Random Notes and Miscellaneous Musings

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

What Is the Capital of Assyria?

In recent weeks the group variously known as ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State or Daesh has perpetrated some of the worst crimes of its short but sordid career by destroying ancient artifacts in a museum in Mosul and ancient ruins in Nimrud and Hatra. However, rather than dwell too much on the depressing destruction wrought by ISIL, I’d prefer to talk a bit about some of the region’s history.

If you’ve seen the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and if you haven’t, you should), you may recognize the title of this essay as the question from the bridge keeper that tripped up Sir Robin (the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot) when he attempted to cross the Bridge of Death. But unlike Sir Robin (and, it is probably safe to say, most other people), I actually knew the answer to the question the first time I watched the movie – or at least I knew a couple of possible answers to the question. In the many centuries when Assyria was a powerful independent state, it had several capitals. The two that I had long been familiar with and so leapt to mind when I heard the bridge keeper’s question were Assur (also spelled Ashur) and Nineveh; a third, Nimrud, was recently in the news for tragic reasons due to the senseless destruction visited on it by ISIL, and there was at least one other significant one. To be sure, the name Assyria was used for various political entities long after the destruction of the ancient Assyrian Empire (the name is still used of an ethnic group in the region), and without looking it up I have no idea what their capitals were. But it is ancient Assyria and its capitals that have the most historical prominence.

Ashur was the center of the Assyrian kingdom that first appeared in the 3nd millennium BCE. Though kings occasionally moved the capital away temporarily in later centuries, Ashur was the capital of Assyria for most of its history, and remained the country’s most important religious center and burial site for most of Assyria’s kings even when the capital was moved away permanently at the peak of Assyrian power. The Assyrians were a Semitic people, like many other ancient peoples of West Asia, such as the Akkadians, the Amorites, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Hebrews and the Arabs. The Assyrian kingdom waxed and waned in power many times over its long existence, though each successive peak was higher than the last. Assyria first appeared in the mid to late 3rd millennium BCE, though little is known of its early history. It first became a regional power in the period around 2000 BCE to 1800 BCE (the so-called Old Assyrian Empire), not long before Hammurabi reigned in Babylon, and in the same era Assyrian merchants had a trading settlement in central Anatolia from which they traded with local kingdoms such as that of the Hittites. Historians have learned a great deal about the ancient Middle East from the documents they left behind (some of which I saw last month in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums). After several centuries of decline, Assur was once again the center of a powerful Assyrian kingdom from the 14th to the 11th century BCE (the Middle Assyrian Empire).

Assyria's final and greatest period of strength began around 900 BCE with the rise of what later historians have sometimes called the Neo-Assyrian Empire. One of the important early kings of this era, Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE), was the one who moved the capital from Ashur to the city of Kalhu (called Calah in the Bible), which the Arabs in later centuries gave the name Nimrud. Several of my books have pictures of some of the monuments, sculptures and reliefs installed there by Ashurnasirpal II and his successors, much of which presumably have now been destroyed by ISIL, who are so idiotic that they try to compare their destruction of the ancient heritage of humanity with Muhammad's destruction of idols in Mecca, even though in the latter case, for better or for worse, he was trying to end active worship of pagan gods by destroying objects that were contemporary and so at the time had no particular historical value, while the things ISIL is destroying are not worshiped by anyone now but have immense historical value. Not to mention the fact that you'd think they'd have better things to do than engaging wanton destruction, seeing as they are in a war that they currently seem to be losing. But I digress....

Kalhu (or Nimrud) remained the Assyrian capital for over 150 years, and major Assyrian kings like Shalmaneser II and Tiglath-pileser III built palaces there (indeed, the later king Esarhaddon also built a palace there, even though by then the capital had been moved), though as noted earlier kings from Ashurnasirpal II on also continued to build and be buried at Assur. Sargon II (721 - 705 BCE) moved the capital to a new city he built called Dur-Sharrukin (meaning Sargon's Fortress). This site, now called Khorsabad, has reportedly also been damaged or destroyed by ISIL. Dur-Sharrukun was only the capital for the reign of Sargon II, as after his death his son Sennacherib moved it to what is probably the most well-known of Assyria's capitals, Nineveh.

Nineveh was already an old city when it became Assyria's capital, but under Sennacherib and his successors Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal it became the largest city in the world at that time and the center of the biggest empire so far in history. In the 7th century BCE Assyria reached the height of its power, ruling or dominating not only all of Mesopotamia but also Syria, Cilicia (the southeast corner of Anatolia), Palestine and even briefly the delta region of Egypt. The Assyrian Empire and its kings have a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty which is not entirely undeserved. Of course, most ancient empires were founded on harsh rule of their subjects, so the Assyrians were hardly unique in this regard. But their own reliefs often make a particular point of showing such things as the impaling or torture of defeated enemies, and they made frequent use of mass deportations of conquered peoples (most notoriously the so-called "ten tribes" of the kingdom of Israel, but they were just one of many groups that was treated this way), an effective but cruel method of control. On the other hand, they also created a highly efficient governmental structure. The efficient Assyrian mail system would later be adopted by the Persians, and later empires also made use of other elements of the Assyrian empire's administrative system. Ashurbanipal also created the greatest library that the world had yet seen, collecting many thousands of texts, including more than 10,000 cuneiform tablets, from all over the empire and covering over two millenia of Mesopotamian history back to the days of Sumer and Akkad (Ashurbanipal himself was supposedly able to read Sumerian and Akkadian, even though by that time Assyrians spoke their own dialect of Aramaic). Indeed, much of what we know of Mesopotamian history comes from the texts recovered in modern times from Ashurbanipal's library.

But the harshness of Assyrian rule eventually caused the empire's subject peoples and neighbors to rebel and attack it. A coalition of peoples led by the Babylonians under their new Chaldean ruler Nabopolassar and the Iranian Medes eventually defeated Ashurbanipal's successors, sacking Ashur in 614 BCE and destroying Ninevah and Kalhu in 612 BCE, bringing the Assyrian Empire to a final, crushing end. But despite the destruction wrought by the victors (who despite a brief period of glory under rulers such as Nabopolassar's son, the famous Nebuchadnezzar, would be conquered by the Persians under Cyrus a few decades later), substantial ruins remained, even aside from artifacts hauled away by later rulers such as the lamassu (winged bull men) we saw in the museum in Istanbul. But now thanks to ISIL, much that had survived for thousands of years, in Nineveh as well as Kalhu and Dur-Sharrukun, has now been destroyed, as have later ruins such as the well-preserved Seleucid-Parthian city of Hatra. We can only hope that ISIL is defeated before they do any more damage to our common heritage.

