And is there really a difference, when they’re both killing you?

This was brought on by Riverbend’s recent post.

I wonder. My immediate reaction is the same as hers. Nobody could be that stupid. (I adhere to the conspiracy theory that says it’s about oil. Once you have the war of the all against the all, they grind themselves to rubble, and then you have a free hand to come in with your siphon and get the black gold for next to nothing.)

But the scientist in me insists on considering the null hypothesis: What if they are that stupid?

Think about it. What if they really are that stupid? The mind reels. It’s actually easier to think they could be that evil instead of that stupid.

And the implications for democracy are staggering. It means there really is a minimum of wisdom required to run a country. It implies not everyone has it. We’d have to start limiting the pool from which leaders can be elected. But how? Any limits always seem to wind up selecting for rich and powerful nincompoops. Which is where we are now.

My head hurts.

Technorati tags: Iraq, politics, oil , conspiracy

There’s been much hoohah over the Iraq Study Group’s report and it’s suggestions about how to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic with a troop movement here and a withdrawal there. Lost in the static is this gem:

From Antonia Juhasz, Alternet, Dec. 7th:

Mission Accomplished.

Does it matter which one is happening in Iraq? If it’s “not a civil war” does that mean it’s “okay”? If it is, does that mean anyone plans on doing anything different?

This is yet another way of avoiding the issues. They aren’t hard to articulate:

1) Saddam Hussein was one of the world’s outstanding sadistic dictators. He needed to be deposed.

2) Killing the patient in order to save them is bad.

3) The US, with it’s hamfisted operating procedures and oil-murky motives, is busily killing Iraq. The US has an absolute moral obligation to stop destroying the place and to make reparations in whatever way is acceptable to civilian Iraqis.

4) While the US fiddles, arguing about how many hundreds of thousands have died and what the definition of war is, people are perishing, families are falling apart, and the land is turning into waste.

Update a few hours later. Well, that’s a relief. The whole thing has been cleared up because, as happens so often, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show have come to the rescue. What we’re dealing with here is a “minor linguistic flareup.” Also a “faith-based melee.” Or, just possibly, a “territorial argle-bargle.” The incomparable crooksandliars.com has the clip.

There is a big divide, important people say. Muslims are furious about the treatment of Palestinians, about discrimination, humiliation, and marginalisation. To demonstrate how to treat people right, they blow them up. The West is furious about people being blown up. To demonstrate how to treat people right, they blow up mosques. And people, but always only as a regrettable side-effect. It’s not terrorism when the West does it. Remember that, or nothing will make any sense.

The West has some other issues that get less press. Oil, for instance. This is not about oil. Do not think about oil. Think about the clash of civilizations. (Are you thinking about it? Good.)

And then there’s human rights. The idea of having to live with the restrictions, uptightness, and all-around neuroticism that most Muslim societies seem to consider normal horrifies the vast majority of Westerners. But since they don’t, themselves, have to live with it, not much is said. It would be intolerant, or meddlesome, or it’s an internal affair. Sort of like wife-beating used to be something between a man and a woman. However, just because almost nobody talks about it, doesn’t stop it from being a source of hostility. Too often, it’s over-generalized hostility, as things that aren’t voiced usually are.

There’s a common thread there. The anger is about occupation, humiliation, poverty, violence, and abuse. These are not religious issues. They aren’t even cultural issues.

They are issues of justice. Nobody, whether Western, Muslim, or Western and Muslim, wants to be poor, hurt, or humiliated. A world united behind impoverishing and abusing people would be worse than our current one, not better. It is not unity anyone wants. It is justice, at least for themselves.

Let me go through a few examples, just to make my meaning clear.

• Palestine. The Jews, having been atrociously treated by the Europeans, decided they needed a Jewish state. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to have a benign government without the separation of religion and state, but I’m also a strong believer in consenting adults doing whatever they damn well please. So I’ll blink the separation issue for a moment, and grant the concept of a Jewish state. They wanted that state in the Promised Land. The only problem was, the land had been promised to some other people as well (perhaps proving not only that God exists, but also that he wouldn’t pass his real estate license). So Palestinian people got turfed out to make way for Jewish people. No matter how you look at it, that is an injustice. The consequences of that injustice will continue to resonate until it either stops (which means the Palestinians can live in peace in their own country, whether that’s a non-religious state or a separate, viable Palestine) or everybody is dead.
• It doesn’t stop because the US is too busy supporting Israel, right or wrong. So we’re currently headed toward the second alternative while we waste time talking about bridging a non-existent divide. There is no divide. Nobody wants to be booted out of their country or have to pass checkpoints to reach a hospital. There’s only a lot of people who’d rather do what’s easy (for themselves) than what’s right. There’s a lot of people who’d rather use poor refugees as irritants against their enemies, or ignore the crimes of their client state. In other words, there’s only a lot of people who’d rather have (other) people die than do what it takes to right a wrong. No divide there either, unfortunately.
• Lack of respect for Muslim traditions. Some traditions should not be respected. Cannibalism. Slavery. Female genital mutilation. Only the first is not well-known from at least some Middle Eastern lands. None of them have anything to do with Islam, but the appalling treatment of people in majority Muslim societies puts the religion in a bad light. So why aren’t the clerics making sure these things stop? Instead, some come out with statements favoring wife-beating and rape. There are psychopaths everywhere. But the right-thinking clerics should be ostracizing the crazies, not meeting them with, at most, embarrassed silence.
• Many of these so-called traditions have to do with depriving women of basic human rights, such as freedom of movement, and even the basic ability to choose one’s own clothing. But they’re not limited to that. There are also ludicrous pronouncements about music and shorts, things that call to mind some of the excesses of Southern Baptists. When Muslims stop demanding respect for travesties of human rights, both serious and silly ones, and start demanding respect for traditions that deserve it, like the Middle Eastern concept of hospitality, at least they’ll have justice on their side.
• Globalization. That’s what it’s called. In actual fact, it gives corporations new ways to make money, new ways to avoid environmental laws, and new ways to avoid labor laws. Even in the US itself, that supposed bastion of globalization, when consumers tried to buy medicines from other countries where they were cheaper, the corporations soon put a stop to that. Globalization for me but not for thee. Nobody wants to be a cash cow for the wealthy. There’s no divide. There’s just rich people, Western and non-Western, who’d rather make money off less-rich people. Nothing new there, not even the diversionary tactic of riling up the poor with religion instead.
• State-sponsored terrorism, aka war. Killing people because it suits your purposes is bad enough, but I want to focus on the demonization that is necessary to allow it to happen. There is, we are told, some kind of “clash of civilizations.” On one side there are the blond, blue-eyed heroes, and on the other a bunch of cheating, thieving, no-good Semites.

