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Embiggen. Pacific Ocean, July 21, 2003. Image: NASA, taken from the ISS. More. And. Also. Via.

On the subject of bizarre ritualistic hang-ups, here’s some lovely religious apartheid in London swimming pools. Naturally, this bold leap forward is publicly funded with council tax.

This morning, my son asked to go swimming at 10 am. As he was going to play with a friend at 11.30, I agreed to take him early. I checked the pool programme online… and the opening times. Apparently, the pool was open, and no special programmes were being run. So, off we trundled. When I arrived at the pool, I was told that we could not swim in it until 10.45. The reason is that it was being used for ‘Muslim Male Swimming’. This is apparently so every Sunday morning. I couldn’t quite believe that a swimming pool was really institutionalising both gender and religious segregation… Apparently, this is a policy insisted on by Hackney Council, which sets the policy for all Hackney pools.

A debate ensues. 

As David T (no relation) says in the comments,

As a test, how would you feel about a policy of excluding Muslims from public facilities at particular times?

I’d add that it’s interesting how a self-inflicted neurosis regarding what is impermissible, impious or unclean has to be accommodated and subsidised by others who do not share that particular irrational anxiety. Thus, the natural consequence of the hang-up in question, i.e. not being able to swim, is avoided by imposing that same disadvantage on others.

Update:

I was also told that the session was being run by the swimming pool, and had begun life as a private hire by a mosque: which had then stopped paying. Accordingly, it was being provided by Clissold Leisure Centre as an attempt to cater to Hackney’s “diversity”… I spoke to another employee this morning. He gave me an identical story. His explanation was that it was a requirement of the Muslim religion that Muslims could not swim with non-Muslims. This, he argued, was an obligation which Clissold Leisure Centre was obliged to respect, and provide for. I asked him whether Clissold Leisure Centre would institute Whites Only swimming for racists. His answer was that they would, if there was sufficient demand.

It’s my understanding that when customers stop paying for a recreational service, let alone one based on obnoxious sectarian voodoo, those customers usually have to go without. Let’s call it the price of piety – the natural consequence of a self-inflicted restriction, i.e. a choice one has made. Surely anything else is an imposition or a cheat? It is, after all, a bit rich to expect irrational hang-ups of this kind to be accommodated and paid for by the same filthy heathens that are being treated with overt disdain. But not, it seems, in Hackney, where such things are positively encouraged and publicly subsidised. Such is our New Jerusalem. 

I’ve lifted this from yesterday’s ephemera because – well, because it’s so shameless and really too good to miss. Behold the wisdom of the Saudi cleric, Muhammad al-Munajid, aired on Al-Majd TV, March 30, 2008.

If you missed the money quote, here it is.

The problem is that they want to open a debate on whether Islam is true or not, and on whether Judaism and Christianity are false or not. In other words, they want to open up everything for debate. Now they want to open up all issues for debate. That’s it. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief. So where’s the conspiracy? They say: Let’s have freedom of thought in Islam… They say: I think, therefore I want to express my thoughts. I want to express myself, I want to talk and say, for example, that there are loopholes in Islam, or that Christianity is the truth. Then they will talk about freedom of belief, and say that anyone is entitled to believe in whatever he wants… If you want to become an apostate – go ahead. Fancy Buddhism? Leave Islam, and join Buddhism. No problem. That’s what freedom of belief is all about. They want freedom of everything. What they want is very dangerous.

I’m almost tempted to admire the frankness. The chutzpah, if you will. But if such things are a dangerous “conspiracy,” an obvious question springs to mind. Dangerous for whom? What’s most interesting about the extract above, and the worldview it illustrates, is that al-Munajid doesn’t seem terribly concerned with the numinous per se, or even with an erratic and spiteful deity named Allah; instead the object of worship is Islam itself – the institution, the power, the license to control.

There’s more, of course. Al-Munajid also shares his insight regarding the use of coloured underwear and how to urinate piously.

Related: Unclean.

