Chess players’ objections grow over hijab requirement at World Championships, and a story about Oriana Fallaci

October 13, 2016 • 9:00 am

I‘ve posted several times about the decision of FIDE, the international chess organization, to host its Women’s World Championship in Iran next February, requiring players to don the hijab (headscarf). American champion Nazí Paikidze-Barnes objected, refusing to abide by the misogynistic covering laws of Iran and saying she’d boycott the championship. Here’s an update:

First, Nazí’s petition, which began, as I recall, with a goal of 1000 signatures, now has over 15,000. Click on the screenshot below to go to the change.org petition, and please add your name if you agree with her and haven’t yet signed. My big wish was that only half of the subscribers to this site would sign it, and that would be over 20,000 signatures alone! Sadly, I couldn’t rouse that much enthusiasm, but perhaps I can persuade a few more of you to sign. The goal will increase as each previous goal is met, so it’s an open-ended petition with no expiration date I can see. Paikidze-Barnes notes that, in forcing participants to wear hijabs, FIDE is violating its own regulations, as the organization “rejects discriminatory treatment for national, political, racial, social or religious reasons or on account of sex.” Mandatory veiling is, of course, discrimination against women.

And Pikidze-Barnes does offer alternative solutions:

  • Change the venue or postpone the competition until another organizer is found to host the championship in a “no conflict” venue.
  • Require that wearing a hijab be optional and guarantee no discrimination based on gender, nationality, or any other human rights as pointed out in the FIDE handbook (listed above).

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As CNS News reports, Nazí’s pettion is gaining supporters:

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov expressed his backing in a series of tweets.

“Hosting an official championship in a repressive theocracy demanding all participants wear hijab is bad even for this corrupt FIDE admin,” he said in one.

“I hope the world’s chessplayers, women and men, find the courage to protest FIDE’s decision,” said another. “Women’s rights are human rights.

Carolina Lujan, an Argentinian woman grandmaster who is one of 64 women around the world who qualifies for the 2017 women’s championship, said in a social media post she was surprised at the FIDE decision to allow Iran to host the event, “knowing some of the laws of this country in relation to human rights and especially those of women.”

“I consider it a danger to me to take part in a competition in a country where by law they can force me to wear hijab or forbid me to work with my trainer in a closed room,” she wrote. “It also scares me that a misunderstanding or my ignorance of the country’s culture can produce an offense that can have me arrested or worse.”

Lujan said she does not intend to boycott the championship, but said she had written to FIDE’s women’s commission to air her concerns, “in the hope they help us finding a solution.”

British grandmaster Nigel Short has called the FIDE decision to hold the event in Tehran “scandalous,” and Emil Sutovsky, an Israeli grandmaster who is president of the non-profit Association of Chess Professionals, is urging people in the chess fraternity who share Paikidze-Barnes’ views to speak out.

“I know very well from the conversations with many top women players, that they are unhappy about the venue,” he wrote on Facebook. “I imagine that there are many [national chess] federations who see a clear problem – but still, no clear stand, no statement, no protest.”

Now it’s a bit cowardly for Lujan to protest so vehemently and still take place in the championship, but I do understand that her international ranking would be affected by her opting out. That’s why Paikidze-Barnes’s stand is so courageous. But I still find it puzzling that FIDE would not only violate its own principles and allow sex discrimination in a secular venue (a chess championship, after all, is not held in a mosque), but also require chess players, who are notoriously picky about the conditions of play (remember Bobby Fisher’s complaints about temperature?), to suddenly have to play wearing a covering on their head.

Sadly, FIDE appears to be holding firm, and bad on them:

Sutovsky also said he had received an answer from FIDE to an inquiry about the championship in Tehran: “the contract with Iran is signed, and the players will be required to follow all the local laws in regards to dressing.”

That’s simply reprehensible, but is not surprising in these days of the Regressive Left not only going along with veiling, but positively celebrating it.

I want to add another tale of a gutsy women defying veiling regulations Iran. That woman was the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who died in  2006 but had been famous for her penetrating interviews, often requiring not just courage to ask hard questions, but simple physical courage. One example is her interview with the Iranian mullah Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Daled Amos’s website tells the tale:

For the interview, Fallaci was told she would have to  wear a chador, an open cloak worn by many women in Iran, during the interview,

Which she did.

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For a while.

