For my last post of the year, I'm simply posting links to some interesting articles from the past month or so.
A series on the effects that the enormous number of humans in the world may have on various issues. While in some cases they may be a little more optimistic or pessimistic than I would be, all of the articles are thought-provoking. Overall it's another reminder that we really need to address the issue of overpopulation, which effects so much else, especially the environment.
http://www.livescience.com/41316-11-billion-people-earth.html
http://www.livescience.com/41381-11-billion-people-climate-change.html
http://www.livescience.com/41300-11-billion-food-security.html
http://news.yahoo.com/11-billion-people-mean-earths-animals-140541848.html
This writer does a good job of making a point I've tried to make from time to time myself about scientific ignorance and the inability to think logically.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/05/1260374/-Couric-s-anti-vaccination-segment-a-symptom-of-wider-scientific-illiteracy
A commentary on Raul Castro's presence at Nelson Mandela's memorial service that aims well-deserved barbs at Castro, Mugabe, American right-wingers, pro-Castro sentiment on the left, and in general the ridiculous but widespread tendency of people of all ideological stripes to look at things in terms of black and white.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/10/ra-l-castro-honors-mandela-but-ignores-his-message.html
An interesting look at China's recent aggressive moves and their implications.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/chinas-dangerous-air-and-_b_4446349.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
A brief but good commentary on the situation in South Sudan from a man who has been deeply involved in the region over the past few years and also happens to be one of the best known actors in the world.
http://news.yahoo.com/preventing-south-sudan-inferno-104500410--politics.html
As an antidote to these somewhat depressing articles about how humanity screwing up things here on Earth, here's one summarizing the most intriguing discoveries of planets outside the Solar System that were made in the past year. It's nice to think that there may possibly be life on one or two of these worlds, and if not on these ones than on some of the many other planets that we can expect to find in the coming decades. Another nice thought is that be the time humanity has any reasonable prospect of reaching any of these places, we will almost certainly have to have become much more mature and rational as a species.
http://www.livescience.com/42217-most-amazing-exoplanet-discoveries-2013.html
Monday, December 30, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Death in Africa
The title of this post refers to a major event that took place in Africa a few days ago, and it isn't the death of the anti-apartheid leader and former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela. That isn't to say that Mandela's death wasn't a significant event, or that he isn't worthy of at least much of the attention and praise being lavished on him. After all, he was a leader of a type that is rarely seen and become even rarer in the future, at least as far as people's view of them, as pointed out in this article. Of the examples discussed in the article, Malala Yousafzai, while worthy of great respect and admiration for her courage, cannot yet be compared with experienced leaders of a long-term political struggle. As for Aung San Suu Kyi, I have great respect for her as well, but I have been somewhat disappointed with her lately, due to her failure to speak out strongly against anti-Muslim violence in Burma. The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, I would probably rank even above Mandela as someone who comes about as close as a public leader can to being admirable in all respects. If anything, it could be argued that he is too willing to forgive and have compassion for his oppressors. Not only does he oppose violence, unlike Mandela who at least for a time embraced armed struggle, but he is willing to give up Tibet's legitimate claims to complete independence in an attempt to satisfy a Chinese government that nevertheless continues in a relentless attempt to demonize him with outrageous falsehoods that no one who has actually heard him speak or read his writings could possibly believe. It is true, as the article points out, that he is a religious leader, but he is a religious leader who wrote an excellent book (one I am reading now) called Beyond Religion, calling for an ethical system that is not tied to any specific religion. But even if the Dalai Lama and perhaps Aung San Suu Kyi approach Mandela's stature, few if any other leaders today can do so.
But while Mandela's death was significant, I think even he would be disturbed or even appalled that it had caused the world to ignore the deadly violence that took place in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, the day before he died. I'm sure Mandela would want everyone to spare a thought for the hundred or so people slaughtered in the violence there, even at the cost of a little less attention on his own, hardly untimely death. Unfortunately, few in the West pay much attention to war and violence in Africa, since most people are unable to tell the CAR from Mali, Somalia, or the Congo, to name just a few countries recently ridden by conflict. In the US people would rather obsess about glitches in health care reform (and in Taiwan about political infighting or in the case of an appallingly large group of narrow-minded wackos whether some groups of people should be allowed to get married) than worry about people dying in a distant, impoverished country.
On the other hand, while a little more of a media spotlight on the CAR would be an excellent first step, it alone would not solve the problem. The French dispatch of soldiers to the country may do more, though considering their seeming reluctance to commit to too much, it may not solve the problem. But the French intervention in Bangui led me to think of another question. Whenever there is even a prospect of US military intervention anywhere in the world, there is a lot of opposition, both inside and outside the US. Of American opponents, some are on the right, not only the (rather rare) true libertarians who are genuine isolationists, but those who will oppose any intervention by the current administration simply because they will oppose anything Obama does (such that many of them will condemn him for not intervening forcefully enough, and at the same time oppose any intervention he actually makes). But for me a more puzzling group are those on the left. Though there are very good, logical reasons for opposing US military intervention in many situations, based on the rhetoric of some on the left, they would oppose any such action under any circumstances. But what would they suggest be done in a case like the CAR, or in the 1990s, Rwanda? Simply standing back while people get slaughtered? To me that attitude seems more appropriate to Ayn Rand disciples on the right. Obviously a non-military solution would be preferable, but I can't imagine one that could work in a situation that has deteriorated this far. Besides, it's quite possible that with a sufficient show of force, the foreign troops will not actually have to fight, as they may be able to intimidate what in many cases are little more than armed gangs (though of course the lessons of Somalia shouldn't be forgotten).
Of course it should also be remembered that the CAR is not Syria or even Libya. Despite what happened to the US in Somalia, it shouldn't take remotely as much of a military effort simply to prevent the relatively disorganized armed bands in Bangui from going on a killing spree as would stopping Assad from doing the same. This is why I personally have considerably greater reservations about the US taking military action in Syria than I would about it doing so in a country like the CAR. Perhaps a better question is why the US doesn't take a more active role in stopping violence in such places. It may be reasonable to say that the global perception, right or wrong, of the US as an overbearing wannabe world policeman precludes unilateral American action, but the US could at least provide active support for a multinational effort in such cases. Its lack of any apparent inclination to do so in impoverished, non-strategic countries like the CAR is as strong an argument as any other that US rhetoric implying impartial benevolence in its actions around the world is so much hot air.
But while Mandela's death was significant, I think even he would be disturbed or even appalled that it had caused the world to ignore the deadly violence that took place in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, the day before he died. I'm sure Mandela would want everyone to spare a thought for the hundred or so people slaughtered in the violence there, even at the cost of a little less attention on his own, hardly untimely death. Unfortunately, few in the West pay much attention to war and violence in Africa, since most people are unable to tell the CAR from Mali, Somalia, or the Congo, to name just a few countries recently ridden by conflict. In the US people would rather obsess about glitches in health care reform (and in Taiwan about political infighting or in the case of an appallingly large group of narrow-minded wackos whether some groups of people should be allowed to get married) than worry about people dying in a distant, impoverished country.
On the other hand, while a little more of a media spotlight on the CAR would be an excellent first step, it alone would not solve the problem. The French dispatch of soldiers to the country may do more, though considering their seeming reluctance to commit to too much, it may not solve the problem. But the French intervention in Bangui led me to think of another question. Whenever there is even a prospect of US military intervention anywhere in the world, there is a lot of opposition, both inside and outside the US. Of American opponents, some are on the right, not only the (rather rare) true libertarians who are genuine isolationists, but those who will oppose any intervention by the current administration simply because they will oppose anything Obama does (such that many of them will condemn him for not intervening forcefully enough, and at the same time oppose any intervention he actually makes). But for me a more puzzling group are those on the left. Though there are very good, logical reasons for opposing US military intervention in many situations, based on the rhetoric of some on the left, they would oppose any such action under any circumstances. But what would they suggest be done in a case like the CAR, or in the 1990s, Rwanda? Simply standing back while people get slaughtered? To me that attitude seems more appropriate to Ayn Rand disciples on the right. Obviously a non-military solution would be preferable, but I can't imagine one that could work in a situation that has deteriorated this far. Besides, it's quite possible that with a sufficient show of force, the foreign troops will not actually have to fight, as they may be able to intimidate what in many cases are little more than armed gangs (though of course the lessons of Somalia shouldn't be forgotten).
Of course it should also be remembered that the CAR is not Syria or even Libya. Despite what happened to the US in Somalia, it shouldn't take remotely as much of a military effort simply to prevent the relatively disorganized armed bands in Bangui from going on a killing spree as would stopping Assad from doing the same. This is why I personally have considerably greater reservations about the US taking military action in Syria than I would about it doing so in a country like the CAR. Perhaps a better question is why the US doesn't take a more active role in stopping violence in such places. It may be reasonable to say that the global perception, right or wrong, of the US as an overbearing wannabe world policeman precludes unilateral American action, but the US could at least provide active support for a multinational effort in such cases. Its lack of any apparent inclination to do so in impoverished, non-strategic countries like the CAR is as strong an argument as any other that US rhetoric implying impartial benevolence in its actions around the world is so much hot air.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
US Health Care Reform, Iran Nuclear Deal, Chinese Imperialism, Women's Rights and More
The big story in US politics over the last few weeks has been the problems with the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act (so-called "Obamacare). This topic has been beaten to death by pundits and commentators, so I'll just briefly summarize my views on it. Yes, the administration screwed up by failing to do a better job with the website. Also, President Obama should have known better than to make statements promising that everyone could keep their insurance policies if they wanted to without qualifying them (it seems he did qualify such statements in early speeches on the topic, but when the debate over the reforms got heated, he dropped the qualifying remarks). But from what I've seen, the website is improving and people are finally starting to enroll. Also, many of those who had their insurance cancelled originally had junk insurance that would have been practically worthless if they'd actually gotten sick. Also, some of the sticker shock came from insurance companies scamming people. They cancelled their old policies (which were junk policies that didn't meet the minimum requirements under the law – and of course there should be some minimum standards, just as there are for automobiles and all sorts of other things) and offered them overpriced new ones, without bothering to mention that they could shop for a better deal on the health care exchanges. It does seem that some people are still going to have to pay a lot more, but overall much of the criticism seems overblown. At this point, the Affordable Care Act may still be a disaster in many people's minds, but it isn't so in reality. Of course a public option or a single payer system would be a lot simpler and better for everyone (except perhaps the very wealthy and those with a stake in the old system).
Another big news story is the short-term agreement reached between Iran and the US, Britain, France, etc. offering Iran some limited relief from sanctions in return for suspending its nuclear activities and taking certain other steps. Of course this deal has been criticized by Israel and American right-wingers, who apparently insist on a full dismantling of Iran's nuclear program. Some in Congress still seem intent on torpedoing this deal and any future ones by increasing sanctions. These opponents of the deal claim that the current deal is in Iran's favor, whereas if prior sanctions forced Iran to negotiate, then more sanctions will force them to capitulate completely. I am not certain that this deal is the absolute best that the US and other Western powers could have gotten, but the implication by opponents that it amounts to Munich-like appeasement (the usual charge) is ridiculous. Their own attitude brings to mind a more appropriate but far less cited analogy from the same period of European history, namely the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I. By forcing Germany to accept all the responsibility for the war and pay them heavy reparations, the Allied powers (particularly Britain and France) created great hardship and resentment in Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis and World War II. Likewise, attempting to impose punishing sanctions on Iran at this point will only ensure that the Iranian hardliners will gain the upper hand, all attempts by Iran to reach some accommodation with the West will be abandoned, and the country will pursue nuclear weapons at full speed. If Iran is back into a corner, the end result will be either war or a nuclear Iran, or even both. On the other hand, negotiation means both sides have to compromise. If the West and Israel want Iran to stop pursuing nuclear weapons in a verifiable manner, they have to give Iran something in return. So while it may not be perfect, this deal is a step in the right direction, and is certainly better than the alternative offered by the US and Israeli hardliners.
Another big international story lately is China's aggressive move to claim the airspace over the ocean to its east, which has stirred a strong negative reaction, not only from Japan, but from the US, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Taiwan (though Taiwan's response has been relatively wimpy, not surprisingly considering the current weak-kneed government). The US sent bombers through China's new air defense zone, and South Korea says its own planes have ignored the zone. China continues to spout strong rhetoric, but it appears to have largely shot itself in the foot, not least because it has now stirred up its own rabid nationalists, who seem to want it to go to war rather than back down again. Also, if it really tried to enforce the zone, some believe it would be a big strain on its military resources. But while China's relatively small scale imperialistic moves in the east have angered its neighbors, its continued repression in its imperial possessions of Tibet and East Turkestan continues with very little international outcry.
Speaking of oppression, a landmark resolution on women's rights defenders was passed by the United Nations General Assembly. Unfortunately it was watered down by the usual subjects using predictable but still disgusting arguments, with backward patriarchies insisting on respect for traditional customs and traditions (i.e., those that repress women) and countries like China and Russia insisting the women's right defenders follow "national laws" (i.e., those used to repress dissent). Regrettably, these reactionary forces were able to force deletion of a paragraph that really should have been in the resolution, saying that countries should "strongly condemn all forms of violence against women and women human rights defenders and refrain from invoking any customs, traditions or religious consideration to avoid their obligations." Still, the passage of the resolution is a small step towards greater respect for women's rights – and it also brought the opposition out into the open.
We should also remember that the Philippines is still recovering from the disastrous Typhoon Haiyan, though at least agencies have found ways to rebuild and help the survivors simultaneously, by paying them to help with the work. But even the Philippines is still getting more media attention than some other places where people are also suffering greatly. Though you might not know it from the headlines, DR Congo is still mired in misery, and the Central African Republic is facing an extremely tense situation that has the potential to erupt into genocidal massacres. Those with the wherewithal to help in these places should do so, and the rest of us should help keep at least some attention focused on these crises.
Another big news story is the short-term agreement reached between Iran and the US, Britain, France, etc. offering Iran some limited relief from sanctions in return for suspending its nuclear activities and taking certain other steps. Of course this deal has been criticized by Israel and American right-wingers, who apparently insist on a full dismantling of Iran's nuclear program. Some in Congress still seem intent on torpedoing this deal and any future ones by increasing sanctions. These opponents of the deal claim that the current deal is in Iran's favor, whereas if prior sanctions forced Iran to negotiate, then more sanctions will force them to capitulate completely. I am not certain that this deal is the absolute best that the US and other Western powers could have gotten, but the implication by opponents that it amounts to Munich-like appeasement (the usual charge) is ridiculous. Their own attitude brings to mind a more appropriate but far less cited analogy from the same period of European history, namely the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I. By forcing Germany to accept all the responsibility for the war and pay them heavy reparations, the Allied powers (particularly Britain and France) created great hardship and resentment in Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis and World War II. Likewise, attempting to impose punishing sanctions on Iran at this point will only ensure that the Iranian hardliners will gain the upper hand, all attempts by Iran to reach some accommodation with the West will be abandoned, and the country will pursue nuclear weapons at full speed. If Iran is back into a corner, the end result will be either war or a nuclear Iran, or even both. On the other hand, negotiation means both sides have to compromise. If the West and Israel want Iran to stop pursuing nuclear weapons in a verifiable manner, they have to give Iran something in return. So while it may not be perfect, this deal is a step in the right direction, and is certainly better than the alternative offered by the US and Israeli hardliners.
