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Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

During our Trip in Nelson I got a chance to see the Nikkei Memorial Internment Center in New Denver. Sara and I went there with her friend Wendy Tagami, whose parents had met near there during the war. Over 22,000 Japanese-Canadians were interned at New Denver. Wendy told us that many of the small houses on the outskirts of town were converted from the cabins that they had to live in. The center consisted of several of the wartime cabins surrounded by a wood fence and a Japanese-style stone garden.

The garden was so beautiful you could almost forget the circumstances by which people came here. At the time, Japan had already taken over Hong Kong and bombed Pearl Harbor. The government felt it couldn’t afford to offer Japan any other gains, so it went so far as to round up its own citizens with any racial connection with that country. Many of the Japanese-Canadians, in the very spirit of “stiff upper lip” calmly signed over all their possessions and reported to Hastings Park in Vancouver, where the PNE is now. From there they were sent off to the BC interior, far from any critical civil or military infrastructure.

Many of the first nights were spent in cast-off army tents. Soon, small cabins the size of most modern kitchens were built with walls so thin that the winter ice served as the only form of insulation. The internees did everything they could to keep life going on as normal as possible. At the memorial center you can see the photos of the dances, the baseball games and the Buddhist church that still stands today. When the war was over, the internees found that most of their possessions had been sold to pay for their internment. There would be no redress until 1988.

It’s easy to deride the decisions of the government at the time as racist and opportunistic. By our standards, they most certainly were. The repatriation and redress of the Japanese-Canadians was just and lawful. However, the policy of current governments apologizing for the mistakes of past governments unnerves me. It is a great way to garner cheap political capital without having to address the mistakes we have made recently and are still making now. We in the present love to inform the past, but how often does the past inform the present?

Have we truly done away with the mindset that caused us to unlawfully sell off millions of dollars of personal property to balance a budget?

Do we still favor solutions that are more convenient than effective?

Instead of trying to distance ourselves from history, we should be trying to find similarities with it. If you think about it, all people in history are just like us. They have a lot of bad past decisions weighing them down, ideals that are impractical, and an uncertain future that’s hurtling at them at the speed of time. At so many points in history you will see people who’ve learned from the mistakes of the past, lived up to the ideals and accepted a future that will outlive them. It shouldn’t be hard for us to be like those people. They often have a lot books written about them.

So the other day Sara and I were watching the encore presentation Olympic Opening ceremonies. As for the ceremonies themselves, they were fantastic. With over 15,000 performers, complex lighting effects and wire-fu to put the best action movies to shame, I doubt any country is going to top this kind of spectacle for long, long time.

The encore presentation on the CBC happened at about 3:00pm, but we were intrigued to find out how NBC handled their coverage. Rumor had it that ratings in the States depended on the victory of their athletes, and events that Americans did poorly in were simply ignored. We wondered how this way of thinking would carry over the coverage of the opening ceremonies and the parade of nations.

At first things were pretty similar to the Canadian coverage, although there was more explanation of the performance in the commentary. It took away some of the fun of interpreting the meaning of the performances, but it was interesting to hear some of the facts about what went into creating them. For example, the ceremonies involved creating images the coordinated movement of thousands of the performers. Amazingly, no markers were used to keep them in place as they created the fantastic designs on the stadium floor. However, as the parade of nations started, things started to get a little weird.

On the CBC, as the parade of nations went by, we heard the stories of the flag bearers, the athletes and how they got to be where they are. Stories such as how one of Japan’s equestrian athletes had been competing since the 1960s, or how the US flagbearer was a refugee from the Sudan.

Later on NBC, the first thing they mentioned about Canada was how we liked to pay people to compete for us and how we never won a medal during the Montreal or Calgary Olympics. Sara and I looked at each other and said: “Did Canada just get dissed?”

It turns out we weren’t alone in being talked about this way. For every nation that came around the track it was how many medals this country won, or how much they didn’t win, or how they’ve yet to win a medal. It wasn’t really offensive I guess, but it really shows off the priorities of the American coverage.

If the Olympics are a grand international society party, I guess the television coverage of these shows would be the impolite whispers spoken in hushed tones around the punch bowl. If only we could translate and consolidate all of the myriad interpretations of this event. We’d get some serious gossip and if we’re lucky spark a diplomatic incident.

On a related note, I hope Tokyo gets the bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. Just think of the events that can be inspired by Japanese game shows. Who would take the gold in an Olympic level competition of “Squishy-Squishy”?

