Random Variable

Photographer and friend Richard Miller sent this by email:

Been asking people at work about how they feel about Muslim girls not being allowed to wear their veils in school..
can you supply me with your opinions/info on this, as I’m getting mainly “this is our country, abide by our rules” reactions.

Richard’s brother, Jamie (who really ought to get a blog), justifiably quotes UN Human Rights Article 18:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

to which one of Rich’s colleagues replied:

I like what you said, but what about communication?

(he refers to the ‘fact’ that 80% of all communication is non-verbal)

What if a child has aspergers? Non verbal communication isn’t going to work in that case, so the teacher must find alternative approaches. In this case, the veil may be treated as an Special Educational Need.
Its the teachers problem if they can’t communicate, though I would try to find out why she is wearing the veil. I would also teach a unit of work on cultural and religious differences, making clear that the veil is a result of a specific cultural mode of religious expression - hinting that there isn’t a compulsion to wear it in most traditional Islamic or more liberal Islamic cultures.

So I would suggest to not restrict negative freedoms (i.e. Freedom from interference) by forbidding her from wearing it, but would try to improve effective freedom (with all the moral implications that entails).

William Davies seems rather peeved at a Guardian journalist, and is worth a read. I was drawn to the statement at the bottom of the Guardian article which said:

In Britain the controversy has focused on the niqab or face veil. Teaching assistant Aishah Azmi was fired for refusing to remove it in November, while earlier Shabina Begum, 17, lost a legal battle to wear the jilbab, a full-length garment including headscarf, to school. In the Netherlands, full-length burkas are banned in some schools and headscarves can be banned under certain circumstances. In France, “conspicuous” religious symbols are banned in schools. Several German states have banned hijabs among pupils.

They don’t make clear that hijab is not even the face covering, it’s the headscarf in its entirety.

Green Party of England & Wales Principal Speaker Derek Wall debated with Chris Horner of the ever-evil/Ebell CEI last night on Aljazeera’s Frost Over the World.

Sir Frost is no Paxman, but Derek does a good job of exposing Chris for what he is. There’s not a family-friendly word to describe Chris Horner’s lies, but hey-ho, watch the video for yourself:

It reminds me of Bill Hick’s comments on what would an audience think if he started doing advertising (ignore the video).

The New Scientist recently published an article based on the work of one David Wasdell of the Meridian Programme, who claims that the IPCC AR4 SPM has ignored the effects of water vapour - though not in the same way Lindzen would normally do. No, this is a leftist attack saying the IPCC doesn’t go far enough and is controlled by business interests.

I don’t know New Scientists’ vetting processes, but I’m not sure that I’d let the work of a psychotherapist and founder of the Urban Church inform an article on climate physics.

His articles have the distinct smell of psuedoscience (Beyerstein, 1995), and his work on water vapour feedback is just outright wrong.

The methodology is also similar to that described by Jodi Dean in her analysis of the “9/11 Truth” movement as a psychotic discourse. That this new mode of attack of the IPCC is gaining ground, has worrying implications for leftist politics, to say the least.

Update:

Gavin Schmidt (RealClimate/NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) had this to say via email on the New Scientist article:

There is work that needs to be done on the general point, but this specific critique [by Wasdell] is worthless. There is nothing there [in the IPCC AR4 Summary for Policy Makers] that isn’t justified on the grounds of clarity.

A number of interesting posts this week.

Harry Brighouse reports on a new book discussing Basic Income Grants, a central tenet of Green policy. The book discusses BIGs against Stakeholder Grants, not entirely dissimilar to Labour’s baby bond:

I’ve been familiar with both proposals for a long time, and find both very appealing, I haven’t got a stake in the debate really. But I was surprised how much new and interesting stuff was in the book, so I thoroughly recommend it whether you are a newcomer to the debate or an old hand.

Tyler comments on carbon offsets:

…these carbon offsets shift back the demand curve for dirty power but they also shift out the supply curve for power as a whole. (The persnickety might argue the demand curve doesn’t even shift back, but if you have to buy all those offsets you will think twice about your next plane trip.) Competition from wind power forces down the price of the monopolistic dirty power company (electricity?), which means that other people buy more of it. The quantity of dirty power consumed might well go up rather than down.

