For Sayed Pervez Kambaksh. Again.

Terry Glavin brings our attention to the continuing case of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, whom I wrote about more than a year ago after he was sentenced to death in Afghanistan for alleged blasphemy.

The sentence was subsequently reduced to a (still ridiculous) 20-year term of imprisonment, and this has recently been upheld by the Supreme Court.

As reported by Human Rights Watch, the circumstances of the court's decision are, to say the least, ridiculous:

The court upheld the sentence on February 11, 2009, without informing Kambakhsh or his lawyer, or allowing the lawyer to submit arguments in Kambakhsh's defense. On March 7, the lawyer, Azfal Nooristani, discovered that the decision had been made.

The case is far from an isolated one:

Human Rights Watch said that the Kambakhsh case is emblematic of a general diminution of freedom of expression in Afghanistan. In February, the Payman Daily newspaper was forced to close after it was accused of apostasy by the Ulema Council (a council of clerics). The paper had published an article downloaded from the internet about the apocalyptic prophesies of a Bulgarian mystic and self-proclaimed clairvoyant known as Baba Vanga, who raised questions about the afterlife. Staff members received death threats and the news editor, Nazari Paryani, spent 10 days in detention. Charges appear to be pending against him.

Another journalist, Ghows Zalmai, is facing a 20-year jail sentence for blasphemy after publishing a translation of the Quran in Dari, one of the languages of Afghanistan. The Supreme Court is currently reviewing his case.

"The Karzai government is allowing blasphemy cases against the press to go forward to keep the support of religious conservatives," said Adams. "Afghans were silenced by the Taliban, and do not want to be silenced again. The government must recommit itself defend freedom of expression."

Yes. They must.

Sunday reading (humorous)

Two related articles of note and interest:

1) The Express claims to have rock-solid evidence that one Jesus of Nazareth once came over to England for a visit, where apparently he had a particularly good time in Stonehenge - where the druids, or demons, or whatever, dwell.

As Glyn Lewis, author of the promising page turner Did Christ Come to Britain?, puts it in an awe-inspiring instance of, ahem, "historical" reasoning, Christmas carols like "I Saw Three Ships," which mention Christ sailing into the country, are “un-likely to be fanciful” because they “survived in the canon of carols.”

Full marks Mr Lewis, full marks for this lovely piece of religious ratiocination!

2) The Spiegel has a bit of a laugh about Erich von Däniken's equally rock- (or pyramid-/petroglyph-) solid evidence that our good old Earth witnessed several visits by aliens from outer space, who left us their various pieces of obscure artwork to ponder over for all eternity.

See what I mean?

Let reason prevail, today and any other day.

Pearls (of reason) before swine

If you are looking for a good example of the futility of using evidence-based reasoning, logic and scepticism in order to change the minds of those who cling to super-naturalist irrationality, look no further than Bing's encounter with a group of devotees of a 'psychic' named Allison Dubois (who seems to have recently appeared on Oprah).

The discussion begins here and then continues here.

Don't get me wrong, by my reckoning, our Man of Reason kicked some serious argumentative ass.

Nonetheless, nearly all the people he was dealing with appear to be absolutely impervious to making any sense whatsoever.

Along with ample wit, he has a lot more patience than I do.

Sunday, silly Sunday

The Mail is up in arms over things said by Academy Award winning actress Marion Cotillard about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Apparently, she does not believe that the event took place the way (and for the reasons) most sane people believe it to have happened. Instead, in what seems to be a fit of anti-American pique, she has suggested that the destruction of the twin towers was a real estate scam:

"It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them."

Even in the world of 9/11 conspiracies, this is a doozy and we thank for Mlle Cotillard for doing her part in popularising the phrase "money-sucker." The sheer dim-wittedness of the statement makes it all the more puzzling that the (probably Oxbridge-educated) copy-editor allowed the following moralistic comment to slip under his or her radar:

But after her outburst, in which she also queried the 1969 Moon landings, a successful future in Hollywood appears to be in jeopardy.

In jeopardy? Hello? Hasn't it gotten through to the staff at the Mail that Hollywood will love that kind of stuff? After all, the US (and Hollywood in particular) is teeming with all species of conspiracy theorists -- not to mention believers in Xenu the Intergalactic Overlord.

My guess is her agent told her to say these things to further her Hollywood career! And Tomkat have already invited her to the Hubbardian blow-out when Tom achieves OT-VIII.

Being...aware.

Damian Thompson, at Counterknowledge, draws our attention to a lecture scheduled today at UCL as part of 'Islamic Awareness Week' at the university.

The talk, entitled “the Collapse of the Evolutionary Theory”, was originally booked for the Darwin Lecture Theatre but, after protests from scientists appalled at the insult to Charles Darwin’s memory, has now been moved – to another UCL lecture theatre.

Quite apart from what kind of 'awareness' this is supposed to promote (other than that of how pathetic religion can be), it is a shame that the university is now providing a platform for the scheduled speakers.

As Thompson observes:

The publicity material says: “Dr Oktar Babuna and Ali Sadun Engin are from the Science Research Foundation, which produces the Harun Yahya series of books and DVDs. They will provide an insightful view into the reality of evolution and the shaky grounds upon which several of the theories are based.”

Insightful? Let me tell you a bit about Harun Yahya. It’s the pen name of a series of writers flooding the Islamic world with books and DVDs that present Darwinism as part of a diabolical conspiracy. This is a particularly poisonous form of counterknowledge.

I have in front of me a book by Harun Yahya called The Dark Clan, which explains that evolutionary science is inspired by “a dark clan behind all kids of corruption and perversion, that controls drug trafficking, prostitution rings”. Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.

Yahya's silly-but-slickly-produced Atlas of Creation found its way to The Wife's university department last year, so I got to have a look at the book sent round the world. (Though it was apparently not sent to everyone.)

I'm happy that UCL moved the lecture out of the Darwin Lecture Theatre. It would have been a travesty.

(As previously noted, the same building contains an excellent -- if tiny -- zoology museum. They deserve your support.)

The limitless abyss of the irrational mind

From a New York Times article on Susan Jacoby's interesting-sounding new book, The Age of American Unreason:

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map. (Emphasis added.)

An anecdote from Jacoby's story explaining how she came to write the book is even more distressing.

It occurred on September 11th, 2001:

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

I'm aware that the fact such episodes cause me almost physical forms of discomfort may be a sign of a certain pedantic streak in my character; however, the extent to which people seem to hold such confused notions about basic geography and chronology leaves me no choice.

And I believe Jacoby's anecdote is largely true: a college-educated friend asked me a few years ago whether Germany had democracy or not. I was tempted to tell him about the hereditary monarch that rules over us and the onerous feudal dues that we owe to the local liege lord, but I resisted. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that he would have believed me had I done so.

