Author: Mick Hartley

ts in an open car. I’ve seen the police laughing and boasting, and the girls in tears. The Sharia police say the tsunami happened because women ignored religion. We never heard of this parading before the tsunami.”

The poor, powerless and female have borne the brunt of the moral enforcers’ righteousness. Mrs Syam claimed the wife of an official caught without a headscarf on a scooter was let off last month and a prostitute who was paraded through the town won the sympathy of passers-by because of the hypocrisy of her persecutors: the woman’s client was allowed quietly to disappear.

question came to be whether there was anything intrinsic to voting, or to men, or to women, which could justify the exclusion of women.

As with the race analogy, so with the voting analogy: yes it does matter that the definition of marriage includes reference to two sexes. That’s my whole point. It isn’t a matter of convention (as, for Norm, with voting), or prejudice (as Peter Tatchell argues, with his hypothetical ban on black marriage), that’s confined marriage to different-sex unions. It’s included in the meaning of the term (which is not to say that it may not change, or that it shouldn’t change). The crucial question of whether there was “anything intrinsic to voting, or to men, or to women, which could justify the exclusion of women”, can be answered in the negative. For the same question applied to marriage – whether there’s anything intrinsic to it which could justify the exclusion of same-sex unions – the answer is, in my view, yes. It’s defined as a union between people of the opposite sex.

Norm continues:

Just so, the question now is whether there is some important difference between same-sex unions and opposite-sex unions that makes the institution of marriage (materially, not just definitionally) appropriate for the first but not for the second – when couples want their partnerships legally sanctioned. What might that difference be? The bearing of children? But not all marriages involve this anyway. What else? Love? Sexual union? Long-term commitment? These are all obvious non-starters for a differentiating criterion.

Well fine: as I said in my earlier post, it could well be that it’s the way we’ll go. But it would mark a significant change to the meaning of marriage, in a way which the introduction of female suffrage did not do to the meaning of voting.

This is not an argument against giving gays the same legal benefits as straights, which is a separate issue: quite clearly they should have the same legal benefits. It’s just to say that changing the meaning of words, and claiming that those who object must be prejudiced or clinging to convention, is not in my opinion an argument whose logic cannot be faulted.

Not good news for proponents of Intelligent Design (via ALDaily):

In a broad and withering opinion, a federal judge ruled today that intelligent design was nothing more than creationism in disguise and therefore that it was unconstitutional to teach it in a public-school science classroom.

The judge, John E. Jones III of the U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pa., took proponents of intelligent design to task in his 139-page opinion, saying that they wished to “change the ground rules of science to make room for religion, specifically, beliefs consonant with a particular version of Christianity.”

He also chastised the former members of the Dover Area School Board who insisted that teachers in the Pennsylvania district present intelligent design as a legitimate alternative to the widely accepted principles of biological evolution laid down by Charles Darwin nearly 150 years ago. The judge cited the “breathtaking inanity” of the board’s decision and the board members’ “striking ignorance” about the concept of intelligent design, often called “ID.” (Eight board members who supported inserting intelligent design into the science curriculum have since been voted out of office.)

“The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the board who voted for the ID policy,” the judge wrote. “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.”

Judge Jones also had harsh words for intelligent-design proponents in general, writing that the concept is “at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed.” At one point in the ruling, he stated plainly that intelligent design is “not science” — a view that reflects the arguments of ID’s strongest critics.

More links at B&W.

ggest that the weapons inspectors in Iraq should have been given more time before the rush to war! He says:

‘…American thinkers and intellectuals warned Bush before the war that everything he needed to guarantee America’s security by removing weapons of mass destruction – assuming they existed – was at his disposal, that all countries were with him when it came to inspections, and that America’s interest did not require him to launch into a groundless war with unknown repercussions. But the black gold blinded him and he put his own private interests ahead of the American public interest….’

The above statement is like a microcosm of the trendy liberal argument against the war in Iraq: we should have let the weapons inspectors continue their job (bin Laden for Blix!) but because Bush is so addicted to oil (the ‘black gold’) he went ahead with the war anyway. Bin Laden even worries about the war having ‘unknown repercussions’, an echo of debates in the West about the unpredictability of war in Iraq and the concern that it might make all of us less rather than more safe. No wonder bin Laden namechecks ‘American thinkers and intellectuals’ – he got his political position on Iraq directly from them.

