Friday, January 27, 2012

US to Blame for Sour US-Iran Relations

The United States largely has itself to blame for the history of tensions and animosity between itself and Iran.

It goes back to the 1950s when a democratically-elected government was ousted—this might have been one of countless instances where the US helped engineer the overthrow of a democratic government—and, in the aftermath, the US helped engineer the assumption of power by the Shah ('king'). The Shah turned out to be a hated ruler because he was tyrannical and despotic, and his secret police imprisoned and tortured dissenters.

Later, in the Iran-Iraq War, the US supported Iraq and in fact armed Sadaam Hussein's Iraq, on the theory that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The Iranians don't want to forgive America for that because it was a bitter, bloody, and costly war.

Actually, suspicion of the US and of the West by Iranians goes back even further because of Western—perhaps more British than US—actions and intervention in the Middle East during and after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. To a degree, in this case, Iran's animosity should perhaps be directed more toward Britain than toward the US because the former was the bigger player, doing much to advance its interests and secure its influence in the area at that time. (For one thing, Britain was looking to protect the Suez Canal, which was jointly operated by Britain and France, but also, as one of the superpowers of the time, may have been moving into a power vacuum).

Update, February 1, 2012
I should add that the overthrow of the Iranian government of Premier Mossadegh in 1953 was due to OIL (surprise, surprise). He had nationalized Iran's oil production, which did not sit well with the US.
Also, two other reasons why the Shah was disliked had to do with his lavish lifestyle and his having offended conservative Iranians by embracing the West and western things.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Fine Art of the Left-Handed Compliment

Left-handed compliment may be a term you don't hear very often; so, for those not sure what it means, I'll explain. It means someone is trying to be gentle and not hurt your feelings, but at the same time they feel they have to tell you something you don't want to hear. So they make it sound nice—sort of—whereas it's really telling you bad news. Dissing you.

An example: A friend of mine reported to me that he was taking some sort of art or painting class. The teacher, he said, told him, "You have a very interesting sense of color." Translation: "Dude, you have no idea what colors to put together. Not a clue. Whatsoever." I have to hope that friend won't read this because he never knew that he had been anything other than complimented. The teacher accomplished her mission. Take a bow.

Two from my own life: I was taking a playwriting course in college. I asked the professor—tactlessly—whether he thought I had any talent. He was more tactful than I was, and replied, "I think you have some of the symptoms of talent." I had to ponder what that meant, but today I'd translate it thusly: "You're fucked up like a lot of talented people, but that doesn't mean that you've got even a single molecule of talent in your entire body."

A few years later I was a graduate student at the prestigious University of M_____. One time I was talking to the department chairman in his office, and he said to me, "You seem to have the right instincts." Now, what the hell does that mean? It must mean, "At times you look like you incline toward doing the right thing, but you absolutely are not going to be a superstar." Hard to tell if that's a true left-handed compliment or a kindred tactic, damning with faint praise. That's similar in that it seems, at first blush, to be saying something nice about you but, if you scratch the surface, you see it really is not a sincere or genuine compliment.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Faustian Urge

I think Mankind has what I call a "Faustian urge" (I probably am not the first to coin the term). It's an allusion to the character of Faust or Doctor Faustus, subject of novels and operas. Faust wanted to know everything so he made a pact with the devil. (Maybe just to make it a little more human and less ivory-tower academic, there's a woman, whom Faust also gains in the pact with the devil.)

Well, Man has been driven to explore and/or "conquer" all of the Earth. It all started when one man was curious to see what lay beyond the river or on the other side of the mountain. Then he had to climb the highest mountain, reach the poles, dive the oceans. Where he can't dive to the bottom of the ocean he uses tools such as little submarines.

We build other tools--microscopes to see the smallest and telescopes to see the most distant. We dig in the earth to go back in time and to see human ancestors and ancient, long-dead, fossilized plants and animals.

So, when people ask why we should spend money on a space program, I answer that it's because we have this Faustian urge and we are compelled to explore continually further and further from home. Who knows where it will end? Since the universe is said to be infinite, it probably will never end.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Monday, January 16, 2012

Stein's Laws

At one point everybody seemed to be promulgating their "laws." We had Murphy's Law, Parkinson's Law, the Peter Principle.

Well, here are a few of my own "laws."

