Archive for July, 2009
Andrew Sullivan is a Very Nice Goy
…so he should stop trying to be a Jew. He had a post recently in which he wrote “To watch someone you love blossom and grow and mature and thrive is what my Jewish friends call a mitzvah.” Someone emailed him to correct him about that. He published that, in a post called Me and My Yiddish, but then, in that post, he got it wrong again, writing, “Schepping someone’s nachas sounds pretty gay to me. So I’m in! What I meant, I think, is that it’s a blessing, a mitzvah from God.” Another blooper (and some of us are beginning to cringe a bit).
Look, you’re a gay Catholic married conservative Obama-supporting Brit from East Grinstead. For you that’s not enough? A Jew you also want to be, on top of all that?
On a more serious note, I’m surprised Andrew doesn’t know this but referring to “my Jewish friends” never sounds good — from anyone. It sounds — not saying that it’s the case, but it sounds — like he feels he needs to burnish his non-prejudiced credentials: a sort of mild version of “some of my best friends are Jews”. I’m sure that’s not what it’s about with Andrew, but what it sounds like is what it sounds like, so the best strategy, for everyone, is just to avoid phrases like that altogether. He could just as well have written “To watch someone you love blossom and grow and mature and thrive is what Jews call a mitzvah”. It would still have been incorrect, but it would have sounded much better, much more like the words of a guy to whom the thought has never even occurred that he might have anything to worry about, because he doesn’t.
English Language Watch: Refute, Rebut, Deny
Oliver Kamm has a column in The Times that I hope will be read by many people. In it he explains the difference between “refute”, “deny”, and “rebut”. The confused and illiterate misuse of these words in public discourse is something that has always irked me no end. Thank goodness for the Oliver Kamms of this world. (Oliver Kamm is a good thing for other reasons, too. Check out his blog.)
AT&T Gives Palm Pre a Boost
The news has been all over the interwebs that Apple has banned Google Voice from the App Store, at the behest of AT&T. The reasons AT&T has for this are quite understandable — why should a telecoms company want to make it easy for people to communicate for free? But it gives an advantage to the Palm Pre, for which Google Voice will be available. This will be the factor that leads some people to choose the Pre over the iPhone. The iPhone is not going to be in danger any time soon, but anything that gives the Pre a boost is good for all of us. (I have an iPhone and I love it. But I’ve been delighted at the arrival of the Pre and I wish it every success, because this kind of competition will lead to even better gadgets.)
Marital Infidelity as a Business Idea
I have just discovered that there is a website, metroencounters.com, for people who are (presumably) unsatisfyingly married and would like to have an affair. Am I naïve to be shocked at this? The website’s home page says:
Has the spark gone from your marriage? Are you feeling trapped? Thousands of men and women have just discovered how to get the butterflies back… Join the UKs largest Married Dating site & meet other married people who want to have some fun…
This is of course perfectly disgusting. Is also perfectly legal, as it should be.
Eating Out (and Getting Fat) in America
There are a number of reasons why obesity is such a big problem in the US. I don’t propose to recount all of them here, as they are well rehearsed. I do however want to take note of one of them, namely the size of the portions of food to which Americans are accustomed, and relate that to my own experience. I’m in the US quite frequently and I often eat in the kind of restaurants that many Americans go to: some chains, some family restaurants, some (woefully clueless) places purporting to offer what they call “fine dining”. And almost every time, when whatever I have ordered arrives, I am both amazed and repelled by the sheer amount of food piled on the plate. It puts me off my meal, and it explains a great deal.
Hear O Israel: Listen to Moussavi
The New York Times quotes Iranian opposition leader Moussavi as saying the following yesterday:
How can it be that the leaders of our country do not cry out and shed tears about these tragedies? Can they not see it, feel it? These things are blackening our country, blackening all our hearts. If we remain silent, it will destroy us all and take us to hell.
