Those approving words describe the murder of a young pregnant woman and her boyfriend in Haryana state by her father and other relatives.

From society’s point of view, this is a very good thing […] We have removed the blot.

It is a story of sexism: the defence of entrenched male power, status and property and the enforcement of women’s role as factor[ies] for making men’; racism: keeping the ‘caste’ and class pure by preventing fraternisation with ‘lower’ orders; and the maintenance of economic power relations through unbridled barbarity in the service of feudalism–the vicious oppression of workers and peasants, all underpinned by a thick layer of superstition and religious obscurantism.

We are not ashamed of it, absolutely not, we have the honor of doing the village proud […] We would not have had a face to show if we had not done this. It was the act of ‘real men’.

So much for empathy then, the prohibition against killing one’s children cast aside in an instant.

A video with everything–yes, even banjos.

What Jim said

Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful messengers who are today no longer alive is the justification for my existence on this earth, rather than a claim for honour.

The words of Irena Sendler who saved 2,500 children from extermination. She has died at the age of 98.

Others too have tried to find a way to encompass the enormity of an act of virtue that seems beyond language.

Elzbieta Ficowska, one of those saved as a five-month-old baby in July 1942 and now the wife of a leading Polish poet: “It took a miracle to save a Jewish child. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come’.

And so we try to understand. The poet, George Szirtes, uses her obituary to explore the poetics of action - dread and numbness followed by ‘the melting of that which is frozen into the otherworldly warmth of language‘. The scientist Francis Sedgemore, in an unrelated post, comments on scientific evidence showing that “Morality is … hard-wired into our neural network“.

Thinking historically, we can see that the possibility of almost unimaginable cruelty is always with us. However, when it emerges, we also invariably find a Sendler; an ordinary person who achieves the extraordinary. This ethical heroism is an historical constant. Whatever the level of barbarism, it can be and is resisted. In that resistance lies the seeds of a future, different world, peopled by survivors and their rescuers. And history is our collective memory; we must commemorate our real heroes - and never forget.

The application of science can, according to AC Grayling, create serious ethical dilemmas. Indeed it can, but scientific data can also confound the designs of ideologues and cultural critics. Take, for example, recent neurological research which disproves the assertions of commentators who plough a moral relativist furrow when trying to convince us of their political prejudices.

In his fortnightly New Scientist column, Grayling the philosopher (not the Guardian Comment is Free wind-up merchant) discusses the implications of research which shows that across our species mirror neurons in the motor cortex of the brain fire in sympathy with what the individual perceives in the activity and experiences of others. That is, irrespective of ethnicity, nationality, gender or whatever, we create in our minds a model of what others are experiencing.

The essential point, says Grayling, is that mirror neurons underwrite the ability to recognise what helps or distresses others, what they suffer and enjoy, what they need and what harms them. Morality is therefore hard-wired into our neural network:

“So even when customs differ, fundamental morality does not; and if two societies differ over what they consider to be moral, one of them must just be plain wrong.”

Some of us already hold a belief that this is a defining characteristic of humanity, but this in itself is a prejudice. Or rather was. What the data now show is that the basis for morality is shared by all humans, and there is a universality to our being that crosses ethnic and cultural divides.

Q: How do you criticise religion without offending its adherents?

A: You can’t. So fuck them all anyway.

The mystical kernel of all religion is inherently hierarchical, discriminatory, and exclusionary, monstrous, archaic, persecutionary and retrograde — a fusion of fascism, populism, forgery, hysteria and excrement — reactionary, pre-modern and primitive. It is incompatible with the process known as the Enlightenment.

All of religion’s shit amounts to a battle between philosophy and priestcraft, between this-worldliness and otherworldliness - between the material and the magik.

Just thought I’d mention it… (and it gave an excuse to chuck up a Youtube with some glib one-liners included).

Will someone please direct the Elders’, or the Lobby’s, efforts against this nut! And soon, before he publishes some half-baked “criticism of Israel,” to defend himself with.

A few selections from the article, “The professor the anti-Semites love: Kevin MacDonald, Cal State Long Beach, and the downside of academic freedom”:

“What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews,” Martin Fiebert [MacDonald’s potential publisher] wrote… “Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive. I’m sure you would be dismayed to find that your book has a treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with ‘Mein Kampf’ and the ‘Protocols of Zion.’”

“I certainly reject the tactics and the rhetoric of these people. It’s very crude,” MacDonald added. “But to the extent that David Duke is trying to advance a white ethnic interest and so on, I don’t have any problem with that.”

