A letter to a professor from Delaware.

So an American student thought he'd see North Korea with own eyes, thought to take home a

souvenir, and ended up paying for it with his life. In his wildest dreams, poor Otto Warmbier never imagined taking home a stupid poster would be the death of him; he probably thought, like most of us, that getting yelled at and send away would be the worst that could happen to him. He underestimated the psychotic viciousness of the regime.  

The fact is, the Kim Il Sung death cult will waste no opportunity to violate human dignity. Warmbier was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour, and released only after N.Korean hospitality put him on death's doorstep - he died less than a week after coming home. 

It was a particularly horrifying example of extreme culture shock, a naive, just about unconscious faith in the sanctity of human life confronted with an almost cartoonish indifference to it. Rarely have two sets of values been more incompatible, and rarely has right and wrong been less ambiguous. 

One would think so anyways. Some folks here in the decadent West side with the regime.

Kathryn Dettwyler, a professor anthropology from the University of Delaware, thought Otto "got what he deserved". 

I provide her words in their entirety (courtesy of the rancid Daily Mail) 

"

“Is it wrong of me to think that Otto Warmbier got exactly what he deserved? 

He went to North Korea for f*** sake, and then acted like a spoiled, naive, arrogant, US college student who never had to face the consequences of his actions. 

I see him crying at his sentencing hearing and think 'What did you expect?'

How about the moments of thought give to all the other people in North Korea who are suffering under the repressive government there? Just because they are north Koreans, and not US citizens, we shouldn't care about them?  

I've spent my life teaching folks just like Otto (I'm a 62 year old college professor of anthropology) and Otto is typical of the mindset of a lot of the young, white, rich, clueles (sic) males who come into my classes. 

These are the same kids who cry about their grades because they didn't think they'd really have to read and study the material to get a good grade. They simply deserve a good grade for being who they are. 

Or instead of crying, they bluster and threaten their female professors. His parents, ultimately, are to blame for his growing up thinking he could get away with whatever he wanted. 

Maybe in the US, where young, white, rich, clueless white males routinely get away with raping women. Not so much in North Korea. And of course, it's Otto's parents who will pay the price for the rest of their lives.”

Kathryn Dettwyler

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4636010/Professor-says-Otto-Warmbier-got-deserved.html#ixzz4l1yLASMr 
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Now, I provide my own response to Prof. Dettwyler:

(*ahem*)

Yes Professor, it is very wrong and you ought to feel ashamed of yourself.

It is very wrong to think that anybody rotting and dying in a dictator’s dungeon is “getting what they deserve”. I am astonished that anyone needs reminding of this. Apparently you do however, so I will repeat it: nobody deserves it. Nobody, whether American or Korean or whatever arbitrary distinction we happen to give them. No Human Being deserves it.

It should go without saying, but it clearly doesn’t. There’s a callousness throughout your post which makes it necessary to repeat. It does make me question your concern for the “other people in North Korea who are suffering” whom you so disingenuously invoke; if one person tortured to death for a petty crime is so unworthy of your sympathy, what makes anyone else? They failed to obey the laws of their land as well (namely, offending their thin-skinned god-king); by your logic surely they “got what they deserved” as well, no?

            No? Then what is the difference?

            Furthermore, how does concern for the one preclude concern for the other? Compassion is not finite; it does not need to be rationed (though yours apparently is).

            I suspect you don’t actually give a damn about the long suffering people of North Korea (your sympathy in this case clearly being for the regime), but use them to dignify your own prejudices. You heap adjectives on this young man – “spoiled, naive, arrogant, white, rich, clueles (sic)” – whom you’ve never met, and is no longer here to defend himself. From what I gather, he was never enrolled in any of your classes (being a student of the University of Virginia I understand, many miles from your office) and never cried to you for marks. He certainly never raped anyone. These are projections that have more to do with archetypes of your own invention that with Otto Warmbier.

            Perhaps you’ve replaced him with a composite of annoying students from your own experience. Perhaps you have had bad experiences, and perhaps you have a right to feel bitter. But I would caution against letting your bitterness overwhelm your basic decency. Remember, this was a person you had never met, and who had not actually done you any wrong. Are you really going to claim that justice was served? (In which case, what of the “all the other” people of North Korea serving similar sentences for similar “crimes”?). Does that kind of student (which Warmbier may or may not have been) really anger you more than the regime that killed him? Would you look his mother and father in the eye and say to their face what you wrote: not only did their son “get what he deserved”, but it was their fault?  