These sound like the words of a man who loves his country. I love Israel, and my fears for Israeli society are the same as Moussavi’s for Iranian society. The constant warfare, unavoidable and defensive though most if not all of it may be, is brutalising Israeli society, slowly making what had been a highly civilised, refined, enlightened, and progressive population coarse, insensitive, unrefined, materialistic, and vulgar. I’ve watched it happening, gradually, over twenty years. Israel itself shares a big part of the blame for all that fighting over all these decades. Not all of the blame, certainly. Probably not even most of it. But a big part of it. Israel, too, could have tried harder, in the past, to make peace, and could be trying harder today. And the violence is destroying what it’s supposed to protect. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)
Varieties of Religious Experience
There are people who are convinced there was never a moon landing. Some people take the fictional best-seller “The Da Vinci Code” seriously. At the moment, some people in the US are claiming to believe that President Obama was born in Kenya. I’ve never been worried by this sort of thing. But recently I’ve been discovering that some people I know very well, and otherwise think very highly of — people who are, indeed, otherwise outstandingly intelligent — entertain as being at least not entirely implausible the idea that the George W. Bush administration might have been complicit in the September 11 attacks. That’s troubling. There are two ways to counter such nonsense: to dispute that Bush would have been involved in such a conspiracy, and to dispute that he could have. The former is a waste of time. Of course it’s extremely unlikely that Bush would have done such a thing, but why get into an empty debate, with no substantive basis on either side, about this question? But the second approach looks like a clear winner. Could such a thing have been possible? How could the secret be kept, given the vast number of people who would have had to know something? Even assuming Bush would have been capable of willing something like that, it would have been impossible to carry out in practice. It’s just plain impossible on a purely practical level, and quite obviously so.
No iPhone App for Amazon?
How come there’s no iPhone app for Amazon.com? If you were Amazon, wouldn’t you want to make it easy for people to order things they suddenly decide they want, whenever they happen to think of them and wherever they happen to be in that moment?
There I was with my iPhone (but no laptop), with a good WiFi connection and a few minutes on my hands, so I decided to go to Amazon.com and order a book I’d just heard about from a friend. First stop: the App Store, where I assumed I’d quickly find and be able to download a free Amazon app that would then let me search for and find the book, log on to my Amazon account, and order it. No such luck, though: Amazon hasn’t published an app.
Naomi Doesn’t Want to be Klein
And neither do many others of her ilk (“klein” being the German for “small”). If Naomi Klein, the author of the best-selling book of nonsense “No Logo”, were to live by the ideas and principles she claims to espouse, then she would have to drop off the public radar screen. But that, of course, she cannot allow herself to do. For what Klein really wants is to be well known and well paid. One can just smell the difference between public campaigners who are genuinely driven by the issues they campaign on, and those who are doing it out of vanity. One example of the former is a man who has my unreserved admiration: Rick Halperin of Amnesty International, who has been a tireless campaigner against the death penalty in the United States. You may well not have heard of him before: if not, then that is because his work doesn’t focus on raising his own profile but rather on the issue that concerns him. In contrast, consider someone like José Bové, the French farmer who started out protesting against McDonald’s, developed a taste for political celebrity, and before long was appearing on television with mass-murderer Yassir Arafat from the latter’s compound in Ramallah in Israel-occupied Palestine.
Feelings Shouldn’t Be Legislated
I agree with almost all of what Norman Geras writes on his blog. On those occasions when I don’t firmly agree, it is usually a matter of not being sure rather than clearly disagreeing. Normblog is characterised by calm, clear thinking and calm, clear writing. Norm’s is a voice of reason and enlightenment. If I come to write questioningly or critically about Normblog posts rather frequently, as I suspect I might, it is because Normblog interests and engages me, and because I like it very much, and for no other reason.
Here, I want to make a remark on Norm’s latest post concerning freedom of speech. In it, he seems, at least implicitly, to accept the idea that “incitement to racial hatred” may, as a class of speech, legitimately be banned. This, in my view, goes too far. Racial hatred is certainly ugly, but inculcating it in others does not constitute what should be considered “harm” for purposes of limiting speech. (One might reasonably argue that inculcating hatred does indeed harm, in a non-physical way, those in whom it is inculcated, and I myself would agree with that generally. But not for purposes of law.) Incitement to physical violence against persons, or to any other illegal acts, is a different matter. But hatred is not an act. It is not even an idea, or a coherent set of thoughts. It is an emotion — a feeling. The state should not legislate what I feel nor what I tell others to feel, even if those feelings be ugly and hateful.
