The White Peril 白禍

I'm glad to see, finally, a news report that mentions that this may not be the deadliest disaster to hit Asia in recent memory:

Rescue workers pressed on into isolated villages devastated by a disaster that could yet eclipse a cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1991, killing 138,000 people.

I tried looking it up a few days ago, but "bangladesh '100,000 deaths'" produces a string of links to general infant mortality rates, so I wasn't entirely sure my memory was serving me well. (BTW, the cyclone there is the word used for the Indian Ocean equivalent of a hurricane; it's not like the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz.)

It's not surprising that people wouldn't make the connection, of course. We can sincerely believe that all men are created equal, but that doesn't stop us from identifying more with those whose particulars we share. And there are lots of particulars. Video cameras have become better and cheaper, and the tsunamis struck in many places where tourists (who tend to have their cameras handy when they leave their hotels) were plentiful. The sheer number of people who were able to film the waves as they hit is astonishing.

Speaking of numbers, it may seem odd to read that there could be 1000 Swedish nationals--just Swedish nationals--killed. But it makes more sense when you consider not just people traveling directly from home but also the expats in Asia. It takes much less time (about 7 hours from Japan, Korea, or northern China) to fly to Southeast Asia than it does to fly home; costs are also low; and, if further incentive is needed, it's wet and cold up here.

Fortunately for surviving tourists, vacation spots tend to be easy to get in and out of--if not because they're that way naturally, then because governments that know the value of tourist income have taken pains to furnish them with superhighways and airports. The places least accessible to transportation are where the populations of locals with the poorest infrastructure in other ways is, too. Hearteningly, those omnipresent video cameras are now being used during flyovers to assess damage and find lone survivors. The scope of the damage is horrifying, but it's beginning to look as if it could have been a lot worse.

Interestingly, if predictably, the major problem that's being reported with getting aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami involves distribution. Part of that is no one's fault: while they're obliterating villages, earthquakes and tidal waves aren't gallant enough to leave passable roads and runways behind for the survivors after all.

At the same time, it's not just the physical infrastructure for the transportation of goods that's a problem. It's also information coordination, though even tenuously-unified countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka seem to be making amazing efforts. Developed countries would clearly have the infrastructure to do a lot better, but this sort of issue is not unknown to us, either. It affected the Kobe earthquake and Hurricane Andrew relief efforts. And even in business, which has time for the trial-and-error development of information management systems without thousands of dehydrating people to worry about, ruthlessly efficient distribution models of the WalMart style are...well, only as old as WalMart.

I only wonder aloud about this because the talk has now, naturally, turned from how we could have warned people to how we could be getting supplies where they're needed more quickly. There are clearly improvements that could be made, but there's a huge amount of information to process on the fly, and much of it to be shared among groups that, shall we say, are not used to cooperating. Attention needs to be focused on helping people in exigent circumstances right now, but it will be interesting to see what we eventually learn that helps make our responses more resilient in the future.

One of the nasty things about a natural disaster such as this weekend's earthquake + tsunami is that the danger doesn't disappear with the waves. Sanitation and hygiene aren't at the highest levels in South and Southeast Asia at the best of times; with decaying organic matter lying around all over the place and iffy access to food, water, and shelter, people in afflicted areas are at much greater-than-normal risk of serious infections. According to WHO projections, the number of deaths from malaria and Dengue fever, among other stock tropical menaces, could be twice as high as normal in the aftermath of the tidal wave. In some places, the figure could rival the death toll from the tsunami itself.

Of course, these are projections. If the immediate effect of this sort of disaster is to show how physically fragile civilization is in the face of nature, the long-term effect is often to demonstrate how resilient people can be in the most appalling circumstances. At the same time, as the Nikkei report notes, Aceh Province in Indonesia was already famous for its recent violent infighting. That's not the sort of environment in which efficient, need-based distribution of aid is going to be easy. In comparison, Sri Lanka, itself known until very recently as the site of one of the fiercest civil wars going, looks like a cakewalk. Fortunately, the greatest risks are right now, in the first few weeks after the tsunami, when the situation will still have the world's attention.

I was disappointed by Jonathan Rauch's book Gay Marriage, which I thought made uncharacteristically spotty arguments. (Uncharacteristically for him, I mean--not, more's the pity, for gay marriage advocates.) Being a sensible person, he knows how to confront reality, though; and with his new op-ed, he ends the year much better than he began it. Well, you have to roll yours eyes and move quickly past the loan shark analogy near the beginning. Part of his main point is this:

The consensus has shifted rapidly, meanwhile, toward civil unions. The 2004 exit polls showed 35% of voters supporting them (and another 25% for same-sex marriage). Particularly after the Nov. 2 debacle, civil unions look to many gay-rights advocates like the more attainable goal. It is not lost on them that Vermont's civil-unions law and California's partnership program have proved surprisingly uncontroversial. For their part, social conservatives increasingly, if grudgingly, accept civil unions as deflecting what they regard as an attack on marriage. John Kerry endorsed civil unions, and in October Mr. Bush accepted them, saying, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do."

