From the diary of Arthur C Clarke, on the writing of 2001:A Space Odyssey.
August 1, 1964.
Ranger VII impacts on Moon. Stay up late to watch the first TV close-ups. Stanley [Kubrick] starts to worry about the forthcoming Mars probes. Suppose they show something that shoots down our story line? [Later he approached Lloyd’s of London to see if he could insure himself against this eventuality].
As some of you seemed to like the bubblegum drum machine, mentioned here, this may also be of interest. The Drum Buddy™ is a “4 oscillator, light activated, mechanically rotating drum machine.” It has a robust wooden cabinet and a state-of-the-art control system.
It is, I think we can agree, a formidable instrument. Though I may wait for a version powered entirely by steam.
If you haven’t been already, you may enjoy a visit to the, fairly self-explanatory, Stuff White People Like.
Entries of note include Hating Corporations, Arts Degrees, Having Gay Friends, White People in the News and, mentioned here previously, Knowing What’s Best for Poor People.
What’s the term I’m looking for? Vanity? Hubris? Ah, yes. Pathological denial.
Concerned about what they see as a rise in the defamation of Islam, leaders of the world’s Muslim nations are considering taking legal action against those that slight their religion or its sacred symbols. It was a key issue during a two-day summit that ended Friday in this western Africa capital. The Muslim leaders are attempting to demand redress from nations like Denmark, which allowed the publication of cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in 2006 and again last month, to the fury of the Muslim world.
Though the legal measures being considered have not been spelled out, the idea pits many Muslims against principles of freedom of speech enshrined in the constitutions of numerous Western governments. “I don’t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy,” said Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade, the chairman of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference. “There can be no freedom without limits.”
The report urges the creation of a “legal instrument” to crack down on defamation of Islam… “In our relation with the western world, we are going through a difficult time,” [OIC secretary general, Ekmeleddin] Ihsanoglu told the summit’s general assembly. “Islamophobia cannot be dealt with only through cultural activities but (through) a robust political engagement.”…A new charter drafted by the OIC commits the Muslim body “to protect and defend the true image of Islam” and “to combat the defamation of Islam.”
The Organisation of the Islamic Conference seems to imagine that self-esteem is a default entitlement and that “defamation” should also extend to matters of inconvenient fact; and thus believers – or rather Muslims - have some fictional right not to be criticised or mocked for publicly airing absurd and objectionable beliefs:
The OIC - backed by allies in Africa and by Russia and Cuba - has been pushing for stronger resolutions on “defamation” since a global controversy arose two years ago over cartoons in a Danish newspaper which Muslims say insult their religion. The “defamation” issue has become especially sensitive this year as the U.N. prepares to celebrate in the autumn the 50th anniversary of the 1948 Universal Declaration, long seen as the bedrock of international human rights law and practice.
That would be the declaration originally intended to protect against the most appalling acts of discrimination - many of which are, of course, still affirmed and perpetuated by orthodox Islamic jurisprudence. But perhaps we should peel away the rhetoric of victimhood, used so indecently, and look at what’s actually being demanded here: A right not to hear that one is being irrational, dishonest or mortifyingly stupid, regardless of just how irrational, dishonest or mortifyingly stupid one actually is. That’s a license of no small magnitude, and one that a person of good faith would neither grant nor desire. It’s one thing for a Muslim to perform whatever mental contortions are required to add the honorific “peace be upon him” to the name of a vain and murderous Bedouin who claimed to talk with God while beheading hundreds of his victims; but to enshrine that pathological dishonesty in international law would be intellectual vandalism on a jaw-dropping scale.
Speaking at the OIC, Indonesia’s President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, mustered the chutzpah to announce, entirely without irony, that “Islam has unjustly been associated with violence.” But events in India, China, the Czech Republic, Afghanistan, Germany, Britain - and, of course, the president’s own country - tell a rather different story. And the supremacist imperatives within Islamic theology, to which jihadists worldwide appeal, are, for many, a matter of religious duty, not some invention of infidels. The association of Islam with intolerance, racism and violence is impressed on the public consciousness first and foremost by those Muslims who, on an all but daily basis, behave in monstrous ways and warp the minds of children in the name of their religion. If the OIC devoted similar indignation and resources to inhibiting the perpetrators of such acts and denouncing what they do, maybe Islam’s public image would be more flattering than it is.
