Author: Ophelia Benson

Good news about Ai Weiwei though.

The release of Mr. Ai, 54, who is widely known and admired outside China, appeared to be a rare example in recent years of China’s bowing to international pressure on human rights. Mr. Ai was the most prominent of hundreds of people detained since China intensified a broad crackdown on critics of the government in February, when anonymous calls for mass protests modeled after the revolutions in the Middle East percolated on the Chinese Internet.

Crappy about the hundreds though.

China came under unusually heavy pressure from all corners of the globe, not only from standard diplomatic channels but also from prominent people like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in New York, who harangued China in May at a Manhattan opening of an outdoor sculpture exhibition by Mr. Ai, and Anish Kapoor, a leading sculptor based in Britain who this month canceled a show planned for the National Museum of China in Beijing.

And Salman Rushdie.

Don’t get too happy though.

Few dissidents who have been detained in recent years have been shown leniency. International pressure so far has not helped Liu Xiaobo, a writer who was given a 11-year prison sentence in 2009 on subversion charges. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October, which he was not allowed to collect.

Always more to do.

Salil Tripathi set off a seriously interesting discussion of Arundhati Roy at Facebook, via a piece by Andrew Buncombe in the Independent. (This is why, say what you will, FB is not altogether silly.) I got his permission to quote him.

The subject is, as Buncombe put it:

It was the writer and activist Arundhati Roy who set foreign journalists in India busily chattering recently. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, Ms Roy was discussing the Maoist and Adavasi “resistance” to encroachment on tribal lands. Mr Moss, asked her why, “we in the West don’t hear about these mini-wars?”. Ms Roy replied: “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it…”

Salil said (among other things)

I agree that journalists who probe too much into Kashmir are likely to have visa problems. I also agree that editors in the West like to look at unusual stories out… of India, and not ones they’ve been covering all the time. But I don’t think there’s a grand conspiracy among editors, who meet at a pub every night in Wapping, exchanging notes, about which rah-rah story about India should they run. Likewise, there is no conspiracy among correspondents either, to meet at specific places and plan coordinated stories that decide to underplay poverty and overplay the Gurgaon malls. In fact, most journalists want the unusual – and so you will find stories that show cracks in the India shining story, just as you will find stories about Indian companies making it big abroad. The trouble with Arundhati Roy is precisely that she thinks only her truth is valid, only the story she focuses on is important, and others must write the same story, and reach the same conclusions. That was infuriating at one point; it is tiresome now. Which is why she is less relevant in India than at any time, and continues to be loved by the Guardian and the Nation, two newspapers which have a patronising view of the “Other”, and can see only one form of stories from that place. (Sure, Guardian will write about Outsourcing, but focus on the soullessness of the job, and not about how it has liberated a person from the Indian hinterland, who’d have married within her caste to whoever her parents insisted, and exposed her to an urban lifestyle, and allowed her to assert her identity, creating her own space in the big adventure called India. Roy sees her as a collaborator; I see signs of emancipation there.)

I’ve noticed the same thing (perhaps alerted to it by reading Meera Nanda): the way UK and US journalists treat Roy as an oracle when there are countless other Indians they could talk to but don’t. (They do the same thing with Vandana Shiva.)

I’m burning up the time reading sapient comments on PZ’s response to “Be” Scofield’s “5 stupid things stupid atheists think” so I might as well recycle one so that I can pretend I’ve accomplished something more than reading sapient comments on a post of PZ’s, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sastra quotes a bit from “Be” and annotates it:

Scofield has gone into Therapist Mode (sometimes known as Anthropologist Mode.) If you’re trying to help or understand other people, don’t treat them as equal members of your own group and argue with them over truth or content. Instead, you concern yourself with what works for them. Are they happy? You shouldn’t try to change their minds because that interferes with the natural course of things — which is allowing them to discover and be who they are on their own terms, not yours.

Spot on.

While I was reading, “Be” Scofield commented. He said he has replied (at Tikkun, oh urgh). So now I have to read that. Is there no end to it?

I’m reading Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death by our own dear Joshua Slocum and Lisa Carlson. It’s very good and very infuriating.

The situation is the totally familiar one of an industry straining every nerve and pulling every string to winkle more dollars out of other people’s pockets into its own, but in a context where doing so allows a lot of really nasty forms of manipulation – like creating a bogus “requirement” to view the body and then saying “wouldn’t you prefer to see her in an upgraded” vastly more expensive box?

There’s a weird strain of hilarity behind the whole thing – the basic idea of buying an expensive box that’s going to be buried in the ground. There’s one quoted item of PR-speak that refers to the body “nestling” in whatever it is. Nestling?

One thing I didn’t know is that in most places there are a lot more funeral outfits than are needed, and given that there’s no legitimate way to expand the market, the only way to survive is to inflate the prices. With shoes or hamburgers or phones, you can just market the bejeezis out of them and sell more and more and more, but there’s no way to sell more and more and more burials.

