Category Archives: Commentary

RANT ROOM: Robots Calling

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698px-Alt_TelefonThe phone rings. I pick it up. A robot starts talking in my ear. Well, not a robot, but an electronically recorded voice. I hang up. This happens about seven times a day.

I’m on a no-call list, but there’re so many loopholes so as to make its value questionable. First of all,  the politicians exempt themselves–of course. Only a politician could be so megalomaniacal as to think that a person who expressly requests not to be bothered by anyone by phone is secretly awaiting his robo-call.  Second, charities are exempt, whether it’s the March of Dimes or the Irritable Bowel Syndrome Defense Fund.  There seem to be more charities calling than ever. Or, perhaps, they’re like Phnom Penh urchins– if you give one of them money it induces a swarm. (Or, more likely, they make all the big money by selling contact lists to other charities.) Finally, any business that you’ve ever done business with is exempt  (even monopoly phone companies and utilities, for which you had no choice but a third world existence), as well as the parent companies that bought a company that you did business with once 20 years ago.

People who know me will tell you that I don’t even like to talk on the phone with human beings that I like, what hope would a machine have? Answer: “None.”

Now, let it be known that I’m not anti-machine. In 200 years, when they unfreeze my brain after the Terminator Wars, I’m not going to be one of the douche-bags standing on a picket like to prevent little T8-Y0 from going to school with the human kids and super-intelligent dolphins. I just resent someone calling me, intent on taking up my time, without even having the common courtesy to be intelligent–artificially or otherwise.

Some will say, “But, Bernie, you’ve called me and said not a word that was remotely intelligent.”

To that I say, “Nuh-uh, stop being a jerk-head.”

I almost always meet the technical definition of “intelligent” (self-aware? I’m self-obsessed!) when I call someone on the phone, and that’s all I expect of others.  I would pass a Turing test because the evaluator would say, “Any machine would maintain a train of thought better than this guy. He’s all over the place. He must be human. Plus, he can’t do math for shit.” [If you want to weed the androids out of your life, ask them to divide 49  by 18. If they answer automatically and correctly to two decimal points, stake them through the oil pump. If they are one of those “Human Calculators,” they deserve it for betraying their kind–but I’m not speciesist.]

Still, this brings one question to mind, how lonely do you have to be to listen to a machine blather on? Obviously the companies using robo-calls have sufficient success to keep paying their phone bills. That means that some people have to hear the robot voice and say, “What the heck? Let me hear what R2-D2 has to say.”

Who does this? I’ve heard that some people have guilt issues with hanging up on people because they were “raised right.” I can’t claim to understand this. It’s not an affliction that burdens me. I will hang up on anyone who assumes they can make demands on my time without compensation in about two microseconds. Yes, I said it, Mom. (Just kidding, I’m really talking to cable companies, natural gas providers, credit card companies, etc.)

Still, even if one feels guilty about hurting the feelings of a person, why would the same guilt apply to machines–which do not have feelings to hurt.

I mean, does this person think the caller might be a T-101 calling from the future to warn him that a mean T-1000 is on its way to poke him to death with a memory metal finger? I guess that sounds reasonable… no, no it doesn’t.

Alternatively, do people sit around thinking, I wish someone would call me up and tell me what I want, because I have no idea.

Maybe I just don’t understand this mindset. No person has ever convinced me to make an impulse buy by yapping. I’ve never said, “Gee-whiz, you’re right, I definitely need this product or plan that I didn’t know existed five minutes ago.”

It has occurred to me that I might be taking the wrong tack by hanging up on these calls instantaneously. By doing that, I am helping them weed out an unlikely sale in as inexpensive a manner as possible. The next time a robot calls me, I think I’ll put the phone down next to the radio–playing easy listening, of course–and then walk off. I encourage you all to do the same.

