Wis[s]e Words

Recently read

Stiff - Mary Roach
303 pages
published in 2003

What happens to your body after you die? Mary Roach explores the options when you donate your body to science. Nicely macaber and interesting without being too gross.

The Demon in the Freezer - Richard Preston
240 pages
published in 2002

Written shortly after the Anthrax attacks on Tom Daschle and other Democrats and several "liberal" media figures, this is about a far more frightening prospect: smallpox. Richard Preston traces the story of how smallpox got eradicated in nature, but still exists in storage in the US and Russia and unfortunately, probably also elsewhere.

Dark Life - Michael Ray Taylor
287 pages
published in 1999

Sort of a weird counterpart to The Demon in the Freezer, this is a book written by a caver/journalist who got involved in the search to socalled dark life; subterran life beyond the boundaries of known life. It largely revolves around the discovery of fossilised nanobacteria in a Martian meteorite and the discovery of terran equivalents

Posted by Martin Wisse at 11:01PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Couple 243

Last Monday, gay marriage became legal in the US state of Massachusetts, which immediately led to a run on marriage licences there, in towns like Cambridge. One couple who did so, couple 243, blogged their experience. It is a very emotional, happy piece:

We paid our $15 and walked up the stairs to the exit. People shook our hands on the way out, and as we walked out the front door at 4:15am we were greeted by a small cheering crowd.

"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" they yelled as we got to the bottom of the nearly-deserted steps. We kissed, posed for a picture and drove home through the nearly deserted streets.

(Brian)

[...]

I have a hard time gauging what my emotions were as we started running up the gauntlet -- the avenue that led from the sidewalk on Mass Ave. up to the front doors of City Hall -- to find that there were relatively few couples seeking licenses -- fewer than the thousand I might have expected -- but that there were about three thousand just *watching* -- a mass of people singing spontaneously, chanting, waving signs, all with their own little political agendas to defeat bush or proclaim love for gays or just be happy that we were getting what they had rights to -- a mass overfilling the lawn in front of City Hall, filling the sidewalk on both sides of Mass Ave, and stretching tendrils up and down several blocks, towards both Harvard and Central. As soon as Brian grabbed my hand and said let's give it a try, and started running, they all started cheering, clapping, screaming. I did not expect that.

(Aaron

It's hard to imagine the impact this has in the US when you're living in a country where gay marriage has been legal for a number of years now. Where it was realised more as the logical end result of the emancipation process rather than as something people had to fight hard for. It must feel so good to finally be able to proclaim your love for each other the way you want to, knowing there are so many who would keep that from you; even if Bush pushes through a constitutional amedament tomorrow making it illegal again, the moment itself can never be taken from you anymore.

Good luck and congratulations to Brian and Aaron; may they and all those other couples who can finally marry have a long and happy marriage.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 5:32PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

What happened in Haiti

Another article from The New Left Review takes a look at what happened in Haiti earlier this year:

What began following the Lavalas election victory of 1990 was the deployment of a partially new strategy for disarming this revolution, at a moment when the Cold War no longer offered automatic justification for the repression of mass movements by the overwhelming use of force. Designed not simply to suppress the popular movement but to discredit and destroy it beyond repair, the key to this strategy was the implementation of economic measures intended to intensify already crippling levels of mass impoverishment, backed up by old-fashioned military repression and propaganda designed to portray resistance to elite interests as undemocratic and corrupt. The operation has been remarkably successful -- so successful that in 2004, with the enthusiastic backing of the media, the UN and the wider 'international community', it resulted in the removal of a constitutionally elected government whose leadership had always enjoyed the support of a large majority of the population.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 4:07PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Planet of Slums

Mike Davis, in The New Left Review writes about the urbanisation of the third world (as also touched upon in an earlier post):

Urbanists also speculate about the processes weaving together Third World cities into extraordinary new networks, corridors and hierarchies. For example, the Pearl River (Hong Kong-Guangzhou) and the Yangtze River (Shanghai) deltas, along with the Beijing-Tianjin corridor, are rapidly developing into urban-industrial megalopolises comparable to Tokyo-Osaka, the lower Rhine, or New York-Philadelphia. But this may only be the first stage in the emergence of an even larger structure: 'a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java.' [13] Shanghai, almost certainly, will then join Tokyo, New York and London as one of the 'world cities' controlling the global web of capital and information flows.

[...]

But slums, however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future. The countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world's poor, but that doubtful title will pass to urban slums by 2035. [49] At least half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be credited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum dwellers by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect, but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds the slums perse.

A very frightening article, reminiscent, as Ken MacLeod also noted of science fiction novels like John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 3:21PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

The Pentagon as slumlord

The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighbourhood militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite army rangers, forced US strategists to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as 'Mout: Militarised Operations on Urbanised Terrain'. Ultimately a National Defence Panel review in December 1997 castigated the army as unprepared for protracted combat in the impassable maze-like streets of poor cities. As a result, the four armed services launched crash programmes to master streetfighting under realistic Third World conditions. 'The future of warfare', the journal of the Army War College declared, 'lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world.'

