The work of Charles and Ray Eames. From furniture and architecture to Powers of Ten, “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the Universe and the effect of adding another zero.”

Powers of Ten can be watched online here.

The last few days here have been a kind of Rushdie and Related Topics Week. Assuming no further Rushdie-related events materialise, I thought I’d wind up this saga, at least for now, with a few words from the man himself. Here’s an extract from a lecture presented by the Centre for Enquiry and given at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on October 11th, 2006:

“I suppose one has to mention the Danish cartoons. I ran into a young journalist working for a small New York magazine who said… his proprietor refused to publish the cartoons because he was worried about his offices getting bombed. This kind of cravenness was worldwide. And the name that cravenness was given was respect. When people said they didn’t publish them out of respect for Muslims, what they meant is they didn’t publish them because they were afraid of their offices getting bombed. And when you create that kind of climate of fear, when you concede… you don’t as a result have less intimidation. I mean as a result you have more intimidation.

I think, with the cartoons, there were two quite separate issues. One is whether you thought the cartoons were good or bad and should have been published or shouldn’t have been… and those are the decisions that every newspaper editor makes every day, and different editors would make different decisions. But the second issue is when the subject of intimidation enters, and the question is how do you respond to intimidation, and do you give in to it or do you not give in to it. I think that when the intimidation became as heavy as it did, the only proper response was everybody should have published the cartoons the next day. And not to do that was a way of showing that threats work…

This is a curious climate that we’re living in, where people are falling over backwards not to name the phenomenon that’s taking place, which is a progressive intimidation of the world in which we live. I’m not talking about these great big geopolitical things going on elsewhere in the world; I’m talking about what is in our own hands to discuss and argue about and fix – what is happening in our town, what is happening in our culture. And the way in which things that we in this room value a great deal are being eroded by this kind of intimidation and cowardice, and by an unwillingness to call things by their true name.”

The full lecture can be heard here or downloaded as an mp3 file. A transcript is available here.

Over at B&W, Ophelia makes the following point re Shirley Williams’ dismal performance on Question Time and what appear to have been her underlying assumptions:

“What people apparently do with these ‘offended’ claims is reverse engineer: they reason backwards: they look at the magnitude of the ‘offence’ and then assign guilt accordingly – but that’s wrong. If that rule held no one would ever criticize or dispute or tease anything because of the risk of ‘offence’ out of all proportion to the intent and to the harm done. Instead what people should be doing is coldly examining the merit of the putative grievance, independent of the quantity of fuss made.”

Indeed. What was curiously missing from Williams’ calculation was whether one party is remotely entitled to such rage, or to anything at all, and whether riots, death threats and howls of indignation are a legitimate response to a novel that hasn’t been read or the knighting of its author. To question the proportion of the affront being claimed, the honesty of the claim, and the assumptions on which that claim is based would risk undermining the premise of this particular manoeuvre.

Williams was, it seems, trying to appear “even-handed” while actually being craven and rather stupid. By which I mean she seems to have imagined that between these two positions there must be some admirable middle point that it must be “fair” to champion. So if you have screaming, tantrums and demented theocrats on the one hand and a rational British novelist on the other, both must be “extremes”, and thus the “even-handed” thing to do is to “compromise” and support some position roughly halfway in between, irrespective of what that position actually entails. Hence Williams’ ramblings about “Muslims” being offended “in a very powerful way” and Rushdie’s knighthood being a “mistake”, “badly timed”, etc. The actual moral issue – of whether umbrage, violence and the threats thereof are justified or opportunist, or even sane – was not a discernible part of Williams’ calculation.

As the audience applause for Williams demonstrated, this is a remarkably common assumption – that the most “fair” and “even-handed” position is halfway between calm argument and homicidal thuggery, or halfway between intellectual freedom and a visceral fear of speaking. Well, that would leave us somewhere near the absurd dissembler, Lord Ahmed, who equated Rushdie’s knighthood with rewarding terrorism. This is the moral calculus favoured at various times by Karen Armstrong and Tariq Ramadan, both of whom “balanced” real intimidation, aggression and murder on the one hand with “tyrannical” free speech and “aggressive” cartoons, published “aggressively”, on the other. By this contorted reckoning, the “compromise” solution is to avoid publishing “aggressive” cartoons, or novels, or films, or plays, etc. And, by implication, to avoid stating inconvenient facts or honouring those who happen to point them out.

And thus the engine of human progress, the testing of ideas – and of bad ideas in particular – grinds to a halt. All in the name of “fairness” and being “even-handed.”