10 Tips for Averting Tiger Attacks

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As with mean drunks, never interrupt a drinking tiger

As with mean drunks, never interrupt a drinking tiger

I was working on a short story that involved a tiger attack, and–knowing almost nothing about the subject–I did a little research. I found some fascinating factoids. Here are some important tips to keep in mind in tiger country:

1.) Avoid squatting postures as it’s thought that many tiger attack victims are cases of mistaken identity. That is, sometimes an individual crouching to do his business or whatnot is mistaken for a tastier species. Apparently, tigers don’t realize that humans are the only creatures that wear clothing. Despite attempts by missionaries to educate tigers on biblical stories such as that of Adam and Eve, tigers continue to see themselves as god’s favorites.

2.) Avoid wearing leather, it makes you smell and taste like cow. While cows are sacred in India, tigers have denied receiving that memo. Or perhaps tigers are like members of PETA and are attacking those wearing animal hides to make a bold statement… but I doubt it.

3.) Avoid carrying meat in your pockets. Enough said.

4.) If one is attacked, don’t immediately counter-attack. Some tigers are just trying to express their passionate feelings on the subject of breakfast cereal, and one would not like a needless fight to ensue. One should only partake in needless fights when one has a good shot at winning– no offense to any one who has ever fought Manny Pacquiao.

5.) Don’t leave your dead out and about. Apparently, human is an acquired taste that tigers will find a fun exotic treat once they get used to it. We are the Rocky Mountain Oysters of the tiger world.

6.)  Be aware of your surroundings, and–as with Zombies–CARDIO-CARDIO-CARDIO. Tigers can run at speeds of up to 35 miles per hour (56km/hr.) for short bursts, but have the stamina of a pack-a-day smoker. If you can keep them from getting close to you, they’ll lose interest.

7.) Stay in the city. Tigers almost never go into the city because they tend to attract unwanted attention. The average tiger weighs about 400 pounds (180 kg.) and the orange and black stripe pattern that camouflages surprisingly well in wild sticks out everywhere except Paul Brown Stadium or the lingerie section of an inner-city K-Mart.

8.) If you are attacked, the tiger will leap up and put its fore paws on one’s shoulders to push one over onto one’s back so that the cat can leisurely crush one’s neck in his or her mouth. When the tiger rears up on its hind-legs you may either try a kick to the crotch or to engage the predator in a foxtrot. The former offers a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of success. The latter has never been tried before, and so no one can rightly speak to its likelihood of success, though it’s suggested that one not try to lead (You must recognize that–at that point– you are the tiger’s bitch.)

9.)  Because humans aren’t ideal tiger food but we are slow, weak, and are skilled in disciplines like “managerial analysis” rather than hunting or survival in the wild, man-eating tigers tend to be the old and infirm cats that find gazelle and antelope both too fast and jungle savvy. Because only the oldest of cats tend to attack, a sure strategy is to get your attacker talking about how things were back in his day and how the current generation of tigers are all misfits and hooligans.

10.)  If you’re attacked, make loud noises and violent “shooing” gestures with your arms. You’ll still be eaten, but you will appear quite brave on the video in comparison to those who go fetal and poo themselves.

Best wishes and be safe out there.

The Good and Ugly of Olden Times

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This was posted in my martial arts blog, Jissen Budoka, as well.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Japan’s past recently. In my spare time, I’m working on rewrites for a novel in which 14th century Japan features prominently. Being my first foray into historical fiction, I’m finding the need to go back and do a lot of research about the time because the quick and dirty draft I wrote needs a lot of gussying up. I just finished reading Charles Dunn’s Everyday Life in Imperial Japan,  which is about a later period but one which would have shared much in common when it comes to everyday life. Presently, I’m reading The Taiheiki–which is about the 14th century, but which blends fact and fiction.

Doing such research encourages one to consider what it meant to live during that time. We all build constructs of the world to adjust for our limitations in knowledge. Some of these constructs hold up better than others, but they’re all simplifications. When one reflects upon a time before one’s experience–and particularly regarding a place with which one has limited familiarity–there are two major forms of fallacious reasoning that can take hold:

1.) The Golden Age Fallacy: This is the thought that everything was better back in the day–back before humanity started slouching toward craptasticness.