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Lightning Tour of Eastern Europe

Since I began this blog in 2009, I have consistently managed to post something (even if it was only a few links to things elsewhere on the Internet) at least twice a month. This month is an exception, however, chiefly because I was traveling for most of the month (and in the week before my departure I was far too busy to post anything). I have only been back for a few days and so have not had time to write an account of our trip (I traveled with my family and a few of my wife's colleagues), but here is a very brief summary of the places we visited.

Istanbul, Turkey: This was a transit stop on our original itinerary, but since we were passing through, I wanted to stop for a few days, and I'm glad we did. We were there three days, which was too little even to explore all the top sites as thoroughly as they deserve, but at least we were able to see the most important ones, such as the Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofia), and we even briefly crossed over to the Asian side by ferry. This is definitely near the top of my list of places I'd like to go back to.

Budapest, Hungary: This was our chief destination, as a friend who had invited us to come was studying there, though altogether we were only there about four days (three initially and one at the end). It was a very pleasant city with some nice sites, and it seems like it would be one of the better places to live in Eastern Europe, as it's nice, has plenty of good restaurants and shops, and yet is not too expensive. Regrettably, it currently has a rather bad right-wing government. We stopped to talk to a few brave protesters who are camping out in the square next to the parliament building until the current prime minister, Viktor Orban, is gone (we wished them good luck).

Krakow, Poland: We were only here for a little over a day, mainly because some in our group wanted to visit nearby Auschwitz. That was interesting but rather depressing (most of the people who really need to see it unfortunately won't go). I preferred Krakow itself, which has a very well preserved old town that is a nice place for wandering around in.

Prague, Czech Republic: We were here for about three days as well. This was also a pleasant place with a lot of interesting sites. Fortunately, though it's a bit more touristy than Budapest, it wasn't as much so as I feared. Aside from interesting places to see, it had a lot of nice little restaurants and shops. The only notable downside was that the middle of the old town square had been taken over by a noisy, over-the-top propaganda show sponsored by the Chinese government for Chinese New Year. Overall, Prague is definitely worth a visit, as are the other places we visited on this trip.

While we flew to and from Budapest, via Hong Kong and Istanbul on the way there and via Istanbul and Singapore on the way back (aside from our extended stop in Istanbul on the way out, we went to downtown Singapore for a few hours during our long layover there), we traveled by bus from Budapest to Krakow and by train from Krakow to Prague and from Prague to Budapest (the former overnight), so we did get a bit of a look at the countryside. We also passed through Slovakia on the first and third of these journeys, and the bus from Budapest to Krakow actually made a rest stop outside of Banská Bystrica, so we did set foot in Slovakia, if only for about ten minutes. If we ever get a chance to go back to that part of the world, I hope we will be able to take time to explore each of these countries in more depth.

Saturday, January 31, 2015

A Whole Bunch of Space and Astronomy Links

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Current Events: Charlie Hebdo, Sri Lanka, US-Cuba Relations, and Boko Haram

The dominant story in the last couple of weeks has been the attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris by extremist gunmen who killed a dozen people, including many of the paper's staff, and its repercussions. There were discussions about the exact affiliations of the gunmen, though I think it's as likely as not that they, like so many radicals, didn't necessarily have any clear affiliations and may well have acted on their own. But if they were encouraged in their plans by any of the larger extremist organizations, one plausible motivation might be that the latter want to deliberately stir up an anti-Muslim backlash which would in turn help them recruit more followers. Whether or not the attacks were part of such a plan, there unfortunately has been some backlash against Muslims in Europe. There were also stupid comments by Islamophobes like Rupert Murdoch, who actually said that Muslims in general should be held responsible for the extremists in their midst, an assertion that was cleverly mocked by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who wondered if she should be held responsible for the Spanish Inquisition and...Rupert Murdoch. In the same vein, I might also point out that no one seems to think Christians should be held responsible for people like Joseph Kony or Andreas Breivick. Of course, there were the usual calls for Muslims to condemn the attacks, ignoring the fact that very large numbers of them did so. This constant insistence that Muslims have an obligation to condemn all acts by Islamic extremists was satirized cleverly in a column on the Independent's website. There were also some hilarious responses to the absurd claims of an "expert" on Fox that the English city of Birmingham is now entirely Muslim. Even aside from claims based on complete falsehoods, the idea that a minority of extremists should be seen as representative of all Muslims is as ridiculous as saying that Christian extremists like the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church fanatics represent all Christians. As for the idea that Islam is inherently a violent religion, while there are some parts of the Quran that can be (mis)used to support violent extremism, the same is true of the Bible, which among other things has appalling stories of genocide committed in the name of God.

The attacks have also led to debates on the limits of free expression, and more narrowly on whether Charlie Hebdo in specific might have sometimes indulged in racism or sided against the weak (though this article is rather lacking in specific examples of how the magazine did the latter), or whether any apparent racism was in fact mocking racism in a way that non-French speakers can't easily appreciate due to the many layered nature of the satire, much like the way Randy Newman's song "Rednecks" mocks both Southern racists and Northern hypocrites. While it's hard for me to judge, I would suspect that the cartoonists did occasionally overstep the bounds of good taste and perhaps occasionally took a regrettable position on an issue, they also had a lot of thought-provoking cartoons that attacked the establishment. But however we view Charlie Hebdo in particular, the larger questions is whether there should be limits on this type of free expression.

In this regard, I will say that in general I side with those who support free expression, even when it's occasionally distasteful. I do think personal insults that cross the line into slander or any obvious hate speech should face some form of restriction, but mocking religious beliefs should always be allowed. On this point I disagree with Pope Francis, who I generally agree with more often than I would ever expected to agree with a pope. As this cartoon of Jesus and Mohammed amusingly points out, mockery of a religious figure is different from mockery of an ordinary person, as they represent ideas and beliefs. Frankly, if your beliefs can't stand up to mockery, then maybe there's something wrong with them. I would agree that the mockery should ideally have some sort of point, rather than being gratuitously provocative, but even in the latter case I would not in most cases support censoring it. The truth is, my instinctive reaction to this kind of act by religious extremists (of any religion) is to do exactly what they don't want me to do and start mocking their religions (or maybe all religions, since I prefer to be an equal opportunity mocker). I may not actually start doing so, but that's as much because I have too many other things I want to write about and not much time to do it as because I worry about hurting anyone's feelings.

