Today I want to talk about something rather different from my recent posts, which have focused on politics and books. This is more of a writing style and editing issue, but one that comes up quite frequently here in Taiwan. It is the problem of how to write Chinese names in English texts. I'm not so much concerned here with the particular type of romanization (for those who don't know the term, this refers to spelling words from languages like Chinese, Thai, and Arabic using the Latin-based English alphabet) used, but the order in which the names should be written. This arises because in Chinese names the family name comes first, followed by the given name. This is true in most East Asian countries, including Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
Actually, the answer is quite simple: Romanized Chinese names should be written the same way they are written in Chinese, with the family name first. Thus we write Ma Ying-jeou (the president of Taiwan), Tsai Ing-wen (the leader of the opposition DPP), Hu Jintao (the president of China), and Mao Zedong (the former leader of China), and to be brief refer to them by their family names only, i.e., Ma, Tsai, Hu, and Mao. This is quite straightforward, but unfortunately many Taiwanese still end up confused, partly due to misguided attempts to adapt their names to English conventions.
Many Taiwanese have the idea that because in English names the family name comes last, they should also put their family name last when they write their name in English. But this is incorrect, unless they are using an English given name. For instance, the former vice president of Taiwan, Lu Xiulian, uses the English name Annette, so she is generally called Annette Lu in English-language news reports. But Chinese names are always written in the Chinese order, whether they are written in Chinese characters or in the English alphabet. Ma Ying-jeou does not use an English name, so his family name is written first. No respectable news organization writes it as Ying-jeou Ma. Unfortunately, many Taiwanese are not aware that this is an error; I even had my romanizations of a number of Taiwanese names appearing in my translation of the liner notes of Story Island (an album that won a number of awards and a Grammy nomination for design packaging) reversed by a Taiwanese editor, which infuriated me when I discovered it (especially since it makes it look like I myself made the errors).
The same principle applies to Korean names, so the president of South Korea is Lee Myung-bak (family name Lee) and the leader of North Korea is Kim Jong-il (family name Kim). Vietnamese names are likewise written family name first, so the prime minister of Vietnam is Nguyen Tan Dung (family name Nguyen). The only frequent exception to this rule is Japanese names. In Japanese, the family name also comes first, but it has become common practice to reverse this when the name is written in English, so the prime minister of Japan, whose name reads Kan Naoto in Japanese, usually appears as Naoto Kan in English news (though I have seen Japanese names written in the proper Japanese order in some places, and I prefer to write them that way myself).
Another common error Taiwanese make in writing their names is to leave the order alone but to put a comma after the family name. This incorrect and ugly (aesthetically-speaking) habit is particularly common among academics and people who have pursued advanced degrees, and seems to derive from the use of the comma in English names found in bibliographies, indexes and similar lists. But the reason for the comma in English names in such situations is simple; since in bibliographies and indexes we list names alphabetically by last (family) name, we reverse the usual order and use the comma to indicate this. So Barack Obama becomes Obama, Barack and Hillary Clinton becomes Clinton, Hillary. If a Chinese name appears in an index or bibliography, of course the family name comes first, but for Chinese names this is already the usual order, so no comma is necessary. Even for English names we only write something like "Obama, Barack" in specific situations. But some Taiwanese stick commas in their names on business cards and documents, and in the building housing the offices of Taiwan's legislators, the name plates on their doors actually have commas after their family names, which looks ridiculous.
One reason some Taiwanese have offered me for either writing their names backwards or sticking a comma into them is a fear that Westerners won't realize which name is their family name. I'll admit that if a Taiwanese writes his name as Lee Teng-hui, some Westerners might mistakenly call him "Mr. Teng-hui" rather than "Mr. Lee", though frankly I can't see how anyone who ever reads the international news could have a problem (everyone who does should be aware that Hu Jintao is "Mr. Hu" and Deng Xiaoping was "Mr. Deng"). But even if a few foreigners are ignorant, there is no reason for East Asians to mangle their own names to accommodate them. Perhaps on business cards or name tags they might want to capitalize their family name (e.g., TSAI Ing-wen), but that's as far as they should go.
Unfortunately, despite my best efforts and the advice of style manuals (not to mention the example of sites like Wikipedia and numerous news reports and articles from major international media organizations), Taiwanese still write their names all sorts of ways. I have even seen names written backward and with a comma (e.g., Ying-jeou, Ma), which combines the worst features of the two more common incorrect ways of writing names without even retaining the dubious virtue of clarifying which is the family name (though I suppose in a certain sense the comma is more logical here, because the normal ordering has really been reversed -- though this still doesn't explain why one would want to reverse it in the first place). While there is only so much I can do, I try to at least make sure the people I come into regular contact with learn the correct way of writing their names in English. Hopefully that will make at least a little bit of a difference.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Some interesting articles
Here are a couple of interesting articles I've come across in the past few days. The first is one by Fareed Zakaria entitled How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch With Reality. The criticism of today's conservatives is completely accurate, and many have noted how even in the Reagan era ideas such as taxes can never be raised under any conditions (even when they are already low and the country has a huge debt) were not standard among conservatives. Reagan himself raised taxes more than once, and I have already cited his budget director David Stockman's scathing criticism of this mentality. In comparison with today's leading right wing politicians and talking heads, the conservatives of previous generations do seem more rational. That's not to say that I agree with George Will, or with a number of the other assertions in the first part of the piece.
For one thing, while I agree with the criticism of Marxism as not being well grounded in reality (as I noted in my recent post which discussed The Communist Manifesto, among other books), not all aspects of traditional conservatism were firmly grounded in reality (for instance, as I mentioned in the same post, the capitalist economic theory regarding international trade). Furthermore, liberalism (as opposed to Marxism) can and often is fairly well grounded in reality. Certainly I and many other sensible liberals would agree that "to change societies, one must understand them...and help them evolve" (though we would disagree about "accept[ing] them as they are". Also, most conservatives, whether now or in the past, have not really been interested in changing society or helping it evolve. They want it to stay the same, or go back to some mythical golden age.
For that matter, George Will himself, while fairly intelligent and rational (certainly when compared to people like Limbaugh, Beck and Palin), has made assertions that were not very well grounded in the real world, such as in a recent column where he criticized Obama for not knowing history by picking on a few misstatements (yes, Obama's statement on Texas was incorrect, but the southern Democrats of four decades ago were essentially the same as the Republicans of today), but himself displayed a rather simplistic and misleading view of history. He seemed to imply that getting rid of or weakening programs like Social Security or Medicare would simply return the US to the conditions that existed before the New Deal -- as if the country had not changed in any other ways. Obama was completely right to say that Ryan's budget proposal would lead to an America that would be "fundamentally different than what we've known throughout our history", because even aside from the existence of programs like those Ryan wants to kill, America is a fundamentally different place from what it was 80 years ago. It's a country of close to 300 million people rather than 120 million, it's urban rather than rural, it's closely tied to a global system rather than being isolationist, it's far more ethnically and culturally diverse, and its communications are dominated by television and the Internet rather than radio and letters. It is also a place in which a lack of a safety net would mean even more suffering than was the case in the pre-New Deal days, and one in which (I would hope) people would be far less content to see others suffer, as many did before those social programs existed (not that they eliminated all suffering -- far from it -- but they did alleviate much of it for the most vulnerable segments of the population). While Will's view of history as given in his column lacks the blatant inaccuracies of people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, it does share with them a rather myopic view that refuses to acknowledge that things have changed a great deal in America and the world since the early 20th century, and it is impossible to go back, even if we wanted to (I sure wouldn't).
There was a time, back when I was young and ignorant, that I would have agreed with Will's statement about conservatism being true. When I was in secondary school, I considered myself a conservative. Even then though, when I read about modern European and American history, I noticed how at virtually every point in the past, I agreed with the liberals. It was the liberals who wanted religious tolerance, an end to absolute monarchies, the abolition of slavery, labor laws, the breaking up of monopolies, women's suffrage, and civil rights. My assumption at the time was that modern liberals were simply trying to push things too far, as if we'd reached an ideal society and it should be kept the way it was. Of course later I learned that there were still many problems and inequalities, and more importantly I learned to empathize better with the situations faced by more disadvantaged people. This didn't mean given up rationality, or coming to insist on any particular means for solving all these problems. For instance, where properly regulated private enterprise is more efficient than government (and there are many areas where that is the case), I am in favor of it. The purpose is to create an open, tolerant equable society where all people have their basic needs met. George Will's brand of conservatism won't do that, and the completely irrational brand of conservatism Zakaria criticizes certainly will not do so.
Speaking of issues where leading conservatives are not only irrational but even downright immoral in their treatment of hardworking, innocent people, the New York Times Sunday Magazine recently published a long article by Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, about how he came to the US from the Philippines at the age of 12 as an undocumented immigrant (i.e., an illegal immigrant) and has lived under the shadow of possible discovery and deportation since. This is exactly the kind of person who the US should want to have here, and the kind who the Dream Act would help. And yet the right wing not only prevented its passage, but continues to demonize all illegal immigrants as criminals no better than murderers and thieves. While there is little hope for the unrepentantly racist and hardhearted among the anti-immigrant crowd, perhaps a few of the relatively open-minded ones could learn something from Vargas's story, or a recent film called A Better Life.
For one thing, while I agree with the criticism of Marxism as not being well grounded in reality (as I noted in my recent post which discussed The Communist Manifesto, among other books), not all aspects of traditional conservatism were firmly grounded in reality (for instance, as I mentioned in the same post, the capitalist economic theory regarding international trade). Furthermore, liberalism (as opposed to Marxism) can and often is fairly well grounded in reality. Certainly I and many other sensible liberals would agree that "to change societies, one must understand them...and help them evolve" (though we would disagree about "accept[ing] them as they are". Also, most conservatives, whether now or in the past, have not really been interested in changing society or helping it evolve. They want it to stay the same, or go back to some mythical golden age.
For that matter, George Will himself, while fairly intelligent and rational (certainly when compared to people like Limbaugh, Beck and Palin), has made assertions that were not very well grounded in the real world, such as in a recent column where he criticized Obama for not knowing history by picking on a few misstatements (yes, Obama's statement on Texas was incorrect, but the southern Democrats of four decades ago were essentially the same as the Republicans of today), but himself displayed a rather simplistic and misleading view of history. He seemed to imply that getting rid of or weakening programs like Social Security or Medicare would simply return the US to the conditions that existed before the New Deal -- as if the country had not changed in any other ways. Obama was completely right to say that Ryan's budget proposal would lead to an America that would be "fundamentally different than what we've known throughout our history", because even aside from the existence of programs like those Ryan wants to kill, America is a fundamentally different place from what it was 80 years ago. It's a country of close to 300 million people rather than 120 million, it's urban rather than rural, it's closely tied to a global system rather than being isolationist, it's far more ethnically and culturally diverse, and its communications are dominated by television and the Internet rather than radio and letters. It is also a place in which a lack of a safety net would mean even more suffering than was the case in the pre-New Deal days, and one in which (I would hope) people would be far less content to see others suffer, as many did before those social programs existed (not that they eliminated all suffering -- far from it -- but they did alleviate much of it for the most vulnerable segments of the population). While Will's view of history as given in his column lacks the blatant inaccuracies of people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, it does share with them a rather myopic view that refuses to acknowledge that things have changed a great deal in America and the world since the early 20th century, and it is impossible to go back, even if we wanted to (I sure wouldn't).
