Jyllands-Posten

The row over the publication of images of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper is threatening to get a little out of hand.

Perry de Havilland (who returns to the subject today) noted back in November that the row got started when:

Flemming Rose, an editor from Denmark's largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, reacted to news that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children's biography of the Prophet Mohammed, by doing exactly that, putting Denmark's policies of tolerance to the test by commissioning a series of illustrations of Mohammed.

Two things occur to me which (even without the benefit of hindsight) should, I think, have been obvious to the editor of Denmark's largest newspaper:

(1) Few of the pictures seem suitable for inclusion in a children's biography of the Prophet Mohammed.

(2) If Danish cartoonists are going to draw offensive images of Mohammed then they are right to be afraid of a backlash - not just from Muslim militants but from millions of ordinary Muslims around the world who take great offense at such things.

This doesn’t look like an issue of free speech to me, it looks like a lack of editorial judgement.

Tuesday Roundabout

Tim Worstall notches up his half-century with Britblog Roundup #50.

One of my personal favorites makes it into Normblog’s Momma 'n' Daddy Collection at number 48.

Quiz yourself and find your perfect Major via Zoe Brain – it seems mine should have been Psychology and not Accounting. I won't argue with that.

Dean Esmay suggests a couple of alternatives to Google. I think I might give Gigablast a try.

And finally,

Call the Scooby Gang! Things are getting spooky at Scribbles’ place.

Pasanda Badam Curry

We eat a lot of Indian food at home and one of my favorite dishes is this rich lamb curry from northern India which I originally got from one of Mridula Baljekar's highly recommended recipe books.

Ingredients
2lb lamb leg steaks
1 inch cube of root ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
4-6 cloves of garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 fresh green chillies, seeded and coarsely chopped
4 tbsps natural yoghurt
2 oz unsalted butter
3 medium sized onions finely sliced
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsps ground coriander
½ tsp ground nutmeg
¼-½ tsp chilli powder
8fl oz warm water
1/2 tsp salt
5fl oz single cream
1oz ground almonds
1sp garam masala
2 tbsps warm water (or rose water if it's available)
½ tsp paprika

Trim the fat off the meat and cut into cubes.

Blend the ginger, garlic, green chillies and yoghurt in a liquidizer until smooth.

Lightly brown the onions in the butter over a medium heat. Add the turmeric, cumin, coriander, nutmeg and chilli powder, and cook over a low heat for 2-3 minutes stirring frequently. Increase the heat to high, add the meat and fry for 3-4 minutes or until it changes color.

Start stirring in the yoghurt mixture a couple of tablespoons at a time, cook for 1-2 minutes and repeat until all the yoghurt mixture is used up. Reduce the heat to medium and cook for 4-5 minutes - keep stirring. Add the water, bring to the boil, cover the pan and simmer until the meat is tender (about 1 hour).

Add the salt, cream and ground almonds and simmer uncovered for 5-6 minutes. Stir in the garam masala and a couple of tablespoons of warm water, transfer to a serving dish, sprinkle with paprika and serve with pilau rice.

Language difficulties

Tomorrow, we're taking the boys up to Liverpool for the weekend. They're looking forward to it in much the same way as they look forward to going abroad. For them, Liverpool is a foreign country. Everything there seems very different and, more importantly, they don't understand the language.

Last time we were there, the Big Fella (10 at the time) met up with a local boy of about the same age who asked him, in a strong Scouse accent: "Oo joo sport?" The Big Fella was puzzled, he recognized it was a question but couldn't make out what he was being asked. So he said "What?" and took a few steps closer. "Oo joo sport?". My boy still can't make it out. "What?" and a few steps closer.

This happens a couple more times before I step in - the two of them are practically nose to nose by now, the oo-joo-sports are becoming louder and more deliberate and I'm starting to worry that a continued lack of communication might result in some kind of incident

Me: He's asking you who you support.
BF: What do you mean?
Me: He wants to know which team you support.
BF: What kind of team?
Me: Football! He wants to know which football team you support!
BF: Oh, I don't really.

At which, his young questioner looked quite askance, momentarily unable to believe that anyone in this soccer-mad city (let alone a boy of about his own age) would not support some football team or other. Still, it didn't phase him for long, friendly and eager for a playmate, he asked: "Worra ye do in the savy?" My boy said "What?" and took a few steps closer....

Later, I told him: "Next time we go up to Liverpool I'm going to buy you a book on how to speak Scouse." Sometimes, it really does sound like a foreign language.

Beautiful proof

Norm Geras links to an article on the beauty of Pythagoras's theorem, or rather the beauty of Euclid's proof.

I could spend days lost in Euclid's "Elements" but my favorite proof of Pythagoras's theorem is a classical Indian proof: a simple diagram accompanied by just one word.

Look!

Oxblog on Hamas

Oxblog's Patrick Belton has been blogging from Ramallah on the Palestinian elections.

