Teshu makes the double standards argument.

With Al-Qaeda being the first in line for newly produced North Korean nuclear bombs (which should roll out within next six months), it is time for America to do some serious thinking. America’s double standards in dealing with rogue nations have taught the rogue leaders one vital lesson: don’t disclose you are anti-American until you have the key in hand; a nuclear key that is.

He wants the Americans to do some serious thinking. Unfortunately, as they have elected a moron for a president, it might not be possible for them. So lets do some of their thinking.

Which is the single standard that Teshu wants the US to follow while dealing with Iraq and North Korea? Does he want the US to bomb both of them equally, or does he want them to withdraw from both places? Will withdrawing from Iraq make South Korea any safer?

Both Iraq and North Korea are on the path of developing nuclear weapons after signing the NPT The US made the mistake of trusting North Korea around 8 years ago, by providing it with nuclear technology in return for a commitment, insincere as it turned out, not to develop nuclear weapons.

North Korea is in impoverished and starving, entirely due to the amazing government it has. Please note that there are no sanctions on the country. Nobody is stopping it from buying all the food it wants- only it has no money to buy food. There are of course restrictions on sale of the nuclear technology that it has pilfered, which it is flouting.

Any other country in such a state would be begging for money. North Korea is carrying out nuclear blackmail.

Signing that agreement with North Korea was a horrible mistake, but what is the US to do now? How will following a “single standard”, whichever that is, make life any easier for anyone?

The US now has a choice between starving North Korea and hope that it collapses, or start a war – and perhaps preemptively nuke Pyongyong.
Or it could stand by and watch as North Korea sells its nuclear technology to Al Queda and Pakistan – wouldn’t that be wonderful for India?

One of the tenets in my glass houses and stones post was “Don’t be a complete bastard”. Which of these choices makes you less of a bastard?

But accusing it of “double standards” is only a way of laughing at the US’ predicament. It is not a serious argument.

Is there none who will tell me whether my new version of the site looks okay on IE 5.0?
Speak now or forever hold your peace, for tomorrow, the new version shall come up.

Ramnath says:
the closest we mortals can get to the spiritual highs of ramakrishna paramahamsa or chaitanya is to listen to pandit jasraj, i think
E?actly my thoughts. When I heard him, I decided that if God didn’t exist, his singing would bring Him into existence.

Work had converted my home into a Bread-and-Breakfast motel, but in the few minutes that I got before I drop off to sleep, I reread Language in Thought and Action by S I Hayakawa. I had borrowed this book from the library when I was doing my MBA. But now I own a copy and reading it, I realise why I thought it worth the price.

The book talks of how the words we use relate to our concepts (thought) and to the real world (action).

This was the book that taught me to differentiate among reports (of verifiable facts), inferences, and judgements. This distinction might seem obvious but is very frequently obfuscated, both by writers and readers. For example take this “report” on discrimination against SCs/STs in IITs (Ashwini sent it to me asking for my comments.) How many verifiable facts can you find in it, as distinct from judgements and sweeping generalizations?

The book also talks of the difference between extensional and intensional meanings of a word.

Once when I told someone that I was a capitalist, he responded with: “So you believe in exploitation?”

The intensional meaning that I assigned to capitalism was very different from the one he assigned to it. The only way such differences can be resolved is to speak of the word in the extensional sense. This is easier said than done. If I?and you disagree on what constitutes a cat, I could point to a real cat and we’d have the same extensional definition of a cat. In case of capitalism, I’d have to point to the process of capitalism to explain what I mean by capitalism.

Perhaps the most important thing the book talks of is levels of abstraction. All words we use are abstractions. But as we move up the abstraction ladder we leave out more and more details. For example, if we accuse security forces of “Human Rights violations”, we are leaving out the details of what exactly they are doing, whether they are committing atrocities like torture and rape or misdemeanors like locking up someone for two days without access to a lawyer. Even the word “torture” leaves out important details, like whether they are pulling out fingernails or shining bright lights at suspects’ eyes.
When I construct an argument, I always try to move between levels of abstractions, just to make sure that I actually know what I am talking of.

