Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Islamists Kidnap Teachers in Southern Philippines

    Officials warned: the kidnapping would discourage others from teaching poor children in Muslim areas.

  • A Step Forward in Texas Science Education

    Texas State Board of Ed elected to get rid of bogus ‘strengths and weaknesses’ claim in textbooks.

  • Islamists Take Baidoa, Promise Sharia

    ‘We shall make changes in the town and will rule by Islamic law,’ spokesman told hundreds at stadium.

  • New Guy Ditches 8 Years of Bad Policies

    Moves on freedom of information, presidential archives, all in direction of more transparency.

  • Obama Tells Regulators to Tighten Auto Rules

    The directives make good on a campaign pledge and signal a sharp reversal of Bush administration policy.

  • Sheer poetry

    Wo, what’s that?! Oh – it’s a blast of fresh air.

    President Barack Obama has called for the US to become energy independent, saying its reliance on foreign oil and global warming posed threats…Mr Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review its refusal of a waiver which had previously allowed California to set its own – stricter – vehicle emission and fuel efficiency standards. He said California had taken bold moves in implementing the standards. Mr Obama said: “The days of Washington dragging its heels are over. My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.”

    Cue the Hallelujah chorus! And Aretha Franklin singing The Star-spangled Banner! And Springsteen doing Eyes on the Prize and Seeger doing We Shall Overcome! Cue them all, cue everyone singing at once – cue the rocks and the trees, cue the stars and the little green frogs; from every mountainside, lift up your voices and sing –

    My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.

    Welcome back to the reality-based community, all. Enjoy your stay.

  • The Biggest Policy Reversal of All

    ‘My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.’

  • Thailand Bans Current Issue of The Economist

    The issue contains an article about an Australian writer who was jailed for slandering the monarchy.

  • Thailand: Writer Sentenced for Lèse Majesté

    Harry Nicolaides alluded in a novel to the way King Bhumipol’s son treated one of his mistresses.

  • Atlanta: Father Accused of ‘Honor’ Killing

    Sandeela Kanwal wanted out of her arranged marriage, father thought a divorce would shame the family.

  • Tom Hanks Apologizes to Mormons

    A Mormon said it is ‘un-American to tell people that they shouldn’t vote their conscience.’

  • Tom Hanks Calls Prop 8 Un-American

    ‘I do not like to see any discrimination codified on any piece of paper in any of the 50 states in America.’

  • The Choice of Hercules

    Two attractive women approach you. Introducing themselves, one tells you that she is the personification of Duty, and invites you to follow her down the road of virtue, piety, sacrifice and hard slog. The second beauty represents Pleasure: she wants to guide you down a path of indolence, vice and hedonism. Which do you choose?

    This was the famous ‘choice of Hercules’, put to him while he was a farm labourer in exile: appropriated by various religions and mythologies, it can be argued that millions of people who have never read the classics still think of life in these terms of virtue versus pleasure: the good life versus the Good Life. A C Grayling’s achievement is to expose this dichotomy as false.

    Of course people can’t truly dedicate themselves either to duty or pleasure alone. The majority of lives are a combination of both, and people who walk one road – Florence Nightingale or Hunter S Thompson – tend to become legendary for their choice of mistress. Yet the convention has it that duty is always worthwhile whereas pleasure is generally worthless self-indulgence.

    But is this true? Ideas of duty animate terrorists and suicide bombers but the outcome of these drives tends to be destruction of life, including their own. Those who dedicate themselves to pleasure, by contrast, tend to be happier and therefore better disposed to those around them. Yet even those of us who dedicate ourselves to hedonism will suffer pain and loss at some time.

    And surely the purpose of duty in a society – having people who commit themselves to defending their country or pounding the streets in uniform on Friday nights – is so that others will be free to experience pleasure: i.e. not murdered, raped, assaulted or vapourised.

    Duty as an end in itself, though, is no goal at all, as Grayling, in his erudite, conversational style, effortlessly shows:

    If anything, the example of humourless, disapproving, repressive moralisers whose pointing fingers have blighted enough lives to fill armies many times over, ought to be enough to remind us that the phrase ‘the good life’ genuinely merits its double meaning: for the valuable life (the life truly worth living for the one living it) and the pleasurable life (of which affection, laughter, achievement and beauty are integral characteristics) are one and the same.

