Scott Horton is a good read. I would like to be as learned as he is. From this, quoting Montesquieu:
No tyranny is more cruel than that which is practiced in the shadow of the law and with the trappings of justice: that is, one would drown the unfortunate by the very plank by which he would hope to be saved.
That is what I was thinking during the Bush years.
Judith Miller writes about Unit 731 and the Japanese germ warfare experiments in China during World War II. Some of the victims are still alive.
Jiang Chun Geng’s poisoned right leg, with its suppurating wounds, hangs limply over the gray wooden bench in the medical clinic here in Dachen, a village in China’s province of Zhejiang. Twice the size of his left leg, the limb is too tender to touch during my visit. Instead, Dr. Zhu Jian Jun gently dabs the putrid wounds with an alcohol-drenched swab. Jiang’s heavily lined face tightens as Zhu wraps the fiery stump with a white bandage and unhooks an intravenous antibiotic drip. Another treatment is over.
Jiang, a 70-year-old farmer, can’t remember a time when flesh-eating ulcers didn’t cover his legs. “They never go away,” he tells me. “They just get drier. Sometimes they hurt less.” He doesn’t know for sure how he got them, but his father told him that the wounds first appeared in July 1942, soon after the Japanese army passed through his village. His entire family developed the festering sores. His mother and younger brother died in unbearable pain a decade later as the untreated, mysterious infection crept up their legs.
Japan has been slow to acknowledge atrocities they committed in World War II. Why?
Working closely with Wang, Franzblau has tried for years to introduce a resolution at World Medical Association meetings calling upon doctors to ask Japan to “officially repudiate Unit 731” and to explain “why physicians employed in Unit 731 have never been prosecuted for murder and crimes against humanity.” Each year, his resolution has gone nowhere. “There has never even been a debate,” he complains. The Japanese Medical Association has also remained silent, perhaps because one former president of the JMA was a Unit 731 staff member, as were former officials in many prestigious Japanese organizations.
Sometimes, people who call themselves ‘liberal’ think that it means that you must be even-handed in all things. When facing extremism, one must see it for what it is. Two things in The Daily Beast caught my eye this morning. The first is Andrew Roberts takedown of Nicolas Kristof’s review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir.
The bravest woman I know—and I know plenty, including Margaret Thatcher—is the Somalian-born writer and former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is presently under a fatwa sentence of death for her apostasy from the Muslim faith. When the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot eight times in 2004, a paper stuck into his corpse with a knife stated that Hirsi Ali would be next. While that would push most of us into hiding for the rest of our days—including me, I’m perfectly ready to admit—Hirsi Ali has resolutely continued to make public appearances promoting the cause of female liberation in the Muslim world.
I’m with Roberts there. Ali is trying to help women in Islamic countries who are oppressed, personally and politically. Personally because of the genital mutilation that is performed on young girls in many Islamic countries; politically because of the second class nature of existence for women in many of those countries.
Roberts shreds Kristof:
No, for true stridency one should instead read Kristof’s almost unhinged response to the book, in which along the disgraceful and untrue accusation of “feeding religious bigotry,” he states that Hirsi Ali “is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir” (she’s written two), “she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase” (she was an elected MP in Holland), “she is at her worst when excoriating a variegated faith” (she does not), and accusing her of “overheated and overstated rhetoric.”
If one is looking for overheated and overstated rhetoric, consider Kristof’s assertion of modern Islam that the reason that it is “one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today” is not simply that Muslims statistically have more children than Christians and non-Orthodox Jews, but instead because of ‘the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews” (tell that to the Christian and Jewish communities that have been expelled from all too many Middle Eastern countries over the past six decades), “charity for the poor” (easy enough in oil-rich plutocracies without social security), and “the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque” (but can’t vote shoulder to shoulder in the non-existent polling booths).
Truly stomach-churning is Kristof’s remark, “Perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: ‘I love you.’” That might be the New York shrink’s answer to every problem, but does it really help at the moment when, as in Hirsi Ali’s case, her father ordered her to marry a stranger? That is the reality for much of Somali Muslim womanhood today, and Kristof’s answer to that nightmare—which he would not for one moment contemplate allowing in the United States—is for everyone to have a nice big group hug and say they love each other.
