I’ve inaugurated a new category, a place to put letters to administrations around the world, on behalf of Amnesty International.
Since I’ll be writing about five or six letters at a time, I don’t want all the posts to show up on the front page, bumping everything else off. Instead, I shall write a digest/round-up post which can act as a sign-post to the most recent letters.
I’ve used a plug-in category_visibility by Keith McDuffee, to achieve this technical trickery.
The next step is to redesign the category template to include a reference to Amnesty’s highly effective candle logo.
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I’m ashamed that it took me so long to upgrade to WordPress version 2. I’m not as much of an ‘early adopter’ as I would like.
I am pleased to say that my templates ported across properly, and the site looks exactly the same as it always did. No ambitious spring clean here.
I don’t think that either of my readers will need to update their RSS feeds.
I have always worried that a movie titled Twin Towers would become inevitable at some point. A woman working in Tower 1, say, with her fiance in Tower 2. Together with his brother the fireman, they hurry up the steps when everyone else is rushing down… starring Ben Affleck, and an array of computer generated reconstructions of the destruction.
Flight 93 is a different sort of film, I hope. It is the story of the people who overcame the hijackers of the plane which was on its way to Washington and the Capitol Building. However, The Daily Dish thinks it is too soon for a movies about their actions:
Sometimes, the greatest deeds, like the most monstrous acts, are best left unrepresented. They stand alone. They demand to be left alone. One day, commemmorate. But do not so swiftly represent. Shakespeare often left the greatest moments in his plays off-stage. They have more power there.
I imagine that one impact of their actions is that it is now virtually impossible to use a passenger aircraft to perpetrate an act of mass terrorism. This is not because of increased security on the planes, or better, tougher surveillance at the airports. Rather, it is because the fact of 9/11 changes the attitudes of the people on board hijacked planes. While the passengers of Flights 11, 175 and 77 believed that they might escape unharmed if they sat tight, the passengers on Flight 93 were under no illusion as to their fate. Using aeroplanes as a weapon of mass destruction became obsolete at half past nine that morning, while Flight 93 was still in the air.
Last week we heard that a large proportion of voters in the UK are considering voting for the BNP (as many as eighty percent in Margaret Hodge’s constituency, she warns us). This prompted the following quip from the highly entertaining Pigdogfucker:
25% of English voters “might be” terrible cunts.
Meanwhile, Tim Newman comments on the nature of democracy in Palestine, and suggests that the Palestinians are stuck with their choice of government. If that has negative consequences for their international funding, as a result of electing a terrorist group to power, then that is their problem. (Via Devil’s Kitchen, who agrees.)
Whenever I hear someone make a throwaway remark of the format “God, I hate Americans,” I point out that actually, they probably don’t. In fact (I say), what they mean is that aspects of American culture annoy them. Those aspects are probably caricatures (gas-guzzlers, homogenising fast-food chains, the NRA, preposeterous statistics about how few Americans have passports) that are not representative of most citizens. At worst, I tell them, they actually hate exactly half the people in America (usually but not exclusively those who voted red). And moreover, they have no way of knowing who those people are, so to hate them seems rather counter-productive, not to mention a bit racist.
Surely the same applies to extreme national or local governments that may be voted in elsewhere. If the BNP do win council seats during the UK local elections, few will follow the Pigdogfucker lead and say “well obviously the people of Barking are… barking,” because for a large proportion of the population that will simply not be true. Not only will it definitely not be true for those who voted for someone other than the BNP… but we will be inclined to extend the courtesy to many of those who did. Rather than blame the voters for being generally racist and ignorant of what is actually good for them, we will instead cite the rise in racist politics as somehow a failure of the incumbent parties on a national and local level.
