it's the little things

Afghanistan has just had its first postal delivery in 20 years. Just as some pretty mundane things turned into important landmarks of the return to normality for New Yorkers last year, this must be a pretty significant sign to some Afghans....

posted @ 10:15 AM -

enrongate

AlterNet have just launched a section devoted to the Enron scandal. As well as some typically opinionated (and well written and well researched, but not everyone will agree with them) pieces it seems like a pretty good source for background information about what happened and why it was possible.

posted @ 4:53 AM -

original

I just saw a wonderful comment about art on a random weblog I was reading. No further comment to make, just thought I'd share that.

posted @ 4:49 PM -

high noon at.... mandela hall

Today was the day of our big Students' Union meeting. We (I and two other Union reps) explained what is happening at our University to crowd of 200-odd bewildered and angry students, then the Vice Chancellor spoke, then one of the Deans (not one of the Deans I know). This was all OK, and all much as expected (the VC wasn't hugely convincing, but did make some good points at the same time as trying to use his stronger points as a smokescreen to distract from all the things we were right about), but what really worked beautifully was the question and answer session. The floor were very hard on the VC (rightly so), and almost all the things I wanted to say (but didn't because I needed it to be clear that this isn't a one-man campaign) were said unprompted by independent members of the student body.

There is now no possible excuse for any Sussex student not to know what is happening to their University, and no excuse for the senior management not to know how strongly we feel about all this.

In other news, I got a letter from Mencap today announcing that the China Bike Ride has raised over �226,000 for the mentally handicapped.

Today I feel more convinced than usual that I the space I take up on this planet is justified.

posted @ 4:47 PM -

best opening lyric

It's audience participation time everyone. What's the best first line of a song you've ever heard?

posted @ 4:33 AM -

so 90s

I forget where I found it, but I was passing time on a silly web trawl today, and found a not very impressive Flash animation. Anyway, the point is that my main criticism while watching it was that it was too 90s. A sign, presumably, that I've finally realised it's not the 90s any more, and yet I haven't even managed to accept a name for the new decade. "Noughties" is just so, well, 2000

posted @ 6:34 PM -

tomato soprano yell

Walking through the maths department today a small notice on a lecturer's office door caught my eye. It was the abstract of a spoof science paper, and I thought I'd probably find a copy online. I entered "tomato soprano yell" into Google, and sure enough found exactly what I was looking for (have I told you lately that I love Google?):

Experimental Demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.)

posted @ 4:53 PM -

COGS Phoenix

It seems I definitely have achieved something with all the on-campus politicking. The Dean of COGS (my department) sent an email out today to all staff and students aiming to put together a working group to discuss the future of our activities. This is very positive because it is the strongest sign he could have sent out (so much business in our department is conducted via email that it is the most reliable way to contact every single member) that our opinions are valued, and now no-one has any excuse for not knowing what's happening. It's also positive for more complex reasons which I think I can learn from.

While I approached the central management of the University in a confrontational way (which I slightly regret, but it did achieve the specific effect I set out to achieve, and I'm not sure a nicer approach would have led to the big man himself addressing a student meeting, something he only does when he's very worried), I approached my own Dean in a completely different tone. This is partly because I feel far less aggrieved by his actions (he didn't initiate the changes I'm unhappy about, and he did make some effort to consult us about them last year), and partly because I know we broadly agree about what is to be done. I think it's fair to say that being more aggressive with him would have had a less productive result.

As for what the Dean is actually doing, our (he, I and the Students' Union) consensus is not to oppose the restructuring itself, partly because we don't really want to tilt at windmills, and partly because now that the changes are happening there is a vast amount of unspecified detail that will be the real determinant of whether the University changes for better or worse. The Dean is not only talking about listening to our opinions, but about actually forming a collective pressure group (faculty, non-teaching staff and all levels of student) to ensure that the sort of innovative cross-disciplinary research (and research environment) that COGS has been so successful at fostering continues even after the unit itself disappears.