Pwn’d. He pwn’d you Nic.
The second piece is an interview with Paul Berman. Berman has written a book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals” about the unwillingness of intellectuals in the West to confront Islamist writers.
Unapologetically high-brow and rivetingly polemical, it is a targeted assault on Tariq Ramadan, Europe’s foremost Islamist philosopher, as well as on Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, two prominent Western intellectuals whom Berman accuses of being willfully blind to the dangers that inhere in Ramadan’s Islamism.
The heart of the book seems to be this:
Berman contrasts this state of mind with the way things used to be: “We used to have a zillion writers on the topic of communism, writers who were all over the map, politically speaking, but who made communism a real topic. It was a perfectly normal thing for American intellectuals to weigh in on the debate over the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. But it’s not normal for people to weigh in on debates on Islam.”
Why the disparity? I ask. “People are mostly concerned that they’re not seen as Islamophobes. And if your principal concern is to show that you’re not Islamophobe, one way to guarantee that is to say not one word on the subject! Besides, people are frightened by a million things: They’re frightened by the topic, by the controversy that surrounds the topic, and obviously there’s a degree of physical intimidation that goes with this. There are, in fact, topics that no one in his right mind is going to take up for reasons of physical fear.
How should we engage with Islamists?
Berman is an indefatigable believer in the power of reason: “I’m not one of those people who believe that everything is doomed, because I think that the very thing that makes the Islamist movement so dangerous—which is its modernity—also allows us to argue with it. So it’s possible to engage in discussions, and actually to win them.” But Berman regrets that we, as a society, “don’t engage in argument with Islamists, and it’s because of our understanding of the word ‘engage.’ The most common definition is to say that to engage with people is to lie down like a carpet in front of them. You don’t criticize them, you don’t argue with them, you concede, and you turn yourself into Mr. Nice. That’s what we do with Islam.
“On the other hand, actually to engage with someone is to argue with them, to take them seriously, and if you’re an intellectual, it means read their books. But there’s a problem with doing that for a lot of people in all the Western countries. It’s as if to argue with someone is the first step toward going to war. If you’re arguing, they worry that’s going to lead to violence… so we shouldn’t even argue. They don’t see argument as an alternative to violence.”
The common American reaction to Islam is a combination of benign neglect and hysteria. We are the product of Enlightenment and we have something to offer. But we must be in the room, at the table and prepared. We won’t be prepared for the debate if we don’t read the books.
In the era of the Internet, it is sometimes hard to know how real something is. What I mean is that if there is a mention of something and no one else follows up on it, was it important? I’m sitting in a suburb of Seattle, and I read about something that happened in Iran. I don’t have the resources to go see for myself, so I rely on others. If other people don’t react to it, maybe the something I read was not that important or not that factual. In the days before the internet, this kind of information would have been first disseminated though an ex-patriate community before reaching English speakers. News editors would weigh the relevance of the information and present only those parts that they thought were interesting. These days, I have google and I use it to do the follow-up on my own.
I read this article and I couldn’t remember where I read it. There was a word, bastinado, that I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember the spelling. I looked for it by subject matter on the websites on which I thought the original article appeared. No luck. Today, I tried looking up the word. Bastinado is a form of foot torture. Okay, I didn’t know that, and I’m not so sure that I wanted to know it. The passage:
It recounts a fairly typical story: A young man named Mohsen Abbaspour (not his real name), who moves from apolitical apathy to action in the weeks before the vote, is outraged by the outcome and joins massive street protests, before being grabbed by goons and “disappeared” into an unspeakable labyrinth of violence. The intensity of the account put me in mind of Bernard Fall’s “Hell in a Very Small Place.” I know the author, who agreed that the true identity of Ms. Moqadam be revealed to me. The author is reliable, knowledgeable and assiduous. After speaking to the author, I have no doubt the events related in the book took place as described.
Mohsen is broken by the Islamic Republic, snapped like a twig. He is forced to name his “seditious” friends. His nightmare culminates in rape:
“Tied down as for a bastinado. The heavy man on top, panting. ‘Here! Have your vote back.’
“He loses consciousness from the pain. He is dead.
“Back in a different cell. All like him. No blindfolds in here. The floor is covered in blood and flies. They do it to them once a day, sometimes twice.”
