Seoulscapade

The right way to progress and move forward with integrity, rigour and transparency.

I couldn’t resist posting these flow charts, especially after finishing a course on astronomy, where the scientific method is absolutely everything. This charts speak for themselves.

I would point out that the first has been instrumental in establish humanity’s place in the universe as insignificant, but incredibly able to discover, for example, the age and vastness of the universe.

In contrast, the method below held us back from the above for some time, while it burned people at the stake for the impudence of suggesting there are other suns and planets out in the cosmos.  The method below embraced by Christians and Muslims alike is a dead end after a journey of delusion.

The wrong to approach reality unless your purpose is to avoid reality and ensure others do along with you.

On concentration camp horrors in North Korea

After having read The Aquariums of Pyongyang, I knew what to expect with this book, the tale of Soon Ok Lee’s 6 years in a North Korean labor camp.

First of all, it’s all the same to call it a labor camp, a concentration camp, a death camp, a prison, when speaking of prison camps in a Stalinist state. The idea of these camps is to provide cheap labor for gangsters presiding over a country that is an economic basket case. That was why Stalin worked 20 million to death.

The toll of the Kim dynasty–Kim Il Sung and his idiot son Kim Jong Il–is probably now also in the millions. Eventually, the number of deaths they are responsible will come to light, and they will join the ranks of modern history’s most reviled and detested mass murdering gangsters, such as Pol-Pot, Stalin and Hitler.

Tailless Animals shows you why. But it’s no Gulag Archipelago, far from it. Solzhenitsyn’s record is up there with the greatest, it’s a literary classic, and one my favorite books of this “genre,” if I can call it that. Tailless Animals is at the other end of the scale. It is not written well and is pretty simple in terms of expression and ideas. It almost seems as if it were written according to a checklist.

So much is left out. You get stark facts but no real attempt to evoke what conditions were like. On the other hand, as a steady and objective account of the depths of human depravity, it serves its purpose. It could be excused as written by someone using their second language, or as a translation, but I tend to think for such an important subject, perhaps more effort could have been made. And the sketches here and there are a waste of space. They appear to have been Americanized, with hardly Asian looking characters, which struck me as bordering on stupid if not insulting. They make it look like a child’s story. Was it to illicit more sympathy from dumb American readers? Regardless, it was a poor decision by the publishers.

Christian publishers, that is, so you can skip the Christian intro. I could have done without the Christian sentiments toward the end, but I guess they were a part of what the author became. Koreans have a habit of getting sucked in by religion as much as they have been by Confucian dictators. No, god didn’t make the birds fly out at the right time to cover any noise Lee made when seeking to cross North Korea’s border. No, the guards let her into Hong Kong because your fake IDs were good not because of god’s smoke and mirrors. Well, whatever gets her through the night.

The Senate hearing testimony she gave contains details that aren’t in the book. For one thing, the ability to bury all factory workers en masse in underground tunnels, if guards wanted to, are absent; for another, the biological experiments conducted on prisoners. Why were things like that left out? I can only wonder.

Despite my criticisms, everyone needs to read this book, as they do the others I’ve mentioned. North Korea is a poisoned land, operating on corruption, greed and thuggery such that decency cannot survive there. It really gets to me that the world knows North Korea is like this and has concentration camps but does nothing–scared of Chine, no doubt. Politics means that the people that get stuck the the death camps simply have no hope, except for the very, very lucky few.

Saturday is the second McEwan novel I’ve read and for me it suffered from the same thing the first did: the drilling down into minuscule detail of mental processes, beyond which for me is realistic. Perhaps I lead a dull inner life. But that would surprise me to learn.

It was also the tangential excursions, not just of emotions but of the intricate descriptions of surrounds and objects, such as the details of Henry’s cooking that drove me to question their relevance. OK, Henry, the main character, can cook, he is a competent modern man—we get it, we don’t need pages of how he cooks to labour the point.

Character introductions or establishments were forced for me, too contrived, such as descriptions of blues guitar playing that not even most blues players would recognize or jargon filled neurosurgerical procedures. I wonder what blues player would analyze “playing off triplets against two- or four-note clusters.” At least, I never did. The impression is that a lot of the novel has been, well, over-researched, which is fine, but you know it only too keenly.

The family at the centre of the novel is very well-to-do. They are so well off that the son can pursue a career in blues music and the daughter in poetry. Half their luck! Their well-to-do upper-class parents, a lawyer and a brain surgeon, don’t seem to mind having kids bordering on wastrel, which might strike some as very unrealistic. On top of that, offspring with such easy fortune put me off them pretty quick.

