Foreign Dispatches

Never Were Truer Words Written

The following words from a post by Jason Soon are the gospel truth, as far as I'm concerned:

And for all those people who claim that Christianity is so
much nicer than Islam, Id' say, along with Bertrand Russell that that's
thanks solely to the contributions of various rationalists and sceptics
through the ages who have basically had more of a chance of diluting
the faith of believers in Western society rather than because of
something intrinsic to Islam or Christianity. And their ability and
potential to do so was mostly thanks to political organisations that
evolved in the West after feudalism. Yes folks, the horrible
truth is that Christianity seems so much nicer than Islam because folks
professing to be Christians don't take it as seriously anymore as folks
who profess to be Muslim take their religion. (emphasis added)

I
know that this is likely to strike a lot of people as offensive, but it
is no more than the unvarnished truth. No religion that makes
exclusive* claims of the sort advanced by the three monotheistic faiths
best known in the West could possibly be reconciled to peace and
progress in the long run. To be sure, there are
individuals who've been able to draw from their religious beliefs a
deep respect for the autonomy and well-being of others, but such people
have always been very much in the minority in every age. For the most
part, religious zeal has translated into hatred and bloodshed, and the
West is a much better place for its decline in belief. If only all the
world's believers were like the typical wishy-washy Church of England
adherent!
*All three of Christianity, Islam and Judaism subscribe to the "Jealous
God" axiom; furthermore, while the blood-soaked history of Christianity
and Islam are known well enough, the books of the Torah suggest that
Judaism had its fair share of bloody excesses when its adherents were
in the position to enforce their will. The entire Tanakh is replete
with smitings and slayings of men, women, children and even beasts,
merely for the "crime" of believing in gods other than the one of
Israel, while Exodus, Numbers and Judges make for some very ugly
reading if one goes beyond a merely tribal mindset; by what right can a
people entirely annihilate another, just because their deity has
supposedly promised the others' land to them?
Defendants of Judaism will step in here and say that the historical
evidence doesn't support the genocidal claims laid out in the books of
the Torah, and indeed, this is true; all the archaeologial evidence we
have indicates that the manifold tales of religious bloodshed detailed
in it are more likely latter-day fictions invented to bestow a glorious
past on a people whose emergence occurred in a rather more organic and
mundane fashion. That said, the mere fact that such brutal actions are
listed in the Torah as having occurred with the full blessing of a
supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful God (who freely chose to create
the idol-worshippers He later would order to be murdered by His Hebrew
followers, with full knowledge beforehand of the terrible fate he had
in store for them) shows that the same genocidal impulses later
displayed by Christians and Muslims towards those who refused to
acknowledge their "obvious" claims to exclusive religious wisdom were
by no means foreign to Judaism, at least as the religion was
reformulated after the return of Ezra and Nehemiah from the Babylonian
exile. To the contrary, Christianity and Islam are intolerant because
they are the offspring of an intolerant religion, and the great tragedy
of the modern world is that they both happened to combine that
intolerance with a belief in a universalist** mission. **In fact, it
isn't even true that Judaism has entirely renounced the universalist
outlook that was increasingly apparent in the Greco-Roman era, at least
until the success of Christianity put an end to Jewish proselytization.
It is one of the traditional articles of faith of Judaism that the
moshiach ("messiah") must someday return, and one of his
accomplishments will be to turn all
of humanity to the truth of Judaism. The main point of difference here
between Judaism and the other two monotheistic religions is that it
does not encourage proselytization to bring about this enlightenment of
the rest of mankind, a difference which, as I've already indicated, was
born of Christian and Islamic supremacy and exclusivity, rather than
being innate to Judaism from the start; at one point, perhaps 1 in 10
of all Roman subjects were Jewish, and the majority of these individuals were either converts or descendants of recent converts.

The Wages of Prudishness

It was only a matter of time before the prudish internet policies instituted by the executives of most big companies caught out one of their own:

A leading banker and director of the Post Office was forced
to resign yesterday from his £1 million-a-year job after admitting that
he had accessed pornographic websites from his office.
Mike Soden, 57, the chief executive of the Bank of Ireland, was forced
to quit after a regular internal check last week found he had breached
the bank's policy on internet use. The businessman, who is married
without children, issued a personal statement yesterday admitting that
he had visited inappropriate sites of an "adult nature".
He said: "I have taken this decision for personal reasons. This arises
from access by me on my PC to internet sites that contain content that
infringed the group's policy on these matters. The content accessed was
not illegal, but did contain links to material of an adult nature. I
now understand and accept that in doing this I breached the policies of
the Bank of Ireland." Mr Soden, who earned €1.6 million (more than £1
million) for running Ireland's second biggest bank, is the first
well-known businessman to be forced to resign after being caught
accessing porn sites.
While companies have become tougher on staff caught surfing for sex, so
far only mid-ranking employees have had to quit. Investment banks, in
particular, have cracked down, with a number of traders being sacked.
Mr Soden joined the Post Office Ltd's board only two weeks ago as part
of a joint venture deal between the Bank of Ireland and the Post Office
to provide financial services in the postal network.
[............]
Of Britain's 10 million regular internet users, more than a third log
on to porn sites. It is estimated that up to 70 per cent of internet
porn traffic occurs during the nine-to-five working day.
Among the employees to have been dismissed for such misdemeanours were
three Rolls-Royce workers sacked last month for downloading porn.
In December, BT admitted that it had sacked 200 workers over the
previous 18 months for viewing internet porn, and in September 2000,
Orange, the mobile phone company, dismissed more than 30 staff in
Hertford and call centres in the North-East for the same reason.
In January 2001, Jerry Miles, the deputy mayor of Harrow, was sacked
from his job as a librarian after a clampdown on internet misuse at the
Marcus Garvey Library in Tottenham.
In March 2002, Paul Finch, an engineer at the Palace of Westminster was
forced to resign after security staff discovered that he had been
accessing websites for "swingers".

What
a waste - if this guy was any good as an executive he won't be easy to
replace, and now a long, difficult and costly search for a replacement
will have to be carried out just because he viewed a sex site or two?
Perhaps this incident will be the one to nudge company policies in a
saner direction; if companies have no problems with their employees
using their online access to visit sites of personal interest only, I
see no good reason for singling out adult websites as particularly
worthy of condemnation.

TypeKey and the Dangers of Re-Inventing the Wheel

A few more thoughts on TypeKey have just occurred to me; those who are
interested in such matters are welcome to read them here on my Tech Notes
blog, where I'll have the freedom to indulge my taste for technological
arcana to my heart's content without worrying about boring everyone
else to death.

Calling All Conspiracy Theorists!

PZ Myers is not amused by a pitch from MoveOn heralding The Day After Tomorrow as a showpiece for the dangers of global warming.

Dear gog, it's based on a book written by Art Bell and
Whitley Strieber. A spazzy New Age conspiracy theorist/talk radio host,
and a deranged author who believes he was abducted by aliens. There
isn't a scrap of serious science anywhere in this monstrosity, and I
sure as hell don't want my party using this gonzo nonsense to inspire
policy decisions.

This mirrors the argument I've often made
in the past about shoddy "arguments" being marshalled on behalf of
causes one believes in; the support of the likes of Art Bell is for
serious scientific advocates of global warming policy changes what the
vocal backing of Randites and Rockwellites is for libertarians - an
excellent way to fall into discredit by association.

A Proof of the Twin-Prime Conjecture?

A Slashdot post pointed me to this purported proof by Vanderbilt University's Richard Arenstorf of the Twin-Prime Conjecture, which states that there are infinitely many primes of the form P, P+2,
e.g, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19, or 29 and 31. This supposed proof,
if correct, would be one of the most exciting results in number theory
in quite some time. I'm not and never have been an analytic number
theorist, and I can't say that I've ever heard of Mr. Arenstorf before
today, so I'm in no position to assess the likelihood that his proof
isn't just stuff and nonsense, at least not without getting a chance to
actually read it through. Going from the comments of some of the Slashdot
readers, this guy got his PhD 48 years ago, and hit his productive
prime in the 1960s; prior to this, his most recent published paper was
in 1993. This hardly makes one feel confident in the correctness of his
work, as mathematics is notorious for being a young man's game, the
likes of Paul Erdos aside. As another commenter noted, I'd feel far
more confident that this guy's hit the mark if the likes of Peter
Sarnak, Andrew Granville, Andrew Odlyzko or Preda Mihailescu were to
give his paper a preliminary thumbs up - that would still be no
guarantee that Arenstorf was correct, of course, but it would lessen
the odds of his being wrong considerably.
One thing I noticed in the abstract of the paper was that Arenstorf
claimed that his proof depended only on methods from classical analytic
number theory, and a quick scan through suggests that this is indeed
the case, as it seems to lean most heavily on the theory of generating functions.
This leads me to harbor some hope that I really will be able to read
through the whole thing if I have the requisite patience - now all(!) I
have to do is find the necessary free time!

So Much for the Age of Reason

It's articles like this one
that make me sceptical whenever I hear someone say we are in a new,
glorious age of heightened rationality, as opposed to the dark old
superstitioous days of yore. That may be true for a small fraction of
the population, but for the rest, it absolutely is not.

