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| Politics, PR and hack philosophy from A Guy Called Donald. But definitely no blogging. Probably. | |
31.1.06Small victoryDon't get too excited, but it seems just about enough Labour MPs have rediscovered their vertebrae. Those Lords amendments to the religious hatred bill are going to stand and will become law:The peers said only "threatening words" should be banned by the bill, not those which are only abusive or insulting. Of course, there is already plenty of decent law to deal with "threatening" behaviour, so the whole charade has just been a pointless waste of money and parliamentary time. A bit like the last eight years. I doubt it even saved any Labour Muslim marginals, which was the whole point of it in the first place. One small footnote. The second of the two votes was won by just one vote, 283 to 282. Just as well Mark Oaten, despite being hounded by homophobes, chose today to get back in the saddle. Two different fundamentalisms and one bad lawIf you've not been keeping up with the news from Denmark (and, hey, why should you?), here's roughly what's happened. The Jyllands-Posten published, last September, a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed (see them at the bottom of this article). One showed him sporting a bomb in his headgear; another turning back suicide bombers at the entrance to paradise with the words "Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins". To an eye brought up on savage satire, it's hit-and-miss amusing, sometimes unpleasant but tame stuff.Predictably, however, the ambassadors of several Muslim countries went apeshit. The illustrators received death-threats, Saudi Arabia recalled its lead diplomat, Danish dairy products are subject to boycotts in the Middle East, and Libya has threatened to shut its Danish embassy. Non-essential Danes (in my experience, that's all of them) have been advised to leave Saudi. Yesterday, masked gunmen raided the EU's Gaza office to demand an apology from Denmark and the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades (Fatah's suicide bombers) threatened Danish Red Cross workers. It's Copenhagen's Rushdie moment. Squared. Well, an apology has now been forthcoming. From the newspaper's editor: They [the cartoons] were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologize... Because of the very fact that we are strong proponents of the freedom of religion and because we respect the right of any human being to practise his or her religion, offending anybody on the grounds of their religious beliefs is unthinkable to us. Of course, that's a lot of nonsense. The drawings were surely designed to offend. Short of incitement, he has that right under Danish law, as representatives from the paper stated in their very first comments on the matter last year. It's a right also claimed by a couple of Norweigan magazines who reprinted the cartoons. It's a right anyone who blogs or reads blogs ought to support. But it's a right that we might not have here for long. Tonight the government's Religious Hatred legislation returns to the Commons, with key curbs on free speech still buried in it. As Polly Toynbee explains in today's Guardian: Alarmingly the bill not only catches anyone who intends to stir up religious hatred. A person "reckless as to whether religious hatred would be stirred up" can also be prosecuted, a stricter catch-all test than under race laws... The government claims free expression is safeguarded in Section 29k. Apologies here for terrible legal language, but this is the key clause the government will use in tonight's debate to falsely reassure MPs unfamiliar with the detail. The clause begins "for the avoidance of doubt" and proceeds to obfuscate the right to free speech still further. A first reaction: that it's a sop to religious fundamentalists. But that isn't enough, it won't do. All religious fundies aren't created equal. Christian crazies have a Bible-full of repugnant opinions. They are involved (perhaps) in some of the darker corners of the planet's power games. But most of the grapeshot aimed at "Christian fundamentalists" has little to do with their Christianity and much with their proximity to and abuse of wealth and GOP power in the southern and midwestern US. The C-word is tagged on as a sub-ed's screamer. Their ability to silence ridicule is close to zero. Many don't even want to: the Christian Institute for one opposes restrictions on their freedom of speech and opposes this New "Labour" bill. The supposedly mainstream MCB, meanwhile, considers a cartoon of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper to be an abuse of our valued freedoms. Au contraire, Iqbal. I'd call it an expression of them. 29.1.06The resurrection of GodI know, I'm supposed to be prostrate with joy at the thought of God's return. So why can't I help thinking that if we needed an unfit bloater up front, we'd have been better off signing Pauline Fowler?26.1.06Google sucksToo busy for the next couple of days. On stuff that