Yeah, I know! Prometheus came out what, like 2 or 3 years ago? Why still bitch about it? Well, for openers, I was really looking forward to seeing the Alien franchise go off into a new and interesting direction instead of just rehashing the same old thing. But alas, it was horribly botched. And now comes word that a sequel to Prometheus is in the works, which only serves to remind me what an awful mess the first one was.
I'm not going to go through a laundry list of plot holes and stupidity in Prometheus. The video below by Cinema Sins covers a lot of it.
There are a couple of things about Prometheus that really irk me that I haven't really seen addressed in comment threads I have read about the movie in a number of articles and posts. Here goes.
Charlize Theron's Character Serves Absolutely No Purpose!
When we first meet Vickers after the crew wakes up from hypersleep, we see her staring intently ahead while doing push ups. The impression we get of her is that of a very strong and determined person who is not to be trifled with. When she addresses the crew, she tells them rather emphatically that "it's my job to make sure you do yours." Afterwards, she has a private meeting with Shaw and Holloway, the two characters whose research has provided the entire raison d'etre for the voyage to another star system, and proceeds to give them a thorough dressing down. Clearly, Vickers is being set up to be a dominant personality and potentially a villain, or at the very least, an obstacle to Shaw.
But once the vessel Prometheus sets down on the moon LV 426, Vickers almost immediately fades into insignificance. It is Holloway, not Vickers, who orders the ship's captain Janek to have the crew gear up to venture to the alien structure near the landing site. Shaw tells one of the security guards accompanying them to the structure that no weapons are allowed. I thought Vickers was in charge! At no point during the crew's journey to and exploration of the structure does Vickers provide any orders or guidance to them, nor does anyone consult with her. The person who just a few minutes earlier in the film made such a show of being a dominant personality ends up being just a passive observer for most of the remainder of the film.
The one time during the entire movie that Vickers shows any real, decisive action is when she torches the infected Discount Tom Hardy with a flame thrower. Even then, he likely would have died on his own, so her action doesn't affect the plot in any meaningful way.
Her irrelevance as a character is further underscored, rather embarrassingly I might add, at the end of the movie when she ejects from the Prometheus in an escape pod seconds before it crashes into the Engineer's ship, only to die moments later when the alien vessel rolls on top of her. At the very least they could have had her survive only to be killed by the Engineer or by the squid creature in the life pod.
Perhaps Vickers was more integral to the plot in an earlier version of the script, only to be pretty much neutered in the rewrite. I don't know. What seems clear to me though is that if Vickers was completely excised from the movie it would basically have been unchanged.
Elizabeth Shaw's Crucifix
After the android David drugs Shaw, he steals her crucifix necklace. It is never really explained why David takes it. Perhaps, because he is an android, David considers religion to be irrational, so by taking the crucifix from Shaw he is separating her from something that he believes she is better off without.
At the end of the movie, when Shaw goes into the crashed Engineer's ship to retrieve David, she makes a point of taking her cross back from him, which prompts David to ask rhetorically how she can still believe after all that has happened.
What is odd about this little subplot is that we are being told that Shaw's Christian faith is very important to her, but at no point during the entire film (apart from the very end when she prefaces the date with "in the year of our Lord") does she give any indication that her actions or beliefs are informed by Christianity. In fact, what she does espouse is the complete opposite of Christian doctrine.
When Shaw and Holloway are giving their presentation to the crew at the beginning of the movie, she tells them her belief that the Engineers "engineered" the human race. This is in complete opposition to the Christian belief that human beings were created by God in the image of God. If the development of the human race, and indeed, the origin of life itself on Earth, is due to the work of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, then what room does that leave for a biblical creator God in Shaw's belief system?
The prominence of Shaw's crucifix is just a lazy way to inject religion into the movie without providing any substance. What would have been interesting is if Prometheus gave us an Elizabeth Shaw who struggled to reconcile her Christian faith with her discovery of the existence of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. After all, how does the existence of intelligent beings on another planet fit into the doctrine of salvation through Jesus Christ? Did Jesus die for the sins of just the human race or does it also extend to all intelligent life throughout the universe, assuming that we are not alone in the universe? If Prometheus wanted to tackle some really important philosophical and religious issues, surely the impact of life on another world on human religious belief systems should have been on the top of the list.
Yes, I know that Prometheus hints that Jesus was a messenger sent to Earth by the Engineers and that his death by crucifixion is the reason why the Engineers decided to destroy the human race. That just seems plain silly to me, as it doesn't make any sense that an extraterrestrial being would succeed in his endeavor by being an itinerant preacher in Judea instead of landing his spacecraft outside of the emperor's palace in Rome. And why didn't the Engineers send a similar envoy to China, which also covered a similar extent of territory and ruled over a large population?
The sad thing about Prometheus, at least in my opinion, is that it could have been a better movie than the one we got. In Greek legend, Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give to humanity. If Prometheus the movie had been true to the legend, then instead of trying to find immortality, Weyland's motivation for funding the expedition would have been to get his hands on advanced alien technology, with Shaw and Holloway's scientific endeavor providing him with the cover to carry out his true agenda. The Engineers, in Chariots of the Gods fashion, instead of having engineered humanity, played the role of trying to shepherd us, as well as beings living on other worlds in our galaxy, until we were far enough along to continue to reach the technological level to become a space faring species. The world that the star map led to could have served as a testing ground for anyone who landed there to determine if their race was worthy or needed to be exterminated. When Vickers, acting as Weyland's proxy on the voyage, attempts to steal from the Engineers, it sets in motion a chain of terrible events that not only threaten the members of the voyage, but the human race itself. The tie in to Alien would be that the derelict Space Jockey ship that Ripley and her crew encountered was on its way to destroy another alien world that failed the test, but something caused the ship to crash.
At any rate, we didn't get the Prometheus that we deserved. Maybe if I was a Christian, I could forgive Ridley Scott for making such a visually beautiful piece of shit.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Sunday, March 23, 2014
More Shit Anti-Choicers Say and Some Shit Pro-Choicers Say
This picks up on a post I did about a year and half ago about the anti-choice line that pregnancies are a "gift from God."
In reading comments that anti-choicers leave on posts that deal with the subject of abortion, there are a number of common arguments I see them make that are flat out dishonest or wrong. Here they are with my response to them.
If She Didn't Want to Get Pregnant, She Shouldn't Have Had Sex In The First Place!
In a nutshell, the anti-choicers who spout this line seem to be saying that every woman who has ever gotten pregnant but doesn't want to have a baby put herself in her position by engaging in reckless promiscuity without a thought to the consequences.
My retort to that argument is to point out to the anti-choicer who uses that line that unless he or she personally witnessed every act of sexual intercourse in this country that resulted in a pregnancy, then he or she is in not position to judge whether or not the woman was being irresponsible. This position also implicitly denies any responsibility on behalf of the man who impregnated her, as if all men are so much a slave to their hormones that they are beguiled by these women into becoming sperm donors.
How can we know that a man and woman who have sex intending to have a child weren't making a rational decision at the time, but that subsequent events forced them to change? Maybe the boyfriend or husband of the woman suffered a serious physical injury or medical condition that made him unable to work while simultaneously incurring huge medical expenses that make carrying the pregnancy to term a tremendous hardship for them. In that case, it would make more sense to terminate the pregnancy and then try again later when the man has recovered and they get their finances back on track.
What if the woman were in an abusive relationship where she is too scared to refuse consent to have sex? The act of getting pregnant might be the catalyst to make her realize that if she carries the pregnancy to term, she might either find herself further trapped in the relationship, or if she leaves him, face the horrifying prospect that the abuser will take her to court for custodial rights or give him a reason to hunt her down.
In short, since we don't know the context for each sex act that results in pregnancy, we can't assume that a woman's reason to abort a pregnancy is done for trivial reasons.
Pro-Choicers Hate Babies and also, We Want to Kill Them!
As the father of two children, I call bullshit on that. I concede that some women who support abortion, such as Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, are on record as stating that they absolutely have no desire to have children. However, the majority of those of us who believe in a woman's right to an abortion are parents ourselves. Some women who choose to terminate a pregnancy will either go on to have children at some point in their lives or they have already had children. From my own perspective as a father who has a daughter, I want her to be able to have the right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy if she found herself in such circumstances.
As for the hyperbolic rhetoric about baby killing, if it were really true, why would abortion rights supporters stop at pregnancy? If we were so gung ho about "killing babies" we would be unplugging incubators in hospital maternity wards and snatching infants out of strollers at the part and smashing their skulls against the pavement. And yet one never hears of such a thing.
Pro-Choicers Celebrate Baby Killing!
Yeah, totally man! I can't tell you how many post-abortion parties I've attended.
No, we don't celebrate abortion. What we do celebrate, if anything, when marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, is the recognition that a woman has the right to bodily autonomy and to be able to have not only the right to terminate a pregnancy if she so chooses, but to also have affordable access to an abortion. What we also celebrate and advocate for is the right of a pregnant woman, if she chooses to carry the pregnancy to term, to have access to quality medical care not only for her own personal health, but to help ensure that the baby she wants to have is born healthy. Anti-choicers never seem to want to acknowledge this.
That being said, in the interest of balance, there are a couple of arguments I hear from pro-choicers that also annoy me.
If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would Be A Sacrament!
Well, if men could get pregnant, then they wouldn't be men. Since we don't live in a world where men can get pregnant, we are in no position to seriously say how that would affect the debate over abortion. That's why that is a line that I never use in arguing with anti-choicers.
How Many Babies Are You Adopting?
On the surface, I get this argument. If an anti-choicer wants to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term that she doesn't want to have, will he or she (as there are a fair share of anti-choice women) step up to take care of that baby?
Admittedly, I haven't looked at the statistics, but I don't doubt that some evangelical Christians do adopt children, whether domestically or abroad.
That being the case, as an atheist and a supporter of abortion rights, I don't want anti-choicers adopting children and indoctrinating them children into believing all of the things we deplore among the Religious Right.
When all is said and done, the basic disagreement between supporters and opponents of abortion rights is that one side considers the fetus to be subordinate to a pregnant woman and the other side takes the opposite position. One side recognizes that pregnancy is a serious medical condition and that a woman should have the right to determine if she wants to terminate a pregnancy, whether it is for reasons for her own personal health and well being or because she does not want to bring a child into this world if she does not believe the conditions are favorable to raising a child in a healthy environment.
In reading comments that anti-choicers leave on posts that deal with the subject of abortion, there are a number of common arguments I see them make that are flat out dishonest or wrong. Here they are with my response to them.
If She Didn't Want to Get Pregnant, She Shouldn't Have Had Sex In The First Place!
In a nutshell, the anti-choicers who spout this line seem to be saying that every woman who has ever gotten pregnant but doesn't want to have a baby put herself in her position by engaging in reckless promiscuity without a thought to the consequences.
My retort to that argument is to point out to the anti-choicer who uses that line that unless he or she personally witnessed every act of sexual intercourse in this country that resulted in a pregnancy, then he or she is in not position to judge whether or not the woman was being irresponsible. This position also implicitly denies any responsibility on behalf of the man who impregnated her, as if all men are so much a slave to their hormones that they are beguiled by these women into becoming sperm donors.
How can we know that a man and woman who have sex intending to have a child weren't making a rational decision at the time, but that subsequent events forced them to change? Maybe the boyfriend or husband of the woman suffered a serious physical injury or medical condition that made him unable to work while simultaneously incurring huge medical expenses that make carrying the pregnancy to term a tremendous hardship for them. In that case, it would make more sense to terminate the pregnancy and then try again later when the man has recovered and they get their finances back on track.
What if the woman were in an abusive relationship where she is too scared to refuse consent to have sex? The act of getting pregnant might be the catalyst to make her realize that if she carries the pregnancy to term, she might either find herself further trapped in the relationship, or if she leaves him, face the horrifying prospect that the abuser will take her to court for custodial rights or give him a reason to hunt her down.
In short, since we don't know the context for each sex act that results in pregnancy, we can't assume that a woman's reason to abort a pregnancy is done for trivial reasons.
Pro-Choicers Hate Babies and also, We Want to Kill Them!
As the father of two children, I call bullshit on that. I concede that some women who support abortion, such as Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, are on record as stating that they absolutely have no desire to have children. However, the majority of those of us who believe in a woman's right to an abortion are parents ourselves. Some women who choose to terminate a pregnancy will either go on to have children at some point in their lives or they have already had children. From my own perspective as a father who has a daughter, I want her to be able to have the right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy if she found herself in such circumstances.
As for the hyperbolic rhetoric about baby killing, if it were really true, why would abortion rights supporters stop at pregnancy? If we were so gung ho about "killing babies" we would be unplugging incubators in hospital maternity wards and snatching infants out of strollers at the part and smashing their skulls against the pavement. And yet one never hears of such a thing.
Pro-Choicers Celebrate Baby Killing!
Yeah, totally man! I can't tell you how many post-abortion parties I've attended.
