Gellner

From Brendan Simms' WSJ review of Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography (Verso, 2010) by John Hall -

Gellner's most celebrated demolition was of the literary critic Edward Said (1935-2003). When Said accused Gellner of writing about North Africa without having a command of the native language, Gellner was too modest to respond that he was in fact conversant in the language of the Berbers. He did, however, make a strong case that the whole theory of "orientalism" — Said's idea that Western interpretations and depictions of the East were designed not to understand the East but to control it — was based on erroneous assumptions about the political power of literature. The viceroys of India, he pointed out brutally, were not known for eagerly scanning the pages of late-19th-century literary magazines. ...

Gellner believed that there really was a clash between "liberty and pluralism," on the one hand, and "authoritarianism and oppressiveness" on the other. In a passionate riposte to Noam Chomsky, who had accused him of ignoring Western crimes, Gellner charged that his critic had "obscured" the fact that "the survival of freedom and accountable, limited government is an enormously important value even when some of its defenders are occasionally tarnished."

This was the authentic voice of Ernest Gellner: honest, cool and reasonable. Mr. Hall is to be congratulated for reminding us of how much we miss it today.

And from 'Deconstructing Prince Charles' by Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books blog -

Like Mount Vesuvius but at briefer intervals, Prince Charles erupts in high dudgeon over various and sundry affronts to his very particular and sometimes very peculiar notions of how life should be lived. The ghastliness of modern architecture and the superiority of homeopathic medicine—in 2004 he endorsed an alternative cancer treatment that prescribes, among other things, daily coffee enemas—are but the foremost of his many contrarian beliefs. Perhaps because mental illness runs in both sides of his highly inbred family, his state of mind has been questioned more than once.

another emperor with no clothes

Adam Kirsch in The New Republic biffs the nonsensical Slavoj Zizek ...

To recap: Writing to TNR, Zizek suggested that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler because his peaceful protest movement "effectively endeavored to interrupt" British imperialism. Now, speaking in an Indian newspaper which most of his American readers will never see, Zizek says the precise opposite: Gandhi was more violent than Hitler because he failed to disrupt British imperialism, and so was objectively responsible for continuing the violence of the Raj. (If Gandhi had taken up arms, presumably, Zizek would consider him less violent, because anything that ended British rule would have been a net gain for peace.) He then adds a grace note — that Hitler was a better anti-imperialist than Gandhi, because he "never wanted" the British Empire to be preserved!

... What matters is that Zizek now explicitly denies what he tried to imply in TNR, that he has any kind of admiration for Gandhian nonviolence: "I don't respect him for his peaceful ways". I am not surprised by this; Zizek is, after all, the author of a book called Violence in which violence is quite openly defended. What does surprise me is the pure hypocrisy that his interview exposes, and the total absence of consistency in his thought and public speech. In the same interview, Zizek also complains that "In the last two years, the tone has changed" in the West regarding him and his work. Let's hope so.

Indeed.

Send lawyers, nuns and money

Another day in the shabby election campaign - choose between tweedledum and tweedledumber in a race to demonstrate which managerialist is tougher on the supposed wave of 'illegals' arriving by boat (the far greater number of people arriving at Sydney Airport apparently are not a concern, but don't let facts get in the way of an appeal to anxieties and resentments) and who is more religious than the other (no living in sin in the Lodge, collecting Bill Henson artworks or omitting to genuflect to Family First).

Today's treat is m,edia coverage of the promise by the Opposition Leader to spend $179 million to "tackle organised gangs and knife crime" if the Coalition wins.

What are "organised gangs", as distinct from the disorganised gangs that appear in law reports and in law enforcement studies? The James Hardie mob? The HIH boys? Directors of the former packaging cartel, inc colourful entrepreneur Richard Pratt (the big sugar daddy who believed in sharing the lerv)?

The answer is not clear, but there are media opportunities to be generated and uncritical reporting, so disregard inconvenient statistics or research such as this month's AIC note on '(Mis)perceptions of crime in Australia' and ramp up the fear. (The AIC elsewhere states that "The number of homicide victims has declined steadily at a rate similar to that of homicide incidents. There were 266 victims in 2006-07, and 351 victims in 1990-91.")

The Coalition promises to 'target gang crime with a national squad and database'. Sounds good ... until you recall that there are already mechanisms for cooperation and that most gang crime is a state/territory matter.

