Great Dreyfus’s Ghost!

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Poor old “Piss Christ” has been in the wars again. The Guardian reports:

When New York artist Andres Serrano plunged a plastic crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it in 1987 under the title Piss Christ, he said he was making a statement on the misuse of religion. Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an “anti-blasphemy” campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon…The photograph had been shown in France several times without incident. For four months, it has hung in the exhibition I Believe in Miracles, to mark 10 years of art-dealer Yvon Lambert’s personal collection in his 18th-century mansion gallery in Avignon. The show is due to end next month, but two weeks ago a concerted protest campaign began.

Civitas, a lobby group that says it aims to re-Christianize France, launched an online petition and mobilised other fundamentalist groups. The staunchly conservative archbishop of Vaucluse, Jean-Pierre Cattenoz, called Piss Christ “odious” and said he wanted this “trash” taken off the gallery walls…On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery immediately stepped up security, putting plexiglass in front of the photograph and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.

But on Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object, thought to be a screwdriver or ice-pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.

It is impossible not to wonder whether these folks haven’t taken a lesson or two from the more extreme followers of another religion I could mention.

Mind you, read the rest of the article, and it appears that the vandals have issues that are specifically their own, a suspicion somewhat confirmed by this interview (in French) with the archbishop of Vaucluse, who seems to hint that freemasons may be somehow to blame for the exhibition.

Freemasons?

Posted in culture | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Update to Previous Post

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Bradlaugh

In a very friendly & gentlemanly email, Nick Schulz assures me that his post on the AEI blog was meant as a fun tweak, not a sneer.  My apologies to Nick.

After all those columns I’ve written about everyone being far too quick to take offense nowadays, perhaps I’ve inhaled a bit of the zeitgeist at last.

Posted in economics, politics | 1 Comment

Working Hard, Working Smart

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Bradlaugh

Mark Krikorian and I have been singled (doubled?) out for a sneer from AEI’s Nick Schultz. Are our heads exploding (he wants to know) at the news that Mexicans lead the world in “total minutes worked, paid and unpaid, per day”?

Mark is very well able to speak for himself. My own reaction on seeing the OECD chart Nick displays was that Mexicans are getting dismally little bang for the industrious buck. After five hundred years of toiling away for 594 minutes a day they have nothing much to show but a mediocre economy propped up by oil revenues and expatriate remittances, dysfunctional politics, and wellnigh zero achievement in the cultural or
intellectual spheres.

A few minutes’ number-crunching confirms the impression. Remember how your Uncle Stan used to tell you that while working hard is good, working smart is better? OK, let’s create an Uncle Stan index. I’ll divide annual per capita GDP (from the CIA World Factbook) by the daily number of minutes worked to see how much annualized per capita GDP each minute generates. For Mexico I’m dividing $13,800 a head by 594 minutes, to get annualized $23.22 per person per minute worked in the day.

On the Uncle Stan Index (USI) Mexico ranks 27 out of 29 on the OECD list. That is to say, it’s one of the least efficient nations in the world at turning work into wealth.

Here’s the table. I’ve included a column for mean national IQ, these numbers taken from Tatu Vanhanen’s latest book. The last two columns correlate quite well:  r = 0.47.

Country USI         Mean National IQ
Norway 131 100
U.S.A. 96 98
Netherlands      90 100
Belgium 89 99
Australia 86 99
Denmark 83 98
Germany 81 99
Austria 79 100
Sweden 79 99
Finland 78 99
Ireland 78 92
Canada 77 99
France 74 98
U.K. 74 100
Italy 65 102
Japan 63 105
Korea 62 106
Spain 62 98
Slovenia 57 96
New Zealand 56 99
Portugal 44 95
Hungary 40 98
Poland 39 99
Estonia 37 99
Turkey 25 90
South Africa 24 72
Mexico 23 88
China 15 105
India 7 82

Now, see how unfair life is. Here’s me, a poor freelance drudge, doing all this math, while Nick Schultz has a nice cushy number at AEI where apparently he is required to do nothing but strike politically-correct moral poses. Nick doesn’t even bother to source his data: I had to Google for the spreadsheet link.