There was a time, back when I was young and ignorant, that I would have agreed with Will's statement about conservatism being true. When I was in secondary school, I considered myself a conservative. Even then though, when I read about modern European and American history, I noticed how at virtually every point in the past, I agreed with the liberals. It was the liberals who wanted religious tolerance, an end to absolute monarchies, the abolition of slavery, labor laws, the breaking up of monopolies, women's suffrage, and civil rights. My assumption at the time was that modern liberals were simply trying to push things too far, as if we'd reached an ideal society and it should be kept the way it was. Of course later I learned that there were still many problems and inequalities, and more importantly I learned to empathize better with the situations faced by more disadvantaged people. This didn't mean given up rationality, or coming to insist on any particular means for solving all these problems. For instance, where properly regulated private enterprise is more efficient than government (and there are many areas where that is the case), I am in favor of it. The purpose is to create an open, tolerant equable society where all people have their basic needs met. George Will's brand of conservatism won't do that, and the completely irrational brand of conservatism Zakaria criticizes certainly will not do so.
Speaking of issues where leading conservatives are not only irrational but even downright immoral in their treatment of hardworking, innocent people, the New York Times Sunday Magazine recently published a long article by Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, about how he came to the US from the Philippines at the age of 12 as an undocumented immigrant (i.e., an illegal immigrant) and has lived under the shadow of possible discovery and deportation since. This is exactly the kind of person who the US should want to have here, and the kind who the Dream Act would help. And yet the right wing not only prevented its passage, but continues to demonize all illegal immigrants as criminals no better than murderers and thieves. While there is little hope for the unrepentantly racist and hardhearted among the anti-immigrant crowd, perhaps a few of the relatively open-minded ones could learn something from Vargas's story, or a recent film called A Better Life.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Sex Scandal Redux
There have been a lot of significant things going on in the world during the last few weeks that I could write about. The Arab revolutions are still ongoing, and there have been new developments in Yemen, Syria, Libya and Bahrain. I would like to comment at some point on the various positions taken by politicians in the US and Israel on resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict. There was an important election in Turkey. There has been unrest in China, including protests by ethnic Mongolians in the Chinese-occupied part of Mongolia. But rather than talking about any of these things, I'm going to comment on another tempest in a teapot, namely the troubles of Representative Anthony Weiner, who was forced to resign after being caught sending racy pictures and messages to various women over the Internet. I don't want to talk about this because it deserves even half the attention it got from the American media, but because it shows some interesting and mostly depressing things about the way a lot of Americans think (or don't think), and because the questions involved are related to those I discussed in my earlier post on other recent sex-related scandals.
But before I get started, let me repeat a point I made in a post a long time ago about another supposed scandal (though in that case the only real scandal was the lengths some people tried to go to in an attempt to discredit legitimate science). One of the most irritating habits journalists, commentators and other such people have is randomly attaching the suffix "gate" to every scandal or controversy that comes along. Whoever first started referring to the Anthony Weiner scandal as "Weinergate" should be forced to eat a complete transcription of the Nixon tapes, as should anyone who sticks a "gate" onto the name of any future scandal.
I'm not going to go over all the details of Weiner's supposed deeds, how they came to light (though I hope some journalist will be able to dig up more on the group of people on Twitter who were practically stalking Weiner in an effort to catch him), and his handling of the affair. Here's an analysis of the political aspects of the affair from relatively early on (though I have a few problems with this one, as I'll point out), and here's a slightly more detailed look at how Weiner supposedly interacted with these women online. This latter point is actually important, not because of any thrills people may get from reading the salacious details (there's a lot of far more erotic stuff online, for those who want it), but because if people are going to try to pass judgment on Weiner's actions, they should be taken into account.
With the recent scandals about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn still fresh in the public memory, and other scandals involving prominent American politicians to provide parallels (Chris Lee, John Ensign, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Foley, Bill Clinton), it is not too surprising that many commentators have tended to lump them all together, as if they all fit into the same moral category of "male politicians' sexual misbehavior". The analysis linked to above, for instance, refers vaguely to Weiner having "behaved badly towards women". But is what Weiner did equivalent to the alleged actions of, say, Strauss-Kahn? For that matter, are there no differences between Weiner's case and those of, say, Craig, Foley, and Spitzer?
The first of the above questions is easy to answer. As I said in my other post, if Strauss-Kahn is guilty of what he has been accused of, his actions were reprehensible and there is no excuse whatsoever for them. If he really did commit sexual assault of the sort he is being charged for, he should go to prison. If Weiner sent erotic photos of himself and sexually charged messages to women who had not indicated any interest in such things, he was at the least extremely foolish, considering his position. At most, if any of the women had clearly expressed that they were not receptive to such messages and he had persisted in sending them, he may have crossed the line into harassment. However, while this is rather a fine line, it's not clear that he really crossed it. It's true that sending even one picture to a woman who it turned not did not welcome receiving it might be considered sexual harassment by many, but it's quite possible that he honestly, though mistakenly, believed she would react positively, in which case I wouldn't really call it harassment (though, as I said, he was very foolish to do it without being absolutely sure). If she had indicated disapproval and he had nevertheless sent more (something he didn't do, from what I've read), that would more obviously constitute harassment, though even then I don't think it would be as serious as, say, a manager doing the same to an employee. After all, none of these women had any contact with him other than online, and it seems they weren't even constituents, so they could simply break off contact if they didn't like what he did. What's more, it seems that a number of the women did in fact reciprocate and engage in sexual banter with him. In those cases, he can hardly be accused of having "behaved badly towards women".
Some might object that he also acted interested in some girls who were under 18. But from what I read there was only girl under 18 that he was confirmed to have had contact with, and he, the girl and her family all emphasized that in that case there was nothing sexual in the messages they exchanged. For that matter, I've always found it a bit odd that Americans get all excited about any hint of sexuality in people under 18, as if 16 and 17 year olds are children in the physical sense, and any adult who acts even remotely interested in a 17 year old sexually is a pedophile (except in music, as few people seem bothered by songs like "Sweet Little Sixteen", "You're Sixteen", or "I Saw Her Standing There"). But really, there's not a huge difference between a middle aged man flirting with an 18 year old and doing the same with a 17 year old. Girls of that age are physically speaking adults, so it's not abnormal for men to be interested in them (while a serious sexual interest in any girl or boy obviously younger than 16 or so is another thing altogether, and is certainly not normal or healthy). Of course a line has to be drawn somewhere, and a man with any sense of decency will at least keep in mind that the average 17 year old (or 18 year old) is not mature emotionally and so he shouldn't take advantage of her (or him). But even if Weiner had done some mild online flirting with a high school girl (and again, there's no real evidence that he did), it would fall far short of what Strauss-Kahn is accused of (or even some of the things Schwarzenegger has been accused of).
In fact, while I have serious problems with French talk about American prudishness in the Strauss-Kahn case, where we are talking about assault, in Weiner's case the criticism is right on. So a US congressman, like a billion other men on the planet, has a strong libido and engages in foolishly risky behavior. Why should anyone else care? Maybe his wife should care, but if all the relationships were online and he didn't actually neglect her in order flirt with them, I'm not even sure that she should care that much either. Certainly it shouldn't matter to anyone else. The only reason Weiner perhaps should have had to resign is because when he was first confronted with the evidence he lied about it. This was his real "sin", if we want to use that word; the same can be said in Bill Clinton's case. But to be perfectly honest, while I think they were wrong and, well, stupid (despite being otherwise very intelligent men) to get themselves tangled up in convoluted denials which they should have known would not work, I have to admit that if I were in that kind of situation, I'd be strongly tempted to lie too, and I think the same would be true of many if not most people. As such, if I had been in the Democratic leadership, I wouldn't have been calling for Weiner to resign. Unfortunately, in this kind of situation a kind of mob mentality takes over, and Weiner was a victim of it.
Ah, but wait, I hear some say, you only say that because Weiner was one of the leading liberals in the House. It's true that I find it a particular shame to lose him because from what I know he was good at his job, and fought hard for good causes. But to take a similar case, I didn't think the Republican Chris Lee should have been forced to resign for sending shirtless pictures of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist either. Sure, I am happy with the ultimate result, since a reasonably progressive Democrat managed to win that seat, despite it being a Republican district, and so someone better than Lee ended up in the seat (though to give Lee credit, he did say some things that showed he was at least more moderate on a few issues than most Republicans). But I didn't think he should have had to lose his seat for that reason (not when all sorts of crackpots, bigots and corporate lackeys are able to keep theirs).
I have a somewhat different view of cases like those of Larry Craig and Mark Foley. Craig in particular deserved to be kicked out (though he ultimately was stubborn enough to stay till the end of his term), not so much because he was actually arrested and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, or even because he also tried to make all sorts of convoluted explanations of his action and made ridiculous attempts to backtrack on his guilty plea, but because he was a hypocrite. He was arrested for soliciting sex with a male undercover officer, yet his voting record was very anti-gay. The same could be said of Foley, who was caught sending sexually explicit email messages to a young man who was a former Congressional page, though Foley's record was not as totally anti-gay as Craig's and he has come out as homosexual since resigning. To extend the analogy to non-politicians, any of the various conservative Christian leaders who have been caught having affairs or paying for sex with either female or male sex workers also deserve condemnation mainly for hypocrisy.
On the liberal side, despite generally liking his politics, I had to conclude Eliot Spitzer pretty much deserved to be driven out of office, again for hypocrisy. I didn't think it was a big deal that he had paid for sex with a call girl, but then I read that, along with his prosecutions of Wall Street crime as NY Attorney General, he had aggressively pursued several call girl rings, even making his usual outspoken statements about how he was going to nail them. I will say that if the rings he prosecuted were involved in human trafficking (rather than being made up of women who voluntarily got involved in sex work, like the one he actually had a transaction with), then he would not be a hypocrite, but I don't recall reading anything indicating that was the case. But if it weren't for the hypocrisy involved, I wouldn't think that Spitzer (or the majority of the other politicians discussed here) should have been forced to resign. On the contrary, my own opinion largely matches that expressed by American philosopher and ethics professor Martha Nussbaum in this piece on the Spitzer affair -- parts of which apply equal well to Weiner's case.
In conclusion, I just have to say that I hope Americans can grow up a bit about sex, and that they'll start caring a little less about what kinds of sexual activities their leaders engage in and more about what kind of policies they support. For some of them, at least, their voting records and public statements contain plenty of things more reprehensible than anything Anthony Weiner did on Twitter or Facebook. If Weiner has to go, then why should they all get to stay?
But before I get started, let me repeat a point I made in a post a long time ago about another supposed scandal (though in that case the only real scandal was the lengths some people tried to go to in an attempt to discredit legitimate science). One of the most irritating habits journalists, commentators and other such people have is randomly attaching the suffix "gate" to every scandal or controversy that comes along. Whoever first started referring to the Anthony Weiner scandal as "Weinergate" should be forced to eat a complete transcription of the Nixon tapes, as should anyone who sticks a "gate" onto the name of any future scandal.
I'm not going to go over all the details of Weiner's supposed deeds, how they came to light (though I hope some journalist will be able to dig up more on the group of people on Twitter who were practically stalking Weiner in an effort to catch him), and his handling of the affair. Here's an analysis of the political aspects of the affair from relatively early on (though I have a few problems with this one, as I'll point out), and here's a slightly more detailed look at how Weiner supposedly interacted with these women online. This latter point is actually important, not because of any thrills people may get from reading the salacious details (there's a lot of far more erotic stuff online, for those who want it), but because if people are going to try to pass judgment on Weiner's actions, they should be taken into account.
With the recent scandals about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn still fresh in the public memory, and other scandals involving prominent American politicians to provide parallels (Chris Lee, John Ensign, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Foley, Bill Clinton), it is not too surprising that many commentators have tended to lump them all together, as if they all fit into the same moral category of "male politicians' sexual misbehavior". The analysis linked to above, for instance, refers vaguely to Weiner having "behaved badly towards women". But is what Weiner did equivalent to the alleged actions of, say, Strauss-Kahn? For that matter, are there no differences between Weiner's case and those of, say, Craig, Foley, and Spitzer?
