Quotulatiousness

October 27, 2013

“Dangerous Ground” in the South China Sea

Filed under: China, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

John Donovan linked to this interesting New York Times Magazine feature about the Spratly Islands and the geopolitical standoff between China and pretty much all of the other nations bordering the South China Sea:

Spratly Islands - Sierra Madre aground on Ayungin

Ayungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. There’s little to commend the spot, apart from its plentiful fish and safe harbor — except that Ayungin sits at the southwestern edge of an area called Reed Bank, which is rumored to contain vast reserves of oil and natural gas. And also that it is home to a World War II-era ship called the Sierra Madre, which the Philippine government ran aground on the reef in 1999 and has since maintained as a kind of post-apocalyptic military garrison, the small detachment of Filipino troops stationed there struggling to survive extreme mental and physical desolation. Of all places, the scorched shell of the Sierra Madre has become an unlikely battleground in a geopolitical struggle that will shape the future of the South China Sea and, to some extent, the rest of the world.

[…]

To understand how Ayungin (known to the Western world as Second Thomas Shoal) could become contested ground is to confront, in miniature, both the rise of China and the potential future of U.S. foreign policy. It is also to enter into a morass of competing historical, territorial and even moral claims in an area where defining what is true or fair may be no easier than it has proved to be in the Middle East.

The Spratly Islands sprawl over roughly 160,000 square miles in the waters of the coasts of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and China — all of whom claim part of the islands.

Spratly Islands shipping lanes

The Green Bay Horror Show

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

After the horrible performance last week in front of a national TV audience, this week the Vikings will face divisional foe Green Bay in the last match-up between the two teams at the Metrodome (which will be demolished at the end of this season). Most Vikings fans will already be worried about the game … despite a rash of injuries, the Packers are a much better team than the Giants, and this is another national TV game in the Sunday Night Football slot. Dan Zinski goes with the Halloween theme for his pre-game post:

It’s fitting that Packer week should coincide this year with Halloween season and its endless television horror movie marathons. What could be a more apt metaphor for this year’s Viking season than an unending parade of scary movies? And with the Packers coming in this week things are only going to get scarier, or at least that’s what traumatized Viking fans seem to believe.

The Vikings have had some success against Green Bay in recent years, but for the most part the Packers have been Jason to the Vikings’ screaming half-naked college co-ed. This year’s first Packer-Viking match-up figures to descend into slasher movie carnage again, with the Packers on the relentless machete-waving march and the Vikings stumbling bloody and blinded through the wilderness.

The Viking fan looking for a glimmer of hope amid the darkness might turn to the Packer injury report, which currently features such big names as Clay Matthews, Jermichael Finley and Randall Cobb. But of course we know the injury report doesn’t mean diddly poo when it comes to the Packers. Like some hideous creation of a horror movie mad scientist, when the Packers lose one of their vital parts they just grow a new one to replace it. And keep on coming after you.

Cupcakes are “butter-iced snares of self-loathing”

Filed under: Food, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

I’m not actually much of a fan of sweet concoctions, so the cupcake revolution swept past without leaving much of an impression on me, but from what I hear they’re still undeniably popular. In the Guardian, Matt Seaton isn’t impressed:

Cupcakes look absolutely fabulous, of course … in photographs, on e-commerce sites, in shop windows and in expensively beribboned boxes. But have you ever managed to eat one without either getting frosting on your nose or ending up with sticky slime between your fingers? They’re the edible equivalent of ultra-fashiony high heels: great to look at, ridiculously impractical.

And like heels, borderline masochistic. Why? Because cupcakes are very obviously a terrible food choice.

Now, anyone who knows me and my industrial-scale chocolate habit will be ready to yell “hypocrite” here. But I’m not preaching abstinence from treats. What irks me about cupcakes is that, for their implied young female, figure-conscious, on-off dieting customers, they set up this horrible dynamic of enabling indulgence in a forbidden object.

You know what cupcakes really are? — butter-iced snares of self-loathing that sell precisely because they exploit young women’s insecurity about their looks and identity, and offer a completely false and self-defeating solace of temporary gratification, almost certainly followed by remorse and disgust.

H/T to James Lileks for the link.

Good news – we’re not in 1984; Bad news – we’re in Brave New World instead

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I’ve already quoted from this week’s edition of Jonah Goldberg’s The Goldberg File email, but I quite liked this passage as well:

The bad news is that we don’t feel that way — anymore — about softer, more diffuse and bureaucratic forms of tyranny. Every American is taught from grade school up that they should fear living in the world of Orwell’s 1984. Few Americans can tell you why we shouldn’t live in Huxley’s Brave New World. We’ve got the dogmatic muscle and rhetorical sinew to repel militarism, but we’re intellectually flabby when it comes to rejecting statist maternalism. We hate hearing “Because I said so!” But we’re increasingly powerless against, “It’s for your own good!”

(Sadly, the surest route to the 1984-ification of America is to embrace Brave New Worldism. Once you’ve created a society of men without chests — in C. S. Lewis’s phrase — you’ve created a society ripe for a father-figure to make all of the decisions).

For instance, when the national-security types intrude on our privacy or civil liberties, even theoretically, all of the “responsible” voices in the media and academia wig out. But when Obamacare poses a vastly more intrusive and real threat to our privacy, the same people yawn and roll their eyes at anyone who complains. If the District of Columbia justified its omnipresent traffic cameras as an attempt to keep tabs on dissidents, they’d be torn down in a heartbeat by mobs of civil libertarians. But when justified on the grounds of public safety (or revenue for social services or as a way to make driving cars more difficult), well, that’s different.

And it is different. Motives matter. But at the same time, I do wish we looked a bit more like the America Edmund Burke once described:

    In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; [In America] they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

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