RosieBell

Burqas and Bicycles

A French Muslim woman has been fined for wearing a burka at the wheel of her car – weeks before the proposed introduction of a total ban on the full-body veil.

The 31-year-old was stopped by two policemen in Nantes in western France earlier this month as she drove wearing a burka, or niqab, covering all but her eyes. She was given a €22 (£19) fine for "driving in uncomfortable conditions", because her vision was allegedly reduced. .

I don’t agree with banning the burqa on the usual liberal grounds that people can wear what the hell they like, but I think the woman instead of being fined should have done community service as a cycle courier.  She would have ditched the full-bodied curtain soon enough.  I mean, can you imagine cycling dressed like this:-

Cycling was emancipating for women.  It was easier to keep a cycle than a horse and it meant a woman could travel alone quite cheaply, or join in with a gang of other cyclists.  It freed her. Victorian clothes were nearly as bad as burqas, which at least don’t constrict you in whalebone, so women cycling lead to rational dress.-

So I would encourage cycling among the women from conservative Muslim backgrounds.  They'll chuck those vision-stopping, spoke-grabbing garments and move into  lyrcra and safety gear.  And if their reason for wearing the burqa is to thwart male lust, nothing is as unalluring as a bicycle helmet and a day glo yellow jacket.

Beasts of Everywhere

Article here on Animal Farm by Christopher Hitchens.

Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole"

. . for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement. On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone . . . However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.

Well, authors don’t normally succeed in their intentions but George Orwell certainly pulled it off in Animal Farm.  He went further in establishing a different myth - that of the revolution that goes wrong.  You could represent Animal Farm in stained glass.   The downtrodden rising up in their earthly hell of servitude and pulling down their old masters.  Then the new masters taking over from the old and the downtrodden returning to their former state of serfdom. 

There is, however, one very salient omission. There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. Similarly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four  we find only a Big Brother Stalin and an Emmanuel Goldstein Trotsky. Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face).

That might have been for artistic rather than political reasons.  You need a power struggle, but two struggling are enough.  It would be like adding another Satan to Eden.

In Zimbabwe, as the rule of Robert Mugabe's kleptocratic clique became ever more exorbitant, an opposition newspaper took the opportunity to reprint Animal Farm in serial form. It did so without comment, except that one of the accompanying illustrations showed Napoleon the dictator wearing the trademark black horn-rimmed spectacles of Zimbabwe's own leader. The offices of the newspaper were soon afterwards blown up by a weapons-grade bomb, but before too long Zimbabwean children, also, will be able to appreciate the book in its own right.

In the Islamic world, many countries continue to ban Animal Farm, ostensibly because of its emphasis on pigs. Clearly this can not be the whole reason – if only because the porcine faction is rendered in such an unfavourable light – and under the theocratic despotism of Iran it is forbidden for reasons having to do with its message of "revolution betrayed".

There can be no real sequel to Animal Farm, but you could do a coda of how on some of the neighbouring farms, rumours of the animals’ success emboldened other animals into asking for more feed and less work and scared the owners into giving into those demands, for fear of revolution.   Not a total loss then.

Support Technicians

I set up a router and wireless on Saturday so can now sit anywhere in my flat and access the internet on my new laptop.  This is marvellously luxurious.  I have to offer thanks and apologies to those support technicians who put up with my brusqueness, rudeness, impatience and ignorance while I snarled at them “why isn’t this thing working - it‘s only three inches away from the computer” or “the mail was working before I tried putting on this router” and “where can I send it back to” while they answered with unfazed politeness.  Some of them sounded foreign though one said he was from Glasgow (if I’d heard a Glasgow accent my immediate reaction would have been to be very unprovoking).  Sorry, guys - it was my fault, not yours. You tried your best to be nice, and I was nasty back. 

I worked as a support technician at one time.  You are dealing with stressed out, impatient, angry, frustrated people down a telephone.  I swore I’d  always be patient and polite to support technicians doing this unpleasant job. I behaved badly and I hope you were rolling your eyes and making rude hand gestures at your colleagues about me.

Hypergeothermia

Kulvinder in the comments column at Pickled Politics recommended this picture of lighting generation at Eyjafjallajokull.  Iceland is meant to have a grand mythology - I can see why.