This year may be remembered as the time when civil unions established themselves as the compromise of choice. For an indicator, watch whether there is an outcry if state courts narrow the scope of the new amendments to allow civil unions and other partner programs. My guess is that few people will fuss.

It's been put to me that even civil unions wouldn't be possible if activists hadn't first gone the whole way and demanded "marriage rights" and then fallen back to what would then look like a more reasonable position. Maybe. It's not possible to know. I myself think the collateral damage, as it were, has to be factored in: the fixing in the minds of Americans of an image of gay public figures as, yet again, screechy single-issue activists who think of nothing but themselves. It's not fair to lay an equal share of the blame on moderate thinkers such as Rauch, but neither is it unfair to acknowledge that his influence was not always as salutary as it might have been. He's still one of the best advocates we have, especially with Andrew Sullivan still off in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, and it's a holiday treat (no one's going to jump down my throat for not explicitly calling it "Christmas" now that it's 28 December, yeah?) to see him coming around.

(Via IGF)

I'd prefer to keep my plans for self-improvement in the New Year private, but I'm perfectly happy to share the things I'd like you all to resolve to do for me. Since I like people with interesting vices, I'm not going to tell you to stop overeating, drinking, or smoking. What I would like everyone to stop over-indulging in are words--just three little ones that have rapidly become a public menace through their overuse by gays and our sympathizers.

hate (used as n.) Oh, children, when your dotty gay Uncle Sean was in college ten years ago, we had many, many ways to accuse people of being intolerant. You could call someone "misogynist" or "sexist" if you thought he was keeping women down, "racist" if he questioned affirmative action, or "heterosexist" if he expressed any discomfort with homosexuality. If you wanted to imply that he was not only intolerant but pathological, you could call him "homophobic." These pronouncements were shrieky and sententious, but rotating through the different charges at least preserved some variety of phrasing and subject matter.

But, being busy people, we've dispensed with all that. Now hate is the word that slices, dices, peels, juliennes, and transforms ordinary radishes into professional-looking rose garnishes at the touch of a button. Just designate someone as "motivated by hate" and move on. The problem, of course, is that calling moral opposition (however misplaced we believe it is) an emotional reaction doesn't make it one; Right Side of the Rainbow explained this beautifully.

Fascinatingly, the venerable noun hatred is not abused this way. When you see someone mention "hatred of gays" or "hatred of women" or the like, you can normally trust him to confine his characterizations to people who really do want to infringe on our rights to self-determination without giving rational reasons. It's a rare instance of more syllables = less airy pretension.

second-class citizen (compound n., usually plu.) My objection to this one is less fundamental than my objections to the other two, so I have less to say about it. If second-class citizens were actually used in the process of making a thorough argument that marriage to the partner of one's choosing is a basic human right, I wouldn't mind so much; and occasionally, very occasionally, it is. Most of the time, though, it comes off as shorthand for, "Why don't you love me?" It also tends to accompany coarse, overarching comparisons to the Civil Rights movement that, in my opinion, only hold up in very limited ways. The term has mutated into a buzzword rather than a concept useful for explicating one's logic.

self-respecting (adj., used esp. in negative construction "no self-respecting gay could possibly...") I used to think I'd be overjoyed when the locution self-loathing dropped out of the queer public discourse. What a naif I was. The wording is gone, but it's been replaced by a longer, more convoluted construction that is, if anything, more annoying. If I had a nickel for every time I read or heard the sentence, "No self-respecting gay could possibly vote for George Bush this year," I'd be retired to a château with guys in loincloths dropping peeled, seeded grapes into my mouth by now.

It was always obnoxious for one gay to call another "self-loathing" for deviating from the activist-approved list of political positions and life choices, but it was almost touching, in a weird way, in its suggestion that the addressee was just stuck in that denial stage on the way through coming out and it was making him behave like a jerk. Accusing someone of not being "self-respecting" goes the whole way and asserts that he's a willful, reasoned-out jerk--in addition to implying that his sense of dignity is properly arbitrated by others.

