The Telegraph has this article on Muslim students in Britain. I am wondering about the methodology employed in this YouGov poll (are they reputable in Britain?). In any case, I have it on good authority that British Muslims as a whole are a good bit more “conservative” (read: attitudinally belligerent) than we are here in the states. That doesn’t mean they are actually violent, but their worldview apparently espouses violence to a greater extent. This greater extent still being the extreme minority of the total Muslim population.

In any case, the Telegraph article is misleading and sensationalist. The article unleashes a barrage of numbers, all intended to be shocking and revolting to the average westerner, it seems. Let’s review the numbers in order of appearance:

40 per cent support the introduction of sharia into British law for Muslims.

Ok, “Shariah” is not a bad word people. You can’t just say “Jack supports Shariah!” and then assume, therefore, anything in particular about Jack, such as his level of conservatism, extremism, predisposition towards violence, etc.
Shariah encompasses a wide range of ethical and legal standards that must be understood before they can be evaluated. And they are certainly not, for any one with a background in law or history, barbaric. Like any field that has been around 4 times as long as the United States, the analysis of Islamic Law takes a deep and nuanced approach. Further, it is my understanding that different religions’ family-laws for divorce and inheritance have already permeated British Law and have certainly permeated the laws of other secular countries (Malaysia and India to name two), to most people’s satisfaction (but also with many similar practical difficulties to Common Law or American Law).
In short, before emphasizing this 40% minority interested in Shariah, it is important to actually define for us and for the respondants what “Shariah” means and what it entails in terms of family law, treatment of women, crime & punishment, and all those hot-button issues. So I am stamping this statistic:

fail

Because it doesn’t mean anything in its current form, and yet somehow buoy’s the article’s thesis that British Muslims are “the other.”

a third back the notion of a worldwide Islamic caliphate (state) based on sharia law

Ok, once again, this means nothing. “Caliphate” is not a bad word. I reclaim the word “Caliphate” for the good-guys. Done.
What does it mean to me? Economic bloc. International-aid conglomerate. Islamic Banking partnership. Caliphate in the modern context probably just means a loose political and close-bound economic partnership for the advancement of common interests. Those interests might be: ending homelessness and governmental corruption. Or: insuring high educational standards and women’s rights. How likely is that given the political landscape? How likely is it that a black man will win this November’s election. Unheard of and yet likely.
But at very least, once again, define the terminology before conning your respondents and scaring your readership.
This statistic gets a:

you fail

40 per feel it is unacceptable for Muslim men and women to mix freely

This statistic does not get a fail. Through all the sensationalism, there is actually something here. Muslims have yet to seriously consider what is at stake when they choose to mix or not mix. Few nonMuslims challenge the norm of abstinence prevalent amongst Muslims and integral to Islam, but when it comes to protecting this value both Muslims and nonMuslims seem quite unsure about the appropriate extent to which this norm must be structurally protected. I haven’t got any answers, only questions.
Does it hurt the internal Muslim economy when men and women don’t allow any significant mixing? I would assume yes, due to inefficiency and the restricted flow of ideas and creativity.
Does the single population suffer from a lack of mixing in terms of developing emotional maturity, evaluating prospective partners (“partners” to use the American vernacular, “spouses” to use the American-Muslim vernacular), and establishing personal and career networks? Almost certainly.
Do strict rules regarding mixing short-change women in educational, work, and religious settings? Often if not always.
Does mixing interfere with other Islamic values such as celibacy and modesty (here modesty, as opposed to salaciousness)? Believe it or not: often. If not always.

These are serious questions that ought to each be addressed–and I have no idea whether there is some kind of “mixing utility” that can be established to compare the spiritual or logistical value of any of these things.

24 per cent do not think men and women are equal in the eyes of Allah

Ok seriously? I just don’t even get this one. I grew up hearing that heaven is at the feet of Mothers. I don’t know what these kids grew up hearing. But 24% is a lot. Either we have a serious issue with these kids’ upbringing or we have a serious issue with this survey and its methodologies. Unfortunately, I tend to fear it is the former.

a quarter have little or no respect for homosexuals.