I guess Uncle Stan was right …

Posted in economics, politics | 9 Comments

Shepard Fairey: I see, I want, I take

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art just opened what it bills as the nation’s first museum show dedicated to graffiti, Art in the Streets.  In an article and a review, I explore the shameless hypocrisy on the part of MOCA’s director Jeffrey Deitch, its Hollywood mogul trustees, and such graffiti superstars as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, who scorn property rights until they get a chance to profit from their vandalism.   The exhibit is a nauseating example of wealthy liberal elites amusing themselves with anti-bourgeois play-acting, knowing full well that the rule of law and bourgeois values will secure their own fortunes against the radicalism that they pretend to embrace.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the New York Times:

In the Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, there are many things that women can’t or just don’t do: Be counted as one of the 10 people needed to make up a minyan, or prayer quorum. Walk around in pants. But vote?

According to the bylaws of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, a social service agency and community pillar that has received millions of dollars in government grants over the years, only those who meet the following requirements can vote for its leadership:

Jewish and religiously observant residents of Crown Heights
Married, previously married or at least 30 years old
Male

Now Eliyahu Federman, a Crown Heights resident and recent law school graduate, is challenging that last requirement, saying he believes it to be unconstitutional.

In Crown Heights, religion and life are inextricably interwoven. But the council itself is not a religious organization, Mr. Federman argues. And in 2008, according to the most recent tax filings available, the council received $1.9 million in government grants. “Women, especially widows and divorcees, are gravely impacted by decisions regarding the distribution of food stamps, housing subsidies and other vital social services” that the council handles, Mr. Federman, 26, wrote in an April 7 letter to the council and the local rabbinical court. “It should hurt us to see religion being misapplied to wrongfully subjugate women in a context that has no basis under Jewish law and is probably unconstitutional.”

Since Mr. Federman first raised the issue, in 2009, he has heard several explanations for the policy: that voting is immodest, that this is how it’s always been done — and that allotting women votes could sow discord among married couples, working against the ideal of “Shalom Bayit,” or marital tranquility.

Posted in Church & State | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

No Double Standards Here, Not At All

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-Posted on the Corner:

Via the Daily Mail:

An electrician faces the sack for displaying a small palm cross on the dashboard of his company van. Former soldier Colin Atkinson has been summoned to a disciplinary hearing by the giant housing association where he has been employed for 15 years because he refuses to remove the symbol….Throughout his time at work, he has had an 8in-long cross made from woven palm leaves attached to the dashboard shelf below his windscreen without receiving a single complaint.

But his bosses at publicly funded Wakefield and District Housing (WDH) in West Yorkshire – the fifth-biggest housing organisation in England – have demanded he remove the cross on the grounds it may offend people or suggest the organisation is Christian. Mr Atkinson’s union representative said he faces a full disciplinary hearing next month for gross misconduct, which could result in dismissal…Despite the company’s treatment of Mr Atkinson, the boss of the depot where he works…has been allowed to adorn his office with a poster of the Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara. Denis Doody…also has a whiteboard on which are written several quotations by the Marxist guerrilla leader…Colleagues said staff and even members of the public who were visiting the depot would be able to see the poster and whiteboard through his office window…

… [T]he company’s equality and diversity manager, Jayne O’Connell… replied: ‘WDH has a stance of neutrality. We now have different faiths, new emerging cultures. We have to be respectful of all views and beliefs.’

…At another meeting, Ms O’Connell said Mr Atkinson could express his faith but ‘it is quite clear it cannot be associated with WDH and displaying the cross gives the impression that WDH is a Christian organisation’. She said staff could demonstrate their personal beliefs ‘discreetly’, even adding that the company could provide extra material in its official corporate colours ‘for employees who wish to wear a different style of uniform’. Pressed… on whether a Muslim woman who wore a burka at work would be considered discreet, she said: ‘If they could do their job effectively, then yes.

Not Discreet

Discreet

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A Culture of Life?

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

We could debate the International Criminal Court at some other time (I’m no fan, to put it mildly) and, indeed, the rights and wrongs of the Balkan wars, but the last sentence in this extract from a Guardian account of that court’s jailing of two Croatian commanders is striking:

Judges in The Hague found Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač guilty on eight of nine counts for commanding operations that included the shelling of civilians, the torching of Serbian homes in south-west Croatia, the murder of hundreds of elderly Serbs and the forced exodus of at least 20,000 from the Serbian minority rooted in the Dalmatian hinterland for centuries…For many Croats, especially on the right, Gotovina is a national hero. Catholic bishops this week denounced the tribunal, accusing it of deliberately confusing victim and aggressor.

