More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • Slavery

    The UK prime minister has just released a ‘statement of regret’ for Britain’s participation in the slave trade which is fair enough … after all slavery was and continues to be a crime against humanity. Some are calling for him to go further and issue a full apology and hand out reparations, which is where things get a little tricky.

    The history of slavery is a little more complicated than just excessively greedy British merchants sailing to Africa, seizing millions of Africans and dragging them across the Atlantic to live and die in atrocious conditions. For a start, many of those merchants bought their slaves from native slave traders who had been in business for many years already.

    In Africa it was common for African tribes or nations to enslave prisoners of war (a common practice in many other parts of the world) and sell those slaves on to slave traders who would them take them East or later West for resale. As many if not more slaves were sold East to Arab slave traders as were sold West to European slave traders.

    In addition, the pirates of North Africa had their own slave trade by seizing Europeans from sea or land and selling them into slavery in their own markets. Whilst not of the same scale as the outgoing trade from Africa, it still counts as a crime against humanity for each of the estimated 1.5 million victims. Including a number of US citizens … the Barbary Pirate attacks on US ships was the chief reason why the US Navy was started.

    In fact slavery or similar states (serfdom, enforced contractual slavery, etc) has been so widespread that there are very few parts of the world that did not have slavery at some point in the past, and probably very few of us who do not have slaves as ancestors.

    So when we talk of reparations for the crime of slavery, who should pay ? And who should be paid ? It is not an easy question to answer. Of course Britain is included amongst the group of debtors, but do we get credit for the amount of efforts Britain made to abolish the slave trade ? And what about the other slave traders … other Europeans, Arabs, and Africans ?

  • IT: A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

    First of my real blog entries on IT … or computing, or anything related to technology really.

    I work in computing so it is hardly surprising that I have a few opinions on it (or IT), but I’ll try to restrain myself from getting too technical.

    Today’s entry is about how having too much knowledge can actually slow you down when trying to resolve an issue. You see, I had a bit of a problem on my SGI workstation when trying to run GIMP or Ufraw (both of which are essential to doing any kind of photographic work). When trying to use either, the application would crash with a little error message saying that I had run out of memory. This was kind of hard to believe as I have 1.5Gbytes of memory in the SGI, and I was not processing any unusually large files.

    However I had recently upgraded the software on my workstation, so my instinct was to blame that. The error message indicated that the problem was with a component called glib so I spent hours recompiling that component using multiple different versions so see if I could eliminate the problem. No luck. I even read the source code to the relevant part of glib and tried a couple of experiments to see what was wrong that way. No luck.

    After all that time, I spent some more productive time hunting in the appropriate place to find out my problem was probably related to an IRIXism … rqs which was not written to take into account just how many shared libraries applications based on GNOME use these days. A quick fix using rqsall and all was fixed.

    Ignoring all the technical details, my knowledge of how Unix works had led me down the wrong path because all the symptoms seemed to indicate an application problem where the real problem was with the operating system. A quick hunt where all the experts hang out showed where the problem was. If I had looked to begin with, I would have saved myself a great deal of time!

    However hunting down the wrong path was useful … it helped me practice some skills which need occasional use.

    Oh! Don’t assume that my experience is common with those who use Linux. If you stick to a stable distribution and don’t mess too much you will not see this sort of thing.

  • Designer Stuff

    It has just struck me … we have all this designer stuff … designer glasses (I wear ordinary ones), designer jeans, designer whatnots, etc. But who designed the other stuff ? After all we have ordinary jeans … were they designed by the tea boy, or a passer-by on the street ?

    After all everything needs a designer, even the cheapest most rubbish sun-glasses you can find. In fact it’s possible that there are more design skills in designing something cheap and nasty as in designing something more expensive. After all it takes some skill to be so cheap 🙂

    So remember ‘designer jeans’ are just expensive jeans.

  • Photography: Return To Arundel

    On Wednesday (kind of late to post this, but as nobody reads it anyway, who cares?) afternoon I returned to Arundel and more specifically Swanmore Lake to make some images there. Just walked around the lake with a short detour along the long trail north.