            Think carefully of your answer: it will reflect far more on you than on them.

I so wanted to write about Doctor Who. . .

But then I woke up to this:

London attack: man, 47, arrested on suspicion of attempted murder


and then this:

Muslim girl, 17, killed on way home from Virginia mosque"

and, finally, this, advertised on Facebook:

I think I'm going to be sick. . .

Naturally, a great many couldn't see, (or refused to see) any connection between the two; singling out minority religions for special attention apparently being a harmless exercise. The supporters of the patch, who outnumbered its opponents, displayed a depressing dis-ingenuity, comparing it with the Bad Religion logo:

(While, interestingly enough, never quoting nor seeking the band's opinion on the matter).

Does the difference really need to be spelled out? Do they really not see that a punk band railing against their own society is not the same thing as braying against a minority culture? That singling out minority groups for special attention is NOT the same thing as critiquing your own society, and never ever EVER ends well?

Nor am I convinced by the "all religion is bad so what's your problem?" mantra spat out by the apologists. Call it a hunch, but I suspect those patches will be less favoured by the anti-theist philosophers of the Sam Harris variety than the cowardly thugs who beat  Nabra Hassanen to death.

Most depressingly of all is we've seen it all before. And we've apparently learned nothing.

I so wanted to write about Doctor Who. . . .

More stooges

So. . .

Dozens of torch-wielding white supremacists show up in Virginia, and folks wonder why I'm worried?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/15/emboldened-white-supremacists-charlottesville

The Prophetic Vandal: Thoughts on THX 1138

I have a weakness for science fiction films from the seventies, come what may. Which brought me to THX 1138. I don’t think anyone will dispute me when I say the film itself is less interesting than the fact that George Lucas made it.

By which I don’t mean that the film doesn’t have its own interesting bits (though nothing here that hasn’t been covered in Every Dystopia Story Ever), but the fact that a film this slow, cerebral and technophobic could come from Mr. Star Wars is just mind-boggling. This is the man who thought nothing of having droids deliver babies. It’s not so much that a film director in his youth could stitch together an art film just before writing the book on popcorn-cinema – there’s room in the human imagination for both. It’s just hard to fathom how someone who made his fortune via sheer consumerism could have once tried so hard to skewer consumerism, and sad to think that an impassioned defender of the human soul would one day banish it from his movies.    

The contrast, from both a thematic and aesthetic level, is just weird. In contrast to the traditional – nay, archetypal – plotting of Star Wars, THX largely just sort of happens. Most of the “dialogue” is just the background noise of machine operators giving instructions to each other over intercoms. Conversation, in terms of human beings talking to each other, is either hurried or whispered. Sex is repressed (of course) as is every other emotion, people live in subterranean cells, and deviants are stuck into vacuous white voids. Like most dystopias, it’s clearly not intended to be prophetic, but cautionary – I can see it happening.

After all, in the Star Wars universe, droids deliver babies. . .

Perhaps THX was intended as a Utopia? No one would accuse the Star Wars prequels of an excess of humanity. What isn’t generated by a computer is altered to look like it was. What human beings are present are made to act like robots, as if Samuel L. Jackson and Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman and a host of actors who spend their lives channelling different kids people had had their brains cut out and replaced with computers.  Even the old films, which so captured people’s imaginations, have been destroyed and replaced with hideous computer mash-ups, in a Stalinistic rewriting of history.

Even the current edition of THX is full of this after-the fact tampering, modern CGI spliced into 70’s era film stock. Again, the effect is jarring and distracting, like modern pastels worked into old oil paintings. Sometimes it seems to blatantly contradict the story; the “shell people” of the outside world were clearly intended to be and said to be midget humans – the shell people. Now they’re feral monkeys. What the hell was Lucas thinking? A glimpse of the original pops up in the original trailors, which Lucas forgot to alter. Robert Duval is briefly seen being attacked by a stuffed doll. It looks pretty dumb, but at least matches its’ surroundings, unlike the CGI chimp that replaced it, which looks no better.

