Bring back the old rules
The So-Called Rule of Law in Russia |
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Some truly flawless logic is coming out of the Russian judiciary with regards to the appropriateness of sexual harrassment in the 21st century:
A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race...“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.
Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.
According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.
Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.
Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.
To quote a journalist friend on the road in East Timor—“Must be the envy of all the world. Think they should use him for the Guantanamo trials.”
Seeing some hope in all the anarchy |
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Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Policy option: ignore symbolism |
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I was happy to see so many comments on my argument against French hypocrisy. Some agreed with my assessment; others did not, calling my reasoning “misleading” or “muddled.” I think my argument still stands when taken for what it is: an analysis of (secular) national law.
Confusion arises in this argument due its complexity: there are actually four entwined issues including personal freedom, feminism, religious freedom and religious expression. I specifically chose to make my case in terms of the first issue. Others did not appreciate my specificity. Renee summed it up by stating that the argument is not over a piece of cloth. The same tactic was used to attack PZ’s cracker analysis.
I disagree with this proposition. By making the argument bigger than than a simple “piece of cloth” secular lawmakers give validation to the status of religion in modern life. Rather, we should focus expressly on the material reality — the corporeality the cloth and crackers. Ignore religious symbols outright, sidelining the religious by giving them no room to leverage their belief system in a court of law. Personal religion as a whole cannot be outlawed because of our beliefs in liberty. However, their outward symbols can be trivialized to meaninglessness. No validation through recognition.
Does this mean we ignore religion in the public sphere? Hell no! There are many unbalanced tax and education laws, as well as warped public perception of secularism and atheism that requires the actions of rationalists and libertarians alike. Rather than keeping foreigners with long dresses outside of our borders, much work needs to be done about the laws within our borders, specifically in terms of the separation between church and state.
Uigher Terrorism’s Rapid Rise |
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In late July, bombs exploded on buses in Kunming and Shanghai, killing two and injuring a dozen people. Chinese authorities initially denied the claims of Commander Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party, which claimed responsibility for the bus bombings. In one respect it does seem far-fetched—while there is a noticeable Uigher presence in Kunming, they are few and far between in Shanghai, and as I personally witnessed, subject to random interrogations by the authorities.
However, perhaps unsatisfied for the lack of credit, Uigher separatists threw powerful explosives into a police station in Kashgar over the weekend, killing 16 border policemen and injuring another 16. Kashgar, also known as Kashi, in far western China on the border with Pakistan. Two men were arrested on the spot—one blew his arm off in perpetuating the attack.
Meanwhile in Beijing, with just days before the Olympics start, the capital has been transformed into a fortress guarded by surface-to-air missiles and surveillance cameras scanning every sidewalk. We certainly all hope that the Olympics progress smoothly without any civilian casualties.
But there are real problems outstanding in China’s nether regions. Tibet has long been the media hog of attentionBoth Younghusband and I have traveled to Xinjiang, and my colleague made it as far as Kashgar. His impressions on his visit can be found elsewhere in this blog in the archives. My visits were limited to the northern area of the region, but I think we both experienced the same thing—very kind and hospitable Uighers, clearly growing ever-resentful of obscene “Hannification” in their midst, where all the government and flash private sector jobs went to newcomers shipped in from the homeland.
Victim of bureaucratic jealousy |
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Canada shows us a brilliant example of how bureaucratic turf wars on the homefront can negatively impact the war effort: Due to interdepartmental jealousies, the Department of National Defence has decided to disband the Strategic Advisory Team-Afghanistan. Since 2005 this unique Canadian Forces initiative — outside of the jurisdiction of ISAF or OEF — has garnered positive results and generally positive reviews from all except the (troubled) Foreign Affairs and the Canadian International Development Agency.
The SAT-A was the brainchild of the former CDS General Rick Hillier and was a group of civilian-clothed military men (plus a few civvies and one CIDA rep) of long experience who advised the new Afghani government. They were put where civilian advisors could or would not go. The team could have came straight out of the pages of a Robert Kaplan book.
Now SAT-A will be replaced by a new CIDA-directed civilian team. True, Governance is one of CIDA’s mandates., but they are basically a development fund rather than an organization for nation-building.
This is a step back in getting Afghanistan on its feet, if simply for the loss of positive momentum already garnered by SAT-A. My first instinct was that this might have had something to do with General Natynczyk taking over as CDS last month. I am sure he was proud of SAT-A, but I don’t know how strong his powerbase in Ottawa is. However, according to The Torch this decision was made in April, during Hillier’s time. After nearly eight years of infighting Canada’s three big departments with responsibility in Afghanistan still have not learned to work together despite a plethora of flash-sounding initiatives (ie. Team Canada, 3D, Whole-of-Government, etc.). It is times like this I wish Canada had a president who could deliver an executive order to ensure that SAT-A could continue its work in the ‘Ghan.
