domingo, 30 de setembro de 2012
terça-feira, 25 de setembro de 2012
segunda-feira, 24 de setembro de 2012
The state of broadband 2012
1/3 população mundial online
International Telecommunications Union/UNESCO
http://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/bb-annualreport2012.pdf
domingo, 23 de setembro de 2012
Integração processos produtivos
Nations where parts are sourced for a hard-disk drive assembled in Thailand; the disk drives are then shipped on to various markets to be used in various electronics.
Source: Adapted from Hiratsuka (2005). Figure 2
Baldwin, Richard, Managing the Noodle Bowl: The fragility of East Asian Regionalism
Asian Development Bank, 2007
Hiratsuka, Daisuke. 2005. Vertical Intraregional Production Networks in East Asia: A Case Study of Hard Disc Drive Industry.
sexta-feira, 21 de setembro de 2012
Cristianismo Demografia
Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org)
Study compares Catholicism to Christianity across the globe
by John L Allen Jr [1] on Dec. 23, 2011
[3]A map of Catholicism globally. Click to enlarge.I happen to groove on population statistics, but I realize that for most people they rival watching paint dry, or the heartbreak of psoriasis, as a good time. Faced with a new report from the Pew Forum on the global Christian population, therefore, let's start with a few deliberately bold assertions to get the blood moving.
Based on the study, here are three rules of thumb about Christian growth and decline -- extrapolations which go well beyond the contents of the Pew report, but which can be supported by the data it contains:
Here's why.
Europe, the erstwhile capital of Christendom, has lost its pride of place. A century ago, two-thirds of all Christians lived in Europe; today, only a quarter of the world’s 2.18 billion Christians are on the old continent. In ultra-secular Western Europe, majorities still identify as Christian, but the percentage share of the population is down sharply.
Despite decades of state-imposed atheism, Christianity is doing remarkably well in Communist lands (either former or current.) Two in three Russians still identify as Orthodox, and some analysts believe there’s a renaissance afoot in Russian Orthodoxy. China is experiencing a spiritual boom, and today China is the third-largest Protestant nation in the world, trailing only the United States and Nigeria.
Put all that together, and the Laws of Christian Thermodynamics look pretty solid. In any event, it’s food for thought during the holiday season.
* * *
Based on the Pew Forum report, Christianity in the early 21st century comes off as a decidedly “multi-polar” faith. Nigeria today has more than twice as many Protestants as Germany, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation; Brazil has more than twice as many Catholics as Italy, the headquarters of Roman Catholicism Inc.
Today, no single continent contains a majority of the world’s Christian population, which suggests that no one regional expression of Christianity can claim to be normative anymore.
The United States is the largest Christian nation in the world, according to the Pew data, with a total of 247 million Christians. Rounding out the top ten are Brazil, Mexico, Russia, the Philippines, Nigeria, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Germany, and Ethiopia. Note that only one nation from Western Europe, and just two from the West generally, make the list.
Similar trajectories run through Catholicism, with the important difference that the United States is not in pole position. Here are the ten largest Catholic countries in the world as of 2010, according to the Pew data:
None of this, of course, should come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. That said, there are two further reflections worth developing based on the “Global Christianity” report.
* * *
Most Christians, according to the Pew data, have never experienced life as a religious minority. While Christians comprise just one-third of the world’s population, they represent a statistical majority in 158 countries, two-thirds of all the nations on earth. Only about ten percent of the world’s Christians live in societies where they are a minority.
This data may help explain a fact of Christian life that otherwise seems inexplicable, which is the decidedly tepid response to anti-Christian violence around the world. Perhaps Christians have a hard time getting worked up about religious persecution because, frankly, most of them have never experienced it.
Those who have, however, are taking it on the chin.
According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular NGO based in Germany, fully 80 percent of all acts of religious intolerance in the world are directed at Christians. A recent symposium organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe asserted that 200 million Christians are currently the victims of violence, oppression or harassment.
Just in the last few days:
Analysts of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have often speculated that one difficulty with Israeli policy is that Jews have a hard time thinking of themselves as a majority. Perhaps the equal-and-opposite problem on the Christian side is that we’re incapable of seeing ourselves as a minority, even when we are.
In a world in which 200 million Christians are under assault, that’s one bit of cultural psychology Christians might do well to overcome.
* * *
An interesting term of comparison in the Pew data lies between Catholicism and Protestantism. In a nutshell, there’s reason to believe that although both traditions have suffered declines in Europe, Catholicism has weathered the storm of secularism more successfully than Protestantism – at least, so far.
The demographic transition from north to south is the Christian mega-story of our time, but it’s even more pronounced on the Protestant side of the street.
Europe today accounts for one-quarter of the world’s Catholic population, but just 13 percent of the Protestant total. There are now more Protestants in Nigeria and China alone than in all of Europe.
The “Global Christianity” report includes a close-up look at Germany which is especially revealing. Today, there are 29 million Protestants in Germany and 28 million Catholics, each representing a third of the national population. A century ago, however, Catholics were also a third of the German population, but Protestants were a robust sixty percent.
The report draws the obvious conclusion: “The Protestant proportion of the population has declined significantly, whereas the Catholic proportion has remained roughly the same.”
The Pew report also spotlights the United Kingdom, where the Church of England is the dominant Christian body. Data from the U.K.’s Annual Population Survey indicate that the proportion of the population which identifies as Christian fell from 78 percent in 2004-2005 to 72 percent in 2008 – a drop-off of six percentage points in just four years.
During a telephone conference call with the Pew researchers on Monday, I asked if the data suggest Catholic losses in Europe have been less severe than in Protestantism. They were hesitant to press too hard on that conclusion, especially because confessional totals from a century ago are often imprecise, but demographer Conrad Hackett leaned in that direction.
“My impression is that Catholic identity tends to ‘stick’ in a way that may not be true for other traditions in countries experiencing a lot of religious change,” Hackett said.
None of this means Catholicism is flourishing in Europe, because it’s not. It does suggest, however, that Catholicism may possess a few anti-bodies against secularism that some other Christian traditions lack.
[3]A map of Catholicism globally. Click to enlarge.I happen to groove on population statistics, but I realize that for most people they rival watching paint dry, or the heartbreak of psoriasis, as a good time. Faced with a new report from the Pew Forum on the global Christian population, therefore, let's start with a few deliberately bold assertions to get the blood moving.Based on the study, here are three rules of thumb about Christian growth and decline -- extrapolations which go well beyond the contents of the Pew report, but which can be supported by the data it contains:
- If you want Christianity to shrink, give it wealth and privilege and back it up with the power of the state.
- If you want Christianity to show surprising resilience, suppress its structures and persecute its people.
- If you want Christianity to thrive, drop it into a free market environment and force it to hustle.
Here's why.
Europe, the erstwhile capital of Christendom, has lost its pride of place. A century ago, two-thirds of all Christians lived in Europe; today, only a quarter of the world’s 2.18 billion Christians are on the old continent. In ultra-secular Western Europe, majorities still identify as Christian, but the percentage share of the population is down sharply.
Despite decades of state-imposed atheism, Christianity is doing remarkably well in Communist lands (either former or current.) Two in three Russians still identify as Orthodox, and some analysts believe there’s a renaissance afoot in Russian Orthodoxy. China is experiencing a spiritual boom, and today China is the third-largest Protestant nation in the world, trailing only the United States and Nigeria.
Christianity’s greatest growth is in Africa, a wide-open spiritual marketplace marked by stiff competition among religious alternatives. During the past century, Christianity in Africa grew by an astonishing 6,000 percent, from 8.5 million to 516 million. Christians were nine percent of the African population in 1910; by 2010, they were 63 percent. Over the same span, sub-Saharan Africa went from 1.4 percent of the global Christian total to 24 percent.
* * *
Based on the Pew Forum report, Christianity in the early 21st century comes off as a decidedly “multi-polar” faith. Nigeria today has more than twice as many Protestants as Germany, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation; Brazil has more than twice as many Catholics as Italy, the headquarters of Roman Catholicism Inc.
Today, no single continent contains a majority of the world’s Christian population, which suggests that no one regional expression of Christianity can claim to be normative anymore.
The United States is the largest Christian nation in the world, according to the Pew data, with a total of 247 million Christians. Rounding out the top ten are Brazil, Mexico, Russia, the Philippines, Nigeria, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Germany, and Ethiopia. Note that only one nation from Western Europe, and just two from the West generally, make the list.
Similar trajectories run through Catholicism, with the important difference that the United States is not in pole position. Here are the ten largest Catholic countries in the world as of 2010, according to the Pew data:
- Brazil: 133 million
- Mexico: 96 million
- Philippines: 76 million
- United States: 74 million
- Italy: 50 million
- Colombia: 38 million
- France: 37 million
- Poland: 35 million
- Spain: 34 million
- DR Congo: 31 million
None of this, of course, should come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. That said, there are two further reflections worth developing based on the “Global Christianity” report.
* * *
Most Christians, according to the Pew data, have never experienced life as a religious minority. While Christians comprise just one-third of the world’s population, they represent a statistical majority in 158 countries, two-thirds of all the nations on earth. Only about ten percent of the world’s Christians live in societies where they are a minority.
This data may help explain a fact of Christian life that otherwise seems inexplicable, which is the decidedly tepid response to anti-Christian violence around the world. Perhaps Christians have a hard time getting worked up about religious persecution because, frankly, most of them have never experienced it.
Those who have, however, are taking it on the chin.
According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular NGO based in Germany, fully 80 percent of all acts of religious intolerance in the world are directed at Christians. A recent symposium organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe asserted that 200 million Christians are currently the victims of violence, oppression or harassment.
Just in the last few days:
- A well-known Christian catechist was killed in the Indian state of Orissa, site of a ferocious anti-Christian pogrom in 2008 that left roughly a hundred dead, hundreds more wounded, and thousands homeless.
- A Sister of Charity of Jesus and Mary was killed in the Indian state of Jharkhand, allegedly by mining interests threatened by her activism among poor tribals.
- Catholics in Kirkuk, Iraq, erected a monument to 36 Christian martyrs since 2003, a reminder of the decimation of Iraq’s once-sizeable Christian community.
- In Pakistan, a 38-year-old Christian mother of two is facing a death sentence under the country’s blasphemy law, allegedly for challenging the treatment of women in Islam during a 2010 discussion about religion in her village.
Analysts of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have often speculated that one difficulty with Israeli policy is that Jews have a hard time thinking of themselves as a majority. Perhaps the equal-and-opposite problem on the Christian side is that we’re incapable of seeing ourselves as a minority, even when we are.
In a world in which 200 million Christians are under assault, that’s one bit of cultural psychology Christians might do well to overcome.