In any case, while I consider the attempts by Islamophobes in the West to paint all Muslims as extremists due to the actions of few to be reprehensible, I must also add that the reaction of some Muslims to any kind of Mohammed cartoons is likewise over the top. While many Muslims have been upset by the widespread distribution of the post-attack issue of Charlie Hebdo and its cover with a cartoon of Mohammed, with the increasingly authoritarian Turkish government moving to censor it and violent protests breaking out elsewhere, this reaction makes no sense to me. I can perhaps understand them getting upset at some of Charlie Hebdo's past cartoons of Mohammed, like the one where he is posing naked for a camera, as that seems to fall under the gratuitously provocative category I referred to (I should note that Charlie Hebdo has also published cartoons targeting Christianity's sacred figures, such as the one where the Trinity is having a threesome). But the one on the new issue isn't even obviously mocking Mohammed. Instead, it seems that some Muslims are upset that Mohammed is being portrayed at all. But there is no basis in the Quran for ban on portraying Mohammed in particular, though there are verses against images in general, clearly aimed at discouraging idolatry. Indeed, having special standards for Mohammed could be seen as a form of idolatry itself, as it treats him as something beyond an ordinary human. Interestingly, depictions of Mohammed, including pictorial ones, have been made by Muslims throughout history and are not unknown even today in places such as Iran (as the Shiites take a more relaxed view on this issue than orthodox Sunnis). In any case, even if it was clear that their religion forbade Muslims from depicting Mohammed, there's no reason this prohibition should apply to non-Muslims. If anything, that's a discussion I would like to see Muslims engaging in, not one about condemning violence which most of them have condemned repeatedly already.

In other news, I was very pleased to see Mahinda Rajapaksa lose his bid for reelection as president of Sri Lanka, as he was horrible on many levels. He tried to turn the country into his family's private domain by accumulating autocratic powers for himself, putting his brothers in charge of important ministries, and changing the constitution to allow him to run again. He presided over terrible violations of human rights, not only in his war against the Tamil Tigers but also among dissidents in the country (incidentally, it was the warmongering support of some groups of Buddhist monks for Rajapaksa and his war on the Tamils back when he rose to prominence that led me to realize that there are nasty, violent Buddhists just as there are nasty, violent Christians and Muslims, long before the attacks by Buddhists on Muslims in Myanmar). He also was overly friendly with China. I was a bit surprised to see him accept defeat, but then maybe he didn't accept it as readily as it first seemed. In any event, I certainly hope the new president is able to put Sri Lanka on a better path.

Going back a little further, I was also pleased to see US President Barack Obama end the American diplomatic embargo against Cuba. While there is no question that Cuba is still an authoritarian state that suppresses free speech, it made no sense to continue a policy that clearly wasn't helping to fix things there. While the right wing and anti-Castro Cubans predictably attacked Obama's move as rewarding a dictatorship, these critics don't seem to have any objections to the US having ties with, say, China, which is at least as repressive as Cuba. They also don't complain about the US having allies like Saudi Arabia, which aside from conducting public executions in questionable cases, goes so far as to sentence a blogger to 10 years in prison and a 1000 lashes just for expressing himself online.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has continued their attempts to claim the title of the most horrible armed group in the world by committing atrocities even more terrible than their previous ones. Unfortunately, the Nigerian government hasn't done much about it, and the Nigerian military is still far from clean of human rights violations itself. Some have even suggested that Nigerian President Goodluck Johnathan is deliberately allowing Boko Haram to run amok because it will make it easier for him to win reelection (since voting will be disrupted in the north, where Boko Haram is active, and most of his support comes from the south). In any case, strong pressure needs to be applied to do something for the people suffering from Boko Haram's depredations.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

What I've Been Reading: May 2014 to December 2014

In the last few months, I have gotten way behind on my reading, but even further behind in writing about my reading. So here's my effort to cover the majority of the books I've read over the last eight months in one go. As usual, there's a lot more to be said about all of them, but in all but the last case I've kept my comments short - admittedly in part because for some of the books I've already forgotten much of what I'd originally thought of saying about them.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
This fantasy novel from Germany is rather different from most other books in the genre. It tells of a boy who enters a fantasy world, which is a common enough concept, but its similarities with other novels with such stories ends there. Fantastica, the fantasy world that the boy Bastian reads about in the book he stole from a seller of old books, is truly fantastic, and when he enters it, it turns out that he can shape it according to his desires, though this turns out to have a downside as well. But the fantasy world itself has virtually limitless possibilities, which is one of several ways in which the title is fitting. Another is the hints at many other possible untold stories that are scattered throughout the book. Basically, when a character’s part in the main story comes to an end, Ende often provides a brief hint at their future, concluding: “But that is another story and shall be told another time.” Of course, stories can be spun off in many directions from most novels that cover a lot of ground, especially in a fantasy world, but Ende makes it explicit that there are if not infinite at least a great number of stories that could be told. The main story itself is interesting and entertaining, if a little strange and unconventional in its twists. Bastian himself ends up as more of an anti-hero than a hero in much of the book’s second half, which makes an interesting twist, and Fantastica is a fascinating and unpredictable setting. While I’ll admit that my own preference is usually for somewhat more Earth-like fantasy worlds, if only because they are easier to get a mental grip on, a creation like Ende’s shows greater inventiveness. Overall, I found the book enjoyable, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys fantasy or just inventive storytelling.

World War Z by Max Brooks
I’ve never been particularly into zombies, but I have to admit a long-time attraction to post-apocalyptic tales, and that’s what this is. The disease that causes victims to become zombies is given a reasonably scientific-sounding explanation, and the stories of the various survivors are sufficiently gripping. While admittedly it has little relation to the merits of the novel as a whole, I have to say I also liked the treatment of China (the disease’s point of origin), where the government due to its exceptionally poor handling of the situation (starting with excessive secrecy similar to its handling of SARS in the real world) is eventually overthrown, and Tibet, which has become an independent, democratic and relatively prosperous independent country. A few things are not sufficiently well explained, and I would have preferred a little more about the overall course of events, as not everything is made clear through the disconnected stories. But while it’s not an exceptional piece of literature, the novel is good entertainment and a decent choice for reading on a trip or at the beach.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
This novel is often ranked by scholars as one of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th century. Like the similarly critically-revered Ulysses by James Joyce, it makes extensive use of stream of consciousness, and as such is not an easy read by any means. It tells of several decades in the lives of the highly dysfunctional Compson family through the eyes of various family members. The first section is told through the eyes of Benjy, the mentally disabled son of the Compsons. The narrative is a highly disjointed stream of consciousness that jumps around in time, so it takes quite some time to follow what is going on. The second section is narrated by the older Compson son Quentin, who was sent to Harvard using the money obtained from the sale of Benjy’s beloved pasture, which is turned into a golf course. Both Benjy and Quentin are in different ways obsessed by their sister Caddy, who is intelligent but willful. She becomes pregnant by one of her several lovers, and rushes into marriage with a man who later dumps her when he discovers the child is not his. Quentin’s part of the tale also jumps back and forth in time between his life at Harvard in an increasingly depressed mental state and his past, particularly his relationship with Caddy. His part of the narrative, while far more articulate than Benjy’s, is just as hard to follow and becomes even more so as his mental state deteriorates. The third section is told from the point of view of the third brother Jason, who is the most stable but the least likeable of the siblings. He is a racist and basically a sociopath who takes after his equally unlikeable mother, a hypochondriac who cares nothing for anyone else in the family except Jason, because he takes after her. Jason’s section is dominated by his running conflict with Caddy’s daughter (confusingly also named Quentin), who he has blackmailed Caddy into making him the guardian of, and whose money from her mother he is embezzling. The last section is narrated by the family’s black servant Dilsey, who does much to help the disintegrating Compson family hold together, though ultimately she can only watch them collapse. All in all, the novel is an impressive piece of work, one that paints an intriguing picture of life in the American South in the early 20th century, and it is an interesting challenge to read, but it isn’t something to read for fun.