No, we don't celebrate abortion. What we do celebrate, if anything, when marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, is the recognition that a woman has the right to bodily autonomy and to be able to have not only the right to terminate a pregnancy if she so chooses, but to also have affordable access to an abortion. What we also celebrate and advocate for is the right of a pregnant woman, if she chooses to carry the pregnancy to term, to have access to quality medical care not only for her own personal health, but to help ensure that the baby she wants to have is born healthy. Anti-choicers never seem to want to acknowledge this.
That being said, in the interest of balance, there are a couple of arguments I hear from pro-choicers that also annoy me.
If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would Be A Sacrament!
Well, if men could get pregnant, then they wouldn't be men. Since we don't live in a world where men can get pregnant, we are in no position to seriously say how that would affect the debate over abortion. That's why that is a line that I never use in arguing with anti-choicers.
How Many Babies Are You Adopting?
On the surface, I get this argument. If an anti-choicer wants to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term that she doesn't want to have, will he or she (as there are a fair share of anti-choice women) step up to take care of that baby?
Admittedly, I haven't looked at the statistics, but I don't doubt that some evangelical Christians do adopt children, whether domestically or abroad.
That being the case, as an atheist and a supporter of abortion rights, I don't want anti-choicers adopting children and indoctrinating them children into believing all of the things we deplore among the Religious Right.
When all is said and done, the basic disagreement between supporters and opponents of abortion rights is that one side considers the fetus to be subordinate to a pregnant woman and the other side takes the opposite position. One side recognizes that pregnancy is a serious medical condition and that a woman should have the right to determine if she wants to terminate a pregnancy, whether it is for reasons for her own personal health and well being or because she does not want to bring a child into this world if she does not believe the conditions are favorable to raising a child in a healthy environment.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Dealing With The Aftermath
I don't know what it is like to be in abusive relationship, but I can imagine that for a person who has experienced being on the receiving end of threats of or actual instances of physical abuse, the psychological scars remain long after the relationship has ended.
For starters, it must be hard to shake the fear, that omnipresent sense of dread, that one day the abuser will find the victim at the victim's new home, at his or her job, or while shopping at the local mall. It can be hard for someone who has been in abusive relationship to allow oneself to trust anyone else who might show a romantic interest in him or her. Then there's the loss of confidence. "How could I have been so stupid to allow such a thing to happen to me?" is a thought that many people who have experienced an abusive relationship must ask themselves.
When I left off with my previous post about my friend Lucy (as an aside, I changed the name I used for her), she had made her escape from her abuser with the assistance of her uncle.
Quite naturally, Lucy was afraid to go back to her apartment, at least for the short term, so she stayed at her uncle. Her uncle though, as it turned out, was not exactly a fountain of sympathy. Lucy would tell me that he would berate her for allowing herself to get involved with such a man. He made her feel like she was imposing on him and her aunt, telling her she could only stay with them until the end of the month. Knowing her uncle's personality, it may be that she was reluctant to reach out to him sooner.
Having been a hotline counselor some years ago, one of the qualities that was ingrained into me was to be nonjudgmental. In Lucy's case, sure I could think some of the things that her uncle said to her, but it would not be productive to say them. What matters most is not to tear a person down, but to build that person back up.
I asked Lucy to tell me as much about the abuser as possible, so that I could make more informed suggestions to her. One of the most important things she said about him was that he was the kind of person who did not like to make a scene in public or draw attention to himself. His parents house, where he was presumably living now, was in the outer suburbs of Toronto, Furthermore, he did not have a car and had to rely on public transportation to get around. Based on this, I told Lucy that it should be safe to return to her apartment building. As the temperatures were starting to get colder in Toronto, it wasn't likely that the man would ride for an hour on public transportation to get to her neighborhood and then stand around in the freezing cold waiting for her to show up at her building.
Still, Lucy was still unable to bring herself to return to her apartment. Not only could she not shake the fear that he might turn up there, she could not bear to be in the place where she suffered the abuse and sleeping in the bed she had shared with him. So Lucy ended up staying for a time at a homeless shelter. She described to me the conditions at the shelter, including a roommate who was not exactly playing with a full deck, if you catch my drift.
After about a week or so, I implored Lucy to return to the apartment. Over a month had passed since she had left, so it seemed reasonable to expect that the abuser would believe she had moved out permanently. I told her that she could look for a new apartment while she was there. Fortunately, she had made the acquaintance of another woman who agreed to stay in the apartment with her on the first couple of nights of her return. The on jarring note was that the asshole ex-boyfriend had left a letter that she reckons he slipped under her door within a week after she had made her escape. He asked her to call him. The only other communication she had from him, apart from that, were the calls he made to her cell phone the night she left him, which she did not answer or return.
Lucy started searching for a new place to live and managed to find another apartment that was in a more favorable location for her commute to her job. She moved into it at the end of the year, and thus far Lucy's life seems to have taken a turn for the better.
While Lucy's physical circumstances have indeed improved, it must be hard for her as well as others to feel normal again. Lucy admitted to me on a couple of occasions that part of her still misses the man who abused her. I told her that it was understandable to feel that way, as he must have had some positive qualities that attracted her to him in the beginning. That being said, I advised Lucy that whenever she starts to feel like she misses him that she should remember what it was he did to her.
For starters, it must be hard to shake the fear, that omnipresent sense of dread, that one day the abuser will find the victim at the victim's new home, at his or her job, or while shopping at the local mall. It can be hard for someone who has been in abusive relationship to allow oneself to trust anyone else who might show a romantic interest in him or her. Then there's the loss of confidence. "How could I have been so stupid to allow such a thing to happen to me?" is a thought that many people who have experienced an abusive relationship must ask themselves.
When I left off with my previous post about my friend Lucy (as an aside, I changed the name I used for her), she had made her escape from her abuser with the assistance of her uncle.
Quite naturally, Lucy was afraid to go back to her apartment, at least for the short term, so she stayed at her uncle. Her uncle though, as it turned out, was not exactly a fountain of sympathy. Lucy would tell me that he would berate her for allowing herself to get involved with such a man. He made her feel like she was imposing on him and her aunt, telling her she could only stay with them until the end of the month. Knowing her uncle's personality, it may be that she was reluctant to reach out to him sooner.
Having been a hotline counselor some years ago, one of the qualities that was ingrained into me was to be nonjudgmental. In Lucy's case, sure I could think some of the things that her uncle said to her, but it would not be productive to say them. What matters most is not to tear a person down, but to build that person back up.
I asked Lucy to tell me as much about the abuser as possible, so that I could make more informed suggestions to her. One of the most important things she said about him was that he was the kind of person who did not like to make a scene in public or draw attention to himself. His parents house, where he was presumably living now, was in the outer suburbs of Toronto, Furthermore, he did not have a car and had to rely on public transportation to get around. Based on this, I told Lucy that it should be safe to return to her apartment building. As the temperatures were starting to get colder in Toronto, it wasn't likely that the man would ride for an hour on public transportation to get to her neighborhood and then stand around in the freezing cold waiting for her to show up at her building.
Still, Lucy was still unable to bring herself to return to her apartment. Not only could she not shake the fear that he might turn up there, she could not bear to be in the place where she suffered the abuse and sleeping in the bed she had shared with him. So Lucy ended up staying for a time at a homeless shelter. She described to me the conditions at the shelter, including a roommate who was not exactly playing with a full deck, if you catch my drift.
After about a week or so, I implored Lucy to return to the apartment. Over a month had passed since she had left, so it seemed reasonable to expect that the abuser would believe she had moved out permanently. I told her that she could look for a new apartment while she was there. Fortunately, she had made the acquaintance of another woman who agreed to stay in the apartment with her on the first couple of nights of her return. The on jarring note was that the asshole ex-boyfriend had left a letter that she reckons he slipped under her door within a week after she had made her escape. He asked her to call him. The only other communication she had from him, apart from that, were the calls he made to her cell phone the night she left him, which she did not answer or return.
Lucy started searching for a new place to live and managed to find another apartment that was in a more favorable location for her commute to her job. She moved into it at the end of the year, and thus far Lucy's life seems to have taken a turn for the better.
While Lucy's physical circumstances have indeed improved, it must be hard for her as well as others to feel normal again. Lucy admitted to me on a couple of occasions that part of her still misses the man who abused her. I told her that it was understandable to feel that way, as he must have had some positive qualities that attracted her to him in the beginning. That being said, I advised Lucy that whenever she starts to feel like she misses him that she should remember what it was he did to her.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Dealing With An Even More Figurative Grenade With The Pin Pulled Out
Sorry, but I couldn't help making an allusion to a now infamous post by PZ Myers on his Pharyngula blog in which he shared allegations from a woman who claimed to have been raped by a famous person in the skeptic community a few years earlier.
This past September, my friend Lucy (not her real name, which I don't want to use in this post) revealed a frightening dilemma of hers to me, but unlike the allegations Myers shared, this was a situation that was happening in the present rather than an event that took place in the past.
Before I get into it though, first a little background information. Lucy is an ethnic Chinese immigrant from Indonesia in her mid-forties. I became acquainted with her in the late 90's because we were both (and are still) trademark paralegals. Lucy worked at a firm that we used for trademark matters in Indonesia and she became my main contact there. At some point, we became e-mail pen pals.
After a few years, she got a visa to visit the United States in 2004 and brought along her mom, who was wheelchair bound because of a stroke she had suffered. The father had died a year or two before that. I invited Lucy and her mom to stay with us in our house during the portion of their trip they spent in New York. Lucy visited the United States a couple of years later on her own, and again stayed with us for the New York portion of her trip.
In my communications with Lucy after she returned to Indonesia, she expressed a desire to leave and move to the United States or Canada. Part of her desire to leave Indonesia stemmed from the anti-Chinese riots that broke out there in 1998. How could the Indonesian-Chinese community be sure that such a terrible thing couldn't happen again? Lucy had applied to immigrate to Canada but hadn't heard anything. Then in 2007 she applied to and was accepted for a year of study at the Franklin Pierce Institute in New Hampshire, a school that offers post-graduate programs in intellectual property law. Besides getting her out of Indonesia for awhile, Lucy hoped it would create an opportunity for her to get a US firm or company to sponsor her for a work visa so that she could stay permanently.
After Lucy completed the program, her hopes for remaining in the United States did not pan out. She was unable to find a firm or company to sponsor her for a work visa, but she did not want to go back to Indonesia. Finally, she caught a lucky break, when her Canadian visa application was accepted. Lucy moved to Toronto and applied for trademark paralegal positions with firms in the city. Unfortunately, she did not meet with success, telling me that the firms wouldn't hire her because she didn't have "Canadian experience." It was a Catch-22 scenario. She couldn't get hired because she lacked the experience, which meant that she couldn't get the experience that would get her hired.
Lucy ended up working at menial jobs, barely scraping by to make a living. She had no family in the area except for an uncle with whom she was not close, and she had no close friends in Toronto, which made her experience all the more gloomy, which I believe left her vulnerable to what would follow.
Fast forward to the near present. When Lucy was in the United States, she had an account with Bank of America. After she had moved to Toronto, she had asked if she could give the Bank of America my address for sending a new debit card, because for some reason the bank couldn't mail it to a Canadian address. So, when the card arrived at my house, I mailed it to her.
This past September, I received another mailing from Bank of America. I could tell from holding the envelope that it had an ATM card in it, so I sent message to Lucy via Facebook that I was mailing her the envelope. I then proceeded to go to the post office to deliver it.
I think it was that very night when I was on Facebook that Lucy sent me an instant message telling me not to mail her the envelope, alluding that she was in a difficult situation. I replied to her that I had already dropped it off at the post office. Then she asked me if my name was on the return address label. I answered that I had, and then she dropped the bomb. She told me that she was in a relationship with a man who was very jealous and violent, and she feared that if he saw the envelope in their mail that he would think I was someone with whom she was having an affair.
Needless to say, I was quite shocked and horrified by this revelation. I had read enough stories in the news of women who were murdered by former or current boyfriends or husbands, and now my friend Lucy was in a dangerous situation where the same thing could happen to her.
Knowing that she really had no one to turn to, I instinctively sought to do what I could to help her, but communicating with her was difficult. Such was the hold he had on her that he made her give her the passwords to her Facebook account and some of her e-mail accounts so he could monitor her activity. I sought to avoid that by sending her a message via LinkedIn, not realizing that doing so sent a notification of the message to an e-mail account that he had access to. Lucy told me that the boyfriend started to ask her who I was, accusing me of being a secret boyfriend, and that he was going to lookup all the men in Toronto who had the same name as me, as he apparently didn't know I lived in New York.
The one bright spot in Lucy's life was that she had finally found a job with an intellectual property firm in Toronto. While there, she was able to e-mail me using an account that she had kept secret from the abusive boyfriend. Thus, Lucy would be able to fill me in on what was happening and I would sound her out on ideas for her to get free of the abuser.
