Dead to rights
The City of Minneapolis will pay $165,000 to seven zombies, and their attorney, to settle a civil-rights lawsuit. The seven, during a protest against “mindless” consumerism, had been “walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated ‘weapons of mass destruction.’” Rather than defend the police’s brain-dead judgement in Federal court, the city agreed to settle.
Asked to comment on the settlement, the zombies’ lawyer only croaked: “Briefs… Must… file… briefs…”
via John Scalzi
Atlas mooched
Using a GPS logger—that is to say, using a satellite network that is funded by American taxpayers and available free of charge to everyone all over the world—some chap named Nick Newcomen has created an advertisement for Ayn Rand’s books.
Is there a store in the Boston area that services irony meters? I think mine needs to be recalibrated.
Translation from PR-speak to English of the Anti-Defamation League’s “Statement On Islamic Community Center Near Ground Zero”
We regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths – to build community centers and houses of worship.
If we tried to use any legal maneuver to prevent this community center from being built, we would be laughed out of court.
We categorically reject appeals to bigotry on the basis of religion, and condemn those whose opposition to this proposed Islamic Center is a manifestation of such bigotry.
Bigotry is bad, mmkay?
However, there are understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site. We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001.
If the events of 9/11 have made someone feel squicked by Islam, that feeling should not be classified as bigotry.
The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process.
We are as high as a kite.
Therefore, under these unique circumstances,
Our opinion regarding 9/11, like the Supreme Court’s opinion regarding the 2000 Presidential election, should never be used as a precedent for anything else.
we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.
Not that we’re offering to draw you a map or anything.
In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values. These questions deserve a response, and we hope those backing the project will be transparent and forthcoming.
We have no evidence that the Islamic Center is run by terrorists, but we’re not above insinuating that such evidence might exist. We call ourselves the “Anti-Defamation League” but we’re not above defaming the Islamic Center’s leaders and donors.
But regardless of how they respond, the issue at stake is a broader one.
We actually don’t care whether or not the Islamic Center is run by terrorists. We just wanted to blow some smoke about that.
Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site,
Then again, they may not.
and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam.
If so, we will strive to prevent anyone from receiving that message.
The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong.
Did we mention that bigotry is bad?
But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.
We must perform a delicate balancing act between the feelings of people who, since 9/11, have become squicked by Islam (in a totally non-bigoted way), and the feelings of those “Islamic moderates” whom we used to call upon to denounce Muslim extremists. For an Islamic Center three blocks away from Ground Zero, that balance favors the non-bigots. Maybe this Center could be built four blocks away. Or maybe fourteen blocks away. Or maybe in Brooklyn. Then again, maybe not in Brooklyn.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.
God help us.
Brooklyn link via agrumer
“Translation” genre canonized by John Gruber
The call of cult-calling
The Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee, while responding to a constituent’s concern about a Muslim community center being built in Murfreesboro, remarked that while he is all in favor of freedom of religion, “you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult, whatever you want to call it”. As others have already pointed out, this is free propaganda for al-Qaeda.
I, for one, would like to highlight that word “cult”, because when used among evangelical Christians, it does not always mean “organization that brainwashes its members”. Sometimes it means “organization that preaches heresy”.
Back when I was researching the Boston Church of Christ, I acquired a book by Walter Martin called The Kingdom of the Cults. Martin’s catalog of “cults” includes not only the Moonies and Scientology, but also Christian Science, Baha‘i, Buddhism, and Islam. In an appendix, he seriously examines the accusation that the Seventh-Day Adventists are a cult, but ultimately declares that they are legit. Judaism and Catholicism are not mentioned at all.
Ask not, fellow unwashed heathen, for whom the wingnut trolls; it trolls for thee.
Wanted: digital passports
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, bemoaning how CNN requires you to sign away your digital soul in order to post a comment on its Web site, remarks:
In the United States, we don’t have many laws protecting our personal information. We need more than we have. The alternative, the one we’ll get by default if we don’t do anything, is to have our online identities mediated by Facebook. If the government had proposed an online identity system that prone to holes, leaks, and exploits, we’d have been up in arms.
