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Sunday, February 12, 2006
Saturday, February 11, 2006
the question of Western
(or maybe just Kevin's) "arrogance"
Commenter Sonagi (who unfortunately posted her reply to my long piece under the wrong entry!) calls my parent-child analogy in this post "arrogant," but fails to see the arrogance in assuming that temperamental Muslims have no control over their own actions and will inevitably react violently to things like cartoon depictions of Muhammad.
If Sonagi's view of human nature were correct, we would have no reason to blame such Muslims for anything: they aren't in control of themselves, being in the grip of psychosis or what have you. Sonagi, who comes off as a liberal in her comments, actually shares the view of many conservatives who have written such Muslims off as mere "animals," an unpleasant term I see lot online.
Sonagi also fails to realize that her judgement of Muslim violence as "wrong, wrong, wrong" implies that she has put herself in a position to judge others. (Personally, I think that's perfectly legitimate, and I applaud Sonagi's conclusion.) She doesn't want to deal with this fact, however, preferring instead to judge fellow Westerners, who are obviously wrong to complain when some among their number are captured (journalist Jill Carroll) or threatened with death (the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists), or killed (Theo van Gogh). Sure, according to Sonagi, such acts are wrong, but how arrogant we are to want to do anything about it!
There are reasons to believe the West has acted arrogantly throughout history in its dealings with other cultures. I find the arrogance question is a non-starter, however (this long post deals in some depth with why, though in a different context... the upshot of that post is that it's easy for everyone to accuse everyone else of arrogance). I also think Sonagi has confused arrogance with sincere belief in one's convictions. To believe something sincerely is to act according to what one believes-- to act, as Confucians might say, such that outside and inside are in harmony. It's what Westerners call "integrity." To believe something to be desperately wrong, especially when the problem concerns one directly, and then to do absolutely nothing about it is to lack integrity. Courage sustains integrity.
A Westerner will inevitably judge certain actions-- both within his culture and outside it-- as primitive or barbaric, if he sincerely cleaves to Western values (and people of other cultures will do the same according to their values). Open-mindedness is one of our virtues, but it would be dishonest to say we espouse infinite open-mindedness or infinite tolerance. Westerners also cherish variety, which is related to an open-minded orientation, but variety comes with some risk: in a variegated culture, people will inevitably step on each other's toes, which is why pluralism and tolerance are important. When we see a lack of such tolerance, we naturally recoil.
Or some of us do, anyway.
POST SCRIPTUM:
Another thing to remember is that the judgement that these Muslims are acting immaturely is not the same as saying that all Muslims are childish. Sonagi misses my point in implying that my "arrogance" is a paternalistic evaluation of the entire Muslim world. Nowhere on this blog will you find me arguing that Islam, as a religion, is somehow inferior, or inherently bad, or inherently violent. What you will find on this blog is the contention that religions are as they are practiced, and are not the sum of their doctrines. Doctrines are nothing when not incarnated in living adherents.
Is Islam a religion of peace? For many Muslims, it is. Those Muslims who are shocked at the West's perception of Islam as naturally bloodthirsty are probably sincere in their surprise. Such Muslims have probably spent their lives simply living day by day, not wanting to pick a fight with anyone. I have no quarrel with such Muslims. In fact, I stand against Westerners who are now trying to claim that there is something essentially wrong with Islam, and who reduce Islam to the Koran and to what little they know about the life of Muhammad.
We can make certain claims about the various Islams as they are currently practiced. We know that some strains are indeed violent in orientation. We know that hundreds of thousands of angry Muslims have taken to the streets in protest, not only of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, but of other supposed affronts as well. They may not realize it, but these angry Muslims make it difficult for the West to see who, exactly, counts as a "moderate" Muslim (moderate in the modern Western sense). While I believe that 1.3 billion Muslims cannot all be frothing head-choppers, I think it's legitimate to ask just whom we can reliably dialogue with.
