Balu's response to Wendy Doniger's tripe in the NYT

NYT does not publish responses to their OpEds, so they turned this back.  Balu posted this on TheHeathenInHisBlindness yahoo egroup.  He writes: "Note though that this piece merely expresses my irritation…"

I am from Bangalore, India, but work as a professor in Belgium, Europe. My name is not Batra but am known as ‘Balu’. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of either the BJP or of any of the organizations collectively known as the ‘Sangh Parivar’. Even though I am born a ‘Hindu’, some of my ‘liberal’ associates are convinced that I am a ‘crypto-Christian’. So much about my credentials, which are required to make two points of some importance about some sections of the American academia.

These thoughts arise in the context of Wendy Doniger’s op-ed piece in the NYT. This American ‘expert’ on Indian culture and ‘Hinduism’ epitomizes very accurately the state of the American academia when it talks about other peoples and cultures: filled with ignorance and pompousness.

Ignorance: she does not even know that the article 295A of the Indian Penal Code (which she refers to) is not about ‘blasphemy’. (Does she know the meaning of the word, I wonder.) Yet, this inconvenient fact does not faze her from holding forth on the issue. Neither does the fact that being a ‘Jew’ is irrelevant to whether one has a ‘Christian’ missionary zeal or not. (Does she know that Judaism also ‘proselytized’ during the Antiquity?) After all, the so-called ‘Hindu fundamentalists’ have been repeatedly accused of exhibiting precisely that zeal which Wendy claims is inappropriate to describe her because of her Jewish birth. This nonchalant attitude towards others is typical not only of her but also of most academics doing India and Hinduism studies in America. Ignorance might not prevent the American academia from sermonizing to the world but, when coupled with pompousness, it damages what many good Americans hold very dear to their hearts: ‘the American national interests’.

Pompousness: Wendy Doniger suggests that the voice of a “narrow band of narrow-minded Hindus” drowned out the voices of “the broader, more liberal parts of Indian society”. This suggests that the latter must have been ‘speaking’ too; how otherwise could their voices be ‘drowned out’? Two questions that even an ordinary child would ask are of relevance here. The first: how could a narrow band ‘drown out’ the voice of a broader band? A possible answer would attempt to identify those in power. One of the things that everyone, especially such intellectual experts, should know about India is that the entire media in India has been under the hegemony of liberal and left-thinking intellectuals ever since independence. Nehru was a socialist; he encouraged leftist intellectuals. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, consciously pursued this strategy: almost all academic institutions and funding agencies are completely in the hands of progressive and left-leaning people. How then, and this is the second question of the kid, could a small number of people (without institutional power or control of the media) outshout the majority especially when it is in power? Surely, this does not jell. But this imperviousness to reason is the required stepping stone for the pomposity, which she exhibits when she says that “the dormant liberal conscience of India” was awakened by the “stunning blow to the freedom of speech”. Let us leave aside the question of logical consistency (an inappropriate term to describe Wendy’s thinking) about the “broader band” that ‘speaks’ and yet is alleged to be dormant. The real issue is far more important.

That consists of some questions. If we know history, we know too that ‘liberalism’ (as we understand the term today) is a product of the extraordinary culture that the West is. We need to acknowledge the contributions of such people like John Locke or John Stuart Mill, if and when we speak about this wonderful political doctrine. We know too that Indians are indebted to the British for this gift to their thinking. Yet, there are questions here: did the Indian culture go around banning books before the British came to India? Was the Indian culture a prey to systematic campaigns against intellectual productions before the emergence of a liberal conscience? Are we to suppose that if the westernized “liberal conscience” does not wake up, Indian culture will fall victim to the “narrow-minded Hindus”? If, indeed, India burnt and banned books before ‘liberalism’ made its advent into India, Wendy’s thought carries credibility.

Actually, that would be a sheer nonsensical claim because it is the other way round: western culture banned and burnt books before the advent of ‘liberalism’; it banned and burnt books also after the advent of ‘liberalism’. Protestants burnt the books of Catholics, Catholics banned and burnt Protestant writings; the Germans, amongst other things, burnt down the entire library of the University of Louvain. The Americans, for their part, unlike the French colonizer, simply bombed away the libraries in Vietnam and elsewhere. In fact, as our history books tell us, it was an enlightenment thinker like David Hume who called upon people to burn libraries, if they housed books that say nothing about “matters of fact” or speak about logic since they can “contain nothing but sophistry and illusion”. He was, of course, referring to books on theology, among other things. (Thus, his logic would have burnt Wendy’s books, seeing that they lack both!) Hence, it is unvarnished pomposity to think that only the western culture embodies freedom of thought and expression, while other cultures are not only primitive but also barbaric and authoritarian.

This implicit attitude towards others (which cannot be effaced by any number of explicit pronouncements, if one intends to remain consistent) characterizes not Wendy alone but also most of the American academia that writes about India and Hinduism. It is this stance that informs the relationship of America with other peoples and nations as well. It is this posture that damages the ‘American national interests’. The incident of Wendy is one of the many warning shots from other parts of the world to all serious, well-intentioned American academics: wake up and listen to what others are saying before it is too late. Do not keep repeating inanities and indulging in table-thumping and breast-beating. Do some serious thinking for a change. That would help us all.

Friendly greetings,
Balu

 PS: Wendy Doniger's OpEd "Banned in Bangalore" is here.
PPS: Worth a read, an interview with Dinanath Batra.

Yet another raccoon

I think there is one more still, in the attic.

The Sepoys Gather Again

My take on the following is - if you want to fight for human rights in India, then fight for them, in India, as resident citizens of India.   As it is, the following from J.E. Menon on Bharat-Rakshak looks like a Leftist recreation of the sepoys that were the basis of the British rule of India.

The following is long, but one must ask, what is the University of California doing with such dubious people?  You will need to read through to know just how dubious.

-Arun

PS: on a personal note, FOIL's attack on the Indian Development and Relief Fund was useful for me. I had been unaware of IDRF's excellent work, and now I am a regular contributor.   Some may see something contradictory in my stance.  But I'm trying to fund schools and orphanages.  Several of the people who are organizing the effort described below have supported secessionist movements in India.

PPS: The National Endowment for Democracy is another CIA front, using NGOs to meddle in other countries' affairs.  This is from US Army Retd. Col W. Patrick Lang's blog, not some conspiracy theorist.   I suspect that the "People's Rights Project" is just another cover under which to meddle in India.  That it is fronted by people of Indian origin means zilch.

Ukraine coverage

In the Guardian among many other things, Simon Jenkins points out:

What has been encouraging about the Ukraine crisis so far has been the unusual emergence of a "case to be made" on both sides. For once we have seen a "revolution" with some balanced coverage. The BBC's Newsnight investigated the "fascist coup" in Kiev thesis, and found some truth in it. The legitimacy of Viktor Yanukovych as elected leader was contrasted with his manifest flaws, as was the motley character of the Maidan crowd. We know of the divided loyalties of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

In the past week I have read more than I dreamed possible of the vexed history of Crimea, of Ukraine's role in Russian identity, and of Putin's complex relationship with Russian pride and paranoia. I have seen Moscow's re-occupation of Crimea as both understandable and illegitimate. Its legal crudity – without even awaiting a local referendum – compares with the political crudity of Nato's attempted encirclement.