Early on, I called the Toronto Police Department and spoke with someone there about the situation. He suggested that I provide him with her address and they could send an officer to Lucy's apartment to investigate. I decided not to, because I didn't want to act without her permission, plus I was afraid it might exacerbate the problem. When I discussed it with Lucy, she was adamant that I not get the police involved, as she feared it would make the boyfriend more violent. I asked her if he had ever hit her, and she told me that he punched her in the face and threatened to throw her off the balcony of her apartment. He also assaulted his own mother when she criticized him for his relationship with Lucy. Some people often wonder why women do not immediately flee an abusive man, but I understand that if a man shows that he is capable of engaging in physical violence, the thought of taking action to leave him can seem more terrifying then staying with him, because leaving him might make him even more violent and unpredictable.
As angry as I was, I realized that my desire to charge into the fray and be the knight riding to the rescue had to be tempered by the need avoid further inflaming the situation. I told Lucy that she had to get away from the man as soon as possible, because he would only further tighten his hold over her as time went by. Such was his jealousy that he didn't even like her going shopping lest she speak to other men. After a dinner with Lucy's uncle and aunt, the man claimed that her uncle was not really her uncle, but rather some kind of sugar daddy. It got to the point where the man was so paranoid, he would follow her to the laundry room to make sure she didn't speak to any other men.
I offered, if necessary to come up to Toronto and be there with her at her apartment in the presence of a police officer and evict the boyfriend, as he was not on the apartment's lease and had no legal right to be there. My plan was that we would then pack up all of his belonging and arrange for a mover to bring them to his parent's house the next day. The superintendent would change the locks on her apartment so that he could not get in if he decided to attempt to return. I also encouraged Lucy to tell her supervisor at her job, because (1) someone else in Toronto needed to know the situation she was in, and (2) at some point she would have to take some time off from her job to take the action she needed to get the man out of her apartment as well as face the possibility that he might try to harass her at the office where she worked. I told her that the more isolated and alone she was, the more easy it would be for the man to maintain his grip on her. Furthermore, when she expressed her concerns about going through with leaving him, I stressed to her that there was no course of action she could take that would not result in disrupting her life in some way. The choices she had, as I laid it out for her, was to either stay with him and he would likely eventually hurt her again or even kill her, or she could make a break for freedom while living with the fear that he might try to find her and hurt her.
Fortunately, she did tell her supervisor, who gave her a referral to someone she could talk to about the problem. Lucy also finally took action and followed the plan I recommended to her. She informed her uncle about what was happening and he agreed to help. She took a day off from her job and went with her uncle back to her apartment, where she arranged with the superintendent to remove and store all of the man's belongings. She then packed some of her own things and left the apartment to stay at her uncle's.
When Lucy shared with me the news of her escape, which happened about a month after she revealed to me that she was in an abusive relationship, I told her how proud I was of her and that I understood that it was not an easy thing to do. She had taken an important step in reclaiming her life, but there would still be difficulties in the road ahead, which will be covered in the next post.
This past September, my friend Lucy (not her real name, which I don't want to use in this post) revealed a frightening dilemma of hers to me, but unlike the allegations Myers shared, this was a situation that was happening in the present rather than an event that took place in the past.
Before I get into it though, first a little background information. Lucy is an ethnic Chinese immigrant from Indonesia in her mid-forties. I became acquainted with her in the late 90's because we were both (and are still) trademark paralegals. Lucy worked at a firm that we used for trademark matters in Indonesia and she became my main contact there. At some point, we became e-mail pen pals.
After a few years, she got a visa to visit the United States in 2004 and brought along her mom, who was wheelchair bound because of a stroke she had suffered. The father had died a year or two before that. I invited Lucy and her mom to stay with us in our house during the portion of their trip they spent in New York. Lucy visited the United States a couple of years later on her own, and again stayed with us for the New York portion of her trip.
In my communications with Lucy after she returned to Indonesia, she expressed a desire to leave and move to the United States or Canada. Part of her desire to leave Indonesia stemmed from the anti-Chinese riots that broke out there in 1998. How could the Indonesian-Chinese community be sure that such a terrible thing couldn't happen again? Lucy had applied to immigrate to Canada but hadn't heard anything. Then in 2007 she applied to and was accepted for a year of study at the Franklin Pierce Institute in New Hampshire, a school that offers post-graduate programs in intellectual property law. Besides getting her out of Indonesia for awhile, Lucy hoped it would create an opportunity for her to get a US firm or company to sponsor her for a work visa so that she could stay permanently.
After Lucy completed the program, her hopes for remaining in the United States did not pan out. She was unable to find a firm or company to sponsor her for a work visa, but she did not want to go back to Indonesia. Finally, she caught a lucky break, when her Canadian visa application was accepted. Lucy moved to Toronto and applied for trademark paralegal positions with firms in the city. Unfortunately, she did not meet with success, telling me that the firms wouldn't hire her because she didn't have "Canadian experience." It was a Catch-22 scenario. She couldn't get hired because she lacked the experience, which meant that she couldn't get the experience that would get her hired.
Lucy ended up working at menial jobs, barely scraping by to make a living. She had no family in the area except for an uncle with whom she was not close, and she had no close friends in Toronto, which made her experience all the more gloomy, which I believe left her vulnerable to what would follow.
Fast forward to the near present. When Lucy was in the United States, she had an account with Bank of America. After she had moved to Toronto, she had asked if she could give the Bank of America my address for sending a new debit card, because for some reason the bank couldn't mail it to a Canadian address. So, when the card arrived at my house, I mailed it to her.
This past September, I received another mailing from Bank of America. I could tell from holding the envelope that it had an ATM card in it, so I sent message to Lucy via Facebook that I was mailing her the envelope. I then proceeded to go to the post office to deliver it.
I think it was that very night when I was on Facebook that Lucy sent me an instant message telling me not to mail her the envelope, alluding that she was in a difficult situation. I replied to her that I had already dropped it off at the post office. Then she asked me if my name was on the return address label. I answered that I had, and then she dropped the bomb. She told me that she was in a relationship with a man who was very jealous and violent, and she feared that if he saw the envelope in their mail that he would think I was someone with whom she was having an affair.
Needless to say, I was quite shocked and horrified by this revelation. I had read enough stories in the news of women who were murdered by former or current boyfriends or husbands, and now my friend Lucy was in a dangerous situation where the same thing could happen to her.
Knowing that she really had no one to turn to, I instinctively sought to do what I could to help her, but communicating with her was difficult. Such was the hold he had on her that he made her give her the passwords to her Facebook account and some of her e-mail accounts so he could monitor her activity. I sought to avoid that by sending her a message via LinkedIn, not realizing that doing so sent a notification of the message to an e-mail account that he had access to. Lucy told me that the boyfriend started to ask her who I was, accusing me of being a secret boyfriend, and that he was going to lookup all the men in Toronto who had the same name as me, as he apparently didn't know I lived in New York.
The one bright spot in Lucy's life was that she had finally found a job with an intellectual property firm in Toronto. While there, she was able to e-mail me using an account that she had kept secret from the abusive boyfriend. Thus, Lucy would be able to fill me in on what was happening and I would sound her out on ideas for her to get free of the abuser.
Early on, I called the Toronto Police Department and spoke with someone there about the situation. He suggested that I provide him with her address and they could send an officer to Lucy's apartment to investigate. I decided not to, because I didn't want to act without her permission, plus I was afraid it might exacerbate the problem. When I discussed it with Lucy, she was adamant that I not get the police involved, as she feared it would make the boyfriend more violent. I asked her if he had ever hit her, and she told me that he punched her in the face and threatened to throw her off the balcony of her apartment. He also assaulted his own mother when she criticized him for his relationship with Lucy. Some people often wonder why women do not immediately flee an abusive man, but I understand that if a man shows that he is capable of engaging in physical violence, the thought of taking action to leave him can seem more terrifying then staying with him, because leaving him might make him even more violent and unpredictable.
As angry as I was, I realized that my desire to charge into the fray and be the knight riding to the rescue had to be tempered by the need avoid further inflaming the situation. I told Lucy that she had to get away from the man as soon as possible, because he would only further tighten his hold over her as time went by. Such was his jealousy that he didn't even like her going shopping lest she speak to other men. After a dinner with Lucy's uncle and aunt, the man claimed that her uncle was not really her uncle, but rather some kind of sugar daddy. It got to the point where the man was so paranoid, he would follow her to the laundry room to make sure she didn't speak to any other men.
I offered, if necessary to come up to Toronto and be there with her at her apartment in the presence of a police officer and evict the boyfriend, as he was not on the apartment's lease and had no legal right to be there. My plan was that we would then pack up all of his belonging and arrange for a mover to bring them to his parent's house the next day. The superintendent would change the locks on her apartment so that he could not get in if he decided to attempt to return. I also encouraged Lucy to tell her supervisor at her job, because (1) someone else in Toronto needed to know the situation she was in, and (2) at some point she would have to take some time off from her job to take the action she needed to get the man out of her apartment as well as face the possibility that he might try to harass her at the office where she worked. I told her that the more isolated and alone she was, the more easy it would be for the man to maintain his grip on her. Furthermore, when she expressed her concerns about going through with leaving him, I stressed to her that there was no course of action she could take that would not result in disrupting her life in some way. The choices she had, as I laid it out for her, was to either stay with him and he would likely eventually hurt her again or even kill her, or she could make a break for freedom while living with the fear that he might try to find her and hurt her.
Fortunately, she did tell her supervisor, who gave her a referral to someone she could talk to about the problem. Lucy also finally took action and followed the plan I recommended to her. She informed her uncle about what was happening and he agreed to help. She took a day off from her job and went with her uncle back to her apartment, where she arranged with the superintendent to remove and store all of the man's belongings. She then packed some of her own things and left the apartment to stay at her uncle's.
When Lucy shared with me the news of her escape, which happened about a month after she revealed to me that she was in an abusive relationship, I told her how proud I was of her and that I understood that it was not an easy thing to do. She had taken an important step in reclaiming her life, but there would still be difficulties in the road ahead, which will be covered in the next post.
Exercise in Futility On Ice
Future Matts Zucarello?
After making an effort to revive this blog in 2012, I found myself unable to focus on writing much of anything in 2013. It was not so much for lack of ideas or things I wanted to write about. A good deal of it was just not being able to find the time to sit down and turn my thoughts into words.
Part of the reason for my lack of time can be found in the picture above. For the last year and a half or so, I have become a hockey dad. After trying and not liking soccer, baseball and basketball, my son Andrew decided he wanted to play ice hockey. Figures it had to be the most expensive sport! LOL! Andrew only started learning to ice skate a couple of years ago and in that time he has made tremendous progress.
This winter is Andrew's most active season yet for hockey. He is currently playing in a Sunday league at IceWorks in Syosset, which is also the practice rink for the New York Islanders (which means occasionally one gets to see the Islanders practice, and a couple of their players have children that play in the house league), and playing in the Town of Oyster Bay ice hockey league, which usually has games two weeknights per week. Then there's a hockey class at IceWorks on Wednesday evenings, plus skating at public sessions at one of the Oyster Bay rinks on Fridays or Saturdays, and a puck shootout session on Saturday nights.
Andrew's near term goal is to tryout for and be able to play on a travel hockey team. His ultimate goal is to be able to play in the NHL, but of course he'll have to take things one step at a time. I don't know how realistic a goal it is for him, but I am happy that my son has found a passion in life that also gives him a measure of confidence that he previously lacked. Naturally, I want to encourage him to pursue his dreams as far as they will take him.
Friday, October 18, 2013
The Dauis Church Part 2
Those of you who follow the news may have saw or read about the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck the Central Visayas region of the Philippines this past October 15, with the epicenter of the quake being the center of the island of Bohol.
Had my life taken a different path nearly two decades ago, this particular earthquake would likely have been no different to me than any other natural disaster to afflict a country thousands of miles away. Brief moments of sadness and maybe a donation to a disaster relief organization if the damage and death toll were particularly severe, only to fade away and be forgotten.
In this case though, the quake affected me personally because Bohol is the island where my wife grew up and where her family lives. I have been there three times in the last ten years and the wife, kids and I were planning to visit again next summer.
The good news, to cut to the chase, is that the family there are safe and unhurt. The house of my sister-in-law Mia and her husband Stuart was badly damaged and is uninhabitable for the time being, though Stuart seems to believe that the damage can be repaired.
The death toll at present is below 200, with some hundreds more injured. The physical damage is far greater, with the island's infrastructure severely damaged. Bridges have collapsed, roads have been buckled, and buildings destroyed. It will likely take some time before the island looks like it did before the quake, and I imagine that there will be some kind of effort to enforce stricter building standards to make structures more resistant to quakes.
One class of buildings that has suffered considerable damage, and in some cases virtually complete destruction, is Bohol's many Spanish colonial era Catholic churches.
Among those churches is one that has some personal resonance with me, the Dauis Church, which I did a blog post on nearly 6 years ago. It was the church were Stuart and Mia had their wedding ceremony on June 26, 2004. Below is a picture of the Dauis Church I took on the day of their wedding.
And here is how it looks now.
As you can see, most of the front of the building's façade has crumbled, though the tower looks largely intact. I haven't seen pictures of the sides and back of the church, so I don't know how widespread the damage is. Other churches, particularly the Baclayon and Loboc churches, have been largely destroyed.
