Egyptian Scribbles: disco boats

Wednesday, 7 November 2007

Disco Boats... got to love them!

Most people who have never spent time in Cairo probably imagine the Nile as a mysterious body of water that flows silently and steadily through the heart of the capital. Think again. I’m afraid bull-rushes and fellucas (sail boats) aren’t the predominant sight on the Cairo section of the Nile. Instead, the big rage is the “disco boat.” As you can see from the photograph, the ‘disco boat’ is basically a floating pile of fairy lights with loud speakers strapped to the sides. All manner of terrible Arabic music blasts from these boats, adding to the constant noise that bombards me on my walk home. My mum is visiting me in February. I bet she can’t wait to join me for some floating disco moves…

Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."