By the time of Iraq, bin Laden – who started out as a Saudi obsessive who wanted to make Saudi society even more chokingly religious – has become a fully-fledged Bush-basher, virtually indistinguishable from a new generation of journos and bloggers who see Bush as the most evil president ever and Iraq as the wickedest war of all time (they have short historical memories).

It appears that there was more to that old Brecht line, about the government dissolving the people and electing another, than he knew:

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a “living war machine”. The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

s made a right?

Imagine the outcry if the government prohibited black people from getting married, and established a separate partnership register for non-whites.

Norm believes that the logic of the argument can’t be faulted. Well, the argument surely can be faulted, because the concept of marriage has, at least until recently, always contained an implication about the sex of those taking part. My dictionary (Collins, 1991) defines marriage as, 1. the state or relationship of being husband and wife, 2. the legal union or contract made by a man and a woman to live as husband and wife. The current arrangement attempts to honour this meaning, while allowing gays the same benefits through civil partnerships.

I’m always wary of analogies between race and sex (and class), and Tatchell’s example isn’t about to change my mind. A prohibition on black people getting married would be a purely arbitrary (and racist) curb on their rights: that gays can’t get married is a consequence of the fact that marriage has always been a union between two people of different sex. Race is irrelevant to marriage: sex isn’t. Do I really need to point that out? And does doing so necessarily mark me down as a homophobe, as Tatchell seems to imply?

Maybe things’ll change. They probably will. But for the moment civil partnership seems a reasonable compromise, and a notable step forward.

7″>Here’s the Pajamas Media announcement. And here’s Solomonia’s interview with Landes.

omed by the North Korean elite, which is cornered, and aware of its own embattled situation. Unlike the rulers of the former Soviet Union, China or most East European countries, the North Korean apparatchiks cannot reinvent themselves as successful capitalist entrepreneurs.

o the decadent nature of the [Baathist] regime (…). While most of these reports contained evidence that was unremarkable for a dictatorial regime (indeed, since Britain has one of the wealthiest monarchies and one of the highest levels of inequality in Europe, the charges of decadence were particularly curious), we found no reports that made this point, or put them in an international context. […]

Our research suggests that the (UK, ed.) wartime coverage was generally sympathetic to the government’s case. This manifested itself in various ways, notably: (…) the focus on the brutality or decadence of the regime without putting this evidence in context.

ch test our resolve, and at the end we’ll be judged on how we’ve coped. Will we be Carol Thatchers, destined for fame-and-fortune heaven, or Elaine Lordans, cast off into outer darkness?

I don’t buy any of this myself, but it’s a perfectly respectable position to take, given that we’re still no nearer understanding what goes on that makes us what we are, the mystery of consciousness. And many are beginning to doubt that we ever will.

I’m not sure who first came up with this – I think I read it in something by Raymond Tallis: the idea that philosophy alternates between periods of puzzling over the mind, and periods of puzzling over language. For much of the 20th Century Anglo-American philosophy was concerned with language (they called it linguistic philosophy: that’s how I know), but recently it seems to be all about mind: mind as a computer, mind as a modular Swiss army knife, or even mind as an illusion. Perhaps it’s because of the recent emphasis on the brain, the Nineties being “the decade of the brain”, which meant the focus was on brain-as-mind, with some of the most interesting books in the field being written by neurologists like Antonio Damasio. So maybe soon we’re due a swing back to language. It’s always seemed to me – and I offer this with no argument whatsoever (this is a blog post, for Chrissakes, not a paper in a philosophy journal) – that when/if we get some kind of grip on language, then the mind issue will sort itself out. Or to put that in a different way, what really differentiates us from other animals isn’t so much the quality of our consciousness, or our morality, but simply our ability to speak. The great mystery, it strikes me, is language. Everything “human” stems from that.

As for Intelligent Design, well, if I were a crusading Christian, that’s the line I’d be pushing. Let the scientists have their evolution; the evidence is overwhelming. But language now – there’s Intelligent Design for you. That’s when God stepped in (and later gave us the Tower of Babel when he realised it was a bit too much of a good thing). For the moment no scientist is going to be able to come up with any decent arguments against you. It’d give them something a bit more substantial as a target to aim at than what’s currently on offer from the fundamentalists.