Another big international story lately is China's aggressive move to claim the airspace over the ocean to its east, which has stirred a strong negative reaction, not only from Japan, but from the US, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Taiwan (though Taiwan's response has been relatively wimpy, not surprisingly considering the current weak-kneed government). The US sent bombers through China's new air defense zone, and South Korea says its own planes have ignored the zone. China continues to spout strong rhetoric, but it appears to have largely shot itself in the foot, not least because it has now stirred up its own rabid nationalists, who seem to want it to go to war rather than back down again. Also, if it really tried to enforce the zone, some believe it would be a big strain on its military resources. But while China's relatively small scale imperialistic moves in the east have angered its neighbors, its continued repression in its imperial possessions of Tibet and East Turkestan continues with very little international outcry.
Speaking of oppression, a landmark resolution on women's rights defenders was passed by the United Nations General Assembly. Unfortunately it was watered down by the usual subjects using predictable but still disgusting arguments, with backward patriarchies insisting on respect for traditional customs and traditions (i.e., those that repress women) and countries like China and Russia insisting the women's right defenders follow "national laws" (i.e., those used to repress dissent). Regrettably, these reactionary forces were able to force deletion of a paragraph that really should have been in the resolution, saying that countries should "strongly condemn all forms of violence against women and women human rights defenders and refrain from invoking any customs, traditions or religious consideration to avoid their obligations." Still, the passage of the resolution is a small step towards greater respect for women's rights – and it also brought the opposition out into the open.
We should also remember that the Philippines is still recovering from the disastrous Typhoon Haiyan, though at least agencies have found ways to rebuild and help the survivors simultaneously, by paying them to help with the work. But even the Philippines is still getting more media attention than some other places where people are also suffering greatly. Though you might not know it from the headlines, DR Congo is still mired in misery, and the Central African Republic is facing an extremely tense situation that has the potential to erupt into genocidal massacres. Those with the wherewithal to help in these places should do so, and the rest of us should help keep at least some attention focused on these crises.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Learning to Live on the Earth (with Links to Various Interesting Stuff)
I talk a lot about the environment on this blog, because in some ways it is more important than any other issue. After all, if humanity can't find a way to live on the Earth without catastrophically disrupting the environment, it won't matter much whether we can solve our other problems or not (though I support colonizing space, that can only involve a tiny fraction of humanity for the foreseeable future). The terrible tragedy in the Philippines is just one example of how destructive the environment can be, and while this particular typhoon may not have been directly caused by global warming, if we continue to heat up the planet, we can expect more of this and other kinds of environmental disasters. The following are some links to various interesting things on the Internet related to humanity's relationship to the environment and the Earth.
First, there are a couple of news stories here and here about how carbon dioxide levels have reached highs not seen for nearly a million years, that is, since well before modern humans evolved. What's more, these records will soon be broken, even if we take immediate action to drastically reduce carbon emissions – and there is little sign of that happening. Unfortunately, in the world's largest economy, the United States, there is still a large contingent of stubborn ignoramuses who insist that there isn't even a problem, and enough of them are in Congress to block most substantial action. Even on the other side of the political divide, while President Obama has done quite a few good things on the environment where he has had the power to act without going through Congress, his environmental record still has a few serious black marks, such as his administration's continued promotion of corn-based ethanol. As for other countries, though Europe has been more proactive in fighting climate change, even they could do better, and most other nations are doing no better than the US or even worse (though there is less excuse for failing to act when you are a wealthy nation like the US).
Then there's this fascinating map simulating births and deaths around the world in real time (for a larger and more detailed version, click here). Of course the map isn't capable of tracking actual births and deaths, but with sufficient statistical information on birth and death rates around the world, it can simulate them fairly closely (as a side note, I should point out one serious flaw on the map: Taiwan is labeled as a "Province of China", an absurd label that crops up on some websites from time to time apparently due to use of country codes from the UN [which of course goes along with Chinese propaganda with respect to Taiwan], though Taiwan's current flag also appears and it is in effect treated as what it is, a separate country). The most fascinating – and disturbing – aspect of the simulation is the contrast between the birth and death rates. In only four minutes, a thousand new babies have been born, but in the same space of time, fewer than five hundred people have died. In other words, in only four minutes, the world's population has increased by over five hundred. In ten minutes, it has increased by almost 1,500. At that rate, it only takes five days to add a million people to the world's population. This rapidly increasing population only increases the environmental problems we face, including climate change. It is no surprise that it has been suggested that one of the best short term ways to fight climate change is contraception, or at least radically reducing the birth rate. I wholeheartedly agree.
But to conclude on a more pleasant note, NASA recently published a new image compiled from pictures taken by the spacecraft Cassini while in orbit around Saturn. The pictures were taken while Cassini was on the dark side of the planet and so Saturn was eclipsing the Sun, allowing the much fainter inner planets to be seen (normally the glare of the Sun drowns them out). So in this picture, in addition to an incredible back-lit view of Saturn's rings and a few of its satellites, we can see a small red dot, a slightly bigger white dot, and a similarly-sized blue dot (with a faint grey dot attached). These are, respectively, Mars, Venus, and the Earth itself (plus the Moon). This is, more or less, how our planet looks from Saturn, at a distance of over a billion kilometers. A picture like this helps put humanity's problems into perspective, but it's also a reminder of how small the Earth really is on an astronomical scale. If we can learn to treat the Earth's resources as the limited, precious things they are, perhaps humanity can survive for a long time into the future and find ways to solve all its other problems.
First, there are a couple of news stories here and here about how carbon dioxide levels have reached highs not seen for nearly a million years, that is, since well before modern humans evolved. What's more, these records will soon be broken, even if we take immediate action to drastically reduce carbon emissions – and there is little sign of that happening. Unfortunately, in the world's largest economy, the United States, there is still a large contingent of stubborn ignoramuses who insist that there isn't even a problem, and enough of them are in Congress to block most substantial action. Even on the other side of the political divide, while President Obama has done quite a few good things on the environment where he has had the power to act without going through Congress, his environmental record still has a few serious black marks, such as his administration's continued promotion of corn-based ethanol. As for other countries, though Europe has been more proactive in fighting climate change, even they could do better, and most other nations are doing no better than the US or even worse (though there is less excuse for failing to act when you are a wealthy nation like the US).
Then there's this fascinating map simulating births and deaths around the world in real time (for a larger and more detailed version, click here). Of course the map isn't capable of tracking actual births and deaths, but with sufficient statistical information on birth and death rates around the world, it can simulate them fairly closely (as a side note, I should point out one serious flaw on the map: Taiwan is labeled as a "Province of China", an absurd label that crops up on some websites from time to time apparently due to use of country codes from the UN [which of course goes along with Chinese propaganda with respect to Taiwan], though Taiwan's current flag also appears and it is in effect treated as what it is, a separate country). The most fascinating – and disturbing – aspect of the simulation is the contrast between the birth and death rates. In only four minutes, a thousand new babies have been born, but in the same space of time, fewer than five hundred people have died. In other words, in only four minutes, the world's population has increased by over five hundred. In ten minutes, it has increased by almost 1,500. At that rate, it only takes five days to add a million people to the world's population. This rapidly increasing population only increases the environmental problems we face, including climate change. It is no surprise that it has been suggested that one of the best short term ways to fight climate change is contraception, or at least radically reducing the birth rate. I wholeheartedly agree.
But to conclude on a more pleasant note, NASA recently published a new image compiled from pictures taken by the spacecraft Cassini while in orbit around Saturn. The pictures were taken while Cassini was on the dark side of the planet and so Saturn was eclipsing the Sun, allowing the much fainter inner planets to be seen (normally the glare of the Sun drowns them out). So in this picture, in addition to an incredible back-lit view of Saturn's rings and a few of its satellites, we can see a small red dot, a slightly bigger white dot, and a similarly-sized blue dot (with a faint grey dot attached). These are, respectively, Mars, Venus, and the Earth itself (plus the Moon). This is, more or less, how our planet looks from Saturn, at a distance of over a billion kilometers. A picture like this helps put humanity's problems into perspective, but it's also a reminder of how small the Earth really is on an astronomical scale. If we can learn to treat the Earth's resources as the limited, precious things they are, perhaps humanity can survive for a long time into the future and find ways to solve all its other problems.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
What I've Been Reading: July 2013 to September 2013 (Featuring the Work of Iain M. Banks)
This covers nearly all of the books I read or at least finished in this period (in the case of the non-fiction ones, I had started reading them previously but only read a bit at a time). There was another novel that I finished at the beginning of October, but I decided to cover that in a future post. As for the reference to Iain M. Banks in the title, I read two of his novels in this period and I have talked about them at greater length than most of the other books. I also spent a couple of paragraphs talking about his work in general, for reasons explained below.
The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow
This is a thought-provoking though dark and slightly disturbing book. The book centers on a graduate student named Daniel Lewin and his family. As the book progresses, it slowly becomes clear that Daniel Lewin’s birth parents, the Isaacsons, are based very closely on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though there are some differences. One obvious one is that the Rosenbergs had two sons, while in the novel, Daniel has a sister. Also, both Daniel and his sister Susan have some serious issues that I don’t think either of the Rosenberg sons had (I once met Robert Meeropol, the younger son of the Rosenbergs, in person and as I read this book I couldn’t help wondering if he had read it and what he thought of Susan’s suicidal tendencies and Daniel’s occasionally abusive behavior to his wife and child). Regardless, the book paints a dark and probably broadly accurate picture of the 1950s anti-Communist paranoia that led to the Rosenbergs’ deaths. The story switches almost at random between first person narration by Daniel and third person. While this doesn’t do much for the book’s readability, it creates an additional parallel with the biblical book of Daniel, which also switches between first and third person, if not as frequently. The book is pretty well-written and tackles some important issues, though it is not an easy read with its occasionally jarring shifts in time and subject as well as narrative point of view.
Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams
This was the first published novel by fantasy author Tad Williams. It is an animal fantasy featuring cats. Inevitably it invites comparisons to Richard Adams’ Watership Down, the best known animal fantasy of this type. There are definitely some similarities, such as the tales told by the cats about their mythological figures, which bring to mind the tales of El-ahrairah in Watership Down. However, Williams has his own style, and his picture of the feral cat society is as well drawn in its way as the society of Adams’ rabbits (the cats’ story of the origin and nature of M’an – humans – is particularly clever). The plot is sufficiently engrossing and the characters are appealing. There are some twists, though a few of them are not difficult to guess at. All in all, while the book doesn’t have the depth or complexity of Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy or his standalone novel The War of the Flowers, it is a solid and enjoyable fantasy.
Matter by Iain M. Banks
On one of the flights we took during our trip in June, I picked up an International Herald Tribune in which I came across the headline “Iain Banks, 59, Scottish novelist and sci-fi writer”. So it was that I learned that one of my favorite science fiction authors (and author of several mainstream novels that I also quite liked) had died of gall bladder cancer. Apparently he had only been diagnosed with it a few months earlier, and had learned at the time that it was already too late to stop it. In his public announcement about it, he showed that he hadn’t lost his sense of humor; he also announced that he was marrying his longtime girlfriend, remarking he had asked her if she would “do me the honour of becoming my widow.” He seemed to have come to terms with his fate, though regrettably he succumbed even faster than he was expected to, so he didn’t survive until the release of his final book, which had already been moved up due to his condition.
Iain Banks wrote both mainstream, “literary” fiction and science fiction. He wrote the former under the name “Iain Banks” and the latter as “Iain M. Banks”. Both varieties were popular and critically praised, though he complained that some literary snobs seemed to regard his mainstream novels as his “real” work, even suggesting that he only wrote science fiction as a money-maker to support his mainstream novels. Banks said if anything it was the other way round, as his greatest love was science fiction, even though the mainstream novels often sold better. The science fiction work was popular as well though, and as a number of commentators (such as this one) have remarked, in the Culture, the society at the center of most of his science fiction novels, he created one of the most convincing utopias ever to appear in literature, one that most people would actually want to live in.
Matter was the only Banks novel I already had a copy of that I hadn’t read yet. Published in 2008, it was his first Culture novel in eight years. He said in an interview that he had been worried that he was running out of ideas for his science fiction (he observed that while mainstream fiction can focus on things like relationship, science fiction needs big ideas to make it worth writing), but he was able to get his creative juices flowing by writing the non-Culture science fiction novel The Algebraist, an excellent work certainly not lacking in ideas. Matter is also packed full of ideas, the most impressive being the Shellworlds, though the Nestworld of the alien Morthanveld is also incredibly imaginative. I won’t attempt to describe either here, but while they may strike a physicist as somewhat improbable – they would take astounding amounts of energy to construct, as well as plenty of “unobtainium” (Banks himself has said this is what many of the Culture’s artifacts are made of) – the same could be said of Dyson spheres, and these are at least as cool and rather more complex.
The story revolves around the three children of the king of the Sarl, a people living on one of the layers of the Shellworld Sursamen. The Sarl are at a technological level somewhere between that of the Renaissance and the early Industrial Revolution, though they are aware of more advanced civilizations, including the Culture. Much of the novel focuses on assassinations, political maneuvering, and war among the Sarl, though gradually it becomes apparent that there is a deeper, more ancient mystery at the heart of these machinations, one that draws in the more advanced civilizations, including the Culture. The novel’s final climax – and the similarly explosive (ahem) event that heralds the fast-paced ending section – may seem a little abrupt considering the long set-up, but according to Banks, this was deliberate on his part. I might have liked to have seen a few more things explained and more loose ends tied up, but I’ll also admit there is an artistic neatness to the sudden, dramatic ending, and there is a brief epilogue that provides a partial dénouement.