Realists might similarly raise an eyebrow over the promise to "toughen penalties for those caught carrying knives and increase restrictions on knife imports". The Commonwealth can readily restrict imports, given its power under the Constitution. Whether that will make 'the knife problem' go away - if there is indeed a fundamental knife problem - is another matter. The forces of darkness (and I'm of course referring to knife wielding criminals rather than what one Coalition member dubbed the 'Sussex Street Death Squad') will presumably be able to buy their own knives domestically or even manufacture their own.

'Knife restrictions' are broadly a matter of state/territory law. The Commonwealth would need to persuade the state/territory governments or engage in 'extreme constitutional ingenuity' (what one colleague refers to as the legal equivalent of 'extreme sport', ie involving bruises and tears and broken bones and ruptured spleen).

Mr Abbott claims that -

The current Government has let our country down when it comes to policing.

Knives are helping to make our streets far less safe.

Are they? The statistics don't show that.

Shadow attorney-general George Brandis said "more could be done nationally" to stop organised crime and that "Increasingly people see crime as a national problem". Heaven forbid that we should disabuse people of dubious perceptions and allocate finite law enforcement resources on a rational basis rather than to reinforce the noise from a political dogwhistle.

The Home Affairs Minister, Brendan O'Connor, is not much more persuasive, proclaiming that -

These things have come into this country - it's really important we restrict the capacity for that to happen.

If we can restrict the access, if we can make it really hard for people to access these weapons, we just reduce the likelihood of people possessing them and of course committing certain assaults.

Expect the SWAT boys to confiscate your cutlery drawer in the near future?

That is presumably the implication, if we take Mr Abbott's words at face value, because he stated that -

We have towards 300 homicides a year in Australia, and almost 50 per cent of these homicides involve knife crime.

It's important that we crackdown on knife crime.

The reality is that several hundred people a year are not being killed in the street by strangers, organised crime gangs, disorganised crime gangs, terrorists or the strange looking, gay alien predator from LA Zombie. Instead, the dicing, slicing & deceasing (as one criminologist friend puts it) involves intimates. You are more likely to be stabbed to death with kitchen implements in your own home by a maddened (or substance-affected) spouse, friend or child than by the 'feral with the flick-knife' that apparently looms large in the minds of the politicians and pollsters.

The Coalition's site, apart from reiterating recent rhetoric about funding for CCTV, offers a few more details. The promise is to

provide $179 million over four years to tackle violent gang and knife crime and build safer communities.

To support the crime-fighting efforts of local communities and the states and territories, the Coalition will establish a National Violent Gangs Database so that law enforcement agencies can better track 'bikie' and other violent gang activity across jurisdictions. Funding of $33 million will be committed to establishing the database.

We will also establish a National Violent Gangs Squad through the Australian Crime Commission (ACC). Funding of $95 million will be committed to the establishment of the Squad. At least 200 additional investigators will be recruited to the ACC through secondment from the Australian Federal Police and state and territory police. These investigators will have with an on-ground presence across the country to work with local police and investigative services.

The Coalition will also implement a National Knife Crime Action Plan to tackle the growing incidence of knife crime in the community. Initiatives under the Plan will include additional funding of $1 million for hand-held metal detectors to assist police in the search for concealed weapons.

We will prohibit that importation into Australia of dangerous hunting knives and standardising the issue of permits for the purchase of dangerous knives online. We will also work with the states and territories to harmonise knife crime laws and penalties.

No permits for nice knives and nothing about sharpening the nice variety.

Ghosts n ghoulies

A friend has pointed me to a Geelong Advertiser report that alleges self-described witch Eilish De Avalon claims she is immune from mere temporal laws. (De Avalon earlier attracted attention from a Victorian colleague for the pronouncement that "There is enough fluoride in one tube of toothpaste to kill a child".)

Under 'Witch Eilish De Avalon drags cop 200m at high speed after claiming Earth laws don't apply' the Advertiser reports -

A "WITCH" told a traffic cop she was above the law because she was "from another world" before dragging him at high speed down a busy street.

"Your laws and penalties don't apply to me. I'm not accepting them, I'm sorry, I must go, thank you," Eilish De Avalon said, before driving off with Sen-Constable Andrew Logan’s arm caught in her driver's side door ...