Working in computers almost requiresyou to be paranoid for a living. We spend so much time trying to get at all kinds data that we know for a fact that someone out there is drooling at the prospect of being able to rifle through our iTunes folders. Whenever the idea of any large entity having access to our “data” whether it’s facebook, comcast, or the City of Seattle. We go on multi-minute tirades on the right to privacy and the dangers of identity theft all the while thumping a copy of “1984″ like some kind of nerd war drum.

It’s always interesting to me how we’re quick to discuss the cons of living in a post-privacy society while ignoring all of the pros. Not that I’d really want a post-privacy society. I’ve read my share of dystopian cyber-punk stories. While they were awesome, living in one would be a complete pain in the ass. The reason we should be discussing the pros of living in a world without privacy is that the advantages are what make such bad ideas reach into reality.

Take slavery, for example. It treats people like animals, sure, but free labor kept it going for so many years. Pollution is merely a side effect of accessing the energy necessary to make modern society possible. Speaking of post-privacy societies, Facism and Communism got their run because the effect they had on crime and class warfare.

The erosion of privacy in western society may be something different from the totalitarian governments of the past. Sure, anyone can see your information, but what if you could see everyone else’s? If your movements could be all tracked, they could become the perfect alibi if you are accused of a crime. If everyone just starts producing all this data, wouldn’t it hamper government efforts to spy on people by producing a lot of dummy data to sift through? You wouldn’t have to lock your doors or your car anymore, those things just won’t open or start for people who don’t have rightful access.

These advantages are what would make a “Big Brother” society possible in the 21st century. What sort of advantages can you think of?

Sara and I finally used our Famous Players gift certificates to catch “Wall-E” just now, but with all the pandemonium surrounding “Batman: The Dark Knight” we probably could have snuck in for free. The film was, in a word, wonderful. Sure, the robots were cute, but the force of the ideas in that movie was something you would expect to find in a classic hard science fiction novel rather than a Disney blockbuster.

When the movie came out everyone wondered whether the conservative hate machine was going to go on a rampage the way they did with “Happy Feet”. There were those who passed off the film as leftist propaganda. But strangely, Wall-E started to become a hit among other conservative bloggers who were won over by the little guy’s crusade against a large oppressive organization and (even stranger) his love of showtunes. In fact, some left wing bloggers decided that they were really clever and decided to bash the film for the plastic merchandise that it generates or its linkage of obesity with environmental problems.

The director, Andrew Stanton, did a lovely job of sidestepping the issue in an interview with New York Magazine.

“I knew that I was going into territory that was basically the same stuff, but I don’t have a political bent or ecological message to push. I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view — it’s certainly a good-citizen kind of way to be — but everything I wanted to do was based on the film’s love story, the last robot on Earth, the sentence that we first came up with in 1994. I said, ‘I have to get everybody off the planet, and do it in a way that audiences get it without any dialogue.’ So trash did that. You look at it, you just get it. It’s a dump, you’ve gotta move it — even a little kid understands that.”

Classy stuff, but he’s not fooling anyone. Nor should he have to.

In British Columbia we’re a little more cognizant of the climate change issue than say, a place like Arizona. We have swathes of dead trees where the Winter has failed to kill off the pine beetle. The glaciers we like to ski on so much are shrinking. Stanley Park looked like a war zone after the wind storms of 2006. From our perspective, the time for being classy about the environment has passed. It’s not a controversy, it’s a real problem.

Yesterday Al Gore threw down a challenge for the United States to get off Carbon Fuels within 10 years. Sure, it seems like it’s on the border of daring and daft, but I would rather see the US fail at something like this than keep going on its present course. However in the comments section of every article on this issue there seems to be a league of twits pointing and laughing at Gore because he was a Democrat or his house sucks up enough juice to power Bangladesh. On the other side there’s the the “Gee-Whiz Mr. Gore, I’d love to help” articles where the commentator gleefully whips out a bunch of statistics about why it can’t be done.

I have had enough of people who would rather feed their own smug egos than do what must be done. People like the Wall-E animators make the case about why we should help the environment. People like Al Gore come up with plans on how to save it. I subscribe to their beliefs because the only constant I have lived with in my adult life is change. My life, and the life of everyone else on that planet will change over time because that’s how the whole concept of time works. In the past five years alone I’ve graduated University, worked for many companies, got another diploma and got married. Even their predictions don’t come true, it’s still not as foolhardy as pretending there is such thing as a status quo.