In a different context today, Dale says some very worthwhile things about scientific illiteracy and what approaches may (and may not) be useful in addressing it.

He notes correctly:

There is nothing in the furniture of the universe that makes it inevitable that mankind will, on balance, choose reality (messy, difficult, counterintuitive) over delusion (comforting, easy, clean).

And a very fine example of that can be found in an article by Steven Novella at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry on the myths of the modern anti-vaccination movement. (Via A&L Daily and The Wife)

It is a depressing read in so far as it demonstrates how ineffective reason, evidence and the scientific method can be when faced with the contortions of conspiracy-minded rationalisation:

The forces of irrationality are arrayed on this issue. There are conspiracy theorists, well-meaning but misguided citizen groups who are becoming increasingly desperate and hostile, irresponsible journalists, and ethically compromised or incompetent scientists. The science itself is complex, making it difficult for the average person to sift through all the misdirection and misinformation. Standing against all this is simple respect for scientific integrity and the dedication to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Right now the evidence leads to the firm conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. Yet, if history is any guide, the myth that they do cause autism will likely endure even in the face of increasing contradictory evidence.

As the article demonstrates clearly (if depressingly) there is no amount of evidence from the real world that can move a truly committed believer.

Argue amongst yourself

I haven't yet commented on the Archbishop of Canterbury's truly interesting suggestion to allow the introduction of sharia into certain areas of British law. This is partly because I've been busy doing other things and partly because other people have been doing such a good job in pointing out what a absolutely Bad Idea this is.

And now, I have just found another very fine argument against his suggestion:

The problem here is that recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens; and while a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions, it can hardly admit or 'license' protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid.

Yes and yes.

It is, of course, curious that this very good argument against introducing sharia derives from a rare moment of clarity in the otherwise very muddy treatise written by the good Arch B himself.

The point made there is quite fundamental, and little of the tortured, jargonistic prose that Williams musters in working his way round it is remotely convincing.

Ophelia has waded in and dragged a few of the more important fragments from the swampy muck, including the one above. Working through the original is a tough slog, one that I must admit I've not yet completed and am not sure I will.

But I wonder: when did establishment Christianity start sounding so much like post-modern waffle? Or has it always been that way and I've just not noticed?

For Sayed Pervez Kambaksh

As some of you might have read, journalism student Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has been sentenced to death by an Islamic court for...well, apparently doing what you might think a journalism student would do. As the Independent reports:

He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

This is, obviously, outrageous, but, also obvious, not at all unusual for 'Islamic courts'.

Unfortunately, as the BBC (via B&W) has reported, the sentence has been backed by Afghanistan's upper house (though apparently without being voted upon).

The Independent (also the source of the above photo) has started a campaign to put pressure on the Afghan government to free Mr. Kambaksh.

There is a petition. It's a small gesture, but we urge you to sign it.

[UPDATE]: Not too long ago, Dale made some very fine observations about this case:

Civilized people cannot accept this. The giving and receiving of offense is not and cannot be allowed to be a life-or-death matter. If it is "Islamophobic," "blasphemous," or merely "disrespectful" to affix the name "Mohammed" to all of my rolls of toilet paper, then so be it. I agree it is. It's a scurrilous, provocative, immature, and probably counterproductive thing to say. But it's nothing but words.

Respect gravitates to ideas and actions that deserve it, whether or not the respect is requested. Requiring respect is roughly as meaningful as requiring happiness or requiring love -- it doesn't work and it's a good thing it doesn't.

Killing people for impiety is indefensible barbarism, and is far more hurtful and dangerous than any series of words or any cluster of thoughts.

Indeed. Someone remind the Archbishop of Canterbury. Of course, he's busy campaigning to do important things like suppress 'thoughtless or cruel words'. Meanwhile, his colleague in Rome is doing the vital work of warning against the seductions of science.

Religion: building a better morality every day, in every way.

Giving credit where it's due

It turns out that, in the face of heavy competition (among others: the Pope, the Westboro ("God Hates Fags") Baptist Church and Chuck Norris), Dinesh D'Souza has won the New Humanist award for being the 'most scurrilous enemy of reason'.

And well deserved it is, if only for his totallyfuckingmoronic claim that the 'cultural left' was 'responsible' for September 11th.

Having seen D'Souza perform live in about 1990, I can confirm that this is certainly worthy as a lifetime achievement award. The man is, truly, an ass.

In this vein, I already have a nominee for this year: Jonah Goldberg, who makes the roughly equally retarded (though historically more long-term) claim that fascism is fundamentally a liberal ideology.

(Quite excellent responses to Goldberg's swill have already been provided by Dave Neiwert, John Holbo and John Scalzi).

In the meantime, though, congratulations Mr. D.

Stranger than fiction. No, really.

Via the New York Times, I learn that actor Wesley Snipes will be tried for non-payment of taxes. Snipes, it seems, counts himself among that interesting coterie of people who have elevated their personal dislike of taxes (which is not all that hard to fathom) into an elaborate self-righteous ideology.

Nothing too strange there, just another day in Ron Paul's America.

However, this story leads down paths that are far, far weirder.

Snipes, according to the Times, has had an 'association' with a group called the 'Nuwaubians', which it describes as 'a quasi-religious sect of black Americans who promote antigovernment theories and who set up a headquarters in Georgia in the early 1990s.' (The 'association' allegedly extends to Mr. Snipes having sought a permit to build 'a federal permit for a military training compound on land next to the Nuwaubian camp' in 2000.)

That rather bland summary was interesting enough to make me want to know a little more about this curious-sounding corner of American madness.

I wasn't disappointed: a quick check at Wikipedia brought up a description of the Nuwaubians that is so dense with esoteric weirdness that I thought I might present it complete and with all of its very helpful references intact:

Nuwaubianism borrows from a wide range of sources which include Theosophy-derived New Age movements such as Astara as well as the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, the Shriners, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the revisionist Christianity and Islam of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the numerology of Rashad Khalifa, the ancient astronaut theories of Zecharia Sitchin, the works of Richard Shaver (a proponent of the Hollow Earth theory), David Icke, the UFO mythology of greys and reptilians, the political and legal theories of patriot mythology, modern scientific and pseudoscientific legends like those of Area 51, the Philadelphia Experiment, Project Blue Book, Montauk Project, and MJ-12, popular conspiracy theories such as those about the Illuminati or the Bilderberg Group, and even a paperback on fortune-telling.

A 'wide-range of sources' indeed.

Along with some intriguing racial theories (Caucasians, in one myth, were 'originally created as a race of killers to serve blacks as a slave army'), the movement believes that Saturn is not a planet and that the Earth is hollow.