Here is a well-balanced family, then, the artists and leaders of society as their parents. Henry, the father and surgeon, is hard on himself for lacking artistic sentiment, but not to outdone he has his own highly lauded craftsmanship. He also good at creating fictions to avoid trouble, so he is not totally devoid of creativity. He appears to be cast as truly a figure of British accomplishment in an age when there seems to be so few of them around.

It didn’t feel so much as Henry’s perceptions of the times as McEwan’s idea of what we should be thinking of them. Against the backdrop of an anti-Iraq war rally, much of it seemed like a modernized rendering around the theme of a “stiff upper lip” or promoting the sentiment British World War II posters used to proclaim: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Spoiler warning: the family encounter their own form of home grown terrorism. But for me the parallelism here of world and local terrorism was too pat. I enjoyed musing, however, that the local terrorist was on the path to becoming a raving lunatic (because of a medical condition), and how that seemed to imply as much of the nature of Islamic terrorists—that is, they are insane.

So, the family, offspring and parents, prevail through their own little war on terror using their collective and superior talents. Then they help the terrorist and give him as much ease as possible. Again, I couldn’t help drawing parallels with what this suggests about the terms of the international drama in the background, a drama that is still going on—the rich Western nations helping to rewire the brains of the poorer (invariably Islamic) troublemakers.

I would never say McEwan wasn’t the master at taking a very simple story and padding it out into a book of many intricacies. It’s happened in both of the books of his I’ve read. But it’s too much padding for me—the scenery in fine detail, the mental process excessively probed. It’s like McEwan was giving film makers every last detail for a film, saving them all the work. This is just not my thing, not in literature: too much served up on a plate, too much like watching a movie.

Survival In Auschwitz

Primo Levi

This book is an undeniable classic. Written with authority and control, with a kind of restrained disgust, it has so many well phrased passages. Its unconventional structure makes it seem more modern than it is: Levi plunges in and out of episodes and time periods. Some things you would expect to be focused upon are not, while others are, such as those things that were most pertinent to individuals on the edge of survival, like the work they had to do in extreme cold.

Because Levi focuses so much of the daily physical privations and the work he had to do, I was continually reminded especially of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Abridged. Interesting how similar both fascists and communists contrived in much the same way to grind millions of human beings into the ground—they took everything from them and ground them down with hunger, cold and work until they died, as of course North Korea is doing right now.

The moment it might have dawned upon Levi that people were being gassed and burned is not detailed. Rather, the idea of it seeps into the text, it is alluded to here and there only, and then finally it is spoken of as one of the facts of life that hangs over everyone. He has few words of hatred for the Germans, as if they are beyond contempt as forces of nothingness and evil—such words would not be enough, anyway.

It was clear Auschwitz was a very different experience depending on your nationality and religion, with the Germans at the top of the heap. But something that is not explored in the book, and which I only learned about recently, is that Auschwitz was a kind of resort for the Germans. They had fun there, with girls and good times, while overseeing the gassing and slaughter of 100s of thousands.

And it did not matter how strong you were, or how smart as a prisoner, what mattered was luck. If Levi does not state it outright, it is nonetheless clear that he only survived through luck. That’s a very sobering thought.

The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter

Peter Singer & Jim Mason

This study covers a lot of ground, tracing back and examining the implications of where our food comes from. Basically it is divided into three sections and each revolves around a family and their eating habits. It goes from a standard meat eating family to a semi-vegetarian or “conscientious omnivore” family to a vegan family. No prize for guessing which comes out as the best lifestyle choice for all of us, for animals and for the environment–the vegan family, of course.

This book is packed with information, more than a lot of other books I’ve read. It introduced me to a couple of things I hadn’t considered, such as the way food industries defray costs onto others, or why fish farming is just as bad as any other factory farming, or how food transportation consumes so much energy, or why buying local may not be best in all cases. It touches upon more issues than you might expect, and gives local detail before widening the perspective with broader implications. Ultimately, “agriculture indirectly affects all living creatures” and all of the detrimental effects of this are “because of our choices about what we eat.”

I was particularly interested in hard facts on labeling. They deliver on this by actually visiting so-called organic farms and detailing what they saw. As suspected, many of these farms are not what I would class as organic regardless of any official pronouncements. The authors had similar reservations. It all remains “questionable,” and while buying products with “Certified Humane” and the like is better than not, the best choice of all is not buying animal based products at all. You cannot get away from one undeniable reality: food producers seek to maximize profits and this is invariably contrary to the interests of the animals.

