Sit down, this will take a minute.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Homeopath Says Don’t Sneer at Homeopathy
Mr Cohen’s piece has ‘offensive overtones.’
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Afghanistan: Protests at New Translation of Koran
Religious scholars say translation is un-Islamic; senators call for translator to be punished..
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Hijacking Anthony Flew
He changed his mind. Then he changed it back. Then he changed it back again.
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Stories
Peter Cave has an entertaining new book of philosophical puzzles, Can a Robot be Human?. The pieces are cross-referenced; one interesting pairing is of a chapter (2) on the way we feel real emotion about fictional characters and their situations, and another (8) on love, what selves are, what stories we tell ourselves about people we love.
It is very odd, and even somewhat mysterious, what powerful emotions we can feel about fictional characters. The oddity becomes more obvious if you try to imagine animals doing it. The idea is absurd – yet we’re so used to doing it ourselves that we forget how odd it is. What’s that about, do you suppose? Other minds, probably. Right? Must be. The social animal thing. Our brains would have been too expensive to have evolved if they didn’t have a huge payoff; the payoff is social collaboration; for that we need a working theory of mind. So we have this hypertrophied faculty of thinking and feeling about the interior worlds of other people – so hypertrophied that it works even (or especially) on people who don’t actually exist. Page 9:
The most rational of people can be moved by fictions yet, even when moved, know full well that they are seated in a theatre, reading a book, or watching television. Or do they? Perhaps, one way or another, they suspend their belief in the stagy surroundings, suspend their memories of the tickets they purchased or block out the sound of the book’s rustling pages. Perhaps they fall for what is being represented as real, as being, indeed, all for real. Remember, though, they cannot be taken in that much; if they were, they would be warning of danger…
It is a peculiar mental state. Peculiar and delicate. It is easy to be jostled out of it – to be deeply in it one moment and the next to remember that you’re sitting in a chair holding and looking at a rectangular box-shaped object packed with slices of paper with black marks on them in rows. But then it’s easy to jump right back into it again. Story-telling seems to work that way. Peter Cave suggests that romantic love does too. Page 44:
When we attend a play, we can lose ourselves within the action. Despite awareness of the theatrical surroundings, we cannot help being moved by the characters on stage. My suggestion is that such fictionalism spills over those in love, generating an erotic fictionalism. When in love, we often cannot help feeling, and believing in, the eternity of that love, despite knowing that, transient and fickle creatures that we are, things may be so very, very different later on; even as early on as the following morning.
Indeed. You’re so wonderful. Oh wait, no you’re not. Human life in eight words.
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Theocracy Now
Reporting from the ‘Value Voters Summit.’
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Baptist Seminary on the Godly Woman
Lecturer Ashley Smith laid out the biblical basis for what she calls ‘the glorious inequalities of life.’
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No Constitution, No Law
Soon after independent tv stations went blank, dozens of cops surrounded the Supreme Court building.
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Telephone Services Cut in Islamabad
Musharraf declared a state of emergency just before a crucial Supreme Court ruling on his election.
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Musharraf Imposes Emergency Rule
Troops in radio and tv stations; Supreme Court held; detention orders served; constitution suspended.
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Can’t We All Just Get Along?
At universities today, the most popular potential US presidential candidate is smart, young, black, good-looking, likeable. His events draw frenzied crowds (a bad sign); pundits say he’s a rock-star (another bad sign).
Why is Senator Barack Obama so popular? His healthcare plan is pedestrian; his foreign policy outlook is interchangeable with Hillary Clinton’s, or Mitt Romney’s for that matter. It’s partly to do with his image as a young charmer and partly because he opposed the Iraq War “from the beginning”, as he likes to remind people. But his position on Iraq is not as hardline as Bill Richardson’s, for example. And laying claim to being the most charismatic Congressmen is really only like claiming to be the most open-minded Klansman. His popularity, I think, is related to his favourite applause-line, which goes roughly as follows: “We have to change our politics and come together around our common interests and concerns as Americans… Change in our politics can only come from you.” It was with those words that Senator Obama announced his presidential run.
There have been many overpraised perorations in the history of US politics, but Obama’s reputation-making “Audacity of Hope” address to the 2004 Democratic Convention really reeks of corniness. If you watch the video, you’ll see people who are actually crying and shaking as the Senator trots out such pearls as, “There is not a liberal America and conservative America, there is the United States of America!” Forgive me for not tearfully struggling for breath as I type these words, but it just doesn’t do it for me.
