If you know anything at all about the history of the 20th century, then you've probably read of the famous phrase uttered by Neville Chamberlain, and usually in the context of his being held up as an exemplar of craven cowardice in the face of militaristic aggression. As attractively simple as this portrayal may be, however - particularly to politicians looking to score cheap points - it does little justice to the reality of Chamberlain the man or his political efforts; as a corrective, I strongly suggest listening to all 8 minutes and 27 seconds of the full speech in which these often-quoted words were spoken, and judging for oneself whether the speaker seems at all the cowardly fool he has so often been made out to be.
It was only a few months that I expounded on the dangers of assuming that where democracy is concerned, "more" necessarily means "better." What I hadn't foreseen at the time was that events in the Middle East would so thoroughly vindicate my skepticism about the supposedly inerrant wisdom of "the people", especially when all segments of a society are given a voice in equal proportion to their numbers, however ignorant, illiterate and subservient to religious superstition each such voter may be.
In the course of the last week, I have learnt of the deaths of two men whose work I greatly admired, first Apple founder Steve Jobs, and today, C and Unix creator Dennis Ritchie. The death of Steve Jobs had a particularly strong effect on me, and in truth I'd spent much of the last week struggling to put together the necessary words to articulate precisely why I should have been so aggrieved by the death of a man who I had never even met, particularly as I have never been a blind admirer of all things Apple, and fully recognize that Jobs was as flawed a human being as any other, and not a particularly likable one at that, at least until his initial ouster in 1985.
I still intend to say a few words about what exactly Steve Jobs meant to me, but in the meantime I'd like to share something by another person who died before his time, and who I considered a personal hero growing up, the man who introduced me to the beauty of science, and the sheer strangeness and magnificence of this universe in which we reside. I am speaking, of course, of Carl Sagan.
I find that Sagan's words here help lend perspective to the deaths of any individuals, however much I might have looked up to them or admired their contributions: the fact of the matter is that any individual life is but an instant in the grand scheme of things, and as much as the passing of particular persons may affect us, this little rock we inhabit will keep on turning for hundreds of millions of years yet, just as it has for the 4.5 billion years it did before we came along. This perhaps may seem like cold comfort to some, but I find it oddly reassuring: from dust we came, and to dust we shall return ...
PS: As an aside, I'd like to mention that I did eventually get to meet Carl Sagan shortly before his untimely death in 1996: he'd happened to come to Dartmouth to give a talk back, and afterwards I went up to ask for his autograph, which he provided on the back of a copy of a paper on the history of group representations which I'd brought with me. I remember Sagan saying making a joking comment about the paper, but what exactly the comment was or why I found it funny I can no longer recall; what struck me most at the time was being surprised at just how tall Carl Sagan was, and how lucky I was to actually be meeting in the flesh the very man whose "Cosmos" ignited my fascination with science as a child. In as far as there are no doubt very many people out there upon whom Carl Sagan had an effect, it simply isn't true that "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones" - at least not in this case.
One of the topics I've visited on here multiple times in the past is the never-ending arguments Japan has with Korea and China over its alleged refusal to apologize for crimes committed during the heyday of Japanese colonialism - never mind that such claims are as false as can be. At any rate, it seems that the latest Japanese government is back in the apology game, with Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada being the latest politician to engage in the obligatory groveling, directed on this occasion to Korea. Knowing how prone to amnesia Korean nationalists can be when it comes to Japanese apologies, it will be interesting to see just how long it takes after this apology before the next future outburst of rage from the Korean peninsula over Japan's supposed lack of contrition (or, when such critics are pressed on the facts, the "insufficient sincerity" of said contrition) ...
PS: What did I tell you? That didn't take long! The Hankyoreh's editorial staff exceed even the capacious limits of my cynicism: apparently the Korean meaning of Japanese "sincerity" is agreeing to any and every demand Koreans happen to make, including sovereignty over the Liancourt Rocks.