   Wait, that’s the old script. Those were Jewish Semites. This time, it’s totally different. On one side are fine, upstanding followers of Western, Christian values, and on the other are a bunch of cheating, thieving, terrorist Arab Semites. Totally different.

• Every single cleric who is allowed to call him- or herself a Christian ought to be condemning this. Instead, there are a few fundamentalist Christian preachers who not only condone it, they promote it. By giving criminal heads of state religious cover, a few clerics make the religion seem like nothing but a bandage for an oozing wound.
• Small-scale terrorism, aka terrorism. Targeting civilians because you can’t get at soldiers is Bad. Not Honorable. Thoroughly despicable. Every single cleric who is allowed to call himself a Muslim ought to be condemning this. By giving criminals religious cover, a few clerics make the religion seem like nothing but a bandage for an oozing wound.

Not one of these issues is anything people disagree about. The only disagreement is how much it matters when they hurt other people. Trying to find “agreement” on that is either despicable (“Okay, I won’t discuss human rights for women if you’ll stop harping on human rights for Palestinians.”) or irrelevant (“We can agree that both Christianity and Islam are great religions”).

By pretending that the problem is some kind of cultural divide instead of injustice, it’s possible to pretend that the only thing needed for a solution is a bit of talk and understanding. Interestingly enough, nobody is ever quite agreed on what to talk about first. Is it respect for religion? Or tradition? Or market forces? Or not committing acts of war without a license? Pretty soon, we’re talking about talking, and that’s even easier than not solving the problem by talking about it.

Many commenters on the Lancet study (pdf) boggle at the numbers, point at the uncertainty, express disbelief, and note that they’re not statisticians. Well, I’m here to help.

Although perhaps not very much. I’m not a statistician either. I scraped the bottom of the barrel as a student taking my one required stat class. It was only because Dick Lewontin was a brilliant teacher and exceedingly merciful that I passed at all. But in some ways that may make it easier for me to explain. I know what we all go through when statistics get thrown at us.

I won’t be discussing specifics of the methodology or how they collected data. (For what my opinion is worth, their methodology is excellent.) Billmon, Zeyad, and the Lancet article itself go into that in exhaustive detail. (Update, Oct 19. Another English- rather than statistics-based discussion by Greg Mitchell. Yet one more: Riverbend gives her usual excellent personal take on the numbers.) Iraq Body Count has a much lower number (about 43,000 at the low end of the estimate) because that is a tally purely of deaths reported in various media. Anyone who thinks that the media are cataloguing every single death in Iraq is living in a dreamworld. Of course IBC’s estimate is vastly lower.

I’d like to (try to) explain in a nutshell what the overall numbers in the Lancet article mean.

The main thing that seems to have people’s knickers in a twist is the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimates of the true number of excess deaths. (It’s worth pointing out that the uncertainty would be much lower if the US had lived up to its obligations as an occupier and kept as good a count as it could of deaths in the country.)

There are two different kinds of uncertainty: the uncertainty of not knowing whether your numbers are right because of the difficulty of collecting the data, and the statistical measure of uncertainty. The broad range of estimates, 392979 – 942636, in the Lancet article is due to the difficulty of collecting data. Since getting the data is difficult, the distribution of estimates of the real number of deaths will look like the blue line below. Note that the line does NOT represent numbers of deaths. It represents estimates of what the actual real number is.

(Graphs modified from Wikipedia, showing generic normal distributions to illustrate the concepts discussed. These are not from the Lancet.)

The important thing to remember is that the statistics tell you how much chance you have of guessing wrong. The true number has a 68% likelhood of being somewhere in the blue zone in the lower graph above. It has a 95% likelihood of being somewhere within the blue plus beige zones. In the top graph, the 95% zone lies between the dashed lines: as discussed below, that’s a narrow range for the red line, broad for the blue one.

With good data, the chance that your estimate will be far from the true number (i.e. “0”) is low, so the curve is steep and pointy. If, for instance, the true number of excess deaths were 655,000, and the necessary records to count the number of deaths were easily available, the likelihood that the real number of deaths was, say, 600,000 would be vanishingly small. Ninety five percent of the estimates might fall between, for instance, plus or minus 10,000 deaths, as depicted by the dashed lines in the top graph.

