You may notice a few additions to the side-bar of this blog. While I don’t want to add any advertising, I do want to promote the causes I believe in. So there are now links to Stop Honour Killings, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
I’m also linking this blog into the atheist blogosphere. Geoffarnold.com is now part of planetatheism.com and the Atheist Blogroll. We actually need a better visualization approach to clusters of related blogs – planet-style aggregators don’t scale, because stuff scrolls off too quickly, and linear blogrolls definitely don’t scale beyond a couple of hundred. Something like a tag cloud with AJAX might be the answer.
Hyperbole
More stuff you can’t make up, this time from Reuters
The Vatican’s official newspaper accused an Italian comedian on Wednesday of “terrorism” for criticizing the Pope and warned his rhetoric could fuel a return to 1970s-style political violence.
…
“This, too, is terrorism. It’s terrorism to launch attacks on the Church,” it said. “It’s terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man.”
Good grief! What kind of things can the comedian – Andrea Rivera – have been saying?
“The Pope says he doesn’t believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved,” he said.
That’s it? (Pretty much, yes.)
Courtesy is good for business ($94B, approximately)
According to a piece entitled America’s war on tourists:
…overseas travel to the US has slumped 17 per cent since 2001, even as world travel to other countries reaches historic growth levels. The decline has cost US$94 billion… in visitor spending, US$16 billion in tax receipts, and some 194,000 American jobs.
…
Interestingly, the poll suggested US foreign policy was not “a significant factor” in global dissatisfaction with the US, but that US entry policies were.
The slump in tourism to the US comes in the middle of a worldwide boom in overseas travel. The USA is singled out by travellers because of the way they are treated:
Before September 11, US airport staff often seemed to err on the laid-back rather than on the vigilant side. Now some overzealous officials appear to regard all tourists as potential terrorists. Entering America can feel like running the gauntlet.
“We are citizens of a country regarded as one of the closest allies the US has,” frequent British visitor Ian Jeffrey told the Orlando Sentinel last November. “Yet on arrival we are treated like suspects in a criminal investigation and made to feel very unwelcome.”
Personally I think that the EC countries should duplicate the US policies exactly – fingerprints, retina scans, arbitrary visa delays, abusive officials – but only for US visitors. And they should put up posters around their airports explaining the reason for their actions, and suggesting that if US visitors don’t like it, they ought to call their congress-critters.
(Of course they won’t do this, because – unlike the US, apparently – they have no wish to cripple their tourist industry.)
Misogyny and its apologists
I’ve been trying to write a long piece about the subject of honour killings, culture, and religion, as well as the multiculturalist fools who try to justify or excuse this stuff. But I’m just too angry, and it won’t come together. Just go and read the stories here and here.
Ed made a good point, which I will quote, and then I’ll shut up.
I’m not sure that calling this “multiculturalism” is the right phrase. As Gretchen said in her email to me with this link, it’s more accurate to call it cultural relativism. It’s something I am staunchly opposed to and absolutely willing to fight over. It’s cropped up on this blog a few times in arguments with commenters. The bottom line is that it is absolutely absurd to dismiss such barbarism as just a matter of cultural choices that we are in no position to judge. Bullshit. I will judge it and I will condemn it, loudly and fervently.
P.S. Spot the common element here and here. Hint: it rhymes with “fuss”.
Wolfowitz: the tipping point
The Paul Wolfowitz affair is provoking the usual partisan food-fight, complete with bellowing Hitchens, and it’s dragging on much longer than I expected. I’ve read the arguments from both sides, and frankly they all carried much less weight than did one little detail in Blumenthal’s piece in Salon.com last week:
But in 2006 Wolfowitz made a series of calls to his friends that landed her a job at a new think tank called Foundation for the Future that is funded by the State Department. She was the sole employee, at least in the beginning. The World Bank continued to pay her salary, which was raised by $60,000 to $193,590 annually, more than the $183,500 paid to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and all of it tax-free. Moreover, Wolfowitz got the State Department to agree that the ratings of her performance would automatically be “outstanding.” Wolfowitz insisted on these terms himself and then misled the World Bank board about what he had done.
