Author: Mick Hartley

Just what China needs: a Marxist-Leninist revival.

At an autumn meeting of China’s all-powerful Politburo, Hu Jintao, the President and Communist Party chief, left the floor to his Prime Minister to discuss economic policy.

President Hu took centre-stage only when it came to the issue of ideology, using the opportunity to propose a revival in Marxism for modern China. An £8 million Marxism-Leninism academy has opened in Beijing to mark the 112th anniversary on December 26 of the birthday of Chairman Mao. An existing institute has been upgraded, staffing expanded to 200 from 75 and its president now holds the rank of a Cabinet vice -minister. […]

Exercising the mind of Mr Hu is how to maintain the party’s grasp on power when its founding ideology is in such contradiction to the market reforms that have brought his people unprecedented prosperity and ensured the party’s longevity. He has dismissed Western-style democracy as a blind alley.

One academic said: “Marxism will be used to explain the party’s political theories, policies and goals and to emphasise the Communist Party’s legitimacy.”

Some thoughts prompted by Channel 4’s 50 Greatest Comedy Films, shown last night:

No point in bemoaning the choices – that’s in the nature of these lists – but the order of Mel Brooks’ films was exactly backwards. The Producers (no. 50) was his best by far. Young Frankenstein (no. 20) had it’s moments, but not many of them. Blazing Saddles (no 8) – well, farting is intrinsically humourous, so it takes a special kind of genius to have a whole scene devoted to farting (the cowboys round the campfire) which is completely and totally unfunny.

Like most of my generation I have a special fondness for the Carry On films. How can you go wrong with a cast list including greats like Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Charles Hawtree, Hattie Jacques? Yet a problem arises when you lower your gaze from that great Platonic Carry on film and actually start to watch a particular example: you’ll find after 10 minutes that it’s virtually unwatchable. Every discussion of the Carry Ons will quote the old line, “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me”, simply because it’s the only decent joke in the whole series.

The comments from talking heads are nearly always a waste of time, but there’s usually one commenter who stands out as particularly useless, and this time we got another celebrity who’s spent far too much time and money being psychoanalysed: the once great Gene Wilder. No, we don’t want to hear yet again how comedy is a powerful weapon against evils like Nazism.

The original ground-breaker for the whole lamentable Richard Curtis Brit-comedies-aimed-at-the-American-market was A Fish Called Wanda. How did Cleese and co. aim to attract those US dollars? By having a couple of British grotesques – Cleese as his usual upper-middle class pompous repressed idiot, and Michael Palin as a stuttering pathetic working class inadequate – come up against a couple of vibrant and neurosis-free Americans, prompting the Cleese character to declaim on how wonderful Americans are, and how pathetic we English are by comparison. Yes, it did well at the US box office. Imagine France, say, coming up with a comedy aimed at the US market about a couple of French grotesques – a womanising buffoon with personal hygiene problems, perhaps, who runs away at the first sign of trouble, and an intellectual who smokes gauloises non-stop, and lectures on the glories of the working class while living a life of luxury in a smart arrondissement of Paris – who are rescued from their follies by a couple of American heroes. Not something we’re likely to see any time soon.

And only one Ealing comedy (The Ladykillers at no 43)? What about Kind Hearts and Coronets?

The Edge annual question to leading scientists: What is your dangerous idea?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Of the contributions I’ve read so far, Steven Pinker’s is the one which best meets the challenge of the question:

Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments

The year 2005 saw several public appearances of what will I predict will become the dangerous idea of the next decade: that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.

In January, Harvard president Larry Summers caused a firestorm when he cited research showing that women and men have non-identical statistical distributions of cognitive abilities and life priorities.

In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin’s Fallacy: that because most genes may be found in all human groups, the groups don’t differ at all. But patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups, and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense. )

In June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by physicist Greg Cochran, anthropologist Jason Hardy, and population geneticist Henry Harpending proposing that Ashkenazi Jews have been biologically selected for high intelligence, and that their well-documented genetic diseases are a by-product of this evolutionary history.

In September, political scientist Charles Murray published an article in Commentary reiterating his argument from The Bell Curve that average racial differences in intelligence are intractable and partly genetic.

Whether or not these hypotheses hold up (the evidence for gender differences is reasonably good, for ethnic and racial differences much less so), they are widely perceived to be dangerous. Summers was subjected to months of vilification, and proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate inscribed by parents). The underlying fear, that reports of group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless.

The intellectual tools to defuse the danger are available. “Is” does not imply “ought. ” Group differences, when they exist, pertain to the average or variance of a statistical distribution, rather than to individual men and women. Political equality is a commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than representatives of groups; it is not an empirical claim that all groups are indistinguishable. Yet many commentators seem unwilling to grasp these points, to say nothing of the wider world community.

the caravan. The signs are that there are more senior-level departments getting involved. Wherever I went, the cars would surround me and a group of about twenty strong men would run up….

