Author: Ophelia Benson

Here we have a media watch item. A rather strange one.

I noticed it late yesterday when I posted this item on the polio outbreak in Indonesia (dated today but I saw and posted it yesterday my time – today UK time). I noticed something missing that I was pretty sure I had seen in previous BBC articles on the subject – a paragraph on how the outbreak was thought to have started. Previous articles had, I thought, mentioned the fact that Muslim clerics in norther Nigeria had urged people not to get vaccinated (and not to vaccinate their children – with horrible results) because the vaccine was contaminated in a US plot. That item wasn’t in this latest article. Later yesterday, I listened to the World Service, which reported the same story. This time, the reporter did mention what was thought to be the origin, and did mention northern Nigeria, whereupon I listened very closely – to hear that ‘public figures’ had spoken against the vaccinations. Public figures – period. I was gobsmacked, and outraged. The BBC is now keeping it secret that polio is making a comeback when it had been nearly eradicated, because of stupid, destructive clerical behavior? Keeping it secret on the World Service, which could be listened to precisely by people who might very well need to know that? Why?? And how can they?!

Allen Esterson noticed the same lacuna, and emailed me about it, with links to further sources that were not as forthright as they ought to have been – including UN sources. He also emailed the BBC, he told me. Well, they may have paid attention. (Perhaps other people noticed and emailed too. One can hope.) The story has been updated, and the paragraph is now there.

The country was free of the disease for 10 years – but in March 2005 a 20-month-old boy in Java was infected. Since then more than 200 polio cases have been reported in the country. Officials believe the outbreak can be traced to Nigeria, where vaccinations were suspended in 2003 after radical clerics said they were a US plot.

I was right about having seen the paragraph in previous articles, I found – this one from July 22 for instance.

Okay, Beeb, well done for correcting it on the screen. Now, include it in World Service broadcasts too, okay? Never mind ‘offending’ people: this is life or death, paralysis or non-paralysis. Don’t mess around.

Oh, come on, Beeb – can’t you write headlines better than that? “‘Men cleverer than women’ claim”? “Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women.”? Come on – pull your socks up, or get on your bike, or something.

A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests.

Hello? That’s not the same thing as saying ‘men are more intelligent than women’? At all? Surely, surely, you know that, if you think about it for five seconds. Think of the stupidest man you know. Now think of the cleverest woman you know. Is he more intelligent than she is? I rest my case.

But, maybe they really don’t know that. It is a common mistake. I heard Andrew Marr make it a few months ago, and he’s not thick – in fact he’s probably one of those men who are more intelligent than quite a few other men. But he said to Steve Pinker on ‘Start the Week’ that Larry Summers had said ‘men are better at science than women.’ I let out one of those exasperated whines one does let out when hearing people say stupid things on major media outlets: ‘That’s not what he said!’ and Steve Pinker said wearily, ‘That’s not what he said.’ But if Marr got it wrong, the chances are that most people get it wrong. The comments on that BBC article seem to confirm that, too – hardly anyone points out the mistake.

That’s quite tragic, really. It could mean that most people actually do think that all men indeed are more intelligent than all women. How depressing.

Something Norm said today that I’ve been wondering about. I can’t quite figure out how it works…

There’s a sense in which all concepts are social constructs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean – though it sometimes does mean – that what the concepts refer to are merely a matter of convention, of moral and cultural context, or what have you. It is true that some of the rights a person enjoys are a consequence of belonging to a particular community (your right to a British passport), or are relative to a given status she enjoys (as an old age pensioner), or the result of his past actions (as the party to a contract of sale). But there are other rights which a person possesses simply in virtue of being a human being. This is why we call them basic human rights. The right against being tortured is one of them. Even the most repugnant of individuals and those guilty of grave crimes, equally those merely suspected of some crime, share with everyone else the right not to be tortured. So the policy of not returning people to countries in which they face the danger of being subjected to torture ought to be upheld and defended.

