One of the irritating things about principles is that due to their reciprocal nature you may find yourself having to argue in favour of people you don’t particularly like. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders, for instance, whose film Fitna was due to be shown tomorrow at a private meeting at the House of Lords, followed by an “open and frank discussion” with peers and MPs. However, the meeting is not to be. The Brussels Journal reports:

This afternoon Mr. Wilders received a letter from the British Embassy in The Hague saying that he is a “persona non grata” in the United Kingdom. The ambassador told Mr. Wilders that he is a threat to public security and public harmony because of the controversy created by Fitna. Mr. Wilders intends to go to London anyway. “Let them arrest me in Heathrow,” he says. If Mr. Wilders is denied entry to the United Kingdom, it will be the first time that Britain refuses entry to an elected politician from another member state of the European Union. The Dutch government has protested to the British government over the unprecedented barring of an EU parliamentarian by another EU country.

Now Wilders isn’t the easiest person to like and his film, discussed here, is glib, crude and insubstantial. (A much more serious exploration of Islamic supremacism and its theological roots can be found in the documentary Islam: What the West Needs to Know, which can be viewed here.) Wilders famously suggested that the Qur’an should be banned for glorifying violence against unbelievers, which doesn’t exactly help his case, though this suggestion seems at best quixotic or more likely another bid for attention, and it isn’t difficult to see why one might wish to press Wilders on many of his claims. But to the best of my knowledge, Wilders hasn’t called for the murder or intimidation of anyone; nor does he advocate terrorism or use casual threats of violence to get his own way. He is, in fact, the recipient of death threats and has spent the last few years living under police protection. An honour he shares with several outspoken women, careless academics and elderly cartoonists.

One therefore has to marvel at the suggestion by the Home Secretary’s Office that in and of itself Wilders’ visit would “pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society” and would “threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.” Presumably what is meant – but not being said – is that a significant number of Muslims with anger management issues would take it upon themselves either to threaten violence or do violence to Mr Wilders, and possibly to others too. One wonders, then, where the real “threat to the fundamental interests of society” is coming from.

One might also note the similarities with recent reactions to a much less outlandish figure, Douglas Murray, who was disinvited from chairing a debate on Islam and liberalism at the London School of Economics, ostensibly on grounds of “campus relations” and, wait for it, “security fears”. But fear of what exactly? Did the LSE anticipate the well-mannered Mr Murray making threats, mouthing obscenities and throwing chairs? Did it expect Murray – who can be heard debating Tariq Ramadan here – to suddenly join the fray in a fit of violent passion and emotional incontinence? Or did the LSE anticipate others, mysteriously unnamed, doing something similar? And doesn’t this suggest that The Guardian Position™ is, once again, being dutifully assumed?

Update: Over at Harry’s Place, some contradictions are noted. Update 2: Via Anna, the position illustrated.

And yes, by all means, fund my blasphemy.

Speaking of human nature and its denial, via The Thin Man, here’s Milton Friedman and Naomi Klein:

For more on Ms Klein’s sly distortions, see this piece by Johan Norberg. Update: Via Gaffee, there’s a longer version here. Recommended.

Incidentally, this site is two years old today. Cake and beers all round. And giant floating cat heads.

I’ve touched on some problems of social construct theory before, more than once, and noted that its implications could appeal to unsavoury motives: 

If a person’s tastes and disposition are primarily socially constructed, that person can also, presumably, be remade to suit society and its representatives. Such high-minded Agents of Society might even become “engineers of the human soul,” to borrow Stalin’s phrase.

With the above in mind, let’s turn our attention to the feminist commentator Amanda Marcotte, whose book cover mishap entertained us so. In a recent outpouring, Ms Marcotte offered this: 

The theory that women have a natural urge to have babies is one that’s got a long and ignoble sexist history, […] None of that is to say that the urge to have children that some (but far from all) women experience isn’t real, and that’s my other giant problem with the ongoing preoccupation with [evolutionary psychology] theories to explain things that are cultural constructs… 

Note that Ms Marcotte is quite insistent on this point. The inclination to reproduce simply is a cultural construct, and a dubious one at that. Why humans should apparently be unique in this regard, untouched by biology, isn’t entirely clear. Presumably, human beings – specifically human men – have constructed elaborate patterns of behaviour to mimic almost exactly biological inclinations that are felt as real, by men and women, but which don’t in fact exist.

