davidthompson

Territory (2)

Further to recent comments on the ideological disdain of territory, this may be relevant. Over at Harry’s Place, David T says something I find bizarre. In discussing the Nassim Saadi deportation case and its broader implications, he says,

I think it is quite right that we should not deport individuals to countries where they will be tortured. A country which deports - or even connives in the rendition of - a person who they know or suspect will be tortured bears moral responsibility for any torture which takes place. If you oppose torture in all circumstances, as you should, then it does not do to argue that your country bears no guilt for what happens after deportation.

This is quite a remarkable bundle of claims and one that’s often asserted wholesale rather than argued. Why doesn’t it do? One might, for instance, take the view that a person of foreign citizenship convicted of serious crimes, whether they include terrorism or not, has broken a fundamental covenant with the host society. And thus, one might argue, the conditional protections extended to visitors by that society are forfeit. Tax payers could conceivably have moral objections to paying for the food, medicines and accommodation of foreign prisoners intent on doing them harm, and possibly spreading their intentions among others, either in prison or at large.

In light of that, expulsion from the host society seems a not unreasonable consequence and certainly within the realm of consideration. If a person facing expulsion runs the risk of ill-treatment, even torture, by third parties overseas, it’s not exactly clear why that should imply some vicarious moral responsibility. (Though one could argue it may discourage foreign nationals from committing serious crimes in the first place.) Awareness that such acts may or may not take place in other countries doesn’t imply that one condones those acts. It merely implies one no longer feels an obligation to protect an unwelcome and hostile visitor from the actions of third parties. Indeed, in instances of egregious criminality, including terrorism and attempted terrorism, I suspect quite a few people would be happy to see the perpetrators dropped into international waters and allowed to fend for themselves, to whatever extent they can.

Update: More in the comments.

Update 2: Over at Harry’s Place, Brett Lock is angry.

I am angry because there is more public debate about the rights of terrorists and criminals facing deportation than there seems to be for genuine, innocent and vulnerable people.

I wonder whether legitimate asylum seekers might fare better in their applications, and their welcome, if the broader public was reassured that visitors who abuse such favours could be expelled without great difficulty.   

Friday Ephemera

A 5-minute history of evil. (h/t, Coudal.) // Star Wars subtitles malfunction. “Dishevelled hair projection.” (h/t, Maggie’s Farm.) // Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. // Garfield minus Garfield. It gets quite strange. // The Einstein Archives. // The Large Hadron Collider. // The Stanford Linear Accelerator. // “That’s the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.” // The silicon womb. // Cheeseburger in a can (mentioned here) finally gets a taste test. // Marijuana school. Higher education. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // A brief history of aviation. (h/t, Stephen Hicks.) //Aurora Australis. // The power shirt. With nanogenerators. // Vivid Audio loudspeakers. These are rather fetching. // Cuddly Venereals™. // Barnacles and cocaine. // $2.6 million necklace. 1,290 diamonds. Only one ever made. // Circular communities. // Daniel Finkelstein on dictators and their groupies. // Caroline Fourest on Tariq Ramadan. “He is a professional when it comes to lying.” // Islam: What the West Needs to Know. September 11, 1683. // Tall buildings. // Even taller buildings. // Skyscraper made of wood. // Wind tunnels we have known and loved. // Kate Bush, Cloudbusting.       

Quantities

Chris Jordan’s statistical art features, among other things, jet trails, Barbie dolls and painkillers. Cans Seurat (60 x 92”) recreates Georges Seurat’s La Grande Jatte using 106,000 images of aluminium cans - the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

(h/t, Dr Westerhaus.)

Imaginings

A directory of visual concept art.

From Star Wars to Iron Man. Related. And. 

Protected Species

Cath Elliott shares her wisdom in today’s Comment is Cheap Free. The self-proclaimed feminist and trades union activist targets an Aspen Times column by Gary Hubbell, whose grumbling about the presidential candidates’ alleged pandering to special interest groups is promptly, and inevitably, compared to that of the BNP. What catches the eye, though, is Elliott’s highlighting of this passage from Hubbell’s article:

Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader.