Spinal Crap

A friend of mine who had severe sciatica would visit a chiropractor doubled up with pain and then emerge walking upright.  That chiropractor had dingy rooms in a busy, dirty street then but nowadays  has swish purpose built offices in a pleasant part of town, so evidently had a lot of satisfied patients.  However, my friend never asked the chiropractor to fix his ulcer or stop his 60 cigarettes a day habit, so did not test the claims of chiropractors that manipulating the spine can cure all sorts of ailments.

Simon Singh  had said these sorts of claims were “bogus” and was sued by the British Chiropractic Association.  They have now dropped the case - here are two pieces which convey a fair amount of glee over this result.

The great anti-chiropractorist of his day was H L Mencken, who saw the emergence of this alternative medicine and denounced it with vituperation whenever he could - see this article he wrote in 1924 for the Baltimore Evening Sun pouring skiploads of scorn over it.  If the British Chiropractic Association reads this, they should realise they got off very lightly with Singh’s  milder comments.  With Mencken you get the impression of a man writing who is not afraid of lawyers and libel actions.  You also get his heartless social Darwinism:-

This preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic "hospitals." The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these "hospitals" copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord -- in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.

…….

Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed. [It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.] Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits -- retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school -- say homeopathy -- plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.
….


For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrant vertebra upon the spinal nerves. And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and determine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine. Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined. My guess is that the chiropractors' errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%. But I am willing to be convinced. . .

Crime and Sin

Prioritise the following:-

Protecting children from rape
Protecting the child rapists’ souls
Protecting the reputation of the organisation that the child rapists work for

An atheist would answer:-

1.  Protecting children from rape
Nowhere Protecting the child rapists’ souls
Nowhere Protecting the reputation of the organisation that the child rapists work for

The organisation however has prioritised like this:-

1.  Protecting the reputation of the organisation that the child rapists work for
2.  Protecting the child rapists’ souls
Limping up behind  Protecting children from rape

The organisation of course is the Roman Catholic church. 

According to this interesting article by John Cornwell (biographer of John Henry Newman) the high ups in that organisation were more concerned with sin and spirituality than damage and crime:-

Through the 1990s John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger tended to dismiss the reports [of abuse] as media mischief-making. Pope and cardinal shared an elevated view of the priesthood which proclaimed that the sacrament of ordination bestowed special graces on a priest, enabling him to withstand the particular temptations that went with his office. John Paul II spoke of the priesthood as a status above that of the angels. Both men simply could not believe that priests could be abusers on anything but a very minor and exceptional scale. Benedict has been forced to alter that opinion, but he continues to think of the abuse as a spiritual lapse, rather than a psychological, social and criminal problem. Priestly paedophile abuse, in his view, is a failure of priesthood, a failure of holiness, asceticism and piety. It is a great sin rather than a great crime. His strategy for dealing with the crisis is accordingly based on that conviction. From the very outset, the Vatican centre has insisted that not a scintilla of responsibility has ever attached, or could attach, to the Pope himself.

So while the secular mind thinks of damage to children, crimes deserving of punishment and the kind of cover up you would get from a corporation selling white wine laced with anti-freeze the religious mind thinks of the soul of the perpetrator and the power and reputation of the church.  That devout Christian turned freethinker, George Eliot pointed out:-

we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

Modern secular morality emphasises shared humanity, Christianity imperilling your own soul.  I would say that modern shared humanity is looking pretty good and the secular attitude the sane one.  However, according to John Cornwell, the Pope’s clean up operation is to encourage the spirituality and reduce the secularism through acts of “extreme ascetic rigour” (i.e. total battiness) :-

In accordance with the Catholic culture of invoking saints, he [the Pope] has asked all priests and seminarians to follow the example of a 19th-century French priest named Jean-Baptiste-Marie ("John Mary") Vianney. This barely literate eremitical priest, also known as the Curé d'Ars, would spend most of the night flat on his face in church, with only snatches of sleep on the stone floor of his house, using a log for a pillow. He whipped himself daily with a metal scourge, spattering the bedroom walls with blood. For food he would boil a saucepan of potatoes once a week and live off them until the final ones were black and rotten. He banned dancing in his parish because he thought it a prelude to carnal temptation. . .