The first of the above questions is easy to answer. As I said in my other post, if Strauss-Kahn is guilty of what he has been accused of, his actions were reprehensible and there is no excuse whatsoever for them. If he really did commit sexual assault of the sort he is being charged for, he should go to prison. If Weiner sent erotic photos of himself and sexually charged messages to women who had not indicated any interest in such things, he was at the least extremely foolish, considering his position. At most, if any of the women had clearly expressed that they were not receptive to such messages and he had persisted in sending them, he may have crossed the line into harassment. However, while this is rather a fine line, it's not clear that he really crossed it. It's true that sending even one picture to a woman who it turned not did not welcome receiving it might be considered sexual harassment by many, but it's quite possible that he honestly, though mistakenly, believed she would react positively, in which case I wouldn't really call it harassment (though, as I said, he was very foolish to do it without being absolutely sure). If she had indicated disapproval and he had nevertheless sent more (something he didn't do, from what I've read), that would more obviously constitute harassment, though even then I don't think it would be as serious as, say, a manager doing the same to an employee. After all, none of these women had any contact with him other than online, and it seems they weren't even constituents, so they could simply break off contact if they didn't like what he did. What's more, it seems that a number of the women did in fact reciprocate and engage in sexual banter with him. In those cases, he can hardly be accused of having "behaved badly towards women".
Some might object that he also acted interested in some girls who were under 18. But from what I read there was only girl under 18 that he was confirmed to have had contact with, and he, the girl and her family all emphasized that in that case there was nothing sexual in the messages they exchanged. For that matter, I've always found it a bit odd that Americans get all excited about any hint of sexuality in people under 18, as if 16 and 17 year olds are children in the physical sense, and any adult who acts even remotely interested in a 17 year old sexually is a pedophile (except in music, as few people seem bothered by songs like "Sweet Little Sixteen", "You're Sixteen", or "I Saw Her Standing There"). But really, there's not a huge difference between a middle aged man flirting with an 18 year old and doing the same with a 17 year old. Girls of that age are physically speaking adults, so it's not abnormal for men to be interested in them (while a serious sexual interest in any girl or boy obviously younger than 16 or so is another thing altogether, and is certainly not normal or healthy). Of course a line has to be drawn somewhere, and a man with any sense of decency will at least keep in mind that the average 17 year old (or 18 year old) is not mature emotionally and so he shouldn't take advantage of her (or him). But even if Weiner had done some mild online flirting with a high school girl (and again, there's no real evidence that he did), it would fall far short of what Strauss-Kahn is accused of (or even some of the things Schwarzenegger has been accused of).
In fact, while I have serious problems with French talk about American prudishness in the Strauss-Kahn case, where we are talking about assault, in Weiner's case the criticism is right on. So a US congressman, like a billion other men on the planet, has a strong libido and engages in foolishly risky behavior. Why should anyone else care? Maybe his wife should care, but if all the relationships were online and he didn't actually neglect her in order flirt with them, I'm not even sure that she should care that much either. Certainly it shouldn't matter to anyone else. The only reason Weiner perhaps should have had to resign is because when he was first confronted with the evidence he lied about it. This was his real "sin", if we want to use that word; the same can be said in Bill Clinton's case. But to be perfectly honest, while I think they were wrong and, well, stupid (despite being otherwise very intelligent men) to get themselves tangled up in convoluted denials which they should have known would not work, I have to admit that if I were in that kind of situation, I'd be strongly tempted to lie too, and I think the same would be true of many if not most people. As such, if I had been in the Democratic leadership, I wouldn't have been calling for Weiner to resign. Unfortunately, in this kind of situation a kind of mob mentality takes over, and Weiner was a victim of it.
Ah, but wait, I hear some say, you only say that because Weiner was one of the leading liberals in the House. It's true that I find it a particular shame to lose him because from what I know he was good at his job, and fought hard for good causes. But to take a similar case, I didn't think the Republican Chris Lee should have been forced to resign for sending shirtless pictures of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist either. Sure, I am happy with the ultimate result, since a reasonably progressive Democrat managed to win that seat, despite it being a Republican district, and so someone better than Lee ended up in the seat (though to give Lee credit, he did say some things that showed he was at least more moderate on a few issues than most Republicans). But I didn't think he should have had to lose his seat for that reason (not when all sorts of crackpots, bigots and corporate lackeys are able to keep theirs).
I have a somewhat different view of cases like those of Larry Craig and Mark Foley. Craig in particular deserved to be kicked out (though he ultimately was stubborn enough to stay till the end of his term), not so much because he was actually arrested and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, or even because he also tried to make all sorts of convoluted explanations of his action and made ridiculous attempts to backtrack on his guilty plea, but because he was a hypocrite. He was arrested for soliciting sex with a male undercover officer, yet his voting record was very anti-gay. The same could be said of Foley, who was caught sending sexually explicit email messages to a young man who was a former Congressional page, though Foley's record was not as totally anti-gay as Craig's and he has come out as homosexual since resigning. To extend the analogy to non-politicians, any of the various conservative Christian leaders who have been caught having affairs or paying for sex with either female or male sex workers also deserve condemnation mainly for hypocrisy.
On the liberal side, despite generally liking his politics, I had to conclude Eliot Spitzer pretty much deserved to be driven out of office, again for hypocrisy. I didn't think it was a big deal that he had paid for sex with a call girl, but then I read that, along with his prosecutions of Wall Street crime as NY Attorney General, he had aggressively pursued several call girl rings, even making his usual outspoken statements about how he was going to nail them. I will say that if the rings he prosecuted were involved in human trafficking (rather than being made up of women who voluntarily got involved in sex work, like the one he actually had a transaction with), then he would not be a hypocrite, but I don't recall reading anything indicating that was the case. But if it weren't for the hypocrisy involved, I wouldn't think that Spitzer (or the majority of the other politicians discussed here) should have been forced to resign. On the contrary, my own opinion largely matches that expressed by American philosopher and ethics professor Martha Nussbaum in this piece on the Spitzer affair -- parts of which apply equal well to Weiner's case.
In conclusion, I just have to say that I hope Americans can grow up a bit about sex, and that they'll start caring a little less about what kinds of sexual activities their leaders engage in and more about what kind of policies they support. For some of them, at least, their voting records and public statements contain plenty of things more reprehensible than anything Anthony Weiner did on Twitter or Facebook. If Weiner has to go, then why should they all get to stay?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
What I've Been Reading -- April 2011 to May 2011
Here are some comments of varying length on the many books I've read in the past two months. I should point out that the length of the comments do not necessarily correlate to how much I enjoyed the book; in fact some of the books that I enjoyed the most I wrote the least about.
The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
The Time Ships, a science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter, is an “authorized sequel” to the classic The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. What most immediately impressive about Baxter’s work is that it really reads like it could have been written by Wells, at least as far as the writing style goes. Even many of the technologies that make appearances in the novel could have come from Wells (and indeed it seems that Baxter did deliberately include things from some of Wells’s other stories).
The Time Machine was the earliest of Wells’s classic stories and, along with The War of the Worlds, remains his best known work. Its ambiguous ending made it a good candidate for a sequel. The Time Ships is told from the perspective of the Time Traveller (like in the original book, his true name is never given), and begins with the events at the end of The Time Machine. Baxter’s portrayal of the Time Traveller is also consistent with that in the earlier book. In both novels, he is clever, persistent, and dedicated in the search for knowledge, but also impulsive, somewhat prone to violence, and has a few unreasoning prejudices. Baxter even neatly accounts for a major scientific inaccuracy in the original – since physicists at the time did not know of nuclear fusion, they believed the sun would burn out in a few tens of millions of years, an idea Wells incorporated into his novel. When the Time Traveller goes more than 30 million years into the future, he sees the sun burn out (we now know it will be several billion years before it reaches a red giant stage, and even longer before it completely burns out). In The Time Ships, what the Time Traveller witnessed is explained as a failed experiment in solar engineering.
I will not go into the plot of The Time Ships in detail here, except to say that it makes use of the idea of multiple histories existing simultaneously, and involves travel both far back and far forward in time, to histories (or universes) that progressively diverge from our own. Time travel stories have never been my favorite type of science fiction, but The Time Ships is engaging and well done, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes The Time Machine (which should certainly be read first) and other works by H.G. Wells.
Gideon’s Wall by Greg Kurzawa [Gage Kurricke]
Gideon’s Wall is a fantasy novel by Gage Kurricke, writing under the pen name Greg Kurzawa. This novel is quite different from most others in the genre, and that is one of the keys to its success. The frame story is that of an archeologist (he calls himself an archaist) who travels to the wasteland that was once the empire of Shallai, before it was destroyed virtually overnight in an unknown disaster. The archaist’s investigations reveal the tale behind the fall of Shallai, told mostly through the eyes of Del, a soldier sent as an ambassador to the Bedu, a people who resemble the Arabs of our world (even their religion has much in common with Islam). He gradually comes to identify closely with them, becoming friends with their chief ruler and standing by them when they are threatened with annihilation. Though the reader knows the ultimate fate of Shallai, the tale of how it happened is riveting, Del is an interesting and sympathetic character, and the Bedu are a colorful people. A good read for anyone who likes fantasy, history, or stories about different cultures.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and other writings by Karl Marx
Over the past few years, one type of bedtime reading I have been doing is of famous religious and philosophical works (because I’m interested in finding out what they have to say first hand, and because most of them are pretty effective at inducing sleep). In this time I have read most of the Bible, the Koran, a selection of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, a selection of Buddhist scriptures, the Analects of Confucius, the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), The Republic by Plato, Aristotle’s Politics, a little bit of The Book of Mormon, A History of God (discussed in an earlier blog) and more that nature (the majority of this I read before starting this blog, which is why I have not written about it, though perhaps I may do so in the future). My most recent reading of this sort was of a central work of what some have called a secular religion – Marxism.
The Communist Manifesto, a collaboration between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (though Engels himself said Marx deserved most of the credit for the work), was first published in early 1848, the same year that revolutions against the conservative aristocratic regimes of the day swept through much of Europe (a situation paralleled to some degree by this year’s revolutions in the Arab world). The Manifesto itself is quite short (less than 40 pages in the edition I have), but the book I read also included an essay by Mark entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and a selection from Mark’s Capital (Das Capital) that the editor gave the name “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”.
I found a number of Marx’s criticisms of the capitalist system valid, and he does raise issues worth thinking about. But his economic theory, while complex, is nevertheless far too simple to be an accurate reflection of the real world (though the same could be said for capitalist economic theory in general and certain aspects of it in particular). To some degree, it is clear that Marxism is a product of its times, as he was clearly basing his theories on conditions prevailing in the mid-19th century, which were quite different – and much worse for workers, at least in what is now the developed world – from today (though the essential point that the labor of workers is devoted primarily to the benefit of their employers remains valid). His view of history, specifically the idea of economic determinism (under which the prevailing economic system determines everything else about a society, including its political system), is obviously a gross oversimplification, and fails to adequately describe many historical societies. Likewise, while I can appreciate the argument that a total transformation in the society is difficult or even impossible to accomplish in a piecemeal fashion, I have a problem with his insistence on the necessity of violent revolution.
Nevertheless, as I said, he does have a number of thought-provoking ideas. He also made an interesting statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that applies very well to the sort of nonsensical statements made in the last few years by some on the American right. Describing the situation in France in 1848, in which the more conservative groups united to crush the more radical revolutionaries, he says: “Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an ‘assault on society’, and is branded as ‘socialism’.” This sounds like a perfect description of the criticism of many of President Obama’s policies. It’s worth noting that to Marx himself, not only were things like “the most simple bourgeois financial reform” or “the most ordinary liberalism” far short of “socialism”, but even socialism as he defined it fell far short of the sort of revolution he advocated. This was why he and Engels rejected the label “socialist” in favor of “communist” and included a critical look at several types of socialists in The Communist Manifesto. Likewise, Marx would almost certainly take the same view of Obama as that expressed in the quote above, as falling far short of even socialism, let alone Marxism, and in this he would be completely correct.