    In a series of essays on social taboos Grayling shows how the false dichotomy of Hercules has corrupted the twenty-first century. One major aspect is that longevity of life has been prioritised over quality of life. On her visit to London this year, the Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi gave her impressions of British society:

    Anything that has a relationship with pleasure we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about Aids; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It’s a very sick society that rejects pleasure… Why should we live like sick people just to give some fresh meat to the ground?

    An obvious example is the war on drugs. Governments are happy to destroy Afghan poppy crops that could be developed into morphine to help the sick. Politicians have always used the drug issue as an opportunity for macho posturing on crime policy, yet continued criminalisation leaves the power and the money in the hands, not of the Treasury (who could put it to good use) but of gangster scum that terrorise communities.

    My Shiraz Socialist
    colleague, Caroline S, is doing some sterling work in showing how the prohibitionist line on prostitution inflicts real harm. In response to the sickening murders of five Norfolk prostitutes – murders that would almost certainly not have happened had these women been working in a legal, unionised, regulated sex industry – Britain’s Home Secretary plans to introduce more of the same: proposals for more criminalisation, pushing women underground and putting them at risk. The war on the world’s oldest profession will get Jacqui Smith some nice headlines but in the long term, it is as doomed as the war on drugs: a pointless and unwinnable battle fought in quicksands of blood.

    Advocates of decriminalisation point out that illegal drugs are actually a lot less harmful that alcohol and tobacco. Government seems to have taken this advice to heart: now as well as policing use of illegal drugs it is policing the use of legal ones. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the UK smoking ban: a policy of social exclusion masquerading as a public health initiative. Banner campaigns and strategy documents suggest that bevvy is going the same way.

    You can find similar intellectual writhings in contemporary attitudes to sex and relationships. Already hammered by millennia of state-sponsored virginity cults, the modern conception of romance is now driven almost entirely by social status and the fear of dying alone. Grayling points out that adultery, divorce and open marriages are better alternatives than condemning people to lonely, loveless partnerships: our puritan climate makes his common sense revolutionary.

    And yet people complain that society is too permissive, yearning for a time a hundred years back, of child labour and child prostitution, when, as Grayling says, ‘if a man’s wife were pregnant or menstruating he might turn to his eldest daughter’ – the Victorian age. Before discussing the petty morality of the twenty-first century, though, Grayling says this:

    The great moral questions – the most moral and urgent ones – are not about sex, drugs and unmarried mothers. They are, instead, about human rights, war and genocide, the arms trade, poverty in the Third World, the continuance of slavery under many guises and names, interreligious antipathies and conflicts, and inequality and injustice everywhere. These areas of concern involve truly staggering horrors and human suffering. In comparison to them, the parochial and largely misguided anxieties over sex, drugs, gay marriage and the other matters that fill newspapers and agitate the ‘Moral Majority’ in America and Britain, pale into triviality. It is itself a moral scandal that these questions preoccupy debate in comfortable corners of the world, while real atrocity and oppression exist elsewhere.

    Too true, and perhaps the real choice of Hercules should be neither duty nor pleasure but the duty of bringing as much of the world to a state where pleasure is, at least, a possible.

    The Choice of Hercules, A C Grayling, Orion 2008

  • The doll study

    I was excited and exhilarated to see this article.

    Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance. Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

    Yeah…

    I started thinking about things like that some time last spring, when I finally accepted that Obama wasn’t just a charismatic but basically random candidate. I started thinking about them even more once his nomination seemed more secure, and then during and after the convention, and then during the rest of the campaign. But I avoided thinking about them too much, because they prompted too much longing, and I was too afraid of disappointment in the end.

    I was thinking about millions of children all over the country, in East St Louis and Detroit and Fresno and Philadelphia, Mississippi, and what it could mean for them to see Barack Obama in the White House. I was thinking about a potential Obama effect. I was thinking about Thurgood Marshall and the ‘colored doll’ –

    In the “doll test,” psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark used four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color. They showed the dolls to black children between the ages of three and seven and asked them questions to determine racial perception and preference. Almost all of the children readily identified the race of the dolls. However, when asked which they preferred, the majority selected the white doll and attributed positive characteristics to it. The Clarks also gave the children outline drawings of a boy and girl and asked them to color the figures the same color as themselves. Many of the children with dark complexions colored the figures with a white or yellow crayon. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.

