Author: geoff

Random 10

I’ve encountered the “Random 10” meme* on various blogs that I read, and I think I’m going to join in. This is what iTunes pulled out of my collection:
“Mass Destruction” by Faithless
“Little By Little” by Groove Armada
“Catch A Match” by The Legendary Pink Dots
“Scene Through The Eye Of A Lens” by Family
“Hour Of Need” by Faithless
“Nostradamus” by Al Stewart
“Absolutely Fabulous (Rollo Our Tribe Tongue In Cheek Mix)“ by the Pet Shop Boys with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley
“Space Manoeuvres” by Stage One (from John Digweed’s Northern Exposure III)
“The White Room” by The KLF
“Looking At You (Jimmy Gomez 6 A.M. Dub)“ by Sunscreem
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* And similar things, like Suburban Guerilla’s Sunday Morning Shuffle.

Hyderabad too

Remember this picture from my tour of Hyderabad last year?
Charminar thumbnail.
The tower is front of us is the Charminar, in the heart of the old walled city. Just a few hours ago, according to The Times of India:

The city had another Friday convulsion as rioting erupted in the Old City over the Denmark cartoon controversy, with Islamic protesters burning and damaging vehicles and stoning shops in the area around Charminar.
This time, the walled city teetered on the edge of a communal riot as the rioters lobbed stones at shops at Gulzar Houz

Of course most of the property that was destroyed will have belonged to Muslims…

Where are the moderate Muslims?

Andrew Sullivan reports that the planned Gay Pride march in Moscow has been cancelled after threats from the Russian Muslim community:

Earlier this week Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin warned that Russia’s Muslims would stage violent protests if the march went ahead. “If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike” … The cleric said the Koran taught that homosexuals should be killed because their lifestyle spells the extinction of the human race and said that gays had no human rights.

If this represents mainstream Muslim thinking, then a “clash of civilizations” is inevitable. If not, it is the responsibility of moderate Muslims to take back their faith from the extremists. I really don’t see any alternative. But the most depressing thing about this choice is that the Chief Mufti claims to speak for the Russian Muslim community as a whole. He, like Sistani, is supposed to be a moderate.
UPDATE: In today’s L.A.Times, Mansoor Ijaz tries to have it both ways: to argue that on the one hand the extremists do not represent Islam, while asserting that there is no such thing as a “moderate Muslim”:

You either believe in the oneness of God or you don’t. You either believe in the teachings of his prophet or you don’t. You either learn those teachings and apply them to the circumstances of life in the country you have chosen to live in, or you shouldn’t live there.

But this is simply disingenuous: it assumes that there is only one possible interpretation of those “teachings”, and that there is only one way to “apply them to the circumstances of life”. Admit that neither is true, and his entire thesis falls apart.

Power and wind

I’ve been working at home yesterday and today, because we’ve had our electrical contractors in to replace our circuit breaker system. (If you remember, we had a circuit failure back in December.) For most of both days the power was off, but I had a spare fully-charged battery for my laptop, and I could still get to my email using my Treo.
Yesterday the weather here was almost perfect – sunny, 60F, light breeze. Today was dramatically different. This morning, the temperature zoomed into the 50s, and a band of heavy showers whipped across the area. As the cold front crossed Boston, the winds picked up to 45MPH, gusting to 60MPH. I retrieved the dustbins which had blown down the street; a few minutes later one of the electricians reported that a large branch was down in the driveway, blocking their truck. (Fortunately it didn’t hit anything.) We dragged it out of the way.
The electricians have now completed the bulk of the work (there’s one small sub-project to finish next week), and the house is starting to warm up. I’m relieved that everything worked out: by Saturday night the temperature will probably be down to 12F, and I’d prefer not to be without heat….

Reasoning about religion

I’ve just finished reading Dan Dennett’s new book, Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Overall, it’s an excellent book, and I highly recommend it. As for a full review, I couldn’t do better than the one in The Economist. (I’ve also seen some awful reviews and interviews which completely miss the point of the book. Dan anticipated this, and on p.412 he notes that he has “made a list of the passages in this book most likely to be ripped out of context and used deliberately to misrepresent my position… I am keeping my list… sealed and ready to release.” I can guess what may be included.)
The book’s divided into three sections. The first three chapters (together with two appendices) set forth the justification for a rational (naturalistic, scientific) study of religion. I suspect that atheists like me will find this rather too obvious and long-winded, but perhaps Dan’s careful approach is warranted for those who subscribe to those faiths which discourage introspection. Please don’t skip over the second appendix (“Some More Questions About Science”); it includes some powerful points and elegant metaphors.
The middle section of five chapters (plus two appendices) presents a collections of theories (or at least hypotheses and questions for further study) on how religion might have evolved. It’s interesting to see how prescient William James was, and Dennett repeatedly returns to “The Varieties…” and other Jamesian material. Indeed much of this section is a synthesis of the work of many others, and although Dan contributes many original insights, he rarely draws attention to them. I enjoyed this section a lot; I found myself re-reading various passages just for the pleasure of re-living the “aha!” moments. A modest version of memetics is proposed, but the main thread – language, intentional world-models, death, shamans and hypnosis, guilds, and the rise of institutional religion – doesn’t hang on one’s attitude to memes. The simple question underlying all adaptation and selection – cui bono?, who benefits – is what drives the development of Dennett’s thesis.
The last three chapters on “Religion Today” are… well, frustrating. The overarching question is “so what should we all DO about all of this?”, and while I agreed with almost every point that Dan makes, I can’t see how we make progress. Yes, we should brush aside traditional “Philosophy of Religion” approaches. Yes, we should all talk, respectfully and openly – but how do you include those whose faith is systematically invulnerable? Yes, it’s deeply frustrating that religious moderates seem unwilling or unable to challenge the extremists in their own tradition. Yes, you can demonstrate the logical inconsistency of those who demand the respect that they are unwilling to grant to others – but so what? Perhaps for those of us that live in countries with liberal democratic traditions some of Dan’s ideas may be useful in working to defend those traditions, but when it comes to Islam reforming itself, or the challenge of disaffected youth in China, I suspect larger forces will be involved.
But perhaps contemporary events have left me too pessimistic. And if there’s one quality that permeates this book, it’s Dan’s optimism. We can understand these matters, if we can just shed the taboos that inhibit our natural curiosity. And we should, because knowledge is better than fear and ignorance. Cui bono? Everybody….

"They Thought They Were Free"

From a comment on Doug’s Rant, a link to an excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free”, Milton Mayer’s history of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Key paragraph:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Sobering stuff.

The Daily Show channels Cheney

If you didn’t catch last night’s Daily Show piece on Cheney’s hunting incident, check it out when it comes up on the streaming video page. Salon’s transcript doesn’t do it justice:

Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak.

UPDATE: Comedy Central seems to be swamped – as an alternative, CrooksAndLiars has a postage-stamp sized video available.