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
This is one of the most well-known retellings of the Arthurian legends, in part because it presents a feminist and pro-pagan version of the stories. This is a commendable approach, as the original stories certainly have a patriarchal and decidedly pro-Christian bias, and it is refreshing to see them re-interpreted in this way (Bradley herself apparently sees the book not as anti-Christian, but as opposing the traditional, patriarchal view of the religion). Bradley’s telling of the story is for the most part sufficiently interesting to keep the reader engaged through a quite lengthy novel. However, the book is not without its flaws. For one thing, some of the characterization struck me as unbelievable and inconsistent. Whether it was Igraine’s apparent transition from non-Christian to seemingly pious believer back to non-Christian; Morgause’s initial portrayal as scheming and ambitious, then basically sympathetic (and content with her situation) if somewhat hedonistic and then as cold-bloodedly scheming again; Arthur’s surrender to his wife Gwenhwyfar on the issue of the banner he carried into battle and his oath to Avalon; the relationship between Gwenhwyfar and Morgaine; or a number of other actions of the characters, there was much that didn’t ring true. Of course, people are complex, they can change over time, and they often hide their true feelings, and some consider that sufficient explanation for these elements in the story. But to me, it didn’t seem so much as if the characters were evolved or revealing hidden parts of their personalities, but more as if they had split personalities or had become entirely different people. Some scenes were a little hard to believe, such as one where Morgaine gets into a very heated argument with Arthur and Gwenhwyfar and aims at least one very strongly worded insult at the latter (the sort which normally would cause a complete rupture in a relationship), and yet a few minutes later they are all talking almost calmly. Also there were occasional lapses in the writing, such as where the exact same phrase was used to describe Arthur’s reactions several times in the space of a few paragraphs. At times it seemed that Bradley overemphasized the conflicting points of view at the expense of the story, somewhat like Ayn Rand did in Atlas Shrugged. Bradley’s tendency to do this was not nearly as egregious as Rand’s, and her writing is much better, but it still pales in comparison to that of a more subtle writer like Ursula Le Guin, who can make a point about a profound issue with much less preaching. These flaws were not enough to make me want to stop reading the book, but they do detract from it. Overall, in the field of Arthurian fantasy, I’d have to say that I’d rank Mary Stewart’s Merlin series as clearly superior to this book, though admittedly having first read Stewart’s books when I was in my teens and re-read them more than once since then, I’m somewhat biased in their favor. I would still recommend The Mists of Avalon to fantasy fans, particularly those interested in tales relating to King Arthur, but I’d recommend reading the Stewart novels first.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
This is a sequel of sorts to Atwood’s excellent apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake. I say “of sorts” because in fact the two for the most part overlap in time, though this book extends to a later point in time than the first. This novel follows two women who were members of an environmentalist cult of sorts, and like the previous novel it skips back and forth in time between the protagonists’ lives prior to the collapse of civilization and their efforts to survive afterward. Generally speaking, it is also a very good book, well-written and engaging, with interesting characters. Some of the coincidences (mainly how various characters just happen to encounter each other in very different places and situations) do stretch believability somewhat, which is a bit of weakness – though the coincidences are not more of stretch than those in Dickens novels, which are still regarded as classics. Atwood also seemingly engages in a bit of re-writing of her previous novel, at least with respect to Ren, one of the protagonists of this one. While a character named Brenda is mentioned briefly in the first novel as a girl that its protagonist Jimmy dated briefly, as is one specific incident between them, there is no hint that Jimmy had especially strong feelings for her, as is stated in this novel (two of Ren’s close friends from this novel also figure in the first novel, somewhat more prominently than Brenda, Atwood doesn’t have to change as much about the nature of their relationships with Jimmy). Atwood also adjusts the timeline of some events to fit the new story. However, this sort of thing is sometimes a necessary evil in writing a series of connected books (J.R.R. Tolkien had to literally re-write the encounter between Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit to fit the story that later developed in The Lord of the Rings, though since all editions of The Hobbit published since the 1950s feature the later version of the story, few readers are aware of this), and the few inconsistencies that result can mostly be explained away, this is a minor issue. All in all, The Year of the Flood is a worthy follow-up to Oryx and Crake, though perhaps not quite its equal.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
One interesting thing for me about this novel is the way it triggered my slightly vague memories of the historical event it is based on. In the novel, a group of terrorists attack a party being held at the home of the vice president of an unnamed South American country, taking the guests hostage. Not too far into the novel, it is mentioned that the country’s president is of Japanese descent, which immediately called to mind Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, which in turn reminded me of an actual incident that took place in Peru. I didn’t remember where the actual incident took place (it was at the Japanese embassy), and I suspected (correctly, as far as I could tell from what I looked up afterwards) that many key elements of the novel were fictional, but it was still obvious that the historical event served as inspiration for the novel. In the book, the party is a birthday party for the chief executive of a powerful Japanese electronics firm that the hosts hope to persuade to build a factory in their country. He has no plans to do so, and was only persuaded to attend the party because the host country arranged for his favorite opera star to perform at it. Of course everything is disrupted by the hostage-taking, but as a stalemate between the hostage-takers – who had originally expected that the president, their actual target, would be at the party – and the country’s military develops, the hostages and their captors end up stuck together inside the house, and all sorts of strange relationships develop. The novel in essence is an exploration of human relationships in an extraordinary situation, one that is far removed from the real world, and the tone of much of it is positive, sometimes humorous, and even uplifting. Unfortunately, the outside world hangs like an ominous cloud over all the blossoming relationships in the house, something I felt perhaps even more strongly than a reader who didn’t know of the historical incident would. This is because one thing I remembered most clearly about the incident was how it ended, including how the military’s behavior in the final assault had later come into question. Patchett hints at how things will end through foreshadowing, but since the actual assault takes place so fast it isn’t quite as dark as it might have been. Still, readers shouldn’t expect a very happy ending, though a few of the main characters are able to salvage something from the destruction. Despite the relatively bleak ending, the book as a whole is a pleasure to read, and it’s worth recommending.

