A First World Problem, if ever there was one...

Our TVs at home are all a good number of years old now - in fact we still use in one room a plasma screen that must be pushing 8 or 9 years, and is a very "standard" definition screen that still somehow gives quite satisfactory enough viewing with DVDs.  The other big screen TV is LCD, but I think a fairly low end one.  It does night time scenes from DVDs particularly poorly.

At Christmas we were watching Guardians of the Galaxy on DVD on my sister's new-ish LCD TV, and while I was sitting there thinking how clear and crisp the image was, my wife pointed out that it was actually too clear - it was like watching very high quality video, not a cinema movie. Once it was pointed out to me, it did become a little distracting.

I noticed that this was also the case with all the HD TVs at the department store this afternoon too - they were all were showing a silly Avengers movie, and they all made it looked rather like video.

But I see on Googling the topic that this is a common issue people have when they first get their shiny new HD TVs.

An article in Wired from last August explains:

This annoying little phenomenon is commonly referred to as the “soap opera effect,” and it’s a byproduct of your TV’s motion-enhancing features. Thankfully, the effect can be turned off, and that’s probably a good idea when you’re watching movies. While these smoothing features can make a few things look better—scrolling tickers, sports, and HDTV test discs, for example—our eyes and brains expect something very different when we’re watching movies. A slower frame rate is one of them.

It then goes into a rather technical description of what's going on, and how to try to make sure your TV isn't making some sublime cinematography look like a high end Days of Our Lives.

I see that this was discussed in the SMH in mid 2013, but I didn't pay much attention to an article describing a problem I hadn't yet seen.

Anyway, now that I realise it's an issue, I'll know how to deal with it when we get a new TV.  We're kind of hoping that happens soon, as the LCD TV did an odd flicker out the other day, but revived itself.  It would be good to be able to watch movies with night scenes again...

Local and global heat

I've been meaning to comment here that it's been a hot and uncomfortable summer in South East Queensland.   When the temperature hasn't been high (it will likely reach 38 degrees in the Western parts of Brisbane today), it's been very humid*, but with little relief from storms.     (Oh yeah, but when they have come, they have caused damage pushing close to $1 billion.)

So with a hot summer, it will make the message that global warming is real more readily accepted by to many in Australia.

Amusingly enough, I see that when the Wall Street Journal runs a "straight" story reporting on the NOAA, NASA and JAMA findings that last year did set a global record (just), it does not go down well with its readership.   (Have a look at the comments.) 

Of course, the paper will probably run six follow up pieces by the likes of Roy Spencer, John Christy, Pat Michaels or Nigel Lawson all offering comfort to their deluded and gullible right wing readership that the paper hasn't abandoned them.

Anyhow, according to the stupid (or, more accurately, the ideologically motivated to disbelieve science)  this is what "AGW - Ha! What a crock!" looks like:

And this is what it looks according to the Japanese (using a different baseline):

And let's not forget - what does Richard Muller's Berkley Earth temperature independently calculated record say:

(Actually, they say that 2014 was a record, but by such a tiny margin it's hard to be sure it really did beat 2010 or 2005.   Seems they are very clear 1998 is not the king, though.)

We all know what the climate change "do-nothings" will say - look at the satellite records - even though they attempt to measure, via the most indirect and complicated means available, the temperature of the atmosphere above the earth rather than surface temperatures.  The two major satellite records have been increasingly diverging, and were shown to be clearly wrong for a protracted period in the past, but deniers will cling to them anyway, rather than believe thermometers on the ground.

That all said, the temperature rise is still running on the low end of model projections (gee, who would have thought that modelling and measuring heat distribution across an entire planet would be complicated...), but stepping back and looking at the big picture (literally, in the case of graphs), people have to be very determined to convince themselves there is not a big problem....

*  This weekend's high humidity (and temperatures - 38 near my house again, today) - noted here.

The secret life of vegans

I didn't go looking for this story, honest.  (I was in fact reading about The Box Trolls' Oscar nomination, and the Laika studio is based in Oregon - see.)

Anyway, this is one of more improbable headlines I've seen for a while:

Two Portland strippers sue vegan strip club Casa Diablo for back wages, unlawful deductions, battery


And the opening sentence:

Two strippers accuse Portland's Casa Diablo, which bills itself the "World's First Vegan Strip Club" of not paying them wages and fining them for such artistic transgressions as failing to disrobe fast enough.

I would never have guessed that a vegan strip joint would have an audience, but it seems to have been operating for a few years at least. 

Bee on being simulated

Backreaction: Do we live in a computer simulation?

Good post by the best active physics blogger that I know...

Update:  I'm sure these are not novel thoughts, but I guess the upside of being in a computer simulation which is running right now is that on death, it may make re-loading me immediately into another simulation a.k.a "the afterlife" a relatively straightforward process.  And, I guess, letting a person review their past life either as part of the dying process, or even at a more leisurely pace from the other simulation, should be easily accommodated too, providing there have been good backups made for "viewing." 