* * *
An interesting term of comparison in the Pew data lies between Catholicism and Protestantism. In a nutshell, there’s reason to believe that although both traditions have suffered declines in Europe, Catholicism has weathered the storm of secularism more successfully than Protestantism – at least, so far.
The demographic transition from north to south is the Christian mega-story of our time, but it’s even more pronounced on the Protestant side of the street.
Europe today accounts for one-quarter of the world’s Catholic population, but just 13 percent of the Protestant total. There are now more Protestants in Nigeria and China alone than in all of Europe.
The “Global Christianity” report includes a close-up look at Germany which is especially revealing. Today, there are 29 million Protestants in Germany and 28 million Catholics, each representing a third of the national population. A century ago, however, Catholics were also a third of the German population, but Protestants were a robust sixty percent.
The report draws the obvious conclusion: “The Protestant proportion of the population has declined significantly, whereas the Catholic proportion has remained roughly the same.”
The Pew report also spotlights the United Kingdom, where the Church of England is the dominant Christian body. Data from the U.K.’s Annual Population Survey indicate that the proportion of the population which identifies as Christian fell from 78 percent in 2004-2005 to 72 percent in 2008 – a drop-off of six percentage points in just four years.
During a telephone conference call with the Pew researchers on Monday, I asked if the data suggest Catholic losses in Europe have been less severe than in Protestantism. They were hesitant to press too hard on that conclusion, especially because confessional totals from a century ago are often imprecise, but demographer Conrad Hackett leaned in that direction.
“My impression is that Catholic identity tends to ‘stick’ in a way that may not be true for other traditions in countries experiencing a lot of religious change,” Hackett said.
None of this means Catholicism is flourishing in Europe, because it’s not. It does suggest, however, that Catholicism may possess a few anti-bodies against secularism that some other Christian traditions lack.
Links:
[1] http://ncronline.org/users/john-l-allen-jr
[2] http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic
[3] http://features.pewforum.org/global-christianity/world-maps/christianity-graphic-13.png
[4] http://ncronline.org/subscribe?sept14b2012
[1] http://ncronline.org/users/john-l-allen-jr
[2] http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic
[3] http://features.pewforum.org/global-christianity/world-maps/christianity-graphic-13.png
[4] http://ncronline.org/subscribe?sept14b2012
http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/laws-christian-thermodynamics
¿Nos podemos fiar de los economistas?
¿Nos podemos fiar de los economistas?
Posted By Manuel Bagues On 14/09/2012 @ 07:00 In Manuel Bagües,Uncategorized | 44 Comments
Con mayor o menor fortuna, los economistas académicos intentamos contribuir a la sociedad analizando la situación económica, evaluando las políticas públicas y proponiendo medidas basadas en la “evidencia empírica”. Sin embargo, muchos lectores se preguntarán, legítimamente, hasta que punto se deberían fiar de los economistas y de nuestra “evidencia empírica”. Y no son los únicos. Como Edward Leamer observó hace casi treinta años en un artículo que se ha convertido en un clásico, “(c)asi nadie se toma el análisis de los datos en serio. O, para ser más precisos, casi nadie se toma en serio los análisis de los demás.”
The Politics of Language
The Politics of Language
My attention was riveted by a story in The Jerusalem Report of September 10, 2012, because it dealt with a topic that has fascinated me since my childhood (for a reason I will briefly mention momentarily). The story reports on a move to revive the Aramaic language in a Christian Arab village in Israel. Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, has a very long history, during which it was for a while the official language of the Persian empire and then the spoken vernacular throughout much of the Middle East, also by most Jews after Hebrew had become a “dead language” used only for religious purposes. It was of course the language of Jesus. Aramaic itself became mainly a “dead language” after the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, spoken by a few scattered minorities but, like Hebrew for Jews, continuing as the language of worship for Orthodox Christian churches in the region.The Jerusalem Report story occurred in the village of Jish in the Galilee, sixty-five percent of whose inhabitants are Maronites (Orthodox in communion with Rome), the rest mostly Melkites (Orthodox in communion with Constantinople), with a sprinkling of Muslims. Both Maronites and Melkites speak Arabic in their daily lives, but use Syriac, a version of Aramaic, in worship. The leader of the Aramaic movement in the village is a young man, Shadi Khalloul, who has been pushing for the teaching of spoken Aramaic in the village school. His advocacy finally succeeded after it was supported by a new principal, who is himself a Muslim. The Aramaic instruction has now been approved by the Israeli ministry of education. The story in an Israeli publication naturally emphasized the similarity with the rebirth of Biblical Hebrew by modern Zionism. Khalloul only speaks Aramaic with his two-year old son—just as Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who led the Hebrew revival in the late 1800s, only spoke Hebrew with his son. There is a story about an elderly Hebraist who came from Europe to the then brand-new town of Tel Aviv. He was jostled and obscenely insulted by a young boy, and afterward turned to his companion with sheer delight—“how wonderful – he can swear in Hebrew!”
Khalloul has an openly stated political purpose in mind: to unite all the Christians in the Middle East as “one strong nation”. A nation, it is supposed, needs a unifying language. Aramaic is a plausible candidate. This is understandable in the contemporary context—Christians threatened by militant Islam in all the Middle East, and as a double minority in Israel, Christians among the Muslims and non-Jews in the Jewish state. But the politics of language has a very old history all over the world, though it flared up virulently with the emergence of modern nationalism. Very often conflicts over language have had a religious dimension.
My own fascination with the topic comes from the fact that I grew up bilingually. Every summer as a child my mother took me from Vienna to visit her family in Italy. The seasons meant an alternation between German and Italian, and I was aware from early on that reality looks very different as filtered through the two languages. I also became aware of the political dimension. The Italy of my childhood was ruled by Mussolini. We went on vacation either to the seashore or the mountains, the latter in the South Tirol that had been annexed by Italy after World War I. The Fascist regime imposed a policy of coercive “Italianization” on the German-speaking population. I remember one summer, we rented a house from a Tirolean farmer. As an only child I was impressed by the large number of children in our landlord’s family. They all had common Austrian names, like Alois or Franz or Johanna—until the last one, a boy who had just been born. He was named Italo. His father had given in.
Language has always been linked to power, from Mandarin in China to Greek and Latin in classical antiquity. But through much of history official languages co-existed with numerous dialects which marked people’s personal identities. The aim to make language the principal unifying factor for national identity is largely a modern phenomenon, perhaps dramatized when Napoleon crowned himself, not as “emperor of France”, but as “emperor of the French”. I seem to remember a nineteenth-century British wit who defined a nation as “a language with an army”, but I surfed the Internet unsuccessfully for the reference. Instead I discovered that a phrase much like it is often attributed to Max Weinreich, a linguist of modern Yiddish, which had to struggle for recognition as a language rather than a low-status dialect. In a lecture in 1945, at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in New York, Weinreich said that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Yiddish, alas, never had either. It is only natural that Israel, once it has both army and navy, discarded Yiddish for renascent Hebrew.
The Austro-Hungarian empire (described by the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus as a “dress rehearsal for the apocalypse”) pioneered the language wars of recent history. At least the Austrian half made serious efforts to institute a multilingual modern state (Hungary pursued a policy of Magyarization). The enterprise, as did the empire, came to a violent end in 1918. The successor states struggled with the same issue, and Yugoslavia collapsed in a series of bloody civil wars. The linguistic aspect of this is clear: The largest group of people in multilingual Yugoslavia spoke a language known as “Serbo-Croat”; they now speak Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak. The religious aspect is also clear: Serbian-speakers are Orthodox, Croatian-speakers Catholic, Bosniak-speakers Muslim. The most visible European case of a successful multilingual state is Switzerland, with its four official languages: German, French and Italian, with Romansch as a quaint fourth language spoken by a handful of people in Alpine cantons. Some might argue that there is actually a fifth language, Swiss-German, or Schwytzerdytsch, which is the vernacular for most people who use High German for public purposes. Swiss-German hovers somewhat awkwardly between being an official language and a dialect, its feisty gutturality (hostile outsiders have called it a throat disease) a marker of genuine Swiss identity.
Given my obsession with language, I have played with the idea of writing a historical treatise on the interplay of language, politics and religion. This is not the place for it. I can only give a few examples of the diversity and the curiosities of the phenomenon in our own time. Papua New Guinea is the country with the largest number of languages in the world (I have heard an anthropologist give the figure of 800, which seems a little improbable); every year some of them die out, yielding to the dominance of official English and vernacular Pidgin. The most famous case of successful resurrection of a “dead language” is of course modern Hebrew. Ireland has not been quite as successful with Gaelic. Modern Greek was deliberately concocted by nationalist intellectuals in the nineteenth century, who “purified” the spoken dialects of its foreign (especially Turkish) elements, so as to create a national language as close as possible to the glory of classical Greek. Politically or culturally repressed languages, like Catalan or Slovak, have been mobilized for the purpose of nation-building. Regional dialects become the official language for an entire country; much earlier in history the dialect of the Ile de France became modern French, a feat facilitated by the brutal repression of the Langue d’Oc in what is now southern France (more or less the same language now resurrected as Catalan). A very successful twentieth-century case is Bahasa Indonesia, which after that country became independent was made the official language, but now has become the vernacular for many people who could not communicate in their native languages. Whether this happened by chance or by deliberate planning, Bahasa was the dialect of a politically unimportant region of Sumatra—not of Java, the center of political power—and this fact made Bahasa acceptable over the vast territory of the Indonesian archipelago. Other newly independent countries tried to nationalize the language spoken at the political center, only to meet up with successful resistance in other regions. Thus Hindi, the language of the north, was resisted in the south of India, and Tagalog, originally spoken around the capital Manila, was not successfully nationalized in other parts of the Philippines. Language politics has been a major factor in Indian politics since independence. It also has a religious dimension: Urdu is the language associated with Islam in India (the fact that it has also become the national language of Pakistan has not enhanced its popularity in the other part of the subcontinent).
Language has often been a symbol of resistance of repressed populations, such as Czech against Habsburg Austria or Polish against imperial Russia. In the latter case, not in the former, there was a religious element: Poland is Catholic, Russia is Orthodox. Closer to home, Quebec has gone to much trouble to preserve itself as an island of French in the ocean of English-speaking North America (its language laws had the unintended consequence of driving out many anglophone businesses from Montreal to Toronto). Language continues to be a political issue in the United States, mainly as a defense against the perceived challenge from Spanish. Belgium is in danger of splitting apart in the battle between French and Flemish (ironically Brussels, a hotpoint of this battle is the capital of the multilingual European Union, whose transactions are laboriously translated, at enormous expense, into all its twenty-some languages). There are semi-political movements to enhance the status of indigenous languages, such as Quechua in Peru, or to prevent their extinction, as with Hawaiian and Welsh.
