Where's the internet?

Another normlink: the always spot-on South Park imagines a world without the internet. I watched the clip with a shudder of recognition. We experienced a brief broadband outage of our own recently, and we were that family. Even worse: that panicked, powerless and ridiculous-looking dad in a dressing-down - that was me.

Where is the Internet? - Click here for more amazing videos

Noams and Norms

Here's the ideal festive present for your pseudo-leftist friends: a Gnome Chomsky, or if you prefer, a Garden Noam. Other punning products on sale at the same site include meditating Garden 'OMs'.

Thanks to normblog for the link. Of course, what members of the decent left would really like to receive this holiday season is a Garden Norm...

Amanda Knox is almost certainly innocent

That's the view put forward by columnists in The Times and The Guardian this week. According to Alex Wade, writing in the former:

This is a young woman preparing to spend the next 26 years behind bars, whose case, had it been brought in Britain, would never have reached court. If by some cruel miracle a British judge had found himself presiding over 12 good men and true, whose task it was to determine whether Knox was innocent of Kercher’s murder, it is inconceivable that he would not have made strong, telling directions to acquit.

Then why was she convicted? Wade puts it down to sexism, plain and simple: 'In a trial where the evidence has struggled even to reach the realm of the circumstantial, Knox has been demonised for being a sexually active woman.' And he concludes: 'It is a tragedy that Italy — which [...] played a key role in the development of Western jurisprudence — should stand by as so chilling a blend of sexism and injustice wreaks havoc.'

On the other hand, for US crime writer Douglas Preston, writing today in The Guardian, this apparent miscarriage of justice is all about preserving the reputations of corrupt and self-serving prosecutors. Preston alleges that Amanda Knox's initial interrogation was a travesty, in which she was tricked (and possibly beaten) into signing a confession she hardly understood:

I have read those statements. They are written in perfect, idiomatic, bureacratic 'police jargon' Italian. It is difficult to imagine that a foreign student, who had been in Italy for just two months, would have understood what those statements said, let alone made them herself.

And he accuses Italian police of declaring the case closed, and treating Amanda Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Solicito as convicted criminals, before they had even come to trial: 'With Knox and Sollecito locked up, the police threw all their resources into retroactively gathering the evidence to prove them guilty.' Then, despite the fact that defence lawyers painstakingly demolished every shred of evidence against them in court, and firmly believed they had won the day, the jury found the pair guilty. Why?

I posed this question to my most knowledgeable contact in Italy, a highly connected person who knows whereof he speaks. Here is his opinion: 'This verdict had nothing to do with the actual evidence. It's all about la faccia, face. They had to convict her. Now, with the conviction, everyone has saved face, the judiciary, the prosecutors and police have been vindicated. There will be an appeal and she will be acquitted, and that will be done to satisfy the Americans. Then everybody will be happy. Of course, Amanda and Raffaele will be in prison for another two years, but that's a small matter compared to the careers of so many important people.'

That's justice in Berlusconi's Italy.

[A trivial aside: I tried linking to Douglas Preston's article, which I read in the G2 section of today's print edition, but despite my best efforts I can't find it on the Grauniad website. It's not the first time this has happened: it may look pretty, but the paper's site must be one of the most frustrating to search, and there's often a strange disconnect between print and online editions. Inputting 'Amanda Knox' only brought up days-old articles, while typing 'Douglas Preston' threw up stories in which that particular Christian name had occurred in conjunction with the Lancashire town. On the other hand, when I searched The Times website, Wade's piece came up first time.]

No relief from belief

A propos of my discussion the other week of performative versus propositional views of faith: Troy Jollimore has written an excellent review of (and riposte to) Karen Armstrong's The Case for God. Here he is summing up Armstrong's sleight-of-hand claim that religion isn't really about 'belief':

Pointing out that sacred texts are not meant to be read literally, then, is not enough. Armstrong’s more radical strategy is to de-emphasize the role of belief in religious life altogether: Practice, she writes, is more important than belief, and we misunderstand references to “belief” in the Bible, the Quran and elsewhere if we interpret them in accordance with our modern understanding of belief. (The correct sense, she writes, has more to do with “ ‘trust,’ ‘loyalty,’ ‘engagement,’ and ‘commitment.’ ”) Critics who focus on the absurdity or implausibility of so many religious beliefs, then, or on the fact that religion encourages people to accept these beliefs uncritically and to hold them in the face of any countervailing evidence, are missing the point: It isn’t believing certain things but rather living a certain sort of life that makes a person religious.

