The Bosnians of Salt Lake City and the best Balkan quote ever

A rather wonderful illustration of how the earthiness of Bosnian culture confounds assumptions about a puritanical Islam is provided by Ed Vulliamy in his book The War is Dead, Long Live the War.

He writes about the surprisingly large community of Bosnians in Salt Lake City. It is replete with examples of how the earthiness of the Bosnians contrasts with the clean cut mormons. This is wonderfully summed up by a welder named Arnel Begovic who says:

“Mormon man is crazy man. He is Christian, he have five wives and do not drink. I am Muslim, I have one wife and I want a drink!”*

You can read much of what Vulliamy has to say in this article though not alas Begovic’s quote.

*Mormons don’t really practice polygamy anymore but the quotes still funny

The story of my favourite blog post

My favourite blog post ever is Hyperbole and a half’s wonderful explanation of what it’s like to have depression. Salon carries an interview with its author Allie Brosh.

Having known several people who suffer from depression, I know it’s a hard thing to talk about — let alone share with the world. Why did you write about depression?

I thought a lot about this, and I think that putting it out there was sort of my way of owning it. You know, taking this scary thing, the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and just looking at it, and examining how absurd it is, was really liberating.

I’ve been working on [the post] for a very long time. Probably over a year. Once the depression got bad – my way of sorting through things and finding out how to progress during a difficult time in my life is really to think about it. I’m sort of a self-fixer — where if something’s wrong I just go into my head and just think about it and think about it until I find some way to either fix it or deal with it mentally, and in the process of that, I do a lot of writing, just to sort things out. So I’d written part one, and I thought it was over after I’d written that, like, “Oh yeah, that was my experience with depression and it’s done now!” That was not the case. Very much not the case.

What kind of feedback did you get?

I got a lot of feedback – depression is such an isolating experience, and because of that it’s sort of surprising to see how many people sort of feel the same way or identify with this totally isolating experience I went through. And yeah, I like seeing how helpful it was to people; there were some people who didn’t even realize they were depressed, and they got help because of it. People who wouldn’t have felt comfortable talking about it, were coming up and talking to me about it. So it was helpful, it was helpful to me to see – as it would be helpful for a reader to see this and think, I’m not alone, it was helpful for me to get that feedback from people.

Hilarious And Heartbreaking

The story behind my favourite blog post

The Dish

Allie Brosh, author of the brilliant web-comic Hyperbole and a Half, has published her first book. In an interview, Brosh discusses her approach to comedy:

Stand-up was originally the thing that I wanted to do. I love stand-up, I watch a lot of it, I’m just very, very into stand-up. It’s always been a dream of mine to do that. I haven’t figured out how to do it in a way that I feel comfortable with. I almost think my writing and drawing is a result of my attempts to – subconscious attempts, of course – to bring the look or the feel of stand-up to this inanimate space. So there is more of facial expressions in drawings, so there is more of that sense of watching someone’s facial expressions and body language while you’re listening to them tell you jokes.

Linda Holmes applauds Brosh for writing so…

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The hollowness of Islamic banking and its lessons for Christians

The promise of Islamic finance

The UK government is apparently planning to sell £200 million worth of bonds that are compatible with the rules of Islamic finance. This is symbolic of the growth of so-called sharia compatible investments.

There are high hopes of Islamic finance amongst some of its promoters. For some of those who are trying to create new regimes in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, it appears to offer a new political economy for a new political order. The ban on the charging of interest is supposed to create a market economy without capitalism: giving people freedom to trade without being exploitation by the owners of finance capital.

 Why that promise is not delivered on

John Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies, asks rhetorically:

Where are the 10 largest Islamic Finance banks: Saudi Arabia? Kuwait? Qatar? or even Malaysia which has positioned itself to be the global capital for Islamic banking? If you guessed any of these or indeed any country in the Muslim world, you would be wrong. While Islamic banks do exist in many Muslim countries, the 10 largest Islamic finance institutions are European and American banks. UBS, HSBC, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, Lloyds, Swiss re, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are some of the leading Western institutions that have rushed to the Shariah-compliant market. To assure their acceptability, all have Shariah advisory boards, made up of well-credentialed Islamic scholars.

It is often argued that Islam is too inflexible to accommodate itself to modernity, for which the weak economic and social development of much of the Islamic world is often cited as evidence. That Islamic banking has been accommodated into the global financial system in this way is a strong indication that ways can be found to comply with ‘sharia’ law whilst still participating in activities considered essential for living in an advanced economy such as borrowing and saving money.

