There is a big divide, important people say. Muslims are furious about the treatment of Palestinians, about discrimination, humiliation, and marginalisation. To demonstrate how to treat people right, they blow them up. The West is furious about people being blown up. To demonstrate how to treat people right, they blow up mosques. And people, but always only as a regrettable side-effect. It’s not terrorism when the West does it. Remember that, or nothing will make any sense.

The West has some other issues that get less press. Oil, for instance. This is not about oil. Do not think about oil. Think about the clash of civilizations. (Are you thinking about it? Good.)

And then there’s human rights. The idea of having to live with the restrictions, uptightness, and all-around neuroticism that most Muslim societies seem to consider normal horrifies the vast majority of Westerners. But since they don’t, themselves, have to live with it, not much is said. It would be intolerant, or meddlesome, or it’s an internal affair. Sort of like wife-beating used to be something between a man and a woman. However, just because almost nobody talks about it, doesn’t stop it from being a source of hostility. Too often, it’s over-generalized hostility, as things that aren’t voiced usually are.

There’s a common thread there. The anger is about occupation, humiliation, poverty, violence, and abuse. These are not religious issues. They aren’t even cultural issues.

They are issues of justice. Nobody, whether Western, Muslim, or Western and Muslim, wants to be poor, hurt, or humiliated. A world united behind impoverishing and abusing people would be worse than our current one, not better. It is not unity anyone wants. It is justice, at least for themselves.

Let me go through a few examples, just to make my meaning clear.

• Palestine. The Jews, having been atrociously treated by the Europeans, decided they needed a Jewish state. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to have a benign government without the separation of religion and state, but I’m also a strong believer in consenting adults doing whatever they damn well please. So I’ll blink the separation issue for a moment, and grant the concept of a Jewish state. They wanted that state in the Promised Land. The only problem was, the land had been promised to some other people as well (perhaps proving not only that God exists, but also that he wouldn’t pass his real estate license). So Palestinian people got turfed out to make way for Jewish people. No matter how you look at it, that is an injustice. The consequences of that injustice will continue to resonate until it either stops (which means the Palestinians can live in peace in their own country, whether that’s a non-religious state or a separate, viable Palestine) or everybody is dead.
• It doesn’t stop because the US is too busy supporting Israel, right or wrong. So we’re currently headed toward the second alternative while we waste time talking about bridging a non-existent divide. There is no divide. Nobody wants to be booted out of their country or have to pass checkpoints to reach a hospital. There’s only a lot of people who’d rather do what’s easy (for themselves) than what’s right. There’s a lot of people who’d rather use poor refugees as irritants against their enemies, or ignore the crimes of their client state. In other words, there’s only a lot of people who’d rather have (other) people die than do what it takes to right a wrong. No divide there either, unfortunately.
• Lack of respect for Muslim traditions. Some traditions should not be respected. Cannibalism. Slavery. Female genital mutilation. Only the first is not well-known from at least some Middle Eastern lands. None of them have anything to do with Islam, but the appalling treatment of people in majority Muslim societies puts the religion in a bad light. So why aren’t the clerics making sure these things stop? Instead, some come out with statements favoring wife-beating and rape. There are psychopaths everywhere. But the right-thinking clerics should be ostracizing the crazies, not meeting them with, at most, embarrassed silence.
• Many of these so-called traditions have to do with depriving women of basic human rights, such as freedom of movement, and even the basic ability to choose one’s own clothing. But they’re not limited to that. There are also ludicrous pronouncements about music and shorts, things that call to mind some of the excesses of Southern Baptists. When Muslims stop demanding respect for travesties of human rights, both serious and silly ones, and start demanding respect for traditions that deserve it, like the Middle Eastern concept of hospitality, at least they’ll have justice on their side.
• Globalization. That’s what it’s called. In actual fact, it gives corporations new ways to make money, new ways to avoid environmental laws, and new ways to avoid labor laws. Even in the US itself, that supposed bastion of globalization, when consumers tried to buy medicines from other countries where they were cheaper, the corporations soon put a stop to that. Globalization for me but not for thee. Nobody wants to be a cash cow for the wealthy. There’s no divide. There’s just rich people, Western and non-Western, who’d rather make money off less-rich people. Nothing new there, not even the diversionary tactic of riling up the poor with religion instead.
• State-sponsored terrorism, aka war. Killing people because it suits your purposes is bad enough, but I want to focus on the demonization that is necessary to allow it to happen. There is, we are told, some kind of “clash of civilizations.” On one side there are the blond, blue-eyed heroes, and on the other a bunch of cheating, thieving, no-good Semites.

   Wait, that’s the old script. Those were Jewish Semites. This time, it’s totally different. On one side are fine, upstanding followers of Western, Christian values, and on the other are a bunch of cheating, thieving, terrorist Arab Semites. Totally different.

• Every single cleric who is allowed to call him- or herself a Christian ought to be condemning this. Instead, there are a few fundamentalist Christian preachers who not only condone it, they promote it. By giving criminal heads of state religious cover, a few clerics make the religion seem like nothing but a bandage for an oozing wound.
• Small-scale terrorism, aka terrorism. Targeting civilians because you can’t get at soldiers is Bad. Not Honorable. Thoroughly despicable. Every single cleric who is allowed to call himself a Muslim ought to be condemning this. By giving criminals religious cover, a few clerics make the religion seem like nothing but a bandage for an oozing wound.

Not one of these issues is anything people disagree about. The only disagreement is how much it matters when they hurt other people. Trying to find “agreement” on that is either despicable (“Okay, I won’t discuss human rights for women if you’ll stop harping on human rights for Palestinians.”) or irrelevant (“We can agree that both Christianity and Islam are great religions”).

By pretending that the problem is some kind of cultural divide instead of injustice, it’s possible to pretend that the only thing needed for a solution is a bit of talk and understanding. Interestingly enough, nobody is ever quite agreed on what to talk about first. Is it respect for religion? Or tradition? Or market forces? Or not committing acts of war without a license? Pretty soon, we’re talking about talking, and that’s even easier than not solving the problem by talking about it.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but Dawkins’ pronouncements are just plain stupid.

Using religion and God as an excuse to kill people is evil. If he’d said that, I’d agree 100%. Some of the things people do in the name of God really are evil.

But to say that religion is at fault because people make a pig’s breakfast of it is like saying that love is evil because people can use it to hurt each other.

The other thing is, where does he get off, making sweeping statements about God? He’s just finished saying he doesn’t think God exists. If God doesn’t exist for him, he couldn’t know anything about it. I would have thought he was smart enough to see the paradox. (Yes, I do have issues with not separating science and religion. Read more about it here, if you’d like.)

Maybe he should stick to genetics, something he does have a clue about.

Technorati tags: Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, religion, God, evil

I give up. I have to comment on the Foley business because so many people seem to be totally confused about sex.

On the left and the right, every scandal that involved private parts has been enumerated, going back for decades right to Gary Hart and his Monkey Business. The implication is that they’re all more or less the same. They are not.

This really isn’t difficult. Sex is enjoyment, preferably between people, but not unknown as a solitary activity. That’s it. That’s all anyone needs to know. If anyone involved isn’t enjoying the situation, then it’s not sex.

If anyone involved is creeped out, then it’s harassment. If anyone involved doesn’t have the power or the knowledge to say no, then it’s exploitation in the same sense that slavery is exploitation. If anyone involved is saying no, then it’s rape. These are crimes. CRIMES. They are not sex, even if there is an erection going on somewhere.

There’s one reason why it’s essential to keep the difference between sex and crime clear. Sex is nobody else’s business. Crimes are everybody’s business and have to be stopped immediately.

Some examples, just to make the distinction clear. Barney Frank and Mark Foley were elected to Congress and are both gay. So far, so good. Their gayness is nobody’s business but their own and their partners’. Barney Frank does not proposition pages. That is also good. Foley propositions people young enough to be his grandchildren, AND OVER WHOM HE HAS POWER. That is a crime. It would have been bad enough if he’d been streetwalking in DC looking for nineteen year-olds. But he had to go harass lowly clerical staff who are hoping to make a career in his business. That makes his crime that much worse.

Or, take another pair of examples. Clinton having sex in the Oval Office. This was a poor choice of venue and one taxpayers can justly complain about. Dignity of the office and all that. But the sex itself is nobody’s business (except Hillary’s). Alternatively, there’s the current Gubernator of California, who apparently has a decades-long history of groping women. He said he was “just playing.” The narrative when this first became public (2003) was, really, what did anyone expect, we’re surrounded by sex scandals, and anyway, look at Clinton. Boys will be boys.