I suppose that’s what puzzles me the most about these alterations. None of them actually improve anything. But they do alter the product unrecognizably. The original prints have been withdrawn from circulation-they no longer exist. We can no longer experience the films as their original audience did. For THX, it’s no great loss – a curiosity and a noble effort, but hardly earth shattering. Star Wars is another matter. For those of us of a certain generation, who were exposed to Star Wars at birth, who recite every word of dialogue and hum every note of music before we could spell or even write our own names, Star Wars was part of the scenery – the environment in which we grew up. And it’s gone now, bulldozed by the man who built it in the first place. I can’t shake the feeling that an incredible vandalism has taken place.

To think the vandal saw it all coming. . .

Pi in the Sky: thoughts on Life of Pi

My God, look what he’s doing now. . .

Nevermind. Lest I begin to sound like a one-trick pony, I’m taking a break from politics. Let’s talk about books. Oh don’t worry, I’m still going to complain – you wouldn’t want me to go all kum-bai-ya on you, would you? But it will be complaining of a far less earth shattering variety.

Thinking I needed to make some tentative outreach to the modern world (and finding it readily available on my school’s shelf), I went for a book from 2001 – practically this morning by my standards. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi was one everyone went ga ga over back in the day, winning slavering critical reviews, a Man Booker prize, and becoming a major motion picture directed by Ang Lee (who got a bleedin’ best Director Oscar for it. . .). So, people really freakin’ loved this book.

What can I say? The Mob Rules.

I suppose it’s all a very cute adventure story and survival tale, and I particularly liked the mysterious island chapter (I’ve always been a sucker for Mystery Island stories).  True, the whole first thirty six chapters felt kind of superfluous - more like abandoned plot threads then rich background detail - and the italicized narrator switch rather half-baked (what was the point exactly?). But I like adventure stories and survival tales, and I’ve always been a sucker for Mystery Island stories, and Martel’s got a friendly prose style, so I was happy to go along for the ride and had would have had a gay ol’ time.  . .

If only. . . .

If only it didn’t read so much like a dopey New Age apologia. Granted, the narrator is highly unreliable – how seriously are we supposed to take the rantings of some delirious kid with an admitted penchant for mysticism? – but I am still stuck in the proverbial elevator with him, and don’t have the luxury of shouting back at him. Authors make choices. Martel might have had his narrator simply tell his tale, and   

left it a lost-at-sea adventure story with bits of fantasy and sf thrown in (or “magic realism” as the snotty literati like to call it). Which would have been fine by me. But this narrator, “Pissing” Pi Patel, isn’t content to tell his tale – he insists that we believe it.

On several occasions he attacks skeptical thinking with arguments only a delirious teenager would find compelling, yet Martel allows for no rebuttal; only idiots get to challenge his narrative. When these idiots tell Piscine that they “believe what we see”, his response is textbook new age/pseudo science/crypto zoologist:  “So did Columbus. What do you do when you’re in the dark?”

Well, I certainly don’t let my faith guide me Piscine. And unlike you Mr. Patel, Columbus could point to his “new land” on a chart, and send other people to look for themselves. But of course, the idiots aren’t allowed to say that – they just stumble and mutter.  When they tell him that his island is “botanically impossible”, his response is pure teenaged smart ass:

“Said the fly just before landing in the Venus Flytrap.” 

Of course the idiots don’t patiently but politely point out this is what we call a “false analogy”; that Venus flytraps and bonsai trees have been extensively documented and independently verified and explained by scientists, unlike his island of bloodsucking seaweed. Bringing me to the kicker:

“ No scientist would believe you.”

“Those would be the same who dismissed Copernicus and Darwin.”

Woh, how many fallacies can we fit into one line? Kind of like his Columbus statement, this is the classic cry of pseudo-crytpo-claimant: “crazy things have been discovered before, therefore my crazy thing must be true”.  Or: “they laughed at Galileo, and they’re laughing at me, therefore, I must be Galileo”. Piscine forgets (and the idiots neglect to remind him) that Copernicus and Darwin had to prove their findings with empirical evidence. They weren’t accepted on faith.  

I suspect that many botanists would be quite intrigued by Piscine’s story,  for the same reason they read science fiction. They’d be tickled by the possibility, and speculate how it might work. That does not mean they would accept it blindly; not without physical evidence, which he has neglected to provide. The scientist does not have the luxury of the religious mystic; he or she cannot believe something just because it makes a “better story” (unlike Piscine, who pretty much admits later that’s the entire basis of his cherry-picked faith – kinda like Trump’s politics).

