Letters to the Editor
shannonr
Published Letters: 286 Editor's Choice: 80
-
Humanity vs. The Aliens
[Read the article: How the Turks made Europe safe for capitalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]An extraordinarily common theme in Cold War-era SF is the "we all band together to fight off marauding aliens" plot.
My favorite version, though, has always been the "Twilight Zone" take on the idea, which goes something like this:
*Aliens menace us, threatening destruction unless we "start living up to our potential". They give us 90 days.
*Treaty-signing breaks out at the UN, wars are stopped, nuclear weapons destroyed, a brotherhood of man declared.
*The aliens return, and say "But we bred you to be warriors! This is exactly the sort of namby-pamby nonsense we warned you about! Your "potential" was as stone-cold galactic killers! Oh the humanity..."
*Destruction pods drop out of the sky...
I tend to agree with Bertrand Russell that there's hardly any evidence in history, if you really look, of the "banding together to ward off a common danger". But there's an awful lot of "trying to get one over the other guy".
Look at the current debate over global warming, for yet more evidence. What's the most common reason for not doing anything? That's right -- it will affect our economic competitiveness...
-
Slave Labor, Chinese bloggers, and Progress
[Read the article: The price of non-progress in China]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As you can imagine, the recent "revelations" about the Shanxi brick-kiln slaves has exploded onto Chinese blogs.
What is being said might surprise many.
As usual, ESWN and Danwei are are carrying translations of some of the more interesting and high-profile Chinese language blog reactions to, and news stories about, this ongoing incident.
From one blog (translated from Chinese):
...they do not touch the root cause of the slave system. That root is none other than today's unitary political structure. The kiln slave incident demonstrates that without constitutional oversight from free citizens, an independent media, and democratic organizations apart from the party, this structure cannot prevent corruption in itself or renew politics.
Chinese frankly and openly discussing their own future -- a future that doesn't by default include the Party? Progress of a sort, I guess.
ESWN is at http://www.zonaeuropa.com/
Danwei is at http://danwei.org
-
Gentlemen, start your metaphors...
[Read the article: We are meant to be here]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]From the article:
And we may find that the big-bang theory goes out of favor at some point in the future. And then what? Religious people will have backed the wrong horse. So it's fraught with danger to seize on these cosmological ideas.
Very much like the new-age writers who seized on certain popular ideas in physics in the 70s, (string theory, anyone? look at all the pretty dimensions!) ideas that in the late 90s underwent an enormous amount of revision and change, all of which has left said new-agers looking decidedly last age...
In a larger sense this is simply illustrative of the fundamental difference between the process of science and the process of religion. Science says "Here's the best interpretation we've been able to come up with -- all this may change if we get some new data tomorrow." Religion says "Our ideas are inherently correct and eternally unchanging and you will offend us if you question them."
But I encourage religious leaders to ignore these warnings and continue making the oft-used statement "Scientists are just now coming to understand these eternal truths" because at the end of the day exposing the faithful to even bad, obsolete science may just fire off a hunger for a system of discussing our place in the universe that's not based on magical thinking.
-
The subtle art of "Sexing Up"
[Read the article: China to foreigners: Quote Mao, at your peril]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]China Development Brief did a great job of bringing obscure-yet-terribly-important China news to light. Often in the Muddle Kingdom epoch-changing government decisions get no coverage in the foreign press, while we endure yet another round of "quirky China" articles.
But while this role was an important one, CDB continously undermined that by the way they chose to report on certain issues. An article prevocatively titled "Time to reconsider autonomy" contained the following:
[The central government started] a drive to get more children into school. Yet all too often this in fact boils down to local officials threatening and bullying [Tibetan] parents to enrol their kids in order to meet Beijing’s targets.
There aren't too many Western countries where it is optional for parents to send kids to primary school! American parents choosing home schooling, for example, often report "bullying" by local officials!
Exactly this kind of poorly-sourced allegation (who is reporting this bullying, to whom, how often, when?) was and remains distressingly common in CDB material.
We wouldn't accept this kind of "sexing up" from a Western newspaper or magazine -- why should the Chinese government accept it from a web-based 'zine?
"We" would expect a Chinese printing company operating in "the West" to comply with local law. As clearly as can be made out from Nick Young's (possibly deliberately) unclear explanation on the CDB website, they're under investigation and have been ordered to cease publication while that investigation goes on.
This may well be a clear and unambiguous case of Beijing "killing the rooster to frighten the monkey" but more likely there are be details to which we are not privy. CDB's POV is unlikely to be unbiased!
I am not suggesting this is the case here, but it bears remembering that a highly profitable and oft-trodden path for the "old China hand" is to deliberately provoke Beijing into punitive action, and thereafter forever milk the "I was banned in China!" angle on the lecture circuit...