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Aug. 9th, 2005
[B5] Quick Reactions
Aug. 9th, 2005 08:50 am"Signs and Portents" was easily the best episode of the night: Morden's arrival, Kosh's encounter suit, the rages of G'Kar and Londo, and Lady Nadira's bizarre conviction that her nephew was destined to be killed by shadows. "TKO" was worthwhile mainly for the subplot of Ivanova's character development and the complete rip-off of 1980s American-wünderkind martial arts movies that passed as the main plot. "Grail" was just light and episodic.
There was one oddly familiar song at Woody's Friday night. The other one was Sir Ivan's techno remix of Scott McKenzie's 1967 international hint single "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)", a vaguely unsettling hard-edged techno remix of that hippie anthem. I could write at length about how this remix is a good stand-in for the collapse and cannibalization of the old hi[ppie dream almost forty years after the fact, but it would be entirely clichéd. I'm not sure if I like this version of the song, for just these non-music reasons.
[LINK] Don't ask, don't tell?
Aug. 9th, 2005 09:19 amDan Savage, guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan's blog writes about why the policies of the United States military on sexual orientation are problematic, to be kind.
[META] Blogroll Update
Aug. 9th, 2005 02:11 pmI've added Jaquandor's Byzantium's Shores to the non-SHWI segment of the blogroll.
Jonathan Edelstein reports that French Polynesia's president wants his country to become fully self-governing, enjoying something like the free association linking the Cook Islands with New Zealand. Easter Island, under Chilean sovereignty, is also starting to move towards a similar status, though full independence will likely be prohibited by Easter Island's extreme insularity and its Chilean-majority population. This movement towards isolated island colonies gaining substantial autonomy short of independence is a trend that I wrote about last May in relation to New Caledonia, another South Pacific possession of France.
[LINK] Cool Straight People are Nice
Aug. 9th, 2005 04:59 pmLike ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jrittenhouse, as demonstrated right here.
jrittenhouse, as demonstrated right here.[NON BLOG] Hanging Out
Aug. 9th, 2005 10:58 pmI met up for supper with A. from Queen's. Fun was had, chatting, dining on the soup du jour and fish and chips at the Village Rainbow (477 Church Street), then perambulating north up Yonge Street. it's been rather too long since I've seen him or quite a lot of my other Queen's friends. Yes, the Village Rainbow's fare is still indifferent (overcrowded beef and lentil soup, blah fish and chips) but it works quite adequately as a venue for meeting old friends. I'm rather pleased that he'll almost certainly be in Toronto on a regular basis shortly.
It occurred to me, sitting by the Village Rainbow's window, that it has been two years since I left Prince Edward Island. So much has changed since then.
It occurred to me, sitting by the Village Rainbow's window, that it has been two years since I left Prince Edward Island. So much has changed since then.
[BRIEF NOTE] More on Hiroshima
Aug. 9th, 2005 11:34 pmFrom the very interesting conclusion of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's 2005 tome Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2005), in reply to queerbychoice and gunlord:
Footnote 1 refers to the 1996 edition of Gar Alperovitz' The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. Footnotes 2 and 3 refer to Barton Bernstein's paper "Compelling Japan's Surrender without the A-Bomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the U.S. Bombing Survey's Early-Surrender Conclusion," published in the June 1995 issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies 18.2, pages 101 to 148. I lack access to this journal article, unfortunately, as I'm no longer an academic. Can someone still so blessed oblige me with an e-copy?
Hasegawa argues that Truman wanted to avoid Operation Downfall, the two-stage invasion of mainland Japan projected to produce millions of casualties, and saw the atomic bomb as the best way to force Japan to surrender. He also notes that Truman didn't believe that Japan was truly interested in surrendering, and that the expense put into Los Alamos almost required the bomb's usage. Finally, the atomic bomb wasn't nearly so threatening to Japan as the Soviet Union's invasion of the Japanese empire, since this invasion not only threatened metropolitan Japan and removed the last glimmer of a possibility that the Soviets were interested in mediating a surrender peace. If the United States had waited, Japan might well have faced the unenviable situation of a Soviet occupation of Hokkaido, bloody American invasions of Kyushu and the Kanto Plain, and the casual American use of nuclear weapons not as war-ending devices but rather as heavy artillery.
In conclusion, he notes that "[a]lthough much of what revisionist historians argue is faulty and based on tendentious use of sources, they nonetheless deserve credit for raising an important moral issue that challenges the standard American narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (300). It is true that the role of the atomic bomb in the Japanese government's desire to surrender is debatable, but the decision to use the atomic bomb seems to have been a defensible policy choice that did save American lives and, indirectly, many more Japanese lives. The ethics of total war remain debatable as always, but the argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed on a whim doesn't seem to be supportable.