Here's his initial take on Hamas's surprise victory:

It's not clear anyone wanted this, least of all Hamas, who in assuming the administration of the Palestinian national authority's creaking and often corrupt bureaucracy single-handed in a moment when its sole lifeline of European and other international support appears threatened, may just have stumbled into the biggest molasses patch the Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah has ever faced. Unlike the Lib Dems of 1985, Hamas did not go to its constituencies to prepare for government. It had prepared for a coalition, or possibly pristine opposition, but not this.

Racist soup

French food fascists.

Meet the candidates

From the Guardian's coverage of the Palestinian elections:

Among the more contentious candidates in Gaza was the Mother of Martyrs, who sent three of her sons to be suicide bombers. Mariam Farhat's campaign video includes footage of her helping her son, Mohammed, 17, to prepare his bomb belt and advising him on techniques that killed five Israelis.

In the West Bank, a candidate appeared on the ballot as Hitler, a nickname he picked up because of his virulent hatred of Jews.

Man bags whale

The BBC reports that rescuers are becoming increasingly concerned over the safety of a whale stranded in the River Thames.

But one of them has a cunning plan.

Religious reading

Being ill and largely housebound does have its consolations - I've recently been able to catch up on a lot of reading. One book I hadn't read in some time, and which I've just finished rereading, is Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas.

We moderns like to think that superstition was vanquished by the rise of scientific rationalism. In fact, as Thomas shows, the relationship between the rise of science and the decline of magic is not nearly so clear cut.

It is […] possible to connect the decline of the old magical beliefs with the growth of urban living, the rise of science, and the spread of an ideology of self help. But the connection is only approximate and a more precise sociological genealogy cannot at present be constructed.
[…]

The only identifiable social group which was consistently in the van of the campaign against certain types of magic is the clergy, but their attitude to supernatural claims in general was highly ambivalent. It does not seem possible to say whether the growing ‘rationalism’ of natural theology was a spontaneous theological development or a mere response to the pressures of natural science. It would make sense, no doubt, if one could prove that it was the urban middle classes, the shopkeepers and artisans, who took the lead in abandoning the old beliefs, but at present there seems no way of doing so.

It would indeed make sense. And furthermore, it would offer comfort to rationalists like myself who sometimes worry that by undermining the authority of established religion we run the risk of people coming to believe all kinds of dangerous nonsense.

VROOM VROOM

I'm a Ferrari 360 Modena!



You've got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You're sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you're expensive and high-maintenance, but you're worth it.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Via Normblog.

Late night linkage

Two new additions to the blogroll: Ophelia Benson's Notes and Comments and Small Town Scribbles.

I've been reading Notes and Comments for some time. I've even been showing some of Ophelia's posts to the boys. As a result, she's fast becoming one of the Big Fella's intellectual heroes; he rehearses her arguments and then deploys them against his religious peers. They don't know what's hit them!

I started visiting Small Town Scribbles after reading her Normblog profile (that man should get an award for services to the blogosphere. He did? Oh, good). As for Scribbles, well, in her own words:

Left-wing, atheist, insomniac, female. Earnest working-class outlook. Poncy middle-class sensibilities. Big City pretensions, Small Town reality. Likes cats.

Likes cats? Aw hell, read her anyway.

Worrying about Iran

When I talk to people over here about the dangers posed by a nuclear Iran they seem quite sanguine about it. I think they’ve all pretty much absorbed the BBC line, most succinctly put by John Simpson in his Global Predictions for 2006:

Iran will take its nuclear ambitions further, and its negotiations with the European countries will seem more and more pointless. President Ahmadinejad will, however, start to lose favour in Iran, and the political opposition to him will grow.

To my mind, that’s wishful thinking.

My fear is that Iran’s nuclear ambitions will remain unchecked and that Israel, threatened by the imminent prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, will want to act to destroy or significantly disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. Israel is not capable of doing so using conventional weapons; the only country with the necessary conventional capability is the US.

Will we act, and if not, what are the risks of inaction?

Winds of Change addresses the issue head on with an essay by Thomas Holsinger (The Case for Invading Iran) and posts from Joe Katzman and Marc Danziger.

Casabianca

The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled;

What boy? Which deck?

The good old days

Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata is getting nostalgic for earlier times:

"Insofar as it was then acknowledged that the Welfare State would undermine the social pressures on people to be upright citizens, this was mostly regarded as a good thing. The Welfare State would enable people to escape from narrow-minded social prejudices and live freer and happier lives.
I consider the Prime Minister's somewhat implausible attempts to civilise our current crop of barbarians to be evidence, if you need any more, that those diehard free-marketeers had a point.

Ah yes, "the social pressures on people to be upright citizens". I remember them well. I’m not as old as Brian, but I remember those pressures vividly. They were the pressures that led to me being called a “bastard” at an English primary school in the sixties because I didn’t have a visible father. These were the same pressures that later led me to describe my father as being dead because, at a English Catholic school, it was preferable to have a “dead” father rather than being the son of a divorcee, the product of a “broken home”.