pays, like, actual money. Just enough time to say: heh. And to add: cultural-revolution-independent-Taiwan indigenous-Taiwanese-Japan-world-cup-2006-qualified.Oh, and if you want to read my most recent sensible post you'll find it here. 25.1.06Curtain call on Guido and the Monkey... but only to point you toward Tim's neat summary of what happened here. Weirdly, I must be a soothsayer: I culled the tedious homophobe from my RSS reader just last week.The 49'erThanks Justin. I really hate these things, but anyway:Seven Things I Cannot Do Presentations. Fly without Valium. Write well. Be near a snake. Build flatpack furniture. Empty my head. Tolerate selfishness. Seven Things To Do Before I Die A Ph.D. Live by the sea. Visit my best mate in Western Australia. A presentation. Write Well. Meet Kenny Dalglish. See my daughter smile one more time. Seven Things That Attract Me to… Prime Numbers 7 13 17 23 29 37 7177 Seven Things I Say Shite. I'll call you tomorrow, promise. Can we not watch Noddy again, please? I can't be arsed. I can't afford it. I have a plan. Fucking Man. U. Seven Books That I Love On Liberty. La Peste. The Big Con. The New York Trilogy. American Tabloid. Moonfleet. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Seven Movies That I’ve Loved (at different times and in no particular order) Pi. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Flowered Up's Weekender. The House of Flying Daggers. Vertigo. The Thin Red Line. Groundhog Day. Seven People to Tag (in no particular order) Andrew B Blimpish Jamie Phil Chris Owen Shuggy 24.1.06David Cameron's blue and white army?It's easy to sneer. In fact, maybe I'm stuck on sneer. So, today, I'm going to try and sound positive about something apparently ridiculous. About this:Forcing school leavers to do three or four months of community service could help bring people together, Tory leader David Cameron has said. This could work. More: it looks at first glance like a great idea. First, it needs to be compulsory. It's pointless if the indolent rich can opt to spend their three months on St Kitts instead. Second, there must be some choice (what, where, when). No point forcing a young lad with building skills to do tea duty in an old folks' home. Or a wannabe carer on graffiti-scrubbing duty. Or someone who wants to attend university first to do her service at age 18. And so on. Third, compensatory remuneration has to be sorted out (not pay). I'd also like to see exemptions for those training for community service: nursing, teaching, medicine and the like. And it ought to be clear: this is an obligation, not an opportunity. But overall I can't see a decent objection in principle. It's egalitarian. Which is more than the tax system is. It's race, color and faith blind, which is more than the education system is. It's a practical response to communitarian concerns coming from left and right. It might even be achievable, though the Tories can probably be trusted to chuck a few bones to the clients when it comes to implementation. But is it illiberal? Absolutely not. It would be great if we all volunteered, but we don't. Or won't. Most people don't even give blood, which is a minimal commitment to sit on your arse for an hour twice a year. We're increasingly aware of our rights. But what about our counterpart (though not contingent) duties? Not to the state, obviously: to each other. But people aren't going to help their neighbours unless they're made to. And consider this: if you believe it's okay to forcibly deprive someone of a third of their income every year until they die, how exactly is making someone give three months of their lives to help their local community any less liberal? 23.1.06Last word on the oating of OutenWell, it's my last word anyhow, after numerous comments on the matter here and here, among others. Not much to say on the facts either: what Oaten did was (a) stupid for a politician and (b) not really anyone else's business outside of the Oaten family. Tim and Clive have rounded it up if you've been in space since Sunday. Garry has a theory about a traitor that might have legs.Nah, I just want to give a final thought on the detritus. I see two possibilities. The first: Guido (and probably Popbitch) had absolutely nothing to do with this story coming out. He was just indulging his renowned penchant for self-fellating in public, this time dancing on the corpses of the Family Formerly Known as Oaten. (Though he's not the only one sniffing a bit of circulation in this. I'd have thought a man with two daughters himself would have spotted a good moment to keep quiet.) Scenario 2: Guido did in fact have the full story, as he implies (Did it hint enough?). But, and this is the funny bit, he didn't have the balls to break it. He's sitting on the scoop of the year, and he recorded a bit of frat-boy homo-banter and some paedo jokes in the pub. Obviously, it's Scenario One. But I do wish it was Two, if only because it would tell us something about the grotty little homophobe that he doesn't brag about on his blog.
