Month: January 2005

  • Anderson, Sowell, Crosby on Affirmative Action

    Affirmative action is recursive: whether it works depends on our interpretations of it.

  • Kicking and Spanking

    This is an odd piece – a mix of harsh but possibly true observations and macho unpleasantness. Of course the one so often does slop over into the other. I do that slopping often myself, at least so I’m told (and I’m sure it’s true). That’s what’s usually going on in disagreements over Richard Dawkins (and Christopher Hitchens, too: he attracts such Necker cube-like clashes of perception the way chocolate attracts, er, me). Many people think Dawkins is being rude, tactless, brutal, self-satisfied and the like, while others think he is being honest and fog-dispelling. I tend to the latter view, but then I’m an atheist myself, so what he says doesn’t get up my nose at the outset.

    But this guy who doesn’t admire Susan Sontag…

    The reverential tone of the obituaries served to confirm that self-proclaimed intellectuals, no matter how deluded or preposterous, exert a strange, intimidating power over non-intellectuals – especially if they employ that infuriating literary device, the epigram.

    Well, yeah. One does know what he means – though actually I would say that it’s (some) intellectuals that the intimidating power is really exerted over, rather than non-intellectuals. It’s hard not to suspect that some version of that is what’s going on with the cult of Derrida. (I say ‘suspect’ because as I’ve mentioned several times, I haven’t read Derrida [apart from a few late articles], so I’m talking about the way his followers [and they are followers, all too often, rather than merely admirers or readers] talk and write about him, not what he said and wrote himself.) The admiration seems to be so out of proportion to anything anyone manages to articulate that one has to wonder – are they simply snowed by rhetoric? If they were snowed by substance, wouldn’t they do a better job of convincing skeptics?

    But even though one knows what he means, one also wishes he had kept some thoughts to himself – or better yet not had them at all (in a perfect world).

    But would that someone had treated Sontag in life as Dr Johnson had disposed of Bishop Berkeley’s contention that objects only exist because we see them: kicking a stone till he bounced off it, he snarled, “I refute it thus.”

    To take the trivial point first, it’s well known that Johnson didn’t ‘dispose’ of anything, that idealism is not disposed of that easily, that Berkeley was not such a fool that he didn’t know what a stone was. But that aside – Johnson kicked a stone, not Berkeley. Here’s this columnist guy (an intellectual of some sort, presumably, or he wouldn’t have the gig) apparently wanting to kick Sontag herself. Or perhaps not – perhaps simply wanting someone to ‘dispose of’ her contentions by kicking stones with energy. But he phrases it so vaguely and ambiguously that we can’t really tell, and I suspect that’s deliberate. Especially given the way he follows it up.

    If memory serves – and possibly it doesn’t, no doubt clouded by guilt that I failed to put the wretched woman over my knee and give her a sound spanking…

    Oh please. Come on. Isn’t it time to wake up now? Time to get a clue? Time to, you know, not let one’s threatened guy syndrome hang out quite so blatantly? Don’t men realize what they sound like when they slaver over fantasies of beating up women? Well who knows – I suppose in their view and that of their fans they are doing what I take people like Dawkins to be doing: brushing away clouds of sentimentality and obfuscation and appeasment (as Salman Rushdie put it) to tell the plain truth. Being blunt, irreverent, disrespectful, amusing, and honest. But threats of violence (however ‘jokey’) don’t work that way. Except clearly some people think they do. Oh well.

  • Appeasment

    Well said, Salman. In a sharp letter to the Guardian in reply to a silly comment of Ian Jack’s on Saturday (I saw the comment at the time, rolled my eyes and wanted to argue with it, but also wanted a rest from the sound of my own voice arguing), in which he mentions the ‘currently fashionable Blairite politics of religious appeasement at all costs.’

    Should we now censor ourselves because the current potentates of the Islamic faith are more repressive than their predecessors? Do we have no principles of our own? The continuing collapse of liberal, democratic, secular and humanist principles in the face of the increasingly strident demands of organised religions is perhaps the most worrying aspect of life in contemporary Britain.

    Well said, Salman (excuse the familiarity – I’m a vulgar Yank). Well said Salman and Kenan and Homa and Maryam and Azam and many more. Maybe before too long this kind of well-saying will reach critical mass and the fashionable appeasment thing will become much less fashionable. If everyone just keeps nagging away (despite getting tired of sound of own voice, as one does).

  • A Culture of Conformity in the Humanities?

    Scholes, Appiah, Menand, Guillory and others discuss the problem.

  • Politics of Religious Appeasment at all Costs

    Salman Rushdie laments collapse of liberal principles before religions’ strident demands.

  • Unionists Around the World Condemn Murder

    Last month at ICFTU congress Salih spoke of hopes to build a democratic union.

  • Shock and Revulsion at Torture and Murder

    Attack on the right of Iraqi workers to trade union representation.

  • AFL-CIO Condemns Murder of Iraqi Trade Unionist

    Hadi Salih was shot by assassins who broke into his Baghdad home January 4.

