Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: World Affairs

  • Freedom of Expression has a Price

    From Berkley’s excellent China Digital News, I find Li Yong Yan’s excellent article about the inconsistencies of mainland China’s censorship:

    The Internet is supposed to be borderless and limitless in the exchange of information and ideas. But using sophisticated fire walls from capitalist Cisco and other vendors, China blocks all those overseas Chinese websites that are deemed un-communist, too democratic and critical. The “access denied” message will display whenever a surfer types such key words as June 4, Fa Lun Gong. Key in “democracy” and “freedom” on a Chinese search engine and the results will flash a headline, “Bush is raping Iraqi public opinion by pushing for so-called ‘Democracy and Freedom’.”

    While we shouldn’t minimize China’s repression, we need to recognize that different societies and cultures have different controls. (more…)

  • The New Fascist

    Here is a list of rightwing media attacks against George Soros. Outrageous! Full disclosure: I wrote commentary about George Soros’s support of Democratic causes for a political journal in which I expressed some ambivalence about Soros’s getting involved in US politics. But this stuff goes beyond the pale.

    I usually try to guard against using political labels. Usually they are meaningless and full of emotion. But Bill Oreilly is a fascist–as close as the USA will get to having one. He is marginally educated, and at first glance, reasonable-sounding enough, but totally convinced of the rightness of his words and his cause. He’s articulate (I’ll grant him that) and there have been multiple instances where he’s shouted down reasonable people and accused them of sinister motives (look at his tete-a-tete with Terry Gross). He considers himself beyond criticism; alternative viewpoints are to be held at arm’s length, and he always controls the microphone. He surrounds himself with guests who parrot his extremist rhetoric and just seems unable to adopt anything but extremist jingoistic positions. Despite his massive media megaphone, he seems perennially indignant at being ignored, at being silenced. Watch him for 5 minutes, and you can’t help but have the sense that Bill Oreilly has paranoid visions of the world.

    Now let me say that I rarely watch him and don’t need to. You can say: why criticize a man when I barely know his opinions? My answer: Oreilly is a voice of intolerance; why should an intolerant man be entitled to our tolerance and indulgence? It’s like saying, “well, your criticism of Adolph Hitler is superficial and invalid because you haven’t read Mein Kamp.” (And beleive me, when referring to Hitler, I am keenly aware of Godwin’s law ).

    While we’re in the habit of creating sociological dictums, here is Nagle’s dictum: the degree of Bill O’Reilly’s prominence in American society is proportional to USA’s susceptibility to fascism. Right now Bill Oreilly has one of the most prominent positions in one of the most powerful media outlets in America.

  • Thrilling Book Reviews

    Here’s a lot of book reviews I enjoyed recently:

    Kenneth Champeon writes (in my opinion) book reviews that sparkle with insight, witticism and sympathetic judgment. He is an expat living in Thailand and just seems to review anything remotely related to Asia. I’ve been reading his criticism for more than a year now, and his literary discoveries just wow me, as does his style:

    Champeon’s review On John Burdett’s Bangkok 8, Bantam Press, 2003

    When I first saw John Burdett’s novel Bangkok 8 in a Chiang Mai bookstore, I suspected that it was yet another failed attempt by a middle-aged white male to explain the city of angels to countless other white males, who know nothing about it except that a practically infinite amount of inexpensive sex with beautiful women can be had there. Such books are myriad, most of them badly written, because the kind of person who is enthralled by semi-literate and often seriously drunk hookers is unlikely to be endowed with a talent for prose, much less the mental capacity to perfect it. Yet nearly everyone who has had contact with this scene starts out believing that they are the first ones ever to do so, and can’t wait to tell the world once again what those of us who live here already know, and for the most part ignore, believing that we are somehow duty-bound to portray Thailand as it exists outside of its self-regarding capital city, outside of its go-go bars, outside of its jails.

    After complimenting Simon Winchester’s turn of phrase in River at the Center of the World, Champeon remarks:

    Fair enough, although like many contemporary authors Winchester spends too much time congratulating himself for arriving at this less than ingenious scheme. If the book has a main fault it is Winchester’s garrulousness, a writing style as narcissistic as it seems humble, and which might best be summarized in the words, “Welcome to my brain.”

    Moorishgirl writes occasional book reviews. About Funny in Farsi, she starts:

    Regardless of how poorly people pronounce your name, I bet you didn?t have to be called ?Fritzy, Fritzy Dumb Ass? by a receptionist at the doctor?s office. So you can imagine the kinds of stories that Firoozeh Dumas relates in Funny in Farsi, her memoir of growing up Iranian in Southern California. ?As I stood up for this most linguistically original version of my name,? she writes, ?I could feel all eyes upon me. The room was momentarily silent as all these sick people sat united in a moment of gratitude for their own names.?