Which reminds me…
In the Anglo-American legal tradition we’ve always been antsy about government officials saying “papers, please”, but authentication of identity is one of the traditional functions of the state. The paper trail certifying that I really am Seth Gordon, for all transactions where it really counts, terminates in two places: a birth certificate issued by the State of Illinois, and a driver’s license issued by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. (If I had changed my name since birth, of course, that paper trail would have taken a detour through some probate court.)
The governments of Estonia and Lithuania have brought state-authenticated identity into the digital age with systems that combine a smartcard, a PIN, and the OpenID protocol. (My Web browser cannot authenticate the Web site for Lithuania’s national OpenID provider, which suggests there are a few kinks to be worked out of the system.) Why can’t the United States do the same thing?
For financial and medical transactions, this would create a single strong system for logging into the Web sites of multiple banks, credit-card issuers, and so forth. For non-financial transactions, a government-backed identity broker could authenticate a user by revealing the minimum amount of information that a Web site operator actually needs, rather than the maximum amount that some profit-seeking broker wants to share. The government could protect citizens’ privacy by offering them proxy identities: “account 2b740996-9919-11df-80f3-001aa0739303 is associated with a lawful US resident over the age of eighteen and you don’t need to know anything else about them”. And a Web site that accepted any OpenID-based authentication system could let users certify their identity through LiveJournal, AOL, Google, or any other private provider, so people who didn’t want to involve the government wouldn’t have to.
Obviously no system is perfectly secure, and letting a single agency manage hundreds of millions of digital identities raises the spectre of catastrophic failure. However, I believe that the current way we handle digital identity, juggling dozens of half-remembered usernames and passwords, is even less secure, because none of the institutions managing these databases have a strong incentive to do it right, and an attacker can wreak havoc by simply penetrating whichever system is weakest. The alternative to authentication by the government is not authentication by Bruce Schneier, but authentication by Facebook.
Sorry, Bibi
The Nine Days are an appropriate time for Jews to repent, and it is appropriate for me to repent for being too cynical about the Israeli political process. I had assumed that the Israeli government is so independent of the Diaspora1 that complaints from liberal American Jews could not possibly block MK Rotem’s proposed conversion bill. I was wrong. חטאתי.
1 Note that for all the fulminations over the “Jewish lobby”, the Israeli government probably gets more political benefit in the US from evangelical Christians than it does from the Jews who live here.
The workers’ flag is bluest blue
According to a recent poll [PDF] with a three-point margin of error:
- 55% of likely voters think think that the phrase “a socialist” describes President Obama “very well” or “well”.
- 51% of likely voters disapprove of how President Obama is doing his job. When asked why they disapproved, only 8% of those who disapproved described him as “socialist” or “communist”.
I wonder what proportion of voters both consider Obama a socialist and approve of his job performance.
IMPORTANT BUSINESS PROPOSAL — BUY THIS BOOK
Every once in a while my kids get a book about Africa from the library, and invariably, it reinforces the image of the continent as one massive wildlife preserve with the occasional village. You’d never know from these books that, for example, Lagos and Kinshasa are among the largest cities in the world.
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, born and raised in Nigeria, the daughter of an accountant and a teacher, apparently had a similar problem. In this interview, she says:
Most of [the books I read as a child] were about African children living in mud huts and hawking oranges to pay their school fees. I read so many of these books that I began wishing my family also lived in a mud hut with thatched roof, and subsisted on proceeds from our yam farm.
She went on to write I Do Not Come To You By Chance, a novel about urban, internationally connected, 21st-century Nigeria. My children are about ten years too young to appreciate it, but you, Gentle Reader, are not.
The novel describes the coming-of-age of Kingsley Ibe, whose college-educated parents raised him to believe that hard work and a good education are his tickets to success and respectability. Except… in spite of his college degree and his excellent grades, Kingsley remains unemployed. As his family’s financial situation grows more desperate, his only source of help is his uncle, a high-school dropout who has become fantastically wealthy running 419 scams. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.