The book is dictated by the food choices in it, but I wonder would it have been an entirely different book if different families and foods been focused on? There’s no doubt, although given that the problems with food production are universal, many food trails would lead back to the same culprits or their equivalents. I then wonder how much was controlled by the authors and how much simply left to chance. That is not really explored, and I guess the idea was to leave much to chance, to rely on chance to deliver “averages” and make it more “objective” without their interference.

One criticism I have is that I had trouble remembering who bought what, which farmer it was traced back to, and what the findings were. Perhaps if each section paralleled others I could look back and find corresponding sections for each family, but sections do not parallel each other, and I suppose they can’t, since different issues arise for different circumstances. For example, meat and dairy are not going to be discussed in relation to the vegan family. I question the effectiveness of this structure. For me, it would have been better to structure it according to food type and discuss each family under that.

I would like to have seen more details on the families, like which family members haul around the fattest arses and what kind of education levels we are dealing with in relation to food choice. I guess that’s all getting into murky territory that would be enough to sustain another book, yet a few cholesterol stats wouldn’t have taken up much space. I did enjoy the note that although the US is somewhat slavish to Christian notions, the sin of gluttony appears to get overlooked.

Criticism there could have been sharper, and sharper too against lazy or twisted thinkers the authors touch upon. They at least took Michael Pollin to task and others who justify the raising of animals for slaughter as some kind of bizarre evolutionary bargain or “mutualism,” as if they cannot shake a dominion mentality passed on through Christian culture. As for the farmers they spoke to, I suspect they were not chewed up and spat out because of their cooperation.

One idiot they did not talk to called Joel Salatin believes humans are made in the Christian god’s image and have a soul, while animals do not. All they say to this lunacy is that religions often reflect “the speciesism of the humans who made them.” Again, dissecting Salatin would have gone beyond the scope of the book, but still I’d like to have read a few more sentences explaining in their words why he is deluded.

Overall, this is a great book to have on the shelf, one that can be returned to for reference, since I doubt the findings will be going out of date any time soon. It is heartening to see that the kind of information Singer and Mason have presented here is entering into mainstream consciousness. I expect the documentary Food, Inc. will echo many of the issues found in this book and will probably reach a wider audience, of the kind that would never pick up a book on ethics.

Candide

Voltaire

This was a fun read and, as I find with a lot of earlier literature, quite modern in its execution. Or, did the translation make it seem that way? Partly, perhaps. Maybe it’s the eighteenth century writing, which for me has a timeless quality. Many of my favorite authors come from that period—it really was such a golden age for literature. I suspect the original French Candide would be funnier but as it stands the Penguin Classic I read gave me a smile and an occasionally a laugh. You don’t need to go into great depth studying the philosophical arguments of the day to enjoy this. The gist of it is explained well enough in the intros of most editions, I should think. The “indifferint shrug and callous inertia” Voltaire satirizes could apply equally well to attitudes and behaviors today.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Christoper Hitchens

As someone who has always been an atheist, I knew I’d like this book before even picking it up. Sometimes the logic flow of the argument isn’t always clear, but perhaps that is because it is a personal polemic with many asides. Similarly, the chapter structure is a bit like a collection of loosely ordered short essays. But none of this detracts from making it a thoroughly enjoyable read. Hitchens puts things exactly how I would put it myself if I had the talent. He really nails it at times and pulls no punches. It’s also refreshing to read someone who’s not afraid to announce and denounce the lies and stupidities and Isalm and Muslims along with all the other cult movements based on illusions, delusions and peasant ignorance. Good on you, Hitchens! I’m probably going to read this again shortly–this time underlining and taking notes.

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

This was great. Dawkins is a “man after my own heart,” to borrow that excellent phrase from the King James Bible. There needs to be more people like Dawkins in the world. I could not disagree with anything in this book. And what was new were some of the current flash points of the religion vs. science debate. The book gives a rundown of them. Dawkins takes the arguments that are invariably touted and lays out some standard responses to them. Actually, it wouldn’t be bad having something like that in handbook form!

