Fidel Castro Ha Muerto
Castro is finally dead, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be the only one bummed about it. “It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President,” he said. “A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation,” Trudeau continued.
Everyone else is being a callous jerk! Sure, Fidel was a dictator who tortured and massacred tens of thousands of people. And yeah, maybe he sentenced thousands more to forced labor. And I suppose there are the millions more who fled the country or died trying. And…Maybe we’re still not happy about the time he sent 125,000 refugees over on boats, along with the contents of his prisons and mental hospitals. And I think we’re still sore about the fact that Castro asked Khrushchev to nuke us.
But still! Come on people now, try to look past the mass murders and remember the good times. Here are some New York Times headlines from Castro’s good old days as a young impassioned revolutionary.
CUBAN STUDENT HELD AS LEADER OF REVOLT
SANTIAGO, Cuba, Aug. 1 (AP) — Cuban Army authorities announced today that Fidel Castro, 30-year-old student leader at the University of Havana, had confessed directing the unsuccessful rebellion Sunday against the Government of President Gen. Fulgencio Batista.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Old Order in Cuba Is Threatened By Forces of an Internal Revolt; Traditionally Corrupt System Faces Its First Major Test as Reform Groups Challenge Batista Dictatorship Majority Rule Is Lacking Economic Figures Unknown Opposition Is Anti-U.S. Sale of U.S. Arms an Issue Student Faction Accused
The old, corrupt order in Cuba is being threatened for the first time since the Cuban Republic was proclaimed early in the century. An internal struggle is now taking place that is more than an effort by the outs to get in and enjoy the enormous spoils of office that have been the reward of political victory.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
THE SIERRA MAESTRA SPEAKS
The Cuban situation has moved into a new and important phase with new political pronouncements from the resistance leaders. The main statement came from the Sierra Maestra, where Fidel Castro and his young rebels continue their successful defiance of the Batista Government. View Full Article in Timesmachine »
‘BONDS’ SOLD HERE FOR CUBAN REVOLT; They Cannot Be Redeemed and Are Donations Only, Local Committee Says
Supporters of Fidel Castro, Cuban rebel leader, are selling “bonds” in the United States to help finance their movement to overthrow President Fulgencio Batista.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
CASTRO PROGRAM DEFINED BY AIDES; Spokesmen Here Say Cuban Rebel Seeks Free Vote– Further Plans Unshaped
Representatives of Fidel Castro, Cuban insurgent, asserted yesterday that his only present program was to bring about a provisional coalition government and free elections. Economic and social policies, they said, are still being shaped.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
CASTRO’S ANNIVERSARY
A year ago today one of the strangest and most romantic episodes in Cuba’s colorful history began. On Dec. 2, 1956, a band of eighty-two Cuban youths, headed by a 30-year-old law graduate, Fidel Castro, landed on a marshy strip of beach in Oriente Province at the eastern end of the island.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
CASTRO DISAVOWS PRESIDENTIAL AIM; Cuban Rebel Chief in Article Outlines His Program -Would Impeach Batista
Fidel Castro has disclaimed any aspiration to the Presidency of Cuba either in a replacement of the present regime by a provisional government or in the next elected administration.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
CASTRO DECLARES HE WILL WIN SOON; In Interview, Rebel Leader With Battle Force of 400 Is Certain of Victory
HAVANA, Feb. 26 — A rebel leader capable of throwing into battle only 400 riflemen boasts that within a few months he will oust the Batista dictatorship and occupy all Cuba.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
CASTRO SUPPORTERS RAISE HIS FLAG HERE
Cuban rebel sympathizers ran up the red-and-black banner of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement on the staff reserved for Cuba at Rockefeller Plaza last night.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Folly in Rebel Cuba
It is now obvious that Fidel Castro and his rebels in Oriente Province, Cuba, are carrying out a widespread campaign of kidnapping Americans. Since last Thursday, when ten American and two Canadian engineers were captured at Moa Bay on the north shore, forty-five Americans and three Canadians have been seized. The latest outrage was the kidnapping of four Americans from a United Fruit sugar plantation early yesterday morning.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Elaine: I like how the NY Times calls the kidnapping of 45 Americans a “folly”. Like, taking hostages was an innocent act of youthful indiscretion or whatever.
CASTRO’S KIDNAPPINGS SHOW WAR IS STILL ON; But Methods He Uses Have Cost Him Support of Friends in U. S.
A vast majority of Americans must have been surprised, shocked and angered this week at the news from Cuba. The surprise came because the most rigid censorship in Cuban history had for months clamped a curtain of silence over what was happening in the island, which is only 100 miles from our Florida shore. View Full Article in Timesmachine »
The Cuban Episode Ends
The Cuban adventure, in which Americans and Canadians were at one time hostages of the rebels, has ended as happily as anything so rash and ill-advised could be expected to end. All the kidnapped men are now back safe and sound, having been treated with a courtesy and friendliness that in other circumstances might have been considered amusing.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Elaine: Heehee! It was all in good fun! If only the Iran hostage crisis could have been so amusing!