    Amma Kamat writes about Arthashatra, an ancient Indian book about statecraft discovered 100 in 1909 by a librarian/scholar named Shamashastry. “Royalty and learning can never be compared. The king is revered only in his country. The scholar is revered everywhere”

    Cory Doctorow writes a glowing review of Red Mars. I don’t normally venture into sci fi, but when Tim O’reilly raves about the same book, my ears perk up.

    I will confess to a certain weakness for Mars books. Ever since Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, I have made it a point to hunt down almost every film with a Mars theme in it. Mars interests me first because I did a science project about Mars in elementary school; second, because we can project our vision of the future onto Mars because it bears such a resemblance to Earth; and third, because getting to Mars is probably the only realistic destination for spaceships in my lifetime.

    David Lodge recently wrote a longish book review on Nabokov’s Pnin (which caused me to buy the book!). He argues that Pnin is the first of a genre of “campus novels” :

    What the three books have in common is a pastoral campus setting, a “small world” removed from the hustle and bustle of modern urban life, in which social and political behaviour can be amusingly observed in the interaction of characters whose high intellectual pretensions are often let down by their very human frailties. The campus novel was from its beginnings, and in the hands of later exponents like Alison Lurie and Malcolm Bradbury, an essentially comic subgenre, in which serious moral issues are treated in a “light and bright and sparkling” manner (to borrow the phrase applied to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, who would certainly have a written a campus novel or two if she had lived in our era).

    As well as being a pioneer of campus fiction, Nabokov was one of the first writers to whom the epithet “postmodern” may be usefully applied – that is to say, he had absorbed the lessons and achievements of modernism (in prose fiction represented supremely for him by Joyce and Proust) without feeling the need to reject the social realism of the 19th-century novel (he was devoted to Tolstoy and Jane Austen, for instance), but he developed an innovative form of fiction that was distinctively different from both of these traditions.

    On another note, I used to write regular book reviews for slashdot, and in fact owe that site 2 book reviews, but I have to admit it just hasn’t been a priority with me. Book reviews (especially in depth book reviews) are never urgent matters. Being a book critic is an iffy proposition. First, it’s a little too tempting to review latest releases (because there is the possibility of review copies. Second, book reviews (as well as reading in general) just sucks up your time. A good book reviewer should read a book and be done with it. Write the review fast and not try to hard to be profound. A very comepetent book critic and friend of mine, Michael Barrett, who writes for the San Antonio Express News, is the ideal type of reviewer: a fast reader (who knows when it is best not to bother finishing a book), who can dash something off that sounds cerebral and informed regardless of whether it actually is. Yes, he is certainly capable of pondering a book or film in depth, but in reviews, (like blogging) quantity is almost just an important factor as quality. A person who writes a review every three or six months will always manage to be dazzling (that I can do). A critic who can toss a review every one or two weeks doesn’t need to be dazzling, merely adequate to gain a literary reputation. In this age where time is at a premium, and most of us do not have stipends or fellowships to feed our literary addictions, writing book reviews is a luxury few of us can afford.

    And yet, book reviews are pretty much our only way of finding out about masterpieces.

  • Death of a Giant Foretold

    This is the first time I’d ever seen a typepad group blog show up on Google news, but Submerging Markets runs some excellent essays, including a great post by Matthew Maly about how America’s view of progress and technology pisses the rest of the world off. A lot of lovely quotes:

    If an American soldier dies in Iraq, every inhabitant of our planet learns about his death almost instantly: a giant falls with a thud. When a crowd of Iraqis carried the helmet of a dead American soldier it seemed like it took fifty of them to carry it. Yet like every giant from a fairy tale, the American giant has a vulnerability that may prove its undoing.

    More:

    India invented quiet contemplation and has congested, noisy streets; Britain invented good manners and reads the stolen letters of royalty; Russia stood for the soul elevated by beautiful literature, and so Russian prostitutes are the best-read in the world. The world abandons its values, and American culture pours in and rules. But the world understands that the American version of good is not good, and the stronger America becomes, the more it tries to impose its will, the more it will be resisted.

    Another quote on MacDonalds:

    If we compare a McDonald’s to a French restaurant, we are likely to conclude that the McDonald’s is cheaper, cleaner, faster, and friendlier. It is a triumph of technology, research, and training. The French restaurant has only two things going for it: you will not remember a McDonald’s meal for the rest of your life, and you cannot propose at McDonald’s. McDonald’s stands for a satisfying technologically-assured result, but the French restaurant stands for life, whatever it is. McDonald’s has a very useful role to play, but when it proposes itself as a substitute for a sit-down meal, there is a problem.

    A few random thoughts. First, this is an insightful essay whose conclusions would be obvious to anyone living outside USA and inconceivable to most people inside the U.S. What distinguishes the U.S. (aside from its arrogant insistence that its way is the superior way) is its ability to market itself. American film is not any better than the film of other cultures, and yet B-movie DVD’s are found in bazaars and musical pop stars like Britney are talked about everywhere. America could market shit and convince the world it’s gold. The good thing about the U.S. is that it changes and adapts. Sure, Bush was a nincompoop, but the media has caught on, and so has the American public. Recently I’ve noticed that the U.S. is no longer the bellwether for technological innovations that it used to be (in environmental engineering, open source, cellphones, etc). Some of it might be a result of unique geographic characteristics (i.e, why cellphones or 3G didn’t take off here), but a lot of it may simple be that the incumbent companies are unwilling to innovate, preferring just to buy other people’s brilliance.

