Mick Hartley

Death Penalty Increase

In the death penalty league, China is way out in front, with Iran second and Pakistan third:

Even though more countries are renouncing the death penalty, more people were put to death last year - 5,628 - than in either of the previous two years, an anti-death penalty group reported yesterday.

China alone accounted for 5,000 executions.

A Rome-based group, Hands Off Cain, said the increase was because more countries that have capital punishment on their books resorted to it in 2006.

In its annual report, the group said the gradual trend of abolishing capital punishment continued, with 51 countries retaining the death penalty, compared with 54 in 2005. But it said 27 countries had used it in 2006, up from 24 in 2005. The number of executions increased to at least 5,628 compared with 5,494 in 2005 and 5,530 in 2004.

Hands Off Cain said 146 countries and territories have renounced the death penalty to some extent, either through outright abolition or a moratorium.

China remains the top executioner, with at least 5,000 confirmed and unconfirmed reports that as many as 8,000 people are put to death annually...

Iran came in second in the top execution rankings. Hands Off Cain said Tehran doubled the number of people it put to death in 2006, executing at least 215 people compared with 113 in 2005, though it said the real number may be even higher.

Pakistan also nearly doubled the number of executions in 2006, putting at least 82 people to death last year compared with 42 the year earlier.

Hands Off Cain said both Iran and Pakistan executed minors, in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The United States remained the only country in the Americas that carried out a death sentence in 2006. Fifty-three people were executed in the US in 2006, down from 60 in 2005 and 59 in 2004, the group said.

Here's the Hands Off Cain report.

Of course the real figures are going to be a lot higher than that, as the report acknowledges. North Korea is credited with "at least 3" deaths. Burma doesn't feature at all.

There's been a hefty rise in Muslim countries:

In 2006, at least 541 executions, up from 302 the previous year, were carried out in 16 Muslim-majority countries, many of which were ordered by religious tribunals applying a strict interpretation of Sharia law...

Sentences of death by stoning were issued in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and in Iran, where at least three people were stoned to death in the period from 2006 to the first seven months of 2007. On June 5th 2006, Iranian websites reported that a man and a woman had been stoned to death three weeks earlier. On July 5th 2007, a man was stoned to death, after being convicted of adultery and having already spent 11 years in prison on the same charge.

Two men and a woman were stoned to death in Pakistan in 2007, but in a extra-judiciary case, tried by a tribal jury...

Beheading, as a method to carry out Sharia-based sentences, is exclusive to Saudi Arabia, the Islamic nation that follows the strictest interpretation of Islamic law. Usually, the execution is held in the city where the crime took place in a public place near the largest Mosque. The condemned is brought to the site with their hands tied and forced to kneel before the executioner, who draws a long sword amidst cries of “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great!”).

Saudi Arabia has one of the highest numbers of executions in the world. It’s all-time record was established in 1995 with 191 executions. There were 39 executions in 2006, much lower than the 90 recorded in 2005. However, in the first six months of 2007, there have already been 119 beheadings.

Ramadi

Worth a read - from inside the Sunni triangle:

Ramadi’s transformation is breathtaking. Shortly before I arrived last November masked al-Qaeda fighters had brazenly marched through the city centre, pronouncing it the capital of a new Islamic caliphate. The US military was still having to fight its way into the city through a gauntlet of snipers, rocket-propelled grenades, suicide car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Fifty US soldiers had been killed in the previous five months alone. I spent 24 hours huddled inside Eagles Nest, a tiny COP overlooking the derelict football stadium, listening to gunfire, explosions and the thump of mortars. The city was a ruin, with no water, electricity or functioning government. Those of its 400,000 terrified inhabitants who had not fled cowered indoors as fighting raged around them.

Today Ramadi is scarcely recognisable. Scores of shattered buildings testify to the fury of past battles, but those who fled the violence are now returning. Pedestrians, cars and motorbike rickshaws throng the streets. More than 700 shops and businesses have reopened. Restaurants stay open late into the evening. People sit outside smoking hookahs, listening to music, wearing shorts – practices that al-Qaeda banned. Women walk around with uncovered faces. Children wave at US Humvees. Eagles’ Nest, a heavily fortified warren of commandeered houses, is abandoned and the stadium hosts football matches.