This is from a book, “Death to the Dictator”, about how protesters in Tehran were rounded up and tortured after the election in 2009. Sexual assault is often a tool of the oppressor. I remember that various secret police groups in Latin America used it to try to destroy anti-government groups.
I told an old Iran hand, a former U.S. diplomat, about “Death to the Dictator” and Mohsen’s rape. “Oh, yes,” he said, “That was an old Savak technique.” The Savak was the shah’s brutal secret police.
This should give any Muslim pause: the secret police of Iran, now working for as an arm of the Muslim clergy, are using the same tactics as Savak did. I looked for references to the prison, Evin, and reactions to this story, but so far, there hasn’t been a lot on the web. Is this just too sensational? Or has fatigue set in? I don’t know.
I was writing a note to someone, iTunes had been playing Bach, and this song came on. The aching beauty of it grabbed me.
Wynton Marsalis, Yesterdays, Standard Time, Volume 3
Higher education is being massively underwritten by the federal and state governments, mostly through research grants and programs. In larger terms, this is an acceptable form of self-investment for the country. Investment stimulates growth, and in this case, usually growth in technology sectors. But this investment falls mostly to the middle class. It is another example of “welfare for white people”, along with most military spending. Most military spending is in procurement, for defense contractors. Those companies are overwhelmingly staffed by white people.
Colleges that operate for profit (what could possibly go wrong with that scenario?) have been sucking at the public teat also.
The for-profit education sector has soared over the past decade, making companies like ITT and Apollo Group into heavyweights. Driving much of the growth, Eisman explained, was the sector’s easy access to federally guaranteed debt through Title IV student loans. In 2009, he said, for-profit educators raked in almost one-quarter of the $89 billion in available Title IV loans and grants, despite having only 10 percent of the nation’s postsecondary students.
Eisman?
Steve Eisman, the outspoken investor whose huge wager against the subprime mortgage market was chronicled by author Michael Lewis in his bestselling book The Big Short, has set sights on a new target: for-profit colleges…
What is the modus operandi?
Another similarity between subprime lending and for-profit education is this, Eisman said: Both push low-income Americans into something they can’t afford—in the schools’ case, pricey programs that leave the students heavily in debt; what’s more, the degrees they get mean little in the real world: “With billboards lining the poorest neighborhoods in America and recruiters trolling casinos and homeless shelters—and I mean that literally—the for-profits have become increasingly adept at pitching the dream of a better life and higher earnings to the most vulnerable.”
Which companies is he shorting?
Eisman saved the ugliest part for last: As he sees it, the industry’s era of massive profits—ITT is more profitable on a margin basis than Apple, he notes—are about to end, thanks to new government regulations in the pipeline. He predicts big hits to the per-share earnings of Apollo Group, ITT, Corinthian Colleges, Education Management Corporation, and the Washington Post Company—which owns and relies on Kaplan for profitability.
Washington Post Company is being underwritten by federal dollars. Whodathumkit? Be seeing you.
Change happens. Sometimes it happens when you expect it sometimes not. Sometimes it happens even when you thought it never would. Obama getting elected was something that I thought would never happen. DADT ending is another.
When I was a soldier, I wouldn’t say that I was homophobic, but it was close for me. I started to write stories here about what I knew about homosexuality in the Army, but I don’t think I could cover the topic well in the amount of time I have to write this.
This article this morning is what prompted this post. A lieutenant colonel in a combat arms unit is gay. For those who don’t know what that means, this is a guy who has been at the top of his promotional group for a long time. He is a top soldier. He is probably a battalion commander. There are not that many battalions to command in the combat arms, and he commands one of them. Most officers will not get the opportunity to command a battalion in the combat arms. He wrote this:
I deeply believe that America is fighting the right fight in Afghanistan. I believe in this battle against our enemies. And, I believe that the US Army is the single greatest force for good the world has ever known.
But I want to tell the guys I eat lunch with every day about my partner. After all, these are the guys I risk my life with—the guys who think they know me. I can tell you every detail of how each of them met their wives; how one of them still feels guilty about an affair he never had, but thought about; how one of them cried so hard the day his son was born.