I don't really see that there should be much difficulty in allowing ghost like visits from one simulation to another, too.  Perhaps either the person/thing running the simulation could allow for it, upon request, or there could be viruses that allow for cross simulation incursions.

Of course, the downside is that if the simulation controller is a super advanced teenage gamer, he/she/it may find relocating people into randomly chosen varieties of afterlife a bit of a laugh.  "Put Hitler and all the other bad dudes into  into what everyone else thinks is Heaven, and see how they react?  Haw, haw, haw."

Or does something like Game Theory dictate that if you are running simulations, you do not mistreat your underlings for fear of being punished yourself in the simulation you might be running in?

No news deemed blogworthy

Heh...

Bitcoin revealed: a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another - The Washington Post

One month - shortest policy lifetime we've seen outside of an election?

So the government has given up on the bulk billing attack after all.  It must have been 9th (or 8th?) December that it was announced by Abbott as a 

"an intelligent and sophisticated response" from government to the "quite reasonable observations" of the backbench and the community"

and he was still defending it, what, yesterday?

Isn't he supposed to be on holiday at the moment?   Can't be a very enjoyable one, if all this reverse-coursing is happening while he's trying to fit in some surfing.

What a shambolic government, and leader...

Update:  one of the few commentators around who had been backing the government move was Terry Barnes, who was Abbott's policy adviser when he was Health Minister.  Barnes has been slagging off the AMA on twitter for attacking this, but I note that he got sidelined earlier this month into mentioning climate change, and he tweeted:

It's another case of disbelief in AGW being the most reliable sign there is of unreliability generally in someone's political and policy judgement.  Abbott should avoid them like the plague, but he's not the sharpest at knowing who to listen to, to put it mildly...

Perhaps I should switch my health inadequacies to obesity...

Lack of exercise responsible for twice as many deaths as obesity

More battery news

The Train of the Future Might Be Battery-Powered - CityLab

I'm surprised I had not heard of this before:

This week, the U.K. has been quietly making transit history: it’s just brought the country’s only battery-powered passenger train into service. The train, fitted with lithium phosphate and hot sodium nickel salt batteries, is now undergoing a trial run shuttling passengers on a 12-mile stretch to the northeast of London. You can see a video of it below (spoiler: it looks like a regular train). If it works as it should, it will be able to make its journey without any connection to electrification.

Sick videos on the rise

I was somewhat amused to see at JB Hi Fi the other day a display stand of new DVDs (one containing the kid's movie The Box Trolls, actually, which I was supposed to review but never got around to it) with a hand written notice on the surround that was something like this  "Must watch - sick videos!"

I blame Taylor Swift.  She's like, totally sick.

Makes some sense, I guess...

The math of one-night stands and long-term relationships

Maybe another round of climate change and economics commentary due on the 'net

I see that an article appeared at Nature Climate Change on Monday with this abstract:

Integrated assessment models compare the costs of greenhouse gas mitigation with damages from climate change to evaluate the social welfare implications of climate policy proposals and inform optimal emissions reduction trajectories. However, these models have been criticized for lacking a strong empirical basis for their damage functions, which do little to alter assumptions of sustained gross domestic product (GDP) growth, even under extreme temperature scenarios^{1, 2, 3}. We implement empirical estimates of temperature effects on GDP growth rates in the DICE model through two pathways, total factor productivity growth and capital depreciation^{4, 5}. This damage specification, even under optimistic adaptation assumptions, substantially slows GDP growth in poor regions but has more modest effects in rich countries. Optimal climate policy in this model stabilizes global temperature change below 2 °C by eliminating emissions in the near future and implies a social cost of carbon several times larger than previous estimates⁶. A sensitivity analysis shows that the magnitude of climate change impacts on economic growth, the rate of adaptation, and the dynamic interaction between damages and GDP are three critical uncertainties requiring further research. In particular, optimal mitigation rates are much lower if countries become less sensitive to climate change impacts as they develop, making this a major source of uncertainty and an important subject for future research.

The only commentary I have seen about this so far is at The Atlantic   Its key point is this:

Researchers from Stanford University found that the current price of climate change is more likely six times as much, approximately $220 for every ton of carbon produced. Using a new model to calculate the number, the researchers took into account the economic damage that catastrophic climate events, like storms or crop loss, could pose to a country’s GDP over time. “If climate change affects not only a country's economic output, but also its growth, then that has a permanent effect that accumulates over time,” Frances Moore, co-author and environmental scientist, said.

 But then they go on to note that many others think that the study might be too pessimistic.

The other point made in the Atlantic is that the study emphasises how poorer countries are estimated to do worse:

Another intriguing aspect of this new model, however, is that it also incorporates the economy’s ability to adapt to damage from climate changes and acknowledges that warming temperatures will economically affect high- and low-income countries differently. "There have been many studies that suggest rich and poor countries will fare very differently when dealing with future climate change effects, and we wanted to explore that," co-author Delavane Diaz said. The researchers noted that because poor countries are on average hotter than rich countries and have less rigid infrastructure, they might suffer greater economic costs due to climate change. “If temperature affects economic growth rates, society could face much larger climate damages than previously thought” Diaz said. “This would justify more stringent mitigation policy.” 

