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31. august 2003
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Monsters and their useful idiots
The Spectator's Matthew Leeming uses a very positive book review of Norwegian author and journalist Åsne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul to launch a double-barreled shot at the mysogynic and backwards culture of Afghanistan and its postmodern apologists in the west. He begins by retelling how he had been lambasted for the worst kind of neo-colonialism writing at Oxford.
In other words, I had once described an arranged Afghan marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man as ‘legitimised rape’. I thought I had rather understated the horror of it.
My thought-crime was ‘Orientalism’, the depiction of eastern cultures as strange and inferior to the West, rather than portraying them as both equally bad. In future I will give any cultural relativist this book. It explains what it is like to be an Afghan woman. The answer is that it is even more ghastly than I had supposed.
It is an irony that the kind of cultural relativism could only possibly exist in the west, and precisely because of the freedom intellectuals and others can enjoy here. Åsne Seiersted lived with an Afghan family for five months, and the description of what she experienced and heard makes Leeming label the patriarch an absolute monster.
Women are objects that can be bought and sold. I am often asked the market price of a wife in England. This book tells you what they cost in Afghanistan: $100, with a handicapped sister thrown in free. The morning after the wedding night a rag from the bed is taken to the mother-in-law. If it is not bloodstained, the wife is returned. Once married, women are seldom allowed to work. Men would feel threatened if they did.
The emotion most often invoked is ‘shame’. It is shameful for a woman to want to be in love. It is shameful for her to be in love with a man she cannot have. It is shameful for her to sit in a taxi with an unrelated male. It is shameful to be looked at in the street. Shame for a man can be expiated by a pilgrimage. The shame of a woman is often only expiable by death. Seierstad tells of three brothers who suffocate their sister with pillows for having entertained a lover at night. This shame culture institutionalises male hypocrisy —one thinks of Muslims in Pakistan decanting beer into a teapot and drinking it from china cups. There’s plenty of guilt, too, but the worst thing is being caught.
The problem, as Leeming sees it (and I agree) is a religious tradition that caters to the most primitive male desires and insecurities. Let's face it, Islam bears all evidence of being made up by a group of brutish savages, and the progress having been made in Islam to get out of that has been brutally turned back by the Islamists.
Afghanistan is a good place to ponder one’s good fortune in being born in the modern West and not in a culture where malaria is treated by yelling, or the best cuts of meat are reserved for the dead, or it is believed that the motions of the stars are controlled from the liver of a rogue elephant, or divine honours paid to shallow depressions in the ground. We have the Enlightenment to thank for this, the moment when the West achieved intellectual maturity (or rediscovered that of the classical world) and reduced religion to a matter of opinion and turned the mullahs into comic turns like Rowan Williams. The Orientalist witch-smellers and postmodernists at Oxford have the Enlightenment in their sights. It is a sobering thought that whole cultures and educated elites can commit intellectual suicide.
Indeed.
PS: Åsne Seierstad has experienced a storm of her own here in Norway over the book, as the bookseller himself has now finally read the book, and he is not at all amused.
8:41:05 PM 
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You just know he's being sarcastic
"Good thing we have FBI and Gates on case" (San Fransisco Chronicle headline)
Of course the topic is the fantastic capture of script kiddie Jeffrey Lee Parson, who had left electronic trails that a blind cave dweller could find.
Oh, wait. Even better than that was the actual complaint filed electronically by federal prosecutors Friday. It wasn't very legible, because the super cybersleuths who chased down this menace to society had scanned the legal document sideways. The PDF files that folks were trying to read on this matter showed only half of each page, laid out vertically across the horizontal format.
Now, if these geniuses can't scan a document right, how did they ever corner a mastermind like Parson? They had help from Bill Gates. That's how.
No wonder the net is in trouble.
5:45:46 PM
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Bride from hell revisited
Remember the story about Adrienne T. Samen, the bride nicknamed "bridezilla" who went crazy at her own wedding reception? The whole thing ended up with her being fined $90 for causing a public disturbance. I guess the bad publicity was more punishment than the fine.
