Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
And in yet another post on Christopher Hitchens, here’s an interview with him. The lion still has a roar, but not for much longer, I fear. He is deep into the land of malady. Nevertheless, it’s good to hear direct from his lips that any future rumours of deathbed conversions should be treated with the contempt that they deserve.
Hat tip to Jerry Coyne, over at Why Evolution Is True.
Tony Judt has died. I have read very little of his work, but what little I have, makes me think that I should seek out more. Sample:
“History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another,” he once declared. “It can also show you that there’s been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
“And if you can’t find a meaning behind history, what would be the meaning of any single life? I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can’t see a meaning in it at all.”
So it goes. And that can, accidentally, add up to a great deal.
P.S. here’s a video of Judt talking about the appalling disease that killed him
Yesterday, I mentioned the article by Christopher Hitchens about his entry into the land of malady. It’s an article that has been picked up by many people in the blogosphere, including PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula. But what caught my eye was the comment made by “Cuttlefish” on that entry concerning how atheists face death. It’s a short, but beautifully written, statement about the subject. A taste, but do go and read it in its entirety:
How does an atheist face death? By facing it, not by denying or diminishing it. Not by turning it into a transition to some other reality. Not by making up a story to make themselves feel better. It hurts because it’s real, it’s permanent, it’s the end. It should hurt.
And now he lives on only in our memory, and in our changed lives. That is his legacy; that is the good he continues to do. He’s not looking down and guiding; he doesn’t wait for us to join him. If we love him, we can do our best to fight for his causes, to continue his work.
In the real world. The only one we have.
Amen.
The Guardian’s Comment is Free section runs a feature called “The Question” Each week a question is posed and a series of writers offer their thoughts (usually both pro and con) on it. This week, the question is: Can we choose what we believe? Or, to put it another way: How do you believe the things you do, and are they things you can change?
Julian Baggini gets things off to a good start, but as is so often in CiF, we lurch from the sublime to the ridiculous with the next response from Usama Hasan. His opening sentence is a perfect illustration of the begging the question fallacy:
God exists, obviously.
Erm, no, it ain’t obvious. His piece pretty much goes downhill from there. As Baggini concludes in his piece:
The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments. Beliefs based on ignorance or whim are thus less freely chosen than those held in full knowledge and on reflection. So to take one of the biggest belief choices of all, we do not choose to believe in God or not, but we can choose how much we attend to inconvenient facts, distorting self-motivations, and the rationality of arguments. In that sense, we are responsible for what we freely believe.
There’s been a number of items recently on whether free will is itself an illusion or not. For example, the philosopher Dr. Galen Strawson had a good article in the New York Times recently. His position is that free will is definitely an illusion. Bradley Voytek, over at his Oscillatory Thoughts blog, has some comments to counter the argument. And Jerry Coyne had an item on his Why Evolution Is True blog outlining the surprising results of an experiment to test “free will”. As Coyne writes:
Here’s the surprising result: the brain activity that predicted which button would be pressed began a full seven seconds before the subject was conscious of his decision to press the left or right button. The authors note, too, that there is a delay of three seconds before the MRI records neural activity since the machine detects blood oxygenation. Taking this into account, neuronal activity predicting which button would be pressed began about ten seconds before a conscious decision was made.
Food for thought, and a good deal more interesting than “God exists, obviously”.
Photographer Jodi Bieber talks about the experience of photographing Aisha – a young woman disfigured by men in the Taliban. What I found the most affecting statement was Bieber’s wish not to make Aisha a victim. I would say that she has succeeded. Aisha stares out at us, to challenge us, and ask how can we sit back and let this happen?
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/42806370001?isVid=1
Here’s an interesting presentation by Naif Al-Mutawa. He has created a group of superheroes based on Islamic culture and religion.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
I have mixed feelings about it. His heart is clearly in the right place, but… I think my misgivings are crystallised by the comments from “a persona” on the TED page of the video:
superficially commendable reframing exercise with profound problems.
– Naif conflates thema with schema in describing archetypes as christian. Archetypes didn’t come from the bible – the bible (as with the qur’an) came from archetypes. they reflect aspects of human psychology, and to misappropriate them in this way is disingenuous at best.
– Values aren’t islamic or christian, in the same way that logic isn’t greek and science isn’t western. this is a classic argument used by religious apologists. (“judeo-christian values”, “islamic values”). values are values because they are to the good, or otherwise, of human life.
The issue should not be to make people feel good about being muslims. it should be to educate people that values are intrinsic, not because mohammed espoused them. the 99 is based on a lie – that these values are good because mohammed, through allah, says that they are good. teach that reality is the authority, not another fictional cartoon character such as allah.
These points summarise my view. The whole point about Superman and other superheroes is that they draw upon archetypes that are not tied to any one religion, but to something deeper and more fundamental – our very humanity. Linking superheroes explicitly to one religion – whatever it is – could well end up backfiring on the good intentions behind their creation. Still, it will be interesting to see what happens with the 99 over the next few years, and how the children who read about their adventures will develop and take their place in tomorrow’s world.
