Author: Ophelia Benson

Ah well that is reassuring. The Grand Mufti of Egypt explains about apostasy and stuff.

[F]rom a religious perspective, the act of abandoning one’s religion is a sin punishable by God on the Day of Judgment. If the case in question is one of merely rejecting faith, then there is no worldly punishment. If, however, the crime of undermining the foundations of the society is added to the sin of apostasy, then the case must be referred to a judicial system whose role is to protect the integrity of the society.

Excellent. From a religious perspective, no earthly bastards will punish you for apostasy, it’s only God who will. Of course, God will presumably do a pretty thorough job of it, being a jealous and tyrannical kind of shit, but no matter, that’s a few years off probably, unless you get run over by a bus tomorrow. The important thing is that the mullahs and the cops aren’t going to push your door down and take you out for execution right this second. Unless, of course, they are – on account of you done added the crime of undermining the foundations of the society to the sin of apostasy, and that we don’t allow, so up against the wall mothafucka. Because the thing is the sin is God’s business and God will deal with it as and when necessary, but the crime is a whole nother story. The thing is, the integrity of the society has to be protected from the likes of thinking doubting questioning mind-changing you; understand? The integrity of the society is the important thing, not selfish little you and your selfish individualistic atomistic consumerist idea about wanting to think for yourself and make up your own mind and not be compelled to ‘believe’ what you don’t believe. Got that? You don’t matter, the integrity of the society does. No yous matter; all the yous added up don’t matter; what matters is the society and its integrity – in other words its uniformity of thought. Integrity of the individual, poison; integrity of the group, divine Utopia. See? It makes perfect sense if you look at it in the right way.

There’s also of course the familiar irritating boilerplate about women – equal but not the same blah blah blah so actually they have higher status than men which is why they’re not allowed to leave the house or the country without permission from a man.

Islam adopts the perspective of gender equality, but it does not endorse the idea of gender equivalency. Islam affirms the difference between the natural dispositions and constitutions of men and women. Women have the ability to bear and nurse children, whereas men do not, so there is a lack of equivalency in regards to the physical and psychological make-up of men and women…

Therefore…you know the rest.

Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder; so is evidence; so is replication; so is falsification; so is peer review; it’s all, all in the eye of the beholder. Knowledge is power, therefore I don’t need to make sense.

[T]he firing of Churchill reveals a very pernicious kind of exclusionary dogmatism in scholarly research and writing and media reporting. The firing of Professor Churchill for alleged research misconduct…ignored all Indigenous evidence and perspectives that are critical of Eurocentric versions of the history of the European invasion of the Americas. Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. Euroamerican teachers and scholars have taught and written for several centuries that Columbus discovered America. That is a more profound and easily provable case of research misconduct than anything of which Churchill has been accused.

Gary Witherspoon confuses teaching the content of a textbook with research, which is odd, since he is apparently an anthropologist, so one would assume he must have learned at some point along the path to becoming an anthropologist what research is and what it isn’t. Maybe he has a bad memory, maybe he’s just forgotten what research is. Couldn’t someone tell him though?

The whole article goes on in the same vein, citing what a 1987 textbook said, what an 1864 Rocky Mountain News article said (that’s not a typo – 1864, a century and a half ago), what Ben Nighthorse Campbell said about the massacre that the Rocky Mountain News misunderstood a century and a half ago – all apparently in aid of the point that research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, these other people over here killed ten people and ate them for lunch, so why are you making such a fuss about my killing one person and eating her for lunch? In other words, it’s infantile and jaw-droppingly stupid. It’s also a pretty brazen example of epistemic relativism in all its tinsel glory.

I wrote this on Thursday but the database broke while I was writing it, so it had to wait.

Norm has an additional thought on my murmurings about truth and the harm principle and enforcement on Point of Inquiry.

The non-enforceability of any responsibility there is not to teach children untruths must surely follow, in liberal societies, from not having public bodies issuing pronouncements as to what is – officially as it were – true and untrue. Even on matters where there is a scientific consensus, that consensus is left open to challenge. But more relevantly, on matters of ethics, politics, metaphysical outlook, there’s no official truth that could be enforced.

Hmmmm. I’m not sure that’s quite true, actually – although it is mostly true. But I think it’s mostly true in part because of…well, a kind of stealth, or evasion, or (not to put too fine a point on it) concealment. I think to some extent liberal societies and public bodies conceal the degree to which they do in fact rely on implicit but binding official truth that can be and is enforced, on matters of ethics and politics at least, even if not on those of metaphysical outlook. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ you know – it was a public body that issued that pronouncement, and it does colour much of US politics to this day.

I think it could be argued that there is some official truth that could be enforced, that lies behind various laws and policies – at least in the US. Maybe it’s the Supreme Court that makes this seem to be the case; maybe the non-existence of either a Supreme Court or a constitution in the UK means that Norm’s claim is more plausible there than it is here. For instance I think it is something of an official truth here that ‘separate but equal’ is a deeply suspect formula; I also think that possible official truth tends to foster others – about history, and official lying and bullshitting, and (paradoxically) the fallibility of the Supreme Court itself; about the kind of bullshit people will believe when they want to defend their prejudices or privileges or both.

In fact the truth (if I may call it that) that ‘separate but equal’ was a self-serving lie was indeed enforced, with federal marshals, in Little Rock. Enforcement was exactly the issue. Eisenhower and Kennedy both wanted very badly not to have to do the whole enforcement thing; they really didn’t want to have to enforce that truth on people who wanted neither to hear it nor to act on it; but in the end they both had to. There is a limit to our liberalism in that sense; fortunately.

Sorry things went silent for a few days: the database broke, and Jeremy was in New York, so unable to fix it until today. Give the man a nice round of applause (or you could tell him how impressive his biceps are).