I know it sounds insane, but it’s true.

The BBC is report­ing on an inter­view he gave, in which he argued that many Muslims don’t relate to Brit­ish law and would seek to prac­tice Sharia Law any­way. To avoid this going under­ground, or being a source of cul­tural ten­sions, he thinks we should imple­ment “aspects” of Sharia Law in a con­trolled way, in order to “main­tain social cohe­sion.” It sounds sort-​​of reas­on­able on the face of it, until you ask how exactly it’s going to main­tain social cohe­sion, and remem­ber exactly what par­tic­u­lar wedge this could be thin end of. Dr Wil­li­ams know this, and he says:

nobody in their right mind would want to see in this coun­try the kind of inhu­man­ity that’s some­times been asso­ci­ated with the prac­tice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme pun­ish­ments, the atti­tudes to women as well

But what he either doesn’t know or doesn’t say is that you can’t draw that dis­tinc­tion in a use­ful way. This is what Sharia Law is about, it’s not some optional extra that sits on top of a bunch of more accept­able legal con­structs. Of course there is more to Sharia Law than oppress­ing non-​​Muslims and bru­tal­ising women, and it would (argu­ably) be pos­sible to imple­ment some of the less offens­ive aspects of it in the UK — but that wouldn’t help. And this is why it would have no pos­it­ive effect on social-​​cohesion: No one who can’t relate to the Brit­ish legal sys­tem is hav­ing a prob­lem with the way it handles fin­an­cial mat­ters or what bank hol­i­days we have; that feel­ing of ali­en­a­tion doesn’t stem from minor admin­is­trat­ive details, it comes from a fun­da­mental dis­con­nect with the basis of the law. Brit­ish law is, by and large, sec­u­lar, egal­it­arian and lib­eral; Sharia Law is none of those things; it’s reli­giously motiv­ated, pat­ri­archal and author­it­arian, and those are exactly the fea­tures that the Muslims who can’t abide by UK law want to see intro­duced. Mak­ing a few token ges­tures won’t appease those people, but it will give them a sense of momentum and a legal pre­ced­ent for Sharia Law being enacted in the UK. I don’t know about Dr Wil­li­ams, but that’s not a situ­ation I want to find myself in.

Actu­ally, I think I do know about Dr Wil­li­ams. I’m sure he doesn’t want Sharia Law to make sig­ni­fic­ant head­way in the UK — he’s a civ­il­ised man, after all — but, as is so often the case with the reli­gious, he sees any reli­gion as bet­ter than no reli­gion, to the point that he thinks any reli­gion is due spe­cial privilege:

What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-​​off, where the law squares up to people’s reli­gious consciences.

Per­son­ally, I’d like to reph­rase that second para­graph as “What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-​​off, where people’s reli­gious con­sciences lead them to claim spe­cial priv­ilege to break the law that applies to every­one else.” But then, Dr Wil­li­ams doesn’t believe in the law as I under­stand it:

An approach to law which simply said — there’s one law for every­body — I think that’s a bit of a danger

OK — what? What is the law if it doesn’t apply to every­body? It’s noth­ing more than a tool of oppres­sion, and an edu­cated man like Dr Wil­li­ams should be ashamed of him­self for even sug­gest­ing it. The law, one law, must apply to all people equally, oth­er­wise we have no claim to be a lib­eral, free soci­ety, and we might, as Dr Wil­li­ams sug­gests, resign ourselves to being on the inex­or­able path to Sharia Law.

---

Stand­ard dis­claimer: I have noth­ing against the vast major­ity of Muslims, and have a lot of respect for many of them. It’s the bar­baric miso­gyn­ists who believe that women are prop­erty to be used and abused as men see fit, that it’s per­fectly reas­on­able to behead “the enemies of Islam,” and (most import­antly) that the “law of God” is the only one to which they are beholden, that I’m talk­ing about here.

Even the BBC appears to use them rather too lib­er­ally. Take a look at this art­icle. There’s no sug­ges­tion any­where that the girl might have made it up; ware­house have apo­lo­gised and com­pensated her, the tool in the photo looks like the sort of thing that would be used for cut­ting can­vas in a bag fact­ory; so why the scare quotes around ‘finds blade in bag’ in the head­line? Why say she ‘claims she pulled out a cut­ting device’ rather than just report­ing that she did?

It’s a weird art­icle; I can’t decide if it’s just slop­pily writ­ten, or if the author is try­ing to play on the public’s fear of teen­agers with knives. In either case, it’s below the BBC — they should know better.

There’s a great art­icle over at the BBC, about what hap­pens when you give the cli­mate change deni­al­ists a chance to present their side of the argu­ment. You get

The sum total of evid­ence obtained through this open invit­a­tion, then, is one first-​​hand claim of bias in sci­entific journ­als, not backed up by doc­u­ment­ary evid­ence; and three second-​​hand claims, two well-​​known and one that the sci­ent­ist in ques­tion does not con­sider evid­ence of anti-​​skeptic feeling.

While I’m not sur­prised that these people com­plete failed to back up their claims of sys­temic bias in the sci­entific com­munity, I don’t share Mark’s view that the whole exer­cise was a waste of time. Sure, we knew they wouldn’t come up with the goods, but it’s worth doing the leg­work to prove that to the pub­lic at large, espe­cially if you can get that res­ult pub­lished on a hugely pop­u­lar site like the BBC.

Also, if someone goes through these motions every once in a while, then it gives the deni­al­ists less scope to claim they’re being oppressed. Of course they won’t stop; they’ll just claim that this a piece of estab­lish­ment pro­pa­ganda, but for every art­icle like this that is pub­lished, the pub­lic at large will be less inclined to give those claims credence.

I think maybe I’m just shock­ingly insens­it­ive, but when I saw the head­line for this art­icle on the BBC, I was expect­ing the trib­ute to be:

BRAINNNSSS!!!

The BBC is report­ing that a breed of two-​​nosed dogs has been dis­covered in Bolivia. It’s hered­it­ary, which sug­gests a genetic rather than devel­op­mental cause, although it sounds like they are only some­times viable (at least when one of the par­ents is a one-​​nosed dog.) Appar­ently, the other dogs don’t like them, which is inter­est­ing and may be a inform­at­ive about beha­vi­oural mech­an­isms for reg­u­lat­ing muta­tion rates in anim­als — humans obvi­ously have such responses to mutants, so it’s inter­est­ing to get another data point. Appar­ently they have a bet­ter sense of smell than nor­mal dogs, although the evid­ence for that is entirely anec­dotal, as far as I can see, so it’d really cool to get some actual sci­entific stud­ies done.

Right now I have this weird men­tal pic­ture of these things a few mil­lion years down the line; their super­ior sense of smell has made them a suc­cess, and hav­ing two noses allows them to more accur­ately detect the ori­gin of a scent than other anim­als. Because of this there’s been selec­tion pres­sure to max­im­ise the dis­tance between their noses, and they look some­thing like ter­restrial ham­mer­heads — with flat rect­an­gu­lar heads many times the width of their bod­ies, sport­ing a nose on each front corner…

And yes, if any IDers are read­ing I’m kid­ding; that is not the sort of think­ing that dom­in­ates evol­u­tion­ary the­ory. And actu­ally, even if I wasn’t kid­ding, it would just mean that I was stu­pid, not that there was any­thing wrong with the the­ory of evolution.

I do like the explorer’s descrip­tion of how he dis­covered the breed; “I was sober at the time…”