Topic: United States

According to Condoleeza Rice, the Bush administration today changed its position on torture, finally determining that the UN Convention against Torture, which bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners, applies even to US personnel even outside of US territory — an interpretation that has been glaringly obvious to everyone else all along.

Let's just hope that we actually adhere to this new public policy. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that while we're now officially swearing off such behavior, it's still going on in secret.

Update: Sadly, it looks like I (and much of the media) jumped the gun on this one. My friend Daniel Kleinfeld posted a couple of clarifying links in the comments, including this one, which explains that Condi's language has been in use by the administration for some time and does nothing to stop or prevent the continued torture of those we have imprisoned without anything resembling due process.

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Topic: Society

A group called The Atheist Agenda, out of the University of Texas at San Antonio, has gotten national media attention for its "Smut for Smut" program, in which they set up a table and offered to give pornography to anyone who traded in a Bible or another religious tome. It's a stunt, clearly, but meant to demonstrate that there's a lot of dirty business in the Bible, which makes it a questionable basis for morality.

The group's president, Thomas Jackson, was recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson on MSNBC's The Situation, and it turns out (no surprise) that Jackson has thought through his position more carefully than Carlson. Said Jackson:

Morality is not derived from religious texts. Religious texts actually contradict each other. If you read the Bible, it contradicts itself on nearly every page. And the fact that people can decide which one to go with shows that they are getting their morality from somewhere else ....

[Morality is] based off of things that are good for society. If citizens murder each other, this is bad for society. And you see this across the board in many nations.

Several religions have stumbled upon this, but it's not the religious text that's bringing this to people. They are finding this on their own, and societies that don't find this don't survive.

Brilliant. This is a very clear summation of an argument that I've often had with religious people who believe that morality is only possible if you believe in God. Indeed, this is so obvious that Talmudic rabbis differentiated between those laws between man and man whose purposes could be rationally understood, and those between man and God, which may or may not lend themselves to human understanding.

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Topic: North Korea

So the new American ambassador to South Korea, Alexander Vershbow, announced his presence by calling North Korea a criminal regime.

Okay, so North Korea did manage to poke America in the eye, which is what triggered Vershbow's harsh words. North Korea insisted that the US lift economic sanctions, threatening to walk out of the negotiations if we didn't. So Vershbow as explaining why we weren't going to back down on this issue:

This is a criminal regime, and we can't somehow remove our sanctions as a political gesture when this regime is engaging in dangerous activities such as weapons exports to rogue states, narcotics trafficking as a state activity and counterfeiting of our money on a large scale.

Nevertheless, it was totally unnecessary to poke back. We could have said simply that the sanctions, like everything else, could be discussed at the Six-Party Talks once North Korea has dismantled its nuclear program.

Unfortunately, as has so often been the case with the Bush administration, we seem to have decided that a tough stance was worth more than actual progress. What did we gain with our tough talk? If North Korea walks out on the negotiations, we will have succeeded in highlighting our impotence on the Korean Peninsula.

Whatever happened to walking softly and carrying a big stick? At the moment, our big stick is looking stretched and fragile in Iraq, and still our government insists on shouting when a few quiet words would do.

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Topic: North Korea

Slate today has a photo essay on North Korea. Nothing earth-shattering here, but notice that every single picture emphasizes collective activity. In North Korea, no one is ever alone.

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Topic: Korean Culture

The Korean Cultural Service in New York has announced two wine-tasting events that will have a Korean angle:

Wines of the World: On Wednesday, December 7, the 92nd Street Y will hold a lecture and tasting of international wines, including wines from Korea.

Taste of Korea 2005: Munbaeju, Korea's Wine Treasure: On Thursday, December 8, at the Korean Cultural Service, will be a tasting of Korea's "important intangible cultural property number 86-ga," munbaeju. Click Korea describes munbaeju as "a traditional liquor made of malted wheat, rice, and millet which originates in the Pyeongyang region of North Korea. It is famous for its fragrance[,] which is said to resemble the munbae rose, hence its name. The alcohol content is around 40%." More entertaining is this blurb from the government website of the Jung-gu district of Seoul:

This is the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree(similar to pear). April or May is the proper time to make it and it takes approximately 4 months to mature. The characteristic of Munbaeju is to make the fragrance of fruit be emitted without using Munbae fruts at all. There are two ways of making; one is to use yeast and the other is to use white chrysanthemum. The color is light yellowish brown and it is a kind of Soju with 40 degree of alcoholic ingredient. At present, a person who possess the skill to make it is Lee, Gichun, who received the brewing skill continued to his farther from his grandmother.

Sic, which is probably how you'll feel if you get drunk on the stuff. As for "the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree," that would've been an improvement over the alcoholics emitting the perfume of soju, kimchi and cigarettes, a heady bouquet often found on the Seoul subways early Sunday morning, as stuporous salarymen made their way home after a night spent sleeping it off at the bathhouse.

Hey, you think the Jung-gu government is hiring English editors?

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Topic: United Nations

The New York Times today devotes its lead editorial to bitch-slapping John Bolton, claiming that his bluster and bullying are derailing a reform process that the United States actually supports and giving ammo to those who oppose serious change. In my view, the Times is pretty much right on.

(Oh, and I just got a call from one of the diplomats asking me what is meant by the sentence, "America's most successful U.N. ambassadors ... have known how to harness American power to patient, skillful diplomacy." I had to admit that this one threw me a bit as well. Are we using patient, skillful diplomacy to drive American power or vice versa? The language supports the first interpretation, but that doesn't make much sense conceptually. Anyway, an odd sentence, but a forceful editorial.)

