Month: February 2014

A reader rolls her eyes:

Why learn French? Well, it’s the official language of 29 countries and is the 12th most spoken language in the world. It’s a working language and an official language of the United Nations, the European Union, UNESCO, NATO, the International Olympic Committee, the International Red Cross and international courts, and it is the seventh most common language used on the Internet.

Another adds:

McWhorter’s snobby dismissal of French as the language of art-house subtitles ignores the more than 115 million French speakers in Africa, as well as the francophone Caribbean countries, not to mention Switzerland, Canada, and so forth. I get that he was making a basic point about utility, but French is an actual language used by real people the world over, many of them living and working in this country.

Another suggests that French is just as useful as Arabic:

Remember when France tried conquering the Arabic world? A lot of those countries still speak French, at least to some degree. Learning French is usually much easier for English speakers than learning any of the many spoken dialects of Arabic, arguably making it a more practical means of communicating with parts of the Arabic world.

Another wonders how long Chinese and Arabic will remain the hot languages of the moment:

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Russian and Japanese were the languages that the really smart kids learned to conquer the world. Then the Japanese (who had learned already English much sooner anyway, because it is more widely used and easier) stopped spending money and their economy sat in the doldrums, and the Iron Curtain fell. Who knows what may happen to China by the time someone learns Chinese fluently? (Maybe we’ll all be talking about learning Persian after President Palin’s invasion of Iran.) You can’t tell, and it’s foolish to guess. But one could do a lot worse than French.

Adam Rawnsley and David Brown share the the incredible story of the B-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), otherwise known as the “backpack nuke”:

Soldiers from elite Army engineer and Special Forces units, as well as Navy SEALs and select Marines, trained to use the bombs, known as “backpack nukes,” on battlefronts from Eastern Europe to Korea to Iran – part of the U.S. military’s effort to ensure the containment and, if necessary, defeat of communist forces [during the latter half of the Cold War]. … Cold War strategy was filled with oxymorons like “limited nuclear war,” but the backpack nuke was perhaps the most darkly comic manifestation of an age struggling to deal with the all-too-real prospect of Armageddon. The SADM was a case of life imitating satire. After all, much like Slim Pickens in the iconic finale of Dr. Strangelove, American soldiers would strap on atomic bombs and jump out of airplanes as part of the opening act of World War III.

The convenient thing about backpack nuke was that you could take them, well, almost anywhere:

Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces were trained to reach their targets by air, land, and sea. They could parachute behind enemy lines from cargo planes or helicopters. Teams specializing in scuba missions could swim the bomb to its destination if necessary. (The AEC built an airtight, pressurized case that allowed divers to submerge the bomb to depths of up to 200 feet.) One Special Forces team even trained to ski with the weapon in the Bavarian Alps, though not without some difficulty. “It skied down the mountain; you did not,” said Bill Flavin, who commanded a Special Forces SADM team. “If it shifted just a little bit, that was it. You were out of control on the slopes with that thing.”

Previous Dish on nuking the Cold War fridge here, here, and here.

More readers offer their nominations:

My vote goes to Alexandra David-Néel: explorer, opera prima donna, anarchist, spiritualist, and author. She was an acquaintance of the 13th Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, studied Buddhism at the Royal Monastery of Sikkim (becoming the Maharaja’s lover), trespassed into Tibet disguised as a pilgrim, traversed China, traveled through the Soviet Union during WWII, completed a circumambulation of the holy mountain Amnye Machen. She died in France at age 100, having written over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels. Her ashes were mixed with those of her lifelong traveling companion and dispersed in the Ganges.

Another:

As a general rule, the women featured on the site Badass of the Week (especially the real-life ones) are pretty damn interesting. Some examples include a Somali gynecologist who gets terrorists to stand down with stern dressing down (Hawa Abdi) and the “Joan of Arc” of India (Rani Lakshmibai). Plus, I need to throw in a nomination for a personal heroine of mine, Dr. Francis Kelsey, a.k.a the woman who saved the United States from the ravages of thalidomide.

Another:

Thank you for this. I find myself needing to search for interesting and inspiring people, to renew my faith in humanity. I have two nominees who may be unknown to many Dish readers:

Celia Sánchez and Emily Hahn.

Alice Walker, at the beginning of her article on Sánchez, wrote: “Nothing makes me more hopeful than discovering another human being to admire”:

My wonder at the life of Celia Sánchez, a revolutionary Cuban woman virtually unknown to Americans, has left me almost speechless. In hindsight, loving and admiring her was bound to happen, once I knew her story. Like Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Luxemburg, Agnes Smedley, Fannie Lou Hamer, Josephine Baker, Harriet Tubman, or Aung San Suu Kyi, Celia Sánchez was that extraordinary expression of life that can, every so often, give humanity a very good name.

