Interesting Links for 17-09-2013
- Europe's largest tidal power project is approved (between Orkney and mainland Scotland)
(tags: scotland renewables electricity tidal ) - Netflix studies piracy sites to decide what to buy
(tags: tv netflix copyright piracy ) - On the banality of systemic evil
(tags: systems organisation secrecy evil viafanf ) - Richard Dawkins's Existence Poses a Real ( Read more... )
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Saying that, people with their faces covered or wearing mirrored sunglasses make me feel a bit uncomfortable for reasons I’m not entirely sure I can put my finger on. Partly, it’s to do with being able to see facial expressions and recognise people but I’m not entirely sure that’s all that I find uncomfortable.
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Yeah, very much so. Although the ones saying "whatever they want" are hopefully off to a closer start than the ones saying "face-covering must be mandatory/banned".
Disturbingly, I can't remember reading anything about the topic from anyone who claimed to know _anything_ about it, even in countries where face covering has become much more prevalent.
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Me neither. Well not much.
I recall some commentary along the line that the requirement was for modest dress and some suggestion that it was not specifically about covering parts of the body but about avoiding wearing ostentiously rich or flamboyant clothing but I'm not sure if that was someone coming from a position of deep knowledge or just back filling in a way that suited their position.
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Bloody Saxons.
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Even if most wearers of a veil were being pressured into wearing one in some way, compared to the other bad things that happen to people, being made to wear a veil in public appears to me to be less important. Not unimportant, but I don’t think it would make a top ten social justice issue for me.
We have time for a national debate on some women wearing a veil but we don’t appear to have time for one on cultural norms on wearing high heels or the living wage or shelters for physically abuse women, or men or rape conviction rates.
Then it occurs to me that the question of the veil is a really good way of having a go at Muslims.
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*Yes, I think she can choose to wear a veil and still be a feminist. I'll concede that her choice may not be that free, but we all live in a society where our culture affects our choices, I agreed with Victoria Coren comparing it to the choice to change your name when you get married as a woman in her column yesterday.
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I cannot conceive of a human culture where this wasn't the case. People are social and cultural by nature. I can conceive of one where people applied a lot less pressure on each other, of course, but most people would still feel the urge to fit in with what most other people did.
One of the things about being 'liberal' is accepting that I may not like other people's choices, but I accept that they are their choices to make, learn from, and make again, not mine to make for them.
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http://www.metpolicecareers.co.uk/eligibility_requirements.html
and it seems to vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
I am frequently glad that as an IT person I don't have to fit in with the same norms as everyone else. I am _very_ glad that ties went out of the window about five years ago, and hopeful that mandatory shirts will follow in a few years...
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More to the point: it's a special case of the general problem of humans enforcing dress codes as a tool for mediating social hierarchy. Everything from male officewear (ever wonder what a necktie is for?) to niqab is part of the pattern. We're surrounded by it, and those who transgress are targeted with severity that increases the greater the perceived infraction -- take Stephen Gough as an example for how far it can go.
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Not how I read it. The essay specifically mentions shops, libraries and shopping centres ("etcetera") as places where facial communication is not needed (or at least, does not trump the right to wear a veil).
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