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid, written in the 1st century BCE by Publius Vergilius Maro (better known as Virgil), is perhaps the most famous work of literature from ancient Rome; it is certainly the most famous Roman epic poem. Perhaps due to my cultural background, the epic poem has never been a favorite genre with me (that they were originally meant to be read out loud may also have something to do with it), though the stories themselves are often entertaining enough (I particularly enjoyed a prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey that I read a few years ago). Given this, it is no wonder that I found parts of the Aeneid slow going. The endless recounting of the deeds of various, often obscure characters can get a bit tedious at times, and the overly patriotic (to me at least) view of the Rome that Aeneas is supposed to be the ultimate ancestor of (though that was a pure fiction invented by the Romans after they came into contact with the Greeks) doesn’t help. But there are certainly some well-written passages, and the story picks up somewhat in the second half, which, with its emphasis on battles between the Trojans led by Aeneas and his allies on the one hand and various Italian opponents on the other, is the part most clearly influenced by Homer’s Iliad, down to the very graphic descriptions of the fatal wounds suffered by participants in the battles.
Other notable parts of the book are Aeneas’s encounter with Dido, the semi-legendary founder of Carthage, and his descent into the underworld to see his father, which provided a model for Dante’s Divine Comedy (in which Virgil served as Dante’s guide through Hell). This latter passage contains a look forward (from Aeneas’s perspective) at the history of Rome, including a lengthy, rather overblown lament over the death of the young Marcellus, the prospective heir of Virgil’s patron, the emperor Augustus, but also a few lines implicitly criticizing Augustus’s adoptive father Julius Caesar and his opponent Pompey for the civil wars they fought, even particularly calling on Caesar to “be the first to show forbearance” and “cast down the weapon from [his] hand.”
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Road, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, is set in a grim post-apocalyptic world dominated by sadistic cannibals and slavers and darkened by a permanent cloud cover (the conditions seem to be those of nuclear winter, as temperatures have dropped to a level that is barely survivable, especially in winter). It is the story of a father and son, never identified by name (they are referred to only as “the man” and “the boy”), who are traveling south to find a place where they have some hope of survival. McCarthy’s prose is made up of spare, fragmented sentences with minimal punctuation (except for periods): “The road was empty. Below in the valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded.” The world he depicts is a terrible, bleak place in which very little is left alive.
The theme at the heart of the novel is the struggle between the good and the evil in human nature. On the one hand are the cannibals and other sadistic people who seem to dominate the surviving population (not that the man and boy encounter a great many people in their travels) – as the boy calls them, “the bad guys”. On the other hand, there are the man and the boy, who represent what the boy calls “the good guys”. More particularly good is represented by the boy himself, who often acts as the man’s conscience, urging him to good deeds and against evil ones when he’d rather do whatever seems most conducive to their survival (not that he always goes along with what the boy says).
While it isn’t necessarily the easiest or most purely enjoyable novel I’ve read recently, there’s no question that The Road is well written and deserving of much of the praise it received. Its picture of a destroyed ecology also makes it a worthwhile read from an environmental standpoint. It is rather depressing, but it ends on a note of hope (though this comes after a particularly low point, and the hope offered is limited in scope). It’s an excellent choice for those who enjoy good literary fiction.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Casino Royale was the first of Ian Fleming’s novels featuring James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy. Despite being familiar with the character, I had never actually read a James Bond novel, and I’ve only seen one or two of the many James Bond movies. The book was well-paced and entertaining, though it has a very 1950s flavor to it (it was published in 1953). Bond is depicted as more than a little sexist, though he is aware of a certain degree of “hypocrisy” in his attitude toward women. The cool competence I tend to associate with the character was on display in a key episode at the gaming table in the casino, but was otherwise surprisingly absent. This isn’t to say he was bumbling, but most of his successes outside the casino came from luck or fortitude rather than from his own actions. He survived one attack purely by luck, and while his ability to endure torture (in a particularly nasty episode) was characterized as exceptional, his ultimate survival again was due to luck. He was also fooled more than once. In another interesting episode, he expresses doubt about the righteousness of his job, questioning whether the people he operates against are really bad people just because they work for their country the same way he does for his, though ultimately his friend and his own experiences lead him to conclude that “there are plenty of really black targets” working for the other side (i.e., the Soviets), so as long as he targets them, he will be doing good.
The Dark Elf Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore
The Dark Elf Trilogy is an omnibus edition of three novels by R.A. Salvatore, Homeland, Exile, and Sojourn (I picked up my copy for free, as it was left behind by the friend of a friend when he had to leave Taiwan at short notice). They feature the character Drizzt Do'Urden, who is, as the title suggests, a dark elf, a member of the race also known as drow. The drow are evil subterranean-dwelling elves, originally created by Gary Gygax for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (I have copies of the classic adventure modules in which they first appeared). Though the dark elves are characterized as thoroughly evil, Drizzt is an exception, a drow with a conscience that drives him to do good. Indeed, the theme of the novels is basically Drizzt’s struggle to come to understand his conscience and find a way to live in accordance with it. In this respect, if no other, the novel resembles The Road.
But while these novels are entertaining enough as adventure stories, in other respects they were somewhat disappointing. I wasn’t particularly impressed by Salvatore’s writing, but a bigger problem was the believability of the characters, most particularly Drizzt himself. In part this is not exactly Salvatore’s fault, as the problem can be traced to D&D and even to some extent to the great Tolkien himself, blasphemous as it may be to say it. In D&D, certain types of creatures are seen as inherently evil, including the drow and races such as orcs, and others are inherently good, such as deep (subterranean-dwelling) gnomes and surface elves (though there are quite a few exceptions in these cases). This to some degree reflects the situation in Tolkien’s work, where orcs are always evil and elves and halflings (hobbits) are almost always good. But how can a race of creatures be inherently good or evil? Is their moral outlook inborn, or a product of their society, or some combination of the two? Salvatore tries to grapple with this question, with upbringing playing the most obvious role, but the problem is that Drizzt (and his father Zaknafein, who becomes something of a model for him) are too dramatically different from all the other drow in terms of moral outlook to be credible (and in their case the implication is that their moral sense is inborn and strongly resistant to perversion through their upbringing). Most implausibly, some of Drizzt’s supposedly instinctive moral standards are based on rather conventional American ideas of what is good, such as when he is revolted by witnessing a sexual orgy among the drow (this to some extent reflects Gygax, who portrayed the drow as being “sexually depraved”, with both of them implying that sexual promiscuity is somehow evil in and of itself) or when he wishes he could have brought a marauding humanoid before a court of law (given his background, how would the idea even occur to him?). This flaw dooms Salvatore’s laudable attempt to write a set of D&D-based novels with philosophical depth.
Inca by Suzanne Alles Blom
Suzanne Alles Blom’s novel Inca is an alternate history, a historical novel in which the course of events is altered from what occurred in real history. I have read a number of novels of this sort, the most recent being The Difference Engine (which I discussed in a past blog post). In Inca, Blom changes a number of things about the initial encounters between the Inca and the Spanish, allowing her to speculate on how things might have happened differently.
Overall, this novel is a well-done example of its genre. The story is told from the Inca point of view, and Blom succeeds in creating a vivid picture of Inca society (whether it is completely accurate I can’t say, not knowing enough about the Inca) and allowing the reader to see the Spanish the way the Inca might have seen them. Her portrayal of the Inca might be slightly idealized (though she does refer to some bloody deeds in their history) and her portrayal of the Spanish might strike some as overly negative (though even her Inca characters do note a few talents that the Spanish have aside from war), but from what I know of that period, I would say it is largely accurate. Her main character, Exemplary Fortune (known to history as Atahualpa, the last Inca ruler), is perhaps depicted as a better and wiser person than he probably was in real life, though he does seem to have been both more likeable and a better leader than his half-brother Huáscar (Cable in the novel), who he overcame in the civil war that divided the Inca immediately before the Spanish conquest in the real world (here the civil war is averted). But since we know very little for certain about any of these people, this is not a major problem. I recommend this book, with the caveat that it ends without the ultimate conflict being resolved, and it seems that Blom has not yet written a sequel.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by Douglas Adams, best known as the creator of the science fiction comedy classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While the majority of Dirk Gently is set on Earth in the present day, it still involves travel through both time and space, as well as some supernatural elements (specifically ghosts). While this book doesn’t contain quite as many laugh-out-loud bits as the Hitchhiker books, it is still quite funny, and the plot is more coherent. While not absolutely necessary, some knowledge of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is helpful for full enjoyment of the novel (though I must confess I only remember the poems in question vaguely myself). Interestingly, while Dirk Gently is the title character and Adams went on to write a second novel featuring him, he doesn’t actually appear until nearly halfway through; his friend Richard MacDuff is much the chief protagonist as he is (MacDuff appears from almost the beginning). Another interesting feature of the novel is that it features the Electric Monk, an amusing Hitchhikeresque creation that the band of the same name (see also this site) took its name from. Definitely recommended for any who like the Hitchhiker books or just humor, science fiction and good times in general.
The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
The Time Ships, a science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter, is an “authorized sequel” to the classic The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. What most immediately impressive about Baxter’s work is that it really reads like it could have been written by Wells, at least as far as the writing style goes. Even many of the technologies that make appearances in the novel could have come from Wells (and indeed it seems that Baxter did deliberately include things from some of Wells’s other stories).
The Time Machine was the earliest of Wells’s classic stories and, along with The War of the Worlds, remains his best known work. Its ambiguous ending made it a good candidate for a sequel. The Time Ships is told from the perspective of the Time Traveller (like in the original book, his true name is never given), and begins with the events at the end of The Time Machine. Baxter’s portrayal of the Time Traveller is also consistent with that in the earlier book. In both novels, he is clever, persistent, and dedicated in the search for knowledge, but also impulsive, somewhat prone to violence, and has a few unreasoning prejudices. Baxter even neatly accounts for a major scientific inaccuracy in the original – since physicists at the time did not know of nuclear fusion, they believed the sun would burn out in a few tens of millions of years, an idea Wells incorporated into his novel. When the Time Traveller goes more than 30 million years into the future, he sees the sun burn out (we now know it will be several billion years before it reaches a red giant stage, and even longer before it completely burns out). In The Time Ships, what the Time Traveller witnessed is explained as a failed experiment in solar engineering.
I will not go into the plot of The Time Ships in detail here, except to say that it makes use of the idea of multiple histories existing simultaneously, and involves travel both far back and far forward in time, to histories (or universes) that progressively diverge from our own. Time travel stories have never been my favorite type of science fiction, but The Time Ships is engaging and well done, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes The Time Machine (which should certainly be read first) and other works by H.G. Wells.
Gideon’s Wall by Greg Kurzawa [Gage Kurricke]
Gideon’s Wall is a fantasy novel by Gage Kurricke, writing under the pen name Greg Kurzawa. This novel is quite different from most others in the genre, and that is one of the keys to its success. The frame story is that of an archeologist (he calls himself an archaist) who travels to the wasteland that was once the empire of Shallai, before it was destroyed virtually overnight in an unknown disaster. The archaist’s investigations reveal the tale behind the fall of Shallai, told mostly through the eyes of Del, a soldier sent as an ambassador to the Bedu, a people who resemble the Arabs of our world (even their religion has much in common with Islam). He gradually comes to identify closely with them, becoming friends with their chief ruler and standing by them when they are threatened with annihilation. Though the reader knows the ultimate fate of Shallai, the tale of how it happened is riveting, Del is an interesting and sympathetic character, and the Bedu are a colorful people. A good read for anyone who likes fantasy, history, or stories about different cultures.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and other writings by Karl Marx
Over the past few years, one type of bedtime reading I have been doing is of famous religious and philosophical works (because I’m interested in finding out what they have to say first hand, and because most of them are pretty effective at inducing sleep). In this time I have read most of the Bible, the Koran, a selection of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, a selection of Buddhist scriptures, the Analects of Confucius, the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), The Republic by Plato, Aristotle’s Politics, a little bit of The Book of Mormon, A History of God (discussed in an earlier blog) and more that nature (the majority of this I read before starting this blog, which is why I have not written about it, though perhaps I may do so in the future). My most recent reading of this sort was of a central work of what some have called a secular religion – Marxism.
