The spot where God became man

David Lindsay weighs in on UNESCO’s decision after the application from the Palestinian Authority to secure World Heritage status for the oldest Christian church in continuous operation in the world (with the delegates of modern Israel and the United States being predictably incensed at the inclusion):

The Palestinian Authority has managed to secure World Heritage Site status for the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which the Israelis had wanted to demolish in favour of a Wal-Mart or something.

The Israelis are incandescent that the PA has secured World Heritage Site status for what, whether or not you believe (as I do, because I can see no reason not to) that it stands on the site of the Birth of Jesus, is undeniably the world’s oldest Christian church in continuous use.

How was it not already a World Heritage Site? Who has been stopping that designation? And why would they not want it to be so designated? What else do they want to do with the site? One really does shudder to think. But it is academic now, so they may as well tell us.

The howling over the impending prospect of a Palestinian State also includes, as if it were self-evidently a bad thing, the possibility of World Heritage Site status for the Tomb of Rachel and for the Tomb of the Patriarchs. But then, the present Israeli Government wants to denaturalise the ultra-Orthodox Jews as well as the ancient indigenous Christians.

The war that Israel ordered up in Iraq has already turned the Shrine of Ezra the Scribe, who invented both synagogues and the square Hebrew script, into a mosque. The Shrine of Ezekiel, featuring some of the oldest Hebrew inscriptions in the world, is next on the hit list.

Across the border in Iran, whatever regime the Crazies sought to install would be just as conservative of the Shrine of Habakkuk, of the Shrine of Daniel, and of the Tomb of Esther and Mordechai. It says in the Bible that those figures were Persian. Where did you think that they were buried? Or did you just not believe it...?

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said in response to the UNESCO decision that the body ‘is motivated by political and not cultural considerations’. Riddle me this: if the very birthplace of Our Lord and Saviour is not of overriding cultural significance to the nation and to the world he came to save, let alone religious, what possibly can be?

The Great Diploma Hunt

It was a balmy summer in the Year of Our Lord 2012, when our hero first set out upon his quest to earn the rank of Master of International Development from the mysterious academy deep in the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania known only as the University of Pittsburgh. It must be made plain that our hero would do nothing by halves, but rather foolishly insisted upon being set upon three impossible tasks by the wise masters of his programme at the University. Well, not technically ‘impossible’; after all, he did accomplish them, but very difficult and not in the least because they all had to be completed within the same term: the Thesis, the Capstone and the Independent Research Paper. These he stalked in the long, dusty, collapsible corridors of the second floor of the arcane and freshman-infested Hillman Library, through stacks of venerable and ancient tomes inscribed in the language of Cathay, chased through far-off lands such as Homewood neighbourhood in Pittsburgh’s East Side, and aided a band of noble heroes and heroines in seeking ways to improve the plight of southwestern Pennsylvania’s electronic waste. At long last, after the epic struggle with the guardians of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations website to upload and publish his work, his journey came to an end. He returned home to his native country in Rhode Island, to await the arrival of his certification.

Weeks passed, and still our hero had received no word from the University. Weeks dragged into months; eventually, he returned to Pittsburgh to attempt to track down his diploma, on an Odinic ride fuelled by carbonated maize-based beverages and set to a soundtrack consisting primarily of Tad Morose. The kindly staff of the University had already sent out his diploma, and asked if he had checked with the post in Rhode Island. Sadly, he had. The ride continued to the post office in Oakland, where they too informed him that they had seen neither hide nor hair of the package he sought. Dejected, he finally arrived at the doorstep of his former home. He found the door slightly ajar, and after looking carefully around he found no packages - until the letters ‘PLOMA - DO NOT BEND’ caught his eye from behind the radiator grill on the landing. Indeed, they had sent the diploma to the wrong address, and it had sat half-obscured behind the radiator God only knows how many days before our hero chanced to unearth it. In the end, however, our hero emerged triumphant.

我丁老端 (or, How to be a public intellectual in China, in five simple lessons!)

Duan Hongbin is snarking in high form on Weibo (original post here):

Lesson 1: Why become a public intellectual?

Simply put, you attract a lot of attention as a public intellectual. Your fans will increase geometrically. You can make a microblog post about there not being any toilet issue when you used the bathroom, and several thousand persons will forward, comment upon and share your post.

Secondly, you will be able to hold the moral high point. That is to say, you can curse and smear anyone you want, and your target won't be able to do a thing to refute. You may even have the privilege of "rumor mongering" at will without bearing any legal responsibility. If anyone tries to stop you, that person will be assaulting freedom of speech.

[...]

Moreover, if you do your job well, the American Embassy may invite you over for tea. Maybe some democracy foundation will offer you a sizeable subsidy in American dollars.

[...]

Lesson 2: The minimum requirements to become a public intellectual

With technological advances, the minimum requirements to become a public intellectual has reached historical lows. In terms of hardware, you only need a crappy computer and an Internet connection. In terms of software, you need to know the basic skills of typing, making comments, posting to blogs/microblogs, forwarding and using PhotoShop.