This is what unionism should be about - not simply fighting against 'da management', but working together with anyone who has common goals because we can achieve so much more together. I am also beginning to understand, 6 months after starting, why I took this job.

posted @ 1:52 PM -

a brother from a different mother

It's been an evening of watching people confront racial issues for me. First of all the "Students For Peace" society showed Promises, a documentary about Israeli and Palestinian children, growing up literally within a stone's throw of each other, but living completely seperate lives. Then as I arrived home I just caught Trading Races, a BBC documentary in which a black man is made up to look like a white man, and a white man made to look black, and they discuss how it changes peoples' reactions to them.

I found Promises depressing; a view which other people who stayed around at the end to talk about mostly didn't share. It wasn't one of these conventional liberal documentaries about Israeli & Palestinian kids on a play scheme all getting on and saying how stupid the conflict is - it actually had the guts to interview people whose views were deeply ingrained and quite offensive (as well as others with more moderate voices). We listened to a Jewish child talking about the Arabs like vermin and about how the Jews can only be safe when the Arabs have been driven out of their land. Then we heard a young Arab saying what amounted to the same thing, except that the words Jew and Arab were reversed. Then we heard people on both sides of this divide talking about how God had promised this land to their ancestors; of course if one takes the Bible literally, they are both right - the promise was made to Abraham (Genesis XVII:8), and Abraham is supposed to be the last common ancestor of the Jews and the Arabs.

It wasn't all bleak - there was a range of views presented on both sides, and some of the kids were eventually talked into meeting each other. The actual meeting was wonderful, progressing from initial nervousness to comfortable communication, and a mixed group of Jews and Arabs were soon playing happily without any sign of partisan divisions. Then as they had their final discussion some extremely perceptive and conciliatory things were said by these quite young kids, but one of the Palestinians, Faraj, started to cry. He was asked why he was crying, and his answer was that the day had been great, but he knew that once the film-makers left it would all be forgotten and the Jewish kids would stop coming to visit them (the Palestinians couldn't visit the Jews because of the checkpoints, even though this was before the latest Intifada). The end was a follow-up 2 years later, and sure enough the kids had lost contact. It's deeply frustrating, because this seems universal - people try extremely hard to bring the two cultures together, but if it only happens on a small scale like this it just seems doomed in the face of the more powerful forces keeping them apart. It's a problem I just can't see a solution to, much as I hate to admit that.

Trading Races, on the other hand, was quite uplifting. A lot of the prejudice that the people expected was internalised, which was summed up for me by a story the black man told in an interview the other day. He decided to go to the dog races, which are probably one of the most white-dominated institutions in this country, to see what it was like when disguised as a white man (the make-up was actually really convincing, much to my surprise). At the races he went up to someone for advice on how to read the listings and place bets; someone he wouldn't have approached without the disguise because he was a big, white, tatooed skinhead. The guy was really nice, friendly and helpful, and after the documentary the black man decided to go back without a disguise. He approached the same punter, and got exactly the same response. He was left reflecting on how he had pre-judged the white man, by deciding not to approach him in the first place assuming he would be racist. When he did approach him he found out that there was no racism there at all. There is an upsetting lesson here, about how prejudice is self-maintaining, but also an uplifting one about how both the people in the documentary found less prejudice than they expected out in the world.

posted @ 8:06 PM -

elephant bigamy

What is the world coming to? Where have all our moral standards gone? It's all very well that an elephant is about to get married in a Thai zoo, but I find it disgraceful that he's already planning a second wedding shortly afterwards, and to mate 4 different females. Honestly, if these noble creatures set such a poor example what can be expected of us mere humans?

posted @ 9:32 AM -

What is this... brainwashing?

This morning's TV news featured an interview with the 2 brothers of one of the British men currently being held in Camp X-Ray. While I can only feel sorry for the family, especially when they pointed out that the Sun splashes photos around that are not even of their brother, I'm tired of people claiming that their loved ones couldn't possibly have done such terrible things and must therefore have been brainwashed. All the relatives of terrorist suspects who come out and face the media claim at least one of these things.