Yiddish is a very interesting case of the overlap of religion and politics. For most of its history, Yiddish was the profane language representing Judaism, while Biblical Hebrew was the latter’s sacred language. There was an interesting case in Austria-Hungary in the early years of the twentieth century. Bukowina, a multilingual and multireligious province of the Austrian part of the dual monarchy, was a showcase of enlightened language policy. If I remember correctly, the official languages were, in addition to German: Polish, Ukrainian and Romanian. There was a large Yiddish-speaking Jewish population, whose religion was protected by law. A Jewish group demanded that Yiddish be added to the list of official languages. The demand was rejected by an administrative court, on the ground that it would violate the religious freedom of Jews by forcing an ethnic (or, in the term used then, a national) designation on them. In a curious way this Habsburg court anticipated and rejected the Nazi policy of forcing Jews into the designation of a race rather than a religion. When the Zionist movement transformed Hebrew from a sacred to a profane language, it concomitantly secularized it. Yiddish was widely looked down upon. Significant numbers of Orthodox Jews continue to resent this, in Israel and in the diaspora. This fact is beautifully and economically reflected in an Israeli joke: A woman on a bus in Tel Aviv is speaking to her son in Yiddish. A fellow passenger, a staunch Zionist, rebukes her: “You should speak to your son in Hebrew. Why do you speak to him in Yiddish?” She replies: “Because I don’t want him to forget that he is a Jew”.
This blog is supposed to deal with religion and other curiosities. A very curious case of the politics of language (religion was not involved) occurred in South Africa soon after the establishment of post-apartheid democracy. Every modern nation is supposed to have a flag, an anthem, and a coat of arms preferably inscribed in the national language. A new flag was designed very creatively and has been generally welcomed. The anthem issue was avoided by adopting two anthems, the old Afrikaans one and in addition the hymn “God bless Africa” of the anti-apartheid movement. The coat of arms presented a more difficult problem. The old official languages were English and Afrikaans, and the inscription on the coat of arms was in Latin – “Ex Unitate Vires” (“Strength from Unity “). This clearly would not do. The New South Africa now has 11 official languages: the old two, plus nine African ones. (This means that English is actually the national language—as, incidentally, it is in India.) They could not be squeezed onto the new coat of arms (which displays a diversity of pictorial symbols). It was decided that none of the official languages were to be used. Instead the coat of arms now sports an indigenous language that is virtually extinct in South Africa (it survives, precariously, in Botswana): Koisan, the language of the Koi, the so-called Bushmen who inhabited this part of the continent before the invasion by Bantu-speaking Africans. It is full of click sounds and glottal stops almost impossible for an outsider to pronounce (The Star, Johannesburg’s major newspaper, published a pronunciation guide, which I, for one, could not understand let alone follow). It appears on the coat of arms as follows: !KE E:/XARRA//KE. Thabo Mbeki, the successor of Nelson Mandela as president, explained that the motto means “Let diverse people unite”. As I recall, there were two linguistic experts on Koisan in South Africa. One had advised the government on the new motto. The other stated publicly that this was a mistranslation. The correct translation should say “Let us urinate together”. I don’t suppose that this rendering would negate the intended noble purpose. I don’t know whether there was a genuine scientific disagreement between the two linguists, or whether number two was a politically subversive jokester.
How one views these very different cases will obviously depend on one’s own political positions. (And I have not even mentioned the language rules propagated by feminists in both politics and religion.) But I think I can say one thing quite beyond any particular partisanship: Every language opens up a distinctive window on the world. It is a distinctive world. The loss of a language means the loss of a world. Perhaps some worlds deserve extinction. Most do not. Their extinction is an impoverishment in our capacity to appreciate and to wonder at the many different human attempts to come to terms with reality. Of course the study of a “dead language” can mediate this wonder (which is why the study of Latin and Greek was for a long time an integral part of school curricula). But there is nothing like hearing contemporary people actually speaking a language. This is why keeping a language alive, or restoring it to living speech, is a truly humane value of civilization.
10 Responses to The Politics of Language
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger/2012/09/12/the-politics-of-language/
segunda-feira, 17 de setembro de 2012
Dunbar's Number
Robin Dunbar
How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
Faber & Faber, London, 2010
Rushdie`s Fatwa
The Financial Times
September 14, 2012
The lessons of Rushdie’s fatwa years
The affair began with The Satanic Verses going up in flames in Bradford. Western Muslims lit the spark. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini fanned it into a global blaze and, with American embassies under attack in the Arab world, the fatal dialectic between Islamic rage and western free speech once again leaves death in its wake.
On the day the fatwa was pronounced, February 14 1989, Salman Rushdie attended a memorial service for Bruce Chatwin in central London. When the service ended, we watched as he was pushed into the back of a car and driven off, looking bewildered and frightened.
In his forthcoming memoir, Joseph Anton – named after the alias he chose to assume – Mr Rushdie will tell us what the next decade was like for him. I once had a glimpse inside. In the 1990s, he and his protection team drove me home after dinner. We circled the north London streets, they watched through the tinted windows and when the car came to a stop and I tried to open the door, the officer said, “Better let me, sir”, the reinforced glass and steel making it too heavy to open. Mr Rushdie was caged in glass and steel for a decade.
The affair erupted into a conflict between the European Enlightenment – reason, tolerance, dialogue, secularism – and radical Islam – theocratic, literalist and intolerant. While Mr Rushdie knew a lot about Islam, his liberal followers like me knew less. Looking back, we purchased moral clarity about our own values at the price of greater confusion about Islam.
We fell for the idea that the ayatollah was speaking for the whole faith. In reality, he was recovering from the disastrous war with Iraq, battling with the Saudis for mastery of the Muslim masses and in need of a cause célèbre to reignite an Iranian revolution becalmed. The affair was a gift from the gods and he used it to bolster a terrorist theocracy in difficulty.
The risk to Mr Rushdie was never from Islam or from its western believers, but from a terrorist state. Twenty-three years later, the fatwa, though not enforced, still hangs over Mr Rushdie, Iran lurches towards possession of a nuclear weapon, it still proclaims death to the “Zionist entity” and it is still a terrorist state. Perhaps that is what the wily ayatollah, architect of permanent revolution, wanted all along.
The imams who organised the book-burning in Bradford got what they wanted too. When I went to Bradford in the spring of 1989 to listen to Muslim leaders, their sincerity was clear enough. It was their authenticity that I questioned.They told stories that expressed unease about what their daughters and sons were learning on the streets and unease about the compromises that western life was forcing upon them. One prosperous restaurant owner – who loudly supported death for Mr Rushdie – admitted he made his living selling alcohol to the infidel. The Rushdie affair was exactly what he needed. The angrier the reaffirmation of his faith, the more authentic he felt.
The affair gave liberals and the worldwide ummah of Muslim believers a chance to define what was sacred for each. It allowed both to express strong emotions, but neither side closed the gap between the sincerity of their emotions and the authenticity of their faith.
An authentic faith might have made us both more humble about our beliefs and more curious about the convictions of others. We might have learnt something from each other. Instead we had a painful awakening to our differences.
The affair was the moment that westernised Muslims encountered the hidden demand of life in a secular democracy. They discovered that their faith could be mocked and they demanded that freedom of expression be circumscribed by respect. Their demand was backed, at least among a marginalised and angry minority in Europe, with a threat to burn the multicultural house down.
The threat was as unacceptable as the fatwa. No one should be required to rethink the terms of free speech with a gun to his head. If it is true that no western author now will dare to insult Islam after the Rushdie affair, the death of his translators, the attack on the Danish cartoonists, then all of us will lose.
So if resentful self-censorship on the liberal side and violent explosions in European banlieues would be the worst possible consequence of the affair, what might be a positive outcome?
We need to rethink what it means to live together. Everyone in a free society shares the deepest possible interest in protecting Muslim minorities, indeed all faith communities, from discrimination, defamation, violence or incitement to acts of hate. But no free society has an interest in protecting their doctrines, beliefs and practices from criticism, scorn, ridicule or belittlement.
This is a hard bargain for faith communities. It is not pleasant to live in societies that appear to hold nothing sacred except the liberty to get rich and the freedom to be sarcastic and sacrilegious. But tolerance is a hard bargain for secular liberals too, requiring them to live with those who believe in the subjection of women, the subordination of reason to faith and the division of humankind into the faithful and the infidel.
So we come out of the Rushdie affair with one thing in common: democratic life together is a hard bargain. Each of us, Muslim believer and secular liberal, wishes the other were different. But we are not, and living together requires us to accept what we cannot change.
Living together should not be in resentful silence, each in our own ghettos. It means shouldering a burden of mutual justification without privilege. Faith has no privilege, no exclusive rights, and secular reason has none either. We are stuck with each other, with the burden of justifying ourselves, living with each other in freedom and trying to persuade the other to be different, free from menace or violence. That is what democratic life demands.
The writer teaches human rights at Harvard and the University of Toronto
domingo, 16 de setembro de 2012
Ponto percentual
Ponto percentual: indica o valor absoluto da diferença entre percentagens.
Exemplo: a subida de uma taxa de juro de 20% para 50% representa um aumento 150% ou um aumento de 30 pontos percentuais.
Exemplo: a subida de uma taxa de juro de 20% para 50% representa um aumento 150% ou um aumento de 30 pontos percentuais.
Uso numerais
Att: O bilião do Brasil corresponde a mil milhões de Portugal
Sexta-feira, 23 de Setembro de 2011
Biliões ou triliões?
Imaginem o símbolo 1 seguido de 12 zeros: que nome se dá ao número que daqui emerge? A pergunta parece tonta, mas não é.
Se estivermos nos EUA, a cada acrescento de três zeros chamamos sucessivamente milhares, milhões, biliões e triliões. Mas, na generalidade dos países europeus, a mesma sequência é de milhares, milhões, milhares de milhões, biliões. Ou seja, o mesmo número é um bilião em Paris e um trilião em Nova Iorque. Faz sentido?
Recentemente correu mundo o número $14,3t - 14,3 triliões de dólares -, a expressão da dívida americana, que chegou a ameaçar o país de insolvência. Toda a gente falou disso! Estive atento às interpretações portuguesas e descobri que se dividiram em dois grupos: o dos práticos, que lhe chamaram triliões, e o dos puristas, que preferiram os biliões. Já a população em geral alheou-se do assunto: era um número "muito grande", ponto final.
Esta indiferença pelo rigor sempre me fez confusão. E, em Dezembro de 2007, em artigo no Expresso, decidi bater-me publicamente pelo modelo americano. Uma jornalista do semanário pegou a seguir no tema e foi mais longe: investigou as razões do diferendo, abordou economistas e professores e lançou um debate na Internet. Que me recorde, as opiniões eram unânimes: sim à uniformização. Depois, como é normal nestes casos, o assunto morreu.
