularly in the dialectical philosophy of Heraclitos (influenced, according to Mühlestein, by Iranian Zoroastrianism), which he compares to the idealistic and static worldview of Parmenides and particularly Plato, in whom he sees a precursor of the ecclesiastical dogmatism of the medieval Catholic Church:

"Diese völlig irreale Tautologie des Parmenides, diese "logistische" Simplifizierung aller Weltprobleme, ein rein logistischer Traum, hat denn auch den ungeheuerlichsten Erfolg in der Weltgeschichte bis auf unsere Tage gehabt: es ist zum Geburtshelfer der Ideenlehre Platos geworden, in der zwar dieses Traumgenie die kosmische Dynamik des Heraklit nicht etwa vergass, sie aber vom Diesseits resolut ins Jenseits transzendierte, in die angeblich absolute "Entelechie", d.h. in die "Selbstbewegung der Ideen" nicht nur hinter aller Naturwirklichheit, sondern auch hinter allen logischen Begriffen, mittels derer der Mensch dieser Ideeen (natürlich vergeblich) habhaft zu werden trachtet - so dass alles Leben, im Kosmos wie hienieden, nur ein vom allein "seienden" Ideenspiel der selbstbewegten Ideen geworfenes "nichtseiendes" Schattenspiel wäre. Sowohl in dieser Form Platos, wie aber auch in der Form der ganz ebenso idealistischen, nur mit zahlreichen "realistischen" Exemplifikationen versetzten Logik des Aristoteles, unterwarf sich das späte Griechentum die ganze intellektuelle Welt des Abendlandes: es wurde zur Amme aller Ontologien, aller wissenschaftlichen und religiösen Dogmatik und Scholastik. Aristoteles wurde direkt zum Kirchenvater des Mittelalters, von dem jahrhundertelang die Rede ging: "Die Logik des Aristoteles ist die Logik Gottes" - und auf dessen Autorität hin noch Galilei verurteilt wurde. Und Platons Mystik hat alles freiere Denken der Renaissance verdorben, bis hinauf in die kühne Kosmologie Giordano Brunos, den der leidenschaftlich unternommene Versuch, aus der ungefährlichen platonischen Traumwelt in die gefährliche Welt der astronomischen Wirklichheit (der "Millionen Sonnen") durchzubrechen, auf der Scheiterhaufen brachte..." (p. 53-54)

Mühlestein's emphasis on a, so to speak, metareligious attitude - of audacity and curiosity rather than dogmatism - rather than a non-religious naturalistic worldview itself as a basis of the concept of individual reason which defines the Enlightenment may make today's defenders of that Enlightenment - both against religious attacks on science, for example "Intelligent Design" and creationism, and postmodernist attacks on the concept of scientific objectivity - somewhat uneasy. Nonetheless, I am with Mühlestein here: what is at stake, currently as probably as well in Plato's time, is basically the position of man itself as either a subject slowly gaining control over the natural forces surrounding him as well as over his own history, or as a prisoner of culture, worldviews or religious dogma, rather than the existence or non-existence of God.

The second part of the book deals with Etruscan culture of central Italy, which Mühlestein regards as the last protagonists of a pre-Indo-European matriarchal meditterranean cultural complex. The issue whether, and to what extent, pre-IE Europe was "matriarchal" or not is a very controversial one, nonetheless there seem to be indications that pre-Indo-European meditterranean cultures were, at least, somewhat less patriarchal than the extremely patriarchal ancient Greeks and Romans. Mühlestein makes an extremely bold move in locating the primeval homeland of the Etruscan homeland. The current consensus,defended recently
by for example the Dutch linguist Beekes, is that the Etruscans are not indigenous to Italy but have originated from Asia Minor.Evidence for this is for example found in the existence of some identical Etruscan and Lydian/Hittite deities (mentioned by Mühlestein on p. 152). Mühlestein, however, goes further and regards Northern Africa, more precisely, the Shot-Dyerit basin of central Tunisia, as the original homeland of the Etruscans. The original inner sea of the basin has been thought to have slowly dried out after a catastrophical earthquake in the mid-2nd millenium BC, and, according to Mühlestein, the Etruscans would have pushed westwards in a coalition with other tribes to Egypt, where they appear as the tursha. Also, Mühlestein believes the city of Tartessos mentioned in Greek legend was located in central Tunisia rather than in Southern Spain (where it is currently thought to have been located). Though I am somewhat sceptical, the often tantalizing bits of evidence and indicators that Mühlestein succeeds in collecting for his hypothesis are certainly interesting.

Mühlestein regards the non-anthropomorphized, secret "council of hidden gods" of the Etruscans as a remnant of the anonymous, female Cretan Potnia, the symbol of which is the labrys. Another remnant of a matriarchal religious conception, according to Mühlestein, is the ruling Etruscan triumvirate of Gods: both Tina (identifiable with Zeus or Jupiter) as well as Uni (Juno) and Menrva (Minerva) are armed with lightning bolts. Mühlestein traces his concept of Traumkraft particularly in Etruscan fresco art as well as in the political, egalitarian tendencies found in some Etruscan cities: notably, the nascent Roman Republic founded by the Etruscan Servius Tullius, and the last Etruscan cities of central Italy, surviving as republics after the Etruscan monarchy and priesthood were wiped out by the Roman onslaught. Mühlestein contrasts these tendencies with the scraps of Etruscan culture that survived during Roman times - namely, as superstition and a strongly hierarchical priesthood (which itself survives, partially, until this day in the organization of the Catholic Church). The line Mühlestein then draws - from the last, free Etruscan city-republics of central Italy in the final centuries BC to the cities where the renaissance first takes root, is a very bold one.

The other "strain" Mühlestein follows up is one departing from the Christian mystics and heretics of the first millenium BC to the great heretical movements of medieval times - the Bogomils in the Balkans, and the Cathars in Southern France. Mühlestein emphasizes the influence of various Iranian schools of religious thought - from Zoroastrian dualism to, particularly, Manicheanism, on the heretical movements of the middle ages.

The sheer timespan Mühlestein thus deals with - from the neolithic Pre-Indoeuropean mediterranean to the Italian renaissance, in about 450 pages is enormous, and sometimes he seems to be charging ahead a bit too quickly for my taste. This notwithstanding, the book is monumental if merely because of Mühlestein's extremely powerful, clear and often simply beautiful writing. That alone makes it a fitting monument to the very subject he is dealing with: that of the emergence of human reason as the sole determiner of what it truth and what is error. And, though published first in 1957, the book is far from obsolescent: though Mühlestein regards the great scientific breakthroughs of the past four centuries as a continuous triumph - science, and the mindsets and attitudes necessary for science and human progress, does not lack challenges.

- Merlijn de Smit

Curricula Cuts, Rightless Students and Censorship, oh my!

2004-12-04T14:23:00.000-08:00

The educational realm has quite a bit of problems, from the belief that once a pupil enters the schoolyard he surrenders his rights to curricula cuts to legislated textbook censoring. These woes are no secret and I'm not entirely convinced things were worse (or better) in days passed. Regardless, education is certainly a hallmark of any society and how much intellectual independence students are left with speaks volumes.