The person who stood as close as 1.8 meters away from my wife at the KFC restaurant and watched her dined was the hardest working of the whole lot, and also the most shameless. You can tell that he treated this dirty business as a sacred duty. Whenever I go, he followed me almost as if he was going to touch my body. Today when I went home, he was shameless to the point of obstructing me from entering my home.

Correspondingly, when my wife went to the market, the number of plainclothesmen has increased from two to four…

When I arrived at the office this morning, the landlord called to say that someone was causing him trouble for renting the office space to me. The level of tender loving care from the plainclothesmen to me is incredible. They can think about all the things that you can never imagine, and this is perhaps the unique attribute that they use to select plainclothesmen.

Recently, a lot of people want to offer me ‘love.’ The day before yesterday, a person with a Wuhan (Hubei) accent called me and wanted me to take on a big case involving several tens of millions of yuan, for which I can expect to make a few million yuan in legal fees. I told him: (1) my law office has been ordered to cease business by the authorities; (2) even if there was no stoppage, I have no interest presently in any case that involves only monetary interests as I would rather do something more meaningful. The other party passionately expressed his firm support for the value of my past activities and denounced the barbarity of the authorities. He said that despised the authorities and he could provide the several million yuan secretly to me without any receipt as long as I personally took care of the case. On one hand, this setup had no apparent flaws. On the other hand, I had never imagined that anyone would set up such a trap. Still, I turned it down, thank God! As I was hanging up the telephone, I heard someone laughing and saying: “Fuck! He did not fall for it!” in perfect putonghua intonation on the other side.

Where have conditions deteriorated most during the course of 2005? There are plenty of contenders – Western Sudan, maybe? – but the situation was appalling a year ago; the scandal is that there’s been absolutely no improvement. North Korea, perhaps, but again we’re starting from a low, and we don’t have enough information about conditions in the countryside, where famine may or may not be threatening. Overall, though, it would be hard to beat Zimbabwe:

The cost of buying groceries in Zimbabwe increased almost 10-fold in 2005, according to the country’s independent Consumer Council.

Its report found that the price of a loaf of bread rose by 1,157% throughout the year to 44,000 Zimbabwean dollars (55 US cents; 32p). Milk rose 1,718%.

The runaway prices have caused living standards to plummet, especially since unemployment has risen to 80%.

The Zimbabwean government’s own figures put the inflation rate at 502%.

Yet this figure is calculated on a broader selection of goods and services, some items of which have recorded smaller price hikes than essential food products. […]

The Consumer Council’s end-of-year report said 2005 had been an “agonising” year for Zimbabwean consumers.

Aid agencies estimate that 70% of Zimbabwe’s 12 million population now survive on one meal or less a day, while the UN World Food Programme expects to feed some three million Zimbabweans next month.

mid-December and the justice ministry is still to rule on whether it continues.

Still, it does signal the way this is likely to go. The Turkish government have nothing to gain now for continuing with their prosecution of Pamuk except more bad publicity, but they can, and most likely will, use the case as a bargaining chip, dropping the charges at some point when it suits them, as an indication of their good will and reasonableness. Everyone will say how much this shows the progress that Turkey is making towards genuine freedom of expression. Meanwhile the point has been made: no one with less international prestige than Pamuk can expect to get away with talk of Armenian deaths, and any mention of genocide, or admittance of guilt, are still strictly off limits.

As China proves yet again, you can take the socialism out of a Communist regime, but you can’t take out the totalitarianism:

About 100 journalists from one of China’s most progressive newspapers, the Beijing News, have walked out to protest against their editor’s sacking.

The highly unusual move follows the ousting of editor-in-chief Yang Bin and two senior editors, as Communist Party officials moved to rein in the paper….

Papers like the Beijing News have been publishing stories to attract readers and advertising revenues, leading to disputes with Communist Party censors, who have traditionally maintained an iron grip over all media.

After a recent easing of government control, several high-profile incidents this year suggest the Party is reversing that trend. […]

The Beijing News has a reputation for forthright reporting and commentary.

In June, it exposed a bloody crackdown ordered by officials against protesting farmers in Dingzhou, in the northern province of Hebei, where six farmers were killed.

Following the reports, a local Communist Party official and 26 others were put on trial for organising the violence. […]

Paris-based organisation Reporters Without Borders has frequently criticised restrictions on the media in China, and says Chinese journalists are routinely forbidden from mentioning many sensitive subjects.

In its 2005 world press freedom index, China came 159th out of the 167 countries listed.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a famous essay on the panda’s thumb, citing it as an example of the way evolution works: making do with what’s available rather than coming up with optimal design solutions, in this case by adapting a wrist bone so that it sticks out and acts as an opposable digit to grasp bamboo shoots with. A case of not-very-intelligent-design, in fact, and therefore a pretty good argument for evolution and against the Great Designer in the Sky.