One word of warning for those who become overly attached to the characters in a novel (semi-spoiler alert): at some point midway through I started speculating on which of the major characters (the three siblings plus two or three others) might end up dying. From his other books, I knew that Banks occasionally kills off major characters even on the “good guy” side, sometimes unexpectedly, though generally not quite as casually as, say, George R. R. Martin. In this case, I started wondering who if anyone among the main characters might not make it. Without giving too much away, I will say that as it turned out, the body count was higher than I expected. In one or two cases, one could reasonably wonder why Banks spent so much time developing a character only to eliminate them the way he does. This feeling is enhanced by the contrast between the lengthy build-up and the fast-paced conclusion, something that some readers have criticized, not entirely without reason. But as I said, Banks did this deliberately (though of course the critics may argue that he was wrong to do so), and there's something to be said for defying the reader's expectations – after all, it isn't as if unexpected death doesn't strike in real life, or that such death necessarily negates all prior meaning in the person's life (a topic that is the theme of the novel I'll discuss next). In any case, Matter has so many interesting ideas that combined with Banks’ literary but very readable and occasionally witty prose, the book is excellent reading despite these issues. As with a book like Infinite Jest (which doesn’t have a proper ending at all), the journey is well worth any disappointment the reader may feel with the destination.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
This classic novel, which won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer Prize and has appeared on a number of best novel lists, tells the stories of the five people who died when a (fictional) bridge in Peru collapsed in the 18th century, and of the priest who investigated their lives in hopes of scientifically proving that God had chosen these particular individuals to die on this occasion. Some of the characters are based roughly on real people (for instance, there really was a famous actress in 18th century Peru named Micaela Villegas who was known as La Perricholi and was the mistress of the Viceroy), but while Wilder’s depiction of 18th century Peru seems very true to life, his primary interest is not to relate actual history, but to explore deeper questions. According to Wilder himself, one of his inspirations was Luke 13:4-5, in which Jesus ask rhetorically whether the people who died in the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem were guiltier than anyone else, and concludes that they were not. Wilder uses his novel to pose a similar question about what gives a life meaning. But, as he explained afterward, the book is not meant to actually answer these questions, just to state them clearly. The result is a thought-provoking meditation on human existence. Wilder’s prose is clear and very readable, which together with the relative shortness of the book (just over a hundred pages) makes this one of the most accessible classic novels around.
Beowulf (translated by Burton Raffel)
Beowulf, written – or composed, as it was probably originally an oral work rather than a written one – by an unknown author sometime between 700 and 1000 CE, is the most famous extant work in Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon). This modern translation is surprisingly readable. This is probably helped by the poet’s digressions being shorter and less frequent than I recall Virgil’s being (it’s been longer since I’ve read either of Homer’s epic poems, so I can’t remember how often he went off on tangents), not to mention the relatively short length of the poem (it’s just under a hundred pages in the volume I have).
One interesting aspect of the poem is that in several cases where the poet mentions a woman who is the daughter, mother or wife of a male character, he doesn’t give their name (Beowulf’s mother is one such example). This would seem to hint that women were considered unimportant. On the other hand, a couple of women do get named, such as Hrothgar’s queen’s Welthow and Higlac’s queen Higd, and are described quite favorably. Welthow is even given several speeches. Another interesting thing about the poem is that it is obvious that it was a major inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, and even for fantasy role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and wrote scholarly works on Beowulf, so it is not really surprising that it would have influenced him, but it’s still striking how much of it will seem familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings (such as the references to kings as “ring-givers”) or to D&D players (Beowulf’s search for and battle against Grendel’s mother in an underground lair sounds very much like a D&D adventure). So not only is Beowulf a must-read for those interested in the history of English literature or in the societies of the medieval Viking peoples, it also holds considerable interest for fans of fantasy and even role-playing gamers.
The Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System by Ron Miller and William K. Hartmann
I recently finished reading through the third edition of this book (published 2005), an updated and expanded edition of a book I first acquired as a boy in the early 1980s, when it was one of my favorite astronomy books. The approach taken by the authors is different from the standard way of examining the Solar System starting with Mercury and traveling outward. Instead, they look at the planets, satellites, asteroids and other bodies in the Solar System (other than the Sun itself) beginning with the largest, the gas giant Jupiter, and proceeding in order of size. Thus Saturn is next, followed by Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, Saturn’s moon Titan, Mercury, and so forth. Though there are quite a few photos taken by space probes or the Hubble Space Telescope, most of the illustrations are artwork and paintings by the authors, showing imaginary but highly realistic views of the various Solar System bodies. While Miller did the majority of the art, Hartmann, who is also a professional astronomer, did a substantial amount as well. Both also shared writing duties. In the course of the book they occasionally go off on short diatribes about ignorant people back on Earth, such as “conservative ideologues” who attack the science of climate change or the contrast between the empirical science that allowed astronomers to predict the tidal heating of Io and the claims of “religious fundamentalists and mystics” like self-proclaimed astral travelers and so-called creation scientists. But these asides are quite brief, not to mention being correct, so the vast majority of the book is filled with clear descriptions of the various planets and other objects, and those incredible illustrations. While it may be that no human alive today – or even in the far future – will actually be able to stand on most of these bodies and see the literally otherworldly vistas they offer, through Miller and Hartmann’s work we can at least get a good idea of what it would be like to do so.
The First Punic War: A Military History by John Lazenby
This book is the only one I know of devoted solely to the first of the three wars between Carthage and Rome, though there are a few (one of which I own) that cover all three wars and even more that cover the Second Punic War. One of the best of the latter is Hannibal’s War, which was also written by John Lazenby. While The First Punic War comes across as somewhat more cursory and less detailed than Hannibal’s War, this is largely a problem of the sources, as Lazenby explains at the beginning. Quite simply, the ancient accounts of the First Punic War that have survived are much more limited in scope than those that deal with the Second Punic War and themselves lack much in the way of detail. In addition, the extant accounts date from well after the war, though some of them may be based on more contemporary sources that haven’t survived. Given these problems, Lazenby did a good job of bringing the ancient sources, supplemented by some archaeological information, together into a clear account of what was the greatest naval war of ancient times (and included one of the largest – if not the largest – naval battles of all time, the Battle of Ecnomus). I might have liked to see a bit more commentary on Lazenby’s part about some of the individuals and events, as he mostly sticks to a bare recitation of the facts. However, given the limited information at his disposal, perhaps he was wiser to refrain from, for instance, commenting much on the generalship of various Carthaginian and Roman leaders. In any case, this is a good account of this important war, though those who prefer more colorful history might be better off with an account of the much better-known Second Punic War. On the other hand, this war seems like fertile ground for a historical novel, since its twenty three years and numerous battles on sea and land, coupled with our limited knowledge of the details, leave a lot of scope for an imaginative writer to work in. Certainly for anyone attempting such a work, Lazenby’s book would be indispensable.
Inversions by Iain M. Banks
As sort of a belated tribute to Iain Banks, I decided to reread one of his novels soon after finishing Matter, despite my general rule of not reading two books by the same author within a short space of time, unless they are part of a connected series. Inversions, if I remember correctly, was actually the first Banks novel I ever read, or at most the second (it’s possible that I read Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games first, since I no longer quite remember the sequence in which I read them).
It was not even obvious at first glance that Inversions had anything to do with science fiction. It is set on a world where the technological level is roughly that of Europe in the late medieval to early Renaissance period. It consists of two interwoven accounts, centered around two individuals who seemingly have only two key characteristics in common; they are both outsiders hailing from very distant lands and they are both extremely competent at what they do. In many other ways, they are opposites, as to a certain extent are the leaders they serve. Vosill, or simply the Doctor, is a physician to the King in a long-established monarchy, while DeWar is the bodyguard of a leader responsible for overthrowing a monarchy. One heals, while the other kills. On the other hand, Vosill’s master seems to be a conservative with a deep belief in the divine right of kings, while DeWar’s comes across as more progressive.
But of course, as is usual in Banks’ novels, there is more going on than meets the eye. For one thing, we learn that Vosill and DeWar may have more in common than anyone around them knows. DeWar relates a story that clues the reader into both of their origins, without laying it out specifically. It also hints that the two of them are opposites in an additional way: they hold opposing beliefs about the right of a technologically superior civilization to interfere in the course of a more primitive one’s development. In some ways, the entire novel is a reflection of these opposing beliefs. Needless to say, there are many other surprises and plot twists in store for the reader, together with Banks’ excellent and often witty prose.
Anyone who has never read any of Banks’ sci-fi novels might enjoy reading this the way I did the first time, without any preconceived notions about the unspoken background of the book and specifically the two chief protagonists. Anyone who wants to do so should stop reading this now and just go out and get the book. For anyone who is more familiar with Banks’ work or doesn’t mind a very minor spoiler, I will conclude by saying that Inversions is a masterfully written look at the Culture, the utopian, galaxy-spanning society Banks created, from the bottom, i.e., from the perspective of one of the less advanced planets that the Culture decides to take a hand in influencing toward a particular path of development. It is all the more clever in that the reader is never specifically told that the Culture is involved, though the clues are fairly obvious to those familiar with it, and even those who aren't will beginning to guess by the end. In any case, it is definitely recommend reading.
The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow
This is a thought-provoking though dark and slightly disturbing book. The book centers on a graduate student named Daniel Lewin and his family. As the book progresses, it slowly becomes clear that Daniel Lewin’s birth parents, the Isaacsons, are based very closely on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though there are some differences. One obvious one is that the Rosenbergs had two sons, while in the novel, Daniel has a sister. Also, both Daniel and his sister Susan have some serious issues that I don’t think either of the Rosenberg sons had (I once met Robert Meeropol, the younger son of the Rosenbergs, in person and as I read this book I couldn’t help wondering if he had read it and what he thought of Susan’s suicidal tendencies and Daniel’s occasionally abusive behavior to his wife and child). Regardless, the book paints a dark and probably broadly accurate picture of the 1950s anti-Communist paranoia that led to the Rosenbergs’ deaths. The story switches almost at random between first person narration by Daniel and third person. While this doesn’t do much for the book’s readability, it creates an additional parallel with the biblical book of Daniel, which also switches between first and third person, if not as frequently. The book is pretty well-written and tackles some important issues, though it is not an easy read with its occasionally jarring shifts in time and subject as well as narrative point of view.
Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams
This was the first published novel by fantasy author Tad Williams. It is an animal fantasy featuring cats. Inevitably it invites comparisons to Richard Adams’ Watership Down, the best known animal fantasy of this type. There are definitely some similarities, such as the tales told by the cats about their mythological figures, which bring to mind the tales of El-ahrairah in Watership Down. However, Williams has his own style, and his picture of the feral cat society is as well drawn in its way as the society of Adams’ rabbits (the cats’ story of the origin and nature of M’an – humans – is particularly clever). The plot is sufficiently engrossing and the characters are appealing. There are some twists, though a few of them are not difficult to guess at. All in all, while the book doesn’t have the depth or complexity of Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy or his standalone novel The War of the Flowers, it is a solid and enjoyable fantasy.
Matter by Iain M. Banks
On one of the flights we took during our trip in June, I picked up an International Herald Tribune in which I came across the headline “Iain Banks, 59, Scottish novelist and sci-fi writer”. So it was that I learned that one of my favorite science fiction authors (and author of several mainstream novels that I also quite liked) had died of gall bladder cancer. Apparently he had only been diagnosed with it a few months earlier, and had learned at the time that it was already too late to stop it. In his public announcement about it, he showed that he hadn’t lost his sense of humor; he also announced that he was marrying his longtime girlfriend, remarking he had asked her if she would “do me the honour of becoming my widow.” He seemed to have come to terms with his fate, though regrettably he succumbed even faster than he was expected to, so he didn’t survive until the release of his final book, which had already been moved up due to his condition.
Iain Banks wrote both mainstream, “literary” fiction and science fiction. He wrote the former under the name “Iain Banks” and the latter as “Iain M. Banks”. Both varieties were popular and critically praised, though he complained that some literary snobs seemed to regard his mainstream novels as his “real” work, even suggesting that he only wrote science fiction as a money-maker to support his mainstream novels. Banks said if anything it was the other way round, as his greatest love was science fiction, even though the mainstream novels often sold better. The science fiction work was popular as well though, and as a number of commentators (such as this one) have remarked, in the Culture, the society at the center of most of his science fiction novels, he created one of the most convincing utopias ever to appear in literature, one that most people would actually want to live in.
Matter was the only Banks novel I already had a copy of that I hadn’t read yet. Published in 2008, it was his first Culture novel in eight years. He said in an interview that he had been worried that he was running out of ideas for his science fiction (he observed that while mainstream fiction can focus on things like relationship, science fiction needs big ideas to make it worth writing), but he was able to get his creative juices flowing by writing the non-Culture science fiction novel The Algebraist, an excellent work certainly not lacking in ideas. Matter is also packed full of ideas, the most impressive being the Shellworlds, though the Nestworld of the alien Morthanveld is also incredibly imaginative. I won’t attempt to describe either here, but while they may strike a physicist as somewhat improbable – they would take astounding amounts of energy to construct, as well as plenty of “unobtainium” (Banks himself has said this is what many of the Culture’s artifacts are made of) – the same could be said of Dyson spheres, and these are at least as cool and rather more complex.
The story revolves around the three children of the king of the Sarl, a people living on one of the layers of the Shellworld Sursamen. The Sarl are at a technological level somewhere between that of the Renaissance and the early Industrial Revolution, though they are aware of more advanced civilizations, including the Culture. Much of the novel focuses on assassinations, political maneuvering, and war among the Sarl, though gradually it becomes apparent that there is a deeper, more ancient mystery at the heart of these machinations, one that draws in the more advanced civilizations, including the Culture. The novel’s final climax – and the similarly explosive (ahem) event that heralds the fast-paced ending section – may seem a little abrupt considering the long set-up, but according to Banks, this was deliberate on his part. I might have liked to have seen a few more things explained and more loose ends tied up, but I’ll also admit there is an artistic neatness to the sudden, dramatic ending, and there is a brief epilogue that provides a partial dénouement.
