Foreign Dispatches

A Homage to the Weeaboo

It's not exactly surprising to hear me say that I am a great admirer of Japanese culture, especially the artistic and historic aspects, and have spent a great deal of time and effort mastering the Japanese language in order to deepen my understanding. I think that anyone with a sufficiently fine aesthetic sense cannot but fail to be captivated by reading tanka poems, learning about the tea ceremony, contemplating a rock garden or looking at ukiyo-e prints. What is more, as one learns more about Japan, one comes to realize that the aesthetic sensibilities underpinning all of these traditional aspects of the nation's culture survive into the present, and that they permeate life in modern Japan in a great many ways, from the way presents are wrapped in gift shops to the design of electronic goods made for export. Gaining a deeper understanding of Japan's history, language and culture can be a highly rewarding experience.

Unfortunately, as I've discovered, not everyone who claims to be an admirer of Japanese culture turns out to be interested in any but the most childish and facile aspects of said culture: on the contrary, what I've found is that the great majority of western "Japanophiles" happen to be immature idiots obsessed with anime and J-Pop in their least ambitious forms: Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Morning Musume, AKB48, etc., and it is precisely these sorts of people - aka "weeaboos" - who constitute the targets of the video below.

We are Star Stuff

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.

Lady Gaga is Boring and Derivative

Commenting at length about the ephemera of popular culture isn't really what I have in mind to write about on here, but on this occasion I must make an exception, as Nathan Heller does such a superb job of explaining what it is I can't stand about Stefani Germanotta's "Lady Gaga" persona. Some choice excerpts:

Notting Hill Carnival 2011

Here's a funny thing: as much as I enjoy taking photographs, so much so that I don't mind taking on all sorts of inconveniences to get the shots I want, I've never really been able to muster much enthusiasm about actually promoting my work once it's done. Rationally speaking, I understand the absurdity of this - I do want the pictures to be seen as widely as possible, and yet I operate as if I expect the work to promote itself - but what is interesting (from a psychological perspective, at least) is that understanding the irrationality of my behavior does nothing to overcome the inertia which precipitates it.

At any rate, on this occasion I'm not going to let my torpor win out, as I think the pictures I obtained this time around are some of the very best I've ever taken (slideshow here). Hopefully you'll agree.

On the Tottenham Riots

As you may be aware, the last two days have seen serious bouts of rioting occur in various parts of London. The instigation for the rioting was the shooting to death of a certain Mark Duggan, whose questionable acquaintances in life, and alleged behavior towards the police before being shot, certainly make him seem a less than entirely sympathetic victim. Even if Mark Duggan were the angelic figure that circumstances indicate he was far from being, it is also impossible to accept that the appropriate response to even the most unjustifiable shooting is to engage in large-scale looting, arson, stone-throwing and other acts of mayhem under the guise of expressing one's anger at the police.

The riots of the last two days cannot and should not be excused, and those who participated in them should be held accountable for their actions, but here's the thing: despite the utter wrong-headedness of the rioters' deeds, and the dubious character of the individual in whose name they've gone about their lawlessness, there is in fact a germ of justification for their hostility towards the London Metropolitan Police, a justification which goes well beyond the death in an alleged firefight - and here I stress the word "alleged" - of one man with shady friends. The fact is that the London Metropolitan Police has a history of biased and heavy-handed policing which presumes guilt if you happen to be the wrong skin color, regardless of however much the evidence might be in your favor.

Test Your Vocabulary

How many words do you know? Take this test and you'll receive an estimate, the value of which will be directly proportional to how honest you're willing to be with yourself about the limits of your knowledge ...

My own results are visible here - not surprising in the least, and certainly a decent indicator that the test isn't entirely without merit. Still, there's a legitimate question as to whether the percentile estimates provided with the test results really are on the mark, as the discussion here makes clear. I imagine most of the survey respondents would actually rank in the top 30% or so of the general population, vocabulary-wise.

Issues of ranking aside, I think that the primary point to take away from this test is just how vital reading - and, to be specific, reading "high literature" -  is to vocabulary acquisition. Most of the rarer and more obscure words are of the sort one would never be exposed to in a verbal or everyday literary context, and my experience is that much the same sort of thing is true in other languages, including German and Japanese. To illustrate, although I am able to handle German TV shows and newspaper articles just fine, I find my assumptions of fluency completely undermined by reading Thomas Mann's "Der Zauberberg", whose pages I cannot manage to get through without frequent consultation of a dictionary.

PS: I've actually touched on this language/vocabulary issue before - 5 years ago, in fact ...

China's Real Estate Bubble

As is obvious to everyone by now, much of the Western world suffered from a real-estate bubble over the last decade, and the consequences of the bursting of said bubble are still with us today in the form of low-growth; it isn't out of the question that the malaise of slow-growth which accompanied the bursting of Japan's bubble at the end of the 1980s might also now plague much of the West for a long-time going forward, especially given the need to reduce public debt. Still, for all of the above, the problems in Europe and America seem readily manageable when compared with the scale of the bubble that has arisen in China, as Nourel Roubini explains.

China's real-estate bubble can seem like an abstract problem of economic theory when put across in polite conversation as in the video above, but the following video should bring home just how massive the misallocation of resources has been.

The Chinese government may hold vast quantities of foreign reserves, but given the scale of bad debt which is building up within the country, and the lack of political legitimacy of the government which has allowed it to happen, even $2.5 trillion will likely prove insufficient to staunch the upsurge of discontent which will occur when this bubble bursts - and burst it will, as they always do.

Nonsense in the Netherlands

No one who has read this blog over the years can accuse me of having closed my eyes to the problems which have accompanied large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe, but there's a clear divide between taking sensible measures to contain a problem before it gets out of hand and pandering to the rawest prejudice - a line which Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party have marched right past.

Under current law the third generation children of immigrants in Holland are classified as Dutch, in terms of government statistics and entitlements, as long as both their parents were born there.

But the anti-Muslim Freedom Party is concerned that by treating the grandchildren of immigrants as Dutch, 80 per cent of whom are under 10 years old, it will stop being possible to measure their integration.

Why Mandatory Voting is a Bad Idea

One of the axioms of modern political journalism is that anything that encourages greater participation in the political process is a good idea by definition, and any measure which permits marginalized voices to be heard with greater force is by necessity a positive thing. Left unchallenged is the assumption that all voices are indeed worth hearing, however stupid, extreme or uninformed, and that allowing the indifferent, the insane and the ignorant to speak will not simply end up with them drowning out the voices of those with more knowledge and better judgment. The thinking seems to be that since history teaches us that outright dictatorship is bad, more participation is always better, and if only we could properly divine the true "will of the people", all problems in political life would quickly melt away.

Back in the Saddle

A year ago, I decided to take a lengthy hiatus from blogging. Several reasons lay behind this decision - e.g. the drudgery of dealing with spammers, the decline in meaningful feedback caused by implementing countermeasures against trolls, etc. - but the primary motivation for taking a break from writing was something else altogether: a desire to re-evaluate what exactly I should be writing, and why I should be writing it.

The year-long break has provided plenty of time to reflect on these matters, and the conclusion I've come to is one I think I'll be able to live with in the long term. Formerly I'd written with one eye on general accessibility, but from now on what I write will be for the satisfaction of one person alone: myself. This has never been a widely-read blog even at its most popular, and I lack the necessary inclination required to try to make it one, so the only way the blog's continued existence can be justified is that I should be able to feel some satisfaction about the quality of what I've written, whether or not it has an audience. I will no longer make any concessions whatsoever to a broader readership, and if that means my obscure vocabulary and abstruse subject matter drive my already minuscule audience to zero, so be it.