“Al-Qaeda is gone. Everybody is happy,” said Mohammed Ramadan, 38, a stallholder in the souk who witnessed four executions. “It was fear, pure fear. Nobody wanted to help them but you had to do what they told you.” [...]

The city council and US military broadcast daily progress reports, introduced by the national anthem and English football results, from giant loudspeakers above 19 police stations.

The 6,000 US soldiers are now dubbed “friendly forces”, and most are bemused by their new civil role. “I want to fight al-Qaeda, but f*** it – this is victory,” said Corporal Patrick Marzillo from Chicago.

“Instead of using my radio to summon support fire I’m calling to get a water leak mended,” said Colonel Turner. The soldiers’ biggest enemy now is the scorching heat – well over 110 degrees most days, which is no joke in body armour.

Rats Everywhere

A tale of animal lovers:

Stephanie Taylor, 51, and 71-year-old partner John Gooch, of Bingham Drive, Staines, admitted 13 counts of cruelty to animals at Staines Magistrates Court on Wednesday, August 22.

The court heard the creatures, who have all now been destroyed, were so tightly packed into the couple's former home in Ashford that they were living "on top of each other" as there was not enough floor space.

Prosecutor Chris Simms told the court the smell of urine and faeces in the flat was "unbearable"...

A statement from a police officer called to help deal with the problem said it appeared the rat cages had never been cleaned.

"There were dead rats inside the cages and a number looked like they were dying," it read.

Defence barrister Lesley Barry said Taylor, who had previously been banned for life from owning animals, had become overwhelmed by the situation after buying two rats from a pet shop which then started to breed. Wild rats had then infiltrated the flat and continued to breed.

"She realised she had a population explosion," said the barrister.

"Then it escalated and we are in the realms of 316 rats."

She said Taylor, who viewed the creatures as "my babies", was an animal lover and had not wilfully neglected her animals.

The court heard how she had tried to self-medicate the rats' abscesses and tumours with vaseline because she did not trust going to the vets.

Outside the court, RSPCA officer Dave Johnson said he had been shocked by what he saw.

"The smell was unbearable," he said. "There were rats everywhere, all in cages, and about 100 just running around loose.

"They were in the kitchen, living room and there was a wardrobe full of them. They were even in the walls."

Cruelty to animals? I mean, with rats, does anyone care? What about firms like Rentokil, who specialise in killing the little buggers? Or Rentokil's clients, who lay down rat poison? That's pretty cruel, isn't it? And I don't suppose anyone's shedding any tears about the fate of those 316, all "destroyed" (not even dignified with the phrase "put down"). Not much effort, I should think, went into finding alternative homes for the healthy ones, or releasing them into the wild (ie down the nearest drain).

The sad couple involved aren't so much cruel as, well, stupid. Still - a wardrobe full of rats!

Follies of the Wise

Jonathan Gottschall reviews Frederick Crews' "Follies of the Wise":

The first two chapters of the book, along with large sections of the first eleven chapters, describe revisionist analyses of Freud that challenge the hagiographical image promoted by Freud and his devotees. This Freud — Crews calls him “the unknown Freud” — is a megalomaniac, a tireless self-promoter, a hopelessly biased and inept scientist, and a truly dangerous quack with very real victims. Take Crews’s retelling of the famous Dora case study: Dora was a young teenager being sexually hunted by an older man while her father turned a blind eye to her peril; for his part, Freud puzzled over Dora’s failures to become aroused by the man’s attentions, tracing her frigidity back — where else? — to the predictable infantile traumas. But for all of his bumbling as an investigator of the mind, Freud also had a tragic facility with language, an ability — like the Sophists in The Clouds — to make a weak and baseless claim seem compelling (to his everlasting chagrin, even Crews was once seduced by Freud’s literary charisma). Consider Crews’s gloss of one of Freud’s most famous case studies, that of the Wolf Man, Sergei Pankeev:

Freud was determined to find a primal scene to serve as the fountainhead of Pankeev’s symptoms. He made it materialize through a transparently arbitrary interpretation of a remembered dream of Pankeev’s from the suspiciously young age of four, about six or seven white wolves (actually dogs, as Freud was later compelled to admit) sitting in a tree outside his window. The wolves, Freud explained, were the parents; their whiteness meant bedclothes; their stillness meant the opposite, coital motion; their big tails signified, by the same indulgent logic, castration; daylight meant night; and all this could be traced most assuredly to a memory from age one of Pankeev’s mother and father copulating, doggy style, no fewer than three times in succession while he watched from the crib and soiled himself in horrified protest.

This is despite Pankeev’s protestations that he could not have witnessed this event: due to the customs of his social class, his crib would never have been located in his parents’ bedroom. Crews makes it clear that, far from being exceptional, the Wolf Man case is a typical foundation stone upon which the whole “ramshackle edifice” of psychoanalysis was set to wobble. And, in the first eleven chapters of Follies, he shows that Freud is still very much with us today. In chapters on the recovered memory movement, the Rorschach test, hysteria, and alien abductions, Crews shows that elementary Freudian concepts underlie them all — especially the cornerstone concept of the “recoverability” of repressed memories by canny therapeutic sleuths. The two chapters on the recovered memory movement are especially powerful, and they demonstrate one of Crews’s most effective points: “pseudoscience inevitably leads to harm.”

I don't why this review should appear now, as the book's been out for over a year, but really no excuse is needed for quoting Crews, who as well as being right on target is also a supremely lucid stylist.

Free Will

Benjamin Libet, the man who conducted what is possibly the most famous experiment ever on the subject of consciousness, has died at the age of 91. Sue Blackmore has a brief article on him at CiF:

[I]t is for his experiment on free will that he will mostly be remembered. In this experiment he wanted to find the cause of our spontaneous, deliberate actions. Certainly we feel as though we consciously decide to act and then do so. Yet philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years have argued that the brain does not need a magical conscious self to start actions off, and free will must be an illusion. Unlike all the thousands of people who have argued around this point, Libet actually found a way to test it.

He asked subjects in the laboratory to hold out their arm and, whenever they felt like it and of their own free will, to flex their wrist. He then measured three things - the time at which the movement began, the time at which the "readiness potential" in the brain began (signalling the brain starting to organise the coming movement) and then, most tricky of all, the time at which the subject made the decision to move.

This really is tricky because there is, by definition, no physical activity in the brain or anywhere else that corresponds to this. He was trying to measure something purely mental - the free decision, or thought, of wanting to act. Finding a way to do this is probably why the experiment became so famous. What he did was this. He had a spot revolving on a screen, like a clock face, and he asked the subjects to call out where the spot was at the exact moment that they decided to act. In other words, they were, after the fact, making a judgement about where the spot was at the time, and that could be used to accurately time the decision to act.

And his results? They were quite consistent and have since been repeated many times. The brain activity comes first, then the decision to act, and then finally the action itself. Not only does the decision to act happen after the brain is already getting ready to set off the action, but it comes nearly half a second later. It looks as though our conscious decision to act cannot, however strongly it feels that way, be the cause of our actions.

Oh dear! Free will seems to be disproved. But it's not that simple. Libet himself did further experiments that seemed to show that we may not be able to start actions consciously, but we can veto them once they have begun - saving at least some role for free will. But even that does not end the issue. Literally hundreds of academic articles, and several whole books, have been written about this experiment and how to interpret it. This is why I say it is the most famous experiment on consciousness ever done.

In a way the whole furore is bizarre. Most scientists claim to be materialists. That is, they don't believe that mind is separate from body, and firmly reject Cartesian dualism. This means they should not be in the least surprised by the results. Of course the brain must start the action off, of course the conscious feeling of having made it happen must be illusory. Yet the results created uproar. I can only think that their materialism is only skin deep, and that even avowed materialists still can't quite accept the consequences of being a biological machine.