The officer was left seriously injured in the incident after being dragged nearly 200m.

De Avalon has pleaded guilty to recklessly causing serious injury, dangerous driving and driving while suspended, using a mobile phone while driving and failing to stop on police request on February 23. The Advertiser states that -

"De Avalon was a suspended driver and that is why she took off," Leading Senior Constable Geoff Lamb said.

The court heard that the policeman had feared for his life when De Avalon drove off with his right arm pinned in her car window.

Senior Constable Geoff Lamb said De Avalon ignored repeated calls to stop and instead accelerated, reaching up to 60km/h as she dragged Leading Senior Constable Andrew Logan 190m along busy Moorabool St.

De Avalon had only stopped after being forced to slow in traffic and the officer grabbed the keys from her ignition.

De Avalon, 40, a marriage celebrant, of Victory Way, Highton, had initially been stopped after she was seen using a mobile phone while driving about 10.40am.

"When asked to produce her driver's licence, De Avalon replied that she did not have one," Sen-Constable Lamb said. "When asked why not, she said, 'I'm a being from another world and don't require one.' When asked to state her name and address De Avalon replied, 'I have a universal name that is not recognised here'."

Sen-Constable Lamb said that when asked for ID, De Avalon said, "Your laws and penalties don't apply to me. I'm not accepting them, I'm sorry, I must go, thank you.

"De Avalon began to wind her window up and Sen-Const Logan reached through in an attempt to remove the keys from her ignition. She continued to wind the window up pinning the officer's right arm to the door frame.

"She then drove off dragging him along with her."

In the old days, of course, she could have just kick-started the broomstick, told her black cat to hang on tight and flown off home. The Force - or the Akashic Field - obviously just wasn't with her. Maybe mobile phones make the Field go away.

Rahoon

Alexander Pope's friend John Arbuthnot, criticising scabrous publisher Edmund Curll (1675-1747) - infamous for penny dreadful biographies and unauthorised publication of correspondence, including stolen correspondence - quipped that Curll has added new terrors to the grave.

Some people may feel like that regarding Australian defamation law, which provides no posthumous protection for saints and crooks alike. The powerful may chill criticism while they are alive but denunciations of shameful practice or outright criminality lie asleep on databases and in secure storage, ready for publication - as obituaries and exposes - once word of death has been confirmed.

Today's Age starts a belated critique of colourful entrepreneur Richard Pratt, variously accused of bribery, tax offences, Trade Practices Act contravention, standover tactics and association with criminal groups (ie the outlaw motorcycle gangs that are the subject of controversial SA and NSW statutes highlighted elsewhere in this blog). Nothing yet about arson or other nastiness but presumably that will come.

Pratt is alleged to have employed members of the Hells Angels, an entity that its advocates picture as a philanthropic body (santas on wheels but with tats) and its opponents as bloodcurdling practitioners of organised crime straight from Satan. Wainohu of the Hells last week filed a writ of summons in the High Court, preempting a hearing by NSW Supreme Court judge Peter McClellan.

The Hells are appealing to the High Court to have the Crimes (Criminal Organisations Control) Act 2009 (NSW) - ie the NSW anti-bikie law - declared invalid. Wainohu's writ claims the NSW statute is unconstitutional, arguing that it "undermines the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court of NSW, is outside the legislative powers of the defendant, and is invalid".

The Supreme Court was to consider a NSW Government application, filed earlier this month, that would allow NSW police to gain control orders over Hells Angels members. Those orders would restrict the movements and activities of the members, leaving them facing jail terms of up to five years without being convicted of any other offence. The restriction would affect contact with other parties and potentially penalise those parties ... if successful it could have been used against figures such as Pratt.

McClellan has stood the matter over for two months, indicating that he did not want to have to go through the police's weighty brief unless absolutely necessary: "I could be wasting my time if the High Court says this application is invalid. The proposition is that I stand the matter over for some eight weeks to enable me to understand what the High Court has done or intends to do."

The application for an order remains contentious, with criticism that the legislation enables a denial of justice through the suppression of evidence (ie evidence can be kept secret and not sighted by defendants) and comment - for example by the author of this blog - that the legislation is unnecessary, given that existing statutes and protocols cover illegal activity by OMGs. NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery for example condemned the statute as unnecessary and as offending against the rule of law.