One added dimension to this book is the mention of Paster Ted, who had not fallen from grace at the time of this books first publication. You can see Paster Ted in action in Dawkins’ Root of all Evil documentaries, and he also appears in the horrifying Jesus Camp documentary. He is in top form in both films. It’s hilarious to know that after these appearances and his mention in this book, he was busted for gay sex and a meth habit. I do hope Dawkins updates this book one day with mention of Paster Ted’s current spiritual progress.

The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition–with a new Introduction by the Author

Richard Dawkins

This another book I should have read many, many years ago. Science books aren’t often thought of as page-turners, but this one it, for me at least. I’ve developed a much better understanding of the beginnings of life from this. It all makes perfect sense, once spelled out so clearly and engagingly as it is in this classic. I’d recommend this to anyone, especially as it relates to the grand questions, such as the meaning (or rather meaninglessness) of life, and our existence as biological entities sharing the planet with other evolutionary beings that have all evolved from the same origins.

Lucky Jim (Penguin Classics)

Kingsley Amis

I’d heard this was a classic of “academic life” literature that had an influence on later writers of that genre. But there is quite a dated feel about this. Many passages, especially dialogue, play out like a 1950s movie, with snappy but unnatural conversations and retorts. The humor was not as evident to me as it might have been back in the day. It relied a lot on the antics of the main character, whom for me was just an immature prat.

Gulliver’s Travels (Penguin Classics)

Jonathon Swift

As a fan of Swift, I should be ashamed of not having gotten around to this sooner. As a fan of Swift I already knew I’d like it. A funny and rewarding classic, not for the kiddies. I knew bits of the first two books as a kid, mainly from a movie, but this has so much more. The parts left out of the movie are what all readers must think about when pondering Gulliver’s predicaments, and what kids would love, such as Lilliputians bearing away Gulliver’s poo in wheel burrows. A number of sections, particularly those condemning human nature, had me laughing out loud. The books seem to be progressively acerbic. The last book on the Houyhnhnms is a sustained invective against human folly, so I enjoyed it immensely.

Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, and Money

Erik Marcus

The beginning of this is a good no nonsense summary of what goes on in the meat industry. It is followed by the author’s call for a kind of dismantlement movement, which I found a little lame–full of pronouncements and, well, platitudes. The last part of the book is a collection of small essays by activists. Then there is an Appendix section that could well have made up a decent chapter. So, this was not what I expected and on that count was disappointing. But there’s some reliable and direct information here that is useful.

The Lives of Animals (The University Center for Human Values Series)

J. M. Coetzee

I found it a bit stilted and artificial. Inserting a lecture into a fictional story is a difficult concept to pull off. It covers some interesting topics, however–some of the major ones in animal welfare debates. I might dip into this one again, keeping more in mind that it was delivered as a lecture and that is what it was first and foremost.

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.) Alexander Solzenitzen

This is one amazing book. There is perhaps no other document and analysis of human evil quite like this. It’s like reading Kafka, only all of this was for real. With what I have encountered in the working world and at public universities, I cannot help but think that the motivations and forces behind the whole gargantuan insanity of Stalin’s Russia can also be found in minute forms in any human organization, especial the government ones. This book also shows that evil cannot be blamed on one individual at the top. It’s systemic and ubiquitous and self-reinforcing at every level. And I’m also of the opinion that if factory farmed or exploited animals could speak, what they would say might resembling the contents of this book.

Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

William Manchester

I was really looking forward to this after reading some of the hype around it and knowing of the reputation of its author. However, ultimately I was disappointed. I was anticipating something like With the Old Breed, but it was far from that. This is about a guy journeying back to key locations of the Pacific campaign, many of which he was not even present at during the war. Interspersed with impressions of his modern day island hopping are war stories, many of which he was not involved in. But also thrown in are stories of his own experiences. So you can see how things get confusing quick. I lost track of where he had actually been and only had it sorted out towards the end. For an experienced writer, I really feel he “lost the plot” to some extent with this one. Having said that, the unfailingly honest accounts of his own experiences on Okinawa were worth the effort.

Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism

Mark Hawthorne

This proved to be a very straight forward and useful compendium. A lot of stuff is common sense, of course, but it’s nice to have everything in one place and set out nicely. It is also nice to read the brief anecdotes on numerous activists around the place and know that there are plenty of them out there. For anyone who is feeling isolation because surrounded by a world that seems clueless about animal rights issues, then this book will give some comfort. One criticism is that in promoting websites, the text could become dated very quickly. One site praised in the book did not seem to have much to it upon investigation, as if it’s potential when initially appraised by the author had not been fulfilled.