Which is nonsense. Hundreds of millions of boys with plenty of testosterone manage to get through life without harassing women. It’s got nothing to do with boys or sex or hormones. It has to do with the sense of power that twisted people get from humiliating another person. Doing that by assaulting a person and grabbing her breasts is not sex. It is a crime. (And one which the Gropinator has kept out of the news by using the power of the Governor’s office to investigate the victims.)

There are vital implications from the fact that sex is private, but crimes are public.

One is that the media and the politicians need to get out of everyone else’s underwear. Leave people’s sex lives alone. Enough already. Publicly messing about in people’s private affairs always ends in disaster. In the case of sex, the end result is something like Saudi Arabia, with morality police roaming the streets and masses of the men with erectile dysfunction (Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors, 2005; no direct link, unfortunately. Also, U. Chicago study (pdf) based on the GSSAB.). In the case of religion, the result is endless war. (I don’t really need to give references for that, do I?) Sex and state need to be separated at least as much as church and state. And although a politician’s attitudes to sex, race, or religion may need to be discussed if they are likely to affect voters, there is never any need to gossip about his or her Catholicism, hairstyle, or bed partners. Gossip may whip up the voters, but it’s a drug which is killing our ability to have an intelligent public conversation, and since democracy is founded on informed voters, this is not trivial.

On the other hand, crimes must be discussed, made public, and prevented, or, failing that, punished. The media and the poltiicians, and all the rest of us, need to stop confusing crimes and sex, need to stop lumping sex in with crimes, and need to stop pretending crimes are caused by wanting sex. Human beings are unique in having opposable thumbs, which gives us ways of dealing with irrepressible sex all by ourselves. Humans are also unique in having a mass of brain, which gives us ways of understanding how other people feel. So if we’re hurting someone, we bloody well know it, which is the very definition of a crime.

We have to keep the distinction between sex and crime straight because when we don’t sex can be called a crime, which makes the whole thing ridiculous, and crimes can be called sex, which, among other things, lets congressmen harass pages for years while everyone looks the other way.

Update, Oct. 14th, 2006
Holy crap. I knew that Those People were confused, but even I had no idea it was this bad: “Shays: Abu Ghraib abuses were sex ring” (Chris Shays, for those who’d like footnotes, is a Republican representative from Connecticut.)

Technorati tags: Foley, Mark Foley, politics, harassment, Congress

What is it about popes? With rare exceptions, like John XXIII, what a bunch of benighted enablers of balderdash. Maybe it has to do with the selection process being limited to a few old men in skirts.

Now the current one has managed to quote a fourteenth century emperor as if he had some relevance six hundred years later. (Quoted from the BBC)

…[H]e [the emperor] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

That from the head of a religion that gave people the Inquisition and witch-burning. That from the head of a religion that was so famous for converting people by fire and sword that it’s a joke in one of the world’s most indispensable books, 1066 and All That.

The sad thing is, old Ratzinger–sorry, Benedict XVI–was actually trying to make a good point. Violence has no place in religion, which is sort of like saying that moms and apple pie go together. You’ll get no argument from anyone, except of course the people trying to use religion as an excuse for their own greed or hatred. That, too, is not limited to Islam or Christianity. You could probably dig up a paleolithic shaman with ten followers, and find a couple grunting slogans to justify killing their neighbors.

Ratzinger-Benedict was also trying to say that narrow Western concepts of reason interfere with dialogue with non-Western cultures. An attitude of “The facts, ma’am, just give me the facts” is indeed too limited to encompass any of the finer things in life. The Westerners have a lot to learn. So does everyone else. Worshipping gods made in our own image is not working out for us.

John Lennon said it best:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Technorati tags: Pope, Islam, Christianity, terrorism, violence, religion

I know I’ve said it before. I know I’m repeating myself. I still can’t believe it needs saying at all.

You can’t trade human rights for expedience. It does not work. It’s not only bad, as in BAD, but it achieves less than nothing. Let me run through a couple of obvious examples. (After all, if their message hasn’t gotten across yet, they must bear repeating.)

Slavery. In recent times, it created–and still creates–suffering among blacks. No particularly startling insight there. It held back the economic development of the US South for over a hundred years, and the area still hasn’t caught up. It created whole swathes of whites who have to believe in fear and hatred to justify what was and is done. It led to a disastrous war that would never have happened if slavery had been outlawed from the birth of the republic. It wasn’t outlawed then because the rights of a bunch of blacks wasn’t worth the trouble of arguing with a bunch of much richer whites.

Anti-semitism. This one is overused to the point of coma, so why haven’t we learned the lessons yet? Before the Second World War ground in its awful message, some anti-semitism was quite acceptable. It’s been lost in the fog of embarrassment just how normal it was to ignore Russian pogroms or to subscribe to conspiracy theories about world domination by a cabal of Jewish bankers. But even so, Kristallnacht, the night of November 9, 1938 that was a lynch party to end all lynch parties, should have been an alarm loud enough to wake the morally dead. However, at the time the rights of a bunch of Jews wasn’t worth the trouble of taking on a military superpower. It didn’t save anyone from having to deal with the Nazis eventually, of course. It just made it a lot more costly.

Moving right along to what caused me to go on this rant, the following is a quote from one of the best, most insightful, and most intelligent left wing bloggers:

Like most extreme reactionary movements, Al Qaeda has no meaningful economic or political program …. But what it does have going for it are wide and deep fears of cultural penetration and Western domination …. These are precisely the fears the administration and the neocons appear determined to stoke with their sweeping demands for “democratic” but slavishly pro-American regimes, privatization, women’s rights, Western-style individualism, etc.

This is like those lists on an SAT: “Find the element that does not belong. Red. Green. Blue. Purple. Concrete.” Putting “women’s rights” in amongst privatization and puppet regimes sets at nothing the unbelievable courage of people who try to give an education to girls in Afghanistan, or who try to help the victims of sexual crimes in countries where blaming the victim is taken for granted. It sets at nothing the superhuman efforts of the Shirin Ebadi’s of the world who are using every ounce of their strength to get at least some of the most basic human rights for the female half of the population in their countries. By implying that we should deny truth to avoid offending tyrants–we who would lose nothing but some money if we did–he sets at nothing the sacrifices of life, limb, sanity, and family that every fighter for human rights risks under those tyrants.

But human rights are a luxury, right? People who aren’t even really men can’t be worth an argument with a bunch of guys with their heads up their seventh centuries. Think about it. These guys have both oil AND guns. It’ll be different this time. It’ll really be much easier, much cheaper, much less painful if we don’t let the rights of these minor groups interfere with the big picture. It’s never worked before, and right now it’s making us more dependent on oil, more involved in wars, and it’s breeding more drug-resistant epidemics in more failed states. But if we just ignore people’s rights harder than ever, this time it will work.

Right?

This is down there with “Attack Iraq because of terrorists in Afghanistan.”

A headline today in the UK newspaper Independent:
“Let us adopt Islamic family law to curb extremists, Muslims tell Kelly.”

Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Ireland, said he had asked for holidays to mark Muslim festivals and Islamic laws to cover family affairs which would apply only to Muslims.

Dr Pasha said he was not seeking sharia law for criminal offences but he said Muslim communities in Britain should be able to operate Islamic codes for marriage and family life.

Ri-i-ight. I’ve noticed the problem too. It’s all the young men running around without their veils on. And the wild girls: don’t get me started. They come under bad influences, and the next thing you know, they’re carrying blow-your-socks-off-red lipstick on to airplanes.

The application of a bit of Muslim family law should sort that right out.

Update, Aug. 21, 2006
British Muslim MP, Shahid Malik, says the same, more elegantly.

As I have repeatedly said, in this world of indiscriminate terrorist bombings, where Muslims are just as likely to be the victims of terrorism as other British and US citizens, we Muslims have an equal stake in fighting extremism.
…
When Lord Ahmed, the Muslim Labour peer, heard my comments — I said essentially that if Muslims wanted sharia they should go and live somewhere where they have it — he accused me of doing the BNP’s work. He is entitled to his opinion. However, a little honesty, like mine, in this whole debate might just restore trust in politicians and ease the population’s anxieties.
…
[earlier in the piece] …given that these [terrorist] acts are carried out in the name of our religion — Islam — we have a greater responsibility not merely to condemn but to confront the extremists.

I don’t know about “greater” responsibility, but certainly as much. And confronting extremism, rather than aiding and abetting it, might be worth a try, perhaps, bizarre as it sounds.

There’s a big flap, as there should be, over AOL releasing information about searches that is detailed enough to identify individuals. Google says they’d never, ever, ever do something like that. Sure, they could, but they wouldn’t. Honest.

On the other side are privacy advocates saying all this information needs to be safeguarded by neutral third parties. Or someone trustworthy. Or something.

