Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Category: Diary (Page 148 of 300)

Things that happen to me, or things I do

Defending the Cordoba Mosque

10 August 2010 / / 13 Comments

Over in New York, an argument is blazing over the Cordoba Initiative, an Islamic cultural and community centre planned for downtown New York.  Shrill critics have labelled it the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and called for the project to be cancelled, due to it offending the sensibilities of the families of 9/11 victims.  However, a calmer look at the proposed centre reveals although it is in the vicinity of the World Trade Centre site, its hardly on top of it.  Other mosques exist in the downtown area, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the project, has been praised for his interfaith work.
This controversy has clearly been manufactured by those who seek to polarise American political debate.  It is depressing and astonishing that the arguments against the centre have gained any traction at all.  One might expect this in Europe, with its muddled and inconsistent relationship with secular ideals.  Or in theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran, with their blanket intolerance of other faiths.  But for a country which explicitly enshrines human rights such as free expression and freedom of religion in its constitution, it is bizarre that the debate has advanced so far.  Most ironic is that the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation set-up specifically to combat religious prejudice and anti-semitism, has led the calls for the plans to be scrapped.  Their statement prioritises public outrage and ‘offence’ over freedom of expression, assembly, and religion – A dubious position indeed.
Thankfully, the principles of tolerance appear to be waxing.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently gave a fantastic speech where he reaffirmed the principles upon which the United States was founded.  As a Jewish New Yorker, his words have a certain ‘rhetorical authority’ (as David Foster Wallace would call it).  Let’s hope this argument becomes another ‘teaching moment’, a step away from the global war that Osama Bin Laden sought to provoke when he planned the September 11 attacks.

“The attack was an act of war, and our first responders defended not only our city, but our country and our constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

Update

Daily Dish has some great commentary.

Known Unknowns

9 August 2010 / / 5 Comments

At the Plain Blog About Politics, Jonathan Bernstein reminds us that, despite the oceans of political coverage that seems to saturate the media, many people do not take an active interest in politics outside of election time.

If you asked [my Father] to name a NASCAR driver he’d probably look at you as if you were nuts…but if you named some of them, he’d probably recognize the names. The idea is that lots and lots of people have about that level of knowledge about most of what happens in politics. It’s just background noise. We, the people who write and read political blogs, and watch debates, and pay attention to politics even in the off season –we’re the minority.

Bernstein is writing about US politics, discussing former Governors and presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, two people who I bet few in Britain would recognise.  Nevertheless, Bernstein’s cautionary tale is pertinent in the UK too – At election time, I remember being amazed that the Leaders’ debates could increase Nick Clegg’s popularity ratings so substantially.  How had so many people not heard of him, or see him perform?  In my world, he was on TV all the time!
Here’s Caitlin Moran on Twitter:

I’ve made a decision – I’m not going to find out who Justin Bieber is. He’s going to be the first “modern thing” I’m going to ignore.

This has stuck with me, because it was via this message that I discovered that a person called Justin Beiber existed.  Whenever I have mentioned this to other people, they have, without exception, replied: “Who’s Justin Beiber?” which reassures me somewhat.  If I am being culturally ignorant, then at least a lot of other people I know are too.  There is a Facebook group called I bet I can find 1 million people who hate Justin Bieber.  Perhaps I should start one called I bet I can find 1 million people who have never heard of Justin Bieber?
That Bieber is, in many circles, a hugely famous global phenomenon – worthy of single-serving sites, mash-ups and parodies – matters little to me.  The most cursory research quickly reveals that I am not his target market.  In such cases, admitting ignorance becomes something of a badge of sophistication.  However, in other cases, the sudden exposure of my own ignorance leaves me more concerned.  It is more embarrassing for me to admit that I had barely any knowledge of Alan Watkins’ career, or the output of Tony Judt, until people I follow began tweeting and blogging their RIPs.  As a fully paid up agent for the liberal left conspiracy, Watkins and Judt were guys I really, really should have known about before they died.  Instead, both names were part of the ambient noise around me (like Bernstein Snr and the NASCAR drivers).  I’m grateful that at least the news of their passing found its way into my ‘streams’, and I can now set about reading Postwar.
Of course, knowing that there are influential people out there who you have not heard of is not very helpful, because of course, you don’t know who they are!  This can be remedied by reading an entirely new or random blog, or just by picking up a weekly magazine that you might otherwise avoid.  What might me more interesting, however, is considering who or what currently exists on the penumbra of your consciousness?
The answer that springs to mind is Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, which I first became aware of when I began to see young teensm on trains reading improbably thick paperbacks.  Meyer’s series managed to become a global success story while I remained oblivious.  Again, this is easily explained by the fact that I am not the target market.  However, now that movies are being made and advertised on the public transport system, I would say that the saga, with its emo-vampire chic, is part of most people’s peripheral vision now.  It is no longer ‘background noise’ as Bernstein has it, but rather, a collective cultural happening that infiltrates our awareness via a kind of osmosis.
I would say that there are a whole class of public figures – people like Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Huw Edwards, and John Terry – who enter our thoughts this way.  We know about them, and their notoriety before we even consider consuming their cultural oevres ourselves.  Certain politicians fall into this category too.  I would expect even the most uninterested and sullen of the lumpenproletariat to know who David Cameron was, and possibly George Osborne and Nick Clegg too.  However, if they aren’t clear who David Willets or Danny Alexander are… well, I think that’s forgivable.