And...Yoda is apparently part of their cosmology.

According to the Wikipedia entry, the founder of this charming movement is apparently Dwight York, though his most common alias appears to be 'Dr. Malachai Z. York'. He has, however, also been known by dozens of other names. Many of them are very creative, such as 'Imperial Grand Potentate Noble: Rev. Dr. Malachi Z. York 33°/720°' or 'Chief Black Thunderbird Eagle'.

It also turns out that Mr. York (or whatever) is currently serving time in a maximum security prison after being convicted of multiple child molestation counts. He's due for release in 2119.

For Oxford American, A. Scott narrates his photographic slideshow of the Nuwaubian's (now mostly demolished) ancient-Egyptian-themed 'Tama Re' compound in Putnam County, Georgia (and he refers--among other things--to a ceremony involving 'hundreds of men in red fezzes who were parading around one of the huge pyramids '.)

An earlier story on Snipes, 'tax resistance' and the Nuwaubians appeared in December in Radar magazine.

And if you're wondering, it seems that Nuwaubians, as a rule, vote Republican.

Reading roundup

Some rather randomly assembled things worth reading that I've noted in the past week or so:

1. A new series has started at the New York Times called 'War Torn', examining the violent crimes committed at home by Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans.

This is an interesting topic, and many of the stories are indeed remarkable and sad. (I must also say that “Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” is one of the more striking sentences I've read in a long time.)

Concerns about 'brutalised' soldiers returning from the front lines to wreak havoc in civilian life is hardly a new issue, as the article briefly notes. Last year I saw a fascinating paper (scroll down to the second plenary speaker to see the abstract) by Clive Emsley at a violence history conference in which I participated on precisely this issue. He looked at concerns about returning soldiers and violence in England, Germany and France after the First World War.

In some cases, he found a great deal of concern about such violence (and some stories about ex-soldiers committing crime as a result of 'shell shock'), but relatively little evidence that there was anything remotely like a violence wave caused by veterans. (Obviously, in Germany, the role of Freikorps in causing post-war social unrest is an exception, but this was a special case.)

Worries about this sort of thing have nevertheless cropped up in individual cases.

Quite by chance, while looking for something else entirely last November, I ran across the following newspaper headline story from 27 July 1929:

Sidney Harle was alleged to have (and confessed to having) killed a child in circumstances that are not entirely clear. In any case, he claimed 'that he was not normal at the time, his mind having given way under the influence of drink, which is forbidden to him as the result of malaria and shell shock contracted during the war.'

Surprisingly, since it was a case of child murder, the tone of the article was generally sympathetic (thought this might have had something to do with the suggestion that Harle had to be rescued by police from an enraged mob and was then, allegedly, roughed up by French police themselves).

As the reporter explained:

The crime is undoubtedly a terrible one that has stirred public opinion here, but on reflection people are now inclined to extend sympathy to him as a victim of war conditions, and the authorities are being asked how it came about that a man with such a medical history was at large and able to settle in France when superficial examination by a doctor suffices to show that he is not normal and at any time liable to become a menace to those around him.

Perhaps it's not entirely the same as the stories in the Times, but it's not entirely different either.

It's a difficult issue: playing down the effect of the wars seems, in many of these cases, to risk ignoring the real trauma the perpetrators might have experienced in combat. On the other hand, one is wary of over-doing the 'brutalised veteran' angle, since, as one of the quoted experts notes, most veterans seem to manage some kind of normal post-war life. Very few are ticking time-bombs.

Furthermore, even in some of the quoted cases, the connection with between military service and the crime committed seems rather tenuous: some of them sound pretty...typical.

Moreover, the Times cites 121 confirmed cases of killings by veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan, presumably since those wars began. Which sounds bad, maybe, until you consider there are about 16,000 homicides a year in the US.

This is not at all to detract from the individual tragedy in each case; but, so far--and even if the Times count missed a lot of cases--it seems as if we are far from an epidemic of war-related crime.

2. At Freezerbox, 'Megatons and Memory Holes' by Alexander Zaitchik takes a nice trip down nuclear-terror nostalgia lane by talking with Stanislav Petrov.

Who is Stanislav Petrov, you ask?

The occasion of our meeting was the 24th anniversary of a historic nightshift Petrov worked at the Serpukhov missile command center. What happened was this: half past midnight on September 26, 1983, the radar screen in the Serpukhov bunker showed several missile launches on U.S. territory. Petrov was the ranking officer on site. The protocol that he himself had authored dictated that he inform his superiors immediately. They, in turn, would have contacted the ailing, paranoid, and hawkish Soviet premiere at the time, Yuri Andropov.

With his computer screens beeping havoc, Petrov was forced to think fast. Under unimaginable pressure, he reasoned that because of the small number of launches, the alarm was likely false. "In a real first-strike, they would have hit us with hundreds of missiles," he said. And so he sat tight and never kicked the alert up the chain of command.

It was the right call. It turned out the alarm was the result of sunlight reflecting off low-altitude clouds above several U.S. missile silos. A satellite misread.

As they sometimes do...

Thank you, Stanislav.

3. Two interesting articles related to animal rights have appeared at the New York Times in the last month or so, and both of them highlight either difficult dilemmas or the dangers of unintended consequences. One is recent, the other I read quite a while ago and never got around to writing about.

A few days ago the New York Times wrote about the fate of horses that are shipped out of the US for slaughter.

In an apparent victory for animal-rights supporters, horse slaughter was virtually banned in the US last year. However, this has meant that many horses are being shipped to Canada or Mexico for slaughter. Good news? Bad news?

Well...

“It’s a step closer to the long-term goal of banning slaughter in North America,” said Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States. “There are fewer horses slaughtered.”

Indeed, even with the busy export to Canada and Mexico, the Agriculture Department estimates that 105,000 American horses were slaughtered in the three countries in 2007, down from some 138,000 the year before.

For many horses, though, export means hundreds more miles of strenuous transit in large trailers. “It’s difficult for them to keep their balance, they’re often crowded, they have no access to food or water while en route,” said Timothy Cordes, a senior veterinarian with the Agriculture Department.

Of particular concern to advocates is the treatment of the horses once they reach Mexico, to which exports have more than tripled. American protections simply do not apply there, Dr. Cordes said.

The American slaughterhouses killed horses quickly by driving steel pins into their brains, a method the American Veterinary Medical Association considers humane. Workers in some Mexican plants, by contrast, disable them by stabbing them with knives to sever their spinal cords, said Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

“My worst nightmare has happened,” Dr. Grandin said. “This is an example of well-intentioned but very bad unintended consequences.”