1. You usually get an itch when can't scratch it because you've got both hands full.
2. The quality of the food at a restaurant is inversely proportional to the amount of hype from the management. In other words, the more a restaurant hypes its food (e.g., "the best . . . in the world") the worse it actually is. Good food will speak for itself.
3. Within 10 minutes after buying gas, you see it cheaper.
4. That stock you thought about buying—but didn't—will triple or quadruple.
5. As soon as you switch off the vacuum, you notice at least two visible bits of dirt on the floor.
6. Gas station employees should not be asked directions because they don't know the area beyond half a mile from where they are standing.
7. When a new building has been built, you can't remember what used to stand there.
8. Law (or advice) for Asian business people (e.g., people who run Chinese restaurants, stores, etc.): If you need to give an explanation to an Occidental customer, you can give her any BS, because (1) you're smarter than they are, and (2) they won't understand you anyway.
9. Two men who have similar patterns of facial hair are going to be perceived as "looking alike."
10. Sometimes life will give you a second chance. But don't ever, ever expect that you'll get a third chance.
11. Elvis is dead but Picasso lives.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Growing Social Inequality in America

A little survey of man-in-the-street–type individuals by a TV show showed them all saying that what America needs is to raise the taxes on the rich—and maybe also reduce taxes on the poor.

And that is a core message of the "Occupy Wall Street" and other "occupy" demonstrations.

So millions of Americans feel this way. But—you know what? It's not going to happen. At least not as long as some of the fundamental facts of the American political system do not change.

The fact is that wealthy interests control our government. They can effectively buy Congress through lobbying, and through campaign contributions. Wealthy individuals and corporate-organized and -funded lobbying organizations buy Congress. Whereas political contributions from individuals are limited to $2500, the so-called "Super PACs" (political action committees) have little or no limitations on them. This state of affairs was made possible by the disastrous Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United (discussed elsewhere in this blog).

A recent book by Hacker and Pierson, two social scientists, called Winner Take All Politics, shows how the concentration of wealth in America has worsened. That is, the top few as regards wealth have grown wealthier—in fact vastly, astronomically wealthier—in the last 25 or 30 years.

The concentration of wealth in America is worse than in other Western countries: in Europe, in Canada, in Australia. And of course money is power. It can even be concluded that we no longer have a democracy.

The situation is the result of money buying influence; of the tax code; and of lax or even lack of regulation of Wall Street. (The countries named above, for example Canada, did not have as severe an economic crisis as the US four years ago, because they have more effective regulation of their financial systems.)

In 1986 legislation was enacted that closed many of the loopholes in the tax code that enabled the super-rich to escape taxation. But in the years since, those tax reforms have been very largely undone.

It's a sad situation in America. People are speaking out and voicing their dissatisfaction. But have they got power to effect change? Are any of the political candidates even promising to do something about the situation? It does not seem to be one of the issues discussed in candidate debates. The Occupy people are aware of all this but otherwise it all seems to be a big secret.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Are We Bloodthirsty Like the Romans?

Everybody is familiar with the image of the ancient Romans' entertainments in the Coliseum: gladiators fighting to the death, wild animals fighting one another, Christians being thrown to the lions (this last, it turns out, is completely a myth). So we regard the Romans as bloodthirsty and pat ourselves on the back for being more civilized than that.

But are we? I'd argue that modern Western peoples are probably just as bloodthirsty as the Romans were. The first example that might come to my mind is boxing, which is simply about one man hitting, punching, and beating up another one (I know, boxing's defenders will say that they look for, and admire, grace, strategy, this and that); and the crowd evidently loves it if/when blood flows. Not to mention that boxers' brains quite infamously get permanently damaged. (Mohammed Ali has Parkinson's disease; as Wikipedia says, "Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome in 1984,. . . a disease to which those subject to severe head trauma, such as boxers, are many times more susceptible than average" [Wikipedia, s.v. Muhammad Ali].)

Then there's football. It's starting to be realized that professional football players can receive concussions, and some high-school football players not only have received concussions but even fatal injuries in the course of a football game. Just in very recent news there was a story of a high-school athlete who received brain injuries and another who became paralyzed from the neck down and died 11 years later—while still a young man.

(If I were a parent I would not want my kid to play football on any school team. I know, the argument on the other side is, "But they want to play." Well, it's notorious that teen-agers don't understand risk, and that is why they have a high rate of auto accidents.)

Last I want to mention car racing. Again I think the crowds of spectators hope to witness a crash. That might not be wishing to literally see blood but it's certainly bloodthirstiness in a less literal sense.

