The White Peril 白禍

So Hamas won big against Fatah in the Palestinian elections. Great:

International peace broking in the Middle East was plunged into turmoil on Friday by Hamas's shock Palestinian election win and a U.S. vow not to deal with the Islamic group until it renounced violence against Israel.

Many world leaders turned up the heat on Hamas to moderate policies and Israel itself ruled out talks with any Palestinian government that involved Hamas, which is sworn to its destruction and has been behind dozens of suicide bombings.

Fears of internal Palestinian unrest grew when hundreds of gunmen from President Mahmoud Abbas's long-dominant Fatah movement marched in Gaza City, firing in the air to protest against the Hamas victory and demanding that Abbas resign.

Hamas's triumph on Thursday in winning 76 seats in the 132-member Palestinian parliament against 43 for Fatah was widely seen as a political earthquake in the Middle East, triggered by voter disenchantment with corruption.

"I have made it very clear...that a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of a platform is a party with which we will not deal," U.S. President George W. Bush told a news conference in Washington.

The US, Russia, the UN, and the EU (the Palestinian Authority's biggest financial backer) are pressing Hamas to soften its position against Israel. Since it's still calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, that's going to be some softening.

There's no cause-effect relationship here, but the Japanese cabinet resolved today to extend the deployment of SDF personnel in the Golan Heights:

In a 27 January cabinet meeting, the government decided to extend by six months the deployment of the SDF in the Golan Heights, which was to expire in March but will now last until September. The measure follows a half-year extension of peace-keeping activities by the UN Security Council's United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). The SDF has participated in UNDOF, which conducts peace-keeping operations, since 1996; it conducts operations that include the transporting of basic supplies for living, the dissemination of information from headquarters, and project implementation.

John at TP with Page Numbers says something that one wishes wouldn't have to be repeated quite so often:

What I came away with from those broadcasts [while studying in the then-Soviet Union] was the view that the American press wasn't reporting on the European reaction (mostly negative – we should have given sanctions more time). I used to tell people about that "missing" perspective a lot when I got back here. God, what a little snot I was. I like to think I've grown a lot since then. I was still in my "Americans are so provincial" phase, which I can partially forgive myself for, since I was the only person, outside of my college friends, in my social circle that spoke a language that wasn't high school French or Spanish. If you judge me more harshly, I don't blame you, though. I doubt most Europeans would speak more than one language if another language wasn't as close to them as the state line is to me. And really, even children with Down's syndrome can be taught another language. It's not a sign of intelligence, although it is a sign of diligence, especially if you are in a large monolingual country such as China, Russia, or the US. Most of the pretentious Western Euros I know don't speak the hard languages (non-Indo European, or even Indo-European ones that require a non-Latin alphabet).

I think most of us are kind of snotty when we're in our early twenties, and the "hard languages," as John flatteringly styles them, tend to attract competitive know-it-all types. (Yes, obviously, I'm including myself--I'm aware of my flaws. Or at least aware of that flaw.) So I'm not inclined to judge him harshly, because he was willing to look and learn as he grew up. It's people who retain the "Ooh, FRANCE! How learnèd!" mentality well after they've been around the block enough times to know better that drive me nuts.

Of course, not all change is progress:

And my, how things have changed in 15 years, no? The press is full of the European reaction today. As if American interests should be subject to the judgment of a bunch of snot noses who tear their continent apart every fifty to hundred years or so. My guess is that 15 years ago the old guys with a grain or two of sense, who came of age in the late 40s and early 50s were still around in the newsrooms to keep the Boomers in check, but now the Narcissist Generation is running the show according to the score of '68. For which a lot of Euros happily produce new refrains.

I rag on the Boomers myself, but I think it's useful to note that they developed as their post-War parents, anxious to make everything safe and comfortable and pain-free after the first half of the century, reared them to. Not that all the fatuous navel-gazing was an intended consequence, of course. And plenty of Boomers in the mass audience, if not behind editors' desks, wish the more pompous European commentators would go take a flying leap and probably ignore most of the yak time CNN provides for them. It's still annoying that they're deferred to so much.

One of Virginia Postrel's latest posts is a great potential discussion starter:

Some years ago, an editor asked me how he could give his children an appreciation for the English language. He wanted them to write well. Since he's an evangelical Christian, I told him he should teach them Psalms from the King James translation of the Bible. My mother did that with me as a child, and it gave me an early sense of metaphor and rhythm. It taught me to appreciate, and understand, complex, beautiful English.

My friend didn't like my suggestion. After all, nobody reads the KJV anymore. Forget poetry (not to mention sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew), today's suburban Christianity is all about accessibility. It's been dumbed down.

...

