History's Big Losers

"Legitimate Grievances"? Ha. Get In Line.

Any time I see some idiot wrapping themselves in a flag or burning one on the streets, I'm overcome with the sort of grief at the number of stupid people on the planet for whom a bit of graphic design means so much in their identity politics. Really, a bit of flag both with some patterns and colours is not some kind of magic talisman that empowers you with greater moral authority or privileged position in the world. Nor is burning the other guy's flag going to do anything but symbolic damage - yet the important thing about symbolic damage is that it makes you feel good and the our guy feel offended, and that's the idiotic be-all and end-all.

Let me be blunt. If you identify with any group, you have to accept that identity is a construct and has no real bearing in reality; and that your commitment to such abstractions is fundamentally stupid as abstractions go. If you're a sporting fan and you're a die hard fan of a team, that's one thing. Everybody accepts sports is not an issue to kill and die over. Nationalism and religion on the other hand have no greater actuality than identifying with a sports team but asks you to commit murder on its behalf. It feels stupid having to point out the distinction but yes, it's true. Your patriotism or religious fervour is no better than my fandom of the New York Yankees as abstractions go. It may be much worse if it asks you to go do violent shit on their imaginary behest. I might hate the Red Sox, but I don't hate them enough to to kill or hurt them or their fans. However, if you wave enough flags or bibles or Korans, you're liable to eventually kill somebody at their behest - and that's a problem.

This is one of the reasons why identity politics is at its heart, Stupid with a capital 'S'.

Which brings me to this article about how Muslims in Australia feel.

In a scathing assessment of Australia's efforts to create a harmonious society, he said constant persecution, hypocritical Australian laws, vitriolic media and repeated invasions in the Middle East were pushing young Muslims "to the margins of society" and driving them to radicalisation.

"Denying the root causes is like applying a Band-Aid to an open wound before cleaning and disinfecting it," he told an anti-radicalisation forum at the University of Western Sydney on Wednesday night. 

Mr Trad, a controversial figure who described himself as a "roving imam", said he could understand why young Australians were driven to join Islamic State but he tried to convince them it was not the solution. 

His comments were reflected in a recent study that found one in five Australian Muslims think terrorists have legitimate grievances. 

The nation-wide survey of 800 Muslims, conducted last year by the University of Queensland, found that counter-terrorism policy in Australia was breeding anger, backlash, distrust and a siege mentality. 

Mr Trad listed the Iraq invasions, the war in Afghanistan and the torture of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as grievances for young Muslims. 

He cited the case of Northern Territory unionist Matthew Gardiner, who recently returned to the Northern Territory after reportedly fighting with the Kurdish forces against IS , as an example of hypocrisy in Australia.

Yes, good grief and grievances. How do you account for this stupidity? Identity politics. It's one of those illusory abstractions that allow Australian muslim youths to identify with Iraq or Afghanistan or those tortured in Guantanamo Bay. In this case the illusory abstraction emanates from one of the great religions on the planet and so they feel solidarity with the Iraqis and Afghans and those tortured in Guantanamo Bay (not that you see this crowd rally around the detestable David Hicks, but hey, what's a little chauvinism on their part?).

They live in Australia and benefit from living in Australia materially, but no, identity politics puts them in the corner where the Iraqis and Afghanis and G'itmo Detainees are their spiritual brethren. I'm sorry, but it should make you bloody wonder in cognitive dissonance rather than feel like you have "legitimate grievances".

*Ugh*.

That's the essential problem with identity politics: it always seems to gravitate around the dirty sinkhole of bad ideas that is argued from grievances. That somehow you are being hard done by because somebody with the same faith is being actually physically hard done by in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay, and you - in the comforts of living in Australia - make the conscious choice that you will align yourself with that idea against the people and things around you. I understand alienation - I've felt it all my bloody life. Living in Australia and not being 'anglo' is truly a Gorillas In The Mist experience. But if you live amongst the metaphorical gorillas, you should show understanding and empathy for the gorillas. Not, go around siding with spiritual brethren over an idea as feeble and idiotic as religion. Because that way lies the truly stupid phenomenon to grace this planet ISIL and you dying in a suicide bombing attack for them.