Let’s step back a moment, and think about why search information needs to be saved. It’s not to help you recover lost searches which you forgot to back up. It’s not to help scientists discover the Grand Unified Theory of Information. Searches are saved so that the search engine can target ads more precisely. Precise targeting allows the search company to charge more for ad placement.

We’re supposed to live under a constant spiritual colonoscopy, as it were, so that Google can make money.

I don’t think so.

Privacy should not be the last priority. Marketing should not be the first. It’s way past time for legislation that puts those two in their proper relationship.

A schism without a name runs through the world. People are supposed to be divided by race, class, gender, religion, education, or wealth, but the biggest division cuts across all those. A fundamentally different sense of good and evil is the biggest rift. It’s been there a long time, but technology is making it huge.

The realization that a different concept of evil exists first struck me when I was reading an article by George Packer about post-occupation Baghdad. A well-educated doctor doing the best job he could under impossible circumstances was showing the journalist around the hospital and the morgue. “An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine deals with virginity,” Packer notes, and before the war there was an examination room at the hospital that did nothing but perform female virginity tests. “These days, the morgue overflows, but the examination room down the hall is usually empty.” The doctor “was appalled by this inversion of the normal order. In his view, a fragile moral relationship existed between the two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute—as if the social control of virginity offered a defense against the anarchy that led to murder.” (Caught in the Crossfire, New Yorker, May 17, 2004.)

And yet, absurd as it sounds, on some fundamental level that is precisely what that doctor and like-minded people think. Looked at from a different perspective, it is not absurd so long as you feel that sex is evil. If sex is the thing that makes the center lose its hold, that corrupts society, and that has the potential to destroy everything you hold dear, then virginity tests really are vitally important.

I’m obviously in the other camp, the one that thinks damaging others constitutes evil, because the doctor’s world view struck me as new and bizarre. That’s one of the biggest problems when bridging world views, which is that it can’t be done. The closest approach is to gain some intellectual insight, but on the level of actual understanding or empathy, the other viewpoint will always feel insane.

Take one example: the vaccine for cervical cancer. The incidence of that cancer increases with the number of sexual partners. For me, that’s irrelevant. But if sex is the source of evil, increasing the amount of sex in the world will have horrible downstream consequences, and guarding against that by scaring women away from sex with the fear of cancer is a small price to pay for goodness. People in this camp can’t understand how I can be so blind to the destructive forces I’m unleashing on civilized society. I can’t understand how they can think that sex should warrant the death penalty.

Take another example: violence and sex on US television. Children can, apparently, watch any amount of violence without warping their minds. Nudity, on the other hand, or worse yet a visible erection, would cause perversion. Likewise, guns are sold under clear glass in general stores, whereas sex toys are sold wrapped in plain paper in their own part of town. This makes sense only if sex is the prime source of evil, and damaging others is a distant second.

It’s vitally important to see how large a gap in understanding separates the two sides because we expend vast time and effort trying to convince each other to be reasonable, while not even realizing that neither side understands a word the other is saying. We can’t hope to reach any mutual peace–nor can we avoid or implement manipulation–unless we have some clue where they’re coming from.

A tangential point here is how women fit into the sex-is-evil world view. The tangle at the core of that view is that you can’t live with sex, but you also can’t live without it. The party line is generally to tolerate sex only for essential reproductive purposes, which, theoretically, applies to men as well as women. However, it’s a drag to fight your hormones your entire adult life, so the tedious enforcement function gets laid on the less-powerful gender. The sex-is-evil crowd do not, in their own minds, see themselves as anti-women. It just happens to work out that way.

The difference between being anti-women and anti-sex may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it is a significant aspect of the other worldview. It explains, among other things, how so many women can hold that view even while it’s doing its best to cripple them. It also explains why gays are consistently hated by that group. If the attitude was primarily anti-female, gay males, at least, ought to be getting a free pass. Instead they get killed. If, on the other hand, the attitude is primarily anti-sex, then gay sex is about as unnecessary as you can get. Add to that the potential “ickiness” factor of any biological function you’re not personally involved in, and you have a truly toxic mix.

I mentioned that technology is enlarging the gap between the two world views. The separation of sex and reproduction is the main factor. When sex leads to children, uncontrolled sex can cause harm to others, and there is some overlap between the two concepts of evil. When sex is just sex, it becomes much harder to make the case that it’s hurting anyone–unless, of course, you set up social rules to make sure that it does. The anti-sex folks reject technologies that make sex easier or less dangerous. Since a lack of control of reproduction is the linchpin on which this definition of evil hangs, any technologies that increase control over reproduction are also bad. Abortion, cloning, and stem cells all become targets. (Note that other technologies are acceptable. Anti-sex advocates are happy to use medicine, satellite dishes, guns, and computers.)

Being anti-sex is a minority stance in Western nations, so the people who feel sex is bad don’t always label themselves as such. They talk about “family values” or “pro-life” issues instead, but they’re easy enough to spot because the only effects of their policies are to make sex a more fraught experience. “Family values,” oddly enough, are coupled with opposition to parental leave or actual aid to real children. “Pro-life” attitudes tend to be found with pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and pro-war politics.

So what do we do? Is there a point to understanding these blighters? To be honest, I’m not really sure, except that we can stop wasting energy on reasoning with them. Changing concepts of good and evil are realignments of the soul, and reason justifies them after the fact. It doesn’t create them. They happen only on an individual level, they can’t be legislated, and they can’t be bridged. There is no way for the two to live side by side. Tolerance breaks down because it’s a logical impossibility. To take one example, there is no way to simultaneously legislate both against harm to others and for honor killings. The struggle can end only with annihilation of one side or apartheid. The latter solution has already been (semi?)-facetiously suggested in a post-election map that shows the states voting for Bush in a new country called Jesusland, while the two coasts and some of the north Midwest are happily part of the United States of Canada. All I want to know is where do I sign up?

Separation of beliefs and state offers a partial solution. “They” would have to stop trying to control anyone’s sex life except their own. “We” would have to make it easy for them to avoid sexuality they feel is offensive. It would take a real willingness to let other people live by their beliefs for that solution to work, which is why it’s only a partial solution. It is (almost?) impossible to let other people live by beliefs that one is convinced unleash evil on the world.

If we were sensible, we’d avoid murdering each other, wait for the changing of the gods to end, and then the struggle would be over. But what are the chances of that?

Postscript: I can’t stop myself from looking at the whole thing as a biologist’s joke. Label the two viewpoints using the conventions of fruit fly geneticists. On one hand you have harmless–or is it Mostly Harmless? On the other hand is sexless. The only interaction between the two seems to be that they can’t coexist. Expression of one silences the activity of the other.

Technorati tags: sex, evil, culture wars, morality, pro-life, family values, morality

One point is getting lost in the discussion about the Iran “jewish” star sham.

Background: A law passed by the Iranian parliament was initially reported as enforcing a dress code that would mark the various religions (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian). In the “reporting,” this morphed into making Persian Jews wear yellow stars. Horror shot round the world.

Then it turned out that: (from an article in Jewish Week)

Indeed, the law’s text and parliamentary debate, available in English from the BBC Service, discloses no provision mandating that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress. It instead focuses on promoting traditional clothing designs using Iranian and Islamic patterns, by Iran’s domestic fashion industry and preventing “the import of clothes incompatible with cultural Islamic and national values.”

The law is meant to develop and protect Iran’s clothing industry, Javedanfar said.

Note that: “no provision … that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress.”

A recent headline from The Guardian, April 20, 2006
Police in Tehran ordered to arrest women in ‘un-Islamic’ dress

Hello? Earth to progressive blogosphere? Maybe the reason the stuff about yellow stars found so many willing believers is because that nonsense is so similar to the actual nonsense perpetrated by the Islamists?

But the dress code doesn’t apply to Jews. Or “Iranians.” Only to women.

That’s all right then.

Update, June 1
It seems there is some controversy about whether one should criticise things also criticized by illiberals, just in case anyone lumps you into the company of fools. The issue isn’t argument in the forum of ideas, and changing your mind if you’re wrong. The issue is saying anything similar to what comes out of Malkin, to take an example at random.

Laura Rozen’s mentions the

“Iranian American human rights activist Ramin Ahmadi, up at Yale, who wonders why liberals like himself who opposed apartheid South Africa, dictatorships in Latin America, etc. have for the most part abandoned the Iran human rights issue, and not just during the Bush administration.”

Keven Drum says

“And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration’s determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can’t be trusted to act wisely. So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little.”

Call me naive, but that is not the same thing as stupid. The problem with the Bush Administration is that they don’t care about the truth. Among many other symptoms of that, they think a statement can be discredited because of who says it. (“Who said there are problems in Iraq? A Democrat? Well, there you are. It’s obvious nonsense.”)