Hahn was a free spirit, an adventurer, and a book-lover who said, “I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the choice.” She was called “Ms. Ulysses” in her obituary in the New Yorker. She lived in the Congo in the 1930s, “young and impulsive, because I’d always wanted to.” She lived in China in the 1930s and 1940s, immersing herself in writing and politics and love (with a touch of opium addiction). After the war, after her lover, a British intelligence officer, was released from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, they married and lived in England, when “she called herself a ‘bad housewife’ since, in reply to his concern about money, she said: ‘Then let’s not spend money on anything else, except books.‘”

This little search has made my day.

(Photo of Alexandra David-Néel in Tibet circa 1933 via Wikimedia Commons)

Rebecca Schwarzlose surveys research about how children develop a theory of mind, or “the ability to reason about other people’s thoughts and emotions”:

Studies have shown that when mothers refer more often to mental states (thoughts, emotions, and desires) in conversations with their young children, these children tend to perform better on theory of mind tests a few years down the line. But is this effect just a matter of learning a few keys words a little sooner or can it lead to long-lasting differences in theory of mind ability? Rosie Ensor, Claire Hughes, and their colleagues at University of Cambridge tackled this question by testing children over the course of eight years. … They found that the number of times mothers used ‘thought words’ with their two-year-olds predicted the children’s performance on theory of mind tests at six and ten years of age. …

Will talking to a two-year-old about others’ thoughts and beliefs make a child better at social reasoning down the line? It’s hard to say. These latest results are based on correlations and can’t prove that one thing causes another. Still, they are intriguing and suggestive. Encouraging young children to think about others’ beliefs and feelings may strengthen theory of mind abilities or simply get children into the habit of considering others’ thoughts in ways that persist into their middle-school years.

Laszewski criticizes the GOP’s Obamacare alternative:

The problem for Republicans is that they have such a visceral response to the term “Obamacare” that they just can’t bring themselves to fix it. The notion that Obamacare might be fixed and allowed to continue as part of an Obama legacy and as a Democratic accomplishment is something they can’t get past. So, the only way Republicans can propose an alternative to Obamacare is to first wipe the health insurance reform slate clean and start over. There is a problem with that strategy. Have you heard the one about, “If you like your health insurance you can keep it?”

He believes “we will ultimately see a bipartisan agreement to fix Obamacare––most likely after the 2016 elections”:

But by putting a repeal and replace plan on the table, rather than focusing on a fix from the point we are at today that creates obvious losers, Republicans may have handed the Democrats a big political gift.

Bernstein looks on the bright side:

[E]ven if the Coburn/Hatch/Burr plan doesn’t go anywhere, and even if it’s not really quite at the legislative stage, and even if real legislators are still vastly outnumbered in Republican ranks by the clown show, it’s still a lot healthier to have moved to a (still-small) group of serious legislators than it was when the only Republicans trying to draft policy were a handful of bloggers and wonks who were constantly at risk of being excommunicated for their heresies. Given the Republican decline over the past few years, if Coburn, Hatch, and Burr are merely defeated (or ignored), rather than branded as RINOs, that’s a solid step in the right direction.

Earlier Dish on the proposal here and here.

Steven Beller suggests that the “main difficulty in combating antisemitism is that the two main strategies for doing so are increasingly at cross purposes”:

The first sees antisemitism from the perspective of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), for which the answer to antisemitism is Israel, as the political expression of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination. From this perspective attacks on Israel are against the national rights of the Jewish people and hence are antisemitic because anti-Zionist. This linking of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, conceptualized most recently in the theory of “the new antisemitism”, has garnered strong support in the world’s Jewish communities, and is also written into the European Union’s working definition of antisemitism. If we approach antisemitism as a Jewish problem alone, this has a certain sense. It makes little if any sense from the perspective of the second strategy, which sees antisemitism as the ultimate expression of the exclusionary logic of nationalism.

The Zionist perspective actually undermines the most powerful arguments of antisemitism’s main antidote: liberal pluralism. In this view, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously suggested, antisemitism is not a problem for Jews but rather for non-Jews, indeed for all of us. It is representative of a universal moral evil: the exclusion, fear and, ultimately, destruction of the other in society simply because of difference. “Never again” becomes a promise not about preventing Jewish genocide, but any genocide. It is the refusal or inability to accept and embrace difference within a society that is the root of the problem. The solution is to throw over the apparently modern, but actually primitive “either/or” logic of nationalism, and replace it with the more complex, but more supple, inclusionary “both/and” logic that underpins liberal pluralism, the ability “to agree to disagree”, to comprehend, and embrace difference.