I'm guessing then the "do nothing because I hate taxes and government generally" crowd will say something like "see, this means we must make poor countries rich as fast as possible so they don't suffer as much as if we keep them poor.  And that means - they should burn more fossil fuels!"

But the dog chasing its tail aspect of such an argument should be obvious, shouldn't it?  How could you ever work out with confidence that they can grow wealth to a sufficient level fast enough to make the future adaptation to climate change adequate?  (Short answer - you can't.  They want the globe to take a gamble on their mere, ideological motivated, hunches.)

The study does have the benefit of bolstering the Pope's likely position (in a coming encyclical) that climate change is a matter of crucial social justice, and that therefore Catholics should indeed take it seriously.

But back to the big picture of this entire exercise.   People who read me regularly will know that I am deeply skeptical of this whole economic forecasting on a scale out beyond (say) 20 or 30 years; especially so when the point is to try to factor in something about which the regional effects still remain rather uncertain.  (It is easier to be confident about the "big picture" than the regional one in climate change.)

It seems that at least part of this article bolsters my skepticism.  (Although they do continue to put enough faith in the whole dubious forecasting exercise to make one of their own.)

But I have another question:  can any economist type who reads this tell me if there is anything equivalent that has ever been attempted in economics?    And if so, was it successful?

Medicare backlash took a while

It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for the backlash against the government's attack on bulk billing to get into gear, didn't it?   (Well, a month anyway, even though I said at the time that the effect on GP practices was going to be big, and general patient bulk billing was surely going to go because of it.) I suppose Abbott and his advisers may have thought it was a good idea to announce it in the run up to Christmas, as people are too distracted getting ready for the holidays.

But you know a backlash against this government is strong when even Judith Sloan says she can't see the sense in the policy.  (And even she notes that Abbott as health minister used to think that policies that increased bulk billing services to the public were a good idea.)

And remember the Adam Creighton tweet where he said doctors deserved a pay cut because the AMA had opposed the co-payment?  Well, it looks like it won't  be happening at all, given the Senate.    So sorry, Adam:  your desire to see incomes cut to everyone except you seems to have not panned out in this case.

The tough French

Charlie Hebdo: No one in Europe is tougher on terror than France. That didn't stop the attacks.

Interesting article here on how France has long been using very rigorous surveillance and anti-terror laws. 

It's true, it didn't stop recent terror incidents, but the article notes that they had a pretty good run before that.

Lost heads in history

I've stumbled across a couple of reviews of a book that came out last year:  Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson.

While I hate the idea of decapitation as a method of execution or murder, it's always interesting to read some history about it.   I'm not sure that I had heard before that it was novelty seeking Westerners who helped create a market for the creation of shrunken heads:

Larson’s most telling case study is the saga of the shrunken heads that can be seen today in museums. Collected avidly by 19th-century explorers and scientists, they seemed proof of the bestial nature of native peoples, and the West’s superiority. Yet, as Larson demonstrates, the market was created by such collectors, who often unwittingly bought shrunken monkey-heads or caused murder to be committed. Whites themselves were seen as head-hunting ghouls by indigenous people, even as they supplied the demand.

I also hadn't heard before that the audience was somewhat displeased with the efficiency of the guillotine:

The guillotine, created during the French Revolution to be humane, terrifyingly accelerated the production line of execution and effected the Terror. The initial spectators felt cheated. Its action was too quick for the eye to see; there were no enjoyable writhings or screams.

I had not heard of Jameson, of the whiskey family, and the scandal caused when it was claimed he had paid for a slave girl to be killed by cannibals (I have read elsewhere that he - sort of - denied it, but in a way that left considerable doubt.) And as for skulls of the Japanese in World War 2 - I think I read in Chickenhawk that US soldiers in Vietnam were not above doing the same thing:

The most grotesque of Larson's anecdotes from this period concerns one James Jameson, a naturalist in Henry Stanley's equatorial party, who in 1890 paid African soldiers to kill and cannibalise a girl while he watched, sketchbook in hand. He was also said to have had the head of a murdered man shipped home and stuffed for domestic display by a taxidermist in Piccadilly.

Jameson's tale is emblematic, in part because of the public horror that greeted accounts of his grim antics. Mostly, people have found decapitation quite acceptable in limited circumstances, only objecting to the act or the spectacle when it seemed to be flaunted a touch too cruelly. The trophy hunting of American soldiers during the Second World War is a case in point. Larson has read numerous diaries and letters in which men serving in the Pacific admit to boiling Japanese heads in oil drums, bleaching skulls to make candlesticks or amusing themselves by tossing pebbles into the open cranium of a dead enemy. Many cleaned, painted or jauntily inscribed skulls ('This is a good Jap!') were sent home as souvenirs, but it was only in 1944, when Life magazine published a photograph of some GI's sweetheart with a skull grinning away on her writing desk, that the army and the government publicly deplored the habit.