One word of warning for those who become overly attached to the characters in a novel (semi-spoiler alert): at some point midway through I started speculating on which of the major characters (the three siblings plus two or three others) might end up dying. From his other books, I knew that Banks occasionally kills off major characters even on the “good guy” side, sometimes unexpectedly, though generally not quite as casually as, say, George R. R. Martin. In this case, I started wondering who if anyone among the main characters might not make it. Without giving too much away, I will say that as it turned out, the body count was higher than I expected. In one or two cases, one could reasonably wonder why Banks spent so much time developing a character only to eliminate them the way he does. This feeling is enhanced by the contrast between the lengthy build-up and the fast-paced conclusion, something that some readers have criticized, not entirely without reason. But as I said, Banks did this deliberately (though of course the critics may argue that he was wrong to do so), and there's something to be said for defying the reader's expectations – after all, it isn't as if unexpected death doesn't strike in real life, or that such death necessarily negates all prior meaning in the person's life (a topic that is the theme of the novel I'll discuss next). In any case, Matter has so many interesting ideas that combined with Banks’ literary but very readable and occasionally witty prose, the book is excellent reading despite these issues. As with a book like Infinite Jest (which doesn’t have a proper ending at all), the journey is well worth any disappointment the reader may feel with the destination.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
This classic novel, which won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer Prize and has appeared on a number of best novel lists, tells the stories of the five people who died when a (fictional) bridge in Peru collapsed in the 18th century, and of the priest who investigated their lives in hopes of scientifically proving that God had chosen these particular individuals to die on this occasion. Some of the characters are based roughly on real people (for instance, there really was a famous actress in 18th century Peru named Micaela Villegas who was known as La Perricholi and was the mistress of the Viceroy), but while Wilder’s depiction of 18th century Peru seems very true to life, his primary interest is not to relate actual history, but to explore deeper questions. According to Wilder himself, one of his inspirations was Luke 13:4-5, in which Jesus ask rhetorically whether the people who died in the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem were guiltier than anyone else, and concludes that they were not. Wilder uses his novel to pose a similar question about what gives a life meaning. But, as he explained afterward, the book is not meant to actually answer these questions, just to state them clearly. The result is a thought-provoking meditation on human existence. Wilder’s prose is clear and very readable, which together with the relative shortness of the book (just over a hundred pages) makes this one of the most accessible classic novels around.
Beowulf (translated by Burton Raffel)
Beowulf, written – or composed, as it was probably originally an oral work rather than a written one – by an unknown author sometime between 700 and 1000 CE, is the most famous extant work in Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon). This modern translation is surprisingly readable. This is probably helped by the poet’s digressions being shorter and less frequent than I recall Virgil’s being (it’s been longer since I’ve read either of Homer’s epic poems, so I can’t remember how often he went off on tangents), not to mention the relatively short length of the poem (it’s just under a hundred pages in the volume I have).
One interesting aspect of the poem is that in several cases where the poet mentions a woman who is the daughter, mother or wife of a male character, he doesn’t give their name (Beowulf’s mother is one such example). This would seem to hint that women were considered unimportant. On the other hand, a couple of women do get named, such as Hrothgar’s queen’s Welthow and Higlac’s queen Higd, and are described quite favorably. Welthow is even given several speeches. Another interesting thing about the poem is that it is obvious that it was a major inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, and even for fantasy role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and wrote scholarly works on Beowulf, so it is not really surprising that it would have influenced him, but it’s still striking how much of it will seem familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings (such as the references to kings as “ring-givers”) or to D&D players (Beowulf’s search for and battle against Grendel’s mother in an underground lair sounds very much like a D&D adventure). So not only is Beowulf a must-read for those interested in the history of English literature or in the societies of the medieval Viking peoples, it also holds considerable interest for fans of fantasy and even role-playing gamers.
The Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System by Ron Miller and William K. Hartmann
I recently finished reading through the third edition of this book (published 2005), an updated and expanded edition of a book I first acquired as a boy in the early 1980s, when it was one of my favorite astronomy books. The approach taken by the authors is different from the standard way of examining the Solar System starting with Mercury and traveling outward. Instead, they look at the planets, satellites, asteroids and other bodies in the Solar System (other than the Sun itself) beginning with the largest, the gas giant Jupiter, and proceeding in order of size. Thus Saturn is next, followed by Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, Saturn’s moon Titan, Mercury, and so forth. Though there are quite a few photos taken by space probes or the Hubble Space Telescope, most of the illustrations are artwork and paintings by the authors, showing imaginary but highly realistic views of the various Solar System bodies. While Miller did the majority of the art, Hartmann, who is also a professional astronomer, did a substantial amount as well. Both also shared writing duties. In the course of the book they occasionally go off on short diatribes about ignorant people back on Earth, such as “conservative ideologues” who attack the science of climate change or the contrast between the empirical science that allowed astronomers to predict the tidal heating of Io and the claims of “religious fundamentalists and mystics” like self-proclaimed astral travelers and so-called creation scientists. But these asides are quite brief, not to mention being correct, so the vast majority of the book is filled with clear descriptions of the various planets and other objects, and those incredible illustrations. While it may be that no human alive today – or even in the far future – will actually be able to stand on most of these bodies and see the literally otherworldly vistas they offer, through Miller and Hartmann’s work we can at least get a good idea of what it would be like to do so.
The First Punic War: A Military History by John Lazenby
This book is the only one I know of devoted solely to the first of the three wars between Carthage and Rome, though there are a few (one of which I own) that cover all three wars and even more that cover the Second Punic War. One of the best of the latter is Hannibal’s War, which was also written by John Lazenby. While The First Punic War comes across as somewhat more cursory and less detailed than Hannibal’s War, this is largely a problem of the sources, as Lazenby explains at the beginning. Quite simply, the ancient accounts of the First Punic War that have survived are much more limited in scope than those that deal with the Second Punic War and themselves lack much in the way of detail. In addition, the extant accounts date from well after the war, though some of them may be based on more contemporary sources that haven’t survived. Given these problems, Lazenby did a good job of bringing the ancient sources, supplemented by some archaeological information, together into a clear account of what was the greatest naval war of ancient times (and included one of the largest – if not the largest – naval battles of all time, the Battle of Ecnomus). I might have liked to see a bit more commentary on Lazenby’s part about some of the individuals and events, as he mostly sticks to a bare recitation of the facts. However, given the limited information at his disposal, perhaps he was wiser to refrain from, for instance, commenting much on the generalship of various Carthaginian and Roman leaders. In any case, this is a good account of this important war, though those who prefer more colorful history might be better off with an account of the much better-known Second Punic War. On the other hand, this war seems like fertile ground for a historical novel, since its twenty three years and numerous battles on sea and land, coupled with our limited knowledge of the details, leave a lot of scope for an imaginative writer to work in. Certainly for anyone attempting such a work, Lazenby’s book would be indispensable.
Inversions by Iain M. Banks
As sort of a belated tribute to Iain Banks, I decided to reread one of his novels soon after finishing Matter, despite my general rule of not reading two books by the same author within a short space of time, unless they are part of a connected series. Inversions, if I remember correctly, was actually the first Banks novel I ever read, or at most the second (it’s possible that I read Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games first, since I no longer quite remember the sequence in which I read them).
It was not even obvious at first glance that Inversions had anything to do with science fiction. It is set on a world where the technological level is roughly that of Europe in the late medieval to early Renaissance period. It consists of two interwoven accounts, centered around two individuals who seemingly have only two key characteristics in common; they are both outsiders hailing from very distant lands and they are both extremely competent at what they do. In many other ways, they are opposites, as to a certain extent are the leaders they serve. Vosill, or simply the Doctor, is a physician to the King in a long-established monarchy, while DeWar is the bodyguard of a leader responsible for overthrowing a monarchy. One heals, while the other kills. On the other hand, Vosill’s master seems to be a conservative with a deep belief in the divine right of kings, while DeWar’s comes across as more progressive.
But of course, as is usual in Banks’ novels, there is more going on than meets the eye. For one thing, we learn that Vosill and DeWar may have more in common than anyone around them knows. DeWar relates a story that clues the reader into both of their origins, without laying it out specifically. It also hints that the two of them are opposites in an additional way: they hold opposing beliefs about the right of a technologically superior civilization to interfere in the course of a more primitive one’s development. In some ways, the entire novel is a reflection of these opposing beliefs. Needless to say, there are many other surprises and plot twists in store for the reader, together with Banks’ excellent and often witty prose.
Anyone who has never read any of Banks’ sci-fi novels might enjoy reading this the way I did the first time, without any preconceived notions about the unspoken background of the book and specifically the two chief protagonists. Anyone who wants to do so should stop reading this now and just go out and get the book. For anyone who is more familiar with Banks’ work or doesn’t mind a very minor spoiler, I will conclude by saying that Inversions is a masterfully written look at the Culture, the utopian, galaxy-spanning society Banks created, from the bottom, i.e., from the perspective of one of the less advanced planets that the Culture decides to take a hand in influencing toward a particular path of development. It is all the more clever in that the reader is never specifically told that the Culture is involved, though the clues are fairly obvious to those familiar with it, and even those who aren't will beginning to guess by the end. In any case, it is definitely recommend reading.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Factual Versus “Balanced”: The L.A. Times and Climate Change Deniers
A few weeks ago, the Letters Editor for the L.A. Times wrote an explanation of why letters repeating a falsehood about the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) did not get printed in their paper. He noted: “Letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there’s no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed.” Not surprisingly, the parenthetical example of letters that would not be printed because they were untrue had climate change deniers frothing at the mouth. The editor made a response to their criticism in which he concluded: “Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying 'there’s no sign humans have caused climate change' is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”
It seems that in most news reports nowadays journalists bend over backwards to be balanced by presenting both sides of any argument or controversy. While this may be the proper approach in many situations, there is often a difference between being "balanced" and being objective. Simply put, in many debates to give both sides equal time is to create a false equivalence between an argument based on facts and one based on falsehoods. When that happens, the media is not doing its job of informing the public; if anything it is confusing it. Admittedly, there are some "debates" where one side is so blatantly spouting nonsense that most media sources will not attempt to be "balanced". For example, only extreme right wing news sources would present assertions that Barack Obama is a Muslim or was born in Kenya as anything other than false. But many of them do allow those that assert that climate change is unrelated to human activity or even that it is not occurring at all equal time. But in reality, while it is possible to debate how much the climate is changing and to what degree humans are responsible, the L.A. Times editor is absolutely correct to say that the statement that there's no sign (i.e., evidence) humans have caused climate change is factually inaccurate. There is plenty of such evidence, no matter how much some people may like to deny it.
Climate change is not the only issue that suffers from such efforts by the media to be "balanced". For example, as with the original issue that the L.A. Times editor was discussing, many right-wing falsehoods about the Affordable Care Act have been printed unchallenged by the media. Likewise, implications that Social Security is in part responsible for the US government budget deficit are often not called out for the untruths that they are. Another example that irritates me is when articles about Tibet will say something like "China says that Tibet has been part of its territory for centuries, but Tibetans say it was independent for much of that time". If the journalists would bother to do a little historical research, they'd know that what the Tibetans say is true and what the Chinese government says is false. Similar example appear in articles about other disputes that involve history. While in some cases there really is room for interpretation, in others one side's claims are simply false and should be treated as such.
Since the L.A. Times case involves letters to the editor, some right wingers have called the paper's editorial position a suppression of freedom of speech. This is absurd. Again, we are not talking about opinions here, we are talking about facts. If someone writes a letter to the editor claiming that Obama was born in Kenya, or that the so-called face on Mars is an artificial construct, or that aliens crash-landed in Roswell, or that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, or that the Moon is made of green cheese, why would any self-respecting newspaper print it? Those who really want to hear arguments based on blatant falsehoods can find plenty on the Internet or on shows hosted by people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. But, as I noted earlier, the real media's main purpose is, or at least ought to be, to inform the public, which in turn allows the latter to develop informed opinions about important issues. At least in the case of climate change, this move by the L.A. Times is a small step in the right direction, and I'd encourage people to sign this petition urging other newspapers to follow suit. Only a public well informed as to the actual facts, rather than just opinions of varying reasonableness, can choose the leaders and policies needed to solve the important problems we face.
It seems that in most news reports nowadays journalists bend over backwards to be balanced by presenting both sides of any argument or controversy. While this may be the proper approach in many situations, there is often a difference between being "balanced" and being objective. Simply put, in many debates to give both sides equal time is to create a false equivalence between an argument based on facts and one based on falsehoods. When that happens, the media is not doing its job of informing the public; if anything it is confusing it. Admittedly, there are some "debates" where one side is so blatantly spouting nonsense that most media sources will not attempt to be "balanced". For example, only extreme right wing news sources would present assertions that Barack Obama is a Muslim or was born in Kenya as anything other than false. But many of them do allow those that assert that climate change is unrelated to human activity or even that it is not occurring at all equal time. But in reality, while it is possible to debate how much the climate is changing and to what degree humans are responsible, the L.A. Times editor is absolutely correct to say that the statement that there's no sign (i.e., evidence) humans have caused climate change is factually inaccurate. There is plenty of such evidence, no matter how much some people may like to deny it.
Climate change is not the only issue that suffers from such efforts by the media to be "balanced". For example, as with the original issue that the L.A. Times editor was discussing, many right-wing falsehoods about the Affordable Care Act have been printed unchallenged by the media. Likewise, implications that Social Security is in part responsible for the US government budget deficit are often not called out for the untruths that they are. Another example that irritates me is when articles about Tibet will say something like "China says that Tibet has been part of its territory for centuries, but Tibetans say it was independent for much of that time". If the journalists would bother to do a little historical research, they'd know that what the Tibetans say is true and what the Chinese government says is false. Similar example appear in articles about other disputes that involve history. While in some cases there really is room for interpretation, in others one side's claims are simply false and should be treated as such.
Since the L.A. Times case involves letters to the editor, some right wingers have called the paper's editorial position a suppression of freedom of speech. This is absurd. Again, we are not talking about opinions here, we are talking about facts. If someone writes a letter to the editor claiming that Obama was born in Kenya, or that the so-called face on Mars is an artificial construct, or that aliens crash-landed in Roswell, or that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, or that the Moon is made of green cheese, why would any self-respecting newspaper print it? Those who really want to hear arguments based on blatant falsehoods can find plenty on the Internet or on shows hosted by people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. But, as I noted earlier, the real media's main purpose is, or at least ought to be, to inform the public, which in turn allows the latter to develop informed opinions about important issues. At least in the case of climate change, this move by the L.A. Times is a small step in the right direction, and I'd encourage people to sign this petition urging other newspapers to follow suit. Only a public well informed as to the actual facts, rather than just opinions of varying reasonableness, can choose the leaders and policies needed to solve the important problems we face.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Crazy Cruz and Floundering Ma
With its usual short attention span, the US media seems to have largely forgotten about Syria recently, instead focusing on the irresponsible Republican threat to shut down the government if the health care reform that has been given the rather silly and dismissive nickname "Obamacare" is not defunded. The Republicans, or at least the more extreme among them – which of course means most of them – are using a vote to keep the government funded to remove funding for health care reform, and incidentally inserting various other provisions such as one favoring Monsanto and another allowing employers or insurance companies to opt out of providing birth control coverage into the funding bill. In the upcoming weeks, they also are planning to use what would once have been (and still should be) a routine vote to raise the government's debt limit as a club to try to make destructive budget cuts. At the center of this effort are the House Republicans from the so-called "Tea Party", goaded on by the extremist Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz (I should point out that John Cornyn, the other Senator from Texas, is merely less flamboyantly extreme in his right-wing politics).
