China’s Power Isn’t Its Military

Zack Beauchamp believes that China will never replace America as a global hegemon:

Chinese foreign policy, to date, has been characterized by a sort of realist incrementalism. China has displayed no interest in taking over America’s role as protector of the global commons; that’s altogether too altruistic a task. Instead, China is content to let the United States and its allies keep the sea lanes open and free ride off of their efforts. A powerful China, in other words, would most likely to be happy to pursue its own interests inside the existing global order rather than supplanting it.

Charles Kenny notes how China is economically constrained:

If trade was severely disrupted by war today, China’s economy would grind to a halt because a lot of what it does isn’t the complete manufacturing process, it’s some bit of a larger supply chain. That makes the disruption of trade much more damaging to an economy. So, for that reason and because China is just much more integrated into the global trade system, I think that China would have to think a lot harder about declaring war on somebody than the United States did in 1914. (And by the way, the United States was busy invading lots of places in 1914.)

But Elizabeth Economy, co-author of By All Means Necessary, looks at how China’s desire for natural resources is reshaping the world:

Chinese companies are not very strong in undertaking environmental impact assessments back at home, and you can see throughout Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa — they often don’t undertake environmental impact assessments abroad, either. Similarly, in their labor practices, Chinese miners are often poorly paid, and the conditions are challenging, to say the least in terms of labor safety. And we found across the board, in countries like Papua New Guinea to Peru, when miners are asked to compare the practices at Chinese mines with those at others, they uniformly rated the Chinese mines much lower.

And you can also see it in corruption: The way that the Chinese do deals at home for land, through the back door between officials and businesses to appropriate land. Well, when companies go to Brazil, they think that’s the way business can be done there as well. And China does have something akin to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but they don’t have any monitoring or enforcement mechanisms.

So China has a different way of going out of securing resources than we typically see, and it’s impacts can be pretty substantial when you’re looking at a set of governance issues.

Ask Reza Aslan Anything: What Do We Know About Jesus?

A reader is asking:

In another video after the jump, Reza gives a fascinating account of the earliest non-Christian evidence of Jesus (followed by several comments from readers):

Here he addresses the Resurrection:

A reader writes:

Lutheran Seminarian here. Regarding Reza Aslan’s video about why Jesus would be confused about ritual of the Catholic Mass, the reading of and commentary on texts would have been part of Jesus’s religious environment. Moreover, the Eucharist, the Mass itself, was instituted by Jesus. Jesus might be confused by the structure of the Catholic Church, but the core of the Mass itself wold probably feel remarkably familiar.

Another:

If we assume, as Aslan does, this human being named Jesus, who only speaks a long dead language and doesn’t have any cultural or historic context for a modern church, let alone the cars, the lights, the amplified sound, and all the weird clothes, wanders into a contemporary Catholic church, I don’t think he’d even understand he was in a place of worship. Even if he wandered into even a modern synagog, I think he’d be equally confused. Does Aslan really think Jesus would recognize this as a synagog?

The officials of wherever he wandered into – Catholic church, Protestant church, or synagog – would be confronted with a smelly, oddly dressed man who was babbling in some unknown language. They would likely call the police, who, if they didn’t shoot him or stun gun him, would take him to a hospital, which would be vastly more confusing to Jesus. All told, Aslan’s version of Jesus would likely be admitted to a psychiatric hospital within hours, assuming the police didn’t kill him first.

Another:

I’m enjoying the Reza Aslan video thread. I’m going through a prolonged and serious reevaluation of my faith, so his themes play into that well. One point I want to pick up on, and emphasize, is the idea that Jesus’ message is not the same as Christianity. Of course, there is a lot of unpacking to do on that issue, but the short point is that Paul repackaged Jesus’ message into a Gentile/Roman-friendly message. Without that, Jesus’s message would have stopped with the Ebionites.

Of course that means, on some level, I’m denying – or at least seriously struggling – with the miraculous aspects of Jesus’ life.

If you’re just joining the thread, Reza Asland is an Iranian-American writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and, most recently, Zealot, which offers an interpretation of the life and mission of the historical Jesus. Previous Dish on Zealot here, here and here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Don’t Fear The Worst

But, if you borrow a page from the Stoics’ playbook, you may want to anticipate it:

The Stoics, who inspired the pioneers of modern cognitive-behaviour therapies, recommended a practice called premeditatio malorum. This involved envisaging all the evils one could foresee – such as being sent into exile, tortured or shipwrecked. The idea behind this seemingly morbid exercise was that it would help them to react to bad news with equanimity. If such things actually happened, they’d be well prepared. The Stoic advice was to anticipate, not fear, the worst.

