Unclean Unclean

During the Black Death, while plague killed a huge proportion of the World's population there were some places that managed to escape mass outbreaks all together- Poland and Milan most notably. Milan adopted a rather brutal but effective strategy of walling up the homes of anyone infected with the disease with the occupants inside, there seems to be less clarity over how Poland avoided it, but one theory is that they pretty much close the borders as well as a medieval state could.

The most effective strategies for countering the plague were the most offensive to individual rights and personal liberty. A major outbreak of an infectious disease is one of the few times where it is justifiable to put the collective good above individual rights. The outcry over a relatively minor quarantine period for those people who have been at the heart of the Ebola infected region of West Africa is not based on "the science" which is contentious, but on knee jerk ethical preening.

Justice- Not Only Blind But Retarded

I find this story almost unbelievable, it's something you'd expect from Cuba or Russia not the United States:

21-year-old Evan Emory of Michigan has been sentenced to two months jail time after filming and posting a video featuring him singing a sexually explicit song to elementary school students. The only thing is, Emory never did that. He actually sang an appropriate (and apparently well-received) song to the kids and edited in the other song (which the kids never heard) later for a comedy video.

He has also been banned from approaching children under 17. If they're jailing people for bad comedy why not start at the top and throw the creators of "Funny or Die" into the slammer?

The parents were angry that he had misused images featuring their children which is fair enough, there probably is an issue relating to licencing the images of the children that merits a fine. However their anger was quite palpably not in proportion to the actual offence and their grievances were pandered to as though they were angry Muslims- with the prosecution initially going for a 20 year prison sentence and the aggrieved parents arguing that this is what he deserved.


PS- bonus points to anyone who spots what the title refers to.

Don't Ban The Burqa

Nicholas Sarkozy is proposing to ban the Burqa, a move supported both by Letters From a Tory and David at A Tangled Web.

I think they are wrong. Not because the Burqa is a good thing and we mustn't judge different cultures and all that crap. I do not believe that- the garment is an ugly symbol of repressive values and a barrier to integration. It would be good if every wearer responded as the late Orianna Fallaci did when interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeni. However banning it isn't the answer.

Partly for practical reasons, how can you ban it without also banning every other item of clothing that conceals the face- be it Halloween costumes, motorcycle helmets or scarves worn in winter? Also the practical result of banning the burqa might just as easily lead to Muslim women who currently wear it when they go outside the house being prevented from leaving the house at all.

It's a bad idea in principle too, the idea that the state has a right to tell people what they can and cannot wear is completely unreasonable, what someone wears shouldn't be a democratic decision. I'd vote to prevent Sarkozy wearing lifts in his shoes and he wouldn't like that. Whilst a lot is rightly made of women who are forced to wear the Burqa, the fact remains a lot of wearers do so willingly. Forcing someone who doesn't want to wear a burqa to do so is the same in principle as preventing someone who does want to wear it from doing so.

Furthermore the burqa is a symptom of the status of women in certain Islamic societies, not the cause. If the burqa is banned then great we won't see any more BMOs on the streets, but the women themselves aren't going to be any freer from whoever was influencing them in the first place. If one removes one highly visible symbol of coercion without actually doing anything about the coercion itself then what is the point?

Lastly I don't buy the idea that it is an advance for secularism. Secularism should mean refusing to grant any special place in public life to religion or religious institutions, not actively preventing religious expression. We shouldn't protect the right to wear a burqa in circumstances wear concealing one's face would be otherwise unacceptable. but equally we shouldn't ban face covering only when there is an Islamic motive.

All of the above applies only to the idea of the state banning the Burqa on symbolic grounds, I have no objection to private institutions barring it. After all shops have every reason to demand that they can identify customers and should be able to treat the burqa in the same way they treat motor cycle helmets. There is also an argument that there are practical reasons for the state banning it in some circumstances as a security risk which seems implausible but is a legitimate reason to restrict it.

Worst Argument For A DNA Database Yet.

Is David Aaronovitch retarded? I don't wish to be abusive, but he seems to be spending a column unable to figure out the difference between 'guilty' and 'innocent'.

His argument is, and I'm not making this up, that opponents of the current practice of putting innocent people who have been convicted of no crime on the DNA database are hypocrites because they don't object to keeping convicted criminals on the database, and after all those criminals are really just differently innocent because they haven't yet committed the offences which the DNA database might help convict them of.

I'm sure he thinks he's found a very clever example of hypocrisy although if we were to follow his logic we would either have to get rid of all criminal records or give everyone a criminal record because otherwise it's completely unfair on convicts.