A welcome statement

"We are not above the law."

That's Safdar Zia, general secretary of the Jaffria Islamic Centre, speaking in response to this:

A Shia Muslim was convicted of child cruelty yesterday after he forced two boys to flog themselves during a religious ritual.

Beauty and the beast

In Arabic, Al Wahsh means the beast or the monster. Nabih Al Wahsh, an Egyptian lawyer and activist, said this during an interview in 2005:

Nabih Al-Wahsh: No, there hasn't been a single modest and devout woman who follows her traditions and religion that was raped.

Host: It does happen. She was raped because the rapist was a sick man.

Nabih Al-Wahsh: No. Such a thing never happened.

Muna Hilmi: Why didn't those who raped her obey the commandments of your religion and treat her with respect?

Nabih Al-Wahsh: Because she was promiscuous. Because it was she that encouraged them to rape her.

This is what he looks like:



In 2007, he demanded that the hands of a television presenter called Abeer Sabi be amputated, to punish her for taking off her veil. This is what she looks like:



More faces of evil from Egypt here.

Censoring Darwin

"The team agreed the wording was poorly worded and could cause offence. We took the decision to obscure part of it rather than spend tax payers' money on a replacement."

Those are the words of a spokesman for Northampton Borough Council, explaining why a sign next to a display in Abington Park Museum was censored. The display related to Charles Darwin and fossil collecting. The third paragraph below was blacked out with tape:

In early Victorian times, most geologists still accepted the biblical view of evolution. They saw the different layers of fossil-rich rocks as telling the story of successive waves of creation, each one being obliterated by a deluge.

The young scientist Charles Darwin (right) was already beginning to question this view, but it was another 30 years before he had painstakingly put together the vast assemblage of facts and observations that enabled him to write On the Origin of Species.

He used the same layers of fossils that had supported the Genesis view of evolution to show the slow changes that are taking place over the millennia of earth history, each small change enabling a species to the rigours of it's (sic) environment – the struggle for survival through natural selection leading to the survival of the fittest.

It seems a single religious extremist complained, and the Council ordered the censoring. The censored paragraph is of course entirely true. But the feelings - the susceptibility to offence - of a religious maniac, a creationist, trumped truth.

Thanks to JuliaM in the comments of an earlier post.

UPDATE: As Julia points out in a comment, the credit should go to Unenlightened Commentary. Remiss of me.

UPDATE 2: Incidentally, anyone capable of writing "the wording was poorly worded" deserves to be dragged outside and beaten about the head with a copy of Fowler's (the original edition, to be fogeyish for a moment).

Printing buildings

Using inkconcretejet technology. Funded by Caterpillar Inc.

Fewtril

I missed this first time round, but David Thompson spotted it:

It is no disadvantage for those who thrill at enmity also to profess a universal brotherhood. There are many men who do not profess any such idea, or who do not do so with the demanded zeal, and who therefore make a most fitting object for hatred.

Yup, that hits the spot.

An America Carol

Clip montage:

Capitalism is rape

The roots of sexual assault, from the website of DNC Disruption 08:

Sexual assault is rooted in broader systems of oppression- such as patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, homophobia, and colonialism- and is not separable from them in how and why it is perpetrated, experienced, and dealt with.

Endarkenment news

This is the front page article on the free copy of the Ely Standard that just dropped through my door:

A WHITE witch is about to cast a bad weather spell on Ely's Oliver Cromwell celebrations due to take place next month. And perhaps even more controversially, the witch has told the Ely Standard that he was contacted by an Ely councillor and asked to cast a spell on the event.

Plans to mark the 350th anniversary of the Lord Protector's death on September 6 will have a spell put on tomorrow by Kevin Carlyon, a broomstick-riding* chat show regular who proclaims himself high priest of the British White Witches and guru to stars such as Ruby Wax.

The article is accompanied by a picture of Mr Carlyon 'at a previous cursing ceremony' and by another of him 'performing a spell'. It continues:

Tracey Harding, tourism team leader at Oliver Cromwell House's and the event's organiser, said she was seeking advice on whether to undo the hex

Let's round this up, so far. An elected politician has asked a "witch" to cast a spell to bring bad weather for an event. The event organiser is considering soliciting a rival spell to, presumably, bring her sunshine. And this is on the front page of a newspaper, even if it's just a local one.

With a nicely judged sense of irony, Mr Carlyon had this to say about an email he received that was not supportive of his actions:

"The lady didn't agree with what I was doing but she expressed herself in such a loony manner you couldn't take her seriously."

These events, and their prominence in a news sheet, come straight from the dark recesses of the seventeenth century.

I know local newspapers are often short of stories but the journalists in question must be out of their minds.

Hang on. Let me rephrase that. The journalists in question must be out of their fucking minds. There's a headlong flight from reason happening right now. Carl Sagan warned us about as the last millennium approached. And as this reviewer said:

In fact, if there is anything I disagree with in Sagan's book it is probably his encouragement of skeptics to be as civil as he is in dealing with what skeptics see as the dark that extinguishes the candle.

