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| Politics, PR and hack philosophy from A Guy Called Donald. But definitely no blogging. Probably. | |
27.2.06Fraudulent ironyVia Tim, this:Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing their own publishers, Random House, claiming Dan Brown's story [The Da Vinci Code] lifts from their 1982 book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, itself a best seller. They'll lose, of course, though I'm probably not allowed to say that. Not because Brown didn't lift huge chunks of his story from Holy Blood. He surely did (so sue me...). It's plain impossible to put the plot similarities down to chance. About as likely as a blindfolded Pro-Tester typing out Anna Karenina in the right order. No, unfortunately for them, Baigent and Leigh claimed their book was fact. That their preposterously entertaining pseudo-historical romp (as the Mail might have said) was a work of research rather than fiction. It doesn't matter that nobody else really believed it: you can't be sued for re-using facts, or AJP Taylor would be the wealthiest (dead) man in Britain. [Oh, I'm not really out of retirement. Just felt like scribbling something today.] 6.2.06Racism and cartoons (fin)UPDATE 7/2A footnote to this post. This is my final, final word on this. Point made, it's now time to shut up. There's a Scum witch hunt going on for this guy from Bedford. One version of Kant's categorical imperative requires that we "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity... never simply as a means, but always at the same time an end." We can treat them as the butt of the joke (means) if we also treat them as ends (securing everyone's freedom). There has to be more than just ridiculing and offending. You could argue that a couple of the original cartoons fail Kant's test. I'm still undecided. However, Omar Khayam's protest most certainly passes. He makes an important point about the logical conclusion of a society that allows free expression. He threatened nobody. BBC TV news are reporting that he's out on license on a drugs charge, and that the police are now "considering their options". As far as I can tell, he's done nothing wrong. Locking him up for exercising his absolute right to protest would be a monstrous abuse of state power. As predicted at Talk Politics, Charles Clarke was already playing politics in the Commons today with his ludicrous "glorifying terrorism" legislation — it'll be up on Hansard soon. And that is all — I'm now in retirement. Racism and cartoons (again)Thought I'd make a post out of this rather than bury it in the comments below. The story so far: the blogger known as Lenin accused me of being a racist. The money quote; well, the edit:But what is really disgusting is the fact that you take these racist representations and instead of sympathising with their victims... you obsess over the reaction of a handful of zealots in order to contemptuously dismiss the entire reaction as an effort to create a religious hierarchy. Read it all: first comment to this post. It's rather good, actually, though it would have been even better if he'd stuck to eviscerating what I wrote (here, too) and not what he wished I wrote or I failed to write or I might write about something different altogether. He might be a clever fellow but his pop-psychology sucks. Anyway... Square peg: Muslims quite reasonably taking religious offense and a few quite unreasonably expressing that in an unacceptable way. He saw what he wanted to see in the cartoons: in fact, only one pictures Mohammed with a sword (with, I'd argue, a vaguely feminist message), only one (that I would certainly have spiked) has "glowering" eyes, etc. etc. Read the placards and listen to the chants: he wants to make this all about race. The majority of the protesters don't see it that way: "insults on the Prophet of Islam", "We have a right to defend our prophet", and so on. (Though, of course, Lenin's correct that it's always partly about race, even though I stand by my initial impression that ten of these images are rather tame examples of racism.) Round hole: his neo-imperialist discourse that doesn't work without a victim, and for whom the faces of right-wing cartoonists receiving death threats and embassy staff having their workplace burned down don't fit. The actual victim, the butt, is long dead and fair game. He probably had a beard and a sword or two — he was a philospher-warrior-king, after all. So, how would one suggest we draw him? With a laptop? Lenin chooses to see caricatures of a long-dead desert Arab as a cipher for how the West sees Muslims. I don't know where he lives, but it's not how we see Muslims round here. We tend to see them as "mate" or "neighbour". And all quite different, of course, from saying I sympathise with the actual pictures or their, largely crude and unpleasant, message or context. Or that I personally condone offending the devout gratuitously. I agree with Jamie: offense ought not to be for its own sake. But Lenin gives the enemies of his enemy carte blanche to behave as they wish. Why? Because we can't expect Them to hold to the same standards we expect of others? Not good enough, as someone worthy of respect would agree. That way we hand ammo to the "kill all towelheads" nutcases who think Guantanamo is a Good Idea We Need To See More Of. It's morally vacuous. Freedom of expression unfortunately means the freedom to be a shit, too, and even more unfortunately means defending shits. I realise it isn't popular – it wasn't when I defended Saad al-Fagih and Dilpazier Aslam in the zoo at Harry's Place either. As for the rest... Meh. Playground stuff, littered with fallacies (bonus points for spotting Lenin poisoning the well) and misrepresentations that I can't muster the energy to bother with. Make your own mind up. And on that note, I'm off. For a while, at least. Maybe I just need to inhabit a world that doesn't house wankers like Guido for a bit. Maybe I'm just bored with provoking people into abusing me. Heh, it's not like there's anyone left to fall out with, and I have a stack of books to catch up on: Hayek, Arendt, and Patrick Leigh Fermor are up next. So, 'til whenever and thanks for reading. 