Let’s put it this way: maybe I tiger could hide undetected in the Mexican wilderness. But if we find some delirious kid adrift in a life boat, ranting about talking tigers and flesh eating trees, are we supposed to take his word for it?

One of the main responsibilities of any author is to the consistency of his/her characters, and I suppose Martel is doing no more than putting words in Piscine’s mouth which Piscine would actually say. In a first-person narrative which the narrator spends almost entirely in isolation, it is entirely reasonable to provide only that narrator’s perspective – indeed, isn’t that rather the point? To be fair, Martel does throw a bit of a bone to skeptics like me: Piscine admits the use of a “dream rag”, a saltwater-soaked rag he suffocates himself with. Deprived of oxygen, he “would be visited by the most extraordinary dreams, trances, visions, thoughts, sensations and remembrances”. A couple pages later the tiger starts talking to him. I think it’s an entirely to interpret the whole novel as a product of the dream rag.

Martel allows for this interpretation, but I bet dollars to donuts most readers (and viewers of the Lee film) will miss that detail completely and go for mysticism, taking from the novel Piscine’s false analogies and nonsensical aphorisms. I suppose they make for a “better story”. But I refuse to be drawn in by this kind of thinking. And if I have to sit in a boat with this quack for three hundred and fifty four pages, you’re damn right I’m going to yell back at him.  Especially when confronted with this howler:

“It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. . .to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

Bullshit! Seriously. Not all of us need a dream rag to make sense of life. On the contrary, I would argue that the here and now, the solid, the tangible, the actual, slowly and painfully revealed by science, offers a much richer life experience than Patel’s fever dreams. Why is reasonable doubt – the simple act of admitting what we don’t know – a less viable philosophy than making it all up? Pretending you have special insight into the mind of the (necessarily invisible) creator? On this point, Pissing should piss off.   

Waves of Truth: murder in a Quebec Mosque

When last we met, this letter had appeared in the Hamilton Spectator.

“ You better worry, because that wave of truth and anger will come, and you, other so called progressives, and your immigrant neighbours will be the first to be washed away.”

            - F. Stevens, Hamilton

            Several days ago, some deranged maniac walked into a Quebec mosque and shot six people.

            Do I really need to spell this out? 

            Those who care don’t need to be told, and those who don’t, never will, so it might be a superfluous effort. But I’m going to try anyway. I live next to a Mosque, you see, where many of my neighbours worship, play basket ball, and hold used clothing bazaars. I also live near a gun store, which advertises Bushmasters (rifle of choice for Adam Lanza) in its front window.  I know there is at least one individual in this town who wants to “wash away” immigrants and progressives. So excuse me for being a little tense.

            The White House has already tried to cash in on the blood, citing it as justification for Trump’s immigration bans:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-white-house-quebec-mosque-cites-attack-justify-anti-immigration-ban-muslims-a7554491.html

I suppose the logic here being that if those immigrants had stayed home, a white man might not have shot them.

            Even those disingenuous enough to see no connection at all with Fearless Leader’s purges down south might want to note the irony: six Muslims dead at the hands of a local, even as the President insists Muslims are dangerous and need to be kept out of the country. What are we to make of the home-grown terrorist? What, no hysteria? No nervous hand-wringing over the sick ideologies that poisoned his mind? No collective punishment for his community?

            Are we expected to believe he acted in isolation?

            I suppose we are, and to some extent we must: the many cannot be held responsible for the one. Those predisposed toward violence will inflict it under any pretense, be it religion or politics. But we don’t have to provide these weeds with such fertile soil. I for one am not keen to let religion or politics off the hook, finding in both as many calls to quash the moral impulse as to listen to it. I think we should pay attention to the ideologies in which such twisted individuals found inspiration. What reality did they choose to reside in? What truth – which alternative facts – did they choose to believe? What words gave shape to their thoughts and what thoughts gave way to actions?

            It seems trite to look for lessons, but there are reminders and warnings aplenty: of what can happen when a majority turns on a minority, when the powerful target the vulnerable, when certain segments of society are singled out for a greater share of the blame. When we are divided and further subdivided into ever more rigidly defined Uses and Thems, blood and tears always follow. 

L-R: Azzedine Soufiane, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti,
Thabti Ibrahima Barry, Abdelkrim Hassane (CBC)