The book covers a lot of other things, about ritualistic communication, about the symbolic uses of language. It has an interesting section about how advertising is similar to poetry though I think the book is somewhat unfair to advertising.

I owe a lot to Language in Thought and Action. It has helped me clarify my thinking and see through bullshit. If you’ve been dazzled and awed by the way I construct my arguments, I recommend that you read the book to see what makes me tick

Yup – I’m trying out my brand new Amazon Associates link. I’ve shamelessly sold out to commerce- shoot me. Seriously speaking, I’m just experimenting with the idea that the only advertising that works on the net is advertising that’s so effectively disguised that it isn’t really advertising. The Amazon Associates thing is one example. Everyone benefits from the deal. I do. You do because you get to read more on the book. Amazon benefits if you buy the book.
For Indian readers, here is the Fabmall link. Not very informative I’m afraid.

Sulekha has put up a petition to make India a permanent member of the UN.
Please sign it.

And while we are on the subject:
informally, suggestions have been made that China would be taken in the UN but not in the Security Council, and that India should take her (China’s) place in the Security Council. We cannot of course accept this as it means falling out with China and it would be very unfair for a great country like China not to be in the Security Council. We have therefore made it clear to those who suggested this that we cannot agree to the suggestion. We have gone a little further and said that India is not anxious to enter the Security Council at this stage even though as a grea? country she ought to be there. The first step to be taken is for China to take her rightful place, and then the question of India might be discussed separately(Jawaharlal Nehru in 1955)

My respect for the man was already at rock bottom. Now it has started to dig.

I love this:
The Pakistan team crept back home after issuing an abject apology to fans for their poor performance…(Pakistanis gun for coach Pybus after Cup debacle – The Times of India)

Now they are blaming their coach and a Jewish conspiracy.
One report identified Pybus as a Jew and described him as an ‘articulate conman planted by someone for ulterior motives’

How should foreign policy be conducted?
We Indians have this fantasy that we are in a morality play where the US is the villain and we are the good guy. There are two versions of this fantasy. In the leftists’ version, we are actually leading a revolution of the third world countries against the imperialist superpower. In the rightists’ version, we are a wannabe superpower, but we are nicer.

So both sides criticise the US – just about any criticism will do, even contradictory ones.

I cannot do that. To criticise, I need a standard of behaviour and I need to be able to say that this standard was not upheld. I have to be able to say: “X was the expected behaviour. The US did not do X. Hence the US is wrong.”

That brings me back to my first question: How should foreign policy be conducted? Or, What is X?

Is it: Do not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs?
If so, what were we doing in East Pakistan circa 1971?

Is it Act in self-interest?
If so, why did we send in the IPKF to Sri Lanka in 1987? (and why did Rajiv Gandhi train LTTE militants?) Sri Lanka was our Vietnam. No one knows why we went there and what we were expected to achieve there. All we know is that we needlessly lost the lives of a lot of our soldiers.

Is it Be friendly with democratic governments and oppose dictatorships?
If so, what are we doing in Myanmar? That country is ruled by a gang of thugs who have kept its legitimate government out of power. Unfortunately, the rebels fighting the Myanmar junta are in cahoots with insurgents in the northeast. Do we co-operate with those thugs or do the right thing?

Is it Respect world opinion?
If so what are we doing about the 1948 UN resolution? Why are we unilaterally claiming that Kashmir is a bilateral issue?

I am not pointing out India’s foreign policy record to claim that we cannot cast the first stone because we too have sinned. Rather, I am pointing out that there is no single criterion under which we can judge all foreign policy actions. We can have multiple criteria, but they will often contradict one another and there is much more scope for error.

What happens, for example, when our self-interest requires us to ally with a bunch of thugs? What happens when we have to choose between two gangs of thugs? What if we aren’t sure which of the two gangs is the lesser evil?

What will we do if the Maoist rebels take over Nepal, or if the pro-China king comes to an agreement with pro-China Maoists and establishes a hostile government there? What if he Nepal becomes a base for ISI activities? Is it okay to use dirty tricks to destabilize that government and install a friendly one?

In other words, X is indeterminate. I cannot propose a set of hard standards by which to judge a country’s foreign policy. The best I can come up with is:

1. Act in long-term self-interest.
2. Don’t be a complete bastard while doing so.
3. Don’t get into something unless you know how to get out.
4. Do as little as possible.

