Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Society

  • The Me Generation

    The concept of the Me Generation is not particularly new – it’s been around since the 1970s, but I wonder whether the intensity dial isn’t being turned up a notch or two higher by our technology.
     
    Danah Boyd, over at Apophenia, has been wondering something similar, and as usual explores the issues in a thoughful way. She comes to the conclusion that technology isn’t the culprit, rather it’s ourselves.

  • The Lonely Robot

    That was the subtitle of the second part of Adam Curtis’ new series on BBC2. Another hour of exposition of theory illuminated (mostly) by a dense weave of archive footage. This second part struck me as being somewhat easier to grasp than the first, but it’s still tough going for me. Still, I shouldn’t complain at having something on the telly that deserves to be well-chewed and savoured. It makes a welcome change from the usual diet of pap.
     
    There were some good moments in it. I screamed an obscenity at the point in the interview with James Buchanan, when Curtis poses the question to him on whether some politicians could act out of idealism. Buchanan’s point of view is that politicians and bureaucrats are self-serving and that public duty is a myth – it is impossible for them to interpret and express the general will of the people. Buchanan’s reply to Curtis was one of puzzlement and denial that idealism could ever exist – a "it does not compute" reaction. My scream was powered by the certain and personal knowledge of one politician – my father – who certainly was never self-serving, and went into politics out of a sense of duty. He may well have been a rare bird, and perhaps these days his breed is even rarer, but for Buchanan to deny even the possibility of the existence of such a species was too much for me. 
     
    Not Saussure and Fixed Point have more, much more, in-depth analysis on The Lonely Robot. Recommended reading.

  • Forward to the Dark Ages

    I see the leaders of Poland are determined to turn the clock back. They want to introduce a law to ban discussions on homosexuality in schools and educational institutions across the country, with teachers facing the sack, fines or imprisonment.
     
    It’s only a few years since the pernicious Section 28 law was at last repealed in the UK, and now another EU country wants to go back down that road. And as proof that being a leader of a country is no obstacle to being barking mad, we have President Lech Kaczynski, the twin brother of the prime minister, supporting the law, claiming that:
    the future of the human race is dependent on discrediting homosexuality in the classroom. During a visit to Ireland last month, he said: "If that kind of approach to sexual life were to be promoted on a grand scale, the human race would disappear."
    Er, Lech, fat chance. Life doesn’t work that way. But then, rational thought clearly doesn’t seem to be his strong point.

  • The Half-Bitten Peach

    Elsewhere in today’s Observer, Victoria Coren dreams of combining the UK’s Department of Education’s latest whizzo schemes. Apparently one scheme is that primary schools should teach compulsory languages, including Mandarin; while another is to introduce children’s books with gay themes into the primary schools. You can, of course, guess which of the two the usual suspects (i.e. the Daily Mail tabloid and fundamentalist "family" groups) have been fulminating about the most. 
     
    But real life has already got there ahead of Victoria. For centuries in China, the terms "half-bitten peach" and the "cut-sleeve" have been metaphors for homosexual intimacy. The first dates from the Zhou period. Let Adrian Carton, in an excellent chapter in the equally excellent Gay Life and Culture – a World History, take up the story:
    The politics of personal favouritism are explored through the infatuation of Wei, Duke Ling (534 – 493 BCE), for the court official Mizi Xia. At the imperial court, making use of the ruler’s carriage for personal errands was deemed a serious offence, attracting the penalty of foot amputation. When his mother fell ill, Mizi Xia used the carriage in order to visit her; instead of punishing him, the duke praised his protégé’s filial duty and respect. Another scene depicts Mizi Xia and the duke walking through an orchard; the favoured official gives the ruler a half-eaten peach to eat, inspiring the duke to contemplate Mizi’s sense of devotion and self-sacrifice. Such was the influence of this fable that the name ‘Mizi Xia’ and the metaphor of the ‘love of the shared peach’ (fen tao zhi ai) evoked the phenomenon of homosexual intimacy for generations to come.
    And for the second example, from the time of the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE):
    Ban Gu supplies perhaps the most famous example of male intimacy which became a synonym for homosexual desire in China. The tale of Emperor Ai and his favourite, Dong Xian, speaks of an affectionate tenderness that seems universal. The couple were sleeping, with Dong Xian stretched out across the sleeve of the emperor. Not wanting to disturb his companion, the ruler cut off the sleeve of his own robe so that he could rise and resume his duties. The metaphor of the ‘cut sleeve’ (duan xiu) thus became a recognized euphemism for homosexuality, it reflected the extent to which homosexual intimacy had permeated the culture of upper-class Chinese life, but it also conveyed enduring noble qualities of loyalty, respect and filial attachment intrinsic to the Confucian moral univers. 