Moon Landings: Easy as Pie
Jean-Yves Le Gall says in today’s Financial Times that landing on the moon is “very easy”. Jean-Yves Le Gall is the head of Arianespace, a French satellite-launching outfit. He would probably tell you that the reason Arianespace has never landed anyone or anything on the moon is that there’s no money in it. But I think I know the real reason: it’s that there’s no challenge in it.
As High Streets Go
Generally, I don’t like high streets very much. Most high streets in London are no exception. But St. Johns Wood High Street is. It is small, calm, uncrowded, and clean. It is quiet, and there is an almost village-like feel to it. It’s nice. As high streets go.
Dumb Design Flaw on Palm Pre
There are design flaws that are not obvious, and there are those that are. The ones that are obvious are, because obvious, also stupid. Into the obvious-and-stupid category falls the plastic cover over the micro-USB port on the Palm Pre. This port is used for both charging and data. Either of those alone would already mean that the port will be used frequently; together they practically guarantee that the port will need to be accessed several times per day. Why force users to hassle with a finicky plastic cover each time they need the port? (A cover which, moreover, will eventually break off, leaving one with a damaged phone.)
Religiosity as an Evolved Trait
Atheists and agnostics might wonder: why is religious belief so widespread, and why is it so persistent? Why does there seem to be such a receptiveness to it in the human animal? How is it that a belief in the supernatural seems so natural as to appear almost inborn? Believers will point to this and say, “You see? God has created us with an instinct to believe,” or something along those lines. But there is a better hypothesis that is non-religious, and that is that humans evolved a tendency toward religious belief because this trait is advantageous. As the human species evolved, it became more and more conscious, and as it became more conscious it began to ask questions. Where did everything come from? What is life? What is death? Why are these things the way they seem to be? And so on. And with these questions came, perhaps, a sense of missing something, perhaps what we would today call “meaning”; there came, perhaps, a feeling of wanting more, something we might call, today, a “purpose” to live for. The idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing god (or other supernatural entity) that created “us” and cared about what we did could have been a satisfying answer to such questions and a powerful balm for such feelings. Those who believed in such things might well, therefore, have been happier than others. Evolution might have favoured them — after all, a happy and confident man gets more girls than an anxious and questioning nebbish, and a cheerful and unpreoccupied girl is much sexier than a pensive and uncertain one — and thus, quite plausibly, might a genetic tendency to believe in the supernatural have been selected for, and become almost as ineradicably established in humans as, say, the language instinct. Couple this with the strong tendency of people to pass on to their offspring pretty much everything they themselves were taught as children whether or not they still believe it as adults, and it’s not hard to see why Freud’s predicted “Future of an Illusion” has not yet arrived.
Obama’s Bad Hand
I voted for Obama in both the primary and the general election, and I still love the guy. But I feel frustrated and disheartened when I consider the hand history has dealt him. He came to office with the ambitions of a giant: among others, to reform health care at home and bring peace to the Middle East. At the moment, these things look impossible. Yet imagine: if instead of the worst recession in generations, Obama had inherited a relatively strong economy and a balanced budget (or even a surplus, like the one Clinton left Bush); if instead of Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel were Livni and if instead of Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran were a Khatami or even a Moussavi or a Rasfanjani. It’s depressing.
Microsoft Online vs Google Apps
You possess a fortune and need a bank to manage it for you. There are two banks you can choose from. One is housed in a large and very solid-looking building with a serious and classical design. Merely the appearance and feel of the building inspire confidence. The people in this bank welcome you and are polite and respectful, very happy to help, and always available. The other bank is housed in what appears to be a flimsy shack. It doesn’t look at all like a bank; on the contrary it resembles a temporary structure, and is also quite ugly. There seem to be very few bank staff inside, and those few are too busy to help, so you are essentially on your own. This bank advertises its services by saying that its fees are much lower than those of the other bank, and you can see that, yes, they would be, and certainly should be.