The Communist Manifesto, a collaboration between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (though Engels himself said Marx deserved most of the credit for the work), was first published in early 1848, the same year that revolutions against the conservative aristocratic regimes of the day swept through much of Europe (a situation paralleled to some degree by this year’s revolutions in the Arab world). The Manifesto itself is quite short (less than 40 pages in the edition I have), but the book I read also included an essay by Mark entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and a selection from Mark’s Capital (Das Capital) that the editor gave the name “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”.
I found a number of Marx’s criticisms of the capitalist system valid, and he does raise issues worth thinking about. But his economic theory, while complex, is nevertheless far too simple to be an accurate reflection of the real world (though the same could be said for capitalist economic theory in general and certain aspects of it in particular). To some degree, it is clear that Marxism is a product of its times, as he was clearly basing his theories on conditions prevailing in the mid-19th century, which were quite different – and much worse for workers, at least in what is now the developed world – from today (though the essential point that the labor of workers is devoted primarily to the benefit of their employers remains valid). His view of history, specifically the idea of economic determinism (under which the prevailing economic system determines everything else about a society, including its political system), is obviously a gross oversimplification, and fails to adequately describe many historical societies. Likewise, while I can appreciate the argument that a total transformation in the society is difficult or even impossible to accomplish in a piecemeal fashion, I have a problem with his insistence on the necessity of violent revolution.
Nevertheless, as I said, he does have a number of thought-provoking ideas. He also made an interesting statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that applies very well to the sort of nonsensical statements made in the last few years by some on the American right. Describing the situation in France in 1848, in which the more conservative groups united to crush the more radical revolutionaries, he says: “Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an ‘assault on society’, and is branded as ‘socialism’.” This sounds like a perfect description of the criticism of many of President Obama’s policies. It’s worth noting that to Marx himself, not only were things like “the most simple bourgeois financial reform” or “the most ordinary liberalism” far short of “socialism”, but even socialism as he defined it fell far short of the sort of revolution he advocated. This was why he and Engels rejected the label “socialist” in favor of “communist” and included a critical look at several types of socialists in The Communist Manifesto. Likewise, Marx would almost certainly take the same view of Obama as that expressed in the quote above, as falling far short of even socialism, let alone Marxism, and in this he would be completely correct.
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid, written in the 1st century BCE by Publius Vergilius Maro (better known as Virgil), is perhaps the most famous work of literature from ancient Rome; it is certainly the most famous Roman epic poem. Perhaps due to my cultural background, the epic poem has never been a favorite genre with me (that they were originally meant to be read out loud may also have something to do with it), though the stories themselves are often entertaining enough (I particularly enjoyed a prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey that I read a few years ago). Given this, it is no wonder that I found parts of the Aeneid slow going. The endless recounting of the deeds of various, often obscure characters can get a bit tedious at times, and the overly patriotic (to me at least) view of the Rome that Aeneas is supposed to be the ultimate ancestor of (though that was a pure fiction invented by the Romans after they came into contact with the Greeks) doesn’t help. But there are certainly some well-written passages, and the story picks up somewhat in the second half, which, with its emphasis on battles between the Trojans led by Aeneas and his allies on the one hand and various Italian opponents on the other, is the part most clearly influenced by Homer’s Iliad, down to the very graphic descriptions of the fatal wounds suffered by participants in the battles.
Other notable parts of the book are Aeneas’s encounter with Dido, the semi-legendary founder of Carthage, and his descent into the underworld to see his father, which provided a model for Dante’s Divine Comedy (in which Virgil served as Dante’s guide through Hell). This latter passage contains a look forward (from Aeneas’s perspective) at the history of Rome, including a lengthy, rather overblown lament over the death of the young Marcellus, the prospective heir of Virgil’s patron, the emperor Augustus, but also a few lines implicitly criticizing Augustus’s adoptive father Julius Caesar and his opponent Pompey for the civil wars they fought, even particularly calling on Caesar to “be the first to show forbearance” and “cast down the weapon from [his] hand.”
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Road, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, is set in a grim post-apocalyptic world dominated by sadistic cannibals and slavers and darkened by a permanent cloud cover (the conditions seem to be those of nuclear winter, as temperatures have dropped to a level that is barely survivable, especially in winter). It is the story of a father and son, never identified by name (they are referred to only as “the man” and “the boy”), who are traveling south to find a place where they have some hope of survival. McCarthy’s prose is made up of spare, fragmented sentences with minimal punctuation (except for periods): “The road was empty. Below in the valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded.” The world he depicts is a terrible, bleak place in which very little is left alive.
The theme at the heart of the novel is the struggle between the good and the evil in human nature. On the one hand are the cannibals and other sadistic people who seem to dominate the surviving population (not that the man and boy encounter a great many people in their travels) – as the boy calls them, “the bad guys”. On the other hand, there are the man and the boy, who represent what the boy calls “the good guys”. More particularly good is represented by the boy himself, who often acts as the man’s conscience, urging him to good deeds and against evil ones when he’d rather do whatever seems most conducive to their survival (not that he always goes along with what the boy says).
While it isn’t necessarily the easiest or most purely enjoyable novel I’ve read recently, there’s no question that The Road is well written and deserving of much of the praise it received. Its picture of a destroyed ecology also makes it a worthwhile read from an environmental standpoint. It is rather depressing, but it ends on a note of hope (though this comes after a particularly low point, and the hope offered is limited in scope). It’s an excellent choice for those who enjoy good literary fiction.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Casino Royale was the first of Ian Fleming’s novels featuring James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy. Despite being familiar with the character, I had never actually read a James Bond novel, and I’ve only seen one or two of the many James Bond movies. The book was well-paced and entertaining, though it has a very 1950s flavor to it (it was published in 1953). Bond is depicted as more than a little sexist, though he is aware of a certain degree of “hypocrisy” in his attitude toward women. The cool competence I tend to associate with the character was on display in a key episode at the gaming table in the casino, but was otherwise surprisingly absent. This isn’t to say he was bumbling, but most of his successes outside the casino came from luck or fortitude rather than from his own actions. He survived one attack purely by luck, and while his ability to endure torture (in a particularly nasty episode) was characterized as exceptional, his ultimate survival again was due to luck. He was also fooled more than once. In another interesting episode, he expresses doubt about the righteousness of his job, questioning whether the people he operates against are really bad people just because they work for their country the same way he does for his, though ultimately his friend and his own experiences lead him to conclude that “there are plenty of really black targets” working for the other side (i.e., the Soviets), so as long as he targets them, he will be doing good.
The Dark Elf Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore
The Dark Elf Trilogy is an omnibus edition of three novels by R.A. Salvatore, Homeland, Exile, and Sojourn (I picked up my copy for free, as it was left behind by the friend of a friend when he had to leave Taiwan at short notice). They feature the character Drizzt Do'Urden, who is, as the title suggests, a dark elf, a member of the race also known as drow. The drow are evil subterranean-dwelling elves, originally created by Gary Gygax for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (I have copies of the classic adventure modules in which they first appeared). Though the dark elves are characterized as thoroughly evil, Drizzt is an exception, a drow with a conscience that drives him to do good. Indeed, the theme of the novels is basically Drizzt’s struggle to come to understand his conscience and find a way to live in accordance with it. In this respect, if no other, the novel resembles The Road.
But while these novels are entertaining enough as adventure stories, in other respects they were somewhat disappointing. I wasn’t particularly impressed by Salvatore’s writing, but a bigger problem was the believability of the characters, most particularly Drizzt himself. In part this is not exactly Salvatore’s fault, as the problem can be traced to D&D and even to some extent to the great Tolkien himself, blasphemous as it may be to say it. In D&D, certain types of creatures are seen as inherently evil, including the drow and races such as orcs, and others are inherently good, such as deep (subterranean-dwelling) gnomes and surface elves (though there are quite a few exceptions in these cases). This to some degree reflects the situation in Tolkien’s work, where orcs are always evil and elves and halflings (hobbits) are almost always good. But how can a race of creatures be inherently good or evil? Is their moral outlook inborn, or a product of their society, or some combination of the two? Salvatore tries to grapple with this question, with upbringing playing the most obvious role, but the problem is that Drizzt (and his father Zaknafein, who becomes something of a model for him) are too dramatically different from all the other drow in terms of moral outlook to be credible (and in their case the implication is that their moral sense is inborn and strongly resistant to perversion through their upbringing). Most implausibly, some of Drizzt’s supposedly instinctive moral standards are based on rather conventional American ideas of what is good, such as when he is revolted by witnessing a sexual orgy among the drow (this to some extent reflects Gygax, who portrayed the drow as being “sexually depraved”, with both of them implying that sexual promiscuity is somehow evil in and of itself) or when he wishes he could have brought a marauding humanoid before a court of law (given his background, how would the idea even occur to him?). This flaw dooms Salvatore’s laudable attempt to write a set of D&D-based novels with philosophical depth.
Inca by Suzanne Alles Blom
Suzanne Alles Blom’s novel Inca is an alternate history, a historical novel in which the course of events is altered from what occurred in real history. I have read a number of novels of this sort, the most recent being The Difference Engine (which I discussed in a past blog post). In Inca, Blom changes a number of things about the initial encounters between the Inca and the Spanish, allowing her to speculate on how things might have happened differently.
Overall, this novel is a well-done example of its genre. The story is told from the Inca point of view, and Blom succeeds in creating a vivid picture of Inca society (whether it is completely accurate I can’t say, not knowing enough about the Inca) and allowing the reader to see the Spanish the way the Inca might have seen them. Her portrayal of the Inca might be slightly idealized (though she does refer to some bloody deeds in their history) and her portrayal of the Spanish might strike some as overly negative (though even her Inca characters do note a few talents that the Spanish have aside from war), but from what I know of that period, I would say it is largely accurate. Her main character, Exemplary Fortune (known to history as Atahualpa, the last Inca ruler), is perhaps depicted as a better and wiser person than he probably was in real life, though he does seem to have been both more likeable and a better leader than his half-brother Huáscar (Cable in the novel), who he overcame in the civil war that divided the Inca immediately before the Spanish conquest in the real world (here the civil war is averted). But since we know very little for certain about any of these people, this is not a major problem. I recommend this book, with the caveat that it ends without the ultimate conflict being resolved, and it seems that Blom has not yet written a sequel.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by Douglas Adams, best known as the creator of the science fiction comedy classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While the majority of Dirk Gently is set on Earth in the present day, it still involves travel through both time and space, as well as some supernatural elements (specifically ghosts). While this book doesn’t contain quite as many laugh-out-loud bits as the Hitchhiker books, it is still quite funny, and the plot is more coherent. While not absolutely necessary, some knowledge of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is helpful for full enjoyment of the novel (though I must confess I only remember the poems in question vaguely myself). Interestingly, while Dirk Gently is the title character and Adams went on to write a second novel featuring him, he doesn’t actually appear until nearly halfway through; his friend Richard MacDuff is much the chief protagonist as he is (MacDuff appears from almost the beginning). Another interesting feature of the novel is that it features the Electric Monk, an amusing Hitchhikeresque creation that the band of the same name (see also this site) took its name from. Definitely recommended for any who like the Hitchhiker books or just humor, science fiction and good times in general.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Sex Scandals
Two major news stories in the last week or so have involved the sexual activities of prominent politicians. Taking the more recent story first (though the actual sex took place a long time ago), film star/former Mr. Universe/former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted to having fathered a child with a member of his household staff over a decade ago and having kept it a secret even from his wife Maria Shriver, who is now separated from him, having moved out their mansion after learning of the affair. Judging from the number of headlines it generated, this became a huge news story for at least a few days, and Schwarzenegger has even been forced to put his various post-gubernatorial entertainment projects on hold.
