re:considering

In today’s paper edition of DN a small note can be found in the International section. The headline is set to guarantee a small readership – “Karzai sanctions law hostile to women” (Karzai godkänner kvinnofientlig lag). I searched for the online version, but it isn’t important enough to have been published in the web edition.

The law only applies to shia muslims, and maybe that’s why it’s so unimportant. And – let’s not he shy about it – laws and customs like these are abundant around the globe. The extent is rather such that it’s amazing some of us can live in relative freedom. That don’t diminish the horrors of this new Afghan law as millions of women will suffer from it.

An example (and now I’m citing the article) is the one I used in the headline. Another one is that a husband now has the right to deny his wife food as punishment for her denying him intercourse.

A clause that has been deleted said a wife has to make herself pretty and to put on make-up for her husband. It would be worth a laugh only if it wasn’t a fact that somewhere on this planet, in this case in Afghanistan, a group of men think they have the right to demand such of women.

The politician who in some sense led the protests against this law, Shinkai Karokhel, has been faced with death threats and she lives surrounded by bodyguards.

The article says Karzai, the president, is opposed to the law but that political considerations have forced him to accept it. That he sacrifices the women to stay in power.

It’s unworthy of any human being, and unworthy of a society trying to become politic.

No, this is not about a film. It’s about trusting media channels that are partial while succeeding in appearing unbiased. And how that can turn out.

The day before yesterday – yes, I’m a bit slow, I do have a job to do, and don’t entirely live by word of my laptop /I like to use my brain as well, and analysis can take time/ – there was talk about the qualifications of the judge who had presided over the Pirate Bay trial. He is a member of three different organisations (link goes to a swedish language news site) involved in the copyright issue, two of which is pure professional interest and don’t promote a certain opinion or viewpoint, but a third could be interpreted to suggest disqualification… But long before anyone had had time to research those organisations the verdict was clear, official, and in the public domain – the judge was entrenched in pro-megacorp copyright, and thus disqualified.

At that point it don’t much matter what the objective truth is – the trial was equal to a lynch mob, and he was judged guilty.

Dismissing the question of actual guilt – is this how we wan justice to be made? Because this isn’t the first time public verdict has been given. A couple of days ago two persons were approached and shot in Stockholm Old Town. Next morning everyone knew who did it, only now, a couple of days later, when one of the victims have recovered enough to tell what happened, it appears some one else did it (also in swedish, sorry). Of course, the investigation is still on, and both persons are on the suspects list, or so I assume.

But I wonder how was life for that other person, during those days in between? He was fairly famous, well known within his niche. Now he’s famous for something else.

Just because everyone wanted a piece of the action, just because the blogosphere acted as lynch mob.
And a lynch mob has no place in politic society.

As said in an earlier, in fact my previous post ;-), the range of topics possible to discuss when having read Cherryh’s Chanur books are many and varied. One of the ones most often talked about is gender. Therefore I’ll let that thread rest. Maybe I’ll pick it up later. But for now I’ll reflect on another topic – that of trust.

Take eight different species, three of them not breathing oxygen and one of the oxygen breathers an intruder. Even so the four resident oxygen breathers are very different from each other – from different planets, and thus from vastly different cultures. It should be obvious to us as readers to appreciate the differences, but instead we fall into the trap of anthropomorphising. Or at least I do. Repeatedly.

And what happens is that despite the characters too knowing about these differences, and in some cases learning about the at the same moment as the reader do so, they have troubles with understanding and interpreting each other. It becomes clear to the reader that language is a cultural construct, something that resides within the culture, and not every expression translates very well. Rather the opposite, and it is visible in the pidgin language shared between the hani and their mahendo’sat allies. But it is also obvious in the clashes between groundling or station bound hani and their spacer kin – culture can change within a species as well, culture is in constant evolution – it is the means by which we handle our reality.

It’s almost that the truly weird kif are easier to understand because they are so alien anthropomorphising is not an issue.

So while the hani captain Pyanfar ought to trust her two mahen “friends” Ana and Jik she doesn’t. This is partly because she realises they have been meddling and manipulating, both her and others, and it isn’t until the next to last book that we learn the reason for their behaviour (conditioning), and maybe we don’t exactly understand how their society functions until the next to last chapter of that fourth book.

Are these issues unique to a pretend universe? I think not. Cultures here on our planet places value on different things and behaviours. Immigrant parents don’t understand their kids who have grown up in a different society not only because the surrounding culture is different from what their parents grew up with but because they are younger, and culture and society are fleeting, almost as chimeras. Even waster gaps exist if you look on a greater scale, between and across continents.

How can we expect trust when we can’t even talk to each other without misunderstandings? How can we expect trust when one bows to the other only out of fear? How can we expect trust when one thinks he’s more valuable than another, just because he’s of a different colour or religion or, indeed, only wealthier?

Valid questions. Because I think trust is essential when humans deals with each other – without trust politic society wouldn’t hold.

Will it?