Category: Society

As the trial of Geert Wilders goes on, I thought that it would be useful to link to a translation of a statement given to the court by a Dutch law student. It makes for sobering reading. 

The phrase Dog Whistle Politics refers to a type of political campaigning or speechmaking which employs coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.

It seems to me that something of this sort is increasingly on display in opinion pieces that suggest that militant or strident atheists should pipe down because their tactics are “not helping”.

In today’s Guardian, for example, Julian Baggini has a piece on how Atheists and Believers can get along. At first blush, it appears to be a reasonable enough piece. Who, for example, could fail to disagree with Baggini when he writes:

I see my allies as being the community of the reasonable, and my enemies as the community of blind faith and dogmatism. Any religion that is not unreasonable and not dogmatic should likewise recognise that it has a kinship with atheists who hold those same values. And it should realise that it has more to fear from other people of faith who deny those values than it does from reasonable atheists like myself.

But hang on, who would Baggini then classify as “unreasonable” atheists? Tellingly, he doesn’t actually name names, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to hear the “dog whistle” calling out names such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Indeed, the very first comment following his piece says:

Nice article Julian and I think you’ve made an important distinction between fair minded atheists like yourself and hateful bigotted [sic] “anti-theists” like Dawkins.

Clearly, this person has heard a dog whistle loud and clear and responded with Pavlovian predictability.

It’s all a bit depressing. We seem to be moving towards a situation where robust and overt debate of religious matters is being increasingly thought of as being “shrill” and “militant”. Ophelia is noticing the tendency as well. She suspects that, as an overt atheist, she would be lumped by Baggini into the class of “unreasonable” atheists, but since he, like others brandishing their dog whistles, doesn’t name names, it’s difficult to be definite. But the implication is clearly there. As Eric MacDonald points out in a comment:

This is beginning to border on the absurd! First of all, where are Ruse and Baggini and Mooney, and the rest of the gang, getting the idea that the gnu atheists are hostile? There is actually very little hostility. Listen to some of the debates that Hitchens and Dawkins have taken part in. There’s no evident hatred or hostility. Instead, what you see is an incredible willingness to discuss, to debate, to answer questions, to give explanations, etc. etc. Where did the myth of hostility and stridency and shrillness come from?

It’s all very strange.

The latest issue of Hew Humanist has an interview with Mary Warnock, a redoubtable campaigner on moral ethics and member of the House of Lords. The interview no doubt was prompted by the publication of her new book: Dishonest to God: On Keeping Religion out of Politics.

For the most part, it’s quite a good interview, but it does contain what I found to be an astonishing statement by Baroness Warnock:

“That’s absolutely right. I find Dawkins’ simple-minded view of religion very difficult to take. It pays no proper attention to the history and tradition of religion. It says that religions have done nothing but harm but that is manifestly not true. He omits all the good things, the education, the cathedrals, the music. All that’s disregarded.”

She’s talking about Richard Dawkins, of course. The author of The God Delusion. The book in which he says:

…an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

Dawkins has said of himself that he is a “cultural Christian”, and that he gets enjoyment from such things as Carol music. So how Mary Warnock can claim that he “omits all the good things”, I really don’t know. A surprising lapse from a usually reliable philosopher.

(hat tip to Francis Sedgemore for pointing out this stumble from Baroness Warnock)

I’m not a charitable person, not in the sense of the act of giving to charity, but in the sense that I have a heartfelt distrust of celebrities and those who say how wonderful they are. So I almost missed this story from Marina Hyde on Bono’s “charity” ONE.

The arresting (and would that it were so) fact is that:

ONE took $14,993,873 in donations from philanthropists, of which a thrifty $184,732 was distributed to charity. More than $8m was spent on executive and employee salaries.

Frankly, it doesn’t really surprise me, it just stokes my feelings of misanthropy.

This is an interesting piece of semiotics/eye-candy from Armani. The advert showing Cristiano Ronaldo supposedly looking for his T-shirt in a hotel room, with the maid trying not to look.