Sensitive, aren't we?

Could climate change have played a role in the AirAsia crash?

This is not a bad article that deals with turbulence, aircraft and climate change, and which approaches the topic very cautiously.

But boy, some people in comments have gone off about the question even being asked in the heading.

Big batteries, big future?

Although it essentially reads like an advertisement for one company's industrial batteries for deployment on the grid, it is still interesting to read this interview at Forbes on the topic.

It does seem increasingly likely that putting money into solving the energy storage problem with renewables may be a better use of money than building nuclear reactors.

As for those who moan about "what about Africa - its poor need coal!" - I would have thought that the media coverage of small towns suffering with the ebola outbreak last year would have given people an idea of the problems with electricity infrastructure in those countries.  Get out of the major cities and they look poor - very poor, with ramshackle infrastructure of all types.   It's not going to just be a question of building a coal burning power plant - there is huge work to be done with building and maintaining a grid.

The topic has been under discussion recently at Rabbett Run, where the good professor maintains that localised renewables are the best solution for a country where getting infrastructure built and maintained across large distances is a major issue.  Sounds very likely correct, to me...

Just silly....

Not long now and the atheists will be joining in too

Surge of radical Buddhism in South Asia

Bodu Bala Sena (BBS, the Buddhist Strength Force), a nationalist
Buddhist group with a notorious reputation, is being blamed for the
incident. Galagodaaththe Gnanasara Thera, the group's leader, gave a
speech around the time of the riots in which he claimed that the
Sinhalese Buddhist population was under serious threat from the Muslims.
This instigated further violence by large mobs, which attacked mosques
and burned down shops and houses in Muslim neighbourhoods.

I now will be distracted trying to think of a cool name for a group of radical armed atheists.  I mean if the Buddhists are now being thugs, the atheists can't be far behind...  

A good Krugman summary

Voodoo Time Machine - NYTimes.com

A nice list of the way the current Republicans have been wrong, but their ideological devotion prevents them admitting it.

Rising seas remembered?

Ancient Aboriginal stories preserve history of a rise in sea level

Why it's worth the trouble

Research affirms sexual reproduction avoids harmful mutations

The statute books not always a reliable guide

One of the interesting things in the story out of Egypt today about a bunch of men being acquitted after being arrested on national TV for being at a bathhouse is this:

Five of them - the owner of the bathhouse and four staff members - were tried for facilitating "parties of debauchery, orgies among male homosexuals" in exchange for money. The 21 others were charged with practising debauchery and "indecent public acts".

It is not illegal to be homosexual or engage in homosexual acts in Egypt. But the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) says the charge of "debauchery" is often used to crack down on homosexual activity in the country.

The charge is more often used in cases involving prostitution, but Egyptian legislation - specifically Law 10 of 1961, On the Combat of Prostitution - mentions "prostitution" and "debauchery" together.

The Collins English Dictionary defines the world as "an instance of extreme dissipation"; other descriptions relate to "sensual pleasures".

Homosexuality remains a social and religious taboo within Egypt. However, the country is not the only place where, while not illegal, it is punished or discouraged using other laws.

Goes to show that it's not always a simple matter of seeing what's on the books to know how laws are used in a country.

I also saw at the end of the LA Times report on the matter:

Other often-ostracized groups have been targeted as well; on Saturday, an Egyptian court sentenced a 21-year-old man to three years in prison after he declared on Facebook that he was an atheist.

 And this in a country where the President just got kudos for calling on Islam to reform itself.  He's got his work cut out.

Even more reason to not see a movie

I missed this lengthy commentary at the New York Review of Books in December which is an even stronger attack on The Imitation Game for inaccuracy than the one I had previously linked to.

It sounds to me very much like what happened with the Anthony Hopkins version of Shadowlands - the bones of a true life story but with the details changed enough "for dramatic purposes" that the movie ends up not being all that true to the spirit of the characters it portrays.

Tolstoy re-visited

Somewhere on the net tonight I saw brief mention of Tolstoy having had a venereal disease as a young man, and thought to myself "did I know that before?"  Googling around, I stumbled across a lengthy extract from Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, which I read around 20 years ago, and indeed, it did have a full chapter on the many - and I mean many - character flaws of Leo, including the bit about VD. 

Intellectuals remains the most amusingly appalling book about character flaws of the famous that I have ever read.  Even though I am clearly forgetting the details, I remember how much I liked it at the time.  Of course, later it came out that Johnson had engaged in a lengthy marital sexual indiscretion himself, which would not have been quite so hypocritical if he hadn't spent so much time in his columns criticising the British Royal family for not sucking it up and foregoing extra marital relationships as an example to the nation.