Update:
As I hope the above makes clear, the perversity on display in Dakar is remarkable, if not surprising. Like so many Islamic organisations, the OIC expends much more effort denouncing those who criticise aspects of Islam than it does denouncing those who commit atrocities in Islam’s name. If Muslim groups wish to repair Islam’s public image, to whatever extent it can be repaired, their efforts should be directed at the root of the problem, not at those who dare to point out that a problem exists.
Of the many strange ideas aired at the OIC, one of the strangest is the claim that freedom of religion means the right to have one’s beliefs, and thus one’s vanity, flattered at every turn. This is a novel interpretation, to say the least, and just a tad self-serving. But freedom of religion necessarily entails freedom from religion and the freedom to change one’s mind. Islam is, of course, uniquely barbarous in this regard, and most forms of Sharia mandate punishment, and often death, for those who wish to upgrade to a better faith, or indeed to none at all. For any speaker at the OIC to grumble about how Islam is perceived without first addressing the issue of apostasy and its punishment, and the issue of jihad and the dhimma, and sacralised racism, and blasphemy and censorship, and about a dozen other issues, is inexcusable moral flatulence.
As I wrote in one of my first posts,
Religious freedom is presumed to entail sparing believers any hint that others do not share their beliefs, and indeed may find them ludicrous. There is, apparently, no corresponding obligation for believers to embrace ideas that are not clearly risible, monstrous or disgusting.
Floating hotel, shaped like a whale. // 6 things that resemble the Death Star. // At last, a knitted Princess Leia wig. (h/t, Coudal.) // Boomerangs in space. Will they return? // Martian avalanche. More. // The Abisko Aurora webcam. // Electronic contact lenses. // Jeff Han’s multi-touch media wall. More. And. // Chicago City Council proposes crackdown on “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in height.” // Schweppes and balloons. // Attention proud parents - display your newborn baby on a sack of rice. // The mystery of smell. // Mythical causes of disease. // How the Yeti has been imagined through the ages. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // Hulk alert! // Gnome terrorises town. A Sun exclusive. // The Playmobil security checkpoint. (h/t, Chastity Darling.) // Airport terminals of note. // Heathrow’s electroluminescent wall. // Telescopic rotor blades inspired by toilet paper holder. // “She wasn’t glued to the toilet seat. She was just physically stuck by her body.” The mystery of the adhesive buttocks. // 1950s Sherlock Holmes episodes. Including The Case of the Texas Cowgirl and The Case of the Shy Ballerina. // And, via The Thin Man, Sticky Fingers.
Further to our epic discussion on notions of default gender parity, here’s Christina Hoff Sommers on the prospect of quota-driven, “gender-balanced” and non-competitive science.
Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. “It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as [Donna] Shalala, [Debra] Rolison, and [Kathie] Olsen, on the need to transform the “entire culture” of academic science and engineering…
When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its success would require transforming the “culture of soccer” or putting an end to the obsession with competing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women - but it gives the equity movement extraordinary scope, commensurate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal…
[Virginia] Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, single-minded dedication, and “intense desire for achievement,” not only marginalise women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, “If we continue to emphasise and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.”
Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-science movement, but she is not an empirical thinker. A world where women (and resocialised men) earn Nobel Prizes on flexi-time has no relation to reality. Unfortunately, her outré worldview is not confined to women’s studies. It is a guiding light for some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions… In 2001, the National Science Foundation awarded Valian and her colleagues $3.9 million to develop equity programs and workshops for the “scientific community at large.” Should Congress pass the Gender Bias Elimination Act, which mandates workshops for university department chairs, members of review panels, and agency program officers seeking federal funding, Valian will become one of the most prominent women in American scientific education.
Please, read it all.
Of course, what matters is that men and women of comparable skill and motivation compete fairly for employment. Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome. On what basis could one determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female mathematicians, engineers or oil workers? At what point and on what basis – besides political dogma - could one determine that a particular gender is sufficiently “represented” in any given vocation? Yet these are the assumptions of much of the research mentioned above, and of those who wish to “correct” who is interested in what. The belief that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population should be roughly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – a belief; a prejudice, if you will. And not, it seems, terribly scientific.
Via Photoshop Disasters, I stumbled across a romance novel whose cover promises a little more than is delivered. Behold Christina Dodd’s historical yarn, Castles in the Air. From the blurb: What man would have her once he discovered her secret...?