Megachurch Christianity may hone organizational and business skills, but it isn't teaching believers to think about abstractions or communicate in higher than "everyday" language. No wonder megachurches combine their up-to-date media with fundamentalist doctrine. It fits well on PowerPoint--no paragraphs required. Leaving aside the validity of what they preach, today's most successful evangelicals are spreading pap.

When I was growing up, every Bible I ever had was KJV. The sermons--our services were two hours long, and you were expected to take notes after you were around twelve--generally quoted scripture from the KJV, often with explanations about how obscure passages had been rendered. My mother once, on the recommendation of a friend, bought a New KJV Bible. She found it annoying and went back to the old one the next go-round.

To my knowledge, Virginia converted to Judaism (like 80% of my women friends from college) when she married but, unlike me, isn't an atheist. I will occasionally run into people who ask how my beliefs have evolved and mistakenly assume that the way to get me back to church is by playing the "But you know, lots of churches now are very user-friendly and focus on making the Word of God relevant to life today." Yech. I have my life, and what's relevant to it in the quotidian sense, running pretty well as it is. If I were convinced to go back to worshipping God, it would be because I believed Christianity was accurate about the nature of transcendence.

The KJV has a sense of the sublime. It's mostly understandable, but the language is also obviously old, and there are passages that you can't make your way through without your concordance. It gives a comforting sense of being navigable but containing mysteries. You're constantly reminded that not everything is explicable, even to theologians with expert knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic. And, if you care about literary history, the KJV is the one that inspired countless writers and speakers over the past few centuries, as Virginia points out. It's culturally allusive as well as having the feel of a book that's expansive and meant to take you outside yourself.

Once or twice I looked at a friend's New Revised Standard Version (is that what it's called?) when I was a teenager, and it was dead on the page. Like Dick and Jane Are Fruitful and Multiply and Fill the Earth. No intensity.

And Power Point presentations in services? Rock music instead of hymns? I know those aren't really new developments, but sheesh.

I have a short work trip to a certain renegade Chinese province this coming weekend; I'll be flying to Taipei with Japan Asia Airways (JAA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Airlines (JAL) that exists exclusively as a relic of make-nice moves toward the PRC in the 1970s. (For the life of me, I cannot figure out where the IATA code EG came from, BTW. Just one of those weird things.)




Unfortunately, make-nice moves toward the PRC are not all relics of the past, and not all of them simply involve ghettoization that's barely noticeable to consumers. (I ordered my JAA ticket through my JAL Mileage Bank portal just as I've done with every other ticket I've bought.) I'm probably the last Asia-focused blogger to be linking Rebecca MacKinnon's coverage of Microsoft's repugnant go-along-to-get-along policy toward Chinese bloggers--this post isn't the first chronologically, but it sets up the issues well and is probably a good starting point to scroll up and down from. Key passage:

In my view, this issue goes far beyond China. The behavior of companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! and others - and their eager willingness to comply with Chinese government demands - shows a fundamental lack of respect for users and our fundamental human rights. Globally.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and others are helping to institutionalize and legitimize the integration of censorship into the global IT business model.

Do not count on these companies to protect your human rights, if those rights are threatened by the over-stretching hand of any government anywhere on the planet.

These are not the usual garbage complaints about "censorship" in the West when one of many competing publications declines to disseminate the views of someone who can then look for other outlets, or when someone's published views are scrutinized and argued against in a way that bruises his ego. It's hard to read this as anything but Microsoft's blithe agreement to be an executive arm for the CCP's content managers. And as Mark Alger emphasizes--MacKinnon makes this point, too, but it's easy to lose it in all the column inches of coverage--Microsoft is being anticipatory. It's scrambling to avoid trouble rather than changing its policy after being warned by Beijing. Even more outrageous.

I have a short work trip to a certain renegade Chinese province this coming weekend; I'll be flying to Taipei with Japan Asia Airways (JAA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Airlines (JAL) that exists exclusively as a relic of make-nice moves toward the PRC in the 1970s. (For the life of me, I cannot figure out where the IATA code EG came from, BTW. Just one of those weird things.)




Unfortunately, make-nice moves toward the PRC are not all relics of the past, and not all of them simply involve ghettoization that's barely noticeable to consumers. (I ordered my JAA ticket through my JAL Mileage Bank portal just as I've done with every other ticket I've bought.) I'm probably the last Asia-focused blogger to be linking Rebecca MacKinnon's coverage of Microsoft's repugnant go-along-to-get-along policy toward Chinese bloggers--this post isn't the first chronologically, but it sets up the issues well and is probably a good starting point to scroll up and down from. Key passage:

In my view, this issue goes far beyond China. The behavior of companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! and others - and their eager willingness to comply with Chinese government demands - shows a fundamental lack of respect for users and our fundamental human rights. Globally.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and others are helping to institutionalize and legitimize the integration of censorship into the global IT business model.