We can note that Christians today are largely peaceful, especially in comparison to what we see on the news about certain Muslims. But we know that Christians in Nigeria haven't been peaceful (though, in their defense, I'd say a lot of those Christians have fought defensively against violent Muslims). Christians in Ireland still have a go at each other, and America has its home-grown abortion-clinic bombers, who damage clinics and see no irony in killing for Christ. Is Christianity a religion of peace? These days, it largely is. But that generalization hides as much as it reveals. So it goes with any other religion you care to name.
The above isn't moral relativism. These days, Christianity doesn't make the news for anything like the reasons Islam does. A few centuries ago, we could have had ourselves a good contest as to which religion was bloodier. Many modern Muslims have no trouble living peaceably in the 21st century; others, however, fully deserve our condemnation and do indeed act like children (albeit deadly ones). If Sonagi is willing to call violent protest "wrong, wrong, wrong," then she stands beside me among the arrogant for daring to judge others through the filter of her own cultural values.
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postal scrotum: your Saturday shit story
I got this email from an anonymous Hairy Chasms reader. After reading the email, I knew I had to turn it over to you, the drooling public. The writer has my admiration and envy. Read on:
I've got quite a story for you. The other day I had a bowel movement that ended somewhat uncomfortably with some up my ass and some in the toilet water. It was all one piece, and was rather stringy. I had to use some tissue and pull it out. It took three times, and I had to grab it and pull hard; it was that stringy. My rectum didn't feel quite the same for a few hours afterwards. I don't think it was a worm; the stringy something appeared rather fibrous when I looked at it in the toilet bowl. The other day I ate quite a bit of cow meat with this elasticky stuff around the bone or marrow or whatever it is. Next time I'll be sure to stay away from that elasticky stuff!
I'm guessing that no beef tendon could possibly be that long. If it does come from beef, then my surmise is that this was muscle fascia, which is fascia-nating.
(Charles, you may groan in dismay.)
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Islam and Western "pragmatism"
I've heard it personally from two sources now: the "pragmatic" response to the Muslim cartoon furor (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see here) is to avoid inciting more violence. When we get down to the specifics of what such avoidance entails, we see that it amounts to appeasement. It works like this: for the "pragmatist," it is abundantly clear that certain Muslims are prone to overreaction. Knowing this as we do, we Westerners would be at fault for provoking such people, because provocation in the awareness of Muslim oversensitivity is malicious. You know the angry dog will bite you if you keep prodding it with your foot, so it's your fault if you get bitten. What's more, provocation is impractical: how can we expect to change Muslim hearts and minds when we adopt a confrontational stance?
I'd like to devote this post to a rebuttal of such "pragmatism" in favor of a better, more realistic pragmatism that actually takes human nature into account and aims for a long-term view of the problem. The "pragmatism" outlined above represents, at best, a kind of superficial, short-term reasoning that leads people to believe appeasement to be the best course.
First, what is pragmatism? Generally speaking, people use the term when they want to set themselves apart from those they consider unrealistic. Unlike unrealistic people, pragmatists view themselves as grounded in reality. The implied value judgement is that grounding in reality is better than being unmoored from reality-- e.g., because one is too idealistic, or because one spends too much time daydreaming. A pragmatist prides him- or herself in taking a hard-nosed, practical stance, one that answers the immediate exigencies of the situation, and sees phenomena for what they are, not for what they might or should be.
Over at Oranckay's blog, commenter Sonagi offers an example of his style of pragmatism:
There is no contradiction in my thinking. I am a pragmatist who believes we must all weigh the benefits and costs of our actions. It is unwise to do something that will have a negative outcome simply because we have the right or worse, simply to show that we have the right.
[...]
Let me give you a real-life analogy. One of my neighbors has a steady stream of visitors, who occasionally park in my parking space. I have the right to have any vehicle parked in my space towed. I do not exercise this right because I suspect that the neighbor is a drug dealer, and I fear retaliation. I have two choices: call a tow and risk my car being vandalized or park an extra 3 meters away. I choose to walk the additional three meters. Getting indignant at a druggie won’t cover the cost of a new windshield or worse, medical treatment. Even though I make this choice, I have not lost my right to that space. I can change my mind anytime and call a tow.
To sum up my thinking: we ought to pick our fights carefully.