Em apresentações das grandes empresas portuguesas, habituadas a lidar com números acima dos nove dígitos, indicadores como vendas, resultados ou capitalizações bolsistas são de há muito identificados através da escala curta, ou seja, usando o modelo tradicional. E ninguém se dá ao trabalho de explicar porquê: 100 mil milhões de euros são €100b e é tudo. O que não deixa de ser estranho. A convenção a que aderimos não é a da escala longa?
Eu sei que, à luz desta crise medonha que atravessamos, este não é um tema prioritário. Prioritários são o crescimento e o emprego, o défice e a dívida, os salários e as pensões. Mas, num mundo globalizado como é o nosso, os números não podem ser descurados. Temos de dar o mesmo nome às mesmas coisas! E, a haver mudanças, o normal é que sejam os europeus a fazê-las: a escala curta é a mais fácil, a mais prática e a mais frequentemente usada nos grandes acontecimentos internacionais.
Alguém quer pegar neste assunto?
NÚMEROS E CONVENÇÕES
À esquerda temos a evolução do PIB nominal, que deverá atingir €171 mil milhões no final de 2011. E à direita temos a evolução da dívida pública, que no mesmo período deverá atingir €170 biliões. Os dois números são semelhantes, mas, se não nos explicarem as escalas, parece que o segundo é mil vezes superior. A decisão tomada na 9ª Conferência de Pesos e Medidas tem de ser corrigida - ou ninguém se entende.
Fontes: INE, Banco de Portugal
____
Daniel Amaral, Economista
d.amaral@netcabo.pt
jc , coimbra | 23/09/11 14:50
(cont.)... assim, numa sequência lógica, matemática, harmoniosa e simples, com início na unidae e tendente para infinito, onde os conceitos de unidades, dezenas, centenas, milhares e milhões são comuns nos EUA e na Europa, deixam de o ser a partir dos milhões naquele país, como se de uma aberração matemática se tratasse, sendo adulterada essa sequência, para dar lugar a "charadas com códigos e avisos prévios". Quer dizer, conceitos bem definidos e bem diferenciados como milhares de milhões, milhares de biliões etc, utilizados universalmente pela ciência, são suprimidos nos EUA essencialmente quando aplicados às questões económicas??!, suprimindo as vantagens de uma linguagem intuitiva e universal.
Haverá ainda alguém que, numa perspectiva puramente cientifica e das vantagens recíprocas - que é o que mais interessa - tenha dúvidas de quem deve mudar com vista `a uniformização?!
JSilva , Holanda | 23/09/11 14:05
Em Engenharia à seria os termos ambiguos são facilmente evitados.
Kilo (ou quilo), Mega, Giga, Tera,Peta (10E15), até Yota (10E24).
A designação kilobyte não sofre de nenhuma ambiguidade pois só se aplica a memorias de computadores binários onde efectivamente vale 1024. Quanto aos Gigas de discos duros por exemplo, deve confirmar pois é uma manobra de marketing curiosa, sem ser enganadora, dizer que 1Gbyte são 1000'000'000 bytes (basicamente "roubam-lhe" 73'741'824bytes).
kota , Pentilhão | 23/09/11 13:57
Em matemática não há "falsas questões". Estas falsas questões eternizam-se quando se lhes quer fugir.
Só devido ao peso anglo-saxónico no estabelecimento da sua visão (algo "criacionista") é que o Comité Internacional de Pesos e Medidas condescendeu em manter a Escala Curta, algo que nunca devia acontecer. A escala tem de ser única, múltipla de três e sem "terminologias criativas".
O hábito da denominação em Escala Curta (anglo-saxónica) é muito usada dado o peso mediático dos seus mentores, porém, como é contra-natura, isto é, não tem uma correspondência lógica com a notação científica, acabará por carecer de recurso matemático e, assim, ser ela própria a perguntar à Escala Longa quantos são... "um pentilhão"!
Aliás ouvi, com muita graça Eduardo Catroga, a usar o "pintelho", quiçá um seu submúltiplo de expoente negativo, para anular a importância de querelas orçamentais.
Nuno , | 23/09/11 13:31
Não admira esta opinião por parte do articulista. Esta malta agora acha que a economia é a ciência de Deus. Pois, mas é que não só não é uma ciência (e está cada vez mais longe de o ser...), como é uma simples subordinada da Matemática, de que faz uso do mais elementar que existe. Tal como já foi dito, o sistema de potências múltiplas de 3 é consagrado no Sistema Internacional de Unidades. Por isso, esta coisa do milhão-bilião (ou bilhão, conforme os gostos)-trilião é tão anacrónica como o Sistema Imperial, que nem sequer é decimal.
jc , coimbra | 23/09/11 13:26
É o que se chama a tempestade no copo de água( consequência da obsessão por um protagonismo exacerbado, mas destituido de lógica ou qualquer utilidade funcional).
Muito antes dos EUA existirem como nação, já se conhecia na generalidade dos países mais evoluidos da Europa, Arábia, Ásia etc, forma comum, matematicamente definida para designar números muito extensos,
Ora, como as divergências com o sistema americano só começam a partir dos milhões, concentremo-nos aí: o que é um milhão? É um número que, pela sua dimensão já não cabe dentro da órbita dos milhares, a não ser que se quisesse designar por "mil mil's", mil milhares, etc o que seria uma designação fastidiosa, havendo outra mais simplificada. Matematicamente - e isto é o mais importante - significa o produto de (mil), por si mesmo. De forma análoga, o produto de um milhão por um milhão deverá designar-se um bilião(um milhão de milhões), da mesma maneira, que um bilião por um bilião.
Standard , | 23/09/11 10:38
O que é necessário é que se cumpra de vez as convenções internacionais. O Sistema Internacional de Unidades (SI) prevê isso tudo e os anglo-saxónicos têm é que se alinhar com os standards internacionais que actualmente não usam. Até com satélites estoiraram porque a equipa multinacional usou em simultâneo metros e pés! No Reino Unido os pints e pounds já são apenas usados para medidas tradicionais (cerveja a copo por ex.) no resto é litros e kilograma. Quantos aos G ou Gigas também não servem pois sofrem de um problema ainda maior: 1k são 1000 (10^3) ou 1024 (2^10)?
Biliões de euros triliões de dólares , | 23/09/11 10:22
Penso que esta é uma falsa questão, atendendo também à diversidade de moedas/divisas. Assim podemos sempre referirmo-nos a biliões de euros e triliões de dólares... para além do efeito psicológico do Euro assim se assemelhar ainda mais forte que o Dólar!
kota , Escalas de Prefixos | 23/09/11 06:36
É uma questão estabelecida na Metrologia, que prevê PREFIXOS associados às grandezas do Sistema Internacional de Unidades (SI).
No caso vertente da contagem de dinheiro ou de outras grandezas adimensionais contáveis, como o dinheiro, o peso da "cultura" anglo-saxónica faz sentir o seu pragmatismo, nem sempre muito lógico ao "impôr" a Escala Curta.
A Escala Longa assenta numa lógica de potências múltiplas de três, que é a notação científica usada na Física e na Engenharia.
Ao usar este sequenciamento lógico, a Escala Longa torna a linguagem mais robusta contra interpretações dúbias. Além disso é a terminologia usada mais frequentemente pela cultura europeia.
Em gráficos, nada melhor que usar as potências múltiplas de três
Se estivermos nos EUA, a cada acrescento de três zeros chamamos sucessivamente milhares, milhões, biliões e triliões. Mas, na generalidade dos países europeus, a mesma sequência é de milhares, milhões, milhares de milhões, biliões. Ou seja, o mesmo número é um bilião em Paris e um trilião em Nova Iorque. Faz sentido?
Recentemente correu mundo o número $14,3t - 14,3 triliões de dólares -, a expressão da dívida americana, que chegou a ameaçar o país de insolvência. Toda a gente falou disso! Estive atento às interpretações portuguesas e descobri que se dividiram em dois grupos: o dos práticos, que lhe chamaram triliões, e o dos puristas, que preferiram os biliões. Já a população em geral alheou-se do assunto: era um número "muito grande", ponto final.
Esta indiferença pelo rigor sempre me fez confusão. E, em Dezembro de 2007, em artigo no Expresso, decidi bater-me publicamente pelo modelo americano. Uma jornalista do semanário pegou a seguir no tema e foi mais longe: investigou as razões do diferendo, abordou economistas e professores e lançou um debate na Internet. Que me recorde, as opiniões eram unânimes: sim à uniformização. Depois, como é normal nestes casos, o assunto morreu.
Em apresentações das grandes empresas portuguesas, habituadas a lidar com números acima dos nove dígitos, indicadores como vendas, resultados ou capitalizações bolsistas são de há muito identificados através da escala curta, ou seja, usando o modelo tradicional. E ninguém se dá ao trabalho de explicar porquê: 100 mil milhões de euros são €100b e é tudo. O que não deixa de ser estranho. A convenção a que aderimos não é a da escala longa?
Eu sei que, à luz desta crise medonha que atravessamos, este não é um tema prioritário. Prioritários são o crescimento e o emprego, o défice e a dívida, os salários e as pensões. Mas, num mundo globalizado como é o nosso, os números não podem ser descurados. Temos de dar o mesmo nome às mesmas coisas! E, a haver mudanças, o normal é que sejam os europeus a fazê-las: a escala curta é a mais fácil, a mais prática e a mais frequentemente usada nos grandes acontecimentos internacionais.
Alguém quer pegar neste assunto?
NÚMEROS E CONVENÇÕES
| Da escala longa... (U: €Mil milhões) | ...à escala curta (U: €Biliões) |
 |  |
Fontes: INE, Banco de Portugal
____
Daniel Amaral, Economista
d.amaral@netcabo.pt
Comentários:
jc , coimbra | 23/09/11 14:50(cont.)... assim, numa sequência lógica, matemática, harmoniosa e simples, com início na unidae e tendente para infinito, onde os conceitos de unidades, dezenas, centenas, milhares e milhões são comuns nos EUA e na Europa, deixam de o ser a partir dos milhões naquele país, como se de uma aberração matemática se tratasse, sendo adulterada essa sequência, para dar lugar a "charadas com códigos e avisos prévios". Quer dizer, conceitos bem definidos e bem diferenciados como milhares de milhões, milhares de biliões etc, utilizados universalmente pela ciência, são suprimidos nos EUA essencialmente quando aplicados às questões económicas??!, suprimindo as vantagens de uma linguagem intuitiva e universal.
Haverá ainda alguém que, numa perspectiva puramente cientifica e das vantagens recíprocas - que é o que mais interessa - tenha dúvidas de quem deve mudar com vista `a uniformização?!