2.) The Outhouse Fallacy: This is the idea that any society that couldn’t manage indoor plumbing couldn’t possibly be worthy of emulation.

Of course, these simplifications are both true and false in some regard, and–as absolute statements–are absolutely false. The truth is something more like what Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested in Self-Reliance. Emerson described society as a wave, receding on one side as quickly as it advanced on the other. In other words, changes maybe seen as progress, but they also bring about the destruction of valuable knowledge. In martial arts terms, the spear becomes obsolete and the art of spear-fighting dies.

LastSamuraiThe movie entitled The Last Samurai revolves around this premise. Of course, in Hollywood fashion the forces of modernity are made entirely villanous and our heroes, the samurai, are entirely virtuous. In a way the movie is perverse in that it suggests we root for the medieval approach over our own.

When considering feudal Japan, Golden Agers point to it as a time during which virtue was paramount, craftsmanship was exquisite, and much culture flourished. They are right; but don’t set your time machine just yet because Outhouse Agers are also correct when they say that it was a time during which most of the population had no rights, wars ravaged the country, and in which farmers were not allowed to partake of many of the products they produced–but rather had to feed and cloth their families with inferior substitutes.

One should be careful to neither romanticize nor vilify the samurai. We should keep what is of value of the old ways without being a slave to the worst ways of our predecessors’ nature. One shouldn’t abandon everything old on the assumption that by definition everything abandoned to the past is refuse.

Snowden’s Muddled Message

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Also posted in my blog, Strategic Ramblings.

Edward Snowden is once again the headline leader. The man some consider a whistle-blower and others think a traitor is trying to gain temporary asylum in Russia. His U.S. passport having been suspended, Russian asylum seems to be his only immediate path out of the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. A few countries in Latin America have agreed to offer Snowden asylum and he has expressed interest in taking Venezuela up on the offer, but without a passport he is stuck like Tom Hanks’ character in Terminal Man.

The request for Russian asylum is problematic in that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that asylum wouldn’t be considered as long as Snowden was still leaking. While Snowden said he has no interest in hurting the U.S., he is still talking about U.S. intelligence activities and seems unlikely to give up giving up information.

When the revelations of this story initially broke in the Guardian, I was outraged by the allegations being put forth by Snowden. In essence, Snowden suggested that Americans’ electronic communications were being spied on without warrants and without specificity. While lawyers and politicians love to play word games, the Fourth Amendment is clear and concise. Where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, searches require a warrant that says who is involved and what’s being sought. In short, the Constitution doesn’t allow fishing expeditions.

The damage control by the Administration and the Intelligence Community in subsequent days was even more infuriating. The message seemed to be, “We want to have an open debate about all these nifty protections that are in place to make this all legal, but, alas, that’s all classified.I’m not saying you should just trust us, but–yeah–just trust us, ya-da-ya-da-ya-da.” I’m suspicious of a government attempting to expand its power; I abhor a government that tries to do it under the cover of darkness.

Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, had been asked the following question by a Senator during his testimony, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Clearly the answer to this question, in light of the Verizon revelation was, “yes.” However, Clapper answered in the negative, and then added a qualifier “not wittingly” that didn’t help improve the truthfulness of statement, but should have been a red flag that the Director was trying to play some type of semantic game. Clapper later went on a Nixon-esque / Clinton-esque defensive about how his answer was the “least untruthful.” Of course, to suggest that the Verizon data was “unwittingly collected” strains credulity.

When General Keith Alexander of the NSA (among others) testified, he said that he had three points. First, that the programs had yielded positive results, or–in other words–the ends justified the means. Second, that the programs in question were “limited, focused, and subject to rigorous oversight.” Third, privacy and civil liberties are protected by the programs. However, he seemed to only want to talk substance about the first point–that is, what ends justified these means. I found it disconcerting that Gen. Alexander could tell us something about which cases had positive outcomes as a result of these programs, but not about the processes and protections required to draw specific information from the vast pools of data being collected on Americans. The former being the kind of information that could have negative security ramifications, the latter could only embarrass politicians. Secrecy is needed to protect assets and methods, but shouldn’t be a tool of protecting dubious legal practices. Al Qaeda doesn’t get a leg up by knowing the legal process required to access data generically.