Socialist Review, May 2004

The results of this are currently on display in Iraq...

Link via Genosse Tabu

Posted by Martin Wisse at 7:11AM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Recently Read

Newton's Wake - Ken Macleod
369 pages
published in 2004

I was a bit worried after finishing Engine City, as it wasn't up to Ken Macleod's usual standards; it read as if he had to force himself to finish it. Fortunately, Newton's Wake is much better, basically a space opera trilogy complete in one book.

Singularity Sky - Charlie Stross
313 pages
published in 2003

Singularity Sky is a clever book masquerading as broad farce. Charlie Stross' starting point seems to have been "what if 1905 Tsarist Russia had experienced a full Vingean Singularity". Don't expect the same density of ideas as in his short stories; this is an almost traditional space opera. Almost.

A Question of Blood - Ian Rankin
440 pages
published in 2003

Continuing the Scottish theme, this is the 14th Inspector Rebus series and one of the better efforts. Rebus is a hardbitten, hard luck cop in Edinburgh, who this time gets called in to investigate a school shooting. He's also in trouble again, to great surprise, this time for possibly being involved in the violent death of a small time crook who was harassing a friend.

Year's Best SF 7 - David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (editors)
498 pages
published in 2002

The best short science fiction stories of 2001, according to the editors. Some good stories, but their taste in science fiction is definately not mine. There's a lot of chaff amongst the wheat.

The Great Siege: Malta 1565 - Ernle Bradford
256 pages, including notes and index
published in 1961

History written as if it was an adventure story, this tells about the siege of Malta by the great Ottoman Emperor Soleyman. Ernle Bradford's sympathies clearly lie with the besieged, the Knights of St. John, but he still manages to be objective. Worth a look if you can find it.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 6:40AM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

The morality of the pro-war left

Does the fact that US soldiers have engaged in torture in Iraq demand of those on the left who supported the war to re-evaluate their position?

Wasn't the main reason given by those on the left who supported this war why they did so, the chance to remove a dictatorial regime, rather than any of the official reasons given by the Bush administration?

Than surely, the fact that the liberators themselve engage in torture and rape, must cause some soul searching? After all, what does liberation matter if torture still happens?

Posted by Martin Wisse at 3:19PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Anarchists

In a never ending political joke, the anarchists, led by CLAC who were at the back of the march, got bored of waiting and decided to have their own march of about two thousand. They marched down a street parallel to the main march. They did anarchist things (looking and acting like idiots), accomplished their goals (be more radical than the rest of us bourgeois sell-outs) and ended up becoming what they always do (irrelevant).

From If there is hope...

Posted by Martin Wisse at 1:54AM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Torture

We've all seen the photos by now and been disgusted by them. US and UK soldiers torturing prisoners? Surely that's something that couldn't happen, shouldn't have happened. Surely it is only an isolated occurrence, done by a few psychopaths and this should not reflect on the UK or US military as a whole. Even Bush himself said:

"I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated," Bush said. "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America."

Isn't it?

I genuinely would like to believe that, but I'm not sure I can. I don't think these were isolated incidents. Ever since the September 11 attacks, the US leaders have fostered an atmosphere in which civil liberties and human rights are to be shoved aside in the name of security. Guantanamo Bay, the way in which Josef Padilla and others are held indefinately without charge, the prisoners taken during the Aghanistan campaign and in Iraq who are still held in the region, the alleged transfer of prisoners from US custody to countries who don't have great moral objections against torture, the support for dictatorial regimes who make the appropriate anti-terrorist noises, all of them point to the inescapeable conclusion that this is how "we do things in America".

If their leaders give such sterling examples, can you blame these soldiers for being extra zealous?

Consider also the wider content. First, you have this atmosphere of fear drummed into us by the Bush administration, where we are told drastic measures are needed to keep us safe, that we don't have time for legal niceties and where civil and human rights are luxuries. Second, there is the inevitable wartime dehumanisation of the enemy, combined with the US military's emphasis on keeping its troops safe, no matter the cost in enemy or bystanders' lifes. If nobody bats an eye at US snipers killing ambulance drivers during the battle for Fallujah, why the outrage about what happens after the battle is over?

Third, this is made worse by the framing of the war against Iraq and the wider War Against Terror, as a struggle between good and evil, where "we" are Good and the enemy is Evil and so anything "we" do is automatically right, while anything the enemy does is automatically wrong. Finally, this Manchurian worldview has always had a strong attraction for a lot of Americans; in a culture where quite a lot of people consider prison rape not as much an unfortunate excess as an integral and welcome part of the prison system, is it strange that enemy prisoners are sexually abused?

This is not to say that all or even most US and UK soldiers would do these things, but these are not "isolated incidents" either.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 11:18AM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.

Welcome

Welcome to the EU: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Posted by Martin Wisse at 12:06PM PDT [ Permalink] End of post.