Having encouraged the House Republicans to pass a bill that funded the government for a few more months while defunding health care reform, Cruz then pulled an even more crazy stunt. Since he was no doubt aware of – and was probably jealous of – the national attention Texas State Senator Wendy Davis received for her filibuster in the Texas Senate against an extreme anti-abortion bill (I even referred to it myself in an email petition in favor of filibuster reform), he decided to imitate her. He declared that he would speak until he was "unable to stand" against Obamacare, as he termed it. He proceeded to speak for 21 hours, which on the surface might look as if he outdid Wendy Davis, who "only" spoke for eleven hours. However, Davis had to speak on topic and was not allowed to take any breaks, even to go to the bathroom. Cruz took breaks and rambled inanely, going completely off topic and even spending time reading Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, which as Jon Stewart and others pointed out, about someone who stubbornly insists he doesn't like something that he hasn't even tried – just as Cruz and his fellow Republicans insist they don't like health care reform that hasn't even been implemented yet (it's also worth pointing out that nowhere in his rambling speech did Cruz offer a real alternative). Finally, Davis's filibuster had a point. Regardless of what one thinks of the bill she was filibustering – and I'd say that any law that forces the vast majority of women's health care clinics to shut down or stop providing even first trimester abortions due to absurd requirements is too extreme – she was arguing to stop a particular bill from becoming law, and she even succeeded as far as that particular special session went. Cruz wasn't even actually filibustering (he knew he had to yield the floor at a specific time anyway), and the bill that the House had passed did exactly what he wanted. So while Davis did a real filibuster for a specific purpose, Cruz's stunt was just that, a stunt with no point to it except to draw attention to himself. But only those with similarly screwed up thinking will actually admire him for it.
I will say that I find it difficult to wholeheartedly support the current health care reform myself, mostly because it didn't go nearly far enough. If it had at least included a public option open to all Americans, I would be more enthusiastic about it. But at least it takes a number of positive steps in the right direction. In any case, to refuse to fund the government unless it is stopped is ridiculous. What's more, the additional threat to raise the debt limit unless they get their way on this and other issues is the height of irresponsibility. As has been pointed out many times by many people, a refusal to raise the debt limit means a refusal to pay the debts that the government already owes. Even if these lawmakers consider it important to reduce the deficit, the place to do it is when they are voting on new spending, not on paying for existing debts. In fact the deficit has already been shrinking, and despite the overblown rhetoric, the budget deficit is not actually the greatest problem the US faces. For that matter, the deficit seems to suddenly become less important to the Republicans when it comes time to vote on military spending, corporate tax breaks, or farm subsidies. It's only when we talk about health care reform, or food stamps for the poor, or Social Security (which is still running a surplus and therefore has not contributed anything to the debt) that the deficit becomes a major issue for them.
But Cruz and his fellow extremists in the US Republican party aren't the only politicians showing their electorates how ridiculous they can be. As I have mentioned in the past, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou heads a government that has been doing a lot of stupid and even downright evil things. While he himself may not have been directly responsible for many of these things, he certainly has done nothing to rein in such bad behavior. More recently, he has been directly involved in a mess that is at least partly of his own making, and certainly makes him look bad. I will admit I haven't followed the story very closely, but the broad outlines are clear enough.
First, a little background. The speaker of the Legislative Yuan, Wang Jin-pyng, is, like Ma, a member of the KMT (Kuomintang or Guomingdang). However, he is considered a member of the "native" wing of the party, as opposed to Ma and others in the party who were born in China or whose parents immigrated to Taiwan from China. He was also Ma's rival for the chairmanship of the KMT back in 2005. Though they had seemed to work together well enough earlier in Ma's presidency, relations between them were never warm and recently they deteriorated radically. Not too long ago, I saw a quote from Wang in the newspaper that was highly critical of the way the Ma administration was running the country. At any rate, a few weeks ago it was reported that Wang was under investigation for helping out a senior legislator from the opposition DPP in a court case by pressuring (or persuading) the prosecutor not to appeal a lower court decision in the legislator's favor. It was clear from the beginning that the evidence against Wang was tainted because it had been obtained by apparently illegal wiretapping. Nevertheless, when the story came out ("coincidentally" when Wang was out of the country for his daughter's wedding), Ma roundly condemned Wang, calling his behavior unacceptable "influence-peddling". This was in contrast to his silence about other cases involving KMT figures, such as the mayor of Keelung who in response to a call from a constituent who had been arrested for drunk driving, went to the police station, pounded on a desk and threatened to have the police officers fired if they didn't release her. In Wang's case, not only was Ma very vocal in his criticism, but he had the KMT initiate procedures to have Wang kicked out of the party and removed from the speakership. While Wang certainly has his faults and may even really be guilty of misusing his position, it was immediately obvious to almost everyone that Wang, as a threat to Ma's power, was being treated much more harshly than other KMT officials accused of similar or worse things, a contrast much like that between the lengthy prison term given to former president Chen Shui-bian when he was convicted of corruption and the light sentences received by KMT officials convicted of similar crimes.
From all appearances, this whole affair has blown up in Ma's face. Wang has filed a court appeal against the revocation of his KMT membership. The wiretapping that was used against Wang has created yet another scandal for the Ma administration. Perhaps most importantly, the public seems to have sided almost completely with Wang. In one recent poll, Wang had an approval rating of around 60%, second only to Chen Chu, the DPP mayor of Kaohsiung. Ma's approval rating, on the other hand, was a miserable 11%. An even more recent poll put his approval rating at just above 9%. As several DPP leaders have pointed out, Ma once called for former president Chen to step down when his approval rating was around 18%, still considerably higher than Ma's is now. For now, Ma continues to flounder desperately. A KMT party congress scheduled for last weekend was postponed and moved to a less central location because massive protests were planned outside the venue. Even after the postponement, tens of thousands showed up at various protests around the country. While Ma may still hold the levers of power both within the party and in the government, the fact that even within the KMT many are criticizing him doesn't bode well for the remainder of his presidency.
Having encouraged the House Republicans to pass a bill that funded the government for a few more months while defunding health care reform, Cruz then pulled an even more crazy stunt. Since he was no doubt aware of – and was probably jealous of – the national attention Texas State Senator Wendy Davis received for her filibuster in the Texas Senate against an extreme anti-abortion bill (I even referred to it myself in an email petition in favor of filibuster reform), he decided to imitate her. He declared that he would speak until he was "unable to stand" against Obamacare, as he termed it. He proceeded to speak for 21 hours, which on the surface might look as if he outdid Wendy Davis, who "only" spoke for eleven hours. However, Davis had to speak on topic and was not allowed to take any breaks, even to go to the bathroom. Cruz took breaks and rambled inanely, going completely off topic and even spending time reading Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, which as Jon Stewart and others pointed out, about someone who stubbornly insists he doesn't like something that he hasn't even tried – just as Cruz and his fellow Republicans insist they don't like health care reform that hasn't even been implemented yet (it's also worth pointing out that nowhere in his rambling speech did Cruz offer a real alternative). Finally, Davis's filibuster had a point. Regardless of what one thinks of the bill she was filibustering – and I'd say that any law that forces the vast majority of women's health care clinics to shut down or stop providing even first trimester abortions due to absurd requirements is too extreme – she was arguing to stop a particular bill from becoming law, and she even succeeded as far as that particular special session went. Cruz wasn't even actually filibustering (he knew he had to yield the floor at a specific time anyway), and the bill that the House had passed did exactly what he wanted. So while Davis did a real filibuster for a specific purpose, Cruz's stunt was just that, a stunt with no point to it except to draw attention to himself. But only those with similarly screwed up thinking will actually admire him for it.
I will say that I find it difficult to wholeheartedly support the current health care reform myself, mostly because it didn't go nearly far enough. If it had at least included a public option open to all Americans, I would be more enthusiastic about it. But at least it takes a number of positive steps in the right direction. In any case, to refuse to fund the government unless it is stopped is ridiculous. What's more, the additional threat to raise the debt limit unless they get their way on this and other issues is the height of irresponsibility. As has been pointed out many times by many people, a refusal to raise the debt limit means a refusal to pay the debts that the government already owes. Even if these lawmakers consider it important to reduce the deficit, the place to do it is when they are voting on new spending, not on paying for existing debts. In fact the deficit has already been shrinking, and despite the overblown rhetoric, the budget deficit is not actually the greatest problem the US faces. For that matter, the deficit seems to suddenly become less important to the Republicans when it comes time to vote on military spending, corporate tax breaks, or farm subsidies. It's only when we talk about health care reform, or food stamps for the poor, or Social Security (which is still running a surplus and therefore has not contributed anything to the debt) that the deficit becomes a major issue for them.
But Cruz and his fellow extremists in the US Republican party aren't the only politicians showing their electorates how ridiculous they can be. As I have mentioned in the past, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou heads a government that has been doing a lot of stupid and even downright evil things. While he himself may not have been directly responsible for many of these things, he certainly has done nothing to rein in such bad behavior. More recently, he has been directly involved in a mess that is at least partly of his own making, and certainly makes him look bad. I will admit I haven't followed the story very closely, but the broad outlines are clear enough.
First, a little background. The speaker of the Legislative Yuan, Wang Jin-pyng, is, like Ma, a member of the KMT (Kuomintang or Guomingdang). However, he is considered a member of the "native" wing of the party, as opposed to Ma and others in the party who were born in China or whose parents immigrated to Taiwan from China. He was also Ma's rival for the chairmanship of the KMT back in 2005. Though they had seemed to work together well enough earlier in Ma's presidency, relations between them were never warm and recently they deteriorated radically. Not too long ago, I saw a quote from Wang in the newspaper that was highly critical of the way the Ma administration was running the country. At any rate, a few weeks ago it was reported that Wang was under investigation for helping out a senior legislator from the opposition DPP in a court case by pressuring (or persuading) the prosecutor not to appeal a lower court decision in the legislator's favor. It was clear from the beginning that the evidence against Wang was tainted because it had been obtained by apparently illegal wiretapping. Nevertheless, when the story came out ("coincidentally" when Wang was out of the country for his daughter's wedding), Ma roundly condemned Wang, calling his behavior unacceptable "influence-peddling". This was in contrast to his silence about other cases involving KMT figures, such as the mayor of Keelung who in response to a call from a constituent who had been arrested for drunk driving, went to the police station, pounded on a desk and threatened to have the police officers fired if they didn't release her. In Wang's case, not only was Ma very vocal in his criticism, but he had the KMT initiate procedures to have Wang kicked out of the party and removed from the speakership. While Wang certainly has his faults and may even really be guilty of misusing his position, it was immediately obvious to almost everyone that Wang, as a threat to Ma's power, was being treated much more harshly than other KMT officials accused of similar or worse things, a contrast much like that between the lengthy prison term given to former president Chen Shui-bian when he was convicted of corruption and the light sentences received by KMT officials convicted of similar crimes.
From all appearances, this whole affair has blown up in Ma's face. Wang has filed a court appeal against the revocation of his KMT membership. The wiretapping that was used against Wang has created yet another scandal for the Ma administration. Perhaps most importantly, the public seems to have sided almost completely with Wang. In one recent poll, Wang had an approval rating of around 60%, second only to Chen Chu, the DPP mayor of Kaohsiung. Ma's approval rating, on the other hand, was a miserable 11%. An even more recent poll put his approval rating at just above 9%. As several DPP leaders have pointed out, Ma once called for former president Chen to step down when his approval rating was around 18%, still considerably higher than Ma's is now. For now, Ma continues to flounder desperately. A KMT party congress scheduled for last weekend was postponed and moved to a less central location because massive protests were planned outside the venue. Even after the postponement, tens of thousands showed up at various protests around the country. While Ma may still hold the levers of power both within the party and in the government, the fact that even within the KMT many are criticizing him doesn't bode well for the remainder of his presidency.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Voyager 1 Enters Interstellar Space
I was originally planning to write about how the Syrian crisis shows up serious flaws in the international system, or else about the recent political crisis in Taiwan. But while I may write about these things later, this time I decided to write about a completely different and rather more positive news item.
One of the cooler bits of news lately was the announcement by NASA that Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space. For those who aren't familiar with it, the robotic spacecraft Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and visited Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, making major discoveries at those two planets (its twin, Voyager 2, also became the first and so far only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune). Since then it has been heading out of the Solar System at a velocity of about 17 kilometers per second (11 miles per second), or about 3.6 AU per year (an AU or astronomical unit is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun, or roughly 150 million kilometers). Over the past couple of years there has been debate over the indications that Voyager 1, which is moving slightly faster than Voyager 2 or the earlier but slower Pioneer 10 and 11 (though Pioneer 10 is currently still more distant than Voyager 2), had left the heliosphere, the bubble in space created by the solar wind, but in the latest announcement NASA stated that they finally have definitive evidence that Voyager 1 is now beyond the heliosphere and the boundary area known as the heliopause and has entered interstellar space.
This is a pretty amazing achievement. Voyager 1 is currently almost 19 billion kilometers from the Sun, about 125 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun and over three times the average distance of Pluto, and it is still functioning after 36 years in space. At the speed of light, it now takes signals about 17 hours to travel from Voyager 1 to the Earth, and we are still receiving them. As one article pointed out, Voyager 1 has accomplished this with far less computing power than a so-called smartphone. It is incredible to contemplate that a human-made object has traveled so far into space.
On the other hand, the Voyagers and the Pioneers (and the other, more recent spacecraft on a recent trajectory toward interstellar space, New Horizons) also serve to remind us of how huge the distances in space are. While many headlines have reported that Voyager 1 has left the solar system, this is not really accurate. As others have pointed out, while it is in interstellar space in the sense that it is beyond the solar wind, it is still well within the region gravitationally dominated by the Sun. For example, the most distant substantial object that we know of in the solar system is Sedna, a trans-Neptunian object that probably qualifies as a dwarf planet under the current classification system. Sedna is currently "only" 80-some AU away, but it is now nearing its perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun. At the most distant point in its orbit, Sedna is 937 AU or 140 billion kilometers from the Sun, something like seven times the current distance of Voyager 1. The comets in the Oort Cloud at the edge of the Sun's gravitational grip are many times further than that. So in this sense, it will be thousands of years before Voyager 1 truly leaves the solar system (a point mentioned even in one or two mainstream news articles).
Another way of looking at it is to remember that while Voyager 1 is an impressive 17 light hours away, meaning it takes light 17 hours to reach us from it at a velocity of 300,000 kilometers per second, it won't reach the distance of 1 light day (about 172 AU) for well over a decade, around the time it is expected to cease functioning completely, even if it suffers no glitches in the meantime. The nearest star other than the Sun is over 4 light years away. Even if Voyager 1 were heading directly toward it (which it isn't), it would take it tens of thousands of years to reach it. So while this milestone could be said to mark humanity's first step toward the stars, it is a very tiny step. If we really want to explore the stars, it will take a major leap forward in propulsion technology. This isn't to say we shouldn't be impressed at Voyager 1's achievement, but rather than just patting ourselves on the back, we should be inspired to go even further and faster in the future. If we make the effort, maybe by the end of this century we'll have one or more spacecraft passing the Voyagers on the way to the stars.