Anyway, back to Tolstoy.  Another website (PBS, so the tone is slightly less scurrilous) talks at length about Tolstoy's life-long, um, neuroticism? about women and sex.   It seems he would, in modern parlance, probably be classified as a sex addict, but seemingly spent his entire life not only   intellectually disgusted with it, but also blame shifting onto women. 

It's a wonder his wife went ahead with the wedding at all:

Leo Tolstoy waited until he was 34 years old to marry, but once he had settled on 17-year-old Sofia Behrs, "Sonya," as his bride, he saw that events moved very quickly. At his insistence, but a single week elapsed between his proposal and their wedding on September 23, 1862 -- and in the course of that week Tolstoy asked, really required, his fiancée to read the intimate diaries he had kept for much of his life.

Sonya, the middle daughter of the Tsar's court physician, had grown up in the sheltered, innocent circumstances typical of girls of her class and time, and she had scant knowledge of men, including the man she had agreed to marry, beyond mild flirtation and adolescent fantasy. But now, days before her wedding, she found herself plunged into the sexual autobiography of a vigorous man in early middle age -- page after unsparing page recounting his initiation by a whore when he was 14, the string of impulsive, guilt-ridden erotic adventures with parlor maids, gypsies, and married women, the repeated bouts with venereal disease, and finally, and most recently, the deeply satisfying love affair with a peasant woman, with whom he had fathered a son just a few months before proposing to Sonya.

"I don't think I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries when I was engaged to him," Sonya wrote nearly 30 years later. "I can still remember the agonizing pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity."

 This episode apparently features in fictional form in Anna Karenina.

The article gives a short chronicle of how their marriage deteriorated (and yes, I had remembered that it developed into a high conflict relationship - I wonder if that is made clear enough in that recent movie about the end of his life?).  But this detail shows his incredible insensitivity:

In Sonya's eyes the ultimate affront was "Kreutzer Sonata," a story Tolstoy wrote in 1889 about a man driven by hatred, jealousy, and sexual disgust to murder his wife. Aside from the murder, it was an exact transcription of his feelings about her and the state of their marriage. At the heart of "Kreutzer Sonata" is a savage indictment of marriage as "legalized prostitution," of women as vengeful sirens bent on seducing and controlling men, and of human sexuality itself. For Sonya it was as if Tolstoy had hauled her naked onto a vast public stage and proceeded to sermonize about her moral and physical hideousness. And on top of everything, after railing against the act of love as "perfidious" and piglike, he continued to force himself on her sexually. To her, it was a betrayal worse than adultery. 

I really think he should have spent more time looking into her eyes.   (Ha.)
 

Causation very hard to believe

Circumcision doubles autism risk, study claims - Telegraph

There must be a hundred different ways to confirm or (much more likely) debunk the question of whether they have found anything indicating causation here, given the widely varying populations of males with and without a foreskin around the world.  Must be lots of researchers doing up grant applications on the topic as I write.

Falling in love made easy

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This - NYTimes.com

I had not heard of this study before, indicating a way to make a couple fall in love (or, at least, push them strongly in that direction?):

“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck.  So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

Interesting.  I wonder if there is some connection with mutual eye staring as a common occurrence during or after sex?

More about free speech in France

I've been reading up about the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'Bala at the New York Times, the New Republic and Wikipedia.

While convicted many times for anti-Semitism, and facing currently legally questionable bans on performing his shows, he apparently remains popular with the young, male Muslim population, as well as the National Front.   He ridicules the Holocaust, encourages disbelief that it happened, and is a 9/11 "truther". 

At a time when Jews have good reason to feel an increasing threat to their safety in that country, the example of this comedian perfectly illustrates the double edged sword of free speech, the subject of yesterday's post.  From a free speech purist's point of view, I suppose it may be argued that the laws that have been used against him have not succeeded in silencing him, and in fact may well have made him a martyr in the eyes of his fans, so why keep such laws anyway?  On the other hand, who can say what size following may he have developed if there had never been any attempts at legal hinderance to his views being expressed?

In any case, we can say as follows:  both the anti-Semitic comedian and the religion (including Islam) ridiculing magazine have been the subject of legal actions under French laws that do affect free speech.  Neither of them were actually silenced by the legal actions.  (The action against Charlie Hebdo was not successful.)   We can therefore say that the country has had both of their contributions to the "marketplace of ideas".

The problem is that in this marketplace, the ideas and facts we want all Muslims in France to believe are not spreading to enough of them fast enough.    

Update:   And here, from an Atlantic article by David Frum, is a list of the poisonous ideas far too many French Muslims have (including the anti-Semiticism promoted by Dieudonne):

A pair of Pew surveys in the mid-2000s, for example, found that substantial minorities of Muslims in every European country surveyed did not rule out violence against civilian targets perceived as anti-Islamic. Two-thirds of French Muslims said the use of violence in such a case was never justified, which is reassuring, but one-third felt that it was sometimes or rarely justified. Significant numbers—including an outright majority in Britain—refused to acknowledge that Arabs had carried out the 9/11 terror attacks. A plurality of French Muslims (46 percent) and a crushing majority of British Muslims (81 percent) considered themselves Muslims first, identifying with their respective European nations only to a secondary extent....

