Category: Politics

Abercrombie cool

I don’t know anything about Abercrombie & Fitch. I know it’s a chain of stores that sell clothes, I’m sure I’ve seen their stores, but I’ve never been inside them. Everything I know about their brand comes from an 80-year-old satire by James Thurber that begins

 I always try to answer Abercrombie & Fitch’s questions (in their advertisements) the way they obviously want them answered, but usually, if I am to be honest with them and with myself, I must answer them in a way that would not please Abercrombie & Fitch. While that company and I have always nodded and smiled pleasantly enough when we met, we have never really been on intimate terms, mainly because we have so little in common. For one thing, I am inclined to be nervous and impatient, whereas Abercrombie & Fitch are at all times composed and tranquil…

Take the one recently printed in an advertisement in this magazine. Under a picture of a man fishing in a stream were these words: “Can’t you picture yourself in the middle of the stream with the certain knowledge that a wise old trout is hiding under a ledge and defying you to tempt him with your skillfully cast fly?” My answer, of course, is “No.” Especially if I am to be equipped the way the gentleman in the illustration is equipped: with rod, reel, line, net, hip boots, felt hat, and pipe. They might just as well add a banjo and a parachute….

I was reminded of this in reading about a case that is currently being considered by the US Supreme Court, in which Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has charged the company with religious discrimination, after it refused to hire a Muslim woman, because her headscarf would conflict with the Abercrombie dress code. (As the law would require reasonable accommodation to be made for religious observance, the legal case turns on the relatively uninteresting question of whether the district manager who made the decision, and who reportedly said  “if we allow this then someone will paint themselves green and call it a religion”, is really the last man left in America so uncontaminated by media representations of Muslims that he is not even aware that Muslim women often wear headscarfs as part of their religious practice.)

According to court documents,

Abercrombie described its brand as “a classic East Coast collegiate style of clothing.” When Elauf applied for a job in 2008, the Look policy included prohibitions on black clothing and “caps”; these and other rules were designed to protect “the health and vitality of its ‘preppy’ and ‘casual’ brand.” As Justice Alito put it during oral arguments, Abercrombie wants job candidates “who [look] just like this mythical preppy or … somebody who came off the beach in California.”

From fly-fishing in an east-coast stream to a beach in California. You’ve come a long way, baby!

Counting to zero

I was amused by the comments made by right-wing American TV news personality Bill O’Reilly, who referred to his time in the Falklands “war zone” because he reported on an unruly protest in Buenos Aires after the war ended. He supported his position by quoting a NY Times report that referred to a police officer firing five shots, without mentioning that the shots were fired “over the heads of fleeing protestors”.

Rich Meislin, the Times reporter who wrote the article, said on Facebook that as far as he knew no demonstrators were shot or killed by police that night. On Monday, Mr. O’Reilly said he was just reading clips from the piece during the Media Buzz interview and that official reports on casualties there were difficult to obtain.

One could imagine that in a dispute over the exact number of protesters shot or killed you might say that the official reports were “difficult to obtain”. It seems like an odd defence when people are claiming that the exact number was zero, since, of course, in that case there would be no reports on casualties to obtain. “I do remember that there was tension between the authorities and the crowd,” [CBS correspondent Charles Gomez] said, but added that he “did not see any bloodshed.”

Humans have a separate system for unconsciously apprehending the numbers of items under about four, called subitizing, that is distinct from the conscious process of counting. The idea of “counting” one or two items seems ridiculous, and counting zero items exaggerates the comic effect. I was reminded of a scene in the second volume Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe. Ford Prefect and his friends have accidentally stowed away on a space ship programmed to crash into the local sun (as part of the light show for a rock concert). Zaphod Beeblebrox yells “Ford, how many escape capsules are there?”

“None,” said Ford.

Zaphod gibbered.

“Did you count them?” he yelled.

“Twice,” said Ford.

 Update: In another interview O’Reilly continued to conflate the Falklands War with the unruly demonstration in Buenos Aires:

“A lot of people died,” said O’Reilly, nodding his head. “You bet.”

“On both sides, both the British and the Argentines,” Browne said, appearing to reference the broader war rather than the protests.

“Nine hundred deaths on the Island,” O’Reilly said. “And we don’t know how many in Buenos Aires.”

We don’t know how many. The number is generally reckoned to be around… zero.

Powerless

The Oxford Mail moans in a recent headline that the Oxford city council is “powerless to prevent the spread of graffiti”.