During her interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, Fallaci called him a “tyrant,” removed the chador, and threw it to the ground:

OF: I still have to ask you a lot of things. About the “chador”, for example, which I was obliged to wear to come and interview you, and which you impose on Iranian women…. I am not only referring to the dress but to what it represents, I mean the apartheid Iranian women have been forced into after the revolution. They cannot study at the university with men, they cannot work with men, they cannot swim in the sea or in a swimming-pool with men. They have to do everything separately, wearing their “chador”. By the way, how can you swim wearing a “chador”?

AK: None of this concerns you, our customs do not concern you. If you don’t like the Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it, since it is for young women and respectable ladies.

OF: This is very kind of you, Imam, since you tell me that, I’m going to immediately rid myself of this stupid medieval rag. There!

Ms. Paikidze-Barnes is in that proud tradition, and it pains me to envision a group of non-Muslim women playing chess in a big room while wearing headscarves. It’s the very picture of religious subjugation of women.

h/t: Malgorzata

Readers’ wildlife photographs

October 13, 2016 • 7:45 am
Reader Keira McKenzie sends us a bouquet of lovely flowers: all native orchids from western Australia. Her notes and IDs (some tentative) are indented:
Wispy spider orchid: filimentosa complex (I think):
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Donkey orchid: winter donkey orchid – Diuris brumalis (I think – there are such small points of difference):
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Purple enamel orchid: Elythranthera brunonis (very sure on this one):
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Swamp spider orchid: Huegelli complex (I think):
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Scented sun orchid: actually, seems to be a grantie sun orchid which is weird considering where I was.  But it certainly looks like it. Thelymitra petrophila, but it also might be ‘shy sun orchid: Thelymitra graminea.

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As you can see, the spider orchids do look the same in form – it’s the colours that make the difference.

Keira also added a picture of her beloved black Plushie: a flower among cats:

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Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 13, 2016 • 7:16 am

It’s October 13, 2016, the day on which Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’m still recovering from that one, but I can’t say I’m not pleased. On this day in 1792, the cornerstone of the White House—then called the Executive Mansion—was laid in Washington, D. C., and, in 1917, the so-called Miracle of the Sun occurred near Fatimá, Portugal, making that place a Catholic shrine though now there are several naturalistic explanations. Finally, on this day in 1958, Paddington Bear made his debut.

Notables born on this day include Rudolf Virchow (1821), Lily Langtry (1853), Art Tatum (1909), Lenny Bruce (1925), Paul Simon (1941; he’s 75 today), and Marie Osmond (1959). Those who died on this day include Ed Sullivan (1974). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, who occasionally noms from Cyrus’s bowl (and she shouldn’t), is still coveting his d*g food:

Hili: Look, Cyrus’s bowl is empty.
A: He’s already eaten.
Hili: He ate everything?
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In Polish:
Hili: Patrz, miska Cyrusa jest pusta!
Ja: Bo on już zjadł.
Hili: Wszystko zjadł?

And out in snowbound Winnipeg, Gus has finally decided to start eating his new box. The video proof is below. He’s occupied that box for several months, so his sudden nomming is a mystery. Perhaps he prefers his boxes to age! Note that the box has instructions in French: “Mangez.”

And here’s a Halloween cartoon from Off the Mark, sent by reader Anne-Marie:

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Bob Dylan gets Nobel Prize for literature!!!!

October 13, 2016 • 6:22 am

Well knock me over with a feather: this is something that NOBODY expected, and of course no reader guessed in the contest. My CNN Newsfeed reports this:

Bob Dylan is awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy says.

The Wall Street Journal adds this:

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to musician Bob Dylan for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

I’m flummoxed, but I can’t say that the man doesn’t deserve it: his songs are iconic and many of them classics. Still, I can’t think of any other songwriter who got the prize for their music. The Indian polymath Rabrindranath Tagore won it in 1913, and had written hundreds of beautiful songs (with words), but he got it for his published poetry, especially the collection Gitanjali.  Since it’s a literature prize, of course, no songwriter is going to get it for their music alone; there must be lyrics, and that’s what the prize citation says.

One friend wrote me after hearing the news: “I like his music but he didn’t create anything particularly new.” You could make the case, though, that neither did any writer of fiction. What they created was new imaginings that stirred the emotions, and I’d say that songs like “Blowin’ in The Wind,” “I Shall be Released,” “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” “Mr. Tambourine Man”, and “Like a Rolling Stone” are pretty much sui generis: the musical equivalent of great novels.

