QotD: David Mitchell on burqa bans

Islamophobia
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David Mitchell comments on debates about banning the burqa, which he says would be the only way he would ever wear one and gets to the nub of things quickly:

There’s altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can’t respect something, you should ban it. If it’s not banned, you should respect it. Bullshit. There is a huge gulf of toleration between respect and banning. In a free society, people should be allowed to do what they want wherever possible. The loss of liberty incurred by any alternative principle is too high a price to pay to stop people making dicks of themselves. But, if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so.

(David Mitchell is on twitter as realdmitchell; if the other famous David Mitchell shows up, will he be realdmitchelltoo? And who is to say any other dmitchells aren’t real either, just because they don’t get to be on telly? Burning issues of the day that clearly need answers, unlike the “debate” on whether or not to ban a piece of clothing.)

You have read more Prometheus award winners than you think

science fiction
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Time for another meme. The Prometheus Award is one of the weirder science fiction awards in existence. Supposedly given for the best libertarian or libertarian friendly science fiction novel of the year, the award’s jury persist in rewarding Scottish socialists instead — Ken MacLeod won it three times already. Which means he’s got about two once of gold from them, as the award is a solid gold coin — half an ounce until 2001, a full ounce from then. Charlie Stross and Jo Walton are two other unlikely winners (thought they all used to hang out in rec.arts.sf.written. hmmm). In general, if you look at the list below it’s about evenly divided between fairly obvious libertarian or sympathising authors (L. Neil Smith, who actually founded the award for example) and those like Stross, Walton or MacLeod who just happened to write novels with libertarian themes even if not libertarians themselves and even though the political philosophy in these novels isn’t libertarianism either. This openmindedness is the award’s strength as without the more odd winners, it would be a morass of sucky libertarian power fantasies…

Anyway, usual rules apply: bold if I’ve read it, italics if I own it, both for the obvious and strikethroughs for those books I never ever expect to read. (Meme via James.

  • Dani & Eytan Kollin, The Unincorporated Man
  • Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
  • Harry Turtledove, The Gladiator
  • Jo Walton, Ha’penny
  • Charles Stross, Glasshouse
  • Ken MacLeod, Learning the World
  • Neal Stephenson, The System of the World
  • F. Paul Wilson, Sims
  • Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • Donald Kingsbury, Psychohistorical Crisis
  • L. Neil Smith, The Forge of the Elders
  • Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
  • John Varley, The Golden Globe
  • Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal
  • Victor Koman, Kings of the High Frontier
  • Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction
  • Poul Anderson, The Stars are also Fire
  • L. Neil Smith, Pallas
  • James P. Hogan, The Multiplex Man
  • Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, Fallen Angels
  • Michael Flynn, In the Country of the Blind
  • Victor Koman, Solomon’s Knife
  • Brad Linaweaver, Moon of Ice
  • Victor Koman, The Jehovah Contract
  • Vernor Vinge, Marooned in Realtime
  • Victor Milan, Cybernetic Samurai
  • J. Neil Schulman, The Rainbow Cadenza
  • James P. Hogan, Voyage from Yesteryear
  • L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
  • F. Paul Wilson, Wheels Within Wheels

Yes, basically all the echt-libertarians (as well as Hogan, who was more of a loon) are not authors I ever plan on reading. The Niven, Pournelle and Flynn wankfest only escapes because I read it already when younger and dumber.

Murderer of Ian Tomlinson to escape justice

Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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The Crown Prosecution Service dedices not to bother with charging Ian Tomlinson’s killer:

Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said there was “no realistic prospect” of a conviction, because of a conflict between the postmortem examinations carried out after the death of Ian Tomlinson last year.

The newspaper seller died following the demonstrations on 1 April 2009 in central London. The official account that he died from a heart attack was undermined when the Guardian obtained video footage showing a riot officer striking the 47-year-old with a baton and shoving him to the ground shortly before he collapsed and died.

In a written statement the CPS admitted that there was sufficient evidence to bring a charge of assault against the officer, but claimed a host of technical reasons meant he could not be charged.

Tomlinson’s stepson Paul King, flanked by his mother, Julia, said: “It’s been a huge cover-up and they’re incompetent.”

King said: “He [Starmer] has just admitted on TV that a copper assaulted our dad. But he hasn’t done anything. He’s the man in charge … why hasn’t he charged him?

