Photographs taken from the space shuttle Endeavour, August 2007.

Fabian Tassano ponders dumb culture and its causes. 

If cultural deterioration is acknowledged in a mediocracy, it is blamed on marketisation. The implication is that cultural products are somehow traded more than they used to be, which is specious. Culture has always been bought and sold, and would not get produced at all without someone to pay for it. What is different about a mediocratic market for culture is that purchasing power is in the hands of the mass consumer and the state, rather than those of a small elite. The characteristics of the prevailing culture will therefore reflect the tastes of the mass, and the ideological preferences of the political class, rather than the tastes of the bourgeoisie. This point — that it is empowerment of the mass and of the collective which drives cultural change in a mediocracy — is ideologically unpalatable and therefore suppressed. It is more convenient to blame the market, especially as this can be used to justify intervention.

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Further to recent comments on Muhammad and how one might view him, here’s H.G. Wells on the same subject, from A Short History of the World, published in 1922.

Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad spread his power over the rest of Arabia. He married a number of wives in his declining years, and his life on the whole was by modern standards unedifying. He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite sincere religious passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and expositions, the Qur’an, which he declared was communicated to him from God. Regarded as literature or philosophy the Qur’an is certainly unworthy of its alleged divine authorship.

Wells goes on to concede that “when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writings have been allowed for, there remains in Islam… much power and inspiration.” But what catches the eye is how sharply Wells’ estimation of Muhammad and the Qur’an contrasts with modern affectations. It’s hard to imagine a similar view being expressed quite so freely by a public figure today, when much smaller improprieties often meet with sudden inhalation and calls for apologies.

Karate Monkey. // TV detector vans. “It’s in the front room… and they’re watching Columbo.” (h/t, Biased BBC.) // Climate change and the alignment of the planets. No, really. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Tunguska revisited. // Space History. (1962) “Red spacemen keep coming!” // Is my starship bigger than yours? Death stars, cubes, birds of prey. // The Islamic car. // The bicycle vending machine. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // 5000 London Transport posters. // 25 photos taken at exactly the right time. (h/t, Stephen Hicks.) // Origami insects. // Robo-bug. // Marvel digital comics. // Unintentionally amusing comic strips. Mary Worth, angel of death. (h/t, An Insomniac.) // The world beard and moustache championships 2007. Including the partial beard freestyle. // The art of Travis A. Louie. // Terminal thrill-seeking. // New hate crime discovered. “Research suggests that you are four times more likely to be a victim of blogosphere satire if you are a Socialist.” // Leftwing novelist wants to “de-Europeanise” Paris. “To make space for dissident voices.” (h/t, The Thin Man.) // The world’s longest underwater pipeline. 746 miles. // Wind dam. // Calculator watch prototype. (1970) // A brief history of LED calculator watches. // Via Coudal, the slide rule resource centre. // The museum of horology. // 100 movies, quotes and numbers. // The golden age of the boombox. // Dance like James Brown. Hot damn. // And finally, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Johnny Cash.

Rummaging through the archives, I unearthed this nugget by Steve Edwards, from an essay titled On the Right to Give Offence, published last year in Policy magazine. In the extract below, Edwards points out why offending religious prejudice can be a necessary part of realistic discussion, and why avoiding such offence can be grossly unfair.

A Muslim is somebody who believes that a man called Muhammad… passed on certain revelations and instructions directly from God Himself. By logic, a non-Muslim is somebody who does not accept that Muhammad was any such prophet, and thereby rejects his teachings as not having come from God… If, contrary to Muhammad’s claims (assuming he has been represented correctly), we do not believe that he was any such prophet from God, what do we truly think of the man?

The answer must be one of three possibilities: either Muhammad was a liar, or he was deluded, or he was mad. These are the only possible conclusions of the intellectually honest non-Muslim. Let us ponder one of the three possibilities—that Muhammad was a liar. Would it be unreasonable then to posit that a man willing to deceive many thousands of people, perhaps out of hunger for power or self-aggrandisement, could be labelled as ‘evil’? If so, on what basis do we object to an extremely negative portrayal (either graphic or prose) of such an ‘evildoer’?

Whether or not such a portrayal may appear ‘gratuitous’ or provoke widespread anger, it would nonetheless be a justifiable expression of dissent. Therefore, to place legal sanctions on any such piece of literature is to necessarily outlaw opposition to, and disagreement with, Islam to a logical denouement; this suggests we are implicitly calling for the abolition of the right to proclaim oneself a non-Muslim in clear and in certain terms. That is, one may still be a nominal ‘non-Muslim’ free of harassment, but one cannot explain and defend one’s position in any significant detail without committing the act of blasphemy.

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