But you don't need to know too much about logic and reasoning. This is the reason why public intellectuals come mostly from the humanities. But you must know enough about psychology, because you must try to understand the attitudes of your fans: What do they want to read? What do they hate? What do they respect? What are they jealous of? If you don't even know about these things, you will be going naked into battle.

Lesson 3: Seven keywords for entry-level public intellectuals

In the past, it was necessary to read a lot of books and documents in order to become a public intellectual. But nowadays you only need to use seven keywords effectively in order to become an entry-level public intellectual. These seven keywords are:

1. Freedom
2. Democracy
3. Human rights
4. Political system
5. Constitutional politics
6. Vote
7. Universal value

As long as you keep bringing up these keywords in your blog/microblog posts, you are a public intellectual in form. To the ordinary Internet user, you have instantly acquired sufficient reasoning, you have transcended cheap vulgarity and you are a person with independent character and thinking. In your thinking, you need to be highly conscious that these seven keywords can solve every problem in China. You need to be totally convinced yourself before you can go out to convert others.

But it is not enough to invoke these keywords. You must also deploy them effectively. For example, there is the method of comparative shopping. So you must regularly compare China with USA. Here are some examples:

You went to the bathroom and you found that the toilet issues have run out. An ordinary Internet user would surely write: "Fuck! The tissues ran out just when I went to the restroom, damn!" A silly Internet user would write: "I went to use the restroom, but there were no more tissues. There must be something wrong with the way I use the restroom!" A photo would then be uploaded to show the situation. But as public intellectual, you cannot write that way. The proper way of writing is:

Chinese restrooms run out of toilet issues frequently. When I was in America, there was always toilet issues in the restrooms. What is wrong with our society? There must be a problem with our political system. Why are the expenditures for the restrooms not transparent? Where do the taxpayers' money go? Trillions are spent by government workers on eating and drinking, but they won't pay for a roll of toilet issue? I haven't even gotten into a detailed discussion of China-made toilet issues, because the inside story is too frightening ...

[...]

Lesson 4: The self-improvement of a middle-level public intellectual

As a middle-level public intellectual, you need to promote your own ideas. But more importantly you need to deprecate everything about your opponents. There are three natural targets, and you can do no wrong when you debase them. These are:

1. Despotism
2. Totalitarianism
3. Tyranny

You need to mention these three words all the time, as if they are your most hated enemies. You denounce them day and night, year in and year out. Even if there is no provocation, you must bring them out for a thrashing.

The aforementioned are invisible enemies. But you may also have visible enemies, such as Internet users who make critical comments on your blog/microblog.

If this critic is young, you can call him an "angry young man," you tell him to go and read more books and you can ignore him thereafter.

If this critic supports a certain existing government policy, then you can do no wrong by calling him a "fifty-cent gang" member. You can add a rebuttal such as: "You get fifty cents to make a post, but will it help you to buy a house?" If this person persists, you tell him: "Running dog, you eat shit!" Then you blacklist him from reading/commenting your blog/microblog and you can ignore him afterward.

If this critic is nostalgic about the China 30 years ago under Mao, you can call him "Maoist leftie" and add: "How come your dad wasn't starved to death?"

[...]

Actually, only entry-level public intellectuals go into debates themselves. Higher level public intellectuals will have a bunch of followers to carry out mass brawls. But you still need to learn these basic methods, just so you don't slip up in case you have to chime in.

Lesson 5. Public intellectuals must learn some psychology

A must-read book is Gustave LeBon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. As individuals, people can have low or high intelligence. As a crowd, people have relatively low intelligence. A crowd is immune to reason; it is only affected by "emotions."

With respect to motivating, mobilizing and inflaming crowds, no one is better than Mao Zedong. Peers are rivals, so Mao is the biggest enemy of public intellectuals. If you want to seize turf from Mao, you must thoroughly negate him. The good thing is that Mao is disadvantaged by the fact that he is dead. Nowadays young people won't bother to read Mao's works. Therefore their understanding of Mao is based upon your presentation. You are advantaged by the fact that Mao has transgressed against many people in his time, and so you will have countless allies who will provide you with free promotion.

When you want to go against the government, you need to use populism as your weapon in order to fuse with the netizens. But when your personal interests are in conflict with the people, you will negate populism totally and you invoke the rule-of-law and the inviolability of private property to defend yourself. For example, the government raises the salaries of public service workers and the state-owned enterprises are dispensing benefits to their employees. You must immediately attack them with populism. But when you are ready to divvy up state-owned properties among yourselves, you know that people won't be happy. So you drop populism and you promote the rule-of-law and private ownership. You tell the people that private ownership is the most efficient economic system.

Public intellectuals fall into different levels. Senior-level public intellectuals want to take every advantage within the system while pretending to the unpaid spokesperson for the people. But no matter what their levels, public intellectuals have the same goal: to pay the minimum price to procure the maximum public goods. So you should never criticize for the sake of criticizing. You must always remember to procure public goods from which to maximize profit.