MORE than 1,000 cases of graffiti scrawled on private property are blighting Oxford…

That sounds pretty bad. What sort of extraordinary, perhaps dictatorial, powers would the council need to be granted in this state of emergency, to enable them to rescue us from this blight? The article continues that the graffiti cannot be removed

 because firms are not paying to have them removed, the city council’s graffiti team has warned.

“But 99 per cent of them don’t pay because of the cost and they think they shouldn’t have to.

“There are more than 1,000 jobs on my database we can’t touch –and we have the equipment and the training to deal with them.”

The council charges £27 an hour on top of £15 per square metre for the removal of graffiti from privately-owned property.

It seems strange to formulate this in terms of “lacking powers”. My guess is that if they considered it to be a sufficient problem for the public welfare that they wanted to use tax money to fund the cleanup, very few property owners would wish to hinder them. They lack the power to force the property owners to pay because most of the public agrees that, having been victimised by the graffiti writers already, the property owners don’t deserve to be punished with the compulsory expense of cleaning it up.

This is the city council acting like a private company, advertising its graffiti-cleaning service. But a private company would never think to formulate its inability to attract customers willing to pay £27 an hour for its property-beautification schemes as “we are powerless to carry out our plans because 99 per cent of our potential customers don’t hire us because of the cost and they think they shouldn’t have to,” and whine about how unreasonable that is, because “we have the equipment and the training”.

Come home to Israel…

Binyamin Netanyahu is back to grandstanding as king of the Jews — just days after announcing that he would be speaking to the US Congress as “a representative of the entire Jewish people” — telling European Jews that they will always be victimised by non-Jews as long as they stay in Europe, so they should move to Israel, where they can be victimised by fellow Jews instead. But at least in Israel Jews can pray in peace without armed police protecting them; because in Israel the armed police will break up their prayer sessions and arrest them (if they’re women and not Orthodox).

Are you “cultural”?

A while back I remarked on a tic shared by politicians and political journalists, of designating certain people and their voting choices as “demographic”. Now the RCMP have disrupted a planned mass shooting at a Halifax mall.

wouldn’t characterize it as a terrorist event. I would classify it as a group of individuals that had some beliefs and were willing to carry out violent acts against citizens,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commanding Officer Brian Brennan said.

Now, you may be wondering, how do “violent acts against citizens” carried out by “individuals that had some beliefs” — I’m guessing he means to imply that the acts were supposed to be promoting those beliefs somehow — differ from what you or I would call “terrorism”?

He would not specify what those beliefs were, saying simply that “they were not culturally based.”

Got that? “Terrorists” carry out their violent acts in furtherance of beliefs that are “culturally based”. Wanton violence to promote non-culturally-based beliefs are lamentable, but not terrorism.

I wonder if he has any particular cultures in mind?

“The important thing is to get the money in”

That’s what Lin Homer, head of HM Revenues and Customs (the UK tax authority) said in 2012 about agreements not to prosecute wealthy Britons who had been concealing their money in Swiss bank accounts, and so also protect them from having their identities publicly revealed, in exchange for them kindly consenting to pay the taxes that they were legally obliged to pay. We wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone! And then I recall this woman (a mother with two children) who was sentenced to prison for five months for receiving an item of clothing from a friend who had stolen it.* As Bob Dylan sang, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king.”

Shocked by the criminal activity at HSBC in Geneva, which was revealed to the French tax authorities by an enterprising tech support guy, the Swiss police have been unusually active in seeking to ensure that such lawlessness is stopped — by seeking to extradite and prosecute the guy who revealed the information. Informed of HSBC’s crimes in 2010, the UK government sought ingeniously to decapitate the bank, by appointing its CEO Stephen Green to the House of Lords and making him Minister of State for Trade.

In order to further ensure that appropriate standards of legal and ethical behaviour were put into effect at HSBC, the head of tax at HMRC, Dave Hartnett, started working for HSBC as a consultant two years later.

* This sentence was later overturned on appeal. But she certainly wasn’t allowed anonymity, and no one said “The important thing is to get the trousers back”.

War gilt

It has often been remarked that, whereas the English word “debt” has a long history as primarily a financial term, with only optional moralistic overtones, in German “debt” and “guilt” and “sin” are represented by the single word “Schuld”, deriving from the Indo-European root skel, meaning “crime”. This surely reflects the exceptional German inclination — conspicuous in the current tussle over Greek loans — to view indebtedness as a moral failing, and moral failings need to be chastised, lest the sinner slide back into his old ways. At least, that’s the principle for other people’s indebtedness.