JSilva , Holanda | 23/09/11 14:05Em Engenharia à seria os termos ambiguos são facilmente evitados.
Kilo (ou quilo), Mega, Giga, Tera,Peta (10E15), até Yota (10E24).
A designação kilobyte não sofre de nenhuma ambiguidade pois só se aplica a memorias de computadores binários onde efectivamente vale 1024. Quanto aos Gigas de discos duros por exemplo, deve confirmar pois é uma manobra de marketing curiosa, sem ser enganadora, dizer que 1Gbyte são 1000'000'000 bytes (basicamente "roubam-lhe" 73'741'824bytes).
kota , Pentilhão | 23/09/11 13:57Em matemática não há "falsas questões". Estas falsas questões eternizam-se quando se lhes quer fugir.
Só devido ao peso anglo-saxónico no estabelecimento da sua visão (algo "criacionista") é que o Comité Internacional de Pesos e Medidas condescendeu em manter a Escala Curta, algo que nunca devia acontecer. A escala tem de ser única, múltipla de três e sem "terminologias criativas".
O hábito da denominação em Escala Curta (anglo-saxónica) é muito usada dado o peso mediático dos seus mentores, porém, como é contra-natura, isto é, não tem uma correspondência lógica com a notação científica, acabará por carecer de recurso matemático e, assim, ser ela própria a perguntar à Escala Longa quantos são... "um pentilhão"!
Aliás ouvi, com muita graça Eduardo Catroga, a usar o "pintelho", quiçá um seu submúltiplo de expoente negativo, para anular a importância de querelas orçamentais.
Nuno , | 23/09/11 13:31Não admira esta opinião por parte do articulista. Esta malta agora acha que a economia é a ciência de Deus. Pois, mas é que não só não é uma ciência (e está cada vez mais longe de o ser...), como é uma simples subordinada da Matemática, de que faz uso do mais elementar que existe. Tal como já foi dito, o sistema de potências múltiplas de 3 é consagrado no Sistema Internacional de Unidades. Por isso, esta coisa do milhão-bilião (ou bilhão, conforme os gostos)-trilião é tão anacrónica como o Sistema Imperial, que nem sequer é decimal.
jc , coimbra | 23/09/11 13:26É o que se chama a tempestade no copo de água( consequência da obsessão por um protagonismo exacerbado, mas destituido de lógica ou qualquer utilidade funcional).
Muito antes dos EUA existirem como nação, já se conhecia na generalidade dos países mais evoluidos da Europa, Arábia, Ásia etc, forma comum, matematicamente definida para designar números muito extensos,
Ora, como as divergências com o sistema americano só começam a partir dos milhões, concentremo-nos aí: o que é um milhão? É um número que, pela sua dimensão já não cabe dentro da órbita dos milhares, a não ser que se quisesse designar por "mil mil's", mil milhares, etc o que seria uma designação fastidiosa, havendo outra mais simplificada. Matematicamente - e isto é o mais importante - significa o produto de (mil), por si mesmo. De forma análoga, o produto de um milhão por um milhão deverá designar-se um bilião(um milhão de milhões), da mesma maneira, que um bilião por um bilião.
Standard , | 23/09/11 10:38O que é necessário é que se cumpra de vez as convenções internacionais. O Sistema Internacional de Unidades (SI) prevê isso tudo e os anglo-saxónicos têm é que se alinhar com os standards internacionais que actualmente não usam. Até com satélites estoiraram porque a equipa multinacional usou em simultâneo metros e pés! No Reino Unido os pints e pounds já são apenas usados para medidas tradicionais (cerveja a copo por ex.) no resto é litros e kilograma. Quantos aos G ou Gigas também não servem pois sofrem de um problema ainda maior: 1k são 1000 (10^3) ou 1024 (2^10)?
Biliões de euros triliões de dólares , | 23/09/11 10:22Penso que esta é uma falsa questão, atendendo também à diversidade de moedas/divisas. Assim podemos sempre referirmo-nos a biliões de euros e triliões de dólares... para além do efeito psicológico do Euro assim se assemelhar ainda mais forte que o Dólar!
kota , Escalas de Prefixos | 23/09/11 06:36É uma questão estabelecida na Metrologia, que prevê PREFIXOS associados às grandezas do Sistema Internacional de Unidades (SI).
No caso vertente da contagem de dinheiro ou de outras grandezas adimensionais contáveis, como o dinheiro, o peso da "cultura" anglo-saxónica faz sentir o seu pragmatismo, nem sempre muito lógico ao "impôr" a Escala Curta.
A Escala Longa assenta numa lógica de potências múltiplas de três, que é a notação científica usada na Física e na Engenharia.
Ao usar este sequenciamento lógico, a Escala Longa torna a linguagem mais robusta contra interpretações dúbias. Além disso é a terminologia usada mais frequentemente pela cultura europeia.
Em gráficos, nada melhor que usar as potências múltiplas de três
sábado, 15 de setembro de 2012
Violação
http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/sweden-s-other-rape-suspects-by-naomi-wolf
If I were raped in Uppsala, where Assange is alleged to have committed his crime, I could not expect top prosecutors to lobby governments to arrest my assailant. On the contrary, “ordinary” Swedish rapists and abusers of women should assume that the police might not respond when called. When I tried the rape-crisis hotline at the government-run Crisis Center for Women in Stockholm, no one even picked up – and there was no answering machine.
According to rape-crisis advocates in Sweden, one-third of Swedish women have been sexually assaulted by the time they leave their teens. Indeed, according to a study published in 2003, and other later studies through 2009, Sweden has the highest sexual-assault rate in Europe, and among the lowest conviction rates.
When I reached the Stockholm branch of Terrafem, a support organization for rape survivors, a volunteer told me that in her many years of experience, Sweden’s police, prosecutors, and magistrates had never mobilized in pursuit of any alleged perpetrator in ways remotely similar to their pursuit of Assange. The far more common scenario – in fact, the only reliable scenario – was that even cases accompanied by a significant amount of evidence were seldom prosecuted.
This, she explained, was because most rapes in Uppsala, Stockholm, and other cities occur when young women meet young men online and go to an apartment, where, as in the allegations in the Assange case, what began as consensual sex turns nonconsensual. But she said that this is exactly the scenario that Swedish police typically refuse to prosecute. Just as everywhere else, Sweden’s male-dominated police, she explained, do not tend to see these victims as “innocent,” and thus do not bother building a case for arrest.
She is right: According to a report by Amnesty International, as of 2008, the number of reported rapes in Sweden had quadrupled in 20 years, but only 20% of cases were ever prosecuted. And, while the prosecution rate constituted a minimal improvement on previous years, when less than 15% of cases ended up in court, the conviction rate for reported rapes “is markedly lower today than it was in 1965.” As a result, “in practice, many perpetrators enjoy impunity.”
Until 2006, women in Uppsala faced a remarkable hurdle in seeking justice: the city’s chief of police, Göran Lindberg, was himself a serial rapist, convicted in July 2010 of more than a dozen charges, including “serious sexual offenses.” One victim testified that she was told her rapist was the police chief, and that she would be framed if she told anyone about his assaults. Lindberg also served as the Police Academy’s spokesman against sexual violence. The Uppsala police force that is now investigating Assange either failed to or refused to investigate effectively the sadistic rapist with whom they worked every day.
In other words, the purported magical Swedish kingdom of female sexual equality, empowerment, and robust institutional support for rape victims – a land, conjured by Swedish prosecutors, that holds much of the global media in thrall – simply does not exist.
In the Assange case, the Swedish police supported the accusers in legally unprecedented ways – for example, by allowing them to tell their stories together and by allowing testimony from a boyfriend. But other alleged victims of gender-based abuse, sometimes in life-threatening circumstances, typically receive very different treatment. In particular, according to WAVE, a pan-European consortium of service providers for rape and sexual-abuse survivors, when migrants, who comprise 13.8% of Sweden’s population, report rape and abuse, they face high systemic hurdles in even telling their stories to police – including longstanding linguistic barriers in communicating with them at all.
Likewise, Swedish intake centers for victims of male violence are woefully underfunded – like all support services for rape and abuse victims across Europe and North America – leaving many women who face threats to their safety and that of their children waiting for unavailable places in shelters. When I emailed the Rape Crisis support institute in Uppsala, listed by the global rape-crisis organization RAINN, I received an automatic reply saying that the facility was temporarily closed.
So, for most raped Swedish women, the shelters are full, the hotlines inactive, and the police selectively look the other way – that is, unless they are busy chasing down a globally famous suspect.
We have been here before. Last year, when my left-wing colleagues were virtually unanimous in believing the New York Police Department’s narrative of a certain victim and a guilty-before-due-process rapist, I made the same call – to the local rape-crisis center. There, Harriet Lesser, who works every day with victims whose alleged attacker is not the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, confirmed that the official support shown for the victim – in advance of any investigation – was indeed unprecedented.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Australia and Canada.
Official figures from the United Nations show that there were 17 kidnaps per 100,000 people in Australia in 2010 and 12.7 in Canada.
That compares with only 0.6 in Colombia and 1.1 in Mexico.
So why haven't we heard any of these horror stories? Are people being grabbed off the street in Sydney and Toronto, while the world turns a blind eye?
No, the high numbers of kidnapping cases in these two countries are explained by the fact that parental disputes over child custody are included in the figures.
If one parent takes a child for the weekend, and the other parent objects and calls the police, the incident will be recorded as a kidnapping, according to Enrico Bisogno, a statistician with the United Nations.
Comparing crime rates across countries is fraught with difficulties - this is well known among criminologists and statisticians, less so among journalists and commentators.
Sweden has the highest rape rate in Europe, author Naomi Wolf said on the BBC's Newsnight programme recently. She was commenting on the case of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who is fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden over rape and sexual assault allegations that he denies.
Is it true? Yes. The Swedish police recorded the highest number of offences - about 63 per 100,000 inhabitants - of any force in Europe, in 2010. The second-highest in the world.
This was three times higher than the number of cases in the same year in Sweden's next-door neighbour, Norway, and twice the rate in the United States and the UK. It was more than 30 times the number in India, which recorded about two offences per 100,000 people.
On the face of it, it would seem Sweden is a much more dangerous place than these other countries.
But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries' records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.
"In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.
"So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record - one victim, one type of crime, one record."
The thing is, the number of reported rapes has been going up in Sweden - it's almost trebled in just the last seven years. In 2003, about 2,200 offences were reported by the police, compared to nearly 6,000 in 2010.
So something's going on.
But Klara Selin says the statistics don't represent a major crime epidemic, rather a shift in attitudes. The public debate about this sort of crime in Sweden over the past two decades has had the effect of raising awareness, she says, and encouraging women to go to the police if they have been attacked.