Those of you who missed last night’s Question Time may enjoy this brief extract, courtesy of DSTPFW. On the subject of Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, Christopher Hitchens challenges Shirley Williams’ prostration in the face of intimidation and thuggery. (An act the Baroness subsequently – and dishonestly – denies.) One of Hitchens’ more charming qualities is his willingness to take on an audience that applauds Williams’ blathering and to tell that audience it should be ashamed for doing so.

Someone give Hitch his own show. Related: this and this.

Cheetah expresses dissatisfaction with TV crew. // Via Coudal, King’s College Circle. Le Grand Mobile. // Air Guitar Pro. For those who take air guitar seriously. Only $27.00 // Going to the opera in the year 2000. A vision of things to come. (1882) // Power for Progress. Nuclear power in comic book form. (1971) // The Atomic Revolution. (1957) // Liquid mirrors for lunar telescopes. // The shadow of the Moon. // The lost cosmonauts. Fallen comrades. // The Socialist Worker is thrilled by the “stunning victory” of Hamas. More here and here. // Study reveals support for terrorism correlates strongly with support for political Islam. Summary here. // Ophelia Benson on Inayat Bungawala. “If we were not treated with respect then we were capable of forcing others to respect us.” With book burnings and death threats. // Tim Worstall on the scapegoats of Polly Toynbee. // Mick Hartley on art bollocks. // Peculiar maps. From imaginary places to the Stockholm Metro. (H/T, Chastity Darling) // Animals on the London Underground. Hens, penguins, elephants. // Via Artblog, le beatbox. Part deux. // The mixtape wallet. // Suck your child’s nose clear. (H/T, Dr Westerhaus.) // A brief history of barbed wire. // When jellyfish attack. // The illustrations of Alexei Vella. Borat, alfalfa, robots. (H/T, Drawn!) // Jack and Dick learn about eyes. (1958) // Via Coudal, Japanese pencil carvings. Honeycombs, spirals and moving parts. // And finally… Minnie, mooching.

In response to this post on Muhammad Abdul Bari, a commenter noted this cartoon and asked the following question:

“The cartoon lists a bunch of problems that it claims Muslim societies have. Will Western government and society mocking the most sensitive issues of Islam make those problems better or worse?”

Variations of this question are raised on a fairly regular basis, usually with no expectation of an answer – for example see here. Another version of the same was voiced by Pakistan’s Religious Affairs Minister, Ijaz-ul-Haq, who asked, apparently in all seriousness:

“How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?”

This question should, I think, be turned around, quite emphatically. Given jihadists pointedly cite Muhammad’s purported ‘revelations’ as their mandate and motive, how can the spread of Islamic terrorism be resisted if Muhammad and his teachings remain beyond criticism? How does one respond when the Bali bombing ‘mastermind’ Mukhlas Imron asks his captors: “You who still have a shred of faith in your hearts, have you forgotten that to kill infidels and the enemies of Islam is a deed that has a reward above no other?” – and then quotes Muhammad’s own exhortations as his license for atrocity?

In his book, The Truth About Muhammad, Robert Spencer stresses the same key point:

“If the terrorists are correct in invoking his example to justify their deeds, then Islamic reformers will need to initiate a respectful but searching re-evaluation of the place Muhammad occupies within Islam… If peaceful Muslims can mount no comeback when jihadists point to Muhammad’s example to justify violence, their ranks will always remain vulnerable to recruitment from jihadists who present themselves as the exponents of ‘pure Islam’, faithfully following Muhammad’s example.”

Spencer’s book – and the question it raises – has, of course, been banned in Pakistan, supposedly for containing “objectionable material.” Viewed in this light, the blasphemy laws of which Mr ul-Haq is so enamoured, and which so often serve as a license to intimidate and extort, are very much part of the problem. Blasphemy laws exist in order to make people afraid of saying certain things and, by extension, afraid of thinking certain things. And it’s hard to see how such a fundamental problem will be solved if people are afraid to think about it.

By all means, fund my blasphemy. 

Via Tapedeck.org comes this strangely endearing nostalgia-fest. A collection of 138 vintage analogue audio cassettes. I vaguely remember BASF chrome tapes had a distinctive smell, quite unlike other brands. I forget how well they worked, possibly due to the effects of sniffing the tape.

The collection is, naturally, catalogued by brand, running time and tape quality. Stay away from 120s, though. They tend to stretch. More here.

Further to yesterday’s post on Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, this caught my eye. Here’s Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain:

“The granting of a knighthood to him can only do harm to the image of our country in the eyes of hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world.”