22.1.06Piggy-backing on Oaten, but he was drunk, mindLook, look at me everybody. Go on, look. LOOK. It's another one of my scoops that I break fucking ages after it's broken somewhere else. And look, mummy, I caught one of those nasty bummers this time. Yes, mummy, a horrid, sordid little homo. But I nailed him. I really gave it to him. Roasted the little bastard. Skewered him. His daughters, too.So, pleeeease look. Pleeease. Puh-leeeease. That would be Guido: being the detritus, not just sifting through other people's. 20.1.06The Glasgow model: a great idea for sectarian educationThis post from Shuggy on sectarian schooling in Glasgow reminds me of a story my dad tells. He grew up in the city in the 1950s and 1960s, in Pollokshields and surrounds. By the time I was born, in Govan, he'd moved west a bit, to Paisley (which he still hates). I still vaguely know his home turf as a refreshment stop on the walk from Central station to Hampden, or the trudge home.Anyway, back to the story: according to him, whenever you met new people as a kid or young adult, people who didn't know your face or family, they'd ask you one question first. You're thinking maybe your name? Wrong: they'd ask what school you went to. Why? Because it would tell them right away whether you were Pope or Prod. And that, in twentieth-century Glasgow, was the most important bit of background. He'd certainly be with Shuggy: ...in the West of Scotland, I really don't think dividing an already small population on sectarian lines has been a particularly winning strategy. Certainly sectarianism would exist without separate schooling but could the advocates of religious segregation in education at least concede this much: hasn't exactly helped, has it? Thing is, though, all communities are made up of small populations. Cities, towns, boroughs, streets. Christian, Muslim, Sikh. As I've written before, I can't think of a much worse way to divide us than by religion. And when sectarian schooling is endorsed — heh, encouraged and funded all over the UK — by a supposedly liberal state, that's worse. It's the establishment nod of approval for neighbours living lives apart from the age of four. As ye sow. Unrelatedly, and oddly on a day when I'm writing about home for the first time in ages, I'm pointed to this discussion board for all things social/political in Scotland. They've got live threads going on torture flights, independence and nuclear power, as well as (obviously) football. Worth a look if Scotpol's your bag. 18.1.06The casual murderers of the US war on terrorHaving spent 100 of the most tedious minutes of my life yesterday having my reasonable questions ducked by Louise Casey, Blair's "(dis)Respect czar", I'm too busy to write much today. However, this: if you haven't yet read Andrew Bartlett on intentionality and collateral damage in the US war onThe people who made the decision to fire the missile in Pakistan knew, at least as certainly as anything can be known in conflict, that their actions would cause civilian deaths. They knew this to a higher degree of certainty than they knew that they would cause the death of al-Zawahiri. They accepted this and deliberately proceeded down a course of action that resulted in these civilian deaths. ... the killing of innocent civilians was an integral part of the means chosen to pursue this end. It is not so easy to paint a difference between those who intentionally kill civilians in the pursuit of political goals [i.e. terrorists], and those who deliberately kill civilians in the pursuit of political goals. The US action, quite clearly, falls into the latter camp. He does neglect to mention one possible defence for the US action: The Principle of Double Effect, discussed here on Nagasaki Day. To summarize it: Scenario 1. An agent deliberately causes harm in order to promote some good. In fact, with refence to Hiroshima, this principle can excuse harmful ends that occur as a side-effect of doing good. I imagine that excusers of US action this week in Pakistan would lay out their defence using something like this principle (to claim, as an alternative defence, that civilian deaths in an attack like this are "unforeseeable" or "a horrible accident" or even a "tragic failure of intelligence" would be laughable, wouldn't it?). The death of al-Zawahiri, they might claim, is so important to global security that actions with such risks are necessary. But they would be wrong. Because the principle has a proviso: The benefit of the good effect must be weighed against the harm of the bad effect, and the good must outweigh the bad. This comparison must be done with prudence and reflection. An argument which, absent the remote possibility that we're in a ticking time-bomb situation, it surely isn't possible to make when 17 people, including children, have been forseeably slain. UPDATE: To clarify: of course, you may think there's a point where the risk of civilian deaths is acceptable in pursuit of a noble cause (killing an eeevil terrorist mastermind, say). You'd be right. But there would have to be no reasonable alternative, and you'd have to set the bar a lot higher than, for the cost of 17 lives now, maybe killing one bloke who may be operationally involved in terrorism, and may or may not be currently planning killing, which plans just maybe will be impacted in the future with a saving of an unknown number of lives in unknown circumstances. 