Islam does not condone homosexuality. In fact, Islam condemns homosexuality. But this is not something to be hurtled at western society, as an insult or anything else. This is something that Muslims, if they choose to follow the norms prescribed by the religion, adopt for their own lives. This issue is much bigger than the paragraph I will give it. Suffice it to say, that in my understanding, disliking a lifestyle for oneself does not entail disrespecting someone else on account of their choice. And even preferring something for someone else wrt their lifestyle-choices does not entail disrespect for them. It may be that a given Muslim dislikes homosexuality for himself. It may be that Muslims even pass into a prescriptive role and feel that they know better for someone else (whether they actually know better is completely immaterial). Preferences and prescriptions such as these are not foreign or even blameworthy in our society. The question is whether these preferences and prescriptive ideologies translate into a lack of respect.
This survey purports to have the answer. I am doubtful, however, that they have approached with the proper nuance in posing this question.
This stat gets a:

maybe.

32 per cent said that [killing in the name of religion] was [justified]

Here we run into another huge problem: more poorly defined terms. Are they talking about Jihad? What does it mean to kill in the name of religion? Does this include self-defense? Because that would be considered both Jihad and killing in the name of Islam in my book. Or is this supposed to mean “honor-killings” and all of that abhorrent filth. This stat gets a “meh” because 32% is a high enough percentage for me to kind of wish that the question and response were well articulated so I could make something out of it. 4% apparently also believe killing is ok to “preserve or promote” religion. Really? OR? So defending oneself against attack is suddenly in the same question as the Spanish Inquisition? This stat obviously gets a “fail” in addition to the “me” because it simply doesn’t mean anything and is borderline perverse in terms of its academic nonrigor.

maybe.

fail

Also the study says that Islamic Activism is a gateway drug to Islamic extremism. I couldn’t be bothered to insert another “fail” jpg here. The reporting on this study means less than nothing. However, if someone actually did a good analysis of Muslims and parlayed that analysis into useful, community building, introspective discourse I would be ecstatic. Hey, anyone who’s interested can write a quick message to the editors over at the telegraph and tell them that, if they are interested in doing a balanced and not-complete-nonsense look into British Muslims, we have some contacts on that side of the pond and would be happy to help elevate their articles from “rubbish” to at least “worth-reading” or maybe even “insightful”.

I’m a fan of online cartoons. I will collect cartoons on Iraq here.

1) Iraq: A Parable

I am probably preaching to the quire on this one, but torture, my friends, is bad. Let’s ignore my usual tirade on the obvious contradiction between the values this country was founded upon and the use of torture for national security.
Let’s just ask ourselves: “is this really the most time-tested, most effective, most efficient method of protecting the homeland?”

1) Time tested. No. Brutal interrogations are the stuff of actions movies and fox’s 24. In fact, a number of articles have uncovered that fact that the popularity of Fox’s 24 has done more to inform our interrogation techniques of late than historical analysis or psyche research, for example.

2) Most effective. No. This Atlantic Monthly blogger is right on with his post: Ripping off false-confession techniques is a great way to get false confessions. It’s like Enron: if the income isn’t real, the company will implode; guys, if the intelligence isn’t real: national security is at stake.
What is the cost of eliciting a false confession? Besides the humanitarian cost of torturing someone: there’s the monetary cost of setting up a clandestine scenario to house this practice. There’s the political cost of reducing good-will from the people of other nations, especially the nations who’s citizens we have been torturing. One day these torture victims will go home. They will tell their stories. Whether the backlash is violent, economic, or just a vague vibe of dislike, the US will lose out on tourist dollars, international contracts, and peace of mind, among other things.
And finally, there’s the opportunity cost: if you’re doing interrogation wrong and getting false information, you’re not doing it right and therefore not getting useful information. Simple, I know. These guys valued the potential information they were to eventually extract, so they tip-toed around it, they caressed it, they played chess for it. These heroes developed real rapport in order to extract real, useful information. WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

3. Efficient. Yes. It turns out beating someone silly is much more efficient than cultivating a long-term relationship. That is, as we said earlier, if your goal is to “break them” as opposed to “elicit truthful intelligence”. So in breaking people, toture is efficient. Especially water-boarding. Is it efficacious? Absolutely not. American lives are not saved. See point 2.