5.2.06Anarchy in HKVia Tim, a couple of fascinating links on Kowloon Walled City (and here and here), an ungoverned anarcho-capitalist enclave inside Hong Kong that due to some unresolved treaty law was ruled by neither the UK nor China. Though it had a population of 50,000 at its peak, it was cleared out in 1991 and demolished in 1993.I followed up with a friend of mine who lived and worked in HK in the early 1990s. He writes: A legal quirk made it Chinese sovereign territory, even though it was in the middle of HK – thus it became a major triad/crime hangout as the Chinese wanted nothing to do with it. It was basically one large housing block of dingy apartments... it was synonymous with Hong Kong crime, a kind of stereotype of all the dodgy HK gang movies. And from here: ... much of the power lay in the hands of the Triads: a republican secret society against Imperial Manchu rule, when formed in the late 19th century, turning to more "dubious activities as a way of raising funds" (drugs, prostitution and gambling). An empirical suggestion, at least, that extreme forms of libertarian government don't blossom into free-market paradises. They end up ruled by the guy with the biggest gun. 3.2.06Those Danish cartoons and systematic oppressionDodging the question with sleight of misdirection. Racist stereotypes and sword-wielding Mohammeds that don't exist. Orientalism in the guise of anti-imperialism.Now, I humbly submit that anyone who thinks he's taking orders from a long-dead prophet or advice on modern living from an insubstantial being that nobody else can see is suffering, at the very least, from oppression. I'm being kind. But if you're prepared to support the "Massacre of those who insult Islam" or deadpan request that someone "Behead those who insult Islam", you're frankly scary. And probably deserve something a lot more personal than a shit cartoon in a newspaper nobody reads. It's you that incitement laws were made for, in fact. Cui bono? That would be the religious hierarchy of fundamentalist Islam who have used this (four-month-stale) issue as a way to manipulate and terrorize their own, to spread fear and hatred of the Western Other, while bolstering insidious totalitarian control. If you're looking for oppressors, look no further. 2.2.06Whipper ye notToday's whipping boy is Rob Newman, riffing in a Marxist style in tehgraun on the incompatibility of capital-ism and planetary survivalism.Exhibit #1: Boring smartarseism. Or wit. 'Nuff said. Exhibit #2: In trademark style, Scott zeroes in on one line in a trial by decontextualisation. This: The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. Against which Scott loads up his Lomborg and lets fly with impressive drops in NOx, Lead, SO2, etc. etc. And asks: Given that 'fact' [Newman's assertion], how have the gains [those impressive drops, folks] of the last thirty years been possible? Newman's law is bollocks. QED. Ah, but he hasn't proven anywhere near what he thinks he has. Because he hasn't considered all the possibles: specifically, that none of this "voluntary" and "involuntary" reduction in pollution has constrained, or was designed to constrain, corporate profitability. In fact, it's bolstered it against massive lawsuits and green consumerism. Which seems about as believable as Exxon executives directing environmental policy for the Greatest Nation on Earth. Oh, wait a minute... So, not so much a fisk as an emasculated sk. Exhibit #3: Tim's unhappy about our Rob's definition of capitalism. Fair enough, Tim's no Marxist, so you can't expect him to have any truck with arguments about accumulation. I'm sympathetic to his faith in technology. Vorsprung durch Technik, as they say in Portugal. But you gotta read the comments. Forget the semi-literate screed, this is the best one: If he is basing he arguments on Marx's Capital volume I, then perhaps it would be an idea to send him the works of an economist from the 20th century, instead of his source in the 19th. From there we might in time be able to work him up to the 21st. Heh, argumentary recycling in action? That's twice today, doubtless ten times this week, and a hundred or more this month. It's a curious one for a "free-marketeer", too. Smith's Invisible Hand, Ricardo's comparative advantage and Walras's, erm, Walrasian equilibrium, were all formalised between the 1770s and 1870s. Exhibit #4: It's my turn. I have no idea whether Rob's right or not about peak oil, though someone I trust assures me that he is. (Someone, I'd add, who knows way more than most of the loudmouth know-nothings, him having actually worked as an oilman. In the Cliff Barnes mould, I'm thinking.) I'm sure he's right that micro-generation is the way of the future, though quite how that's incompatible with free markets he doesn't say. Anyway, Rob has a far trickier problem on his hands, a chicken/egg. This: the only way capitalism is going to collapse is in the aftermath of environmental catastrophe. Not before. Not in time to save us. The co-ordination problem of resistance would be insurmountable if we had 100 years. If Rob's friends are to be believed, we have less than 10. So, bring it on. Or don't. 1.2.06It'll take a better man than me...Any philosophers out there fancy sorting out the ethics of this one:Small groups linked to the extreme right are ladling pork soup to France's homeless. Critics and some officials denounce the charity as discriminatory: because it contains pork, the soup is off-limits for Muslims. It doesn't take a Vordermanesque IQ to work out the subtext. But how to retaliate? A punitive but non-discriminatory tax on brown shirts? Profiting from patientsSomething new from me at The Sharpener. |
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