“They knew that if they dragged this out long enough, they would avoid charges. They knew just what they were doing. They’ve pulled us through a hedge backwards – now we have to go on living our lives.”

Is anybody surprised by this? Has there ever been a high profile case of police murder where the subsequent investigation led to a meaningful conviction, rather than at best a slap on the wrist? Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes, Harry Stanley, going all the way back to Blair Peach or Liddle Towers, ther have always been reasons why a prosecution could not happen or an officer was “punished enough” already. Who watches the watchmen is not just the tagline to that Alan Moore comic but also the single most important question we can ask about the police and justice system. Can we trust the police not to kill is for no reason? Can we trust them not to cover up if own of their own does kill us? Can we trust the justice system to investigate and prosecute, never mind convict a police officer when the worst does happen? So far, the answer to all these questions is no…

DC Comics still clueless

Comix
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Proof that DC Comics still does not get Alan Moore, even twentyfive years after Watchmen:

However, DC Comics co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee said, “Watchmen is the most celebrated graphic novel of all time. Rest assured, DC Comics would only revisit these iconic characters if the creative vision of any proposed new stories matched the quality set by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons nearly 25 years ago, and our first discussion on any of this would naturally be with the creators themselves.”

It also shows the essential inability of DC to sell comics any other way but by constant regurgitation of characters, concepts and series, on the monthly superhero pamphlet model. That Alan Moore would want to stay far away from this, that his approval cannot be bought even with the rights to the original series, is both unsurprising and understandable. Watchmen needs no sequls, prequels or side projects: everything Moore and Gibbons had to say about it was said in the original series, which was a product of the time and place it was produced and anything else that will be done in its name will only lessen the original.

Can you imagine a Jim Lee or Dan Didio greenlighted Watchmen project, written perhaps by Darwyn Cooke or a Garth Ennis or Mark Millar (and I don’t honestly know what would be worse: Cooke’s fauxstalgia let loose on Watchmen or the inevitablity of Ennis or Millar going for a Rorschach prison rape “joke”), drawn by whoever is the to-go guy for dark, moody serious superheroics. It would be awful, but still sell on the scale of what DC did to Milestone, with what was a great attempt to create modern superheroes for a properly multiracial America has been folded into the DC mainstream to function as spear carriers and capeholders for old, white supermen.

DC will use up the Watchmen characters because that’s the only thing DC knows how to do, though often they don’t even know how to make effective use of them. As Tim O’Neill points out, this is the main failing of both Marvel and DC, because that’s what their business models are build on. With their comics mean selling points now being their ability to be turned into succesful summer blockbusters (and the continuing sale of pamphlets and deluxe hardcovers to aging fanboys a nice sideline) this has only gotten worse. DC doesn’t just want Watchmen 2: the comic, it wants Watchmen: the Saturday morning cartoon.

It reads better in the original German

Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Palestinian but pretending to be Jewish to score with a Hebrew chick? In Israel you’re guilty of rape if she finds out the truth after you had sex:

Segal said: “The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls. When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when the matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims – actual and potential – to protect their wellbeing. Otherwise, they will be used, manipulated and misled, while paying only a tolerable and symbolic price.”

UPDATE: Lenny has more:

The woman who filed the charge can hardly be burdened with most of the responsibility. Who knows what pressures she was under? Perhaps no pressures other than the racist ideology that she will have internalised if she is a normal product of the Israeli education system. But perhaps it was put to her that her honour as an Israeli Jewish woman, and that of her family, had been sullied by her treasonous intercourse with an Arab from East Jerusalem and that, if she wished to expiate her crime, she should say that she had been raped. Whatever the case, without the backing of the forces of racist patriarchy her complaint would not have resulted in a conviction. It’s not as if it’s easy for women to get their complaint heard and a conviction obtained when a rape really has occurred. It’s not as if the criminal justice system throws its weight behind women every time they experience domestic violence, harrassment, or sexual violation. This was a complaint that, with its obvious paucity of evidence of any kind of violation or assault, could easily have been dealt with outside of the courts. Instead, they devoted their considerable resources to keeping this man in lockdown – he was under house arrest for almost two years while the case was brought to trial – and so loading the scales against him that even when no evidence of rape emerged, he still ended up ‘guilty’.