With hard-to-collect data, the chance of estimating wrong is much higher. The likelihood that the real number was 600,000 is not vanishingly small. It’s quite large, and 600,000 may, in fact, be the real number. So may 700,000. Both are equally likely. If one wants to stress that the number of excess deaths could be as low as 393,000 according to this study, one has to also stress that it could be as high as 943,000. The uncertainty of the estimate means higher numbers are as likely as lower ones.

What the range of numbers means is that there is high statistical certainty (at least 95% to be precise) that the real number of deaths falls within that range. The range encompasses the blue and the beige areas under the graph (and is represented by the hard-to-see dashed lines at the extreme right and left of the blue line in the top graph). That means there is a 95% probability that the true number of deaths falls somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636. There is a less than one in twenty chance that “only” 350,000 people have died due to the occupation, or that a million people have died. In other words, there is a great deal of statistical certainty that the range is correct. The midpoint of the range is the likeliest true number, but that is less certain.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died. That is not in dispute any more than any other scientific conclusion that rests on a 95% confidence level (i.e. all biological and medical science).

So, now that I’ve cleared that up, can we stop pooh-poohing the numbers and start being appropriately horrified that hundreds of thousands of people have died?

Technorati tags: Iraq, body count, Lancet, war, human cost

What is it about popes? With rare exceptions, like John XXIII, what a bunch of benighted enablers of balderdash. Maybe it has to do with the selection process being limited to a few old men in skirts.

Now the current one has managed to quote a fourteenth century emperor as if he had some relevance six hundred years later. (Quoted from the BBC)

…[H]e [the emperor] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

That from the head of a religion that gave people the Inquisition and witch-burning. That from the head of a religion that was so famous for converting people by fire and sword that it’s a joke in one of the world’s most indispensable books, 1066 and All That.

The sad thing is, old Ratzinger–sorry, Benedict XVI–was actually trying to make a good point. Violence has no place in religion, which is sort of like saying that moms and apple pie go together. You’ll get no argument from anyone, except of course the people trying to use religion as an excuse for their own greed or hatred. That, too, is not limited to Islam or Christianity. You could probably dig up a paleolithic shaman with ten followers, and find a couple grunting slogans to justify killing their neighbors.

Ratzinger-Benedict was also trying to say that narrow Western concepts of reason interfere with dialogue with non-Western cultures. An attitude of “The facts, ma’am, just give me the facts” is indeed too limited to encompass any of the finer things in life. The Westerners have a lot to learn. So does everyone else. Worshipping gods made in our own image is not working out for us.

John Lennon said it best:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Technorati tags: Pope, Islam, Christianity, terrorism, violence, religion

This is down there with “Attack Iraq because of terrorists in Afghanistan.”

A headline today in the UK newspaper Independent:
“Let us adopt Islamic family law to curb extremists, Muslims tell Kelly.”

Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Ireland, said he had asked for holidays to mark Muslim festivals and Islamic laws to cover family affairs which would apply only to Muslims.

Dr Pasha said he was not seeking sharia law for criminal offences but he said Muslim communities in Britain should be able to operate Islamic codes for marriage and family life.

Ri-i-ight. I’ve noticed the problem too. It’s all the young men running around without their veils on. And the wild girls: don’t get me started. They come under bad influences, and the next thing you know, they’re carrying blow-your-socks-off-red lipstick on to airplanes.

The application of a bit of Muslim family law should sort that right out.

Update, Aug. 21, 2006
British Muslim MP, Shahid Malik, says the same, more elegantly.

As I have repeatedly said, in this world of indiscriminate terrorist bombings, where Muslims are just as likely to be the victims of terrorism as other British and US citizens, we Muslims have an equal stake in fighting extremism.
…
When Lord Ahmed, the Muslim Labour peer, heard my comments — I said essentially that if Muslims wanted sharia they should go and live somewhere where they have it — he accused me of doing the BNP’s work. He is entitled to his opinion. However, a little honesty, like mine, in this whole debate might just restore trust in politicians and ease the population’s anxieties.
…
[earlier in the piece] …given that these [terrorist] acts are carried out in the name of our religion — Islam — we have a greater responsibility not merely to condemn but to confront the extremists.

I don’t know about “greater” responsibility, but certainly as much. And confronting extremism, rather than aiding and abetting it, might be worth a try, perhaps, bizarre as it sounds.

One point is getting lost in the discussion about the Iran “jewish” star sham.

Background: A law passed by the Iranian parliament was initially reported as enforcing a dress code that would mark the various religions (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian). In the “reporting,” this morphed into making Persian Jews wear yellow stars. Horror shot round the world.

Then it turned out that: (from an article in Jewish Week)

Indeed, the law’s text and parliamentary debate, available in English from the BBC Service, discloses no provision mandating that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress. It instead focuses on promoting traditional clothing designs using Iranian and Islamic patterns, by Iran’s domestic fashion industry and preventing “the import of clothes incompatible with cultural Islamic and national values.”

The law is meant to develop and protect Iran’s clothing industry, Javedanfar said.

Note that: “no provision … that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress.”

A recent headline from The Guardian, April 20, 2006
Police in Tehran ordered to arrest women in ‘un-Islamic’ dress

Hello? Earth to progressive blogosphere? Maybe the reason the stuff about yellow stars found so many willing believers is because that nonsense is so similar to the actual nonsense perpetrated by the Islamists?

But the dress code doesn’t apply to Jews. Or “Iranians.” Only to women.

That’s all right then.

