Spot Check III

Reality check and random thoughts. All, I think, mostly about the real world.

• The perp in a crime manga I was reading was trying to say "the winners write the history books", and said how America and Japan both killed people in World War II, but only Japan got charged with war-crimes. Now, the guy's an ass, and they never for a moment pretended he was doing anything but making bad excuses, but they should've laughed in his face. The reason Japan got charged with war-crimes and America didn't is because Japan committed lots and lots of war-crimes, and America committed them only sporadically.
  
  Aside from Unit 731 and Nanking and the comfort women and so on, is the fact that China lost the same percentage of its population in that war as Japan did—but, aside from the fact China's losses represent ten times as much actual killing (being a much more populous country), Japan's deaths were only 29% civilian, while China's were 70%. Korea lost a slightly lower percentage, and roughly 2/3 the raw numbers, compared to Japan's...but Korea had no military, it was a Japanese vassal. The Philippines lost probably the exact same number of civilians as Japan, but that outnumbers their military losses 13 to 1.
  
  Interestingly, if it were a European crime-comic and the guy were a Neo-Nazi, he could've asked why the Nazis got charged with war-crimes and the Soviets didn't, and would've been quite unanswerable—the only answer is, "Because the Soviets won," they were every inch as bad as the Nazis, in some ways worse. But no way no how is European media ever going to admit that Communism, as an ideology, produces the exact same results Nazism does (actually the average German soldier was nowhere near as bad as the average Russian one, in that war).
• Men's rights weenies have a term for men who, pretty much, remotely acknowledge that there is any unfairness to women in our society, or deny that this is a Dave Sim straw matriarchy set up entirely to benefit women. They call it "white knighting", because much like the undergrad identity-studies courses their entire discourse is copied from, they use nouns as verbs ("'damseled' women").
  
  But, uh, dudes? (I was going to say "gentlemen", but, I mean, come on.) Watch a damn movie sometime. If you use comparisons to chivalric fiction as a pejorative, you are not the good guy. I don't care how much repurposed Marxist gender-feminism you dress it up in, the fact is you're whining that the girls have it easier—like a six-year-old boy. Perfect fairness and equality is not possible in a cosmos made of matter; while, obviously, gross injustices should be corrected, the only society where men don't have a harder time than women is one where women have a harder time than men.
  
  If you were actually worthy to call yourselves men, this wouldn't need to be explained. Man up.
• The colloquial Cantonese for white people is gwáilóu, literally "monster uncle" (as in Japanese, "uncle" is the common Cantonese word for a middle-aged man). Several other Chinese languages, among other languages, refer to white people by words involving ghosts, fairies, or other spooky things. Know why? Because we're damn weird-looking, that's why.
  
  I mean, consider. When every other human being you have ever seen has black or gray hair, and black eyes, and then you meet people with yellow hair and blue eyes, or orange hair and green eyes? That's freaky. There seems to be no compelling reason that it couldn't just as well have been blue hair with yellow eyes or green hair with orange eyes.
• I am ordinarily against spelling reform, but only because it is usually meaningless pedantry that doesn't understand that phonetic spellings date. It is permissable if it removes an ambiguity (ambiguity is actually one of my reasons for opposing phonetic spelling). And if it still preserves the etymology (another thing phoneticist fetishism blithely, not to say blitheringly, ignores), so much the better.
  
  This is occasioned by people using "lead", pronounced "lεd", to mean the past tense of "lead", pronounced "li:d". If it's spelled like that but pronounced "lεd", it means "mildly neurotoxic heavy metal". So plainly, the solution is to spell the present tense as "lede", like the beginning paragraph of a newspaper article, since that means the same thing (it is in fact the same word, respelled precisely in order to avoid this ambiguity). Then its past becomes "led" again, most naturally.
  
  Also? "Read" should be spelled "rede" in the present and "redd" in the past. "Rede" currently means "advice, council", but both it and "read" have the same root—the Old English for "interpret", hence both "discern the meaning of phonetic symbols" and "determine the optimum course of action"—and are pronounced the same. Yes, I know it's mostly used by Wiccans for their ethical adage—the one they copied from Aleister Crowley, who copied it from a Rabelais satire completely out of context.
• And thought of Rabelais reminds me, because he was a Christian humanist, that humanism of any kind involves putting second things first. Man is not the measure of all things, and any attempt to make him so just results in misery. Renaissance and "Enlightenment" humanism made adult women legal minors, brought back slavery, and paved the way for the bloodiest wars in human history (until another wave of humanists topped them in the 20th century); Neo-Confucian humanism made it kinky to be in love with your wife rather than a prostitute or a teenage boy, and persecuted any religion it couldn't turn into a state propaganda-arm (it also was one of the bloodthirsty humanist ideologies of the 20th century).
  
  The fact of the matter is, when human values are subordinated to more transcendent ones, human values benefit—the medievals not only gave women unprecedented rights and abolished slavery, their biggest wars killed vastly fewer people than the wars of the "humanist" era (e.g. 300 years of Crusades combined with the Hundred Years War—which was 116 years long, we're rounding here I guess?—killed about 60% as many people as the accurately-named Thirty Years War alone)^note. Buddhism has never successfully been made the basis of civil life, but in the one serious attempt to do so (the early Goryeo era of Korea), slavery got abolished and, again, women actually had legal rights.
  
  The trouble is that human values and human aims—let alone the tiny artificially-restricted subset of them that "humanists" always work from—cannot be made the sole basis of human life, individually or in a "greatest good for the greatest number" kind of way. Human life, after all, is a thing that happens in the real world, a place that is not of human manufacture, and which does not give a damn about human aims. Maybe if instead of "humanism" we called it "marginally sapient ape-ism" you'd see the trouble?
• Seeing a dustup between a Japanese nationalist and a Korean one was amusing for me—because neither one of them was a linguist, but they were debating linguistics. And like many Cargo Cultists aping motions whose significance they cannot comprehend laymen with a smattering of half-understood theories filtered through pop culture and political ideology, the Korean was trying to claim that a language's sound-inventory is related to how "advanced" or "primitive" it is. Namely, he was trying to say that the fact Japanese is purely (C)V(n) makes it primitive compared to Korean (whose syllables are (C)V(C)(C)).
  
  Only...Japanese is only orthographically limited like that. In actual speech it has markedly more variety than Korean. The Japanese word for "like" is pronounced "ski", that is it starts with a by-God biliteral; the word for "is" is "des", i.e. it ends on a fricative. Korean words cannot end on fricatives, syllables that end with sounds that are fricative in other positions end with stops word-finally. And if we're holding languages' orthographies against them, no Korean syllable starts with a vowel, they have to use "Ng" as a null-consonant syllable-initially (all of which leaves to one side that Korean's structure is not syllabic in the first place, unlike the Chinese their linguists blindly copied, but moraic, like that of Japanese, Turkish, and Finnish).
  
  It's a silly debate anyway, though, because if having a lot of consonants makes your language "advanced", the most advanced language in the world is Georgian, which can put up to eight consonants in a row. Of course, it also has a syntactic alignment more typical of Stone Age cultures of the New World and Australia—is phonetics more or less indicative than grammar? And that's the point: in actual fact, of course, neither consonantal complexity nor ergativity means anything—all languages are as "advanced" as all the others, though some are (to borrow biological terminology) more "derived" than other, more "basal" ones. The idea that stacking consonants means you're advanced is probably a legacy of colonialist scientific racism, given Indo-European languages do it far more than those of most of the Europeans' subject peoples.