Feel free to tout your favorite Dylan songs in the comments. In the meantime, congratulations, Mr. Zimmerman, and I’ll be delighted to see you interact with the King of Sweden.

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USA Today ranks all of Dylan’s 359 songs from the best (#1) to worst, but I disagree profoundly with their rankings. For instance, they put “Like a Rolling Stone” at #357! Rolling Stone’s list of his 100 best songs is better, with “Like a Rolling Stone” at its proper position at #1. Such are the disparities of taste. But I know of no better song about Schadenfreude for someone who’s fallen from the heights. Here’s a live version from the infamous 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, in which Dylan was booed by his fans for “going electric.” (The famous organ riff, by the way, was devised by Al Kooper.)

College students told not to use words like “Greeks” with reference to fraternities: it’s cultural appropriation

October 12, 2016 • 2:30 pm

And it follows, as the night the day, that the Insanity of Regressive Leftism continues apace in American colleges. This time it’s at the University of California at Merced, which, as The College Fix (a right-wing site, of course) reports, is in a kerfuffle about the fraternity and sorority system.

If you’re not familiar with this, fraternities and sororities are single-sex social organizations in U.S. colleges that often have housing for members, and participate in parties, various charity drives, and generally serve as a nucleus for the social life of their members. They’re all named with two or three three Greek letters (e.g. ΛΛΛ, ΦKT, etc.), and are selective: first-year students “rush”, by visiting various fraternity or sorority houses during “rush week” and trying to impress the members, called “Greeks”. Likewise, the frats and sororities try to impress the more desirable students (read: athletes and attractive people) and then, in an age-old ritual that has traumatized millions, the Greeks slowly whittles down the list of those they want to join their group. First-years visit the fraternities who still want them several times until the final choice is made. Those students who join are called “pledges”.

And, of course, some frats and sororities are more prestigious than others: there are “jock houses” for the popular athletes, houses for the most beautiful women, houses for the studious, and so on. When my dad went to Penn State in the 1930’s, there were three all-Jewish fraternities, and Jews couldn’t join any of the other forty-odd ones (his was Beta Sigma Rho). It’s a divisive and snobbish system, and I refused to “rush” when I went to college. But in many isolated colleges, fraternities provide the only kind of organized social life around, including their infamous parties.

At any rate, it’s all called the Greek system. At least it was called the Greek system at UC Merced, until a branch of the student government decided that using the word “Greek” was a form of cultural appropriation, and set out some new language rules. As The Fix reports:

Students involved in a fraternity or sorority at the University of California Merced have been instructed not to use the terms “Greek,” “rush” or “pledge” because they are “appropriating Greek culture” and are “non-inclusive,” several students told The College Fix. [JAC: I don’t think any Greek people objected here, and certainly “rush” and “pledge” are not Greek words or terms.]

In particular, they’ve been told:

Replace “Greek Life” with “Fraternity and Sorority Life”

Replace “rush” with “recruitment”

Replace “pledge” with “potential new member”

These changes have been going on for four years:

The word “rush” was last used in the 2011-2012 academic year. Its use was prohibited because it “promoted a negative stereotype of fraternities and sororities.” The word “pledge” was last used in 2012 because it is considered “a form of hazing.”

What’s bizarre about this, besides the stupid “cultural appropriation” excuse, is that nothing will change except the language, and, frankly, I don’t think “rush” or “pledge” were invidious. Yes, there was hazing, and sometimes it was quite bad (some students died, for instance, because they were forced to drink copious amounts of booze), but changing the language won’t fix that. If they want to repair those aspects of fraternity culture that are harmful (sororities are rarely accused of bad behavior), they have to institute structural change, not linguistic change. Frankly, I see the whole Greek system as analogous to religions in their intra-Greek comity but inter-Greek divisiveness, and the way that non-Greeks are seen as apostates; and I’d just as lief be rid of the whole mess.