Granted, as an atheist, I would rather that a hundred churches (unoccupied, of course!) crumble to dust than lose a single hospital for treating the sick and injured. In this case though, the Dauis Church has a sentimental value for me, as it was the setting for a joyous occasion in our family. And as I wrote in my original post about the church, I can appreciate such places for their historical and cultural importance as well.
Had my life taken a different path nearly two decades ago, this particular earthquake would likely have been no different to me than any other natural disaster to afflict a country thousands of miles away. Brief moments of sadness and maybe a donation to a disaster relief organization if the damage and death toll were particularly severe, only to fade away and be forgotten.
In this case though, the quake affected me personally because Bohol is the island where my wife grew up and where her family lives. I have been there three times in the last ten years and the wife, kids and I were planning to visit again next summer.
The good news, to cut to the chase, is that the family there are safe and unhurt. The house of my sister-in-law Mia and her husband Stuart was badly damaged and is uninhabitable for the time being, though Stuart seems to believe that the damage can be repaired.
The death toll at present is below 200, with some hundreds more injured. The physical damage is far greater, with the island's infrastructure severely damaged. Bridges have collapsed, roads have been buckled, and buildings destroyed. It will likely take some time before the island looks like it did before the quake, and I imagine that there will be some kind of effort to enforce stricter building standards to make structures more resistant to quakes.
One class of buildings that has suffered considerable damage, and in some cases virtually complete destruction, is Bohol's many Spanish colonial era Catholic churches.
Among those churches is one that has some personal resonance with me, the Dauis Church, which I did a blog post on nearly 6 years ago. It was the church were Stuart and Mia had their wedding ceremony on June 26, 2004. Below is a picture of the Dauis Church I took on the day of their wedding.
And here is how it looks now.
As you can see, most of the front of the building's façade has crumbled, though the tower looks largely intact. I haven't seen pictures of the sides and back of the church, so I don't know how widespread the damage is. Other churches, particularly the Baclayon and Loboc churches, have been largely destroyed.
Granted, as an atheist, I would rather that a hundred churches (unoccupied, of course!) crumble to dust than lose a single hospital for treating the sick and injured. In this case though, the Dauis Church has a sentimental value for me, as it was the setting for a joyous occasion in our family. And as I wrote in my original post about the church, I can appreciate such places for their historical and cultural importance as well.
It Takes A Sick Day To Start Blogging Again
Yeah, it's been nothing but crickets here for the last three months, probably my longest dry spell ever. It hasn't been for want of topics to blog about but finding the time. Well, today I'm home sick and have the house to myself, so I am all out of excuses. Here we go!
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Fear of Pigs
For about the last year, I've been reading lots of memoirs and journals of explorers from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. I'm currently reading on my Nook Memoirs of a Buccaneer: Dampier's Voyage Round the World 1697. As I've written before, I find it fascinating to read first hand accounts of such travelers. While their descriptions are of course tainted to varying degree by their biases, flawed recollections or lack of understanding of some of the things they witnessed, they are still some of the best sources of information we have of the lands they visited and the peoples they encountered during an age that did not have cameras.
Once I read a little about William Dampier, a sometime pirate and self-styled naturalist who sailed to many places around the world and wrote in keen detail about the peoples, climate, animals and plants of the lands he visited, I knew I had to read his memoir. In some respects, he was a sort of proto-Charles Darwin.
One recent passage that caught my interest concerns his ship's stopover in Mindanao, a heavily Muslim part of the Philippines that at the time was not under Spanish rule, where Dampier describes the Mindanaoans religious practices.
"A main part of their Religion consists in washing often, to keep themselves from being defiled; or after they are defiled to cleanse themselves again. They also take great care to keep themselves from being polluted, by tasting or touching any thing that is accounted unclean; therefore Swines Flesh is very abominable to them; nay, any one that hath either tasted of Swines Flesh, or touched those Creatures, is not permitted to come into their Houses many Days after, and there is nothing will scare them more than a Swine.
Yet there are wild Hogs in the Islands, and those so plentiful, that they will come in Troops out of the Woods in the Night into the very City, and come under their Houses, to romage up and down the Filth that they find there. The Natives therefore would even desire us to lie in wait for the Hogs to destroy them, which we did frequently, by shooting them and carrying them presently on board, but were prohibited their Houses afterwards."
Dampier then follows this with another amusing story.
"And now I am on this Subject, I cannot omit a Story concerning the General [Dampier is referring to a man called Raja Laut, who was apparently a general of the Sultan of Mindanao]. He once desired to have a Pair of Shoes made after the English Fashion, though he did very seldom wear any: So one of our Men made him a Pair, which the General liked very well.
Afterwards, some body told him, that the Thread wherewith the Shoes were sowed, were pointed with Hogs-bristles. This put him into a great Passion; so that he sent the Shoes to the Man that made them, and sent with him withal more Leather to make another Pair, with Threads pointed with some other Hair, which was immediately done, and then he was well pleased."
Given the popularity and prevalence of pork in the diet of Filipinos (as someone who is married to a Filipina, I can attest that no Filipino party is complete without a pig roast), I wonder how long it took the Filipinos who converted to Islam to abandon pork and if there was some resistance to it.
Once I read a little about William Dampier, a sometime pirate and self-styled naturalist who sailed to many places around the world and wrote in keen detail about the peoples, climate, animals and plants of the lands he visited, I knew I had to read his memoir. In some respects, he was a sort of proto-Charles Darwin.
One recent passage that caught my interest concerns his ship's stopover in Mindanao, a heavily Muslim part of the Philippines that at the time was not under Spanish rule, where Dampier describes the Mindanaoans religious practices.
"A main part of their Religion consists in washing often, to keep themselves from being defiled; or after they are defiled to cleanse themselves again. They also take great care to keep themselves from being polluted, by tasting or touching any thing that is accounted unclean; therefore Swines Flesh is very abominable to them; nay, any one that hath either tasted of Swines Flesh, or touched those Creatures, is not permitted to come into their Houses many Days after, and there is nothing will scare them more than a Swine.
Yet there are wild Hogs in the Islands, and those so plentiful, that they will come in Troops out of the Woods in the Night into the very City, and come under their Houses, to romage up and down the Filth that they find there. The Natives therefore would even desire us to lie in wait for the Hogs to destroy them, which we did frequently, by shooting them and carrying them presently on board, but were prohibited their Houses afterwards."
Dampier then follows this with another amusing story.
"And now I am on this Subject, I cannot omit a Story concerning the General [Dampier is referring to a man called Raja Laut, who was apparently a general of the Sultan of Mindanao]. He once desired to have a Pair of Shoes made after the English Fashion, though he did very seldom wear any: So one of our Men made him a Pair, which the General liked very well.
Afterwards, some body told him, that the Thread wherewith the Shoes were sowed, were pointed with Hogs-bristles. This put him into a great Passion; so that he sent the Shoes to the Man that made them, and sent with him withal more Leather to make another Pair, with Threads pointed with some other Hair, which was immediately done, and then he was well pleased."
Given the popularity and prevalence of pork in the diet of Filipinos (as someone who is married to a Filipina, I can attest that no Filipino party is complete without a pig roast), I wonder how long it took the Filipinos who converted to Islam to abandon pork and if there was some resistance to it.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Thank God for [Fill in the blank]
Recently, one of my wife's aunts flew back to the Philippines for a family reunion. She posted about her arrival on Facebook and proceeded to give thanks to God for safely reaching her destination.
Me, being the wiseass that I am, couldn't help but respond by commenting "Don't leave out the pilot and the air traffic controllers." I also added a smiley face to keep things in a humorous vein.
But seriously though, why didn't the flesh and blood human beings who actively participated in the flight of her plane from takeoff to landing get any credit from her? What specifically did God do to ensure the safe arrival of her flight that could not be accounted for by the engineers who designed the plane, the mechanics who built and maintained it, the pilots who flew it, and the air traffic controllers who helped guide its departure and landing? Did God surround the plane with a magic shield to keep it from being struck by lightning? Or did he prevent a defective part from giving out during the flight?
And of course, for the occasional flight that does crash or encounters some other difficulty, was God momentarily distracted, or, more disturbingly, is this supposedly omniscient and omnipotent being actively deciding what planes will reach their destinations and which will meet with disaster?
Then there was a Facebook friend who wrote of a family member who faced some serious medical issue. She did not elaborate on what it was, and of course, it was indelicate to ask. Fortunately, as per her recent update, the relative is doing better. But this friend added that God had answered her prayers.
Would the relative have recovered in the absence of her prayers, or would he be dead by now? If he had undergone medical treatment, where was the thanks for the medical professionals?
Being the moderate atheist that I am, I can live with people thanking God for this or that thing, so long as they give some props to the people who played a role in helping to bring about the desired end.
Me, being the wiseass that I am, couldn't help but respond by commenting "Don't leave out the pilot and the air traffic controllers." I also added a smiley face to keep things in a humorous vein.
But seriously though, why didn't the flesh and blood human beings who actively participated in the flight of her plane from takeoff to landing get any credit from her? What specifically did God do to ensure the safe arrival of her flight that could not be accounted for by the engineers who designed the plane, the mechanics who built and maintained it, the pilots who flew it, and the air traffic controllers who helped guide its departure and landing? Did God surround the plane with a magic shield to keep it from being struck by lightning? Or did he prevent a defective part from giving out during the flight?
And of course, for the occasional flight that does crash or encounters some other difficulty, was God momentarily distracted, or, more disturbingly, is this supposedly omniscient and omnipotent being actively deciding what planes will reach their destinations and which will meet with disaster?
Then there was a Facebook friend who wrote of a family member who faced some serious medical issue. She did not elaborate on what it was, and of course, it was indelicate to ask. Fortunately, as per her recent update, the relative is doing better. But this friend added that God had answered her prayers.
Would the relative have recovered in the absence of her prayers, or would he be dead by now? If he had undergone medical treatment, where was the thanks for the medical professionals?
Being the moderate atheist that I am, I can live with people thanking God for this or that thing, so long as they give some props to the people who played a role in helping to bring about the desired end.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
China's Age Old Obsession with Secrecy
While reading R. Po-chia Hsia's biography of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, A Jesuit In The Forbidden City, there was one brief passage that was of particular interest to me because it illustrates a certain characteristic of China's government that is still of tremendous relevance in the present day.
In his early years in China in the late 16th century, Matteo Ricci served with another Jesuit missionary named Michele Ruggieri. One of the ways the Jesuits tried to impress and curry favor with their Chinese hosts was to show off their superior knowledge of astronomy and cartography. These included making astronomical predictions and providing the most up to date and accurate maps of the then known world.
Hsia writes of an incident that Ruggieri describes between Ricci and a Mandarin official.
"[O]nce Ricci told their patron Wang Pan the exact latitude and longitude of his hometown and was surprised to find that Wang 'was very angry and reprehended [Ricci] for knowing such things'. Missionaries must not be seen to know or describe their country or provinces, Ruggieri concluded, as they would otherwise be suspected of harboring evil intentions of conquest."
In recent years, foreigners in China are finding themselves ruffling the feathers of the Chinese government over the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment.
An article from Nature in 2008 summarizes the dilemma:
Foreign researchers working in China are falling foul of laws restricting environmental monitoring and use of Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment. Geologists, botanists, environmental scientists and meteorologists have been affected. Even those who believed that they were within the law and were collaborating with Chinese researchers have lost data, been detained and had equipment confiscated.
One of the most recent and prominent cases of foreigners running afoul of these restrictions is Coca-Cola.
The beverage giant's sin in the eyes of the Chinese government was that "trucks for some of its bottling plants use location technology that is widely available commercially in China to improve the efficiency of deliveries."
A more serious case involves a Chinese-American geologist named Xue Feng. Several years ago, Feng was sentenced to eight years in prison for "violating the country’s vague state secrets laws after he obtained an oil industry database for his employer, IHS Energy, a consulting company in Colorado."
In a letter to President Barack Obama, David Rowley, a geologist and professor of geology under whom Feng served as a graduate student, wrote:
This was not a nefarious deal, but a very public one in which Xue Feng was simply a corporate representative acting on IHS’s behalf. He had done this many times before. What is most troubling is that it raises concern for all of us who work or do research in China and may be given books or documents that exist in the public domain but are deemed "state secrets" after the fact. What source can assure us that we are within the law? How can anyone be sure that the information they have is "legal"? Having worked in China for 26 years and researched the geology, including the petroleum geology of China, I have to admit I am no longer certain and far from confident that I too will not be detained, incarcerated, and found guilty of violating states secrets for possession of geologic information that I bought at the bookstore.
Feng has also alleged that his captors tortured him, including burning his arms with lit cigarettes.
It has been over a century since China was ruled by emperors, but one thing that seems to have survived since at least as early as the Ming Dynasty is the ruling government's paranoia with regard to outsiders' knowledge of China.
