Author: Mick Hartley

More Ukrainian graffiti (see here). According to English Russia they’re meant to illustrate Ukrainian fairy tales. It’d be interesting to know more about these fairy tales, if that’s true – but this one at least seems fairly clear.

So the question posed by the book: What makes good people do bad things?, has its clearest application in the case of Zimbardo himself. He is, no doubt, a good person, and yet there he was, setting up a situation which caused considerable pain to a considerable number of people. Why? For the scientific knowledge, he would no doubt answer. Well yes, maybe. But perhaps there was an element of careerism in his decisions? Or he enjoyed the power of being able to order all those people about? Whatever, we’re not going to find out, because that’s not where he’s looking. Psychologists don’t get where they are nowadays by indulging in introspection.

This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are…forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics… Well exactly. As with Milgram, we see what psychologists are capable of when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, and it’s not a pretty sight.

n donned a burqa (a Muslim woman’s head-to-toe robe) and promised to shun “immoral acts.”

The students at the madrassa (Islamic school) in Islamabad had kidnapped the woman, identified only as Shamim, along with her daughter and a daughter-in-law Tuesday, sparking a standoff with the government.

Clad in an identical black burqa to the ones worn by the students, the woman was brought before the media at the Jamia Hafsa school and read out a confession.

“I seek forgiveness for the sins that I have committed and declare I will live like a true Muslim and preacher of religion,” Shamim said in the signed statement.

“I do confess getting involved in certain acts, which are considered moral crimes, with my house being misused for the purpose,” she said.

She denied that she had been forced to sign the statement, but said that there were “several men, who tied and tortured me before I arrived here. But the attitude of the female students was exemplary.” […]

The case has raised questions about the Pakistani government’s willingness to tackle the hardline school in the center of the capital, following a series of incidents.

Many of the school’s female students are still occupying a nearby government-run children’s library after launching a protest in January against plans to demolish a mosque in the capital.

But deputy information minister Tariq Azeem denied the government had showed weakness in its handling of the school, saying it was in talks to remove the protesters from the library.

“No one will be allowed to take the law into their own hands in the name of Islam,” he told Geo television.

ld be there forever and that their pensions were safe. They believed in recycling and environmental protection. They even believed in a German victory at the soccer World Cup.

Now they believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran. This was the by-no-means-surprising result of a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular — 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise — said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran.

The German political establishment, which will no doubt loudly lament the result of the poll, is largely responsible for this wave of anti-Americanism. For years the country’s foreign ministers fed the Germans the fairy tale of what they called a “critical dialogue” between Europe and Iran. It went something like this: If we are nice to the ayatollahs, cuddle up to them a bit and occasionally wag our fingers at them when they’ve been naughty, they’ll stop condemning their women to death for “unchaste behavior” and they’ll stop building the atom bomb.

That plan failed at some point — an outcome, incidentally, that Washington had long anticipated. Iran continues to work away unhindered on its nuclear program, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reacts to UN demands with an ostentatious show of ignorance. The UN gets upset and drafts a resolution.

Another item on the Iranian president’s wish list is the annihilation of Israel. But that will take a bit longer. In the meantime, just to make sure it doesn’t get out of practice, the regime had 15 British soldiers kidnapped a few days ago. But it’s still all the Americans’ fault — that much is obvious…

For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.

Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course — from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE’s readers steadfastly believe, “is worse than Hitler.” Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the Führer on to someone else.

Just what is it that makes today’s celebrities so different, so appealing?:

His lifestyle is clearly lavish – even decadent. In his dressing room full-size portraits of him hang on the wall, dozens of candles flicker, the finest champagnes are on offer alongside Ciroc vodka, and he is dressed by the world’s best designers.

Surrounded by the trappings of great wealth Diddy is nonetheless polite, if rather raunchy as he talks about his love.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with Kim in Paris,” he told us. “And it’s been perfect.

“As soon as we landed, we went straight to the Eiffel Tower, drank champagne at the top and just kissed and kissed… Then we went up to my suite and had tantric sex for at least 30 hours, ordering up whipped cream and strawberries while we were at it.”

Diddy, real name Sean John Combs, goes on: “As meticulous as I am with my work, I’m more meticulous with lovemaking. I like to do it for a long time.”…

He says: “After leaving our hotel, me and Kim were driven down the Champs-Elysees in my Mercedes Maybach at 4am, with music playing in the background and we saw so many beautiful sights together.

Catherine Philip in the Times, on the thousands of Chadians so desperate that their only hope was to head for the refugee camps over the border in Darfur:

For three years, the villagers on this side of the border have watched in horror as a flood of refugees poured over, bringing tales of the slaughter of children, rape of women and burning of their villages by the Janjawid, the Arab militia. Now the Janjawid have followed them into Chad, coopting Arab tribes to wage war on their black African neighbours, ending centuries of peaceful coexistence.