While it clearly tries to do a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink, bit of role reversal (the maid eyeing the man, instead of the other way around), what I took away from it was the absolute laying down of who has the power here; i.e. the man. He does not acknowledge even the presence of the servant. So, close, but no cigar. As it were…

(hat tip: Mark Simpson)

EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding’s verdict on the behaviour of the French government over the expulsion of the Roma. Quite right, it is appalling what the French government has done.

Nosemonkey has a good summary here. I just wish I could embed the video of Reding here. Please go to Nosemonkey’s post and watch it. Her obvious anger and disgust at the French government’s handling of this issue is well merited.

Polly Toynbee is on rattling good form in this piece in the Guardian: Sex and death lie at the poisoned heart of religion.

I particularly like the nod to Ben Goldacre’s piece and the masterful riposte to the utterly witless article from Anne Widdecombe:

As Ben Goldacre pointed out in this paper on Saturday, while this pope claims condoms “aggravate the problem” of HIV/Aids, two million die a year. Ann Widdecombe’s riposte that the Catholic church runs more Aids clinics than any single nation was like suggesting the Spanish Inquisition ran the best rehab clinics for torture victims.

As Toynbee says:

Atheists are good haters, they claim, but feeble compared with the religious sects. Atheists have dried-up souls, without spiritual or visionary transcendentalism. To which we say: the human imagination is all we need to hold in awe. Live in optimism without fear of judgment and death. There is enough purpose and meaning in life, love and leaving a good legacy. Oppose the danger of religious zealotry with the liberating belief that life on earth is precious because this here and now is all there is, and our destiny is in our own hands

Amen to that.

Adam Curtis has a very thought-provoking piece up on his blog about the rise of the new Illuminati – the global terrorist conspiracy. And while terrorism clearly exists; just like the evidence for the fictitious Illuminati, there is little evidence for global puppetmasters pulling the strings of terror.

Curtis carefully documents the rise of this near-religious belief in a global terrorist conspiracy by beginning back in Vietnam in the 1960s with Alexander Haig. He takes in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca, and traces how this became the unwitting seed of the flower that we have today, carefully nurtured along the way by various terrorist experts and governments.

As he says:

The problem with mass politics today is that we increasingly have no idea what is myth and theatre, and what is really true.

That’s how I’m feeling at the moment, having read, and had a shudder of revulsion at the content of, this piece by Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian. As Ophelia says, it’s ugly stuff.

A good rebuttal of Mishra’s tripe is this comment:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was mutilated as a child because of the patriachal religion of her homeland.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali received death threats after publishing her first book, detailing the treatment of women in Islamic society

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s colleague Theo Van Gogh was murdered. A letter threatening Ayaan Hirsi Ali was pinned to his dead body with a knife. As a result, she had to go into hiding.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali still regularly receives death threats.

And yet, according to you, a few criticisms of a planning application represent a tide of hatred, while Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the one to be vilified. It is people like you, Pankaj, the apologists and appeasers, that allow islamists operating in the west to think they can murder and threaten with impunity.

Now are you going to come down below the line and answer our points, or do you think you’ve done enough damage with your witless blathering?

For a longer and more in-depth background on why Mishra is talking shite, then I would point you to this piece by Clive James, penned in September 2009.

Future Perfect is a blog written by Jan Chipchase, who used to work for Nokia, and who now works for a design and innovation company. He specialises in in taking teams of concept/industrial designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists, and ethnographers into the field and, after a fair bit of work, getting them home safely.

He’s currently working in Afghanistan. His blog entries are fascinating, and worth reading. Start here, and then explore some of the other entries.

Tom Rees, over at Epiphenom, draws our attention to some fascinating research:

Polygamy is pretty popular. Most pre-industrial societies were polygamous in some way, and there are increasing pressures in the west for polygamy to be legalised. After all, it’s surely just a matter of personal freedom of expression. If homosexuality and other forms of sexual expression are legal, then why not polygamy. Polygamy never hurt anyone, right?

Well flat wrong, actually, if the evidence presented by Joe Heinrich, at the University of British Columbia, is anything to go by.

Rees’ blog entry is worth reading, as is Heinrich’s brief to the Canadian Court.