One of the cooler bits of news lately was the announcement by NASA that Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space. For those who aren't familiar with it, the robotic spacecraft Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and visited Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, making major discoveries at those two planets (its twin, Voyager 2, also became the first and so far only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune). Since then it has been heading out of the Solar System at a velocity of about 17 kilometers per second (11 miles per second), or about 3.6 AU per year (an AU or astronomical unit is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun, or roughly 150 million kilometers). Over the past couple of years there has been debate over the indications that Voyager 1, which is moving slightly faster than Voyager 2 or the earlier but slower Pioneer 10 and 11 (though Pioneer 10 is currently still more distant than Voyager 2), had left the heliosphere, the bubble in space created by the solar wind, but in the latest announcement NASA stated that they finally have definitive evidence that Voyager 1 is now beyond the heliosphere and the boundary area known as the heliopause and has entered interstellar space.
This is a pretty amazing achievement. Voyager 1 is currently almost 19 billion kilometers from the Sun, about 125 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun and over three times the average distance of Pluto, and it is still functioning after 36 years in space. At the speed of light, it now takes signals about 17 hours to travel from Voyager 1 to the Earth, and we are still receiving them. As one article pointed out, Voyager 1 has accomplished this with far less computing power than a so-called smartphone. It is incredible to contemplate that a human-made object has traveled so far into space.
On the other hand, the Voyagers and the Pioneers (and the other, more recent spacecraft on a recent trajectory toward interstellar space, New Horizons) also serve to remind us of how huge the distances in space are. While many headlines have reported that Voyager 1 has left the solar system, this is not really accurate. As others have pointed out, while it is in interstellar space in the sense that it is beyond the solar wind, it is still well within the region gravitationally dominated by the Sun. For example, the most distant substantial object that we know of in the solar system is Sedna, a trans-Neptunian object that probably qualifies as a dwarf planet under the current classification system. Sedna is currently "only" 80-some AU away, but it is now nearing its perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun. At the most distant point in its orbit, Sedna is 937 AU or 140 billion kilometers from the Sun, something like seven times the current distance of Voyager 1. The comets in the Oort Cloud at the edge of the Sun's gravitational grip are many times further than that. So in this sense, it will be thousands of years before Voyager 1 truly leaves the solar system (a point mentioned even in one or two mainstream news articles).
Another way of looking at it is to remember that while Voyager 1 is an impressive 17 light hours away, meaning it takes light 17 hours to reach us from it at a velocity of 300,000 kilometers per second, it won't reach the distance of 1 light day (about 172 AU) for well over a decade, around the time it is expected to cease functioning completely, even if it suffers no glitches in the meantime. The nearest star other than the Sun is over 4 light years away. Even if Voyager 1 were heading directly toward it (which it isn't), it would take it tens of thousands of years to reach it. So while this milestone could be said to mark humanity's first step toward the stars, it is a very tiny step. If we really want to explore the stars, it will take a major leap forward in propulsion technology. This isn't to say we shouldn't be impressed at Voyager 1's achievement, but rather than just patting ourselves on the back, we should be inspired to go even further and faster in the future. If we make the effort, maybe by the end of this century we'll have one or more spacecraft passing the Voyagers on the way to the stars.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Should the US Intervene Militarily in Syria?
The big international story of the past week is the apparent use of chemical weapons in the civil war in Syria and the signals from the US that it, along with whichever allies it can persuade to go along, may take military action in response. This has naturally given rise to vociferous debate in the US and elsewhere about whether a military response is appropriate or even legal. I have received several requests from different progressive groups asking me to sign petitions opposing military action or insisting that Congress must authorize any attack. Likewise, my right-wing Representative said in his newsletter that he is calling on President Barack Obama to ask for Congressional authorization before taking any military action. Another progressive group sent an email asking for opinions regarding US military action in Syria, with options of "Yes", "No" and "Not Sure" and space to further explain your position. My response was "Not Sure", which at this point is still my position on the issue.
Of the groups opposing US military actions, some did a better job of arguing their position than others. One simply railed against the whole idea of going to war, raising the specter of Iraq and other stupid ventures in the past. Another focused primarily on the legality of military action and the War Powers Act. A related approach was taken by those who talked mainly about "vital national security interests" of the US as being the only legitimate rationale for a US President taking action without Congressional authorization. Some simply argued that US military action would make things worse.
For my own part, I have a problem with anyone who completely ignores humanitarian considerations as if they didn't exist. Whatever arguments one makes against intervention – and there are many good ones to be made – it first has to be acknowledged that the situation in Syria is awful and no one should be comfortable with the idea of just standing by and doing nothing. I won't say that the US or anyone else is compelled to take any particular action without considering all the downsides, and it is possible that a thorough consideration will lead to the conclusion that there is nothing the US can do to improve things, but no debate about taking action can ignore all the dead innocents in Syria (or even all the dead combatants).
Some have questioned whether it is absolutely proven that the Assad regime was responsible for the recent gas attacks. As far as I am aware, the rebels probably would have more difficulty launching a large scale chemical attack due to their relative lack of heavy artillery, but I can't say that it is impossible. Several of the reports on the US moves towards a military response mention that the US intercepted communications among low-ranking Syrian officers discussing the attack. Depending on what exactly was said, I am prepared to believe that it could be proven that the Syrian military was responsible, though the use of chemical weapons could still have been either a mistake or the result of a decision taken at a lower level without consulting the high command. Let's say, however, that the case against the Syrian leadership is compelling. What of the other arguments against intervention?
The US leadership is basing their arguments in favor of intervention on the assertion that the use of chemical weapons cannot be tolerated. In one mailing, US Representative Alan Grayson made the point that tens of thousands have already been killed in Syria, many in ways that are at least as horrific than a poison gas attack (I'd say that in many cases, even more so). So why does a chemical attack justify intervention when those other deaths didn't? This is a legitimate question. I personally think that if military intervention is justified, it was justified long before this. However, it is an unfortunate fact that a single large scale slaughter, complete with pictures of dead children, using a sinister-seeming weapon like poison gas, is more likely to galvanize world opinion in favor of action than any number of smaller-scale massacres or instances of torture using "conventional" means.
Then what of the War Powers Act and the requirement that action be approved by Congress unless the "vital national security interests" of the US are at stake? This is really a major obstacle and is one of the reasons I hesitate to support a military strike. I think the War Powers Act is flawed in that it doesn't allow for emergency action in the name of humanitarian causes. Even in the best of times, it would take some time for Congress to act. On the event of a truly horrific mass atrocity, such as what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s, a delay of a few days could mean thousands of additional deaths (not that the US or anyone else really tried to stop the slaughter in Rwanda...). Given how dysfunctional Congress is now, it might take forever for action to be authorized. I also don't agree with the argument that the "vital interests" of the US have to be at stake; or to put it another way, I think everyone should consider stopping atrocities one of their "vital interests". However, given the way the law is written, I am also highly uncomfortable with idea of allowing the President to just ignore it, even in a good cause. Once that precedent has been set (and some would argue it has been set already in previous military interventions), it will be even harder to stop future Presidents from launching military action for much less noble reasons. While in general if forced to choose, I'd favor doing what is right over doing what is legal, I don't think the future consequences of such a step can be ignored. The same conundrum applies to the question of legality of military action under international law (though this sort of situation is a very good argument for taking away the veto powers of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council; unfortunately, none of them, including the US, is willing to give them up).
But more than anything else, the real question is whether military intervention by the US or other outside powers will make things better in Syria. This is what really concerns me, more than any questions of legality. What we should be talking about is, what will improve the situation for all the civilians in Syria caught in the middle of this vicious struggle? If we can be fairly certain that military action would help and almost completely certain it won't make things worse, than I would favor it. Unfortunately, I don't think that anyone can guarantee that military action will be unequivocally beneficial (some would say that "beneficial military action" is itself a contradiction in terms, but while I understand where they are coming from, I don't agree that such a thing is completely impossible).
The NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war is the one of the most obvious recent cases of outside military action playing a decisive role in a conflict. But even leaving aside the important question of whether Libya is truly better off now than it was before, there are a lot of differences between the situation in Libya and that in Syria. In Libya, there were clear front lines, with the rebels holding the east and scattered pockets elsewhere, and the Qaddafi regime holding the west. It was a relatively simple matter for NATO air power to target the regime's forces in the Libyan desert where much of the fighting was taking place. Even in Libya, however, NATO air power was much less effective in fighting in and around the rebellious city of Misrata in the West, since it was much harder to attack the regime's forces without hitting the rebels or civilians. In Syria, there are few if any clear front lines, and most of the fighting is in urban environments like Misrata's, so it is doubtful that a prolonged air war will do much good, and it is likely to result in more civilian deaths (though one might argue that things are so bad for people in Syria now that it could hardly get worse). A more long-term useful military action might be setting up a no-fly zone, probably along the Turkish border, to protect refugees, though this is less likely to have a decisive effect on the course of the war.
However, from the hints dropped by Obama and other US officials, it seems that the US is merely contemplating a single strike to punish Assad for the use of chemical weapons. If done right, this is at least unlikely to make things worse (since I think substantial retaliation from Syria or its main allies is unlikely, due to the risk that they would be inviting more US intervention when they have their hands full already), and it would at least allow the US to say that it had sent a message about the use of chemical weapons. On the other hand, it would have the negative political repercussions mentioned above due to the questions about its legality and yet would probably do little practical good in terms of ending the conflict in Syria. What will it take to do that, especially without leaving either the bloodstained Assad regime or the radical elements among the rebels in charge? I really don't know, but, whether or not the US decides on a military strike on this occasion, I certainly hope those in a position to act will keep looking for a palatable option aimed at a long-term solution.
Of the groups opposing US military actions, some did a better job of arguing their position than others. One simply railed against the whole idea of going to war, raising the specter of Iraq and other stupid ventures in the past. Another focused primarily on the legality of military action and the War Powers Act. A related approach was taken by those who talked mainly about "vital national security interests" of the US as being the only legitimate rationale for a US President taking action without Congressional authorization. Some simply argued that US military action would make things worse.
For my own part, I have a problem with anyone who completely ignores humanitarian considerations as if they didn't exist. Whatever arguments one makes against intervention – and there are many good ones to be made – it first has to be acknowledged that the situation in Syria is awful and no one should be comfortable with the idea of just standing by and doing nothing. I won't say that the US or anyone else is compelled to take any particular action without considering all the downsides, and it is possible that a thorough consideration will lead to the conclusion that there is nothing the US can do to improve things, but no debate about taking action can ignore all the dead innocents in Syria (or even all the dead combatants).
Some have questioned whether it is absolutely proven that the Assad regime was responsible for the recent gas attacks. As far as I am aware, the rebels probably would have more difficulty launching a large scale chemical attack due to their relative lack of heavy artillery, but I can't say that it is impossible. Several of the reports on the US moves towards a military response mention that the US intercepted communications among low-ranking Syrian officers discussing the attack. Depending on what exactly was said, I am prepared to believe that it could be proven that the Syrian military was responsible, though the use of chemical weapons could still have been either a mistake or the result of a decision taken at a lower level without consulting the high command. Let's say, however, that the case against the Syrian leadership is compelling. What of the other arguments against intervention?
The US leadership is basing their arguments in favor of intervention on the assertion that the use of chemical weapons cannot be tolerated. In one mailing, US Representative Alan Grayson made the point that tens of thousands have already been killed in Syria, many in ways that are at least as horrific than a poison gas attack (I'd say that in many cases, even more so). So why does a chemical attack justify intervention when those other deaths didn't? This is a legitimate question. I personally think that if military intervention is justified, it was justified long before this. However, it is an unfortunate fact that a single large scale slaughter, complete with pictures of dead children, using a sinister-seeming weapon like poison gas, is more likely to galvanize world opinion in favor of action than any number of smaller-scale massacres or instances of torture using "conventional" means.
Then what of the War Powers Act and the requirement that action be approved by Congress unless the "vital national security interests" of the US are at stake? This is really a major obstacle and is one of the reasons I hesitate to support a military strike. I think the War Powers Act is flawed in that it doesn't allow for emergency action in the name of humanitarian causes. Even in the best of times, it would take some time for Congress to act. On the event of a truly horrific mass atrocity, such as what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s, a delay of a few days could mean thousands of additional deaths (not that the US or anyone else really tried to stop the slaughter in Rwanda...). Given how dysfunctional Congress is now, it might take forever for action to be authorized. I also don't agree with the argument that the "vital interests" of the US have to be at stake; or to put it another way, I think everyone should consider stopping atrocities one of their "vital interests". However, given the way the law is written, I am also highly uncomfortable with idea of allowing the President to just ignore it, even in a good cause. Once that precedent has been set (and some would argue it has been set already in previous military interventions), it will be even harder to stop future Presidents from launching military action for much less noble reasons. While in general if forced to choose, I'd favor doing what is right over doing what is legal, I don't think the future consequences of such a step can be ignored. The same conundrum applies to the question of legality of military action under international law (though this sort of situation is a very good argument for taking away the veto powers of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council; unfortunately, none of them, including the US, is willing to give them up).
But more than anything else, the real question is whether military intervention by the US or other outside powers will make things better in Syria. This is what really concerns me, more than any questions of legality. What we should be talking about is, what will improve the situation for all the civilians in Syria caught in the middle of this vicious struggle? If we can be fairly certain that military action would help and almost completely certain it won't make things worse, than I would favor it. Unfortunately, I don't think that anyone can guarantee that military action will be unequivocally beneficial (some would say that "beneficial military action" is itself a contradiction in terms, but while I understand where they are coming from, I don't agree that such a thing is completely impossible).
The NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war is the one of the most obvious recent cases of outside military action playing a decisive role in a conflict. But even leaving aside the important question of whether Libya is truly better off now than it was before, there are a lot of differences between the situation in Libya and that in Syria. In Libya, there were clear front lines, with the rebels holding the east and scattered pockets elsewhere, and the Qaddafi regime holding the west. It was a relatively simple matter for NATO air power to target the regime's forces in the Libyan desert where much of the fighting was taking place. Even in Libya, however, NATO air power was much less effective in fighting in and around the rebellious city of Misrata in the West, since it was much harder to attack the regime's forces without hitting the rebels or civilians. In Syria, there are few if any clear front lines, and most of the fighting is in urban environments like Misrata's, so it is doubtful that a prolonged air war will do much good, and it is likely to result in more civilian deaths (though one might argue that things are so bad for people in Syria now that it could hardly get worse). A more long-term useful military action might be setting up a no-fly zone, probably along the Turkish border, to protect refugees, though this is less likely to have a decisive effect on the course of the war.