The testimony was full of what would be objected to as “leading questions” in a court of law. For example, Alexander was asked if there was “any switch that could be flipped to allow analysts to eavesdrop on communications.” This makes for nice ass-covering when it turns out that they, in fact, have to type a command into a command line. “No, we never lied. We were as truthy as can be, there is no switch– we had the switches replaced with buttons decades ago.” Alexander repeated the “flip a switch” phrase back in his reply so that they were all on the same page.

As sad as any comment made was when Alexander said, “Further, as the Deputy Attorney General noted, virtually all countries have lawful intercept programs under which they compel communications providers to share information about individuals they believe represent a threat to their societies.” At the risk of sounding nostalgic, I remember when America prided itself in being a leader in liberty rather than saying, “look we aren’t doing anything that Russia and China aren’t!”

Telling me that you had success due to these programs isn’t enough for me. If you said, “hey, we put everyone of a particular religious persuasion in jail, and we foiled x-number of plots,” should I be reassured or outraged. I would argue the latter.

Telling me that other countries have such programs doesn’t satisfy me. I think the U.S. should seek to be on the leading edge of freedom and not happy slouching around the middle of the pack.

Telling me that a given database has only phone numbers and metadata and no identifying information doesn’t really inspire confidence. It turns out that there’s this nifty thing called “the internet” that allows one to look up people’s names from a phone number. You’re going to tell me that no one is going to google the number they’re looking for information about?

If the government wants to reassure the public, they need to have transparency in legal processes and not hide behind a veil of classified information.

Of course, part of the disagreement is that the law as it now stands only suggests only the content of messages incurs a reasonable expectation of privacy. That Mr. A talked to his therapist for two hours one Sunday evening as (according to cell tower triangulation data) he was sitting in the parking lot of a hospital is–in the eyes of many–completely unprotected information that no one could reasonably expect to be their own damn business.

I’m not comfortable with the collection of vast stores of information on citizens. Even if there are some protections that are working for the moment, all that information will just be waiting for some moment of weakness, some rally-around-the-flag moment, during which people are willing to flush all they hold dear down the crapper in exchange for a promise of security.

Having said all this, I’ve had a bit of trouble retaining sympathy towards Snowden as he’s muddled his initial message about unconstitutional actions. When he started releasing information about how the U.S. was spying on China, his message became lost. Of course the U.S. is spying on China, and they upon us. That’s the nature of the game in an anarchic international system. Yes, it’s a political embarrassment; coming as it did when the President was attempting to give China “the old what for” over the issue, but spying on other countries in order to keep one safe is part of what is expected of a government. (Yes, even on allies. You can be certain Israel, Japan, and the United Kingdom are spying on the U.S.) I take as a given that other countries might try to read my email if they think it has any potential benefit to them. However, they haven’t been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of force against me. I expect my government to serve to protect me from any dire consequences of other country’s snooping. In fact, I have held jobs where other countries may have eavesdropped on me (not because of the work I did, but because of with whom I was in contact.) The potential for nefarious activities by a foreign country are just not the same as they are for domestic shenanigans–for most of us at least. There is less incentive to try to manipulate a random Joe for political or material gain across borders than there is within.

If Snowden is driven by his love of freedom, why has he headed in the direction that he has. Even if everything he says is absolutely true, the U.S. is still vastly more free than either Russia or Venezuela (e.g.Freedom House ranks the former as “not free” and the latter as “partially free.”) (There is some doubt about whether what Snowden says is true, but as the government hasn’t really delved into details or engaged in any contradiction that is not riddled with carefully censored qualifying words, one cannot tell.)