 Not so fast, Stephen F. Cohen would say, that is the UK only, or UK and Europe.  Not the USA!
In the Nation he writes

The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to US national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines—particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin—is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm.

There are notable exceptions, but a general pattern has developed. Even in the venerable New York Times and Washington Post, news reports, editorials and commentaries no longer adhere rigorously to traditional journalistic standards, often failing to provide essential facts and context; to make a clear distinction between reporting and analysis; to require at least two different political or “expert” views on major developments; or to publish opposing opinions on their op-ed pages. As a result, American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

After listing a long series of examples of distortions, Cohen writes:

Such factual distortions point to two flagrant omissions by Snyder and other US media accounts. The now exceedingly dangerous confrontation between the two Ukraines was not “ignited,” as the Times claims, by Yanukovych’s duplicitous negotiating—or by Putin—but by the EU’s reckless ultimatum, in November, that the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided country choose between Europe and Russia. Putin’s proposal for a tripartite arrangement, rarely if ever reported, was flatly rejected by US and EU officials.

But the most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a US-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy—is deceitful. The EU’s “civilizational” proposal, for example, includes “security policy” provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.

Dirty tricks in Ukraine?

The recording of a call between the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union, Catherine Ashton, is available here.

The authenticity of the call was confirmed by Estonia.

The call took place after Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet visited Kiev on February 25, following the peak of clashes between the pro-EU protesters and security forces in the Ukrainian capital.........

During the conversation, Paet stressed that “there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”

According to the Estonian FM, “all the evidence shows” that the “same snipers” at Maidan were shooting at people from both sides – the police and the protesters.

Ashton reacted to the information by saying: “Well, yeah…that’s, that’s terrible,” adding that the matter is worth investigating.

If this about the snipers is true, then please spare us the moralizing.

More clarity from Jakob de Roover

In Outlook India.

The major obstacle here is what I called ‘the theoretical poverty of the study of Hinduism’. Why do I speak of theoretical poverty? Consider some counter-questions: What makes the Hindu traditions into religion, that is, into manifestations of the same kind of phenomenon as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism? How does one test the presence of religion in some culture or society without presupposing it? Does it make sense to say that purohits are priests, puja is worship, that devas are gods, or that Manusmriti is sacred law? Is the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India a religious conflict or not? Which criteria allow one to distinguish between a conflict that is religious and one that is not?

These and many similar questions remain unanswered in the academic study of Hinduism. They are consistently misunderstood as questions of defining ‘words’, as though the presence of religion in some culture depends on how we decide to define the word ‘religion’. (If it really did, we could just define ‘religion’ as ‘that which is present in all cultures’ and the problem would go away. But it hasn’t.)

 .....

All of this points to fundamental flaws at the heart of a field of study. Scholars have been studying Hindu religion for centuries now. If it turns out that this entity is imaginary, the resulting tomes are about as useful as detailed studies of the unicorn and the leprechaun. Of course, this does not mean that Hindu traditions and practices are imaginary. It means that they have been thoroughly and fundamentally misunderstood precisely because they are conceptualized in terms of religion.

English terms like ‘religion’, ‘priest’, ‘god’, and ‘worship’ are more complex than words like ‘rain’, ‘sunshine’, or ‘darkness’. They are theoretical terms embedded in a specific way of understanding the world. That is, there is conceptual framework where such terms had a clear meaning and reference: generic Christian theology. And this is where the rub lies: once you draw on concepts inherited from centuries of Christian thinking in order to make sense of a culture, you inevitably end up with standard implications of this framework. In the case of India, the central implication is that an implicit notion of ‘false religion’ continues to structure the dominant understanding of the Hindu traditions as' Hinduism’ and ‘the caste system’. If that is the case, even scholars who ‘genuinely love Indian culture’ will end up producing deeply problematic descriptions, albeit in unconscious and unwanted ways.

The Embarrassed Hindu Upper Caste Male?

Over on kafila.org, (I refuse to give them a link, but do see Sufiya Pathan in Outlook India), we are treated to the idea that Doniger's essential fault was that she embarrassed the Hindu Upper Caste Male, the "Hindu gentleman" described in Jakob de Roover's essay in Outlook India.    Among one of the emerging themes there seems to be that the Soorpanakha episode in the Ramayana (cut off her nose) encompasses the entirety of How The Hindu Male deals with female desire.

Well, I can only speak for myself.  I was not an "Amar Chitra Katha" (the comic book) child.  I grew up on Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan books, in particular those by C.Rajagopalachari and by K.M.Munshi.  I cannot state for sure, but I must have read them between the fourth and ninth grades.   Anyway, I leafed through C. Rajagopalachari's Mahabharata today, a slim 330 page paperback.  I see Devayani proposed to Kacha, who turned her down, on the grounds that he was more like a brother to her.   I see Devayani propositioned Yayati, who tried to turn her down on account of her being of a higher caste.  But Devayani's father cleared the way for that marriage. Sarmishtha propositioned Yayati,  and he had children by her.  Devayani eventually found out, and her anger led her father to curse Yayati  with premature old age.  Amba, who had been kidnapped by Bhishma,  proposed to Salva, who turned her down on account of Bhishma having defeated him in battle when he tried to thwart the kidnapping. Draupadi favored Arjuna at her swayamvara.  Urvasi, the divine apsara,  made amorous advances towards Arjuna, who turned her down on the ground she was more like a mother to him.  A result of that was Arjuna was cursed to live as a eunuch for an year.   Sachidevi pretended to be ready to yield to Nahusha, to bring about his downfall. In explaining Rukma’s position in the Kurukshetra war, Rajagopalachari reminds us that of when his sister, Rukmini “abandoned all maidenly reserve” and sent an emissary to Krishna to ask him to marry her (and rescue her from being married to Sisupala).

And this is in a book for school children.

Life as a dhimmi - 13

 The BBC reports:

A jihadist group in Syria has demanded that Christians in the northern city of Raqqa pay a levy in gold and accept curbs on their faith, or face death.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) said it would give Christian residents "protection" if they agreed to the list of conditions.
...
...
...
The directive from ISIS, citing the Islamic concept of "dhimma", requires Christians in the city to pay tax of around half an ounce (14g) of pure gold in exchange for their safety.

It says Christians must not make renovations to churches, display crosses or other religious symbols outside churches, ring church bells or pray in public.

Christians must not carry arms, and must follow other rules imposed by ISIS (also known as ISIL) on their daily lives.

The statement said the group had met Christian representatives and offered them three choices - they could convert to Islam, accept ISIS' conditions, or reject their control and risk being killed.

"If they reject, they are subject to being legitimate targets, and nothing will remain between them and ISIS other than the sword," the statement said.

A group of 20 Christian leaders chose to accept the new set of rules, ISIS said.

QOTD

Regarding the discussion about Ukraine on Fareed Zakaria's show  on CNN:

Zakaria himself was so worked up that he looked as though he might have a stroke.  Too much Oxbridge and Ivy is a heavy burden for anyone to bear. 