Drawing from a long list of "alternative" medical
therapies as diverse as the Atkins diet, acupuncture, homeopathy and
prayer, federal health researchers reported Thursday that nearly two
out of three Americans were using unconventional approaches to mend
their bodies or maintain their health.
When prayer is dropped from the list, the federally funded survey found
that 36 percent of Americans over the age of 18 used so-called
complementary and alternative medicine. [............]
A snapshot of American health care choices in 2002, the survey
concluded that 8 percent of the nation's adults visited chiropractors;
5 percent practiced yoga for health; 1.1 percent had acupuncture; and
1.7 percent employed homeopathy.
The wildly popular Atkins diet, one of several listed as therapies in
the survey, was tried by only 1.7 percent of those surveyed -- but the
study was conducted in 2002, just as the national craze for
high-protein, low- carbohydrate foods was igniting. [............]
Skeptics of alternative medicine nevertheless questioned the scientific
value of the survey. "I can't imagine why someone would invest so much
money for something that has no significance whatsoever,'' said Dr.
Stephen Barrett, a retired Pennsylvania psychiatrist who runs the Web
site Quackwatch
A frequent critic of the NIH alternative medicine program, Barrett said
it made no sense to include activities such as prayer under the rubric
of alternative medicine. "Praying for one's own health is not an
alternative medicine,'' he said. "Everyone who prays, prays for their
own health."
Therapies such as massage, which are labeled as alternative medicine,
are often used by mainstream medical practices, Barrett noted. Hypnosis
and "progressive relaxation," also on the survey list, are techniques
used by conventional psychotherapists.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with the esteemed Dr. Barrett on this one: prayer most definitely is
"alternative" medicine, if by "alternative" one means any curative
method without a solid scientific rationale to it. As for hypnosis and
progressive relaxation being validated by their practice by
psychotherapists, in my eyes at least, that very fact is enough to damn
them outright as pseudoscientific claptrap. The talking cures peddled
by psychotherapists at hundreds of dollars an hour give no greater
benefits than any that might be recieved from any other technique that
relies on the placebo mechanism; in fact, if I were forced to recommend
one of the two, I'd go for prayer before psychotherapy - at least it
costs nothing more than a little of one's own time.

On a final
note, I've got to say that the exploding popularity of the Atkins Diet
says something about the appetite* of lots of people for shortcuts to
success. The reality of dieting is really quite simple - one has to
consume less energy than one expends in activity over a sustained
period of time, and no particular dietary mix will do anything
whatsoever to negate this simple equation. As far as I can make out,
the whole "ketosis" mumbo-jumbo peddled as an explanation for the
wonder-working powers of the Atkins diet is so much rubbish, as the
truth is that lots of human societies have subsisted primarily on
animal protein for long periods, to no ill effects, and certainly not
to the detriment of their body weight. The Neandertals almost certainly
lived on little other than meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but
they too would have gotten grotesquely fat if all they did with their
days was sit in offices, followed by evenings spent watching sitcoms on
the Laz-E-Boy.

If people really want to lose
weight, the choice they face is a simple one - eat less and/or be more
physically active. No miracle diet will help one get over the fact that
one loves eating too much to abjure stuffing oneself, or that the mere
thought of even moderate physical exertion makes one ill. Food faddism
is just one more example of magical thinking in operation.

*Pun intended

Spam as a Barometer of Linguistic Influence

Just a quick thought: what does it say about the commercial importance
of English that something like 90% of all spam sent and received
everywhere in the world is in that language? Why have I never yet once
recieved a single spam message in any other language? I have a
hypothesis to offer, which is that spammers, being both extremely
avaricious and operating outside the boundaries of the law, feel no
need to meet any obligations to "linguistic diversity" or any of the
other non-pecuniary considerations which most legitimate business
operations have to bother with. As far as spammers are concerned,
English is the language that offers by far the most reach to the
customers most worth having, and speakers of other languages are simply
not valuable enough a market to bother targeting* their efforts
towards. In a sense, one might call spam the ultimate wealth-weighted
index of linguistic reach.
*Of course, spam is by definition the very opposite of targeted
advertising, but one would still think that greedy spammers would like
to reach as many gullible people as possible, and the gullible are a
lot less likely to be polyglots than your netwise sorts. What is more,
virtually every single one of the c. 100 million German-speakers there
are in the world lives in a wealthy country, while several hundred
million English-speaking recipients of spam are relatively indigent
Third Worlders. Were I a spammer, Japan, Germany, Austria and
Switzerland would be my top targets on demograpic grounds alone.

OpenGPG Commenting for WordPress

It seems as if someone by the name of Christoph Rummel has already gotten down to work
on adding support for PGP-signed comments to WordPress. All to the
good, I say - for one thing, this shows that there's more interest in
the notion of identity-verification via public-key cryptosystems than
one might have feared. For another, it potentially saves me a lot of
effort; having never been the sort to reinvent the wheel if I can help
it, I'd much rather build on Mr. Rummel's work than start from scratch.
One very important piece of functionality that I would
like to add to this plugin is automatic fetching of public keys, and
their subsequent use in verifying signed comments. Ideally, comment
verification should be done server-side, with the option left to the
reader to carry out client-side verification of the raw data as well;
anything less than this, and the likelihood is that most people won't
bother. Still, it would be petty to cavil too much at such an early
date, and Christoph Rummel's plugin does at least deal with the
aesthetic factor that's given so much cause for opposition to
PGP-signing on the part of some.