  • “The Law Is A Ass”

    Mr. Bumble would have undoubtedly repeated his famous line at the news, reported in The Guardian today, that the UK Law Lords have:
    decided, by a four-one majority, that the pair, who spent more than 12 years in jail for a murder they did not commit, must pay the "living expenses" they incurred in prison and which have been deducted from their compensation package. The law lords said the deduction, which amounted to around £50,000 each, should not be seen as board and lodging, but as expenses they would have had to pay from their earnings if they had been free. 
    Absurd doesn’t even begin to describe this. As one commenter in the Guardian notes, and as I’ve said before, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil increasingly looks like less of a satire and more of a prescient factual documentary of today’s society.

  • Did You Know?

    Entertaining little presentation of facts and figures. While some of the implications and interpretations are somewhat questionable, I do like the punchline. However, the assertion that we live in exponential times is very misleading. We have always lived in exponential times, it’s just that now the rate of change is becoming very apparent.
     
     
    (hat tip to Crunch Notes)

  • Crib Notes

    Once again, I am grateful to Not Saussure. This time for two reasons.
     
    a) drawing my attention to the synopsis of the second installment of The Trap. Close reading of this material will prepare this bear of very little brain to have a fighting chance of understanding and appreciating the argument being put forth by Adam Curtis when the programme is broadcast this coming Sunday.
     
    b) referencing the article in today’s Guardian which appears to indicate that idiotic quantification is the new fashion for Nu Labour.

  • The Trap

    I mentioned that I would be screwed to the sofa to watch The Trap by Adam Curtis on BBC2 last Sunday. I was there and watching – but for this bear of very little brain there was an awful lot to absorb. There’s a problem, I have found, when both the argument and my brain are dense. I’m not really complaining – the current approach in the media to reduce everything to a two-minute soundbite deserves to rot in Hell – but there was a lot to take in. Perhaps the next programmes will give me a chance to tease out the arguments.
     
    Still, I did not feel that it was a waste of time – unlike most stuff on the telly these days.
     
    Not Saussure comes closest to what I think my reaction would have been had I grokked Curtis’ argument more fully… However, I’ll be there on the sofa for the rest of the series…

  • Playing With Dolls

    Jeremy Stangroom, over at the Talking Philosophy blog, links to, and discusses, the short film A Girl Like Me. The recreation of the famous doll experiment of Kenneth and Mamie Clark breaks my heart. Have we really not moved on at all?

  • The Power of Language

    I’ve remarked before how language can be used to shape and direct our attitudes and feelings. Jim Burroway in Box Turtle Bulletin has a particularly interesting entry on how language is used by anti-gay groups in the US. Well worth reading and thinking about. As Burroway says:
    For me, attending the Love Won Out ex-gay conference in Phoenix was very much like being an anthropologist from Mars, as Oliver Saks [sic] once put it. I observed a culture with its own vaguely familiar language and customs. And learning its language was key to understanding the framework and worldview from which Love Won Out operated. But as is true with many cultures, it almost requires a total immersion inside the culture of Love Won Out to pick up on the nuances of those terms and customs. 
    I tend to feel like that Sacksian anthropologist (actually ‘on’ Mars, rather than ‘from’ Mars, as Burroway writes) when I look at much of what emanates from the US, and doubtless the feeling is mutual. The contrast with things that are taken for granted here in The Netherlands is sometimes startling. Yesterday, for example, the Dutch "queen of the afternoon chat-shows", Catherine Keyl, had as her main guests Albert Verlinde and Onno Hoes, a same-sex couple who have been married for five years. Verlinde works in television and produces musicals, while Hoes is a politician; a member of the Executive for the province of Noord-Brabant. While the focus of the interview was on how do this couple juggle their busy professional careers to have enough time together, the underlying language and feeling of the interview was how "gewoon" (commonplace, ordinary) their situation was.
     
    The interview served to point up that their experience was part of family life, whereas in Burroway’s example of the Love Won Out conference, the language used serves to drive a wedge between a person and their sexuality:
    Their language is specially designed to treat people and their sexuality as if they were two completely separate entities, as if sexuality were a separate thing outside of the person. As Melissa Fryrear put it in a breakout session, they constantly work to “separate the ‘who’ from the ‘do’,” or, as others have put it more crudely in Mike Haley’s example, “the sinner” from “the sin”. 