Update, January 24, 2012
Other sports, even skiing or skateboarding, can produce injuries. When or where these are made spectator sports (shown on TV or youtube), I wonder if people are hoping to see a wipeout.
Update, February 1, 2012
I don't really follow sports, but I just saw a news item that said that John Wesley Reed, a "cage fighter" (I confess I don't even know the terminology of some of the new sports) collapsed after a fight on TV and was taken away in an ambulance. According to the online article,
Nobody in in the mixed martial arts scene was prepared to acknowledge that he might have suffered serious trauma, instead blaming his condition on "fatigue and dehydration."

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Friday, January 13, 2012

Racism in America

I can remember well a trip I made through the American South in 1964. This was during the era when new laws and so forth were just beginning to ameliorate the discrimination and segregation in the South; and at the time the South and Southerners were not very willing to change their very long standing ways.

Some of the things I saw: In a small town in Arkansas, just across the border from Missouri, the local movie theater required blacks to sit in the balcony. And when visiting the Black section of the town I saw that it had dirt streets. In Memphis, a big city, a restaurant had a sign over one door, "Colored Entrance."

It's certain things have changed, but one might ask, "How much?" Today African Americans can be doctors, lawyers, college professors. But I have a feeling they are under-represented in these and many other professions.

Here is an interesting fact: Middle-class African American women complain that they have trouble finding suitable mates. (We will disregard the issue of whether they do or must or even should look only within their own race.) In other words, there is a relative lack of middle-class African American men.

The implication of this is that it's been easier for African American women to move up into the middle class. It's easier for African American women to get good jobs. And African American men are more likely to be effectively limited to lesser-paying jobs.

Okay, now we must wonder why. And to do that I have to talk about a subject that is unpopular and virtually never confronted. One lingering, and maybe tough, part of racism is that White people are afraid of African American men. When walking in an African American neighborhood, would anybody be afraid if approached by an African American woman? No. Not so in the case of an African American man.

I'm confident it would be extremely hard to find anyone who would admit to this. But part of a stereotypical, racist image of African American men that perhaps has still not completely gone away is that at best they are looked on as thuggy, brutal, wild. I could go on with other very negative, racist adjectives and images but even I am reluctant to do that.

But this is my explanation for the gender difference noted above: people are not afraid of African American women, but they may be of African American men. At least there is more of a certain wariness we have of African American, which holds them back in the job market.

Of course there are other sorts of evidence that the lot of African Americans in America is still not equal; but I'm going to let those things lie outside the scope of this blog posting.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein

Monday, January 9, 2012

What a Theocracy Might Mean

After being truly struck by a couple of Iowa voters who, when interviewed, said we need "God in America" or "God in government," as I previously wrote, I want to write a bit more about what theocracy means, what a theocracy might be like.

When religion and the government are in the same hands, you have people making laws according to what they believe God likes and wants. To me it is supreme arrogance for anyone to claim to know what God wants; and certainly not everyone is going to agree about what God wants. No matter how confident this or that person is as to what God's will, wishes, likes (etc.) might be, we will have a difference of opinion in a society as diverse as America. We do, after all, have not only different religions in America and even within Protestantism we have many denominations and sects.

These differences of opinion can mean religious war; and in a theocracy, religious war is civil war. We should look at the example of the Muslim world where the two main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, are constantly at war with one another, bombing and murdering one another.

The Inquisition was a good example of the Church and the State, while not officially one and the same, practically being one. In Spain, once Christians had reconquered all of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors (and in fact a bit before), the Inquisition was started. Many Jews and Muslims—who had previously lived in harmony with Christians—now had three choices: leave the country, convert or at least pretend to convert, or be tortured to death.

The Framers of the US Constitution had the negative example of England one to two centuries earlier. In the period between the death of Henry VIII and the first Elizabeth, there was considerable jockeying back and forth between Catholics and Protestants. The country was Catholic one day, Protestant the next. It was hard to know which side your bread was buttered on, it changed so fast. And the consequences of who was in power at the moment were not inconsequential. For example, Catholics—at least wealthy ones with big houses—had secret rooms and passages built in their houses where priests and other artifacts of their worship could be concealed. Queen Mary, who ruled, I believe, on and off in the period between Henry VIII and Elizabeth, was known as "Bloody Mary" because of her practice of burning Protestants at the stake. And Elizabeth, once in power, executed Catholics who she believed had been plotting against her. There was armed strife and many people lost their lives. "By 1643, hundreds of thousands of Christians had been slaughtered by other Christians because of the way they worshipped Christ."*

(There was again strife later in the 17th century when King James II, suspected of being secretly more Catholic than Protestant, was forced out in the so-called "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 that installed the Protestants William and Mary.)