She goes on to describe how Libet himself fully believed in free will - in the power, as it were, of mind over matter - but she disagrees:

I think, and thought then, that free will is entirely illusory.

I wrote about this a few months back - about the problem of free will in the light of Libet's experiments:

This [Libet's] result depends on the accurate reporting of the conscious experience of making a decision, which is always going to be unreliable. But then why assume that your free will is always conscious? Yes, you may report that the decision took place, as far as you were aware, after the neurological activity appeared - but what prompted that neurological activity? What else but a decision of yours? Otherwise why doesn't your arm keep moving all the time, randomly? The cause of your arm moving was your decision to move your arm. The fact that your awareness of that decision follows on from the neurological activity doesn't change that. All it shows is that (perhaps) a part of your decision-making is pre-conscious, or unconscious. That's not an uninteresting finding, but it certainly doesn't show that you have no free will.

That still seems to me the best way around the problem: if Libet's experiments show anything, they show that our will, our decision-making, isn't always conscious. That's a great deal more plausible than to assume that we're just robots whose sense of free will is an illusion. As for the jibe that scientists' materialism can only be skin deep if they can't "accept the consequences of being a biological machine", that's to pretend that there's just no problem of consciousness at all. But there is a problem. Biological machines we may be, but we're still conscious biological machines. Inseparable from that consciousness is our sense of our free will. Well, at least I can make no sense of consciousness apart from free will. In fact I'd suggest that to deny we possess free will is philosophically incoherent. Sadly I'm not going to argue the point, as my brain's reached its memetic limits.

It's interesting that Sue Blackmore is, according to her Wikipedia entry, "an active practitioner of Zen" though "not a Buddhist". I wonder how much the death of the self - the acceptance that one's ego is an illusion - which in my no doubt superficial understanding is the goal of Zen Buddhism, is the same as an acceptance that one has no free will. If you could really and truly arrive at that state of mind where you believed - you knew - that you had no free will, would that be nirvana? Would you have cast off the veils of illusion? Or would you be insane?

Lockheed That-A-Way

A hidden aircraft factory in Burbank California during World War II:

Related (possibly apocryphal) story:

Well aware that the Lockheed aircraft plant in Burbank, just blocks from his studio, was certain to be a high-value target, [Jack Warner] was horrified one day to have someone point out that, from the air, a Japanese bomber might not be able to tell the difference. Warner promptly visited the studio’s paint shop and ordered the erection of an enormous sign on the roof of one of the Warner soundstages. The result? A twenty-foot arrow pointing to Burbank, along with the words: LOCKHEED - THAT-A-WAY!

[Thanks Damian]

Union Rules

If you're Egyptian you've got to be careful who you work with nowadays. Wouldn't want to get, you know, contaminated in any way:

A rising Egyptian film star who plays the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein in a British Broadcasting Corporation drama faces a possible ban on performing in Egypt for acting with an Israeli in the film.

Actor Amr Waked, now shooting in Tunisia, ran into trouble when his union learned that Israeli actor Yigal Naor is playing the role of the ousted and executed dictator in the drama about his life.

Waked, who appeared alongside Hollywood star George Clooney in the 2005 blockbuster Syriana, defended his position, telling several Egyptian papers he did not know an Israeli was involved until after he signed the contract.

He also said the film was pro-Arab, and criticizes US foreign policy, according to the Egyptian Mail.

"The position of the union is clear in its rejection of normalization [with Israel], and requires that members abide by this position," Ashraf Zaki, the head of the union, said.

"Amr Waked is playing the role of the husband of Saddam's daughter opposite an Israeli who plays Saddam ... Amr will be facing an investigation as soon as he returns [from filming]," Zaki said.

He also said the film was pro-Arab, and criticizes US foreign policy. As it's a BBC production, he's on safe ground there.