Fighting that by abandoning our view of truth makes us the same as them. When we start pretending it’s not the truth that matters, but how fools will take it, we’ve decided to join them because we can’t beat them.

To hell with that. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Technorati tags: Iran, yellow star, Iranian badge, dress code

I am an immigrant. I grew up bilingual. My grandmother learned English in her fifties, and always spoke with one of those formidable accents that you hear in the movies. So I can’t get too worked up about people who don’t speak English, or who came over on the boat. I came over on a boat, and I still remember walking down the gangway, clutching my teddy bear. I was nearly six at the time.

Immigrants come here to survive, to make a living, or to make a fortune. I never met anyone who came over purely because they admired the Bill of Rights. This doesn’t make immigrants a particularly mercenary lot, but there are those who say that foreigners who don’t share our “values” should just go home. I don’t know about that. It might be hard to keep the country running with the few people who would be left.

If we start litmus tests for admiration of the Constitution, everyone except ethnic Amerindians should have to pass it, since we’re all rather recent immigrants. The outlook is not promising. Consider, for instance, a National Constitution Center poll done about ten years ago that found one in six Americans believe the Constitution establishes the US as a Christian nation. Freedom of religion was the whole original point of the country, and this is what we’ve come to. That was only one of a long string of depressing results, and things have not improved since. Recently there was a poll finding that 20% of Americans (one in five!) believe the Constitution guarantees the right to keep pets and drive cars. No doubt, the Bill of Rights refers only to the standard transmission cars available in the late 1700s.

I think the evidence shows that immigrants do share American values. Like most people, they’re not thinking too much about the Bill of Rights and they’re doing their best to get by.

I think the real objection to immigrants’ values is their inability to see the special value of Americans. Immigrants know other countries in a way that many Americans don’t, and they know that Americans are just folks. When you have grown up feeling that you’re one of God’s chosen, uniquely gifted to bring goodness to the world, it’s depressing to have people around whose very homesickness says that the US isn’t everything.

Immigrants are also supposed to be depressing because they take jobs away from citizens. Well, they do. Without an adequate social safety net in the US, there are plenty of citizens who would work at any jobs they could get. But they could also demand minimum wages. They could demand compliance with safety, health, and environmental regulations. They could, God forbid, unionize. This is not what (most? all?) employers want. Employers want voiceless, exploitable illegals. The job that “Americans won’t do” is hiring workers who can demand their rights.

While I’m on that topic, let’s talk specifically about the subset of immigrants who are illegal. The Immigration Reform bill currently stuck in Congress–the one that planned to turn illegals into felons, but ran into trouble because people noticed–will do almost nothing to allow illegals to become citizens. For illegals who’ve been here over five years (and I’d be willing to bet that means continuous residency, without any secret trips home over the long years to see family), they can get in line for permanent residency. So far, so good, but long-term residents are not the seething mass of border-crossers we’re supposed to be afraid of.

People who’ve been here between two to five years can go back to their home countries and apply for permanent residency there. I’m sure lots of migrant fruit pickers have the savings to travel home and then sit on their hands for several years in a country they left because they couldn’t make a living. It takes years to get permanent residency. This isn’t like going to the DMV and getting your driver’s license. It also takes unbelievable quantities of paperwork. My university-educated mother struggled with it, and it boggles my imagination to think of farmworkers having to deal with it.

Illegals who’ve been here less than two years could get temporary guest worker status. That would create a permanent class of workers who could not vote. They would have no recourse–none, zip, zilch–against exploitation. If they made any waves, like say asking for an extra bathroom break, they could be fired and sent home. Citizens wouldn’t care because it didn’t affect them. But soon, citizens who wanted better-than-slave labor conditions would find themselves replaced by guest workers. Guess who would benefit hugely from this. Guess who’s the biggest supporter of the “Immigration Reform.”

As BottleofBlog puts it so well:

That’s the ugly hilarity of Republicans proposing an immigration bill. It’s that simple. … These are people who get their jobs from scaring the bejesus out of you about open borders, when what they really want to do is pave a giant highway across the border. And these are people who earn a living by whipping up your ugliest emotions at people who are getting something on your dime, when really, you’re getting something on their dime–cheap food, cheap service, cheap whatever.

And the cost is spread out to all of us.

My take on the economics of illegal immigrants is that the sense of being ripped off is way overblown. Kids in schools and people in emergency rooms are easy notice. People forget what stuff would cost if illegals weren’t there to work for next to nothing, and to depress other menial wages. (In my books, the latter is not a benefit, but we’re talking about people who don’t want anyone to cost them anything.) It’s also hard to put a price on how much more our foreign affairs would cost if billions of dollars in remittances were not sent home, were not keeping whole populations out of desperation, and weren’t helping to prevent the resulting (expensive-to-Americans) revolutions, wars, sabotage, attacks, nationalizations of businesses, mass refugee movements, and all the rest.

Besides, if illegals require taxpayer-funded services, whose fault is that? If you, as a US citizen, have an employer who doesn’t pay the outrageous cost of health insurance, you too are one of the millions of citizens using emergency rooms. Would you be depending on charity if you had coverage? Of course not. So, is the situation your fault for getting ill? Or the employer’s for sloughing off costs this society expects them to shoulder? What we’re really complaining about is that illegals aren’t being paid a living wage and that some of them don’t pay taxes. They’d be happy to do both. Ask them, if you doubt me.

Moving on to arguments that might seem to have validity, what about the fact that illegal immigrants are, in fact, illegal? They broke the law. They shouldn’t break the law.

That is true. Nobody should break the law. This includes the US itself. As MaxSpeak notes, the US has made such a mess of Central and South America that hosting hardworking people is the least we can do. Not all of the mess we made was “illegal,” but some of it was legal only in the sense that slavery was once legal. Words were written on paper to sponsor criminality. That doesn’t make it legal in any real sense of the word. Look at US actions, including recent ones like the Nafta legislation that flooded Mexico with enough cheap agribusiness corn to kill whole corn-growing regions. Then look at immigrants who are crossing the border because they’d rather not starve to death. I just cannot get worked up about the criminality of the immigrants.

The other problem with sending all the illegals home is that it is impossible. The Amerindians did not issue visas. If the first settlers were illegals, so is everyone they brought in after them. (That is the current logic, I believe. The children of illegals are not supposed to have a right to citizenship.) So, the rest of us should just go “home”? And where would that be? On the other hand, if hanging on long enough somehow makes it okay, who’s to define what is “long enough”? It’s a bit convenient if long enough means I’m okay, but you’re not.

Another bugbear is security. After all, anyone could be among those undocumented millions flooding across the border.

That is also true. But recent terrorist attacks by foreigners in the US were all the work of legal foreigners. They were on student visas, or tourist visas, or otherwise quite well known to the INS. Terrorists need to have enough money to commit their terrorisms. They aren’t going to be paying some smuggler a couple of thousand dollars for the privilege of walking across a lethal desert for a week or two. They fly in. And they don’t pick fruit. Sealing the Mexican border to prevent terrorism is like searching Granny’s jogging shoes while letting whole container ships offload without inspection.

I’m not saying that countries have no right to control their borders. On the contrary, I think the current inhabitants of a country do have the right to object to mass immigration that would change their world into something else. Ethnic Tibetans have a right to object to the land grab by the Han Chinese. Ethnic Fijians have a right to find some way to preserve their culture despite the enormous number of Indians brought in by the British to work the plantations. (And, yes, I realize that gets into very thorny issues like the Palestinians and Israeli Jews, or the Dutch and citizens of their former colonies. I have thoughts on that, too, but that’s a topic for another post.) Cultures, especially endangered ones, have a right to preservation, even if it is not yet written into law.

The US, however, is one of the few countries with almost no claim to this right. It’s a nation of immigrants. US culture is mainly about doing your own thing. At the highest levels, that includes the Bill of Rights and it really is a contribution to the human story on our planet. However, that isn’t pegged to any single ethnic group or to any race. In the US, talk about loss of our “culture” by invading hordes from across the border isn’t really about culture. It’s about richer immigrants who want the poorer ones to shut up and work.

(Other links: Krugman. Brad Plumer: a series of good posts at the end of March-beginning of April with excellent links to the economics of the issue.)

Technorati tags: immigrants, immigration reform, illegal aliens, HR 4437

I’ve had it with being bullied by bigots hiding behind cutouts of gods made in their own image. Enough already.

Burn witches for God. Kill heathens for God. Let people die of Aids for God. And so on and on and on and on. The latest was that God is so huffy about having his picture taken, it was worth killing people over it.