    That haunting, painful study played a role in Brown v Topeka Board of Education and thus in the end of ‘separate but equal’ as a legal fiction and segregated schools in the US…So it seems pretty obvious that a hyper-intelligent, eloquent, impressive black person in the White House would enable children to select the black doll and attribute positive characteristics to it. This study seems to bear that out.

    Not that we didn’t already know that (but it’s nice to have the data). We knew it up one side and down the other. We knew it all over the place for the past week – and a beautiful thing it is. I still have Wednesday’s New York Times hanging around, because I like looking at it – it has the Obamas taking up nearly all of the front page, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with enormous smiles on their faces. They look…extraordinary. Any doll would give its left arm to look that good.

    Bill Moyers talked to Patricia Williams and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Friday. He reminded Harris-Lacewell that when he talked to her last spring she said Obama couldn’t win. I remembered that, once he mentioned it, and I remember the despairing pang it gave me. Harris-Lacewell beamed acknowledgement, and then talked about the intense sense of connection to this country that she felt for the first time in her life. Same here. Same here, same here, same here. One feels as if old wounds and old divisions really do have a good chance of being healed. (I know that sounds soppy – but it’s not sheer airy-fairy fantasy – see the doll experiment!) Furthermore…for the first time in my life I know what it’s like to feel ‘patriotic’ – the idea is suddenly no longer alien. I sang along with Aretha on Tuesday (and I wanted to wear her hat). I suddenly realized today that I don’t even mind American flag pins any more – I don’t have to any more – because they don’t stand for things I hate any more. Now they stand for closing Guantanamo and banning torture and respecting the rule of law.

    On a more prosaic but still not altogether trivial level, I also no longer have to cut the sound whenever the BBC or NPR cuts to the president talking; on the contrary, I get to listen with actual pleasure.

  • Switzerland Not Eager to Introduce Sharia

    Social anthropologist wrote a paper suggesting the idea, wiser heads prevailed.

  • Vatican Accuses Obama of Arrogance

    Religious dictator chosen by groupuscule of priests accuses democratically elected president of arrogance.

  • Obama Makes al Qaeda Desperate

    Bush was the perfect recruitment poster, Obama not so much.

  • Taliban Threatens Swat Nightly on the Radio

    Taliban enforcer announces newly proscribed ‘un-Islamic’ activities, names people killed for disobeying.

  • Study Finds Obama Effect Lifts Black Test-takers

    Performance gap all but disappeared when the exam was administered after the election.

  • Another chorus of ‘Pot, kettle’

    The great thing about religion, you know, is that it teaches people humility.

    The Vatican has condemned President Obama’s move to restore US funding for family planning clinics abroad that give advice on or carry out abortions. One Vatican official warned against the “arrogance” of those in power who think they can decide between life and death.

    That’s terrific, isn’t it? An ‘official’ of an authoritarian moth-eaten hidebound reactionary gang of priests calls a guy elected in a landslide ‘arrogant’…What does the Vatican ‘official’ think the Vatican is if not arrogant? Humbly obedient to god, no doubt, being conveniently blind to the fact that it’s hard to obey someone who never communicates, and that what the Vatican chooses to pretend is what god commands is actually what the Vatican commands – that the Vatican selects its own laws and then pretends they are god’s laws. It’s a common practice, a familiar con-game, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

    And don’t forget the arrogance of the Vatican as ‘those in power who think they can decide between life and death’ by ordering people not to use life-saving condoms during an Aids epidemic.

    In an interview published in an Italian newspaper on Saturday, senior Vatican official Monsignor Rino Fisichella urged Mr Obama to listen to all voices in America without “the arrogance of those who, being in power, believe they can decide of life and death.”

    Mr Obama does listen to all voices in America, including that of Rick Warren, which I and others consider one voice too many; but really…how obtuse does a senior Vatican official have to be not to realize and keep constantly in mind that he is ‘in power’ and that the Vatican and its officials emphatically ‘believe they can decide of life and death’? Do they never embarrass themselves with this kind of brazen absurdity?