Readers with an interest in visual culture should visit the blog of Eye magazine. While you’re there, you could even take a minute or two to read my post on the art world’s rhetorical flummery:

Take artist Aliza Shvarts, for example, who rose to fleeting prominence last year with a work that purported to involve “repeated, self-induced miscarriages”. She described her efforts thus: “This piece – in its textual and sculptural forms – is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a [sic] independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse… It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership.”

It isn’t clear how form or function can ‘converge’ on the body, not least because the human body is already a form with numerous functions. Can function, strictly speaking, ‘converge’ on anything at all? Can ambiguity be a ‘focus’ and ‘isolate’ something else – something that is terribly important but unclear and at no point explained? Despite such mysteries, one thing is unambiguous. Ms Shvarts believes that the extract above is itself a work of art: “The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above…”

The rest.

Readers may recall Theo Hobson’s rather colourful assertions regarding James Bond. Among them, his belief that the implausibly competent fictional spy is  

a deeply malign cultural presence. He represents a nasty, cowardly part of us that ought to have been killed off long ago.

And that,

Bond is a big factor in the sexual malfunction of our times; the difficulty we have finding life-long partners, and the normalisation of pornography.

Yesterday, one of Hobson’s Guardian colleagues turned her righteous disapproval to the subject of science fiction and its

paucity of simple respect and human understanding.

A paucity demonstrated by the genre’s alleged inability to

create women who are not token geishas (or, given the genre, wild assassin women, escaping court hookers or muscly babes in bronze breastplates), non-white characters who are not noble magical heathens with psychic abilities and a strong connection to the earth, or perverted gay interplanetary warlords.

“Perverted gay interplanetary warlords” sounds promising and readers may wish to Google further and report back with their discoveries. However, the claim that the world of science fiction is inordinately populated by “homophobic white male straight writers” and “woman-hating racists” – none of whom are named – sits uneasily with the author’s admission that science fiction fandom is noted for its breadth and inclusivity and a propensity for discussing “sex, race, whatever.” Nor is it entirely consonant with her own extended list of suitably inclusive authors. Indeed, so extensive is this list, and so numerous are the writers and characters unfairly omitted from it, one might suppose the author of this article is intent on disproving her own premise. (One might even wonder if the real objection here is that some science fiction doesn’t yet comply with how she feels it ought to be. Which seems rather at odds with the title of her article, Planet Diversity.) The author also concedes that the popular series Battlestar Galactica is actually rather good, not least because its most interesting characters come in various ages, shapes and colours and are very often female. We are, however, told that for every BSG – or Buffy, or Voyager, or Firefly, or Alien – there’s

a homosocial all-male fantasy fest like the film Dark Knight.

Well, I too was disappointed by Chris Nolan’s overpraised, overlong Batman sequel and its glib ambiguities, but its grievous status as a “homosocial all-male fantasy fest” somehow escaped my notice. I shall, of course, try harder to detect such things in future. After all, the forces of patriarchal oppression are everywhere and eternal vigilance is required:

We should take it as given that sex, race and sexuality bigotry manifest in cultural works just as they do in society. Outrage against such bigotry is met with bafflement by apolitical people who simply don’t get what the big issue is and are too lazy and complacent to fight the status quo.

The animated, nay heroic, author of this article is Bidisha, a woman so unassuming she declares only one name and describes herself as “a non-white angry political female.” She also defines racism as, exclusively, “despising non-whites.” So no bigotry there. Those who’ve followed Bidisha’s penetrating insights will surely recall her no less remarkable assertions regarding the sexualisation of the Olympics and its “brutalising” and “devastating” effects on the male psyche.