Do not count on these companies to protect your human rights, if those rights are threatened by the over-stretching hand of any government anywhere on the planet.

These are not the usual garbage complaints about "censorship" in the West when one of many competing publications declines to disseminate the views of someone who can then look for other outlets, or when someone's published views are scrutinized and argued against in a way that bruises his ego. It's hard to read this as anything but Microsoft's blithe agreement to be an executive arm for the CCP's content managers. And as Mark Alger emphasizes--MacKinnon makes this point, too, but it's easy to lose it in all the column inches of coverage--Microsoft is being anticipatory. It's scrambling to avoid trouble rather than changing its policy after being warned by Beijing. Even more outrageous.

Wow. That's horrible. Atsushi and I watched the initial reports on CNN yesterday. Certain physical-labor jobs can only be made so safe--my father's gotten into a few scrapes at the steel plant over the years, and that's not a few hundred feet underground--but modern detection and rescue equipment is very sophisticated. With that and the memory of the PA incident a few years ago, I wasn't really all that worried (despite the regularity of reports of high-casualty disasters from the PRC). My thoughts are with the families.

Added later: CNN's thoughts are with the families, too, though for what appear to be slightly different reasons. I'm copying the link in the parenthetical even though it won't work from here:

It was about three hours after the first news — at roughly 3 a.m. — that Hatfield, the CEO of International Coal Group, announced that 12 of the 13 were dead. (Watch relatives weep over 'a miracle taken away' — 3:21)

Egads. I'm all for candor, but there's something to be said for keeping a decent cover on your exploitativeness, even if everyone recognizes that being pushy is part of your job.

Here's a question for people: Which of the following is the more important to you?

1. living by your principles


2. making other people like you

Because the thing is, they're both worthy goals, but you can't prioritize them equally all the time. You can and should listen to others without assuming you already know what they're going to say. You can and should resist the temptation to put words in their mouths just because you heard them from the last few proselytizing [conservatives/liberals/heteros/homos/Atkins dieters/Steely Dan fans] you got into a tussle with. You can and should avoid second-guessing people's motivations and spinning out speculative narratives about their inner emotional lives (a pet peeve of mine, that). All of which is to say, you can and should be civil.

But that doesn't mean making nice at all costs. Something Camille Paglia wrote a decade ago in her "No Law in the Arena" essay impressed me greatly when I first read it, even though it clearly wasn't intended as one of her trademark rampaging-diva climaxes. She was talking about rape activism specifically, but her point has wider applications:

What I call Betty Crocker feminism--a naively optimistic Pollyannaish or Panglossian view of reality--is behind much of this. Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical "patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities.

It's hard to have a discussion with people whose view of reality starts with the fallacy that people naturally get along swimmingly, and that therefore whatever friction arises is only there because you--you evil [liberal/conservative/homo/hetero/carb consumer/only-owns-Gaucho-er]--artificially brought it in from an alien realm. Living, breathing people in a free society have deeply-held beliefs that are at loggerheads with other people's deeply-held beliefs. People also have internal conflicts that are hard to resolve. That doesn't make human empathy or the impulse toward kindness less real; it just means that it's not the only force we need to factor in when discussing our interests.

It also means that we have to deal with people on their own terms. No one's personality comes with a line-item veto. I don't see why LaShawn Barber should not write what she thinks about homosexuality in order to get a rep as the nice black female conservative any more than I plan to stop being a flaming homo in order to get more social conservatives to pay attention to what I'm saying about Japan-US relations. People who only like some aspects of a given blog are free to skip the posts they don't feel edified by; if the stuff they object too carries sufficient weight with them, they can decide the rest of the blog isn't worth it and skip the whole thing. People who freak the hell out at the possibility that they might applaud 80% of what a blogger writes and be outraged at the other 20% should probably skip reading blogs altogether and take up PlayStation. Those who are secure in their identities and convictions don't shrink from criticizing that which they believe reprehensible (or plain inaccurate), but they don't have a nervous breakdown over its very existence.

Open conflict is a part of life in democratic societies, and it has the advantage of sifting out and sharpening the best among competing ideas as well as the disadvantage of making life less harmonious. (See also Eric and Grand Stander) The alternative is rule by the collective, in which you the individual are peremptorily informed which tradeoffs will make you happy and then expected to live with them. The tendency of people from such societies to scramble aboard the nearest boat to America the minute they get the chance should indicate how attractive that option really is. In a classical-liberal society, we can't stop people from trying to impose their estimation of our dignity and worth on us--sometimes loudly and publicly--but we're not obliged to go along with it. Are there really people who don't think that's worth the compromise?

Don't answer that.