I referred a short while back to a good post from Steve Zara on why the burqa should not be banned. Now, Norm draws my attention to an equally good post on the same subject from Kenan Malik. The heart of the matter:
If women are forced to do something against their will, the law already protects them in democratic countries. But what evidence exists, suggests that in Europe most burqa-clad women do not act from a sense of compulsion. According to the DCRI report in France, the majority of women wearing the burqa do so voluntarily, largely as an expression of identity and as an act of provocation. A second French report by the information authority, the SGDI, came to similar conclusions. Burqa wearers, it suggested, sought to ‘provoke society, or one’s family’, and saw it as a ‘badge of militancy’, and of ‘Salafist origins’. The burqa ban will only deepen the sense of alienation out which the desire for such provocation emerges.
The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.
Unfortunately, I suspect that with Wilders in the ascendancy here in the Netherlands, Malik’s common sense will be ignored.
A good article by Julie Bindel about the film Eyes Wide Open. The film depicts what happens when two men, who also happen to be Hassidic Jews, meet and discover their love for one another. As she says about the real-life gay people who exist within such communities:
The fascination for me was the subjects’ allegiance to their religion rather than their sexuality. Why do they stay wedded to a set of beliefs that interprets their lifestyles as an abomination? What pull does fundamentalist religion have for these people, who, unlike many others, could walk away into the arms of another community?
They are good questions, and I don’t know the answers. I also don’t know what would have happened had I, by chance, been born into such a community. Would I have had the strength to be true to myself? Or would I have lived and died under the yoke of an inimical morality?
I see that the mascots for the 2012 Olympics to be held in London have been unveiled. They have the improbable names of Wenlock and Mandeville, and apparently figure in a children’s story specially commissioned for the Olympics and written by Michael Morpogu.
I have to confess that I have never heard of him before Sir Sebastian Coe claimed that Morpogu was “the nation’s most popular children’s storyteller”. Er, really? Anyway, Mr. Morpogu has his own website, and I have to say that he sounds rather engaging.
Still, Wenlock and Mandeville? I think it’s going to be an uphill struggle – rather like the London Olympics themselves. The comments on the Guardian’s story do rather spell it out:
Obby:
I think I speak for everyone when I say:
Jesus Fucking Christ
PaulBowen:
Because nothing says "Britain" like a creepy bipedal showerhead/penis thing with lobster claws.
DataHoover:
I have to get this off my chest:
Doesn’t the new Olympic logo look like Lisa Simpson performing a sex act?
And that’s only a selection…
Today, May 4th, is Remembrance Day in The Netherlands. Throughout the country, ceremonies are held to remember the dead of World War II and other conflicts. Chief amongst these is the ceremony that is held in Dam Square in Amsterdam, in the presence of the Dutch Royal Family, politicians and veterans.
Today’s affair was a telling example of how crowd hysteria can suddenly take hold. Of course, many people would probably be on edge following the incident in Apeldoorn in 2009 on the Queen’s Birthday.
The Remembrance ceremony revolves around the two-minute silence held at 8pm, when throughout the Netherlands, people stop. Today, in Dam Square, in the presence of the Dutch Royal Family, politicians, veterans and thousands of people, another incident occurred. Just before the end of the two-minute silence, the stillness in the Square was broken by the sound of a man shouting. People started to panic, and a stampede began:
It appears as though an Orthodox Jew had suddenly started declaiming into the silence; as a result another man nearby, dropped his suitcase (er, his suitcase?) at this, and the crowd panics. The Royal Family are whisked away, and chaos ensues.
To give the organisers credit, order is soon restored as it becomes clear that it was a false alarm. But it just goes to show how easily shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre can lead to panic.
At the impromptu press conference held a couple of hours later with the Amsterdam Mayor and Chief of Police, a journalist asked whether it was a good idea to let people carrying suitcases into the Square. And so it goes – let’s all get frightened over phantoms. Fortunately, the Police Chief had the good sense to defuse the question. Hopefully, sanity will continue to prevail.
Update: It seems as though the man who caused the panic is a 39 year-old Amsterdammer who is well known to the police because of his record of theft, possession and dealing of drugs and threatening violence. He wore a hat, long black coat and has a full beard and long sideburns – that’s why many took him to be an Orthodox Jew. An eyewitness said that he was talking to himself during the silence, and when he was asked to be quiet by bystanders, he suddenly threw his head back and screamed. A man nearby dropped the case he was carrying, and panic ensues in which 63 people were hurt. The Dutch word "koffer" was used to described the case, but this is literally a portmanteau word that can describe anything from a handbag up to a suitcase, which is why I thought it was the latter. But now I suspect, given the fact that the police described the contents as being personal documents, that the man was probably carrying a briefcase.
KIN’s look, feel and functionality are designed around this notion — You are your own publisher, and KIN is a magazine of your life. What you share, and with whom, are the heroes of the experience, rather than icons and menus. KIN completely changes the way people think about sharing and networking on a mobile phone.
Oh well, I’ll be getting off the world soon enough.
Update: Hah – I see that Microsoft scrapped the KIN phones after less than a year, and after spending $1 billion on the fiasco.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 