In the United States, a pupil has few rights on the school campus. Handbooks detailing all the things that are not allowed are passed out within the first few days of class and the student and his or her parents must sign a slip agreeing to abide by all that is written therein under threat of punishments (e.g. repetitive detentions, etc.) It was not until 1969, and it took a Supreme Court case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, that students were guaranteed their First Amendment rights inside the school's gates. A student's right to privacy is not guaranteed: his or her belongings may be searched and atheletes may be subjected to mandatory drug tests.

The United States leaves education, for the most part, to the counties - the subunits of the states. This minute division makes for a very varied educational spectrum across the country. Students are often allowed to take harder classes in the subjects they excel in and easier classes in those they are horrible. This selection creates widely different educational experiences for the students. It is hard to generalize, therefore, but I will be so bold as to say that the US seems to focus, clearly, more on mathematics and English than it does on any of the other subjects and that foreign languages are probably the weakest point of all in American secondary schools.

German schools grant their students many more rights, from being able to leave the classroom without asking permission to an open-campus policy. Students generally stay in one place and their teachers come to them.

However, students take the same classes as each other and it is not until the the last two years, for Gymnasium students, that they actually have a say in their schedule beyond deciding which Sport class they'll take or whether they want to have an Art, Music or Theatre class. There also exists, so I'm told, a North-South gradient: schools in the north are not as academically challenging as those in the south. One person who attended school in the rich Bundesland Bayern (Bavaria) was told by her teachers that Bavarian pupils were ready to pass the Hamburger Abitur in the 11th grade--two years early.

The major problem with German schools, at least here in the North, is their exclusive curricula, especially in mathematics. Students in the 11th grade here have not yet learnt how to factor out something like x²-5x+4 into (x-4)(x-1), they will never learn how to work with imaginary numbers according to the mathematics teacher, they need not be taught synthetic polynomial division. In the US all of those things are normally taught before or during the 10th grade. In their Religion class, which is taken by all student except those who "have no religion", i.e. are not Lutheran or Catholic, Judaism and Islam and other world religions are skimmed over. A German teacher had no idea what Hannukah was and what most people know of Islam comes from Turkish friends or brief news blurbs about Ramadan in the Middle East.

Whatever failings the Germans have in mathematics, they make up in foreign language instruction. English is beaten into most students for 7 years and soon students will be beginning English studies as young as 3rd grade. In addition, they must take a second foreign language for certain number of years, the exact number I haven't worked out since some people are beginning Spanish in the 11th grade but others have been taking French or Latin for 5 years already. Compare this to the mere 2 years required in most American high schools.

The United States is also leading the way in recent censorship and censorship proposals when it comes to educational materials. From the recent proposal by Gerard Allen on banning materials mentioning, referring to, etc. homosexuality from public libraries to the new health books to be used in Texas classrooms. Textbook errors seem to keep popping up as well. Frighteningly enough, many parents are the origin of such censorship measures.

On the same topic, here's a link to a the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged books between 1990 and 2000.

Until parents, school administrators, textbook publishers and politicians can step back and let the students of the world learn unhampered there will always be a stain on education where intellectual freedom was not allowed to prosper.

-J

The British Helsinki Human Rights Group

2004-12-03T13:49:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago I linked to this report on the second round of the Ukrainian presidential elections by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. The report seems to have caused some hubbub over the internet - for example, this discussion at Harry's Place and this one at Reason's Hit and Run blog. Then in last Tuesday's Guardian, David Aaronovich weighed in with this column, mainly focusing on John Laughland, one of BHHRG's trustees, who is at the same time connected to Sanders Research Associates, and BHHRG co-founder Christine Stone, who used to be a columnist at Antiwar.com, which, as Aaronovich seems to be surprised to find out, "was not a leftwing site opposing the Iraq war. It was a rightwing site set up to oppose the Kosovo intervention in 1999." (in fact, some people opposed both wars...). Aaronovich finds these connections mighty fascinating.

I've never heard of Sanders Research Associates, and their articles seem to come with subscription only. This said, ridiculing Sanders Research Associates for predicting a massive John Kerry win, as Aaronovich does, is a bit rich, really - most people believed John Kerry would win the US presidential elections.

I have occasionally read Laughland, though, am a big fan of Antiwar.com, and have occasionally read the BHHRG's reports, so I'm going to make a few small comments.

1. I'm not going to get into the issue of Kosovo, at least not for now - I might do so in the near future, but it'd take a long time. Suffice to say for now that I do not know whether Laughland is an all-out Milosevic supporter in the way that some latter-day Stalinists seem to be, rather than someone who has merely opposed the Kosovo war and Milosevic's indictment. You don't need to be a Milosevic supporter to do either: both Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo and Nebojsa Malic have strongly opposed both without having shown much in the way of personal sympathy for Milosevic - at least not to this reader.

2. I would hesitate even to call Antiwar.com right-wing, even if its main political thrust is libertarian (which is quite some miles way even from the anti-imperialist paleoconservatism of Pat Buchanan, not to speak of the the likes of the John Birch Society which did at the time oppose the intervention in Kosovo as well. And an acerbic radical leftist like Alexander Cockburn used to have a regular column on the page.

3. At Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo has responded to Aaronovich in typical Raimondo style - which is something like the rethorical equivalent of an all-out armoured assault, with lots of hyperlinks. Justin Raimondo makes much of Aaronovich's communist past in a way that makes this NOT-ex communist here extremely uneasy. However, he makes one extremely important point, which is, that, quoting Laughland:

"We are told that a 96 per cent turnout in Donetsk, the home town of Viktor Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts of more than 80 per cent in areas that support Viktor Yushchenko are not. Nor are actual scores for Yushchenko of well over 90 per cent in three regions, which Yanukovich achieved in only two. And whereas Yanukovich's final official score was 54 per cent, the Western-backed President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially polled 96.24 per cent of the vote in his country in January. The observers who now denounce the Ukrainian election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying that it 'brought the country closer to meeting international standards'. We have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double standards in media reporting."

Raimondo helpfully links to a map of the election results.

Whatever Laughland's or the BHHRG's political loyalties may be, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If the stalinistic support figures for Yanukovich in Donetsk are suspect, then so are by extension similar support figures for Yuschenko in the West, not to speak of the massive 96.24% victory for Saakashvili in Georgia.
Instead of casting suspicion on the BHHRG for reporting issues like these, perhaps some slight consistency would be asked for?

4. I generally take the BHHRG's report with a grain of salt, especially since they seem so much at odds with what is generally reported in the media. But then again, I try to take most things I read with a grain of salt. Aaronovich's attempt to make the BHHRG look like some extremely nefarious organization doubtlessly depending on sinister funding sources: "So what on earth is going on here? I know nothing about BHHRG's finances, but the ideological trail is fascinating." seems not particularly convincing to me - since at least one of these ideological trails leads to antiwar.com, a rather innocuous organization.

