The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

Best Sellers

Just time this week to check in on the Times Best Sellers List...

India, Nationalism and Archaeology

East Asian cultural blog A Man With Tea muses on the implications of a request by the Archaeological Survey of India for the return of certain art objects in the British Museum.

On paper, at least, India under the Raj wasn't the single nation "India" as we know it today, but a massively fractured series of kingdoms and micro-nations. (Think of the Warring States period in China, or Italy until the late 19th century -- but cloned many times over.) Each was (in theory) independent, though deeply linked with the others through trade and treaty. Each (in theory) had its own arrangements with the British. In practice they were vassal states to a virtual vassal state ("India") of Britain.

In ethical terms, there is a difference between taking advantage of a period of unrest to loot art objects, and taking things with the permission of whomever is in charge of the place where the artifacts are located. (In some cases, like Boston's Japanese art collection, the items were literally being discarded during a period of unrest, and would no longer exist if some foreigner hadn't taken a shine to them. VERY tricky.) Obviously leaders change, and by the standards of democracy virtually no leader from the past would now be considered "legitimate" -- but that's applying modern ethics to the past. Modern ethics are a modern technology.

Indians are wonderfully legalistic, and I'd be a little disappointed if they didn't try to make a case for having the items returned. But Indians have a bad habit of building a convoluted case and then BELIEVING it too. I'm afraid that what this probably comes down to is nationalism, and that's something that I, personally, have no truck with.

Is It Just Me...?

Thirteen Ideas We Need Words For

1. verb. Treating a verifiable fact as a philosophical opinion. (Evolution, heliocentrism, tax rates, etc.)

2. adjective. An idea which is neither fringe nor mainstream; a plausible idea without sufficient refuting or corroborating evidence.

3. noun. The desire to marry outside one's ethnicity, religion or culture.

4. noun. The talent for attracting resources to oneself, as distinct from talent or charm.

5. noun. The peculiar semi-English used in Indian advertising. India's version of "Engerish."

6. noun. Putting a great deal of work into looking less attractive.

7. noun. The inflated price of a good or service from which a predetermined "discount" is expected to be deducted. (Magazines, cars, medical services, etc.)

8. verb. Looking for attractive friends-of-friends on a social networking site.

9. adjective. The quality of a language to sound good rapped.

10. noun. An imagined period of time which doesn't fit into the known timeline of history. (Nationalist myths, "ancient wisdom," the 1001 Nights stories, etc.)

11. noun. The ageing character who survives the story despite having little concern about his or her death. (The hostages in the Nausicaa mangas, Terence Stamp's character in The Limey, etc.)

12. pronoun. A neuter third-person singular.

13. pronoun. A second-person plural distinct from the second-person singular.

You'll notice that there are no adverbs on the list. We have more than enough adverbs as it is, and compositions are usually improved by their deletion.

Some suggestions for the above:

1. To murdoch? In honor of its greatest worldwide proponent.
2. Borderland? Useful for grain-of-salt publications like "Counterpunch."
3. No idea. "Exo-" constructs sound too cold.
4. Does this already exist as an off-label use of the word "gravity?"
5. Hindlish? (Hindi + English.) Not entirely accurate, but most Indian culture that reaches the West escapes via (Hindi speaking) Bollywood.
6. Emoing down? More of a term than a word.
7. Bulltag?
8. This usually gets lost under the broader term "Facebook stalking."
9. Spittable? As in "Korean is not very spittable."
10. i-time? Ugly, esoteric and hyphenated. Refers to the mathematical concept of i -- imaginary numbers which can be visualized as extending to the left and right of the number line.
11. Old soldier? Most stock characters get a term, not a word.
12. Ee? (False root of "he" and "she.") None of our other pronouns have this problem.
13. Yall? I still flinch when I hear "y'all," but unless we somehow bring back the third person singular "thou," it's our best hope. Perhaps we should drop the apostrophe and make it a proper word.

The Fiddlers of Rome

Sneering, populist climate science denialism from a self-described Libertarian is nothing shocking, but it should be a bit beneath the New York Times science page. I'm beginning to think the best thing to do is just to sneer back, and keep asking questions about those lovely secondhand robes they've bought from the Emperor.

