Author: Ophelia Benson

Aha – you’re in luck. I assumed the postcolonial article on (re)production of bullshit was unavailable online, but in fact it is, so you get to find out who the author is and you also get to read the whole dang thing if you want to.

So. Since a flood of people, which is to say, two people, have requested more extracts, I shall oblige.

At the heart of the relationship between feminism and imperialism is an
Orientalist logic that posits Western women as exemplary and emancipated in relation to
“Other” (Afro-Asian/colonized) women, thereby charging the former with the
responsibility of saving the latter from their backwards (i.e. Muslim), uncivilized
cultures.

Right. Tell that to the little girls in Ethiopia who don’t want to be raped into marriage at age eight. Tell them it’s an Orientalist logic that thinks they should have something better. Tell Boge Gebre.that – if you have the gall.

By deliberately
attempting to mask the problems that are always associated with representation, 9and the
inconsistencies that inevitably arise within categories of experience, CW4WAfghan’s use
of personal anecdotes both confirms and conceals their own ideology. Reproducing the
oppressive gesture of imperialist feminism, their homogenous image of Afghan women
reduces them to the role of “generalized native informants”, who Spivak asserts, “sometimes appear in the Sunday supplements of national journals, mouthing for us the answers that we want to hear as our confirmation of the world.”

I repeat. Tell that to the little girls of Ethiopia, and the women who used to be little girls and remember what happened to them. Tell them they are ‘mouthing for us.’

There. That’s only page 16, and it’s only a selection. It’s all like that. It’s arrogant patronizing crap. It’s insulting. I wish you joy of it.

Once again, some people in the UK seem to have a shaky grasp on the concept of free speech.

A Tory MP was investigated by police after he said in Parliament that the niqab and the burqa is the ‘religious equivalent of going around with a paper bag over your head with two holes for the eyes.’ He was questioned over the telephone by officers and a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, but he was later told that no action would be taken.’ That’s nice, but how odd that he was questioned at all. It was the Northamptonshire Rights & Equality Council that thought he needed to be shopped.

Anjona Roy, the REC’s chief executive, said she contacted police by email after her organisation received complaints about the MP’s comments. She also said that the incident had been raised at a meeting of the County Hate Incident Forum, whose members include local authority and police representatives, and it had been agreed that a complaint was appropriate. Ms Roy said she took offence at Mr Hollobone’s likening of the head-to-toe Muslim covering known as a burka to a paper bag. “I think the majority of people would find that quite offensive. If you disagree with people wearing burkas, there are other ways of putting it.”

[through gritted teeth] Yes but ‘quite offensive’ is not a police matter. Mere ‘offensiveness’ is not illegal. The fact that the majority of people would (according to one person) find something ‘quite offensive’ is not enough to make that something a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service. If the only free speech is speech about which no one will say ‘I think the majority of people would find that quite offensive’ then there is no free speech at all. Speech that has to pass the test that no officious head of a so-called Rights & Equality Council will call it offensive is about as far from free as speech can get. ‘Quite offensive’ speech is not against the law except in benighted oppressive stupidity-ridden theocracies and tinpot dictatorships.

When people who don’t get that, but in fact think the very opposite – think that speech that they find ‘quite offensive’ should be reported to the police – are the heads of Rights & Equality Councils, then there’s a problem.

Religious bodies have been demonstrating their virtue again. They’ve quit Labour’s ‘advisory group on religion’ in a huff because the secularists there resisted their demands to be allowed to ignore equality laws.

Muslims had already stopped attending the group…Hindus, Baha’is and secularists are still represented but the Church of England, Salvation Army, Methodist Church and Roman Catholic Church have all left.

Because they don’t want no stinkin’ equality. How impressive.

Peter Vlachos, the National Secular Society delegate, said he was appalled and accused the church groups of “abusing” the forum. He said: “Rather than supporting and championing equality and human rights, the Churches have tried to use the consultative process to try to gain further exemptions from equalities legislation. They wanted the freedom to discriminate and they didn’t get it so now they’ve walked away.”

So – generosity, compassion, justice, equality – all spurned by the churches. So that’s what they’re like, is it? Well I knew that, but I’m a little surprised they’re so open about it.

The Pope recently intervened in the debate over equality legislation in Britain. Benedict XVI is expected to use his visit to Britain in September to preach moral virtue. Leaders across the churches continue to defend the right of Christians and other religions to discriminate against women, gays and others according to their religious beliefs.