Obviously Schwarzenegger's wife has a right to be angry at him for his failure to be honest with her, and given that by some accounts he can be self-centered and conceited, among other faults, it is no surprise that she regarded this as the final straw (that they stayed together for 25 years is actually fairly impressive, especially for a Hollywood marriage). But in other ways, since the actual affair took place long ago, it is really water under the bridge. Certainly no one who is not actually part of the family (or perhaps a close friend who might have reason to resent being lied to) should get worked up about it. I almost get the impression that some people think it's a bigger deal because he actually had a child out of wedlock. I'm sure people would still be criticizing him if he had admitted to having an affair more than a decade ago, but I suspect not as much. But this is completely illogical; having an affair is not any more immoral because you have a child as a result, unless you then fail to provide for the child (it is my understanding that Schwarzenegger has financially supported since his birth, so that is not really the case here -- it could be argued that he also was responsible for acting as a father to the boy, but as his former staffer married not long afterward, the boy had a father).
Of course many people will condemn Schwarzenegger simply for having an extramarital affair, as many other public figures have been condemned in the past. But really that is mainly the business of the married couple. Some couples even have an understanding that allows occasional flings (Schwarzenegger himself was supposedly in an open relationship with another woman at the time he started seeing Shriver). Where Schwarzenegger does probably deserve moral condemnation is for alleged actions that were reported in the media a long time ago, namely that the accusation that he groped a number of different women who didn't in any way welcome his attentions. Having an affair with a willing partner (I am assuming here that the woman he had a child with was not in any way pressured into the relationship -- if she was, that's an entirely different matter) is far less immoral than forcing yourself on someone who is unwilling, even if you don't actually have sex with them.
This brings us to the other recent political sex scandal, the arrest of IMF head and prospective candidate for French president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for sexual assault. If the facts of the case are at similar to what has been reported, then this was not even a remotely consensual encounter. A few news reports have seemed to generalize about the accepting French attitude toward the sexual behavior of their leading politicians. I would have assumed for the most part, though, that this mostly extends to having consensual extramarital affairs (including one night stands), including having children outside of marriage like Arnold Schwarzenegger (80s era president Mitterrand being the most prominent case). I'm not sure how much they are prepared to overlook sexual assault, which is a completely different thing.
I have read that a few French papers have made comments about American prudishness when talking about this case. While I would certainly agree that Americans tend to be prudish, if those making these comments accept that Strauss-Kahn actually acted in the way he is accused of acting, then there is something seriously wrong with them. If he had been arrested for, say, solicitation of prostitution, they would have a right to complain about American prudishness. Sexual assault, however, is something completely different. It is true that some of Strauss-Kahn's supporters in France and elsewhere have claimed it was a set-up. This possibility has to be acknowledged, and there should be a presumption of innocence until the case goes to court, but it certainly seems that Strauss-Kahn has a history that makes the accusation somewhat more credible. True, he hasn't been accused of behavior quite this violent, but at least one female journalist only reluctantly refrained from pressing charges over an encounter with him. If French politicians go around seducing willing women, I wouldn't say the French are that wrong in overlooking it. But if they overlook assault, they need a serious readjustment of their moral standards.
While we will have to hope that the truth of this particular case will come out in court, the main point is that people have to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts. While a certain degree of condemnation may be deserved in a case like Schwarzenegger's, mostly for the dishonesty involved, it isn't really a big deal, and he certainly shouldn't have his career destroyed because of it (I'm referring here to the recently revealed affair and child, not the groping, which is worse). For that matter, Eliot Spitzer deserved to be pilloried more for his hypocrisy in aggressively pursuing call girl rings then for the mere fact of paying a call girl for sex. But Strauss-Kahn, if guilty, not only deserves to have his career ruined, but deserves to go to prison, as do, say, prominent athletes who force themselves on women (I seem to recall a number of stories of this sort in recent years as well). Unfortunately, many people are either prone to condemn others out of hand for any sort of sexual activity that doesn't fit their personal standards of acceptable behavior, whereas others will excuse even assault if committed by those they highly admire (or have an interest in defending). Neither response is reasonable, though they both conform to the usual contradictory attitudes people have about sex.
[Update: Here's an article about the understandable reaction of many women in France to the absurd remarks made by some French political and media figures in their initial responses to the Strauss-Kahn arrest. Also, I read that at least one hotel worker says he asked her to come to his room when she got off work, though she declined. This, however, proves little one way or another about his guilt, since there is nothing really wrong with hitting on somebody if you don't use force or coercion, and you don't persist after you've been turned down. Again, what really matters is whether he crossed the line into forcing or try to force an unwilling participant into engaging in sexual acts with him. Incidents like the alleged one with the journalist a few years ago are more indicative of a pattern of behavior than simply flirting with members of the hotel staff.]
Obviously Schwarzenegger's wife has a right to be angry at him for his failure to be honest with her, and given that by some accounts he can be self-centered and conceited, among other faults, it is no surprise that she regarded this as the final straw (that they stayed together for 25 years is actually fairly impressive, especially for a Hollywood marriage). But in other ways, since the actual affair took place long ago, it is really water under the bridge. Certainly no one who is not actually part of the family (or perhaps a close friend who might have reason to resent being lied to) should get worked up about it. I almost get the impression that some people think it's a bigger deal because he actually had a child out of wedlock. I'm sure people would still be criticizing him if he had admitted to having an affair more than a decade ago, but I suspect not as much. But this is completely illogical; having an affair is not any more immoral because you have a child as a result, unless you then fail to provide for the child (it is my understanding that Schwarzenegger has financially supported since his birth, so that is not really the case here -- it could be argued that he also was responsible for acting as a father to the boy, but as his former staffer married not long afterward, the boy had a father).
Of course many people will condemn Schwarzenegger simply for having an extramarital affair, as many other public figures have been condemned in the past. But really that is mainly the business of the married couple. Some couples even have an understanding that allows occasional flings (Schwarzenegger himself was supposedly in an open relationship with another woman at the time he started seeing Shriver). Where Schwarzenegger does probably deserve moral condemnation is for alleged actions that were reported in the media a long time ago, namely that the accusation that he groped a number of different women who didn't in any way welcome his attentions. Having an affair with a willing partner (I am assuming here that the woman he had a child with was not in any way pressured into the relationship -- if she was, that's an entirely different matter) is far less immoral than forcing yourself on someone who is unwilling, even if you don't actually have sex with them.
This brings us to the other recent political sex scandal, the arrest of IMF head and prospective candidate for French president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for sexual assault. If the facts of the case are at similar to what has been reported, then this was not even a remotely consensual encounter. A few news reports have seemed to generalize about the accepting French attitude toward the sexual behavior of their leading politicians. I would have assumed for the most part, though, that this mostly extends to having consensual extramarital affairs (including one night stands), including having children outside of marriage like Arnold Schwarzenegger (80s era president Mitterrand being the most prominent case). I'm not sure how much they are prepared to overlook sexual assault, which is a completely different thing.
I have read that a few French papers have made comments about American prudishness when talking about this case. While I would certainly agree that Americans tend to be prudish, if those making these comments accept that Strauss-Kahn actually acted in the way he is accused of acting, then there is something seriously wrong with them. If he had been arrested for, say, solicitation of prostitution, they would have a right to complain about American prudishness. Sexual assault, however, is something completely different. It is true that some of Strauss-Kahn's supporters in France and elsewhere have claimed it was a set-up. This possibility has to be acknowledged, and there should be a presumption of innocence until the case goes to court, but it certainly seems that Strauss-Kahn has a history that makes the accusation somewhat more credible. True, he hasn't been accused of behavior quite this violent, but at least one female journalist only reluctantly refrained from pressing charges over an encounter with him. If French politicians go around seducing willing women, I wouldn't say the French are that wrong in overlooking it. But if they overlook assault, they need a serious readjustment of their moral standards.
While we will have to hope that the truth of this particular case will come out in court, the main point is that people have to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts. While a certain degree of condemnation may be deserved in a case like Schwarzenegger's, mostly for the dishonesty involved, it isn't really a big deal, and he certainly shouldn't have his career destroyed because of it (I'm referring here to the recently revealed affair and child, not the groping, which is worse). For that matter, Eliot Spitzer deserved to be pilloried more for his hypocrisy in aggressively pursuing call girl rings then for the mere fact of paying a call girl for sex. But Strauss-Kahn, if guilty, not only deserves to have his career ruined, but deserves to go to prison, as do, say, prominent athletes who force themselves on women (I seem to recall a number of stories of this sort in recent years as well). Unfortunately, many people are either prone to condemn others out of hand for any sort of sexual activity that doesn't fit their personal standards of acceptable behavior, whereas others will excuse even assault if committed by those they highly admire (or have an interest in defending). Neither response is reasonable, though they both conform to the usual contradictory attitudes people have about sex.
[Update: Here's an article about the understandable reaction of many women in France to the absurd remarks made by some French political and media figures in their initial responses to the Strauss-Kahn arrest. Also, I read that at least one hotel worker says he asked her to come to his room when she got off work, though she declined. This, however, proves little one way or another about his guilt, since there is nothing really wrong with hitting on somebody if you don't use force or coercion, and you don't persist after you've been turned down. Again, what really matters is whether he crossed the line into forcing or try to force an unwilling participant into engaging in sexual acts with him. Incidents like the alleged one with the journalist a few years ago are more indicative of a pattern of behavior than simply flirting with members of the hotel staff.]
Sunday, May 8, 2011
The Death of Osama bin Laden
Last week's biggest news story was the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at the hands of a US special operations team. The story has a number of interesting aspects to it, but I'll focus on just two or three. Before I get to that, I should mention that when I heard that after killing him, the US buried him at sea, it immediately occurred to me that the conspiracy theorists that I talked about in my last post would almost certainly make a big deal of the lack of a corpse, and it didn't take long for my guess to be proven right. Of course most of them, at least in the US, are the same right wing crazies that went for the "birther" lunacy (since of course they are prone to believe any conspiracy relating to Obama anyway), though there are also a few on the left (yes, the left has nutty people too, though they generally don't have as big a profile or as much influence) that also claim to doubt the account of bin Laden's death. If this had happened under Bush no doubt there would be even more left-wing conspiracy theorists and fewer right-wing ones, but it was inevitable that there'd be some in any case. For the record, I am sure that bin Laden is really dead and that he was indeed killed only last week in Pakistan (even al Qaeda itself has acknowledged this). I also understand the reasoning behind the burial at sea (though I wonder if they considered an unmarked grave in a secret location; perhaps there was some reason that wouldn't have been practical).
But moving on the points I wanted to focus on, the first of these is the significance of bin Laden's death. Obviously it is a political victory for President Obama, since he is now able to claim credit for eliminating the leader of the organization behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States, something George W. Bush, despite two wars (the one actually irrelevant to 9/11 absorbing most of his administration's energy) was unable to accomplish. It makes it harder for the Republicans to claim Obama is soft on terror (though many of them continue to say that is the case) or that he is incapable of making tough calls.