If I wanted to dwell on things that annoy me, I have no doubt that I could lengthen the above list without much exertion. If our commentators can start avoiding these terms, however--or at least being certain they're using them to build and not substitute for argumentation--it will be a good thing for gay issues and for civility in general, neither of which has benefited from many of this year's installments in the public discourse.

Happy New Year.

And what would Christmas in 2004 be without a million and one attempts to bend it in pretzels to suit current ideological wish-lists? Larry King decided that the best panel to discuss the profundities of Christ's legend and legacy included Deepak Chopra. I regard the fact that he and his studio weren't zapped into ash on the spot as final proof that there is no God.

Later, Atsushi and I watched part of another vile CNN special called The Two Marys. (Don't bother with the jokes about how well audience and subject matter suited each other--way, way too easy.) This was narrated by theological eminence Sigourney Weaver, and it included a lot of talk about how Mary the mother of Christ and Mary Magdalene could have had roles in the early church that were much more official than the Old Boy Network currently dominating Christianity lets on. Oh, yeah, and in case no one's told you, Christ was gay.

Now, obviously, as an atheist and believer in the disinterested pursuit of historical truth, I have no objection to the good-faith efforts by skeptics to do what they must with any genuine scholarly lead. Sometimes new knowledge, or improved theories that fit the evidence better than the previous ones did, will indeed prove disillusioning. When that happens, we have to be strong-minded enough to abandon our old beliefs.

I do find it worth noting, though, that those who cast Mary Magdalene as the lost first disciple always seem to be feminists by conviction. Those who say Jesus had one or a string of queer relationships (always the icky-sensitivo kind, too--as long as we're embroidering history, couldn't we put those rough-tough carpenter muscles to better use? I'm just asking) turn out to be--ta-dah!--gay advocates. And in presenting their findings in soundbites of the form, "I've discovered X, and therefore Christian sects will have to stop mistreating group Y, " these researchers don't seem to make much effort to hide that ideology is driving their efforts.

None of this is a new problem, no; and the point could be made that it's none of my affair. You could come up with demonstrable proof that Jesus was a real historical character who had more sex partners than a Falcon Video actor, and it wouldn't change my life one bit. Nevertheless, religion used to show people how to take the good with the bad and to do their best with the proportion of the two that circumstances had dealt them. Now a lot of it makes the chirpy pretense that it's all good. Something is lost for all of us when people push the line that reality has to be altered to show us in the most approving light before we can live meaningful lives.

The earthquakes in Sumatra demonstrate how bad things can get when a natural disaster strikes at the perfect place to maximize damage: a central location in a Third World country, surrounded by other Third World countries, in the middle of tourist season. Tidals waves have radiated out in several directions, hitting Thailand and Sri Lanka and Maldives hard. The Indian mainland has seen damage in the southeast also. Of course, all of these places are either coastal countries or islands, so they're not unprepared for maritime disaster; but the scope of damage is obviously immense. Additionally, developing countries are developing countries, and general medical and transportation infrastructure may accordingly not be up to coping with multiple emergencies.

I know that weather has interfered with travel for a lot of Americans this Christmas, and the broadcasts from the States appear, understandably, to be devoted mostly to that, to the holiday itself, and to the most recent attack in Iraq. Problems in Southeast Asia--from the Bali bombing to Thailand's hitman-style drug war to just about everything else--seem to get very little play in the American media even on a slow day, though. I hope the scope of the damage, which is still undetermined and likely to keep growing over the next week, isn't downplayed.

There's an expression in Japanese--have I maybe discussed it before?--that combines two first-year words into an exponentially more complex and useful idea: ありがた迷惑. Those who remember Styx know ありがとう (arigato, usually rendered "thank you" but more literally a classical form of an adjective that means "it is a thing to be grateful for"). 迷惑 (meiwaku, "pain in the ass," "annoyance") is a word you use a lot in a country of such frictive crowding. An arigata-meiwaku is what you get when someone meddles out of a sincere desire to be helpful but ends up making things worse. The sister role played by Laurie Metcalf on Roseanne is a good example.

So is France's new hate crimes law:

The French Senate Wednesday night gave final approval to legislation making it a criminal offense to speak or publish homophobia.

The bill adds sexuality to an existing law banning hate speech against other minorities.

Under the legislation, anyone who provokes hatred or violence on the basis of sex or sexual orientation could be fined up to $60,000 and be subject to one year in jail.

The bill was fought by the Roman Catholic church which claimed it could be used against priests who speak out against homosexuality or to censor the Bible. [Enh...never happen!--SRK]

Despite the concerns of the Church, the legislation had little difficulty in the conservative dominated Senate.

The bill which had been pushed by President Jacques Chirac gives France the toughest hate-crime law in the European Union.

