Sunday, March 21, 2010

Al Gore v George W Bush/ Gordon Brown v David Cameron

It's election year in the UK, and nobody is sure what the outcome will be.
People are concerned about the personalities of the two main contenders, and I have a slight sense of deja vu.

The 2010 UK general election feels a little like the 2000 US Presiential Election. On one side you have a knowledgeable, though charmless-looking incumbent (AG and GB); on the other, you have a charismatic, though fairly clueless, challenger (GWB and DC).
Well, we all know how the American public voted in 2000; split down the middle and undecided, the Supreme Court finally chose George W Bush after the fiasco of the Florida ballot recount saga. And the polls in the UK are getting closer as each week nears to election day early May.

Sometimes I wonder what people really want in their politicians. Sometimes I wonder if the people voting really care at all about who's in charge. Certainly, those undecided voters who voted for George W Bush were likely swayed by his "charisma". And some people in the UK have been swayed by David Cameron's "charisma". But in 2000 the USA was in an economic boom; in 2010 the UK is in an economic recession. So in that way, the rationale behind the UK electorate is much more important, as it directly affects the direction of the country. The Conservative plan to save the economy is mostly based on cutting public services to the bare bones. But this seems like asking a person on life support to go on a diet.
As experts seem to think a minority government (of which party, no-one's sure) is a distinct possibility, the Liberal Democrats may (emphasis on "may") get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to directly influence the government. Going back to the 2000 US election parallels, the Lib Dems are like the Ralph Nader of UK politics. I have to admit that of the "big three", the Lib Dems have some of the most sensible ideas overall. So they get my vote. Gordon Brown has his flaws, of course (who doesn't?), but he at least has more ideas, experience and (overseas, at least) respectability than David Cameron. DC seems a perfectly nice chap, of course, but I'm not so sure about the rest of his party. Oh, and if the Conservatives get in, maybe Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, will be cock-a-hoop. He'll have a better chance to convince the Scots for more powers and to try and break away from "Tory" England.
As a side note, it's often forgotten that Scotland joined with England because Scotland was bankrupt. Now that Scotland has oil, and England is bankrupt, well...

Why More Anti-Terror Laws Help Terrorists

First of all, I'm not going to repeat the well-known idea that stricter anti-terror laws act as a "clarion call" to other fanatics. This has been said before. What interests me is this from a policing point of view.

In Al Gore's excellent book "The Assualt On Reason", he mentions that the 9/11 terrorists were already known the the FBI and other policing agencies, and were bring tracked using already perfectly well-functioning methods. The reason they were able to cary out the atrocity was because simply through police incompetence, not because there were lack of laws existing to help catch or prevent them. And from a policing point, this is the crucial issue: effective anti-terror policing comes through sheer hard work at infiltration and detection of threats. Creating more laws makes policing more complacent, not less, because it changes the focus of police's attention to merely minimising the risk, rather than seeking out the root cause. Police say they have prevented dozens of potential attacks through traditional infiltration and tracking; they almost never prevented an attack by relying on the new powers they have through more anti-terror laws.

Another point about crime prevention; creating all these new anti-terror laws may seem to work in the short term as a way of making it more difficult for terrorists, but in the medium and longer term, it just forces terrorists to up their game and get smarter. In other words, anti-terror laws make terrorists think smarter. After 9/11, restrictions were placed at airports: the result was the shoebomber. Then there was the "liquids" plot, that resulted in the liquids restrictions at airports. Then there was the more improvised attempted attack over Christmas. So, well done, people in charge; every law passed aides the evolution of terrorism.
I just wish these people had thought about that, before they thought about all the new powers it would give them.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Land Of Fire, City Of Winds

In the place between East and West, lies the Eagle, its wings spread,
its veins run with the blood of victories and predators past defeated,
in its mouth it holds the prize, the victory of victories.
The City Of Winds, they call it.

As ancient as the pyramids, they say.
There they worship the elemental flame of life,
its followers live off the fiery, black blood of the Eagle,
as it nourishes and feeds their own life-blood.
In the Land Of Fire, the ground itself bleeds for its people.

All people flock to the land shaped by the Eagle,
all drawn by the charity of the soil, the majesty of the mountains,
drawn by the clarity of its waters, the modesty of its disciples.
They all flock to the City Of Winds.

Time is slow in the land shaped as the Eagle,
everything and nothing changes, people are the same but different,
powers rise and powers fall, the fiery, black blood of Eagle flows on,
people come and people go, drawn in and pushed away.
In the Land Of Fire, nothing is as it seems.