There’s something insanely funny about Muhammad Abdul Bari talking about image problems. Bari, like his predecessor and many of his colleagues, is an admirer of the totalitarian fantasist, Syed Abul A’ala Mawdudi. In April 1939, Mawdudi wrote: “Islam requires the Earth – not just a portion, but the whole planet… [Muslims are] under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge [non-Muslims] from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.” Lest we forget, Mawdudi’s writings influenced Sayyid Qutb, who in turn inspired bin Laden.

Some readers may recall Bari’s awkward evasions regarding the preaching of supremacist hatred during John Ware’s Panorama documentary, A Question of Leadership. Others may recall Dr Bari’s assertion, made last year, that while there are “a few bad apples in the Muslim community”, “negative attitudes” towards Muslims would result in Britain being faced with “two million Muslim terrorists — 700,000 of them in London.” Again, like his predecessor, Bari has the knack for undermining his own arguments and turning protestations of victimhood into barely-veiled threats. And this is the man who presumes to lecture others on the importance of how one seems.

For some reason, I’m reminded of this Cox & Forkum cartoon, published during the last bout of indignation on demand:

Salman Rushdie’s knighthood has, predictably, upset the Iranian authorities. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, said the decision to praise “the apostate” had “insulted Islamic sanctities,” before wheeling out the familiar stall of pretension, gasbaggery and affected victimhood:

“Giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is… a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials… Paying tribute to this apostate and detested figure will definitely put British statesmen and officials at odds with Islamic societies, the emotions and sentiments of which have again been provoked.”

Today, and no less predictably, the Guardian ran a generically tendentious piece by Priyamvada Gopal, a lecturer in literature and “postcolonial studies” at Cambridge University:

“More interesting is the question of why this ‘honour’ comes now and what Rushdie’s alacrity in accepting it tells us about politics and letters in our times… Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’…

[Rushdie] is iconic of a more pernicious trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally Western ideas that have to be defended as such… Now [Rushdie] recalls his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack corralled into attacking his ruler’s enemies.”

One might, I think, argue that Rushdie’s defence of basic, universal freedoms has little to do with being “corralled” by “his rulers” (whoever they might be) and rather more to do with the countless followers of a “most merciful” Allah who wish to murder him due to their own hysterical vanities. And perhaps it has something to do with a painful realisation that much of the “liberal literati” is unwilling to defend either him or the freedoms now at stake.

Oddly, Ms Gopal seems unconcerned by the passive-aggressive pretensions of Mr Hosseini, now so commonplace, or by the explicitly genocidal intent of the government he represents – factors, among so many, that would appear to support Rushdie’s position rather than her own. Nor, it seems, is she concerned by the fanatics who burned a novel they hadn’t read, or the psychopaths who hunted down and murdered translators of that novel, or those who set fire to occupied buildings as an act of protest and piety. Or indeed by the familiar pattern established by those acts. Instead, Gopal’s indignation is aimed at Rushdie’s criticism of violence committed in the name of Islam and his support for ousting the Taliban – an act that allowed almost 4 million exiled Muslims to return to their homes and which allowed millions of young girls to resume an education forbidden by the Taliban. But such are the moral priorities of the esteemed educator, Priyamvada Gopal.

I scarcely need to point out that Mr Hosseini and Ms Gopal have something in common. Both dislike apostates, albeit of different kinds. In Ms Gopal’s case, Rushdie’s sin is to depart from the guilt-clotted gospel clung to by Ms Gopal and so many of her peers.

Update: More on this at Normblog.

Update 2: Speaking of predictable, the madness begins. More here. Doubtless we can expect more threats, burning and hysteria after Friday prayers. Note that the BBC website asks, apparently in all seriousness: “Is Mr Rushdie’s award an insult to Islam?” Readers aren’t, of course, asked whether the Muslims calling for the murder of a novelist are an affront to civilisation.

Related, this.

Further to the recent post on Vanessa Engle’s Lefties documentaries, here’s another curio from a bygone age. The People’s Cube highlights video, probably from around 1984, of KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov explaining psychological warfare and the demoralising effects of Marxist-Leninist ideology. It isn’t clear exactly how much is boasting and embellishment, and it isn’t clear whether the word “demoralise” is intended to mean “destroy the morale of” or “render morally impotent.” Both would seem to apply. Of particular interest is the KGB’s apparent focus on influencing the “soft” brains of Western students and rendering them impervious to inconvenient facts.

Make of it what you will.

More at Roborant. Related: this and this.