$eattle

From 'The Official Microsoft Blog' an 'our stats are better than their stats, nyaaargh nyaaargh' post -

Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, "making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history" - 150,000,000

Projected PC sales in 2010 - 355 million
Projected netbook sales in 2010 - 58 million
Projected iPad sales for 2010 - 7.1 million

Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008 - 10
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009 - 96

Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in June 2010 - 10,000 (up from zero in November 2009)

"Number of students, teachers and staff using Microsoft's cloud productivity tools in Kentucky public schools, the largest cloud deployment in the US" - 700,000 (factoid of the day)

Number of customer downloads of the Office 2010 beta prior to launch, "the largest Microsoft beta program in history" - 9,000,000

Number of new Bing search users in one year - 21.4 million (ah yes, but did they keep searching?)

Global Windows Live Hotmail users - 360 million (versus 284 million global Yahoo! Mail users and 173 million global Gmail users)

Rank of Windows Live Messenger globally compared to all other instant messaging services - 1

Active Windows Live Messenger Accounts worldwide - 299 million

Total Microsoft revenue, FY2000 - US$23.0 billion

Total Microsoft revenue, FY2009 - US$58.4 billion

Microsoft Net Income for fiscal year ending June 2009 - US$14.5 billion

A commentator in the New York Times responded that -

Bing, its search engine, attracted 21.4 million new users in one year, Mr. Shaw says. Very well, but he does not mention the following: in 2007, the company’s online services group lost $604 million; in 2008, $1.2 billion; and in 2009, the year of Bing’s introduction, $2.25 billion.

Mr. Shaw also points out that in its 2000 fiscal year, Microsoft’s revenue was $23 billion, and that it grew to $58.4 billion by 2009. He does not, however, go on to compare this growth with that of Apple and Google, whom he had just called upon to illustrate another point. But let’s call Apple back to the stage: from 2000 to 2009, when Microsoft’s revenue grew 153 percent, Apple’s grew 436 percent. (Google’s number, beginning from a tiny base in 2000, is too large for use as a fair comparison.)

Post toast and jibberjabber

I confess that 'It's (for) you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human' by Julian Yates in 1 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 223–234 leaves me cold.

Yates explains that -

This essay asks what kind of trope or rhetorical operation is activated by the call of the 'post-human'? What modes of inscription does the term deploy? I argue that the 'post-ing' of the human proceeds by refiguring of the 'human' as telephone or screen, as a surface that registers the action or presencing of the inhuman via an overwhelming apostrophe or prosopopeia. Allied to this call is a refiguring of the 'post-humanities' as an inquiry into how the modeling of non-human entities inflects the constitution of a common world, leading us to embark on a quest for less lethal or more friendly modes of inscription or writing. The philosophical movement known as 'speculative metaphysics' provides a rubric for this quest and so for a speculative literary history that would refigure our contacts with the textual traces named 'past' as a contact zone with alternate ways of being.

After that you can read treats such as -

Obviously there are difficulties, not least of which, as Katherine Hayles remarks, is that 'post, with its dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, hints that the days of the "human" may be numbered' (Hayles, 1999, 283) and that the term might sponsor fantasies of escaping embodiment in some transcendent upload or translation. Indeed, no matter how many brilliant, vital, anti-teleological protestations there are to the contrary – that 'we have never been modern' (Latour, 1993); that 'we have never been human' but have always been 'embodied' (Hayles, 1999); that we have always been 'natural-born cyborgs' (Clark, 2004); or that 'humanism' not the 'human' is what finally resides in the ‘post-human’ (Wolfe, 2010) – the pull to mere chronology in the preposition 'post' threatens to posit the 'post-human' merely as what comes next, nominalizing the term, and so sloughing it off as a category, a type of being, an ontology, even an anthropology, and so a valid reference.

