Mick Hartley

Rotating snakes

A dramatic optical illusion:

Invented by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University, Japan, in 2003. The snakes seem to rotate, but only if you're not looking at them directly. Focus on a particular coil and it stops moving.

Carl Zimmer writes here about new research on why the illusion works.

Lots more rotating snakes at Kitaoka's website.

Sex and death

In Egypt they're not afraid to grapple with the big issues:

Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper. 

The appeal came in a message sent by Dr. Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker, Dr. Saad al-Katatni, addressing the woes of Egyptian women, especially after the popular uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death....

The controversy about a husband having sex with his dead wife came about after a Moroccan cleric spoke about the issue in May 2011. 

Zamzami Abdul Bari said that marriage remains valid even after death adding that a woman also too had the same right to engage in sex with her dead husband. 

Hmm. I wonder if he'd thought that one through.

It's not just Egypt where the strange sexual byways of Islamic jurisprudence can be observed. Karim Sadjapour writes at Foreign Policy (in the same Sex Issue as Mona Eltahawy's polemic against Arab misogyny) on the fevered sexual obsessions of theocratic Iran, going all the way back to Ayatollah Khomeini:

In his 1961 religious treatise A Clarification of Questions (Towzih al-Masael), Khomeini issued detailed pronouncements on issues ranging from sodomy ("If a man sodomizes the son, brother, or father of his wife after their marriage, the marriage remains valid") to bestiality ("If a person has intercourse with a cow, a sheep, or a camel, their urine and dung become impure and drinking their milk will be unlawful")....

Scholars of Shiism -- including harsh critics of Khomeini -- emphasize that such themes were the norm among clerics of Khomeini's generation and should be understood in their proper context: Islam was a religion that emerged out of a rural desert, and the Prophet Mohammed was himself once a shepherd. Whereas religions like Christianity and Judaism simply declare such behavior to be sinful, Islam addresses them from a juridical point of view.

The underlying problem, says Islamic scholar Mehdi Khalaji, a former seminary student in the Shiite epicenter of Qom, is not that such issues were addressed, but the fact that "Islamic jurisprudence hasn't yet been modernized. It's totally disconnected from the issues that modern, urban people have to deal with."

Indeed, Khomeini's religious prescriptions are often the butt of jokes among Iran's post-revolutionary generations. "I've never even seen a camel in Tehran," prominent Iranian cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar told me, "let alone been tempted to have sex with one."

 Though it'd be difficult to top the theological speculations of one Ayatollah Gilani:

Imagine you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake of argument, let's assume that you're both nude, and you're erect, and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?

Wet blossom

The Hill, Hampstead:

Fun with cooking

At the Washington Gas Light Co., circa 1926:

[Photo: Shorpy/National Photo Co.]

Full size.

...and blow up everything

Those North Koreans really don't like South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak. Not at all:

The rat-like group of bastards living in ditches in the area along the River Han are persisting in their mischief.

Aged reactionaries affiliated to the "Association of Elders of the Republic of Korea" who are more dead than alive, and gangster students ignorant of the world are going reckless, risking their lives.

They put up effigies allegedly representing the supreme leadership of the DPRK in different places including Kwanghwamun square in Seoul and got off such hysteria as firing at them.

Vicious conservative media including Dong-A Ilbo did not hesitate to deliberately defame the image representing the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK.

All these provocations were conceived and manipulated by the rat-like Lee Myung Bak group at a ditch of Chongwadae.

The insult to the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK is the worst of the criminal moves to escalate the confrontation with compatriots as they were the unprecedentedly hideous provocations. 

This insult lashed the army and people of the DPRK into the greatest fury as they regard the dignity of the supreme leadership as dearer than their own lives.

No matter how mischievious the rat-like group is going, it can never shade the bright sun.

The world is watching with admiration and envy the DPRK where the great sun in the 21st century rose. 

The south Korean people also feel proud and honored to see the glorious tradition of the nation given steady continuity with the appearance of the peerless young leader.

The army and the people of the DPRK are united ever closer around the sun, encouraged by mankind's warm congratulations and best wishes.

Taken aback by this tremendous might and the advent of the new stirring era, the above-said bastards are shaking their fists against the sun. They are the top-class criminals who should never be forgiven.

Those who hurt the noblest and most sacred dignity of the supreme leadership of the nation should not expect to go scot-free in this land and sky.

The historic advance toward the new century of the nation is bound to be accompanied by a sacred war to wipe out a tiny handful of rat-like group.

Our retaliation will prove to be the most powerful strikes to take merciless revenge upon the hideous provocateurs, whoever they may be and wherever they are, and blow up everything.

Only then the nation will expect true peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. 

Um...

Articulating our unfreedom

Slavoj Žižek is wondering what's to be done now that the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have come to an end - especially given that the protestors weren't all that clear about their aims anyway.