Right. The pope, who spent years enforcing secrecy about child abuse in his church, will be preaching ‘moral virtue,’ which takes the form of defending the ‘right’ to discriminate against various groups of people ‘according to one’s religious beliefs.’ Well the hell with that – that’s not moral virtue. The pope wouldn’t recognize moral virtue if it grabbed him between the legs.

I’ve been reading an article called ‘Canadian Women and the (Re)Production of Women in Afghanistan.’ I do not like it.

From the abstract, so that you can get the big picture:

Focusing on
the prominent group Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), this
paper looks at the role its advocacy assumes in the context of the “War on Terror”. In
Canada as in the United States, government agencies have justified the military invasion
of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which
narratives of East versus West are performed. While CW4WAfghan attempt to challenge
dominant narratives of Afghan women, they ultimately reinforce and naturalize the
Orientalist logic on which the War on Terror operates, even helping to disseminate it
through the Canadian school system. Drawing on post-colonial feminist theory, this
paper highlights the implications of CW4WAfghan’s Orientalist discourse on women’s
rights, and tackles the difficult question of how feminists can show solidarity with
Afghan women without adhering to the oppressive narratives that permeate today’s
political climate.

Then from the main body:

Building on Krista Hunt’s analysis of feminist
complicity in the War on Terror (Hunt 2006), this essay draws attention to Canadian feminists’ role in (re)producing neo-imperialist narratives of Afghan women. Focusing specifically on the NGO Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan),
it shows how their use of feminist rhetoric and personal first-hand narratives, together
with national narratives of Canada as a custodian of human rights, add to the productive
power of the Orientalist tropes they invoke.

If within Canada, constructions of Afghan women remain one of the most
powerful means by which knowledge about the “War on Terror” is produced,
CW4WAfghan are among the most active and powerful disseminators of such
knowledge. CW4WAfghan express the importance of this role in their twofold mandate:

1) to raise awareness in Canada of the need to secure and protect human rights
and opportunities for Afghan women and, 2) to support the empowerment
efforts of Afghan women in education, health care and skills development
(CW4WAfghan 2008a).

By explicitly focusing on how the second half of this mandate is pursued, my aim is not
to discredit what CW4WAfghan may have accomplished in Afghanistan, but rather, to
see how this work might be undemiined by becoming part of the War on Terror’s neo-
imperialist project of knowledge construction.

And so she does. She wants to get her Master’s degree, so she proceeds with her project of saying invidious things about an NGO working for Afghan women’s rights, for another forty pages. She leans heavily on Foucault and Said, she talks much of knowledge-power and Orientalism, and she ploughs her academic furrow. Meanwhile the women who work for CW4WAfghan do that. I know which I admire.

I might give you more extracts later. It’s replete with interesting items. The sad part is it was published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

There’s a post at Talking Philosophy called In Defence of Religious Belief. I would comment on it there but I can’t because I’m banned from commenting, so (since I want to say something) I’ll do it here.

It’s a thought experiment. You’ve been having hallucinations of a monster following you. You believe the shrink who tells you you’re mentally ill. ‘You’re a logical sort of person. If you weren’t too classy, you’d even consider becoming a New Atheist.’ But the experiences feel real.

And then it happens. It’s late at night. You’re alone in your bathroom, and the monster comes crashing in through the window – at least this is what you experience – and it’s on you. It doesn’t attack, but it’s right in your face, and you can smell rotting flesh on its breath. You close your eyes hoping it’ll just disappear, but you can hear its breathing, sense its malevolence, and in your head there’s this insistent thought: What if it’s real?

Well of course there is, with an experience like that.

At this point, given how high the stakes are, isn’t it reasonable to believe that the monster is real? Imagine yourself in that situation. What would you say to somebody who told you it was unreasonable or irrational to take evasive action? You wouldn’t be impressed, I suspect. Moreover, it’s not simply that you wouldn’t be impressed at the time – which is not particularly interesting, since you’re in a freaked out state – you wouldn’t be impressed afterwards either, you wouldn’t be impressed on calm reflection (with the claim that you were unreasonable to believe then).

That last parenthesis is important – I overlooked it at first, and objected, but then I went back and saw the parenthesis and my objection became superfluous. But given the parenthesis, the overall claim is a pretty narrow one – too narrow for the rest of the work it’s supposed to do. No, I wouldn’t be ‘impressed,’ or convinced, by anyone who told me I was unreasonable to be terrified by the hallucination while it was going on. That would be absurd. But I don’t think I know anyone who would say that. Of course a terrifying convincing hallucination is terrifying while it is happening.

But so what? That doesn’t translate to the claim that I would be reasonable to go on thinking the hallucination was real after it was over – which I thought was the claim itself, until I noticed that last parenthesis. That’s not the claim – but then what is the claim?

