Demonstrate Literature

My favorite signboard from the demonstration at the Danish embassy in Washington yesterday, in support of the Jyllands-Posten and free speech in general:

If thou art privy to thy country's fate,
Which happily foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
  Wm. Shakespeare - Hamlet: I:1

Chapeau to instapundit, where there are lots more links and photos.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 09:52 AM | TrackBack

Islam in Indonesia: just add water

I was listening to Glenn Reynold's and Helen Smith's podcast with Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan, which I found very engaging (more here).

Dunnigan's comments on Indonesia, however, differ from my perceptions when I was living there (I was there for two years in the mid seventies, young and jewish in java). Indonesia is the world largest Moslem country, yes, but Dunnigan painted it as a "partial conversion" which made it sound like people practiced a syncretic religion like what we see with Christianity in Haiti or Brazil. However, there is really less separation from the Arabs, theologically and in religious practice, than there is between the Baptists and the Catholics (far less than between the Orthodox and Reform Jews). The Indonesians I knew were very, very Moslem (but not Wahabi. That's a very recent import, and I'd guess there's more Wahabi in New York than in Jakarta)..

The cultural separation, of course, is huge. Especially among Indonesians around my age, the important forces are related to the memory of authoritarian governments (Sukarno, Suharto) fighting communist (or otherwise separatist) "insurgencies" (Timor, Flores). The problem of forging a country out of an archipelago spread over an area larger than that of the U.S., containing the world's most densely populated islands, creating a common language, dealing with religious differences among the islands (Bali is largely Hindu), land reform, are all different.

But, of course, the main difference between Indonesia and Arabia is that Indonesia has humidity. Dry heat makes people cranky. Everyone knows that.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 09:48 PM | TrackBack

Tradition

My friend Michael forwarded me this quote by G. K. Chesterton:

"Tradition is democracy extended through time. Tradition means giving the vote to that most obscure of classes, our ancestors. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are walking about."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:19 AM | TrackBack

Self-censorship

So Bob Wright in the NYTimes is suggesting (to grossly paraphrase) that America works because we are so good at using self-censorship in order to get along.

Then Andrew Sullivan comes along and writes about the Russian's canceling a gay parade, after the chief Russian Chief Mufti warned that gays would be bashed. Andrew adds:

Would Bob urge the gay marchers in Moscow not to parade, because it offends so many religious people, Orthodox and Muslim? Should gay people censor themselves to avoid offending others? Should women who object to the brutal subjugation of half the human race in many Islamic societies silence themselves? Maybe Bob would indeed argue for self-censorship in these cases. Maybe he wouldn't. After all, Islam is very clear about the fate of homosexuals and the role of women. But self-censorship is a slippery slope.

Of course, it is not as if there aren't any number of towns in the United States where gay parades are canceled, schools (or armed services) where gay groups are banned, and gays do get bashed. Is the mainstream Muslim position so far from the mainstream Baptist position? And is it any more than 20 years behind the mainstream American position?

Being gay is still a political act, laden with consequences. Even now. Even here. Gay people self-censor all the time, and they're mostly pretty good at it.

Andrew's question has already been asked of the U.S. military, and the military said yes.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:17 PM | TrackBack

Negotiating Free Speech

Mohammed on his prayer rug; Persia, late medieval (date unknown). From Depictions of Mohammed Throughtout History

We're talking about the exothermic reaction that results from mixing Danish cartoons and the Prophet. Kurt Anderson, in New York Magazine, puts forth the New York position in They Can't Take a Joke:

Freedom of speech is absolute: Isn’t it pretty to think so. In fact, everything is a little negotiable. It’s why we haven’t invaded nuclear North Korea, and why we play so nice with the rich Chinese. The cartoon affair has been a negotiation. The drawings were the West’s opening salvo. The violence was the other side’s display of leverage. When the Bush administration responded by coming down on the side of aggrieved Muslims, and the Times decided that it wouldn’t reprint the cartoons, they were, for better or worse, the negotiators on our side of the table, making tactical concessions instead of shouting back or walking away.

Of course, here where business is the prevailing religion, and negotiation its eucharist, New York, the City of the Deal, is Mecca.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 08:08 PM

The Wasp and the Mockingbird

In the normally prosaic letters section of this week's Science News (169:5), C.A. Nalepa of Raleigh, NC blesses us with the following response to this article:

The larvae of phytophagous wasps
 Living inside the seeds of the multiflora rose,
  Pass unharmed through the guts of mockingbirds.

I wanted to share that with you.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 09:23 AM | TrackBack

Babelchat - Lost In Translation

My friend Joel wonders why translation software isn't embedded in chat clients?. Well, actually, there is an opensource project called Babelchat that attempts to do this, though it uses a freely available Systran service which has been recently discontinued, and it looks moribund.

But, given the current state of translation technology, this doesn't seem like such a useful idea.

Go to Altavista's Babel Fish Translation page, and consider:

Given how funny or offensive the mistranslations often are, I would be a bit circumspect about using such a tool.

Translated to dutch:

Gegeven hoe grappig of aanvallend de verkeerde vertalingen vaak zijn, zou ik een beetje omzichtig over het gebruiken van een dergelijk hulpmiddel zijn.

To french:

Donné comment drôlement ou les traductions trouvées attaquant sont souvent circonspectement, m'un peu au sujet de l'utilisation d'un outil semblable seraient.

To greek:

Δεδομένος πώς παραδόξως ή οι που βρίσκονται μεταφράσεις ο επιτιθέμενος είναι συχνά επιφυλακτικά, λίγο σχετικά με τη χρησιμοποίηση ενός παρόμοιου εργαλείου θα μ' ήταν.

Back to english:

Given how paradoxically or that is found translations attacking is often circumspectively, little with regard to the utilisation of similar tool with it was.

Does anyone remember the "I Love Lucy" episode where she is in a Parisian police station, trying to answer questions through a chain of 6 interpreters? Hysterical.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 10:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Moderate Islam's Voice

BBC News gives a roundup of editorials in the Middle Eastern press about the destructive protests in Syria and Lebanon against the Danish and Norwegian embassies, following newspaper publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed.

From Algeria:

It is no coincidence that it is only in Damascus and Beirut that the embassies of Denmark and Norway were set ablaze and nowhere else... Syria, which is in the hot seat because of possible repercussions following the international inquiry into the assassination of Hariri... has every reason to want to divert the world's attention and have the world focus on another issue... It is time to stop exploiting the anger of the masses to achieve political goals such as saving a party or regime. Such action can also be viewed as another form of blasphemy.

How often do we get the western press to report on moderate voices in Iran, for goodness' sake? Hmm?

From Iran, the squib is critical, but the implications are more transparent:

Are those angry young men who burnt Danish flags and tried to enter the embassies of those countries ignorant demagogues? ... When we think about the matter, we find that the crisis has covered up a lot of problems among Muslims themselves and given a real impetus for believers to unite in order to distinguish friend from foe.

I mean, how many ways can this be read?

Posted by BradRubenstein at 09:04 AM