A survey of French Muslims in 2014 found a community seething with anti-Semitism. Sixty-seven percent said “yes” when asked whether Jews had too much power over France’s economy. Sixty-one percent believed Jews had too much power in France’s media. Forty-four percent endorsed the idea of a global Zionist conspiracy of the kind described by the Holocaust-denying French Muslim comedian Dieudonne. Thirteen percent agreed that Jews were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

Tackling blasphemy

In Defense of Blasphemy - The Daily Beast

Michael Tomasky here makes a well reasoned case for the world's governments to get serious about removing (rarely used) blasphemy laws from their own legislation, and then to put pressure on those countries where it's use really is a major issue.

From the Pew Research article that he links to:

Nine of the 50 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (18%) had blasphemy laws in 2012, and in Europe such laws were found in seven out of 45 nations (16%). In November 2012, the Dutch parliament dissolved its blasphemy law, which was drafted in the 1930s and had not been used for half a century.

In the Americas, 11 out of 35 countries (31%) had blasphemy laws, including the Bahamas, where the publication or sale of blasphemous material can be punished with up to two years imprisonment. The U.S. does not have any federal blasphemy laws, but as of 2012, several U.S. states – including Massachusetts and Michigan – still had anti-blasphemy laws on the books. However, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would almost certainly prevent the enforcement of any such law.

In South America, Peru’s federal law does not formally prohibit blasphemy, but local government authorities have enforced penalties for it. In October 2012, a district mayor in Lima closed a public art exhibit that featured a naked statue of Christ after religious groups condemned it as blasphemy. According to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, representatives of the local art community “expressed concern over censorship and freedom of speech” after the incident.

Blasphemy laws are least common in sub-Saharan Africa (three of 48 countries), according to 2012 data. In April of 2012, anti-slavery activists in Mauritania were charged and imprisoned for blasphemy after publicly burning religious texts to denounce what the activists viewed as support for slavery in Islamic commentary and jurisprudence.

 

Riding the stream

British Airways Boeing 777 approaches supersonic speed

Well, good to get away from Islamism for a moment, and read about the way a strong jet stream speeds up some flights.  Didn't know they sort of deliberately use it.

Not helpful, Rupert

As tweeted a short time ago:

Rupert Murdoch @rupertmurdoch · 47m47 minutes ago

Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.

0 replies .405 retweets198 favourites

What if the free speech competition of ideas results in the better ideas losing?

It's completely understandable that pro free speech sentiment should be running sky high as a result of the bloodshed in Paris this week, but, perhaps once things have cooled down a bit, it will be time to consider some points that are not being much considered in the current atmosphere.

First, the almost trite, but nonetheless highly relevant, point that free speech is a two edged sword.  It allows bogus claims of current or historical fact, gossip, rumour and all sorts of poisonous attitudes and ideology to have an audience and influence.   The argument for free speech is that the good and true needs its own outlet to overcome the bad and false, and that, eventually at least, the better and true ideas will win.   But what guarantee do we have this process really works out for the best, or at least, is working fast enough in the modern world?

Surely, this is extremely relevant to the matter of the current state of Islam.

There has been some commentary from the pro-free speech side in the last couple of days that Western political correctness actually encourages radicals in Islam (and, perhaps, simple anti-Western sentiment in the Muslims more generally) by demanding self censorship from legitimate challenge to some of its ideas.

Well, in some limited respect I can see grounds for that complaint.  For example, I think some of the politically correct "hands off" approach to female genital "circumcision" is very ill considered; although, perhaps that's not the best example, as it is more of a cultural-regional thing that a particularly Muslim one.  Perhaps the case of actual laws forbidding insulting depictions of Mohammed is a good case, as is exampled by this story out of Ireland a couple of days ago.  But to be honest, I am not sure how many Western countries do have such a law anyway.  (Although, I did, by co-incidence, note just before the Paris events this week that British law has genuinely gone too far in making generic offensiveness a matter of criminality.)

But looking at the bigger picture, do the free speech advocates really think that if every bit of legal or (so called) self imposed "censorship" was removed that it would make any great practical difference to the state of Islam across the world?

It seems to me that there is a good argument to be made that the poisonous and false ideas which are distressingly highly influential in much of Islamic society (including those within the West) - the disbelief in the Holocaust; the beliefs that death for apostasy is a reasonable thing, that blasphemy should be punished by jail or worse, that the IS fighters are taking part in a great "end times" conflict - actually benefit from the fact that the internet and modern communications generally has given free speech a wider and more unfettered reach than it has ever had.  

This is why I think that the sort of reaction of "if only more in the West ridiculed Islam, the better things would be"  is shallow idealism.   What evidence is there that it would help win the competition of ideas?  Why should it?