In his early years in China in the late 16th century, Matteo Ricci served with another Jesuit missionary named Michele Ruggieri. One of the ways the Jesuits tried to impress and curry favor with their Chinese hosts was to show off their superior knowledge of astronomy and cartography. These included making astronomical predictions and providing the most up to date and accurate maps of the then known world.
Hsia writes of an incident that Ruggieri describes between Ricci and a Mandarin official.
"[O]nce Ricci told their patron Wang Pan the exact latitude and longitude of his hometown and was surprised to find that Wang 'was very angry and reprehended [Ricci] for knowing such things'. Missionaries must not be seen to know or describe their country or provinces, Ruggieri concluded, as they would otherwise be suspected of harboring evil intentions of conquest."
In recent years, foreigners in China are finding themselves ruffling the feathers of the Chinese government over the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment.
An article from Nature in 2008 summarizes the dilemma:
Foreign researchers working in China are falling foul of laws restricting environmental monitoring and use of Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment. Geologists, botanists, environmental scientists and meteorologists have been affected. Even those who believed that they were within the law and were collaborating with Chinese researchers have lost data, been detained and had equipment confiscated.
One of the most recent and prominent cases of foreigners running afoul of these restrictions is Coca-Cola.
The beverage giant's sin in the eyes of the Chinese government was that "trucks for some of its bottling plants use location technology that is widely available commercially in China to improve the efficiency of deliveries."
A more serious case involves a Chinese-American geologist named Xue Feng. Several years ago, Feng was sentenced to eight years in prison for "violating the country’s vague state secrets laws after he obtained an oil industry database for his employer, IHS Energy, a consulting company in Colorado."
In a letter to President Barack Obama, David Rowley, a geologist and professor of geology under whom Feng served as a graduate student, wrote:
This was not a nefarious deal, but a very public one in which Xue Feng was simply a corporate representative acting on IHS’s behalf. He had done this many times before. What is most troubling is that it raises concern for all of us who work or do research in China and may be given books or documents that exist in the public domain but are deemed "state secrets" after the fact. What source can assure us that we are within the law? How can anyone be sure that the information they have is "legal"? Having worked in China for 26 years and researched the geology, including the petroleum geology of China, I have to admit I am no longer certain and far from confident that I too will not be detained, incarcerated, and found guilty of violating states secrets for possession of geologic information that I bought at the bookstore.
Feng has also alleged that his captors tortured him, including burning his arms with lit cigarettes.
It has been over a century since China was ruled by emperors, but one thing that seems to have survived since at least as early as the Ming Dynasty is the ruling government's paranoia with regard to outsiders' knowledge of China.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Back In Action Soon
My computer was knocked out of commission due to a massive hard drive corruption since last week, but fortunately the computer repair guy I know was able to bring her back to life. I hope to resume posting next week.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Om Mani Pad Butt: In Which I Shit on Buddhism
"Let not one deceive another nor despise any person whatever in any place. In anger or illwill let not one wish any harm to another."
The Metta Sutta, a Buddhist sutta.
"This spirit of tolerance and understanding has been from the beginning one of the most cherished ideals of Buddhist culture and civilization. That is why there is not a single example of persecution or the shedding of blood in converting people to Buddhism, or in its propagation during its long history of 2500 years. It spread peacefully all over the continent of Asia, having more than 500 million adherents today. Violence in any form, under any pretext whatsoever, is absolutely against the teaching of the Buddha."
'What The Buddha Taught' by Walpola Rahula (emphasis mine).
When I abandoned the Catholicism in which I had been raised and believed on Easter in 1988, I spent the next two or three years in a state of spiritual flux before I eventually came to the conclusion that there was no god. During that period, I took an interest in Buddhism and added to my library Walpola Rahula's 'What The Buddha Taught', from which I quoted above.
Though I ended up rejecting Buddhism as a package, I did find a lot in the religion that appealed to me and which I incorporated, with varying degrees of success, into my life. In some ways, Buddhism has a lot in common with Christianity, with both religions admonishing us not to set too much store in the material things of this world. And Catholicism and Buddhism both have nuns and monks.
One valid criticism that Western Christians have made of Westerners who rejected Christianity and embraced various forms of Eastern religious and spiritual traditions is that they idealized the East while having a shallow understanding of it and overlooking some of the very flaws that turned them off to Western religions.
Regardless of our knowledge of Buddhism, many of us in the West likely hew to notions of Buddhists, particularly Buddhist monks, as being gentle, peaceful folk who would never harm anyone.
This stereotype, whether it was ever really true, is increasingly being shown to be false in at least two Buddhist majority countries. In both Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) and Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks have been instigating violence against the Muslims and other religious minorities in their respective countries.
First, Myanmar. This article from The New York Times paints a frightening picture:
Images from Meiktila showed entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, some with only blackened trees left standing. Lifeless legs poked from beneath rubble. And charred corpses spoke to the use of fire as a main tool of the rioting mobs.
One video posted to Facebook by Radio Free Asia on Friday showed Muslim women and men cowering and shielding their heads from flying objects as they fled their attackers. Onlookers are overheard shouting, “Oooh! Look how many of them. Kill them! Kill them!”
Just as in western Myanmar, where more than 150 people have been killed in clashes between Buddhists and Muslims over the past year, those behind the violence in Meiktila tried to stop images of the destruction from getting out. On Friday, a group of Buddhist monks threatened news photographers, including one who works for The Associated Press, with a sword and homemade weapons. With a monk holding a blade to his neck, U Khin Maung Win, the A.P. photographer, handed over his camera’s memory card. (Underlined for emphasis).
While the violence has only recently flared in towns like Meiktila in central Myanmar, the situation with regard to the Muslim Rohingya minority in Arakan, a coastal state on the Bay of Bengal near Bangladesh, has been festering for a number of years and looks to be getting worse.
From a Human Rights Watch report:
The Burmese government is systematically restricting humanitarian aid and imposing discriminatory policies on Rohingya Muslims in Arakan State.
Arakan State’s Rohingya population also faces widespread hostility from the majority Burmese Buddhist society. The violence in Arakan State in June between Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims was followed by planned attacks on Rohingya and Kaman Muslim communities in various townships in the state in October.
More recently, disputes between Buddhists and Muslims resulted in violence in the central Burma town of Meikhtila on March 20 to 22, which has spread to other parts of the country. During the violence, at least five mosques were burned down and an unknown number of people died as mobs and Buddhist monks attacked Muslim residents and set fire to Muslim homes, businesses, and places of worship. The violence in Meikhtila has displaced 12,000 Muslims, according to OCHA.
“The unfortunate lesson from the violence in Arakan State is that so far the government does little to hold accountable those who violate the rights of Muslims in Burma,” Robertson said. “By failing to stop violence and prosecute those who incite it, the country’s leaders are failing the test of reform.”
And then there's Sri Lanka.
Several people have been injured in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, when Buddhist monks led hundreds in an assault on a Muslim-owned clothing warehouse.
Buddhist monks were filmed throwing stones at the storage centre of popular garment chain Fashion Bug in a suburb of the capital on Thursday night.
After some Muslim groups called a strike in protest against a growing Buddhist campaign against their lifestyle, including halal food classification, a hard-line Buddhist party in the governing coalition issued a statement saying: "Sinhalese Buddhists should be determined to teach such Muslim extremists a lesson that they will never forget".
Perhaps the Sinhalese Buddhists would be wise to heed the words of the Buddhist Emperor Asoka Maurya, who declared in one of his Rock Edicts:
"One should not honor only one's own religion and condemn the religions of others, but one should honor others' religions for this or that reason. So doing, one helps one's own religion to grow and renders service to the religions of others too. In acting otherwise one digs the grave of one's own religion and also does harm to other religions. Whosoever honors his own religion and condemns other religions, thinking 'I will glorify my own religion.' But on the contrary, in so doing he injures his own religion more gravely."
Happy Chocolate Bunny Day!
I've just been too damned busy to post anything new of late, for which I apologize. It's just so hard to find the time given all I have on my plate, but in the spirit of Easter, hopefully I will be able to resurrect this blog.
But for now, I leave you with an obligatory clip from Monty Python's Life of Brian:
But for now, I leave you with an obligatory clip from Monty Python's Life of Brian:
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Why Did China Fall Behind?
"Moving on from here, we shall tell you next of a large and very splendid city called Suzhou. The people here are idolaters subject to the Great Khan and using paper money. They live by trade and industry, have silk in great quantity and make much silken cloth for their clothing. The city is so large that it measures about forty miles in circumference. It has so many inhabitants that no one could reckon their number. I give you my word that the men of the province of Manzi [southern China], if they were a war-like nation, would conquer all the rest of the world."
The Travels of Marco Polo (circa 1300)
"The Empire of China is an old, crazy, First rate man-of-war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbors merely by her bulk and appearance, but whenever an insufficient man happens to have command upon deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may perhaps not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom."
Lord George Macartney (1794)
There are a number of topics that historians and those who take an interest in history love to discuss and debate. Among the more popular ones are the reasons for the collapse and fall of the Roman Empire in the West or whether the Confederacy could have won the Civil War. Another subject of historical interest is the mystery of why China, which had seemed so far advanced a half millennium ago, fell so far behind the European powers.
The two quotes at the top of this post serve as convenient bookends to the period when Europeans received their first popular eyewitness account of China possessing vast riches and power and ending when they realized the Chinese empire had become a hopeless anachronism. So, somewhere in between that time, something happened to cause China to fall from its height as an object of wonder and admiration down to the level of pity and scorn.
The China described by the Venetian Marco Polo was ruled by the Mongols, whose various khanates stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Eastern Europe, which some historians have dubbed the "Pax Mongolica". The Mongols would be driven out of China in 1368 and replaced by the last native Chinese dynasty known as the Ming. The early Ming emperors were energetic rulers who expanded their territory south into present day Vietnam and north against their former Mongol rulers.
It was during the reign of the third Ming emperor, known as the Yongle emperor, that a series of treasure fleets were sent out that sailed through the Malacca Strait into the Indian Ocean, some venturing as far as the Red Sea and possibly to the coast of present day Mozambique. The treasure fleets, consisting of several hundred ships, some reportedly up to 400 feet in length (by way of comparison, Columbus's ship the Santa Maria was about 85 feet long) were launched on their first of seven voyages in 1405, with the seventh and last voyage ending in 1433.
Right about the time that the era of the Ming treasure fleets was drawing to a close, at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, the Portuguese were spearheading what would become the European Age of Discovery. Over the course of half a century, Portuguese navigators pushed further and further down the coast of Africa until in 1488 they reached the southern tip and were poised to enter the Indian Ocean.
So why was it that it was the Portuguese who circumnavigated Africa and came to dominate the Indian Ocean, instead of the Chinese sailing into the Atlantic and discovering Europe?
The short answer is that the Portuguese, as well as the other European kingdoms and states, desired the goods of the Orient, and wanted to trade directly with the lands of east Asia, thus bypassing the hostile Muslim states that dominated the Middle East. In other words, the Europeans were driven by a want of things. The Chinese, on the other hand, felt they had all that they needed and saw no need to explore foreign lands.
One possible reason for China's stagnation is that being the largest and most powerful state in East Asia made it complacent. Portugal, by comparison, was a poor country inhabiting a strip of land on the Atlantic coast that was hemmed in by Spain. The Portuguese had nowhere to go but out into the sea to seek their fortunes.
China's view of itself and the world around it may have been roughly analogous to the Roman Empire at its peak during the 2nd century C.E. H.G. Wells, in his sweeping historical work, The Outline of History, makes the following observations about Rome:
"In one field of knowledge particularly we might have expected the Romans to have been alert and enterprising, and that was geography. Their political interests demanded a steadfast inquiry into the state of affairs beyond their frontiers, and yet that inquiry was never made. There is practically no literature of Roman travel beyond the imperial limits..."
"Yet Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of India, China, Persia or Scythia, Buddha or Zoraster, or about the Huns, the Negroes, the people of Scandinavia, or the secrets of the western sea."
A similar mindset can be detected in the letter of the Qing dynasty's Qianlong Emperor to King George III of England in response to Lord Macartney's mission to open China to trade in the 1790's.
"You, O King, live beyond the confines of many seas, nevertheless, impelled by your humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilisation, you have dispatched a mission respectfully bearing your memorial. Your Envoy has crossed the seas and paid his respects at my Court on the anniversary of my birthday. To show your devotion, you have also sent offerings of your country's produce."
"Our dynasty's majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures."
While Western ships began to frequent China's waters from the 16th century onward, and some Westerners, particularly Jesuit missionaries, became resident in the Chinese imperial court, there does not seem to have been much, if any, effort on the part of the rulers of the Chinese empire, be they native Ming or later on the Manchu Qing, to send ambassadors to the European powers and learn more about them.
I remember reading somewhere that one theory for why Europe was able to advance technologically so fast was precisely because it consisted of a multitude of smaller countries that were in competition with one another. Because China was the preeminent power in East Asia, there was no local competitor to spur her on to innovate. The one nation in the region that had the potential to play the part of that competitor, Japan, would itself turn inward in the early 17th century and stay that way for another two and a half centuries.