However, from the hints dropped by Obama and other US officials, it seems that the US is merely contemplating a single strike to punish Assad for the use of chemical weapons. If done right, this is at least unlikely to make things worse (since I think substantial retaliation from Syria or its main allies is unlikely, due to the risk that they would be inviting more US intervention when they have their hands full already), and it would at least allow the US to say that it had sent a message about the use of chemical weapons. On the other hand, it would have the negative political repercussions mentioned above due to the questions about its legality and yet would probably do little practical good in terms of ending the conflict in Syria. What will it take to do that, especially without leaving either the bloodstained Assad regime or the radical elements among the rebels in charge? I really don't know, but, whether or not the US decides on a military strike on this occasion, I certainly hope those in a position to act will keep looking for a palatable option aimed at a long-term solution.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Events and Developments around the World
A lot has been going on in the world recently, too much for me to adequately cover myself. In addition to some brief commentary of my own on a few things, I've included a large number of links to news articles and commentaries that I've assembled over the past few weeks and months.
The most recent big international news story is what might reasonably be considered the Egyptian equivalent of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. After numerous threats, the Egyptian military violently cleared the camps of pro-Morsi Muslim Brotherhood protestors in Cairo, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The government made dubious claims that all violence was initiated by the protestors, and a few governments that were particularly hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood made supportive statements, but for the most part outside observers, including the US, condemned the violence, though the strength of their condemnations and the degree of blame they ascribed to the army varied. Notably, Mohamed El-Baradei, the liberal Interim Vice-President and one of the few relatively admirable prominent figures in Egyptian politics, resigned over the massacre. For my part, while I don't agree with anything the Brotherhood represents and I think their overthrow was probably on the whole a good thing, since they were governing not only badly but undemocratically, there is really no excuse for a slaughter on the scale that took place. It is an unfortunate reflection of the extreme polarization of Egyptian society nowadays that many ordinary Egyptians unreservedly supported the crackdown.
Elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, Tunisia has also been facing a political crisis. While theirs has not been as violent or chaotic as Egypt's, we can only hope that they find a resolution (preferably Ennahda agreeing to a technocratic transitional government) before it gets worse. Turkey's government, despite demonstrating an authoritarian streak in its response to protests in Istanbul, has also made positive moves to expand Kurdish rights.
Thanks to various radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere, a lot of people nowadays associate religious extremism exclusively with Islam. Not only does this ignore the long history of Christian extremism (including the rhetoric of some fundamentalists in the US today), it ignores contemporary situations in which Muslims are the victims of violent religious extremism. The most prominent example in the last year has been the massacres of Muslims in Burma (Myanmar) at the hands of Buddhists (while in a few instances individual Muslims helped start the violence, the vast majority of victims have been innocent Muslims, including women and children). Fortunately, a few Burmese have begun to speak out against those who encourage anti-Muslim prejudice. Unfortunately, despite Buddhism's peaceful reputation, Burma isn't the only country with violent Buddhist extremists, as a recent incident in Sri Lanka shows. Actually, I had heard of Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka many years ago, as around the time I visited the country groups of radical Buddhist monks were among those pushing for a renewal of hostilities against the Tamil Tigers. In that case the victims (not so much the Tigers as the Tamil civilians, though the Sri Lankan military committed human rights violations against captured Tigers as well) were Hindus, though of course there are Hindu extremists as well, such as the ones that perpetrated the horrible massacre of Muslims in India a number of years ago. Also, of course, there are plenty of peaceful and idealistic Muslims, even in places like Yemen.
Going back to Southeast Asia, this article about Myanmar brought back memories of our trip there. When we were in Bagan (aka Pagan), we happened to come across a National League for Democracy office. There were a few guys sitting around outside on motorcycles who told us we could go in and take a look (the office was open but there was no one inside). It seemed obvious to us that the men outside were secret police, just like the ones described in this article. Unfortunately such a massive security apparatus can't be expected to disappear in a short space of time, though one might hope that some individuals would repent of their previous deeds and join in efforts to reform the country. Past misdeeds and their perpetrators are also an issue in Thailand. Unfortunately in this case neither side of the political divide exactly excites admiration, though certainly Thaksin shouldn't be allowed back in power. It's a little easier to favor the opposition in Cambodia, which managed to do fairly well in the country's recent parliamentary elections, despite the obstacles to a free and fair election created by the government of premier/dictator Hun Sen. Of course, if the elections had actually been free and fair, there's a good chance that the opposition (which, though certainly preferable to the authoritarian Hun Sen, does have a regrettable tendency to use nationalist rhetoric) would have won outright.
But while Hun Sen didn't succeed in completely stealing the Cambodian elections, Robert Mugabe seems to have managed to steal the elections in Zimbabwe. In retrospect, his statement on the eve of the election that he would willingly give up power if he lost was not surprising. No doubt he felt he could afford to sound conciliatory, since he knew that thanks to his party's manipulation of the voting rolls and so forth, the election was already in the bag. Many Zimbabweans have already started to resign themselves to more years of mismanagement and stifling of opposition voices.
Returning again to Asia, I've seen numerous interesting articles in the past few weeks on the continent's biggest and most rapidly growing imperialist power, China. Domestically, despite occasional good signs such as this or this, overall there is little indication that the human rights situation will improve in China under Xi Jinping – if anything, it may be getting worse. There is some reason to hope that the environmental situation may start to improve in the country, with positive consequences for the world, but even about this I'm not entirely optimistic. It seems to me that often the Chinese government only takes positive action on environmental and similar issues when it is almost forced to by Chinese public opinion, and in some cases only after things have reached an absurdly extreme state, such as this case of a wealthy Chinese building an artificial mountain complete with villa on top of an apartment building. Even in more open Hong Kong, the Beijing government's recent version of responsiveness sent decidedly mixed messages.
China's influence is being felt more and more outside the country, often for the worse, including in such places as Africa, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and the South China Sea, with the last one being the most obvious case of naked aggression. But China's influence is not limited to economic and military power. For instance, though this very interesting article about how Hollywood went out of its way to avoid offending the Nazis in the period before World War II might seem to have nothing to do with China, I was immediately reminded of some things I have read recently about Hollywood films being cut differently for the China market, often for political reasons. This is a highly disturbing trend.
This in turn brings to mind some of the similarly disturbing trends we've been seeing here in Taiwan. One that I have mentioned before is the cross-strait agreement covering service industries, including for example the film industry and hairdressing. I recently saw a government ad in an MRT station promoting the benefits of the pact, and they mentioned how China has a big market, blah blah, without mentioning that there's no guarantee Taiwanese companies will be able to successfully compete, not to mention issues such as political censorship which will affect such things as Taiwanese films even more than Western ones. But at least as disturbing are some of the recent actions of the KMT government in Taiwan itself. First there have been numerous instances of people having their land confiscated or their houses torn down in the name of "development". In many cases this "development" blatantly favors private developers. For instance, the government may confiscate land for a "public" project (often a clearly unnecessary one), in which the compensation they provide will be less than market value. Then they rezone the land and sell it to private developers at a profit to the government (not to mention individual officials who may pocket some of the proceeds). In several cases, the local government has used heavy handed methods to remove protestors and tear down buildings that they have targeted for these projects. The increasing tendency of the police to be heavy-handed with protestors is another bad trend, as is repression of dissent by methods such as the designations of restricted areas (for instance in the general vicinity of the president), where the police claim the power to check IDs without probable cause and even to arrest people shouting slogans for "endangering public safety". [Update: Here's a news article about a big recent protest against the government's handling of development projects, and here's an animated video on the topic, focusing on a development project in the central part of Taipei.]
In virtually all of these situations, the government's favorite response is that they are acting "according to the law". Now there is no question that operating under rule of law is preferable to a situation where government actions are entirely arbitrary and often in blatant violation of the countries own laws, as is still the case in China (whose constitution actually guarantees many rights that the Chinese people have never enjoyed in practice). But simply following the letter of the law is no excuse for perpetuating obvious injustices. What's more, many laws, in Taiwan and in countries such as the US as well, are written in ways that strongly favor the wealthy, large corporations, or others with power. Legalized theft is still theft. One can only hope that more ordinary people become aware of these issues and not only pressure the government to follow principles of justice rather than the letter of the law, but also put people in power who will make laws that benefit the disadvantaged as much as the powerful.
The most recent big international news story is what might reasonably be considered the Egyptian equivalent of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. After numerous threats, the Egyptian military violently cleared the camps of pro-Morsi Muslim Brotherhood protestors in Cairo, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The government made dubious claims that all violence was initiated by the protestors, and a few governments that were particularly hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood made supportive statements, but for the most part outside observers, including the US, condemned the violence, though the strength of their condemnations and the degree of blame they ascribed to the army varied. Notably, Mohamed El-Baradei, the liberal Interim Vice-President and one of the few relatively admirable prominent figures in Egyptian politics, resigned over the massacre. For my part, while I don't agree with anything the Brotherhood represents and I think their overthrow was probably on the whole a good thing, since they were governing not only badly but undemocratically, there is really no excuse for a slaughter on the scale that took place. It is an unfortunate reflection of the extreme polarization of Egyptian society nowadays that many ordinary Egyptians unreservedly supported the crackdown.
Elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, Tunisia has also been facing a political crisis. While theirs has not been as violent or chaotic as Egypt's, we can only hope that they find a resolution (preferably Ennahda agreeing to a technocratic transitional government) before it gets worse. Turkey's government, despite demonstrating an authoritarian streak in its response to protests in Istanbul, has also made positive moves to expand Kurdish rights.
Thanks to various radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere, a lot of people nowadays associate religious extremism exclusively with Islam. Not only does this ignore the long history of Christian extremism (including the rhetoric of some fundamentalists in the US today), it ignores contemporary situations in which Muslims are the victims of violent religious extremism. The most prominent example in the last year has been the massacres of Muslims in Burma (Myanmar) at the hands of Buddhists (while in a few instances individual Muslims helped start the violence, the vast majority of victims have been innocent Muslims, including women and children). Fortunately, a few Burmese have begun to speak out against those who encourage anti-Muslim prejudice. Unfortunately, despite Buddhism's peaceful reputation, Burma isn't the only country with violent Buddhist extremists, as a recent incident in Sri Lanka shows. Actually, I had heard of Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka many years ago, as around the time I visited the country groups of radical Buddhist monks were among those pushing for a renewal of hostilities against the Tamil Tigers. In that case the victims (not so much the Tigers as the Tamil civilians, though the Sri Lankan military committed human rights violations against captured Tigers as well) were Hindus, though of course there are Hindu extremists as well, such as the ones that perpetrated the horrible massacre of Muslims in India a number of years ago. Also, of course, there are plenty of peaceful and idealistic Muslims, even in places like Yemen.
Going back to Southeast Asia, this article about Myanmar brought back memories of our trip there. When we were in Bagan (aka Pagan), we happened to come across a National League for Democracy office. There were a few guys sitting around outside on motorcycles who told us we could go in and take a look (the office was open but there was no one inside). It seemed obvious to us that the men outside were secret police, just like the ones described in this article. Unfortunately such a massive security apparatus can't be expected to disappear in a short space of time, though one might hope that some individuals would repent of their previous deeds and join in efforts to reform the country. Past misdeeds and their perpetrators are also an issue in Thailand. Unfortunately in this case neither side of the political divide exactly excites admiration, though certainly Thaksin shouldn't be allowed back in power. It's a little easier to favor the opposition in Cambodia, which managed to do fairly well in the country's recent parliamentary elections, despite the obstacles to a free and fair election created by the government of premier/dictator Hun Sen. Of course, if the elections had actually been free and fair, there's a good chance that the opposition (which, though certainly preferable to the authoritarian Hun Sen, does have a regrettable tendency to use nationalist rhetoric) would have won outright.
But while Hun Sen didn't succeed in completely stealing the Cambodian elections, Robert Mugabe seems to have managed to steal the elections in Zimbabwe. In retrospect, his statement on the eve of the election that he would willingly give up power if he lost was not surprising. No doubt he felt he could afford to sound conciliatory, since he knew that thanks to his party's manipulation of the voting rolls and so forth, the election was already in the bag. Many Zimbabweans have already started to resign themselves to more years of mismanagement and stifling of opposition voices.
Returning again to Asia, I've seen numerous interesting articles in the past few weeks on the continent's biggest and most rapidly growing imperialist power, China. Domestically, despite occasional good signs such as this or this, overall there is little indication that the human rights situation will improve in China under Xi Jinping – if anything, it may be getting worse. There is some reason to hope that the environmental situation may start to improve in the country, with positive consequences for the world, but even about this I'm not entirely optimistic. It seems to me that often the Chinese government only takes positive action on environmental and similar issues when it is almost forced to by Chinese public opinion, and in some cases only after things have reached an absurdly extreme state, such as this case of a wealthy Chinese building an artificial mountain complete with villa on top of an apartment building. Even in more open Hong Kong, the Beijing government's recent version of responsiveness sent decidedly mixed messages.
China's influence is being felt more and more outside the country, often for the worse, including in such places as Africa, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and the South China Sea, with the last one being the most obvious case of naked aggression. But China's influence is not limited to economic and military power. For instance, though this very interesting article about how Hollywood went out of its way to avoid offending the Nazis in the period before World War II might seem to have nothing to do with China, I was immediately reminded of some things I have read recently about Hollywood films being cut differently for the China market, often for political reasons. This is a highly disturbing trend.
This in turn brings to mind some of the similarly disturbing trends we've been seeing here in Taiwan. One that I have mentioned before is the cross-strait agreement covering service industries, including for example the film industry and hairdressing. I recently saw a government ad in an MRT station promoting the benefits of the pact, and they mentioned how China has a big market, blah blah, without mentioning that there's no guarantee Taiwanese companies will be able to successfully compete, not to mention issues such as political censorship which will affect such things as Taiwanese films even more than Western ones. But at least as disturbing are some of the recent actions of the KMT government in Taiwan itself. First there have been numerous instances of people having their land confiscated or their houses torn down in the name of "development". In many cases this "development" blatantly favors private developers. For instance, the government may confiscate land for a "public" project (often a clearly unnecessary one), in which the compensation they provide will be less than market value. Then they rezone the land and sell it to private developers at a profit to the government (not to mention individual officials who may pocket some of the proceeds). In several cases, the local government has used heavy handed methods to remove protestors and tear down buildings that they have targeted for these projects. The increasing tendency of the police to be heavy-handed with protestors is another bad trend, as is repression of dissent by methods such as the designations of restricted areas (for instance in the general vicinity of the president), where the police claim the power to check IDs without probable cause and even to arrest people shouting slogans for "endangering public safety". [Update: Here's a news article about a big recent protest against the government's handling of development projects, and here's an animated video on the topic, focusing on a development project in the central part of Taipei.]