The police have also made efforts to improve their handling of cases, she suggests, though she doesn't deny that there has been some real increase in the number of attacks taking place - a concern also outlined in an Amnesty International report in 2010.
"There might also be some increase in actual crime because of societal changes. Due to the internet, for example, it's much easier these days to meet somebody, just the same evening if you want to. Also, alcohol consumption has increased quite a lot during this period.
"But the major explanation is partly that people go to the police more often, but also the fact that in 2005 there has been reform in the sex crime legislation, which made the legal definition of rape much wider than before."
So an on-the-face-of-it international comparison of rape statistics can be misleading.
Botswana has the highest rate of recorded attacks - 92.9 per 100,000 people -
but a total of 63 countries don't submit any statistics, including South Africa, where a survey three years ago showed that one in four men questioned admitted to rape.
In 2010, an Amnesty International report highlighted that sexual violence happens in every single country, and yet the official figures show that some countries like Hong Kong and Mongolia have zero cases reported.
Evidently, women in some countries are much less likely to report an attack than in others and are much less likely to have their complaint recorded.
UN statistician Enrico Bisogno says surveys suggest that as few as one in 10 cases are ever reported to the police, in many countries.
"We often present the situation as kind of an iceberg where really what we can see is just the tip while the rest is below the sea level. It remains below the radar of the law enforcement agencies," he says.
Naomi Wolf has also written that Sweden has the lowest conviction rate in Europe.
She was relying on statistics from a nine-year-old report, which calculated percentage conviction rates based on the number of offences recorded by the police and the number of convictions. But this is a problematic way of analysing statistics, as several offences could be committed by one pers
The United Nations holds official statistics on the number of convictions for rape per 100,000 people and actually, by that measure, Sweden has the highest number of convictions per capita in Europe, bar Russia. In 2010, 3.7 convictions were achieved per 100,000 population.
Though it's still the case, as Wolf pointed out to the BBC, that women in Sweden report a high number of offences - and only a small number of rapists are punished.
So there's a lot that official statistics don't tell us. They certainly don't reveal the real number of rapes that happen in Sweden, or any other country. And they don't give a clear view of which countries have worse crime rates than others.
Rape is particularly complex, but you'd think it would be straightforward to analyse murder rates across different countries - just count up the dead bodies, and compare and contrast.
If only, says Enrico Bisogno. "For example, if I punch somebody and the person eventually dies, some countries can consider that as an intentional murder, others as a manslaughter. Or in some countries, dowry killings are coded separately because there is separate legislation."
What's more, a comparison of murder rates between developed and less developed countries may tell you as much about health as crime levels, according to Professor Chris Lewis, a criminologist from Portsmouth University in the UK.
The statistics are to some unknown degree complicated by the fact that you're more likely to survive an attack in a town where you're found quickly and taken to a hospital that's well-equipped.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19592372
Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf is a world-renowned public intellectual who played a leading role in so-called “third-wave” feminism and as an advocate of “power feminism,” which holds that women must assert themselves politically in order to achieve their goals. She has advised the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Her books include The Beauty Myth and The End of America.Sweden’s Other Rape Suspects
31 August 2012
NEW YORK – It is difficult for me, as an advocate against rape and other forms of violence against women, to fathom the laziness and willful ignorance that characterize so much of the media coverage of the sexual-assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. To report that we are simply witnessing Swedish justice at work, one must be committed to doing no research – not even the bare minimum of picking up a phone. In fact, we are witnessing a bizarre aberration in the context of Sweden’s treatment of sex crime – a case that exposes the grim reality of indifference, or worse, that victims there and elsewhere face.
If I were raped in Uppsala, where Assange is alleged to have committed his crime, I could not expect top prosecutors to lobby governments to arrest my assailant. On the contrary, “ordinary” Swedish rapists and abusers of women should assume that the police might not respond when called. When I tried the rape-crisis hotline at the government-run Crisis Center for Women in Stockholm, no one even picked up – and there was no answering machine.
According to rape-crisis advocates in Sweden, one-third of Swedish women have been sexually assaulted by the time they leave their teens. Indeed, according to a study published in 2003, and other later studies through 2009, Sweden has the highest sexual-assault rate in Europe, and among the lowest conviction rates.
When I reached the Stockholm branch of Terrafem, a support organization for rape survivors, a volunteer told me that in her many years of experience, Sweden’s police, prosecutors, and magistrates had never mobilized in pursuit of any alleged perpetrator in ways remotely similar to their pursuit of Assange. The far more common scenario – in fact, the only reliable scenario – was that even cases accompanied by a significant amount of evidence were seldom prosecuted.
This, she explained, was because most rapes in Uppsala, Stockholm, and other cities occur when young women meet young men online and go to an apartment, where, as in the allegations in the Assange case, what began as consensual sex turns nonconsensual. But she said that this is exactly the scenario that Swedish police typically refuse to prosecute. Just as everywhere else, Sweden’s male-dominated police, she explained, do not tend to see these victims as “innocent,” and thus do not bother building a case for arrest.
She is right: According to a report by Amnesty International, as of 2008, the number of reported rapes in Sweden had quadrupled in 20 years, but only 20% of cases were ever prosecuted. And, while the prosecution rate constituted a minimal improvement on previous years, when less than 15% of cases ended up in court, the conviction rate for reported rapes “is markedly lower today than it was in 1965.” As a result, “in practice, many perpetrators enjoy impunity.”
Until 2006, women in Uppsala faced a remarkable hurdle in seeking justice: the city’s chief of police, Göran Lindberg, was himself a serial rapist, convicted in July 2010 of more than a dozen charges, including “serious sexual offenses.” One victim testified that she was told her rapist was the police chief, and that she would be framed if she told anyone about his assaults. Lindberg also served as the Police Academy’s spokesman against sexual violence. The Uppsala police force that is now investigating Assange either failed to or refused to investigate effectively the sadistic rapist with whom they worked every day.
In other words, the purported magical Swedish kingdom of female sexual equality, empowerment, and robust institutional support for rape victims – a land, conjured by Swedish prosecutors, that holds much of the global media in thrall – simply does not exist.
In the Assange case, the Swedish police supported the accusers in legally unprecedented ways – for example, by allowing them to tell their stories together and by allowing testimony from a boyfriend. But other alleged victims of gender-based abuse, sometimes in life-threatening circumstances, typically receive very different treatment. In particular, according to WAVE, a pan-European consortium of service providers for rape and sexual-abuse survivors, when migrants, who comprise 13.8% of Sweden’s population, report rape and abuse, they face high systemic hurdles in even telling their stories to police – including longstanding linguistic barriers in communicating with them at all.
Likewise, Swedish intake centers for victims of male violence are woefully underfunded – like all support services for rape and abuse victims across Europe and North America – leaving many women who face threats to their safety and that of their children waiting for unavailable places in shelters. When I emailed the Rape Crisis support institute in Uppsala, listed by the global rape-crisis organization RAINN, I received an automatic reply saying that the facility was temporarily closed.
So, for most raped Swedish women, the shelters are full, the hotlines inactive, and the police selectively look the other way – that is, unless they are busy chasing down a globally famous suspect.
We have been here before. Last year, when my left-wing colleagues were virtually unanimous in believing the New York Police Department’s narrative of a certain victim and a guilty-before-due-process rapist, I made the same call – to the local rape-crisis center. There, Harriet Lesser, who works every day with victims whose alleged attacker is not the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, confirmed that the official support shown for the victim – in advance of any investigation – was indeed unprecedented.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that Assange, much less Dominique Strauss-Kahn, committed no crime against women. Rather, Assange’s case, as was true with Strauss-Kahn’s, is being handled so differently from how the authorities handle all other rape cases that a corrupted standard of justice clearly is being applied. These aberrations add insult to the injury of women, undefended and without justice, who have been raped in the “normal” course of events – by violent nobodies.
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BBC
Sweden's rape rate under the spotlight- The Julian Assange extradition case has put Sweden's relatively high incidence of rape under the spotlight. But can such statistics be reliably compared from one country to another?
Australia and Canada.
Official figures from the United Nations show that there were 17 kidnaps per 100,000 people in Australia in 2010 and 12.7 in Canada.
That compares with only 0.6 in Colombia and 1.1 in Mexico.
So why haven't we heard any of these horror stories? Are people being grabbed off the street in Sydney and Toronto, while the world turns a blind eye?
No, the high numbers of kidnapping cases in these two countries are explained by the fact that parental disputes over child custody are included in the figures.
If one parent takes a child for the weekend, and the other parent objects and calls the police, the incident will be recorded as a kidnapping, according to Enrico Bisogno, a statistician with the United Nations.
Comparing crime rates across countries is fraught with difficulties - this is well known among criminologists and statisticians, less so among journalists and commentators.
Sweden has the highest rape rate in Europe, author Naomi Wolf said on the BBC's Newsnight programme recently. She was commenting on the case of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who is fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden over rape and sexual assault allegations that he denies.
This was three times higher than the number of cases in the same year in Sweden's next-door neighbour, Norway, and twice the rate in the United States and the UK. It was more than 30 times the number in India, which recorded about two offences per 100,000 people.
On the face of it, it would seem Sweden is a much more dangerous place than these other countries.
But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries' records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.
"In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.
"So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record - one victim, one type of crime, one record."
The thing is, the number of reported rapes has been going up in Sweden - it's almost trebled in just the last seven years. In 2003, about 2,200 offences were reported by the police, compared to nearly 6,000 in 2010.
So something's going on.
But Klara Selin says the statistics don't represent a major crime epidemic, rather a shift in attitudes. The public debate about this sort of crime in Sweden over the past two decades has had the effect of raising awareness, she says, and encouraging women to go to the police if they have been attacked.
The police have also made efforts to improve their handling of cases, she suggests, though she doesn't deny that there has been some real increase in the number of attacks taking place - a concern also outlined in an Amnesty International report in 2010.
"There might also be some increase in actual crime because of societal changes. Due to the internet, for example, it's much easier these days to meet somebody, just the same evening if you want to. Also, alcohol consumption has increased quite a lot during this period.
"But the major explanation is partly that people go to the police more often, but also the fact that in 2005 there has been reform in the sex crime legislation, which made the legal definition of rape much wider than before."
The change in law meant that cases where the victim was asleep or intoxicated are now included in the figures. Previously they'd been recorded as another category of crime.
So an on-the-face-of-it international comparison of rape statistics can be misleading.
Botswana has the highest rate of recorded attacks - 92.9 per 100,000 people -
but a total of 63 countries don't submit any statistics, including South Africa, where a survey three years ago showed that one in four men questioned admitted to rape.
In 2010, an Amnesty International report highlighted that sexual violence happens in every single country, and yet the official figures show that some countries like Hong Kong and Mongolia have zero cases reported.