That does not mean that the BHHRG is above criticism. For one thing, they seem to have presented an extremely rosy report on the situation for Roma in the Czech Republic some time ago - strongly criticized by the European Roma Rights Center here. But their election report on the Ukraine definitely deserves to be read.

- Merlijn

Galloway Follow-Up

2004-12-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

Johann Hari reminds his readers of some of the charges against Galloway - not that he accepted money from Saddam Hussein's regime, but that he was extremely supportive of said dictator. Nonetheless, Media Lies argues that the quotes Hari provides are, seen in their context, considerably more nuanced than they would seem at first sight. I don't believe this disproves the points I made below - it does prove, though, that the issue may be more complex than it seems.

- M.

Censorship daily digest

2004-12-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

Apparently, a number of Dutch muslims have hired a lawyer, R. Moszkowicz, to try and ban the planned sequel to Ayaan Hirschi Ali and Theo van Gogh's film Submission - the first part of which criticized violence and oppression of women in islamic culture, and was probably the reason why the filmmaker, van Gogh, was shot and stabbed to death by an islamic extremist early this month. Also, the idea of the lawsuit is to prohibit Hirschi Ali to make "offensive" statements about islam.

I expect the judges to laugh this lawsuit out of court immediately - the Netherlands have never been really big on censorship ever after a christian bid to censor the writer Gerard Reve for a passage in a novel in which the protagonist has sex with God in the guise of a donkey failed some decades ago. And banning a film before it is even made is of course the height of pre-emptive censorship.

Then again, nothing really surprises me these days.

Let's not forget, of course, that there are not only muslims in support of censorship. In the US, a republican representative from Alabama, one Gerald Allen, is preparing a law proposal to ban books with gay protagonists and textbooks suggesting that - horror! - homosexuality is natural from libraries.

His solution: "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them."

I fear that the only reason Mr. Allen proposes this is his frustration at not being able to dump gays and lesbians themselves into that hole. Mr. Allen seems to be quite a dangerous fellow to me.

Aside from this, of course this ban is pretty much an all-out assault on human civilization itself. As a librarian reports in the article linked to above: "Half the books in the library could end up being banned. It's all based on how one interprets the material."

I am deeply ambivalent about anti-war MP George Galloway's victory in a libel case against the Daily Telegraph today, which accused him for, among other things, being in pay by the Saddam Hussein regime. When these charges became known, it seemed to me to be a smear against the anti-war movement as a whole. It may well have been so.

This notwithstanding, socialists, or people interested in free speech in general, have no reason to cheer the court decision - as the British Socialist Workers Party, currently in an extremely odd alliance with Galloway and islamic religious groups, of course does.

The British libel laws are pretty draconic, and only a few years ago, the British magazine LM, quite possibly the best political magazine on the left of the past one-and-a-half decade (archives linked to in sidebar), was gagged in a libel suit by media giant ITN. The outcry among the socialist left that should have been there during that time was, well, eeriely absent. Of course, a number of leftists, Noam Chomsky being one example, principledly defended LM. There were however also individuals mistakingly regarded as part of the left - green reactionary George Monbiot one of them - one rather toxic example here, who made a career out of going after LM in top conspiracy-theorist fashion.

This aside, going to the bourgeois court to repress someone else's speech - even if that speech is, indeed, libelous - cannot but strengthen those libel laws themselves.
Perhaps next time they'll be employed against the left again.

Anyway, George Galloway is the last thing the anti-war movement, or the socialist movement in general, needs: a deeply conservative stalinist, who strongly opposes a woman's right to choose and who visited Saddam Hussein, greeting him with the words: "Sir... we salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability... We are with you. Until victory! Until Jerusalem!"

Excuse me - to Jerusalem!!?

I am not a very good Marxist, to be honest. I would like to be a good one - but I'm way too wobbly with my own politics (which is one of the reasons I am building the PSSST(KA)). But I much prefer principled Trotskyist opposition to both the imperialist war as well as Ba'athism and islamic fundamentalism - say, the line taken by the ICL:

"As revolutionary Marxists, we have a side in the current situation, against the U.S., its allies and Iraqi lackeys. Our starting point is to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, and their allies. We defend the peoples of Iraq against any U.S.-led attack and repression. Insofar as the forces on the ground in Iraq aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers (including the over 20,000 private mercenaries operating in the country), we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism. Every blow struck against the imperialist occupiers is a blow struck against the enemy of workers and the oppressed all over the world.

But we do not imbue the forces presently organizing guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces with “anti-imperialist” credentials and warn that in the absence of working-class struggle in Iraq and internationally against the occupation, the victory of one or another of the reactionary clerical forces is more likely to come about through an alliance with U.S. imperialism. We are intransigent opponents of the murderous communal violence against other ethnic, religious and national populations oftentimes carried out by the very same forces fighting the occupation armies. And we condemn the kidnappings and executions of foreign civilian workers in Iraq.

We are external to the situation inside Iraq and our task at this point in time is therefore necessarily largely propagandistic, but no less crucial. While making clear that the main enemy is U.S. imperialism, a revolutionary party with roots and influence in Iraq today would mobilize against the reimposition of sharia, against communalist sectarian attacks, for organizing the vestiges of the workers movement and the legions of the unemployed on a class basis through strikes and workplace occupations against the thieving imperialist occupiers and parasitic clerics."

Or the AWL:

"In the event the American forces met less resistance than they expected from the political Islamist “insurgents” in Fallujah. Although pockets of fighting continue, operation Phantom Fury was over much quicker than we (or they), expected. Many of the Islamist/Ba’athist fighters seem to have deserted their “stronghold” before the attack. They will regroup and may fight in other Sunni cities. Right now the US forces are in Mosul “clearing” what they call “pockets of resistance”.

The fact that less damage was done than might have been will be very little comfort to the people of Fallujah when they return to their bullet-ridden homes and a city devastated by the Americans and the “resistance”. Or who stayed inside the city, who are living with dead bodies in the streets, the threat of snipers, and the lack of food and water.

Reports of civilian casualties are only just beginning to come out. In true Ba’thist fashion Prime Minister Iyad Allawi claimed that no civilians had been killed in Fallujah!

(...)

What do those on the left who back the occupation, who put their faith in the big powers, think now? No matter how much we want to see reactionary militias marginalised — forces that would annihilate the fledging workers’ organisations — we cannot rely on, trust or back forces with such a lack of care for civilian life, those who are concerned essentially with their own “big power” strategy to secure Iraq for “normal” capitalist plunder and not with the needs of the Iraqi people.

The US and British are trying to bring into their fold “mainstream” Islamism in the form of Sistani and SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq). Moqtada al-Sadr could be part of a Sistani-led grand coalition. These are not friends of the working class.

As to those on the left, the SWP and others, who back the “resistance” — the events of the last weeks flatly contradict their position. The people of Fallujah did not “resist”.

