Buddhist atrocities

Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize for “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”.

The Burmese Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of the legendary liberation movement leader Aung San. Following studies abroad, she returned home in 1988. From then on, she led the opposition to the military junta that had ruled Burma since 1962. She was one of the founders of the National League for Democracy (NLD), and was elected secretary general of the party. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, she opposed all use of violence and called on the military leaders to hand over power to a civilian government. The aim was to establish a democratic society in which the country’s ethnic groups could cooperate in harmony.

In the election in 1990, the NLD won a clear victory, but the generals prevented the legislative assembly from convening. Instead they continued to arrest members of the opposition and refused to release Suu Kyi from house arrest.

The Peace Prize had a significant impact in mobilizing world opinion in favor of Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause. However, she remained under house arrest for almost 15 of the 21 years from her arrest in July 1989 until her release on 13 November 2010, whereupon she was able to resume her political career and put her mark on the rapid democratization of Myanmar.

She is currently the de facto leader of Myanmar (although trying to puzzle out the tangle of factions running that country is not trivial), and representative of the Buddhist majority. A Buddhist majority which is currently active in perpetrating genocide. A Muslim minority, the Rohingya, have been living in Myanmar, and right now they’re being rounded up by the military and murdered.

“They’re killing children,” Matthew Smith, the chief executive of a human rights group called Fortify Rights, told me after interviewing refugees on the Bangladesh border. “In the least, we’re talking about crimes against humanity.”

“My two nephews, their heads were cut off,” one Rohingya survivor told Smith. “One was 6 years old and the other was 9.”

Other accounts describe soldiers throwing infants into a river to drown, and decapitating a grandmother. Hannah Beech, my Times colleague who has provided outstanding coverage from the border, put it this way: “I’ve covered refugee crises before, and this was by far the worst thing that I’ve ever seen.”

Even Buddhists. We tend to think of Buddhism as the nice peaceful religion (we conveniently ignore their history and the oppressive nature of Tibet), but this just goes to show that people with power can be horrible no matter what philosophy they pretend to have.

“We applauded Aung San Suu Kyi when she received her Nobel Prize because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny,” noted Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Now that she’s in power, she symbolizes cowardly complicity in the deadly tyranny being visited on the Rohingya.”

He did this, and he lived?

This video is profane and loud, so don’t play it at work. Wait, it’s Sunday morning — it’s perfectly OK to play it in church, if you find yourself wasting time there.

Anyway, a cop pulls someone over for failure to use his turn signal, and walks up to the driver with his gun drawn…because you know that someone who forgets to signal when driving on an empty street is one badass renegade wild thing who is likely to be on his way to a bank robbery or a murder or, I don’t know, a shoplifting spree. Only this guy turns out to be worse: he’s a man with a cell phone camera and a righteous rant.

I wish I could say I’d do the same, except the cops look at the color of my skin and see me as an agent of the status quo, so they would never come up to my door with their gun in hand. I’d probably be terrified into silence if they did.

Kudos to this man standing up to The Man.

InfoWars is afraid

That young lady who impudently scorned the InfoWars hack has done us a service. She’s shown us how to properly treat liars and nutjobs: cuss ’em out, flip ’em off, and walk away. They don’t deserve more.

Alex Jones brought on Owen Shryer, the hack, who whines about how he’s never been attacked so viciously, how he needs comforting because he’s so distressed…so he turns to reading scripture to console himself. Meanwhile, Jones is making funny voices to mock the girl, who is now, in his head, some kind of gun-running mobster leading an antifa army. It’s pathetic. It is pitiful hand-wringing. It shows how easy it is to make the InfoWars crew cry.

Make them cry more often.

A Viking woman!

This is a Viking grave from Sweden — a high status warrior buried with weapons and jewelry and two horses. It was assumed it had to be a man, but closer investigation revealed that the bones were those of a woman — and now genomics has confirmed it.

Do weapons necessarily determine a warrior? The interpretation of grave goods is not straight forward, but it must be stressed that the interpretation should be made in a similar manner regardless of the biological sex of the interred individual. Furthermore, the exclusive grave goods and two horses are worthy of an individual with responsibilities concerning strategy and battle tactics. The skeletal remains in grave Bj 581 did not exhibit signs of antemortem or perimortem trauma which could support the notion that the individual had been a warrior. However, contrary to what could be expected, weapon related wounds (and trauma in general) are not common in the inhumation burials at Birka. A similarly low frequency is noted at contemporaneous cemeteries in Scandinavia. Traces of violent trauma are more common in Viking Age mass burials.

Although not possible to rule out, previous arguments have likely neglected intersectional perspectives where the social status of the individual was considered of greater importance than biological sex. This type of reasoning takes away the agency of the buried female. As long as the sex is male, the weaponry in the grave not only belong to the interred but also reflects his status as warrior, whereas a female sex has raised doubts, not only regarding her ascribed role but also in her association to the grave goods.

