The American Family Association experiences technical difficulties. // Sweden’s classroom esteem police. // Excuse me, sir – do you have any cigarette in your marijuana? // Medical mannequins. // Kubrick. // Abandoned hotels. (h/t, Things.) // Impressive swimming pools. (h/t, Coudal.) // Pencil sculptures. // A very large drawing. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // The Metzo School, Doetinchem. // Undersea internet cables. // The Amazon bookstore browser. With virtual shelves and everything. // Vintage comic book covers. // Vintage gay paperback covers. // Porn for the blind. (sfw) // Two decades of party flyers, 1987 – 2007. // Hey, mobile DJ. // 120 years of electronic music. // Faces and pocket contents, scanned. (h/t, Quipsologies.) // Octopus jewellery. Precious tentacles. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Greta Keller.

In revisiting the recent saga involving the Muslim hairstylist, Bushra Noah, and her award of £4000 in damages for “injured feelings,” Mary Jackson touches on an important point.

[Salon owner, Sarah] Desrosiers railed against this injustice:

I’ve worked hard all my life – how can it be possible that someone can come into my shop, talk to me for ten minutes, and then sue me for £34,000? How is that possibly fair?

It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair because the balance of risk and reward has been cruelly inverted. Desrosiers risked, sacrificed, and lost. Noah risked nothing, sacrificed nothing, and won.

Desrosiers risked. She risked her savings and her security, and was punished for refusing to risk still more. Significantly, the employment tribunal overrode her judgment, concluding that “there was no specific evidence before us as to what would (for sure) have been the actual impact of the claimant working in her salon,” and that it “doubted whether the risk was as severe as the owner believed.” That is easy for them to say. They do not bear the risk. The only way to provide the required “specific evidence” would be for Desrosiers to employ Noah, lose business, and perhaps go bankrupt. The time spent preparing her defense cost Desrosiers an estimated £40,000 of the salon’s income and many sleepless nights. The case cost Noah, who, being unemployed, must have received legal aid from the British taxpayer, nothing at all. Desrosiers risked and Noah was rewarded.

And here’s the bigger issue:

Likewise, Desrosiers made sacrifices and was punished for not sacrificing still more – for someone else’s freely chosen religious convictions. Most religions require conservative dress, particularly of women. Conservative dress is not compatible with a “funky” workplace, but why should a devoutly religious woman mind? Forgoing the opportunity to work in an “urban and edgy” salon would seem a small price to pay for God’s approval. Wouldn’t God prefer Noah to work in a more traditional salon? And shouldn’t Noah accept this sacrifice as part of the deal?

Indeed. Isn’t the cost of piety meant to be borne exclusively by the pious? Isn’t that the whole point, such as it is? If a believer chooses to forgo certain pleasures and opportunities, isn’t that meant to be a metaphysical test of some kind – a matter of self-denial – one of supposedly cosmic importance? And isn’t demanding exemptions and compensation simply cheating to gain the approval of one’s hypothetical deity? If a person avoids certain foodstuffs or swimming with infidels because he believes avoiding those things will please God for some strange reason, then that’s a pretty mad formulation. But attempting to circumvent those self-imposed restrictions by imposing on others seems somewhat dubious even on its own, mad, terms. Or doesn’t God mind if someone else is forced to pick up the tab? And how convenient is that?

Broadly speaking, I don’t particularly care what metaphysical hang-ups a person has, provided those mental ticks are, as it were, kept off my lawn. If people wish to be a little bonkers and neurotic, that doesn’t usually trouble me. But expecting others to indulge those neuroses or defer to them – and then cheerily subsidise them too – is, well, pushing it a little. That isn’t piety or anything close to piety; that’s just parasitic arrogance.

Over the last week or so there’s been some discussion about the nation state and democracy. Chris Dillow asked,

If nation states did not exist, would we these days feel a pressing need to invent them?

To which Shuggy replied,

What problems are best solved by national political systems? The problem of who governs and what the people can do if they want a change in government. In other words, the ‘nation-state’ has historically been the theatre of democracy and there is, in my view, absolutely no evidence to suggest that trans-national institutions like the UN or the EU are capable of answering these questions better than nations for the simple reason that neither of them can be considered democratic in any meaningful sense.