Maybe they should consider that. Reburial every few years, just like getting new appliances and granite counter tops. The living room looks a little dull and drab, time for new curtains and a lick of paint. Same thing with the ancestors.

Exctract here.

Catherine Bennett isn’t fooled or wowed or befuddled or rendered absent-minded by the archbishop.

After a great success with Jemima Khan, the New Statesman had made the archbishop guest editor. Why? Why not?…As it turned out, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s internship proved equally inspired, exposing a public tolerance of episcopal power that, even as it dismays reformers, can only encourage undimmed Anglican ambition.

What was that all about? It seemed more like a Monty Python joke than anything else. Who’s the next guest editor, the queen? Could they have found anyone less appropriate for a putative left-wing magazine?

The response to his provocation could hardly have been more satisfactory. Clearly, everyone had forgotten his flirtation with sharia and that other time, with Labour’s equality bill, when Williams won his church a special bigotry exemption.

Well why? If so, why?

Even rightwing Anglicans, who recoil from Williams’s politics, relish the spectacle of the established church being recognised, unlike their competitors, as a prominent and respected meddler in sublunary affairs.

Yes of course they damn well do, but what is the Staggers doing helping them?

Next up was the Rev Michael Banner, on Thought for the Day, exulting in the bravery of his spiritual brother – and boss – Rowan. “The voice of prophecy – the voice of what Christians have called the Spirit of God – ought never to be silenced and ought never to go unheeded,” said Banner. What, never? some listeners must have thought as they sprinted for the off-switch. How about Rasputin?

Or Savonarola, or Jerry Falwell, or Fred Phelps, or Terry Jones (of the Florida clan), or all the various “spiritual leaders” of Hizbollah, Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Shabab and all the other “spiritual” gangs – how about them?

It is this “voice”, Banner continued, presumably alluding to the established church, speaking through him on the BBC, “which constantly challenges a complacent satisfaction with the existing social order, which dreams of a better society” etc etc.

Ah yes, the established church and the BBC joining hands to challenge complacent satisfaction with the existing social order. Makes the eyes mist up, don’t it.

But don’t non-prophetic voices also do that, without recourse to a contested spiritual authority? That’s the great thing about pulpits: they don’t take questions. And Banner was right in thinking that his superhuman case for being “heeded”, over inferior, secular voices emanating from, say, charities or academies, is often accepted as blindingly obvious.

Pulpits don’t take questions because god doesn’t take questions. A great deal too convenient, if you ask me.

Last week, the media response to Terry Pratchett’s intensely troubling investigation of assisted dying was, similarly, a deferential search for the nearest bishop, even though a bishop’s moral insight on this question, whatever he may add about palliative care, represents not so much superior expertise as an immutable faith requirement. Defying an overwhelming lay majority that supports assistance for dying people who want to control their deaths, Rowan Williams has called the proposal, flatly, “immoral”.

He’s the immoral one.

Trevor Phillips of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission talks a lot of sinister crap to the Telegraph.

“The thing I’ve become anxious about in recent times is this – there is   certainly a feeling amongst some people of belief that they are under siege,   that they are often disadvantaged, that they are looked at and considered in   some way different and their faith makes them less worthy of regard,”   he said.

That could be so, but it could also be inevitable given that their beliefs are not well supported. The conspiracy of silence about that incovenient fact has been broken lately. That’s as it should be.

I understand why a lot of people in faith groups feel a bit under siege.   They’re in a world where there are a lot of very clever people who have a lot of access to the airwaves and write endlessly in the newspapers knocking   religion and mocking God. The people who want to drive religion underground are much more active, much more vocal.

Yes, we are, and people in faith groups will just have to learn to put up with it. (And note that those people too have a lot of access to the airwaves and write endlessly in the newspapers knocking atheism and mocking atheists.) We are allowed to be both active and vocal. People in faith groups don’t get to veto us.

There is no doubt there’s quite a lot of intolerance towards people of faith   and towards belief. There’s a great deal of polemic which is anti-religious, which is quite fashionable.

And there’s quite a lot of intolerance towards people of no faith, and towards unbelief. There’s a great deal of polemic which is anti-atheism, which is quite fashionable.

Being an Anglican, being a Muslim or being a Methodist or being a Jew is   just as much part of your identity and you should not be penalised or   treated in a discriminatory way because of that. That’s part of the   settlement of a liberal democracy.

“Just as much part of your identity” as what? He doesn’t say. Either the Telegraph cut that bit, or he never did say. If he said “as race or sex” he’s wrong; he’s also wrong even if he didn’t. Religious beliefs can’t have a total, blanket protection order, because some of them are murderous or otherwise dangerous.

“It’s perfectly fair that you can’t be a Roman Catholic priest unless you’re a man,” he said.

Oh jeez. I give up.