“Uni Muki” — How to prepare a sea urchin |
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In previous posts I’ve covered how a squid is prepared for consumption in Japan (unfortunately now eaten in one of our site updates), and showed the consumption of a fish’s heart still beating. During a recent trip to Rebun Island, the northernmost island in Japan after Hokkaido, I had a chance to break open and prepare a sea urchin at a local fishery. The pictures of the experience are posted here for readers to enjoy below.
Sea urchins are a delicacy in Japan. Here is a tub of the spiny creatures waiting to be shipped across the country or otherwise served up for food.
The only edible part of the creature are its orange gonads. This requires completely destroying the creature, breaking through its spines and hard crusty shell. To split the creature open, three tools are required—a chisel with a lever, a dull scalpel, and twezers.
The rest of this gets messy… don’t continue to read if you have a thin skin (no pun intended). (more…)
Politics and the Olympics in the 20th century |
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Check out this audio slideshow of how politics has overshadowed past Olympics.
The Economist Still Opposes the Beijing Olympics |
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From John Micklethwait, Editor in Chief of The Economist:
In 2001 The Economist argued against the Olympic games being given to China, making unkind comparisons to the event in Berlin in 1936. Now that the games are about to begin, many people, not least in China, say we were wrong: the Olympics have helped the world’s largest country. We disagree. China has certainly made a huge and admirable leap forward, but that is attributable to other things, such as opening up its economy or the spread of mobile telephony. On closer examination, the Olympics have been bad for human rights and the environment, and they have done little to make China more biddable when it comes to foreign policy. Now they may further fuel the flames of nationalism.
Read the article here.
The Big News |
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As readers have noticed, I haven’t been very active blogging the past few months. This is because I’ve been preparing for a major change which has involved a great deal of work, planning and preparation. What is this secret you may ask? Why, it’s a masters degree in Defense and Strategic Studies.
In order to give you some quick background, although I originally intended to attend school here in Germany, the difference between the US and German systems was ultimately too much for me. Whereas in the US a master’s would have taken two years to complete, here in Germany, the system does not allow you to have different undergraduate and graduate majors meaning I wasn’t allowed to change or I had to start from the very beginning as a freshman! Needless to say, I ultimately gave up on that option and decided to work and travel a bit longer before going to back to America with Mrs. Chirol which brings us to now.
After nearly four and a half years in Germany and having visited over a dozen countries in that time, I’ll be moving back to the U.S. tomorrow, specifically to Washington D.C. I’m excited both to live in my home country again and to move forward into a field which will soon provide me with rewarding and endlessly fascinating work. I’ll be busy finding an apartment, getting ready for school and so forth but I invite anyone in the greater D.C. to leave a comment or shoot me an email and we can meet up for a beer and geopolitics.
China as an Island |
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From strange maps comes this, well, strange map:
China has land borders with 14 other countries, but its best to think of “China Proper” as an island. Over a billion people live in the agriculture heartland shown in the map above. The Han people who life in this are speak Mandarin and are the majority of China’s population.
When the Chinese state was strong, it managed to conquer and rule these outlying areas, providing a defensive buffer for the heartland. When central authority was weak, these fringes broke off – leaving the heartland vulnerable to invasion. China is strong again, even up to the point where the fringes now are the target of large migrations of Han, much to the chagrin of the native peoples.This Han-ification of the Chinese fringe does not necessarily imply that the Chinese have more contact with the countries beyond their borders. Only in three places are the Chinese borders naturally permeable: at the Vietnamese frontier, via the Silk Road, and near Russian Far East. Hilly jungles separate China from Laos and Burma, the Himalayas shield it from the Indian subcontinent, almost impassable deserts divide it from Central Asia and the forbidding expanses of Siberia have never appealed to Chinese expansionism (until now, as the Russians fear).
China’s relative isolation, combined with the size of its population (1 in every 5 humans is Chinese), means China is virtually impossible to subdue militarily (as the Japanese discovered to their disadvantage in the 1930s). It also means China can – and often has – turned its back on the world, existing in splendid isolation.
The post also identifies China’s three primary “geographic objectives”:
- – maintain unity of the Han heartland;
- – maintain control over the non-Han buffer zone;
- – deflect foreign encroachment on the Chinese coast.