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (Translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa)
This famous book is one of the earliest works of prose fiction to appear in post-medieval Europe. In structure it is quite similar to The Arabian Nights, as it consists of a series of mostly unrelated stories told within the context of a frame story. The frame story itself is not particularly eventful, though its background is fascinating. Boccaccio wrote the book in the mid 14th century, soon after the bubonic plague commonly known as the Black Death struck Italy, including his home city of Florence (Firenze), and the novel’s introduction includes a very vivid and grim description of the ravages of the plague. The premise of the book is that a group of ten young people, seven women and three men belonging to the upper classes, decide to escape to the countryside together, where they spend their time singing, dancing and telling stories. As they decide at the beginning of their trip to leave all bad news behind them, it is not surprising that for the rest of the book, the plague is rarely mentioned, to the point where one could easily forget their motivation for embarking on what seems like a rather idyllic holiday of idle pleasure. But then the frame story is not really the point, and anyway the introduction was no doubt enough unpleasantness for the readers who were Boccaccio’s intended audience (mainly women looking for something to while away their spare time). The main point is the stories told over a ten day period, with each of the characters telling a story in turn, usually based on a theme set by the member of the group whose turn it is to be Queen or King for the day.

The stories themselves come in a wide variety and for the most part are highly entertaining and often funny. Most are set in contemporary or near contemporary Italy, but others range farther afield, all over the Mediterranean and even to Cathay (though the characters in the story set there are Hebrew and Persian rather than Chinese), and back in time to Lombard Italy and even in one case the time of the Roman Empire. The obvious difference between these stories and those of The Arabian Nights is that there is much less swashbuckling adventure and magic (although there’s a bit of both) and a lot more sex. The amount of the latter (occasionally graphic, though mostly through use of earthy metaphors) may be surprising, until one recalls that not every Western culture of the past has been as repressed about sex as, say, the English of the Victorian era or Americans of almost any era. The Romans, for instance, frequently wrote very forthrightly about sex. Nevertheless, some of the (often hilarious) stories of various lovers’ escapades – one story involves a man who ends up sleeping with all the nuns in a convent, and another ends up with two couples making a permanent spouse swapping arrangement – make the reader wonder if the Italians of Boccaccio’s day really were that open-minded. Not that everything took place out in the open; in fact, though many of the stories involve adulterous affairs, it seems that being caught in one red-handed could have serious consequences (in fact much of the humor involves the efforts of various lovers to avoid getting caught). Homosexuality is rarely alluded to, and when it is it is treated negatively, though the mild disapproval in The Decameron is nothing like the virulent homophobia in a book like Fanny Hill. I should also note, though that it would be a mistake to assume that all the stories involve love affairs and sexual escapades. In fact, most told on the first and last days do not involve anything of the sort, and many of the others do not either. Many revolve around reversals of fortune, or clever remarks that put someone in their place, or get the speaker out of trouble.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is its view of women. At times, the book presents the sort of attitude toward women that one might expect to see in a very patriarchal society, that is to say, quite negative about both the abilities and the rights of women. Even at the beginning, when the group of seven women is discussing fleeing the city, one of them gives a speech that is very derogatory about women and their ability to manage without men, leading them to decide to ask the three young men to come with them. A few of the stories repeat attitudes of this sort. Several of the sexual escapades described are essentially rape, as the woman is described as submitting to the man’s advances unwillingly. In one of the stories featuring the rather stupid Calandrino and the pranksters Bruno and Buffalamaco (some of the few characters who appear in multiple stories), the former beats his wife rather badly, though in a later story she is able to take revenge. The most extreme example, however, is a story told by one of the women on the ninth day that not only once more contains a speech about women’s inferiority to men, but directly advocates the beating of wives by husbands (though it seems that not all the women approved of the message, as the story evoked “murmuring” among them).

Despite these examples of blatant misogyny, however, much of The Decameron has a very liberated attitude toward women. Many of the stories feature women who are not afraid to speak their minds and very clever women who get the better of the men they deal with. Nor do the women only use their intelligence for love affairs. In a few stories, the female protagonists display capabilities in fields that in that era were generally reserved for men alone. One woman is a very talented doctor who successfully treats the king of France. Another, after narrowly escaping death at the hands of her husband, who falsely believes she was unfaithful to him, disguises herself as a man and displays such abilities in a series of situations that she ends up as a high placed member of the court of the Sultan of Egypt. Another woman, caught in an affair in a city with draconian punishments for unfaithful women, forthrightly declares to the judge that the law is unfair because women were not consulted in its drafting. These positive portrayals of women are enough to justify the statement in the scholarly introduction to the translation I read that The Decameron is notable for “almost revolutionary feminism” – certainly, despite the lapses mentioned above, on the whole women are portrayed much more positively and in much greater variety than in many other later novels, even many from only half a century ago (where the women are usually restricted the roles of secretaries and housewives).

The Decameron paints an interesting picture of Italian society of the times in other respects as well. At times the stories reflect the belief, unfortunately widely prevalent in pre-modern Europe, that people of noble ancestry were naturally superior. However, other stories directly contradict this, presenting a much more egalitarian view where characters of poor backgrounds can be at least as noble as those of high birth. Another aspect of the book is its generally very negative view of the Catholic clergy, all the way up to the Papacy. Friars are routinely mocked and lambasted for their greed and hypocrisy, and in one of the very first tales a Jew whose Christian friend keeps trying to convert him goes to Rome to see how the leaders of the Church behave, and in the end converts not because the Pope and other prelates behave well, but because the religion manages to thrive in spite of their scandalous behavior. Incidentally, while this tale implies the superiority of Christianity as a religion over Judaism, the Jew himself is portrayed positively, and in the following story, the only other to feature a Jew, he is again shown in a positive light – as is Saladin, who also features not only in the latter story but in a much longer one near the end. All in all, the book doesn't include many of the biases against various groups (except the one against the clergy, but then they were not a disadvantaged group) that are common in many stories from previous centuries.