Evidently, women in some countries are much less likely to report an attack than in others and are much less likely to have their complaint recorded.
UN statistician Enrico Bisogno says surveys suggest that as few as one in 10 cases are ever reported to the police, in many countries.
"We often present the situation as kind of an iceberg where really what we can see is just the tip while the rest is below the sea level. It remains below the radar of the law enforcement agencies," he says.
Naomi Wolf has also written that Sweden has the lowest conviction rate in Europe.
She was relying on statistics from a nine-year-old report, which calculated percentage conviction rates based on the number of offences recorded by the police and the number of convictions. But this is a problematic way of analysing statistics, as several offences could be committed by one pers
The United Nations holds official statistics on the number of convictions for rape per 100,000 people and actually, by that measure, Sweden has the highest number of convictions per capita in Europe, bar Russia. In 2010, 3.7 convictions were achieved per 100,000 population.
Though it's still the case, as Wolf pointed out to the BBC, that women in Sweden report a high number of offences - and only a small number of rapists are punished.
So there's a lot that official statistics don't tell us. They certainly don't reveal the real number of rapes that happen in Sweden, or any other country. And they don't give a clear view of which countries have worse crime rates than others.
Rape is particularly complex, but you'd think it would be straightforward to analyse murder rates across different countries - just count up the dead bodies, and compare and contrast.
If only, says Enrico Bisogno. "For example, if I punch somebody and the person eventually dies, some countries can consider that as an intentional murder, others as a manslaughter. Or in some countries, dowry killings are coded separately because there is separate legislation."
What's more, a comparison of murder rates between developed and less developed countries may tell you as much about health as crime levels, according to Professor Chris Lewis, a criminologist from Portsmouth University in the UK.
The statistics are to some unknown degree complicated by the fact that you're more likely to survive an attack in a town where you're found quickly and taken to a hospital that's well-equipped.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19592372
Stuart Carvalhais
Desenho de 1923, publicado na "A BATALHA" em Dezembro, da autoria de Stuart Carvalhais
Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique
Lourenço Marques: aspécto do sobêrbo Cais Gorjão com os seus grandes armazens para guarda de mercadorias», em João dos Santos Rufino, Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique, vol. I («Lourenço Marques. Panoramas da Cidade»), Lourenço Marques, 1929 [recorte de fotografia panorâmica].
Delegação Aduaneira de Ressano Garcia. "Magaizas" que regressam das minas do Rand, dando a bagagem ao manifesto», em João dos Santos Rufino, Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique, vol. IV («Distrito de Lourenço Marques. Indústrias, Agricultura, áspectos das circunscrições, etc.»), Lourenço Marques, 1929.
Delegação Aduaneira de Ressano Garcia. "Magaizas" que regressam das minas do Rand, dando a bagagem ao manifesto», em João dos Santos Rufino, Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique, vol. IV («Distrito de Lourenço Marques. Indústrias, Agricultura, áspectos das circunscrições, etc.»), Lourenço Marques, 1929.Inspecção médica aos indígenas que vão trabalhar nas minas do Rand», em João dos Santos Rufino, Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique, vol. IV («Distrito de Lourenço Marques. Indústrias, Agricultura, áspectos das circunscrições, etc.»), Lourenço Marques, 1929.
Arregimentados e tratados como gado, finalmente humilhados na vistoria médica antes de embarcarem no comboio da estação fronteiriça de Ressano Garcia, centenas de milhares de homens moçambicanos rumavam às minas do Transvaal e do Rand. Desde finais do século XIX que os governos da África do Sul e de Portugal mantinham um acordo de fornecimento de mão-de-obra africana para as minas de ouro e diamantes no Transvaal e no Rand. Sucessivamente ratificado durante toda a presença colonial em Moçambique, o acordo previa, como contrapartida para Portugal, o pagamento em barras de ouro. Todos os anos um comboio sul-africano, fortemente escoltado, chegava à estação de caminho-de-ferro de Lourenço Marques com um carregamento de ouro que era, de imediato, embarcado para Lisboa. Só assim se explica que em 1974, no fim do império colonial, Portugal possuísse, nos cofres do Banco de Portugal, a 16.ª maior reserva de ouro do mundo.
Arregimentados e tratados como gado, finalmente humilhados na vistoria médica antes de embarcarem no comboio da estação fronteiriça de Ressano Garcia, centenas de milhares de homens moçambicanos rumavam às minas do Transvaal e do Rand. Desde finais do século XIX que os governos da África do Sul e de Portugal mantinham um acordo de fornecimento de mão-de-obra africana para as minas de ouro e diamantes no Transvaal e no Rand. Sucessivamente ratificado durante toda a presença colonial em Moçambique, o acordo previa, como contrapartida para Portugal, o pagamento em barras de ouro. Todos os anos um comboio sul-africano, fortemente escoltado, chegava à estação de caminho-de-ferro de Lourenço Marques com um carregamento de ouro que era, de imediato, embarcado para Lisboa. Só assim se explica que em 1974, no fim do império colonial, Portugal possuísse, nos cofres do Banco de Portugal, a 16.ª maior reserva de ouro do mundo.
O vapor Loanda da Companhia Colonial de Navegação começou por ser baptizado de Wurzburg em 1901, quando foi lançado à água no porto de Bremen, mandado construir pela armadora alemã Nord Deutscher Loyd (NDL).
Com o desenho de prancha convencional da época, ou seja, superestrutura central de dois conveses, única chaminé, dois mastros, seis porões de carga, distribuídos à popa (ré) e à proa (frente) possuía motor a vapor de tríplice expansão com acoplamento a um único hélice e modestas acomodações para apenas 30 passageiros em segunda classe e um milhar em steerage, ou seja, nos porões. Poder-se-ia dizer, portanto, que acomodava 1030 passageiro, sendo a noção de comodidade ali muito relativa.
De facto, os porões destinavam-se primariamente a carga e foi nessas funções que cumpriu os seus primeriros anos, rumando aos portos da América do Sul, nomeadamente Santos, onde carregava sobretudo café.
Em 1914, ao eclodir da I Guerra Mundial, encontrava-se em pleno Atlântico Central, ao largo de Cabo Verde. A 29 de Julho de 1914 o governo alemão enviara por TSF instruções a todos os navios civis alemães para regressarem de imediato à Alemanha ou demandarem portos neutros. Uma vez que Portugal ainda não se envolvera no conflito, o Wurzburg acolheu-se, em 3 de Agosto, no porto do Mindelo (São Vicente).
Entre Fevereiro e Março de 1916, ao envolver-se no conflito, Portugal toma posse de todos os quase 70 navios alemães que se tinham acolhido nos seus portos, entre eles o Wurzburg que é então re-baptizado de São Vicente e entregue à gestão da armadora estatal Transportadora Marítima do Estado (TEM).
No ano seguinte, em 1917, foi arrendado ao governo britânico para ser utilizado numa variedade de rotas ligadas às operações de guerra em curso, sobretudo no Mediterrâneo Oriental.
Findo o conflito, em Novembro de 1918, o vapor português São Vicente foi subfretado às autoridades francesas para repatriar tropas, permanecendo nessa função até Outubro de 1920, quando foi devolvido a Portugal, à TME. Estava praticamente inoperacional, desgastado pelo uso e precária manutenção.
A partir de 1921 o São Vicente iniciou, após as devidas reparações, o serviço de passageiros da TME entre Lisboa e Nova Iorque, via escala nos Açores. Permaneceu nessa carreira até 1925, quando foi vendido à Companhia Colonial de Navegação, que lhe deu o nome de Loanda.
Com outros vapores da CCN, como o Amboim, o Guiné e o João Belo, passou a assegurar as linhas de África.
Manteve-se nesse serviço até 1937, ano em que a Companhia Colonial de Navegação começou a substituir os seus vapores por navios com outra motricidade, com maior viabilidade económica e mais rápidos.
No início de 1938 foi vendido a uma sucateira italiana, que o fez desmantelar no porto de Génova.
Com o desenho de prancha convencional da época, ou seja, superestrutura central de dois conveses, única chaminé, dois mastros, seis porões de carga, distribuídos à popa (ré) e à proa (frente) possuía motor a vapor de tríplice expansão com acoplamento a um único hélice e modestas acomodações para apenas 30 passageiros em segunda classe e um milhar em steerage, ou seja, nos porões. Poder-se-ia dizer, portanto, que acomodava 1030 passageiro, sendo a noção de comodidade ali muito relativa.
De facto, os porões destinavam-se primariamente a carga e foi nessas funções que cumpriu os seus primeriros anos, rumando aos portos da América do Sul, nomeadamente Santos, onde carregava sobretudo café.
Em 1914, ao eclodir da I Guerra Mundial, encontrava-se em pleno Atlântico Central, ao largo de Cabo Verde. A 29 de Julho de 1914 o governo alemão enviara por TSF instruções a todos os navios civis alemães para regressarem de imediato à Alemanha ou demandarem portos neutros. Uma vez que Portugal ainda não se envolvera no conflito, o Wurzburg acolheu-se, em 3 de Agosto, no porto do Mindelo (São Vicente).
Entre Fevereiro e Março de 1916, ao envolver-se no conflito, Portugal toma posse de todos os quase 70 navios alemães que se tinham acolhido nos seus portos, entre eles o Wurzburg que é então re-baptizado de São Vicente e entregue à gestão da armadora estatal Transportadora Marítima do Estado (TEM).
No ano seguinte, em 1917, foi arrendado ao governo britânico para ser utilizado numa variedade de rotas ligadas às operações de guerra em curso, sobretudo no Mediterrâneo Oriental.
Findo o conflito, em Novembro de 1918, o vapor português São Vicente foi subfretado às autoridades francesas para repatriar tropas, permanecendo nessa função até Outubro de 1920, quando foi devolvido a Portugal, à TME. Estava praticamente inoperacional, desgastado pelo uso e precária manutenção.
A partir de 1921 o São Vicente iniciou, após as devidas reparações, o serviço de passageiros da TME entre Lisboa e Nova Iorque, via escala nos Açores. Permaneceu nessa carreira até 1925, quando foi vendido à Companhia Colonial de Navegação, que lhe deu o nome de Loanda.
Com outros vapores da CCN, como o Amboim, o Guiné e o João Belo, passou a assegurar as linhas de África.
Manteve-se nesse serviço até 1937, ano em que a Companhia Colonial de Navegação começou a substituir os seus vapores por navios com outra motricidade, com maior viabilidade económica e mais rápidos.
No início de 1938 foi vendido a uma sucateira italiana, que o fez desmantelar no porto de Génova.
