hailing Myers, bemoaning the HRCAC

 always a hard act to follow

I'm a great fan of PZ Myers. Maybe sometimes he comes on too strong, but that's only in seeming - a reread usually convinces me of the logic and the need for toughness. And he's such a good writer - always entertaining, brief and clear. And informative with a word or two, not just on matters scientific. This recent post is an excellent example - I learned about Adonai [again - I'd forgotten the term] and shofars while having my thoughts provoked on how to deal with the more bizarre aspects of religious belief - in this little piece he manages to show how those bizarreries might be seriously combated while mocking such a serious combat and musing on the power of laughter. Mockery is often the most appropriate weapon but it pays to have a  whole, diverse arsenal. Anyway, the prolific PZ is always worth reading, and is also a corrective when I get too pseudo-philosophically prolix.
Keep it pungent, without sacrificing too much depth.

David Walker, erring bishop

Tonight's 7.30 Report featured abuse allegations, and damn convincing ones, against catholic priests in Australia - good for me to focus on the backyard instead of Ireland, Germany, South America... face it, their protection racket spreads o'er the planet. The 7.30 Report has been doing good work in this field in recent times, and tonight's report is a follow-up on two Irish-born priests recruited to Australia, Finian Egan and Paddy Maye. Egan in particular has a lot of evidence against him, and tonight's report has two more women, twins, adding to the other allegations. In fact, the church has found against both Maye and Egan but has failed to prevent them from administering services as priests. In this case, the neglectful authority seems to have been bishop David Walker, of Broken Bay in northern Sydney. The old old story, and Egan used the old methods, described by Colm O'Gorman in his book Beyond Belief, written from the perspective of an abuse victim in Ireland. He inveigled himself into the family, winning their trust and respect, thus throwing the poor child into a confusion of guilt and self-blame. My advice to anyone who has suffered abuse at the hands of such people is to go to the police straight away. Never, never, never leave it to the church to sort out. In fact many catholic clergy are coming to the same conclusion - they understand the church's divided loyalties and ineffectiveness in this sphere. I wish sometimes people knew about or read this blog, so I could make this advice effective - but the message is already getting through by many other means.

on the endless struggle to make decision-makers accountable

On bringing heads of state to justice, on amnesties and immunities and the like, I must repeat that I'm on the side of getting stuck into political leaders, making them suffer for how they've made their people suffer. It's a slow process, but it should always be remembered that a century ago, the idea of bringing heads of state to account was virtually inconceivable.
So commendation is due to Charlotte Dennett and her ilk, for having the guts to at least try to stick it to George Bush and his henchmen, for flouting the law and common decency in bringing war to a people who did nothing to deserve it, as well as imposing it upon the military of their own country, with devastating consequences for so many ordinary front-liners. While I'm interested in the current pressure on the Pope and the Vatican, there's no doubt in my mind that particular members of the Bush administration are the greater criminals.
Via three quarks daily

a controversial historical matter

a monument to the Armenian genocide in Bikfaya, Lebanon

Canto: You've been talking about how human society rights itself, or fights its way back to health, by facing its invaders, its peculiarities, and defeating them, or assimilating them in a more benign form maybe...
Jacinta: Like with endosymbiosis...
Canto: Yet often there's a struggle to face the past, and a wholesale denialism, as with holocaust denialism, but that's just a loopy fringe thing. In other cases the denialism is more 'mainstream' if you like, as with Japan and its 'war heroes', and Turkey and the Armenian genocide. What do you think of this last example - there was an article in this weekend's Australian about it.
Jacinta: I tried to emphasize last time that though it's 'natural' that we move towards health after troubled times, that shouldn't diminish our respect our respect for those who put themselves about, and even sacrifice their lives, for the sake of a healthier, fairer, more balanced system. Also, people disagree, often violently, over what such a system should be like. Some people feel it should be based on suppression of the 'wrong attitudes', and some of those people really believe, in the case of the Armenian genocide - well, first of all they reject the term 'genocide' as a gross exaggeration, or even a complete lie - that it's an anti-Turkish conspiracy.
Canto: Designed to destabilize Turkey - there we are with health and balance again.
Jacinta: The second secretary to the Turkish embassy in Canberra described the claims as  'a systematic  campaign of defamation carried out by Armenian lobby groups living in various countries all over the world. Any recognition or any resolution accusing the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed is unacceptable. The allegations are totally groundless and baseless.' A pretty unequivocal response. However, Australian politicians Maxine McKew and Joe Hockey have both made speeches acknowledging the Armenian genocide. McKew is the member for Bennelong, which has a large Armenian population...
Canto: Ah yes, those Armenian lobby groups...
Jacinta: And Hockey has an Armenian grandfather. So we have contradictory claims, and what do we do? We look at the evidence.
Canto: Only twenty countries have so far recognized the Armenian genocide [among them Britain, France and  Switzerland], but Australia isn't one of them. I would imagine that for many nations, recognition would depend on issues of diplomacy and trade rather than truth or falsity.
Jacinta: The Wikipedia article on the subject, while anonymous as usual...
Canto: Obviously written by an Armenian lobbyist..
Jacinta: It seems to be well-documented and footnoted, with photos of the forced marches, of the bones of massacred Armenians, and descriptions from observers at the time, such as ambassador Henry Morgenthau, of the US, who reported that what was happening to the Armenians was public knowledge, freely admitted by many Turks. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee published a book about the treatment of the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1916, including much eyewitness testimony. It seems to have held up well, in spite of claims at the time that it was just anti-Turkish wartime propaganda. In short, while the extent of the extermination will always be arguable [Wiki puts the numbers at one to one and half million], the claim that it didn't happen at all seems absurd. The treatment of Armenians by the Turks became increasingly Draconian towards the end of the nineteenth century, leading to the Hamidian massacres [under Sultan Hamid II] in 1895-6, and various other pogroms and massacres up to the 'official' genocide of 1915-22.
Canto: So there appears to be plentiful evidence. And this diplomat's comments suggest that there's still quite a bit of anti-Armenian bigotry in that part of the world. Does he claim that there was no killing at all, or is he quibbling about the term 'genocide'?
Jacinta: Yes, it isn't clear, but there appears to be a wealth of info about it online. Just reading some of the comments on different articles, though, tells me how emotive and polarizing the subject is.
Canto: Well, I've found this well-written, and thoroughly footnoted, piece which discusses the event or events as a 'disputed genocide'. It ends on a reasoned note, I think, with these remarks:

