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I won’t be blogging for the next few hours—it is rumoured that I have a life outside of blogging—so for that time, I leave you with ”The Tale of the Slave” by Robert Nozick. Magnificent.
(Link via Cafe Hayek.)
This next video is for all those of you who like Pachebel’s Canon. And also for those of you have have never heard it, because you have heard it, as you will find out shortly. It’s following you. Here, check out Rob Paravonian‘s “Pachelbel Rant”:
Pachelbel’s Canon plays a big part in YouTube lore, with one of YouTube’s legendary videos being an electric version played by Jeong-Hyun Lim aka funtwo. It’s that video that turned me on to YouTube, and which I have no doubt watched a few dozen times since then. Here it is for you, below the fold.
(Why below the fold? Because site designer MadMan gets angry when I post too many videos on the homepage, as it makes the page slow to load. So blame him!)
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 May, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment
In an old piece I came across today, Salil Tripathi explains his belief in free speech:
I derived my position not only from Voltaire’s defence of ideas he disagreed with, or Milton in Areopagitica, or John Stuart Mill’s thoughts, but also from my own traditions and thinkers.
The Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore wanted India to awake in that heaven of freedom ‘where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.’ Mahatma Gandhi had said freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
Freedom of expression, then, was not only the product of Western Enlightenment; it belonged to all of us. And it included the right to say something outrageous, something offensive and even something stupid. Speaking to Der Spiegel, Pnina Werbner of Keele University says: ‘There’s a difference between a novel of great merit … and ... cartoons that are in many ways trivial, have little artistic merit and are deliberately provocative and gratuitous.’
But who decides artistic merit? What constitutes provocation? In the neat world of academic distinctions, Werbner may be able to separate the two and say, Rushdie yes, cartoons no. But the assassin will target both.
If the priority is to avoid provoking him, we have lost the battle already, for he wants total silence. To take a sartorial analogy, it is like telling women not to wear miniskirts because they’ll inflame passions. There are no half-measures, like checking the appropriate length of the skirt. It is hijab or bust.
Indeed. In discussions with people, I am often tempted to just burst out, “What part of ’Free Speech‘ do you not understand?” I am tired of the ‘but’ people, who will say, “Oh, I believe in free speech but...” and “Hey, I believe in free markets but...”
After such a ‘but’ there is no way back.
[I]f the Sandman and Spiderman could have just gotten away from their positional stances (“I need to take money” and “I need to catch crooks” respectively), to their underlying interests (“I need to help my little girl” and “Dude, I’m all about helping the people”), they could have found some common ground. There was opportunity there, and it could have saved a lot of expensive plate glass and I-beams and cars being thrown about.
True, but my question is this: What if “I need to take money” was the Sandman’s underlying interest and “I need to help my little girl” just a rationalization, and thus a positional stance for himself? Heck, even Spiderman could have had a crook-catching fetish, and the altruism, and the story that the comic books and films tell us, could have come later. I haven’t seen the latest Spidey flick, actually, but who can tell the difference between reason and rationalization? Huh?
(Link via Marginal Revolution.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 May, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
Economics
Pratap Bhanu Mehta nails it:
From a religious point of view, I find it to be the height of impiety and hubris to suppose that we humans are in the business of protecting our gods rather than the other way round. It betrays a fragility of belief and a crisis of confidence that genuinely religious people ought to find offensive.
Quite. If I was God’s boss, I would have fired her by now. The universe and all is fine, but look at the humans she created. Shoddy job!
(Link via email from reader Kriti.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 May, 2007 in
India
Bomb disposal squads abroad typically wear a fair bit of protective clothing, as shown in this picture (via). But Indians seem to be macho, with no need of such protection. Check out the photograph below, from CNN-IBN, of a bomb disposal squad at work in Hyderabad:
Now, if they were parliamentarians, I could understand. That type is so thick-skinned…
(Links via email from Gautam John.)