CUBA REBELS SEIZE TWO U. S. WORKERS; Nine Oil Company Employes Abducted by Castro Men — Consul to Take Action CUBA REBELS SEIZE TWO U.S. WORKERS
HAVANA, Oct. 21 — Cuban rebels have kidnapped two Americans and seven Cubans employed at an oil refinery of the Texas Company, the United States Embassy said today.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Fidel Castro’s Mistake
Fidel Castro, the rebel leader who has been operating for nearly two years in eastern Cuba, has been tolerantly regarded in this country because most of us did not care for President Batista. Batista’s arrogance as well as his fear have grown with time, and both have expressed themselves in illegal arrests, abuse of prisoners and a good deal of wanton shooting.
At first Fidel Castro, raising his banner against all this from a dreary hideout in the Sierra Maestra, seemed a sort of Robin Hood. But he appears now to be trying to alienate American sympathy. Last spring he kidnaped a number of American civilians, some American sailors from Guantanamo base and several Canadians. These were later released. But last week he picked up several more hostages, including two Americans, and appears to regard our protests as “an act of aggression.” In some other ways he is growing more unreasonable, as when he threatened to shoot and candidates he could catch who were running in the Batista elections set for next Monday.
This country has been patient, even to the point of cutting off arms shipments to Batista’s territory. We would like to see a democratic government in Cuba and a final end to the suppressions, censorships and outrages of the Batista regime. We know that revolutions, like other sorts of wars, are not Boy Scout exercises. But if he wishes to hold our friendship Fidel Castro must earn it by giving up terrorism, threats and misrepresentations. View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Castro Wins; New Regime for Cuba
” I will be a hero or a martyr!” Fidel Castro said in 1956, the year he launched what then appeared to be a forlorn attempt to overthrow the Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Executions in Cuba Protested
In general, Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba has been hailed as another advance of liberalism and democracy over dictatorship and totalitarianism. Perhaps it is all of that. However, it gives me somehow an uneasy feeling reading in the newspapers that the victorious rebels are placing hundreds of persons — men and women — before firing squads after drumhead trials lasting a few minutes.View Full Article in Timesmachine »
Elaine: Back in 1959, New York Times reporter John Billi expressed a bit of unease about the fact that Fidel Castro and his merry men started executing hundreds of people within a week of taking power. Ordinarily, the mass murder of dissidents would draw a stronger reaction, but how could a Marxist-Leninist possibly be a bad guy? Remember, Castro promised to destroy bourgeois decadence and bring free education and healthcare. Sometimes you gotta break a few eggs to make a left-wing omelet. Fortunately, under Castro’s rationing system, each adult gets to purchase up to twelve eggs a month.
Tolerance Camp
The fact that Zuckerberg has still refused to fire Peter Thiel despite Thiel now being a formal part of Trump’s transition team is so far past shameful and embarrassing that we might need to coin some new words. –Paul Bradley Carr, Pando
Once and for all, any company defending their connection to Peter Thiel as he vocally and vigorously supports Trump is not embracing diversity. It’s making hollow excuses that show it doesn’t get the idea at all. –Davey Alba, Wired
That’s the spirit. Let’s bully the country into open-mindedness.
Sometimes Silicon Valley reminds me of South Park’s Tolerance Camp:
What is up with Germans and Scheiße?
I’m like a ripe stool and the world’s like a gigantic anus and we’re about to let go of each other. –Martin Luther on his deathbed
Keeping with our tradition of tackling hard-hitting questions of great social and political import, today we examine the German obsession with scat.
Now, I know what you might be thinking: Hey wait a minute. I’m German, or I know a German, or maybe I’ve seen a German on TV –- They don’t ALL have an unhealthy obsession with shit. Why do you have to make such gross generalizations?
I know, I know. While no single citizen is responsible for the works of Martin Luther or Heinrich Böll, it just so happens that some of the most famous Germans in history were really into toilet things. And I don’t know of any other country that advertises financial services like this:
In Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder, Alan Dundes conducts a survey of German folklore and colloquialisms, and posits that German national culture is defined by anal eroticism. The fixation begins at birth, when infants are subject to tightly wrapped swaddling and disciplinarian toilet training.
According to Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, children have a healthy and natural curiosity towards their bowel movements. If toilet training begins too early or is too strict, the child may develop feelings of guilt that become sublimated into an anal-retentive personality. This persists into adulthood and is characterized by obsessive tidiness, punctuality, and deference to authority. Anal personalities also tend to be overly cautious with their money, although that doesn’t seem to have been a problem at Deutsche Bank.
So the theory is that anal-retentive adults toilet-train their kids in anal-retentive ways, which propagates scatological obsession until it becomes a national culture.
Dieter Rollfinke’s Call of Human Nature also points out the relationship between authoritarian parenting and an anal-retentive culture. The fixation is especially prominent because Germans are not a terribly emotive people. Emotions are more easily expressed through the sphincter, which makes shit a convenient and relatable literary device. To humanize a character, portray him on the latrine (All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque, 1929). To depict frustration, make a character constipated (The Flounder, Günter Grass, 1977). To show internal conflict, describe a rectal exam (A Man and His Dog, Thomas Mann, 1912). As a result, scatological themes frequently turn up in German literature, film, adult film, and Michael Lewis articles.