You can find out more about Al Gore’s Green Challenge Here: Link

This an explanation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis I came across a few days ago.

The Real Estate Market Crash – Free Legal Forms
It’s a brilliant piece of work. Who knew that the use of stick figures and profanity could provide such an in-depth understanding of a complex issue? It’s the classic example of a boom-bust market cycle. Something out there makes Scrooge McDuck levels of money, eventually attracting more investors than the market for that something could ever support. The inferior somethings lose value, leaving millions broke. The same thing has happened with everything from stocks and south sea islands to tulips and comic books. Only now the hot commodity was mortgage loans, which involves a lot more money, and will cause a lot more damage.

Now, we could take this as a grand global lesson in how to manage our money and not live beyond our means. Basic arithmetic should keep us from making bad loans like this again. If we don’t have the basic arithmetic we should invest more in education so that we have the basic arithmetic. Then again, I don’t know if we’ll learn anything at all. The Sub-prime mortgage crisis, like most other economic crises before it, arose from attaining that sweet between scarcity and abundance. Mortgage loans were scarce enough to be valuable, but abundant enough so that anyone could get a hold of one. Whether it’s carbon nano-tubes or near earth asteroids, it’s always the next best thing in investing that’s going to tip off the next recession. We can only hope our laws are strong enough to pick up the pieces when the whole thing comes crashing down again.

From my house I can see the dark cloud of political op-ed articles that was formed across the border when Hillary Clinton conceded the nomination. This turn of events was not unexpected. The political stunts that Hillary pulled in the final weeks of the primaries range from merely condescending to outright bone-headed. However, it turns out that Clinton’s fate was sealed many months ago as she organized her campaign.

An article in the March Rolling Stone told the story of the Obama Campaign. While Hillary Clinton favored paid organizers and top down management approaches, the Obama campaign relied on social networking websites and thousands of volunteer organizers. The Campaign’s own website, MyBo, served as an information clearing house. Organizers could get in contact with other supporters in their area for whatever they needed, be it rallies, letter-writing campaigns, or voting road trips. Working from a basic framework outlined at various three day training seminars, Obama’s front-line campaign workers were allowed to make crucial decisions on how to get this man into the whitehouse. That whiff of self-determination has given the Obama Campaign energy that Clinton could not hope to duplicate. She was content to let her supporters stand around and clap when she should have been offering them the tools to change the entire country.

The Clinton, McCain and the rest of the old guard politicians wasted their time either buying or stealing the kind of intellectual and political capital that Obama gets for free. I believe that the reason Obama is vague on certain issues is that he expects the electorate to do his thinking for him. In a democracy, this is a good thing. If people feel that they’ll be listened to, that an exchange is taking place, then they feel a gratifying sense of responsibility for what the other person is thinking. The actions of your Mayor, your Member of Parliament, your President are now dependent on what you have to say right now. That is the point when people stop thinking about what their country can do for them, and start thinking about what they can do for their country.

I’ve been checking out the Young Adult genre for the past little while now. Harry Potter and his ilk have completely changed the publishing industry and apparently “saved reading”, so I wanted to find out what the fuss was all about. Harry Potter was okay, but not without certain nitpicking flaws. James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series was so inexcusably bad that I couldn’t make it through the first few chapters. Sara introduced me to another series by Rick Riordan called Percy Jackson and the Olympians and surprisingly, I couldn’t put it down.

It’s the story of Percy Jackson, a dyslexic, ADHD twelve-year-old boy who one day finds out that his long lost biological father is none other than Poseidon, Greek god of the sea and earthquakes. After a desperate escape to a demi-god summer camp in upstate New York, Percy is assigned a quest to retrieve the Thunderbolt of Zeus from the Underworld, which is now in LA (Mount Olympus is respectively now on the six hundredth floor of the Empire State building. It’s a long story, read the book already). It was heavy on action and self-referential humour, but it was complex enough to get me to read all three books in the space of a week.

Now, as I was going through all of these books for “young” adults, I realized I had gone sour on most adult books of the same genre. Truth be told, most of my friends had as well. The Author of Old Man’s War, Jon Scalzi wrote a really neat post on what is happening to the industry. Without mentioning titles, YA Science Fiction titles are outselling adult titles two to one. YA Fantasy outside of Harry Potter is outselling adult Fantasy by four to one.