Crammed. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // An illustrated history of computer data storage. // 3000 photos of antique computers, 1961-1989. (h/t, Coudal.) // Newspaper clippings from 1885. Tales of woe and strangeness. // Caminito del Ray, near Malaga. Not for vertigo sufferers. // The spatuletail hummingbird. // The dioramas of Lori Nix. // Control rooms of note. // How to disarm an atomic bomb. // Bomb the Bass: Butterfingers. // Laurie Anderson, O Superman. (1981) // Eugene Sandow’s Physical Culture Museum. (h/t, Things.) // Iron Man clip. Yes, I’d like one of those. // Batman and Robin take on schoolgirls, British hippies and African Death Bees. Wait for the saucy nail file scene. // Laser gloves. Fight crime, impress women. (h/t, Chastity Darling.) // Deter thieves with soiled underwear. Again, impress the ladies. // “Talking like this may get you shunned by polite society (i.e. scared society).” // Saudi cleric says questioning Islam is “barbarism” and leads to terrible things, like freedom of belief. // A Millar on why the left has gone jihadi. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // Ruth Fowler on being a middle-class lefty. “More commonly termed wankerism.” // Lost titles, reimagined. // And, via The Thin Man, Music for a Found Harmonium.

Busy today, but here are a few random films unearthed from the archives.

Carlitopolis. Experiments with a mouse.

Roof Sex. Furniture in heat.

KaBoom! Warfare with nuts and ribbon.

The power of faith. And very large vehicles.

Feel free to browse and rummage.

Some time ago, the estimable Scott Burgess remarked on the ability of some commentators to detect racism “in homeopathic concentrations.” As if to prove the point, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, a hand-wringer of note, today detects something sinister in the word “hoodie”:

The term hoodie initially seemed racist to me, a way of saying “a group of young black guys”, without actually calling anyone black, and nobody could point it out, because the first person to say the racist connection would be the first person who made it. It never became necessary to protest over this sleight of hand, however, since the criminal connotation of the look was immediately subverted by that very association – all young people, of all races, of all classes, anyone under 25 who wanted to look a bit downtown, started dressing in this way.

Tom Paine comments on Ms Williams’ convoluted outpourings and outlines a phenomenon noted here once or twice.

We laughed at the obsessives on our university campus who could explain everything in terms of race, class or sexual orientation. University was such an exhilarating experience after the squalid anti-intellectualism of our comprehensive schools that we could not take seriously those who preferred such formulae to thought. Most hilarious of all were leftist students from privileged backgrounds who, on any logical application of their own formulae, were the enemy. They simply decided that holding with greater intensity the views that cast them as such would exonerate them. Indeed, in a classic piece of doublethink, heterosexual whites from wealthy backgrounds seemed to think themselves more virtuous for being leftist witch-hunters of racists and homophobes…

We should not have laughed. While those of us who were there to learn left university to get on with our lives, the class/race/sex retards stayed on as academics or left to go into politics, journalism or both. They would do anything to escape the need to think, it seems. Zoe Williams’ piece today is a case in point. I can honestly say that I had never considered “hoody” a codeword for black youth. Any mental images I had formed when I heard the word had involved the sort of pizza-faced yob who constitutes the main threat when walking the streets of my home town. In her warped view of the universe however, Zoe has scored bonus points for “discovering” concealed racism in public discourse. Sadly, she has more influence in the world than those of us who can see her for the obsessive thought-avoider that she is.

Mr Eugenides notes the same and adds,

Zoe inhabits a particular corner of London media life so insulated from the real world that she has to project all her own experiences onto the rest of us as a substitute for actually knowing what she’s talking about. A glance at any daily front page in the Independent gives you an idea what I mean. Mm, yes. Plastic bags. Something must be done. Food miles. Absolutely. A Chilean glacier retreating? Terrible. Terrible. Shit, we’re out of tapenade.

In a sense it’s classic Guardianista handwringing – Zoe hates herself for the slightly jittery feeling she gets when she sees a group of black youths on a street corner, and if her spider sense can detect lurking racism inside even herself, then it stands to reason that the rest of us, whose liberal credentials are far less impeccable, must be far, far worse, surely?

Bingo.

Battlestar goes Barbarella. Via io9. Related. And. Also. Plus. 

Peter Tatchell has some peculiar ideas. In detailing Ken Livingstone’s habitual smear tactics, Tatchell recalls the leftist mayor’s public endorsement of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and says,

Because I criticised Ken on one issue (Qaradawi), he has slurred me as an Islamophobe. It all began when Ken invited the right-wing Muslim cleric to City Hall in 2004 and saluted him as an “honoured guest”. I found his embrace of Qaradawi very odd and quite appalling, given that the sheikh is indisputably anti-Semitic, homophobic and sexist… The mayor condemned me as anti-Muslim, and even suggested I was a pawn of the Israeli secret service and US NeoCons.