-- retd. US Army Col. W.P. Lang

Comment on the news

"You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text," Kerry told the CBS program "Face the Nation."  (Reuters)

At which point, Dick Cheney piped up,  "What, you were talking to me?"

PS: Dailykos.com points out even Kerry's hypocrisy:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted in 2002 for the U.S. to invade Iraq on specious WMD claims, and who reiterated in 2004 that he would do so again, even if he knew there were not weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has really laid into Russia on the Obama administration's behalf. 

The Copyright Law and Freedom of Speech

In a decision (2-1)  that apparently has not woken up any liberals, or Hollywood producrs,   the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered Google to take down the Youtube video of "Innocence of the Muslims".  This is the video that sparked riots in the Middle East including the riots leading up to the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi.

The basis of the decision is that the Court thinks that Cindy Lee Garcia, the plaintiff and one of the actresses in the video, and who claims a copyright interest in the video,  is likely to prevail in her copyright infringement claim.   Per the court documents, the producer of "Innocence of the Muslims", Mark Basseley Youssef hired Cindy Garcia, gave her a four page script in which her character appeared, and paid her $500 for three and a half days of filming for a movie "Desert Warrior".   The movie "Desert Warrior" never materialized, instead Youssef dubbed over the material and used (some of?)  it in "Innocence of the Muslims".   Google says her part amounts to five seconds.

The Court notes that

Google argues that Garcia didn’t make a protectible contribution to the film because Youssef wrote the dialog he spoke, managed all aspects of the production and later dubbed over a portion of her scene.

And of course, Youssef hired Garcia, and holds the copyright to the script (so Garcia's work is derivative).   The Court asserts even under such circumstances that an actor's work is original, and the actor (well, maybe Garcia only) likely holds a copyright interest in her appearance in the movie.

We need not and do not decide whether every actor has a copyright in his performance within a movie.  It suffices for now to hold that, while the matter is fairly debatable, Garcia is likely to prevail.

Now, the case is not likely to end here, and here the Court did what is another apparent innovation - it ordered Google to take down the Youtube video while this matter is litigated.  It dismisses the idea that this constitutes a prior restraint on the freedom of speech.

The dissenting opinion in the case points out that what the Court majority has done is issue a mandatory injunction, and that the legal standard for issuing mandatory injunctions is very high, "the law and the facts must clearly favor the moving party".

Instead, the majority makes new law in this circuit in order to reach the result it seeks.  We have never held that an actress’s performance could be copyrightable.  Indeed, “[t]here is little case law or statutory authority as to the position of performers as authors of an audiovisual work under U.S.  law.” F . Jay Dougherty,  Not a Spike Lee Joint?  Issues in the Authorship of Motion Pictures under U.S. Copyright Law, 49 UCLA L. Rev. 225, 300 (2001) 

The Court's opinion is available here (PDF).

We note that the question of why the Court sought a particular result is not mentioned in the opinion.  We can only guess, and in that context, we should note that the Federal Government had pressured Google strongly to take down the Youtube video.  The ACLU, that ever-alert watchdog, has decried the heckler's veto exercised by the Court.

We have a term for censoring speech because others might react badly to it—it's called a heckler's veto. And it's prohibited under our Constitution. It's the reason we don't prohibit controversial speakers like the KKK from marching down public streets out of concern that bystanders will react violently. Under our Constitution, we don't allow the government to censor speech on the theory it might cause someone else to misbehave.  Our Constitution—and common sense—tell us to target the threats and the violence, rather than the protected speech.

Only two of the three judges voted for the misguided takedown order—the third, Judge Smith, balanced the harms differently, and noted that taking down the film was a heavy-handed and unprecedented move by the court. Let's hope the case gets heard by the full Ninth Circuit court, and that they hear the clarion call of Judge Smith's wise words.

My guess is that the American Academy of Religion and its members will remain silent about this blatant misuse of the copyright law to suppress inconvenient and offensive speech.   This, in my opinion, arises from their ideological predilections - they are much more respectful of their fellow Abrahamic monotheistic faiths than of pagan religions. The conservative media will make some noise about it, not because of the infringement on freedom of speech, but because it involves a hated group, the Muslims.

Compare the relative silence (the opinion was given on February 26th and today is March 1st)  to the brouhaha when Penguin Books in India, under the pressure of a court case brought by a private party, reached a private settlement with the plaintiff and withdrew the offending book by Wendy Doniger.  It would seem to any objective person, that in the US, the Court has created new law to get the result that officialdom strongly desired.**

Putting aside the double standard in the media, there is, I predict, going to be a very unfortunate side-effect.   We should remember that section 295-A of the Penal Code in India, the law under which the suit against Penguin Books was brought, was enacted because of the threat to the British Indian Government that there would be nationwide violence if there was no legal remedy for a pamphlet (Rangila Rasul), that offended Muslims.   It would seem that even a United States Federal Court is not immune to pressure arising from the offending of Muslims on an international scale; and of course, this pressure arises from large-scale violence -- riots in Egypt and Libya and all over the Middle East.   The sad conclusion will be drawn is that violence is effective.

** I should make it clear, if it hasn't been so far,  that to me, neither the withdrawal of Doniger's book from India nor the removal of "Innocence of the Muslims" from YouTube is a good outcome.

PS: There is a third thing to note.  Consider all the people in the Middle East who did not riot in response to "The Innocence of the Muslims".   Yielding to bullying as in the case of Section 295A or in the case of the US Ninth District Court grants effective representation of the Muslim communities worldwide to those who would riot.  

PPS: Good news, dailykos informs us

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has entered a revised Order to make clear that:

This order does not preclude the posting or display of any version of “Innocence of Muslims” that does not include Cindy Lee Garcia’s performance.

 

Ukraine - Billionaire-funded revolution?

http://pando.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-ukraine-revolution-groups-with-us-government-documents-show/

For what it's worth:

Pando has confirmed that the American government – in the form of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – played a major role in funding opposition groups prior to the revolution. Moreover, a large percentage of the rest of the funding to those same groups came from a US billionaire who has previously worked closely with US government agencies to further his own business interests. This was by no means a US-backed “coup,” but clear evidence shows that US investment was a force multiplier for many of the groups involved in overthrowing Yanukovych.

PS: Elevated from the comments to make what my concern is more clear (it is not the independence of Greenwald and others' journalism).   This is what a retired US Army Colonel has written:

It is becoming clear that the Nuland/neocon/NED campaign against Russia in Ukraine was probably a covert action intended to punish Russia for not supporting US/Israeli/Saudi and Turkish policy in Syria and to some extent with regard to Iran.  I have no specific knowledge of US actions in this but "back azimuths" run into events and actors make the true story obvious.  Was there to be a second phase of the spread of revolution, a phase aimed at Russia itself?  We will probably never know.

and this:

"What we are risking is a great power confrontation. The various Russian strategic thinkers have already said that NATO bases in Ukraine would be a serious strategic threat to the existence of an independent Russia. So, if Ukraine moves into the EU and then NATO bases are on their way, there's no doubt whatsoever that southern and eastern Ukraine are going to split off, and I just don't believe the Russians are going to give up their naval base on the Black Sea.