The second component of the practice – cultivating equanimity – is as important as the first. If we just focus our attention on all the things that are bound to go wrong and how awful it would be if they did, the exercise would be likely to cause depression rather than serenity.

Most of us are not Stoics but we could still benefit from reflecting on how we think of potential negative events. The first point is to remember that these things may, rather than definitely will, happen. The second is to ask what the most constructive reaction would be if they actually happened. Imagine you lost your job: what resources could you draw on to deal with the situation?

Hair Pieces

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Rebecca Drolen explores our relationship with hair:

In my work, Hair Pieces, I am interested in exploring the fickle relationship most have with their body hair.  We consider some hair very desirable and grow and groom it with care, while we treat other hair as shameful and cover or remove it.  Once hair has become disconnected from our bodies, we treat it with disgust, yet it has an archival, lasting presence that outlives the body and defies death and decay.

Last year, Joe Nolan reviewed an exhibition by Drolen:

Many of Drolen’s objects speak to the the kind of mourning jewelry that was popular at the end of the 19th century. During that time special lockets and picture frames were often made to contain a lock of hair from a deceased family member. A piece like “Tweezings” takes this idea to the extreme, displaying a pair of open lockets, one of which has about a foot of hair pouring out of it. This piece could be making a statement about how the dead live on in our memories with a grisly allusion to the contentious claims that the hair will continue to grow on the deadest of corpses. However, Drolen’s lighthearted titles don’t let us take these objects too seriously and they’re only allowed to take on more interesting resonances in their roles as props in Drolen’s fantastical narrative photographs.

More images here.

(Photo by Rebecca Drolen)

Quote For The Day

“On Feb 9th 2011, you were evicted from an apartment at 20 Catherine St and your old red pit bull was seized by animal control and taken to 00F0F_kl0HDvSJdB6_600x450the kill shelter. She was really skinny and had bad skin infections, and had been bred A LOT. She’d even had a Caesarian, judging by the scar. They said at the kill shelter she was 12 years old. She also had a lopsided face and it looked like there were a few cigarette burns on her head/ears …

If you do see this, we’d love to know how old she is, and what your name for her was. Also please say a prayer for her, as soon she is going to have mammary surgery to remove some small lumps … unfortunately not spaying a dog and breeding her a lot means she is very likely to get mammary cancer, and Cathy has it. Luckily my vet caught it early, so I am hoping Cathy can spend many more happy years with us. She really is the best dog.

P.S. you can’t have her back,” – a Craigslist posting for the ages.

Can We Read The News As Literature?

Lee Siegel suggests that, in the wake of news scandals such as the Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow case, “you could be forgiven for feeling that literary art … has been largely displaced by life—or, at least, by the pictures of life ceaselessly produced by the all-powerful media—as the realm in which we lose ourselves in a moral problem”:

There are those events in which something unequivocally bad is claimed to have been done, but we cannot know what actually happened: Farrow and Allen. Then there are those in which we know that something happened but can’t decide if it was bad: Edward Snowden. Finally (though there are countless sub-categories), there are situations in which we know that something unequivocally bad happened, and we know who did it, but, because the law in these situations seems so weak, even perverse, we—society—do not know whether to blame the perpetrator, the victim, or the legal system: George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin; the recent shooting over texting in the Florida movie theatre.

The confusion created by these mounting, everyday enigmas is so impenetrable that it is difficult to say whether this trend of being incapable of moral closure is itself good or bad. On the one hand, we are now able to talk about injuries and abuses that were formerly swept under the rug. Twenty years ago, adults who, as children, had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, or were the young victims of Jerry Sandusky, would not have come forward, for fear of being accused of mendacity or mental illness. On the other hand, our conscientious parsing of particulars may lead us to miss the blazing forest for some smoldering trees. As we labor over our public enigmas, the country does not seem to be becoming more equal or more fair to people left behind. Perhaps, on some level, and in the face of social problems that are ultimately simple cases of gross injustice, we find these murky ethical situations gratifying, as if they offer us an excuse—human existence is just too complicated!—not to try to make meaningful changes in our public life. Or maybe our attempts to get at the truth of an imbroglio, like that involving Farrow and Allen, reflect a frustrated aspiration to retrieve some kind of shared, collective truth, period.

Are Colleges Failing Their Mentally Ill Students?

Katie J.M. Baker investigates:

“Schools should encourage students to seek treatment. But a lot of policies I see involve excessive use of discipline and involuntary leaves of absence, and they discourage students from asking for the help they need,” says Karen Bower, a private attorney who specializes in disability discrimination cases in higher education. “Ultimately, that makes the campus less safe.”

