Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 November 22

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November 22

France racism between Arabs and Africans

Is this true that there was racism against African Francophonies from the Arabs who were from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon and Syrian such as Arabs would never pray behind a black man who is leading the prayer? If so, when and how it overcome? -- 01:17, 22 November 2014 70.31.16.33

This is very complicated but is not at once merely a question of racism however. "It is forbidden to describe God": see Problem of religious language and Theological noncognitivism. --Askedonty (talk) 08:27, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

what is libyan "Nakabwe Shwahabilia" is it real?

the group is supposedly a belligerent in the infobox of 2014 Libyan Civil War i wondered if you know what that group with a new flag is i cant find anything about the group or leader on google, so what is it and is it real? 81.235.159.105 (talk) 12:53, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

This info was added by another sockpuppet of Caradoc29105, a chronic hoax vandal here. Please do not take it seriously. Fitzcarmalan (talk) 17:35, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Private Police Forces

Are there any territorial police forces in the world that are privately operated, as opposed to publicly? I know that, for example, England and Wales have the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and the British Transport Police, both of whom receive significant parts of their funding from private companies but they are not 'real' police forces, in the sense that they do not undertake the activities normally associated with the police. In E&W, the 'real' police are the 43 Home Office, or territorial, forces, and their counterparts across the world are the ones that I am interested in. Also, in the UK at the moment, one of the big debates in politics is the privatisation of the National Health Service. Why is privatisation of the police not a similar question? They're both important services that the public need to be provided with; why is one seen as so much more amenable to being privately operated, and one isn't? All relevant comments welcome. Thanks. asyndeton talk 16:14, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

We have articles Private police and Private police in the United States. These aren't great articles but perhaps have some examples worth considering. But there also seems to be a definition problem here, the later article, and to some extent the former, seems be using private police primarily to refer to police who are privately funded rather than simply those who are privately operated (even if still publicly funded). The article even says "private companies to whom police work is contracted out by the government would still be considered public police, since they are funded by government, and private security officers would be considered private police". I don't live in the UK, but while there may be some calls for greater requirements for private funding AFAIK the privatisation talk has mostly been about pay public funds to private services instead of the current public funding a public service to do the same thing (perhaps with the claim it will lead to a greater requirement for private and public funding). And this also seems to be at least partially what you are referring to. Still some examples may be worth looking in to. E.g. if you look at the talk page, there is [1]. Nil Einne (talk) 17:16, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

We have a template Template:UK private and military police forces which may help you with your first question. DuncanHill (talk) 17:19, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

(ec) Assigning police power to a body outside of state control would call into question the legitimacy of the power of the state - the fundamental basis of social organization above the level of the tribe. If the state gave up it's responsibility to wield power the state itself would fail. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:30, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

British Transport Police do undertake normal police duties but just on railway property. I wouldn't call them a private police force. They're funded by the DfT and rail operators. 90.192.116.60 (talk) 18:18, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

The Civil Nuclear Constabulary could not be considered private either, they are just a specialised armed police force controlled by the Civil Nuclear Police Authority which is part of the government Deparment of Energy and Climatic Control. It is funded by the nuclear industry but that doesnt make it private, the police officers have all the powers of any police constable. MilborneOne (talk) 18:45, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Part of the issue, as noted above, is that law-enforcement and healthcare are fundamentally different. Law enforcement is rather necessary for the laws to have a purpose, and a state that lets someone else enforce the laws isn't really controlling anything. Healthcare, on the other hand, is fundamentally irrelevant to the nature of a state; the NHS is an add-ons, since a previous UK government decided (and later ones have agreed) that society will function better with state-operated healthcare, but private healthcare (or no healthcare at all) won't eat away at the basic function of the state. See below discussion about post-apocalyptic societies: take away the police, and you're in Locke's pre-social contract situation where the life of men is nasty, brutish, short, and various other adjectives, or you're in a warlord-type scenario, where the people who are officially in power are unaffiliated with the real state, the entity that is running things on the ground. In the latter scenario, the private people who run everything are eating away at the official government, and if they themselves didn't have people to carry out police functions, they'd get taken over by whoever else did have people to carry out police functions. Nyttend (talk) 22:16, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

In any case, the banks would still work. Not a huge step to running a state from running a bank. Instead of appointing ministers for fixed terms, they would negotiate partnerships for fixed terms. As long as the private police wanted to bank's money (i.e. all the money) to retain value, they'd enforce the bank's regulations, keeping everything nice and aspirational. The takeover could theoretically go so smoothly that it's already finalized before anyone notices a difference. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:50, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

• San Francisco Patrol Special Police may be an interesting read. --Jayron32 00:46, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Postapocalyptic trust and the origin of state and hierarchy

There is a common trope in television where two individuals or small groups of individuals, let's call them A and B, meet up in a postapocalyptic society. They are each armed with a formidable assortment of zombie/mutant/alien/Russian-killing weapons, and each carry a lean and precious trove of canned goods. It is in their mutual interest to cooperate, but they each suspect the other group may simply want to kill them to take their stuff, or for some other reason. The way this is often resolved is that group A manages to achieve a position of clear tactical advantage that forces group B to surrender because resistance is futile. Group A then spares Group B's lives and returns their possessions, thus proving that, at least to a zero order approximation, they can be trusted.