Enough with pretending that these so-called religions pre-empt every other value, from free speech to life itself. To hell with them. Let them go back where they came from.

God is no excuse for killing people. Anyone who pretends so, is not religious. God is no excuse for destroying women. Or for throwing acid in their faces, or for pretending they’re half-human. God is no excuse for letting children starve, while forcing women to produce starving children. God is no excuse for ANY suffering inflicted by one human being on another.

Enough with the rest of us losing all our fight the moment someone pulls out a God-shaped facsimile. The Vatican didn’t condemn the genocide of the Jews when it happened, and it took them damn decades to mumble an apology. Don’t tell me that’s not a shame on all Catholicism. Don’t tell me something is a religion when its leaders would rather protect their priests than condemn sex crimes against children. We’re told that Islam doesn’t actually have anything against women, that all the anti-women sentiment in Islamic countries is cultural. Fine. Then condemn the people who use the religion to justify their “honor” killings and all their hate crimes. Make women judges and imams (and, for the Catholics, priests). Until then, don’t make excuses for hatred.

God is no excuse for spewing hate speech, not even in a sermon. Especially not in a sermon. God is no excuse for spewing lies. If the facts don’t agree with your particular god-story, then tough. God is no excuse to shout down the facts. Especially since God is supposed to have made them.

The irony is that hiding bigotry under a flag full of God is idolatry, in the real meaning of the word. That would be funny, if it didn’t cause oceans of suffering.

People talk of culture wars and clashes of civilizations. Damn right there’s a clash. It’s between people of good faith, with or without a religion, and theocrats dictating how others should live.

It’s time we stopped letting them get away with it. Stop dignifying the theocrats’ excuses with the name of religion. They may be weird cultural practices, or cults, or delusions, or power grabs. People who advocate hurting other people don’t worship God, and we have to stop letting them pretend they do. God is no excuse for the things they do.

Technorati tags: freedom, democracy, human rights, theocrats, fairness, Islamism, literalismfundamentalism, totalitarianismCharlie Hebdo

Why isn’t she running the world? She knows right from wrong, she and Malalai Joya are the two bravest people on the planet, and Ayaan has gone through trial by horror. She made a film with her partner, Theo van Gogh, about women in Islam. He got murdered for it. If anyone understands the price of free speech, it’s Ayaan. This is what she has to say about it:

From the BBC:

Dutch MP backs Muhammad cartoons

The Somali-born Dutch MP who describes herself as a “dissident of Islam” has backed the Danish newspaper that first printed the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

[She] said it was “correct to publish the cartoons” in Jyllands Posten and “right to republish them”.

Ms Hirsi Ali … said… “today the open society is challenged by Islamism”. … “Within Islam exists a hardline Islamist movement that rejects democratic freedoms and wants to destroy them.”

[She] criticised European leaders for not standing by Denmark and urged politicians [and I could think of a few others!] to stop appeasing fundamentalists.

She also said that although the Prophet Muhammad did a lot of good things, his decree that homosexuals and apostates should be killed was incompatible with democracy. … Ms Hirsi Ali said the furore over the cartoons had exposed the fear among artists and journalists in Europe to “analyse or criticise intolerant aspects of Islam”.

What do spam, Islamists, porn, Cindy Sheehan, and cartoons have in common? Free speech. It’s everywhere these days, a constant din. We need to figure out what’s free and what’s just speech before we go deaf.

In the high and far off times, when the Founding Dads were mulling over the liberties essential to the life of a free society, free speech was front and center. They were talking about free political speech, which explains points of view or criticizes them. I doubt there’s any dispute that the free flow of ideas is essential to democracy. People may not feel that democracy is necessary, but if you do want democracy, you can’t have it without free political speech.

So far, so good, but talking to yourself in a closed room isn’t really the point. The free *flow* of ideas means people need to hear as well as speak. That leads to radical conclusion #1: Broadcast information is an important method of delivering ideas, so free airtime has to be available to air different points of view. The time needs to be taxpayer-funded *at cost* because the free flow of ideas is the lifeblood of democracy. I know the broadcast giants would have foaming fits if the public actually had some use of the public airwaves. That’s just too bad.

Illegal takeovers of the kind that have gutted traditional broadcasting are not limited to old media. There is the issue of “pipes” and the internet. In the US, the government and a few large companies own major portions of the backbone, the “pipes,” that allow the broadband internet to function. Some of those companies have started making noises about how they’re going to promote their own “products” on “their” pipes, and start charging others more for the use of the network.

The internet was started by the government, carried forward by the free contributions of countless academics and others, and the basic fiber optic cables were laid down with taxpayer money. The companies who now have responsibility for running parts of these networks received all that immense value for free. The companies need to pay back all that value first, if they think the internet shouldn’t be free. (More on these issues by Christopher Stern at WaPo, Jeffrey Benner at Salon.com, and on “content-based billing” by Feliks Welfeld at CommsDesign.com. Remember, the companies are NOT the ones generating the content. They just want to charge for it, apparently simply because they think they can.)

The whole idea of charging for the network is as antisocial and counterproductive as charging everyone to set foot on the road. The net is a social good and a natural monopoly, like highways. Like them, it needs to be recognized as such, and to be regulated and freely available the same way.

Tangentially, another natural monopoly and essential utility of the internet is the ability to search it. That, too, needs to be freely available and regulated for the good of all. (Yes, Google, I’m looking at you.) Bill Thompson has some more thoughts on that subject.

Religious or philosophical expression is another cornerstone of free speech, and not one subject to much controversy. Without that freedom, the central quest of finding our own place in the universe becomes crippled. The whole point of a free society is that the only limits are not harming others, and it certainly covers the freedom to search for our God in our own way.

Here again, the need to be heard is important, so nobody can have a much bigger megaphone than anyone else. That’s the idea behind insisting that government cannot promote any given religion. If it does, other religions quickly become suppressed mutterings in small rooms. People may not want free societies, but if they do, then separation of church and state is essential to the freedom of religion. Lately, this seems to be turning back into a new concept.

That was the easy part. Now comes the hard part. Cartoons. They’ve been much in the news lately. A Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons depicting Mohammed in the context of a discussion about free speech and whether it was right that Muslims tried to insist that everyone, not just other Muslims, had to refrain from showing images of the Prophet. Four months went by. Nobody really noticed. The Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca by millions of Muslims took place. Once again, there was insufficient planning and organization with the result that several hundred people were trampled to death. This is not the first time that’s happened. There were rumblings that the Saudi government should “do something.” The Saudis started the storm about some four month-old cartoons. (Insight into this affair from the incomparable Religious Policeman, and other posts earlier and later.)

That’s the background on that particular controversy, but there is a real issue at its heart. Is respect for other people’s viewpoints more or less important than free speech? The way I would answer that question is by taking both choices to their potential conclusions. If respect is more important, then any speech that offends someone has to be silenced. If applied to everyone, nobody would have any free speech. On the other hand, if free speech is more important, then some people would have to avert their eyes to avoid offense. So long as they are able to do that, giving free speech priority enables everyone to live according to their own lights.

In the interests of following that principle myself: note that a copy of one of the cartoons appears below. It says it all, as far as I’m concerned. A link to all twelve of the famous cartoons: The Shadow of the Olive Tree . [Update 2013-03-31. A cursory search indicates that the cartoons have been removed at news sites. The only copies I could find are on the Wayback Machine.]

Then there’s Tom Toles’ cartoon that offended the Joint Chiefs of Staff so much. “Beyond tasteless” said the top military brass.

The cartoon is a real avert-your-eyes piece of work, but not because of Tom Toles. What’s tasteless is a useless war that destroys people, and a country that hardly takes care of the vets afterward. The cartoon points that out. Starkly. The cartoon would be tasteless if Toles thought that was funny. He’s outraged. What’s tasteless is worrying about a cartoon rather than sharing the outrage. This is such an obvious example of free speech being used to air criticism that I’m not sure why the Joint Chiefs, who are presumably in the business of defending those freedoms with their lives, need to have this explained to them. If they don’t like the cartoon, they have it in their hands to make it irrelevant.

Moving right along to the other burning question: t-shirts. In the days when clothes were clothes, you had to carry a placard to make a point. Now, through the miracles of modern technology, we can print slogans on t-shirts and bill caps, which enables Cindy Sheehan and a congressman’s wife to appear at the State of the Union speech wearing t-shirts that support the troops, each in her own way. How far do you take the outlawing of meaningful clothing? If words or numbers are forbidden, how about pictures? One could wear a shirt printed with Picasso’s Guernica painting. Is it art or is it a Statement, and who gets to decide? If a near-Muslim aversion to any representational imagery is enforced, will pink triangles become illegal because they make a statement about gays? How about just the color pink, if triangles are deemed too obvious?