In a dramatic Hegelian twist typical of the bold thinking for which Žižek is so renowned, he argues that this very lack of clarity only serves to demonstrate how serious the situation actually is. Those protestors lucky enough to suffer under repressive regimes have the advantage of knowing what they want, ie the end of repression, even though they might face being shot, or at the very least having their heads kicked in. It's so much worse for us in the West - because we don't even know what our problems are!  

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms sare such answers) but doesn't know to what they are answers, and the analyst has to formulate a question. Only through such a patient work a program will emerge.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aaware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends:

"Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false."

After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink:

"Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair – the only thing unavailable is red ink."

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants – the only thing missing is the "red ink": we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict – "war on terror", "democracy and freedom", "human rights", etc – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.

The task today is to give the protesters red ink.

"We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom". But that's why God created intellectuals. 

London Terraces

From Images of earth from above at In Focus:

[Photo: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth]

"Rows of houses near the London 2012 Olympic Park in London, England, on March 27, 2012."

I wonder where this is. These kind of late Victorian/Edwardian terraces are such a familiar feature of suburban London that it could be almost anywhere, but my guess is round Ilford way.

The real war on women is in the Middle East

Mona Eltahawy, Why do they hate us?

Some may ask why I'm bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn't everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I'm not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system -- one that treats half of humanity like animals -- must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun....

Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either.

There's much more.

But why do editors - at Foreign Policy in this case - so often illustrate these articles on the suppression of women in Islam with eroticised images of sexy kohl-heavy eyes looking alluringly out from inside a niqab? Well OK, we know why they do it. Isn't it kind of subverting the whole point, though?

Opportunity lost

This editorial at the Jewish Daily Forward is worth reading in conjunction with the interview with Hamas deputy political director Abu Marzook which I posted on yesterday:

The Forward’s exclusive interview with Mousa Abu Marzook, who is widely considered the second most important leader of Hamas, sends a message that is stunning and sobering. The very fact that the meeting happened will empower those who believe — or need to believe — that the terrorist organization is softening and maturing as it seeks wider acceptance and a more productive role in the new Middle East. But a careful reading of Abu Marzook’s own words, so skillfully transmitted by our Larry Cohler-Esses, also highlights the disappointing, indeed infuriating, fact that Hamas continues to be unwilling to forswear violence and accept the Jewish state of Israel as a reality.

It is a message of opportunity lost, for all concerned.  [...]

The Abu Marzook interview surely can give succor to those who believe that an agreement with the Palestinians is currently impossible. But it also could, and should, do the opposite. In a sense, knowing the alternative in even more detail than before should encourage Israel and the U.S. to do everything in their power to support Abbas and his leadership team. Meantime, there is always hope that Hamas’s ever-so-slightly moderating stance might speed up its evolution.

Because in the end, beyond even the blinding immorality of pursuing terrorism and violence, is the plain fact that it does not work. It has not brought about a Palestinian state, nor the end of Israel, nor even a realignment of Palestinian politics. In the end, Hamas must abandon its armed resistance, or history will abandon Hamas. Perhaps Mousa Abu Marzook will be brave enough to lead the way.

Allegories of architecture

“Duisburg #111,”, by Jörn Vanhöfen, at PDN:

[Photo © Jörn Vanhöfen, Robert Mann Gallery]

From the Robert Mann Gallery, New York, where Vanhöfen's exhibition Aftermath is currently on show:

Although his subject is perhaps best characterized as human interventions in the landscape and the structures of civilization, Vanhöfen's images evince a psychological range extending beyond more familiar conceptions of post-New Topographics landscape photography. Not mere documents, these grand tableaus function as visual metaphors: allegories of architecture and the complex dynamic between nature and culture. Searching pictures, they suggest that amidst the decay and abandonment that all is not disconsolate and beyond redemption. Indeed, wit and awe appear in equal measure with outrage and condemnation. In one image from the series, a disconsolate apartment building, initially appearing passed over by the intractable advances of modernity, seems uninhabitable, until one notices the plume of smoke rising from the chimney — the sign of presence and beacon of persistence.

From sublime vertiginous vistas to restrained views on structures of refuse and ruin, Vanhöfen charts the effects of social drives that have globally propelled development and the pursuit of wealth. A peripatetic artist, Vanhöfen travels the world over, arriving at pictures that convey the tumult of the 21st century. Whether the harried trading floor of a Chicago commodities exchange or the humble structures of another era sequestered in the lee of freeway overpasses, Aftermath is sensitively attuned to the complex network of market and social forces. Mining the aesthetic and philosophical legacies of Romanticism, the artist deftly plays on established conventions while updating them to the concerns of the global present.

Well....um....great pictures, anyway.