Yet they don’t know much about my life, except the most superficial details. Over the years, I have become good at evading and changing subjects artfully. To slip up—using the wrong pronoun when describing whom I was with during R&R, or mentioning who I talked to on Skype last night—is no longer something I worry about. I have become so good at this lying game it eats at my soul.
I have tried to come to grips with the military and how it relates to a free society and I think he nails it. I signed up because I wanted to be part of that force for good. So did he. And it has cost him.
In my own life, my partner has none of the privileges of a spouse. We have weathered three long deployments like any other couple might. But should I die in the line of duty, my partner would get no support from any official channels. He would be notified after my brother who is listed as my legal next of kin.
My partner and I have happily accepted my various assignments because we’re truly committed to the army, its soldiers and their families. But after our ten years together, my partner has earned the right to be told first about my death. He has earned the right to make my health emergency decisions. And, he has earned the right to be recognized for his sacrifices just as any other spouse.
I don’t think I am as homophobic as I once was. Some of my friends may be gay, I don’t know.
It looks like President Obama is going to end DADT, and that is a good thing.
When things around my desk at work get too noisy, I plug in my headphones to block it out. I have some Don Henley music on my player and his first album has some good stuff on it. I like “Lilah” and his reggae version of “The Unclouded Day”, but the cut that got the most airplay was “Dirty Laundry”. That song is about a television anchor and it came to mind when I saw this about Ann Curry.
When Ann Curry, news anchor of the Today Show, gave the commencement speech at Wheaton College in Massachusetts last Saturday, she listed several famous graduates — Wes Craven and Billy Graham among them — of thewrong Wheaton College. Curry mistakenly listed the graduates of an evangelical school in Illinois rather than the secular, once all-women college in Massachusetts.
I grew up in the Midwest and I know about the evangelical school, not the other one. Her response?
“I am mortified by my mistake, and can only hope the purity of my motive, to find a way to connect with the graduates and to encourage them to a life of service, will allow you to forgive me,” Curry said in an open apology letteron Wheaton’s web site. The text and video of her speech, posted on the site, have been edited of the mistakes.
I can see editing the text, but the video? Shouldn’t the video serve as a record of what really happened, rather than what you wanted to happen?
Martin Gardner, who teased brains with math puzzles in Scientific American for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic, philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, died Saturday in Norman, Okla. He was 95.
From Scientific American:
The 81-year-old Gardner seems more comfortable talking about others than about himself. Perhaps part of the reason is that he has no formal training in mathematics. In discussing his youth, he muses on religion and philosophy, topics to which we keep veering back. “When I grew up in Tulsa, it was called the oil capital of the word,” he says. “Now it’s known as the home of Oral Roberts. That’s how far Tulsa has gone down the hill.”
I used to read his column in Scientific American because it was so much fun.
Here is a taste: 3 Martin Gardner puzzles.
Thanks, Martin.
Fred Malek got to where he is the old fashioned way. By being a great backstabber. Timothy Noah has a great takedown on the mess that is Virginia.
On May 7 Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell appointedFred Malek chairman of his Commission on Government Reform and Restructuring. McDonnell, a conservative Republican who assumed office inJanuary, had achieved unwelcome national attention a month earlier when he declared April “Confederate History Month” without mentioning that the Confederates fought to preserve slavery (because, he explained to reporters, slavery did not rate as one of the issues “most significant for Virginia”). Two months before that, McDonnell had issued an executive order banning discrimination in state government that pointedly removed Virginia’s previous protections based on sexual orientation.
McDonnell ended up backing down a little after his whitewash of the Confederacy and his revocation of civil rights protections for homosexuals stirred a predictable outcry from the African American and gay communities. (See “What’s The Matter With Virginia?“) But Jewish groups have been slow to protest the appointment of Malek, whose most noteworthy prior experience in government reorganization dates to 1971, when Malek was a 34-year-old special assistant to President Richard Nixon. At Nixon’s request, Malek produced a memo denoting the number of Jews employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Malek then arranged the demotion of at least four people with Jewish-sounding surnames. (He didn’t actually know who was Jewish and who wasn’t; he guessed based on their names.) It was the last recorded act of official anti-Semitism by the United States government.
That is the lede and I can’t summarize the piece into a few short pithy paragraphs. Read the whole thing.