I think any adult with half a brain* should know by now that the Daily Mail is hardly to be counted amongst the more objective or thorough news outlets in the English-speaking world. Indeed, this is one of the few periodicals whose Uncyclopedia entry gives a far more accurate idea of what the newspaper is really about than the corresponding Wikipedia article: fear-mongering, sensationalism and fanning the flames of nearly every prejudice under the sun. Still, you'd think the Daily Wail's "journalists" would adhere to a certain minimal level of conscientiousness when spinning their tripe, and that there'd at least be a kernel of truth to whatever outrageous claim they may choose to present to their audience. Unfortunately, any such assumption would be wrong, as this German-language article illustrates [excerpts translated below.] Apparently putting fictitious words in a researcher's mouth is not a problem where the Daily Heil is concerned, especially when it presents an opportunity to indulge one of the primary fascinations of its bigoted readership - Adolf Hitler.
My attitude towards religion has long been identical to that held by Thomas Edison, but while I refuse to consider the claims to truth or insight made by any religion on its own behalf as more than so much nonsense, one thing I do recognize is that, to paraphrase Gershom Scholem, the study of religious nonsense can nevertheless be worthwhile. In particular, if one is willing to read the Bible with a critical cast of mind, considering it as the product of historical, human forces that it is rather than the revealed and inerrant truth that so many Jews and Christians consider the Bible to be, a great many insights into the past become accessible.
I don't know why it is that so many people feel obliged to sugercoat the life of a man like Jesse Helms upon his passage: to read about Helms' life even in organs like the New York Times, one would think he were a man of honor in spite of having a few flaws, when in truth Jesse Helms was nothing more than a power-hungry, vicious, ignorant, Bible-thumping racist and homophobe who just happened to have a talent for exciting the same prejudices in large numbers of white voters in North Carolina.
Fortunately, not everyone is willing to abide by such hypocrisy: Christopher Hitchens sets the record straight - the world is a better place without the worthless bastard's presence in it, and the only thing to be sad about is that Helms didn't die much sooner.
In debates about the American Civil War and its causes, one often hears the argument advanced that the efforts of the Northern abolitionists were unnecessary as slave labor was already on the way out, owing to its declining profitability. I've always found this argument preposterous on its face, but in the course of reading Götz Aly's "Hitler's Beneficiaries", I am struck anew by the utter mendacity of such an assertion: not only did the Nazi regime make slavery pay, but it paid on a truly colossal scale, something on the order of $100-150 billion in the space of a handful of years. If slavery could be made to pay so handsomely in 1941-1945, and in a Germany whose economy was already far more knowledge-intensive than the American South would be until perhaps the 1980s*, why are we supposed to believe that slavery would be abolished today without a war to force its abolition? Why would the South have been willing to go to war to preserve a soon-to-be obsolete institution in the first place?
Human slavery is and likely always will be profitable, at least until reality catches up with Blade Runner and artificial sentient humanoids can be made to do what men, women and children in chains would have (and even that would simply be replacing one type of slavery with another). Optimists might like to believe otherwise, and nothing will stop neo-confederate apologists masquerading as "libertarians" from continuing to make stupid arguments to the contrary, but the viability of slavery is something that will not change in the foreseeable future.
*To be perfectly candid, it isn't even clear that this is true today, considered objectively. 1930s Germany was a creative and innovative powerhouse on a scale that the American South just doesn't seem to be.
PS: A little searching turns up this paper on the economics of slavery in the antebellum South. As expected - and in contrast to the rubbish to be found on "Lew Rockwell" and similar sites - the paper gives every reason to believe that slavery would have continued to thrive had the American Civil War been averted.
I've said my bit in the past about how utterly false the claims Koreans make about the era of Japanese rule tend to be, only to be met with lots of angry but empty-headed nonsense to the effect that I must be wrong, facts be damned, because Imperial Japan could never have done anything positive for its colonial acquisitions: after all, the Koreans say so loudly and angrily all the time, right?
Right now, if you wander over to the TMZ website, you'll see this inflammatory headline at the top of the article list: "Will Smith -- Hitler, Schmitler; He Wasn't That Bad". You might be forgiven for thinking that Will Smith had suddenly lost his mind and started cribbing from the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" or something, but when you actually go take a look at the source article, what you find is something else entirely:
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