 Let's be practical here:  if you are actually engaged in a life or death war time struggle with another nation (the West against Nazi Germany, for example) ridicule has a propaganda value but it is done with a clear, short term, end point in sight (the defeat of the other regime).     But no one in their right mind thinks the West is going to militarily wipe out all Islamic regimes with views we find quite medieval.  Modern trade relationships in fact mean that showing some respect to Islamic countries is in your economic self interest.

In any event, calling the desire to not cause offence on religious grounds "self censorship" is unjustified politicisation of matters relating to mere decency and respect.  Sure, the Right typically complains that the media feels a free hand to ridicule Catholicism or Christianity but won't treat Islam in the same way.   But if one feels that some attacks on one religion are in poor taste, I am not sure how insisting they attack another in the same way is meant to make amends for the former.  In the current situation, provided you accept that being religious and not being happy with ridicule of your religion does not of itself make you an extremist (as all people should), I think there are perfectly legitimate and well reasoned cases to be made on both sides of the question of whether mainstream media should re-print the French cartoons - and actually, I think either decision should be respected as a matter of editorial conscience and ethical arguments that led to no black and white conclusion.    

I also see that the argument has been put that Islam does not need "reformation", and that, if anything, the Wahhabi movement was its Reformation and was a regressive rather than progressive change.  What it needs is for the Enlightenment to reach it. 

This is a valid enough argument, and it is relevant to the theme of this post.   Unless you're talking about some of the really undeveloped Islam backwaters (rural Afghanistan) or countries which really do have effective free speech control over the internet and airwaves (Saudi Arabia, perhaps?) you surely can't argue that Enlightenment ideas are not already out there to be seen and understood by Muslims.

Isn't what's happening that in the marketplace for ideas, the ideas and values we want all Muslims to adopt are not winning out.  Or not winning out fast enough.   Not that there is a crisis in global free speech.

This is why I am not convinced by this column from Frank Furedi at Spiked, who notes that in education, both Britain and France has been accused of not challenging in the classroom Muslim student's disbelief of the Holocaust, or other ideologically driven views of history.   Well, OK, that may be true, but at the core of that problem is that the students have already come to school with set beliefs that they have inherited from their parents, mosque, and/or the internet, and such home bred beliefs and biases can be incredibly hard to dislodge.     And in the case of France, the free speech that allows Charlie Hebdo to draw rude cartoons of Mohammed has not made any difference to that problem.

Furedi seems to admit as much in his final paragraph:

The chain of events that led to the massacre in Paris may well have been sparked off by a classroom discussion in the banlieus of Paris or Marseilles. Some pupils were no doubt certain that the Holocaust was a myth. And the defensive way their teachers dealt with their points would only have strengthened their conviction, itself informed by their older peers at home. Throughout their teenage years, their alienation from French society would have gained in force. They then encountered radical Islam, a medium to express their alienation, and the rest is history.

He also adds as his final sentence:

But if Europe wakes up, this won’t necessarily be the future.

What he leaves unsaid is what Europe is meant to do, once it does "wake up", about the cultural segregation that he cites as being at the core of the problem.

I don't have clear suggestions either.  All I am arguing is that the true issue is what's happening in the competition of ideas and the dissemination of what is true historical fact, and that making a bit of a fetish out of freedom to ridicule is putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

Updates:

On re-reading this post, I realised I had not emphasised enough the role of the internet in enabling radicalism, rumour and false claims of all types to spread quickly and have influence. It has sped up the process enormously compared to what was previously possible with books, pamphlets or even broadcast media, given its 24 hour availability, instantaneous publishing, and the echo chamber effect where people with the craziest ideas can find a support network of the likeminded agreeing with and supporting them.  

Its exact role is going to be inherently hard to study or prove, but I have mentioned before that I suspect  that the political success of the climate change denial movement is virtually a creation of internet.  It is hard to imagine it maintaining the grip it has for so long without it.

Whether or not this will prove true of Islamic radicalising material is hard to say.

The issue of free speech and the internet is therefore particularly vexed, with free speech advocates routinely deriding (with rare exception) any suggestion whatsoever of government interference with content.    I am also curious as to what they think about hack attacks if they are well motivated.   It will be interesting to see if anything comes of the threatened hacking of Islamic extremists.   I would find it hard to be concerned if renegade hackers achieved things of value which Western governments consider they cannot.

Oh - and just after typing this, I have found a post from the University of Pennsylvania which makes the exact same point.  It proposes using a deliberate public-private campaign of messaging on digital media to oppose extremism.   Sounds good - except for the question of how to get it to be viewed by the people who need to see such content.   (The example of climate change denialism is again relevant - the fact that there is a huge resource of good scientific material on the internet to rebut their specific claims has actually had little effect on those who are ideologically committed to their view.  They simply dismiss such sites and will not read them.)

With respect to the competition for ideas generally, I think Mohammed El-leissey made some good points in his recent article at the Drum.   He notes that Western media pays little attention to the idealogical war being fought within Islam itself, and I was surprised to learn that Iraq has a satirical "sitcom" on TV about Islamic State.  (You should go view the separate story about that which appeared in October 2014.) 

