Heretics' almanac

Harry's lack of education

Much can be said about Prince Harry's bad taste, poor sense of history, and lacking sense of responsibility, and I will in a minute.  But there's something more troubling over the glee with which the press has attached itself to this.  I can't imagine that a single editor of the tabloid press was actually unhappy about this incident.

You have to wonder whether the Royal family more regrets the publicity than the actual event, what with all the crap they have to put up with anyway.  And you also have to wonder whether the foolish prince (and his brother) will learn the right lesson from all of this.

Because for the future head of state for the United Kingdom, the legacy of World War II isn't limited to a visit to Auschwitz, no matter how much it will (and should) shake them up.  In fact, in today's climate, the princes might be tempted to categorize Nazis as someone who primarily hated Jews. 

This year's most outragous word

The word of the year, according to the American Dialect Society, is:

red/blue/purple states (further explanation unnecessary)

though I have to say that "urban archipelago" may turn out to be the word that best covers the insight from this year's election returns.

Voted the most outragous was:

santorum: the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

Not bad - a lesson in ehmm biology and dialect at the same time.   As it turns out, there's a whole movement to make this term stick (so to speak) in order to soil (so to speak) Senator Rick Santoro's name for his obsessive and detailed talk about sex between two males (even though he apparently is against it - the sex, I mean, but probably also the use of his last name). 

The ADS voted it in, but noted that newspapers were unlikely to carry it, and they were right.  So now it's up to the blogosphere.  I'm doing my part in the interest of free speech.

Christopher Hitchens's sense of justice

Christopher Hitchens fancies himself a rigorous and reflective thinker, and he may well be.  But he has a hopeless blind spot when it comes to Jews Israel.  Consider this paragraph:

The Palestinian people have a much more justifiable grievance against Israel than even the most alienated Sunni slum-dweller has against the Coalition in Iraq. The Arab citizens of former mandate Palestine live, at best, as second-class citizens in Israel. At worst, they live in vile refugee camps in other states. In the middle, in Jerusalem and Gaza and the West Bank, they experience occupation and colonization and annexation. More than that, they have been told that their very presence is an inconvenience, since the land was awarded by God to the Jews.

Hitchens offers this paragraph as a premise for his discourse; it's not up for discussion; anyone who aspires to Hitchens's cosmopolitan sophistication must simply accept it all as true.

Of course, it isn't.  At best, it's argumentative, and at worst it's all false and misleading. 

Jagland's not quite off base, for once

Torbjørn Jagland chairs the Norwegian parliamentary foreign affairs committee and has become one of the oft-consulted politicians on the Arab-Israeli conflict in Norwegian media.  He's become rather more thoughtful through the years, though he's still nearly hopelessly naive about the dynamics of the conflict.

So when the Norwegian Press Agency, which should be known as PLO (Norway) interviewed him about the Palestinian election, he had something to say:

First and foremost, that the Palestinians had sent a "clear signal:"

We must remember that the elections were held under Israeli occupation.  But that the Palestinians have sent a clear signal that they wish for negotiations, while they also distance themselves from violence.

But he also sent a warning:

But many are misinterpreting the situation if they think Abbas will be more moderate than Arafat.  Abbas will be just as tough on the central issues as Arafat was.

It is, of course, all up to the Israelis:

Can Abbas win?

Mahmoud Abbas is described as a “moderate” politician, and most analysts believe that his election brings hope to the peace process, which in the last few years has been neither.

For his part, Abbas vows to carry on the legacy of Arafat, and that one may hope he means the Western, English-speaking and largely fictitious  edition of Arafat rather than the Arabic-speaking one. 

Arafat's legacy, of course is one of murder, corruption, and self-serving cowardice.  The Palestinians would do well to reallocate much of the blame for their misery to him rather than the Israelis.  Still, Abbas has to face the reality that too much moderation is going to get him killed.  Because Arafat's most intractable legacy is that he set false expectations among the Palestinians - that an armed struggle would somehow lead to victory and vindication, and that the more they suffered, the better the outcome.

Abbas has said that all this terrorism has been futile, but he hasn't said it was wrong.  He's never said that it's too late to hope for anything as good as  Barak's proposal at Taba.  He wouldn't get elected if he had, and he'll be killed if he does.