Against this pull to linearization, the 'post-human' stages an ontological slide that up-ends the stability of categories (animal, plant, person, machine, fungus and so on) and their enabling narratives to focus instead on the ligatures, connections, or vinculae between differently animated entities that constitute ways of being (Serres, 1995, 4). The term deterritorializes being, making visible what Jacques Derrida once called the arche, 'general' or 'generative text,' the set of programs or infrastructure that writes/constitutes the world. It is worth recalling here that Derrida's staging of 'the history of life ... [or] differance' as the 'history of the grammè' aims to make visible modes of cognition, historical consciousness and forms of personhood that do not respect the ratio of the line or the linearization of the world that occurs in a phonetic writing system. The story, as you remember, begins with the observation lethal to any metaphysics of presence that 'life' begins with the writing event of 'genetic inscription' and 'short programmatic chains regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens' (Derrida, 1974, 84). The project of metaphysics has been to construct a shelter from the technologizing of being as writing and being written by boxing up this program or inscription as an untranslatable origin – call it Nature – and so holding at bay the insight that there exists a history of technology, of the machine and the animal, that is simultaneously, necessarily a history of human life. ...

But this passage 'beyond' or 'after' obeys no linear chronology so much as it seeks to stage the 'human' now as a site of exposure, effecting a pause, and so figuring a hiatus or fitting of the 'human' as a category. Rhetorically, the 'post-human' accomplishes this task by placing a potentially deadly, overwhelming call to the putatively human dasein, a call that cannot be refused, that comes in on all frequencies, and that simply overwhelms or overwrites existing codes.

The solipsistic human dasein is forced to idle and to listen or try to listen to the figurative chatter, songs or screams of the countless non-human actors whose manufactured declensions fund the networks that wrote the 'human' as self-identical being. If the 'human' is judged now to be the product or precipitate of a catastrophic way of modeling the relations between differently animated beings whose mode of existence, once upon a time, posed no ethical or political questions of use, then, the 'post-human' fractures forever that certainty. It brings the figure of the outside or the exterior inside the oikos or collective, remarking that the figure of the outside, that is of all the beings confined there and not granted citizenship, is a structural fault in the collective and its concept.

The Collect Call

By making lively, by making present, 'things' that once were silent, the 'post-human' functions as a powerful tele-t/r/opical operator – activating calls that resonate within the 'human' but whose exteriority precludes their ready processing. It deploys an overwhelming, potentially cacophonous prosopopeia, the trope that means to give voice or face to some thing, the trope of apostrophe, which, as Paul de Man notes, 'implies that the original face can be missing or non-existent', that it exists only because of its being figured or by the program of figuration itself (De Man, 1986, 44). But the call doesn’t quite go through. There's a fault on the line. And so the prosopopeia folds back on to itself to become a personification of the call itself: a figure of the figure, a call of the call or the potentiality that there is a call, coming through, but going unanswered. By connecting calls that the ‘human’ once simply blocked, the 'post-human' floods the switchboard, threatening paralysis, extinction or terminal overload. It raises the ethical and political ante that inheres to the 'human' to breaking point.

Fans can turn to Amar Dhall's 'Neo-Naturalism: A Fresh Paradigm in International Law' in 66(5) World Futures(2010) 363-380, a journal for fans of the Akashic Field - aka quantum flavoured parapsychology - and the amazing (in my opinion appalling) Ervin Laszlo.

The 'A Field', as noted in past posts of this blog, offers a theory of "past, present and future universes" as an "evolving" "collective consciousness" that unites the living and dead - yes indeed, the full kit n caboodle of reincarnation and parapsychology. It apparently provides an "empirical" "scientific" basis for human rights law.

The unkinder critics - readers should of course make their own judgments rather than relying on my opinion - would suggest that the A Field is the sort of mumbo jumbo deconstructed by Sokal in the famous 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' article and Sokal & Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile Books 1998). Laszlo has explained that the A Field provides 'everything from single celled organisms to the cosmos with information to assist in the development and evolution of their systems. Once these systems have run their course the information is then sent back to the A-field to once again assist in the development and evolution of other organisms and masses.' Intelligent design sans the divine clockmaker, Madame Blavatsky's hocus pocus (or that of L Ron Hubbard) dressed up as science rather than spiritualism?

Dhall explains that -

Neo-Naturalism is a discrete paradigm of analysis emerging in the several sciences such as unified field theories in quantum mechanics and transpersonal psychology (Grof, 2000); looking at quanta in an entangled state or in superposition, and from remarkable evidence of observations of coherence in the fields of cellar biology, cosmology, and consciousness research (Laszlo, 2003, 2007).

An ungenerous reader exploring Grof, Laszlo and other authorities might raise an eyebrow at their enthusiasm - questioned elsewhere in this blog - for astrology, precognition, remote healing, reincarnation, communication with the dead, dowsing and so forth.