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A fraternity house

h/t: Cindy

A spontaneous rendition of “Over the Rainbow” on an Aussie train

October 12, 2016 • 12:00 pm

The video below shows a bunch of passengers on a commuter train in Perth, Australia being incited to sing “Over the Rainbow”—the wonderful ukelele version by Israel (“Iz”) Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole. And many of the passengers joined in. Now this is not an attempt to ask for money, which would have been my first thought had I been on that train. Rather, as Inspiralight reports, it’s one act by a movement called “The Liberators”:

Pete hands out the lyrics to the song whilst a young Ukulele player brings out a vintage uke and starts to hum out an angelic version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Within seconds other members of the public decide to join in on this outpouring of community joy.

“We had a few of the Liberators help get the ball rolling, however more than 60% of the passengers who sung along were complete strangers. We sung the entire song, progressively gaining confidence and participants as we went. When we finished an uproar of positive emotion, claps, cheers and smiles came streaming from the people.” Said Michelle, one of the Liberators who helped in the morning.

The Liberators are no strangers to these public participatory experiences having created multiple examples of freedom & human connection in Perth including the Perth Train Party which gained more than 40 million views online. The Liberators create these moments for the world to no longer be fearful of respectful self-expression in public. We expose an element of our own vulnerability as a way to give strength to those who are unable to do so yet. This is where the idea of Liberation comes in to the picture.

The next step for this Perth based international social movement is taking their concepts of love and human connection through 5 capital cities in Europe to see if these acts of spontaneous joy are universally well received or if it’s just in Perth. Assist the Liberators in sharing the love to a global audience by supporting their crowdfunding campaign here à www.pozi.be/liberatorstoeurope

My question to readers: would you have sung? I don’t know. For me, being shy, I suppose it would have depended on how many fellow passengers I saw singing along. But really, it does seem like it was a great experience.

In case you’re not familiar with the version of “Over the Rainbow” that’s played here, I’ve put it below. It astounds me that a song that I considered a bit schlocky can be made into such an emotional experience. It’s compounded for me by knowing that Iz Kamakawiwo’ole died way too young: he was only 38, but had multiple health problems from being morbidly obese. He was reportedly a wonderful person, and when he died he had a state funeral, with his big body encased in a koa wood coffin and placed in the Hawaiian state capitol building: the first time that honor was accorded to someone not in the government. He left behind a wife and one child.

Back when I used to watch more television, one of my favorite television shows was E.R., about an emergency room medical staff in Chicago. One of the doctors, Mark Greene (played by Anthony Edwards), was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and decided to stop chemotherapy and end his life with his partner and child in Hawaii. His daughter played this song to him when he was dying (you can see that scene here), and it made me blubber like a baby. I don’t dare watch that video because it’ll happen again.

RIP Iz. Your life was too short, as are ours.

A few more substantive things

October 12, 2016 • 10:30 am

I’m pretty busy with CoyneFest stuff, my upcoming trip to Singapore, Hong Kong and China, and other matters, so substantive posts are going to be scarcer than usual until I return from Asia in mid-November. Let me call your attention today, then, to three things that you might want to read:

1). Over at Heather’s Homilies, Heather Hastie has a long and perspicacious analysis of the second Clinton/Trump debate, and adds a lot of good cat memes deriving from Trump’s “grab the pussy” statement. There is in fact a #pussiesagainsttrump site where you can find lots of LOLz.

2). The Guardian reports that a bunch of protestors in New York besieged the American Museum of Natural History, protesting the “Columbus Day” holiday as favoring the genocide of native Americans, criticizing several of the anthropological exhibits for “colonialism” and “exoticizing” Islam, and demanded the removal of a statue outside the Museum showing Theodore Roosevelt with a Native American and and African American. There’s an argument to be made about the “Columbus Day” holiday, though my own thoughts haven’t gelled on that, but less of an argument for removing that statue. Must we efface all of our history? As the Guardian reports:

“Teddy Roosevelt’s nature was not empty wilderness. It was and is indigenous land,” one reader said as the organizers took turns reading from a speech. “Taken through violence. Just like Columbus who came to enslave. To take their gold and their bodies and their souls.”

That’s a stretch. Here’s the statue. Do you think it should be removed?

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The video below shows a bit of the protest, which seems to have covered just about every issue going, including the perfidy of Israel and the Black Lives Matter movement:

3). Finally, over at Free Inquiry there’s a meaty published debate (four adjacent back-and-forth articles) between Michael Shermer and Phil Torres on whether terrorism poses an existential threat. Shermer says “no”, and Torres says “yes”.