You see where I’m going with this. It wouldn’t take much to end in rules that require everyone to wear identical clothing in sober shades of gray. This is ridiculous. I can understand that on decorous occasions one doesn’t want the visual landscape cluttered with people’s personal billboards. And I can also understand that potentially offensive sexual or religious messages are deprecated, because there is no way to avert your eyes when someone is in your face with their clothing. But editing political statements on people’s clothing during a political occasion is absurd. It’s nothing but shouting down the opposition, and that is suppression of free speech.

What about those other wellsprings of offensiveness, porn and spam? Let’s take them in order. The idea behind free speech is that some of it is essential to a free society, and the rest of it is nobody’s business but your own. If porn had no effects beyond the consumer of it, there would be nothing to regulate. However, porn does have demonstrable effects on people’s minds. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be so worried about children seeing it. It is an infection of the imagination that may or may not cause harmful consequences to others. Whatever else it is, it is definitely not a social good. It’s as gray an area as you could ever hope to find.

That leads to Radical Conclusion #2. Porn as a voluntary, private matter shouldn’t be regulated. It should be invisible to those of us who don’t want to see it, but to those who do, it’s their business. Achieving that would mean separate Internet domains, changes to magazine cover art, and so on through more sad examples than I have space for.

There is, however, another aspect to porn, the aspect of infecting imagination and the addictiveness of it for some people. Most people’s imaginations don’t reach all that far, but broadcasting the slickest, extremest fantasies of a few gives everyone access to the drug in its stronger forms. I think it is a real mistake to allow that. People should be limited to their own imaginations, and the way to do that would be Radical Conclusion #2a: allow non-commercial porn, but not any other kind. Actors, producers, distributors, in short, everyone involved would have to be working for free, purely because they liked what they were doing so much. Nor could they sell advertising or make ads.

[Update 2013-03-31. The amount I know about porn could, obviously, fit on a postage stamp. It has since come to my attention, e.g. 1, 2, that some of the most damaging porn is non-commercial. (A search for “rapes posted online” gave well over ten million results when I tried it today.) So forget the non-commercial distinction. The only real distinction is between harmful versus harmless. And porn has disappeared so far down the sewer that it’s not even called porn if nobody is degraded, humiliated, or damaged.]

(I’m purposely avoiding the whole question of art versus pornography. They’re easy to distinguish at the extremes, impossible in the middle. Where to draw the dividing line is a matter of taste, and doesn’t really affect the main argument that volunteer pornography harmless erotica shouldn’t be regulated, except to enable people to avoid it. So much art is produced for a pittance that it would probably fall under that umbrella in any case.)

Hate speech is another form of offensiveness with a big gray area where it shades into political or religious speech. There is one simple distinction that can be made, following the same principle that makes it illegal to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Speech that advocates harm to others is increasingly being considered illegal hate speech in many countries. This is not a radical conclusion. What is radical is the idea that we should apply that measure to entertainment as well. Advocating harm against a person because of their membership in a group is not entertainment. It’s illegal hate speech. For instance, it is not okay to put women through meat grinders any more than it is to lynch blacks, whether it’s for politics, or for religion, or, God help us, for “entertainment.”

Finally, we get back to an easy one: spam. The justification behind spam is something called “commercial free speech.” In plain English, that says that if I have something to sell, I can say as much as I want about it. The idea behind political free speech has been applied to something totally different. It’s as if someone said, “Salt is essential to life. Therefore I’ll pickle you in salt.”

The idea behind free speech–one more time–is the free flow of ideas. Not the free flow of dollars. There is no such thing as commercial free speech. Speech that is not about ideas, but is about making a buck, does not need protection for the good of a free society, and, in fact, cannot have protection for the good of a free society. That’s why we have truth in advertising laws. Radical conclusion #3: We need to get our heads around the fact that telemarketers, spammers, junk mailers, and the whole boiling of pestiferous blots on the body politic are not exercising free speech. They’re trying to sell us stuff. One citizen is not normally allowed to harass another. That comes under the definition of causing harm. So when will some brave politician finally point out that all this garbage is nothing less than harassment and it has to stop?

Interestingly enough, the other side of “commercial” free speech doesn’t get much respect. Individuals who complain about their experiences with a company are being sued for slander or annoyance or who-knows-what-all. The principle in operation seems to be that if you’re a company it’s free speech, not harassment, but if you’re just a wee little individual spending your own time and money, then it’s the other way around. Before this complete travesty gets any further out of hand, individuals’ rights to discuss their experiences on an unpaid, uncompensated basis must be totally protected.

So . . . where are we now? The short form is this: Speech that’s a drug or an amusement or is trying to make a buck is fine so long as it’s not in anyone’s face. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. But speech about ideas, any ideas, that does not advocate hate crimes, should and must be free. Without that, there can be no free society.

Update, March 1, 2006:

Turns out, I’m fiddling at the feet of giants. They’ve weighed in on the cartoon controversy much better than I can. From the BBC report on Writers issue cartoon row warning.
Signed by:
Salman Rushdie – Indian-born British writer with fatwa issued ordering his execution for The Satanic Verses
Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Somali-born Dutch MP [see next post, and link also in link list]
Taslima Nasreen – exiled Bangladeshi writer, with fatwa issued ordering her execution
Bernard-Henri Levy – French philosopher
Chahla Chafiq – Iranian writer exiled in France
Caroline Fourest – French writer
Irshad Manji – Ugandan refugee and writer living in Canada [link]
Mehdi Mozaffari – Iranian academic exiled in Denmark
Maryam Namazie – Iranian writer living in Britain
Antoine Sfeir – director of French review examining Middle East
Ibn Warraq – US academic of Indian/Pakistani origin
Philippe Val – director of Charlie Hebdo

“We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.”

“It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.”

“Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present,” the writers added, saying it is nurtured by fears and frustrations.

Not just Islamism, I would add. All totalitarian fundamentalisms–Christian, Hindu, all of them–bring ignorance, war, and death in the name of some god made in their own image and likeness.

Technorati tags: free speech, cartoons, Danish cartoons, cartoons of Mohammed, hate speech, protests, regulation

The current torture scandal in Britain is about how they were willing to use information extracted in Uzbek prisons. Britain, too, has legal beagles to pretend it’s all okay. In their case, it’s supposed to be okay so long as it’s not used in evidence. /Holds head with both hands to prevent explosion./

The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, protested against this practice until his government decided to remove him from office. He has a book ready for publication on the subject of Britain’s role in using torture. It has to be vetted by the UK Foreign Office. Instead of doing that, or pointing out any bits they object to that compromise national security, they have told the former Ambassador that he may not publish at all, and that all copies are to be destroyed.

Right. Britain, the first nation to have anything like the Magna Carta, the first to have habeas corpus, has decided free speech is inconvenient. So copies of Murray’s unpublished work are multiplying all over the world, to make sure it can’t be suppressed. Please download it to your site and include it in your blog, if you have one.
http://users.pandora.be/quarsan/craig/telegrams.pdf
http://users.pandora.be/quarsan/craig/npaper.jpg
Please let me know in comments or by email if the links no longer work, and I’ll post copies from another server.

Folks, I got up on this soapbox because I couldn’t just sit there when the Abu Ghraib disgrace came out. I had to do something, even if it’s kinda useless in the real world. Unfortunately, I have a very vivid imagination, and I can’t deal with the news about torture. I literally wake up at three in the morning, listening to screams I can’t hear. So I haven’t read any of this. I’m afraid of clicking on the links. But the word just has to get out there.

More information here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3750370.stm
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/04/timeline_of_cra.html

Links from: King of Zembla, a href=”http://haloscan.com/tb/simbaud/113593767086382173″ Boiling the Messenger [2014-05-14: link now inactive]
Trackback: http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/trackback/716

Technorati tags: human rights, crimes against humanity, Craig Murray, torture, Uzbekistan

Ownership vs. creativity. We’re going to have to decide why we protect intellectual property. Is it to own ideas? Or is it to reward creativity? Copyright and patent law are supposed to do both, but new technologies make them do neither. Worse yet, technology is making creativity incompatible with the ownership model.

As a creative type, I’m supposed to be all for ownership, and yet I find the concept of owning ideas ridiculous. All ideas stand on a stage built of other ideas, even when they’re as great a breakthrough as Einstein’s famous equation. Yet the partial interest of the “minority shareholders” is not recognized. How can a property right be justified that is based on stealing other people’s property rights? On the other hand, if having a hand in creating something does not confer rights, then the main creator doesn’t have any either.