  • Partial defence = support

    “In the Guardian last week, the eminent philosopher, Julian Baggini, announced that, contrary to appearances, New Labour’s plans for identity cards were an idea which should be embraced by the left.”
    Nick Cohen, the Observer, 5 December 2004

    Bad moves can be made by readers as well as writers. When those readers are writers themselves, the result can be flagrant misrepresentation of someone’s position, which is very irksome for the inaccurately portrayed party.

    I have been at the receiving end of this kind of thing several times now, and a pattern seems to be emerging. Time and again, people mistake a partial defence of something for full support of it. It seems impossible to point out that something can be said for x or y without someone who should know better interpreting that as meaning that, on balance, you think x or y is a good thing.

    For example, a while back, someone on the widely-respected Crooked Timber blog attacked a previous Bad Move saying “the whole argument was undermined by the blatant political stance of the writer.” (See Armando’s comment, fifth one down.) What he then went on to say was true “according to Baggini” just wasn’t what I said at all. What seems to have happened is that Armando saw that I had, on one specific point, defended Blair and criticised one of his opponents, and he had therefore assumed that I in general supported Blair. This ignores the fact that in other columns I have used Blair’s speeches as examples of bad moves. This seems to me a classic example of mistaking a partial defence for full support, so that to defend Blair just once is to adopt a “blatant political stance”.

    Nick Cohen has recently made the same mistake. In a Guardian article, I tried to argue that the debate over compulsory ID cards in the UK was dominated by concerns about limits on freedom from government “interference” and neglected legitimate concerns about how far governments are entitled to get involved in our daily lives to increase, on balance, our freedom to act.

    Whether or not my argument was a good one, I quite clearly stopped short of commending ID cards, saying that I did not suspect the measure “would reap a big enough dividend in terms of increasing our positive freedom to go about our business safely” and describing the plan as “half-baked”. But it seems this was not clear enough, for once again, partially defending the home secretary David Blunkett and seeing some merit in the grounds of his arguments was quickly confused with being a supporter of him and his measures.

    Cohen was perhaps being deliberately mischievous. After all, his description of me as an “eminent philosopher” is an ironic in-joke. (He used the term previously in an openDemocracy exchange and, when I corrected him, he made “an unreserved apology” saying “I withdraw the slur at once and promise never to repeat it.”)

    But mischief alone surely can’t explain this, as no self-respecting, eminent columnist would consciously go into print having got their facts so clearly wrong. And if Cohen was indeed sincere, it shows how easy it is for people to confuse partial defence with support.

    I don’t know what the origins of the mistake are, but I would speculate that they reside in the desire to divide the world into clearly opposing camps – the “us” and the “them”. If you tend to think in this way, partial defences can look like signs and signals of what someone really believes. In such a binary world, for me to admit that Blair or Blunkett has a point is therefore a sign that I’m a closet authoritarian Blairite. Well, maybe I am! But the key point is that the partial defences I have described show no such thing, for I have also partially defended the political opponents of these people and I can’t be a closet supporter of everyone. Not, that is, unless my own powers to embrace contradiction are more developed than I thought.

  • Massimo Pigliucci on Nonsense on Stilts

    Rhetoric, mistaken claims, sweeping statements, unhelpful analogy taken for deep insight…

  • Steven Weinberg on Oppenheimer Biography

    He was wide open to new ideas and had the ability to understand anything.

  • Are You an Altie?

    A while back on misc.health.alternative, a term was coined to describe people who are so militantly pro-alternative medicine and so distrustful of conventional medicine that they will never admit when conventional medicine is effective and refuse ever to concede that any alternative medical practitioner might, just might, possibly be a quack. (Certain regulars on misc.health.alternative inspired this term. One day perhaps I will discuss a couple of specific examples with actual posts by them to Usenet, so that you can see even more clearly what I mean.) I forgot which m.h.a. skeptical regular coined the term, but the term was “altie.” About a year ago, we even came up with a Jeff Foxworthy-like list of traits of alties (“You might be an altie if…”). Several regulars in m.h.a. contributed, after a regular named Rich Shewmaker got the ball rolling.

    DISCLAIMER: Before the hate mail and nasty comments start rolling in, please remember that the following traits (and the term “altie”) are NOT meant to describe all (or even most) users of alternative medicine or people who think certain alternative medicine modalities are useful treatments. They describe a strident, anti-intellectual, and anti-science subset of alt-med users, who tend to make impossibly grandiose claims for their favorite remedy and usually also express a strong distrust (or even hatred) of conventional medicine. The problem is, rational users of alt-med, who have a more realistic concept of where it might and might not be useful, tend to be reluctant to criticize alties, at least on Usenet and web discussion groups. Unfortunately, alties are not hard to find. So, without further ado, here we go:

    YOU JUST MIGHT BE AN ALTIE IF….