China's age of exploration, if one could call it that, was largely due to the vanity and pretensions of the Yongle emperor, and once he had died, there was no one else capable or interested in patronizing such voyages. One factor in ending the treasure fleets was the conflict at the imperial court between Confucian advisors, who considered the fleets to be wasteful extravagances, and the eunuchs, with the former opposing them and coming out on top in the struggle. If the Chinese court was not going to sponsor a long distance naval voyage, there was no one else to turn to.
In Europe, by contrast, there were a multitude of potential patrons. The Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus claimed that one could reach the wealthy kingdoms of Asia by sailing westward into the Atlantic. If the king of Portugal turned him down, he could try his hand with the French court. If France wasn't interested, there was always Spain. And once Columbus returned from his voyage, evidently having found some hitherto unknown lands, it spurred an interest in further exploration of what would turn out to be the Americas by the other naval powers of Europe. Magellan is another illustrative example. He was Portuguese, but when the king of Portugal declined to support his plan to find a way to sail around South America to reach the Spice Islands of the East Indies, again the Spanish monarchy was willing to bankroll a navigator who was not one of their own.
The Ming cannot be entirely faulted for ignoring the potential threat from European navies during the duration of their rule. In fact, on several occasions, the Ming navy was able to inflict defeats on the Portuguese and the Dutch. The real existential threat to their survival came from their northern and western land frontiers. While the Mongols were expelled from China in 1368, they remained a powerful opponent well into the 16th century, even capturing a Ming emperor in battle in the mid-15th century. The Mongols were soon eclipsed in the north by the Jurchen, more commonly known to us today as the Manchus, who themselves would succeed in conquering China in the latter half of the 17th century.
Still, if one Ming ruler, the Yongle emperor, was the initiator of China's great treasure fleets, another Ming monarch, the Wanli emperor, played a critical role in crippling the dynasty's survival. After showing some early promise, during the remainder of his reign, which straddled the last two decades of the 16th century and the first two decades of the 17th century, the Wanli emperor basically stopped doing his job. Jonathan Spence, in The Search for Modern China, writes, "For years on end he held no court audiences to discuss key political events, gave up his studies of the historical and philosophical texts that lay at the heart of Confucian learning, refused to read state papers, and even stopped filling the vacancies that occurred in the upper levels of officialdom."
With the emperor asleep at the wheel, the dynasty entered a period of terminal decline. The tax structure collapsed, leaving the dynasty without the means to pay its armies to defend against the Manchus as well as deal with the internal revolts that ended up bringing the dynasty down. So, while the European naval powers were making technological advances in a wide range of fields, the Chinese at this critical time were held back by a lack of effective leadership, which in turn led to government collapse. Perhaps if Wanli had been a visionary and dynamic emperor, he might have attempted to learn how small nations so many thousands of miles away could send ships across vast oceans into Chinese waters. In an autocratic society, change comes from the top down. China needed its equivalent of Russia's Peter the Great, a ruler with the wisdom to recognize that his empire was backward and who possessed the force of personality needed to drag his empire, kicking and screaming, into modernity. But no such leader was forthcoming.
A Spanish Jesuit, Alonso Sanchez, acidly observed in 1581 that "the Chinese are so arrogant that they consider themselves the cream and flower of the world, and it seems to them there is no understanding except theirs, and no-one but they knew any laws or customs. Thus they look down on all other nations, considering them beastly."
China was ultimately held back by its self-imposed conceit that it was the center of civilization and that any relations with other nations was viewed through the prism of receiving tribute from barbarian states. The Jesuit Sanchez, quoted above, was also of the belief that China was militarily weak and that the Spanish king Philip II should send an armada to conquer her. We know that Philip did eventually build an armada to attempt to conquer England, which did not end well. While the balance of power had gradually tilted in Europe's favor by the late 16th century, because of the sheer distance involved, it would not be until the Opium War of 1839 to 1842 that a European power, namely England, possessed the means to project sufficient force to crush China.
As a history lesson, China is a case study of what can happen to a great power when it takes its superiority for granted.
*********************************************************************
In writing this post, I relied on the following books, which I recommend if one has a further interest in this topic or Chinese history in general.
The Travels of Marco Polo. I have the Penguin Classics edition.
The Immobile Empire by Alan Peyrefitte. This is a fascinating book about Lord Macartney's mission to open China to British trade in the 1790's. Peyrefitte interweaves his story with written accounts from members of the mission as well as the Chinese officials and the emperor Qianlong himself. One can see how how both sides ended up talking past each other rather than to each other.
The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence. Spence's sweeping work covers Chinese history from the late Ming up to the era of Deng Xiaoping. The edition I have was published in 1990, so it is possible that later editions of this book cover the post-Tiananmen era.
A Jesuit In The Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552 -1610 by R. Po-chia Hsia. I only just started reading this book on my Nook several days ago. It was the source for my quote of the Spanish Jesuit Alonso Sanchez. As a well educated Jesuit missionary in late Ming China, Matteo Ricci is a valuable source of information about China during that time period.
The Outline of History, Vol. 1 by H.G. Wells. This was one of the books that really got me into history. Thank you to whichever of my parents was responsible for buying it. It's one major weakness is that it is suffused with the author's racial views of nearly a century ago, which have long since become outmoded.
When China Ruled The Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1403 - 1433 by Louise Levathes. It's a work of popular history, just over 200 pages, not including the notes and the index, that covers the treasure fleet voyages and their historical context, without the outlandish claims of Gavin Menzies.
The Travels of Marco Polo (circa 1300)
"The Empire of China is an old, crazy, First rate man-of-war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbors merely by her bulk and appearance, but whenever an insufficient man happens to have command upon deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may perhaps not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom."
Lord George Macartney (1794)
There are a number of topics that historians and those who take an interest in history love to discuss and debate. Among the more popular ones are the reasons for the collapse and fall of the Roman Empire in the West or whether the Confederacy could have won the Civil War. Another subject of historical interest is the mystery of why China, which had seemed so far advanced a half millennium ago, fell so far behind the European powers.
The two quotes at the top of this post serve as convenient bookends to the period when Europeans received their first popular eyewitness account of China possessing vast riches and power and ending when they realized the Chinese empire had become a hopeless anachronism. So, somewhere in between that time, something happened to cause China to fall from its height as an object of wonder and admiration down to the level of pity and scorn.
The China described by the Venetian Marco Polo was ruled by the Mongols, whose various khanates stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Eastern Europe, which some historians have dubbed the "Pax Mongolica". The Mongols would be driven out of China in 1368 and replaced by the last native Chinese dynasty known as the Ming. The early Ming emperors were energetic rulers who expanded their territory south into present day Vietnam and north against their former Mongol rulers.
It was during the reign of the third Ming emperor, known as the Yongle emperor, that a series of treasure fleets were sent out that sailed through the Malacca Strait into the Indian Ocean, some venturing as far as the Red Sea and possibly to the coast of present day Mozambique. The treasure fleets, consisting of several hundred ships, some reportedly up to 400 feet in length (by way of comparison, Columbus's ship the Santa Maria was about 85 feet long) were launched on their first of seven voyages in 1405, with the seventh and last voyage ending in 1433.
Right about the time that the era of the Ming treasure fleets was drawing to a close, at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, the Portuguese were spearheading what would become the European Age of Discovery. Over the course of half a century, Portuguese navigators pushed further and further down the coast of Africa until in 1488 they reached the southern tip and were poised to enter the Indian Ocean.
So why was it that it was the Portuguese who circumnavigated Africa and came to dominate the Indian Ocean, instead of the Chinese sailing into the Atlantic and discovering Europe?
The short answer is that the Portuguese, as well as the other European kingdoms and states, desired the goods of the Orient, and wanted to trade directly with the lands of east Asia, thus bypassing the hostile Muslim states that dominated the Middle East. In other words, the Europeans were driven by a want of things. The Chinese, on the other hand, felt they had all that they needed and saw no need to explore foreign lands.
One possible reason for China's stagnation is that being the largest and most powerful state in East Asia made it complacent. Portugal, by comparison, was a poor country inhabiting a strip of land on the Atlantic coast that was hemmed in by Spain. The Portuguese had nowhere to go but out into the sea to seek their fortunes.
China's view of itself and the world around it may have been roughly analogous to the Roman Empire at its peak during the 2nd century C.E. H.G. Wells, in his sweeping historical work, The Outline of History, makes the following observations about Rome:
"In one field of knowledge particularly we might have expected the Romans to have been alert and enterprising, and that was geography. Their political interests demanded a steadfast inquiry into the state of affairs beyond their frontiers, and yet that inquiry was never made. There is practically no literature of Roman travel beyond the imperial limits..."
"Yet Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of India, China, Persia or Scythia, Buddha or Zoraster, or about the Huns, the Negroes, the people of Scandinavia, or the secrets of the western sea."
A similar mindset can be detected in the letter of the Qing dynasty's Qianlong Emperor to King George III of England in response to Lord Macartney's mission to open China to trade in the 1790's.
"You, O King, live beyond the confines of many seas, nevertheless, impelled by your humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilisation, you have dispatched a mission respectfully bearing your memorial. Your Envoy has crossed the seas and paid his respects at my Court on the anniversary of my birthday. To show your devotion, you have also sent offerings of your country's produce."
"Our dynasty's majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures."
While Western ships began to frequent China's waters from the 16th century onward, and some Westerners, particularly Jesuit missionaries, became resident in the Chinese imperial court, there does not seem to have been much, if any, effort on the part of the rulers of the Chinese empire, be they native Ming or later on the Manchu Qing, to send ambassadors to the European powers and learn more about them.
I remember reading somewhere that one theory for why Europe was able to advance technologically so fast was precisely because it consisted of a multitude of smaller countries that were in competition with one another. Because China was the preeminent power in East Asia, there was no local competitor to spur her on to innovate. The one nation in the region that had the potential to play the part of that competitor, Japan, would itself turn inward in the early 17th century and stay that way for another two and a half centuries.
China's age of exploration, if one could call it that, was largely due to the vanity and pretensions of the Yongle emperor, and once he had died, there was no one else capable or interested in patronizing such voyages. One factor in ending the treasure fleets was the conflict at the imperial court between Confucian advisors, who considered the fleets to be wasteful extravagances, and the eunuchs, with the former opposing them and coming out on top in the struggle. If the Chinese court was not going to sponsor a long distance naval voyage, there was no one else to turn to.
In Europe, by contrast, there were a multitude of potential patrons. The Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus claimed that one could reach the wealthy kingdoms of Asia by sailing westward into the Atlantic. If the king of Portugal turned him down, he could try his hand with the French court. If France wasn't interested, there was always Spain. And once Columbus returned from his voyage, evidently having found some hitherto unknown lands, it spurred an interest in further exploration of what would turn out to be the Americas by the other naval powers of Europe. Magellan is another illustrative example. He was Portuguese, but when the king of Portugal declined to support his plan to find a way to sail around South America to reach the Spice Islands of the East Indies, again the Spanish monarchy was willing to bankroll a navigator who was not one of their own.
The Ming cannot be entirely faulted for ignoring the potential threat from European navies during the duration of their rule. In fact, on several occasions, the Ming navy was able to inflict defeats on the Portuguese and the Dutch. The real existential threat to their survival came from their northern and western land frontiers. While the Mongols were expelled from China in 1368, they remained a powerful opponent well into the 16th century, even capturing a Ming emperor in battle in the mid-15th century. The Mongols were soon eclipsed in the north by the Jurchen, more commonly known to us today as the Manchus, who themselves would succeed in conquering China in the latter half of the 17th century.
Still, if one Ming ruler, the Yongle emperor, was the initiator of China's great treasure fleets, another Ming monarch, the Wanli emperor, played a critical role in crippling the dynasty's survival. After showing some early promise, during the remainder of his reign, which straddled the last two decades of the 16th century and the first two decades of the 17th century, the Wanli emperor basically stopped doing his job. Jonathan Spence, in The Search for Modern China, writes, "For years on end he held no court audiences to discuss key political events, gave up his studies of the historical and philosophical texts that lay at the heart of Confucian learning, refused to read state papers, and even stopped filling the vacancies that occurred in the upper levels of officialdom."
With the emperor asleep at the wheel, the dynasty entered a period of terminal decline. The tax structure collapsed, leaving the dynasty without the means to pay its armies to defend against the Manchus as well as deal with the internal revolts that ended up bringing the dynasty down. So, while the European naval powers were making technological advances in a wide range of fields, the Chinese at this critical time were held back by a lack of effective leadership, which in turn led to government collapse. Perhaps if Wanli had been a visionary and dynamic emperor, he might have attempted to learn how small nations so many thousands of miles away could send ships across vast oceans into Chinese waters. In an autocratic society, change comes from the top down. China needed its equivalent of Russia's Peter the Great, a ruler with the wisdom to recognize that his empire was backward and who possessed the force of personality needed to drag his empire, kicking and screaming, into modernity. But no such leader was forthcoming.