By and large they fled the city or stayed in their homes. There is probably a lot of passive support for the armed resistance and much misery and discontent, but most of the people of Fallujah seem to have regarded themselves as victims of the Islamic militants."

(even if the two of them probably don't want to be mentioned in the same post) - anyway, I much prefer nuanced socialist analyses like the two linked to, above cheering for islamic fundamentalism or Ba'athism as the latest reincarnation of the fight against Empire - if we have to rely on the liked of Galloway, that fight is in dire straits, indeed.

- Merlijn

Run into machine-gun fire - But watch out for second-hand smoke!

2004-11-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

The Idleworm has a good link to an article by Naomi Klein in the Guardian, Smoking while Iraq burns, in which she tears apart some of the hubbub in the US around the photograph of a US Marine relaxing with a cigarette after a long hard day's work of killing the natives in Fallujah. The photograph itself apparently has quite a few pro-war crotches in the US going a bit damp.

Here's the photograph on a pro-Bush blog by Michelle Malkin. It seems CBS news anchor Dan Rather commented this photograph as follows: "For me, this one's personal. This is a warrior with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger. See it. Study it. Absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And if your eyes don't dampen, you're a better man or woman than I."

So, the Americans have found their rugged, sweaty, masculine God of War. You'd think they'd be happy.

But no. As Naomi Klein's article reports, the wide coverage the photograph has received has met with criticism in some quarters. Some people remark that this cigarette-smoking Mars may not be a good example to the children.

Of course - you'd think. Running around in a country where you have no business being and alternatingly shooting people and getting shot at is not what mom and dad might have in mind for junior. Glorification of war, combat and widespread destruction is, perhaps, not what one would want the next generation to be raised with.

Wrong.

The problem, you see, is not that he's engaged in a senseless slaughter that has claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives. Don't be that naive. The problem is - that he's smoking.

As Naomi Klein quotes some letter-writers: ""Lots of children, particularly boys, play army, and like to imitate this young man. The clear message of the photo is that the way to relax after a battle is with a cigarette," wrote Daniel Maloney in a scolding letter to the Houston Chronicle. Linda Ortman made the same point to the editors of the Dallas Morning News: "Are there no photos of non-smoking soldiers?" A reader of the New York Post helpfully suggested more politically correct propaganda imagery: "Maybe showing a marine in a tank, helping another GI or drinking water would have a more positive impact on your readers.""

That's right. Quite aside from the little circumstance that, after having dodged bullets all day, the Marine in question probably couldn't care less about the warnings on the cigarette package, it now seems that it's okay if the current generation of children take the Marine as their role-model when playing army - after all, we want them to become good cannon fodder for the Fatherland, won't we? But God forbid that they get the idea to indulge in the disgusting habit of smoking!!! Lest they do not understand that their bodies do not belong to them, but to the State, and they are their Fueh.., erm, President's to expend, not theirs!

As Klein continues: "Yes, that's right: letter writers from across the nation are united in their outrage - not that the steely-eyed, smoking soldier makes mass killing look cool, but that the laudable act of mass killing makes the grave crime of smoking look cool."

Quite. If you needed any proof of the life-abhorring, decadent, morally vacuous nature of today's health fascists - look no further.

- Merlijn

McRevolution comes to Ukraine

2004-11-26T13:31:00.000-08:00

All those of you who lambast the Bush administration for its monumental, and continuing, screw-up in Iraq must admit that US policy towards central/Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been a resounding success. Not only are American troops stated all along the southern periphery of the former Soviet Union - courtesy of the War against Terror, of course - but in two countries, somewhat dodgy governments have been replaced by solidly pro-Western ones after street revolts during the current administration - Georgia and Yugoslavia. Now, it seems a third one is under way.

So, after the elections in Ukraine were apparently won by Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Russian government candidate with solid backing in the heavily industrialized southeast, supporters of the other candidate, pro-Western Viktor Yuschenko, immediately took to the streets in Kiev - massive demonstrations in his favour have been held for days, with demonstrations in eastern cities like Donetsk in Yanukovich's favour being somewhat underreported here - though not by the BBC.

The EU and the US were as quick to denounce the elections as rigged as Putin was to congratulate Yanukovich - a move undertaken successfully in Yugoslavia as well: denounce the election result and have your candidate announce himself as president on the basis of, say, exit polls; besiege government buildings, and if you can, invade them (if you can't, burn them down as happened in Belgrade); overwhelm your opponent with something like shock and awe. Of course, turnout figures in the high nineties as reported from Yanukovich's base seem very fishy indeed, to be sure. The nicely contrarian British Helsinki Human Rights Group reports some dirty tricks in the western part of the country as well, though.

Now, the OSCE's condemnation only signifies which side of which candidate's bread is buttered. As Matt Taibbi noted in a blistering takedown of the OSCE's election monitoring, the OSCE quite happily sanctioned Yeltsin's elections even though most polls showed he was running with about 2% popular support. But we couldn't have had Zyuganov, a Communist, win, couldn't we?

Anyway, as Srdja Trifkovic noted in an analysis of the Ukrainan situation in the right-wing Chronicles Magazine, it is unlikely that the "McRevolution" (borrowing and bowlderizing this nice term from the Dutch NRC Handelsblad) pioneered by OTPOR in Serbia will be successful in the Ukraine. The country is too divided for that. In Serbia, as Trifkovic notes, most of the police and military switched sides before the election was actually held - whereas in the Ukraine, the government seems to have remained largely intact for now (with the exceptions of more local levels like the city of Kiev). Suppose free and totally flawless re-elections were held - it is unlikely either Yuschenko or Yanukovich would win by more than a few percentage points, and both would hold on to their respective strongholds. Yuschenko may well succeed in securing the presidency in Kiev, but that might precipitate a secession of the eastern regions - and vice versa.

But what is astounding about the generally extremely positive attitude in the West towards the Ukrainian revolt is that few people remember what happened in rump Yugoslavia after the OTPOR revolution - funded and assisted, as Trifkovic and also this Guardian article point out, by the US. The "Democratic Opposition of Serbia" lost the democratic part of the title pretty soon after the opposition part became irrelevant with one of the main participating parties (Djinjic's) simply expelling the other (Kostunica's) from parliament. Two successive presidential elections failed since the people were so excited and energized about the advent of democracy in their war-torn country that fewer than forty percent took to the polls (most of which voting for the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party). Only after lowering the bar of fifty percent turnout was a president actually elected. A smashing success story, indeed!

That does not mean Viktor Yanukovich is any kind of working-class titan, as the Trotskyist Newsline would have. It seems to me he represents the first wave of counterrevolution rather than some heroic defender of socialism's gains - the crooks who did the dirty job of dismantling the socialist economy, and who may now well be replaced by more sophisticated crooks who want their share of the pie.

One could say, even, that Putin's endorsement of Yanukovich should be warning enough- Putin being such a beacon of democracy that he succeeded in uniting right-wing oppositionists like Irina Khakamada, the Zyuganovist communists and the National Bolsheviks of Edward Limonov together against him.