Without the atomic bombs and without the Soviet entry into the war, would Japan have surrendered before November 1, the day Operation Olympic was scheduled to begin?
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, published in 1946, concluded that Japan would have surrendered before November 1 without the atomic bombs and without Soviet entry into the war. This conclusion has become the foundation on which revisionist historians have constructed their argument that the atomic bombs were not necessary for Japan's surrender (1). Since Barton Bernstein has persuasively demonstrated in his critique of the Survey that its conclusion is not supported by its own evidence, I need not dwell on this supposition (2). The main objective of the study's principal author, Paul Nitze, was to prove that conventional bombings, coupled with the naval blockade, would have induced Japan to surrender before November 1. But Nitze's conclusion was repeatedly contradicted by the evidence provided in the Survey itself. For instance, to the question, "How much longer do you think the war might have continued had the atomic bomb not been dropped?" Prince Konoe answered "Probably it would have lasted all this year. Bernstein introduced numerous other testimonies by Toyoda, Kido, Suzuki, Hiranuma, Sakomizu, and others to contradict the Survey's conclusion. As Bernstein asserts, the Survey is "an unreliable guide" (3).
The Japanese leaders knew that Japan was losing the war. But defeat and surrender are not synonymous. Surrender is a political act. Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese would never have accepted surrender in August (294-295).
Footnote 1 refers to the 1996 edition of Gar Alperovitz' The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. Footnotes 2 and 3 refer to Barton Bernstein's paper "Compelling Japan's Surrender without the A-Bomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the U.S. Bombing Survey's Early-Surrender Conclusion," published in the June 1995 issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies 18.2, pages 101 to 148. I lack access to this journal article, unfortunately, as I'm no longer an academic. Can someone still so blessed oblige me with an e-copy?
Hasegawa argues that Truman wanted to avoid Operation Downfall, the two-stage invasion of mainland Japan projected to produce millions of casualties, and saw the atomic bomb as the best way to force Japan to surrender. He also notes that Truman didn't believe that Japan was truly interested in surrendering, and that the expense put into Los Alamos almost required the bomb's usage. Finally, the atomic bomb wasn't nearly so threatening to Japan as the Soviet Union's invasion of the Japanese empire, since this invasion not only threatened metropolitan Japan and removed the last glimmer of a possibility that the Soviets were interested in mediating a surrender peace. If the United States had waited, Japan might well have faced the unenviable situation of a Soviet occupation of Hokkaido, bloody American invasions of Kyushu and the Kanto Plain, and the casual American use of nuclear weapons not as war-ending devices but rather as heavy artillery.
In conclusion, he notes that "[a]lthough much of what revisionist historians argue is faulty and based on tendentious use of sources, they nonetheless deserve credit for raising an important moral issue that challenges the standard American narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (300). It is true that the role of the atomic bomb in the Japanese government's desire to surrender is debatable, but the decision to use the atomic bomb seems to have been a defensible policy choice that did save American lives and, indirectly, many more Japanese lives. The ethics of total war remain debatable as always, but the argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed on a whim doesn't seem to be supportable.
[BRIEF NOTE] Cultural Capital
Aug. 9th, 2005 11:58 pmPierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" has always interested me.
The questions of how the acquisition of cultural capital can be routinized, what approaches work best, or whether the acquisition of cultural capital can be routinized at all are all interesting and relevant in numerous contexts. Unfortunately, I don't have the theory to begin to respond to Bourdieu.
The term cultural capital represents the collection of non-economic forces such as family background, social class, varying investments in and commitments to education, different resources, etc. which influence academic success. Bourdieu distinguishes three forms of cultural capital. The embodied state is directly linked to and incorporated within the individual and represents what they know and can do. Embodied capital can be increased by investing time into self improvement in the form of learning. As embodied capital becomes integrated into the individual, it becomes a type of habitus and therefore cannot be transmitted instantaneously. The objectified state of cultural capital is represented by cultural goods, material objects such as books, paintings, instruments, or machines. They can be appropriated both materially with economic capital and symbolically via embodied capital. Finally, cultural capital in its institutionalized state provides academic credentials and qualifications which create a "certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to power." (248) These academic qualifications can then be used as a rate of conversion between cultural and economic capital.
The questions of how the acquisition of cultural capital can be routinized, what approaches work best, or whether the acquisition of cultural capital can be routinized at all are all interesting and relevant in numerous contexts. Unfortunately, I don't have the theory to begin to respond to Bourdieu.