French gay rights group Inter-LGBT hailed the vote as as a decisive step to combat growing homophobia.

The government drafted the law after a young gay man was brutally attacked. After he was beaten his assailants poured gasoline on him and set him on fire leaving him severely burned.

Stories like that make me want to punch a hole in the wall. Once that feeling subsides, though, we're left with all the usual questions about hate crimes legislation. They've been articulated before, but since these bills keep passing, it's obvious that we need to keep repeating them: For one thing, isn't dousing someone with gasoline and torching him already punishable under French law, or has everyone been busy making sure the produce meets EU shape and color specifications? For another, is it really possible that people still harbor the delusion that forcing people not to talk about deeply-held beliefs will simply make their potential ill-effects vanish? Do those who sympathize with gays really think we need the deck stacked for us this way? If they don't think we can meet the opposition with persuasive arguments in our own favor, why do they themselves side with us in the first place?

And the issue that saddens me most to contemplate: Are there really gays who think we can only function well in society if we're subjected to nothing but compliments and Nerf-ball questions? If they're that lacking in conviction about their own moral choices, why don't they, indeed, just convert to Christianity and off-load the responsibility onto someone else?

This flood of rhetorical questions is going to start sounding hysterical, so I'll knock it off. I can only marvel anew that the most basic life lesson--(1) not everyone is going to love you + (2) there's nothing you can do about it, so deal--is being so ineptly handed down to so many people.

Added on 24 December: Amritas is a dear as always to link me, especially with the compliment that I've acquitted myself well at the sociology-by-way-of-linguistics posts he specializes in. I have to say, though, that if I were really as good at that sort of thing as he is, I'd have given you the words for "thanks but no thanks" in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, with due explanation of which parts were native and which borrowings.

Since he has another post up related to the perceived religion-evasion of holiday greetings, this is as good a time as any to clarify something I discussed here. That is, I think that forcing a greeting such as "Happy holidays" on people is ridiculous. So is forcing Nativity scenes and such out of the public square.

I just don't think that "Happy holidays" is in and of itself a denatured substitute. A lot of people do use it that way, yes, but to me it's a nicely economical way of conveying, "I hope you had a good Thanksgiving" + "Merry Christmas" + "Happy Hanukkah, if you're Jewish" + "Happy Kwanzaa...uh, if that's how you pronounce it and even though I'm not entirely sure what it is" + "Happy New Year!"

Contrast this with, for example, "Have a nice day!" Blech. "Goodbye" is perfectly adequate, and "Have a nice day!" adds nothing to it. It takes the goodwill conveyed and, if anything, makes it less intense. Not being one to reject polite gestures, I've never drawn myself up to full height and replied, "Actually, I plan to fill the remaining time before midnight with wickedly scrumptious indelicacies, but thank you all the same." Been tempted, though.

Please, let it be true. Ronald Bailey reports in his TCS column that the Kyoto Protocol is no more:

The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development. [I didn't carry over Bailey's links--SRK]

For the last few years, I've cringed every time I've seen the word Kyoto leap out at me while scanning through a news story; dollars to doughnuts, it meant that someone was caviling that the US is pursuing profit over the cries of the sylphs and toadstool spirits.

Along those lines, people familiar with Japan will get a chuckle out of the name of the Japanese energy analyst quoted in the article: 杉山 (sugiyama: "cedar mountain"). If anything symbolizes Japan's own unromantic, calculating approach to environmental management, it's the replacing of old-growth forests with batallions of cedar and other industrial trees. I'm not sure whether there's a more specific name for the varieties usually planted than sugi, but to non-biologist me, the coincidence is pretty funny.

(Via Instapundit, so you've probably seen it already)

Michael J. Totten is having a discussion with various commenters about this post about this story, in which he draws parallels between being a resident foreigner and being an immigrant and then calls on everyone to remember to a good "guest." I agree that that wasn't the greatest choice of words--in fact, it gave me a double-take--but I also think his point is obvious enough that it doesn't warrant going ballistic over.

I wouldn't renounce my American citizenship for all the gold in the world, but even if I wanted to, I probably wouldn't be able to become a Japanese citizen without supernatural help. Very much like many Muslim cultures, I suspect, Japan is the kind of place with very hospitable individuals and a very insular government. And I am, essentially, a guest, so I do most of the adapting.

What would I do if I did, in fact, immigrate? I would still do most of the adapting, only in that case we would usually call it "assimilating." Immigrating into a pre-existing country with its own traditions is not like founding a new one where you can stack the deck in favor of your own worldview. When you join a society whose tolerance for different ways of life is one of the very principles that allowed your entrance in the first place, you have to get used to being exposed to points of view that are opposed to your own. That doesn't mean you have to change your beliefs, necessarily, only that you have to accept that you won't be insulated from others'. Either that, or stay home where the surrounding culture is the same as your own but you have no job.