Another article from early December was extremely interesting. In 'Kill the Cat that Kills the Bird?', Bruce Barcott looks at the conflict of interest between cats and birds...or, actually, between cat lovers and bird lovers. The conflict between the animals themselves is real enough, but it's pretty straightforward: that between their respective human supporters not so much.

The story considers the plight of birds--many of them rare--living on the Gulf Coast near Galveston. On top of the other environmental challenges they face, these birds, it seems, have been subject to devastating predation from feral cats (though just how much of a problem this constitutes is debated).

The article opens with the actions of a locally renowned ornithologist, who, seeking to take action to protect the local birds (particularly piping plovers, an endangered species) shot a feral cat.

And was arrested and put on trial.

It's a fascinating article and there are, as the Dude would say, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous.

Still, I have to say that I come down in the side of the birds (and the vigilante ornithologist) in this one. I like cats just fine, but it's not like they're about to go extinct or anything, unlike some of the wild bird species we're talking about.

And the argument that they're just doing 'what nature intended' is hardly convincing when not only are the cats only there because of human stupidity but, it seems, one of the most vociferous cat lovers in the story seems to be feeding them cat food.

Ah...nature....

4. Finally, and on a much different note, 'Château Scientology' at the New Yorker is well worth a read.

It examines the landmark building in Los Angeles where the 'religion'...well, does what it does:

Celebrity Centre is used for Scientology courses and for “auditing,” a mainstay of the religion, in which a person undergoes a guided talk-therapy session, usually while holding a device known as an E-Meter, which is supposed to measure one’s spiritual state. The goal is to eliminate “mental image pictures” associated with traumatic events; when a person is “Clear”—freed of all such associations—he can advance to the mystical and esoteric levels of Scientology. The path to becoming an “Operating Thetan,” or pure spiritual being (“thetan” being Hubbard’s word for the soul), is laid out in a table called “The Bridge to Total Freedom: Scientology Classification Gradation and Awareness Chart of Levels and Certificates.” Scientology is a technological religion and claims to have developed “exact, precise methods to increase man’s spiritual awareness and capability.” Completion of the Bridge takes years, and each stage requires a cash investment. An initial twelve-and-a-half-hour auditing session costs between six and seven hundred dollars, Greg LaClaire, a vice-president of Celebrity Centre, says. (Aspiring Scientologists can mitigate the expense by choosing to be audited by a fellow initiate rather than by a staff member.) In the Holiday 2007 Dianetics and Scientology catalogue, a deluxe Planetary Dissemination Edition E-Meter—billed as a “tool for Golden Age of Tech certainty,” to assist in “faster progress up The Bridge”—was offered, in “Diamond Blue,” for five thousand five hundred dollars.

It also has a restaurant, and there are...musicals. Gift certificates are no doubt available for the aspiring 'Operating Thetans' among your friends.

Women beware women (too)

A few years ago, I read Jon Krakauer's excellent book Under the Banner of Heaven, about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), more easily referred to as Mormon Fundamentalists.

Amongst other things, this breakaway sect asserts that mainstream Mormons were wrong to abandon the 'plural marriage' that its founder, Joseph Smith, had advocated. Krakauer's book is full of accounts of what that innocuous-sounding term conceals: in short, systematised oppression and child abuse spiced with healthy doses of religious insanity.

More recently, a woman who escaped from both her 'plural marriage' and the FLDS has published her insider's account of the cult. An excerpt from Escape by Carolyn Jessop appeared a few days ago in the Guardian, and it makes for enlightening -- and chilling -- reading.

It also contains a few elements of near-comical absurdity, particularly when Jessop explains the circumstances of how the sect's 'Prophet' had arranged her marriage at age 18 to a man more than 30 years her senior:

I later discovered that Merril had married into my family only to stop my father suing him over a business deal that had gone sour. More humiliating still, he hadn't meant to marry me, but my younger and prettier sister, Annette. When he asked the Prophet to arrange the marriage, Merril got our names mixed up.

So much for divine omniscience.

There is much that is worrisome in Jessop's narrative -- such as, for instance, the apparent fact that the local police are cult members themselves. But I think the most disturbing element in the story -- and this was something I felt about Krakauer's book too -- was the key role played by women in maintaining the cult's twisted ideology. Jessop describes being indoctrinated by her grandmother:

I had been blessed, Grandma taught me, to come into a family where generations of women had sacrificed their feelings to preserve the work of God. My sole purpose on earth, she explained, was to have as many children as possible. I would not fall in love and choose my husband like gentile women did; instead, God would reveal him through the leader of our community, the man we called the Prophet. [...]

Because I loved her so much and this was presented to me as absolute truth, it would be years before I would flee my so-called destiny.

And the reality of relationships among the 'sister-wives' is, unsurprisingly, a ruthless one:

Men were supposed to treat their wives equally, but everyone knew that a woman who was in sexual favour with her husband had a higher value than the others. Because she had his ear, she would be treated with respect by his other wives and her stepchildren. She might be exempted from physical labour or other family responsibilities. She could make sure that the wives she disliked were assigned the worst jobs. A woman who no longer satisfied her husband, meanwhile, was on dangerous ground. No wonder that when a new wife entered a family, her priority was usually to establish power with her husband sexually.

Merril tried to keep all of his wives pregnant because it suggested he had an equal relationship with each of us. But he was a polygamist in body, a monogamist in soul. Barbara was the only woman he ever loved. She took full advantage of it to dictate every detail of her sister wives' lives, right down to our diet.

Barbara and many other of the women in Jessop's and Krakauer's books seem to have little doubt that their severely restricted lives are divinely ordained. This belief not only ennobles their very apparent suffering but it also ensures that their energy is channelled primarily into struggles with (and attempts to dominate) other women.

This aspect of the story reminded me of something Catherine Bennett wrote at the beginning of November, on the occasion of the Saudi king's official visit to Britain.

With the advance of young British veil wearers, proudly declaring their right to be invisible and their love of extreme modesty, this and many other forms of faith-related female subjugation have become complicated areas for liberal protest. If, as we're often told, many British Muslim women love their jilbabs, how can we be sure Saudi women do not also rejoice in their coverings, accepting, in the same dutiful spirit, total exclusion from civic life and physical chastisement by their devout partners? How can we be sure their would-be liberators are not - like women who adorn themselves and women who cut their hair short - just a few more Women Who Will Go to Hell?

I have no doubt that many (perhaps most) of the women remaining among the FLDS view Carolyn Jessop as just such a Woman Who Will Go to Hell. Is this surprising? Not really: as in practices such as female genital cutting or 'honour killing', women appear to very often be complicit in the oppression of other women (and themselves).

I can almost see Bennett's point about how this makes protest 'complicated' for liberals.

