Category Archives: Politics

Islamic prostitution in Iran

I’ve been intrigued by the practice of what is effectively legalized and religiously sanctioned prostitution in Iran since I heard about it a couple of years ago and this article is the most in-depth look at it that I’ve read. It’s technically called temporary marriage but it’s clearly prostitution. The temporary marriage contract lasts for a predefined duration, from a matter of minutes to 99 years and there is an explicit provision for the woman to be compensated by the male in some way, with the precise terms being negotiated between the two parties.

What’s interesting is that like normal marriages, any children conceived under the temporary marriage contract are considered legitimate and may inherit the father’s property, but the woman is not required to obey the man as traditionally required under Islam, except in sexual matters. These actually sound like reasonable rules to protect the woman and provide for a measure of security for any children that might result.

In fact, the whole thing is refreshingly honest and straightforward. The religious authorities acknowledge that the primary purpose of such contracts is pleasure for the men and money for the women. They even insist that it be proudly branded as Islamic so that critics cannot say that Islam is blind to the physical needs of men. They also see it as a useful way for women, particularly widows, to earn money to support children who might otherwise go uncared for.

At the same time, the authorities remain puritanically strict against liaisons between men and women that are not sanctioned under Islam. Once you have the paper contract, issued and approved by the proper religious officials, everything is okay, but without it, the liaison is sinful and will be zealously prosecuted in Iran. It’s a weird disconnect.

Greek lessons

I have to admit that I’m one of those who have been following the travails of the Greek government with a touch of schadenfreude. As this article in The Economist put it, how can the German government justify giving aid to Greece when Greek public sector employees get to retire earlier than German ones. Germany has for years been reforming its own welfare programme to save money while Greece has been happily pretending it could afford its bloated public sector workforce, going to the extent of fudging its statistics and outright lying to creditors about its liabilities.

It’s also worth remembering that the Haiti earthquake happened not too long ago and still needs money to rebuild. While it’s true that corruption and mismanagement played a part in the ineffectiveness of the Haitian government, exacerbating the damage caused by the quake, it’s impossible to argue that the quake was anything other than an accident that the Haitians had absolutely no control over. By contrast, an entire generation of Greeks was complicit in the decisions that led Greece into the mess that it currently finds itself in. How then is it morally justifiable to help the Greeks when there are so many other more worthwhile causes that require finite resources?

This blog post, again from The Economist, is very sympathetic towards the Greeks, but to me, they still reinforce the impression that the current problems are the result of specific choices made by the Greek government beginning in the 1980s. By successively voting for governments that continued those policies, the Greek people chose short-term wealth and growth without a care for whether or not these policies were sustainable, and so are complicit in them. Should they be saved from the results of their own choices?

Finally, shouldn’t the principles that apply to countries be equally applicable to individuals? I don’t begrudge the appeals for aid in cases where clearly the people involved have troubles that are none of their doing. Orphans come particularly to mind. But I do get annoyed when I see articles in the newspapers about how the government should be considerate towards people who have accumulated unsustainable levels of credit card debt or how richer people should contribute towards the welfare of those who have incurred responsibilities that they never had the ability to bear. Why should those who have worked hard to live within their means be punished and those have been short-sighted and irresponsible be rewarded?

Scientologists in Haiti

This article about scientologists going to Haiti to help save the quake victims cracked me up. It only mentions that the plane was provided by a wealthy private donor but I’ve read elsewhere that it was personally piloted by John Travolta. Anyway, while I understand that they also carried emergency supplies with them and that is certainly a contributed that deserves appreciation, I’m also disgusted that they’re also sending along Scientology ministers who practice “touch” healing and other techniques that are frankly just snake oil.

Of course, there’s no danger of the scientologists trying to recruit in Haiti. They’re only interested in rich people and the Haitians are too poor to afford their expensive auditing procedures. But the intent is clearly to buff up their image and earn credibility for their quack medicine. As such, I think legitimate medical authorities should be readier to denounce bad science whenever they see it.

Baidu.com is awesome

I’ve written about China’s censorship of the Internet before, so I didn’t have much to say that’s new about the brewing dispute between the U.S. and China over the cyberspace attacks that Google recently went public with. However as everyone knows, if Google does pull out of China, the company that stands to gain the most would be Baidu.com, China’s dominant search engine with more than 60 percent of the market. Baidu.com’s shares have duly shot up on the news of Google’s possible withdrawal.

Being a home-grown Chinese company, Baidu of course has absolutely no qualms about enforcing any of the country’s censorship edicts. Since the search engine is actually accessible from anywhere in the world, it’s possible to test it for yourself to see how it filters its results. For an easy test, search for the keywords”falun gong” on Baidu.com and see what happens. Warning: don’t do this if you are actually in China or any territory controlled by China and don’t do this if you’re actually afraid of getting onto China’s hatelist.