I like hijacking other people’s words and using them to start hares running. On my own blog, I’ve used this word ‘negativist’ (much loved of Will of this parish, from whom it came). And a while ago, we had ‘bloggertarian.’

That was a laugh that was.

My favourite word at the moment is ‘memebot.’ I saw it a few weeks ago in the comments here …or more precisely, here:

“For examples, see just about every other article by Seumas Milne. The imperviousness to evidence and reason is quite remarkable. He’s not so much a thinker as trafficker in assertion; a memebot, if you will.”

Seumas Milne is, indeed, a memebot. As is Simon Tidsall (dealt with nicely by Norm here).

These are both examples of journalists that offend my Eustonian prejudices, of course - I’m sure that you can find a few membots that exhibit them as well. Be my guest.

Other examples are, of course, our friends the bloggertarians. Raise a question - any question - and the answer is always ’sack public employees’ / ’school vouchers’ / ‘government can’t work’ etc. The thick shitheads.

A one line assertion is always sufficient for memebots. It’s getting so that you can’t write a post anywhere without a few of them popping up to annoy you. It must stop.

The reason that I’m writing about it here is because I think it may be a useful shorthand comments policy for any bloggers who like getting half-decent arguments back in their comment threads.

In future, I may just delete commenters on the grounds that they are memebots. A one word explanation. Take my advice, for once in your life? Delete your memebots too. Life’s too short to do anything else.

The final paragraph in the newest C Hitchens article.

That last point, however, brings me to my own closing observation. It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today’s Iranian “Islamic republic” is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60^th, let alone a 70^th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.

Last night I thought about writing something about the BBC documentary series Wild China that has just started its six-episode run. But events in China have taken a catastrophic turn in the form of a very wild natural event that is reported to have resulted in the deaths of thousands.

Unlike in Burma, the Chinese authorities are known for their skill in dealing with natural disasters such as the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Sichuan province early this morning. Let’s hope that all goes well with the emergency effort, and there are no aftershocks that take further lives.

The first episode of wildlife film producer Phil Chapman’s documentary broadcast yesterday was superb, and I’m looking forward very much to the rest of the series. The dead tree edition of the Radio Times this week describes the film as “sumptuous”, and for very good reason. Chapman says that there was a lot of negotiation involved between himself and the Chinese state broadcaster, which is ever wary of foreigners. Says Chapman:

Our greatest misconception of the country is that it’s military-dominated, industrialised, trashed, with a cowed population. Well, it just isn’t like that. China’s a big, beautiful country, with amazing people, most of whom don’t give a shit about Beijing or politics. I was expecting a much more guarded, fearful society, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you’re in, it’s hard not to fall in love with the place.”

It sounds like the kind of place I should see for myself. What Chapman says is no doubt correct, and those of us who spend much time criticising China for its state capitalist dictatorship would do well to remember this and keep a sense of perspective. Totalitarianism is a complex beast.

I want a t-shirt made up with this image — it will enhance myself as a thing of beauty when worn.

respec - madfuckker

I am narf tired oot by all the highfalutin political activism that is blogging I am.

I want one of these to ease the strain.

Where do you buy a horse from?

Heine’s famous quotation, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” has had a fresh outing in the wake of the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the public burning of books by the Nazis. Today, Islamist militias in Iraq are showing that they can eclipse even the Brownshirts in brutality. They have skipped a stage. They don’t bother with destroying art - they are killing artists.

In November Seif Yehia, 23, was beheaded for singing western songs at weddings, and painter Ibraheem Sadoon was shot dead as he drove through Baghdad. In February Sunni fighters killed Waleed Dahi, 27, a young actor, while he rehearsed for a play due to open at the Jordanian National Theatre this month.

These chilling words came from a spokesman:

‘Acting, theatre and television encourage bad behaviour and irreligious attitudes. They promote customs that affect the morality of our traditional society.

I suppose beheading is a moral act then.

One of the things tyranny fears most is art. It is the anti-imperialism of the mind, expelling the totalitarian occupation force of the official ideology. Instead, it offers rational thought and human emotion - truth and beauty. It is on the front line.

Here’s a guest post from the one and only Dave Osler

The last time an Old Etonian got to head a major British political party, the Beatles had only just released their second single. Back in 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home ‘emerged’ as a non-elected prime minister, after not being elected to head the Conservative Party.