It also seems probable that bin Laden's death will have an effect on al Qaeda and Islamic extremism in general, as bin Laden was an important symbol and his death shows that the US is capable of hunting down the group's top leaders (though many of them may not particularly fear death anyway -- fanatics often don't). However, the impact is likely to be limited. In fact, the big deal that many Americans and others have made of bin Laden's death shows more about the human tendency to make individual people into symbols for much bigger things, good or bad. Bin Laden has been largely irrelevant for the past decade, with his deputy and probable successor Ayman al-Zawahri being more active than him, many groups using the al Qaeda name having at best very loose ties to the central organization, and even al Qaeda as a whole looking pretty irrelevant in the Middle East during the revolutions there over the past few months. It is still possible that bin Laden himself could have directed further attacks (such as the attacks on the US rail system he is said to have been plotting), so he was still dangerous. But a lot of other people probably represented a greater current threat to the US and other Western countries than he did.
Another aspect of bin Laden's death is the ethics of it. There is reason to question the propriety of launching a mission like this in another country without that country's permission (though I can understand why the US didn't trust Pakistan's military or security agency, and one Pakistani even said "If your enemy was living in my house for years and I never did anything about it, of course you'd come get him yourself" or something to that effect). But leaving that aside, there is the point that only one person at the house fired at the US team and bin Laden himself was unarmed when he was killed, and probably had little time to surrender. This indicates that the US didn't really want to capture him, but set out to kill him. Several reports suggested that he might have been reaching for a weapon, and one mentioned a fear that he could have a suicide vest (though given that he'd been living in seclusion in that house for years, it seems extremely improbable that he'd have habitually worn a suicide vest). But it seems just as likely that this was a simple hit job, which raises uncomfortable ethical questions. There's no question in my mind that Osama was a bad person -- though there are many people who are much worse, given all the sadistic murderers and torturers in the world -- or that he was at least at one time one of the world's most dangerous (as opposed to worst) people, though as I said above, he was much less dangerous by the time of his death. I'm certainly not sorry that he's dead. But I'm not going to dance in the streets over it, and I have some doubts about the morality of just shooting him dead rather than even trying to capture him. I understand that a captive Osama bin Laden would have created a lot of headaches, but I'm not convinced we should just kill someone because it's more convenient that way.
On the other hand, I suppose one could look at it another way. Once the US had strong reason to believe that Osama bin Laden was in that house, they were certain to go after him one way or another, which is understandable enough, as he still presented a danger. If Obama had not ordered a strike team sent in but had gone with his most likely other option, a Predator drone strike, everyone in the house, including women and children, would probably have been killed. So at least this way casualties were kept to a minimum, and seemingly only one innocent life was lost (I am referring to the wife of the courier who was killed when her husband shot at the Americans, though admittedly I don't know that the son of bin Laden who was also killed was in anyway dangerous). So in comparison to a Predator strike, sending a strike team, or even a hit squad, has to be seen as the humane choice. I still have problems with the image of the US team shooting several unarmed people seemingly without even giving them time to surrender, but there are worse things they could have done. Also, at least the US leadership itself openly revised their story about what happened rather than trying to cover it up, a far cry from a country like, say, Sri Lanka, which according to a number of reports killed several Tamil Tiger leaders in cold blood after they surrendered but still refuses to admit it, despite video evidence of at least one of the people who supposedly died in battle having been in government hands.
So while I have mixed feelings about the way bin Laden was killed, I'm not sorry he's dead. But even before I heard he was unarmed when he was shot, I had read about another point that, though relatively minor, speaks of poor judgement by someone in the chain of command. I refer to the choice of the name "Geronimo" as the US team's code name for bin Laden. As soon as I read that, I thought, "That's not a very well thought out choice of name", and evidently I was not the only one who thought so. You would think it would have occurred to someone that more than a few Native Americans might be offended by equating Geronimo with Osama bin Laden. While it's not really a big deal, an apology might be in order at some point down the line.
But moving on the points I wanted to focus on, the first of these is the significance of bin Laden's death. Obviously it is a political victory for President Obama, since he is now able to claim credit for eliminating the leader of the organization behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States, something George W. Bush, despite two wars (the one actually irrelevant to 9/11 absorbing most of his administration's energy) was unable to accomplish. It makes it harder for the Republicans to claim Obama is soft on terror (though many of them continue to say that is the case) or that he is incapable of making tough calls.
It also seems probable that bin Laden's death will have an effect on al Qaeda and Islamic extremism in general, as bin Laden was an important symbol and his death shows that the US is capable of hunting down the group's top leaders (though many of them may not particularly fear death anyway -- fanatics often don't). However, the impact is likely to be limited. In fact, the big deal that many Americans and others have made of bin Laden's death shows more about the human tendency to make individual people into symbols for much bigger things, good or bad. Bin Laden has been largely irrelevant for the past decade, with his deputy and probable successor Ayman al-Zawahri being more active than him, many groups using the al Qaeda name having at best very loose ties to the central organization, and even al Qaeda as a whole looking pretty irrelevant in the Middle East during the revolutions there over the past few months. It is still possible that bin Laden himself could have directed further attacks (such as the attacks on the US rail system he is said to have been plotting), so he was still dangerous. But a lot of other people probably represented a greater current threat to the US and other Western countries than he did.
Another aspect of bin Laden's death is the ethics of it. There is reason to question the propriety of launching a mission like this in another country without that country's permission (though I can understand why the US didn't trust Pakistan's military or security agency, and one Pakistani even said "If your enemy was living in my house for years and I never did anything about it, of course you'd come get him yourself" or something to that effect). But leaving that aside, there is the point that only one person at the house fired at the US team and bin Laden himself was unarmed when he was killed, and probably had little time to surrender. This indicates that the US didn't really want to capture him, but set out to kill him. Several reports suggested that he might have been reaching for a weapon, and one mentioned a fear that he could have a suicide vest (though given that he'd been living in seclusion in that house for years, it seems extremely improbable that he'd have habitually worn a suicide vest). But it seems just as likely that this was a simple hit job, which raises uncomfortable ethical questions. There's no question in my mind that Osama was a bad person -- though there are many people who are much worse, given all the sadistic murderers and torturers in the world -- or that he was at least at one time one of the world's most dangerous (as opposed to worst) people, though as I said above, he was much less dangerous by the time of his death. I'm certainly not sorry that he's dead. But I'm not going to dance in the streets over it, and I have some doubts about the morality of just shooting him dead rather than even trying to capture him. I understand that a captive Osama bin Laden would have created a lot of headaches, but I'm not convinced we should just kill someone because it's more convenient that way.
On the other hand, I suppose one could look at it another way. Once the US had strong reason to believe that Osama bin Laden was in that house, they were certain to go after him one way or another, which is understandable enough, as he still presented a danger. If Obama had not ordered a strike team sent in but had gone with his most likely other option, a Predator drone strike, everyone in the house, including women and children, would probably have been killed. So at least this way casualties were kept to a minimum, and seemingly only one innocent life was lost (I am referring to the wife of the courier who was killed when her husband shot at the Americans, though admittedly I don't know that the son of bin Laden who was also killed was in anyway dangerous). So in comparison to a Predator strike, sending a strike team, or even a hit squad, has to be seen as the humane choice. I still have problems with the image of the US team shooting several unarmed people seemingly without even giving them time to surrender, but there are worse things they could have done. Also, at least the US leadership itself openly revised their story about what happened rather than trying to cover it up, a far cry from a country like, say, Sri Lanka, which according to a number of reports killed several Tamil Tiger leaders in cold blood after they surrendered but still refuses to admit it, despite video evidence of at least one of the people who supposedly died in battle having been in government hands.
So while I have mixed feelings about the way bin Laden was killed, I'm not sorry he's dead. But even before I heard he was unarmed when he was shot, I had read about another point that, though relatively minor, speaks of poor judgement by someone in the chain of command. I refer to the choice of the name "Geronimo" as the US team's code name for bin Laden. As soon as I read that, I thought, "That's not a very well thought out choice of name", and evidently I was not the only one who thought so. You would think it would have occurred to someone that more than a few Native Americans might be offended by equating Geronimo with Osama bin Laden. While it's not really a big deal, an apology might be in order at some point down the line.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Will People Believe Anything?
In the US in recent weeks, one of the main political news stories has been something that, if everybody (except for a few mental hospital patients) was rational, would be completely unworthy of attention. I am talking of course of the lunatic fringe inspired "controversy" over President Barack Obama's birthplace. Actually, there have been two things in American political news recently that are unworthy of attention, the other being a certain loud-mouthed businessman. I refer to the guy Joe Klein calls "Trumpet" (and who he also says he generally makes a point of refusing to dignify with a mention). Even before he came out with all his wacky criticisms of Obama, he struck me as an obnoxious and somewhat sleazy character, almost an archetype of the unscrupulous businessperson, with his frequent declarations of bankruptcy, his tacky sense of style, his self-righteous moralizing about beauty show contestants, and his attempt to trademark the phrase "you're fired". How could anyone take him seriously as a candidate for president? Actually, some speculate it's all just a publicity stunt; in other words, all he wants is to get even more attention. In any case, if we all ignore him, maybe he'll go away.
But back to the question of Obama's birthplace. In polls taken before Obama obtained a waiver from Hawaii (where he was, in fact, born) to release his long-form birth certificate, close to half of Republicans, a fair number of independents, and even some Democrats expressed doubt or uncertainty as to whether Obama was born in the US. Not only had the documentation that the state of Hawaii normally provides been released publicly long ago (and it is worth repeating that Obama himself had to get a special waiver from Hawaii to get and release his long-form birth certificate -- it's not as if he could have released it whenever he wanted), but there were announcements of Obama's birth in two Honolulu newspapers at the time. There's as much or more evidence for where Obama was born than there is for a lot of Americans, including many who claimed to believe he wasn't born in the US (not everyone's birth is announced in a newspaper, for one thing). Believing that Obama was born in Kenya or some such place is the intellectual equivalent of believing that humans didn't land on the Moon, the Holocaust didn't happen, or the Earth is only 6000 years old. It's even worse (if possible) than believing that the Earth isn't getting warmer or that William Shakespeare the actor didn't write the plays that bear his name. So how is that so many Americans believe this kind of fantastic nonsense, and in some cases will even continue to believe it after Obama released his long-form birth certificate?
One simple answer might be that people are just plain stupid. In many cases, that probably is the reason, but while I doubt there are many so-called birthers who are intellectual powerhouses, they can't all be below average in intelligence, and some of the similarly nonsensical ideas mentioned above have been adopted by people who are clearly intelligent (for example, the anti-Stradfordians, as those who question Shakespeare's authorship are called, in the past included such people as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Wells). In part it is simply people's fondness for conspiracy theories. While clearly delusional belief in conspiracies is often a sign of schizophrenia, even people without any form of mental illness will often believe some type of pattern exists where there clearly isn't one, whether it's a conspiracy theory, a face on Mars (it's just a geological formation), or a curse like the one claimed to be on the tomb of Tutankhamen (Howard Carter, the leader of the team that discovered the tomb, lived for almost two decades afterward, dying at a respectable 64).
However, other factors can predispose people to believe in conspiracy theories, especially those having to do with politics. For instance, in Taiwan, there is a significant portion of the population who believes that the assassination attempt against former President Chen Shuibian the day before his narrow reelection victory was staged, but almost all of those people are supporters of the KMT or other parties on that end of the Taiwanese political spectrum. Likewise, most if not all of the diehard "birthers" are people who are strongly opposed to President Obama and his policies (or what they imagine to be his policies). What's more, I suspect that those who say questioning Obama's citizenship (or his academic credentials -- this being a more recent game for the conspiracy theorists) is ultimately motivated by racism are right in at least some cases. A similar motivation, though less commonly cited, is xenophobia. Many of these same people are rabidly anti-immigrant, and the idea that someone with a foreign background -- and though Obama was clearly born in America, his father really was a foreigner, and he himself did spend part of his childhood in Asia -- could be president drives them insane (even though virtually all of them are descended from relatively recent immigrants themselves). Unfortunately xenophobia is a common cancer worldwide (just look at how every country facing public protests in the past few months has tried to place some or all the blame on foreign enemies), when in truth it would do everyone in the world good to be exposed more to foreign peoples and their cultures. But just as xenophobia remains strong in many countries around the world, there are many in the US who will continue to view anyone whose background is not "all-American" as suspicious, even to the point of believing obviously nutty theories about them.