The events in the Ukraine may thus well be the next stage in the piecemeal annexation of the former Soviet Union by the west, but as this piece in Spiked points out, there seems to be little to be liked on either side.

Burqas and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

2004-11-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

One of the two universities in Amsterdam, the Vrije Universiteit (VU) has introduced a number of dress instructions at the beginning of the Academic year, banning, for example, clothing covering the face such as the Burqa and the Niqaab as well as short shirts leaving the lower belly visible. The reasoning being that, translating from the newpaper article linked to above, "In order to make communication as usual in our society and culture possible, a veil covering the face will be banned, male and female students will be taught together and on equal terms, and heed will be paid to the handshake, eye-contact and other social norms in the field of communication, as usual in our western culture."

Now, this happened before the murder of Theo van Gogh exploded the Dutch tinderbox, but since then, leftists groups have started to protest the ban, which they regard as singling out muslims. A declaration by "VU tegen Racisme" (VU against racism) can be read here. The organization "opposes this ban as it represents an attack on individual beliefs and political rights. It is Muslim women themselves who must be won to see that the wearing of the burqa is a right, not a duty. VU Tegen Racisme also enforces a 'no platform' position for fascist scum who want to use our campus as a recruiting ground. All boneheads will be confronted and escorted off campus.".

The latest phrase and also the poster downloadable at the address linked to above sound pretty much International
Socialist boilerplate, and the latter group themselves have organized a petition against the ban. Anyway, the phrase I find myself stumbling over is that "Muslim women themselves who must be won to see that the wearing of the burqa is a right, not a duty" - what do they mean, that Muslim women must be convinced to like the burqa? Or that they must be won to see that they don't have to wear the thing? If the latter is the case, what about pressure from family, Muslim men, etc.? Anyway, it could be the original Dutch that the statement is doubtlessly translated from was clearer.

Anyway, my take on this. On the one hand: University students are adults. Having a dress code in a primary or secondary school is one thing, a University another. Also, I can imagine why some people would regard the wording of the VU ban as singling out muslims - even though I can hardly imagine someone would substantially disagree with such things as common and equal teaching to men and women. Particularly, it seems the ban is a bit pre-emptive in that there seem to have been no students at VU wearing a burqa or niqaab.

This notwithstanding, if someone would show up in a Burqa or Niqaab in my course, I might have a problem with that. I also might have a problem with someone wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood, an executioner's cap, a paper bag, or a Frankenstein mask in the auditorium. The reason is that as a teacher, I need to be able to see someone's face. I need to see how they respond to what I am saying, whether they are smiling, scowling, or about to fall asleep. So I can understand the VU's reasoning to an extent.

Also, I don't think there's much of a possible argument that the Burqa and the Niqaab are anything but symbols of the oppression of women.

There's a few intertwined matters here - the rising tide of anti-muslim violence in the Netherlands which needs to be protested and halted; the presence of a violent, extremist wing of islam in the Netherlands which also needs to be protested and halted; and the issue of women's rights within islamic society. The problem with the leftist boilerplate like the VU Tegen Racisme statement, and more widely with the response of the Dutch socialist left to recent events is, I believe, that it is right on the mark on the first issue - but tends to forget #2 and #3. Aforementioned Internationale Socialisten are building a Dutch Social Forum, apparently scheduling a session under the title "The headscarf and the phoney feminism of Hirshi Ali". Would I have liked to be able to be there... Really. Whatever one may think of Ayaan Hirshi Ali, she brings issues to the fore that should have been issues of the political left. But the political left has neglected them. And now, after Pim Fortuyn almost made it to Prime Minister surfing on the discontent of a lot of people whom the political left did not reach, after the foul political murder of Theo van Gogh, we have the same kneejerk reaction...

I am troubled a bit by the VU's ban - because personal rights and liberties seem to be at conflict here with the need to create a gender-equal, neutral teaching and learning atmosphere. But I won't be signing the petition.

-M.

2004-11-21T05:31:00.000-08:00

Must reads: Counterpunch's Alexander Cockburn on the US elections, Martin van Creveld on LewRockwell.com with a fascinating piece on Moshe Dayan's experiences in Vietnam and their relevance to Iraq and Llewellyn Rockwell himself with an acerbic takedown of the Wall Street Journal's jubiliant editorial on Falluja.

Now, for my own European cynical bastard perspective on the US elections... I have been hesitant to write is since I dislike the mainstream European response to the US election outcome - it has been either unbearably arrogant, like this Daily Mirror cover (I would be inclined to remind our limey friends that they have elected a Prime Minister which much the same evangelical messianism and much the same Iraq policy as the Americans) - or extremely unhelpful, like the Guardian's misconceived tell-an-American-to-vote-for-Kerry letter campaign. So, at first I thought it wiser to shut up. I changed my mind.

In 2000, I found myself rooting for Bush, rather than Gore. The main reason was that I intensely disliked the Clinton/Albright school of foreign policy, turning Bosnia in a non-state surviving only by perpetual foreign supervision, turning Kosovo in a mono-ethnic non-state after an intervention purportedly to preserve multiethnicism in Kosovo, and continuing a stranglehold with regular bombings in Iraq. Let's get one thing straight here: Bush's policies in Iraq may have turned it into an anarchic haven for homegrown guerillas and foreign terrorists to have target practice at real life Americans, and may have caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths - but the death toll of UN-sanctions in Iraq is thought to be well in the hundreds of thousands, while at the same time perpetuating Saddam Hussein's barbaric regime. Misconceived as the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the neo-conservative ideology of worldwide wallmartization behind is may have been - at least the US are now taking responsibility for the mess there (whether they want it or not).

Anyway, I expected a Bush administration to be much more reserved and cautious in its foreign policy, with possibly even a US withdrawal or at least significant downsizing in the Balkans. That was, of course, before nineteen men in three airplanes decided to hand Bush the global mission that he, fortunately, lacked before.

Were I an American, I might well have voted for Kerry holding my nose. But I'm not that surprised by his election defeat. In response to an administration that passed the Patriot Act and went into a, thus far, pretty disastrous war in Iraq, the Democrats decided to field a candidate who supported the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq - promising to get European allies in to take some of the casualties (a pretty desperate wish). In the Dec. 2003 issue of Playboy (the one with Shannen Doherty), when it still looked like Dean (who actually, unlike Kerry, could have made a credible anti-war stance) might have a chance, there's a very interesting and prophetic analysis by 1972 Dem. candidate George McGovern:

"In terms of stage presence and audience reaction at this one event, I would have to give the nod to Senator John Kerry. But Dean also came across well. When he finished, Dean asked me to meet with him privately. He plied me with questions about how I thought he was doing. I told him he seemed to be doing fine and offered him only one real bit of advice: Beware of excessive fatigue. That's sometimes the cause of political gaffes. (...) If I had felt qualified to advise Governor Dean, I would have urged him to stay with his current strategy: The way to beat George Bush is not to be like him."