So, Young Adult authors are moving books like gangbusters, and we can reasonably assume that an increasing portion of that readership is made up of adults (including yours truly). The question is why? It’s not because the books are shorter either. The Harry Potter series topped out at 900 pages. There hasn’t been a Percy Jackson book under 200 pages. The answer then, is hidden in the adult books.

I’ve also been doing a long, painful parallel study into adult science fiction novels, particularly David Brin’s Uplift War, Verner Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky and Greg Bear’s Forge of God. In all three books I found ideas that would blow your mind. A Galactic culture based on cultivating animals into sentient races, 1000-year-old computer programming traditions, and roving fleets of self-replicating killer robots. The problem is that the books are an utter pain in the ass to read.

In all three of these books, the authors seemed more concerned about getting the science and social concepts right rather than concentrating on writing an entertaining novel. The ideas in these books are great food for thought. You could debate for hours on how the societies and technologies in these books actually work. Unfortunately the characters are either unlikable or unremarkable, the language is obtuse and the conflicts are unsatisfying. In Uplift War, everyone except the sentient chimpanzees speak the same “alien” dialect that’s devoid of any slang or color. If you’ve heard Mr. Spock open his mouth at any time you know what I’m talking about. The Qeng Ho space traders in A Deepness in Sky were so insipid that by the time they had defeated the Fascist Emergents, I just didn’t care any more. I feel really bad about Forge of God, because I loved Greg Bear’s Blood Music. But in this book, so many of the characters are just stalwart experts and scientists. I can’t properly tell the astronomer advising the president from the geologist held in quarantine at the Airforce base. The President in this book decided to lay down arms in front of the impending alien invasion, but the description of his thought process was so mushy that I wasn’t aware of the decision for about two chapters.

It’s important to note that all three of these books are Hugo award winners, the top honor among literary science fiction. Some fans out there may scoff my claims, that these books are too advanced for my primitive brain to handle. However, all of these books are guilty of the sins described in George “1984″ Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”.

In the essay, Orwell writes that difficult prose with too many long words, jargon and adverbs is not only difficult to read, it might as well destroy western civilization. By making political speeches and decrees unclear and lacking of any strong imagery, you can justify any monstrous action you can imagine. Take George W. Bush’s definition of “freedom”, for instance. The same rules apply to fiction, only we don’t use it to pick leaders, we just don’t want to get bored at the bus stop. It’s impossible to enjoy yourself when you’re puzzling over what “circumlocution” means.

It wasn’t Harry Potter who saved reading. That series was only a conduit, a lightning rod for a public that was tired of bloated prose, threadbare imagery and indulging author’s neuroses. We should keep in mind that it’s enough just to keep it simple, stupid. The very best of the genre will walk the edge of pandering and indulgence. Most Adult SF and Fantasy are on the indulgence end of the equation. If the genre is to survive, then this time a little bit of pander is in order.

I admit the idea of a class society has sounded appealing to me at one time or another. Imagine, if you will, being subjected to a battery of tests at a young age, after which you are separated, placed in a special group where your talents are honed to razor sharp efficiency. When you finally leave school and unleash your talents on the real world, you leave with the confidence that you are one of the few, the proud and the brave that can do your special task. You are respected by others because they also are the few, the proud, the brave for their special field, and each of them knows what it took to grind you into your particular niche. No one is held back by the unspecialized majority, and we are only limited by our intellect.

Although I must admit that I’ve never taken the time to explore that idea fully. I’ve checked out some of the secondary literature to Ayn Rand, and I fear if I actually take the time to read “Atlas Shrugged” one of my basic questions about this philosophy will remain unanswered. If smart people are being held back by the unwashed masses, and if that specialized intellect is truly what is necessary to realize a perfect world: why hasn’t it happened yet? If the world could really be run by intellect alone, we’d all be run by a cabal so secretive, so perfect, that even if we were to uncover that democracy was a lie we’d give a sigh of relief that the world was being run by these people and then carry on our merry way.

Still, the case for a council of appointed Philosopher kings mounts ever higher. In the United States, the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proposed a repeal of some of the Gasoline taxes to reduce the financial burden on “Ordinary Americans”. This proposal, like the decision to revisit NAFTA, would do more harm than help in the end. My friend Erin in Chicago said that if Clinton pandered any harder she’ll need to get a set of Truck Nutz . Personally, I think her next promise will be beer in the water taps.

