Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Society

  • Religious Poison

    Very depressing news from Pakistan about Salman Taseer being shot by one of his own bodyguards. While the bodyguard was clearly influenced by his religious beliefs to commit cold-blooded murder, it would seem that he’s had ample encouragement from his religious leaders as well:

    A prominent group of Islamic scholars said that the funeral prayers should not be offered and warned that anyone who expressed grief for Taseer could suffer the same fate.

    The Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan group represents scholars from the mainstream Barelvi sect of Sunni Muslims. Although considered moderate, they have led protests in favour of the blasphemy law.

    “More than 500 scholars of the Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat have advised Muslims not to offer the funeral prayers of Governor Punjab Salman Taseer, nor try to lead the prayers,” the group said.

    “Also, there should be no expression of grief or sympathy on the death of the governor, as those who support blasphemy of the prophet are themselves indulging in blasphemy.”

    At times like this, it’s hard to disagree with Christopher Hitchens’ view that “religion poisons everything”.

  • Carbideschieten 2010

    I don’t know where the year has gone, but here we are at the last day of 2010. And in the Dutch countryside, the last day of the year is celebrated by Carbideschieten. So once again, we enjoyed the hospitality of our neighbours; drank mulled wine, and ate oliebollen and snert. It was the very definition of gezelligheid – a practically untranslatable Dutch word.

  • UN Restores Resolution

    I noted earlier this month that a UN Committee had proposed removing the reference to sexual orientation in the UN’s resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. It was a move led by African and Arabic nations – in other words, the usual suspects when it comes to their record on human rights abuses against lesbians, gay men and transgendered people. As the Swedish representative on the Committee said at the time:

    …sexual orientation had often been the motive for extrajudicial killings, and the deletion of the reference would amount to the Committee looking the other way concerning arbitrary executions based on sexual orientation.

    Quite.

    Fortunately, there has been a reaction to this draft resolution, led by the US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice. Now the UN has voted to drop the amendment and retain the reference to sexual orientation in the resolution against the unjustified killing of minority groups.

    While the original reference still stands for the moment, it’s clear that those who wish to reverse progress will not be giving up in a hurry. Typical of them is Zimbabwe’s ambassador to the UN, Chitsaka Chipaziwa, who attacked the US amendment, saying there was no need to refer explicitly to sexual orientation.

    “We will not have it foisted on us,” he said, according to Reuters. “We cannot accept this, especially if it entails accepting such practices as bestiality, paedophilia and those other practices many societies would find abhorrent in their value systems.

    Yep, I’m sure that he and others of his ilk are only too happy to heap up strawmen and turn a blind eye to what happens in their countries. As Hilary Clinton is reported to have said:

    The U.S. reintroduced the language to send an unequivocal message that “No one should be killed for who they are.”

    “Sadly, many people around the world continue to be targeted and killed because of their sexual orientation,” she said. “These heinous crimes must be condemned and investigated wherever they occur.”

    And for some of us, the struggle continues, with real and present danger.

  • Two Data Points

    While it is true that the Netherlands is one of the most prosperous countries in the EU, the other side of the coin is that there is also more poverty than in previous years. In particular, after a long period of decline, the percentage of poorer children in Dutch society increased in 2009.

  • Science or Dogma

    A few days ago, I mentioned Jacob Bronowski and his TV series The Ascent of Man. Here’s that scene of him speaking at Auschwitz, explaining the difference between science and dogma.

    (hat tip to Alun Salt for providing me with the link to this key scene)

  • My Father, The Bomb and Me

    When I was growing up. Jacob Bronowski was a presence on the telly. He was the scientist, the boffin, who could be relied upon to explain science to the rest of us. In 1973, he presented a ground-breaking series, The Ascent of Man, that gave him a platform to present his humanist view of the role that science has played in the development of our species.