Now this doesn't work in modern society, except maybe within the context of sexual bondage practices, because of course you assume anyone pointing a gun at you is more dangerous than someone who doesn't, even if they do it just to let you go. But I'm wondering if it has a role in the process by which governments and hierarchy originate, whether in the pure form I outline above, or in a more compromised way where group B is released under some terms of submission, such as giving up some of their best weapons, so that group A can also sort-of trust group B because they know they have the superior firepower.

Can you name a political science term to describe the sort of "trust through firepower" described in the first paragraph, or reference the idea of analyzing the origin of states in terms of some sort of game theory of trust? Wnt (talk) 20:57, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

I encountered the overall idea elsewhere (in a source I can no longer lay my hands on), but Max Weber defines governments (though more accurately, modern governments) through their monopolization of legitimate violence. That is, in line with Hobbes's Leviathan, everyone hands over their "right" to honor-killings, "taking back what's ours," lynch mobs, and other forms of revenge violence to an authority that will handle revenge for victims with the least amount of disruption possible to the rest of society.

This is only one theory, however, and doesn't cover all forms of government. David Hume would point out that as great as government by consent would be, it lacks a historical basis. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:12, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Actually, what I'm describing doesn't involve a monopoly on violence. The two groups, even if united, would still be in a dangerous world. And it could happen that later on Group B finds a way to get the drop on Group A, and does so simply to prove that it too can be trusted, as well as to reassert its power. (of course, Group A wouldn't allow this voluntarily, because there's no benefit to be had in finding out group B can't be trusted by doing it the hard way) A variant on this sort of reciprocal trust comes up I think in Beowulf or some similar such work, where warriors trust one another because on many occasions they have come to the other's aid in battle, and had they not done so (or betrayed their comrade) then no one need have known. But of course if group A gets the drop on group B, C, D, and E, and each time returns their possessions, then even left by themselves people from the latter four groups would see no idea more obvious than trusting group A to guard a shared resource they are able to get hold of, rather than one of their own. Wnt (talk) 21:22, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

This question leads one to a LOT of threads within the context of political science and political philosophy. Weber, cited above, is part of a long line of thinkers who deal with such notions as the social contract and the consent of the governed and the like. The specific situation you site reminds me vaguely of the novel Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, you may find it interesting. --Jayron32 01:39, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm, the thing is, normally I get the feeling that violence is a departure from social contract theory, whereas when I think of it this way it seems like violence (or the potential to impose violence) is an essential feature. For example, suppose A and B talk over the radio and A offers B a social contract where they give up their heaviest weapons, pay a 20% tax, and receive the benefits of Pax Romana and a monopoly on violence. Well, B might turn this down, not merely because it is a bad deal but because they don't know what the deal really is -- they might give up the 50-caliber and next thing they know the men are being strangled while the women are auctioned off. But if A and B should come across one another and get into a pitched battle, even if a substantial fraction of B is killed, the remaining members who heed a call to "surrender or die" seeing no other option then learn - know - that they aren't killed out of hand after that, but taxed and disarmed like A said all along and sent on their way. At that point it becomes possible for them to weigh the "social contract" (and the unsubtle blackmail backing it) as a genuine proposal. Wnt (talk) 05:24, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Social contracts are not offered explicitly. The notion of a social contract is that it is agreed upon tacitly by the people involved. The ruling class agrees to not abuse their subjects, and the subjects agree to not revolt. No groups, in history, have ever sat down and actually written a "social contract" like this. The social contract is a heuristic device used by social scientists to describe the relationship between the rulers and the ruled; it is an attempt to describe why functional society functions at all: the ruling elite control the power and access to the best weapons, but the underclass always outnumbers them to a ridiculous amount. The social contract just means "We agree to rule you justly, if you agree to obey the laws we've set out for you" While the notion of a social contract was made explicit in the Enlightenment writings of people like Jean Jacques Rousseau, the idea stretches back many hundreds of years before that; Plato toyed with the notion in The Republic for example. A social contract does not preclude the use of power or the threat of force; Thomas Hobbes argues for a strong state which uses its force to maintain social control in Leviathan for example. --Jayron32 13:24, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Right, so it's a thought experiment for judging what is reasonable behaviour. If the behaviour was proposed in a contract negotiation, would it be in the other side's collective long-term interest to agree? 213.205.251.135 (talk) 08:35, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Weber's definition is probably the worst. "State" and "government" are two separate things, with the former meaning something like "country". — Melab±1 ☎ 21:21, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