Update, June 1
It seems there is some controversy about whether one should criticise things also criticized by illiberals, just in case anyone lumps you into the company of fools. The issue isn’t argument in the forum of ideas, and changing your mind if you’re wrong. The issue is saying anything similar to what comes out of Malkin, to take an example at random.

Laura Rozen’s mentions the

“Iranian American human rights activist Ramin Ahmadi, up at Yale, who wonders why liberals like himself who opposed apartheid South Africa, dictatorships in Latin America, etc. have for the most part abandoned the Iran human rights issue, and not just during the Bush administration.”

Keven Drum says

“And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration’s determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can’t be trusted to act wisely. So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little.”

Call me naive, but that is not the same thing as stupid. The problem with the Bush Administration is that they don’t care about the truth. Among many other symptoms of that, they think a statement can be discredited because of who says it. (“Who said there are problems in Iraq? A Democrat? Well, there you are. It’s obvious nonsense.”)

Fighting that by abandoning our view of truth makes us the same as them. When we start pretending it’s not the truth that matters, but how fools will take it, we’ve decided to join them because we can’t beat them.

To hell with that. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Technorati tags: Iran, yellow star, Iranian badge, dress code

Why isn’t she running the world? She knows right from wrong, she and Malalai Joya are the two bravest people on the planet, and Ayaan has gone through trial by horror. She made a film with her partner, Theo van Gogh, about women in Islam. He got murdered for it. If anyone understands the price of free speech, it’s Ayaan. This is what she has to say about it:

From the BBC:

Dutch MP backs Muhammad cartoons

The Somali-born Dutch MP who describes herself as a “dissident of Islam” has backed the Danish newspaper that first printed the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

[She] said it was “correct to publish the cartoons” in Jyllands Posten and “right to republish them”.

Ms Hirsi Ali … said… “today the open society is challenged by Islamism”. … “Within Islam exists a hardline Islamist movement that rejects democratic freedoms and wants to destroy them.”

[She] criticised European leaders for not standing by Denmark and urged politicians [and I could think of a few others!] to stop appeasing fundamentalists.

She also said that although the Prophet Muhammad did a lot of good things, his decree that homosexuals and apostates should be killed was incompatible with democracy. … Ms Hirsi Ali said the furore over the cartoons had exposed the fear among artists and journalists in Europe to “analyse or criticise intolerant aspects of Islam”.

What do spam, Islamists, porn, Cindy Sheehan, and cartoons have in common? Free speech. It’s everywhere these days, a constant din. We need to figure out what’s free and what’s just speech before we go deaf.

In the high and far off times, when the Founding Dads were mulling over the liberties essential to the life of a free society, free speech was front and center. They were talking about free political speech, which explains points of view or criticizes them. I doubt there’s any dispute that the free flow of ideas is essential to democracy. People may not feel that democracy is necessary, but if you do want democracy, you can’t have it without free political speech.

So far, so good, but talking to yourself in a closed room isn’t really the point. The free *flow* of ideas means people need to hear as well as speak. That leads to radical conclusion #1: Broadcast information is an important method of delivering ideas, so free airtime has to be available to air different points of view. The time needs to be taxpayer-funded *at cost* because the free flow of ideas is the lifeblood of democracy. I know the broadcast giants would have foaming fits if the public actually had some use of the public airwaves. That’s just too bad.

Illegal takeovers of the kind that have gutted traditional broadcasting are not limited to old media. There is the issue of “pipes” and the internet. In the US, the government and a few large companies own major portions of the backbone, the “pipes,” that allow the broadband internet to function. Some of those companies have started making noises about how they’re going to promote their own “products” on “their” pipes, and start charging others more for the use of the network.

The internet was started by the government, carried forward by the free contributions of countless academics and others, and the basic fiber optic cables were laid down with taxpayer money. The companies who now have responsibility for running parts of these networks received all that immense value for free. The companies need to pay back all that value first, if they think the internet shouldn’t be free. (More on these issues by Christopher Stern at WaPo, Jeffrey Benner at Salon.com, and on “content-based billing” by Feliks Welfeld at CommsDesign.com. Remember, the companies are NOT the ones generating the content. They just want to charge for it, apparently simply because they think they can.)

The whole idea of charging for the network is as antisocial and counterproductive as charging everyone to set foot on the road. The net is a social good and a natural monopoly, like highways. Like them, it needs to be recognized as such, and to be regulated and freely available the same way.

Tangentially, another natural monopoly and essential utility of the internet is the ability to search it. That, too, needs to be freely available and regulated for the good of all. (Yes, Google, I’m looking at you.) Bill Thompson has some more thoughts on that subject.

Religious or philosophical expression is another cornerstone of free speech, and not one subject to much controversy. Without that freedom, the central quest of finding our own place in the universe becomes crippled. The whole point of a free society is that the only limits are not harming others, and it certainly covers the freedom to search for our God in our own way.

Here again, the need to be heard is important, so nobody can have a much bigger megaphone than anyone else. That’s the idea behind insisting that government cannot promote any given religion. If it does, other religions quickly become suppressed mutterings in small rooms. People may not want free societies, but if they do, then separation of church and state is essential to the freedom of religion. Lately, this seems to be turning back into a new concept.

That was the easy part. Now comes the hard part. Cartoons. They’ve been much in the news lately. A Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons depicting Mohammed in the context of a discussion about free speech and whether it was right that Muslims tried to insist that everyone, not just other Muslims, had to refrain from showing images of the Prophet. Four months went by. Nobody really noticed. The Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca by millions of Muslims took place. Once again, there was insufficient planning and organization with the result that several hundred people were trampled to death. This is not the first time that’s happened. There were rumblings that the Saudi government should “do something.” The Saudis started the storm about some four month-old cartoons. (Insight into this affair from the incomparable Religious Policeman, and other posts earlier and later.)