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Secondly, Professor Berger reflects at some length on Yiddish, but he neglects to mention Ladino which in fact has a far richer linguistic heritage than even Yiddish does. While Ladino was based on Spanish (much as Yiddish was based on German) it was also heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish and even Greek. Almost 100,000 people in Israel (virtually all of them of Separdic decent) consider it their native language. Ladino is still spoken in Spain, Turkey and the United States and ad with Yiddish, there have been recent attempts to revive the language.
Than you for very interesting post. I happen to be from Bukowina’s capital Chernotsy (now Chernivtsi or Chernivci, between WWI and WWII: Chernauti, and before Chernowitz). Unfortunately, during the soviet time the multilingual culture disappeared. I knew though uneducated people who did speak 5 or 6 languages.
Recently I’ve heard someone calling pre-soviet Chernovtsy a fish that spoke 5 languages. So yea, you are correct.
Thanks again!
Uzh
For a quick taste of what Ladino music sounds like, try this link,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sKXXPzYbH0
Pinker’s book expounds on Noam Chomsky’s theory about “universal grammar.” To be fair, at this point to call Chomsky’s thesis a theory doesn’t do it justice; it’s more like Darwin’s theory of evolution-that is to say an accepted fact by anyone other than the preternaturally dimwitted. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Chomsky’s thesis suggests that the ability to learn grammar (which is the building block of all language) is hard-wired into the human brain which is evident from the fact that children learn to speak without being taught. Chomsky started a whole generation of linguists on the search for the universal properties that all human languages share. To the extent that Pinker disagrees with Chomsky at all, Pinker believes even more doggedly than Chomsky does about the biological imperative when it comes to language. Since Chomsky developed his thesis and Pinker wrote his book, the genomics revolution has validated a number of points that they made. Several human genes associated with language have been identified and disorders in speech development in children have now been associated with a number of these genetic variants. For those who are interested, the most important gene regulating human language development is called “FOXP2.”
Given that there is nothing that unites the human species more than the fact that we, alone amongst the species inhabiting the earth, possess the language instinct (Pinker’s book demolishes the idea that animals such as birds, dolphins or non-human primates have real language) it is somewhat surprising that differences over language have proven so divisive.
Perhaps the only thing that has excited more rancor throughout human history than language is religion. This fact puts me in mind of an explanation I once heard during an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez where the great author was asked how he explained why the animosity between co-religionists like Roman Catholics and Protestants or Shia and Sunni was more likely to lead to violence than animosity between members of different religions (e.g. Hindu and Christian). Garcia-Marquez’s explanation was as elegant as it was simple; the problem he said was that they all read from the “same book.” Religious people who take their cues from different books have much less to fight about.
All of this brings me back to Professor Berger’s remark about the Anglophones in Quebec. I don’t think that there is any question that the purpose of the Quebec language laws was to ethnically cleanse Anglophone speakers from the Province. The French majority in the Province, which overwhelmingly supported the legislation, wanted what all linguistic chauvinists want; they wanted their Anglophone neighbors to “convert” and speak French or to leave. Like the conversos in Spain, many Anglophones chose to conduct their business in French while furtively speaking English at home; many left the Province for good. Either way, the French chauvinists got what they wanted, but only partially.
After achieving their linguistic hegemony in the Province, the next goal of the many Québécois was independence from Canada. For a time, it seemed that the political party enfranchised to accomplish this goal, the Parti Québécois (PQ), might achieve independence. Ironically, once the English language was practically banished from Quebec, this caused the nationalist fervor amongst the Province’s French speaking citizens to abate. Previous referendums on the issue all failed and for the past 15 years the PQ was out of power in Quebec. Just a few weeks ago, the PQ was voted back into power but without any mandate to seek independence from Canada. Once the French in Quebec could bully others into speaking their language, their zest for political independence dissipated.
Of course, the French are not the only linguistic chauvinists in the world. The Turks don’t much like the Kurds speaking their native tongue; the fact that Turks and Kurds are both mostly Sunni Muslims hasn’t lessened the distaste that both populations have for each other, largely over the issue of language. In Japan, during the 1970s when the Japanese economy was ascendant, it was not uncommon to hear Japanese intellectuals and businessmen attribute their superior economic performance to the supposedly unique way in which the Japanese language shaped the Japanese intellect. Of course, now that Japan has become an economic laggard for the past 20 years, we never hear Japanese attribute their economic failings to the inadequacies of their language.
Still, there does seem to be something unique about the French; in a world full of linguistic chauvinists they always seem to ascend to the top of the pyramid. In fact, the political unification of France was very much about the French language crowding out and then destroying local languages and dialects spoken in what were to become parts of the French periphery. A wonderful book that describes this history in some detail is Graham Robb’s, “The Discovery of France.” At $9.99 on the Kindle, it is also a steal and well worth a look,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Discovery-France-Historical-Geography/dp/0393333647
In other words, translated from Yiddish to English, the punch line is that she is speaking to her son in Jewish so that he won’t forget he’s a Jew.
Berger describes the stated purpose is to unite all Middle East Christians in “one strong nation.” Cognitively besieged by Arabic and Hebrew languages as what might be called “hegemonic languages,” this Christian minority wants to re-institute Aramaic as a way to re-create what Berger would call a “Christian plausibility structure.”
This is ironic in that the New Testament world and language was Greek.
In Jerry Dell Ehrlich’s book “Plato’s Gift to Christianity: The Gentile Preparation for and the Making of the Christian Faith” (2001) the author asks:
“Why, if Jesus and all the disciples were Jewish, is the entire New Testament written in Greek?”
“Why within 100 years of Jesus’ reported religious ministry were all the leaders of the Christian Church Greek speaking?”
Ehrlich makes a case that Jesus was a “Hellenized” or Greek Jew, not a Palestinian Jew. Ancient Palestine was a Greek state or occupied territory. The names of Jesus’ family and his Disciples are mostly Greek. The Herodian dynasty ruled Palestine from 37 BC to AD 70, with the life pf Jesus exactly at the peak of this 107-year dynasty. The lineage of Herod the Great had mainly Greek names. His wives had Greek names. Herod’s grandfather was a Greek army general or “Strategos.” A large proportion of the names in the Christian New Testament are Greek, not Jewish or Palestinian. Ehrlich writes that the name “Jesus” is of Greek origin.
According to Ehrlich, the occupation of Jesus as a reported carpenter or stone mason could not have occurred in Galilee, but in the City of Sepphoris, built during the years of Jesus’ life by Herod Antipas, the Greek son of Herod the Great. In Sepphoris, a 4,000 seat theater was built in which Greek plays were performed and Greek philosophy was taught. This theater was the largest public works project of its time and locale. As a builder, Jesus may even have worked on this nearly project. Thus, Jesus may have come into daily conversation with Greeks.
An Ehrlich point out the very word “synagogue” is a Greek word. And since Jesus is reported on nine occasions by his Disciples to have read from the Jewish scriptures in the synagogue, and the Jews in Palestine mostly used Septuagint Greek, Ehrlich believes he must have known Greek.
Jesus is referred to as a “teacher” over 50 times in the Christian Gospels. But in the entire New Testament only three Aramaic expressions are attributed to him and everything else is in Greek.
The Letters of Paul the Apostle were written before the Christian Gospels. And the Pauline birthplace of Christianity was the City of Antioch, not Jerusalem.
That the modern Greek state is now bankrupt and a dependent ward of the European Union may be why a Christian enclave in the Arab section of Israel may desire to revive Aramaic rather than Greek for its community language.
Corrections to the above comment:
“As a builder, Jesus may have worked on this NEARBY project.”
“AS Ehrlich POINTS out the very word “synagogue” is a Greek word.”
Radical sociolinguistic constructionism, which holds that there is no mind-independent reality, is obviously not interested in listening for signals of transcendence from what Nietzsche dismissed as worlds behind the scene. For constructionists, the point is to engineer a better world through language-police enforcement of politically correct language. (I recall a sociology textbook which denounced the military’s attempt to normalize war with terms like collateral damage and neutralization of enemy assets. Having finished the topic of linguistic spin, the text took up the topic of abortion and noted the case of a woman who experienced unnecessary guilt because she believed she had killed her baby—rather than removed unwanted “products of conception”!)
Cognitive scientists like Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate) have properly ridiculed standard sociological nonsense about Eskimos constructing snow with words. But, refreshing as it is to have fellow-traveling scientists debunking the idea that humans and the whole world are blank slates, theists can travel only so far with those who ignore philosophical anthropology and view language simply as a collection of modules in the “adapted mind.” The language “instinct” cannot explain a God who speaks or the responses of creatures made in the image of God. Language, like consciousness, remains a miracle, despite the claims of cognitive scientists to have “explained” both.
Berger’s inclination to support a multiplicity of distinctive language windows is sound. If language does not actually construct reality, there is not much danger of getting stuck in the “wrong” language. As Archie Bunker famously put it, God speaks all five languages. And, of course, language differences are not just between languages but within them. Chaucer’s English is not ours. Language change never stops.
But if laissez faire is the best language policy, it is not only unwise to police language but perhaps also to artificially preserve it. Spoken language windows are more life-enhancing than dead language windows—or dying language windows. As a current resident of Oklahoma, I frequently encounter efforts to preserve Indian languages that have dwindling numbers of speakers. The multicultural presupposition seems to be that if culture constructs selves and language constructs culture, then letting a language die out is tantamount to genocide. But if a language is dying not because of language suppression and the associated hostility to its speakers, it may be possible for values acquired in one language to receive expression in another. If I may be permitted to expand the discussion to include the “language” of ballet, I would note the disproportionate number of world class Indian ballerinas from Oklahoma. I recently attended a memorial tribute for one of them, Moscelyne Larkin, daughter of a Russian mother and Indian father. As a child she hated ballet lessons—“Indian children like to run free, not be stuck doing barre exercises.” But then she discovered that all that discipline vastly enhanced her capacity for self-expression– including her Indian self. Linguists speak of “subtractive bilingualism” when oppressed people are forced to speak the oppressor’s language (and their own on the sly). The additional language diminishes their selfhood. I think it is safe to say that the Indian ballerinas experienced no subtractive bilingualism when they danced Swan Lake. The point is that the larger world was receptive to their contributions. They did not have to choose between being Indians and being ballerinas. Dancing Swan Lake was one way of being Indian.
So, in accordance with laissez faire language policy, I would not oppose efforts to revive Aramaic or preserve Chickasaw or hold a war dance festival. But linguistic ethnocentrism is not our greatest human failing. Ranking higher is our reluctance to say what needs to be said in any language.
I would like to offer a clarification: The Maronite Catholic Church is not ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome.” It never entered into schism. Also, Melkites as they are referred to in the piece can only be Catholic, as their Church of the see of Antioch came into communion with Rome in the 18th century, after a split with the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch.
Both are referred to as Eastern Churches.