I recently decided to move my company’s e-mail, contact management, calendaring, collaboration, and document management “into the cloud”. I considered two services for this: Microsoft’s relatively new Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and Google Apps. In the bank analogy above, BPOS is the attractive, serious and solid-looking bank, and Google Apps the ugly and flimsy shack. Of course my evaluation included many other technical factors, and considerations based on specific needs determined by the way the people in my company work together. But the respective user interfaces of the two offerings; and the respective levels, availability, and effectiveness of the support provided, certainly influenced the final decision quite strongly.
The End of the Khan Era
Among the job advertisements in the back of this week’s Economist (July 11 – 17 2009) is one that made me glad. Amnesty International is looking for a new Secretary General. Whatever else that may mean and whatever else may result, it does mean that Irene Khan will soon be gone. Khan was a major factor in the politicisation of a human rights advocacy organisation whose erstwhile policy and practice of remaining strictly apolitical, coolly analytical, and professionally distanced from emotions had been an underpinning of its credibility and effectiveness. Amnesty International’s credibility eroded during Khan’s tenure. Its press releases became impassioned and sometimes blatantly tendentious. An example of Khan’s suitability for her job was her comparison of Guantanamo Bay to the Gulag. Guantanamo Bay was and remains very bad, but comparing it to the Gulag is stunningly unserious for a Secretary General of Amnesty International. That is the quality of leadership Amnesty has been labouring under. Let us hope that it will do better this time around.
The Limits of Tolerance
“Tolerance”, which I’ll use here in the usual sense of an acceptance of the presence of ethnic groups and cultures different from one’s own, has long been established as a watchword for liberal, open, progressive societies. And rightly so. But a bad mistake was made in some such societies: a failure to recognise that this tolerance must not be extended to groups or cultures whose practices and customs are themselves INtolerant, coercive, or oppressive. Cultures that engage in the enforcement of a particular religious affiliation and practice, or the silencing of women, or forced marriages, or other forms of oppression or coercion, cannot be tolerated within a free and liberal society. In a liberal society, freedoms are protected by the law, and the rule of law must extend to all without exception, or it is worth little. This is being discovered too late in the Netherlands and it’s a great pity. The Dutch have been one of the finest societies in the world: liberal, tolerant, enlightened, progressive. Now, in reacting to the destructive effects of the country’s having too long tolerated the presence of highly illiberal, intolerant groups, some of those same Dutch people are voting for poisonous, extreme-right politicians. Dutch society at large, in any case, appears to have recognised the problem. In Britain, where the same mistaken approach to intolerant cultures is an even more severe problem, it has nevertheless not yet been admitted by large sections of the moderate Left. That, I submit, is at least partly because the Left, particularly in Britain, is interested far more in ideological fashion than in actual reality.
Why “Tolerance”?
There is a broadly accepted moral imperative that one should be “tolerant” of people from cultures, ethnicities, or even just places not one’s own. The thrust of this imperative is right but the language is misleading — or is it perhaps revealing? To “tolerate” something implies that it is in some way undesirable. That is hardly an ideal starting point for true harmony.
Creationists
How they limit their god, these “creationists” whose imaginations cannot embrace the thought that their supposedly omnipotent god might, in his omnipotence, have set a primordial soup a-simmer on the stove-top of eternity with the divine will that life evolve out of it in just the way that modern biologists suppose it did.
The Anti-Religionists
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others spend time and energy polemicising against religious belief. Why? They point to the undeniably great amount of harm to humanity that has been caused in the name of one religion or another. But religious belief has also motivated much charity and many good deeds. It is not at all obvious that the harm caused by religiosity outweighs the benefit it can take credit for.
Hippocritial, Not Hippocratic
The AMA’s opposition to Obama’s proposed health care reform is naked, cynical self-interest. I know doctors who have always refused to join the AMA because the imperative to heal is not among its top priorities.