So, if the Americans push too hard, and by Americans I mean Washington, of course, it's going to be a great power confrontation. Very, very serious thing... I mean what in the world do you think Washington cares about democracy in Ukraine? They don't even have any in the United States! We have a police state that spies on everybody, the whole world. The media is a propaganda ministry. It's worse than it ever was in the Soviet Union. People have no idea of what's going on and what they're told about the Ukraine is a fabrication."  Paul Craig Roberts quoted in the Voice of Russia.

-------------------------------------

If you are Russian, it is very easy to see what has happened in Kiev as a neocon inspired US plot for which the "second act" will be an attempt to foment  a similar uprising in Russia itself.  This belief is reflected in the article quoted above.

Paul Craig Roberts and Phil Geraldi make strong cases for the continued influence of the neocnservatives.  As a conspiratorial "vanguard" the neocons think nothing of changing their official party identity in pursuit of power.

Americans should ask themselves if people like Victoria Nuland and Michael Rubin are dragging the United States toward a crisis and possible conflict with Russia.

The neocons gave us the Iraq war.  What a triumph that has proven to be.  What new mischief will they heap upon the heads of the American people?  pl

1968 - Petula Clark Touches Harry Belafonte's Arm

Happened to be awake at 6:00 AM on Saturday, and I happened to hear this WNYC program.

On this special hour-long episode of Witness from the BBC World Service, listen to incredible interviews looking at the African-American experience as told by people who were there.

One of the interviews related to this, from 1968:

Steve Binder, the producer of a NBC special starring Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte, chronicles the time when Clark became the first white woman to touch a black man on US television.

I'm probably more impressionable that early in the morning.

The rules of the Academy

Wiki describes the Catholic Holy Communion a.k.a. Mass (emphasis added):

Communion rite

All together recite or sing the "Lord's Prayer" ("Pater Noster" or "Our Father"). The priest introduces it with a short phrase and follows it up with a prayer called the embolism and the people respond with the doxology. The sign of peace is exchanged and then the "Lamb of God" ("Agnus Dei" in Latin) litany is sung or recited, while the priest breaks the host and places a piece in the main chalice; this is known as the rite of fraction and commingling.

The priest then presents the transubstantiated elements to the congregation, saying: "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb." Then all repeat: "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed." The priest then receives Communion and, with the help, if necessary, of extraordinary ministers, distributes Communion to the people, who usually approach in procession. Silence is called for following the Communion procession. A Prayer After Communion is then proclaimed by the priest while all stand.

What are these "transubstantiated elements"?

Wiki explains in another article:

Transubstantiation (in Latin, transsubstantiatio, in Greek μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is the change whereby, according to Catholic doctrine, the bread and the wine used in the sacrament of the Eucharist become, not merely as by a sign or a figure, but also in reality the body and blood of Christ. The Catholic Church teaches that the substance or reality of the bread is changed into that of the body of Christ and the substance of the wine into that of his blood, while all that is accessible to the senses (the outward appearances - species in Latin) remains unchanged. What remains unaltered is also referred to as the "accidents" of the bread and wine, but this term is not used in the official definition of the doctrine by the Council of Trent. The manner in which the change occurs, the Catholic Church teaches, is a mystery: "The signs of bread and wine become, in a way surpassing understanding, the Body and Blood of Christ."

So, what is this ritual? An objective observer could say this is ritual cannibalism. ("not merely as a sign or figure")   

Academics might note in passing that this ritual has been on occasion described as such, but when studying Catholics, their history, etc., they go by the Catholic understanding of their ritual.   Can you imagine someone who keeps insisting that the Catholics practice  ritual cannibalism will get a platform in a major university in the United States to publish and propagate those views? How many academic journals will accept their papers?

But, these rules do not apply to Hindus and Hinduism.  Anyone who has the temerity to point out this glaringly obvious fact is accused of being a "Hindu fundamentalist", whatever that might mean. 

Karma

If, today, a child gets polio, it is likely the virus is from Pakistan.

Why Pakistan?  The global campaign to eradicate polio is foundering there.  After Pakistanis came to believe that the CIA used the cover of a vaccination team to find out Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts, vaccination teams have been the target of violence.

....The latest casualty was a police constable killed Tuesday protecting a team of vaccination workers in northwest Pakistan. During a two-day vaccination campaign in Peshawar earlier this month, 5,000 police were deployed to protect health workers,....

But how did the phenomemon of Osama Bin Laden come about in the first place?  That is a long story.  Ostensibly it began with Carter and Brezezinski, and continued with Reagan, and America's Saudi allies and so on, funding and arming Islamic fundamentalists, with the goal of bleeding the Soviet Union.  And it continues from there.

One might say, well, in this case, the end justified the means.  But that is being myopic.  Historically,  English-speaking empires have never hesitated in aiding and abetting illiberal Islamic forces to further their own ends.  That goes even to the other "root cause" of why children may still get polio - the existence of Pakistan.   And every "end justifies the means" that violates good principles has resulted in further problems.

Bad actions have corresponding consequences - but they appear to affect others than those who committed those actions, which seems like a travesty.  Which points to another fact which we ignore too often - we are united in our humanity.   This will hurt all of us, one way or the other.

PS: Obama recently declined to do in Syria what would amount to supporting Islamic extremists; it went against the historical grain, and the angst it caused in America's neo-imperialistscons was evident.

Pet parrot helps solve murder

Story from Agra.

Freedom of Speech in American Universities

Per Wiki, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a non-profit group founded in 1999 that focuses on civil liberties in academia in the United States. Its goal is "to defend and sustain individual rights at America's colleges and universities," including the rights to "freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience--the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity".

One of FIRE's main activities has been criticism of university administrators whose activities have, in FIRE's view, violated the free speech or due process rights of college and university students and professors under the First Amendment and/or Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. FIRE lists over 170 such instances on its website.
.....

FIRE has no stated political affiliation, and has represented the causes of parties with varied political viewpoints, ranging from conservative, liberal, and religious student groups to other activists such as members of PETA[9] and Professor Ward Churchill.

You can find FIRE on the web here. FIRE rates universities as green (free), yellow and red (restrictive). Among the major universities rated as green are Carnegie-Mellon University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia.

Wendy Doniger's home, the University of Chicago, is rated as yellow, actually pretty good compared to the sea of red in its state of Illinois.

We short, dark, rice-eaters should be truly honored that such people as Doniger and her colleague Nussbaum are concerned about the freedom of speech in far away places like our native India, while neglecting the problem at home. It is very much in the illustrious tradition of Lord Edward Cromer, who was very concerned about the rights of Egyptian women, but opposed female suffrage at home.

Sheldon Pollock's remarks

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/030220/vernacular.shtml
Chicago Chronicle, Feb 20, 2003:

....
Although cosmopolitanism might be viewed as a solution to some problems, a fear also exists that across the world people are forgetting their own literary cultures and traditions and learning the cosmopolitan English, absorbing themselves in Hollywood movies and Western goods.
.....

But as a scholar of the intellectual and cultural history of pre-modern South Asia, Pollock, the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies in South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, has a different perspective.

He noted that “global” cosmopolitan cultures usually existed before local literatures arose. In his research, he has found that often people began to form literary traditions only in reaction to encounters with international languages and literary traditions, like those of Sanskrit, writing down their own vernacular languages in scripts borrowed or adapted from older, broader literary cultures. He has found similar things in the history of Latin and the regional languages of Europe.