The idea that we should "pick our fights carefully" is legitimate. I agree that we should. But Sonagi says this by way of critique of those Westerners who, Sonagi feels, unnecessarily aggravate the situation by loudly insisting on their rights to free speech, etc.
My reply to Sonagi in that thread was this:
If the drug dealer using your parking space decides to use it every single day… what exactly have you gained by giving in to cowardice? The drug dealer learns the lesson that he can act with impunity.
Where the appeasing "pragmatist" misses the point is in his assessment of human nature. The assumption that things will get better, if only we lie low a bit, is not particularly courageous. More important, it's not realistic. As a teacher, I've been in plenty of situations where I've made the mistake of being too friendly, to my cost. Those situations happen less frequently now, because I've learned the wisdom of being firm, and especially being firm in a timely manner.
When it's time to discipline a student (or your child, or Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jong-il), you must do so swiftly, surely, and without rancor. Discipline must be seen as the direct consequence of wrong action. If the disciplined party has an inkling that the discipline was meted out in anger, or in haste, or belatedly, he won't respect it. If discipline is meted out inconsistently over time (e.g., Rumsfeld shakes hands with Saddam in the 1980s, then orchestrates his capture a couple decades later) this will also lead to disrespect.*
Many Muslims perceive the West as weak. While Westerners consider self-criticism a virtue, many outside our borders view our self-criticism, our culture of debate, as mere indecisiveness or lack of conviction. It doesn't help matters that we, as a culture, often are indecisive or at loggerheads. The Muslim world was encouraged by France's and Germany's opposition to America's designs against Saddam. Saddam himself probably thought we wouldn't go through with our war,** perhaps hoping that the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and his "contrepoids" (counterweight) philosophy would prevail and stay America's hand.
The West and its allies occasionally shoot themselves in the foot: Kim Jong-il, for example, relies on Seoul's and Washington's indecision to get what he wants, like a child adept at "playing" his parents. North Korea, in the role of the spoiled brat, knows it can sit back and make demands of its far more powerful interlocutors. In the end, Seoul and Washington gain nothing while Pyongyang continues its illegal nuclear program, its counterfeiting, its drug trafficking, and its systematic oppression of the North Korean people-- all while spewing outrageously self-righteous rhetoric whose crazed tone I often wish we matched, just for fun's sake.
The Muslim perception of the US, before 9/11, was that we were weak and would respond limply to an attack on our soil. The same Muslims have judged Europe the same way, and many European countries affirm the Muslim assessment of Western weakness daily. While it is fine for Western governments and newspapers to appeal for calm on both sides and to remind us that we should treat other religions and cultures with respect, it's another thing entirely to ban the reprinting of the Muhammad cartoons as a sign of so-called "respect."***
Sonagi's drug dealer has nothing to worry about. The police don't seem to be prepared to do anything serious, and Sonagi isn't about to make waves. The wild-eyed Muslims who make death threats against the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists (some of whom are in hiding) and burn foreign embassies have nothing to worry about, either. Why worry, when it's obvious that actions against the West have no negative consequences? Theo van Gogh is dead, and it's his own damn fault for prodding the angry dog with his foot. Blame the murder victim!
But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves. The pragmatic appeasers want to cut Western action off at the root: they would prefer that we stop openly acting outraged about Muslim outrage. Some, like Sonagi, seem to feel that we should feel outrage but then do nothing-- that we should, in fact, compromise with oppression by reducing our own range of movement to accommodate the violent Other. This is a comfortable, lazy position that allows us to pretend we have the moral high ground even as that ground is rapidly eroding beneath us.
Others feel that dialogue with the wild-eyed Muslims is the best answer. While I'm a staunch advocate of dialogue (interreligious, intercultural, diplomatic, etc.), I'm under no illusions that the people out there destroying embassies and threatening infidels with death are going to sit down calmly and listen to rational discussion. As far as I'm concerned, most of those people are already beyond redemption. Dialogue is reserved, then, for moderates (in the Western sense of the word, not the Muslim sense). What's more, we need to be focusing on the next generation of Muslims-- the children, the ones who are impressionable. If we don't move to communicate with them directly, they'll grow up just as indoctrinated as the current generation of willful idiots.