Almost.

Because, surely, it doesn't make it all that complicated, does it?

In defense of naturalist green libertarian social democracy...or something like that

There was quite a remarkable essay by George Monbiot at the Guardian a few days ago that manages to combine zoology, libertarianism and the near-collapse of Northern Rock Building Society.

In particular, he discusses one Matt Ridley, who was not only chair of Northern Rock but is also a well known author of several fascinating books on human nature.

Silly me, I've never made the connection before. (But, then again, I have a difficult enough time remember whether it's Matt Ridley or Mark Ridley, let alone checking on the political allegiances and possible bank chairmanships of the zoologists I read.)

Monbiot gives Ridley's (quite astoundingly radical) libertarian philosophising a good drubbing, but the more interesting bit is where he brings up evolutionary psychology:

I studied zoology in the same department [as Ridley], though a few years later. Like Ridley, I am a biological determinist: I believe that much of our behaviour is governed by our evolutionary history. I accept the evidence he puts forward, but draw completely different conclusions. He believes that modern humans are destined to behave well if left to their own devices; I believe that they are likely to behave badly. If you belong to a small group of intelligent hominids, all of whom are well known to each other, you will be rewarded for cooperation and generosity within the group. (Though this does not stop your group from attacking or exploiting another.) If, on the other hand, you can switch communities at will, travel freely, buy in one country and sell in another, hire strangers then fire them, you will gain more from acting only in your own interest. You'll have an even stronger incentive to act against the common good if you run a bank whose lending and borrowing are so complex that hardly anyone can understand what is happening.

Ridley and I have the same view of human nature: that we are inherently selfish. But the question is whether this nature is subject to the conditions that prevailed during our evolutionary history. I believe they have changed: we can no longer be scrutinised and held to account by a small community. We need governments to fill the regulatory role vacated when our tiny clans dissolved.

In general, I tend far more toward Mobiot's arguments on this issue, even if I think he should avoid the use of the word 'determinist', particularly since so many evolutionary psychologists have been struggling to free themselves of that label and have rightly emphasised interactions between genetics and environment in describing behaviour.

But the larger point that becomes clear is the utter diversity of political views that can emerge from taking human nature seriously.

I note this aspect of Monbiot's reply partly because I have more than once run up against an assertion that evolutionary psychology more or less automatically entails some version or other of radical laissez-faireism and/or the creation of social policy that is 'conservative' in all kinds of undesirable ways. ('Undesirable' from the perspective of the generally liberal people with whom I have had these discussions.)

This is, as I think Monbiot nicely demonstrates, not the case, and I think he is right that the bulk of the evidence on human nature does not lead us to the conclusion that people -- left to their own devices -- will necessarily act in ways that are good. He is right that, for instance:

Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.

Precisely what the parameters and means of 'mutual scrutiny and regulation' should be is, of course, the tricky bit. Nevertheless, I think there's enough evidence from enough quarters to suggest that what is arguably the most successful form of human social organisation so far (with all its faults and shortcomings) -- i.e., liberal social democracy -- is not Homo sapiens's default state.

There are a lot more things that could be said on that, of course, but just to be brief, Monbiot's article has gotten me thinking about libertarianism again since it's something, actually, with which I have a not entirely hostile but somewhat conflicted relationship.

On the one hand, there are many ways in which I find libertarian thinking and commentary to be very insightful. For a while, for instance, I became a regular reader of Reason, with which I typically found myself in, alternatively, nodding agreement and seething disagreement. (In many ways, they're interesting for asking the right questions if not necessarily coming up with the right answers.)

And there have been various other places where I've found some intriguing thinking from the libertarian corner, particularly by those who seek to develop that thought humbly and consistently (i.e., not just screeching about low taxes and free-enterprise but advocating the passing of liberal immigration laws, the ending of the intrusive legislation of morality and the increased protection of civil rights).

Indeed, I would say that, along with social democracy and naturalism (by which I mean recognising our animal natures and connection to the ecosystems in which we live), libertarian principles of freedom form an important source for my -- admittedly perhaps somewhat ramshackle -- worldview.

Unfortunately, many (though not all) of my personal encounters with real, existing libertarians have tended to be rather negative. They have often held strangely simplistic (ranging to naive and fundamentally ahistorical) perspectives on the world and a relentless (ranging to bug-eyed and ranting) distrust of any concept of social or community good beyond (typically very narrowly conceived) individual interests. Libertarianism in these cases seems to only be an ideology for successful entrepreneurs: what it offers for people don't fit that category -- either because they are not entrepreneurs or because they are not successful -- tends to remain either unclear or be quite obviously vicious.

These, furthermore, have often been accompanied by two things.

1) A tendency toward hyperbole (e.g., 'all taxation is theft', sensible gun control laws are 'oppression' and the UN/EU/WTO/IMF/ATF -- and their fleet of black helicopters -- are plotting a tyrannical world government) and a slightly shouty form of unpleasantness

and

2) Almost limitless self-aggrandisement (i.e., seeing themselves among an extraordinarily creative and productive self-sufficient elite that, obviously, would thrive in the radically privatised world they envision creating). (The latter I blame partly on excessive reading of Ayn Rand, but that's another topic for another time. Or, preferably, for never).

Strangely enough, I have also encountered precisely these same two characteristics in many discussions with the radical left (mainly Trotskyists for some reason I'm not interested enough to speculate about). So, rest assured, I'm quite capable of being equal opportunity with my scorn.

Oddly enough, just about all the libertarians I've met have identified themselves as right-wing, even though a lot of the things that dominate right-wing parties (whether in Europe or America) these days -- xenophobia, religion, militarism, a strong desire to regulate morals -- are anathema to what I would see as 'real' libertarian thinking.

There's not, of course, anything inherently 'right-wing' about the notion of 'freedom' or about being suspicious of the state, or of emphasising forms of voluntary self-organisation to provide mutual assistance. These have long been elements in anarchist and some socialist thought, and the European green movement ('neither Left nor Right: Green' being one of their early slogans) has also long had the libertarian notion of decentralising power as one its core principles as well, even if at times it has been emphasised rather less than more. (Just to note one of the more obvious practical examples: green thinking on energy focuses on decentralised, even household, power production, freeing people not only from the centralised power of the state but also from the concentrated power of large corporations.)

Of the two general strands of thought that emerged from the 60s (and which have in various ways been around for long, long before that of course) -- i.e., 1) making a new world and 2) being left alone to do your own thing -- my own emphasis has been shifting toward the latter: partly because it's increasingly clear to me that the first -- whether in its left or right-wing form -- generally leads to Very Bad Things. (NB: Making a better world is, I think, still on the table though.)