Your Post-Apocalyptic Guidance Counselor Is In

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I’ve been reading World War Z because I had heard it’s an interesting book and because it went on sale–presumably in anticipation of the movie that comes out next week that shares a name (but probably little else besides Zombies) with the novel. I don’t usually read zombie or vampire literature because there’s so much of it and rarely does it offer anything new or intriguing. (Once one’s read Bramstoker and Matheson, what more is there to be said on the undead.) Brooks’ book is an exception. Told as a series of oral histories collected by a UN employee who serves as a quasi-protagonist–but not necessarily a central character–of the book, World War Z  chronicles the human dimension of the Zombie War.

The book tells a series of personal vignettes from the earliest sign of the pandemic through the cleanup afterward. One of the issues that is discussed is the mismatch between the skill sets the survivors had and the skill sets that were needed to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. In one of the interviews, a bureaucrat discusses the need for job retraining because they had all these information age analysts, managers, coordinators, etc. but few people who knew how to make new things, grow food, or repair damaged infrastructure. They had all these mid-level white-collar people and they needed blue collars.

This got me thinking. To be honest, I haven’t had a job that would be useful in a post-apocalyptic wasteland since I was a 22-year-old infantry-trained law enforcement officer. Everything since then has involved life in a cubicle or small office uncovering, creating, evaluating, analyzing, describing, modifying, and disseminating information. Then there has been writing, which I love, but which isn’t exactly going to pull humanity back from extinction. (Let’s not kid ourselves that “reading is fundamental” when society has to be rebuilt from the ground up–fed, clothed, etc.)

This isn’t to say that I would be altogether useless in a post-Zombie Apocalypse world. I lived years 0 through 18 on a working farm. That was a long time ago, but I’m sure I could remember something about how to engage in activities that are actually directly related to keeping people alive (as opposed to keeping them informed.)

So will you be useful post zombie apocalypse? What would you be interested in doing if your current Dilbert-esque work life became irrelevant?

The Snowden Dilemma

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[This was previously posted in my blog, Strategic Ramblings.]

As I–and everyone else– follow the slew of articles on Edward Snowden, I saw the following quote from Lord Acton:

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

I agree wholeheartedly with Acton’s statement. The debate revolving around the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor raises some intriguing questions. Once upon a time, I held a security clearance–not a particularly high one–but nonetheless a promise to keep the secrets I was exposed to in the process of my job. I took that clearance deadly serious and recognized its value and importance. However, I had it easy. I never faced any great moral dilemma over keeping my promise. Snowden’s situation was quite different.

What does one do when one sees one’s employer engaging in behavior that is illegal and/or unconstitutional under the normal definitions of words as we commonly use them. That is, the government has creatively taken words like “facility” and “targeting” and put an Orwellian twist on them to make a wild violation of U.S. citizens’ reasonable expectation of privacy in order to lawyer the program into one that some might define as “technically” legal. (e.g. the Washington Post article said that huge sets of information data were labeled “facilities” [suspected involved in terrorism] in order to justify all that information being handed to the government.) Of course, the national security leadership has been singing a refrain of “we don’t target U.S. citizens.” What is left unsaid is that while they don’t “target” U.S. citizens they come into a lot of information on citizens because: a.) they have a very low standard for determining likelihood of foreignness, and b.) they are collecting information on individuals regardless of whether they are suspected of anything.

So if you are Edward Snowden, you are a low-level employee. Your superiors don’t give a damn what you think about the legality of the program. You can’t complain to anyone because no one who cares is cleared to hear it, and those who are cleared to hear it have a vested interested in maintaining (if not expanding) the intrusions.  What would you tell Snowden if you were his friend, and not a complete stranger with your own feelings on the subject? That’s a tough one.

Secrecy may be necessary in some cases, but I’m uncomfortable writing the government a blank check. Officials will say, “it’s not a blank check, we have internal and external oversight.” First of all, the idea of “internal oversight” is not particularly confidence inspiring. That’s a little too much like “Otis” from the Andy Griffith Show letting himself in and out of the drunk tank as he saw fit for my taste. Second, how can any of us know that a judge acting on a FISA warrant treats it with the same seriousness as a case in which their decision will be open to public scrutiny? I don’t know, but I don’t hear of a lot of warrants in, say, bank robbery cases in which the phone records of millions of people unsuspected of a crime are to be handed over for a period of months.  Yes, finding and uncovering terrorists is more difficult than building a case against other criminals, but I remain skeptical because–as Lord Acton said, “Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice…”

Teachable and Unteachable Lessons

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[Note: This is posted in my Jissen Budōka blog as well.]