    I’ve written several essays about Eastern Europe (which, except for this one, I have yet to post online) and expect to start my Ukraine essay (where I lived for a year) over this summer. I’ve been suffering from withdrawal symptoms for having no more “letter from America” episodes by Alistaire Cooke to listen to; maybe this will help me through these tough times.

    Speaking of MacDonalds, I remember making the point to a Ukrainian girlfriend once when stopping at MacDonalds. It’s not that I love MacDonald’s, I told her. But it’s cheap and convenient and sometimes a fast alternative. MacDonalds is really a growth of a culture on the run, where lunch is not something you spend a lot of time for, but instead is something that must be consumed quickly and with little thought. That, of course, is one reason, why Americans are so obese.

  • Susan Sontag on War Photographs

    Amazing essay by Susan Sontag on War Photographs (specifically the Iraqi prison war photographs). A few preliminary thoughts: 1)The Guardian has been printing some incredible essays recently (almost better that the highbrow U.S. publications). 2) Sontag’s comparison between Soviet gulags and the Bush Administration’s follies is a little extreme, but on the other hand, any shortcomings of the world’s predominant power will look abominable.

    It’s likely that quite a large number of Americans would rather think that it is all right to torture and humiliate other human beings – who, as our putative or suspected enemies, have forfeited all their rights – than to acknowledge the folly and ineptitude and fraud of the American venture in Iraq. As for torture and sexual humiliation as fun, there seems little to oppose this tendency while America continues to turns itself into a garrison state, in which patriots are defined as those with unconditional respect for armed might and the necessity of maximal domestic surveillance. Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis who resisted their American liberators. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. Should we be entirely surprised? Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality….

    So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to “suspects” in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken – with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, Photographing the Holocaust by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show small-town Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

  • Gore’s Litany

    Gore’s speech calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation. The speech is too good to take excerpts from. Superficial thoughts:

    1. It is really exhausting to read all the instances of Bush’s stupidity/incompetence. A liberal is aware of all this stuff, but it’s frightening to take it all together in a single read.
    2. Gore’s military critique of Bush’s policies reflect the fact that Gore was one of the few Democratic hawks with a clear understanding of how the military works. That would have made him a great commander in chief.
    3. Gore always had a good sense of religious and moral issues as they relate to politics. They are reflected here. The problem with Gore is that his ideas were too subtle, not easy to grasp. Bush’s political philosophy is easy to understand and sympathize, especially if you don’t make a special effort to learn about divergent opinions. Interestingly, Gore’s eloquent condemnation of Bush’s politics reveal Gore as his most presidential than he ever seemed to be on the campaign trail.

  • Lucky Chinese Women

    Parapundit speculates about the impact of the skewed gender demographics on China (and ultimately North Korea). One possibility: Chinese men will find North Korean wives to marry. Another possibility: More wars.

  • Madonna’s Political Statement

    I’ve lost respect for Madonna over the years (partly because she’s owned by corporations), but I found the articles about her recent political tour to be hilarious. A Reuters article writes:

    LOS ANGELES? She sits in an electric chair and dances and sings against a backdrop of war images, President Bush, and Saddam Hussein, but fans of Madonna say the pop queen of shock seems to have mellowed with age, religion and motherhood.

    Madonna opened her extravagant and politically charged Re-Invention tour on Monday wearing a jewel-encrusted corset but changed into army fatigues when she sang “American Life” against projected images of a war-torn nation and the sounds of dropping bombs.

    Another article by Karen McVeigh:

    Meda Namdar, a fan from Orange County in California, was unimpressed with the opening show. “We are so disappointed – what happened to the cool, energetic Madonna?” she asked. “I mean, come on dude, get out there, start dancing. “Nobody cares about her political views. Who is Madonna to be offering her political views – she?s just an entertainer. It?s like the Pope starting a rock band.”

    Ok, I understand people’s discomfort with singers like Madonna stepping into politics, and truthfully, political speech can be grating at times. But here’s the point that is missed: this is the first time that artists in America have spoken with near unanimity about the horrible state of America and the fact that George W. has to go. The fact that entrenched entertainers like Madonna are even trying to push politics show how quickly the winds are changing.

    A caustic remark about Madonna’s recent stunts by Grant McCracken:

    Poor Madonna. Her concerts were staging areas for the next restless self. They sprinted out ahead of contemporary culture, sending back new intelligence. Now they are more like a high school reunion, with all the old Madonnas turning up, unbidden, unwelcome, and more often than not, uninteresting. Somewhere in the life of this changeling, the transformation stopped. As Kaleefa Sanneh, says, ?Having created all those old selves, she can?t now disown them, she can only play with them.?