A Spanish Jesuit, Alonso Sanchez, acidly observed in 1581 that "the Chinese are so arrogant that they consider themselves the cream and flower of the world, and it seems to them there is no understanding except theirs, and no-one but they knew any laws or customs. Thus they look down on all other nations, considering them beastly."
China was ultimately held back by its self-imposed conceit that it was the center of civilization and that any relations with other nations was viewed through the prism of receiving tribute from barbarian states. The Jesuit Sanchez, quoted above, was also of the belief that China was militarily weak and that the Spanish king Philip II should send an armada to conquer her. We know that Philip did eventually build an armada to attempt to conquer England, which did not end well. While the balance of power had gradually tilted in Europe's favor by the late 16th century, because of the sheer distance involved, it would not be until the Opium War of 1839 to 1842 that a European power, namely England, possessed the means to project sufficient force to crush China.
As a history lesson, China is a case study of what can happen to a great power when it takes its superiority for granted.
*********************************************************************
In writing this post, I relied on the following books, which I recommend if one has a further interest in this topic or Chinese history in general.
The Travels of Marco Polo. I have the Penguin Classics edition.
The Immobile Empire by Alan Peyrefitte. This is a fascinating book about Lord Macartney's mission to open China to British trade in the 1790's. Peyrefitte interweaves his story with written accounts from members of the mission as well as the Chinese officials and the emperor Qianlong himself. One can see how how both sides ended up talking past each other rather than to each other.
The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence. Spence's sweeping work covers Chinese history from the late Ming up to the era of Deng Xiaoping. The edition I have was published in 1990, so it is possible that later editions of this book cover the post-Tiananmen era.
A Jesuit In The Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552 -1610 by R. Po-chia Hsia. I only just started reading this book on my Nook several days ago. It was the source for my quote of the Spanish Jesuit Alonso Sanchez. As a well educated Jesuit missionary in late Ming China, Matteo Ricci is a valuable source of information about China during that time period.
The Outline of History, Vol. 1 by H.G. Wells. This was one of the books that really got me into history. Thank you to whichever of my parents was responsible for buying it. It's one major weakness is that it is suffused with the author's racial views of nearly a century ago, which have long since become outmoded.
When China Ruled The Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1403 - 1433 by Louise Levathes. It's a work of popular history, just over 200 pages, not including the notes and the index, that covers the treasure fleet voyages and their historical context, without the outlandish claims of Gavin Menzies.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Magical Thinking Gets People Killed
Some three dozen people were killed yesterday during a stampede at a train station in Allahabad, India during the Kumbh Mela festival. The festival is described as "the largest religious gathering on earth" which takes place every 12 years "on the banks of the 'Sangam'- the confluence of the holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati."
So, what happens at this Hindu religious festival?
From The New York Times article linked to above:
"Those who bathe in the conjoined waters are cleansed of their sins and given blessings that extend through several generations, Hindus say. Pilgrims make the trip not just for themselves but for their children and grandchildren.
N. K. Auddy, a consulting engineer from Kolkata, was taking part in his first Kumbh because his daughter recently gave birth to his first grandchild, and he was hoping for a divine blessing for the child. “I want him to have a good future,” Mr. Auddy said."
Seriously? How does one measure the difference in the lives of children or grandchildren of those whose ancestors bathe in the rivers and those who don't? It obviously didn't make a positive difference in the lives of the pilgrims who were trampled to death.
If Mr. Auddy's grandson is to have a good future, he'll be better served by having a loving, supportive family, access to a good education, clean drinking water and decent health care. I don't see how bathing in a river with millions of other people, which is not particularly sanitary, is going to provide a better future for his descendants.
So, what happens at this Hindu religious festival?
From The New York Times article linked to above:
"Those who bathe in the conjoined waters are cleansed of their sins and given blessings that extend through several generations, Hindus say. Pilgrims make the trip not just for themselves but for their children and grandchildren.
N. K. Auddy, a consulting engineer from Kolkata, was taking part in his first Kumbh because his daughter recently gave birth to his first grandchild, and he was hoping for a divine blessing for the child. “I want him to have a good future,” Mr. Auddy said."
Seriously? How does one measure the difference in the lives of children or grandchildren of those whose ancestors bathe in the rivers and those who don't? It obviously didn't make a positive difference in the lives of the pilgrims who were trampled to death.
If Mr. Auddy's grandson is to have a good future, he'll be better served by having a loving, supportive family, access to a good education, clean drinking water and decent health care. I don't see how bathing in a river with millions of other people, which is not particularly sanitary, is going to provide a better future for his descendants.
Monday, February 04, 2013
The Tragedy of the Rhino
Since at least from the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, the human race has had a growing impact on the natural world. We have expanded into virtually every area of the globe, cutting down forests, draining swamps, turning fields into farmland, fishing the oceans and building factories that have spewed pollutants into the atmosphere.
By sheer virtue of the size of the population of the human race, which is now counted at over seven billion people, we simply can't help but have a negative impact on the Earth's ecosystems and the other species that inhabit them. On land, we have encroached on the habitats of numerous species, while the weapons in our assault on the oceans have included overfishing and the release of our sewage and agricultural runoff to create oceanic deadzones. Then there is the threat of global warming.
We're a veritable bull in a china shop, destroying so much around us. Even the most environmentally conscious of us realize that while we can take steps to mitigate the damage, it is simply impossible for humanity to stop all or most of it, unless we are all prepared to commit mass suicide.
We take it for granted that the decline of most forms of wildlife and the loss of natural wilderness is the unavoidable collateral damage caused by the dominance of our species on this planet. Still, we cannot help but be shocked and outraged when an animal finds its very existence imperiled because of the misguided beliefs of a significant number of people.
The animal in question here is the rhino and the threat to them comes from increased poaching due to a recent and rising demand for rhino horn powder in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. The chart below, from the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, displays annual death tolls for rhinos in South Africa.
This Conde Nast Traveler article on the rise in rhino poaching notes that "[t]his current poaching spike, which follows years of relative calm, began in 2008 after a Vietnamese government official claimed to have been cured of cancer after taking rhino horn."
For centuries, the powder from ground rhino horns have been a staple of traditional Chinese medicine. Rhino horns are composed mostly of a protein called keratin which can also be found in the hair, skin, and nails of humans, along with horse hooves and the horns of other animals.
"Overall there isn’t much evidence to support the plethora of claims about the healing properties of the horns. In 1990, researchers at Chinese University in Hong Kong found that large doses of rhino horn extract could slightly lower fever in rats (as could extracts from Saiga antelope and water buffalo horn), but the concentration of horn given by a traditional Chinese medicine specialist are many many times lower than used in those experiments. In short, says Amin, you’d do just as well chewing on your fingernails."
According to TRAFFIC, "Four main user groups have been identified in Viet Nam: the principal one being those who believe in rhino horn’s detoxification properties, especially following excessive intake of alcohol, rich food and 'the good life'. Affluent users routinely grind up rhino horn and mix the powder with water or alcohol as a hangover-cure and general health tonic."
From TRAFFIC's report The South Africa-Viet Nam Rhino Horn Trade Nexus, "Collectively, this group personifies the cultural concept of 'face consumption', whereby extravagant usage of something rare and expensive becomes a means to flaunt wealth, status and success amongst friends and associates. These consumers probably account for the greatest volume of rhino horn used in Viet Nam today... Popular websites drive this usage with an endless stream of slick come-on slogans: "to improve concentration and cure hangovers", "rhino horn with wine is the alcoholic drink of millionaires", and rhino horn is "like a luxury car".
In a possibly dismal foreshadowing of what awaits the rhinos of Africa, the last Javan rhino in Vietnam, which lived in Cat Tien National Park, "was shot and had its horn removed in early 2010."
South Africa is home to the majority of the worlds remaining rhinos, But as The New York Times reports, sadly, "The number of rhinos poached in South Africa has soared in the past five years, from 13 killed in 2007 to more than 630 in 2012. The prehistoric, battleship-gray animals are often found on their knees, bleeding to death from a gaping stump on their face."
Having identified the problem, the question is what can be done to solve it?
One idea that has been proposed is legalization of the trade. Why not raise rhinos specifically for the purpose of harvesting their horns?
The Conde Nast Traveler article quotes an Albi Modise, spokesman for the country’s Department of Environment Affairs, who points out that "There are now potentially three billion end users of rhino horn [in Asia] and only 21,000 rhinos left in South Africa.”
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet. Putting a stop to the slaughter requires addressing the trade in rhino horns along the entire trade chain, from making it harder to kill rhinos to changing the attitudes of consumers of rhino horn powder in Vietnam and other Asian countries so that the demand is reduced. That could take years, during which rhinos will continue to be decimated.
An idea that occurred to me was flooding the market with a counterfeit product. Is it possible to fool consumers by selling them keratin powder made from alternate sources while slapping a picture of a rhino on the packaging? There are ethical considerations though to such an approach, particularly when Western governments and businesses press countries like China and Vietnam to crack down on counterfeiting of American and European products. If it is wrong for China to tolerate counterfeit Viagra, for example, then it may seem hypocritical to them for us to promote counterfeit rhino horn powder just because we think it is a worthy cause.
One day, the large scale poaching of rhinos will come to an end, either because we were successful in stopping it, or because there will be no more rhinos left to kill.
South Africa is home to the majority of the worlds remaining rhinos, But as The New York Times reports, sadly, "The number of rhinos poached in South Africa has soared in the past five years, from 13 killed in 2007 to more than 630 in 2012. The prehistoric, battleship-gray animals are often found on their knees, bleeding to death from a gaping stump on their face."
Having identified the problem, the question is what can be done to solve it?
One idea that has been proposed is legalization of the trade. Why not raise rhinos specifically for the purpose of harvesting their horns?
The Conde Nast Traveler article quotes an Albi Modise, spokesman for the country’s Department of Environment Affairs, who points out that "There are now potentially three billion end users of rhino horn [in Asia] and only 21,000 rhinos left in South Africa.”
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet. Putting a stop to the slaughter requires addressing the trade in rhino horns along the entire trade chain, from making it harder to kill rhinos to changing the attitudes of consumers of rhino horn powder in Vietnam and other Asian countries so that the demand is reduced. That could take years, during which rhinos will continue to be decimated.
An idea that occurred to me was flooding the market with a counterfeit product. Is it possible to fool consumers by selling them keratin powder made from alternate sources while slapping a picture of a rhino on the packaging? There are ethical considerations though to such an approach, particularly when Western governments and businesses press countries like China and Vietnam to crack down on counterfeiting of American and European products. If it is wrong for China to tolerate counterfeit Viagra, for example, then it may seem hypocritical to them for us to promote counterfeit rhino horn powder just because we think it is a worthy cause.
One day, the large scale poaching of rhinos will come to an end, either because we were successful in stopping it, or because there will be no more rhinos left to kill.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Prostitution Is Already Legal For The Rich
Several years ago, when I took one of my kids to a doctor appointment, several of the clerical and medical assistant staff, all female, were gathered towards the back of the area behind the counter, talking amongst each other.
I guess they were talking about relationships with men, because one of them then declared loud enough that I could clearly hear her, "I don't want a boyfriend, I want a sugar daddy."
Another time, when I was getting a cleaning or some other dental procedure at my dentist's office, the dentist and the hygienist were conversing with each other. Apparently, the hygienist was in some kind of sugar daddy relationship and the dentist was asking her questions about it. When he asked her how old the benefactor was, she demurred. I then blurted out "He's fifty."
The hygienist must have been impressed at the accuracy of my guess, because she then admitted that the man was 49. Neither she nor the dentist asked how close I was to the right answer, but to me, it just seemed to make sense.
In order for a man to play the part of a sugar daddy, he needs to be wealthy enough to do so. For most of those men, that probably does not come until they are in their late forties or early fifties when they are well established in their careers and are in their peak earning years. The mortgage has been paid off. The kids have been put through college. If they're married, they may still love their wives but are looking for the excitement of being with a younger, more energetic women. These are men who are nearing the end of their prime and want to relive their youth while they are still relatively healthy and fit enough to do so. (As an aside, I just want to acknowledge that not all sugar daddy or benefactor relationships are exclusively older, wealthy males with younger, financially struggling females. There are also male benefactor-male relationships, female benefactor-male relationships and female benefactor-female relationships.)
There are a host of websites that those seeking a "mutually beneficial arrangement" can go, such as sugardaddyforme.com or seekingarrangement.com.
I suppose the idealized version of these types of relationships is one of a successful, wealthy benefactor with an altruistic streak who wants to pamper and spoil a younger recipient and help them pay for their education or otherwise give them a chance to better themselves in some meaningful way in return for an exciting or fulfilling relationship where sex sometimes happens. I don't doubt that in the spectrum of these sorts of relationships this does happen. But then there's the other end of the spectrum.