Source: Wikipedia; Status: Public Domain

Source: Wikipedia; Status: Public Domain

Miyamoto Musashi, who was undefeated in over 60 duels, claimed that he never had a teacher. Some historians refute this claim. Whether one accepts it or not, the statement astonishes.

Musashi wasn’t talking only about martial arts, but about the many areas in which he was accomplished. Not being a painter or a sculptor, I can’t say how important a teacher is in such domains. But it’s easy enough for me to imagine a successful writer who never took a formal class in writing; someone who read profusely and practiced his (or her) craft relentlessly could do it. (Certainly, one can easily imagine successful writers whose formal education was in some area other than writing because there are so many of them–probably at least as many as those whose education was in writing. Examples include: Vonnegut [Chemistry], Crichton [Medicine], Zane Grey [Dentistry], Ursala LeGuin [Anthropology], and J.K. Rowling [French]. That’s not even to start on the many literary legends who dropped out all together– e.g. Dickens, Faulkner, Twain, H.G. Wells, and Jack London.) This isn’t to say that writing teachers don’t make writing better, but just that there is a path to this skill that doesn’t involve being fed lessons.

However, I struggle to imagine a martial artist achieving so much without a teacher. Boiled down to its most workaday definition, a martial art is a collections of lessons about what works in a combative situation. This is what separates the importance of a teacher in martial arts from that of a discipline like writing. In writing, one has the leisure to make one’s mistakes, learn from them, and self-apply course corrections. Musashi was in life or death duels; he couldn’t learn lessons at such a leisurely pace and in such an iterative fashion.

A martial arts teacher has a number of roles, such as preventing inertia (slacking) from taking hold in the training hall. However, the most fundamental purpose is to pass along the collection of lessons so that a student doesn’t have to learn them all by way of personal experience. Most of us aren’t Miyamoto Musashi; we can’t survive the process of learning all our own lessons.

Needless to say, I am a firm believer in the value of a good teacher. I’ve had several over the years, and I received valuable lessons from all of them–all with different, but no less valid, points of emphasis and flavor.

Having said all that proceeds, there’s much that cannot be taught. Such lessons may be described or discussed, but they cannot be learned except through the initiative of the student. I said that most of us can’t survive the process of learning all one’s own lessons, but I’ve increasingly come to believe that one can’t survive learning none of them either. In the beginning, one must be fed the lessons from a teacher in order grow. However, as the decades pass, one increasingly needs the space to learn one’s own lessons. If one lacks said space, one will stagnate and eventually the wheels will roll off one’s training altogether.

So what are the unteachable lessons? Knowledge can be conveyed, but not everything that a martial artist must learn is knowledge. Confidence cannot be taught. A teacher may explain–or even show–how he or she became confident, but that won’t translate one iota into the student being more confident.  This is like a Buddhist monk telling one that “desire is the root of suffering.” One may understand that statement. One may believe the statement. However, one’s suffering won’t decrease because one has the knowledge.  One’s suffering will only decrease if one conscientiously does the hard work of reducing one’s desires.

Another area of unteachable lessons are the lessons that the teacher has never learned. Loyalty is a great virtue, and so there may be a tendency to restrict one’s learning to the lessons of one teacher. However, even if one has an outstanding teacher and are practicing a great lineage, blind spots happen. The only way to learn whether there is anything of value obscured in those blind spots is to throw off one’s blinders and have a look for oneself.