I write this with a fairly clear head about identity politics and the pitfalls of stupidity in which it can fall. It won't make me popular with the religious or flag-wearing or flag-burning, but it's still manifestly true all the same. From where I see it, those people are far better off taking a real appraisal of their lives and stopped identifying with stupid abstractions. It would do them a lot of good.
I'm sorry to shit upon your identity politics, but if your identity politics is about identifying with Iraqis and Afghanis and Git'mo Detainees, it's a shitty, shitty thing that is stunting your intellectual growth. There's just no two ways about it. You can grow up just a little bit by disowning that stuff.

Being Charlie Hebdo Part 2

The Aftermath of Crazy Is More Craziness

Pleiades sent me an article by Guy Rundle where he argues that the western ideology is so bereft and bankrupt of ideas, when it argues in principle, it ends up arguing something incoherent. Instead of heading for a transformative idea, our commentators and politicians alike sink back to old Left-Right partisanship, seeking opportunistic angles to score points within our own polity.

It's content behind a pay wall so I can't link to it, but here's something worth bringing up.

The Right is falling apart as a political formation so fast you’d need stop-action photography to catch the process. Bruce Petty was quite correct, in his cartoon this week, to draw the Right sloping to the drawing board to sketch out a new plan for surveillance and control. But he was wrong I think, to draw it as a great beast. It’s more a Caspar Milquetoast/Monty Burns figure, barely able to hold up the pencil. The failure of Iraq, free-wheeling capitalism, the collapsed legitimacy of Western Right governments, and increasing wars between its liberal and conservative factions sees it without a program, coherent worldview, common sense, or much cheer as far as I can see. 

The Hebdo massacre brought all these contradictions to the fore. Hebdo’s nihilism is actually culturally corrosive, as conservatives charge such obscene desacrilising with being. Conservatives know that a viable culture is a closed system to a degree, and unless it has pinion points -- usually religious -- which are not themselves, by matter of custom, subject to a general back-and-forth, then it is quickly in trouble. This week, sundry idiots have been suggesting that "free speech is part of our cultural tradition".
What nonsense. 

Until the 1960s, hundreds of books, films and plays were banned, even in the US, as way of maintaining the limits of what was publicly talked of, in terms of sex, religion and the like. That maintained a Christian division between profane body and sacred soul. Once abolished, Christian Western culture collapsed. A transitional period lasted into the 1990s. Remember the furore over Madonna’s hokey video "Papa Don’t Preach?". Remember when the porn industry was some marginal thing, and not another career option?

Yes, does anybody remember the furore over things like 'Piss Christ?'

How about the PMRC/Mothers of Prevention episode when a bunch of conservative mothers formed a committee to censor rock music in the 1980s? And Frank Zappa had to testify to Congress?

As Frank would say, "I mean seriously, folks! This is altogether a ridiculous state of affairs!"
It's all well and good that the Conservatives like David Cameron and Tony Abbott are thundering that  Freedom of Expression is our way of life but you sort of wonder if this is because it's just bloody expedient. As somebody who was on the side that supported 'Piss Christ and liked listening to Frank Zappa and certainly never yielded from the position of letting gangsta rappers kill as many cops in their songs, I find it tremendously strange that the very same conservatives now want to stand up for Freedom of Expression. Yay for Free Speech, it's finally self-evident even to the dumbest Conservatives.

You know what? I somehow doubt Cory Bernardi is stocking up on Gangsta Rap music on his iTunes. Anyway, Rundle goes on to have a hack at the Left too:

But much of what remains of the organised Left has revealed its own exhaustion and bankruptcy too. Though Left figures were not the first to repeat the "this has nothing to do with Islam" meme -- Merkel and Cameron joining Hollande in repeating that mantra -- many were quick to adopt it, and to focus on a revival of Islamophobia due to such an event. 

The event itself was barely glanced at, not even in an analytic way. The only response to the ludicrous pseudo-politics of declaring for free speech when no one had declared against it, was to reconstitute Western Arab-originated/descended Muslims as a whole, a subject of history, and then become their representative against oppression. The old, old accordian, got out for one last wheezing squeezeplay. But the wave of attacks against Muslims failed to eventuate. Maps of such events showed about 20 such, not good, but no Muslim-pogrom. 