Ms Dodd’s publishers have subsequently fashioned a corrected - and, alas, less intriguing - jacket.
In today’s Guardian, the fearless Oliver Kamm ventures into choppy waters with a qualified defence of rendition:
The principled objection to rendition is that it stands outside legal process, and the rule of law is the best means we have of constraining arbitrary authority by our own governments. But there is no supranational sovereign authority that can effectively implement the body of international law. After 9/11, peace campaigners urged a judicial approach to bring the perpetrators to justice. What they would have advised if Osama bin Laden had unaccountably declined to turn himself in was never put to the test…
There is an important role for Britain, whose commitment to the war on terror (a phrase I use without irony because it is accurate) is beyond dispute, to intercede with the US administration. There should be no rendition to autocracies whose word on the issue of torture is untrustworthy, such as Syria. Renditions should be used only in extreme cases, against those suspected of directly plotting terrorist acts. The country to which they are transferred must exercise due process under its own laws.
But Europeans have a responsibility too. We are the beneficiaries of American efforts to disrupt terrorism. Diplomacy on the issue of rendition should deal with anticipating and preventing abuses. It should not be an opportunity for hyperventilation on the identity of the hated Bush-Cheney regime and our declared theocratic enemies.
Naturally, rumblings ensue. One comment in particular caught my eye as it distils what might be thought of as the very essence of a Guardianista worldview:
The entire rendition process is about the desire to feed and sustain the sadistic fantasies of that perverse constituency which amuses itself with the Threat of Terror and the War against Evil. The victims themselves are merely stage props in this public demonstration of the anger and power and implacable stupidity of the Empire… Only by reducing international society to a clash between cultures and races can the neo-conservatives prevent people from coming together to deal with the real problems, poverty, disease, environmental degradation…
Ah, bless.
What’s interesting to me is how the subject is currently being discussed on the Guardian’s own moderated website, or rather reacted against, very often with wholesale fantasy. For every partially serious response to a particular point, there are two, perhaps three, comments that are unhinged and simply perverse, albeit in a broadly similar way. I stopped counting after a dozen different commenters asserted, smugly, that no war against terrorism exists, or that the West shouldn’t have made efforts to defend itself, or that the US is some kind of fascist autocracy, or that Osama bin Laden and his associates weren’t responsible for 9/11, or that the US government killed its own citizens for unspecified reasons, or that Bush and Blair are morally indistinguishable from homicidal jihadists. As a thumbnail sketch of Guardianista opinion, or a large part thereof, these reactions are worth noting.
Busy today, but here’s a rather fine collection of condiment sachets.
There’s just about every possible formulation of ketchup, mustard and spicy relish, and several substances I can’t quite identify.
(Via Coudal.)
Chinese space race propaganda. Pandas, kittens, reindeer, all flying into space. (h/t, Coudal.) // Armour for cats and mice. Let battle commence. (h/t, Things.) // The wardrobe of Watchmen. // Welding masks we have known and loved. // Cloverfield green screen. The seams revealed. // BSG in 8 minutes. Roslin loves that airlock. // Brett Lock on pricey booze and social engineering. // Fabian Tassano on disaffection as illness. // Flemming Rose on the Vatican and al-Azhar, united in piety. // Michael Sheridan visits three of the Bali bombing jihadists. “Some try to make a link between al-Qaeda and us. The only link is faith.” // Iranian shoppers turn on Islamic modesty police. // High on Mount Sinai? The tripping Israelites. (h/t, Chastity Darling.) // 10 mental curios. // Mind reading machine will know what you’re looking at. // HAL’s display screens. // Snowflakes and bacteria. (h/t, Dark Roasted Blend.) // The Zenith music hall, Strasbourg. // Tree houses of note. // Eco-terrorists burn down three Seattle homes. For Gaia, of course. // The leather dachshund bag. £65. // Family Guy chicken fight, rounds 1, 2 and 3. // Pork Knox. // The periodic table of condiments. // My pepper heart. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra.
I think this is what’s referred to as weapon porn. Meet the FMG-9. It’s a flashlight and a firearm. And I’m terribly impressed.
Here’s a question. What if Saul Bass had done the opening titles for Star Wars?
Via Beaucoup Kevin.
More on Saul Bass here. Some titles actually designed by Saul Bass. An archive of memorable opening titles.