What blinders? An excellent and tricky  question.  It’s like when someone says, “it’s not what you said, but the way you said it.” We all understand that there is some intangible character in language that is commonly understood but not easily seen or defined. In any culture (and a dōjō contains a culture, believe me) there’s always a collection of norms, rules of thumb, ideas, beliefs, mores, credos, etc. that come to be taken so much for granted that they become an invisible filter through which one sees the world. This isn’t an inherently bad thing, and it’s probably necessary to produce sufficient order in a chaotic world in which to learn and grow. Having said that, some of the ideas and beliefs in our cultural filter may be arbitrary, or at least not universal, but yet we don’t necessarily see the potential for error because we are seeing the world through the cultural filter. We take for granted that grass is green, but what if we see it through a yellow filter? Then it’s blue. Right?

Is India More Rape-prone Than Other Countries?

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india_sm_2012As I prepare to move to India with my wife, the string of high-profile rapes that have taken place in recent months in India have not gone unnoticed. This past week two such cases were in the news. An American tourist was gang-raped in Himachal Pradesh, and a businessman in West Bengal was charged with the rape of an Irish NGO worker. Other recent cases include a Swiss cyclist in the countryside south of New Delhi and that of a British woman who jumped out of her hotel window because a group of men were trying to force entry into her room in the middle of the night.  While one might argue whether these cases should be given particular prominence just because their victims were foreign, they do speak to a certain level of boldness. In these cases, the criminals didn’t know anything about their victims, and while this makes the act no more or less reprehensible, it does suggest the attackers were particularly audacious.

Of course, the case that has garnered the most attention and outrage was the brutal gang-rape and beating of a young Indian physical therapy intern and the thrashing of her male friend last December. This case gained particular attention both because the victim later died, but probably also because the circumstances seemed like those that anybody could fall into. This wasn’t a drunk girl hitchhiking through the countryside at witching hour. The girl and her friend were going home from a movie at 9:30pm and were lured aboard a bus that was said to be going their way. In some sense, the victim was doing most things right. She was not traveling alone. It was not particularly late. She was not in an isolated area.

However, it turned out that the private bus was under the control of six joyriders. All six men, including the driver, participated in the violence. It may seem odd that the victims would get on this bus that was not  a normal city bus. However, for those used to traveling in the developing world, private buses and collectivos are not that out of the norm–and sometimes are the only way to get the place you’re going.

So the question remains, is rape more common in India than elsewhere? It turns out that this question is hard–if not impossible–to answer. If one takes the statistics at face value, then one should be more worried living in America. The U.S. had almost four times as many police-reported rapes in 2010 as India. When one normalizes this for population (accounting for the fact that India’s population is over 1 billion and America’s is only 300 million), this disparity becomes even more exacerbated.

However, it’s impossible to know what these numbers really tell one. While it is a sad fact that many rapes go unreported in the U.S., there is reason to believe that unreported rapes are even more prevalent in India. In absolute  terms, India has one of the highest numbers of police-reported rapes, but it also has one of the biggest populations in the world–and the biggest for a democracy. When one normalizes for population, India drops way down the list. However, up toward the top of the population-normalized list is Sweden, which would seem to speak to how important the incidence of reporting is. (I don’t imagine Sweden to be home of a disproportionate hostility toward women, but I could be wrong.)

I would also say that India is likely not as bad as many countries which institutionalize misogyny, e.g. theocracies. However, one of the breaks of being a democracy is that one gets held to a higher standard. Yes, there is a lunatic fringe in India. This was most vocally personified by Asaram Bapu, a Hindu guru who shifted blame to the victim by saying that she should have fallen to her knees, held her tormentors hands, and invoked their common religion; and, in doing so, she could have prevented the attack. Another break of democracy is having to accept that you’ll have ass-clown douche-bags with the power of the microphone. As much as most Indians might like to ship Asaram Bapu off to an island with the likes of Todd Akin (the Missouri candidate for Senate who said that women don’t get pregnant if they are really raped [presumably because, “it’s devastating to my case, Your Honor”]), that’s part of liberty–the freedom to say really stupid stuff.