And then the Democrats went with a candidate who was, politically, a milder version of George W. Bush. I have to qualify that: who was a politically milder version of George W. Bush able to read, write and speak well. If I had been an American and push had come to shove, Kerry's appearance of basic sanity and Bush's disconcerting lack of it would have probably caused me to vote Kerry - while holding my nose.

Sometime ago, during the British elections, a lefist Labour candidate from Scotland was interviewed on television. At that time, Labour already was New Labour, replacing old-fashioned socialism with a disturbing mix of neoliberalism and nanny-statism. The interviewer asked the man (whose name I don't recall) why he was still running with Labour, and not with one of the leftist alternatives that had already sprung up by then. He basically answered that for people in his constituency, the difference between a Tory administration and a Labour administration - even a New Labour one - was a matter of survival. And there's the whole problem I think the Americans are dealing with: the slight nuances of a Democratic administration as opposed to a Bush administration are extremely important if you're on the brink of survival or famine. Similarly, the different attitudes towards, say, abortion are extremely important if you happen to be a woman.

Split the party, and, ostensively, the Republicans will carry the day for a while. There goes the Supreme Court, there goes Roe vs. Wade.

Yet I am not sure whether there is a choice here. If anything, this election revealed the impotence of the Democratic Party towards a Republican one which actually has a base. A base, ironically, in the white working class and underclass that gets screwed over by any Republican administration. Facing that, the Democrats could not do better than to field a candidate who agrees on most burning issues of policy with Bush, and to ward off any third-party intervention on the left (Nader) by court challenges.

The biggest difference between European politics and US ones is of course the presence of a well-entrenched social democracy in Europe (even if it seems on the wane for now). I'm not sure whether an European-style workers' party could take root in the US - it'd probably have to be a different kind of party.

Anyway, the good side of this election result is probably that Bush will now have to take the responsibility for the mess created in Iraq the past four years - the Republicans will have four more years to dig their own graves. But I think that if this election result should teach the American left anything - it's that they should stop fielding centrist candidates looking like Republicans with an education, they should stop trying to suffocate third-party alternatives like Nader's with court challenged, and they should perhaps stop to look to the Democratic Party alltogether.

My take on this would be that the left's best chances lie with the rural, non-unionized working class and middle classes, with the small shopkeepers who have been pushed out of business by Walmart and with the people working there, with people living in trailers rather than houses; not with the educated, urban liberals. With Michael Moore rather than Noam Chomsky.

-M.

News

2004-11-19T14:57:00.000-08:00

Dutch radical rightist Geert Wilders has
given an interview on AP in which he apparently proposes a five-year halt to non-Western immigrants and also claims that "If you chose radical Islam you can leave, and if you don't leave voluntarily then we will send you away. This is the only message possible."

"Sending back" people of dual nationality who committed crimes has been brought up in Dutch politics some years ago - but never quite seriously. After all, if you have a Dutch passport, you're entitled to the same treatment before the law as anyone else. But here, Wilders does not even refer to criminal behaviour - just "radical islam". So I'm not sure where Wilders wants to go with this. One cannot eject people from the country on the basis of their ideas alone - unpleasant as those ideas may be. The reason is, of course, that any repressive action against a singular political ideology leaves all political ideologies unprotected - left, right and centre, islamic, christian and atheist.

In Iran, meanwhile, a 14-year old boy has been reported to whipped to death after having broken Ramadan fast. Unfortunately, this seems to be far from an unique occurrence in Iran. In August, a 16-year old girl was hanged for "acts incompatible with chastity", whatever that may be.

Thanks to Butterflies and Wheels for keeping the world informed of disheartening news like the above.

-M.

US Election

2004-11-17T13:16:00.000-08:00

Yes, I think we all know that the election was a total flop but a brilliant way for the American people to demonstrate just what the Europeans, and most of the rest of the world, have been saying for about 4 years: 51% of them are witless simpletons deserving nothing short of eradication. At least now we can all put a more exact figure on it.

"Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."

And I can only hope that the above applies to the 58-odd million people in the US who voted for Bush. Doubtful.

When Kerry conceded with, what seemed to us over here in Old Europe, conspiracy-theory speed, I walked through my house and consoled the panicked Germans, many of whom seemed more concerned about the turnout than the Americans, and spoke just the above words, "Forgive us, forgive them," and tried to appear, myself, calm and subdued.

I pointed them to the interesting (and humorous) apologies offered on behalf of those who voted for Kerry, and even for those who did not, archived at www.sorryeverybody.com. I switched the computer on and began to do the same with my network of online friends in the US and around the world as we all screamed silently in our heads and wondered just what the world would be like in four years time.

I, an American who currently lives in Germany, will have to return to the United States to another 3 years and some odd months of Bush's reign of terror, round 2.

I began considering my options. Stay and fight. Marry and move. Transfer to a foreign university. That's all still to be decided...

Not to say that Kerry would have been a perfect alternative. He would not have, to be sure. But better is better and in a two-party system that most seem happy enough with to leave alone those there are rarely choices.

As a result of Bush's winning, I have joined two organizations I've been meaning to join for awhile now: the ACLU and the HRC. We'll need them.

So... who's to say what the world will look like in four years. Surely, not I since I don't even want to begin thinking about it.

I voted for Kerry and I'm sorry fewer of my country(wo)men didn't do the same. Forgive them, because I know I sure cannot.

-J.

News of the day

2004-11-17T06:18:00.000-08:00

Old times come back with the Russians announcing they are building a new mega-big nuclear missile that can negate the American missile defences.

Meanwhile, we may have to look for a new sponsor for our colony on Mars, with portraits of Kim Jong-Il having mysteriously disappeared all over Pyongyang. Usually, it's no good news in those kinds of countries of your portraits suddenly disappear. It usually happens right before or after YOU mysteriously disappear. I love the reaction from the North Korean diplomat, though: ""This is false information, lies. Can the sun be removed from the sky? It is not possible."

NASA succesfully tested a cool new airplane that broke speed records by flying at Mach 10. Unfortunately, this won't help our Mars expedition much since they use an air-breathing engine, and there isn't much air between here and Mars. So, we will place our bets on our intertial hyperspace decelerator which will grant us a negative speed of one kilometer per minus one second.

Of course, the physicists say there's no such thing as negative speed. But that only makes us meaner!

In Colorado, Secret Service are investigating a bunch of school kids who had the dangerous plan of playing Bob Dylan's 1963 song "Masters of War"! I suppose there aren't any REAL psychos left to investigate since they all turned out to vote for the president on Nov. 2 - but what are the Secret Service thinking? Intimidating school kids for playing BOB DYLAN songs?

If any of you is Secret Service, I want to report a song with DANGEROUS REVOLUTIONARY lyrics, celebrating the formation of ARMED UNITS to use POLITICAL VIOLENCE and even ARTILLERY against the LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT:

Chorus
Yankee doodle, keep it up
Yankee doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy.

There was Captain Washington
Upon a slapping stallion
A-giving orders to his men
I guess there was a million.