When PC Myth Becomes Government Talking Point

3 August 2010 / / 2 Comments

Five Chinese Crackers spots a stinker from Baroness Warsi:

“Well I think there’s a difference between multiculturalism per se, and state multiculturalism, where the state intervenes and says, ‘You will do this, you will do that.'” For example, she offers, “When the state says ‘We’ll have winterfest instead of Christmas, so everyone feels included.’ That’s wrong.”

Eh? Did I miss something? When – and you don’t have to be exact now, a year will do – did the state say we’ll have Winterfest instead of Christmas? (Except for the time when Cromwell’s government banned Christmas, smartypants).

The Guardian article by Decca Aitkenhead is here. Now is the perfect time to link to Oliver Burkeman’s fantastic debunking of the Winterval myth:

Perhaps the most notorious of the anti-Christmas rebrandings is Winterval, in Birmingham, and when you telephone the Birmingham city council press office to ask about it, you are met first of all with a silence that might seasonably be described as frosty. “We get this every year,” a press officer sighs, eventually. “It just depends how many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it’s bollocks, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.”
According to an official statement from the council, Winterval – which ran in 1997 and 1998, and never since – was a promotional campaign to drive business into Birmingham’s newly regenerated town centre. It began in early November and finished in January.

Clicking back from the Five Chinese Crackers post, I find that the Exclarotive blog has been logging similar myths.  Anton Vowl spotted another example of the Conservatives propagating the nonsense, this time over health and safety legislation.  Ann Widdecombe cited several examples of PC gone mad during our debate on the issue last year.  I wonder how many had any substance?
One might think that debunking articles, such as those mentioned above, might serve to sink the highly dangerous armada of lies that sails through our society, leaving a hatred of immigrants in its wake.  Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be so.  In the Boston Globe, John Keohane reports on a University of Michigan study that shows that the introduction of new facts may actually cause people to double-down on their strongly held misconceptions.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

This is why we need to discuss much of our politics in terms of narrative.  It sounds pretentious, but the fact is that a single article giving some facts will rarely reverse a political consensus.

Update

Here’s my namesake in the Independent with a similarly fine debunking.

Tropes

31 July 2010 / / 0 Comments

The latest YouTube craze is to take a common film or TV cliché or plot device and splice them together.  Its a diverting way to highlight the many recurring scenes that we see in our media, the audio-visual grammar of our entertainment.
A couple my favourites are Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions and Let’s Enhance, below.

Via that video, I came across the massive time-sink that is tvtropes.org. I think a wiki-style project to create a YouTube video for every TVtrope listed would result in a fantastic media- and film-studies resource. A good use of our cognitive surplus, I reckon.

Update

Tom Cruise, running.

The Bookseller of Kabul

30 July 2010 / / 2 Comments

Åsne Seierstad, a Norwegian author, has been successfully sued in Norway over her book Bookseller of Kabul.  It is a fictionalised account of her time staying with a family in Afghanistan, and much of the family’s private life is laid bare for the reader in unflattering detail.
On Comment is Free, journalist Conor Foley lays in to Seierstad, outlining the social faux pas she has committed:

Some may argue that freedom of artistic expression should be completely divorced from such political considerations. However, a writer who chooses to use a conflict as the background for their work cannot plead cultural immunity when real life intrudes on the result.

Indeed.  But being stung, criticised and discredited for failing to respect cultural norms should not be punished in a civil or criminal court.   Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, explains in the Independent why this development is a worry:

That’s not to say that Seierstad has not broken an unwritten code of hospitality, or that the Rais family has not faced problems as a result of the book’s publication. Although Rais himself continues to operate a successful business out of Kabul, his first wife has sought asylum in Canada and other members of the family are now living in Pakistan. But is this discrepancy in the fates of the male and female members of the family the fault of a Norwegian journalist – or Afghan society? Is it appropriate for a Norwegian court to punish the messenger? Is a court of law the place to determine how a book treats the “honour” of an entire society?

The example that such cases set is a very bad one.  What happens when an investigative journalist wants to deliberately abuse the hospitality of an Afghan businessman, in order to expose corruption?  What if an Afghani journalist wants to make similar, off-message commentary about his countrymen.  Seierstad should certainly suffer the reputational and social hit of her insensitivity, but dragging this sort of roman a clef into the court-room is a terrible precedent for free expression.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Robert Sharp

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