Harnessing Responsibilities

Those Independent front pages continue to inspire. Here's today's, with a special message from Nelson Mandela to black Britain:

"It is important for you as leaders to harness those responsibilities and ensure that you also empower those around you who scale the mountains with you."

I think I preferred his guest spots on "Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul".

The Zionist Bacteria

This is timely given the election today of Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist, as president in a parliamentary vote. It's from an interview with former Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, founder and leader of the Islamist movement Milli Gorus, aired on Turkish Flash TV prior to the July election.

"These elections are about whether we will be, or we will cease to be. I'll tell you where this is coming from, and for this we have to first demonstrate the infrastructure. […] The right path to the happiness of all humanity is our path, the Milli Gorus way.

"Our Prophet was sent with love and compassion, and our goal is the happiness of all six billion people in the world. We are Muslims, and our civilization has brought happiness to the entire world. This is the good, but there also is evil. Our religion says that the infidels are one nation [Millah]. That means evil is run by one control center.

"When we look at the map of the world, we see about 200 countries painted in colors, and we think that there are many races, religions, and nations. The fact is that for 300 years, all these [200 nations] have been controlled from one center only. This center is the racist, imperialist Zionism. Unless you make this correct diagnosis for the illness, you cannot find the cure to it. You will ask, 'What is this belief, this racist imperialism that destroys happiness in this world?'

"This belief began 5,765 years ago, when the children of Israel were living in Egypt, with a book of magic that was written by someone called Kabbala. The author or authors of this book later claimed that they belonged to the tribe of Moses, but this is not true. They distorted the Tevrat [bible] of Moses and put in it the Kabbala. If you want to see proof of this, you can look at their Tevrat and then look at the Kabbala...

"Do you know what the safety of Israel means? It means that they will rule the 28 countries from Morocco to Indonesia. Since all the Crusades were organized by the Zionists, and since it was our forefathers the Seljuks who stopped them, according to the Kabbala there should be no sovereign state in Anatolia. This is these people's [i.e. the Jews'] religion, their faith. You can't argue or negotiate with them. This is their religion, and it comes from the Kabbala. [...]

"Let's go back to the [Zionist] bacteria. About $22 trillion out of all the money we spend every year is paid to these racist imperialist Zionists. We, as a country, are paying $200 billion every year to the Zionists so that they can prepare their bombs, so that they can one day come and take our country. This is the world that the Zionists have built. […]

"This racist imperialist Zionism organized 19 Crusades just to reach its goals. To organize the Crusades, it used the Christians. Why is it that the Christians are helping the Jews? A rabbi goes out on the balcony and tells them, 'Oh Christians, isn't it the Messiah that you are waiting for? We too are waiting for the same Messiah.' What the rabbi is doing is taqiya,(1) of course. Then he goes into his synagogue and tells a five-year-old, 'What you heard me say outside is not true. Our Messiah is different. That Jesus is someone whom we killed. He will not come or go anywhere. I told them that to deceive them.'

"These people tell the Christians, 'You are waiting but you have no guidelines as to how to make him come. Our Tevrat tells us what to do. Let's do them together and let's bring the Messiah.' And what were those guidelines? To bring the Jews to Jerusalem, to build and secure the Greater Israel, and so on."

"It was Zionism that established the sect of Protestantism. The capitalist order of today is the religious order of Protestantism. It's because the pope rejects the concept of interest, so as not to allow the exploitation of his children. That's why the Jews decided to change the [Christian] religion, and founded Protestantism. This way they can charge interest and make everybody work for them.

According to the MEMRI introduction, Erbakan is the mentor of the ruling AKP leadership, including both Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the new president Abdullah Gul – "both of whom have in the past been active members of Erbakan's political parties, filling mayoral, ministerial, and parliamentary posts. All of Erbakan's parties have been banned by Turkish court orders."

A Terrible Form of Rebellion

In amongst all the dross written about gangs and guns and knives and violence in the wake of Rhys Jones' murder, here's something worth reading, from George Szirtes.