Starting in both Western Europe and South Asia in the ninth century C.E, a wave of vernacular literatures began to spread; people started writing expressively in their local languages for the first time.

In an essay titled “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Pollock details the phenomenon. “Vernacular literary cultures,” he said, “were initiated by the conscious decisions of writers to reshape the boundaries of their cultural universe. They renounced the larger world for the smaller place, and they did so in full awareness of the significance of their decision. New, local ways of making culture ... new ways of ordering society and polity came into being, replacing the older translocalism.” This idea will be argued at greater length in a book due next year, Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Before Modernity: Culture and Power in South Asia to 1500.

Pollock said the relationship between the older empires and languages is still a matter of debate. Using Latin as an example, he said, “It’s a great mystery how this local language from the Tiber Valley became a global language. Why did Latin win out? Other great imperial rulers like Darius of Persia and Ashoka of India were not interested in imperial languages or ‘cosmopolitanism’ at the level of culture.”

Pollock is trying to think through different ways of being imperial in the ancient world. “Of course, every imperial ruler shared the same basic goals. They wanted to beat up a lot of people and take their money. But they all did it in different ways–Augustus and Darius said they did it because god was on their side, whether Jupiter or Ahura Mazda, and he had granted them the title to the whole world. But no one in South Asia ever appointed a divine real estate agent–it’s a very important distinction in the history of political thought.”

Pollock noted that histories of language and literature usually are written as if such phenomena are forces of nature. “I’m trying to carve out a history of culture and power where people can be seen to make informed choices about what to do. Vernacularization does not take place like leaves falling in autumn or butterflies emerging from the chrysalis, but rather is a process of informed choice.

“Cultural affiliation has a major element of choice, including media choices. What language do I write in? It was under colonialism, many people think, that South Asians were first confronted with this problem. Do I use English? Do I write in the master’s language? But if we think historically we see a far deeper phenomenon of human culture. Is there an overall shape to these patterns of local and global, cosmopolitan and vernacular, in both culture and power? What kind of reality do they have for the people choosing the one or the other?”

De-Macaulayization - 3

Some relatives of mine visited Israel recently.  They had a language problem, most of the people understood no English, only Hebrew.   This was surprising to me, I thought that American influence on Israel was much greater. 

(via Shadow Warrior) In the first of a pair of recent articles in the Hindu, Shekar Swamy (Group CEO, RK Swamy Hansa, and Visiting Faculty, Northwestern University) points out that in India, English is not used as much as one might think, and that vast pools of talent are left untapped by requiring English.

In the second article,  Swamy points out that of the top ten countries in volume of exports (China, USA, Germany, Japan, France, South Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, Italy and UK) all of them conduct their business in their native language.

We often hear that India’s success in IT is only due to the predominance of English in the country. While it has been useful to have a pool of English-speaking people to draw from for the IT industry, to conclude that therefore English should be the dominant language is hugely misleading. 

Take the case of Samsung Electronics. Among the predominant IT companies in the world, it from South Korea where the Korean language is predominant. 

Set up in 1969, Samsung in 2012 recorded global sales of $189 billion which is higher than the sales of the two tech giants IBM (sales $105 billion) and Microsoft ($78 billion) combined. This demolishes the theory that English has to be the predominant language of the country for success in the global IT world. 

What is required for success is a clear intent, converted into powerful strategy and backed by relentless execution --- and not the English language.

 His conclusion:

The negative impact of this policy on the country has been huge, with the masses kept out of participating in the development of the nation by a linguistic wall, resulting in perhaps the largest underutilisation of human capital ever. At a time when the country was required to be participative, democratic and all inclusive, laying emphasis on English made the nation become a preserve of the exclusive and the elite.

and

While English can remain optional, every Indian should have the opportunity to get ahead on the basis of knowing his/her own language. There will be a surge in growth if people are able to learn and grow and participate in their own language.

Thinking afresh on the language issue will be hugely beneficial. Is any political party willing to see this opportunity?

My take is that there are some logistical barriers, especially the fact that India has scores of millions of speakers of each of about fourteen major languages, that already major literary languages.  By the same token though, there is a huge audience for any decent quality translations and for original books.





 

A second RISA Lila

Koenraad Elst narrates.

Untangling the Knot by Jakob de Roover

Jakob de Roover (a student of Balu) says in many words  in Outlook India pretty much what was said in few.

In the meantime, our middle-aged gentleman’s daughter has gone into the humanities and her excellent results give her entry to a PhD programme in religious studies at an Ivy League university. After some months, she begins to feel disappointed by the shallowness of the teaching and research. When compared to, say, the study of Buddhism, where a variety of perspectives flourish, Hinduism studies appears to be in a state of theoretical poverty. Refusing to take on the role of the native informant, she begins to voice her disagreement with her teachers. This is not appreciated and she soon learns that she has been branded “Hindutva.”

Around the same time, she detects a series of factual howlers and flawed translations in the works of eminent American scholars of Hinduism. When she points these out, several of her professors turn cold towards her. She is no longer invited to reading groups and is avoided at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion. In response, this budding researcher begins to engage in self-censorship and looks for comfort among NRI families living nearby. Her dissertation, considered groundbreaking by some international colleagues, gets hardly any response from her supervisors. Looking for a job, the difficulties grow: she needs references from her professors but whom can she ask? She applies to some excellent universities but is never shortlisted. Confidentially, a senior colleague tells her that her reputation as a Hindutva sympathiser precedes her. Eventually, she gets a tenure-track position at some university in small-town Virginia, where she feels so isolated and miserable that she decides to return to India.

Intellectual freedom can be curbed in many ways. The current academic discourse on Indian culture is as dogmatic as its advocates are intolerant of alternative paradigms. They trivialize genuine critique by reducing this to some variety of “Hindu nationalism” or “romantic revivalism.” All too often ad hominem considerations (about the presumed ideological sympathies of an author) override cognitive assessment. Thus, alternative voices in the academic study of Indian culture are actively marginalized. This modus operandi constitutes one of the causes behind the growing hostility towards the doyens of Hinduism studies.

 and

Again this strand surfaces in the Doniger affair. When critics pointed out factual blunders from the pages of The Hindus, this appears to have been happily ignored by Doniger and her publisher. She is known for her dismissal of all opposition to her work as tantrums of the Hindutva brigade. The debates on online forums like Kafila.org (a blog run by “progressive” South Asian intellectuals) smack of contempt for the “Hindu fanatics,” “fundamentalists” or “fascists” (read Arundathi Roy’s open letter to Penguin). More importantly, they show a refusal to examine the possibility that books by Doniger and other “eminent” scholars might be problematic because of purely cognitive reasons.

Curious

I wonder how many of those U. Chicago professors, so concerned about freedom of expression in India, are watching the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Published on Feb 19, 2014

While performing under a sign advertising the Sochi Olympics, Pussy Riot and their supporters were attacked by Cossack militia with horsewhips on Wednesday.

Read the story here: http://nyti.ms/1magU9l

PS: I can proudly say I have not watched one minute of it.