(The followers of Jesus Christ are so much nastier than their convivial leader, who was often asked out to dinner.)  

The grovelling secular mind would recommend criminal charges where relevant and reparations to victims where possible.  But that’s where lack of spirituality and indifference to the state of the criminals’ souls leads you.

Blogging Limited

Throwing up line after line of text my hard drive died on Easter Sunday.  No resurrection for it, the PC doctor says.  So until I get a new computer, blogging here will be limited.

Today I went to the internet café round the corner from my work.  I thought being a café they’d sell me a sandwich and I’d be able to eat and surf the net.    However, an “internet café” means a place where you can access the internet, and not necessarily one that sells coffee and snacks. 

Cheek, brass neck, chutzpah

The old Jewish joke defining “chutzpah” tells the story of guy who, on being tried for murdering his parents, threw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan.

Father Cantalamessa, [preacher to the papal household] noting that this year the Jewish festival of Passover and Easter fell during the same week, said that Jews throughout history had been the victims of “collective violence” and drew a comparison with current attacks on the Church over the scandal.

Speaking during a ceremony at St Peter’s Basilica commemorating Christ’s Passion, he read to the congregation, which included the Pope, part of a letter that he had received from an unidentified Jewish friend, who said that he was following “with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the Pope and all the faithful of the whole world”.

“The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism,” Father Cantalamessa said his friend wrote to him.

A dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church compares the kind of media attention it has been getting for  covering up the crimes its priests carried out against children to the persecution of the Jews.  A little like, say, David Duke, leader of the Ku Klux Klan,* comparing  abuse on the internet to being the victim of a lynch mob.

Easter and Passover in the same week?  Well, I suppose this Easter may be a better one than it used to be for Jews living in Christendom:-

“For many centuries, Jews living in Christian societies were well advised to stay indoors at Easter time because violent sermons were preached that blamed them in perpetuity for deicide, or awarded them the collective responsibility for the murder of “the Christ.”. . Pogroms and lynchings were incited in the name of Christianity. . . It was not until the time of Pope John XXIII and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, that the Roman Catholic Church explicitly repudiated the “Christ-killer” slur of the Jewish people. (Christopher Hitchens, The Gospel According to Mel, from Love, Poverty and War).

Here’s an interesting piece about the Dreyfus Affair, which, among other things, was distinguished by the anti-Dreyfusards’ vile anti-Semitism and the Church not looking to any concerns about justice but increasing its own power:-

The church, however, was anything but equivocal. In sermons and its own rightist newspapers, the hierarchy insisted that France could regain greatness only by re-embracing its Catholic roots. That meant returning to the verities of sacrament and piety and resisting secularism, science and other symbols of the modern age. Visible among those, . . . was Gustav Eiffel’s thrusting tower, which, to the chagrin of many Catholics, rose to challenge the new Sacré-Coeur basilica for domination of the Paris skyline. Eiffel was incorrectly described in the rightwing press as Jewish.

Passions like that did not vanish overnight, and Dreyfus’s 1906 exoneration was a short-lived triumph. French reactionaries, more outraged than demoralised, quickly regrouped. . . . Anti-Dreyfusard nationalists cajoled the country into that long-anticipated rematch with Germany in 1914. Though France emerged devastated, the rightists rebounded yet again, waving the banners of fascism and a new, more vicious anti-Semitism.

Tragedy came next: Vichy, Drancy and the dispatch of more than 75,000 French citizens and refugees to Nazi death camps. The dark forces that the Dreyfusards thought they had vanquished returned to sweep Europe.

Dreyfus’s ordeal did produce a few lasting changes, however. Anger over the church’s role helped inspire the early-1900s laws that made France an irrevocably secular state. . .

Things have to be very bad for any organisation or people before they can start claiming the miserable distinction of being as persecuted as the Jews.  Editorials in The New York Times don’t really meet the case.

*No offence meant to ordinary Roman Catholics or decent and conscientious priests.  I don’t think they’re like members of the KKK.