"Honour killings conspiracy"

If this is true, things are even worse than I’d imagined:

Whole communities are involved in assisting and covering up “honour violence” in Britain, a new study says.
Informal networks of taxi drivers, councillors and sometimes even police officers track down and return women who try to escape, researchers claim.

When I first came to the USA, I was amused by the fact that I had to sign a document agreeing not to overthrow the government. Obviously no terrorist or anarchist would hesitate to sign such a document, would they? And since overthrowing the government is illegal, the document was surely redundant; by entering the USA, I was implicitly accepting that I was subject to US law.
Well, I think I’ve changed my mind about such “amusing”, “redundant” documents. How would it be if every immigrant to the UK was required to read and swear ((Ideally, read aloud, confirm understanding, and make a religious or secular affirmation.)) to a document which stated, quite explicitly, that “honour killings”, forced marriages, domestic violence, and various other forms of coercion against young women ((And men too.)) were absolutely forbidden, and that even to condone or conceal them would be a criminal offence. Come up with a catchy name that would make it easy to refer to in educational, law enforcement, and mass media contexts. (And ideally make it an EU-wide standard.) Encourage the moderate majority that (we are assured) exists in the South Asian community to promote the idea.
Would it help? Reportedly there’s an “honour killing” in England every month. (Perhaps many more.) It couldn’t really make things worse.
(See the International Campaign Against Honour Killings for more.)

"How lucky do you feel?"

My cousin Clive just forwarded this YouTube video to me. I think the author’s name is Greg Craven ((Here’s another video by him.)); the subject is the question of global warming and rational responses to it:

Now this kind of payoff matrix will be familiar to many, and in fact it’s the basis of the notorious argument for belief in God that we know as Pascal’s Wager. And many people (including me) regard Pascal’s Wager as a bullshit argument. So why isn’t this climate change argument equally bullshit?
The problem with Pascal’s Wager is not the structure of the argument; it’s the epistemic status of the propositions that are used. The payoff matrix is a perfectly reasonable and respectable way of organizing one’s thinking about actions and consequences. Ideally, you want to be able to assign probabilities to the various cells, but even if you can’t do that, it’s still useful. ((It might, for example, help you to decide which areas should be researched in order to develop the data needed to refine your probabilities. Row thinking or column thinking, as the video put it.)) For global warming, all of the contingencies, actions, and consequences represent concrete, real-world phenomena. Temperature goes up X, Y million hectares are inundated, Z million people are displaced. We can argue about the values for X, Y, and Z, but there is no serious debate about whether water, land, and people actually exist, nor about the basic physics of how melting polar ice translates into sea level. Pascal’s Wager, on the other hand, is all about belief in an unsupported fiction, one of many competing and mutually incompatible fictions.
Back to the video. The argument that it makes is sound, and modest; there are plenty of other arguments that could have been factored in. Many of the actions that we should take to address global warming are also needed to cope with the actual or impending shortages in oil, potable water, and other resources. One case which he does not consider – but should – is the “catastrophist” view that global warming is real, it’s inevitable, and no human action can mitigate its effects. If this is true, it would be rationally self-interested to consider a different payoff matrix, comparing the costs of futile response to global warming with the costs of small-group survival in the face of catastrophic collapse. Of course this is no longer a public policy debate…

Playing with my blog

After all, if I can’t play with my own blog, what can I play with?
I’ve been updating some of the plugins and widgets that I use to customize WordPress. While I was doing this, I decided to add a new feature which some of my colleagues at Amazon have been working on: “Context Links”. The idea is that a bit of Amazon JavaScript scans my HTML, looking for a few interesting phrases which can be linked to Amazon products. The phrases are marked with double underlines, and mousing over will trigger a small product popup.
In the past, I’ve tried various pop-over plugins, like the notorious Snap!, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. The problem with Snap! is that every link triggers a pop-up with a thumbnail of the page, which really gets in the way if you simply want to click on a link. Hopefully Context Links will be more acceptable. The feature is still in beta, and I’m doing this more to help out my friends than anything else. (I’ve never been tempted to try to monetize my blog.) You won’t necessarily see any of the links: I get the impression that there is a lag between my changing the page and a new set of links being generated. (I’ll have to ask the author.)
The other big change that I made was to add in the All-in-one SEO Package, a plugin which rewrites the page titles, cleans up the meta tags, and generally does everything it can to make the site as clean as possible to Google and the other search engines. Right now, this is what Google sees: almost every entry is prefixed with “Geoff Arnold » Blog Archive » “, except for a few links to the old Movable Type entries which I’ve left in place. ((They’re duplicated in the new WordPress blog, but I can’t figure out how to easily forward the old URLs to the new pages, because the database keys don’t line up neatly.)) I’ll check agan in a few days to see if anything’s changed.