Stupid people voting for stupid politicians with stupid decisions sounds like a recipe for a country taking a window seat to hell. Anyone who offers an opinion or idea of any appreciable sense gets shouted down as “elitist”. Time for the cabal, I guess. So if we are going to have an appointed council of intellectuals, we have to convince all the little people to accept. There has to be a clear line between who is fit to lead, and who is not. The average man must be made proud of his lot in life, yet forgo any desire to change the status quo.

Hang on, isn’t that exactly what Hillary is trying to do with this gas tax holiday? All this pandering is serving to raise pride in being “the average man” but at the same time cementing her hold on power. The only problem is that it’s just not working.

Hillary’s opponent Barack Obama made a comment about a month back about low-income Pennsylvanians turning to “Guns and Religion” to placate their woes with a failing local economy. The media jumped on this comment, proclaiming that he was going to lose the nomination, he was so elitist, this is what got Democrats in trouble in the last election, etc. etc. Obama’s still leading by 200 delegates as of this posting, and I think I know why. Obama is not operating under the assumption that society is divided into intellectual haves and have-nots. He sounds as if he’s talking to people at his own level. It’s not the adverb-choked speech of the academic, nor is it the laid-back drawl of a Southern good ol’ boy. I’m pointing to the “Guns and Religion” incident not only because he emerged from that situation unscathed, but it was also a powerful and direct image of what Pennsylvanians are going through. Politicians today are so afraid of saying anything negative at the podium. Can you imagine McCain, Clinton or even Bush reciting a speech like JFK’s “The Goal of Sending a Man to the Moon”?He didn’t try to whitewash the fact that the enterprise was going to be expensive, difficult and dangerous. Sure it was awesome, but for a politician to talk at length of the disadvantages of his decision, to actually display a thought process, is unheard of these days.

A politician is just like any other professional. No one cares if their plumber is easy-going enough to have a beer with. We just want our toilets to work, and we want the process explained just enough so we know we aren’t being screwed over. In the end, the fight for political office at any level, in any democracy does not depend how you reach down to the average voter or teach them to fear your humongous brain. The key factor is clear enough communication to provide a conservative estimate, an exhaustive work order, and keep the crap out of the house.

I only used to deal with Free Tibet every time there was a club day at my University. I regarded it with the same curious sidelong glance that I would give “Free Mumia”, “End Circumcision” or any other pet issue that required more charity than sense. Now that Beijing has decided to enter the first world and host an Olympic games, the Free Tibet issue has now plopped into everyone’s cornflakes and everyone seems to have their own opinion on it. You have the Free Tibet movement that wants everyone to boycott the games, the Chinese government and many immigrants who say nothing is going on in Tibet, the Tibetans themselves who are peacefully protesting and getting truncheoned for their trouble, the athletes who just want to participate, and everyone else in between. I guess it’s time for me to weigh in.

First off, no one has anything to gain by boycotting the Olympics. Not the Chinese, not the Athletes and most certainly not the protesters. Free Tibet tried to block Beijing’s bid to the games, but the move seems silly in retrospect. By taking a fire extinguisher to the Olympic Torch Free Tibet has gone from annoying buzzing sound to the elephant in the room. They couldn’t have garnered more international attention if they tried. Once the games are on, there’s a good chance they can actually be heard within China itself, whether it’s through smuggling propaganda or calling on a few athletes to make their voice heard.

And as for China, I have no sympathy. They want to have open trade and relations with the free world, yet the government believes it can pull all this Soviet-era crap on its own people. They cannot have it both ways. Their actions in Tibet may make sense to them. It may have been an authoritarian Theocracy before they took over. Foreign powers may have used dissident provinces of China against the nation at large in the past. But if they truly want to join the first world, they’re going to have to learn that the last thing you want to do to malcontents is make martyrs out of them and then lie about it to a media-savvy world.

I believe that the games are a wonderful venue for the world to come together in a spirit of friendship and competition. I also believe that engagement can do much more than trade embargoes and boycotts ever could. However, there is no place for secret police and national firewalls in an increasingly democratic world. When one country engages in such practices, it affects everyone. Companies and individuals are made to kowtow to a dictatorship that they never voted for. Sure, China’s a different culture, but at the end of the day we have to accept that some things work and some things do not work. China’s response to Tibet is not working.