RISA Lila

A trip down memory lane.  The RISA Lila, narrated by Rajiv Malhotra
1. RISA Lila - 1 Wendy's Child Syndrome
2. RISA Lila - 2 Limp Scholarship and Demonology

One of many things to note - when Motilal Banarsidass, an Indian publisher, withdrew a book because it was offensive to its Indian market, Western academics pushed for a boycott.   e.g., Professor Cynthia Humes:

If nothing else, a no-holds-barred academic boycott against Motilal Banarsidass will provide Indian presses with an answer to extremists on why they should not censor peer-reviewed works in the future...RISA, take a stance against efforts to deny academic freedom. Boycott Motilal Banarsidass. Spread the word. Act.”

I wonder if they are now pushing for a boycott of Penguin Books, that withdrew Doniger's book.

Manasa Taramgini on Sheldon Pollock

Read this like a story from the Panchatantra. Quote:

Pollock is the most interesting of all the American Indologists alive today, but surprisingly the least known to the average Hindu, despite having been given the padma-shrI puraskAr by the secular government of India. On one side Pollock is the opposite of Doniger – he is a solid scholar who has pursued key avenues of Hindu thought that were begging to be pursued. When I first started looking into these lines of Hindu historical development there was no Indian or western student pursuing them. Then I discovered Pollock and, to give due credit, found him to be taking the course that needed to be taken. In fact Pollock’s studies cut down several fantasies of some of the white Indologists including Doniger (as Agrawal has correctly noticed) and the German gang. However, Pollock is no saint – in fact despite seeing the truth before his face (and perhaps privately acknowledging it, for he appears neither schizophrenic nor dumb) he spins of web of well-crafted obfuscations to deface Hindu history.

Let us look at a well-known example from Pollock that has been repeatedly quoted by other Hindu-hating dasyu-s in raising rabble about Hindus and their political institutions.

Pollock wrote an essay on the historical awareness and interest in the rAmAyaNa among the Hindu elite (rAmAyaNa and the Political Imagination in India, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 52, No.2 1993). Here Pollock claimed that the rAmAyaNa has been a key part of the Hindu awareness and has inspired Hindu political systems for at least a 1000 years.

Even as Pollock was making this claim, other assorted mlechCha Indologists and Hindu haters claimed that the interest in Ayodhya was due to Ramanand Sagar’s popular Hindi TV serial on the itihAsa. Now various Hindus pointed out that Ramanand had little to do with the popularity of the rAmAyaNa and the popularity of his TV serial was because the epic is one of the first things a real Hindu learns in his life. Several people saw Pollock’s position as supporting the Hindu position that rAmachandra’s life and thereby Ayodhya had been important to the Hindus even before Babar had demolished the temple to build his eye-sore of a “disputed structure”.

Filled with indignation, Lorenzen, a mlechCha well-known for his studies on kApAlika-s and kAlAmukha-s, declared the essay of Pollock to be “deeply flawed”. This shows how the mlechCha-s are sensitive to even the slightest chance of the Hindu position being reality. However, Pollock, as a true-blooded, Malhotran U-turning mlechCha clarified that his article was woefully misinterpreted and that it was really meant as a critique of Hindu nationalism and of the “instrumentalization” of the rAmAyaNa for political dominance and manipulation by the Hindu elite. Once he clarified the matter, Pollock’s article became dear to the assorted South Asianist dasyu-s who have no better business than to meddle in our affairs.

Says Pollock:

“If the rAmAyaNa has served for 1,000 years as a code in which proto-communalists relations could be activated and theocratic legitimation could rendered…it makes sense that it would be through this mytheme par excellence that reactionary politics in India today would find expression in the interests of a theocratization of the state and the creation of an internal enemy as necessary antithesis.”

There can be little doubt that Pollock is very clear in his conclusion here. Yet, elsewhere in an interview to another Hindu-hater Pollock states:

“Of course, every imperial ruler shared the same basic goals. They wanted to beat up a lot of people and take their money. But they all did it in different ways–Augustus and Darius said they did it because god was on their side, whether Jupiter or Ahura Mazda, and he had granted them the title to the whole world. But no one in South Asia ever appointed a divine real estate agent–it’s a very important distinction in the history of political thought.”

So the man is master of what our yavana cousins called eristics! This is his device of obfuscation of Indic history by talking both ways and trying to present the facts and at the same time be a true-blood member of the mlechCha academia that gangs up against Hindus to sign instruments like the vatsala-patrikA.

What ails Hindus - from 2004

http://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2004/03/03/a-hindu-upheaval/

As I see it the Hindus do have a serious problem- their knowledge of their own texts and culture is pretty shallow. The number of dvijas learning the vedas these days has dwindled. They have to depend on the same Indologist, about whom they have been warned, to understand the veda. The knowledge of the purANas and itihAsas is likewise abyssmal. The knowledge of the tantra is likewise dismal. Thus the Hindus while alerted and angry have still not overcome the effects of Macaulayism. This makes it easier for a Courtright or Doniger to make up fables about the R^igveda or the jaiminIya brAhmaNa or the kAmasUtra, and the Hindus may not be able to pick right from wrong. For example Malhotra had to depend on Witzel, a well-known detractor of Hindus, rather than his own knowledge of the R^igveda or jaiminIya brAhmaNa to pick out the flaws of Doniger. This phenomenon put the Hindus in a relatively compromised situation.

The other problem is after Macaulayitis what?

I feel that Macaulayitis is not really reversible in full, so it has to be factored into any future consideration. A corollary to this is that HIndus should have translations of Sanskrit texts and expositions of the Sanskrit material in English. Have Indian scholars contributed positively to this? One heroic attempt comes to mind: the purANa translation effort. But why are the vedic saMhitas like maitrAyaNi, kAThaka etc lying unattended? Why are the ongoing efforts by Hindu scholars in translation not being popularized. Instead we see proliferation of the highly distorted translations of the Arya Samaj group.

100 years ago Tilak rued the fact that Hindus had very poor access to information. His words uttered then have full force even now. I believe the Hindu upheaval has to go hand in hand with improved Hindu education.

Kappa Beta Phi

Kevin Roose crashes a Wall Street Society.

The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality.

Reversing the gaze

From the Introduction of Invading the Sacred:

The essays and critiques of Western scholarship on India’s religions contained in this book must be seen as the early signs of this awakening, and of this questioning. It is thus an important chronicle of the beginnings of a shift. Some of the essays are critical surveys of what is still being purveyed as factual and veridical knowledge about India and Hinduism. These are often startling and shocking to the Indian reader, but serve the useful purpose of benchmarking the state of current Western ‘knowledge’ about India. Others are critiques of the application of European ideas like psychoanalysis to Indian culture. But all of them, at various levels, must ask the question — is the Western academia producing knowledge about India?

The latter half of the book chronicles how key sections of the academic establishment in America have responded to these challenges, and tries to understand how they processed it as a threat rather than as a long overdue call for a dialog. The book suggests that the answers  to some of these questions may lie in American culture and its European roots. In many ways, therefore, the book is an attempt to reverse the gaze on the West, and is sure to make for provocative reading.