That’s the background on that particular controversy, but there is a real issue at its heart. Is respect for other people’s viewpoints more or less important than free speech? The way I would answer that question is by taking both choices to their potential conclusions. If respect is more important, then any speech that offends someone has to be silenced. If applied to everyone, nobody would have any free speech. On the other hand, if free speech is more important, then some people would have to avert their eyes to avoid offense. So long as they are able to do that, giving free speech priority enables everyone to live according to their own lights.

In the interests of following that principle myself: note that a copy of one of the cartoons appears below. It says it all, as far as I’m concerned. A link to all twelve of the famous cartoons: The Shadow of the Olive Tree . [Update 2013-03-31. A cursory search indicates that the cartoons have been removed at news sites. The only copies I could find are on the Wayback Machine.]

Then there’s Tom Toles’ cartoon that offended the Joint Chiefs of Staff so much. “Beyond tasteless” said the top military brass.

The cartoon is a real avert-your-eyes piece of work, but not because of Tom Toles. What’s tasteless is a useless war that destroys people, and a country that hardly takes care of the vets afterward. The cartoon points that out. Starkly. The cartoon would be tasteless if Toles thought that was funny. He’s outraged. What’s tasteless is worrying about a cartoon rather than sharing the outrage. This is such an obvious example of free speech being used to air criticism that I’m not sure why the Joint Chiefs, who are presumably in the business of defending those freedoms with their lives, need to have this explained to them. If they don’t like the cartoon, they have it in their hands to make it irrelevant.

Moving right along to the other burning question: t-shirts. In the days when clothes were clothes, you had to carry a placard to make a point. Now, through the miracles of modern technology, we can print slogans on t-shirts and bill caps, which enables Cindy Sheehan and a congressman’s wife to appear at the State of the Union speech wearing t-shirts that support the troops, each in her own way. How far do you take the outlawing of meaningful clothing? If words or numbers are forbidden, how about pictures? One could wear a shirt printed with Picasso’s Guernica painting. Is it art or is it a Statement, and who gets to decide? If a near-Muslim aversion to any representational imagery is enforced, will pink triangles become illegal because they make a statement about gays? How about just the color pink, if triangles are deemed too obvious?

You see where I’m going with this. It wouldn’t take much to end in rules that require everyone to wear identical clothing in sober shades of gray. This is ridiculous. I can understand that on decorous occasions one doesn’t want the visual landscape cluttered with people’s personal billboards. And I can also understand that potentially offensive sexual or religious messages are deprecated, because there is no way to avert your eyes when someone is in your face with their clothing. But editing political statements on people’s clothing during a political occasion is absurd. It’s nothing but shouting down the opposition, and that is suppression of free speech.

What about those other wellsprings of offensiveness, porn and spam? Let’s take them in order. The idea behind free speech is that some of it is essential to a free society, and the rest of it is nobody’s business but your own. If porn had no effects beyond the consumer of it, there would be nothing to regulate. However, porn does have demonstrable effects on people’s minds. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be so worried about children seeing it. It is an infection of the imagination that may or may not cause harmful consequences to others. Whatever else it is, it is definitely not a social good. It’s as gray an area as you could ever hope to find.

That leads to Radical Conclusion #2. Porn as a voluntary, private matter shouldn’t be regulated. It should be invisible to those of us who don’t want to see it, but to those who do, it’s their business. Achieving that would mean separate Internet domains, changes to magazine cover art, and so on through more sad examples than I have space for.

There is, however, another aspect to porn, the aspect of infecting imagination and the addictiveness of it for some people. Most people’s imaginations don’t reach all that far, but broadcasting the slickest, extremest fantasies of a few gives everyone access to the drug in its stronger forms. I think it is a real mistake to allow that. People should be limited to their own imaginations, and the way to do that would be Radical Conclusion #2a: allow non-commercial porn, but not any other kind. Actors, producers, distributors, in short, everyone involved would have to be working for free, purely because they liked what they were doing so much. Nor could they sell advertising or make ads.

[Update 2013-03-31. The amount I know about porn could, obviously, fit on a postage stamp. It has since come to my attention, e.g. 1, 2, that some of the most damaging porn is non-commercial. (A search for “rapes posted online” gave well over ten million results when I tried it today.) So forget the non-commercial distinction. The only real distinction is between harmful versus harmless. And porn has disappeared so far down the sewer that it’s not even called porn if nobody is degraded, humiliated, or damaged.]

(I’m purposely avoiding the whole question of art versus pornography. They’re easy to distinguish at the extremes, impossible in the middle. Where to draw the dividing line is a matter of taste, and doesn’t really affect the main argument that volunteer pornography harmless erotica shouldn’t be regulated, except to enable people to avoid it. So much art is produced for a pittance that it would probably fall under that umbrella in any case.)

Hate speech is another form of offensiveness with a big gray area where it shades into political or religious speech. There is one simple distinction that can be made, following the same principle that makes it illegal to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Speech that advocates harm to others is increasingly being considered illegal hate speech in many countries. This is not a radical conclusion. What is radical is the idea that we should apply that measure to entertainment as well. Advocating harm against a person because of their membership in a group is not entertainment. It’s illegal hate speech. For instance, it is not okay to put women through meat grinders any more than it is to lynch blacks, whether it’s for politics, or for religion, or, God help us, for “entertainment.”