In virtually all of these situations, the government's favorite response is that they are acting "according to the law". Now there is no question that operating under rule of law is preferable to a situation where government actions are entirely arbitrary and often in blatant violation of the countries own laws, as is still the case in China (whose constitution actually guarantees many rights that the Chinese people have never enjoyed in practice). But simply following the letter of the law is no excuse for perpetuating obvious injustices. What's more, many laws, in Taiwan and in countries such as the US as well, are written in ways that strongly favor the wealthy, large corporations, or others with power. Legalized theft is still theft. One can only hope that more ordinary people become aware of these issues and not only pressure the government to follow principles of justice rather than the letter of the law, but also put people in power who will make laws that benefit the disadvantaged as much as the powerful.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
What I've Been Reading: April 2013 to June 2013
Hannibal’s Lieutenant by Robert Capps
It was with a bit of trepidation that I started reading this book, because I have thought about attempting to write a historical novel about Hannibal’s war against Rome, probably with one of his officers as the protagonist. If this had been exceptionally good and had been too similar to what I had in mind, I would probably have had to give up the idea. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. While until I actually do it, I can’t be sure that I am capable of writing a better book, if I can’t do better than this I won’t bother. For one thing, except for the background story of Gisco, the titular lieutenant, the book is basically a straightforward history. If you are going to write a novel, you might as well use that to create fictional incidents, imaginary dialogue or something. There is almost none of this here. Capps merely narrates events pretty much as they appear in the history books, which seems rather a waste of the novel form. Furthermore, Gisco is a very exaggerated character: a charismatic orator, an Olympic-quality athlete, and a military genius (as is Hannibal, but in his case there’s a historical basis for the characterization). What’s more, he is Greek. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself – I may be tempted to give my own protagonist at least a partly Greek heritage – but “Gisco” is a Carthaginian name, not a Greek one. When you throw in somewhat wooden prose, there isn’t really a great deal to recommend in this book, though I give Capps due credit simply for writing it – after all, I can’t claim to have written an entire novel of any sort, much less one about Hannibal. David Anthony Durham’s Pride of Carthage is a much better historical novel on the same subject, though his compression of the time scale is a significant weakness. Though there seem to be quite a few Hannibal-related novels around (I even have one of the more recent such books in my bookcase, though I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet), for now, I feel there’s still room for me to write something on the same topic, if I ever manage to do so.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
This is a non-fiction book exploring the reasons behind the success of the people at the top of their various fields. Gladwell brings up a number of interesting points, such as the statistical evidence that success in certain sports such as Canadian ice hockey is determined in large part by birthdate, the unusual opportunities that individuals such as Bill Gates had to put in long hours at their fields before becoming successful, the importance of socioeconomic background, the historical background that provided the opportunities for the industrial titans of the mid to late nineteenth century, Jewish lawyers of the mid twentieth century, and computer pioneers of the late twentieth century, the persistence of cultural characteristics over many generations and more. Many of the arguments he makes are pretty compelling. I was not completely convinced by some of them: For example, it seems hard to believe that the time of year a person is born can have that much effect on success in school (I was born in May, which is fairly late in the school year, and yet I was always at the top in terms of standardized testing). Also, I am not convinced that the 10,000-hour rule always applies in the case of artistic success. Even in the case of the Beatles, while their time spent in Hamburg was indeed very important to their success, it only indirectly applied to the main basis of their artistic achievement, their brilliant songwriting. The technical proficiency and broadening of musical horizons that they gained in Hamburg no doubt helped them write better songs, but without their innate talents, all the hours of playing in the world wouldn’t have made them able to write as they did. Likewise, I think that among artists of all fields you could find some who produced brilliant work very early, without spending long hours honing their skills. There also seemed to be a few errors here and there in the book. For example, in his story of the feud between the Howards and the Turners, “Little George” Turner was shot dead by Wilse Howard, but later Howard is said to have shot at “Little George” Turner and missed him, killing someone else (giving the confusing tangle of characters involved in the feud, probably Gladwell just miswrote one of the names). Despite these minor issues, the book is intriguing and thought-provoking.
Gifts by Ursula Le Guin
Ursula Le Guin has a writing style that is somewhat unusual in fantasy and science fiction. She doesn’t spend a lot of time on elaborate descriptions of her worlds. Her novels also don’t usually have the broad scope of many in these genres. Instead, they focus on individual people and their relationships with others, as well as their understanding of themselves. Despite this apparent narrowness of scope and the seeming simplicity of her prose, she creates very believable pictures of the societies in her stories and in some of her novels she addresses profound issues relating to these societies in ways that make the reader think about their own societies. For these reasons she is one of the best writers of the genre. Gifts is a novel for young adult readers (the same audience her famous Earthsea books were written for) that portrays a highland society partly inspired by real world ones such as that of Scotland, but one in which the different families have magical talents or Gifts that are inherited. But not everyone in a family inherits that family’s Gift, which is a source of concern for the leaders of the families. Also, many of the families feud with each other, using their Gifts to gain advantage in conflicts – if their Gifts are useful in such situations, which not all of them are. Some of the Gifts are more suited for peaceful purposes, and indeed most of them have peaceful uses as well as warlike ones. The novel centers on a teen named Orrec and his struggles with his Gift, his relationship with his parents, and the friendships and enmities between his family and their neighbors, as well as the stories of the Lowlands that he hears from his mother and a wandering Lowlander. It is a simple book, but a very good one. In the future, I will be keeping an eye out for the other two books that are part of Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore series.
Nemesis by Isaac Asimov
In Nemesis, humanity has spread out from Earth, with many people living in space colonies scattered around the Solar System. Earth is still home to the vast majority of humanity, but it is looked down upon as something of a backwater by those living in the space colonies. One of the most isolationist of the latter discovers a red dwarf star close to the Sun, setting the plot in motion. Isaac Asimov’s biggest strength as a science fiction writer was one that he shared with Arthur C. Clarke: Not only did they have scientific backgrounds, but they engaged in imaginative speculation about scientifically-based possibilities, resulting in some interesting story concepts. Asimov’s biggest weakness, on the other hand, is dialogue and to a lesser extent characterization. His dialogue is sometimes wooden and unnatural, and his characters sometimes seem to lack much depth. Nemesis is better than some of his other books in these respects, though it is not without its weak parts. The concept is interesting and the story is reasonably engaging, though some elements stretch the reader’s credulity a bit (not so much the scientific ideas as some of the character’s actions and reactions to them). One of the more impressive bits of scientific speculation was Asimov’s inclusion of a gas giant planet orbiting close to the red dwarf, years before the discovery of the first “hot Jupiter”, which are now known to be a very common type of planet. Overall it is a decent novel and a pleasant diversion, though nothing truly exceptional.
The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) by Apuleius
Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, is one of the oldest novels in existence. Written in Latin by Apuleius, a native of North Africa, it dates to the late 2nd century CE, at the height of the Roman Empire. Apuleius is said to have based it on a Greek text that is no longer extant. The main story, set in Greece, features a young man named Lucius who foolishly gives rein to his curiosity about magic and ends up being turned into a donkey. While the adventures of Lucius form the central tale, much of the book is taken up by various tales that are told to him or that he overhears, the longest and most famous of which is the story of Cupid and Psyche.
There is much that is grim and unpleasant in the book. If Greece had half as many murderous thieves and robbers as depicted in the book, public safety was a serious problem. There are stories of nasty murders and brutality, not to mention misuse of power by the wealthy. Then of course there are the tales of extremely powerful and very malicious witches. These at least obviously didn’t reflect reality, though perhaps Apuleius and his readers believed in such things. Interestingly, though Apuleius also relates a brief story of a supposed fortune teller being found out for a fraud, so he at least was aware that not all those who claimed supernatural powers had them (the effeminate priests who con people with their statue of a goddess reflects a similar cynicism about some religious groups). Women are not depicted very positively in the book, with many of them being murderous schemers, but there are some exceptions. Despite the often unpleasant nature of many of the things that are related in the novel, there is a fair amount of humor as well, though even some of that is a bit on the cruel side. One example is the elaborate practical joke played on Lucius involving inflated wine skins. By a strange coincidence, just after reading this episode, in the course of rereading Don Quixote I came across the part of the book where Don Quixote attacks some wineskins that he mistakes for a giant, an episode clearly inspired by Apuleius. The book does end happily, though the conclusion comes across almost as a missionary tract for the cult of Isis, through which Lucius finds salvation.
It was somewhat unfortunate that the version of Metamorphoses that I read was an Elizabethan translation dating to 1566 that had only been slightly updated in the 20th century. While this version was readable, a completely modern translation would no doubt be far more so. Nevertheless I am glad I read the book. While it is quite different from a modern novel, it is well-written in its way, and not a mere historical curiosity. As an important piece of the history of literature and compilation of many famous and interesting (if not always cheerful) tales, Metamorphoses is certainly worth reading, especially for anyone with even a passing interesting in ancient Greece and Rome. However, I would recommend seeking out a modern translation if possible.
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
This brief play by Oscar Wilde features plenty of his famous wit, and is very entertaining to read. On the surface at least it doesn’t deal with any serious topics; indeed it flaunts its “triviality”. However, its depiction of the English upper classes as being frivolous and downright silly may have been intentional on Wilde’s part. In any case, it is well worth the relatively short time it takes to read it.
Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
In preparation for my recent trip to Spain, I decided to reread Miguel Cervantes’ famous novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, original published in two separate volumes in 1605 and 1615. I say reread, because I had previously read a version of the novel that was included in a Cervantes omnibus, but as that one was slightly abridged, this was really the first time I read the entire book. Don Quixote has appeared more than once at the very top of lists of the greatest novels of all time, and so much has been written about it already that all I can do is relate my own general impressions.
Don Quixote’s reputation is founded on a number of things, perhaps the most important of them being the very well drawn characters in the book. It is a little harder to appreciate the achievement of Cervantes in this respect today, but as the introduction to one of the versions I have points out, character development was essentially unknown in Western literature prior to Don Quixote. While some of the ways in which Sancho Panza, for example, grows in the course of the novel could possibly be attributed to simple inconsistency on Cervantes’ part (Sancho not only gains in wisdom, but he also seems to gain somewhat in intelligence, which is rather improbable), it does seem that Cervantes had a very modern grasp of characterization; in fact he helped create the concept. There are definitely a few inconsistencies in the novel (Cervantes himself refers to several inconsistencies in the first volume in a metafictional episode early in the second volume where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are told about the publication of their adventures by a neighbor), but this is not surprising in a lengthy work written under somewhat difficult circumstances. A few episodes are a bit dull (though not unreadably so), and some characters are rather unappealing, such as Don Fernando from the first volume (as more than one commentator pointed out, his change of heart from a philandering cad to a generous lover is rather implausible, a rare example of a failure of characterization on the part of Cervantes) or the Duke and Duchess in the second volume, whose somewhat cruel jokes on Don Quixote (and rather casual attitude toward others) get to be a little much. Nevertheless, most of the novel is thoroughly enjoyable, and a few episodes are downright hilarious. Many of the more serious things Cervantes has to say are also thought-provoking, though I certainly don’t agree with him on all points.
Cervantes was a product of his times, and so it should be no surprise that he, or at least some of his characters, have some attitudes and opinions that would be considered reactionary today. Cervantes’ views on censorship certainly fall into this category, though much else of what he says about literature is remarkably perceptive (particularly the view that even fiction has to be plausible, if not by the rules of the real world at least by those in which it is set). Sancho Panza is shown to have some clearly racist views about blacks and Jews, though these may not necessarily have been – I’d even say probably weren’t – the views of Cervantes himself (Sancho was after all a fairly ignorant peasant, with similarly ignorant views on many topics). The most obvious prejudices depicted in Don Quixote are not racial but religious. More than once a Moorish convert to Christianity is depicted in a wholly positive way, implying that if a Moor became a sincere Christian, they could be fully accepted. Even non-Christian Moors are not portrayed completely negatively, however. Interestingly, the entire novel is presented as the translation of an account of Don Quixote’s life by a Muslim named Cide Hamete Benengeli. In the second volume, Ricote, the Moorish neighbor of Sancho Panza who admits to not being much of a Christian (though he rather incongruously prays to become one) is portrayed positively and his longing for Spain, the native home he was forced to leave when the Moriscos (the remaining Moorish population in Spain) were expelled in 1609, is depicted with sympathy. Ricote does make an absurd and unlikely speech approving of the expulsion despite the suffering it caused him personally, but whether Cervantes really believed this or felt obligated to include it for fear of getting into trouble himself is not clear.
In any event, aside from the entertaining nature of Don Quixote’s adventures, one of the novel’s great virtues is the very realistic depiction of life in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century. The characters come to life, and the reader can easily imagine the scenes which Cervantes creates. While I would not say Don Quixote is my favorite book, and I’m not even sure that I agree with those who rank it among the greatest novels ever, I can certainly understand why it is so highly praised. Even if it isn’t the greatest novel ever written, it is unquestionably great, and not to be missed by any serious reader.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
This novel is actually a children’s book, told through a combination of prose and pictures. It was a gift from a friend to my daughter on her fourth birthday. Though aimed at much older children, she seemed to enjoy it when I read it to her, though she occasionally got impatient with the more lengthy prose passages. Nevertheless, she followed most of it pretty well. The book is historical fiction, as a number of the key characters and the basic setting are historical, though the protagonist Hugo Cabret, his friend Isabelle, and the majority of the tale are fictional. It is a good tale regardless, and the unusual way Selznick tells the story is quite inventive. The book was made into a movie that I have not seen yet, but it received excellent reviews and several Academy Awards.
Inverted World by Christopher Priest
This novel is an interesting one containing one of the more original concepts in science fiction. The protagonist Helward Mann has grown up in an enclosed city where most of the inhabitants are prevented from going outside or even getting a good look at the exterior. After becoming an apprentice guildsman and thus one of the few who goes outside, Mann, along with the reader, slowly learns the reasons for these restrictions, as it turns out the city exists in a bizarre, surreal world and itself is highly unusual in nature. The concept (which I won’t reveal here) is a fascinating one, though there seemed to me a few possible holes, at least in Mann’s perception of the situation. It seems a bit odd that in all his speculations about the world he never really thought much about the nature of the local inhabitants, which it seems might have provided some clues to the reality of the city’s situation. Stylistically the book has a slightly old fashioned feel common to many novels of the period from the fifties to the seventies (it was published in 1974). The ending is also somewhat abrupt and ambiguous. Nevertheless, the book is an enjoyable one and I would recommend it to anyone who likes interesting concepts. (A side note: I started reading this book while in Spain, which turned out to be kind of appropriate.)
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