Well maybe it is the claim.

Clearly belief in the monster isn’t epistemically warranted: the perilousness of a situation is not part of that story (though this is not to accept that the belief is entirely without epistemic warrant – the fact that the experience has a verdical quality surely counts for something). But the belief is warranted in a certain kind of rationally defensible way. You’re not making a cognitive mistake if you believe: given how high the stakes are, given the fact that the experience seems to have a veridical quality, it’s reasonable for you to believe it.

This is in the present tense, so apparently the claim is after all that it’s reasonable to believe in the monster in general – not just during the hallucination but indefinitely afterward. I don’t think that claim is right. It could be right if ‘you’ had no knowledge of brain science, but the implied ‘you’ has gone to a psychiatrist and knows what hallucinations are, so that’s ruled out. So no, I don’t think it is reasonable for you to believe it, despite the veridical quality. At least not without asking a few questions first.

The monster came ‘crashing in through the window’ – so there would be broken glass if it were real. Is there any broken glass? Is there any physical evidence at all? Have you looked?

What about the fact that there was no contact? That’s very odd, isn’t it, if the monster is real? It’s ‘in your face’ but it doesn’t actually touch you? It goes to the trouble of crashing through the window (what floor is your bathroom on, by the way?) but it doesn’t attack you or touch you – well what kind of creature is that? Maybe not a real one? Eric MacDonald makes the same objection over there.

And then – if there is no physical evidence, and it didn’t touch you, then it certainly looks as if you had a very powerful hallucination. If that’s the case – there could well be something very wrong with you. You could have one hell of a brain tumor. The reasonable thing to do is go to a specialist, it’s not to go on thinking the monster is real as you did while it was (it seemed) breathing in your face.

The rest of the post of course makes an analogy with religion, but since the monster thing, as written, doesn’t work, I won’t bother with that.

The church isn’t giving an inch – on the contrary, it’s fighting like a starving tom cat.

The Catholic Church is being unfairly singled out for criticism of sexual abuse of children by priests and will not tolerate campaigns to discredit it, the powerful head of Italy’s bishops said on Monday.

Oh right – it’s all so terribly unfair. The church sets itself up as a moral arbiter for the entire world, and then it’s surprised and wounded when we get cross with it for its settled habit of hiding priestly child-rape from the police. Yes indeed, that is like so unfair. And it ‘won’t tolerate’ – what does it mean it won’t tolerate? What’s it going to do? What’s it threatening everyone with? Who do they think they are?

Oh it’s a stupid question. They think they’re the holy version of the Mafia, and of course they’re right, except for the holy part.

Speaking two days after Pope Benedict apologised to victims of sexual abuse in Ireland, Bagnasco said the Church was “not afraid of the truth, however painful and detestable” but would not accept any “generalised campaigns to discredit it.”

Well, chum, the church is just going to have to accept it, isn’t it. It has no way of preventing it, and it has no moral standing with which to deflect it. So go ahead and tell each other what you won’t tolerate or accept, but nobody else (apart from Damian Thompson) will pay much attention.

Fergus Finlay hasn’t much sympathy.

[R]eading the letter as a layman, I have to say it was terribly disappointing, and chillingly dishonest in parts…[T]here was no sense, where victims of abuse are concerned, that the church will in future, at the direction of the Pope himself, abandon the adversarial tactics that have characterised all their dealings with people who have been abused in the past…And right from the beginning of the letter, there is a sense that the Pope has chosen to distance himself and the Vatican from what happened in the church in Ireland. There is an air throughout the letter that he is somehow only just discovering what happened in Ireland and that he is “deeply disturbed by the information that has come to light”. The tone of this early part of the letter is deeply offensive because everyone knows the concealment of abuse, and the refusal to cooperate in any open way with investigation, has been a Vatican tactic from the very beginning. The notion that the Pope has had to chastise the Irish bishops for their conduct – as if their conduct wasn’t deeply embedded in church policy – is thoroughly dishonest.

There now, Cardinal Bagnasco, you see how it’s going? People don’t believe you. It isn’t working. The bluffing, the threatening, the pretending to be surprised, the distancing, the claims that everybody does it – none of it is working. You’re deep in the weeds. You will still have your church, but it will be smaller; fewer young men will sign up to be priests; even fewer people will let the Vatican tell them what to do; deference will be a lot scarcer.

If you guys had any sense you would stop bluffing and threatening and distancing, and at least try to claw back a few shreds of integrity from the wreckage. But clearly you’re determined to make things even worse for yourselves. Whatever.