I didn't see any evidence in the Yahoo! article that the Christmas play, nativity scene contest, or Christmas songs were mandatory. And if they're not mandatory, well...suck it up. When I was little, I was part of a church that didn't believe Christmas was a true Christian celebration. When the rest of the class had a Christmas party, I was allowed to eat a treat or two and then went to the library. When we sang Christmas songs in music class, I was unshowily silent. Same at Hallowe'en, Easter, and Valentine's Day. None of this seduced me into believing in mainstream Christianity, or traumatized me, or what have you. Since Muslims have become such a large minority in Italy, it strikes me as a perfectly reasonable idea to incorporate their celebrations into fun-time activities in public schools where they'd be appreciated, and it's hard to believe there's nowhere the children of religious Muslims can go if their parents wish them to absent themselves from the sliver of the day devoted to Catholic activities.

But that requires appreciating a diversity of viewpoints, without trying to wipe out everyone's identity the minute it could cause friction. It's disturbing to see Italy, a country whose contributions to the development of Western civilization are older and vaster than those of almost any other, slowly let itself be cowed into becoming part of the ummah.

There's a new expat blogger in Germany who's honored me by putting on what looks to be his very first blogroll. He has a good post up about, among other things, the effects of NGOs, that makes these important points:

The role of NGOs is especially problematical, since they operate without responsibility. The NGOs go into a country with a problem and try and deal with the problem according to their own priorities and needs. What they end up doing is undermining the authority of the state: whether this is done out of the best of intentions, or deliberately for political purposes, or accidentally plays no role in the effect that it has on the states involved: they are weakened.

Why is this important? It's important because if you are going to push for things like an International Court of Justice, treaties like Kyoto, for "obeying international law" - whatever that means* - then you can't at the same time dismantle the actors that work within this framework.

And I think that many of the NGOs are pursuing their own special agendas that don't have all that much to do with providing aid or help and have a lot more to do with ensuring that the problems failed states face don't go away, since that would mean the NGOs involved would lose their main arguments for fund-raising and that some of those involved might have to drop the pretense of trying to save the world and actually find a real job.

I think most Americans know all this intellectually, but I also think that you don't quite realize until you live abroad just how many pies NGOs have their fingers in. There's an obvious reason for that: America doesn't need their help, so we don't have them around in daily life. The Japanese give, rather than get, assistance, also, but there are a lot of countries with close geographical and economic ties to Japan that do, so I think we hear about such organizations and their policy effects more. Germany is probably the same way.

It may seem odd to have libertarian old me approvingly citing someone who's complaining about "undermining the authority of the state." But it's a problem with regards to these issues for two big reasons, both of which are touched on above. One is that, in countries with corruption problems--and corruption is, naturally, one of the main factors that screw up an economy to the point that it needs outside assistance--NGO personnel end up simply adding another layer to the patronage/approval system. I have no doubt that most of them set out to introduce transparency, equality of opportunity, and the rule of law into the countries they're working with. But to start getting anything done, they have to operate at least partially within the existing power structures. (The recent Western predilection for prostrating outselves before "local cultural norms" when dealing with less-developed peoples exacerbates this problem.) What start out as temporary concessions can rapidly turn into permanent cooption by the political movers and shakers whose grip the organization was trying to loosen from the economy in the first place. So instead of a country or region that's moving toward a set of clear, predictable, freely-available rules that are equally enforced on all citizens, you get yet another player (this one with access to a well of foreign cash) whose vagaries of temperament you have to learn in order to get on with your business.

The second problem is that, sort of the way the most incompetent public schools in America have conventionally gotten the largest amounts of money to help them try again, NGO assistance buffers regimes from the market signals that would normally clobber them. And it is one of the great principles of life--maybe even the great principle--that being insulated from the results of your own screw-ups makes you less likely to change your behavior so you don't make them again.

Now, obviously, if either governments or NGOs are staffed with plain old evil, self-serving people, they are not going to care what the market is telling them anyway. But without having taken a poll, I suspect that most aid workers, and even most entrenched local ruling families in their host countries, really think they're doing the best they can to further the interests of their constituencies. When the path of least resistance is available, though, human nature is capable of going through all manner of ethical arabesques to justify taking it. And it's a given that it's easier to play ball with those currently in power, even if they're causing the problem you've undertaken to remedy.

4 December 07:25 CST
* This was the line at which I was sure I liked this guy.