One reader's "remarkable evidence" is another's 'utterly ridiculous' or - given the third-party debunking of claims by Targ, Puthoff, Radin, Hagelin and other quantum holism fans regarding Uri Geller or levitation - simply repugnant.

Dhall indicates that -

when using quantum holism as the ontological foundation of Neo-Naturalism in this paper and as the hard basis to human rights in Dhall (2010), the following concern becomes manifest: Intrinsically, a holist duality posits a singularity from which not only human beings, but also all other animate and inanimate objects emerge. This poses a logical paradox in which a human rights regime based solely upon supervening quantum holism possibly attaches to other entities, such as animals and ordinary objects. Whilst this creates a doctrinal imperative to distinguish 'humans' as a discrete category of being to which human rights attach, this has not been the subject of either of the aforementioned papers. However, it does seem prima facie possible to argue human beings as a species can be distinguished from other entities that emerge from the supervening level of quantum holism as a species that have conscious recognition of the holist duality, as described by both many mystical traditions and epistemologically valid knowledge.

Prima facie, of course, some "mystical traditions" do not distinguish human beings from "other entities that emerge from the supervening level of quantum holism". Let's not parse the problematical nature of phrasing about "doctrinal imperative" and "singularity" or cavill too much at the fact that Dhall in referring to "either of the aforementioned papers" seems to be referring to a sole paper under his name (noted earlier in this blog).

As for "epistemologically valid knowledge" of parapsychology 'phenomena' ... I am simply lost for words and underwhelmed by a litany of citations to authorities whom most Australian lawyers would arguably regard as exponents of a mumbo jumbo that might be respected as an expression of faith but would not be admissible in an Australian court. Astrology? Reincarnation? The brain as a 'quantum field transceiver' or use of valve radios for messages from the undead? Not, in my opinion, hard science and not - again in my opinion - a more persuasive basis for a universal human rights jurisprudence.

Dhall states that -

In developing a human rights regime derived from holism, an appeal is made to legal pragmatists that seek "the liberation of thinking about law from superstition and dogma so that laws [can] be based on objective, ascertainable, scientific facts" (Triggs, 2006). As stated prior, holism is an epistemologically justifiable ontological construct that legitimizes recognition of human rights, and further creates an imperative for their recognition.

The ontology of quantum holism employed in Dhall (2010) is distinguishable from the claims of weak epistemology assailing the foundational claims currently employed to substantiate human rights doctrines because it is the product of diligent scientific research. This is arguably the most significant aspect of research into theories of holism employing structural realism. Recognizing holism as epistemologically valid mandates a paradigm shift in international law.

What if we do not recognise parapsychology as epistemologically more valid than other belief systems? We might be wary about claims that the "ontology of quantum holism" is superior merely on the basis of "diligent scientific research", particularly as that research - for example claims regarding astrology, reincarnation, precognition, remote healing etc - remains contentious, dismissed by some scientists as methodologically flawed and conceptually mistaken. Devotees of scientology, astrology or other belief systems may well be "diligent" but enthusiasm does not equal truth.

Dhall continues -

acknowledging quantum holism as an epistemologically valid description of physical reality shows a deeper and more nuanced connection between human kind and the natural world. This in turn creates a deontological imperative to reconsider many aspects of memes that define how humankind relates with the 'outside' world, not just other human beings. It is logical that such categories of meme include environmental policies such as animal rights and environmental protection. In point of fact, using holist theories as a place from which to engage in a meaningful dialogue on moral rights and responsibilities provides a platform from which to reframe many doctrinal aspects. Evidencing the drive to integrate holism into such areas of ethical consideration is Steiner's article Cosmic Holism, and Obligations toward Animals (2007).

I remain of the opinion that it is fine to repackage traditional natural law using Harry Potter, Twilight, Batman, the X-Men or other fad du jour. That repackaging should not, however, appropriate scientific language and claim that it has the authority of hard science.

A theory of law that encompasses reincarnation, messages from the dead and other treats is not necessarily objectionable. It is however problematical if it claims scientific authority and should instead stand on its own feet, alongside the 'witches n spookies' jurisprudence of King James I or L Ron Hubbard.

Reliance on magic and on pernicious notions such as 'cosmic ordering' (aka victim blaming) denies rationality and denies human agency. That is of fundamental concern in addressing human rights abuses.