A moment of silence

A moment century of silence.  Via dailykos, Denise Oliver Velez:

I find this to be incredible. How can someone shoot four unarmed people in a car, with the fatal shot in the back of one kid who was apparently trying to lay down on the seat, flee the scene of the crime, and not be found guilty of first degree murder?

And Ta-Nehisi Coates, "On the Killing of Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn",

Jordan Davis had a mother and a father. It did not save him. Trayvon Martin had a mother and a father. They could not save him. My son has a father and mother. We cannot protect him from our country, which is our aegis and our assailant. We cannot protect our children because racism in America is not merely a belief system but a heritage, and the inability of black parents to protect their children is an ancient tradition. 

and

I insist that the irrelevance of black life has been drilled into this country since its infancy, and shall not be extricated through the latest innovations in Negro Finishing School. I insist that racism is our heritage, that Thomas Jefferson's genius is no more important than his plundering of the body of Sally Hemmings, that George Washington's abdication is no more significant than his wild pursuit of Oney Judge. I insist that the G.I Bill's accolades are inseparable from its racist heritage. I will not respect the lie. I insist that racism must be properly understood as an Intelligence, as a sentience, as a default setting to which, likely until the end of our days, we unerringly return.

 Even if one takes issue with him, one is compelled to be silent for now.

The largest women's gathering in the world

In Thiruvananthapuram. (via A.)  News article from 2012.  Never thought of it in that way before.

Rotting from the head downwards

Greg Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard.  Here, Paul Krugman takes down Mankiw's OpEd in the New York Times in grand style.

One may argue that this is only an opinion piece; but look at the underlying facts (Krugman exhibits some of them).   How can a reasonable person arrive at Mankiw's conclusions from these facts?  How is Mankiw's opinion rationally supportable?

The rot is visibly there in that "hardest" of the hard sciences - particle physics, where Peter Woit has been tireless in exposing how much theoretical research has lost its moorings with the experimental side of the science.

The rot is visible in the "hardest" of the social sciences - economics - where Krugman has been diligently exposing it for years.

The idea that the rot extends to the American Academy of Religion which unlike economics or particle physics, works within frameworks that either cannot be falsified or are difficult to falsify, is incredible, unpalatable and unacceptable to some.

So let's give them a certificate here - in all the fields of human study, the scholars of religion are the most scrupulous in their observations,  empirically demanding in their explanatory frameworks, and honest in their interpretations. 

While we're at it, we'll also create a certificate for excelling at ostrich-head-in-the-sand.  

Two Mars missions, two orbital strategies

On the Planetary Society blog, Emily Lakdawalla explains the different strategies used by the NASA MAVEN and ISRO MOM missions to inject their spacecraft into trajectories to Mars. (via Dad).

PS: Lakdawalla's latest status report on the two missions.

Wendy Doniger's modus operandi

I would no more go to Wendy Doniger for knowledge about Hindus than I would go to John Yoo for knowledge about US Constitutional law.  This is because I was there at her unmasking more than twelve years ago.  This was the time of RISA Lila (RISA = Religion in South Asia, an arm of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)), when the power equation in US academia became very clear to Hindus in America.  (Yes, back then, when Hindus painfully learned it, they were apparently whining and biased and fundamentalists and fascists and all the smear words you can throw at.   But the nature of US academia in economics is made clearer, isn't it?  by Paul Krugman's blog and his account of freshwater vs saltwater economists, and what kind of papers are allowed to be published.  So perhaps the Hindu case may meet a little less skepticism. )

What I like about this linked essay is that it goes straight to the heart of the modus operandi of Wendy Doniger and her students.   It also goes to the problem manifest on the Hindu side - the lack of confident scholarship to counter Doniger and company on her playing field.  Too many of them also believe that the study of religion in the university would violate secularism - so India does not have the equivalent of the AAR.   The Indian anglicized elite continues to have a strong case of Macaulayitis as well.

Gendering - 2

A review of Rubina Saigol’s The Pakistan Project: A Feminist perspective on Nation and Identity is here.

However, what I wish to highlight may be most concisely expressed on amazon.com 

Pakistan s multiple, contradictory, fractured and fragile national identity relies on specific notions of masculinity and femininity, reinforced through an ideology of militarism and religious fundamentalism.

Statistic

Per MSNBC, in the 14 months since the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, there have been at least 44 school shootings.

QOTD - sort of.

Chris Matthews on Hardball (MSNBC news show) likened Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to Senator Van Ackerman of Allen Drury's 1959 novel Advise and Consent.  While it is an obvious analogy,  I've been thinking so for many weeks now.

Stereotypes can drive racial classification

It is widely recognized that people are stereotyped by the race they belong to.   It is less widely recognized that the race of a person is driven to some extent by stereotypes.

NPR, on today's Morning Edition, broadcast this story.   The audio and transcript are there.   My summary below the fold.

What a conference call is like

With the modern workforce consisting of geographically distributed teams, the main way of interaction is via conference call.   A lot of my working day is occupied by conference calls.  This is what a conference call is like (not including the commercial at the end)

Deepcut Society's Orchid Show @Dearborn Market

Deepcut Orchid Show @Dearborn Farm, a set on Flickr.

For a person in New Jersey in the white waste of winter, the Deepcut Orchid Society's annual orchid show is a small oasis of green and brightness. I found out about it by chance and in time - via the free weekly newspaper that I normally see as littering the driveway and that usually goes straight into recycling.

Snowfall

The snow from the beginning of February.

Defending the Right to Pollute

Carl Hiaasen in the Miami Herald

The state of Florida has joined a lawsuit aimed at blocking a massive cleanup plan for Chesapeake Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay.

And, no, you can’t make this stuff up.

Last week, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi filed a brief — paid for with your taxes — attacking the legality of the Chesapeake Bay Clean Water Blueprint.

The plan was devised by six bay area states, the District of Columbia and the federal government. Its mission is to improve water quality in the rivers, streams and estuaries of the Chesapeake region.

A federal judge upheld the terms of the so-called blueprint, which will limit the amount of pollution being dumped, but the ruling is being appealed.

Why would the state of Florida try to obstruct the cleanup of public waters hundreds of miles away from our own? Because Bondi and Gov. Rick Scott are complete tools.

They aren’t suing on behalf of the citizens of Florida; they’re suing on behalf of big agricultural and development interests that don’t want the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enforcing clean-water laws anywhere.

Among the lobby groups trying to dismantle the Chesapeake Bay Clean Water Blueprint are the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Home Builders and those famously civic-minded folks at the Fertilizer Institute. They want us to trust them to regulate their own pollution, and to hell with the EPA.

Quietly these industries recruited Florida and 20 other states — most led by Republican governors, of course — to join the lawsuit attacking the Chesapeake Bay plan. Among the other shameless meddlers are Kansas, Alaska and Indiana.

“To say we are outraged is a vast understatement,” said Will Baker, president of the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “We find it almost beyond belief for any state outside of the Chesapeake Bay watershed to try to sue to stop us from cleaning up our waters. What are they afraid of if we have clean water in the Chesapeake Bay?”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/08/3920357/muddying-the-waters-far-from-home.html#storylink=cpy

Competing Frameworks for History

The modern ideas about universal human rights arose during the period called the Enlightenment, beginning in late 17th century Europe.  History after that can be constructed within two different frameworks.