The novel hits almost all the right notes: the characters are engaging, the plot moves right along, and it is intriguing to see the whole world of Internet scams from the other side. The only place I lost suspension of disbelief is in a brief scene where Kingsley meets an old classmate who works in the United States, and rattles off the degrees that he and his American relatives have picked up. (A master’s in “Data Transmogrification” from Yale?)
I don’t know if this is the author’s intention, but I can’t help reading the novel as a commentary on itself. Given the asides that explain Ibo culture and Nigerian politics, Nwaubani appears to have written the book deliberately for a foreign audience. Unlike the 419 scammers, she gives us honest value for our money. But like them, she can prosper by presenting a certain image of her country to people much wealthier than her compatriots. So when her depiction of Nigeria rings true, is it because her depiction is true? Or is it because she tells me what I want to believe? I’m betting on “is true”, because judging from the interview I linked to above, people in a position to know what Nigeria is really like don’t see anything amiss in the novel. And if Nwaubani had wanted to use her literary talents to make a dishonest buck, she could have been a kick-ass 419 scammer.
My fellow American religious fanatics
Living in Israel for eight months, even as a student in an almost-entirely English-speaking environment, made me feel very American.1 One of the features of Israeli political culture that caught my eye was that in Israel, the state serves to allocate privileges and duties among groups, and not just among individuals.
The Israeli educational system illustrates the phenomenon. There are not only separate public school systems for Jews and Arabs, but separate systems for secular and Orthodox Jews. Haredi families who consider the state religious schools to be too left-wing can send their children to schools in the Chinuch Atzmai system, which is not run by the Ministry of Education but receives heavy subsidies from the state.
Israel is a peculiar country, especially when it comes to religion/state relationships, but when it comes to state-sponsored religious education, among developed Western2 nations, the United States is the real outlier. In Germany, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious education is provided through the public schools at state expense. In Great Britain, daily worship is mandatory (although, apparently, it is often pro-forma) and religious education is part of the standard syllabus; furthermore, parents may send their children to faith schools that are run by religious bodies, funded by local governments, and regulated by the national government. In some Canadian provinces, Catholics or Protestants can form parallel school systems in areas where they are religious minorities, and other systems for subsidizing religious education exist, depending on the province. Turkey has vocational high schools that train students to become state-employed imams.
The Religious Right in America hopes some day to reverse Supreme Court decisions that shut down religious observance in the public schools, but as far as I can tell, they do not hope to reproduce the Israeli or German system in America: that is, they do not want a multi-confessional school district to set up separate classes or parallel school systems for Baptists, Pentecostalists, and Catholics. They simply want school boards to have the same constitutional power to establish a school-prayer text as they currently have to schedule football games. In recent years, some conservatives and libertarians have taken a different approach, advocating for school vouchers. But here, the emphasis is on empowering individual families to choose a school for their children, not on empowering religious bodies to establish schools where those children might attend.
The American separation of church and state can also be contrasted with the French practice of laïcité, where friction with the Catholic Church over administration of churches led to entangling the French government in the process for nominating bishops, and where anxiety over overt expressions of Islam led to a ban on wearing conspicuous religious symbols in the public schools. If such laws were passed in the United States, liberal organizations like the ACLU would fight them as vigorously as they fought against mandatory school prayer.
In both liberal and conservative visions of the US Constitution, there is no recognition of religious communities as entities apart from voluntary associations of religious people. An American is free to profess the Catholic faith, pray according to Catholic traditions, and join with other Catholics to incorporate churches, schools, and so forth. Catholic voters and legislators may use their influence to move public policy in a direction closer to their religious beliefs, to the extent that the Constitution permits. But Catholicism as such is no concern of the state.
Our human relationships are defined by more than just citizenship; our religious affiliations are not just associations we have chosen, but reflect powerful feelings of identity. But American political activists who agree on little else share a disinterest in elevating those identities to legal personhood. The individual is both the object and subject of the law.
In other words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
1 Or, as one might say in Spanish, muy estadounidense.
2 As far as I can tell from Googling, Japan and South Korea do not have any kind of sectarian religious instruction in their public schools, nor do their governments sponsor religious schools.
An unpatriotic thought
If it weren’t for those trouble-makers in 1776, my fireworks and barbecue would be three days earlier.