Above, I quoted Sonagi as saying:
It is unwise to do something that will have a negative outcome simply because we have the right or worse, simply to show that we have the right.
I understand what Sonagi is getting at, but I reject this claim. The attitude makes no sense. Sonagi's position immediately leads me to ask, "How can we know what is permissible to do?"**** This is the conundrum faced by the politically correct, who envision society as an up-tight place in which no one would dare think of offending anyone else. I proudly advocate the right to offend, and demand that offended parties unpucker their sphincters and relax. If you want to protest, fine. If you're planning to get violent, don't be surprised if someone shoots your stupid ass.
The politically correct, in their eagerness to keep everyone fiddling happily while Rome burns, forget the value of shakubuku. The term is closely associated with the Nichiren School of Japanese Buddhism,***** and refers to forceful polemic for the purpose of convincing one's audience. In the American idiom, we call this "shaking one's tree." For the politically correct, such an approach is inconceivable: people couldn't possibly respond well to a strong, challenging tone! But American comedians tackle issues of racism and sexism routinely and rebelliously; American audiences, composed of people of all races and both sexes who have real stakes in such discussions, don't quit the theaters in outrage when the comedians start their shtick. Quite the contrary: they laugh their fool heads off! That, folks, is the sign of a civilized society. Our comedians, most of them masters of shakubuku, educate us even as they infuriate us.
[Aside: I'm reminded of a riddle. Question: Why will the meek inherit the earth? Answer: Because that's the ONLY damn way they're gonna get it.]
Religious satire is a venerable part of Western culture. The creators of South Park have suffered no Christian death fatwas for their satirical portrayal of Jesus Christ (I'll be curious to see whether they have the guts to tackle Muhammad now). True: Trey Parker and Matt Stone might not fare so well in the Christian parts of, say, Nigeria. But they're in the West, and thank God we've got them. They help us avoid taking ourselves too seriously.
What worries the "pragmatic" appeasers is the same thing that worries bad parents. A bad parent, when faced with a child's demand, gives in quickly because that's easier than doing what's right (and didn't Albus Dumbledore warn Harry Potter that we'd have to make the choice between what is right and what is easy?). Such a parent is afraid of the initial kicking and screaming, unable to think beyond the kid's squalling to the ultimate effects of consistent discipline: respect for the parent, better behavior, and, in the end, a more fulfilling parent-child relationship.
The "pragmatic" appeaser wants to paint himself as being the one who sees the situation for what it is. To some extent, he does. He correctly anticipates that continued exercise of free speech in the face of Muslim anger will lead to even more Muslim anger. But he is unable to see beyond this: firmness in our collective conviction as Westerners can teach such Muslims that they cannot erase a basic and treasured value simply by playing the bully.
True pragmatism recognizes that human nature responds to firmness, decisiveness, consistency, and conviction. This is not to say that the West should cease all internal debate to give the impression of absolute solidarity: no Muslim would believe such a posture now. But we should be absolutely unrepentant about what our rights are and how freely we enjoy them. This doesn't mean throwing sensitivity out, but it does mean being proud of the breathing room we allow our own resident jerks, dickheads, and assholes-- many of whom are not merely buffoons, but also, in their own weird way, teachers.
Since we're talking about true pragmatism, which involves seeing the situation as it is, I'll observe that the current Muslim anger is not merely a sudden explosion of outrage. It is quite calculated. As has been noted by others, many of the demonstrations in various countries have been spurred, tacitly or openly, by those countries' governments. The original Jyllands-Posten publication was in September of 2005. The cartoons appeared again in Egypt in October, 2005. While there may have been some small-scale outrage when those images appeared at the time, in neither case was there anything like the rampant stupidity we're witnessing now. The time-delay nature of the outrage is suspicious.