"Friends don’t let friends commit, or condone, evil."

Over at Secular Philosophy, Dan Dennett points out the opportunity for clarity which the death sentence of the Afghan student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh provides.

The time has come for Muslims to step up to the plate and demonstrate that Islam is a great faith that has no need for violence or intimidation to maintain the loyalty of its congregation. And we outside Islam must make it crystal clear that we cannot respect or honor a religion that would consider blasphemy a capital crime, no matter how ancient the tradition from which this decision flowed. Muslims who support – or refrain from condemning – the conviction and sentence of Kambakhsh must be made to realize that they share responsibility for bringing dishonor to their cherished heritage, and if we non-Muslims do not speak out, we too must share in the blame. Friends don’t let friends commit, or condone, evil.

There are plenty of people in the west who have written off all Muslims as evil enemies. Ed Brayton blogged about a particularly egregious example of this today. A “breathtakingly stupid woman named Dorris Woods” who is a trustee at the College of the Siskiyous in California, is objecting to the creation of a course in Arabic and Middle East history, saying

“We know all we need to know about Arabs and Islam. They are our enemies pure and simple. There is no getting away from that. They have declared war on the United States and they are committed to our destruction.”

Obviously this blanket categorization is absurd. ((It’s also illogical: if “Arabs and Islam” are at war against us, it would seem prudent to learn about them in order to be prepared.)) Yet it provokes a momentary pause, a hesitation, because there is a widespread feeling that there is something “other” about Islamic values: a subjugation of the individual to social orthodoxy from which we have only recently freed ourselves.
The Kambakhsh affair ((In the interests of full disclosure, it’s worth mentioning that, according to the Guardian, the charge against Kambakhsh is actually a tactic to get at his brother, a journalist who has exposed the unsavory activities of certain Afghan warlords. This should not distract us from the legal and moral issue involved; I have a sinking feeling that some Muslim “spokesmen” will try to do so, however.)) throws this into sharp focus in a way that even the Salman Rushdie fatwa did not. This is not a matter of a distant, raving ayatollah posturing for domestic consumption: we’re dealing with the power of a (supposedly friendly) state being exercised in support of clerical rules. The charge is the purest of thought-crimes: the accused simply read material which was deemed blasphemous. Any Muslim who fails to condemn this is simply confirming the fear which underlies the bigotry of Dorris Woods and her ilk.
There is a minor issue of language to be considered. Apart from the ancient split between Shia and Sunni, Islam has resisted the proliferation of labels to indicate which branch of a particular religious tradition a believer identifies with. Logically, I’d hope that Muslims who oppose the criminalization of freethought (including apostasy) would identify themselves as “Reform Muslims”, in contrast to their “Conservative” or “Orthodox” counterparts. However there are some obvious problems with this terminology….

Another dubious milestone

From the Comments page on this blog’s dashboard:

Akismet has caught 30,138 spam for you since you first installed it.
You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. 🙂

This came after I’d bulk-deleted 265 comments, trackbacks and pingbacks which Akismet had identified as spam, pushing me over 30,000. I hit 20,000 back on June 25 last year, which means that since then the spam has been rolling in at over 45 comments a day.

Christian dentists?

WTF is going on in the UK? According to Terry Sanderson in CiF:

In an obscure little debate in the House of Lords last week, the Bishop of Carlisle, Graham Dow ((We’ve encountered him before, here and here. He’s clearly a lunatic, but that doesn’t prevent him from speaking in the House of Lords.)), let slip in passing a few of the things that are going on between the church and the government that maybe we ought to know about.
Dow revealed that the government had, for more than two years, “been in conversation with church leaders about the possibility of the church providing extensive welfare services, rather in the way that the church plays a major part in education”. Part of this, apparently, is a 20-year contract for “Christian groups bidding to deliver dentistry”.
Not only does the bishop envisage the church taking over welfare provision with the use of public money, he doesn’t want that provision to be regulated. “Church projects of course would be audited, but not controlled. My opinion is that, recently, we have been building a society that is very low on trust and very high on inspection and control,” said his reverence.