Economists are cheap / Engineers are terrorists

A couple of amusing articles by way of Marginal Revolution and the Freakonomics Blog. The first article from the Wall Street Journal details some of the quirky habits of famous economists. We learn for example that Milton Friedman routinely returned the telephone calls of reporters collect and that a dinner served by John Maynard Keynes skimped on the food so much that Virginia Woolf complained about him serving only three grouse for eleven people. John Siegfried, the secretary-treasurer of the American Economic Association, never cares about the the color of the cars he buys and simply asks for whichever color is cheapest, while Robert Gordon of Northwestern University will drive an extra half-hour to get to a cheaper grocery store.

Economists are also less likely to donate to charity. Research by Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose of the University of Washington showed that economics majors were less likely to donate any money than graduates from other majors. Even students who didn’t major in economics gave less to charity after taking introductory economics classes. The rationale is that economists are more aware of economic efficiency and find many types of economic decisions made by other people wasteful. This of course extends to gambling as well and the article claims that casinos make very little money from economists.

The second article appeared in Slate and covers a paper by two sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog who after studying 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 countries, noticed that engineers were three to four times more likely to be violent terrorists than their peers who studied finance, medicine or the other sciences. The next most radicalizing specialization was Islamic Studies but it came a distant second. The same trend also appears to be true anecdotally. 8 of the 25 hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks were engineers and two out of the three founders of the violent Lashkar-e-Taibi group believed to be behind the attacks on Mumbai were engineering professors.

The articles cites a couple of reasons why this trend exists. One is that engineering is a popular subject of higher education in developing countries and many of the graduates who picked engineering expected it to be a pathway to high-status employment. Thus, they have been frustrated by the corruption and repression in many Middle-Eastern countries which stymied the modernization that they expected and led to joblessness among highly educated jobseekers.

Another reason might be that engineers have a tendency to be more conservative and religious, while possessing a mindset that seeks greater order and stability in society and disdaining ambiguity and compromise. They may believe that only a rigid adherence to religious laws can bring about the orderly society that they crave. In any case, intelligence agencies have already noticed that terrorist groups are aware of this and spend extra time and effort to gather recruits from engineering schools, especially since they possess valuable technical skills that can make them better terrorists.

Math is hard

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Or at least it seems to be for the notorious U.S.-based network Fox News. The first picture above is from a month ago and anyone even casually glancing at it should realize that something is wrong with that pie chart. Apparently Fox News didn’t just make a mistake in getting the graphics right, its news anchor Byron Harlan actually spoke these figures out loud as part of his news report.

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This second graphic appeared only recently and again, it’s very obvious that the figures don’t add up. What’s worse is that the original statistics came from reputable polling agencies and their original figures certainly make sense but Fox News seems to have decided to interpret them more creatively. This post on Think Progress explains that fuzzy reasoning. Goofing up the occasional graphic is understandable, but when your news anchors repeat these mistakes on air, it smacks of a deliberate conspiracy, especially when well-educated, highly intelligent news anchors pretend to be dumb in order to better connect with an anti-intellectual audience.

The infamous BTN

The Biro Tata Negara (BTN) or in English, the National Civics Bureau, issue is something that almost everyone has always known about but rarely dared to speak out about. But once the cat’s out of the bag and the taboo of not talking about has been broken, there’s no shortage of people condemning it with their every breath. I guess I’m no different. In case there are any non-Malaysians reading this who have no idea what I’m talking about, it refers to a government agency run by the Prime Minister’s department that runs courses with the ostensible aim of promoting patriotism amongst Malaysians.

To that effect, it runs a series of courses for which attendance is obligatory for everyone wishing to qualify for a government job. However, many Malaysians have complained that the courses actually promote racism and seek to segregate the different ethnic groups that comprise the country’s citizens. The Malays in particular are consistently taught that they are special and hold a superior position with regards to the other ethnic groups while Chinese and Indian participants are taught that their Malaysian citizenship is not a right but rather a privilege for which they must be forever thankful to the Malays.

I’ve never attended one of these courses myself but I heard some very shocking anecdotes recounted by a friend of my wife about the course she was forced to take only a few years ago. This was part of a process that she had to go through to be hired as a public school teacher. I recall that the lecturer was described as being extremely provocative, to the point of shouting at participants even if that meant driving them into a rage or to tears. The Malay participants were constantly harangued with the question, “Are you Malaysians? Yes or no?” When they inevitably replied “Yes”, he would reply, “No, you are Bumiputera!”

This refers to the special classification assigned to ethnic groups recognized as being indigenous to the country, of which the Malays are by far the largest group, and hence accorded special privileges and rights under the national constitution. It goes without saying that this is resented not only by the ethnic groups not included under the bumiputera classification but also by more enlightened bumiputera who believe that such special privileges are a slur on their abilities.

Anyway the most interesting part about the experience that was related to me was towards the end of the course. One of the participants, a male Indian, was seen to be becoming more and more agitated as the lecturer spoke and looked like he was ready to start a fight then and there. The lecturer ignored him and just kept going. However, after he ended his talk, the lecturer took the time to take the Indian guy to one side to calm him down and told him not to take it too seriously and that he was just a guy doing his job. I honestly don’t know if that’s something to laugh or cry over.