Finally, we get back to an easy one: spam. The justification behind spam is something called “commercial free speech.” In plain English, that says that if I have something to sell, I can say as much as I want about it. The idea behind political free speech has been applied to something totally different. It’s as if someone said, “Salt is essential to life. Therefore I’ll pickle you in salt.”

The idea behind free speech–one more time–is the free flow of ideas. Not the free flow of dollars. There is no such thing as commercial free speech. Speech that is not about ideas, but is about making a buck, does not need protection for the good of a free society, and, in fact, cannot have protection for the good of a free society. That’s why we have truth in advertising laws. Radical conclusion #3: We need to get our heads around the fact that telemarketers, spammers, junk mailers, and the whole boiling of pestiferous blots on the body politic are not exercising free speech. They’re trying to sell us stuff. One citizen is not normally allowed to harass another. That comes under the definition of causing harm. So when will some brave politician finally point out that all this garbage is nothing less than harassment and it has to stop?

Interestingly enough, the other side of “commercial” free speech doesn’t get much respect. Individuals who complain about their experiences with a company are being sued for slander or annoyance or who-knows-what-all. The principle in operation seems to be that if you’re a company it’s free speech, not harassment, but if you’re just a wee little individual spending your own time and money, then it’s the other way around. Before this complete travesty gets any further out of hand, individuals’ rights to discuss their experiences on an unpaid, uncompensated basis must be totally protected.

So . . . where are we now? The short form is this: Speech that’s a drug or an amusement or is trying to make a buck is fine so long as it’s not in anyone’s face. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. But speech about ideas, any ideas, that does not advocate hate crimes, should and must be free. Without that, there can be no free society.

Update, March 1, 2006:

Turns out, I’m fiddling at the feet of giants. They’ve weighed in on the cartoon controversy much better than I can. From the BBC report on Writers issue cartoon row warning.
Signed by:
Salman Rushdie – Indian-born British writer with fatwa issued ordering his execution for The Satanic Verses
Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Somali-born Dutch MP [see next post, and link also in link list]
Taslima Nasreen – exiled Bangladeshi writer, with fatwa issued ordering her execution
Bernard-Henri Levy – French philosopher
Chahla Chafiq – Iranian writer exiled in France
Caroline Fourest – French writer
Irshad Manji – Ugandan refugee and writer living in Canada [link]
Mehdi Mozaffari – Iranian academic exiled in Denmark
Maryam Namazie – Iranian writer living in Britain
Antoine Sfeir – director of French review examining Middle East
Ibn Warraq – US academic of Indian/Pakistani origin
Philippe Val – director of Charlie Hebdo

“We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.”

“It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.”

“Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present,” the writers added, saying it is nurtured by fears and frustrations.

Not just Islamism, I would add. All totalitarian fundamentalisms–Christian, Hindu, all of them–bring ignorance, war, and death in the name of some god made in their own image and likeness.

Technorati tags: free speech, cartoons, Danish cartoons, cartoons of Mohammed, hate speech, protests, regulation

The current torture scandal in Britain is about how they were willing to use information extracted in Uzbek prisons. Britain, too, has legal beagles to pretend it’s all okay. In their case, it’s supposed to be okay so long as it’s not used in evidence. /Holds head with both hands to prevent explosion./

The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, protested against this practice until his government decided to remove him from office. He has a book ready for publication on the subject of Britain’s role in using torture. It has to be vetted by the UK Foreign Office. Instead of doing that, or pointing out any bits they object to that compromise national security, they have told the former Ambassador that he may not publish at all, and that all copies are to be destroyed.

Right. Britain, the first nation to have anything like the Magna Carta, the first to have habeas corpus, has decided free speech is inconvenient. So copies of Murray’s unpublished work are multiplying all over the world, to make sure it can’t be suppressed. Please download it to your site and include it in your blog, if you have one.
http://users.pandora.be/quarsan/craig/telegrams.pdf
http://users.pandora.be/quarsan/craig/npaper.jpg
Please let me know in comments or by email if the links no longer work, and I’ll post copies from another server.

Folks, I got up on this soapbox because I couldn’t just sit there when the Abu Ghraib disgrace came out. I had to do something, even if it’s kinda useless in the real world. Unfortunately, I have a very vivid imagination, and I can’t deal with the news about torture. I literally wake up at three in the morning, listening to screams I can’t hear. So I haven’t read any of this. I’m afraid of clicking on the links. But the word just has to get out there.

More information here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3750370.stm
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/04/timeline_of_cra.html

Links from: King of Zembla, a href=”http://haloscan.com/tb/simbaud/113593767086382173″ Boiling the Messenger [2014-05-14: link now inactive]
Trackback: http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/trackback/716

Technorati tags: human rights, crimes against humanity, Craig Murray, torture, Uzbekistan

After terrorist bombings, it is required to stress how evil it is to target civilians, a barbarism without parallel in the modern world.

Yes, it is barbaric. But does it stand alone? Dropping atomic bombs on cities has, so far, thankfully, stood alone. Targeted destruction of ethnic groups by the millions has not happened too recently, although targeted destruction of hundreds of thousands is ongoing and causes mainly averted eyes (just like it did when it was millions). It seems like quite a stretch to insist that bombing tens, even thousands, of civilians is in a class by itself.