Now, I know there are a lot of reasonable and very insightful libertarian ideas out there. (And I know that the Left has its own ideological silliness to answer for.)

Thus, it is encouraging to see, as Dale has pointed out, a thoroughgoing libertarian argument for tackling global warming published recently at Black Sun Journal.

In response to what seems to be a rather unhinged critique of the science of global warming, the journal notes:

Actually, it is the AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming]-deniers who are the collectivists. They support allowing wealthy individuals and corporations to keep engaging in practices that essentially levy a heavy tax-burden on the rest of us. By depleting natural capital, the extractive robber-barons are externalizing their costs to other citizens and future generations. A true individualist libertarian would insist that everyone pay their fair share in the present-day rather than sloughing it off on their children, right? If you want to refrain from sounding completely ignorant and backward on this subject, you need to read and understand the concepts of Natural Capitalism, Externalities, Sustainability, and the Tragedy of the Commons. If you don’t, you have no business claiming to be a true Capitalist.

This article follows another (here), which contained the following:

Let’s look at the nature of our situation: Aside from radiation coming from the sun and other parts of space or the occasional meteorite coming in, and whatever heat is reflected or re-radiated into space going out, Earth is a closed system. Each of the 6.5 billion people who live here therefore have the right (an inherent human right as opposed to an arbitrary legal right) to fully use 1/6,500,000,000th of its resources and atmosphere, which are decidedly finite. If Stelene or Matt Drudge or Michael [Crichton] want to use more than that share of atmosphere or non-renewable resource, they need to purchase it from the people whose share they are consuming. That’s the free-market, right? It’s a classic problem of the commons, and even smart libertarians recognize this.

I imagine there are a lot of things that the writers at Black Sun Journal and I would disagree about. (I'm far from a 'true Capitalist', and they have that Strange Affection for Ayn Rand that I mentioned before and that I Just Can't Comprehend....)

The longer I spend blogging, however, the more I find it is difficult to find anyone with whom I completely agree anyway. But I'm also coming increasingly to the conclusion that, given the enormous decline in the civility of political discourse on the internet (described well, if with a certain justified incivility, at Whiskey Fire here and here) that I have come to see even a reasonable disagreement as, somehow, something precious.

And I am pleased to see the folks at Black Sun Journal take on crackpot irrationalism masquerading as secular, rational and libertarian free-thinking.

There are enough serious discussions to be had, after all.

[Update:] Just after posting this I found (via Pharyngula) a link to China Miéville's recent critique of libertarianism in In These Times. Worth reading. (As is his science-fiction novel Perdido Street Station, which I read recently on vacation.)

Melborea Moronica and other scary creatures

And before I forget...

I've been meaning to draw attention to an excellent essay by Simon Sellars at Ballardian on the disturbing interactions he observes between J. G. Ballard's dystopian imagination and day-to-day life in Melbourne.

It sounds...well, grim.

Worryingly, inner-city Melbourne is becoming increasingly lawless. Each day brings newspaper reports of gangs attacking passengers on trams, bashings involving Sudanese refugees, drunk patrons of nightclubs targeted for muggings… The true sound of Australia is no longer ‘Advance Australia Fair’ but rather the sickening thud of a skull hitting the pavement. Well, that’s what you read in the papers anyway, and while I have never been one to trust the sensationalized Australian media for my eyes and ears on the world, my attitude changed once it started happening to me. In the past couple of years I have been punched to the ground, unprovoked, by a gang of drunken/drugged up men in the main street of Byron Bay, in full view of passers by, for the territorial crime of being a ‘tourist’. Minding my own business, walking home, I have been set upon by a group of football fans leaving the Melbourne Cricket Ground after I made the mistake of protesting when they tried to tackle me to the ground.

And he hasn't even gotten to the part about the 'bicycle wars'.

In my view -- for all the psychological eccentricities of his fiction -- Ballard is quite strong on sociology. (In fact this is one of the arguments of paper I presented not all that long ago at a conference in Norwich which I hope will see the light of the published day at some point. We'll see.)

Along with many other things, Simon offers a different perspective on life in one of the world's 'most liveable cities'.

Great essay, Simon.

And be careful.

A great leap forward

There was a remarkably enthusiastic (and surprising!) reaction to the postmodern propaganda game we devised a week ago, which involves combining images from Chinese Communist political posters with postmodern academic waffle.

We had some nice feedback and lots of visitors (thanks particularly to links from David and Ophelia) and there were several people who came up with their own creations.

Some participants bent the rules a bit, in particular because they had no obfuscatory postmodern feminist texts to hand. This is the kind of practical-mindedness of which we here in the Central Committee fully approve.

But we wonder: what...not everyone has some Irigaray, Kristeva and Butler within easy reach? This might be right-wing deviationism of the most counter-revolutionary sort...

So, to make things simpler, we think any passage from the leading lights of Theory (we think we should limit ourselves to the vanguard here) that combines muddied thinking, incomprehensible jargon, faulty philosophical assumptions, and a facile and self-regarding presumption of 'subversion' (especially if it has a 'post-' attached to it) makes a delightful caption for one of the very fine posters from the collection to which we linked.

Most importantly of all, of course: have fun!

Entries so far:

Gwyn: '...a journey to the dark portals of life...'
Geoff: '...restoring erection in the ageing penis...' (image)
Rob: '...no fully (as opposed to partially) comprehensive doctrine...'
Michael: 'The discipline of the workshop...' (image)
Norm: '...a priori surfaces of emergence of antagonisms...' (image) (I have to say, this is one of my favourite images.)
Dale: '...far removed from the realm of interest...'

(If there are any I've missed, let me know and I'll update the list.)

A fabulous new party game...

[UPDATE: a list of participants and a slight relaxation in the rules is provided here.]

OK, The Wife and I have come up with something fun and innovative to do with your spare time.

1. Take one of the Chinese propaganda posters referred to in the previous post.

2. Go to bookshelf and find postmodern feminist tract of your choice (our preferred plaything is Judith Butler)

3. Flick pages and stop at random.

4. Place finger upon open page. Treat the selected sentence as a caption for the chosen Chinese propaganda poster.

This is our first result. We like. We like very much.

'Libidinal dependency and powerlessness is phantasmatically overcome by the installation of a boundary and, hence, a hypostacized center which produces an idealized bodily ego; that integrity and unity is achieved through the ordering of a wayward motility or disaggregated sexuality not yet restrained by the boundaries of individuation.' (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 75)

A perfect match, we think. Now that is gender trouble.

OK, now it's your turn.

There but for fortune

At the Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich has a short article ('Smashing Capitalism') whose satire falls a bit flat but which makes a good overall point and links to a couple of things worth reading.

