In the Higher Education section of the Australian this week, Luke Slattery gets a mite carried away.
? university leaders are focussing their attention on post-crash curriculum reform.
What leadership role might higher education play in the ethical retooling of the professions and the broader society?
Let’s hope they remember the plumbers.
People talk of ‘monetising’ (or if American, of ‘monetizing’); their blogs or websites. Why this verb? Let’s consider the options. ‘Making money out of’ hints at exploitation, ‘making money from’ suggests that money will actually be made (with blogs, about a 1/1,000,000 chance) To ‘monetise’ cleans up the process; it’s technical and neutral; neither ethics nor the possibility of success need enter into it.
Nothing wrong with making money. I just wish people would be more straightforward about it.
Consider the case of Nathan Rice, a prominent WordPress guru and theme designer. Continue reading »
Christopher Hitchens has a useful piece in Vanity Fair. He recaps the fatwa on Rushdie and briefly works through the various outrages since then, Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoons and the rest. His main points: that the problem for us now is self-censorship and that the multi-culti excuse-mongers need to reckon with the long lists of distinguished writers from the Muslim world who are as outraged as people in the West that their religion is invoked by hateful fanatics. I call it useful for latecomers to these debates – but it doesn’t hurt any of us to go over this ground regularly.
When Iran?s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship. ? more
The star lot was The Golden Calf, a bull in a large gold-plated formaldehyde fish tank-a symbol of the worship of a false god. It went for ?10m, bang in the middle of the range. The Kingdom-yet another Hirst shark-went for ?9.6m, well above the ?4m-?6m estimate. This was an incredible, gravity-defying feat. As the sale started, one of America’s largest investment banks went bankrupt, and a giant insurance company, AIG, was saved only by nationalisation just as the auction ended. The shares of even solid, boring banks were crashing in London and New York. The art market was sending a confusing message. Could it really be that a dead bull floating in a tank was a safer home for your cash than a deposit at the Halifax?
_ Ben Lewis in Prospect.
One of those collocations around which ironies spin, a little planetary system of cool. But all, I think, to be resisted. True, it reads like a sketch for an episode in Rushdie. But also like the chapter opening of a future book about the decadence of capitalism.
Elephant stamp to the reader who can spot the source of the entry title.
The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.
_ David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 1760.
The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.
You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as “the Prophet Mohamed”, so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it “a national security issue”. Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones’s publisher has pulped the book. It’s gone.
In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam.
Johann Hari, ‘We Should Never Pulp Books out of Fear of Fanatics” August 2008