The Decameron features a wide range of characters, from kings to peasants and everything in between, and all of them are very vividly drawn. While Boccaccio may not have written the stories themselves, like William Shakespeare (who also did not make up his plots), it is in the masterful way he tells them that his greatness lies. Also worth noting is his conclusion, in which he addresses criticism that his stories are too scandalous (i.e., too much sex) and contain language not fit for refined readers. He makes a very excellent argument that all the words he uses are appropriate to the stories he tells and furthermore that his tales, like so many other things, will be harmful or useful depending on the reader. As he says, fire and weapons and even the Bible can be used for good or bad, and while "a corrupt mind never understands a word in a healthy way", a healthy mind will not be harmed by words of any kind. With this concise defense of his masterwork, Boccaccio not only punctures contemporary prudes who objected to his stories, but the centuries of prudes that would follow. Today, however, most readers can simply enjoy what the introduction with good reason argues is one of the most readable of any of the world's masterpieces of literature.

Friday, December 19, 2014

US News: Police Killings and CIA Torture

As usual I've been to busy to do much writing here, but I'd like to comment on a couple of US news stories that have gotten a lot of attention, not only in the US but worldwide. First off, there is the issue of killings of African-Americans by police and how the justice system has dealt with them. The Micheal Brown case probably got the most attention, but the Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Tamir Rice cases have also been widely reported and discussed. Let me first say that this issue is more complex than many on both sides make it out. I have considerable sympathy for most police officers, and I understand that it can be easy to overreact to perceived threats, sometimes with fatal consequences. When so many people have guns, of course it's easy for police to think that the slightest move by the suspect may be a prelude to them getting shot at. But of course this is a consequence of America's failure to do something about the ridiculous number of guns in the country, an aspect of this issue that gets far too little attention. Essentially, it is largely the fault of the NRA and the rest of the gun nuts that police work is so dangerous and officers feel they have to be ready to start shooting at any moment. In this sense, the police are not entirely to blame for the rash of police killings (for a summary of incidents where people, many of them minorities, were killed by police, see this article).

Even aside from the issue of guns, it is understandable that mistaken perceptions in a potentially dangerous situation can lead police to use excessive force. It is quite possible that Darren Wilson, for instance, really felt that he was in danger when he started shooting at Micheal Brown. It's even possible that he really believed that Brown was within striking distance of him and preparing to charge when he fired the last, fatal shots, as the human mind can play all sorts of tricks during such incidents, and afterwards as well through its tendency to unconsciously edit memories. But this doesn't mean he shouldn't have been indicted. After all, being indicted is not at all the same as being found guilty; it just means that there's enough evidence that a crime was committed to go to trial. The threshold for indictments is quite low, which is why grand juries will hand down indictments in the vast majority of cases - except, as it happens, where the possible crime was committed by a police officer. In this case, an unarmed man was shot, not once but many times, and was killed. No matter how threatened Warren may have felt, Brown was in fact quite far from him when the fatal shots were fired, and testimonies was conflicting as to the entire course of events. This alone should have been enough to warrant a trial to find out (as much as possible) what really happened. If, as seems probable, Wilson started shooting and kept shooting in a panicked overreaction to a perceived threat, he probably should have been found innocent of murder (though maybe not manslaughter), but at least he should have gone to trial. As an aside, I have to say that what sympathy I have for Warren is lessened by the fact that, as far as I am aware, he hasn't actually expressed any regret for killing Brown. Even if Brown acted aggressively toward him (and stole a few cigars) that hardly means he deserved to die, and in hindsight Wilson should at least acknowledge that he didn't need to shoot him that many times, especially given the distance between them at the end.

The Eric Garner case is even more straightforward. At most, Garner was resisting arrest; he was in no way threatening the officers, who outnumbered him anyway. The officer put him in a chokehold (though he claims it wasn’t a chokehold), and Garner suffocated. All of this was caught on video. Again, the officer probably had no intention of killing Garner, and so he probably could only be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. But at the very least, he should have gone to trial, especially since he can’t really claim that he had no idea that Garner was suffocating, since he repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. Incidentally, despite what some commenters have claimed, being able to talk does not mean you can breathe. On the contrary, you can talk by squeezing air out of your lungs, but that doesn’t mean you are able to breathe in. As for Garner’s physique, of course that played a role in his death, but that doesn’t excuse the officer’s completely unnecessary use of deadly force.

Then there are John Crawford and Tamir Rice, one of whom was carrying a BB gun that was little more than a toy, and the other of whom was just carrying a toy gun. Neither of them was pointing it at the officers, who simply came up and shot them without even trying to talk to them. In Crawford’s case, he was just walking around the store talking on his phone when officers gunned him down, and the 12-year-old Rice was shot by police just seconds after they arrived at the park where he was playing. Both these cases were even more egregious than the Brown and Garner cases, and yet in Crawford’s case the police weren’t indicted, nor was the 911 caller whose false reporting of the situation led them to believe that they were about to encounter a threatening individual (not that that excuses their shooting first and asking questions later). Whether the officer who shot Rice (an officer who had been previously dismissed from another police force as unsuitable for the job) will be indicted remains to be seem, but we’ve already seen the Cleveland police have the gall to demand an apology from a Cleveland Rams player who wore a shirt demanding justice for Rice, when if anyone should be apologizing it should be them.

So how big a role did race play in this and the many other cases of black men killed by police in the past year? In most cases, probably not a conscious one. I don’t think most cops, white or not, are overt racists. But it is surely not a complete coincidence that this sort of thing happens to African-American males with far greater frequency than it does to whites. To a large extent, it is probably a matter of subconscious racial profiling, causing both 911 callers and police to treat black men as more threatening than anyone else doing the exact same thing (one black man was recently questioned briefly by a cop merely for taking a walk with his hands in his pockets on a cold day, and exchange that he recorded and posted online). On the other hand, white gun nuts can go wandering around Kroger armed with assault rifles, and they don’t get the reception John Crawford did for walking around Wal-Mart with a BB gun. Thinking about this issue, I recently recalled that when I was in college, I was pulled over several times for having one dim headlight on the old ’75 Chevy Nova I was driving. Note that the other worked perfectly, and the dim one was at least working, if not well. Every time, I was let off with a verbal warning. Looking back, I have to wonder if that would have been the case if I had been black or Hispanic.

In sum, while acknowledging that police have a difficult and dangerous job, we also have to acknowledge that they are often not held sufficiently accountable, even when they kill people, and that there are definitely disparities in how minorities, especially African-American men, are treated by law enforcement. There is no easy solution to this problem, but recognizing that there is a problem would be a good start.