What, I wonder, will Benedict XVI have to say about this?

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Theocrats at Play

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via Religion Dispatches

On November 2, 2009, five Catholic activists — one nun, two priests, and two laypeople, all age sixty or above — cut through a series of chain link and barbed wire fences surrounding Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor, Washington, where roughly one-quarter of the United States’ nuclear warheads are reportedly stored and a fleet of eleven submarines equipped to deploy Trident nuclear weapons is stationed.

The five unfurled a banner reading “Trident: Illegal + Immoral,” poured their own blood over the site, and beat on the ground and the fences with household hammers before being apprehended and arrested. “We walk into the heart of darkness,” they wrote in a statement distributed to supporters and media, “as one step up the holy mountain where all nations can unite in peace” (read the group’s full statement here).

The five, who call themselves the Disarm Now Plowshares, were found guilty in December on four felony counts: trespass, damage to federal property, injury to federal property, and conspiracy to damage federal property. A week and a half ago in Tacoma’s federal court they received prison sentences of six to fifteen months, with an additional year of supervised release. The days surrounding their sentencing, during which supporters gathered in Tacoma for a “Festival of Hope,” highlighted the importance of legal consequences for this group of activists, and shed light on their aims.

I’m not sure that much is gained by jailing this sad little group of fanatics, but the inclusion of the word “illegal” in their banner reminds us of the game they are playing. The Trident missiles are, of course, perfectly legal. That the Disarm Now Plowshares (oh please) choose to claim that these weapons are illegal (under a distinctly dodgy interpretation of an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice) is telling. The law they are really talking about is their vision of God’s law, a law that they may think is already in force (read the account of their courtroom behavior) or should be. The rest of us will, of course, be expected to knuckle under.

So much for Thomas Jefferson

Posted in law | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Bravo to Eric Holder!

Posted on April 16, 2011 by David Hume

I hadn’t expected to type such a title. A fan of Mr. Holder, I am not. If there is one issue that the some elements on the Right get as regulatory-obsessive as Henry Waxman it is pornography. Obviously there is a broad consensus that some genres of porn warrant investigation and legal proscription, but in its outline this is one component of the “Culture War” than the anti-porn Left and Right long ago lost.

Holder accused of neglecting porn fight:

Earlier this month, Hatch and 41 other senators sent a letter to Holder pushing him to bring criminal cases against “all major distributors of adult obscenity.”

“We write to urge the Department of Justice vigorously to enforce federal obscenity laws against major commercial distributors of hardcore adult pornography,” said the April 4 letter, circulated by Hatch. “We know more than ever how illegal adult obscenity contributes to violence against women, addiction, harm to children, and sex trafficking. This material harms individuals, families and communities and the problems are only getting worse.”

Most signers were conservative Republicans, but Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and six Senate Democrats also signed on: Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, Tom Carper of Delaware, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Dianne Feinstein of California.

A few distinct issues:

Continue reading →

Posted in culture | Tagged | 20 Comments

No Contest

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

The Rev. Denise Giardina of Saint John’s Episcopal Church, Charleston, WV, has come out with a snide little sermon “matching” the views of a writer (Ayn Rand) against those of a largely legendary figure (Jesus), one of His followers (St. Timothy) and a comedian (Stephen Colbert). The reverend claims to be staging something that she calls, with classic priestly selectivity, a “smackdown” between Ayn Rand and the Bible. It’s actually nothing of the sort, but let that pass.

Now, I should say that my enthusiasm for Ms. Rand is somewhat qualified, and I thought that some of the ‘Going Galt’ chatter of a year or so back was distinctly overwrought. Nevertheless, let’s just say that if anything is likely to increase my admiration for the sage of Murray Hill it is nonsense of the type apparently now being spouted from the pulpit of Saint John’s Episcopal, Charleston, WV, but read the sermon and judge for yourselves.

Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan, who is using this sermon to attack Newt Gingrich for hypocrisy. Presumably Mr. Gingrich has being saying something favorable about Ayn Rand or the new Atlas Shrugged movie. No big deal if so; the former Mr. Speaker is a carnival barker these days and the show must go on and on and on…

Posted in culture | Tagged , , | 11 Comments