Two large-scale studies found that around 10 percent of college student respondents had thought about suicide in the past year, but only 1.5 percent admitted to having made a suicide attempt. Combined with data from other studies, that suggests that the odds that a student with suicidal ideation – the medical term for suicidal thoughts – will actually commit suicide are 1,000 to 1. “Thus, policies that impose restrictions on students who manifest suicidal ideation will sweep in 999 students who would not commit suicide for every student who will end his or her life,” Paul S. Appelbaum writes in Law & Psychiatry: “Depressed? Get Out!”

“Colleges don’t want people who are suicidal around, so what’s supposed to happen to them?” says Ira Burnim, legal director of the D.C. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “We’re going to lock them in a bomb shelter?” Kicking students off campus for mental health issues typically does more harm than good by isolating them from their support systems when what they really need is stability and empathy, he says. Moreover, it’s often a completely unnecessary overreaction.

How Scientific Is Astrology?

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Skeptical stargazers are increasingly rare:

[A] substantial minority of Americans, ranging from 31 to 45 percent depending on the year, say consider astrology either “very scientific” or “sort of scientific.” That’s bad enough—the NSF [National Science Foundation] report compares it with China, where 92 percent of the public does not believe in horoscopes—but the new evidence suggests we are also moving in the wrong direction. Indeed, the percentage of Americans who say astrology is scientifically bunk has been declining ever since a high point for astrology skepticism in 2004, when it hit 66 percent.

The recent increase in astrological credulity was most dramatic among those with less science education and less “factual knowledge,” NSF reported. In the latter group, there was a staggering 17 percentage point decline in how many people were willing to say astrology is unscientific, from 52 percent in 2010 to just 35 percent in 2012. Also apparently to blame are younger Americans, aged 18 to 24, where an actual majority considers astrology at least “sort of” scientific, and those aged 35 to 44. In 2010, 64 percent of this age group considered astrology totally bunk; in 2012, by contrast, only 51 percent did, a 13 percentage point change.

Update from a reader:

Just to let you know: the claim that 40% of Americans believe astrology is scientific is complete bullshit. As I suspected when I saw the result, many confused “astrology” with “astronomy”.  The poll did not explain the difference.  As a professional astronomer, this happens to me quite a bit.  With a cold poll, I am guessing that many people, hearing the word “scientific”, got even more confused.

Another:

I had to laugh out loud when I saw the update from the professional astronomer saying that the results of the recent survey were “complete bullshit.”  Once again we see astronomers overreacting in sheer panic at the mere thought that millions and millions of Americans actually use and enjoy astrology.  The horror, the horror! Here are the facts:

1) The professional astronomer should have actually read the study before offering his/her de facto statement of absolute scientific truth. The study is available online for anyone to see (pdf). The astrology survey in question is on page 1729 of the survey.  While the astronomer is correct that people often confuse astrology and astronomy, the drafters of the survey made it very clear that they were specifically referring to astrology. They ask two very pointed, specific questions:

1062. Now, for a new subject. Do you ever read a horoscope or your personal astrology report?

1063. Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific?

So each interviewee was prompted with detailed astrological language to help prevent the confusion between astronomy and astrology.  The professional astronomer is shooting from the hip (his own opinions), not from the actual facts as stated in the report.

2) “Complete bullshit” would assume that closer to 0% of the population believes in astrology. According to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, 25% of the American population believes in astrology. The question again was framed in a manner that would allow no confusion between astronomy and astrology. 25% is over 78 million people.  For someone to discount nearly a quarter of our nation’s population is incredibly insulting.  And unscientific.

Previous Dish on horoscopes here, here, and here.

CB2 vs HIV

The Dish stumbles upon the Holy Grail:

The changes that THC produces in the gut a process formally known as “microbial translocation,” isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Kush_closeDuring HIV infection, one of the earliest effects is that the virus spreads rapidly throughout the body and kills a significant part of cells in the gut and intestine. This activity damages the gut in a way that allows the HIV to leak through the cell wall of the intestines and into the bloodstream.

When THC is introduced into this environment, it activates the CB2 receptors in the intestines to build new, healthy bacterial cells that block the virus from leaking through the cell walls. In other words, the body works hard to keep bad stuff in the intestines and the good stuff out.

Put another way: HIV kills the cells that protect the walls— THC brings them back. Reducing the amount of the virus in the lower intestines could then help keep uninfected people uninfected.