    • If you believe that doctors, scientists, and the pharmaceutical companies conspire to suppress your favorite “alternative medicine” modality, you just might be an altie.
    • If you like to claim that science is a religion, you might be an altie.
    • If you accept vague and/or poorly documented anecdotes and testimonials as sufficient evidence that an “alternative” therapy “works,” you just might be an altie.
    • If you make claims for a product or therapy like, “strengthens the immune system,” “restores balance,” “detoxifies the liver,” “cleanses the colon,” or “cleanses the blood,” you may be an altie.
    • If you are impressed by such claims when made by others, you just might be an altie.
    • If you do most of your “scientific” research on websites that exist to sell “alternative health” products, you might be an altie.
    • If you carefully avoid any criticism of any “alternative medicine” practitioner, product, or theory, regardless of how mind-numbingly obviously unscientific, illogical, internally inconsistent, or fraudulent it may be, you might be an altie.
    • If you accept or agree with every vilification of medicine and science as The Truth, regardless of the source or of how obviously irrational, without basis, or unjustified the vilification is, you might just be an altie.
    • If you believe that Hulda Clark is being unjustly “persecuted” by “conventional medicine” and/or “the government” because she is a “threat,” you are very likely an altie.
    • If you absolutely, positively cannot ever admit that a conventional therapy, any conventional medical therapy, can cure a disease, any disease, you may well be an altie.
    • If you believe that vaccines “don’t work” or that they cause autism or other chronic diseases, you just might be an altie.
    • If you believe anything you read at Whale.to or Cure Zone, you just might be an altie.
    • If you regularly post to the message boards on Cure Zone, you’re very likely to be an altie. Explanation: Cure Zone’s message boards are highly moderated. (Translation: censored.) Skeptical posts, no matter how polite, unabusive, or well-reasoned, are often summarily deleted by the moderators. If a skeptic persists in questioning the alt-med dogma there, he/she will usually eventually be banned by the moderators.
    • If you think misc.health.alternative should be a sunny little support group where true believers in alternative healthcare share testimonials and gleefully trash science and medicine without comment from skeptics (in other words, if you want it to be like Cure Zone), you may be an altie.
    • If you think it’s OK for misc.health.alternative (or any other such newsgroup) to be awash in advertising for snake oil quackery and other spam, you may be an altie.
    • If you believe that alternative medicine practitioners are far more caring for their patients and far more moral (and therefore, by implication, less corruptible by money) than conventional doctors, you just might be an altie.
    • If you believe that companies selling alternative medicines have every right to charge high prices for their products (example: Glow Life charging hundreds of dollars for a 150 g tin of Ginseng powder, as I described earlier), but that pharmaceutical companies (which spend hundreds of millions of dollars and several years to get each new drug developed, tested, and approved) don’t, you are very likely an altie.
    • If you dismiss every well-designed randomized clinical study that failed to show a benefit for an alternative medicine or therapy over placebo control as either not proving that the therapy is ineffective or as having been manipulated by nefarious forces (conventional medicine, the pharmaceutical companies, the government, etc.) to produce a negative result, you may well be an altie.

    Feel free to send me suggestions for more “You just might be an altie” items!

    By the way, I’ve got dibs on this one: If you are deeply offended by the above list, you just might be an altie!

    This article first appeared on the blog Respectful Insolence and is published here by permission.

  • A Televisual Feast

    If you listen to the most recent Start the Week – well you have to listen to a good bit of Ann Widdicombe, which I think is fairly unpleasant – but you could always fast forward. The last ten minutes or so you get Kenan Malik talking about Islamophobia and the religious hatred law. It’s good stuff. He thinks the idea of ‘Islamophobia’ is badly overblown and works to silence criticism of Islam and that that’s a bad thing. As you will have surmised, he also thinks the religious hatred law is a bad thing for the same sort of reason. He asks exactly the question I’ve been bleating and whining and braying for several months – why is it okay to say hard things about other ideas but not about religion?

    And those of you in the UK will get to see his documentary on the subject on channel 4 at the end of the week. Wish I could.

    “Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants to convince us that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia.” But is this the reality or is hatred and abuse of Muslims being exaggerated to suit politicians’ ends and to silence critics of Islam, he asks. Malik, who grew up in the 80s – an era of real racist violence – shows how today there is very little statistical evidence to support the claims that Muslims are subject to either more physical assaults or to being targeted by the police.

    See, silencing critics of immensely powerful institutions like religions is just not a very good idea. On Start the Week Malik talks about self-censorship, and he’s too right. There’s a lot of that around, along with a lot of other-censorship and attempted other-censorship. All of it unfortunate.

  • Kenan Malik Questions Islamophobia

    Is hatred of Muslims being exaggerated to silence critics of Islam?

  • Burma Death Toll Much Higher Than Officials Say

    Government sealed off parts of coast after tsunami, fueling public suspicions.

  • Philip Stott on Voltaire and Earthquake Theology

    Lisbon challenged both religion and enlightenment beliefs in an ordered and predictable universe.

  • NY Times: a Few Answers to Edge Question

    Dawkins, Sapolsky, Harris, Zimbardo, LeDoux, Humphrey.

  • The Edge Annual Question

    What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

  • Francophobia Cool in US

    Don’t speak French, don’t have French relatives, don’t eat or drink French, don’t think French.

  • Kenan Malik on Islamophobia

    And religious hatred law, on Start the Week. audio