Grave Bj 581 is one of three known examples where the individual has been treated in accordance with prevailing warrior ideals lacking all associations with the female gender. Furthermore, the exclusive grave goods and two horses are worthy of an individual with responsibilities concerning strategy and battle tactics. Our results caution against sweeping interpretations based on archaeological contexts and preconceptions. They provide a new understanding of the Viking society, the social constructions and also norms in the Viking Age. The genetic and strontium data also show that the female warrior was mobile, a pattern that is implied in the historical sources, especially when it comes to the extended households of the elite. The female Viking warrior was part of a society that dominated 8th to 10th century northern Europe. Our results—that the high-status grave Bj 581 on Birka was the burial of a high ranking female Viking warrior—suggest that women, indeed, were able to be full members of male dominated spheres. Questions of biological sex, gender and social roles are complex and were so also in the Viking Age. This study shows how the combination of ancient genomics, isotope analyses and archaeology can contribute to the rewriting of our understanding of social organization concerning gender, mobility and occupation patterns in past societies.

A lady Viking! Adjust your preconceptions, and your fantasy novels and movies, accordingly.

Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Anna Kjellström, Torun Zachrisson, Maja Krzewińska, Veronica Sobrado, Neil Price, Torsten Günther, Mattias Jakobsson, Anders Götherström, Jan Storå (2017) A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23308

AN Wilson bombs spectacularly

That fool who wrote a mess of a screed against Darwin has published his book on the subject, which means he gets a little television publicity. AN Wilson appeared on BBC Newsnight to promote his nonsense, and it was far, far worse than I could have imagined. He’s a creationist trying to argue that he’s not a creationist.

His first argument is that Darwin was a racist…which is totally irrelevant to his science. Darwin had the standard biases of the Victorian era, so it’s easy to find instances where he let hints of bigotry bubble out, but he was more liberal than the average Victorian, became increasingly progressive as he aged, and was, for instance, an advocate for the abolition of slavery. He’s not untainted, but it’s absurd to consider his views on human races to be a central problem in his work, especially when he had contemporaries like Arthur de Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, in a century where America fought a great war over the issue. Darwin is simply not a notable racist.

All the boring old cliches are there. Wilson’s excuse that he still believes in evolution is that evolution only happens within a species, and that there are no transitional species. Sound familiar? Even more spectacularly, he begins to stutter out the most common dishonest distortion, the creationists’ favorite quote from the Origin, that bit where Darwin says that the evolution of “inimitable contrivances” of the eye “seems absurd”. They never seem to read beyond the one sentence to the several pages where he explains exactly how it could happen. And then Wilson protests that evolution is simple and he really does understand it, he just disagrees with it.

No, he doesn’t understand it. He’s an idiot.

The interview does also include a lecturer in evolution, Simon Underdown, who seems rather stunned to have to address the inanities Wilson spews, and it’s also a very short segment where Wilson babbles at length and constantly interrupts. It’s kind of terrible.

His book, as of this writing, has 31 reviews on Amazon. Every single one gives the book one star, often grudgingly. I’m not even seeing creationists coming to his defense; usually these kinds of books stir up a bimodal response. It’s being resoundingly dismissed.

You should at least read Adam Rutherford’s review, titled “Deranged: literally the worst book I have ever read about Darwin and evolution”. Sounds about right.

Have you ever used the phrase “politically correct” unironically?

Don’t. I despise it, and it will cause me to re-evaluate your intelligence downward, drastically.

That probably doesn’t worry you at all, especially if you’re the kind of person who whines about political correctness. What ought to worry you more is that James O’Brien might hear you and grind you into a feeble slime for using it.

Man, that is beautiful. He just asks the guy what he means by it, and has him babbling after a few minutes.

“Dia sábháil” sounds like a useful phrase, if only I knew how to pronounce it

At least this guy can just burn his shirt; what’s worse are those cases where someone gets a tattoo in a language they don’t understand, but they think “Hey, Japanese looks neat! And wise!”, so they transliterate something in English using a dictionary.

So about this shirt: it’s in Irish, sort of. Read the explanation for what he got wrong.

I’m often baffled by the number of people who seem to think that you can translate from one language to another simply by pulling the words of one language from a dictionary and plugging them into the syntax of the other. It just doesn’t work that way, friends. Repeat after me: “Languages are not codes for one another.”

That’s exactly what happened here, though. Someone either found a dictionary or searched the internet for the three words “blue,” “lives,” and “matter,” and stuck them together as if they were English. Oy. Dia sábháil (that’s Ulster Irish for “oy”).

You’ll have to read the rest. The punchline is particularly good.

I think I’ve been sinning incorrectly

What causes hurricanes? If you asked me that question, I’d mumble something about rising water vapor in equatorial waters condensing and releasing latent heat, pumping energy into the air. A hurricane starts as hot, moist air rising into the atmosphere. If you ask a demented Christian, like Ken Ham, the same question, though, you get a rather different answer.

Hurricanes are a result of people’s sins, Ken Ham, the president and founder of the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, tweeted on Wednesday.

“Devastating Hurricanes-reminder we live in a fallen groaning world as a result of our sin against a Holy God-it’s our fault not God’s fault,” he tweeted.

In the tweet, he posted a picture with a verse from Romans 8:22: “For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.”

How does that work, exactly? I’m trying imagine the physics of it. Sinnin’ must produce amazing amounts of heat and moisture if it’s generating hurricanes. And the location! Is there a lot of adultery, fornication, drug use, and sodomy going on in yachts and cruise ships in the mid-Atlantic? I feel like I’m missing out on the most amazing hedonistic parties going on right now.

It’s either that or Christian dogma is remarkably idiotic.