What happened in Mrs Anouf’s village, Devis, came straight out of Darfur. She was harvesting the fields when she heard gunfire and looked up to see horsemen, their heads wrapped in white scarves, bearing down on them with machineguns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. By the time the raid was over, Devis had been razed, its mudwalled houses smoking ruins, the tall jars of stored okra broken, the bodies of two dozen men, women and children lying bullet-riddled on the ground.

Her husband limped over to the stubble where she was hiding, bearing the terrible news that two of their children had been taken. “The plague from Darfur has arrived,” he said. “It is a genocide, there is no other word for it,” said the Sultan of Darsila, the spiritual leader of the region, who has tried and failed to broker peace between the neighbours-turned-enemies. “In the past we have always solved our differences peacefully, but this time it is political. This is a fire that has spread from Sudan.” […]

At Devis Mr Sulaiman walks over to a giant toppled food urn and points to the hole that the Janjawid made near its base before throwing in a flame, the simple but efficient means to ensure that not a grain of food remains. “There is nothing left to come back to,” he says. “That was their intention — for us never to come back.”

Back in the sun-blasted settlement outside Goz Amer, Mrs Anouf cries for her two lost children, who have not been seen since the day they were snatched from the fields. Then she cries for the two that survived and their future in this desperate place.

To the south, yet another crisis is unfolding as tens of thousands of refugees pour over the border from the Central African Republic. The conflict has begun to spread there like a contagion. The plague from Darfur rides on.

Video report here.

Well I’m convinced:

A mysterious French nun, who was allegedly cured of Parkinson’s disease after praying to the late Pope John Paul, will be the main guest next week at ceremonies marking the end of the first phase of the process to make him a saint.

But her identity may never be known unless she decides to reveal it.

Next Monday, the second anniversary of his death, the Rome diocese will officially give the Vatican tens of thousands of pages of documentation and transcripts which propose that John Paul should be beatified, the final step before sainthood.

This includes the case of a French nun who was suffering from Parkinson’s – the same disease that the late pope had – until it inexplicably disappeared on 2 June, 2005…

The nun, whose identity is known to only a handful of clerics and doctors, wrote anonymously of her experiences in a Catholic magazine.

“I was losing weight day by day. I could no longer write and if I did try to, it was difficult to decipher. I could no longer drive … because my left leg became rigid,” she wrote.

Exactly two months after the pope’s death, she felt the sudden urge to pick up a pen. “My handwriting was completely legible, my body was no longer pained, no longer rigid, I felt a profound sense of peace,” she wrote.

On the other hand…(see previous post)…here (via Metafilter) are some street murals from Ukraine:

How come we never see anything this imaginative here?

Isn’t it exciting, keeping up with the latest developments in the art world? Somewhere down the line from the Tracey Emin school of self-obsession-and-personal-neuroses art, and the Chapman brothers’ naughty-boys art, here’s Nigel Madden:

A Napier artist who last year exhibited photographs of his dead father lying bruised on a mortuary slab has followed up by offering his father’s ashes for display.

Nigel Madden has entered the ashes in this year’s Norsewear Art Awards, saying his father, Neville, an alcoholic and Radio New Zealand announcer in Napier during the 1960s, was proving to be “much more useful dead than he ever was alive”.

The ashes are in a Belgium-made pewter urn Madden bought over the Internet. It sits on a handmade plinth.

Though his entry in last year’s awards, Three Portraits of Neville Madden, was a lament for a dysfunctional father-son relationship, this year’s piece, entitled The End of Art, was less personal, he said.

“I take my father’s incinerated remains, entombed in a reflective funeral urn, and place it on a pedestal. So, my father’s remains function as a symbol and a stand-in for art.”

Madden quotes Picasso, saying “in art one must kill one’s father”. He said he liked the cold, reflective surface of the urn, which left the viewer “dwelling on their own thoughts rather than the object itself”.

He’s right though: if I came across it in a gallery, I’d very likely be dwelling on my own thoughts rather than the object itself. Not very charitable thoughts, mind…

Not perhaps the most sensitive advertising campaign:

The authorities in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk have removed billboards of ex-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin urging residents to pay their utility bills.

The decision was taken after protests by human rights groups and nationalists, AP news agency said.

Billboards saying “Those who do not pay for heating will be punished!” appeared in the eastern city last week.

Historians say Stalin engineered the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine, during which up to 10 million people died.

A local energy company had come up with the idea of putting up the Stalin billboards, Ukraine’s media said.

It said at least five of them appeared in Donetsk last week.

One of the billboards showed Stalin holding a piece of paper and saying: “Comrades! This is not a film! This is life!”

Last year the Ukrainian parliament voted in favour of declaring the famine, which killed about a quarter of the population, an act of genocide against its people.