Taking her cue from the recent shudder that went through the world's stock markets due partly to the unfolding 'sub-prime' mortgage crisis in the US as well as from disappointing sales figures at Wal-Mart, Ehrenreich comments:

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

Even meant satirically, I think Ehrenreich takes a good point rather too far: it seems to me that the recent market turbulence--as far as I can understand it--is rather more complex.

(Not to mention that the system is nowhere near being smashed: Ehrenreich knows this, which makes her somewhat flamboyant rhetoric all the more silly. I say this as an admirer of some of her work, such as her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.)

But one of her conclusions is on target...

But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis.

...particularly since said system is extracting more than that last cent.

On that point, far more striking than Ehrenreich's sledgehammer rhetoric (in this instance) is an article to which she links from the radical lefties over at Business Week: 'The Poverty Business'.

The main topic can be summed up thusly:

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Along with many interesting and useful facts like that, the article profiles the human side of this situation, presenting stories of poor people who--in one way or another--have found themselves trapped in poverty and victimised by the purveyors of expensive--but oh-so-tempting--credit.

I found myself torn by conflicting emotions when reading some of these stories: certainly there was anger at the greed of companies whose business plans seem to consist entirely of taking advantage of people in the most outrageous ways. I was moved by the plight of individuals who don't sound at all that much different than people I have known.

There was also a certain amount of frustration with some individuals themselves, like 'Luisa' who owes creditors $169,585 and says: "I don't read things. I just sign them."

Comments like this send a certain part of my political brain--the one that is convinced concepts such as 'individual responsibility' should not simply be abandoned to the right-wing--into fits of screaming incomprehension.

However, there are many different ways of being working-poor, and, as is clear, if, say, you need a car to get a job (not at all that rare in the US) and you lack ready cash and good credit, your choices are limited and buying the used Saturn from the local bloodsuckers at 25% interest starts to look like an opportunity rather than a disaster.

This is even more the case when the extent of economic illiteracy (or maybe just basic innumeracy) is taken into account. Niall Ferguson is a condescending bastard, but he points to a real problem:

In 2006, the British Financial Services Authority carried out a survey of public financial literacy. It revealed that one person in five had no idea what effect an inflation rate of 5 per cent and an interest rate of 3 per cent would have on the purchasing power of their savings. One in 10 did not know which was a better discount for a television originally priced at £250: £30 or 10 per cent.

It makes you want to weep, doesn't it?

Of course, it has always been this way, and some people have always made bad choices. (And, though I can manage rather better than the people Ferguson cites, please do not ask me to explain the finer points of my mortgage to you...). Human psychology with regard to economic behaviour is a complex and often irrational thing.

But what does seem to be new is the fact that there is an entire industry devoted to taking advantage of those weaknesses in grand style. The point seems not to provide credit to assist the borrower in succeeding, but to count on the fact that they will fail.

Hence, the 'NINJA' loan for those with 'No Income, No Job and No Assets'.

And I think there is another antidote to the open contempt for the working poor that seems to roll so easily off the tongue of many commentators to the articles at the Nation, the Telegraph and Business Week: the 'There but for fortune' principle.

I have been very fortunate in life, but having worked (and borrowed) my own way through my (extended) education--and having known enough people who were living lives on the margins or who faced setbacks that were not of their own making--it is not easy to look down upon people who, for whatever reason, have found themselves in trouble.

And, unless you come from an extraordinarily sheltered background (in which case, you have nothing useful to add anyway), I imagine you'd have to admit the same.

Which is an excuse to offer this song, which I've always liked very much.

The unbearable slightness of being (Oprah)

I know that there are many many more important things going on in the world today than the thing I am about to talk about.

Nonetheless, I think we should all take a brief moment to consider the infinite intellectual vacuum that is Oprah Winfrey.

This may be blindingly obvious, but it hasn't stopped her from becoming jaw-droppingly wealthy and influential.

What is galling is that she's done this by showcasing precisely that version of vaguely 'spiritual' tear-stained sentimentality that is one of the worst cultural plagues besetting the land of my birth. Having now achieved enormous wealth and influence--when, in short, she is in the position of really making a difference--she's continuing to peddle the same old crap.

I suppose if you're not American, you may be wondering a bit about all this bile, particularly as her image is such a nice one.

And, yes, she has certainly been on the right side of some of the issues that she has taken up, such as gay rights and civil rights. (Very few of which causes, though, have really been controversial or involved her taking any risks.)

Moreover, I don't think that what she's promoting is necessarily very nice at all.

Having never met a bit of meaningless psychobabble that she didn't like, she has for the last couple of decades been one of the reasons that Americans have that distinct habit of blathering endlessly on about their 'issues' and 'codependencies' and inability to 'relate' to their 'significant others' and their never-ending search for 'closure'.

She is one of the reasons why American politics have become so unbearably focused on the minutiae of personality rather than the debating of policy.

And she is part of the reason why so many Americans are susceptible to the comfortably vacuous murmurs of people like Deepak Chopra. (PZ Myers has taken on the tiresome task of addressing Chopra's 'thinking' many times, on issues such as genes, evolution and religion.) Oprah's show was one of the vehicles that made Chopra such a success, so even on that simple ground, she has a lot to answer for.

Oprah-land is an odd alternate-Earth where there are no problems that cannot be solved by a nice chat involving a few tepid burblings about 'healing' and a big dose of positive--to the point of delusional--thinking. All questions have a simple, morally uplifting answer. No obstacle cannot be overcome with the right dosage of spiritualist drivel and 'belief in yourself'.

It is the sugary ease with which such trite views go down that has even made her a 'spiritual leader' of sorts, something that at least some more orthodox believers seem to be concerned about, since Oprah's version of God is rather more ecumenical than theirs. In perfectly post-modern fashion, she takes spoonfuls of yummy spiritual goodness wherever she can find it.

But what kind of message is she flogging, really?

Well, let's take a quick look.

'When you lose a loved one, you gain an angel whose name you know,' she said at a memorial service in the wake of September 11th, concluding, 'May we leave this place determined to now use every moment that we yet live to turn up the volume in our own lives, to create deeper meaning, to know what really matters.'

Oprah, you see, thinks that life always has a message for us. And that message is always, in some way, a positive one.

For Oprah, there is always a pony.

And in this, I know, she is not alone. In fact, there are apparently enough people hungry for this sort of tasteless broth to make her a billionaire.

Its popularity is what makes this kind of nutrition-free blather so bothersome.

Not only does it not, in the end, mean anything, but it is in fact a hindrance to finding meaning. The answers it provides put a stop to further thinking and shut down any possibility of recognising Very Important Things in life: the power of contingency, the essential smallness of our existence, the impossibility of reconciling the contradictions of being a human being.