While accepting this, it doesn't really go to the larger point that people like Bill Maher have been making (although in his case, with some exaggeration) - that across the globe, there is much to be concerned about regarding the apparent attitudes of Muslims, and the question is how to get "Enlightenment values" more widespread.

Kind of a depressing read

Blacklist proposed for fossil fuels : Nature News & Comment

Summing it up

I think the reaction to the Paris terrorism has been pretty encouraging, actually.   The Parisians themselves have been dignified and very impressive.  To a large extent, it has unified the Right and Left in revulsion.

Sure, more broadly, on both sides of politics, there will always be someone who makes silly and inappropriate statements, but I think the fact that this was an attack on a Lefty publication in a Left leaning country has meant that there has been actually next to nothing of the excuse making sometimes seen from the soft Left.   Waleed Aly wisely avoids any contextualizing about it, except to the extent of pointing out that, in Australia at least, anyone's risk of being a victim of terrorism is still vanishingly small.  This is a valid enough point, and perhaps even a needed response to the more extreme "We are at War!" commentary that comes from some.   Still, imagining that there are even a few hundred men in your country who are willing to commit extreme acts of terrorism for purely ideological reasons is not encouraging.

Which brings me to the point:  yes, we've all know for quite a while now extreme or radical Islamism is not compatible with Western values; there is actually no new news in that - the question is how to deal with it, especially in your own country.

And here it seems to me no one has complete answers.   Certainly, some are more useless than others, and  here's roughly how I see it:

*  strong conservatives mutter about ending all Muslim immigration and refuse to believe that moderate Islam exists at all.  Always prepared to see the end of the West as being just around the corner due to what is still a small minority of their population, most of which is not radical; they always want to leap to exaggerate a (claimed) weakness of  most citizen's attachment to Western values.   From such unrealistic premises, you can't expect useful contribution at all. 

*  the libertarian Right are the most obsessed with privacy and most opposed to increased surveillance by security services.  They are also most obsessed with free speech, to such a degree that it seems some think that not causing offence to moderate Muslims is harmful to the cause of de-radicalising the radicalised - a position I find hard to fathom.  They exaggerate the effect of something like s18C RDA, acting as if its existence is the greatest crisis to free discussion ever, despite the fact that it doesn't even address religious discrimination (although some State legislation does) and no one can go to jail for breaching it.    Some also have a silly "open borders" idea, in which they (oddly) come close to the Greens soft and impractical position on this.   And let's not mention their nutty obsession with guns, and how they think arming everyone helps a society be safer.   All in all, they (both libertarians and the Greens) are therefore all over the shop, and have no great practical contribution to make.

*  the soft Left:  can spend too much time on contextualising and fretting how it really is our own fault for not being nice enough to men before they become radicals, and while they do have some suggestions for better social integration (more sports clubs for young Muslim men, I heard this morning) but they all sound rather whimpy and well intentioned but hardly convincing.

*  the "hard" Left:   well, not sure that it really exists anywhere apart from a few corners of Europe, although many on the Right put virtually the whole of France in that category.   But really, if you consider the ban on face coverings as one of the most interventionist ways of seeking to get better cultural integration of  Muslims that has been attempted anywhere, those on the Right should at least be congratulating the country on the attempt.   (I guess that whether it's an idea that appeals more to the Left due to it being a legislative attempt at social manipulation that they tend to like, or to the conservative Right, which just wants to make life as difficult for Muslims as they can, is hard to say.)   Of course, it's not clear that its working, but hey, what is?

In any event, as I say, no one has all the answers.   Reasonable surveillance powers for our intelligence services make sense;  effective gun control and potential weapon checks and balances (such as the controls on potential bomb making ingredients) make sense;  as does active action against radical leaders encouraging killing, of course;  continued engagement with moderate Islamic leaders makes sense.

But ultimately, radicalism within Islam probably has to burn itself out within Islam, and its unclear how much the rest of us can do to assist that ideological (and actual) war.

Update:  it has occurred to me, I should probably say that the conservative Right takes a too strongly one-eyed view always in favour of whatever Israel does, and the hard Left - and sometimes the soft Left too - can be too one-eyed in favour of Palestine.

Before anyone gets too carried away with accusing any on the Left of "appeasement" of Islamism...

...have a read of some of the extraordinarily inane political point scoring attempted in American Right wing media sources in light of the attack.

I also note that David Leyonhjelm could not resist the temptation to (indirectly, via re-tweet) re-publish his "if only more people had guns for self protection" line.  That's pretty offensive, in my books:

Of particular interest at the moment

Reforming Islam: Where change comes from | The Economist

Decent analysis, but light on suggestions for solutions

Europe’s confused debate about Islam and terrorism: Europeans are both too Islamophobic and too timid about facing the roots of Islamic fundamentalism.
Well, not just "light".  Actually non-existent.