Qaradawi is indeed a monster of no small magnitude – much worse than Mr Livingstone, who’s merely a vain and spiteful opportunist. In his fatwas and al Jazeera broadcasts, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “esteemed spiritual leader” endorses acts of terrorism against civilians, including suicide bombing, along with the murder of gay people and apostates and the beating of “disobedient” women. (None of which was sufficient to prevent the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting praising the cleric’s “horror of immorality and materialism” and his mastery of the internet.)

But what catches the eye is Tatchell’s description of Qaradawi as “right-wing”. Is this bearded little sadist also in favour of free markets, a small state, low taxation and individual freedom? If so, this is news. It seems to me Qaradawi is in fact a totalitarian collectivist par excellence – a man who, like his stated inspiration, Syed Abul A’ala Mawdudi, dreams of a world in which a person’s most intimate affairs are governed by the state, in this case an Islamic one. Mawdudi’s Islamic Law & Constitution, published in 1960, includes dozens of passages like the following:

An Islamic state is all embracing… [it] cannot restrict the scope of its activities… It seeks to mould every aspect of life… In such a state no-one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private.

In April 1939, Mawdudi told his followers,

In reality, Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals… Islam requires the earth – not just a portion, but the whole planet.

Like a low-rent supervillain, Qaradawi has echoed Mawdudi’s sentiments and declared the revolutionary destiny of Islam to conquer first Europe and America, then eventually the world:

The patch of the Muslim state will expand to cover the whole Earth and that the strength of this state will grow and become obvious to all. This also denotes good news for the long-cherished hope of revival of Muslim unity and rebirth of [the] Islamic Caliphate.

A Caliphate under which the individual must conform to intimate and exhaustive proscriptions of what is forbidden by Allah – proscriptions listed in ludicrous detail on Qaradawi’s own website. To describe Qaradawi, and Islamists generally, as “right-wing” stretches that favoured pejorative to an absurd and perverse degree. Unless, of course, sacralised bigotry, dreams of world domination and absolute state control are now considered proprietary markers of anyone who isn’t sufficiently leftwing. 

Related. And. Also. 

Help fund my glorious revolution. Trust me, you’ll love the results.

Over at B&W, Ophelia is animated. 

[Dogmatic] believers have an answer that is both quick and easy, and that’s why it’s such a crap answer. Quick and easy answers are worthless for such disagreements. They’re worthless because they have no content. They’re empty. Saying “God said so” is exactly the same thing as saying nothing. It’s like holding up a street sign rather than saying anything. Why shouldn’t we execute gays for being gays? Why shouldn’t we kill women for talking to an unrelated man? Because Galer Street. That tells you just as much as “God said so.” Just saying a name doesn’t tell us anything. All “God said so” really means is “it’s what I think and ‘God’ is like an official stamp on what I think” – which leaves us exactly where we started. “God” is just the label people put on what they already think is good. They don’t put that label on what they already think is bad. They don’t punch “God” into a good-bad computer they have so that they know which goes with what. They just take God to endorse what they think is right, and that absolves them from the work of testing what they think is right.

Indeed. Saying “God said so” is difficult to distinguish from saying “the devil made me buy that dress.” I’ve had quite a few exchanges with dogmatic believers, including a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, for whom history and logic could be upended as convenient, and a Methodist minister from Alabama, whose claims to piety involved extraordinary temper and resentfulness. My attempts to tease out some explanation of exactly how they knew the detailed preferences of their hypothetical deities were unwelcome and, sadly, unsuccessful. At no time during such exchanges did I feel in the presence, albeit vicariously, of some numinous imperative. I did, however, feel I was in the presence of people who were trying, and failing, to hide their own egos, while indulging them with megalomaniacal abandon.

Robert Seidel’s Processes: Living Paintings is a 35 by 16 metre animated projection onto the Phyletic Museum, Jena, Germany, shown February 2nd, 2008.

Widescreen format. More. And. Also. Related: The Agbar Tower, Barcelona.