    It seems my memory of the place had been distorted by time, and the low level of water in the lake was a bit of a shame but I may have come up with some good images (they haven’t been processed as yet). Unfortunately I missed the dramatic sky that was on show on the train back … an oil slick spreading across the sky, white clouds highlighted against huge black clouds and small black clouds highlighted against whispy white skies.

    And I managed to damage my foot again … am I jinxed ?

  • Jack Straw and The Niqab

    Jack Straw (the UK politician) has recently written an article on Muslim women wearing the Niqab (the full face veil) which has drawn a certain amount of attention. I don’t think he meant any more than to start a discussion and point out certain effects that the Niqab has on conventional British society. I am certainly not going to say that Muslim woman cannot wear anything they want … that’s a personal decision for them to make. I have no more right to decide that for them, than they do to decide I should wear something other than jeans.

    However there are a few things that come to mind on this subject …

    Wearing The Niqab In Public

    Before going on to discuss the real issue here, I will mention something else … the Niqab is widely perceived as being a symbol of the Islamic tendency to repress women’s rights. Now I know that isn’t the case, but it is perhaps something that needs to be emphasised more — that it is a freely made choice made by the women who wear it. Perhaps Muslim men could consider wearing it ? After all if modesty is a worthy trait in Muslim women, surely it is also worthwhile for Muslim men ?

    Now for the real issue here, and I’d like to emphasise that it is a minor thing.

    Historically in UK society, nobody conceals their face (except in extreme weather) unless they are intentionally hiding their identity with some nefarious purpose in mind. The groups of people who conceal their face include medieval outlaws, highwaymen, thieves, bank robbers, the KKK, and Muslim women!! Now of course it is ridiculous to say that Muslim women conceal their faces because they’ve got some evil inclination, but at an unconscious level it does come across as just a little sinister.

    Of course if a Muslim woman is deeply convinced that the Niqab is essential, she should carry on wearing it. But if a Muslim woman is not quite so sure and undecided, it may be worth considering this when making her decision.

    Wearing The Niqab For A Face-To-Face Meeting

    When we communicate, part of the communication is the spoken language and part is body language … mostly found in the face. If you doubt this, just dip into any book on basic psychology and check … it will be there. Anyone who has communicated online in the same manner as they would do when speaking to someone will have encountered situations where their communication has been mis-interpreted because of the lack of body language.

    In a society where people are not used to people choosing to cover their face, conversing with someone who does is off-putting. Covering the face comes across to the rest of us as “I don’t want to communicate with you” and could be considered to be impolite … as impolite in fact as asking someone to to remove the Niqab.

    Muslim women who wear the Niqab in public should at least consider removing it to talk to someone who may not be a Muslim. Wearing the Niqab is about maintaining a certain level of modesty in the presence of strange men; removing it to talk to a Muslim man could be considered to be immodest, but nobody who is not a Muslim would consider it so … look around you at what other women in our society wear!

    After all there are many Muslim women who don’t consider wearing the Niqab to be necessary, and suggesting to them that by not doing so makes them less a Muslim, and perhaps immodest to boot could be a little dangerous! For a multi-cultural society to function smoothly, we need to be considerate of each other’s cultural backgrounds and patterns of behaviour, and that goes both ways.

    This is not saying Muslim women should remove the Niqab when talking face to face with someone, just that they should consider it and perhaps explain why they wear it (after all not everybody knows).

    Hysterical Reactions

    Judging by the way that some leaders of Muslim society react, anyone would think that Jack Straw had suggested that women wearing the Niqab should be stoned in the streets, or fined! Jumping up and down, screaming “Islamophobia” at someone suggesting that one aspect of Islam may not be helpful in the UK is hardly a moderate reaction. In fact it is a very unBritish reaction and grates on the nerves.

    Something more like “I don’t think Jack Straw understands how deeply we feel about the Niqab” or “That’s interesting, we should think about that” come across much better to the British people.