Foreign Dispatches

So Much for Egypt's "Arab Spring"

A few years ago, I made the prediction that the so-called "Arab Spring" was doomed to fail in Egypt, in light of the fact that the vote had been given to millions of Egyptians with no real grasp of literacy, let alone the rarified Enlightenment concepts upon whose foundations Western liberal democracies had been constructed. I was admonished by at least one commenter back then about my lack of faith in the good sense of the average Egyptian, and indeed, a part of me hoped to be proven wrong by succeeding developments, but that is not quite what happened (to put it mildly).

Right Wing Hypocrisy in Action

Right on the heels of whining about how Brendan Eich's resignation represents the triumph of "bullying" over free speech - as if those who disagreed with him had no right to voice their own disapproval of his actions - comes news that the very same propagators of the "Brendan Eich is the real victim" nonsense are now pushing to boycott Firefox! So boycotting is bad and anti free-speech when it's directed against bigots, but good when carried out in defense of the prejudiced?

The utter lack of even the slightest pretence at consistency is simply astonishing, and I am now more convinced than ever that the real motivation behind all the nonsensical "Brendan Eich was bullied" rhetoric is raw homophobia, or in the case of people like Andrew Sullivan, cheap contrarianism aimed at eliciting attention and page views. In any case, principle has nothing to do with it.

As an addendum, let me add here that the argument that Brendan Eich's political activities didn't matter as long as he was able to do his job effectively is simply stupid. How could he have possibly been able to do his job effectively when knowledge of his bigotry would have alienated not only users of Mozilla software, but also many of the very people the CEO was supposed to be leading? How many people would argue with a straight face that an active Klansman or Holocaust denier should be allowed to lead a major corporation unchallenged? The only real difference in Eich's case is that, again, those defending him don't really believe in the rights of gays to begin with, which is why they can't see any serious harm in Eich's activities.

Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Consequences

Nor is it freedom from criticism, as Mark Joseph Stern so eloquently elucidates in this Slate article. It is disheartening to see so many supposedly intelligent people failing to appreciate that it is the very same freedoms which allow Brendan Eich to donate the likes of Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul and the Proposition 8 movement which allows others to express their disgust at his actions.

The idea seems to be that one ought to be free to express whatever prejudices one may harbour without having to worry about any negative feedback whatsoever - an absurdity if ever there was one. Either all of these supposedly reasonable supporters of free speech are more stupid than they appear (which, admittedly, cannot be ruled out), or, more likely, they simply don't believe that Brendan Eich's views are at all abhorrent, as they don't think gays really have any rights worth protecting anyway.

On the Resignation of Brendan Eich

Upon hearing that Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, had decided to relinquish his position in the face of heated criticism for his bigoted politics, I felt stirred up enough for a change to step out of my semi-retirement from blogging.

What stirred me from my state of inactivity was not the fact of Eich's resignation, but much of the rhetoric it has given rise to, especially amongst the Hacker News set. To hear some of the commenters on there say it, Brendan Eich is a victim of "bullying", and has somehow been deprived of his "right" to earn a living by an internet "lynch mob": we are supposed to feel pity for him for having had the "audacity" to support a viewpoint which was backed by the majority of California's voters. Such opinions are not only nonsensical, but serve to invert the moral roles of victims and victimizers, which I find particularly appalling.

Direct Democracy is Bad for Individual Rights

Having railed on here repeatedly about my lack of faith in any supposed "wisdom of the masses",  or the alleged merits of ever more participatory and responsive political systems, I'd like to provide some actual social science reseach to back me up.

Why Not Pardon Alan Turing?

It is now 60 years since Alan Turing - war hero and intellectual father of the theory of computing - was convicted on the charge of "gross indecency", which in 1950s terms simply meant that his sexual orientation was other than what was thought permissible by society at large at the time. As 2012 also marks the centenary of Alan Turing's birth, it seemed a particularly apposite time to make a request for his posthumous pardon, a request the Conservative justice minister has now rejected.

"Born This Way" : A Stupid Argument for Gay Rights

I've argued on here a few years ago that apologetically insisting "I was born this way" (i.e. "I can't help it!") is no basis for arguing for one's right to live as one pleases, regardless of others' religious hangups, but it's taken the recent statements by Cynthia Nixon to bring the issue to the fore where it belongs. As Frank Bruni points out, no such argument from genetics has ever been required to justify freedom to worship as one pleases, and yet this is a principle which is universally* accepted in the Western world today. Why then should a "born this way" argument be necessary for gay rights?

Illiberal Democracy, Hungarian Style

If proof were needed about the veracity of my assertion that there is a lot more to Westminster-style liberal democracy than the mere holding of elections on a regular basis, recent events in Hungary seem to be conspiring to establish my argument for me.

Too Much Democracy Too Soon

It was only a few months that I expounded on the dangers of assuming that where democracy is concerned, "more" necessarily means "better." What I hadn't foreseen at the time was that events in the Middle East would so thoroughly vindicate my skepticism about the supposedly inerrant wisdom of "the people", especially when all segments of a society are given a voice in equal proportion to their numbers, however ignorant, illiterate and subservient to religious superstition each such voter may be.

Japan's Mythical Lost Decade

Upon returning from my month-long trip to Japan last year, I noted that the state of the country as evidenced by what I saw was very far from matching the impression one gathers reading about the Japanese economy from afar. The public facilities were as immaculate as ever, the streets remained utterly safe, people were as well-dressed as I'd ever seen them (i.e., much better dressed than the average Londoner or Berliner), and all of the young people seemed to be carrying the same sorts of technotoys which are popular in Europe and the United States: in short, in the course of my travels from Tokyo to Kyoto, Kobe, Tokushima and Nara, nothing I saw gelled in the least with the incessant stories of Japanese stagnation I'd encountered in the Western press. Issues of space aside, I could not find any evidence to support a belief that the Japanese standard of living was lagging behind that of the average Western European in the slightest - on the contrary, the very opposite seemed to me to be true.