For this to work, then, the Israelis have to play the bad guys to Abbas's good guy, so that Abbas can say that peace is at hand while victory is ony a dream.  Or the peace process has to be slowed down enough that Palestinian society can be deradicalized to the point that borders are a side issue.  I'm for the latter, but I doubt Europe and the US have the patience to take this through several election cycles. Sent wirelessly from my Blackberry.

Blaming Israel, just in case

The formerly broadsheet tabloid Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has toned down its rabidly anti-Zionist bias in the last several months, but couldn't resist a swipe today, with this headline:

Voting at Israel's mercy

This kind of headline lays the groundwork for:

• Blaming Israel if the election doesn't get the stamp of approval from international observers
• Giving lots of credit to the Palestinians if the election does get the thumbs up

The Norwegian reporter on site takes Saeb Erakat at face value when he says that Israel has failed to ease a single restriction on travel within the West Bank and Gaza, and he intimates that low turnout will diminish Abbas's legitimacy.

Femininity and feminism

I'm a big admirer of Laura Kipnis (and she even looks kinda hot in her picture), and she doesn't let me down with her new article in Slate, about why feminists don't want to look, eh, unattractive.  She points out that there's a contradiction between feminism and femininity in that:

Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men.  It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself.

while...

Feminism, on the other hand, is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market value as the measure of female worth.

So I have two things to say about this:

Decreasing number of missing Norwegians

I'm completely baffled by the gyrations in the count of Norwegian casualties from the tsunami disaster.  Regular readers will recall that I estimated the total number of missing Norwegians could be upward of 1400; but boy, was I wrong.  We're down to 77 missing people, after the Norwegian criminal police (Norway has - count 'em - one law enforcement agency, the Police) published the raw list of 200-something, after they had cleaned out something like 1200 from the original list.

It turns out people who were minding their own business at home in Norway were on the list, as well as people who were in places far away from both the Indian Ocean and Norway. 

I thought it was a good idea to publish the list, and it turned out I was right - the number sank drastically as a result.  So I can't, in fairness, complain that they shouldn't have published it when the list was a mess.  And while I'm in my fairminded mood, I should also point out that Norwegian citizens are under no obligation to tell anyone where they're going from day to day.

Wikipedia dialectic

If anybody needs an introduction to the mess that is the debate on the Arab-Israeli conflict (never mind the actual conflict), Wikipedia is a pretty good place to start.  Pretty much every article that touches the conflict has an NPOV tag, which translates to The neutrality of this article is disputed.  And it nearly always is.

One example is the article on "Palestine."  This term, you must understand, is distinct from "The Region of Palestine" and "the State of Palestine," or for that matter, "Eretz Israel."  So to avoid any further confusion, there's a separate article called "Definitions of Palestine," which is arguably the most interesting of the lot.

In any event, I waded into the Palestine article and found it to a disjointed mess of partisan arguments that were largely redundant to the same arguments found in other articles.  Since the open source concept of Wikipedia allows anyone to edit anything, I radically got rid of all redundant stuff and left it mostly like a link farm.  Another editor prompty reverted it to its mess without making further comment, and I reverted it back,and it seems most people are cool with my changes.  At least so far.

Blasphemy!

Daniel Gordis writes that the Sephardic Chief Rabbi believes that the earthquake and tsunami resulted from divine anger at the evil ways of, well, I guess the people that were killed, injured homeless, parentless, or childless by the disaster.

With all due respect, I think this is blasphemy - or at least, there should be a serious discussion about whether it is.  So many terrible things happen all the time to people who have done nothing to deserve it, and to think that God will mete out this kind of non-specific, broad, indiscriminate punishment is, well, offensive to say the least. 

I've started to believe that the difference between the pious and the fundamentalists is that the pious mostly have questions, and the fundamentalists mostly have answers.  Asking God "why" is a tradition that goes (at least) as far back as Job, and I'm not sure we're any closer to an answer.  Rabbis and other enlightened souls saw lots of meaningless suffering, and it's rare you'll find any of them speculating too loud about the moral reasons behind it.