Jollimore's response:

One might well worry, though, that it is not as easy as Armstrong assumes to separate belief from action or practice. Indeed all intentional voluntary action presupposes some set of beliefs. Armstrong may perhaps make a plausible claim in asserting that faith, as understood by mainstream religious traditions before the advent of modernity, involved more than “mere” belief in the modern sense; but if the problem with religious life is that it encourages false, absurd, unjustified beliefs, showing that it does other things as well is not sufficient. What must be shown is that religion does not involve belief, and not merely that it involves other things in addition to belief. So long as religious worldviews differ in certain important ways from that held by the nonreligious, one can still complain that that worldview is poorly founded and, to a large degree, implausible.

Precisely.

If you want to read the whole review, which includes a nice distinction between apophaticism and subjectivism, you can find it here. Via Ophelia, Russell and Jerry, each of whom adds interesting comments of their own.

Leith links

As a person of Scottish descent, I managed to resist the siren call of Homecoming Scotland for most of 2009 - and I still haven't visited the Aberdeenshire home of my distant ancestors. However, my day job has meant me spending time north of the border recently - in the fascinating borough of Leith (whatever you do, don't call it a suburb of Edinburgh), where multiple layers of history, culture and migration remain visible, and medieval lanes and Victorian municipal monuments jostle alongside renovated warehouses and spanking new housing developments.

Time, then, for a shout-out to a few of the town's excellent and incredibly civilised cafés, which have made my visits all the more pleasant. I was going to recommend La Cerise, an attractive patisserie and coffee shop right in the middle of Great Junction Street, but unfortunately they were flooded out last week and won't be open again until the New Year. Instead, you could try Café Truva, a cosy Turkish / Mediterranean cafe right on the shore, overlooking the old dockside. Even better, linger awhile at The Water of Leith on Coburg Street, where you'll be assured of great food, an art gallery, free wi-fi and a warm welcome.

I'm looking forward to my next visit.

Eh oh

This'll make a change from all the religion and politics...

Last week I heard Simon Mayo interviewing Andrew Davenport, the creative genius behind those contemporary classics of children's television Teletubbies and In The Night Garden, who has finally begun to emerge from behind his puppets and receive some of the recognition he deserves (it was the second BBC interview with him I’d heard in the past month).

Davenport’s creations hold a special place in the hearts of anyone who was a young child (or a parent of young children) in Britain in the Nineties or early Noughties. Our own children were born in the mid-Nineties, so for them (and us) Andrew will always be, first and foremost, the voice of Tiny from Tots TV. And the question I’d ask him if I was conducting the interview would be: how on earth did someone with such a deeply resonant voice achieve the high-pitched tones of that anarchic green-haired puppet?

Everyone now associates Davenport with Teletubbies, not surprisingly since it was the first of his creations for Ragdoll to gain international recognition. (On a serious note for a moment: John Bayley informs us that, once her dementia set in, Teletubbies was the only TV programme that gave Iris Murdoch any pleasure.) But Tiny and Tom, with their echoes of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers (with the French-speaking Tilly their Margaret Dumont?), are surely one of the great comic partnerships. And for all the simple, wordless brilliance of Davenport's later productions, it's a shame he no longer has the scope to deploy the knockabout verbal wit he showed in the scripts for some of those earlier shows. If you don't believe me (and you've got a few minutes to spare) take a look at this clip, but make sure you watch it through to the end:

Our shelves also contain dusty, worn-out VHS tapes of some of Davenport’s other early programmes, such as Brum and Rosie and Jim. What's more, living as we did in the Midlands when our children were young, we made frequent trips to the Ragdoll shop (sadly, no longer there) in Stratford-on-Avon. Once, we even saw the actual Rosie and Jim barge tied up on the river outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Now here’s my bid for Pseuds' Corner. If Tots TV - full of eccentric wit, but retaining a conventional narrative structure and recognisable characters - was Andrew Davenport's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then maybe the more symbolic and mythopoeic Teletubbies is his Ulysses, and In the Night Garden, with its dreamy, half-conscious associative technique, his Finnegan's Wake. Or maybe Teletubbies is Davenport's Waste Land and In the Night Garden his Four Quartets?