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Topic: North Korea

Reuters is reporting that North Korea is ready to scrap its nuclear program in exchange for better relations with the United States, Japan and South Korea. This is a bit of a shift from the DPRK's earlier stance that it would give up its nuclear weapons only if it received a light-water nuclear reactor for power generation, something the United States has been understandable reluctant to provide.

As is so often the case with North Korea, the information arrived in a roundabout way: South Korea's Grand National Party, the main opposition party, announced in a public statement that Ambassador Ning Fukui, China's envoy to Seoul, had said that North Korea was ready to dismantle its nuclear program.

No one yet knows the source of Ambassador Ning's view, or even whether he really said what he's been quoted as saying. If it's true, however, it bodes well for future talks, which will probably start up again within the next month or so.

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Topic: Politics

It's widely understood that if you want to control a country, you need to control its media. The disastrous rise of Serbian nationalism wass aided and abetted by Yugoslav state television, while in Rwanda the call to genocide was put out over the radio.

The United States has a more diverse and complex media market than either Rwanda or Yugoslavia, of course. But in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing reports on the conservative takeover of American radio, starting with the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987:

Introduced in 1949, [the Fairness Doctrine] required TV and radio stations to cover "controversial issues" of interest to their communities, and, when doing so, to provide "a reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints." Intended to encourage stations to avoid partisan programming, the Fairness Doctrine had the practical effect of keeping political commentary off the air altogether. In 1986, a federal court ruled that the doctrine did not have the force of law, and the following year the FCC abolished it.

At that point, stations were free to broadcast whatever they wanted. In 1988, several dozen AM stations began carrying a show hosted by a thirty-seven-year-old college dropout named Rush Limbaugh.

This leaves open the question of why conservatives have exploited the post-Fairness Doctrine media landscape so much more effectively than liberals. But if you've ever wondered why the tone seemed to change in Washington sometime around the first Bush administration, the abolition of the Doctrine is the reason. It has opened the door for people like Mark Levin, "a lawyer turned talk show host who specializes in right-wing name-calling (he called Joseph Wilson and his wife 'finks,' Judy Miller 'a rat,' Ted Kennedy 'a lifelong drunk,' The New York Times the 'New York Slimes,' and Senator Charles Schumer 'Chucky Schmucky')." That kind of invective has become painfully common in our political discourse (the left does it too, though usually with more wit and tact, and to much smaller audiences).

How can this trend be countered?

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Topic: Nepal

It is generally in times of stress and trouble that people turn to messiahs, but the Nepali "Buddha boy" is something stranger still: a messiah who will submit to scientific verification.

The 15-year-old has been sitting under a peepal tree for six months, supposedly without eating or drinking. He has also been bitten by a snake — twice. Not surprisingly, he's become an object of pilgrimage (and attendant donations and commerce), and some have come to believe he's the reincarnation of the historical Buddha. Now local leaders are going to allow scientists to study the boy, though without touching him. If nothing else, they can watch to verify whether he indeed remains in meditation all night.

It's stories like these that remind me just how different and alien Asia was when I lived there. It made me remember an incident on our visit to Patan (scroll down to "Is It Real?"), in the Kathmandu Valley:

A boy in the square pointed us toward a monumental carved doorway into the courtyard of an adjacent palace. "Come see! Ritual!" he shouted. Inside the courtyard we discovered a mostly Nepali group of spectators ringing a troupe of masked dancers who shivered and twitched to the rhythms as several young men played bell cymbals and an older man drummed and crooned a strange wordless chant. In the center, one dancer paid elaborate homage to the bloody severed head of a buffalo, next to which an assistant held a butter torch. Eventually the dancers were all given swords covered in tikka (colored powder used for rituals), and they began a slow, whirling group dance.

I can make guesses as to what the ceremony was about, but what stands out is its very strangeness — the wild, matted hair of the masks; the old men underneath dressed as tribal women with earings and bracelets and necklaces; the hypnotic clang of the cymbals and the ragged line of the old man's wordless singing; the raw power of the sacrificed head still trickling blood.

It was moments like that, or being told matter-of-factly about reincarnations and miracles at Kopan Monastery, that made us realize we had stepped into a different world that seemed to function by different rules than the ones we knew and accepted.

I didn't believe in miracles, and I still don't, but it was also ridiculous to imagine that all these earnest monks were simply lying. So what was going on? I don't know. Indeed, if you're looking to not-know, I strongly recommend a visit to the Indian subcontinent. There is value in discovering the limits of your own explanations for things. Ideally, instead of lunging for some new set of explanations, one can learn to accept a level of ambiguity, complexity and obscurity. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.

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Topic: United Nations

Slate has an article about the conflict over top-level domain names on the Internet. It's an abstruse subject, but essentially it comes down to this: there's a group called ICANN that administers top-level domain names (that is, the URLs we type to go to web addresses, including .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and country codes such as .us, .cn, .kr, and so on). ICANN is a California-based nonprofit, and this is what makes the rest of the world nervous. Countries like Iran and China worry that leaving the top-level domain system under US control puts them at risk of having their web traffic meddled with, and they would like to have greater control of that traffic themselves.

The latest round of chatter on this subject has been generated by a recent summit in Tunis, at which the idea was floated that the UN should take over ICANN's job. Enthusiasm for this notion was reportedly low.

There are two interesting concepts in the Slate article, and I would love to hear from readers who know more about this subject than me whether either one makes sense.

The first is that top-level domains could be administered by some kind of distributed peer-to-peer system like BitTorrent:

Countries that choose to house Torrent servers would receive a random piece of the DNS pie over a closed P2P network, with mirrors set up to correct data by consensus in the case of corruption or unauthorized modification. No one country would actually physically host the entire database.

Is this actually plausible?

Secondly, the article argues that top-level domains are headed for eventual obsolescence. How realistic is this idea? Will other modes of communication make .com irrelevant? If so, how soon will this happen?

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