The absurdity of treating ideas as property is evident in other ways. There is no relation between the usefulness of an idea and its level of protection. The equivalence of mass and energy was never patented, but one-click shopping was not only patented, it was litigated. This is not a simple matter of one being a discovery and the other an invention. Genetic engineering is based on decoding DNA. Not inventing it. Decoding it. The discoveries of the genetic engineers have been patented for no other reason than the widespread ignorance about what workers in white coats actually do. People were at least as ignorant about what Einstein was doing, but he didn’t think to hire a team of lawyers because of it.

Further, if an idea can be owned, what does that mean? If a piece of music is sold, some part of the rights used to be sold under what was called the “fair use” doctrine. The buyer had control over it similar to their other property. But recently a “no use” doctrine seems to be gaining currency. You may buy it, but every time you want to use it, you should pay again. Ownership becomes meaningless.

There is neither rhyme nor reason regarding which ideas become property, which don’t, what they cost, or who pays for them. The operating principle seems to be, “You pay for it because I grabbed it first.” This may be expedient, but it is not valid. Capitalism is not actually supposed to be a criminal enterprise based on might making right.

Creations are, in essence, ideas trapped in three dimensions. They’re really more like thoughts than things, and they share the traits of other intangibles, such as hope, love, truth, beauty, or justice. These simply are not property, they can’t be owned, and any attempt to buy them changes them into something worse than worthless. Information doesn’t just want to be free. It has to be.

Beans can be counted. Ideas can’t. The ownership model suffers from the delusion that in a perfect world there would be a one-to-one correspondence between payment and product. But when the product is an idea, you might as well try to count moonbeams. Creations travel with the speed of thought, literally so in an electronic age. Slowing them down enough to corral them and limit their spread reduces the number of people who can benefit from them. This is not in the interests of consumers, who lose out, nor is it in the interests of creators, if they’re paid based on how many people use their product. The only reason it seems like a good idea is that we don’t know any other way to do it. That is a failure of imagination, not a proof of effectiveness.

The actual point behind payment for intellectual property is that the most useful “properties” should yield the greatest return. Our current system is very far from giving the biggest rewards to the people who create the value. The artist or inventor is generally the last one in the food chain that depends on their work, and as often as not they miss out on the distribution entirely. If our current system can miss its point so badly, and yet be seen as having merit, then any distribution of royalties that does a better job of accruing to the creator, even if it is imprecise, would be an improvement. As a matter of fact, it is *easier* to reward creativity if the ownership model is abandoned in favor of limited creator’s rights.

What we need is a method of figuring out how widely used a product is. That is a *census* issue, not a sales issue. Methods of estimating flows have grown very sophisticated. Wildlife biologists have techniques to estimate migrating populations of animals. Traffic engineers do the same with cars. Telephone companies have ways of estimating the flow of calls.

Similarly, software usage, movies, music, games, and anything that moves over the net could be censused as it goes by. Product headers (such as the “created with the Gimp” embedded in graphics files made with that program) are another source of usage data. Automated spot check queries could go out to computers, phones, or wifi players asking users if they would mind a poll of the software in use on their machine. There could be self-reports, like the Nielsen ratings for tv, to estimate usage of other popular items.

A program that is used daily, a song that is shared all over the world, all kinds of increased usage then help rather than harm the creator. Users don’t have to pay each time their eyes rest on a screensaver, but the most popular screensavers provide more money anyway. People whose function is packaging rather than creating, movie producers, publishers, agents, and the like, could contribute to a finished product the same way they do now, although their strategic significance in the process would probably change.

Payment. How would the user pay if usage and payment are separated? The answer seems obvious to me: by including a royalty fee in the sale of anything involved in using or enjoying the fruits of someone’s creativity. Memory, computers, displays, phones, routers, the list is quite long, and some percentage tacked on to each one could provide the funds that are then divvied up based on the census. This has seemed like the logical solution to me for years, and I heard somewhere that the Dutch are actually trying it. However, they missed on one important point. Artists who want to participate have to sign up and pay a fee. Needless to say, the type of starving artists who need the system most are not in it.

A census method would solve almost all of the problems that plague the current system. Ever since the printing press made it easier to share ideas, sharing has been known to generate incalculable social value. If information were set free, we could concentrate on creating that value instead of bogging down in futile attempts to count usage by hijacking computers. Creators could concentrate on creating instead of wresting royalties out of megacorporations. It’s true that people would not get paid for every single copy of their work, but they don’t now, either. Under a census system, most people would get paid a lot more than they do now. As a matter of fact, the only ones who would lose big are the megacorporations themselves. And that, of course, is such a minor objection that we should see an open and rational system in place any day now.

Update, March 5, 2006

Dream we dream together is reality. (Yoko Ono)

From the BBC report on French filesharing legalization:

MPs introduced an amendment which would authorise internet file-sharing by setting up a “global licence” system.

Users would pay a few euros a month to download as much music or film material as they wanted, with proceeds going to the artists.

Socialist MP Patrick Bloche helped draft the amendment.

He argues it makes no sense to treat several million French internet users as potential offenders.

“Rather than outlawing, punishing, and paradoxically maintaining to a certain extent an illegal system,” he says, “let’s make a different choice: authorising peer-to-peer downloading, but in return, putting in place a system allowing artists to be paid.”

Technorati tags: copyright, copyleft, creative commons

The DNA evidence has come in, and the answer is clear. Women are human beings. Who knew? Consider all the evidence to the contrary.

Skip lightly over the centuries when women were explicitly defined as property. Skip likewise over Samuel Johnson’s famous commen when he said, “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” He is said to have been intelligent, witty, devoted to his wife, and kindhearted. It was the 1700s, and DNA hadn’t been discovered yet.

We know better now, right? No, not exactly. Catholicism, Islam (except Sufism, I believe), Judaism, some Protestant sects, the Mormons, many organized religions in fact, tell us that women cannot commune with God well enough to minister to others. Given that the argument can be made, and has been made, that religious awe is what divides us from animals, exclusion from the priesthood says something about the attitudes involved. Especially so when you consider that it can be the same people making the argument and doing the excluding.

It would make sense if women, at least, avoided religions that relegate them to irrelevance, but that’s not what happens. It is, perhaps, the strongest proof that (some) of reality is a social construct. Women don’t mean much even to women.

Consider some examples. There are plenty to choose from. After Pope John Paul II’s death, someone who’d had enough of the eulogies pointed out that his policies had led to millions of excess deaths. Well, I thought, if you add up all the unwanted children who’d died as the pope implemented his policies, and the women dying in unwanted childbirths and botched abortions (e.g. for one year: WHO, world health report 2005), as well as AIDS deaths due to unprotected sex (UNAIDS,2004), it would easily reach into millions. But it turned out the speaker had been thinking only of AIDS. The others were invisible.

Another example is a discussion I had regarding Iraq. I pointed out how braindead it was for the US to let violence and fundamentalism disenfranchise women. The US was wasting a huge bloc of moderate, non-violent voices of the kind they kept saying they wanted. I was told that the issues in Iraq were much bigger than “women’s rights.” I was speechless. The right to freedom of movement, to free assembly, to vote–these are women’s rights? I had thought they were human rights. Furthermore, if women are human, we’re talking about half the population. Of course, if they’re not, then it makes sense that their rights are secondary.

Now, on a personal level, this seems crazy. People, men and women both, care about the women in their lives, and there aren’t many who would insist that their own wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters are some kind of different order of being. It’s hard (but not impossible) to live with someone and not realize that you both have hopes, fears, dreams, and hardships. Thinking of women as belonging to some other species is not something that anyone does. It’s something “other people” do.

Take one example. Ask any father whether he loves his children, and he will say yes. However, look at the marriage statistics of brides who were pregnant at the time and who knew the sex of the child-to-be. The couple was more likely to be getting married if they were expecting a boy (Dahl and Moretti, 2004). Few people see this in their own lives, but, in the aggregate, it happens. Most people’s contribution to the rush of events is so small, it can’t be seen, like a molecule of air. But put all the contributions together, and, like air, they can make people live or die.

The peculiar attitude to women, in the aggregate, can be seen in every aspect of life, but people are tired of being reminded about the world’s social backwaters. However, troglodyte fundamentalists aren’t the only problem. For instance, the left side of the blogosphere had a discussion recently about female bloggers and the relative lack thereof at the top of the blogging tree. Why, we pondered, were there so few female bloggers with huge readerships who were linked to by other important bloggers?

There were many explanations. Women are less techie, so there’s a smaller pool to draw from. Women’s writing of the same quality gets linked to just as much, and the lack of links indicates lack of quality. Women write perfectly well, but the topics they write about have less general interest. And so on. All of these explanations may have some merit, and yet the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the room was missed.