US courts, definition of derivative work

Looking for any US court case that hinges on a copyrighted work that's incorporated into a larger work, without changes to the original document, and decides whether the final result is a DW or not. For example, a newspaper uses someone else's image (with permission) in an article, without changing the image, and the court decides that the finished article is a derivative work (because it incorporates the image) or that it's not (because they just threw in the image, without modifying it). This is just a matter of curiosity (I'm not looking for advice, for example) that arises because I noticed that many of Ram-Man's uploads (example) warn reusers that putting his images on their websites causes the websites to be derivative works subject to the viral nature of the GFDL. Also curious because I wonder what people could do with CC-by-noderivatives images (expressly prohibited on Wikipedia) without a fair-use justification, if simply reproducing the image without modifications is still considered the production of a derivative work. Again, I just want to see a court opinion (or another discussion of the subject written by legal scholars) that answers the question of whether the final result is a derivative work. Nyttend (talk) 22:07, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

I am incredulous that whiting out text on a U.S. government work grants Ram-Man any copyright. —Nelson Ricardo (talk) 04:04, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

• See Legal issues surrounding music sampling for court cases regarding sampling. Your example (with permission) establishes no DW rights for the licensing owner, since he allowed the use, presuambly for consideration. Otherwise Getty Images would own pretty much every periodical in the US. μηδείς (talk) 06:12, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Why did some oblasts keep their Soviet names?

Hi. After the fall of the USSR, cities and towns all over Russia reverted to their pre-Soviet names. Not so oblasts, so people still live in Leningrad oblast or Sverdlovsk oblast. Why? Thanks for your answers.--Leptictidium (mt) 22:08, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

This is not entirely true for cities either, e.g. Kaliningrad. As to why the oblasts kept their name I can only guess that it is a bureaucratic affair. If today's oblasts have the same limits as the Soviet oblasts but different limits from the oblasts of the Russian Empire then it would have been a headache to go back to the old names or invent new ones. But this is just a guess. I'm also guessing there's probably no document in existence giving a general reason: "We're gonna keep the Soviet names because..." but that's until I'm proven wrong of course. Contact Basemetal here 23:48, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

what pre-Soviet names?

Leningrad Oblast (...) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast). It was established on August 1, 1927, (...)

Sverdlovsk_Oblast: Established: January 17, 1934

Asmrulz (talk) 16:25, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. But what the OP was asking was clear, if clumsily worded. The OP clearly wanted to know why the names of oblasts that had obvious connotations with the communist regimes were not changed one way or another. Contact Basemetal here 16:52, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

• I'd point out that changing a name can be contentious. The town I grew up in tried to change its name for years since the Post Office wouldn't assign it its own separate zip code, given that its then and still current name was the same as several other towns in the state. No proposed candidate name ever achieved a majority, and this issue has gone on for at least four decades. Second, historical revisionism is much more common in revolutions like the French which go from a traditional to a radical regime, for which see the French Revolutionary Calendar as an example.

The fall of the Soviet Union was not a bloody, radical movement. There is also the fact that although it is in name a federation, in 2001 Putin assumed the power to dismiss regional legislatures and appoint governors: Putin's "Reforms" and Russia's Governors], basically removing any power or incentive the regions might have to resist or act beyond the will of the autocrat.

Note also the prevalence of British names in the US, especially in the area of the original colonies. Americans felt no need, for example, to rename Georgia while fighting King George. μηδείς (talk) 19:43, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Reverting to an older name is a bit easier than coming up with an entirely new name. In the case of the newly independent US even that apparently never happened. New York did not revert to being New Amsterdam (was this even ever proposed? this specific case is clearly different in other ways too). The case of Stalingrad is peculiar. Despite the name being attached to a momentous victory of the Soviet Union, it was changed while the Soviet Union was still in existence as a result of destalinization. When the Soviet Union collapsed it was not changed back to the pre-1925 name. Related to all this is the following question: There surely are cities and towns created during Soviet times, so there was no pre-Soviet name to go back to. Among those there must have been cases where the name had a communist reference. What happened in such cases? Were they just left as they were. If not, how were new names come up with? Contact Basemetal here 08:18, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

This is a question nobody in Russia can answer. Financial reasons for not renaming were cited in the 1990s. Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg were renamed in 1991. There has been no wide-scale renaming campaign since then, so as not to antagonize the powerful Communist party and its sizable electorate. Unlike the population of these two large cities, the rural population of the surrounding regions has had a nostalgia for the Soviet past. And Putin's official line is that the Russians should equally respect and cherish the Soviet and Tsarist heritage, hence the adoption of the Soviet national anthem, etc. --Ghirla^-трёп- 07:57, 25 November 2014 (UTC)