This puts a wrinkle in the discussion I'm having with the Pragmatic Appeasement School. If Muslim outrage is, to some degree, a tool being manipulated by Muslim governments, how does it help matters for us to strive for appeasement? Sonagi asks us to choose our battles carefully, but from what I've seen, we've been far too passive for too long, and the battles are being chosen for us. Extremist Muslims are relying on the gentler aspects of our culture to spare them from the potentially frightening and devastating consequences of their own barbarity.******
A true pragmatist takes more than a short-sighted view. Like a good parent, he harnesses the power of ideals and takes a future orientation, because those ideals provide us practical direction, guiding our actions and leading us-- those of us with courage, anyway-- to something better than the present. If a pragmatist is sincere in his evaluation of the consequences of his and others' actions, he'll do more than cede Lebensraum to the Muslim idiots currently making headlines (or to drug dealers in parking lots), and he'll stop insulting the rest of us by assuming the wrong things about human nature. You can't be pragmatic when your observations are fundamentally mistaken.
*The UN is perhaps a better example of what happens when your discipline is inconsistent. UN sanctions, for example, did little to impress Saddam. Other murderous regimes also take the UN lightly: condemnation produces little more than a shrug from the tyrants. The slaughter in Darfur continues. North Korea allows no close supervision of food distribution. Iran has now stood up in defiance of the UN Security Council (which wasn't planning on acting for several weeks or months, anyway). In the comments thread at Oranckay's blog, Sonagi referred to the UN Declaration of Human Rights as "toothless," and s/he has a point. But it's toothless precisely because the UN has almost never followed through on any of its warnings. See the psychology I'm talking about?
**Newbies to this blog might not know that I opposed the war. I don't consider myself either liberal or conservative (in the American senses of those terms), but I failed to see the practical long-range benefit of trying to "establish democracy" in the Middle East. Removing Saddam from power and establishing military bases-- that I might understand. But nation-building has been a hard sell for me, for reasons you'll find on this blog if you dig around.
***Muslims and non-Muslims are right to point out that the West itself puts limits on freedom of expression. American TV recently "bleeped" the Rolling Stones during the Super Bowl, for example; we have a bizarrely prudish TV culture, often a disappointment to relaxed Europeans.
The current disconnect in the "cartoon war" between Muslims and Westerners lies in the conflation of the theological and the political-- quite natural for Islam, which admits no secular reality, but fundamentally antithetical to the pluralistic, secularistic Western mindset. Many offended Muslims see the cartoon issue in terms of blasphemy, which is a religious notion. They then move from that thought to the idea that there should be no published blasphemy in our culture, which shifts the discussion to the political.
****The adjective "permissible" galls me. Whose permission do we require? Radical Muslims'? Are we allowing others outside our culture to determine what we should and shouldn't do? Might as well put those burqas on now, eh? It's wrong for women to show too much skin, after all, and our TV shows, which are broadcast beyond our borders, must be causing our Muslim brothers and sisters a lot of distress. By this logic, we really should do absolutely nothing, because we can never be sure how we might offend someone-- Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, etc.
*****Remember Dennis Quaid in the 1980s movie "Innerspace," chanting Namu myoho renge-kyo! Namu myoho renge kyo! to a petrified Martin Short to persuade him to leap out of a moving truck? That chant-- In the name of the Lotus Sutra!-- comes from Nichiren, the founder of the Nichiren School.
******Even France, for God's sakes, is building up its stockpile of nuclear weapons. President Chirac has made clear that he keeps the nuke option open for terrorist nations.
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Friday, February 10, 2006
Thursday, February 09, 2006
hmmm
I should have posted something of substance earlier, but it's been a busy Thursday: today was the final day for my Freshman English classes. Sad goodbyes, lots of food eaten and cell phone photos taken-- and final exams. Yes, I gave my two classes their final exams today. I have to correct those this evening and tomorrow, then enter the grades in my nifty Excel file (I'm not too bad at navigating through Excel in Korean), and turn the final grades in to the office sometime tomorrow evening.