Chorus

And then the feathers on his hat
They looked so' tarnal fin-a
I wanted pockily to get
To give to my Jemima.

Chorus

And then we saw a swamping gun
Large as a log of maple
Upon a deuced little cart
A load for father's cattle.

Chorus

And every time they shoot it off
It takes a horn of powder
It makes a noise like father's gun
Only a nation louder.

I'd advise them to get the writer of these lyrics before some POLITICAL EXTREMISTS will get the idea! This Captain Washington guy sounds like an extremely dangerous fellow as well. I'd launch an immediate investigation into what he is up to.

-M.

UPDATE: For those of you who read Dutch, on an art photography course in the Netherland, nudy pictures have been censored and removed for fear of offending islamic participants. One answer I could have to this crap is that I am extremely offended by anyone censoring images of the naked female body or the naked male body. Not offended, disgusted.

If you feel the naked human body is vile, filthy or sinful - do not go to an art photography course! Go study accountancy or something.

UPDATE II: The photographs were removed not to offend islamic participants in other courses in the same building, not the art photography course - but they have been put back. Apparently, they had been removed pre-emptively: without actually asking whether anyone found them offensive - and it turns out that the only person happy with the censoring was the Bible trainer of the local evangelical youth centre. More here

Sigh

2004-11-15T16:45:00.000-08:00

So Pim Fortuyn has been elected Greatest Dutchman.

Well, it was a done deal, really. He only had to compete against, say, Johan van Oldebarneveldt (founder of the Dutch republic), Hugo Grotius (pioneer of international law), Johan and Cornelius de Wit, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (inventor of the microscope), Christiaan Huygens, Michiel de Ruyter (great sea admiral), Abel Tasman (discoverer of New Zealand and Tasmania), Kamerlingh Onnes (liquefied helium and got a Nobel prize), Baruch de Spinoza, hell, RUTGER HAUER!!! - they could have chosen Rutger Hauer!

I'd have settled for Rutger Hauer.

For what it is worth, I'll stick it out in Sweden for the time being.

-M.

Meanwhile...

2004-11-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

Finally - having waited for almost two weeks for the Exile's response to the US elections, here it is, with Mark Ames in top shape. Also check out War Nerd's brilliant plan for victory in Iraq - replace Allawi with Saddam Hussein!

Here's an interesting article by one Colin Shea about election irregularities in the US. It seems though that the reported overvote in some Ohio counties has resulted from spreading out absentee ballots evenly across pretincts. I'll probably ask "J" to post something here on the US elections.

Anyway, if there was election fraud (which might well be the case) it'll probably never reach the surface, and if it does, it won't help the US left much. Kerry's Iraq policy would not be that different from Bush but having Kerry as president would allow the right to snipe at the Democrats and probably by extension most of progressive America for the mistakes that their own favourite idiot made. Four more years of Bush, though, is for more years of the Republican US digging its own grave.

Michael Fitzpatrick at Spiked has a good article about the passive smoking myth. It sounds pretty impressive that regular "passive smoking" increases your chance of getting lung cancer with some fifteen or twenty percent - but a lot less impressive when you know that the base chance of getting lung cancer (for a non-smoker) is so minute that the elevated chance is just hovering on the edge of statistical significance. I especially like Fitzpatrick's closing words:

"For the anti-smoking zealots, the loss of civil liberties resulting from their widening range of bans and proscriptions is justified by the anticipated health gain. Yet, as the great microbiologist Rene Dubos observed, health should not be considered an end in itself, but as 'the condition best suited to reach goals that each individual formulates for himself' (26). By curtailing the autonomy of the self-determining individual, authoritarian public health policies infantilise society, weaken democracy and diminish humanity."

Amen to that.

In other news, madness in the Netherlands continues, with another attempted arson attack on a mosque yesterday. Also, some retards in Dokkum, Friesland, tried to set fire to a local school, adorning it with white power signs, etc. The thing is that it was a Public school, named after a famous Frisian socialist (Pieter Jelles Troelstra). Either these guys are too dim-witted to actually find a real islamic school to attack and therefore go for the second best alternative, or they're disgruntled pupils burning down their own school. Perhaps both.

- Merlijn

Press Release!

2004-11-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

PRESS RELEASE

PYONGYANG, NOV. 14 - Proletarian masses around the world jubilate at Merlijn de Smit's decision to re-launch the Party for Socialism and Space Travel (PSST), now renamed the Party for Subversion, Socialism and Space Travel (Kicks Ass) - PSSST(KA).

Amid raucuous cheers, M. de Smit announced during an impromptu press conference in Pyongyang that the ultimate goal of the PSSST(KA) remained to build a socialist colony on Mars, to be renamed Marx.

"A decent-sized asteroid in the general vicinity of Mars would be good too." Great Leader Kim Jong-Il added sagaciously.

M. de Smit continued to announce that until the construction of the spaceship "Red Planet" was finished, the PSST(KA) would endeavour to uphold a weblog dedicated to "the fresher ideas from the socialist left and the libertarian right."

The last four words, however, were drowned out by spontaneous cheers, jubilations, cries of "Forward the PSSST(KA)" and the roar of fifty North Korean aircraft suddenly flying over low.

The PSSST(KA)'s logs may be accessed at: http://pssstka.blogspot.com.

Though the headquarters of the Party are located in an ultra-secret hollowed-out mountain in Haarlemmermeer municipality in the Netherlands, the party may be contacted at: pssstka@hotmail.com.

"The Party for Subversion, Socialism and Space Travel kicks ass!" Great Leader Kim Jong-Il added sagaciously.

After the press conference, a spontaneous protest march of North Korean workers was held, with such catchy slogans as "The brotherhood between Earthling workers and workers from other Star Systems will constitute an iron fist in the face of US imperialism!", "Forward the socialist colony on Marx, whose tremendous technical advances will utterly overshadow those of all the capitalist nations combined!" and "Bring us to your leader!"

Falluja

2004-11-14T07:42:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, Americans say that they're in control of Falluja, well, almost. I wonder when they get in control of, say, Baghdad, and meanwhile guerillas are patrolling the streets in Mosul - the third-largest city of Iraq. Anyway, when entering a city with overwhelming force, lightly-armed guerillas will likely melt away before you. Question is whether or not they will re-emerge in the Americans' wake, and whether the American "control" of Falluja will come to resemble their "control" of Samarra.

The problem with the hailing of the Iraqi resistance by such leftists as Tariq Ali or say the Socialist Worker is that there are many resistances in Iraq. There's the actions against American military patrols in the Sunni Triangle and more and more outside of it as well, the Mehdi Army of Muqtada Al-Sadr, the unknown jihadists (?) that massacred Shi'ites in Kerbala during a muslim holiday last spring and the occasional beheading of an abducted foreigner - surely not all of them supportable! I strongly doubt whether an Al-Sadr-dominated (rump?) Iraq would be seriously a better alternative to the current status quo. Whatever reaches the press here about conditions inside rebel-controlled Falluja by the way - which isn't much - seems contradictory, some stressing a largely indigenous pro-Iraqi resistance, some a rather noxious mix between foreign fighters and Iraqi radical islamists.