Leaving aside the question of whether libertarian philosophy is even flexible enough to mount a response to a problem with personalized rewards but socialized consequences, let's make sure we understand why this is denialism, and not skepticism. Climate change "denialism" relies not on a single set of arguments, but on several tiers, whose only commonality is a defense of inaction on the issue:

1. I don't "believe" in climate change, because of X,Y, Z
2. If you show that X,Y,Z are invalid, I will find new arguments U,V,W
3. If you demolish U,V,W, I will say that even if climate change is happening, there is no evidence that it is anthropogenic because of A,B,C
4. A,B,C become D,E,F through the same process that produced U,V,W
5. When D,E,F fall, I will argue that there's no evidence that it will be harmful
6. When harm is shown, I will pass the buck to the next generation, assuming they will invent some whiz-bang technology to reverse the damage
7. Why, under libertarian philosophy, anyone in the future would undertake a massive program whose only benefits are social will remain unasked; presumably in the future Libertarians will remain a fringe minority

The scientific consensus on plate tectonics is about as old as I am. It's been around much longer than that, much like our understanding of the greenhouse effect. To certain generations of Americans, though, the Earth never moved. The geological revolution was a boon to oil and gas exploration, and the free market as a whole. If modern climate science had such a rosy picture to offer, would such an unfortunate gap have ever been opened in the last ten years between scientific consensus and public perception?

Carry On

No existential threat to the civilized world exists from fundamentalist terrorists. We do not call the madman Emperor, and we do not call the criminal Nemesis. Were terrorists able to threaten the existence of our values, the existence of our institutions of law, or even the lives of any great portion of us, they would not require the tools of cowardice. If Cheney, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin or O'Reilly will argue otherwise, let them do so, and let them stand against evidence. Fear will always be sold cheap by shameful men. Defend reason. Keep calm, and carry on.

Huebner's Six Rules of Mountaineering

1. Climb with passion.
2. No guts, no glory.
3. Expect dead ends.
4. Never turn your back on your partner.
5. Never look where you don't want to go.
6. There's always room on the rope for a person with honor.

Jim Huebner, as quoted in Roy H. Williams' Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.

More on the Gay Marriage Ban Referendum

You go up to Appleton; you get your hair cut. You see a "No on 1" sign down on the verge. You park, you put it back up next to the "Yes on 1" sign. The grass was just mowed. You figure maybe they both got knocked over by the mower and the Yes people are just more vigilant about getting their signs back up.

You drive back to 131. You see another "No on 1" sign down at the intersection. You park, you fix it. You figure, hey, we had some rain and wind, maybe they both went down and the Yes people are just more vigilant about getting their signs back up.

You learn better as you pass the sign at the intersection of route 17, which has been spray painted. Not just marked, either: Someone had a stencil. Looks like they bugged out halfway through though; it's just a big yellow overspray mess unless you look closely.

On the common -- in your hometown -- you find a "No on 1" sign down. The stakes have been pulled out of the ground. One's been stolen. You come back with a hammer. You put the sign back up next to the "Yes on 1" sign. You'd be happy to do this for the Yes signs as well, but none of them have been vandalized.

You go down to the town office, and register to vote. This is your town too.

A Question for the "Yes on 1" Campaign

What's to prevent individual teachers from discussing homosexual issues now?

I get it. You don't like gay people. You don't know any gay people. It's not that big a deal, in real life.

The fact remains that if I like a girl I have the right to marry her, without any "seperate but equal" rejiggering. How could I, as a decent person, deny that right to someone else?

(Question 1 is a Maine ballot initiative to outlaw gay marriage.)

Class in America: The "Good Schools" Myth

The day's favorite American euphemism for deliberate class stratification, "good schools," is back, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. This one is doubly insidious because liberals are still comfortable saying it aloud. I bitchslapped Kristof's fellow white-flight New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell when he took this same call up a year ago, and since nothing's changed, I'll refer you to my post from that time, Malcolm Gladwell's Good Teacher/Bad Teacher Delusion.

Snip:

Don't blame students; don't blame parents; don't blame underfunded schools; don't blame distending class sizes, don't blame school funding being tied to local property taxes; don't blame artificial testing requirements devouring classroom time; don't blame required special education skewing dollar-per-student vs. results numbers wildly below magnet and parochial schools; don't blame the flight of your upper-middle class into homogenous neighborhoods.

...As We All Must

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