[Update (2011/05/08): The death of Osama bin Laden, as mentioned in my latest post, has given rise to a new crop of conspiracy theories. Here is an article on the topic of conspiracy theories in general from the NY Times (which mentions one I left off, the "Paul is dead" nonsense, though it also includes a link to a rather incoherent rant from conspiracy buff Alex Jones -- yes, many of the conspiracies he cites were real, but a number of them are dubious at best, and his rambling and poorly copy edited arguments don't help) and another from CNN.]
But back to the question of Obama's birthplace. In polls taken before Obama obtained a waiver from Hawaii (where he was, in fact, born) to release his long-form birth certificate, close to half of Republicans, a fair number of independents, and even some Democrats expressed doubt or uncertainty as to whether Obama was born in the US. Not only had the documentation that the state of Hawaii normally provides been released publicly long ago (and it is worth repeating that Obama himself had to get a special waiver from Hawaii to get and release his long-form birth certificate -- it's not as if he could have released it whenever he wanted), but there were announcements of Obama's birth in two Honolulu newspapers at the time. There's as much or more evidence for where Obama was born than there is for a lot of Americans, including many who claimed to believe he wasn't born in the US (not everyone's birth is announced in a newspaper, for one thing). Believing that Obama was born in Kenya or some such place is the intellectual equivalent of believing that humans didn't land on the Moon, the Holocaust didn't happen, or the Earth is only 6000 years old. It's even worse (if possible) than believing that the Earth isn't getting warmer or that William Shakespeare the actor didn't write the plays that bear his name. So how is that so many Americans believe this kind of fantastic nonsense, and in some cases will even continue to believe it after Obama released his long-form birth certificate?
One simple answer might be that people are just plain stupid. In many cases, that probably is the reason, but while I doubt there are many so-called birthers who are intellectual powerhouses, they can't all be below average in intelligence, and some of the similarly nonsensical ideas mentioned above have been adopted by people who are clearly intelligent (for example, the anti-Stradfordians, as those who question Shakespeare's authorship are called, in the past included such people as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Wells). In part it is simply people's fondness for conspiracy theories. While clearly delusional belief in conspiracies is often a sign of schizophrenia, even people without any form of mental illness will often believe some type of pattern exists where there clearly isn't one, whether it's a conspiracy theory, a face on Mars (it's just a geological formation), or a curse like the one claimed to be on the tomb of Tutankhamen (Howard Carter, the leader of the team that discovered the tomb, lived for almost two decades afterward, dying at a respectable 64).
However, other factors can predispose people to believe in conspiracy theories, especially those having to do with politics. For instance, in Taiwan, there is a significant portion of the population who believes that the assassination attempt against former President Chen Shuibian the day before his narrow reelection victory was staged, but almost all of those people are supporters of the KMT or other parties on that end of the Taiwanese political spectrum. Likewise, most if not all of the diehard "birthers" are people who are strongly opposed to President Obama and his policies (or what they imagine to be his policies). What's more, I suspect that those who say questioning Obama's citizenship (or his academic credentials -- this being a more recent game for the conspiracy theorists) is ultimately motivated by racism are right in at least some cases. A similar motivation, though less commonly cited, is xenophobia. Many of these same people are rabidly anti-immigrant, and the idea that someone with a foreign background -- and though Obama was clearly born in America, his father really was a foreigner, and he himself did spend part of his childhood in Asia -- could be president drives them insane (even though virtually all of them are descended from relatively recent immigrants themselves). Unfortunately xenophobia is a common cancer worldwide (just look at how every country facing public protests in the past few months has tried to place some or all the blame on foreign enemies), when in truth it would do everyone in the world good to be exposed more to foreign peoples and their cultures. But just as xenophobia remains strong in many countries around the world, there are many in the US who will continue to view anyone whose background is not "all-American" as suspicious, even to the point of believing obviously nutty theories about them.
[Update (2011/05/08): The death of Osama bin Laden, as mentioned in my latest post, has given rise to a new crop of conspiracy theories. Here is an article on the topic of conspiracy theories in general from the NY Times (which mentions one I left off, the "Paul is dead" nonsense, though it also includes a link to a rather incoherent rant from conspiracy buff Alex Jones -- yes, many of the conspiracies he cites were real, but a number of them are dubious at best, and his rambling and poorly copy edited arguments don't help) and another from CNN.]
Monday, April 18, 2011
Two Anniversaries
Anniversaries of two major historical events took place during the past week. The first of these was the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. This anniversary is naturally of greatest significance to Americans, but considering the influence the United States has had on world events for the past century, there is no question that the Civil War ultimately had an effect that reached far beyond American borders. If the Confederacy had managed to win independence, the world would certainly be a very different place.
When the causes of the war are discussed, many southerners assert that the Confederacy was mainly fighting for states' rights and against tyranny by the federal government, and to preserve the Southern way of life. They also focus on the major disadvantages the South had in manpower and industrial development and the devastation caused in the South by invading Union armies. In other words, in their view, the South was fighting in a just cause against great odds.
Unfortunately, while it is true that the South faced great odds and, after holding out much longer than might have been expected, suffered great hardships in the last years of the war, the argument that the cause was just doesn't hold water. I say this in spite of the fact that a large number of my ancestors were Southerners (certainly more than were Northerners) and several fought for the Confederacy, and in spite of my support for the principle of self-determination. The truth is, the South was fighting to maintain the institution of slavery. All this talk about states' rights and the Southern way of life is just another way of saying the Confederates were fighting to ensure that slavery could continue in their territories. This is obvious if one looks at the history of the years before the war. All of the major political disputes that divided the North and South in the decades before the war had to do with slavery, including the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and more. The Southern states seceded because they saw that the balance of power in the US was shifting to pro-abolition forces, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the abolitionist Republican party, was the final straw.
As I said, I do in principle support the right of self-determination, including the right of regions to secede from larger nations for reasons such as having a distinct language or culture that is in danger of being swamped by the majority. But if their reason for secession is because they want to maintain or put in place a system that oppresses minority groups, then I cannot support them. If a part of some nation wanted to secede in order to institute or maintain capital punishment for homosexuals, genital mutilation of girls, repression of religious minorities or laws that forbid women from working or going to school, then I would certainly be against it. Suppose, for example, a part of South Africa had attempted to secede in order to maintain apartheid in its territory; that would have been completely different from the much more reasonable aspirations of the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Quebecois, the Chechens, the Acehnese, or the Puerto Ricans. As a look at the history shows that the main issue for the South was maintaining slavery, it is impossible to view their cause as just.
This is not to say that the North was necessarily much better. Many Northerners, including Lincoln himself, held arguably racist views, and the Lincoln administration virtually suspended the Bill of Rights during the war. The destruction caused by the Northern armies as they invaded the South was in many cases completely unjustifiable, and there is no doubt that many Union soldiers were guilty of cruel and brutal behavior, as were some Confederate soldiers, though at the same time there was also chivalrous behavior displayed by people on both sides. But none of that changes the basic point that the South was fighting to maintain a oppressive system, and so it is hard to feel much regret over its defeat.
Last week was also the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight, by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Since then, hundreds of people have flown in space, and a dozen have even walked on the Moon. There has been a continual human presence in space for more than 10 years on the International Space Station. However, while much more has been accomplished in terms of human spaceflight than could have been imagined before Gagarin's flight, expectations raised by the rapid progress in the 1960s have not been met. While humans landed on the Moon less than 10 years after Gagarin orbited the Earth, it has been almost 40 years since the last lunar landing, and Mars remains a distant goal. The development in the past few years of numerous promising private spaceflight programs is encouraging, but I also hope in the next 50 years humans will travel much further than they have done yet, going to Mars and back to the Moon and taking steps to establish a permanent human presence in both of those places. I hope we will also see landings on near-Earth asteroids, for research and possible resource extraction (though some regulations should also be put in place, to prevent the sort of unrestrained exploitation that has caused so many problems on Earth). As I have argued before, spending what amounts to a small fraction of our resources on space exploration will be, in the long term, of great value to humanity as a species. Human spaceflight has been worth every penny that has been spent on it, and I only hope that there are enough far-sighted people to ensure that it continues to achieve new things in the decades to come.
When the causes of the war are discussed, many southerners assert that the Confederacy was mainly fighting for states' rights and against tyranny by the federal government, and to preserve the Southern way of life. They also focus on the major disadvantages the South had in manpower and industrial development and the devastation caused in the South by invading Union armies. In other words, in their view, the South was fighting in a just cause against great odds.
Unfortunately, while it is true that the South faced great odds and, after holding out much longer than might have been expected, suffered great hardships in the last years of the war, the argument that the cause was just doesn't hold water. I say this in spite of the fact that a large number of my ancestors were Southerners (certainly more than were Northerners) and several fought for the Confederacy, and in spite of my support for the principle of self-determination. The truth is, the South was fighting to maintain the institution of slavery. All this talk about states' rights and the Southern way of life is just another way of saying the Confederates were fighting to ensure that slavery could continue in their territories. This is obvious if one looks at the history of the years before the war. All of the major political disputes that divided the North and South in the decades before the war had to do with slavery, including the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and more. The Southern states seceded because they saw that the balance of power in the US was shifting to pro-abolition forces, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the abolitionist Republican party, was the final straw.
As I said, I do in principle support the right of self-determination, including the right of regions to secede from larger nations for reasons such as having a distinct language or culture that is in danger of being swamped by the majority. But if their reason for secession is because they want to maintain or put in place a system that oppresses minority groups, then I cannot support them. If a part of some nation wanted to secede in order to institute or maintain capital punishment for homosexuals, genital mutilation of girls, repression of religious minorities or laws that forbid women from working or going to school, then I would certainly be against it. Suppose, for example, a part of South Africa had attempted to secede in order to maintain apartheid in its territory; that would have been completely different from the much more reasonable aspirations of the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Quebecois, the Chechens, the Acehnese, or the Puerto Ricans. As a look at the history shows that the main issue for the South was maintaining slavery, it is impossible to view their cause as just.
This is not to say that the North was necessarily much better. Many Northerners, including Lincoln himself, held arguably racist views, and the Lincoln administration virtually suspended the Bill of Rights during the war. The destruction caused by the Northern armies as they invaded the South was in many cases completely unjustifiable, and there is no doubt that many Union soldiers were guilty of cruel and brutal behavior, as were some Confederate soldiers, though at the same time there was also chivalrous behavior displayed by people on both sides. But none of that changes the basic point that the South was fighting to maintain a oppressive system, and so it is hard to feel much regret over its defeat.
Last week was also the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight, by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Since then, hundreds of people have flown in space, and a dozen have even walked on the Moon. There has been a continual human presence in space for more than 10 years on the International Space Station. However, while much more has been accomplished in terms of human spaceflight than could have been imagined before Gagarin's flight, expectations raised by the rapid progress in the 1960s have not been met. While humans landed on the Moon less than 10 years after Gagarin orbited the Earth, it has been almost 40 years since the last lunar landing, and Mars remains a distant goal. The development in the past few years of numerous promising private spaceflight programs is encouraging, but I also hope in the next 50 years humans will travel much further than they have done yet, going to Mars and back to the Moon and taking steps to establish a permanent human presence in both of those places. I hope we will also see landings on near-Earth asteroids, for research and possible resource extraction (though some regulations should also be put in place, to prevent the sort of unrestrained exploitation that has caused so many problems on Earth). As I have argued before, spending what amounts to a small fraction of our resources on space exploration will be, in the long term, of great value to humanity as a species. Human spaceflight has been worth every penny that has been spent on it, and I only hope that there are enough far-sighted people to ensure that it continues to achieve new things in the decades to come.
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