There are a number of classical experiments in psychology where researchers looked at attitudes to writing based on whether the author had a male or female name. Regardless who the actual author was, papers apparently by males were significantly more highly rated. Yet this obvious explanation was not brought out by the heavy hitters, nor was it noticed when I contributed it.

The big problem, in other words, is not with the women doing the blogging. The problem lies with the audience and with the many small, unnoticed moments of inattention that end up making a huge pattern. To take an analogous, far more extreme situation, the level of analysis in blogspace would have been like that of an Abolitionist who said that slavery was bad . . . and then asked what was wrong with blacks that they were trapped in it.

Sex, like religion, is central to who we are, and the same pattern is repeated. Women are irrelevant. No, really. Think about it. Even the definitions give the game away. Sexually repressed women have to dress in tents. Free women can wear lipstick and thong underwear. And this is supposed to do exactly what for women? (I’m talking about heterosexuals, of course. Homosexuals don’t have to contend with the X-challenged world in quite the same way.) Being “allowed” to be attractive to men is not the same as having men who are willing to think about what a woman might want. Defining a situation in a way that works for you is freedom. Living inside someone else’s reality is not.

I’m sure I’ve hit a sore point by bringing up what women want. Men’s regular complaint is that they can’t figure this out. Well, how about the same things men want? Such as pleasure, perhaps? Such as someone who’s both willing and wants to please, like the nice young women in all the ads? The specific way a man acts who wants to please would be different, because he’d look stupid batting his eyelashes. And what he does would also depend on the specific woman in question, since women don’t actually come out of a mold down at the female factory. However, the principle, surprisingly enough, is the same.

The irrelevance of women is particularly evident in mainstream ads, big movies, and other dominant myths. The images of women of reproductive age all tend toward the slightly exaggerated breasts-forward, tush-back, pleased-smile look. It’s something that anthropologists call “presenting” when they observe the equivalent in a troop of, say, rhesus macaques. It says, “I want sex,” and it is the female equivalent of an erection. To spell it out, in case it’s not clear, that message is aimed at males. Not females. Is there any equivalent message of obvious and willing male sexuality for women? Have you ever seen even a hint of an erection shown in any medium intended for general audiences? Ever? It’s as if only men have sex. Women have children.

The usual objection to exposing general audiences to actual male sexuality is that it would be bad for the children. However, given that children survive exposure to blatant female sexuality, that doesn’t seem like the real problem. Men, on the other hand, would be in the novel position of seeing themselves as sex objects for women, something which seems to make them squeamish. (That may sound implausible, but there is a difference between wanting sex and doing what someone else wants.) Having said that, personally I don’t think I’d like seeing men on display the same way women are. Sex seems to work better in private, where it’s more interesting (and more feasible), and I’d rather not have either side of it relentlessly in my face. But what do I know? I’ve never been surrounded by images of men with tastefully concealed erections lining up to please me, 24/7, selling everything from broadband to soap to themselves.

So far, I’ve been discussing religion and rights and sex. These are all optional, on some level. Survival isn’t, and the weirdness in attitudes is at its most stark in the reaction to crimes against women.

We had an election for governor not long ago in California. During the campaign, news came out that Schwarzenegger had perhaps praised Hitler, and people even grew concerned about his father’s activities during the World War. There was a great deal of back-and-forth, lots of digging for facts, and it came out that, no, he did not admire Hitler, and that his father had not committed atrocities during WWII. His campaign came back on track.

Shortly before the election, he was accused, by the woman involved, of groping her on a movie set. There was a certain amount of disbelief, but then six other stories surfaced of similar behavior (e.g. LATimes, Oct. 7, 2003) with other women, spanning 25 years right into very recent times. It began to look like he might have had a habit of forcing his attentions on women, to use an old phrase. However, it was not essential to his campaign to show his innocence before the election. He lost a few points in the polls, but only enough to feel called upon to apologize for “playing.” And people voted for him. Women voted for him. The point here is not what he did or did not do. The point is the difference in people’s reactions to accusations of antisemitism versus accusations of anti-women behavior. The point is that people didn’t care enough. Somehow, although nobody agrees with the statement when face-to-face, crimes against women just aren’t that important.

Then there are the attitudes to a far more serious crime: female genital mutilation. The attitudes in Africa vary in ways that are painful to discuss, but what about attitudes here in the progressive West? There are a number of confounding issues: it’s happening “over there,” and it’s happening in a very different culture. Except when it isn’t. At least in the US, I haven’t noticed that it’s much of a priority to prevent this heinous child abuse by the relevant ethnic groups living in this country. (For some statistics on the practice, see, e.g., Dr. N. Nour, African Women’s Health Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, “Number of women, girls with or at risk for female genital cutting on the rise in the United States”)  The British make slightly more effort (see, e.g., this BBC report).

The objection is that, well, it’s highly regrettable, but it is their culture and who are we to interfere? The practice has also been intertwined with religion, so for a while it was excused on religious grounds, until people more familiar with Islam pointed out forcefully that the Koran sanctions no such thing. Either way, there is no other group for whom culture or religion is allowed to trump the most basic human rights. Imagine the reaction to a headline that said: “Penises cut off to keep men faithful.” (Subtitle: “Strangely effective!”) You might as well excuse cannibalism on cultural grounds. That’s only possible if the people involved really are “long pig,” as that particular meat was called by Fijians in the very old days.

Consider the archetypal crime against women: rape. We’re all agreed it’s a very bad thing. We’re all agreed it’s a hate crime. Consider the New Yorker, a magazine with impeccable liberal credentials. They published a book of humor a few years ago, and since like many people the first thing I look at in the magazine are the cartoons, I was sure it was going to be good. I trotted right down to the bookstore. There, at the beginning of the book, was a funny story about rape. To say that I was stunned would be putting it mildly. I returned the book to the shelf and didn’t read any of the rest, so I don’t know if there were jokes further in about lynching, or gas chambers, or murders of gay men. Somehow, I doubt it.

Rape is not a joke. Rape is not a regrettable form of sex any more than foot-binding is a regrettable form of shoes. Rape is a type of torture that uses sex. Like other torture, it is primarily meant to break the spirit, not the body. Its intention is to turn the victim into a tool of the torturer. Obviously, torturers aren’t likely to be the introspective type and articulate all this. But the actions can be judged by the results, whether it produces women who stay in their place or compliant prisoners.

The BBC did a report a few years ago on a brave woman living in one of the predominantly Muslim housing projects outside Paris. She didn’t wear a veil, as per the local thugs concept of propriety, so they gang-raped her. Instead of being intimidated, she spoke out against the reign of terror directed at women. So they gang-raped her again. As the reporter said, “Who in such a system would dare to speak, or even know, her own mind?”

Well, yes, you might say, that’s all very dreadful. But it doesn’t touch me. It has nothing to do with my life. Maybe not, but I see women who think crimes against women are isolated incidents, even as I watch them rearrange their whole schedule to avoid the late-night train. I see men who want everyone to understand that it’s-not-their-fault-they-found-it-that-way, and who are tied in knots about how to approach a woman so she doesn’t misunderstand their intentions.

The threat of physical danger focuses anyone’s mind, male or female. When faced with an unknown man, women go through some millisecond decision-making about the need for fight or flight or whether they can go off red alert. After all that, if he’s trying to be friendly, comes the question of whether he was worth all the bother. The sexual landscape women have to live in is so different from the one inhabited by men that obvious male sexuality is often considered repellent rather than attractive. That makes as much sense as men being put off by sexy women. Imagine how much damage it would take to achieve that effect, and you start to have an idea how much crimes against women complicate everyone’s life, male and female.

The various points raised in this essay are not new. We’ve known about all this forever, or, at least, it feels like forever. Many people, certainly among those reading this, would agree that the human rights of women haven’t been any too good in the past, and that very serious issues still exist in benighted sectors. But the feeling is that the problem has been identified, we dealt with all that years ago, and this is the post-feminist era. The “Mission Accomplished” banner is up and it’s time to move on.

The only problem is that we haven’t actually moved on. Besides the vast swamps of pure-bred ignorance, even progressives don’t always seem to know which species women belong to. It’s not time to move on. It’s time to get back to work.

I know that’s an unwelcome message. Adjusting gender attitudes is the open heart surgery of the soul, and there’s no anesthetic. However, the thing about surgery is that it’s a lot better than the alternative. I’m not suggesting that some sort of new millenium would break out afterwards, but simply that we’d be free of a whole set of aches and pains. Nor am I saying that it’s up to men to do all the work, since there’s plenty of attitude adjusting for women to do too. Actually, it would be surprising if that weren’t the case. We are, after all, only human.

Technorati tags: human rights, gender equality, sexism, hate crimes, discrimination, women priests, genital mutilation, crimes against women