She'll get a chance to tell her story next month when she makes an appearance on a television show hosted by Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy Osbourne's wife.
Judge Patricia Swords suggested she seek substance abuse and anger managment counseling. The judge also commented:
"This behavior does not bode well for the well-being of your marriage."
The groom, David Samen, (yes, they are still married) is a 21 year old Marine reservist who just came home from a six month service in Iraq. That is good, because he'll need everything he learned about dealing with hostiles and dodging flying objects.
2:26:01 PM
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Government inspector closes down kids' pop stand
Mikaela  Ziegler, 7, and her 4-year-old sister, Annika, from St Paul, were selling lemonade at a stand, like so many kids have done before them.
That is, until an inspector with St. Paul's Office of License, Inspections and Environmental Protection put an end to it, as the kids didn't have the required license to sell refreshments in public.
Licensing Director Janeen Rosas said Mikaela was violating St. Paul Legislative Code Chapter 331A.04(d)(24), which requires a license for "A temporary establishment where food sales shall be restricted to prepackaged nonpotentially hazardous foods or canned or bottled nonalcoholic beverages; operating no more than fourteen (14) days annually at any one location."
Rosas said the city has received more complaints than ever this year about sellers at the fair, although she said no one had registered a gripe about the enterprising Ziegler sisters.
"If someone were to get ill from one of these products, with a license we're more able to track them back," she said. "And at the fair it's an equity issue. Allowing some people to sell without licenses gives them an unfair advantage over others."
I am so happy that all other problems with food and refreshments have been solved in the Twin Cities, so its inspectors can spend their time chasing kids playing business.
Now, what lessons have these young girls just learned about private enterprise?
Update: This story had a sort of happy ending when St Paul's Mayor Randy Kelly heard about the story and instructed his staff to "leave the little girls alone."
12:33:09 PM
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David Kelly made the case for war
Dr David Kelly, the British WMD expert who committed suicice after he was named as the source of a controversial BBC news item accusing the Blair government of "sexing up" its Iraq weapons dossier, wrote an article for The Observer that made a strong case for military intervention. The article was written just before the war, but has not been published before now. Dr Kelly writes:
But Iraq always gave up materials once it was in its interest to do so. Iraq has spent the past 30 years building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use. [...]
The UN has been attempting to disarm Iraq ever since 1991 and has failed to do so. It is an abject failure of diplomacy with the split between France, China and Russia on the one hand, and Britain and the United States on the other, creating a lack of 'permanent five' unity and resolve. More recently Germany, a temporary yet powerful member of the Security Council, has exacerbated the diplomatic split. The threat of credible military force has forced Saddam Hussein to admit, but not co-operate with, the UN inspectorate. So-called concessions - U2 overflights, the right to interview - were all routine between 1991 and 1998. After 12 unsuccessful years of UN supervision of disarmament, military force regrettably appears to be the only way of finally and conclusively disarming Iraq. [...]
The long-term threat, however, remains Iraq's development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction - something that only regime change will avert.
The anti-war movement just lost its martyr.
10:23:07 AM
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Big beef
Is this talk about sex and drugs really enough to hurt Arnold Schwarzenegger's chances in the California recall election? We'll see.
8:17:37 AM
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Living cliche
Jeffrey Lee Parson (picture), an 18 year old Minnesotan, is charged with creating and spreading a variant of the so-called MSBlast worm. He is overweight, had very few friends, was unpopular with other kids, everybody said he was quiet and didn't do anything wrong, he was a geek, and he liked playing Counterstrike. Not mentioned, but one can guess, he never had a girlfriend.
Sheesh. Is this a bad movie or something?
1:46:47 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.09.2003; 08:41:24.
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This is my blogchalk:
Norway, Bergen, Norwegian, English, Jan, Male, 31-35.
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