My Freshman 1 class gave me the highest ratings I've ever received on teacher evaluations-- nearly perfect. Lots of cute little hearts and "I LOVE KEVIN!" declarations scrawled on their forms. My Freshman 3 class, as befitting the students' higher level and greater worldliness and sophistication, proved harder to please. I haven't done the calculation, but I suspect I've got about a 4.7 or 4.8 out of that class. None of the complaining comments pertained to me personally: many students in that class were thoroughly dissatisfied with the textbook we'd used, which hadn't been geared to their level. For whatever reason, our department had decided to make all levels of Freshman English use the same textbook. I adapted to this by giving my advanced class more time to tackle tougher subjects than the book was offering. While this was enough for some of my 3s, it wasn't enough for all of them. Another complaint, among both my 1s and my 3s, was that there were simply too many students in the class. I agree. I had twenty-five Level 1s and twenty-one Level 3s. A conversation class should, ideally, have no more than 7-10 people.
But that is neither here nor there. We now look forward.
So tonight-- ah, tonight, my love... I grade tests. Expect the next "Smells Like Golgotha" to appear around midnight, Seoul time, or shortly thereafter.
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Smells Like Golgotha: Chapter 20
UPDATE: This rocks. I just found that my paper on Ray Grigg's The Tao of Zen is listed over at The Dao House, a website that seems to serve as a clearinghouse for Taoism-related links. (Pinyin romanization dominates over there. I have mixed feelings about pinyin. While I do think qi is a cooler spelling than chi, I'm not a fan of Lao-tzu's becoming "Laozi," and Chuang-tzu's becoming "Zhuangzi." "Laozi" sounds too much like "lousy" in my head.)
The site's writeup says this:
In his BigHominid's Hairy Chasms blog, Kevin Kim discusses Grigg's contention that "Zen is basically Taoism with a superfluous Buddhist cortex." Note: scan down through the left column first, or you may find yourself repeatedly distracted.
NOTE TO PEOPLE IN KOREA: Some Korean Net cafes have blocked all GeoCities sites. I have no clue why. You might have to visit the site through a proxy if you're at a PC-bahng.
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Wednesday, February 08, 2006
last batch
And now: the final batch of silliness from our Angry Arab:
I've think we've beaten the dead horse until it was properly undead. So we'll stop here and look for juicier targets. I hope you've enjoyed this series. Thank you for flying Jewish Conspiracy.
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what remains of my collection
Here are the brush art images I still have. Email me if you're interested in having one (full disclosure: black borders are cyber-add-ons, and not part of the original works).
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here's a paranoid thought
JOYOUS UPDATE: My mistake. Ignore the following post. The reason no pics were uploading is that I had been trying to upload the original, 600-dpi scans, which are huge files, especially in TIFF format. Once I clicked "browse" and found the correct directory, I was able to upload my made-for-Web, 72-dpi files with no problem.]
I appear to be unable to upload any more images to Photobucket, despite having signed on for their "unlimited capacity" subscription. Just a few seconds ago, I began to wonder whether this might have anything to do with the nature of the photos I've been uploading-- Photobucket does have a Terms of Service to which we're supposed to agree, and while I haven't been uploading porn, I have been leaning on the sacrilegious humor.
(Joshua at One Free Korea wrote that I am "a regular practitioner of more-or-less principled blasphemy.")
So-- did Photobucket deliberately scissor off my scrotes? I have to wonder. They'd notify you of a TOS violation, right? I'm able to sign on and see my album without difficulty; the images on the album are still being displayed on my blog, so it's not as though Photobucket's servers are down, and they haven't pulled the photos I'm currently displaying. What the hell's going on?
In any case, you get no new photos until I figure out alternative photo-posting methods. I might sell my soul to Flickr, but I wasn't impressed with their service when I tried it over a year ago. Opinions on good pic-uploading services are welcome.
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Smells Like Golgotha: Chapter 19
NB: I create these pics in batches, and then post one daily. If you read the comments to some of my posts, you'll have noted that Malcolm Pollack of waka waka waka "anticipated" the INRI joke: although I'd made the above pic a couple days before his comment appeared, his comment appeared before I published the image.
Just so you know: for Malcolm, INRI stands for, "I'm nailed right in." Oh, that's bad. It's almost bad enough to make you manifest stigmata.
You might be interested in Malcolm's recent post on the Muslim controversy. See here.
UPDATE: On a somewhat related note, check out this depiction of Jesus as the Korean peninsula. You read that right. Click the link, which is brought to you by Jason.
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Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Ave, Nomad!