An Indian novelist, Arundathi Roy, recently seems to have argued that we should "become the Iraqi resistance", even, only to add that she apparently meant it metaphorically, or so: "One wasn't urging them to join the Mehdi Army, you know, but to become the resistance, to become part of what ought to be a non-violent resistance against a very violent occupation. So that is to redefine what resistance means, you know, we can't just assume that resistance means terrorism, because that would be playing right into the hands of the occupation." I wonder whether the Iraqis agree that the resistance should be a non-violent resistance against a very violent occupation. Anyway, I think I'll decline the invitation - I have a nasty feeling that I'd become the star in Al-Zarqawi's newest video pretty quickly.

The whole point, I suppose, is that the anti-war left first succeeded to build a massive but politically quite impotent movement around the lowest common denominator of "Not in our name". Now, we have an Iraqi resistance part of which seems to be quite legitimate, parts of which seem to be very, very bad news - and we have the anti-war left hailing this undifferentiated Iraqi resistance. The Americans will lose this war - they're losing it pretty quickly. The whole question is what will happen to Iraq after it. Will there be a secular Iraq with a strong trade-union movement, or an islamic Iraq which is a sattelite state of Iran? Will the Kurds secede, and should the left support the right to self-determination of the Kurds? These are questions that will become urgent pretty soon.

- M.

Theo Van Gogh

2004-11-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

I am still pretty shaken by Theo Van Gogh's murder on November 2. Theo Van Gogh was one of the few Dutch public figures who held an absolute, Voltairean commitment to free speech. I did not agree with much of his politics - he backed Pim Fortuyn, for example, and while I never believed Fortuyn to be some closet Jörg Haider (he's far too complex for that), I did not see much in his politics either - but I very much enjoyed his colums (most of which were republished on his website.

Had a quick look at the radical left's reactions. The stalinists of DeWaarheid.nu published a letter drawing a comparison between Van Gogh's murder and the events preceding the Kristallnacht - the murder of a Nazi diplomat by a young Jew in France whose family had just been deported. How very tasteful.
The Internationale Socialisten - who reacted to Pim Fortuyn with the brilliant slogan "Stop de Hollandse Haider!" - have a remarkably mealy-mouthed condemnation, not mentioning such details as the right to free speech, but instead arguing that "whatever motives the individual that shot him may have had, it is certain that the murder can only have negative consequences." Ummmm... Yes.

The Trotskyist Offensief, which generally tend to have both legs on the ground, have a much better statement, as have the anarchists of the magazine Ravage, whose statement can be read here, and whose reaction is by far the best I have seen so far.

I am a strong believer in the freedom to say offensive things. Freedom of speech should not be qualified. No "yes, free speech is important, but..." cop-outs. The murder of Theo Van Gogh was an attack on that freedom - my freedom, your freedom, everyone else's.

- Merlijn

Anti-Muslim violence in the Netherlands

2004-11-14T06:56:00.000-08:00

A few posts on matters to which I will return a few times probably. First, things are going down pretty badly in the Netherlands, with another mosque having been set on fire yesterday - the twentieth or so so far? Mind you, most arson attempts remained attempts - we're not talking about the sharpest knives in the kitchen here. Additionally though, an islamic primary school in Uden was totally destroyed. Some five protestant churches seem to have been attacked as well. All part of the backlash after Theo Van Gogh's murder.

I'm not optimistic. The problem in the Netherlands, I believe, is that it tried to be multicultural without a single unifying basis for those cultures, that it tried to nurture a reputation of tolerance without an underlying ideology of tolerance - basically, various cultures living alongside each other without interacting much - until now, that is. There's a pattern here. In the 17th century, the Netherlands were a Republic without an idea of Republicanism - with large swaths of the country controlled by nominally elected stewards, in practice, however, hereditary princes. There's nothing in the Netherlands like the French idea of the republic arisen from the revolution, or the American idea of the constitution as a central underlying document defining what an American is. Our national anthem, even, is a ditty from the 16th century about fighting the Spanish - nothing like the German "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit".

So, "tolerance" in the Netherlands was entirely pragmatic: based on the peaceful co-existence of first a host of religious factions, then, after secularization in the 1960s, a host of ethnic groups, various lifestyles, etc. without ever defining "Dutchness" in terms of this tolerance. There's a recent article in International Herald Tribune which gets some things right.

Anyway, it's too late now. Ever since the meteoric rise of Pim Fortuyn threw Dutch politics in a turmoil, the established parties are way too afraid to lose ground to a next populist or far-right challenger. One such challenger, Geert Wilders, has already rising up and is soaring in the polls. That's real hair, by the way.

As an answer to this, I suppose the Dutch government will tighten up security even more and probably drift to the right to take the wind out of Wilders' sails if he continues to do well in public opinion. Meanwhile, the extremists on both sides will carry the day.

- Merlijn

2004-11-13T15:17:00.000-08:00

Allright. Since the foundation of the glorious PSSST(KA) is to be announced by press conference in Pyongyang tomorrow, here's the first entry. *listens to echoes*

And one induced by this piece by one Stefan Kanfer on Chomsky. Needless to say I don't agree with the thrust of the article. It however raised some thoughts with me on arguably the most widely-known leftist intellectual.

I am a bit biased against Chomsky because of his linguistics. That does not mean his linguistics are bad - however, the Chomskyan syntax-centered "paradigm" of linguistics had a tendency in the 1960s and 1970s to overshadow all other areas of linguistics. However, when Chomsky is criticizing the US for its invasion of Hawai'i, mentioning that "Hawai'ians voted to become the fiftieth state" in the 1950s as Stefan Kanfer does is a, well, astonishingly weak defence.

The problem with Chomsky, if any, is probably that he thinks and speaks like a Vulcan. That's why his criticisms on the U.S. right after 9/11 sounded so terribly flat. They were also, in broad lines, correct. In his log (see sidebar) Ken MacLeod recently remarked that socialists (and I know Chomsky is an anarchist) should "Read Gramsci, but talk like Debs". Chomsky, however, writes and talks like Mr. Spock.

However, there's one reason why I respect the man. Chomsky may be an academic, and a leftist, but he's always stayed clear from "academic leftism" in as far as the latter means a concern with pseudo-radical postmodernist "deconstruction" of the world, rather than an actual analysis of it.

Merlijn

Testing....

2004-11-13T13:54:00.000-08:00

This is a test post. The idea of this thing - The Party for Subversion, Socialism and Space Travel (Kicks Ass) is to create a weblog/discussion forum dedicated towards a crossbreed between a Marxist outlook on social justice, a Libertarian outlook on personal and civil liberties, and a few other things. That is before we set off to found a communist colony on Mars (to be renamed Marx, of course). Whether this is going to work or not depends on whether I can find a second editor. I'll be back.