Villains
Every good story needs a good villain. After all, some of fiction’s greatest characters are compelling — or just plain awesome — bad guys (disclosure: I may be a little biased considering how two of the 10 people I’d love to meet most are Dr. Doom and Lex Luthor).
But, while you can be fairly sure to find a villain in every great story, the same doesn’t hold true in real life. It seems almost too obvious to even say out loud. Yet, if you were to follow what lawmakers and political commentators have to say about almost anything, you would think that everything bad in life could be blamed on some group of evil people:
- Got in a fight with your spouse? Depending on who you ask, it’s either because gays are getting married or because our evil capitalistic overlords are putting too much stress in our lives.
- Kids misbehaving? It’s either because of violent video games or stores selling guns.
- Lost your job? It’s either because of evil labor unions or evil immigrants.
- Healthcare getting more expensive? It’s either because insurance companies are the devil, or because some incompetent bureaucrats are screwing up your healthcare.
- Gas prices? It’s either because those goshdarn liberals have taxed gasoline too much, or because those crazy conservatives are in bed with the Saudi’s.
- Housing payments going up? It’s either because those irresponsible minorities bought houses they couldn’t afford or because some evil banker gets a kick out of watching you suffer.
Now, I’m not claiming that we shouldn’t try to find and hold people responsible for the things that they do. But too often, real world problems are caused by forces and factors which we cannot control or reasonably assign blame for. It’s relatively straightforward to point to Osama bin Laden and blame him and his cohorts for September 11. It’s a whole different ball game to “blame” someone for things like energy costs, poverty, the decline in “family values”, and global warming, for three reasons:
- Witchhunts are usually pretty meaningless when it comes to large problems. Economics blogger Megan McArdle, when reflecting on the causes of the current financial crisis, had this bit of wisdom to impart:
Nature is not a novelist. Reality does not come packaged in narrative form, and rarely gifts us with either true heroes, or true villains … Societies, and economies, cannot be brought down by a few people or a few bad decisions–otherwise we’d all still be living in hunter-gatherer tribes eating roast locusts for breakfast. A failure this massive can only occur if massive numbers of people had their hands in it somehow. If you want to find a villain, there’s probably one handy at the nearest reflective surface.
Who do you blame for the downfall of Detroit automakers? Do you blame Asian and European automakers? The American consumers willing to buy Japanese cars? The labor unions who have burdened Detroit with high labor costs? The government for protecting Detroit until the point of bankruptcy? Management for making stupid decisions? The real answer probably is a complicated combination of all of the above. And, really, did any of them do anything horribly evil? Foreign automakers just wanted to make a decent profit. Labor unions were looking out for their members’ interests. The government wanted to protect the economy of the Great Lakes region. Management had trouble making good decisions, yes, but every industry/company goes through stages of weakness and strength and no one has a perfect 100% record – I don’t see any horrible evil in this. Some stupidity, maybe. But there’s no individual or group that I can just point the finger at and say “there, it’s your fault, go clean it up!”
- Politicians and pundits have good reason to play the blame game.
Politicians want to get votes and attention – and the easiest way to do that is to blame somebody else for a voter’s problems. It plays on people’s sense of outrage when bad things happen, and the desire for quick-and-easy solutions to be carried out by the “man of the hour”. Of course, outlaw those dastardly unions! Burn down the mansions of those CEOs! Ban foreign cars! That’ll solve everything – vote for me and I’ll do it! Woe to the politician who talks about complicated tradeoffs or advocates nuanced policy. And woe to the voter who now has to choose between two extreme sides of the same coin. - Related to #2 is the unfortunate fact that playing the blame game shifts the burden of action away from you. It’s easy to blame an incompetent teacher’s union or horrible conservative spending cuts for your child’s grades. It’s easy to blame immigrants or new technology or taxes when you lose your job. It’s much harder to look into yourself to see what you should be doing differently. As Gandhi once said, “be the change you seek” – an especially powerful and inspirational sentiment considering that the problems Gandhi and his followers were dealing with were started by someone else (the British colonizers).
Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century
I’ve posted before on some hilarious Facebook parodies, like what if the Earth had a Facebook account?, or Hamlet as told through Facebook.
Today, I stumbled on yet another to add to the collection: what if Pride and Prejudice were told through Facebook, brought to you by much-ado.net (cut to focus on the few events I can remember from the story)?
Charles Bingley is buying a house!
Mrs. Bennet became a fan of Charles Bingley.
Charles Bingley is now friends with Mr. Bennet and Sir William Lucas.
11 of your friends are attending Assembly at Meryton.
Caroline Bingley tagged Jane Bennet in her note Visit us at Netherfield.
Lydia Bennet and Kitty Bennet joined the group 1,000,000 Strong Against the Officers Leaving Meryton!
Lydia Bennet and George Wickham are in a relationship.
I love the “George Wickham told Elizabeth Bennet about Mr. Darcy’s evil deeds. ” bit.
For the whole thing, in all of its literary grandeur, check out much-ado.net’s genius!
Living Lamps
Over on Xhibiting, I made a post on a couple of very interesting lamps which defy our typical conception of what a “lamp” is:
If you’re like most people, all your life you’ve learned that lamps are supposed to be rigid things with no flexibility. No life. No character. They’re “supposed” to be boring, not exciting. Static, not dynamic. We wouldn’t want to jeopardize their role as bringers of light, now would we?
Wrong. I say defy the convention!
Take this Abyss Table Lamp manufactured by Kundalini (whose name, incidentally, is the Sanskrit word for the coiled “serpent power” which rests within each of us).