17.1.06Webchatting our way to RespectThis looks too good to miss. A new New Labour nadir in the fetishism of pointless gimmickry and vacuous policy-on-the-hoof. The new kid in the office must have been half-way through HTML for Dummies and dipped into something on deliberative democracy while he was on the john.This afternoon, 3 p.m. London time, Louise Casey, head of the Government's Respect task force, is hosting a live webchat on the Downing Street website. The precis: Do you have problems with anti-social neighbours? Are you tired of a lawless minority making your life a misery? Which measures would you like to see introduced to tackle unruly youngsters? Straight from the foot of the Daily Mail letters page, surely. (Missing a punchline, though: Take two flick-knives into the playground? I just Slice and Go.) Anyway, you can post your questions in advance here. Here's mine: In his speech to launch the "Respect agenda" last week, Tony Blair claimed an affinity with the ideas of R. H. Tawney and Richard Sennett. Both have written about the corrosive effects of material inequality on "respect", but since New labour came to power inequality has risen sharply and continues on an upward trend. Why, then, this tinkering round the edges of petty authoritarianism, rather than tackling this real driver of anti-social behaviour? From Sennett's latest book: "Treating people with respect cannot occur simply by commanding it should happen." But that's your strategy, isn't it? So, is it because you're not serious about tackling low-level criminality, or just that you're not bold enough? 16.1.06Another hack-philosophical meanderStill can't think of anything proper to write about, but here's something that sprung from my last post on Hobbes's return at The Sharpener. This assertion I made seemed to get people hot and bothered:Could it be true? That the PM suspects the answer to this drip-drip of low-level criminality and disengagement just maybe lies somewhere in the gross and increasing maldistribution of wealth and power? You can guess the angle the crit hit the fan from: that by suggesting poverty and/or inequality (actually, the latter is the one) tend to breed low-level criminality, I'm somehow excusing criminals for their behaviour; that redistribution as a partial solution to anti-social behaviour would, in some sub-Daily Mail headline world, be rewarding crime. That (and here's the money quote) I'm outright denying the moral agency of criminals. Of course, this is nonsense. Anyone who's followed the site since before July 7th, 2005 will know I'm rather a fan of moral agency, in its simple (nay, simplistic) form: ...the absurdity of deterministic theories of responsibility. They neglect morality altogether. Far simpler to do away with apologism and excuse-making... The counter-position was typified by this from some SWP moron whose name I forget: The British government cannot avoid its responsibility for these terrible attacks, which are a consequence of its support for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Leave aside the problems of ontology (or is it epistemology, I can never remember) with this (in eight words: how the hell does he know this unknowable?), and spot the difference with my argument on inequality. I'm making a statistical argument, an argument about how structures and agency interact, an argument about macro not micro. It's not that difficult, is it? It's not original. It's not even especially left-wing. From Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1948, p. 6): ...the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society But don't just take Freddy's word for it. You'd go a long way to find a neater destruction of the simpleton's approach to moral agency than this, in the comments to the original post, from Andrew Bartlett: Every single crime is the result of an individual’s moral agency - fine, a perfectly reasonable moral and political statement. ... [But] If you do not think that there are extra-individual causes of character and behaviour then you are left in an irrationalist position. Not just because you deny causation, but in denying the external causation of behaviour you deny the philosophical possibility of empiricism - the generation of ‘true’ belief by the stimulus of the outside world. This would be the ultimate in irrationalism. ... We need not say that material deprivation makes all people criminal, nor that material deprivation makes most people criminal. We are simply saying that material deprivation is a causal factor in making some people criminal. This isn't an exclusionary statement: inequality isn't the only cause of low-level crime. It isn't a call for maximal action: perfect equality is unachievable nonsense. And it isn't a call for tunnel vision: redistribution in combination with, say, a harsher punishment regime wouldn't be oxymoronic policy. And, as I've explained, it doesn't deny moral agency. So why is it so controversial? 15.1.06When I grow up I want to be a... darts playerYou know you're doing a good job as a father when: you catch your two-year-old daughter trying to scale the kitchen worktop to get at the portable TV so she can "watch the arrows". It'll take at least a podium finish in the nursery sack-race to match the pride of that moment.More politics and hack philosophy here soon, perhaps. Meanwhile, in the words of 12.1.06You WILL Respect, respect Thomas Hobbes, that isJust to prove I'm still, in fact, alive, something new about something old from me at The Sharpener.6.1.06George Galloway meets Big BrotherIt was inevitable that someone would get irritated enough by GG's latest adventure to kick off a Miffed of Mile End pledge. I can't say the whole episode bothers me over-much, though I did allow myself a little chuckle at this attempt at a defence:I can't think of a politician who better knows how to handle the media - how many won libel cases? how many inerviews? how many TV appearances? I have no idea, absolutely none, whether the Big Brother appearance will work out. But there's no other MP who could come close to pulling this one off Knowing Meaders as I (vaguely) do, I don't doubt he believes he's sincere. But I can't help thinking that if it had been anyone other than his Dear Leader, my favourite Marxist would have been classifying George where he belongs, somewhere between political pond life, preening twat and circus clown. And one, further, who's just stamped his approval on a television format that delights in nightly posting the weak and foolish in the corner of the room for us all to laugh at. I can't say I much get the joke. Now, if George had chosen the Mariam Appeal rather than Interpal as his nominated charity — that really would have been funny. |
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