Exhausted, but in a good cause

I had forgotten how tiring it can be to drive. Back home in Seattle, it’s so rare for me to get behind the wheel of a car that each spell of driving (courtesy FlexCar) is over before I’ve had a chance to register any stress or discomfort. But on this visit to Massachusetts, I’ve been driving all the time ((Often at what I would refer to as an “ungodly hour” were it not for the fact that all hours are equally devoid of deities!)). My shoulders are remembering that odd posture where you keep your arms raised for hours at a time… it’s weird.
Anyway, all of this is in a very good cause: helping my daughter to recover from Tori’s birth four weeks ago, while getting Tommy to his day care, doctors’ appointments, and so forth. So here are two iPhone pics of Tommy and Tori from the last couple of days. As you can see, Tommy is prepared for next Sunday’s big game…
Tommy Tori

Obama, Hillary, and Bill: Josh nails it

Over at Talking Points Memo Josh deflects the kind of shrill anti-Clinton stuff we’ve been hearing from Andrew Sullivan et al, and gets the three points about the current Obama-Hillary contest.
First, it isn’t a question of the substance of what’s being said:

[T]here’s very little I’ve seen from the Clinton camp that would seem like anything but garden variety political hardball if it were coming from Hillary or other Clinton surrogates rather than Bill Clinton.
I hear from a lot of Obama supporters that […] Obama is about the ‘new politics’. But this is no different from what Bill Bradley was saying in 2000. And it was as bogus then as it is now. Beyond that there is an undeniable undercurrent in what you hear from Obama supporters that he is too precious a plant — a generational opportunity for a transformative presidency — to be submitted to this sort of knockabout political treatment. That strikes me as silly and arrogant, if for no other reason that the Republicans will not step aside for Obama’s transcendence either.

Second, Obama has to bear a lot of the blame for alienating the older members of the party. I’m not talking about his innocuous references to Reagan, but about…

…an air of arrogance in Obama’s talk of transcendence, reconciliation and unity. I think there are a lot of people who would say, I would have loved to have transcended back in 1995 or 1998 or 2002. But we were spending every ounce on the political battle lines trying to prevent the Republicans from destroying the country. It’s hard for folks like that to hear from someone new that they’re part of the problem, part of the ‘old politics’.

If Obama’s going to take that line, he must expect a backlash. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t do that: every candidate has to decide when to pander to base, and when to tack to the center and piss off the party faithful. ‘Twas ever thus. But let’s not pretend that Obama is “above this” kind of politics.
So if Hillary and Obama are engaging in a legitimate, hard-fought campaign, what’s the problem? It’s Bill. It really is. And the problem is that the person most likely to get hurt is Hillary. Josh again:

With the exception of a few days in early January I’ve gone on the assumption for many months that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. But I think Bill’s actions have greatly diminished her. He has put her back under his shadow where she hasn’t been for years.
For the moment, I doubt either of them is losing much sleep over that. Get through today and then worry about tomorrow. But I think she looks much smaller now. He’s dominating the race. And that makes her look like a weaker figure — something that will not wear well in the general election. And this campaign really suggests this is going to be some sort of co-presidency. When Hillary’s getting knocked around by the folks on the Hill is Bill going to go Larry King to knock her enemies around? Will he be going off to foreign countries on his own little diplomatic missions?
I had assumed he’d remain a step in the background as he has through through most of this decade. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. If the constitution allowed it, I’d happily have Clinton back. I’d happily have Hillary in his place. But I don’t want them both.
The presidency is a singular job. It should stay that way.

I think Hillary realizes this now. Does her husband? Michael Tomansky wonders if they can “do humble”.

Priorities

On the one hand:

UK astronomers will lose access to two of the world’s finest telescopes in February, as administrators look to plug an £80m hole in their finances.
Observation programmes on the 8.1m telescopes of the Gemini organisation will end abruptly because Britain is cancelling its subscription.

This is a program that the UK has already invested £70m in.
On the other hand…

Estimated cost of operations in 2007–08
11. The Winter Supplementary Estimate estimates the additional costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007–08 as £1,315 million in resources and £604 million in capital. These are the net additional costs incurred as a consequence of the operations, not including the costs which would have been incurred regardless, such as wages and salaries.

This is from the Costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan: Winter Supplementary Estimate 2007–08 ((Like the Bush Cheney admistration, HMG funds its wars through last-minute supplementary appropriations, rather than doing the honest thing and including the projected expenditures in the main Defence Budget.)) issued by the Commons Defence Committee in November.
In other words, in 2007-2008 the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) £80m shortfall will be just 4.2% of the military expenses for Blair’s ridiculous poodling, or roughly the same as the price tag for two Apache helicopters.