A fair point, one might think. Much as many have recoiled from the current incumbent of the White House, due in part to his limited ability to convey whatever thought processes may take place behind his eyes. Ms Elliott adds,

This isn’t because she’s a woman, he goes on to say, but because she is who she is.

Again, sounds like a fair point. My own impression of Hillary Clinton is of a shrill and dissembling harpy forever peddling victimhood - quite often her own - and struggling with rather vengeful authoritarian urges. Pointing that out says nothing in particular about the rest of womankind, at least among those of us who think in terms of individuals, not symbols of some designated group. However, Ms Elliott disagrees: 

I for one don’t believe him. Hubbell and his new-found cheerleaders across the net give the game away when they reserve the worst of their ire for Hillary Clinton. This isn’t about a crisis of identity for poor working class men; it’s a defence of masculinity and a last desperate effort to cling on to the power that men have enjoyed for centuries. Just another anti-Hillary misogynist rant, then.

And nothing at all like a hackneyed far left rant against the “defence of masculinity” - which, as every good-hearted person knows, is an unspeakable vice and almost certainly a cover for something more unspeakable still. But hold on a minute. Does this mean that we men folk aren’t allowed to take a dim view of a presidential candidate if she happens to be a woman? What about Clinton’s female critics - do they get some special license to be unkind by virtue of having internal genitalia? What about men who dislike Hillary Clinton but quite like Condoleezza Rice? And, by the same thinking, does any disparaging of Cath Elliott immediately signal misogyny and oppression, regardless of what claptrap falls from her mouth? Are quasi-Marxist power dramas and the dislike of an entire gender the only conceivable motives here? And if I point out that Ms Elliott looks and sounds like an Eighties cliché, is that just my desperate attempt to cling to masculine power? I think we should be told.

The Vision Thing

Eyescapes. 

By Rankin. Via Tim239.

Territory

A few weeks ago, Georges and I were discussing Margaret Thatcher’s often-taken-out-of-context “society” quote and the idea of the nation state as a marker of solidarity. Georges was struck by,

How much people seem to need larger forms of affiliation than self and family and immediate social circle.

To which I replied,

Well, indeed, and some more than others. But I don’t see why that should necessarily conflict with Thatcher’s statement, or with her broader outlook, or with a Conservative outlook generally. And the people who most vehemently disdain national identity and national pride - those “larger forms of affiliation” - tend to be on the left of the political spectrum. Which strikes me as counter-productive.

In today’s Observer, David Goodhart elaborates on a similar theme and offers reasons why such disdain is counter-productive.

Most of today’s cabinet were students in the 1970s and 1980s. If their student union had been debating the motion “The nation-state is a bloodstained anachronism”, most of them would probably have voted for it. And why not? I was there too and we were growing up in the shadow of nationalism’s 20th-century horrors… People on the left… were pro-mass immigration - among other things it added colour to the staid stoicism of Anglo-Saxon life. Meanwhile, a broader political world view emerged - there was no common culture in Britain, but, rather, a multicultural ethnic rainbow…

The fact is that the liberal baby-boomers were too insouciant about the nation-state and feelings of mutual obligation and belonging. Events, and voters’ responses to them, forced them to adjust. In Britain, those events included the asylum crisis in the late 1990s, the unprecedented increase in legal immigration, the unexpected East European surge after May 2004, the 7 July London attacks and, most important, the hostility of public opinion to mass immigration amid anxieties about public services and rapidly changing communities.

This does not mean that the average British citizen has become more prejudiced, though the far right gets more votes than ever. The principle of anti-discrimination is now more widely practised than ever… and the average Briton is more comfortable with difference - consider the rise of interracial marriage. But the liberal baby-boomers have come to grasp that a belief in universal moral equality does not mean that we have the same obligations to all humans - we do not consider our families to be on a different moral plane, yet would not hesitate to put their interests first. Until a few decades ago, the basis of national ‘specialness’ would have been ethnicity - shared ancestry, history, sacrifice. In multi-ethnic and multiracial societies, the basis of specialness is citizenship itself.