As I’ve been reading about these cases, there are a number of explanations that I’ve heard that hold varying degrees of sway. Some have suggested that alcohol is the culprit. Wrong! Yes, alcohol makes one stupid, but this stupidity is usually restricted to the making and accepting of ill-considered marriage proposals. Millions of people get drunk every week without perpetrating violence other than badly sung karaoke.

There are a few cultural arguments. One is that there’s a bodice-ripping theme in Indian entertainment. This sounds like the alcohol argument and a few other arguments that shift blame away from the attackers–in this case by suggesting that they were just confused about what women want by pop culture depictions.  Speaking as a man, we are all perpetually confused about women want, but knowing that a person doesn’t want to be beaten up or lose control of her body is a no-brainer.

Another argument is that Indian tendencies towards rape reflects the vestiges of ingrained power dynamics. While India may have abandoned the caste system, the idea that some class of people have the right to exert power over others may not be entirely dead.

I don’t know if India has a more extreme problem than other countries in this domain, but I’ll take the recent outrage as a good sign. If there is some societal proclivity that contributes to the problem, perhaps it is about to go down.

Most importantly, be careful out there.

Blatant Blog Post Theft by Martial Arts Outfitters

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In all my years of blogging, I haven’t caught any incidents of blatant plagiarism of my posts… until now.  I was looking  through the martial arts posts and saw this post on the MartialArtsOutfitters.com blog posted Thursday.  It immediately seemed to me that it looked just like a post that I had posted a year and a half ago. (See: Yoroi Kumiuchi.) Then I realized that they were the same word-for-word.

This is blatant plagiarism. I mean they copied everything including the photo (granted that was public domain and not mine) and title, and then published them on the same platform (i.e. WordPress.) This wasn’t reblogged, which is a function that I allow because it comes with attribution and a hit to one’s site. The fact that reblogging would have been easier for them to do means that this company was outright trying to steal content.

What’s particularly sad to me is that the thief is an organization that is involved with martial arts. The martial arts should be about advancing virtue not practicing vice. I guess they are targeting those scheezy pedophile “teachers” one hears about in the news, and not high-caliber martial artists.

What is doubly disappointing is that this is a business, and, thus, one would expect that they would be in favor of people paying for what they take in principle.

If you are a WordPress blogger and write martial arts posts, you might want to look at the feed of http://www.martialartsoutfitters.com to make sure they aren’t ripping you off.

If you are a supplier of http://www.martialartsoutfitters.com, be warned they don’t feel obliged to pay for what they take.

The IT Revolution & Crises of Self-Importance

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Source: Ed Poor at Wikipedia.en

Source: Ed Poor at Wikipedia.en

If you’re as old as I (no, I’m not Wilford Brimley old by any stretch), you remember the days when you couldn’t count on getting a hold of another person instantaneously. Incidentally, the phrase “get a hold of” is apropos. Think of other times one might use those words. If one were a practitioner of judō (i.e. a judōka), one might use that phrase when talking about seizing an opponent in anticipation of throwing them.

Herein lies an intriguing irony. The person calling is dominating the called. That is, they are writing a check on one’s time that they believe to be cashable whenever the hell they please. Therefore, one might expect the person receiving random calls at random times to suffer a diminution of self-esteem. They are, after all, at the beck-and-call of some localized bit of humanity. However, on the contrary, the perfection of the electronic-leash has spawned a growing field of narcissists.

The reasoning that drives this plague of narcissism is as follows, “I am so important that some–albeit tiny–part of the universe is at risk of collapse if I’m not ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. In other words, I am a localized superman[/superwoman.]”

The thing is, you’re really not. The deflating truth is that none of us is so important that any portion of the universe will collapse if we are unplugged from the hive for a few hours– try it.

Now, you may be saying, “Look, I have my phone on all the time, and I talk on it much of the day, but I’m not one of those loud people whose conversation lays waste  to the solitude of people around me everywhere I go.”

The thing is, you really are. Those annoying bastards that you “hurrumph” at when you’re not on the phone–that’s you when you are on it. You make a connection at a distance and, like all others, become oblivious to your immediate environment. At best you are a destroyer of solitude; at worst you are a danger to yourself and others.