  • International Women’s Day

    Tomorrow is the annual marking of International Women’s Day. It continues to be necessary, although as Zoe Williams points out in today’s Guardian, it appears to be in danger of drowning in trivia. Just one minor quibble with Ms. Williams’ article, I think she was having a Freudian slip when she reffered to "Agassi kitchen utensils" in place of "Alessi kitchen utensils"…

  • Is Your Baby Gay?

    Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, dreams of the day when he can carry out a final solution for gays…
    If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin. 
    (hat tip to Unscrewing the Inscrutable for the link)

  • The Trap

    Via Not Saussure comes news that BBC2 starts a new three-part series next week. It’s The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream of Freedom. As it’s made by Adam Curtis, the man who made the absolutely riveting Power of Nightmares, I can see that I’ll be screwed to the sofa watching this.

  • God Is A Spandrel

    Darwin’s God is the title of an interesting article* in the New York Times magazine about exploring the basics of the two major camps in the scientists studying the evolution of religious belief: the byproduct theorists and the adaptionists. The former posit theories that religion is a byproduct of some other cognitive processes. That’s the "God is a spandrel" camp. The adaptionists, on the other hand, posit theories that religion of itself is a succesful evolutionary strategy. The article opens with the author (Robin Marantz Henig) introducing the person and the work of the anthropologist Scott Atran. He’s an interesting character, and I’m in the middle of his book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. However, I’m not convinced by his explanation of the "African Relic" anecdote related in the NYT article. It seems to me to be much more reasonable that, rather than the subjects’ reluctance being powered by superstition, as he claims, it’s powered by suspicion.
     
    I need to explore both sides of the byproduct versus adaptionist arguments some more. My natural tendency is to plump for the "God is a spandrel" explanation, but I’m quite willing to accept evidence that religion might have once solved problems of survival and reproduction of our early ancestors. I’m far less convinced that it continues to do so today.
     
    *This link goes to the opening section of the article reproduced on the Richard Dawkins web site. The full article is currently to be found here, but the NYT has a habit of placing archive material behind a subscription wall. Get it while it’s hot.

  • Coulrophobia

    I’ve often suspected that I suffer from a mild form of coulrophobia – I find clowns somewhat disturbing. But I think that when I end up in a nursing home, the last thing I want to invade my space is a posse of clowns, particularly Christian Clowns…
     
     
     
     
    (hat tip, I think, to Orac)

  • Life Was Simpler Then…

    …and Health and Safety issues were a thing of the future. Still, I’m sure a barrel with a pipe stuck through it worked out a good deal cheaper than the Playstations, Nintendos and Xboxes that today’s children have come to demand.

  • The Land of the Free?

    Well, not if you happen to be a transsexual, it would appear. A friend of ours has emailed me news of what has just happened in Largo, in Florida, where she lives. The City Manager, Steve Stanton, has been removed from his post. His crime? He is a transsexual who wishes to proceed to become female. And for that, the bigots in Largo have been out in force. People such as Peggy Schaefer and Ron Sanders. Over to Peggy:
    "I don’t want that man in office," she said. "I don’t think we should be paying him $150,000 a year when he’s not been truthful. We have to speak up. Of course, we don’t believe in sex changes or lesbianism. They have their rights, but we do, too." 
    And Ron:
    "Mr. Stanton is not a role model. He’s proven that. I think for the sake of our young people today, you need to do what’s right, and that’s terminate him. … If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he’d want him terminated. Make no mistake about it." 
    While there have been voices of moderation – such as the Reverend Abhi Janamanchi:
    "Do not give in to extreme pressure, because there is such a thing as the tyranny of the majority. … Make this judgment based on sound ethics, compassion, humanity, and truly show commitment to diversity."
    – the end result is that the City Commissioners voted 5-2 to remove Stanton from his post. Another victory for bigotry and intolerance. God bless America?

  • Reflections on a Mote of Dust

    Carl Sagan wrote Reflections on a Mote of Dust in 1996. His words remain as true today as they were then.
    Icecorescientist has set the words to images and music…
     
     
     
    (hat tip to the Bad Astronomer for the link)

  • Hell On Earth

    Hilzoy, over at Obsidian Wings, draws our attention to the situation in Northern Uganda. Heartrending.

  • Another Two Data Points

     
     
    An open and shut case – ineffably sad and a terrible waste of human potential of all concerned.