On the other hand, for those who had hoped that that Islamic finance can provide an alternative to Western capitalism the compatibility of the two must be disturbing. Timur Kuran, a Turkish American professor of economics has branded Islamic banking as “a mighty deceit” because “Islamic banks give and take interest as a matter of course, though under the guise of commissions, fees, penalties or profit shares. The holder of a “halal” credit card pays a penalty on unpaid balances; this penalty is proportionate to the size of the balance, which makes it equivalent to interest. The sharia code was suited to the Middle Ages, when it assumed its classical form. At least on matters of economics and finance, it has not advanced measurably since then. To regain economic usefulness, it would have to be modified so extensively as to make it unrecognisable.”

Why this matters to Christians

I would suggest that this is also relevant to debates within Christianity. What conservative evangelicals are trying to do to Christianity is at a certain level trying to make it more like Islam: a faith centred on an inerrant scripture delivered direct from God that yields a set of binding and inflexible set of moral precepts. They also have a tendency to suggest that Christians who advocate a less legalistic form of the faith are seeking an easier faith. On the contrary as Islamic finance shows it is legalism that is easy. A set of specific rules can either be complied with or not. Hence Islamic theology tends to affirm the possibility of an individual saving themselves from sin. By contrast, it is virtually impossible not to fall short of the command to “love others as we love ourselves” hence the Christian emphasis on us being rescued by God’s grace

Correction Of The Day

American conservatives are rapidly rendering satire obsolete

The Dish

From the WSJ dealing with an op-ed they commissioned from – no, I’m not kidding – Suzanne Somers:

An earlier version of this post contained a quotation attributed to Lenin (“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state”) that has been widely disputed. And it included a quotation attributed to Churchill (“Control your citizens’ health care and you control your citizens“) that the Journal has been unable to confirm.

Also, the cover of a Maclean’s magazine issue in 2008 showed a picture of a dog on an examining table with the headline “Your Dog Can Get Better Health Care Than You.” An earlier version of this post incorrectly said the photo showed and headline referred to a horse.

It was not a long article. Update from a reader:

You mock the Wall Street Journal for publishing Suzanne Somers’ silly, error-filled piece on Obamacare. But the…

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Why Macedonia sits next to Thailand at the UN

In the ancient world, Macedonia was a small Greek speaking kingdom around modern day Thessaloniki. Then Alexander the Great converted it into a mighty empire. This piece of ancient history underlines one of the most bizarre disputes in European politics.

In 1991, the Yugoslav province of Macedonia declared its independence. This created tension with its neighbour to the south: Greece. This was underlain by complicated issues of ethnic identity – of which more later – but it was to be boiled down to one essential question: what was the new state to be called.

The new state referred to itself as the ‘republic of Macedonia’ but this met with furious opposition from Greece. In protest they vetoed Macedonia’s accession to the UN and other international organisations. As a compromise to overcome this veto Macedonia joined these organisations on the condition that they refered to it as ‘the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.’

This set the stage for the absurd spectacle of bickering about where Macedonia would sit in the UN chamber:

Greece rejected seating the Republic’s representative under M [as in “Macedonia (former Yugoslav Republic of)”], and the Republic rejected sitting under F (as in “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, which turned the reference into a proper noun rather than a description). Instead, it was seated under T as “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” and placed next to Thailand.

So what’s all this about? Well Greece and Macedonia are fighting over the ownership of the idea of Macedonia. Greeks took the new republic’s name as a challenge to the legitimacy of a region in northern Greece also called “Macedonia.” Greece suggested that the name implied a territorial claim on its own Macedonian region and an attempt by the Slavic population of Macedonia to co-opt the heritage of the Ancient Greek Macedonians.

This can all seem rather trivial – and on one level it is – but it’s having real consequences. It is a barrier to Macedonia’s accession to the EU and NATO. It has also had an unhelpfully inflammatory effect on Macedonia’s unstable internal politics. The country’s government has responded to the stand off by emphasing its ancient history – much to the irritation of its Albanian minority who feel excluded from that heritage.

 

The Greeks at Srebrenica: a warning from history?

Why a horrifying massacre twenty years ago should raise alarm bells about the potential repercussions of the Eurozone crisis

Do you want to be scared about the Eurozone crisis? Then read a book about the war in Bosnia. The Greek journalist Takis Micas’ Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic’s Serbia includes an account of how around a dozen Greek soldiers came to be in Srebrenica in July 1995.