Another major news story was the release of the executive summary of the Senate committee report on the use of torture by the CIA under the Bush administration. In a lot of ways the defenders of torture (or "enhanced interrogation") are quite similar to the defenders of the police in the incidents described above, in that they argue that the end justifies the means and that those responsible for defending Americans (or maintaining public order) should get extra leeway in their use of violence and other extreme measures. Former Vice President Dick Cheney went so far as to say he had "no problem" with the fact that up to 25% of the people the US tortured were later found not to have any involvement with terrorism as long as the torture accomplished its objectives. But in truth there is little evidence torture actually produced any useful intelligence. Almost all key intelligence obtained from captured individuals was not obtained through these methods. However, even if it had been effective, not only should we be appalled that the US tortured innocent people, we should even be appalled that "guilty" people were tortured. Use of torture is reprehensible even if it works and even if the tortured people really are enemies. Of course it's even more so when it is useless and many of those tortured are not even hostile. Certainly it's unlikely that Americans would so blase about if the victims had been American soldiers.

Despite the police killings and even the torture committed by the CIA, the US still has a better human rights record than places like China, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or nowadays even Thailand. But that isn't saying much. If it wants to be able to maintain the moral high ground against authoritarian regimes around the world, the US not only needs to address the problems with the police, but it needs to put safeguards in place against future attempts to use torture, and it needs to hold those who engaged in torture accountable, all the way up to Cheney and probably former President George W. Bush as well.

To end on a much more positive note, here are some links to news about recent discoveries on Mars:
http://news.yahoo.com/found-ancient-lake-mars-sign-143002982.html
http://news.yahoo.com/curiosity-rover-drills-mars-rock-finds-water-122321635.html
http://www.space.com/28019-mars-methane-disovery-curiosity-rover.html
http://www.space.com/28033-mars-life-building-blocks-curiosity-rover.html?cmpid=558746
http://www.cnet.com/news/curiosity-has-discovered-organic-matter-on-mars/#ftag=YHF65cbda0
And lest we forget, there's a lander on a comet as well, one that may wake up again and start sending us new information:
http://news.yahoo.com/european-comet-lander-may-wake-space-slumber-232545821.html
When things on Earth are looking bad, it's always nice to remember there's a big universe out there to explore.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Current Events: Taiwanese Elections, Obama Tackles Immigration, and Comet Landing

A lot has been going on in the past few weeks that is worth of comment, and if I had unlimited time I could write a half a dozen essays around current events. But for now I’ll just settle for some (relatively) brief observations on a few news items. Starting with news from home, Taiwan held local elections in cities and counties around the country this past Saturday, and the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) did much worse than expected, losing most of the mayoral and county commissioner races, including in usually KMT-leaning areas such as Taipei and Taoyuan. At the risk of over generalizing, this result can be ascribed to disapproval of the governments’ performance, with food scandals, economic issues, corruption, expropriation of land with poor justification, and attempts to force through the service trade agreement with China all contributing factors. I should point out, however, that it would be a mistake to overestimate the importance of Taiwan-China relations in voters’ minds, as a lot of people in Taiwan, like elsewhere in the world, are more concerned with local issues (in other words, the food scandals probably hurt the KMT more than the service trade agreement did). In any case, the results were good news for Taiwan as a whole, even though in places such as Taipei it was a matter of a mediocre candidate beating a terrible one, and places like Hualian and Taidong on the east coast remain in the hands of terrible politicians. Our local Green Party candidate unfortunately didn’t win election to the city council (though one Green Party candidate in Taoyuan was elected to their council with a high vote total) and the KMT mayor in our city won, though by an unexpectedly narrow margin. Still, while the KMT and KMT-leaning independents hung on in many places and even the winning DPP and DPP-leaning candidates who won around the country are in many cases just the lesser of two evils, I’m certainly much more happy with these election results than those in the US at the beginning of the month.

Speaking of the US, I have been glad to see US President Barack Obama take strong actions in a number of important areas, even if it is overdue and often insufficient. The one which garnered the most attention, of course, was his executive order allowing some 5 million undocumented residents of the US to remain in the country without fear of deportation. Many Republicans had a predictably hysterical reaction to this. But contrary to their claims, Obama’s action was neither unprecedented nor illegal, and it was clearly justified. Many presidents have taken executive action relating to immigration, and both Reagan and the first Bush took actions very similar to Obama’s. The Supreme Court just a few years ago ruled that the executive branch had discretion in determining when to pursue deportation and that the law did not obligate authorities to deport all undocumented people. Many Republicans also complained that Obama should have left immigration reform to Congress. The problem with this complaint is that he did leave it to Congress for a long time, and Congress – more specifically, the House Republican leadership – did nothing. The Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill (an imperfect one which placed far too much weight on “border security”, but better than nothing) almost two years ago, and the House never even voted on it. So how long was Obama supposed to wait for Congress to act? If anything, Obama should be criticized for waiting as long as he did, and for not covering more people with his executive order.

In news (much) further afield, last month saw the first soft landing of a probe on the surface of a comet when the European Space Agency’s Philae lander, dispatched from the orbiting Rosetta probe, touched down on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Admittedly, the landing was not without a hitch; the harpoons that were supposed to anchor the probe to the comet’s surface failed to deploy, so the probe bounced twice before coming to rest, the first time traveling as far as a kilometer before landing and bouncing a shorter distance the second time. This was because due to the small size of the comet, its gravity is extremely weak. It is estimated to be about one meter per second, meaning you could easily throw a ball into space and with a hard enough jump you might be able to launch yourself. In any event, the probe ended up next to a cliff that left it mostly in shadow, so it could not recharge its batteries with its solar panels. However, it managed to send off some data before its power ran out, and simply by landing the probe made history. We can look forward to more space exploration milestones in the near future, as an unmanned test flight of the Orion capsule that NASA is developing for future crewed space exploration is coming up which will send the capsule further than any such capsule has traveled from Earth since the Apollo missions ended in 1972. While this would be even cooler if it actually had a crew (after all, unmanned probes have traveled thousands of times farther), if the test goes as planned it will be an encouraging sign that we may say real human crewed space missions to destinations beyond low Earth orbit in the not too distant future. Finally, looking further ahead, next year the New Horizons probe will make its rendezvous with Pluto on the edge of the Solar System, and the Dawn probe will visit Ceres. While humanity is still trying to get its act together on Earth, it’s good to see us continuing to explore beyond our home world.

Monday, November 17, 2014

2014 US Election Recap

So the results of the US election are in (except for a few close races that are still being contested, and the Senate race in Louisiana, which will decided by a run-off), and for the most part the Republicans came out on top. They won a majority in the US Senate, improved their hold on the US House of Representatives, and gained a number of state governorships. So how did the Republicans win, and what does their victory mean? Can this election be seen as a vindication of the Republicans' policies? What roles did massive amounts of anonymous campaign spending and voter suppression play?