Matthew Sinclair added,

[Supranational] organisations lack legitimacy as they lack history and have, instead, been superimposed on better established communities. A nation state’s legitimacy is rooted in its history and, usually, a common stand against some adversity (wars build nations as well as destroying them). Supranational institutions never have that as they are superimposed and never command enough loyalty to take a serious common stand against serious adversity.

Rooting through the archives, I unearthed this gem, in which Deogolwulf tackles George Monbiot’s erotic dreams of global government:

George Monbiot calls for a world-government with direct popular representation. For a moment, even he is aware of the problem that such a system would bring, but then madness takes him once more:

Global democracy has a special problem — the scale on which it must operate. The bigger the electorate, the less democratic a parliamentary body will be. True democracy could exist only in the village, where representatives are subject to constant oversight by their electorate. But an imperfect system is better than no system at all.

He is not quite right even when he senses the problem; for the bigger the electorate, the less the vote of a single person matters, which is more democratic, not less. A tolerable, even decent, democracy can exist in a small society because the individual is not dwarfed by the vastness of demotic power. But let us imagine something at the other end of the scale: a world-democracy. The world-population is about 6.5 billion, and perhaps 4 billion are of voting-age. If there were a representative for, say, every 100,000 of such persons, as is broadly comparable with the representation-ratio of the British House of Commons, then there would have to be 40,000 representatives in the world-parliament. If, on the other hand, we wished the world-parliament to be of manageable size, then we would have to reduce the number of representatives, such that, if we had, say, 1,000 representatives, then each would represent 4 million people.

It is rather odd, therefore, that a man who complains about the smallness of his representation on a national scale – a reasonable complaint in a large democratic state – should then seek representation on a global one; for however such “representation” is instituted, a single man’s vote would count for even less than it already does in a large democratic nation-state of today, and anyone bothering to get out of bed to vote in a global election would be doing so quite irrationally; for the chances of his having any appreciable effect on the outcome would be far less than the chances of his tripping over a discarded first-edition of Probability for Dummies on the way to the polling-station and plunging head-first in front of a bus driven by a hard-up student of political statistics.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

A mobile in a microwave – what could possibly go wrong? 

(h/t, Ace.)

I’ve lifted these from today’s ephemera because they’re too good to miss. Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz make limited edition snow globes with a difference. Instead of the usual uneventful winter scenes, these six-inch globes offer glimpses of intrigue and alarming goings-on.

More.

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. Sergei Brukhonenko and the disembodied dog’s head. (1940) // Farming with dynamite. (1910) // From bull fights to ape rights. // Snow globes of note. // Rice paddy art. // Echochrome. A game of perspective. // The book of sleep. // The worst places to be a woman. // Dr Ahmad Al-Mub’i shares his thoughts on marriage. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // A map of the political blogosphere. // A timeline of internet memes. (h/t, Crooked Timber.) // Peter Risdon on Marxists, memes and benefit cheats. // Jihad on the dole. Your taxes at work. // Guardian hypocrisy shock. // Bill Blake on Grand Theft Auto IV. Missile launchers, temptation and vigilante strippers. // Photographed while driving. // “Come and play with us, Danny.” Kubrick analysed. // The art of the title sequence. // George Dyson on the birth of the computer. // Dish camouflage. // Big science. // The Tokyo Sky Tree. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // The aerodynamic Nubrella. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Flanagan and Allen.

Matt Kirkland reveals the innards of some popular cuddly toys. Pooh, Elmo and Ernie are among the fluffy creatures stripped to their stumps and wires.

Children, avert your eyes. (h/t, Ace.) 

The Guardian’s Zoe Williams – whose wisdom is known to us – today asks her readers the burning question,

Why don’t lefties complain more?

What prompts this question is the recent, rather baffling, fuss over an advert for Heinz mayonnaise. The Advertising Standards Authority has apparently received around 200 complaints, many of which concern the advert’s dénouement in which one man kisses another. The ad wasn’t shown during children’s programming  – due to the mortally harmful effects of full-fat mayonnaise – and has subsequently been withdrawn by Heinz UK. In light of such controversy, I feel obliged to share the offending advert with you. Brace yourselves.