What could be less controversial than claiming to stand against “division” and for “unity”? I wouldn’t be surprised if every single modern American politician has pulled this same rhetorical move, at one time or another. Remember, GWB was originally elected as “a uniter, not a divider”. Even at the corresponding Republican Convention in 2004, it was a Democrat who gave the keynote address, claiming that some good old-fashioned bipartisanship was necessary. Perhaps the only political clichÈ more annoying than this is the trend of calling the campaign trail drudge a “conversation” with the people; every politician who wants to be seen as “in touch” with “fellow Americans” now loves nothing more than having an ongoing conversation or dialogue or chit-chat with you.
Strange, though, that Democrats still fall for the “bringing the country together” gambit. After all, haven’t a significant number spent the past few years complaining that Bush has used wartime unity rhetoric to silence dissent? I vividly recall watching interviews with Democrats who claimed they simply could not – could not – vote against the Patriot Act, or the Iraq War, or any number of bills that they assented to, for the solitary reason that it would have been divisive to depart from the regnant orthodoxy. Nor do Democrats care that Gerald Ford got away with pardoning Richard Nixon for the fatuous reason that the nation needed “healing”. But then, the Democrats have their own reasons for keeping the consensus card on hand: it got Bill Clinton out of opinion poll trouble in 1998, when he decided that nothing was more important than bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan – anything else, like impeachment, was a disruption. Politics has reached a stage where you look credible if you can claim to be a “moderate”, and you look savvy and wised-up if you can say that your opponent is “divisive”.
The open secret of American politics, of course, is that there is too much consensus and not enough conflict. The major parties are agreed on almost every major issue. Even over Iraq the Republicans are moving closer to the Democrats – or is it the other way round? As to what the issues are, there is no debate. Obama is right when he says that American domestic politics has an air of “smallness” to it. But that’s precisely because the parties have a diminishing number of issues over which they dare to disagree; more “togetherness” is hardly the answer. There hasn’t been a genuinely conservative Republican president for a long time; there hasn’t been a genuinely liberal Democratic president for even longer.
If Obama were serious about “a different kind of politics”, he would say that he is OK with division. Thomas Paine, the greatest of America’s founders, got it basically right: “Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.” It is odd that the public should be so titillated by politicians who are lukewarm in all their convictions, except for the conviction that they are moderate. Who wants a “moderate” president on human rights or corruption or church-state separation?
At least in a small way, any politician purporting to be “above” politics must be taken at his word: the manoeuvre is essentially a cop-out. If you don’t like politics, which inherently involves dispute, being a politician is a bizarre career path. If you want soothing psychobabble about healing wounds, try therapy. This is doubly important for anyone who claims to be a progressive politician. All progress involves struggle: American independence, women’s suffrage, black civil rights – these were not gained through a joyous conversation, but through tense, bitter, open confrontations.
More than this, consensus politics, anti-politics politics, whatever you want to call it, is boring. That’s almost worse than being irresponsible. Al Gore may be sincere in his lamentation that the media is not sufficiently interested in “issues”, and too interested in Paris Hilton, but the media is only partly to blame. Mr Gore will find that the fault is largely that of public opinion and the public opinion industry, which reward floweriness dressed up as conviction. To stand on principle is to risk being branded “extreme” or “a fringe candidate”; to risk a fight with an opponent is to be accused of “partisanship”. Even against Hillary, the queen of bland centrism (which really means conservatism), Obama has a good chance of winning the race to the middle, and he’ll have simpering admirers shouting, “Hope!” following him all the way.
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Submit, and what’s for dinner?
Oh the joy of learning at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. How the world opens up before the eager student, how the riches of human knowledge spill out before her excited gaze.
It offers for instance ‘classes in homemaking.’
The academic program, open only to women, includes lectures on laundering stubborn stains and a lab in baking chocolate-chip cookies. Philosophical courses such as “Biblical Model for the Home and Family” teach that God expects wives to submit graciously to their husbands’ leadership.
So that all female students will realize they mustn’t get married? Does it work? What are the stats?