An Interesting Factoid about Pius XII

When the Allies were planning for the liberation of Rome from German
occupation, Pope Pius XII is said to have specifically requested that
black soldiers not be used in the campaign, for fear that they would
engage in mass rapes of Italian women. If this story is accurate, it
certainly says a lot about the Catholic Church's current efforts to
have him canonized - none of it good.

Ultranationalism and the Irish Stance in World War 2

Here's an interesting BBC article
on a period in Irish history which I suspect most would rather forget,
given what we now know. Still, it is heartening to learn that many
young Irishmen weren't so consumed with dislike for their former
colonial rulers that they were willing to abide by a stance of
neutrality in the face of Nazi aggression.

Sixty years on from the anxious summer months of
1944 it is a time for remembering in all the nations that were shaped
and scarred by World War II.
There is one European country though where the full picture of what
happened during the war is being discovered for the first time.
Neutral Ireland saw no reason to fight against Hitler's Germany
alongside Britain in 1939; it was after all only 18 years since the
country had bloodily secured a partial independence from London after
centuries of British rule. At the time it seemed a reasonable decision,
and at the political level neutrality was scrupulously observed.
When the first, still barely believable reports of what had happened in
the Nazi concentration camps emerged they were strictly censored.
And the Irish leader Eamon de Valera even paid his respects to the
German representative in Dublin when news of Hitler's death emerged.
Irishmen who had volunteered for Britain's armies were given a tough
time when they were home on leave, and were cold-shouldered after the
fighting by a de Valera-led government that didn't see why they should
qualify for state welfare payments when they came home from fighting
for a foreign power. [............]
Yvonne McEwen, a historian with a special interest in Irish affairs,
has now come up with a detailed estimate of the numbers of Irishmen
from both sides of the border who fought for Britain.
Based on the War Office calculation that 22 men served for every one
who died, she estimates that 99,997 Irishmen volunteered, with the
number divided almost evenly between the North and the South.
Fascinating stuff which still has a certain political resonance. After
all it suggests that while the government of Ireland may have been
neutral, many of its people were not. And it also demonstrates that the
supposedly non-combatant Irish Free State contributed as many soldiers
as Northern Ireland, a region of the UK whose unionist population
prides itself on its loyalty.

I've
known about Eamon de Valera's paying his last respects to "Chancellor
Hitler" for quite some time now, but I still can't help feeling
nonplussed that anyone should have been so consumed with hatred for
Britain that he should have been willing to go that far; fear of German
aggression can't explain it, as Germany had obviously lost the war long
before then, and the cessation of fighting in Europe was clearly going
to occur in a matter of days. No, de Valera's message of condolence to
Admiral Dönitz was clearly a matter of sticking a finger in the eye of
the hated British enemy.**

It's compensatory hypernationalism of
the sort epitomized by the American-born de Valera* (and by Napoleon,
and by Verwoerd, and by Stalin, and even by a certain Austrian ...)
that makes me less than agitated by the decision of Sonia Ghandi to
decline the premiership in the face of BJP opposition. Whether they are
driven by an ambition to prove their loyalty to their newly-adopted
countries, or merely by the same intense identification that drove them
to adopt new nationalities, foreign-born leaders tend to have a marked
tendency to go overboard with the chauvinism. What a striking thing it
is to consider that some 100,00 native-born Irishmen, who were unlike
de Valera in lacking the easy option of a return to some foreign
domicile, were willing to risk their very lives in opposition to a
cause they rightly recognized as being far more evil than even the
British Empire ever was at its very worst.

For the record, I
don't believe that Eamon de Valera was an anti-semite, or any more of a
racist than the average white person in the Western world was in those
days, and I certainly don't think that Irish neutrality was entirely a
matter of cocking a snook at the British. Nonetheless, it seems to me
at least that this was one moment in history in which the Irish
government allowed (well founded) historical animosities to get the
better of its moral judgement. If this shameful story is redeemed, it
is by those Irish volunteers who came forward in the face of official
government indifference, only to be met with indifference on their
return from the fighting.

*It's also worth noting that the only
reason de Valera wasn't hanged after the Easter Rising of 1916 was
because of his American citizenship, while Roger Casement, a far nobler
character who did far more to make the world a better place, went to
the gallows all the same.

**Further corrobaration of this view
can be found in de Valera's contrasting reaction to Churchill's death;
not only did he refuse to attend the funeral on being sounded out by
the British government, but he also sent a low-level official to stand
in for the Irish government in his place. As a calculated insult one
could hardly have done better.