Shock is an understandable reaction, and it seems that if this person is guilty (which is a bit dubious, but he's not been tried yet in any case) there has been a strangely quick transformation from non-fanatic to fanatic, but I can't accept claims of brainwashing until someone explains what this process is. I think people have some sort of image of locking the victim up in a darkened room and magically turning them into a new person. There is no way to do this. If you torture people you can make them claim all sorts of things that are not true (hence some famous miscarriages of justice like the Guildford Four), and you can make them drop their resistance to thinks you want to do, but there is no way to actively replace someone's mind with a new one. I'm sure many organisations, and not just ones as sinister as terrorists, use subtle and effective techniques to convince people of their view of the world, but this is not brainwashing. In the absence of a magical way to re-program peoples' minds, all you can do is modify their opinions and behaviour, which will not make a terrorist of a pacifist or an evil person of a good one.

Brainwashing is also an idea that comes up every now and again as a reason not to learn about other peoples' religions. When would-be-evangelists knock on my door (hasn't happened for ages, but I used to live near a Mormon lodge) I like to invite them in and talk to them. The less intelligent ones provide comic relief with their inability to argue properly, and the more intelligent ones tend to have very interesting things to say for themselves. I haven't ever been convinced of anything that these people are trying to evangelise, but I have learned a lot about what they believe and why, and I think my life is richer for it. Yet somehow I'm supposed to be scared of them because they might brainwash me. Of course, if one of my mainstream Christian friends were to convert me it would be OK, but if they were from a fringe religion it would be brainwashing, scary and wrong. Why?

Convincing someone of something, however alien that something might be to their brothers, parents, friends or anyone, is not brainwashing. You have to start with a person's actual beliefs and emotions, which means that if their nearest & dearest thing they have been brainwashed all it really means is they didn't understand the person in the first place. Brainwashing is just a convenient excuse for families to make themselves feel better about the terrible things they have done, because they feel somehow responsible. People need to learn to accept that individuals can make individual decisions, and that it is not impossible for people to do things completely against not only their families' beliefs, but also against their families' perceptions of them, without needing to invoke brainwashing to explain it.

This freedom is not actually a bad thing either. While it does make it harder for well-meaning parents to keep their children on the path of virtue, it also allows people not to be bound by the family or society they were born into if there is something wrong with its values. What else was the story of Abraham breaking his father's idols supposed to teach us?

posted @ 3:55 AM -

Israeli reservists refuse to fight for disputed settlements

I said I'd generally steer clear of politics, but I bet this story from the Jerusalem Post doesn't get reported in the mainstream UK media at all, because it doesn't fit into their nice over-simple picture of Israelis all believing one thing on one side, and an equally homogeneous mass of Palestinians on the other.

The gist of the story is that a group of 50 reservists (background info: in Israel every man and I think also every woman receives several years' military training after school, and is then a reservist for 40-50 years. Reservists are expected to serve for a few weeks every year - something hard for me in a peaceful corner of a peaceful land to imagine) have refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. They delivered a statement aiming to make it clear that they are patriotic Israelis, some of whom have served for many years, and that they are willing to do their military service, but that they "will not continue to fight beyond the Green Line in order to rule, to expel, to destroy, to blockade, to assassinate, to starve, and to humiliate an entire people...".

As well as hoping that I would have the resolve to do as they did in their place, I think their actions underline the really important point that real conflicts like this one are not kiddie-cartoon battles between two sides that each think with one mind. There are plenty of Israelis who are not comfortable with what their government is doing to the Palestinian people, and some of them are prepared to take action like this. Especially as the UK observes Holocaust Memorial Day, I think it's important to celebrate people like this, who are willing to take personal risks to try and stop the wholesale oppression of a people, just as the Oscar Schindlers of this world did for the Jews when it was Jews who were being persecuted.

posted @ 7:07 PM -

pending redesign

in a few weeks' time, when I am less busy, I will be doing some redesigning to this page. I'm not sure if I'll come up with a completely new look or just add a few bits (mainly depends on whether I have any good ideas for a new look), but in any case now would be a really good time to tell me if you have any problems viewing the site, if there is any specific change you would make, and if there's anything else you'd like to see here. I have some ideas, but there's no point doing this without readers, so any reader feedback will be very welcome.

posted @ 9:12 AM -