Everybody okay? Now, the ad strikes me as innocuous and faintly amusing, and hardly malevolent or corrupting. (Though an image of Bernard Breslaw does, unfortunately, come to mind.) The ad isn’t even explicitly about a gay couple. The visual pun being that the husband is actually kissing his wife, who – thanks to her choice of mayonnaise – has acquired the zing and authenticity of a New York deli stereotype. However, the minor hoo-hah surrounding the ad leads Ms Williams to argue – indeed complain – that lefties don’t complain anywhere near as much as they should:

Jason Tozer’s bubble photos. 

Behind-the-scenes. The physics. Via Coudal.

Last year, I wrote a short post titled It’s Okay to Dislike Islam. In it, I argued:

One of the creeping, unanalysed myths of our time is that it is somehow wrong to dislike Islam, or any part thereof, and wrong to take a dim view of its tenets and demands, and wrong to take a still dimmer view of the figure who founded it. I can practically hear the distant tutting and grunts of disapproval. Poor Islam. Poor Muslims. Their beliefs are being mocked. How hurtful. How “racist”. How terribly unfair.

No. It’s not unfair at all. What’s unfair is a demand for unearned deference and a unilateral exemption from the testing of ideas. What’s unfair, indeed despicable, are efforts by Islamic groups to cow dissent and stifle criticism with a well-rehearsed pantomime of victimhood and the projection of false motives. Pretending to be hurt in order to assert one’s will over others, or to gain unreciprocated favours, or to exert control over what others may say and think, is cowardly and malign. Let me say that once again. It’s cowardly and malign.

At the time, I feared I might be stating the blindingly obvious. Thankfully, today’s Independent on Sunday suggests the sentiments above may still, to some, be novel. Peter Popham and Thais Portilho-Shrimpton apparently find it “astonishing” that an author, i.e. someone whose livelihood presupposes a freethinking society, should take a strong dislike to those aspects of Islam, often labelled Islamism, that are explicitly antithetical to a freethinking society:

The novelist Ian McEwan has launched an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism, saying that he “despises” it and accusing it of “wanting to create a society that I detest”. His words, in an interview with an Italian newspaper, could, in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

At this point, perhaps it’s worth bearing in mind just what kind of world Islamist groups wish to share with us, whether we like it or not. Consider, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps the foremost Islamist group, which declares its aim as the “widespread implementation of Islam as a way of life; no longer to be sidelined as merely a religion.” In 2004, the Brotherhood’s president, Muhammad Mehdi Akef, told the Egyptian newspaper al-Arabi: “Islam will invade Europe and America because Islam has a mission.” Later the same year, Mehdi described the Holocaust as “a myth” and insisted that, when in power, the Brotherhood would not recognise Israel, whose demise he “expected soon”. Mehdi views “martyrdom operations” in Palestine and Iraq as a religious duty and has described all Israelis – including children – as “enemies of Islam”. The Brotherhood’s literature and website still bears the charming prophesy: “Islam will dominate the world.”

If some among us don’t find the above quite enough to warrant concern or contempt, perhaps we should remember the words of Ragab Hilal Hamida, a Brotherhood MP and former member of the jihadist group Jama’at al-Takfir Wa al-Hijra, who in 2006 told the Egyptian weekly Roz al-Yusouf: “Terrorism is not a curse when given its true [religious] meaning. From my point of view, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi are not terrorists… I support all their activities.” When asked if such statements might reflect badly on the public perception of Islam, Hamida replied, “Islam does not need improvement of its image.”

In light of such statements, and many others like them, what is astonishing is the notion that a dislike of Islamism, or of Islam generally, should invite fears of “hate crime” investigation. As I’ve said before, religious freedom does not entail sparing believers any hint that others do not share their beliefs or indeed find them ludicrous. There is, after all, no corresponding obligation for believers to embrace ideas that are not clearly risible, monstrous or disgusting. But, again, perhaps I’m stating the obvious.