Colin Farrelly comments on Dworkin’s recent Oxford lecture, in which he weighs in on the role religion should have in politics, a major gripe of mine with the “secular left”:

Dworkin then noted that the most powerful argument for establishing religion are not paternalistic. Rather it is the claim that the majority are entitled to a particular culture. So the important question is- Who gets to shape the culture with which we live? How do we decide to answer this question?
The 2 models give different answers. The culture could be shaped organically… millions of independent decisions about what to buy, what to make, who to talk to, etc. can shape the culture. Or the culture could be shaped through collective political/coercive decisions. Dworkin argued that it has OK to collectively shape the moral culture, but if we hope to take his second principle seriously- the principle of special responsibility- the culture must be shaped organically. And this then leads him to endorse model (2)- the tolerant secular state.

Larval Subjects discusses pedagogy from a Deleuzian standpoint:

A pedagogy of problems, a new dialectics, thus becomes the site of a politics– A site where false problems would be revealed and carefully criticized, and where the focus would consist in the articulation of genuine problems where new individuations might take place…

John Quiggin reports on the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change:

It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.

One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.

A new category of my blog entitled “Totalitarianism and Ecology”

Anthony Paul Smith explains:

According to Neocleous “the concept ‘nature’ is, of course, deeply problematical” and “an empty vessel to be filled with whatever meaning is politically expedient”. The context for this is not nature “within fascism” but necessarily in itself. That is to say, Neocleous doesn’t see nature as a concept that can be negotiated, but that holds within it an already reactionary character. It seems the main mistake that fascism makes in regard to nature is to think of it as a subject in itself. For Neocleous nature is culturally constructed and thus a kind of artifice attached to human subjectivity. This goes so far as to cause Neocleous to take a negative view towards political ecology and one can almost say he sees being anti-ecological as being on par with an anti-fascist position. He claims that green groups and philosophies, like Deep Ecology (with which I too have issues, though in a different register), make the same mistake concerning nature (that it is a subject in itself) and even aside from that totalitarian political structures would be necessary to carry out the environmental changes necessary.

So first off, here’s this from a mailing list associated with one radical green group:

Hi All,
Reducing Greenhouse Gases
…
Step Three, reduce the World’s population, Nature is already doing this with HIV/AIDS and may be about to do more anyway

Need I say anymore?

Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler talks up Seth Roberts and the importance of self-experimentation.

When Oh When will people appreciate how deep Seth Roberts’s self-experimentation concept runs? Descartes started with the idea that we know only ourselves, Seth realizes that the self is often the last thing we know and discovering the self is the highest stage of science not to mention performance art. The innovation of hermeneutics (as found say, in Paul Riceour) was to set the self apart from the social world and trace the implications of a dualistic and indeed interpretative social science. Seth reestablishes methodological monism by turning the world-self distinction on its head, relocating the self in the world of science. Add to that mix a working knowledge of experimental psychology, insights from neurodiversity (the meticulous recording of self, the focus on detail, plus the deeply autistic speak of the self in the third person as an external object to be observed; are they so wrong?), and sugared water, for a potent mix.

Increasingly, I think that self-experimentation and ethnography have a lot in common. There is just so much we can learn from anthropology.

On Wednesday, I had the great privilege of getting a few moments of time to speak with the great man himself. I want to leave what we talked about for later though. On Monday, I saw Saba Mahmood give her Milliband lecture on Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Her thesis is that the social sciences in general have avoided treating secularism as an object of study in itself. She asserts that are assumption up to now is that secularisation always follows the pattern experienced in Europe, but that this doesn’t necessarily hold true in all circumstances. In the Q&A that followed, she gave two examples. Egypt – authoritarian, secular, state replacing civil society services that were provided by religious institutions, but yet a deeply religious society. Lebanon – a state system founded upon religion, but one of the most secular cultures in the Middle East. This is exactly the kind of work expected in Beck’s call for methodological cosmopolitanism. However, as a side effect, this opens a critique in Beck’s work itself. Mahmood also claims that attempts by Western institutions to modernise Islam necessarily involves a certain amount of theological and hermeneutic (re)invention. So when Beck asserts the need for negative freedoms that everyone can agree upon (something that is problematic in other ways), does this not imply that Beck’s cosmopolitanism also involves a certain theological project? Read the rest of this entry »

The more I think about it, the more the new film from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright grows on me. What interests me is what the film surreptitiously says about country life. That hidden under the veneer of the quiet life, lies a hidden, obscene violence. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a long running discussion between K-Punk, Foucault is Dead and Amish Lovelock over the media’s response to Jade Goody’s outbursts during Big Brother. Whilst I generally agree with the conclusions reached by all parties, I do take issue with Foucault is Dead’s opinion that saying ‘I’m not a racist, but I think the logic of multiculturalism prevents us from treating people as individuals’ really is a racist statement. That statement is the position that both me and Ulrich Beck share. To make it clear, I post the more interesting points of my response to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion consultation: Read the rest of this entry »