In my opinion, the Republicans' success was due to a combination of factors, not any single thing. An important point to remember is that turnout was very low – at 36%, it was the lowest it has been since the mid-term elections in 1942, in the middle of World War II (when many eligible voters were fighting overseas and unable to vote). Aside from being appalling evidence of voter apathy, this means that even though the Republicans got the majority of votes cast, that only means they got the support of about 20% of the electorate, hardly a mandate for their policies. It remains an unfortunate fact that, as is usually the case, older white voters had the highest turnout, and this is the demographic that most favors the Republicans. This election certainly doesn't show that the Republicans have the support of most Americans, just of a small (and shrinking) but politically active block of voters. But the low turnout, and particularly the low turnout among minorities, can't be put down to apathy alone. Republicans throughout the country made obvious efforts to suppress turnout in general, and minority turnout in particular. In numerous states, they used the excuse of voter fraud, which is almost non-existent with possible cases over the last decade at most in double digit, to institute voter ID laws that prevented many thousands of people from voting. They reduced the time periods for early voting. Most blatantly, they closed down polling places in minority areas, so that not only did people have to travel farther to vote (often having to rely on public transportation due to a lack of their own vehicles), but lines were much longer at the polling places that were left, meaning that many with limited time had to give up without getting to vote. Then of course there was the failure of some Republican Secretaries of State to process many voter registration forms, Georgia being the most widely reported case. Of course these efforts to suppress the vote were hardly the sole reason for the low turnout, but in some races they may have done enough damage to change the results.

An additional reason for the Republicans’ success was the enormous amount of money that was spent by right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and corporate interest groups like the US Chamber of Commerce to support the Republicans – or, more commonly, to attack the Democrats. Recent dubiously reasoned Supreme Court decisions have unleashed an avalanche of spending, much of it anonymous (so-called “dark money”), and much of it going to attack ads containing so many misleading statements, factual inaccuracies and outright lies that if they were held to the same standards that we generally expect of product advertising, they would be immediately pulled off the air. You even had ads prominently featuring ISIL and Ebola (sometimes conflating them not with each other but the similarly unrelated issue of “border security”) and insinuating that President Barack Obama and by extension the Democrats running in the election were responsible, even though, first of all, claims that Obama is to blame are dubious in the case of ISIL and absurd in the case of Ebola; secondly, even if Obama were to blame that would not mean the Democrats in Congress, who have no control over the administration’s actions in these areas, were also to blame; and thirdly, ISIL and Ebola currently present negligible threats to the US itself. But these ads and others like them no doubt had an effect on low information voters, who unfortunately make up much of the electorate.

Some also have argued that the way the Democrats themselves campaigned was in part to blame for their defeat. Certainly candidates like Alison Grimes in Kentucky at times seemed intent on painting themselves as being closer to the Republicans than to Obama, just less extreme than the former. Few of them actively promoted progressive ideas, and those that did, like Jeff Merkley in Oregon (admittedly a heavily Democratic state to begin with), often won. I’m not certain that a more aggressively progressive campaign strategy would have gotten better results, especially in conservative states, but if nothing else it might have helped educate some voters and lay the groundwork for the future. In any event, running to the right didn’t pay off for the Democrats who tried it. Unfortunately, some don’t seem to have learned that lesson: while I wasn’t terribly inclined to go out of my way to support Mary Landrieu, the conservative-leaning Democratic Senator from Louisiana, in her run-off election against the (of course) even more conservative Republican Bill Cassidy, she recently destroyed any chance getting my support by introducing a bill in the Senate to approve the Keystone XL pipeline at the same Cassidy introduced a similar bill in the House. It is if the two are competing to show who is most beholden to oil and gas interests, hardly a strategy that’s going to appeal to anyone who cares about the environment or indeed the future of human civilization.

Another interesting point about this election, one that has been noted by a number of observers but largely ignored by Republicans and the right wing, is that even this small, relatively conservative group of voters passed a number of progressive ballot measures, even states where Republicans won Senate and gubernatorial races. Marijuana legalization referendums passed in several states, and a liberal medical marijuana measure got 57% of the vote in Florida, only failing because Florida requires a supermajority of 60% for passage. Personhood measures put forward by anti-abortion activists failed in conservative states like Colorado. In several states, including conservative ones like Arkansas, voters passed increases in the minimum wage. In Washington, a gun control measure was passed (while Washington leans Democratic, it is still significant that that the measure passed easily, in the face of the usual NRA scaremongering, and a pro-gun measure to hobble it failed by a substantial margin). So voters in many states approved progressive ballot measures and voted down right-wing ones, even while in some cases electing Republicans who took opposite positions on those issues.

While these indications that many progressive policies are popular – even among a narrow and more conservative electorate – are certainly heartening, the contradictory votes are also evidence of another reason for the Republican victories, one that was mentioned above: there are still far too many people in the US who are poorly informed, easily manipulated, full of biases and mistaken notions, or almost sociopathic in their lack of concern for the well-being of anyone other than themselves. No one who was well-informed, rational, reasonably objective and had any concern about the future could vote for a climate change denier, nor could anyone concerned about the long-term well-being of society vote for people who refuse to recognize income equality as a problem. Legalizing marijuana, treating undocumented people like human beings, making birth control easily accessible and making same sex marriage legal are all likewise easy calls. And yet people in many states elected people who not only oppose such things, but practically froth at the mouth in their opposition to them. Of course the US is hardly the only democracy where it is a mystery to many observers how some of the country’s politicians get elected: I still have difficulty comprehending how Israelis could elect not only Benjamin Netanyahu but the even more extreme politicians to his right, or how Australians could elect an anti-environmentalist like Tony Abbott, or the Canadians vote in the similarly fossil fuel-loving Stephen Harper, or the Indians vote in someone like Narendra Modi with so much blood on his hands (though I can understand their disgust with the Congress party). Humanity in general evidently has a long way to go on a lot of fronts.

But whatever the reasons, for the next two year, the US will be stuck with a Congress run by people like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, and with even more crazy people like Ted Cruz and James Inhofe exercising far too much of a sway. It would be nice to simply dismiss it as a problem for the Americans who allowed these people to get into office (whether by voting for them or just failing to get to the polls and vote against them), but unfortunately the US has far too much of an impact on the rest of the world to do that. For instance, even two years of letting the fossil fuel industry run rampant could do a lot of harm, possibly even making it impossible (or at least very difficult) to avert the worst case climate change scenarios. So we’ll just have to hope that Obama stands firm and makes as much use as he can of his Presidential powers to keep things from getting too bad, and when necessary and possible, give him what support we can for doing so.