It seems that wherever there is not complete religious homogeneity—and there is nearly always someone with differing ideas—there is likely to be strife. Theocracy is a recipe for terrible conflicts.

You know, I just said to myself, looking over what I wrote: "God, I shouldn't even have to write this!!"
_________
This quotation is from an article, "God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea," Smithsonian, January 2012; adapted from the book, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John M. Barry, copyright 2012 by Viking.

Update: This posting was updated with additions on January 13, 2012.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Nearing Age 70: Some Thoughts

I have a birthday coming up in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be 70 years old. You think more about the age you've reached when it's one of these round-number milestones.

It doesn't seem possible. Can there be some mistake? To convince myself, I had to do the mental math, subtracting the year I was born from the current year. Yup, 70. No mistake.

I don't feel any different than when I was 20. But everybody says that. There's something that never changes, your inner feeling of self, maybe. Hard to explain.

And you want to say, How did I get to be this age? Well, of course, the seconds and the minutes tick away and become hours, days, weeks, months, years. Tick, tick, we're all getting there. It's just that when you're young you can't visualize yourself as old. Once, when I was young—I'm only sure it was younger than age 12—I wondered if I would live to see the year 2000. You never realize you are going to be old until one day you are. And maybe not even then.

An uncle of mine once said, Life is a cruel joke, you just get old and have aches and pains. My sister, eternally an optimist—you know, one of those "the-glass-is-half-full" types--had no sympathy or understanding for how our uncle could say that. I understand it, even though I am not (yet) too seriously wracked by aches and pains. (I could be either more or less healthy than I am, although illness is not the sole province of the older.) I think that a reflective person can't help but say, What's it all about? I have to add that I have some notion of the fact that some people's religious faith gives them comfort in the form of an answer to some of these questions about "the meaning of life"—but it's been a question for many of the more thoughtful persons since Mankind began.

Some people say there's a good side to getting older. Maybe even beyond being able to retire and so not have to get up in the morning, get dressed, and go out into the cold to get to work; and becoming eligible for Medicare, which is wonderful because it goes a long way toward paying your medical bills.

They say that you get more content, more comfortable with who you are, more comfortable in your skin, so to speak. Yes, I think it's true. It's probably very different from a lot of the angst that we all go through when we're teen-agers.

There's the matter of regrets. There's probably no one who does not have at least some little regret about something done or not done in the past of their life. And, again if you're an introspective type, you might spend some thought on thinking about what might have happened, where you might be now, if you had done that rather than this.

Of course they say that it's not good to have regrets nor to think about what might have been: they're not productive thoughts. That may be true: you only upset yourself, wishing you could go back to some earlier time and do it differently.

But for every choice you might have made differently, you would have made yourself a different person. If you're content with who and what you are, you might not like one of those alternative paths your life would have taken, just because you'd be someone else now.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Get God into Government?

As American politics approach the famous or infamous "Iowa caucuses," of course that is very much in the news. One particular item of comment concerned which candidate so-called Evangelical voters are going to favor. Accordingly, the news reporters interviewed a few such.

One of them said, "We've got to get God back into this country." Another said, "We have to get God into government."

I dearly wish I could have asked them exactly what they meant. But absent that, my reaction would be to say that America is not a theocracy, never has been, and anyone who thinks that a theocracy is in any way desirable should look at the example of Iran, where the opinions of the ruling ayatollahs trump the views of the more secular organs of government such as, indeed, President Ahmadinejad. Considering the freedoms that prevail in Iran—or rather the lack of them—should make anyone think twice before wishing for a theocracy in this country. (But they'd probably try to argue that a Christian theocracy is a good thing even if a Muslim theocracy is a bad thing.)

I have a feeling that these respondents, if I were to expostulate with them on the notion of church-state separation, would give me the standard Religious Right line that church-state separation is a "myth." And I would point out that it was Thomas Jefferson who, in a famous letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, wrote of a "wall of separation" between church and state. (And the idea has even earlier roots, going back 150 years earlier still, to Roger Williams who was exiled from the Bay Colony in Massachusetts and established Rhode Island to provide religious freedom.)

If I did have my hypothetical chance to interrogate these same (presumably) caucus-bound Republican voters in Iowa, I have a feeling that before too long we'd hear that they want to see things like a return of prayer to the public schools; posting of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, city halls, etc.; total outlawing of abortion and same-sex marriage. These have been issues for, and aims of, the Religious Right for a long time—in some cases for decades.