I should stop now...

The blinkered vision of the 'post' left

A couple of interesting pieces about anti-imperialism and the myopia of the modern left:

First, Michael Tomasky on the 'fatuous gas' of Michael Moore's open letter to President Obama 'about America, Afghanistan and empire', in which the film-maker repeats the lazy trope about US involvement repeating mistakes made by Britain and Russia:

I really don't see what America's mission in Afghanistan has to do with what the British did or what the Soviets did. People love lazy historical parallels, and have a tendency to have over-learned the famous Santayana maxim and believe that invoking it makes them sound smart. But every historical situation is different. Why wouldn't someone with Moore's lefty politics be righteous in the conviction that we owe it to the Afghan people to try to help them establish a proper nation-state for the first time in their history?

And in response to this from Moore - 'Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has' - Tomasky writes:

That sentence of Moore's [...] is pretty condescending, isn't it? It's never been a nation, isn't now, and (implied) never will be. Ain't our problem. Well, I think it is our problem. It's true that some places and peoples on this earth just get dealt a bad hand. Afghanistan, with no ports or water access and an impossible terrain, is one of those places. It's always going to be poor. But it can adopt the structures of a functioning society. Having invaded it, we ought to try to help it, not just throw up our hands and say forget about it.

Tomasky interprets Moore's position as symptomatic of the political tunnel vision of many on the modern left:

Anyway, this is the thing about the left, at least of Moore's generation. The anti-imperialist reflex -- the tendency and sometimes even eagerness to see America as an empire bent on imperial designs and dominance -- always trumps everything else.

Along similar lines, here's Joshua Leach writing about the work of postcolonial critic Ashis Nandy (via B&W):

Had William Hazlitt written his essay “On Persons with One Idea” today, he would surely have found room for the field of postcolonial studies. It is a field with only one idea: namely, that imperialism and racism are such dominant features of modern life, and had such a foundational role in the construction of our present society, that they inform every aspect of our ideas, culture, and history. Postcolonialism is, in theory, anti-hierarchical and anti-oppressive. But because it has only one idea, it can easily become oppressive in practice, and to quite a large extent.

I recommend reading the whole article: it carefully takes apart the hoary myth that liberal universalism is nothing more than a cover for western imperialism, and highlights the logical contradiction of criticising the evils of imperialism from a standpoint of cultural relativism, in the belief that 'egalitarian ideologies, the ideals of democracy and human rights [are] mere hierarchies and oppressions in disguise'. As Leach writes:

But how does one know that such hierarchies are reprehensible if equality is not a goal? If egalitarian ideologies, democracy, and self-government are not legitimate ideals, why should it be the case, as Nandy maintains, that imperialism is so wrong?

Like Tomasky, Leach points to the dangers of the single-minded focus on imperialism by the post-colonialist, post-modern left:

What is important to realize, however, is that imperialism is not the only evil in the world, even though it is a serious one. The failure to see this rather elementary fact characterizes a great deal of postcolonial scholarship. One must avoid imperialism, but one must not be so desperately fearful of intervening in other countries that one seals off the victims of cruelty within their respective nations and refuses to promise aid.

The danger of this position, of course, is that self-proclaimed progressives end up endorsing the most reactionary social movements in the name of anti-imperialism:

Nandy is tempted, thanks to the entire spirit of postcolonialism, to attribute all of the world’s evils to imperialism. And because of this, he ends up tacitly condoning all of the world’s injustices which predate imperialism, such as patriarchy, religious intolerance, and the violence of tradition. Given Nandy’s personal views in his public life, he would no doubt be shocked to be accused of defending such things. But he has in fact fallen victim to the postcolonial trap: he has focused so exclusively on one injustice—imperialism—that he has rendered himself inured to all the other injustices in the world which are also crying out for redress.