For more pictures of the Abyss Lamp and of the Titanic Lamp, check it out at: http://www.xhibitr.com/xhibiting/2008/12/living-lamps/
Acronym heaven
I’ve written before about the phenomena of TLAs in consulting (three-letter acronyms – which is itself a TLA), but sometimes the acronyms go beyond three letters. They can range from widely used acronyms acronyms you can sort of pronounce “EBIAT” (Earnings Before Interest After Tax), and sometimes they’re client-specific acronyms which defy all attempts to decipher or pronounce. My client, in particular, is fond of its acronyms – about as fond as scientists (esp. those dastardly biologists who keep coming up with random names for random proteins) are.
No small wonder that I took an immediate liking to this gem from Jorge Chan’s PhD comics:
Independent Taiwan
As many of this blog’s readers know, I was born in Taiwan but raised in the United States. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but it wasn’t until college that I began to get a real sense of what being Taiwanese meant – the culture, the history, the customs. Sadly, it wasn’t until I started doing research on technology companies that I got a sense of the importance of Taiwan in the global economy.
And it wasn’t until even more recently that I got a real sense of Taiwanese politics. Taiwan is basically split between two parties, the Kuomintang (KMT) – the party of Chiang Kai-shek – and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Technically, if one were to classify the two parties in Western terms, the KMT would count as the “conservative/right-wing” party and the DPP would be the “liberal/left-wing” party. But, while this difference is real, the main issue that divides the two parties is their stance on Taiwanese “independence”.
The reason I put “independence” in quotes is because the subject is a very nuanced one. Currently, Taiwan is in a state of de facto independence. Although neither China nor the United States will go so far as to say it openly, there is fairly wide acceptance that the Taiwanese government is “sovereign” in the sense that its democratic government rules Taiwan without any real question. The “independence” that divides the KMT and the DPP, however, goes beyond this independent-even-though-nobody-will-say-it status quo. It’s the question of whether or not Taiwan is truly a separate political and cultural entity from China altogether. And, because of the KMT’s origins in China, the KMT is the party which most favors reconciliation with China and greater integration, while the DPP favors stronger terms of independence.
And, while I have many problems with the DPP’s positions and base of support, I am completely opposed to the KMT party line for four main reasons:
- The government of Mainland China is a repressive regime with little regard for human rights. The only way I can even begin to understand why people would think that Taiwan would be better off as a part of China is if they didn’t pay attention to the news: Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Uighur Muslims, silencing of political protest, disregard for the health of their own people and trading partners, excessive pollution, support for genocide, the list goes on and on. Yes, plenty of other countries have their fair share of human rights issues, and it’s a perfectly valid point to say that Taiwan at various stages of its past had similar problems which they eventually solved, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Chinese government today is less desirable than an open, democratic one, and anyone who thinks that Taiwan ought to subject itself to such a rule either has no clear idea what the Chinese government has been up to or has something against Taiwanese freedom.
- A not-very-similar society and culture is hardly a reason for Taiwan to belong to China. To say that Taiwan ought to reunite with China because of strong cultural ties would be the same as arguing that the United States and India should be colonies of Great Britain. Yes, they speak the same language (although there are many in Taiwan who prefer Taiwanese or Japanese), and some of the same pop music is played in both countries (Asian pop superstar Jay Chou is from Taiwan), but that’s hardly a decent reason to just surrender one’s national identity and government to someone else, especially when the cultures (e.g. phrases, foreign influences, even the writing of characters) have several big differences.
- The KMT has a murderous history which the people of Taiwan should
want to distance themselves from. This will piss off many KMT, but Chiang Kai-Shek was a contemptible man who butchered his own people and let them starve while he enriched himself. When the Chinese people turned against him and sided with Mao Zedong’s Communists, instead of learning from his mistakes, Chiang repeated them on the island of Taiwan, installing a brutal military rule. The KMT seized all available property and, during the infamous 2-28 incident, butchered political dissidents and native Taiwanese. For years, they suppressed the local culture/dialect, demanding instead that students be educated as if they were mainlanders (Chiang’s plan all along was to re-take the mainland). That the KMT wants to look backwards on these “good old days” strikes me as a somewhat ridiculous basis for foreign policy (not to mention the irony of the party of Chiang Kai-Shek wanting to negotiate “surrender” with the party of Mao Zedong). - The best way to improve Taiwanese economic growth is in achieving independence. KMT supporters oftentimes float the idea that the Taiwanese economy depends on tighter integration with China. While this is certainly true, there is nothing which says that more trade and immigration between China and Taiwan has to mean that Taiwan becomes a part of China. France and Germany have more or less completely free trade and immigration, yet you would be hard-pressed to find a Frenchman who thinks that France should be made a part of Germany. On the contrary, because of Taiwan’s dependence on trade, the issue of independence is especially important. How do you trade or do business when no countries recognize your laws or authority? How do you flourish when few will grant visas to your businesspeople? When your customers find it difficult to travel into your country? Or when pressure by China can cause your telephone area codes to suddenly change?
The DPP, in my opinion, is a backwards party content to play class and identity politics (fomenting racial/cultural backlash against the mainland and the wealthier, more cosmopolitan base of the KMT), argue over trivial things like the official flag of the country (one such example is to the left) and whether or not the map of Taiwan should be depicted with North-South on the vertical or the horizontal axis (to de-emphasize their location next to China), and play to narrow-minded anti-trade/anti-immigration isolationists.
But, despite all of this, I believe that the issue of the hour for Taiwan is independence. And I believe that, because of Taiwan’s relative strength and China’s focus today on economic growth and integration with the global political community, the time for pushing independence is now. Maybe, later, when the need for independence is less and when (hopefully) China becomes more democratic and open, the dialogue and the priorities might change. But, until then, I see the DPP representing the lesser of two evils.