The voters didn’t get any say on this one, and nor did the hapless Tory backbenchers, for that matter. It would have been a damned impertinence to subject Baron Home of the Hirsel, fourteenth Earl of Home, to that kind of inconvenience.

Instead, a handful of leading Conservative figures selected Sir Alec for the job, by a process only paralleled by the mechanisms for choosing a new Pope.

They say Sir Alec was a good chap and a jolly nice fellow and all that. But as a paid-up, grouse-shooting, not particularly bright member of the upper class, he was very obviously out of touch with ordinary voters. Labour was quick to realise that, and leader of the opposition Harold Wilson hammered home the point. Repeatedly.

A year later, Wilson was in Number Ten. The Tories had been ousted from office after 13 years, with class politics one of the major reasons. From then on, the Tories were determined to broaden their appeal.

Home’s replacement, Edward Heath, became the first grammar school boy to lead the Conservatives. Later, things got more plebeian even than that, with the job later going to a petit bourgeois grocer’s daughter from Grantham, the son of a garden ornament manufacturer who went bust, and even a kid from a comp in Rotherham.

Until now, that is. As if to illustrate the statistical tendency of reversion to the mean, the Old Etonians are back in charge of the Tories. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an OE with deep family roots in the ruling classes of several nations, has just been elected mayor of London.

Meanwhile, the party is headed by David Cameron, offspring of a stockbroker and the daughter of a Baronet, making him fifth cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II. He is thought to be worth £30m.

Labour has historically been the party that represents the majority of society against the elite, so all this should present it with an open goal. I mean, Wilson was nobody’s idea of a prole, but he was still able effectively to highlight what the Tories are and who they represent.

But you can bet on one thing. Labour today - ‘ideologically neutral’ New Labour, with its schoolgirl crush on the super-rich - won’t try anything of the sort. That would smack of class politics, and we can’t be having any of that, can we? Not even if the other side are most insistent on its reintroduction.

Link:

Nowhere but Burma can one find this combination of brutality, corruption, ineptness, religiosity and xenophobia in a regime which, under one leader and name or another, has hung on to power for 46 years.

Invade Burma — kill the rulers — put their heads on spikes. Free the people. 枪杆子里面出政权

Self-explanatory? Maybe, if you’re familiar with the German scene. If not, by way of a confusing introduction, the photo was taken on Mayday in Hamburg, which I reported on in a previous post. But, these black-block looking youth are not from the radical Left, but rather from the radical Right. “Autonomist nationalists” or some other faction of the neo-Nazi scene.

“Deutsche Intifada”? This says a lot about the self-understanding of some of the radical right in Germany. Not conservative but rebellious and militant; not parliamentary (though they do have their party, the NPD, holding seats in office) but combative; anti-imperialist with a constant focus on their supposed victimhood.

And who do they appeal to? The radical Left, rebellious youth, and older generations whose guilt-defensive antisemitism (or “secondary antisemitism”) can be projected onto Israel.

The photo comes from the website of the Anti-Defamation Forum.

Keep an eye on this guy’s blog for analysis.

There is a report from Al Jazeera here which seems to my eyes to give a pretty good account of the current situation and forces at work.

Yom Huledet Same’ach.

His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster has called for Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”. We are to be respected and understood, he says, but at the same time Britain must not become “a God-free zone”.

After all he and his fellow clerics have said about the fanaticism of people like me, what with our “secular fundamentalism” and all, I’m really not sure what to make of this latest intervention from England’s leading Roman Catholic.

So how should we respond? Keep it clean and civilised, boys and girls, or I’ll start deleting comments. We keep a respectable house here. Oh yes.

An actor comes to a sticky end.

The Torygraph describes them–barristers, a remnant of feudalism which, despite attempts to diversify the profession remains ‘male, public school and Oxbridge educated’–as ‘work-obsessed stars’. The poor loves:

The Bar, once the most fusty of professions, is being penetrated by young men who look like City traders–and some of whom are increasingly seen to be acting like their whizzkid financial equivalents.

But today it is still a profession shocked by the violent death earlier this week of Mark Saunders, an Oxford-educated barrister in one of London’s leading chambers, but who ended up shot dead by police at the end of a five-hour siege at his home in Chelsea.

[…..]

[C]ould it be that the peculiar stresses and strains of the barrister’s life may have contributed to Saunders’s violent end–what has been described as “suicide by cop”?

Exeunt omnes.

In case you were in any doubt:

Great tits cope well with warming

Impressed.