Their own debts are more nuanced. Particularly war debts, as this article from Spiegel makes clear. In 1942 Greece’s national bank cancelled Germany’s debt of 476 million Reichsmarks, out of pure gratitude for Germany’s contributions toward a unified Europe, into which Greece had just been integrated. In retrospect this deal — the debt would be worth something between 8 billion and 80 billion Euros today — seemed overly generous to some, given complaints about the quality of the services provided to the Greek public by the Wehrmacht. The 1953 London Agreement on German External Debt provided for the resolution of these customer-service complaints to be postponed until after a formal WWII peace treaty which, I was surprised to learn, has never been concluded.

But obviously the Germans don’t believe that a people should be forced to suffer economic devastation because of financial obligations undertaken by an irresponsible government that the people have since repudiated.

The next war

The BBC reports that education secretary Nicky Morgan “wants England to be in the top five in the world for English and maths by 2020. It is currently 23rd.” They quote her:

Returning us to our rightful place will be a symbol of our success. To achieve this, we will launch a war on illiteracy and innumeracy.

So, I’m thinking about wars that Britain has prosecuted over the past half century or so, often with the goal of “returning us to our rightful place”. Suez. Falkland Islands. Bosnia. Iraq. Yemen. Cyprus. Kenya. Afghanistan. Northern Ireland. Not all disasters, but not an unbroken record of glory either. Not really a set of memories you want to activate if you want your audience to think “overwhelming success” rather than, say “useless drain on national resources”, “antiquated racist ideology”, or “undermining democracy and human rights”.

Putting aside the absurd-sounding ambition for England to be among the top 5 for English, (I’ll just guess this wording reflects the slightly vague British awareness that foreigners tend to speak Foreignish, and so might have literacy skills to be tested that aren’t literally “English”) the battle plan for maths all comes down to tables:
Continue reading “The next war”

Parking violations in a democracy

A throwaway comment by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, in an article about the fascist overtones of recent police challenges to civilian authority in New York, reminded me of one of the things that has long mystified me about the psychology of automobilism. He writes

We still don’t know where this confrontation between de Blasio and his cops will lead, or how it will be resolved. (So far, the city has been peaceful – and nobody on my block got a parking ticket all week! So it’s win-win.)

In most places I’ve lived, at most times, I tend to think that enforcement of parking regulations is distressingly lax. This surely reflects, in part, my own interests, as someone who doesn’t drive, but who frequently finds sidewalks and cycle lanes blocked by illegally-parked cars. And I particularly resent when the illegally parked endanger my children’s lives by forcing them out into the street. But in most places I’ve lived — including significant periods in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany — the general culture seems to view enforcement of parking regulations as an evil incursion upon human liberty.

It doesn’t seem at all strange that people resent their own fines — that’s core human nature — or even that people would develop a general perspective of ignoring the benefits of parking regulations and communing on the personal nuisance, particularly when the benefits accrue disproportionately to the weaker members of society — the young, the handicapped. What seems strange is that people seem, on the one hand, to consider enforcement of parking and traffic laws illegitimate, on the other hand not to want their elected representatives to do anything about it.

As with so much else, our current Tory government is different in this point. They genuinely seem to want to bring the Wild West to British roads. One of the first things the Tories did after coming to power was to stop funding speed-limit enforcement cameras. A few years ago the government said that widespread lawlessness on the roads proved that the current speed-limit regime lacked democratic legitimacy. Most recently, spheroid Tory caricature Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, was prevented by the Liberal Democrats from pushing through a 15-minute grace period for parking on double-yellow lines, essentially making all local parking restrictions unenforceable.

And now, Pickles has just announced that from this autumn local councils would be banned from using CCTV to enforce parking laws, including “Orwellian spy cars”, because if Winston Smith hadn’t been ticketed for parking too long outside the Ministry of Truth he never would have to go pay his fine in room 101.

The great cartoon shortage

I just came across this report on a call by cartoonists (including the second-place finisher in the 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Competition) for the Angoulême International Comics Festival to boycott ‘any Israeli entity that does not “promote freedom and justice for Palestinians.”’ I take the role of cartoonists in a free society very seriously, but I can’t help thinking that the attempt to force the Zionist oppressors to their knees with a cartoon boycott would be a great subject for a cartoon.