Author: Mick Hartley

From Mark Steyn:

George Clooney, the matinee idol, made an interesting point the other day. He said that “liberal” had become a dirty word and he’d like to change that. Fair enough. So I hope he won’t mind if I make a suggestion. The best way to reclaim “liberal” for the angels is to get on the right side of history — the side the Iraqi people are on. The word “liberal” has no meaning if those who wear the label refuse to celebrate the birth of a new democracy after 40 years of tyranny. Yet, if you wandered the Internet on Thursday, you came across far too many “liberals” who watched the election, shrugged and went straight back to Valerie Plame, WMD, Bush lied.

Bush lied, people dyed. Their fingers. That’s what this is about: Millions of Kurds, Shia and Sunnis beaming as they emerge from polling stations and hold up their purple fingers after the freest, fairest election ever held in the Arab world. “Liberal” in the American sense is a dirty word because it’s come to stand for a shriveled parochial obsolescent irrelevance, of which ”Good Night, and Good Luck,” Clooney’s dreary little retread of the McCarthy years, is merely the latest example. (Clooney says he wants more journalists to “speak truth to power,” which is why I’m insulting his movie.)

ssed to stealing it.”

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse. […]

If America’s leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID [cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment], has historically been an instrument of oppression — not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to “legalize” torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn’t stopped, torture will destroy your nation’s important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: “You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . “

Off we go, back to the caves.

Courtesy of Yoko, brand Lennon takes another step forward:

Coming in Spring 2006, this is the first officially licensed John Lennon Figure ever. He will “speak” authentic John Lennon phrases and is known as “The New York Years” John Lennon.

(via)

Courtesy of MEMRI TV, a nice little clay-mation kiddies film shown on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar channel: the Jews ignore the Lord’s commandment about resting on the Sabbath, get rich selling the fish they’ve caught, and sneer at the pious Arabs – but they get their come-uppance when they’re turned into apes and pigs, and then cast out into the sea.

Habakkuk: “Step right up. It is me, Habakkuk. I am, as you can see, safe and sound. The only illness that has struck me is wealth. Come here. How nice it is to work on the Sabbath. How nice it is to work on the Sabbath. I am working on the Sabbath, and I challenge the will of the heavens.”

While jumping up and down Pinhas, Shamloun, Habakkuk as well as others in the marketplace turn into apes. The boy and his grandfather [our heroes] open a door in the wall and step to the other side with some other villagers.

Grandfather:”Look, my child, the young among them have turned into apes, and their elderly have become pigs.”

Boy:”They should know that the Lord speaks the truth and punishes severely.”

Grandfather:”Praise the Lord, who has saved us. They remained in this condition for three days, and then were annihilated. The wind has cast them into the sea.”

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In 1988, the Iranian government executed thousands of political prisoners held inside Iranian jails. The deliberate and systematic manner in which these extrajudicial executions took place may constitute a crime against humanity under international law, Human Rights Watch said. Mustafa Pour-Mohammadi was a member of the three-person committee that ordered prisoners held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison to their summary executions.

From 1990 to 1999, Pour-Mohammadi was director of foreign intelligence operations in the Ministry of Information. During this period, dozens of opposition figures were assassinated abroad. In some of these cases the hand of the Iranian government has been well established, while in others there are credible allegations of government involvement. Pour-Mohammadi is at the center of strong allegations of direct involvement in orchestrating these assassinations.

In 1998, agents of the Ministry of Information killed five prominent activist intellectuals in Tehran. An Iranian source with first-hand knowledge of the investigation told Human Rights Watch that Pour-Mohammadi was implicated by investigators in those killings and even that an arrest warrant was about to be issued for him. “But instead it was arranged that he leave his post in the Ministry of Information,” this source said.

Gholamhussein Mohseni Ezhei, the new Minister of Information, served as prosecutor general of the Special Court for the Clergy and in this position spearheaded the prosecution of prominent reformist clerics. He has also been a key figure in suppressing press freedoms, resulting in the closure of more than 100 newspapers since 2000. Several journalists and activists have alleged that Mohseni Ezhei ordered the kidnap and killing of Pirouz Davani, a dissident and political activist, in 1998.