Seminary President Paige Patterson and his wife, Dorothy – who goes by Mrs. Paige Patterson – view the homemaking curriculum as a way to spread the Christian faith. In their vision, graduates will create such gracious homes that strangers will take note. Their marriages will be so harmonious, other women will ask how they manage.
Yeah? You think? You sure other women won’t ask how ‘Mrs. Paige Patterson’ can stand the boredom, the dependency, the servility, the official inferiority? If they can even stand to go in Mrs Man’s house at all, that is.
[G]uest lecturer Ashley Smith, the wife of a theology professor, laid out the biblical basis for what she calls “the glorious inequalities of life.” Smith, 30, confided that she sometimes resents her husband…But then she quoted from Ephesians: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” And from Genesis: God created Eve to be a “suitable helper” for Adam. “If we love the Scripture, we must do it,” said Smith, who gave up her dreams of a career when her husband said it was time to have children. “We must fit into this role. It’s so much more important than our own personal happiness.”
Oh, you bet; ‘fitting into’ a role laid down for us by a few guys a few thousand years ago is much much much more important than our own personal happiness. Naturally. One’s own personal happiness is important only for men, women are just tools. Well done Ashley Smith; enjoy your glorious inequalities.
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Aznar and Bush, February 2003
Bush: I am an optimist, because I believe that I’m right. I’m at peace with myself.
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Evidence for Nonhuman Primate Language
The point here is not to deny Kanzi’s achievements but to quantify them correctly.
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What is Debate Really For?
Plato, Rousseau, Mill, Arendt and Habermas discuss with Cmdr Taco.
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Murder of Uzbek Reporter Condemned
CPJ urges a thorough inquiry into the murder of outspoken journalist Alisher Saipov.
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Katha Pollitt Skeptical of Horowitz’s Feminism
Ayaan Hirsi Ali gets bad press on the left. Why?
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The Eye of the Storm is in sub-Saharan Africa
The largely unnoticed collision of HIV and TB has exploded to create a deadly co-epidemic.
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Co-epidemic Spreading in Sub-Saharan Africa
Half of all new TB cases in sub-Saharan Africa are now HIV co-infected.
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Pik and Ab
[I]t would be a simple matter to send out for professional reinforcements, thus demonstrating to King Abdullah that, whatever the Prince of Wales may have told him in the dunes, our shared values do not, currently, feature male supremacy. Instead of Prince Charles fawning on the airstrip, one pictures, say, Sandi Toksvig, heading a welcoming party composed of adulterers, gays, Jews, Catholics, apostates, immodestly dressed women and a variety of other law-abiding sinners who would be dead, or at least severely incapacitated, if they lived in King Abdullah’s country. After inspecting a battalion of beautifully turned out slags (replacing the Welsh Guards), he and his companions would be driven – by women drivers of Filipina extraction – to a special performance of the Vagina Monologues, after which a female journalist (replacing John Simpson), would explore the extent of our shared values on behalf of the BBC.
Then some rather pointed questions.
From Prince Charles, with his history of woman trouble, one has come to expect this creepy respect for an absolute ruler with 30 wives. From Howells, who presumes, no doubt, to be a progressive politician, the reflexive, Foreign Office cringe is more disturbing. What if the more persecuted half of the Saudi population were black? Would he have talked about “shared values” in the days of Pik Botha? Is it because only half its population is oppressed that we share values with Saudi Arabia, but none with Burma?
Umm…yes. It’s democracy, you see. Women are only half the population and they’re oppressed in so many places – that it would be undemocratic to make an issue of it. Colonialist and undemocratic. Pik Botha different, Pik Botha bloody Boer, King Ab not a bloody Boer.
Of course Howells is not alone in considering the complete subjugation of Saudi women to be a kind of quirky, cultural difference, rather than an outrage…With the advance of young British veil wearers, proudly declaring their right to be invisible and their love of extreme modesty, this and many other forms of faith-related female subjugation have become complicated areas for liberal protest. If, as we’re often told, many British Muslim women love their jilbabs, how can we be sure Saudi women do not also rejoice in their coverings, accepting, in the same dutiful spirit, total exclusion from civic life and physical chastisement by their devout partners? How can we be sure their would-be liberators are not – like women who adorn themselves and women who cut their hair short – just a few more Women Who Will Go to Hell?
We can’t, so let’s talk about something else, shall we?