In conclusion: even if we were all presented with the urgent life-or-death scenarios that Jack Bauer faces on 24, we would be stupid to employ torture. And to clarify, we are not presented with those life-or-death scenarios, we’re presented with detainees of (at best) questionable guilt and we *do* torture.
I’m probably rambling here…forgive me. My mind turns to mush when I try to understand what we’re doing here. I feel like I’m on crazy pills, seriously.

I’m a huge video geek. I love my Panasonic AG-HVX200. I constantly think of ways that I could mod or hack together my own 2k or 4k digital video camera that would compete with the red for under 5k or so.

And so for a number of reasons, this blew my mind.

So here’s a neat little article on no-fault divorce. I haven’t done additional reseach so I can’t vouch for the stats cited or for the correlation drawn between the institution of no-fault divorce and falling suicide/abuse/divorce rates in the long term, but it does seem feasible to me that an easy out from an emotionally or physically dangerous situation would, in fact, be for the better.

My question is: what about the starter-wife phenomenon and the fickle-spouse phenomenon. After my eyes were opened to it, I came to know about a dozen people in their mid- and late-twenties who had been through a divorce, a surprising number due to (what some described as (though I can never really know)) spousal fickleness. Is the growing phenomenon of spousal fickleness being accounted for in these studies and stats? Will we see an upsurge of divorce numbers and a downturn in quality of life numbers for couples in their twenties when the next set of census data and marriage studies come out? Perhaps I’m jaded, or perhaps I’m just suddenly unnaive, but it seems to me that the nature of divorces playing out across my generation is shifting a bit, perhaps for the tumultuous. But, again, I’m pretty clueless when it comes to love/marriage/social-implications-of-changing-relationship-norms.
In any case, it’s ok with me: at least we’ll get some pretty awesome, angsty pop music out of all the upcoming divorces. Watch out famous musicians/famous-musician-wives: your marriage might get traded for a platinum record.

And I thought Goodreads was a good idea…

Bookmooch.

Here’s a boring little video about how a simple silk cloth folded in your pocket or backpack can easily be your grocery bag, hijab, or rocketship*. Obviously we should all be doing this. Awesome.

*Not actually true

Sometimes, when everyone is asleep, I go outside and laugh really loud. Now I kind of wonder if people nearby ever have dreams about me laughing really loud.

These two posts were both upvoted pretty high on reddit. As we know, the US and Britain both have crazy over-the-top “see something, say something” type public transport and public awareness campaigns. Fortunately the British also have a knack for writing style and presentation that makes them hilarious in general. So we get public service announcements like this:

Hey! This is serious.

Of course, sometimes you have wise-guys (wise-chaps?) who don’t love freedom and make stuff like this:

Report Fascism

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

So after a very very long hiatus, I’m back into writing (not to mention back into Boston and back into some semblance of orderizing in my life). I’ve decided that while my own commentary on things might just accidentally be interesting, another aspect of my online presence is probably for more consistently compelling: I read an unusual number of online articles about a broad range of things.
I think this blog will become a frequently updated catalogue of: the cool, the strange, the funny–but more importantly a reservoir of social justice issues, appropriate technology solutions, community empowerment projects, political conversations/alternative media, and so forth…

I rely heavily on reddit.com and digg.com (news aggregators where users rank user-submitted content in a simple list). I also just realized that I am on 3 or 4 fairly eminent email lists where each day brings a variety of new academic and other discussions from experts in technology, Islam, society, video, art, interaction, design, and legos (no, seriously).

So for now, I’m just your friendly neighborhood facilitator.