    The bit that sticks in my mind, that probably sticks in everybody’s mind who saw the series, is the scene where he is ankle-deep in a muddy pool in Auschwitz, and he suddenly bends down to bring up a handful of mud before the camera, while talking to us in that faintly-accented voice of his. Except that this is not mud, this is ash. The ash of millions of human beings who were consumed by the ovens of the Nazis. I can never watch that scene without being overwhelmed.

    Last night, I saw that scene again. It was part of a documentary, My Father, The Bomb and Me, presented by the historian Lisa Jardine. She is his daughter, and she explored aspects of his life that she knew little of. For example, the fact that he worked in operations research during WWII, designing more effective bombs, and she wondered how she could reconcile that with the loving father that she remembered.

    Her documentary succeeded brilliantly, bringing to life a man who was both humane and who was deeply affected by remorse at some of the things that he had to do in his life. The depth of that remorse was expressed by the simple act of cleaning his glasses in public on a talk show. It sounds ridiculous, but watching his daughter watch the video of that sequence with her seeing the deeper meaning in what he was doing as he carefully sought for the just words to answer the interviewer’s question made everything come clear, and the thought arise, in my mind at least, that here was a good man doing the best he could, as he always had done.

  • The United Nations – A Force For Good?

    I hope that the above title is somewhat of a rhetorical question. I would hope that, on balance, despite its many failings, the UN still counts for something in this sorry world.

    However, when it gets down to a personal level, I find myself questioning whether the ideals in fact count for very much in the face of politics.

    I read two weeks ago Paul Burston’s blog entry where he wrote that he sat down and wept at the news that of the United Nations panel’s decision to remove sexual orientation from an anti-execution resolution. As he said:

    The resolution has contained a reference to lesbian and gay people since 1999. Today, it was announced that this has changed. Other groups are still covered, including those facing persecution on the grounds of religion. But not us.

    According to Pink News, “the vast majority of countries in support of the change were African or Arabic” – ie, those countries with the worst records on human rights abuses against lesbians and gay men, countries where gay people are regularly stoned, flogged and publicly executed.

    What surprised me is that I had not seen even a mention of this on any mainstream news web site (e.g. newspapers and the BBC), so I had hoped that Paul had been mistaken.

    But no, it does in fact appear that this has occurred. Here’s the UN record of the meeting.

    As William Crawley asks: Does the UN now support the execution of gays?

    I take a little comfort from the fact that the UK’s Association of British Muslims has condemned the removal of the reference to sexual orientation in the resolution. That is a statement of support from what will seem a surprising group to many people.

    I wrote yesterday that some of us are involved in a war that is not of our choosing. It now seems to me that there are more of us involved than I had at first appreciated.

  • The Unchosen War

    World AIDS Day was on December 1st. I had the luxury of reflecting on lost friends, since it is my good fortune to be living in the Netherlands.

    Some of us reflect on the fact that they are fighting in a war that is not of their making, and that the makers of that war are their fellow countrymen, who are in positions of political and religious power.

  • Living In Fear

    Brian Whitaker has an article in the Near East Quarterly describing the targeting of gay men in Iraq by vigilantes. It makes for sobering reading. Yet, at the same time, some of the absurdities that are resulting would be laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that their perpetrators wield guns and are only too prepared to use them:

    The problem in post-Saddam Iraq, though, is that the official legal position counts for less than realities on the ground. The wave of “gay” killings was made possible by the breakdown of state control and the rise of local militias, some of them seeking to enforce their own interpretations of Islamic law. That resulted in people being killed for the most trivial of “sins” – among them barbers who gave customers “un-Islamic” haircuts. It reached a peak of absurdity when al-Qa‘eda elements in Iraq sought to impose “gender” segregation of vegetables. Claiming that tomatoes are feminine and cucumbers masculine, they argued that greengrocers should not place them next to each other, and that women should not buy or handle cucumbers.

  • World AIDS Day

    Today is World AIDS Day. One of those occasions that you wish you didn’t have to have, but which is important to remember and do something about. 