It's noteworthy, in passing, that the word "sceptic" has become tainted by the advocates of global warming, one of whose leaders, as I pointed out earlier, the head of the IPCC no less and an alleged man of science, has calculated how many reincarnations will be necessary for him to neutralise his carbon profile.

Reason taught us all we know. Scepticism is the handmaiden of reason, without which reason cannot operate except within narrow and often absurd and non-true boundaries - such as those pegged out by religions.

Journalists have a duty to ignore or deride drivel about Wiccans, or be ignored or derided in their turn. The Ely standard has brought itself and its profession into even further disrepute.

* And they think he can ride broomsticks? The journalist asserts he rides a fucking broomstick?

A history of violence

There's a transactional view of crime that holds a certain punishment to balance out a given crime, after which the felon has paid his or her debt to society. "If you don't want the time, don't do the crime," shouted Michael Howard, when Home Secretary, to a Conservative Party conference back in the 1990s.

There are two problems with that. If you don't mind the time, or the risk of the time, the corollary goes, then do the crime. That's not so great for society. Secondly, if no thought is given to, or measures taken to prevent, re-offending, then there can be grave dangers for some of the most vulnerable in society.

Joseph Edward Duncan III has just been sentenced to death in Idaho for doing this:

He took [9 year old] Dylan and the boy's then-8-year-old sister, Shasta, to a remote western Montana campsite where he raped, tortured and threatened them before shooting Dylan in the head and burning his body. Jurors viewed horrifying video Duncan made of him sexually abusing, torturing and hanging Dylan until the boy lost consciousness.

First, though, he had tied up their 13-year-old brother, his mother and her fiance and bludgeoned them to death with a hammer.

Here's something about Duncan's background (emphasis added):

... by the time he was 16, Duncan estimated he had raped 13 younger boys, some at gunpoint, it said.

“It was an outlet for my feelings [of] rejections. One from my mother and one from my father,” Duncan wrote in a personal history cited by The Times. He said he didn’t feel wanted at home and at school, he was bullied by peers because of his constant moves.

His hostility led him to sexually assault a 9-year-old boy at gunpoint when he was 15, and a year later, to tie up six young boys and sexually assault them, the newspaper said.

Duncan was deemed a sexual psychopath at 17, after he was arrested for the rape and torture of a 14-year-old boy in 1980. Police said Duncan broke into a neighbor’s house, stole a gun, and then pulled it on the boy, who was walking to school.

Duncan forced him into a wooded area and made the boy take off his clothes and perform a sexual act, according to court documents. Duncan then prodded the boy further into the woods, sexually assaulted him again, and then beat the boy’s buttocks with a stick and burned him with a cigarette. He led the boy back to his clothes and told him to run away.
[...]

Duncan's next encounter with the law came in April, when he was released on $15,000 bail after being charged with molesting a boy in Minnesota. Police in Fargo, where his last-known address was, had been looking for Duncan since May, when he failed to check in with a probation agent.

Note the psychobabble of victimhood in Duncan's words. His self-pity also drips from the entries of the blog he maintained until 2005. On the whole, this sort of self-exculpatory drivel is learned by the offender from some of the professionals they encounter as a consequence of their crime, generally those most self-consciously motivated to help the offender. It doesn't help. It excuses. It makes matters worse.

A fundamental principle of the criminal law is that people should not be punished for crimes they have not (yet) committed. The parenthetical "yet" in the previous sentence seems to me to be reasonable in the case of Duncan, a lifelong, unrepentant, violent, sexual predator, but perhaps not so in the cases of most criminals - who generally grow out of it.

If people fell neatly into the categories of "mad or bad", things might be simpler, but they do not. We all inhabit the continua of human behaviour and psychology and while there are extremes, like Duncan, there are few of them.

There's no easy answer that I can see. The suffering and deaths of the children and adults in the wake of Duncan's passage through life seems too high a price to pay for a legal principle. Unfortunately, I suspect this is a false opposition: while Duncan was an extreme and might have been preventable, I have no confidence that any bureaucratic system would successfully identify risks while avoiding false positives. A system of preventative detention, even if acceptable in principle which I doubt it could be, wouldn't work.

But perhaps we could look again at the transactional view of justice. The idea that a given term of imprisonment in some way equals a certain crime is silly. It might be that such a term is proportional to a given crime, but ideas of reparation and prevention should also have a place.

Prevention needn't mean detention. But it would surely be reasonable to subject proven recidivist criminals to a greater burden of surveillance and inconvenience than that endured by the rest of society, until such time as their behaviour seems proven, in return, to have changed.

In the case of the tiny group of very dangerous psychopaths like Duncan, that would be never.

Unions vote for no-strike agreement

Or so suggests the Spy Blog:

We wonder if any of the Trades Union leaders realise that by accepting " the government's proposals for ID cards", they have effectively agreed to a "no strike" and "no work to rule" arrangement, for any of their members who happen to work with, or to simply use, the forthcoming National Identity Register systems ?

