Author: Mick Hartley

argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

The consequences are hideous. Whatever one thinks of the Muslims who blow themselves up in crowded cities in Europe or Israel or fly planes into buildings in the US, who could dispute that the certainty of their faith had something to do with it? George W. Bush and many others would have us believe that terrorism is a distortion of Islam, and that Islam is a religion of peace. Of course, it is good policy to say this, but statements about what “Islam is” make little sense. Islam, like all other religions, was created by people, and there are potentially as many different versions of Islam as there are people who profess to be Muslims. (The same remarks apply to Eagleton’s highly personal account of what Christianity “is”.) I don’t know on what ground one can say that a peaceable well-intentioned person like Abdus Salam was any more a true Muslim than the murderous holy warriors of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, the clerics throughout the world of Islam who incite hatred and violence, and those Muslims who demonstrate against supposed insults to their faith, but not against the atrocities committed in its name. (Incidentally, Abdus Salam regarded himself as a devout Muslim, but he belonged to a sect that most Muslims consider heretical, and for years was not allowed to return to Pakistan.) Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world, and in the harm it does. Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced. I share his lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally.

Nice photo essay from Monrovia by Christopher Herwig, featuring the National Association of Wheelbarrow Operators of Liberia (NAWOUL).

In our membership we have qualified people, people with high school diplomas and people who are going to college even, but they are constrained by economic circumstances to pick up the ‘wheel’. I would like to study business administration, but the bad economy just won’t let me. Most people don’t do this by choice, but they have families to feed and children’s school fees to pay.

By the same photographer, Stanorama, a journey through Central Asia.

rom American soldiers and from Iraqis, too. In large parts of Iraq, still, there are people who dread what might happen in the event of our withdrawal—people to whom in some sense we remain pledged. A surge of any size will be worse than useless if it loses us that moral advantage. In all the recent ignorant burbling about another Vietnam, it ought to have been stressed that there is just one historical parallel worth noting: the early identification of the Kennedy brothers with the Catholic faction in Saigon over the Buddhist one. This is one mistake that we can and must avoid repeating, and Maliki’s regime, with its Dawa and Sadrist allies, should be made to know it.

Further to my post on talking parrots, here’s more on N’kisi, the remarkable African Grey, at the Skeptic’s Dictionary (via):

[A]pparently nobody involved in these parrot promotions thinks it of much interest that none of the jabbering parrots converse with each other. Wouldn’t you think that if they had language they’d use it with each other? Wouldn’t at least one of the many parrots whose owners claim to have taught them language have tried to converse with another parrot, just to find out if the other also thinks the owner is an idiot?

A link is provided to what must surely rank as one of the great scientific papers of our time: Rupert Sheldrake’s “Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy” (pdf file).

of multi-culturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous’. Generations of Muslims and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these
catechisms.

The build-up to the second Holocaust (which, incidentally, in the end, will probably claim roughly the same number of lives as did the first) has seen an international community fragmented and driven by separate, selfish appetites – Russia and China obsessed with Muslim markets; France, with Arab oil – and the United States driven by the debacle in Iraq into a deep isolationism. Iran has been left free to pursue its nuclear destiny and Israel and Iran, to face off alone.

capacity. In turn, there are fewer international witnesses to the ethnic crimes that define the conflict in Darfur. Khartoum’s crackdown on journalists traveling to the region has also reduced the means of chronicling the accelerating genocide.

This is the context in which to understand President Omar al-Bashir’s insistence that Khartoum will not allow UN troops into Darfur – indeed, that Darfur doesn’t need UN troops. Asserting that Khartoum’s “experience with UN operations in the world is not encouraging,” al-Bashir went on to declare: “There are sufficient forces in the Sudan from African countries to maintain order and they can provide order. All we need is funding for the African troops.”

It is a political and moral failure of the first order that this mendacity should be the obstacle to deployment of the UN forces needed to protect the collapsing humanitarian operations and vulnerable population. Acquiescence to al-Bashir’s defiance makes a mockery of the world’s “responsibility to protect” civilians in places such as Darfur. This responsibility was a centerpiece of the September 2005 UN World Summit and was unanimously reaffirmed in UN Security Council Resolution 1674 of April 2006.

All of which produces this – not untypical – comment.

So, Eric Reeves, as a proven liar and accessory to mass murder, how do you live with yourself as you continue to peddle the same lies that produce yet more deaths and misery in Sudan? Drugs, I imagine?

A belated New Year’s resolution: never, ever, read the comments threads at CiF.

The view from a Sunni insurgent in Baghdad:

“Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad,” Abu Omar told me in a low voice. He had been on the Americans’ wanted list for three years but I had never seen him so anxious; he had trimmed his beard in the close-cropped Shia style and kept looking towards the door. His brother had been kidnapped a few days before, he told me, and he believed he was next on a Shia militia’s list. He had fled his home in the north of the city and was staying with relatives in a Sunni stronghold in west Baghdad.

He was more despondent than angry. “We Sunni are to blame,” he said. “In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: ‘This is not jihad. You can’t kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs – why provoke them?’ “

Then he said: “I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming.”

This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.

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More hot tango action for you tangueros – yes, I know you’re out there – from Geraldine Rojas y Javier Rodriguez:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Cy6jHnhf4&w=425&h=350]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25-5dLLkVzA&w=425&h=350]

Previous tangotastic post here.

not interpret Shakespeare any more usefully by applying Freud’s map of the mind or his analytical system to the plays….

For many years I have taught that Freud is essentially prosified Shakespeare: Freud’s vision of human pychology is derived, not altogether unconsciously, from his reading of the plays.

If you extend Shakespeare to include the whole “Western Canon”, then I think Bloom may well be right. Psychoanalysis is a theory of the mind as developed by a highly ambitious man thoroughly at home with all of Western literature from the classical to the modern. As we now know, its supposed grounding in the therapeutic situation, in the rigours of scientific endeavour, is entirely spurious. Freud didn’t cure anyone, or come to his conclusions through the hard work of trial and error. The analytic situation was merely the backdrop for what was really going on: myth-making on a grand scale.

Which explains why among all Freud’s followers, the literary establishment are the most entrenched. It’s just the sort of theory they’d appreciate, because it’s true home is not science, but, precisely, Western literature. That’s why they feel so at home there. It’s Western intellectual and literary thought, as at the end of the 19th century, condensed into one all-encompassing theory. To use it to explain Western literature, as generations of academics have done, following Freud’s example, is to hold up a mirror and believe you’re seeing through a window. It’s an echo chamber for the best that’s been thought and written in Western culture, from sex to death and all points in between. Those who devour Freud’s writings so eagerly do so because they want so badly to believe it all. How wonderful to have such a deeply satisfying theory that gets you from biology to culture in just a few short steps, throws in Sophocles to Shakespeare, Goethe to Nietzsche on the way, and explains it all in what seems to be such a rigorously scientific manner.

What a pity it’s none of it true.