Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Society

  • Smoke and Mirrors – And Terrorism

    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.

  • Short Story

    Paul Burston, over at his blog, pens an (autobiographical?) short story about a mother and son. In just a page of short sentences and short paragraphs, a whole life is conjured up. That’s talent.

  • A Catholic Appeal

    Johann Hari addresses an appeal to British Catholics in the run up to the Pope’s visit. I suspect that most will be blinded by hero worship and not see the feet of clay in the red Prada shoes.

  • What’s the Point?

    I know I shouldn’t get irritated by it. I know that it is pointless to feel exasperated by twaddle. But when Lord (yup, Lord) Sacks starts heaping up strawmen, I really do feel like saying enough is enough, fer gawd’s sake.

    Let’s just examine what he is reported to have said:

    “There is a difference between science and religion. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation. The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the universe came into being.”

    Erm, hello? The Bible simply isn’t interested, because it states how it happened. The fact that it’s nonsense seems to have passed by its readers who think they know how to interpret its fantasies. Its mind was made up by the original writers.

    And Religion is about interpretation, eh? Tell that to those who think that the Bible is God’s inerrant law.

    And of course, there’s a warning:

    Sacks also said the mutual hostility between religion and science was one of “the curses of our age” and warned it would be equally damaging to both.

    Enquiry is not a curse. The fact that your folklore feels under threat is not equally damaging to both..

    And Lord Sacks rounds off with:

    “But there is more to wisdom than science. It cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science.”

    Science is not masquerading as a religion, except in your worldview, Lord Sacks. And that is simply because the results of scientific enquiry are undermining the strawmen set up by your interpretation of sacred texts. Texts that were written by human beings trying to do the best (or the worst) that they could in less enlightened ages.

    And of course, Moses speaks for Lord Sacks.

  • Feeling Slightly Dirty

    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.

  • The Illusion of Free Will

    Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne muses on the concept of Free Will. His musings were prompted by reading Dan Dennett’s book: Freedom Evolves.

    His post is followed by a discussion by commenters batting the ideas back and forth. I’m no philosopher, and reading some of this stuff makes my brain hurt, but it’s enjoyable all the same to explore the ideas.

    When it comes down to it, I think I’m pretty much in the camp that believes that free will is an illusion, albeit an exceedingly strong one. I think Ophelia pretty much sums it up for me:

    This subject doesn’t fret me the way it does some people, and I suspect that’s because I’m lazy about it. I’m lazy about a lot of things. It doesn’t fret me because I always end up thinking “but it feels as if I choose and in a way that feeling amounts to the same thing as really choosing.” That’s probably lazy because of the “in a way” or the “amounts to” or both. It’s woolly. And yet –

    And yet if we all do live that way, feeling all the time as if we choose various things, then for the purposes of living that way, it does amount to the same thing. Or at least it seems to. It’s like the self, and other such illusions. We can agree that they’re illusions, and yet in everyday life, we go on living and thinking as if they’re not, and we can’t really do anything else.

    It’s like vision, too – we don’t really see what we see; what we see is a confabulation – we fill in all kinds of missing bits with our brains to make a seamless whole that our eyes don’t in fact see. I’m aware of that, but I certainly can’t refrain from doing it.

    Perhaps I should go back and re-read Freedom Evolves again. Now, is that a decision taken of my own free will?

  • Afghan Images

    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.

  • The Pope and Gorgeous Georg

    Colm Tóibín has a very good article in the London Review of Books looking at the issue of homosexuality and the Catholic Church. It’s long and it’s worth reading.

  • “I Believe in Wallace Stevens”

    I didn’t know who Wallace Stevens was until I listened to A. S. Byatt. In this interview, her thoughts and ideas are simply scintillating. Well worth watching. What I want to know is, what is the significance of the roll of sellotape?

  • Polygyny Is Bad For You

    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.

  • Hitchens: No Deathbed Conversion

    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.

  • RIP, Tony Judt

    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

  • How Do Atheists Face Death?

    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.

  • Begging The Question

    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”.

  • Aisha

    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

  • Islamic Superheroes

    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.

  • Another Defence of the Burqa

    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.

  • Love Wins Out

    An unexpected ray of sunshine in Malawi. I am pleased for Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, but clearly Malawi’s President uttered the pardon through gritted teeth. That does not bode well for Steven and Tiwonge’s life in Malawi. We’ve had enough martyrs.

  • Open Your Eyes

    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?

  • Statesman Speaks

    The term "Statesman" is defined in my dictionary as "one versed in the art of government; one taking a leading part in the administration of the State". The former president of Nigeria, Olesegun Obasanjo, is described by the Guardian as an "African Statesman". He’s also, on the evidence of his comments on recent events in Malawi, something of an old-fashioned bigot.