It was cautioned that the attacks would create a surge of support for the French anti-immigration party Front National. But there was no sign of that (though it may come), giving a strong suspicion that the FN had reached near-saturation level. Charlie Hebdo’s nihilistic style was taken as racism, its physical depiction of Arabs vastly exaggerated. Some jokes against the Right, using their language, were taken as witless Bill-Leakesque curmudgeonliness (the eternal fate of the satirist - if Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ were published today it would have a beyondblue tagline, a body image trigger warning at the top, and a "Visit Ireland" google ad pop up). This shoehorned French political style into Anglosphere political divisions, where such a robust space for pre-identity politics Leftism has largely ceased to exist. Implicit was a causal model, which constructed Charlie Hebdo as having a FOX News-ish right-wing, pseudo-populist style, which it was using to rag on racial-religious minorities only -- this effectively accusing it of a certain naivete as regards race and oppression, with lethal results. As Daily Kos’ selection of some of Hebdo’s anti-imperialist cartoons showed, that wasn’t the case at all. 

But the causal/determinative model dies hard. And one popular article tweeted around was one about the "anomie of the banlieues". Ah, the anomie (i.e. lack of meaning) of the banlieues (the featureless, high-rise housing around Paris and other cities) -- Shift-F1 on the keyboard of a certain type of feature writer.

There's been a growing opinion that maybe Charlie Hebdo with its crude, rude and pointed satire in some way had it coming, and that no, some of want to say 'Je ne suis pas Charlie' because some ideological sticking point makes it "none-of-my-concern". Which is probably more honest but also goes to show why the identity politics being exercised is (as Helen Razer would have it...) Stupid.

The added absurdity of arguing that Islamism is not to blame in the face of people who yelled "Allahu Akbar" after they shot 12 people is, you know, pretty Islamophilic - as in, an unnecessary love of things Islamic, - to excuse that crime on some level.

Nobody in their right mind is pinning the blame on all the Muslims the world over for what happened. Yet the guys who did it are saying they did it for Allah. So somewhere in the discussion of ideas, we have to tackle Islamism and ask it some probing questions. To date, the argument the Left-side commentators is mounting as whole is a kind of "it was just provocation by the magazine when they insulted their faith". In other words, simultaneously abandoning Freedom of Expression and condoning violent action. If we accept that, we're essentially accepting the brothers arguing "look what you made me do."
I don't think we're ready to dumb ourselves down to that level for the sake of political correctness. At least, I'm sorry, I'm not going there. And why is the Left suddenly acting Stupid?

None of this is going to play out properly without a major argument with Islamism. In Northern Iraq, it's being contested with lethal force. They are winning in parts because they have a lot of conviction in their bullshit. If we are to contest our ideas against them, we'd better get our shit straight. If it is going to be Freedom of Expression and that's where we plant a flag, it's a good start. Somehow I share Guy Rundle's doubts that what we have is just massive cognitive dissonance and a bare cupboard for transformative ideas.

The Pinko Crisis

Pinko Blues

The big irritating topic of the month was the brouhaha surrounding Ben Affleck's appearance on Bill Maher's show together with Sam Harris. You all know what happened next - Ben Affleck said "That's gross, you're bigoted, and you're racists," then proceeded to lambast Maher and Harris for the rest of the short segment. What was more perplexing was how Affleck would garner a lot of public support for having tarn a stand against racists and 'Islamophobes', and then there was a dearth of any kind of sensible discussion about any of the topics. Since then Sam Harris has put up an excellent explanation of his side of the fracas so I won't be mounting a defence of atheism or central state materialism here.

What I do want to write about is this growing notion that you can't criticise a group of people for having a particular beliefs, and to criticise them is

1. somehow intolerant 
2. leads to 'ethnocide' and that is 
3. tantamount to genocide.  