Just as an aside, when they helped elect Ronald Reagan, and maybe ditto for George W. Bush, they were very disillusioned that these objectives of theirs were not realized. That those policies were not enacted, even by presidents whom these people thought were one of them or at the very least largely on their side, shows that these are not popular (in the original sense) or mainstream positions.

I think some polls have shown that about one-third of American voters consider themselves Evangelicals. Even if that is so and is not an inflated statistic, that number still is not a majority. Yet this minority aspires to political power such that it can trample on those who don't agree with it. The majority in the US gets to wield power via elections; but when it comes to rights (e.g. the civil rights of minority groups), the government is set up so that the majority cannot impose its religious views or practices on a minority. Nor a minority on the majority. The arbiter of any disputes about that is our court system.

Some of the earliest polities in America—for example, the seventeenth-century colony settled by Puritans in Massachusetts—were in fact set up as theocracies. A dissenter such as Roger Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts and went on to found Rhode Island. But the Framers of the Constitution, a century and a half later, in envisioning the shape of a federal government, wanted to avoid any government like that.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Update, January 4, 2012
This posting received a comment from a faithful follower of this blog. While I have the power to moderate all comments—that means I can allow or not allow a comment to be posted—I am pledged to allow dissenting opinions to be expressed on my blog.

However, I have to object to what was said; and I at first did so by writing a comment myself, commenting on the reader's comment.

However, I think I will use this avenue, an "update" to my original posting, to further express my refutation of what this person says.

He accuses liberals of being opposed to "school choice." Now, what exactly is school choice?

First, the term is a euphemism of the sort that I particularly hate because it obscures what is really being talked about. To me that is deceptive and downright evil.

"School choice" means what are also called school vouchers. Vouchers are given to parents of school-age children who can take them and use them as payment for school tuition; that is, tuition at private schools, and that usually means parochial--religious--schools.

So, school vouchers are beloved by the Religious Right. I, however, am strongly opposed to them. They allow tax money—my tax dollars—to be used to pay for religious education. I don't think I should be forced to pay for religious, sectarian, doctrinal education—which might, for example, teach Creationism instead of evolution. I believe that breaches the Constitutionally-mandated separation of Church and State.

Here is an interesting slant on school vouchers from the article on that subject in Wikipedia:
In some Southern states during the 1960s, school vouchers were used as a method of perpetuating segregation. In a few instances, public schools were closed outright and vouchers were issued to parents. The vouchers, in many cases, were only good at privately segregated schools, known as segregation academies.[6] Today, all modern voucher programs prohibit racial discrimination. [Wikipedia, s.v. school vouchers]
Public school teachers and teacher unions such as the National Education Association oppose vouchers. For all of the arguments both in favor of and against vouchers, see the Wikipedia article.

An interesting alternative, which does not seem to me to be as objectionable, is called "education tax credits." This basically says that if you pay to send your children to private school, you don't have to pay taxes which go to finance public schools. That seems fair, but I'd hasten to add that by the same logic, people such as myself, who have no children, probably should not pay for public schools, either.

There was an important ruling by the Supreme Court: in "2002 in a landmark case before the US Supreme Court, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, . . . the divided court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled the Ohio school voucher plan constitutional and removed any constitutional barriers to similar voucher plans in the future. . . " [Wikipedia, ibid.].

However, in Florida vouchers were struck down:
In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court struck down legislation known as the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), which would have implemented a system of school vouchers in Florida.[67] The court ruled that the OSP violated article IX, section 1(a) of the Florida Constitution: "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools" [Wikipedia, ibid.].

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Writing without Spaces

Last October I wrote,
Now, interestingly, in this age of the Internet we are back to where we were three or four thousand years ago [that is, in the history of writing, before spaces or some other marker of word division was invented and words and even sentences were simply run together]. Web site addresses (URLs), email addresses, and screen names often run words together. This occasionally makes for interesting possibilities to misread, but it almost always means we're having to learn to read writing that once again doesn't use spaces—thus going back thousands of years in the history of writing.

Now a friend has sent me some humorous examples of the problems I had in mind when I wrote that.

All of these are companies that didn't spend quite enough time considering how their online names might appear - and be misread:

1. Who Represents is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is
www.whorepresents.com/

2. Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange Advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com/

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net/

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
www.therapistfinder.com/

5. There's the Italian Power Generator company,
www.powergenitalia.com/

6. And don't forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales,
www.molestationnursery.com/

7. If you're looking for IP computer software, there's always
www.ipanywhere.com/

8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is
www.cummingfirst.com/

9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site,
www.speedofart.com/

I tested a couple of these links and they all appear to be genuine web sites.