Her message is the antithesis of one of the most important virtues in the world: humility.

If the main meaning she can find in the carnage of September 11th is a call for each of us to focus even more on ourselves, then I think that in some serious way she may have missed something more important.

But it is clear what Oprah thinks 'really matters'.

Consider the death of her own two-year-old golden retriever, Gracie, which Oprah writes about in the current issue of her magazine, O (and which is the thing that has caused me to go on about this at such length).

Now...in terms of one of those crucial binaries of life, I'm much more a cat person, I have to admit. But, still, I have had enough experience with dogs to know it is possible to develop an emotional attachment to them that, to all appearances, they are capable of reciprocating.

Moreover, one of the key perspectives of a naturalistic world view is the recognition of what we share as living creatures, among them the ability to suffer and feel fear.

So, I think it is difficult to read the story of Gracie's sudden death through choking on a plastic ball without feeling, in some way, moved and saddened.

And then...and then we get to the part where we all are taught The Lesson, from the big O herself.

Because, of course there must be a lesson.

Weirdly, though, it is, more-or-less the same lesson to be learned from mass death caused by terrorist atrocity.

So through my tears and stabbing pain and disbelief and wonder and questions about how and why this happened, I leaned over my sweet and wild and curious and mind-of-her-own Gracie, and asked, "Dear Gracie, what were you here to teach me that only your death could show me?" And this is the answer: This lovely little runt whom I'd brought home sick—on his first visit with her, the vet told me to return her and get my money back—did more living in two years than most dogs do in 12.

Now, I'm not sure how Oprah knows about how much 'living' Gracie did (or about whether, maybe, she'd have preferred to go on living that pampered, raucous lifestyle for a good long time). But, OK, it was her dog, not mine, so perhaps I should not judge.

But...is it just me, or is there something not entirely nice about a dog owner kneeling over their beloved pet just after it has gone through its death throes, and, in effect, posing the following question: 'What's in it for me?'

Because, it seems to me, that is what Oprah did. And that is, in the end, the basis of the lesson she draws.

Her life was a gift to me. Her death, a greater one.

Ten days before she died, I was getting a yearly physical, and to lower my blood pressure I'd think of Gracie's smiling face.

Just days before the "freak accident," the head of my company came into my office to have a serious talk about "taking some things off your schedule—you're doing too much." Maya Angelou called me to say the same thing. "You're doing too much. Don't make me come to Chicago," she chided. "I want you to slow down."

I'd broken a cardinal rule: The whole month of May I'd had no day off, dashing from one event to the next. But though I appreciated everyone's concern, I still had to finish the season. Wrap up the year's shows. Have foundation meetings. Meet with auditors. Review plans for a new building, and on and on. So many people on my list. I literally forgot to put myself on the list for a follow-up checkup.

When the doctor's office called, I confessed. I hadn't heeded what I know for sure. I said, "Doctor, I'm sorry. I had so many meetings with different people, I forgot to put myself on the list."

The next day, Gracie died.

Slow down, you're moving too fast. I got the message.

Thank you for being my saving Gracie. I now know for sure angels come in all forms.

Does this story not suggest a deeply self-centred personality, the sort summed up in the line, 'Her life was a gift to me. Her death, a greater one.'?

Even worse: this is solipsism of the most tenacious and unpleasant variety being sold under the cover of sweet sentimentality.

And this, I think, is one of the keys to Oprah's success.

It's OK, she says, go ahead, see yourself as the centre of the universe. Everything that happens to you happens for a reason. And, to quote a well-known book, it is good. And it is something she 'knows for sure'. No evidence, mind you. She just knows.

Of course.

But who gave this 'gift'? Is Oprah saying the dog sacrificed herself for her owner?

If not, it never seems to occur to her that she is therefore suggesting that whatever force she thinks is guiding the universe thought it was OK to choke a dog to death to give her the simple message that she needs to chill out a bit.

Because, it would seem to me, that is what she is saying happened.

And that strikes me a very nasty world view indeed.

Sadly, it is not one held only by a dimwitted talk show host.

War is hell

The stories collected in 'The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness' at The Nation are certainly harrowing. They make for very hard reading.

But anyone who is surprised by them is being naive. This, after all, is what war is like:

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."

Yes it is.

And four years in, it's still not exactly clear what this was all about.

Were there a clear and unequivocal answer to that question, the horror might be easier to bear.

But, it seems, such an answer is not all that easy to find.

So it goes...

Let's Talk About Sex (-ratios)

Speaking of sex videos, I can think of few better ways to spend a spare half-hour on the Sabbath than watching Richard Dawkins give a 'brisk run-through' on sex-ratio theory and sexual selection.

Not only do you get a rare opportunity to see Dawkins lecture in casual beachwear, there is something special about hearing the Oxford professor utter words like 'copulation' and 'Bull sea lion' in the same sentence. (Dawkins, for instance, seems genuinely moved by the unjust plight of the 90% of 'bachelor sea lions' who 'never get a look in'. His pronunciation of harem as 'har-eem', though, is a bit mysterious. Perhaps things are done differently in Oxford...)

(While we're on the topic of sexy animals, it has recently been suggested that even sparrows have some kind of notion of what it means to be cutting edge, musically speaking. Thanks to Anja for the tip.)

Also this Sunday, I'm concluding my reading of Christopher Hitchens's book, God Is Not Great. I've enjoyed it very much, although much as in the case of my reading of Sam Harris's The End of Faith, or Dawkins's own The God Delusion, there is an odd feeling--almost a kind of exhaustion--that comes with reading so much intense argument with which one agrees.

I am struck, though, by what I see as an unexpected mildness of tone in Hitchens's critique of religion. Not that he doesn't have his (enjoyably) splenetic moments, but I found the book to be surprisingly balanced.

(A General Theory of Rubbish has posted just today some quite good video of Hitchens in fine, though restrained, form. Hitchens's mildness is all the more remarkable given the sunny, superficial inanities uttered by John Meacham, the other guest. I mean, please: 'I believe in God for the same reason I believe in love'? This is what Meacham builds his life around?)

Of the three, it strikes me that it is Harris who comes across as the most angry, whereas Dawkins is the most relentlessly rational. He (Dawkins) is also the most optimistic. There is a weariness in Hitchens's book, I think (for all its energy and venom), which perhaps derives from a pessimism about how likely it is that the fanatical madness he chronicles can be subdued. If so, this is a doubt I share.

Not, of course, that he (or I) would for a moment suggest that we should stop trying.

As it was pithily put recently, in a message directed toward the most recent attempted outrage by religious fanatics: 'We'll just set about ye'.

And I, for one, can't top that.