The Lost Nomad sent a few links my way.
First link, to a fisking-worthy article (I'll come back to this one):
Cartoons and the Clash of "Freedoms"
Second link, which produces mixed feelings:
A Kick in the Eyeballs
Third (and most recent) link:
Why Can't Muslims Take a Joke?
A key paragraph from this article:
Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.
Then there's this, later on:
Globally, we discern a clear link among literacy, secularism, and birth rates; the high birth rates of traditional society fall sharply with greater literacy and weaker religious belief. In the non-Muslim world, literacy alone explains 46% of variation in population growth.
In the Muslim world, however, the link between rising literacy and falling population growth is much more pronounced. In the Muslim world, variation in literacy explains nearly 60% of the variation in population growth, not a surprising result considering that the Muslim world begins with extremely high population growth and extremely low literacy rates.
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the blogosphere shows its stuff
From Gaijin Biker of the blog Riding Sun (might want to get a load of his heartening Muslim apology post while you're at it):
And from Hairy Chasms reader Curtis S., via email:
UPDATE: Many thanks to Joshua of One Free Korea for his support (see here and here).
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Sneoul!
Looks like we've had our first major Seoul snow for 2006. A bit powdery in the morning, with a slushy under-layer. This afternoon while walking home, I noticed that most of the roads-- even our back streets-- are remarkably clear. Some freezing to occur overnight, I assume, but very little to slip on tomorrow morning. Or so I hope.
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Smells Like Golgotha: Chapter 18
UPDATE: Wimps at NBC give in to Christian pressure. For a history of the term "Crucifixins," which certain Christians appear not to have noticed before now, check this article out. At the same time, be happy our Christians don't call for the penknife beheading of network execs.
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Monday, February 06, 2006
Ave, Bluto!
Bluto, a co-blogger over at the right-leaning My Pet Jawa, notes that Islamists are now responding in kind to the recent inflammatory cartoons (i.e., the ones depicting Muhammad and Islam in a bad light-- see a writeup of the history of the toons over at Gypsy Scholar) by publishing their own Holocaust-bashing art.
Soon to be lost in the Islamist shuffle will be the fact that thousands of maddened Jews and Danes will not be taking to the streets and shouting, "Death to Islam! Death to Arabs!", etc., and running straight to the nearest Syrian or Jordanian or French* embassies to burn them down and threaten their staffers. Maybe a few white skinhead types will start sharpening their knives and yammering about "ragheads," but we Westerners label such people, who are by no means common, as ill. I'm trying to wrap my mind around a culture that considers it normal-- or at least justified-- to storm embassies, fire ill-gotten weapons into the air, shout death slogans, etc.
The biggest canard is the still-rampant Edward Said meme: that all this unfocused rage is some sort of "natural" or "inevitable" response to poverty and oppression, a reaction to the horrifying rape of the powerless Orient by the maleficent West. I suppose the "victim" rationale explains why China (known for its oppression) and India (known for its large swaths of poverty) are engulfed in flames as I write this. While poverty and oppression and a history of certain Western injustices doubtless play some role in Muslim grievances, the evidence of other countries, religions, and cultures suggests that there is nothing-- NOTHING-- inevitable about current Muslim reaction to a few cartoons.
I refuse to call these extremists animals. I won't dehumanize them and thereby give them an excuse for their behavior. They're grown adults with, in many cases, plenty of access to information about the outside world. They know how others respond to poverty and oppression. If they react with violence, it's because they've made a choice** to do so. These aren't victims-- not even the poorest of them. They're children of a religion that, from my superficial study of it, does inculcate definite notions of right and wrong. I can't hold these people accountable if I write them off as crazy or inhuman. They are neither. What they are is wrong.
*Sorry... just being an asshole. Heh.
**In a private email, I called these Muslims' behavior "simply sick." This doesn't contradict the idea of choice at all: raging lung cancer is the end result of a long series of choices every time a smoker is faced with a cigarette. My own blubberosity doesn't grant me victim status: it's the result of bad choices I've made, and which I can unmake. The process takes effort, of course; to continue down the path is to succumb to laziness, and laziness takes many forms, including the spiritual.
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