We do not extend this ‘courtesy’ to the Palestinians. Instead we write them off as people not interested in peace, forgetting that there are plenty of their number who did not vote for terrorism (only one third of the total electorate voted for Hamas, for example). Nor do we seem willing to appreciate any subtlety or difference of opinion within American politics: “God, I hate Americans…”
Remember the old saying, about how an Opposition never wins an elections, but Governments lose them? This is important with regards to how much responsibility the electorate must take for their government. The adage above implies that people vote retrospectively, casting their ballot not on what they expect the new government to do, but on what the old government has done. If extremists are elected to power, this analysis would place a much of the responsibility on the shoulders of the outgoing government! Only when we consider the electorate to be voting prospectively and not retrospectively, does the balance seem to tip in favour of blaming the voters themselves for a poor choice.
Clearly, people vote for a mixture of prospective and retrospective reasons. But the notion of blaming an electorate for the government it has chosen remains problematic. Personally (and I suspect, in common with many others) find it difficult to take any personal responsibility for the recent actions of my own government, because I did not vote for them. Likewise, pointing at a random Palestinian and saying “sorry mate, you brought it on yourself” seems spectacularly unfair, as is calling anyone from Barking a racist.
Democracy is a bizarre thing. Because governments take their legitimacy from the voters, we are encouraged (especially immediately after an election) to ascribe the policies and beliefs of certain sections of the population, to everyone within that population. In actual fact, we know next-to-nothing about the particular individual at the other end of our finger, other than where he lives. He is damned by the tyranny of the majority, and suffers our prejudice as a result.
Since The Devil’s Kitchen seems to revel in people being rude to him, I have a notion I should be positively delighted by his pointer to an earlier post of mine:
Robert Sharp agrees with The Euston Manifesto, except that it has no clause about wearing sandals and saving the planet.
I’ll admit, I did spill some muslei into my beard when I first read it. Thank goodness my khaftan can be machine-washed.
DK’s point is that scientists do not all agree on climate change, and that it is wrong of me to announce Judgement Day so quickly. I might point out that “nothing is proven yet” was a staple of the apologists for Stalinism and Nazism… but that is a point of little interest, especially as I’ve used the “nothing is proven” stance myself in other debates. The question of whether climate change is indeed happening remains. Whether it is detrimental to the planet as a whole, and humanity in particular, must therefore be a point of substance.
I cannot resist the temptation to say: If I am wrong, what will be the harm? But this is also a difficult argument. To begin with, it sits on the same slippery slope as the Bush/Blair “God will judge me” mantra. Hypotheticals can be dangerous things. If actions to combat climate change do not involve military interventions in the middle-east, they will certainly involve massive economic restructuring. Someone will be harmed, and we cannot take such decisions lightly, based upon the environmentalists’ equivalent of Pascal’s Wager. Those of us who believe that climate change is happening, and is bad, need to convince others through the presentation of convincing facts.
This is not to say that DK is not being (I think) beligerent and wrong in his assessment of the issue, and his representation of mine.
One of the many problems with climate change is that the concensus [sic] that we are told exists simply does not.
Crucially, our taking actions to prevent climate change need not rest on a complete scientific consensus. Is there ever a scientific consensus on anything? True, “no consensus over climate change” is indeed an argument against lumping climate-change-deniers in with Holocaust-deniers. It is not, however, an argument for inaction, or for abandoning one’s own critical eye! There is still a great deal of evidence to suggest that the observed increase in average global temperature is the result of human industrial activitiy. There are also thousands of scientifically observed examples of temperature change causing habitat change. I am hardly behaving in an irresponsible manner when I infer that this habitat change is undesirable, and we should at all costs avoid it. Pointing at my sandals is an irresponsible smoke-screen. Far better to compare the arguments and evidence of those on both sides of climate change debate, and see who is most convincing. Every time I’ve done this myself, those who claim that global warming is real and bad have been more persuasive. I am not a reactionary… and there is enough of a consensus for me, at least.
But where my fellow Edinburgher makes his biggest mistake, is in his implication that I did not think of him when I typed my late night response to the Euston Manifesto. That he should assume I could be so thoughtless and disrespectful, hurts me deep.
The group makes statements on particular issues … so one on global warming, or rather, “a shared responsibility for the earth’s resources”, needs to be in there too.
The emphasis was present in the earlier post. For all my rhetoric, my actual suggestion was pretty secular, I thought.
DK responds from his Kitchen.