The main reason why there is no moral equivalence between terrorists and everyone else seems to be that Our mayhem is good, whereas Theirs is bad. Possibly, this is true. However, whether I was killed by a terrorist or a soldier in a clean uniform, I’d be just as dead. The only real difference, in practical rather than moral terms, is that right now my personal chance of being killed by a soldier is zero, but my chance of encountering terrorism is slightly greater than that. (I use the word “slightly” on purpose. The risk of dying in a terrorist attack, worldwide, is on the order of being struck by lighting: not zero, but also not much more. This is true post 9/11, post Madrid, post Beslan, and post London tube bombings.) I have a sneaking suspicion that it is the practical difference, not the moral one, that leads to much of the outrage about terrorism. The terrorists have succeeded in terrifying us, and we don’t like it.

The moral differences depend mainly on where one stands for their strength. The people standing under the bombs don’t like them, no matter who sent them. We target the enemy and define civilians as collateral damage. Terrorists, on the other hand, target the enemy and define civilians as the enemy. Civilians are not given the opportunity to reject either classification. Maybe that makes us better than them, but it is difficult to see by how much.

So what am I suggesting? That terrorism is okay? That it is just another tool in the eternal struggle to advance one rung up the ladder?

No.

Just in case someone didn’t hear that, let me say it again. No.

What I am suggesting is that targeting civilians is not okay, whether it is done on purpose or accidentally-on-purpose. What I’m suggesting is that we preface all mention of miltant actions with sorrow and outrage for the people who died in them. What I am suggesting is that we expand our outrage over violent deaths to the point where PEOPLE STOP BEING KILLED.

Update: August 5th.

I just read the BBC quotes from the men who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The following is from Dr Harold Agnew, now 85, who was a scientific observer on a chase plane of the Enola Gay.

Technorati tags: terrorist, moral equivalence, nonviolence

Is anyone else boggling?

Here we are, in a country founded on the separation of church and state, yet we can’t figure out how to balance a Shia majority in Iraq against the minority neighbors they would like to overrun. (Because, let’s face it, the sudden Shia commitment to elections is not a symptom of conversion to democratic ideals.)

Granted, the idea of separating church and state is “out there” for some Middle Easterners. It is also out there for an administration that hopes to be re-elected with the help of fundamentalists. But these aren’t the only available voices. Where are the constitutional scholars, the journalists, or the ninth grade civics students who could point out that this is a problem with an obvious solution?

There’s a good bit of talk about the impossibility of keeping religion out of politics because the “Iraqi people” want Islamic government.

I hadn’t realized we cared what the Iraqis want. We invaded their country because it suited us. We killed thousands of their citizens. Yet now we’re saying it would be too rude to tell them they can have any government they want, so long as it’s secular. I know nation-building is for softies, but this is ridiculous.

And, furthermore, who are these “Iraqi people” who want things? Almost two thirds of the Iraqis, two thirds, are women. They can’t all be like Ann Coulter. Many of them are on record as being quite progressive. Obviously, these women are not “Iraqi people” since what they want doesn’t enter the picture. I’m not even talking about how Iraqi men feel. I’m talking about a two thirds majority that doesn’t seem to exist for Bremer and Bush.

It’s also unclear why we’re ignoring our own democratic principles when they could address so many problems for us. Separating church and state and paying attention to a two thirds majority could reduce the influence of fanatical Islamists, which we say is our goal.

Mysteries are supposed to be solved by considering motives, and the effects of US occupation in Iraq are clear enough, even if the rhetoric makes no sense. Oil installations are the only things protected from looting. Taxpayer money flows to crony corporations. It all feels like a bad echo of the attempts in the 1950s to install puppet dictators in Central America. Now, it’s not cheap fruit we’re trying to extract, but cheap oil. The “unforeseen” consequences won’t be illegal aliens. Instead, we’ll have our hands full of illegal terrorists.

How long can we sustain this planet-sized gap between what we say here and what we do there? When the terrorists refuse to seethe quietly in their own part of the world, will we boggle again about why they hate us so much?

(Written March 19, 2004, but misposted.)

Technorati tags: Iraq, Islam, Christianity, terrorism, violence, religion, separation of church and state

[The blogposts before March 2005 had been deleted, and were re-posted in October 2005.

This was my first post because I couldn’t, and I still can’t, stand what has happened in the US. I never thought this country would commit torture, and I never thought it would react with anything but outrage. I never, ever, thought Americans would calmly re-elect the people responsible. I’d forgotten you don’t have to be German to be a Good German. US crimes against humanity haven’t stopped, and now we’re due for another round of publicity. Let’s hope it slays the beast this time.]

Sex is not torture. Maybe that’s obvious, but then again, given some of the statements on prison torture, maybe it needs to be said. There’s Limbaugh, hopefully speaking only for himself rather than as a mouthpiece of the Too Right, saying it was a few soldiers having “fun.” The Muslim community, on the other hand, fully conscious of the subhuman brutality involved, sees it as symptomatic of debauched Western attitudes to sex. Whether or not Western sex is debauched, subhuman brutality is not its goal. So maybe the point bears repeating. Sex is not torture.

Sex–obviously–is pleasure. It’s the biggest, easiest high available without drugs, and it is bound up with the deepest desires for admiration and love. Poisoning that is to poison a person’s very heart . . . which is why sex is so effective in torture.

There has been no mistake in the methods used by the Americans. The humiliations were carried out not to gratify some inhuman appetite on the part of the torturers, although they may have done that too. Their stated purpose was to extract “information.”