Automatically “outstanding”. What a deeply cynical, self-important, “fuck-you” touch. This is what distinguishes a “painful forced choice” from an act of brazen, selfish nepotism.
Firing’s too good for him. Wolfowitz should be made to walk the plank by the Crimson Permanent Assurance.
UPDATE: Hallelujah! Someone has actually found a funny angle to this whole sordid affair. And it’s a beaut!
How extraordinary!!
Exhibit A: A HuffPo posting by Deepak Chopra that is clear, concise, uses no twee or mystical language, and makes his point forcefully. And as a bonus, I agree with him 100%.
What next? Humility from Coulter? Insight from LGF? Honesty from the NRO? Nuance from Malkin? We’re living in strange times, ladies and gentlemen….
Interpreting advertisements
I’ve noticed a lot of impressions of this Flash web ad for a well known bank:
Obviously they are trying to reassure their customers: “Emigration is a stressful process; let us relieve you of some of that stress.” What caught my eye was the choice of graphic. The airliner sweeping in to land is clearly a Tu-154, a Russian airliner flown mostly by airlines in Russia and other CIS countries. It’s a notoriously uncomfortable plane to fly in, and both the airliner and the airlines that operate it have questionable safety records.
So why would you use this in an advertisement that was intended to reassure? ((Of course the most likely explanation is that they had the artwork done by an agency operating in a country where the Tu-154 is the most common type of airliner.))
Just a little test of a new WP plugin
I tend to use footnotes for article attribution and stuff like that, and realized that there must be an easier way than banging out the HTML markup by hand. ((Of course muscle memory does most of the work.)) So I’ve just installed Simon Elvery’s footnotes 0.9 plugin, and this post is intended to check it out. Text to be footnoted is introduced with “space-openparen-openparen” and ended with “closeparen-closeparen”. ((Obviously I’m not going to simply type in that text, because the plugin would process it. And I’m feeling too lazy to look up the HTML entity codes for parentheses.))
So let’s see what it looks like. (/me clicks “Save and Continue”, and inspects the preview.) Not bad. Ideally the footnote text, and even the numbering style, should be styled using the CSS, but that would involve more installation complexity; right now this is simply a single PHP file installed in wp-content/plugins. I might tweak the markup to add <small> and </small> ((Some HTML entities don’t need to be looked up.)), and to reduce the vertical spacing.
UPDATE: After seeing the author‘s comment here, I upgraded to the latest version ((currently 1.4)) of the plugin, which has all sorts of nice configuration options. Thanks, Simon – and perhaps you could edit the old blog entry to indicate that the 0.9 version has been superceded! Google has a long memory…
A Christian starts to get it
What it’s like to be an atheist in America, I mean.
[Via the Barefoot Bum.]
Doing the postmodern twist
While reading a piece by Stephen Law on Clarity, continental philosophy, and bullshit, I came across this delightfully succinct analysis by Larry Hamelin:
Your friend is dancing the Postmodern Twist, so beloved by such as Camille Paglia.
Step 1: Invert the narrative and deny the implicit privilege of the original frame (legitimate enough)
Step 2: Since the original frame is not The Truthâ„¢, it must be false.
Step 3: Since the original frame is false, the inverted frame is true.
Voila! Black is white, day is night, the oppressor is the oppressed. You can say anything you please this way: Just find someone who disagrees with you and your point is proved!
Of course it doesn’t actually help in dealing with these types, but then what can? In the meantime, having found Stephen’s blog (via Butterflies & Wheels), I’m now working through the last few months’ entries. I like the elegant way in which he deals with the tedious “atheism is just a matter of faith” argument, here, here and here. Highly recommended.