The Massacre

Before that month, this small town in eastern Bosnia was known – to the limited extent it was known at all – for salt mining and spas. After that it would be known as the site of the worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. The town had been declared by the UN as a safe zone and thousands of Bosnian Muslim refugees fled there from neighbouring Serb controlled areas. However, when it came under siege, rather than defend it, the UN peacekeeping force turned it over to the Bosnian Serb forces. What ensued in the following days is close to unspeakable. Men of fighting age were separated off from the rest of the refugees and were systematically executed. Many women were raped and tortured. Those refugees who’d fled into the hills found themselves in a desperate race to get out of Serb territory before they were hunted down and killed. By the end, more than 8,000 people had been murdered.

The Greeks who participated in this atrocity belonged to the Greek Volunteer Guards, a unit of the Bonsian Serb army, composed mostly of mercenaries and members of the far right. In fact, when the town was captured by the Bosnian Serbs, their commander Ratko Mladić ordered that the Greek flag be flown over the city.

Greek volunteers with the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic

The Unholy Alliance

While it would be unfair to read too much into the actions of a dozen men – people from many countries fought in the war – their actions were unfortunately a microcosm for Greek attitudes to the war. People and politicians alike at best ignored and at worst actively condoned the atrocities being committed. Michas describes how during the nineties a Serb journalist working on his magazine was frequently approached by strangers who would congratulate him on the “great work you guys are doing.” Michas also points to polling evidence showing that not only was there near universal opposition to NATO’s military action amongst Greeks but that a clear majority said they actually approved of Milosevic’s regime.

This support manifested itself in many ways. Greek officials passed the information they obtained from NATO briefings to the Serb military. Priests from the Greek Orthodox Church blessed Serb units. And the Greek government helped break the economic sanctions against Serbia.

The Scary Part

The obvious explanation for Greece’s support for Serbia is their shared Orthodox Christian heritage and fear of a Muslim enemy – Bosnia and Turkey. But Michas suggests there is more to it than that. He suggests his country is defined by ethnic rather than civic nationalism. Modern Greece was formed by population transfers that purged it of its non-Greek inhabitants. Michas suggests that this created a political culture that allowed Greeks to see the actions of their co-religionists as excusable or even commendable.

Golden Dawn party members

The alarming part of this in the context of the Eurozone crisis is this: if Greeks were prepared to condone mass murder in Bosnia and Kosovo, might they do the same in their own country? Yugoslavia fell into bloody chaos after an economic crisis pushed the country to accept an international bailout the terms of which lead to a recession that sent unemployment skyrocketing. That gave extreme nationalists the chance to gain power. Now a decade and half later Greece is suffering a post bailout economic crisis and its own extreme nationalists are on the march. Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi movement that supplied many of the members of the Greek Volunteer Guards is now the third largest party in Greece. Its members have been linked with numerous acts of violence and even mainstream parties are pushing a progressively more extreme line on the treatment of migrants. For these reasons it would be a mistake to think that the dangers of the austerity policies being pushed by the Troika are purely economic: a bad bailout can lead to genocide.

Reasons to visit the Balkans (3) – it has a music festival in a castle

Every year 180,000 music fans gather for the Exit Festival. What makes this unusual, is it’s held in a fort built in the 17th century to by the Hapsburg Empire as part of its defences against the Ottomans.

This is indicative of Serbia’s surprisingly vibrant youth culture:

Today, Belgrade may be many years behind other European capitals when it comes to economic, industrial, and scientific development, but it’s literally light years ahead when it comes to nightlife. The Belgrade clubbing industry is better organized and has more to offer than any other out there. Every night of the week, there are countless different clubs with different styles and with different kinds of music where you can go. It may be hard to believe, but all the clubs which have the capacity of 300 to 500 people are basically full every night of the week.

And it’s not the most surprising place in the Balkans to be developing a reputation for its nightlife:

Tell us, do you associate Kosovo with partying? Well, you should. Kosovo’s capital Pristina is an awesome place to go out. Balkan people know how to party and they can drink A LOT. Drinks are cheap: a beer never costs you more than one-fifty euros. Or try a homemade Rakia that will burn your intestines, if you dare. In Pristina there is a big community of young internationals; working in NGO’s or interning at embassies. You will meet them for sure, since they mingle with locals easily and they are always up for something on the weekends. Just like locals, they will be happy to show you around (the relatively small) town of Pristina. Check out our Pristina party tips below.

Finding Nemo/Memento mashups

Pixar’s animation about a fish in search of his son and Christopher Nolan’s thriller about a man searching for his wife’s killer don’t have much in common. However, they are both a) really good and b) have characters with amnesia.

And in fact, their portrayals of the condition are surprisingly similar: “the amnesiac character retains [their identity, has little retrograde amnesia [where memories of the period just prior to the injury are lost] and shows several of the severe everyday memory difficulties associated with the disorder” such as “learning and retaining information, recalling names and knowing where she is going or why.”