(hat tip — probably every site on the hintertubes by now)

Contrary to the assertion on the advertisement, we–humans–are not ‘99% monkey’, but we are 100% ape. Of course if you are feeling like a baboon, you might be interested in Paulville–a cursory scan of the website forums turns up yet more ‘libertarians’ in favour of the free movement of capital without corresponding free movement of labour–or in fact free movement of pedestrians … shut that gate! Do they really enjoy it when their waking hours are spent staked out on the porch with a loaded shotgun trained down the street? Perhaps someone should build Paulieville next door–just to piss them off.

Remaining on the topic of feudalist filth, according to the Times, ‘help is at hand for organisations that fear disruption if their workforces are unionised’–those bastards, refusing to send their children up chimneys!

Burke Group […] is a new sort of HR consultancy that arrived in Britain eight years ago. [I]t describes itself as the largest American management consultancy that specialises “in union avoidance and preventative industrial labour relations”. It employs more than 60 consultants, including a representative in Britain.

Most of the companies seeking Burke Group’s help want to swing an employee ballot against union recognition. If 40% vote in favour of recognition, their union gains legal rights, including the right to negotiate on pay, hours and holidays.

The next time you ask what trade unions have ever done for you, think about the 40 hour week, award wages, holiday and sick leave, the fact that your employer is supposed to provide a safe and secure working environment and that your kids aren’t working 16 hours a day in a factory–rights which were won after years of hard class struggle by working men and women, for which some laid down their lives. Anyone who takes these rights for granted is deluded–they are not guaranteed.

Fight the power!

End slavery!

Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. [ … ] By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. [ … ] if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level.

The Gospel of Consumption (via isotopp)

Christopher Hitchens

Of all the slogans that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama might have picked to distinguish themselves from one another, “Prolier Than Thou” was probably the least convincing.

Yet in the closing days of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, it seemed as if the two graduates of the nation’s most privileged law schools, and the two former residents of the Ritziest parts of Illinois, were in a race to don the bluest collar and the most stained factory overalls.

Not since a desperate George Herbert Walker Bush (father of the current incumbent) started munching on pork-rinds, donning a Teamster cap and squeezing behind the wheel of a big rig in 1992 have I seen anything so condescending and ridiculous as the recent competition between Clinton and Obama to down the most beers, pose with the most guns, boast of the most hunting expeditions and so forth.

(By the way, if you want to know the most interesting class difference between Britain and the United States, notice that in America it’s the worker and trade union member who talks most about hunting, shooting and fishing.)

However, it was not really the class vote at which people were looking. In North Carolina, Senator Obama reaped almost one hundred per cent of a constituency which the commentators quite frankly called by its primary color.

In Indiana, that constituency is not such a large share of the electorate.

Nobody especially likes to bang on about this, but this is as good an explanation as any for the discrepancy between the two candidates and the two states.

And, since West Virginia and Kentucky are next up – and reporters are almost unconsciously describing these two states as for some reason more “natural” for the former First Lady – in a short while we will be seeing the pendulum of politics swing back again.

There is less and less point in pretending that this campaign is not “about” race.

As far as I can calculate it, though, Mrs Clinton can carry all the next five states AND Puerto Rico and still not get an arithmetical majority.

Nonetheless, she continues to act as if she knows something that the rest of us do not. And I can tell you that it spooks the Obama campaign.

Last night, claiming victory in Indiana, she continued to make her pseudo-populist demand that there be a remission of the tax on petrol. She loudly repeated her call for the disallowed votes in Michigan and Florida to be counted and recounted.

She coined a new term – “invisible” – for the luckless and underprivileged Americans that she so weirdly claims to understand and represent. (“Invisible Man”, I could not help remembering, was the title of Ralph Ellison’s most famous novel about the neglect of black Americans.)

And she looked tireless and energetic and full of vim and vigour in her – ill advised I felt – electric blue trouser-suit. It’s this amazing love of combat for its own sake that has won her so much grudging respect even from many Republicans.

However, just take a look at the speech and notice the lugubrious, white-haired, red-faced, scowling and bored figure standing so listlessly just behind her.

How can a campaign once renowned for slickness and spin have permitted such a horrid spectre at the feast?

And this dreary, resentful and shambolic person was once himself described as the country’s first black president. If his wife loses we shall know why.

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It has been a while since we had a youtube and a glib one liner here. Will make up for it now.

German technological superiority on display — they can fuck off as well.

They think it’s all over.

It is now.