Even by these loose standards, the US falls short. They got into the Vietnam quagmire. They trained terrorists in Afghanistan. They supported dictatorships in South America.

But then, so does every other country. When I evaluate the US, I ba?ance it out against the good it has done – in Japan, South Korea, Kosovo.

India is now developing global interests, and facing global threats. As it does, it will face some of the same choices that faced the US, and I daresay it will tend to make the same mistakes as the US did. It is counterproductive to oppose everything that the US does instead of learning both from its mistakes and from the things it did right.

As usual, ads for fairness creams have come under fire.

The withdrawal comes after protests from several women’s organisations, led by the All India Democratic Women’s Association, that these ads stigmatised dark skin and they should be taken off(Ads cleansed in all fairness – Commercials pulled off television after viewer objections)

I’ve heard many claims that Indians are “racist” because they prefer fair skin over dark. I don’t understand the accusation.

All evaluations of beauty are qualitative. We prefer youthful faces over older ones. We prefer slimmer women to fatter ones. We prefer smoother faces over wrinkled ones and women of medium height over very short women. While many of these criteria are universally held, there are many others that are culture specific. Some cultures prefer round faces while some prefer long ones. Some like round eyes while some like narrow ones, etc.

There is very little an ugly woman can do about any of the things that mark her out as ugly (except perhaps her weight). So I don’t understand why skin-colour preference is singled out as particularly unfair (pardon the pun).

Being beautiful does provide an advantage to women (and to a much lesser extent, men) even where objectively speaking, looks shouldn’t matter. I am sure that prettier women have at least some advantage over others in getting jobs, for example. So it is much more coherent to rail against the idea of idolising beauty itself.
But if you do so, you’d be up against the combined forces of literature, art, culture and biology, to name just a few of your potential opponents . I think that it makes much more sense to make people aware of their biases so that they can correct it, rather than try to eliminate bias.

In any case I don’t see why advertisements should be blamed for “perpetuating stereotypes”

Now that the going is good, the cricketers can stamp the feet and call the shots; but the knives are out. The next time Ganguly’s team stumbles, the men behind the mikes will be ready tools and tongues sharpened. The saga of India’s dramatic World Cup has just added on a new sub-plot(India Today, March 10, 2003 – The other battle – Paper version. I am too lazy to hunt down the online version)
Are they trying to make up for Sidhu’s absence or something?

I got an afternoon free and I made some changes to the site that I had put off for long. Please check out those changes here

The Examined Life has a state-of-the-art test lab which consists of all of two machines geographically distributed across two cities. However I have no idea how my site looks outside of IE6 +Win2K and Mozilla +Win2K combinations.

So here is an unprecedented opportunity for my loyal readers to participate in beta testing of v 1.1!
Please click on the link above and tell me how the new version looks on your machine. Leave a comment telling me how the new layout looks. Don’t forget to also tell me your OS version, browser (with version) and screen resolution.

If the layout looks screwed-up, can you take a screenshot of the site and send it to me at site[@]ravikiran.com. I’ll be eternally grateful to you. I’ll also give you shares when The Examined Life does an IPO.

Note 1:If you are on Mozilla, you may find a bravenet counter at an odd place.
Note 2:On IE6, the Blogsnob ad looks horrible. I’ll fix that too.
Note 3: Sathish – If this layout works (I picked it off S Anand’s site, so it probably will), this is what you are looking for. The stylesheet is here. The relevant css tags are the “middle” and the “rightbar” tags. (The leftbar has now moved to the top and there are 2 rightbars )

Back Soon.

He [Mukesh] is, in fact, treading the same route his father Dhirubhai Ambani did in the commodities business. Reliance Infocomm is staking Rs 25,000 crore on becoming a communications giant that has a presence in limited mobile services, fixed lines phones, national and international long distance services and broadband and end-to-end communication solutions for companies. Then, as now, the rules of the game are virtually similar A,?_” become an integrated company that straddles the entire chain of business, build economies of scale to reduce costs and offer products at affordable prices to customers(Reliance’s real strategy – Business Standard via Tamizhan)