They were the same pressures that required me to spend one of my school years referred to simply as “The Jew” because I was the only circumcised boy at my school. And the same instincts led to ceaseless jibes about my German surname and my American heritage – in those times, my background was just too different to warrant any kind of acceptance.

By all means Brian, talk to me about the old days, but unless you were on the receiving end of those “social pressures on people to be upright citizens”, don’t try and tell me they were days of milk and honey. Because, for a lot of us (though, obviously, not the majority) they were the hardest days of our lives.

Alcohol and altitude

Not good.

The Gaga Hypothesis

James Lovelock, writing in today's Independent, says climate change is out of control and the end of civilization is nigh.

I don't know where Lovelock is getting his information (maybe he's channelling Gaia) - but he's certainly in an apocalyptic mood. Here are a couple of his more outlandish predictions:

"[A]s the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics."

And

"[B]efore this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

This isn't climate science, it's New Age Millenarianism.

The Kennedy cover-up

I would have thought the fact that the leader of one of Britain’s main political parties had a major drink problem would be eminently newsworthy. Evidently, the BBC didn’t think so.

Here’s a transcript from last Sunday’s Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4 in which veteran radio reporter Nick Jones explains why the BBC and other broadcasters covered up for Charles Kennedy’s drinking (the relevant segment starts at 35:20):

Yes, dear listener, I have to admit it, I was part of that benign cover-up by broadcasters. We did collude, we didn't level with you, we didn't explain that Charles Kennedy really did have a serious drink problem. Perhaps we should, perhaps we shouldn't. I'd known for years (and so did most of my colleagues) that Kennedy was more than partial to a wee dram and, yes, another dram too.
Unlike newspaper journalists, we radio reporters get pretty close to the action, we know when our interviewee has had one too many. But there you go, we needed Charles and he needed us. If he was late or hung-over, we'd make an excuse. If we thought the tape couldn't be broadcast, we'd ditch it.

So you can understand why, in our frustration and wishing to give you a hint of what was really afoot, we always made so much of that coded criticism which came tumbling out when the party hierarchy were firing their warning shots.

[...]

[I]f they [Liberal Democrat MPs] didn’t mention the dreaded word “drink” then we, the broadcasters, were ready to hold back. Journos are sometimes nicer than you think. Occasionally, we will skate over the truth, especially if someone in the public eye is nice to us and, yes, understands our foibles.

So there you have it: the BBC and others took part in a "benign" cover-up because Charles Kennedy was “nice to us”, “understands our foibles” and because “we needed him”. That’s not about reporters being “nicer than you think”, it’s simply unprincipled journalism.

And it makes you wonder what else they're not telling us.

Cutest thing on the block

Spud versus the store front snowman



He's three years old in that picture. Today, he's eight.

Happy Birthday, son.

Who knows

Is this really the funniest blonde joke, ever?

Linguistics 101

Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log tells it like it is:

they not only can have a morphosyntactically (and semantically) singular antecedent, but it can do so even if the gender of the referent is known, and syntactically overt

And

This use of they isn't ungrammatical, it isn't a mistake, it's a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don't buy what they're selling.

Heh.

Ancient wisdom

The wise man travels all day but never loses sight of his baggage.

Lao Tzu

Cancer and terrorism

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber takes another look at cancer as a metaphor for terrorism:

It struck me that, to make this metaphor exact we’d need:

• attacks on cancer researchers for seeking to ‘understand’ cancer

• even more attacks on anyone trying to find ‘root causes’ for cancer in the environment, such as exposure to tobacco smoke

• lengthy pieces pointing out that the only thing we need to know about cancer cells is that they are malignant

• more lengthy pieces pointing out that criticism of any kind of quack remedy marks the critic as “objectively pro-cancer”

Perhaps. Though, I’d add a couple more:

• lengthy articles from moral philosophers pointing out that cancer cells can't be held responsible for their malignancy

• numerous highly speculative papers from researchers suggesting that if cancer is left untreated it won’t spread

Justifiable abuse

The BBC reports on allegations that inmates on hunger strike at Guantanamo are being "force fed in a cruel manner".

[Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture,] told the BBC that he had received reports that some hunger strikers had had thick pipes inserted through the nose and forced down into the stomach.

This was allegedly done roughly, sometimes by prison guards rather than doctors. As a result, some prisoners had reported bleeding and vomiting he said.

I'm not surprised: force feeding someone is never easy or pleasant. Twenty-five years ago, when I worked in a UK hospital, I was involved in force feeding a teenage anorexic. It's a rough business and there's no gentle way of doing it. And, I have to say, it was the most distressing thing I've ever had to do.

Is it cruel? I don't think so, but it's clear that force feeding someone (whether they are a Guantanamo detainee or a patient in a UK hospital) involves a considerable level of physical abuse, which is only warranted by the intent to sustain life.

Happy New Year

Let's hope it's a good one.