Mac McClelland wrote an article for Mother Jones describing some of the encounters she had with would be male benefactors when she set up an account with one of these web sites for research for her article. From the opening paragraph:
Few things are less appetizing than a man four years my father's junior, a dumpy, pasty, greedy-eyed man in a gray suit who says he doesn't care to screw fat women because they're harder to overpower, asking me over a big bowl of warm apple crisp if I like anal sex. But since he's just offered me $3,000 a month plus perks—gifts, dinners, shopping sprees—to get naked with him once a week, I keep my tight young ass in its place, laugh politely, and pick up my fork.
She goes on to write, "[He] puts proprietary hands on my shoulders and hips before we even get our cocktails and starts bartering for carnal treasure by the time dessert comes by asking me if I'd want to "hang out" once a week. I ask if "hang out" is a euphemism for "screw"; he says yes; I say that I wouldn't consider it for less than $5,000 a month. He counters with $3,000."
For the purposes of writing this article (seriously!) I registered for a free 30-day trial membership just to get an idea of what was waiting out there for me if I were actually wealthy enough to be some young woman's sugar daddy.
Here's a sampling:
1. From a 22-year old single woman in Manhattan, "My favorite sexual position is doggie style because it feels the best. I enjoy giving and receiving oral, and I am VERY good at it." (Capitalized in the original).
2. From a 27-year old woman from da Bronx, "I love singing and dancing specially when I'm drunk. I love being drunk because that's the time that I can express my feelings but watch me when I'm drunk because I'am (sic) wild!!!"
3. From a 24-year old single in Manhattan, "I could be your own Asian Barbie that you can play with."
Of course, not all or even most of the ads were that explicit or suggestive.
4. From a 27-year old Manhattanite, "Down-to-earth, sincere, genuine and kind, intelligent and well-educated… I love to go out dancing, watching movies, theater and sports. I also love to sail and horseback riding and entertaining!"
5. From a 25-year old in Manhattan, "I'm an attractive, passionate, sensual girl, with a good sense of humor. I am well educated and keep myself in a good shape. I enjoy reading, arts, fine dining, shopping and explore the city. I am trustworthy, honest and discreet. I am working on my masters degree, but I also have a flexible schedule."
6. From a 26-year old in Manhattan, "Fun, kind and classy young lady that loves to have fun and have intellectual conversations...(I am not your average girl on here) I take very good care of myself and have a beautiful, toned and slender body. The finer things in life are a great joy to me...what can I say, I LOVE luxury goods!" (Capitalized in the original).
When you get right down to it though, these benefactor relationships are simply a form of prostitution that is available only to the wealthy and it cannot be prosecuted because it is not a matter of payment for an encounter where sex is expected, like busting a john for trying to pick up a hooker on a street corner. Instead, these are relationships in which sex is expected but which encompass more than sex. It is impossible for law enforcement to police it because it is not an effective use of their time or resources.
From the aforementioned Mother Jones article:
"Under California law, solicitation is to offer or accept anything of value for sexual services," says former San Jose police chief and Hoover Institute fellow Joseph McNamara. "But this is right on the line. If the relationship exists for some time and the guy is mega-rich, he can give you whatever he wants; it's not prostitution anymore. Let's face it—a lot of relationships are like that. It's a common thing."
Such benefactor type relationships may be on the rise in recent years, at least for college students or recent graduates, due to the high cost of college education, accumulated student loan debt, and a lousy economy where one either cannot find a job or at the very least a well paying job.
On the one hand, I can understand if student or recent graduate is looking to enter into an arrangement with a wealthier, older person for a relationship that offers the prospect of being able to not only make ends meet, but if they're lucky, enjoy some of the finer things in life in return for putting out for their benefactor once in a while. On the other hand, as the father of a daughter who will likely be a college student a decade from now, I would certainly hope that she would never feel the need to seek out such an arrangement for herself. As someone who styles himself a feminist, I want her to feel rewarded and be able to succeed because of her talents and intelligence instead of being just a commodity for an older man with cash to burn.
I guess they were talking about relationships with men, because one of them then declared loud enough that I could clearly hear her, "I don't want a boyfriend, I want a sugar daddy."
Another time, when I was getting a cleaning or some other dental procedure at my dentist's office, the dentist and the hygienist were conversing with each other. Apparently, the hygienist was in some kind of sugar daddy relationship and the dentist was asking her questions about it. When he asked her how old the benefactor was, she demurred. I then blurted out "He's fifty."
The hygienist must have been impressed at the accuracy of my guess, because she then admitted that the man was 49. Neither she nor the dentist asked how close I was to the right answer, but to me, it just seemed to make sense.
In order for a man to play the part of a sugar daddy, he needs to be wealthy enough to do so. For most of those men, that probably does not come until they are in their late forties or early fifties when they are well established in their careers and are in their peak earning years. The mortgage has been paid off. The kids have been put through college. If they're married, they may still love their wives but are looking for the excitement of being with a younger, more energetic women. These are men who are nearing the end of their prime and want to relive their youth while they are still relatively healthy and fit enough to do so. (As an aside, I just want to acknowledge that not all sugar daddy or benefactor relationships are exclusively older, wealthy males with younger, financially struggling females. There are also male benefactor-male relationships, female benefactor-male relationships and female benefactor-female relationships.)
There are a host of websites that those seeking a "mutually beneficial arrangement" can go, such as sugardaddyforme.com or seekingarrangement.com.
I suppose the idealized version of these types of relationships is one of a successful, wealthy benefactor with an altruistic streak who wants to pamper and spoil a younger recipient and help them pay for their education or otherwise give them a chance to better themselves in some meaningful way in return for an exciting or fulfilling relationship where sex sometimes happens. I don't doubt that in the spectrum of these sorts of relationships this does happen. But then there's the other end of the spectrum.
Mac McClelland wrote an article for Mother Jones describing some of the encounters she had with would be male benefactors when she set up an account with one of these web sites for research for her article. From the opening paragraph:
Few things are less appetizing than a man four years my father's junior, a dumpy, pasty, greedy-eyed man in a gray suit who says he doesn't care to screw fat women because they're harder to overpower, asking me over a big bowl of warm apple crisp if I like anal sex. But since he's just offered me $3,000 a month plus perks—gifts, dinners, shopping sprees—to get naked with him once a week, I keep my tight young ass in its place, laugh politely, and pick up my fork.
She goes on to write, "[He] puts proprietary hands on my shoulders and hips before we even get our cocktails and starts bartering for carnal treasure by the time dessert comes by asking me if I'd want to "hang out" once a week. I ask if "hang out" is a euphemism for "screw"; he says yes; I say that I wouldn't consider it for less than $5,000 a month. He counters with $3,000."
For the purposes of writing this article (seriously!) I registered for a free 30-day trial membership just to get an idea of what was waiting out there for me if I were actually wealthy enough to be some young woman's sugar daddy.
Here's a sampling:
1. From a 22-year old single woman in Manhattan, "My favorite sexual position is doggie style because it feels the best. I enjoy giving and receiving oral, and I am VERY good at it." (Capitalized in the original).
2. From a 27-year old woman from da Bronx, "I love singing and dancing specially when I'm drunk. I love being drunk because that's the time that I can express my feelings but watch me when I'm drunk because I'am (sic) wild!!!"
3. From a 24-year old single in Manhattan, "I could be your own Asian Barbie that you can play with."
Of course, not all or even most of the ads were that explicit or suggestive.
4. From a 27-year old Manhattanite, "Down-to-earth, sincere, genuine and kind, intelligent and well-educated… I love to go out dancing, watching movies, theater and sports. I also love to sail and horseback riding and entertaining!"
5. From a 25-year old in Manhattan, "I'm an attractive, passionate, sensual girl, with a good sense of humor. I am well educated and keep myself in a good shape. I enjoy reading, arts, fine dining, shopping and explore the city. I am trustworthy, honest and discreet. I am working on my masters degree, but I also have a flexible schedule."
6. From a 26-year old in Manhattan, "Fun, kind and classy young lady that loves to have fun and have intellectual conversations...(I am not your average girl on here) I take very good care of myself and have a beautiful, toned and slender body. The finer things in life are a great joy to me...what can I say, I LOVE luxury goods!" (Capitalized in the original).
When you get right down to it though, these benefactor relationships are simply a form of prostitution that is available only to the wealthy and it cannot be prosecuted because it is not a matter of payment for an encounter where sex is expected, like busting a john for trying to pick up a hooker on a street corner. Instead, these are relationships in which sex is expected but which encompass more than sex. It is impossible for law enforcement to police it because it is not an effective use of their time or resources.
From the aforementioned Mother Jones article:
"Under California law, solicitation is to offer or accept anything of value for sexual services," says former San Jose police chief and Hoover Institute fellow Joseph McNamara. "But this is right on the line. If the relationship exists for some time and the guy is mega-rich, he can give you whatever he wants; it's not prostitution anymore. Let's face it—a lot of relationships are like that. It's a common thing."
Such benefactor type relationships may be on the rise in recent years, at least for college students or recent graduates, due to the high cost of college education, accumulated student loan debt, and a lousy economy where one either cannot find a job or at the very least a well paying job.
On the one hand, I can understand if student or recent graduate is looking to enter into an arrangement with a wealthier, older person for a relationship that offers the prospect of being able to not only make ends meet, but if they're lucky, enjoy some of the finer things in life in return for putting out for their benefactor once in a while. On the other hand, as the father of a daughter who will likely be a college student a decade from now, I would certainly hope that she would never feel the need to seek out such an arrangement for herself. As someone who styles himself a feminist, I want her to feel rewarded and be able to succeed because of her talents and intelligence instead of being just a commodity for an older man with cash to burn.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Have A Happy 2013!
Another year is upon us.
Meanwhile, 2012 was my most productive blogging year since 2009, when I had 79 posts. In both years before that, I had over 200 posts each year. 2009 saw a steep drop, but 2010 was even worse, when I managed only 33 posts. Last year saw an increase to 59, while this past year I was able to achieve a little more than that. Still, it's a far cry from my golden age, which I don't expect to ever achieve again.
Like a lot of bloggers, a number of factors conspired to hamper my productivity. For starters, I just don't seem to have the time that I used to have. I also find myself sometimes falling short in the inspiration department. There are moments during the day where I think of topics to write about, but then when I'm home later on, I forget what it was that had interested me earlier and I just spend my time surfing the Internet.
I can't promise that 2013 will see a concerted effort to revive this blog to a semblance of what it once was. At times I veer from wanting to throw myself into making this a venue for impassioned and informed commentary to the other extreme of just throwing in the towel and shutting the whole thing down. By the end of 2013, I like to think that I will have definitely chosen one or the other.
Anyway, I wish any and all reading this a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year.
Meanwhile, 2012 was my most productive blogging year since 2009, when I had 79 posts. In both years before that, I had over 200 posts each year. 2009 saw a steep drop, but 2010 was even worse, when I managed only 33 posts. Last year saw an increase to 59, while this past year I was able to achieve a little more than that. Still, it's a far cry from my golden age, which I don't expect to ever achieve again.
Like a lot of bloggers, a number of factors conspired to hamper my productivity. For starters, I just don't seem to have the time that I used to have. I also find myself sometimes falling short in the inspiration department. There are moments during the day where I think of topics to write about, but then when I'm home later on, I forget what it was that had interested me earlier and I just spend my time surfing the Internet.
I can't promise that 2013 will see a concerted effort to revive this blog to a semblance of what it once was. At times I veer from wanting to throw myself into making this a venue for impassioned and informed commentary to the other extreme of just throwing in the towel and shutting the whole thing down. By the end of 2013, I like to think that I will have definitely chosen one or the other.
Anyway, I wish any and all reading this a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year.
Richard Dawkins on Al Jazeera
In case you haven't seen it yet, you might want to check out the interview/debate between Richard Dawkins and a Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera above.
I felt that Dawkins should have done a better job when the interviewer brought up Stalin and Mao Zedong. As I argued here, Stalin's atrocities were made possible because he ruled a state that had inherited a centuries long tradition of absolutism from Russia's tsarist predecessors. The same can be said for Mao Zedong, who became dictator of a country that had been ruled by emperors for millennia.
One could also bring up the millions who died during China's Taiping Rebellion, which was led by a failed aspirant to the civil service who styled himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ.
To me, the whole argument of whether or not religion is a force for good in the world and whether the world would be better without religion is a stupid argument. The way I see it, the world would be a better place if more people would be good regardless of whether they were religious or not, just as the world would be worse off when more people are bad, again regardless
of whether they are religious adherents or atheists.
The problem with the communist dictators is that they were radical utopians who had no check on their power. But this is not merely an atheist problem. One can see strains of this radical utopianism among various Muslim movements throughout the world today, such as the Salafists, whose vision of an ideal society is to live as the prophet Muhammed and his early followers did in 7th century Arabia or the Muslim purists who have recently seized control of large swathes of Mali in western Africa. It all boils down to the belief that you possess the one true way of living and that everyone else is mistaken and you're going to force them to live the way you want them to regardless of how they feel about it. One of the hallmarks of a free, pluralistic society is that you have to accept that some members of that society will have beliefs and behaviors that offend you or you find to be mistaken but who otherwise do not infringe on your personal life. It's the idea that we can all find a way to coexist as long as we respect one another's boundaries.
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