    At  a personal level, it’s a chance for me to recall some lost friends: Kerry, Lance, Eric, Humphrey, Peter, John, Kingsley, Graham, and Neil. I’m sorry that you’re not around with the rest of us today.

    Ach, another year. Meanwhile, I have to ask myself WTF are the younger generation doing ignoring the lessons of history?

  • Statistics Made Fun

    Nobody does this better than Hans Rosling. Here’s a particularly nice example:

    (hat tip to Pharyngula)

  • Hitchens and Paxman

    Last night, BBC Two had a terrific interview of Christopher Hitchens conducted by Jeremy Paxman. It was a joy to listen to Hitchens laying out his ideas and thoughts on his life and politics. What was not a joy was to look at him and realise that he is not long for this world. He has a particularly virulent cancer that gives its hosts only a 5% chance of pulling through more than five years.

    Still, at least we will have the record of his work to remind us of the need to keep fighting for reason and the Enlightenment against the forces of superstition and theocracy. And for the moment, at least, we still have Hitch.

    …and here’s to KBO…

  • Price and Value

    I read in today’s Guardian that there was an auction today of Alan Turing’s papers. While I was pleased to see that Google had donated $100,000 to the bid of Bletchley Park to keep the papers for the nation, I couldn’t help but feel disheartened by the thought that Turing’s papers could potentially disappear into a private collection, to be gazed upon by a single, wealthy individual, quite possibly hailing from Silicon Valley.

    Turing was an important individual in the history of not only computing, but in the fact that Nazi Germany was eventually defeated by the Allies. And Britain repaid that debt by persecuting him because he was gay, with the result that Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

    I can’t help feeling that Turing’s papers should have been acquired for the nation and humanity at large. Once again, we seem to understand only the price of everything and the value of nothing.

    Perhaps all is not lost; if the new owner will arrange for the papers to be made available online, then something may come out of this. Perhaps the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online can serve as a model here.

  • “Treating People Like Pigeons Really Does Work”

    Adam Curtis has another fascinating blog entry. This time he takes as his cue the Behavioural Insights Unit recently set up by David Cameron to advise the UK Government. Curtis argues that this unit is built on the Operant Conditioning ideas of B. F. Skinner.

    It makes for fascinating, and somewhat unsettling, reading. Do check out the videoclips that Curtis includes, particularly the one of the two market researchers and the final comment from Lewis Mumford.

  • It Gets Better–Part II

    Here’s another video response to the rising wave of anti-gay sentiment towards American LGBT teens. This time it’s from Google employees who are themselves LGBT.

    I think that the testimony of “ordinary” people as opposed to “celebrities” makes a much more powerful message. And good for Google for standing behind this video.

  • A Treasured Heritage

    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. 

  • Baggini’s Dog Whistle

    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.

  • Things Will Get Better…

    A speech from the heart of Joel Burns, councilman in Fort Worth, Texas. He made it to adulthood. It would seem that today, in 21st Century America, it is becoming even more difficult for gay teens to escape being bullied.

    (hat tip to PZ Myers)

  • RIP, Claire

    Damn, Claire Rayner has died. A wonderful woman. While I never had the privilege to know her personally, I spoke with her many years ago on one of her phone-ins. She was forthright, sensible, and I would have trusted her to the ends of the earth. She will be missed.

    And here’s another tribute to her from Roy Greenslade. I did enjoy the quote that he gave of her commenting on a far more powerful, yet by comparison an immeasurably poorer example of a human being than she was:

    “I have no language with which to adequately describe Joseph Alois Ratzinger, AKA the Pope. In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature. His views are so disgusting, so repellent and so hugely damaging to the rest of us, that the only thing to do is to get rid of him.”

    It also took this piece from Greenslade to cause some pieces to finally fall together in my increasingly addled brain. I simply hadn’t realised that Jay Rayner was the son of Claire. I leave you with his tweet:

    My dear old mum, Claire Rayner, died yesterday aged 79. I, like so many others, will miss her terribly.

    Amen.

  • Baroness Warnock, Please Check Your Facts

    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)