Finally, I want to remind you that there are five things in the world that you can attack and smear at will: China; the Chinese government; the Chinese people; Chinese officials; Chinese state-owned enterprises. You can do no wrong no matter how you attack them; you will be able to seize the moral high point. But you must never provoke Fang Zhouzi. You can't complain that I didn't tell you. How can you be more awesome than Han Han?

Now that you have become a qualified public intellectual, I recommend that you apply your knowledge and write your first "public intellectual"-style blog post to condemn this society and gather fans. You may just be the next Han Han!

Pointless video post - ‘Again Will the Fire Burn’ by Lost Horizon

A recent discovery, I like these guys only a little bit less than I like their fellow Swedes Falconer and Tad Morose, which, coming from me, is no mean compliment. A melodic power metal band originally founded by the people who would become the members of Hammerfall, they straddle that fine, fine line between ridiculous and profound (their lyrics are pretty heavily influenced by existentialist philosophy) which leads straight to awesome. The fact that they have delivering the vocals Ethereal Magnanimus [Daniel Heiman], one of the best ‘wailers’ since Geoff Tate, merely adds to their heavy metal panache. (Also, I don’t know about the other members of the band, but the drummer Preternatural Transmogrifier [Christian Nyqvist], leans pretty firmly toward the left, politically, in a way which it seems influenced the lyrics of their first album, Awakening the World.) This song, however, comes from their second album, A Flame To The Ground Beneath. This is some top-notch power metal, folks; enjoy!

Forbidden fruit

Ms Sahar Sabet, 19-year-old Iranian student, denied iPad by Apple Store

At least as far as Iranian teens in Georgia are concerned. To be blunt, this is appalling. It could merely be the local store being discriminatory against Ms Sabet, or, if indeed this is a larger corporate policy, it could be Apple attempting to marginalise the Iranian (and Iranian-American) population in order to curry favour with an American government it sees as wanting a war with said country. I have the same reaction as Naj does here; I am greatly ashamed to have supported this company by buying and using its products (just an iPod, in my case, but still)…

Basic principles

Daniel Nichols at Caelum et Terra has a couple of utterly brilliant posts on the subject of the ‘real problem’ with American nuns; and the language he uses I do not think I can top:

Meanwhile, though, the more traditional orders, the ones who wear habits and attract young women to the convent, like the sisters in this photo, are, many of them, bowing to the god of Americanism. There are too many instances of American habited sisters swooning over the late candidacy of Rick Santorum, defender of torture and assassination as foreign policy.

What I want to know is whether the Vatican is going to wait forty years before doing something about this. One can’t help but worry for the young minds in the care of teaching sisters whose first religion is America, who endorse candidates whose political positions fly in the face of Catholic social teaching.

And:

For conservative Catholics, rejecting the Church’s clear teaching on war, nationalism, torture, economic justice, etc comes too easily. They fall back on the claim that these things are “not taught infallibly”. But this magisterial minimalism leaves them in a very precarious position, for they have long denounced those on the left who make the same “non-infallible” argument when rejecting the ordinary magisterium on birth control or women’s ordination.

[...]

In fact, the Church teaches that the ordinary magisterium is to be received with faith, and this includes not only things like liturgy and traditions of prayer, but the clear Mind of the Church on social issues. Catholic social teaching is just applied moral theology.

[...]

[N]o one is claiming that Catholic social dogma can only result in one particular social order. It can be interpreted in many ways. I personally interpret it in the most radical way, but I don’t argue that other, more moderate interpretations can be valid. However, there are basic principles that cannot be denied. You may argue for social democracy and be in accord with those principles, or you may argue for distributism. You may wish to see a well regulated market economy. But nowhere in Catholic social teaching can you find justification for the sort of free market ideology that has ruled in this country, and increasingly around the world, for thirty years. You can nowhere in the Catholic tradition find justification for torture, or assassinating foreign enemies, or invading a country because you claim that they may be a threat.

If you claim otherwise, excuse me for doubting your faith.

Rave at the wall

Qu Yuan 屈原

Qu Yuan of the Kingdom of Chu was an upright official who worked tirelessly for the common people of his kingdom, and ended up proposing and defending an alliance between Chu and its neighbours to withstand the growing, overpowering hegemony of the Kingdom of Qin (whose ruler would go on to unite China under a single brutal, authoritarian and blessedly short-lived rule). Slandered by jealous, greedy and vengeful fellow-officials in Chu, he was exiled for his troubles and eventually committed drowned himself in the Miluo River in protest after Chu was conquered by Qin. An honest and faithful official who is revered by history as a patriot and whose holiday, the Dragon Boat Festival 端午節, is celebrated in Korea, Japan, Burma, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and the Overseas Chinese Communities as well as on the Mainland, he is unfortunately without equals today. Equally unfortunately, we know precisely why. Any official who nowadays dares to rave at the wall, to challenge corruption within the party apparatus in any visible or politically inconvenient way, is removed through political theatre, through slander and through carefully orchestrated transmission of rumours.

During this Dragon Boat Festival, please remember Qu Yuan’s legacy. A more humane system of government, peopled with more humane officials, ought to be fought for, even if it went unrealised then and goes unrealised now.