There’s a whole large literature about this, of which I have read perhaps a page or two, so I’m stumbling around in the dark here, but – I don’t see how human rights can be anything other than a matter of convention. I don’t see how they can be anything other than social. Suppose you’re in a canoe paddling up a river (I read an account of just such a situation by an Australian philosopher once) and you’re attacked by a crocodile. You have a human right not to be tortured, which the crocodile is flagrantly disregarding. And – what? Nothing. What do human rights mean in such a situation? Nothing, that I can see. Surely human rights depend – quite heavily – on enforcement, laws, protection, recognition. So surely as a matter of brute fact, it is the case that all the rights a person enjoys are a consequence of belonging to a particular community – if they are real rights that she really does enjoy, at least, as opposed to being rights that no one in her world pays the smallest attention to. Some societies – a lot of them, actually, unfortunately – don’t respect human rights, or respect some but not others. Some human rights appear to be doomed for the foreseeable future in Iraq, thanks to the role of Islam in the constitution. So in what sense are rights not conventional? What does it mean to possess rights that are not enforced? Is it just a way of referring to rights we think people ought to have? I certainly have no problem with that; I’ve been talking about violations of [what ought to be] women’s rights in Niger, Pakistan, Guatemala, China, all over the place lately. But even then I don’t see how that makes such rights not a convention. We think women ought to have them, other people don’t; we can’t hold up anything labeled ‘human rights’ to show the other people and silence them once and for all. I wish we could, but we can’t.

Update: Norm points out that I don’t actually disagree with him after all. Since I said in an email message, “But I don’t mean that I think rights are a ‘mere’ convention – I’m happy to say they’re more than a convention – but I don’t see how they can escape being a convention too” – when he had said in the post I was wondering about, “There’s a sense in which all concepts are social constructs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean – though it sometimes does mean – that what the concepts refer to are merely a matter of convention, of moral and cultural context, or what have you.” (emphasis added) Well don’t I feel silly. I’m not quite sure whether I talked myself into something, or simply ignored the word ‘merely’ the first time and thus misread him* – but either way I’m a simp. Oh well. I quite enjoy talking about what kind of thing rights are, so it doesn’t matter – apart from disagreeing with Norm when I didn’t of course. But I have a right to be forgiven, so I’m sure I will be.

*Close reading! How many times do I have to tell you!

Galloway’s a funny guy. Maybe not as funny as Pat Robertson (‘I didn’t say “assassinate”!’ ‘Okay I’m sorry, I’m rilly sorry, I was just in a mood that day.’) but still pretty funny. Okay not really funny, more like disgusting, but I get so tired of pointing out how disgusting people are. Still – he is.

Mr Galloway, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, said TV executives had to be “very sensitive about people’s religion” and if broadcasters did not show sufficient sensitivity they “had to deal with the consequences”. He said: “You have to be aware if you do [offend people’s beliefs] you will get blowback. You should do it very carefully, especially if you are a public service broadcaster.”

Thenthitive. They have to be thenthitive – and if they’re not thenthitive enough, then blam! Okay? Got that? Be thenthitive or I’ll kill you.

Rushdie called him on it, as well he might.

“Is that a threat?” asked Rushdie during the debate at the Media Guardian Edinburgh international television festival. Describing Mr Galloway’s argument as “craven”, the author said: “The simple fact is that any system of ideas that decides you have to ringfence it, that you cannot discuss it in fundamental terms, that you can’t say that this bit of it is junk, or that bit is oppressive … we are supposed to respect that?”

It’s craven, it’s stupid, it’s mindless, and it means we can’t discuss things properly. Which is pretty much how things are: there are all sorts of subjects that don’t get discussed properly because there’s way too much senstivity about ‘people’s beliefs’. A lot of people believe that women should be subordinated, locked up, owned, and without rights, and a lot of other people who don’t believe that nevertheless keep silent on the subject out of brain-dead sensitivity to ‘beliefs’. Call it Gallowayism, if you like, or hypertrophy respectis.

Sad about Kashmir.

“I have a deep feeling for Kashmir, and I just had to write this book,” Rushdie said. “[But] it’s very hard to write about real events. It becomes unbearable. The challenge in writing this book was: how do you write about these things bearably without sweetening the pill?” Rushdie said Kashmir had changed since the 1950s and 1960s. “There was no radical Islam in Kashmir then – it was pacifist, Sufist – and it had nothing to do with jihad. But in the last half century this terrible fundamentalism has got hold of the region.”

Like so many regions. Terrible nightmare – and not one to be respectful or sensitive about; one to be resisted and fought.