The Telegraph has a report on the latest findings from Spain, a tree-climbing ancestor to the red panda – not, in fact, a close relation to the giant panda, but sharing the “false thumb”.

(Via Tim Worstall, who’s in a particularly pedantic mood, taking issue with the terminology whereby the false thumb “evolved for this use“: “Things evolve and are then put to certain uses but the entire point is that the appearance of the characteristics is not driven by their use.” Well yes, but they evolve because the use they’re put to helps the survival and propagation of individuals with that particular characteristic. Might as well do what everyone else does and say it evolved for that purpose. Yes, it’s a metaphor, but a very handy one. Thanks to Darwin we can now talk about purpose in evolution without implying the existence of a designer or an overall plan.)

Which is all by way of an introduction to Carl Zimmer’s excellent article on the subject.

Well worth a read….Michael J. Totten visits Libya:

The main drag along the sea into the city [Tripoli] was one straw short of a freeway. There were no houses, businesses, restaurants or shops along the way — only clusters of vertical human-storage units surrounded by empty lots the size of a Wal-Mart.

Trash was smeared on the sidewalks. It clogged all the street gutters. Almost every available blank space (and, oh, were there plenty of those) was a dumpsite.

I got agoraphobia walking around. The streets were too wide, the buildings too far apart, the landscape barren. The traffic was too fast, too close and too hectic. I was pinned on a thin ribbon of sidewalk between the Mediterranean and the freeway.

There was no way I could cross that river of mayhem and steel unless I found a traffic light and a crosswalk — an unlikely event from the look of the place. There wasn’t much worth seeing on the other side anyway. Those towers and the empty lots strewn with soda cans, candy-bar wrappers and billowing plastic bags didn’t get any prettier as they got closer.

The sea was all but boarded up behind blank white walls and a decayed postindustrial concrete catastrophe of a “waterfront.” In the few places I could get a glimpse of the shoreline, it didn’t have the look and feel of the familiar Mediterranean, but rather an inland sea in a Central Asian republic. The city felt harsh and jagged, and the close but unreachable sea could not take the edge off.

arth:

Is the Iranian population being thus prepared for the announced nuclear war against Israel? Three years ago, the then Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that a single atom bomb used against Israel “would leave nothing on the ground”, whereas the damage done by a possible retaliatory strike would be limited (source: MEMRI Special Dispatch, 3 January 2002). Even with a million dead, the Islamic world would survive, whereas Israel would be destroyed. Thus the logic of Rafsanjani’s argument. It is this murderous calculation – the sort of calculation that lies at the base of every suicide attack – that distinguishes the atomic ambitions of Iran from the interests of all existing nuclear powers.

If there is a western nation today that has the means to confront such madness with effective sanctions, it is Germany. For the last 25 years, the German government has offered its good offices to the anti-Semitic Mullahs in Tehran with a shamelessness unrivalled by any other western government. In 1984, Hans-Dietrich Genscher was the first western Foreign Minister to pay his respects to the Mullah regime. Ten years later, Germany’s federal intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), trained Iranian intelligence agents in Munich. (See Arthur Heinrich, “Zur Kritik des ‘kritischen Dialogs’”, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, May 1996.) And whereas since 1995 American firms are prohibited from trading with Iran, Germany will, in the words of Werner Schoeltzke of the German Near and Middle East Association, , “remain the preferred technology partner of Iran also in the years to come” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 December 2003).

Germany is today by far the most important supplier of goods to Iran and its exports are increasing at a steady 20% per year. In 2004, German exports to Iran were worth some €3.6 billion. At the same time, Germany is the most important purchaser of Iranian goods apart from oil and Iran’s most important creditor.

So, the German Left must be outraged at the shameless way German companies are helping to strengthen a regime which seems to want to carry on where the Nazis left off – right?

And what of Germany’s “Left” opposition? Should we not assume that privileging the most elementary human rights over the interests of the big corporations would be a special concern of the “Greens” or the “the Left” alliance? Far from it. Apart from some few exceptions, the “Left” has not been prepared to allow the Holocaust denier from Tehran to deprive it of its conspiracy theories and rage against “BuSharon”. “If the Iranian President Ahmadinejad did not exist,” writes, for example, the Berlin-based “Green” daily Die Tageszeitung (taz), “the USA and Israel would have had to invent him” (15 December 2005). Ahmadinejad’s words are only to be taken seriously inasmuch as they “provide a welcome pretext for the USA and Israel.” […]

Given the obvious solicitude for the requirements of German industry, it would not surprise me if Ahmadinejad ordered his next batch of plastic keys for his Basiji from Germany. But will 500,000 keys to paradise be enough for the war against Israel?