The first framework says that after the Enlightenment, the West is defined by its ideals of human rights.  Its deviations from human rights amount merely to hypocrisy, which is a natural human failing.  It is the other cultures of the world and their traditional orders that are often deeply  threatened by this Western gift.

The second framework - the one I favor - says that once the idea of universal human rights was invented, and diffused through the world, it created convulsions in the traditional cultures of Europe and America, just as much as it did, and continues to do, in the rest of the world.   Just to take America as an example, there was a century-long debate over slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and then it took another century until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s established a semblance of these universal human rights for the non-white component of America.  It was not hypocrisy that made this struggle necessary and made it last so long.  American culture underwent the trauma of the ending of its traditional order in favor of universal human rights similar to any Middle Eastern society that is in the throes of change today.

It is true that Western Europe and the United States had two advantages with regard to universal humans rights: - having invented the idea, they have the first mover's advantage; and having political independence (i.e., not being in a vassal or colonized condition) they could begin the long process of adjustment to these powerful ideas sooner.   So, with respect to universal human rights, they are, in most part, ahead of the rest of the world.

Nevertheless, in the race for universal human rights, those who were behind can overtake and even have overtaken in some aspects, those who were ahead.   For instance, today, in 2014, the threat to the citizens' right to vote from actions of the State are far graver in the United States than, say, in India. 

The war on voting rights in the United States does not arise out of hypocrisy.  The underlying cause is the threat minority voters' increasing numbers presents to traditional order.  The minority voters won't support the traditional order any longer because it has been inimical to them.  The difference in consequences between threat to the traditional order in the United States and the threat to the traditional order in, say, Syria, is that the United States has in place mechanisms that will likely settle this peacefully (those mechanisms, though, failed once before, and the Civil War was the result).

How does the first framework of history arise,  then?  History is written by the victor, and thus the innumerable factions and interests in the West that resisted universal human rights are assigned to a lesser role,  no longer included in the "We, Who are the West".   In a sense, the first framework of history is just another manifestation of imperialistic thought.

Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3

A colleague bought a Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 lens and thus I briefly got my hands on it, even took a trio of test shots (unfortunately through thick window glass) with my 5d2 body.

From all accounts, the picture quality is good, the lens seems well-made,  and it focuses fast on static objects (the AI servo mode on moving objects is still an open question, being discussed on fredmiranda.com).  The lens doesn't feel heavier than the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8, though it actually is several hundred grams more massive.

Conclusion: The value for the price (e.g., compare with the Canon 100-400mm) for this lens is good. Tamron likely has a winner on its hands.


PS: with certain Canon models, AI servo apparently does not work well (details in this fredmiranda.com thread)

Gendering

In the NYT today, Charles Blow writes:

If one of the overt Democratic lines of attack against Republicans is that Republicans are conducting a war on women, one of the low-simmering, implicit lines of attack from Republicans is that Democrats are conducting a war on men, or at least traditional views of masculinity.  The idea of the effete, feminized liberals threatening to suffocate the last remaining expression of true manliness is rife in Republican rhetoric.

.....As Glenn Greenwald put it in 2007, “For some time now, it has been commonplace for Democratic candidates to be depicted as gender-confused freaks.” He added, “One can make a strong argument, as some have, that those personality-attack themes have played a far larger role in the outcome of the last two presidential elections than any substantive issues, and liberals simply have nothing close to the potency of the right-wing filth machine in advancing these gender themes.”

But this is not the first expression of such ideas that I've come across in the past few days. Earlier, I came across (PDF) an essay by Andrew J. Rotter, "Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947-1964".

The focus of this essay is on gender, one of the critical skeins in the web of significance deployed by U.S. policy makers and used to explain India.  An analysis of gender illuminates important aspects of relations between nations; here the concern is with the United States, India, and tangentially Pakistan.  Mrinalini Sinha has written, "Empires and nations are gendered ideological constructs", to which one might add nations also construct each other.  For the purposes of this essay, gender, or "gendering", is not a static idea but a transnational process: it is the assignment of certain characteristics based on prevailing ideas of masculinity and femininity to a people and nation by another people and nation.   Masculinity and femininity are not, in this view, biologically determined categories but culturally and socially conditioned constructs.  Nations and the people who constitute them become "gendered", and this affects the policies that other nations pursue toward them.

 In this language, the Republicans have "gendered" the Democrats.  In a comment on a dailykos.com diary, MUST-SEE: Bill Maher takes apart the right-wing's fake machismo, I had pointed to Rotter's essay,

I think it is worth reading; I think the right-wing today has the analogous view of liberals and minorities as the US foreign policy folks had of India.

Charles Blow completed the circle today, which is a satisfactory outcome, whether one believes or is skeptical about the idea of "gendering". 

PS: another quote from Blow's essay:

At the height of the anthrax scare in 2001, Ann Coulter wrote a piece for the conservative site Townhall titled “The Eunuchs Are Whining,” in which she referenced liberals as “mincing pantywaists” and proclaimed that “women — and I don’t mean to limit that to the biological sense — always become hysterical at the first sign of trouble.”

 

Haqqani's Magnificent Delusions

An excerpt from ex-Pakistani-Ambassador-to-the-US  Hussain Haqqani's "Pakistan, the United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding : Magnificent Delusions" (page 277):

The Americans were unaware of {head of the ISI, General Hamid} Gul's ideological predilections and fantasies.   A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) profile described Gul as "a powerful mediator" who had organized "the unruly Afghan Alliance Leaders into a viable institution".   He was characterized as "a sincere and caring individual who is attempting to do what is best for the Afghan Alliance as well as for Pakistan".  In what turned out to be a massive miscalculation, the DIA believed that Gul was "a strong supporter of Pakistan's ties to the US; is generally friendly towards the U.S and the West and very comfortable with foreigners."  The US intelligence community thought that Gul did not "have any particular political contacts of any significance within Pakistan".  They were wrong on all counts.

Haqqani's book is masterful narration of some 65 years of such "wrong on all counts" by the Americans who set policy.   There were people with a clearer vision, but they were mostly ignored.   The long span - six+ decades -  of the continuous mistaken judgements show that this is no ordinary human error, it is the error of a people who have a strong commitment to thinking in a particular way - a certain inter-generational pig-headed arrogance.  It would almost be funny, but for the cost in lives, including 9/11, as a consequence of such errors.  Scarily, this pig-headedness is still widely prevalent, but Americans take great umbrage at any suggestion about the possibility of thinking differently.  So it is a safe prediction that Haqqani's book is going to have little practical effect.

Pakistanis too, were deluded, thinking that they would get more support for their misadventures than the US was actually prepared to give.  The Pakistani side of the Magnificent Delusion is essentially that of the con-man believing too much his own spiel.   Nevertheless, Pakistan achieved its own survival, always kept afloat by its 3.5 friends.

(BRF dictionary:  Three and a Half Friends
These are countries who have, for various reasons, been the main contributors to propping up Pakistan through its entire history. The three friends refer to the United States of America, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and China. The half-friend refers to Japan because they usually do contribute aid money into the bottomless Pakistani drain, but only with US prompting. )


PS: the Pakistani side of the Delusion is described here.