Unattributed comments from an interrogator said the techniques had been practiced in Afghanistan, and that they had Afghani men talking within hours. Who knows what they talked abo

ut, because torture has a bad track record for extracting truth, but the techniques were then applied in Iraq to equal effect. Sexual humiliation, the military found, works wonders at causing compliance.

Why, one wonders on a horrible sort of practical level, did the soldiers at the bottom take those souvenir snapshots? Were they nuts? Apparently not. The pictures were taken to increase the humiliation, and they also had other purposes. They could be used for blackmail to extort more information once the prisoner was nominally free. And showing them to other prisoners could save the time and effort of having to commit more atrocities. Anyone with less than perfect courage was terrorized into compliance merely by knowing what could happen.

Make no mistake, it is the military and the administration at issue here, not just some soldiers. As Senator Collins pointed out, a few frustrated soldiers would try beatings. They wouldn’t apply techniques designed to cause maximum humiliation to Muslim men. The intent is also evident in Rumsfeld’s statement that what occurred is not torture. Lawyers, he says, have looked into it and it is not, to be exact, torture. This raises the macabre spectacle of well-spoken men in suits making sure that their kind of torture is legal. It does not square with the image of a few impulsive sadists. Never let it be said again that Americans lack cultural sensitivity. We can manage it when we want to.

One excuse is that whatever you call it, American torture isn’t as bad as even more horrible tortures practiced by others, or it’s not on the same scale, or it’s in a good cause, or something. Yet the inescapable fact is that no matter how little we do, more of the same is all it takes for us to become like any monster in history. To say we’ll somehow only dabble in it is like saying we’ll only be a little bit pregnant. There is no reliable social equivalent of abortion if a monster is in the making, not least because abortion does require some foresight. Prevention is really the only approach.

To avoid taking that road altogether, we have to recognize that the first step is dehumanization. It makes torture excusable. Whether the torture then uses sex to strike at a person’s innermost heart is a matter of methodology. It doesn’t change the nature of torture, except to make it worse, and it has nothing to do with sex itself.

The use of sexual humiliation to force compliance is not a rare event, whether in its worst form as state-sponsored torture, or in more individual crimes. It is practiced against women daily, hourly, and everywhere. It is so common, it seems like a normal, if regrettable, state of affairs. It is not. Its effect on women is no different from its effect on men. It is so completely dehumanizing and terrifying, it can force compliance of any kind. We belong to the same species, after all.

Consider the situation in some of the housing projects near Paris. Gangs of toughs rape women who don’t conform to their idea of proper behavior for Muslim females, such as not wearing a head scarf. Now, clearly, women can choose to express their religion as they see fit, but if someone chooses not to wear a head scarf, sexual humiliagtion is not a legitimate means of forcing compliance. The situation was reported by the BBC because of a woman who refused to knuckle under–and who had suffered gang rape twice as a consequence. I can’t even begin to imagine how much courage she has. The BBC reporter wondered who, in such a system, would dare to speak or even know her own mind. Anyone with less than infinite courage is terrorized into compliance merely by knowing what could happen.

That is not fundamentally different from the common brutalities that happen every day, everywhere. Their message to women is clear: stay in “your” place or you’ll get put there. They work. They affect where every woman goes, what she does, and how she makes a living. Women either live within narrow limits, or they need the courage and caution of a war reporter to make it through the day and, even more so, the night.

Crimes by states are, of course, a different order of evil than crimes by individuals, even gangs of them. States have practiced sexual humiliation on a recurring basis, although generally against women rather than men. And even though it is the women who are tortured, they are so much less than nothing, they aren’t even the real targets. Mostly, the intended targets are the men to whom the women “belong.” Such mind-numbing levels of dehumanization need their own category among crimes against humanity.

The victims are not the only ones dehumanized. Everyone has understood by now that the perpetrators have to lose their humanity first to commit horrors like the annihilation of the Jews or the lynchings of blacks. It is no less true of torture.

It is also no less true of crimes against women. People might ask why we should extend the parallel to women when there is a much closer one in the treatment of prisoners right here in the USA. However, with prisoners it’s possible to pretend that the problems are happening somewhere else to someone else. By extending the parallels as far as they go, we may learn to recognize the quiet beginnings of atrocity.

The sexual humiliation of women touches every one of us. It shows how easy it is to deny that brutality is happening, to deny that it has any far-reaching effects, to deny even that anything is being denied, and to thereby enable the whole system to continue. My point in drawing the parallel between the sexual torture of women and that of prisoners is to show how easy the first steps are, and how quickly we take them as the path of least resistance.

I am not trying to say the torture of prisoners and the humiliation of women is always exactly the same. Nor is either of those the same as ethnic cleansing, or slavery, or genital mutilation. Nothing is ever exactly the same. If we wait for exactly the same crime, new horrors can never be prevented.

The Limbaughs of the world notwithstanding, atrocities aren’t generally committed for entertainment. They’re done for a higher purpose, to preserve a way of life against all enemies, to survive. But some fates truly are worse than death. Living with a poisoned heart is one of them. Losing one’s heart altogether is another.

(For details and sources of the facts discussed, see Sy Hersh’s series of articles on US prisoner abuse in the New Yorker, 10-05-2004, 17-05-2004. Many of the facts were also indicated earlier on blogs. The ones I have drawn on include Juan Cole – Informed Comment, www.juancole.com, Billmon – Whiskey Bar, www.billmon.org, and Riverbend, riverbendblog.blogspot.com/.)

Technorati tags: torture, prisoner abuse, crimes against humanity, hate crimes, sexual torture