The disciples are gone from the Land shaped like the Eagle,
drawn elsewhere as the ground bleeds with the blood of its people,
the Eagle's life-blood feeds the victory of victories.
In the City Of Winds, there is no past, present or future.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Byzantine bureaucracy and Kafkaesque capers

I remember the time a few years ago when I was in Istanbul and needed to go to the central police station near Aksaray to get a residence permit:

I arrived there at around 7am with my local helper from school, in order to be near the front of the queue. The station opened operations at 8am, but already there were a number of people there. Applicants has to wait in the reception area until it opened, handing their passport to the officer on duty. Then, when the time came (by which time there were over a hundred people in the reception area), we were called through the turnstile one by one, as though heading for the execution block. Once through the turnstile we exited the reception and walked through the large courtyard that seperated it from the modern main building, a large office block some storeys high. Entering the building, we turned to walk up a flight of stairs to join another queue, which wriggled its way upwards to the next floor. Some minutes later, we arrived at the top of the stairs, being given a ticket from a man in the doorway we were to head through. The ticket gave us a booth number, and the number in line. Walking through the doorway, we were confronted by a long corridor to our left and right that comprised a glass screen. A number of booths (maybe eight or nine) punctuated this long screen. The corridor was less than two metres wide, and the hundred or more applicants were fitted into this space. Working our way through this scrum of humanity, we found our booth. The interesting part was next; although we all had tickets and numbers, as there was no automated system, everyone was asking everyone else what their number was so they knew who should go before who. The result was clusters of people patiently waiting their turn, each one straining to hear what the number of the person being served was. And this was happening in a space about two metres by five (the rough distance between one booth and the next). As there were on average between ten and twenty people waiting by each booth in a ten metres squared area, you can imagine that the atmosphere was funereal. It took between ten and twenty minutes for each person's documents to be processed at the booth, so you can do the math. This waiting game took more than three hours. Oh, and I forgot to mention; beyond the glass screen where the booths were housed there was a long office full of police officers sat, reclined or otherwise, chatting and exchanging jokes, occasionally an orderly coming around with tea, and perhaps a police officer's child gamely skipping through the office playing with the stationery.
After waiting for three hours (our turn had not yet arrived) , the booth staff took a lunch break for an hour. We went for lunch in the police station's canteen, and came back at one o'clock. After another twenty minutes our turn arrived, and our documents were handed over at the booth. But there was more. After spending three hours in Death's Waiting Room (plus lunch break), we then went down the stairs to another booth, stood in another queue (this one mercifully taking only twenty minutes) to receive some slip of paper. This then meant returning to the Waiting Room Of Death and to yet another booth further down the glass corridor. Initially, the booth was empty, but eventually someone came to take the slip of paper, or whatever it was, and then we walked into another room for a discussion with some official-looking person. My helper did all the talking, but after a few exchanges, the official was seemingly satisfied. Thus we were excused, and the application process ended.
I had to return to the same police station some weeks later to receive my permit, though this process was thankfully much shorter - it involved sitting on a bench in a grey corridor with many other random foreigners, after about twenty minutes being summoned to an office in small groups so we could formally receive our documents from an officer. I wanted to kiss the guy.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Religious Intolerance vs. Religious Intolerance

I just watched the recent film "Agora" (starring Rachel Weisz), which deals with Christian riots in Alexandria in Egypt in the 4th century AD. This kind of film powerfully shows how, throughout the ages, Religion has been used by demagogues and fanatics to silence free thinking and rational thought. The rise of Christianity came about partially as a response against the decadent poytheism they saw in Rome; the rise of Islam came about under a very similar social environment in Arabia. One side-effect of this was that learning became skewed through a narrow-minded lens of thought; if it was written in "the book", it was good; if it was not written, it was bad.
I'm not going to spend my time criticising religion here. Any line of thought, whether faith or philosophy, can be misused for someone's own ends. Whereas one religion can be intolerant towards another, the same can be true of those who are not religious - athiesm expressed by some people can be as intolorant of religion as any religious fanatic. Some atheists take atheism to be a kind of "religion" in itself - Communism being just one example. It's not what you believe, but how you show it that's important. I've met a number of devout people during my time as a teacher abroad; I respect any one who chooses to live their life to good ends, but has the respect for humanity to not force their beliefs onto others, or, even worse, makes a show of moral superiority.
The example of the Danish publication of the offensive images of Muhammed is a great example of the divide here. Muslims around the world were horrified and disgusted. Europeans, however, were confused by the Muslim reaction, and some countries published the images as a sign to show how much more open-minded they were compared to Muslims. Iran, in reaction, published anti-Semitic images, to the offense of Europe. But this is the point - the Iranians were consistent with the European mentality. If it is fair to denegrate Islam, why not Judiaism? Why not Hinduism? Why not publish homophobic imagery? For that matter, let's have a competition to publish the most offensive image ever! Racist, sexist, violent, it doesn't matter! In Europe, people want to be indulgently offensive! In Denmark, being "tolerant" means you can offend any person you want to with full support of the state media! Yes, this shows how "enlightened" we are. And if you have a problem with that, then that only shows how "intolerant" you are of other people. Yes, according to this rationale, "morality" is equal to "intolerance".
"Religious intolerance" can have two meanings: a) intolerance of other religious (fanaticism); b) intolerance of religions as a whole. "Intolerance" is quite a flexible term, really. You can be intolerant of intolerance, for example (making you an "Intolerance Intolerant").
Funny, really.