Apologies to anyone who came by here today (Friday) and wondered what was going on. Typepad crashed, so they put up what was presumably the last back-up, from a couple of days ago. Let’s hope we’re back to normal now.

From Natalie Solent, noting (with Scott Burgess) that the Independent has abandoned its role as a newspaper to become instead a dispenser of morality tales, as it omits more and more information it doesn’t think people should be aware of – such as for instance that it’s not only white people who are capable of behaving badly:

If this carries on it’ll save a packet on the paper’s coverage of the sunnier parts of the world. There were dramatic developments in Basra today, where people did stuff. Meanwhile in Darfur people did peoply things, other people claim. Eventually it might reach a stage where the only person mentioned by name in the entire newspaper was George W. Bush. One would open one’s copy to see the Presidential name repeated endlessly, like a mantra.

The Times’ art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston has an almost endearing knack of breathlessly stating the latest received opinion as a profound insight, and stringing together tired cliches as though they were important contributions to the debate. I suppose it’s part of the job description. How else can you write seriously about the Turner Prize? – “It begs important questions about the ways that we negotiate our planet“. Now, from her latest Arts Notebook:

King Kong has a visceral power because it speaks with the voice of a myth: with the bellow of the Minotaur as he lumbers through his labyrinth; with the arrogance of Theseus as he trusts to his thread; with the sorrow of Ariadne left abandoned on an alien island. This is a movie that reverberates with a deep symbolic resonance. It speaks of the inner life of mankind: explores the emotional jungles that explanation alone cannot navigate. Myths like this help us to feel our way back into the world.

This film speaks directly to a mankind more than ever numb to nature. This Kong — not a monster but a magnificent silverback gorilla — speaks of the ravages that we wreak upon the splendours of the planet, of the greed that lays waste to natural glory. This is a movie that explains why in a world of almost six billion people there are barely 600 gorillas left; why in a Montreal conference dedicated to environmental matters, the chief American negotiator upped sticks and walked out.

It does??

Speaker] Arinc are trampling the constitution with their statements, and are committing a crime.”

CHP Chairman Deniz Baykal underlined that Erdogan’s interpretation was against the principle of secularism and the constitution that secures this principle, and added that Erdogan’s words reflected a longing for a theocratic state.

Baykal further said: “These words should not have come out of the mouth of a prime minister of the democratic, secular Turkish Republic. That we should ask the ulema! What kind of mentality is that? What else should we ask the ulema? Should we consult them on having four wives [as permitted by Islam]? About the inheritance law? Maybe on women’s rights? And who shall we ask? The Shi’ite ulema in Iran? Or the Wahhabi ulema of Saudi Arabia?”

Not forgetting, of course, novelist Orhan Pamuk’s trial, for “insulting Turkishness”, due to start in Istanbul tomorrow:

The charges relate to a magazine interview in which Orhan Pamuk said 30,000 Kurds and one million Ottoman Armenians were killed in Turkey and no-one dares talk about it.

He could face up to three years in jail.

A fascinating article by Carl Zimmer, on an experiment which demonstrates how children tend to “over-imitate”, ie to copy the actions of their elders scrupulously even when those actions appear to have no purpose. Young chimps in the same situation, on the other hand, ignore the unnecessary steps and go straight for the result (opening a box to obtain food). It’s a surprising result, because at first sight it appears to show that the chimps are being more intelligent. But in fact it may point to an important element of human psychology:

Mr. Lyons [a Yale grad student seeking to replicate the original findings from the University of St. Andrews] sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn’t understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.

Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. “Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought,” Mr. Lyons said.

We don’t appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. “It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way,” he added. “You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it.”

As a commenter at Metafilter) points out, Susan Blackmore in “The Meme Machine” proposed that imitation is a key human skill. Learning to speak would be inconceivable without it, and once we start to imitate each other memes take over from genes, and culture takes off (to boil down a whole argument into a single phrase). The down side, of course: we look for role models and strong leaders to show us the way.

OK, a lot to load onto a single experiment, but it is a particularly interesting one.