These thing are clearly big leaps. You can be tolerant of people having beliefs and still question the basis for their beliefs. This is not offensive in of itself - although let's be honest is is offensive to religious thinning to ask any questions, no matter how value neutral the question might be. All the same, asking questions of beliefs does not automatically indicate intolerance. If people are going to go around waving their beliefs, then it is legitimate that they get ridiculed for their silly beliefs.  It's just the split coin of freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

The second notion that questioning the ideas in other people's cultural beliefs leads to ethnocide needs some examination. If we came across a tribe of people 'X' in a remote place of the world and they had a cultural practice that was against our values (and you can insert your most hated taboo here), is it ethnocide to try to change their practices?

I am reminded of a friend of mine who once taught a high school class about evolution. A muslim girl  raised her hand, and said "sir, I don't think you should be pushing your Christian views on to us."
Is teaching evolution ethnocide?
Sometimes bog ignorance is exactly that and getting educated might mean the abandonment of dearly held beliefs. After all, things that fly in the face of reality have a limited utility. It's hard to argue the gain in utility by the ignorant as ethnocide.

The third notion is perhaps the most pernicious. It suggests if we were to change people's beliefs, it would spoil their culture, and if their culture is gone, the people are gone. It is argued vehemently that this is genocide. I have great trouble with this construction. Genocide, to my mind of thinking is systematically targeting a people and trying to kill them into extinction. As the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians or the Nazis did to the Jewry in Europe, or the Bosnian Serb did to the Bosnian slims, which was to round them up an kill them; that strikes me as the working historic model of genocide, from whence we get this notion. The jump from ethnocide would mean if you taught the tribe 'X' not to commit taboos, it kills Tribe 'X'.

I have a friend Roddy the Samoan, who once told me that his people used to eat people. Roddy felt that this was just wrong. Some Samoans wanted to hide behind cultural practices as a defence, justifying cannibalism but Roddy was dismissive of such arguments. He felt that some things are just wrong and better left behind.
If you make Samoans stop cannibalism, is this ethnocide? Did they really lose their identity as Samoans when they stopped the practice? Can this legitimately be called 'genocide' in the same sense  as the Ottoman Turks and Nazis and Bosnian Serbs carrying out their respective killing programs?If we did, aren't we cheapening the definition and gravity of the genocide offence to take a cheap political shot? Is that a worthy exchange? Really, I think not.

I raise all this to point out to the hysteria on my own side of politics with the desire not to demonise people. It's understandable that we ought not demonise anybody for their beliefs. Not even Satanists - even though they're really into demons themselves - and so I totally understand the politically correct impulse to say one should not attack a people for their beliefs. Yet Maher and Harris made those caveats, just as any proper thinking small-'l' liberal pinko would do - and really wasn't the point under dispute. The mischaracterisation of their position that followed has left me wondering just how polarised the left end of the left has become.

The crux of the argument is, how explicit are the injunctions to attack apostates and infidels in Islam, and should this cultural practice really be given a free pass on the basis of our liberal tolerance. This actually hides a very difficult problem. For instance in Algeria during the 1990s Muslim brotherhood put up a candidate for election whose electoral promise was to shut down democracy and return Algeria to Sharia law. In other words, the candidate stood in a democratic election on the promise of ending democracy. It's unthinkable in the liberal west that we could have such a candidate, let alone that such a candidate would find significant popular support. Just how far must our tolerance stretch for these ideas? Is it really unreasonable to say, "look, you can have your religion but we're keeping our laws and institutions." Is that really bigotry, racism and 'Islamophobia'?

This is sort of weird. We're at the point where some small-'l' liberals are willing to sell out their own institutions and traditions that gave them the small-'l' liberalism for the sake of staking out the most politically correct position. And being the small-'l' liberal pinko lefty that I am, I'm just not comfortable crossing that bridge to that penultimate PC-ground being staked.
Instead I would posit that an infinitely open mind is not a mind at all.

Perhaps missing in this trendy-lefty intramural crossfire of abuse is that we have to understand that appeals to tolerance includes a hefty dose of our own cultural baggage that allows us to understand what tolerance might look like. we have freedom of speech, expression and religion, and nobody is talking about revoking those things. It really shouldn't exclude discussion of whether Islam has injunctions that we might find politically for philosophically unacceptable. That's not 'white privilege' and 'entitlement', as some have claimed in lauding Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck shouting down the discussion is privilege and entitlement.