Quote of the Day

Worstall on energy windfall taxes:

We have high energy prices, certainly. This is because there are more of us who want to use cheap energy than there is cheap energy around. Prices thus do their magic thing and change so as to balance supply and demand. What we want to do to get out of this bind of high demand and low supply is to increase supply and reduce demand. Those backing a windfall tax and energy subsidies are proposing exactly the opposite. They're suggesting that we can solve high demand and low supply by reducing supply and increasing demand.

The veil - a quote

From The Heresiarch, in response to an article by the Guardian's religion correspondent, Riazat Butt, about some abuse her fully veiled sister encountered on a street. Butt asked how her sister should respond next time such a thing might happen. Here's the Heresiarch's response:

How should she respond? By taking it off.

I'm sorry your sister has been abused, but the veil not only gives many people the creeps (and that is only natural, given that it is utterly alien, not just to western culture, but to western conceptions of human dignity) it is also extremely rude. So it's something your sister wants to do? I might want to walk down the street stark naked. I don't, as it happens, but I might. If I did, I would run the risk of being arrested; but even if walking around naked were not illegal, it would still be an act of selfishness, even self-absorption, displaying a complete lack of regard for other people and the common proprieties. Wearing a face veil is exactly the same.

If your sister wishes to go about her business like everyone else, then she should prepared to meet society at least half-way. She should accept that, far from being "modest" (it is, surely, as immodest a garment as it is possible to imagine) the veil is a proclamation of difference, even of superiority. It is (in an unveiled society) an assertion of not wanting to belong. Well, that is her right in a free society. But it would be wrong for her to imagine that it is or should be cost-free. If your sister has a right to passive-aggressively insult the culture in which she lives, then, sadly, rude ill-bred people have an equal right to be rude to her. Most people will be silently pitying her.

Click through to Heresy Corner to read more from Maryam Namazie and another Guardian commentator, Clare London.

String 'em up

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the return of convicted child molester Garry Glitter, now better known as Paul Gadd.

But less about the trend in movies that depict the sexual molestation and rape of young girls including - seriously - one that suggests the victim is strengthened by the experience.

Suicide bomber chooses life

There's an extraordinary set of photographs at The Guardian's website, showing what happened when a young woman decided not to blow herself up. The Iraqi policemen who removed the explosive belt from her showed exceptional courage.

A domain registrant to avoid

Details are a bit thin on the ground at the moment, but the Harry's Place blog has disappeared, temporarily no doubt, because the company handling their domain registration has deleted/suspended their (DNS) name service.

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2-P1 <<>> www.hurryupharry.org
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 28594
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.hurryupharry.org. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
hurryupharry.org. 10573 IN SOA ns1.daily.co.uk. root.hurryupharry.org. 2008082603 10800 900 604800 43200

No answer section, you might note. Apparently, this is because a complaint of some kind was sent to them.

At first sight, this is an escalation of the tactics used in past attempts to suppress blogspeech, during which complaints were sent to the hosting company involved but, to my knowledge, there were no attempts to have DNS records suspended.

More later.

Oh, and the registration company to avoid? Daily Internet Services Limited. They're the people who manage this DNS zone.

A scientist writes

I've become a vegetarian. I try to minimize the use of cars. Where I've failed is my impact with regard to air travel. I tell people I was born a Hindu who believes in reincarnation.It will take me the next six lives to neutralize my carbon footprint. There's no way I can do it in one lifetime!

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Via.

Secularism trumps religion

In India. Good - about time we started seeing this here:

A centuries-old tradition in Nepal of worshipping a virgin girl-child in a palace as a "living goddess" has been deemed outdated by the country's supreme court, which has ruled that the supposed deity must go to school.

Incidentally, I'd also like to see the Guardian start referring to Mohammed as a "supposed prophet".

Farewell Ronnie

Ronnie Drew died a couple of days ago. One of the greats.

Here's to you:

Saved by the police

People in Kent can sleep more soundly, following the seizure of a board game from a climate protest camp. The game, called 'War on Terror', allows players to struggle against one of their number - the terrorist state - and they get to poke fun at George Bush at the same time.

So far, so innocent you might think. But the player selected randomly by a spinner to be the terrorist has to wear a balaclava with the word "Evil" stitched across the front. Kent Police seized the game because the balaclava can be used - by a real terrorist - to conceal their identity.

Now if a real terrorist wants to conceal their identity with a balaclava with the word "Evil" emblazoned on it, they'll just have to go and buy one in the normal way. And they'll have to do their own damn embroidery.

Via.

A diplomatic success

Iowahawk:

Tbilisi, Georgia - Bowing to a withering barrage of pointed criticisms and strongly-worded letters of reprimand from the international diplomatic community, an embarrassed Russian military today abandoned its attack on the former Soviet republic of Georgia late this afternoon and retreated sheepishly over the Caucasus.

"Look, I don't really know what to say - other than, 'hey, our bad,'" said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an awkward, shoe-gazing statement to the United Nations. "Seriously, dude, it just totally wasn't like us to lash out like that. We've been having a couple of bad decades, and I guess we just sort of snapped."

And while we're at it, you really should read the best introductory paragraph of a news story this century.