The justification for giving priority to the interests of fellow citizens boils down to a pragmatic claim about the value of the nation-state. Without fellow-citizen favouritism, the nation-state ceases to have much meaning. And most of the things that liberals desire - democracy, redistribution, welfare states, human rights - only work when one can assume the shared norms and solidarities of national communities.

Given the above, one might wonder how it is much of the left came to embrace dogmatic self-loathing and a pretentious disdain of territory. As when Joseph Harker, the Guardian’s deputy comment editor, repeatedly claimed “all white people are racist,” before identifying any fluttering of national identity as suspicious and, almost by default, a sign of xenophobia. When such views appear in the mainstream organ of the British left, voiced by a member of its own editorial staff, this isn’t exactly a cause for optimism. Nor is it encouraging to discover that even the most positive expressions of shared national identity can meet with official censure and threats of punishment. As, for instance, when Pendle council reprimanded Matthew Carter, a black dustman born in Barbados, for wearing a St George’s Cross bandana to keep his dreadlocks out of the way:

Ian McInery, the operational services manager for Pendle council, defended the decision to discipline Mr Carter. He said: “We have made it clear to staff that they are not allowed to put stickers or flags on bin wagons or wear clothing which shows support for a particular team, group or country… It’s just a common-sense approach that we are sticking to.”

One also has to wonder if viewing Mr Carter’s choice of headgear as a sign of xenophobic atavism, or as likely to be perceived as such, is what multicultural theorists really had in mind. And does this affected distaste for national symbols suggest progress, or its opposite?

Conscience in Extremis

I gather some of you are fans of the retooled Battlestar Galactica, which remains one of the more intelligent and compelling science fiction series. Given the issues raised during the last three seasons and their real world resonance, law professors Daniel Solove, Deven Desai and David Hoffman have taken an interest and interviewed BSG’s creators, Ronald D Moore and David Eick.

Part 1 deals with the trials and legal systems of the human survivors. Part 1-B explores the depicted use of torture. Parts 2 and 3, on the series’ treatment of politics, cylons and religion, will follow shortly.

Those of you unfamiliar with BSG can watch the episode 33 below.

Link: sevenload.com

(h/t, Volokh.)

Friday Ephemera

Peter Callesen’s paper cuts. Each one made from a single sheet. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // The Agbar Tower, Barcelona. More. // Zoudov. A Cold War thriller. (h/t, Coudal.) // 9 improbable weapons of war. Pigeons, rats, unspeakable lust. // Robo-fawn. // Robo-ferret. // Robot water strider. // Advanced prosthetic arm. // Deluxe finger painting. // Cutest. Thing. Ever. // A feline wake-up call. Scroll down. (h/t, Andy.) // Marvelous aquariums. (h/t, Things.) // The relative sizes of stars. Let it play. (h/t, Stephen Hicks.) // Methane detected on world 63 light years from Earth. // Is the Earth flat? A debate ensues. (h/t, Mick  Hartley.) // The People’s Quiz. Who said what. // Knowing what’s best for poor people. // Madsen Pirie on the pursuit of happiness. // Oliver Kamm on CND. // Fabian Tassano on Cornelia Parker’s politics-as-art. // Exploding flower arrangements. Frozen with liquid nitrogen, then shot. // Self-healing rubber. // Bubble gum drum machine. // Bubble gum alley. // Bubble gum sculptures. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s the Ohio Express.

Resonance

Wine glasses, played well. Things get clever about one minute in.

(Via Centripetal Notion.) 

Related: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy played on a glass harmonica or hydrocrystalophone. The Glass Duo may also entertain. Or enliven your soirée with the skills of Miss Gloria Parker.