So it’s not surprising that the internet has created mashups of the two:

Saturday Suggestions: Ipads without keyboards, the friend zone, online breakups and Gypsies are stealing blonde children

During the course of the week I come across a lot of articles that I think are worth reading about but don’t blog about. This can be because I don’t have anything to add, don’t know enough to write about the topic or just run out of time. So as an experiment here’s a post bringing together things I’ve seen that are worth recommending.

If Tablets Are Replacing Computers, Why Doesn’t the iPad Have a Keyboard? by Will Oremus (Slate blog)

So Microsoft is banking on people replacing laptops with tablets, and Apple is banking on people continuing to buy both.

Here’s an idea: They’re both right. Tablets will replace computers, but only for people who can’t afford computers. As the global masses continue to come online, they’ll increasingly use Surface-style hybrids for both work and entertainment. (Whether Microsoft can actually capture that market is a question for another story.) But the world’s wealthy will reject the tradeoffs that those devices require. Instead, they’ll continue for the foreseeable future to own at least three devices: a desktop or laptop for work, a tablet for mobile applications, and either a smartphone or smart watch for instant communication. And they’ll continue to largely prefer Apple’s finely honed products to those of its less tightly focused competitors.

The downside for Apple in that arrangement is that its iPads will never conquer the world. Indeed, as the Statista chart below shows, iPad sales growth has tapered sharply in the past year, and the iPad Air may not change that. But this fits with the approach that Apple took earlier this year when it declined to produce a really cheap iPhone. The upside is that Cupertino gets to keep its grip on the high end of the global marketplace, with all the fat profit margins that entails. And if Apple can’t make its next fortune selling tablets to people who can’t afford multiple devices, maybe it can make it selling smart watches to people who can.

6 reasons the “friend zone” needs to die by EJ Dickson (Salon)

Even if the friend zone did exist, there would be no reliable way to get out of it. Look, friendships are hard, and relationships are even harder, so wanting to have a relationship with someone you’re friends with is obviously the worst. As someone who has been both the friend zone-r and the friend zone-ee on numerous occasions, I can say that both positions are, for lack of a better term, shitty; where one side can be whiny and self-pitying and sexist, the other can be equally callous and contemptuous and cruel. What makes the friend zone even worse is that I’m pretty sure there’s nothing you can do to get out of it: most studies show that interpersonal attraction forms in the first few seconds after meeting someone, and without that initial, incontrovertible tug toward another person, it’s unlikely that it’ll ever develop, no matter how many shopping trips you go on or Gchats you have or John Hughes movies you watch. The only way you can make a friend a lover, or a lover a friend, is to be nothing less than completely honest about your intentions, and wait for them to melt in your arms or run screaming toward the nearest decontamination facility.

The Breakup Email Is Not a Dick Move by Amanda Hess (Slate)

I’m not convinced that breaking up electronically is more traumatic than experiencing it in person. Getting dumped sucks, no matter the medium. We can blame technology, but the problem is usually a lot more human. Walansky’s essay is ostensibly about the pain of losing someone over email, but she lost her boyfriend well before he hit send: “Last year, I nearly died and he didn’t visit me in the hospital,” she wrote. “When I expressed my hurt over it, he accused me of ‘playing the death card’ to manipulate him and we didn’t talk for weeks.” (Talk about burying the lede). Walansky went on to write that the email breakup robbed her of her ability to communicate her own feelings about the situation to him, and “that’s possibly the worst part of all.” But airing your opinion to your all-of-a-sudden-ex in person doesn’t guarantee that he or she will actually listen—and if you’d still like to have that experience, you’re free to send off an email of your own.

Conversations about email breakups often focus on the feelings of the dumped, but dumpers have feelings, too. Cowardice is just one interpretation for why a person might prefer to put it in writing. In the context of some strained relationships, it’s perfectly reasonable to refuse to be alone with a person who you expect may become very angry at you in the near future. And even in more conciliatory breakups, it can be ultimately helpful for both parties to give the dumper a chance to fully assemble his or her thoughts in a message window before contending with the dumped’s demands and appeals. Having a breakup in writing can also help establish clear closure in the moment, and it can stick around as a useful artifact for reflecting on past relationships in the future—no matter who started the thread.

The Gypsies are stealing our children by Jonathan Calder (Liberal England)

I also wonder if this story tells us something about the slender intellectual base of social work. Twenty years ago the idea of satanic ritual abuse moved rapidly from the wackier fringes of American Christianity to the heart of the profession. Today they are looking for children stolen away by the Gypsies.