Shruti Rajagopalan, fellow libertarian and gurgling buddy, has an excellent piece in Wall Street Journal Asia today titled ”Indian Property Wrongs.” (Subs. link, but the piece is also on her blog here.) It narrates the story of how “the socialists managed to out-shout the Madisonians” when our constitution was being written, which led to property rights not being adequately protected in India. And as a result of that, we have Singur and Nandigram. Fine piece, do read.
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 May, 2007 in
Economics |
Freedom |
India
Vir Sanghvi makes an immensely valid point here:
Every liberal I know argued that MF Husain had the right to paint a naked Saraswati or a nude Bharat Mata. Yet, hardly any liberal of my acquaintance extended the same principle to the Danish cartoons. The liberal position was that Hindus should be tolerant of the manner in which their gods and goddesses were portrayed but that Muslims were right to complain about any visual representation of the Prophet Mohammed.
By ‘liberal’, of course, he is referring to the Leftists who have appropriated that term (both in India and the US), and are hardly liberal in the classical sense. So while liberalism is all about individual freedoms, many Indian ‘liberals’ are actually against economic freedom, and their support for social freedoms depends on convenience. As Sanghvi points out, many of them have double standards, speaking out for free speech on issues where the BJP is involved, but being silent when people of other religions act in an equally repugnant manner. As I wrote here, such ad-hoc support does nothing for the cause.
(Readers of this blog would know that I invite abuse from intolerant people everywhere by speaking up against violations of free speech regardless of the religion of the violators: one of the most-read posts on this blog is the one speaking up for the Danish cartoonists, and I’ve expressed myself on the subject adequately in ”Don’t Insult Pasta” and ”Fighting Against Censorship”.)
What gets my youthful goat, however, is when Hindutva supporters use the hypocrisy of some of the protesters against the Baroda incidents to distract from the larger issue of oppression and free speech. Focussing on people instead of issues is a typical diversionary tactic, and I think they would be much better off simply stating, “We do not believe in free speech. We believe our religious sentiments are more important than your individual freedoms. So there.” That would at least be an honest position, and would address the issues involved. But public discourse in India focusses more on personality than on issues, ignoring arguments while attacking the people making them. Pity.
(My posts on the Baroda incidents: ”Fascism in Baroda.” ”Only live in fear.” ”The Hindutva Rashtra.")
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 May, 2007 in
Freedom |
India |
Politics
Question: What do you do when the object of your affection rejects you because you are too dark?
Answer: Sit outside her house for two days and get a tan.
In the case of Saral Prasad from Bihar, this worked. The lady in question “was finally moved by the gesture of the young man and married him.”
So now every time he wants to sulk, you know what will happen. He’ll go outside the house and wait. Men!
(Link via email from reader Nox Rupawalla.)
The New York Times reports:
The United States is continuing to make large payments of roughly $1 billion a year to Pakistan for what it calls reimbursements to the country’s military for conducting counterterrorism efforts along the border with Afghanistan, even though Pakistan’s president decided eight months ago to slash patrols through the area where Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are most active.
[...] So far, Pakistan has received more than $5.6 billion under the program over five years, more than half of the total aid the United States has sent to the country since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, not counting covert funds.
As I’d written in my essay, ”General Musharraf’s incentives,” the carrots aren’t working. And the US is too scared to try the stick, having bought Musharraf’s bluff of après him le déluge. And so it goes…
(Link via email from Manish Vij, who has recently returned to the US, and after numerous emails about how his broadband is 82 times faster than mine, has started sending me screenshot evidence. Fug you, Mr Vij. Fug you and your broadband. We have culture and family values here in India. You can stig your broadband you know where, and make that broad too. So there.)
A lot of effort went into putting up this Under Construction sign!
By Sanjeev Naik in The visual arts
A collection of good youtube videos, via Metafilter.
By Sanjeev Naik in Miscellaneous
Netherland is an Indian novel accidentally written by an Irishman
Read more...
Method acting meets controlled staginess in 3:10 to Yuma
Read more...
Sample clues
9 across: Van Morrison classic from Moondance (7)
6 down: Order beginning with ‘A’ (12)
Question by Amit Varma
This character’s creator described him as “insufferable”, and called him a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. On August 6 1975, the New York Times carried his obituary, the only time it has thus honoured a fictional character. Who?