Some Turkish and Armenian historians have suggested recently that it is time to "step back from the was-it-genocide-or-not dialogue of the deaf, which only leads to mutual recrimination" and instead concentrate on empirically grounded historical research that seeks a common pool of firm knowledge.[56] Time will tell whether it will be possible to rescue history from nationalists who have plundered history to serve their own political ends.

Jacinta: Sounds sensible. So we, who are new to the subject, must reserve our judgment, not having fully analysed the evidence. Clearly the Armenians became a target because of their siding with Russia during the Great War...
Canto: Not surprising, then, that Russia is one of the countries that has officially recognized the genocide.
Jacinta: But whether there was an intention to exterminate the Armenians in Turkey, that's the big genocide question. Not that this matters much to the victims.

justice [delayed]

bye bye bignose

Jacinta: So Canto, what has been catching your attention of late.
Canto: Well, amid all the noise about tubby little Carl Williams, I've just heard that justice has been meted out to the old Argentinian dictator, Reynoldo Bignone, 82, the last of the dictators in the so-called 'dirty war' period between 1976 and 1983. He was sentenced to twenty-five years jail - in a real jail, a federal prison - and six other officials of the period were also given jail time.
Jacinta: A former head of state, a dictator no less, jailed! Sounds v promising, amnesty-wise. Tell us more about this Bignone fellow.
Canto: He became dictator in 1982, after the previous dictator, Galtieri, was forced to resign following the Falklands debacle, but he wasn't jailed for anything he did as dictator. After a career in the military, he became involved in running the notorious detention centres inside the Campo de Mayo, Argentina's largest military training base, after the coup deposing Isabel Peron. This is usually designated as the starting point of the dirty war, but in fact left-wing and right-wing militias had been operating in Argentina since the early seventies, as things spiralled out of control under Peron.
Jacinta: Yes it's fascinating how the times can make or break people like that. Were he born and raised in Australia, someone like Bignone might have quietly made a fine career for himself, ending up as a 'typical' retired general with conservative political sympathies.
Canto: I don't know about such speculations. I do know that during the dirty war period, or the dictatorships of Videla, Viola, Galtieri and Bignone, between 9,000 and 30,000 people were 'disappeared', not to mention the abduction and kidnapping of children. Videla or one of his henchmen cynically described this as the 'National Reorganisation Process', and it was part of a larger right-wing process involving the governments of Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia, known as 'Operation Condor', with the US providing plenty of support before and after the Carter Administration.
Jacinta: Okay, enough with the conspiracy theories, let's get back to Bignose.
Canto: This is cold hard fact mate, read all about it, and it's Bignone, though he did have a big nose. But let's move forward to the guy's prosecution. In 2005, the  Argentinian Supreme Court repealed the notorious amnesty laws instituted nearly twenty years before under then President Raul Alfonsin. Before those laws came into play, Videla and a number of the other military leaders were tried and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. But then another Prez, Carlos Menem, started issuing pardons in the late eighties.
Jacinta: So it's been an in and out sort of thing with the amnesties and the imprisonments.
Canto: Yeah, and there's been a lot of anger about the soft treatment of these guys, with cushy house arrests and the like. But after the election of the relatively unknown Nestor Kirchner in 2003 things changed pretty quickly. Kirchner injected a healthy dose of integrity into the Argentine government, increasing accountability and transparency, standing down powerful military figures, and making changes to the Supreme Court, pressuring some justices to resign and facilitating the impeachment of others. He didn't stand for re-election in 2007, though, and now his wife is Prez.
Jacinta: Seems to be the sort of thing that happens in Argentina.
Canto: Yep, the memory of Evita still lingers. Anyway, it has taken a while, but Videla was stripped of his Presidential pardon in 2007, and in 2008 he was sentenced to life, I think, in a military prison. And now it's Bignone's turn. Down with amnesties! Down with immunities! Justice for the oppressed!
Jacinta: Great, you've set the world to rights once again, time for bed.