But Germans don’t have a monopoly on shit references. International content creators include Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Salvador Dali, and the guys who brought us South Park. Why is no other country branded as a scat-loving nation-state?
Historically, it’s been culturally acceptable to make fun of Germany without fear of recourse. The country started two world wars, after all. There’s some unofficial doctrine that if you start a war and lose, the rest of the world gets a free pass to mock your people for all of eternity. I think it’s even written in the Treaty of Versailles somewhere.
So we can openly allude to German toilet habits, knowing that residual war guilt makes it politically okay. And, you know, stuff like this probably doesn’t help:
India’s Cash Problem
What happens when a country suddenly finds that 86% of the currency in circulation is invalid?
On November 8th, India prime minister Narendra Modi announced that the two highest-denomination notes, worth 500 and 1,000 rupees ($7.50 and $15), were legally worthless. Effective pretty much immediately. Two days later, the government issued new 500 and 2,000 rupee notes to replace the old ones. Old bank notes can be exchanged at banks and post offices until the end of the year.
In theory, the surprise demonetization should flush out black market money — ill-gotten gains from illegal financial activity. People who want to exchange their canceled notes have to show proof of identity and are limited to Rs 10,000 a day, and Rs 20,000 per week. ATM withdrawals are limited to Rs 2,000 a day.
The prime minister calls the demonetization a “minor inconvenience”, but India isn’t exactly known for its expedient financial infrastructure. ATMs quickly ran out of cash. People are literally dying: Not just because they’re waiting in line for hours, but also because they can’t buy necessities like food or gas. India is a country where 90% of transactions are conducted in cash, and now that existing cash has been declared illegal, no one can buy anything.
Ideally, people will take this opportunity to move their money to banks and the government will be able to track future financial activity, ensuring peace and prosperity for all. Except that over half of Indian households don’t have a bank account and a quarter of the population has no form of ID.
India has tried this demonetization strategy twice before, in 1946 and 1978. Both times, the effect was pretty much nil. After the conversion period in 1946, the amount of outstanding cash did not change. In 1978, the amount of outstanding cash actually increased.
In 2014, the Reserve Bank of India pulled a smaller-scale surprise demonetization by canceling pre-2005 currency notes. The Bharatiya Janata Party (the current ruling party) criticized the move as anti-poor: “The aam aurats and the aadmis, those who are illiterate and have no access to banking facilities will be the ones to be hit by such diversionary measures.”
The ruling party doesn’t seem to be so worried about the unbanked this time around. Conspiracy theory: There are assembly elections coming in January, and political parties are holding large cash donations, which they use to bribe voters (India has a long history of vote-buying). So the ruling party wants to financially cripple the opposition.
The Delhi chief minister has accused Prime Minister Modi of informing his political aides of the currency ban ahead of time so that they could launder their unaccounted money. So a move that was advertised to eliminate corruption may turn out to in fact enforce it.
Kingdom of Speech
There’s a tribe in the Amazon called the Pirahã that talks like birds. Like, they communicate using variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm, as opposed to consonants and vowels.
That’s not the weird part. Researchers who spent fifty years studying the Pirahã language say that it doesn’t adhere to Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar.
Tom Wolfe has a new book called The Kingdom of Speech that describes the rivalries between linguistics researchers over whether or not humans have an innate idea of grammar. Chomsky’s key idea is that human brains are Turing machines capable of producing infinite combinations of sentences from a finite number of words. The reason why we can make infinite use of finite means is because language has a recursion function, which is the ability to put a sentence inside another sentence. ←See?? I just did one right there!
The Pirahã language is non-recursive, so their language lacks relative clauses. Here’s an example: Ko Paitá, tapoá xigaboopaáti. Xoogiai hi goo tapoá xoáboi. Xaisigiai. Word for word, it translates to “Hey Paitá, bring back some nails. Dan bought those very nails. They are the same.” In English, we would say “Hey Paitá, bring back some nails that Dan bought.” Without recursion, they need extra statements to perform the same function.
Right, who cares. But when you lose recursion, you also lose numbers and counting. Like, any number greater than ten is a recursive word. “Twenty-five” is actually 2*10+5, which we can figure out in our Turing-complete heads. Recursion lets us make infinite numbers out of ten numerical words.
Without recursive numbers, the Pirahã only have three words to describe quantity: hói, hoí, and baagiso. This roughly translates to “small amount”, “somewhat larger amount”, and “many”. One researcher showed a group of Pirahã between one and ten spools of thread, and asked them to describe how many they saw. Responses varied, even when people saw the same quantity twice. The word used depended entirely on the last-seen quantity. If a Pirahã subject saw one spool, and a second one was added, the subject would describe the two spools as “somewhat larger amount”. If the subject saw three spools, and one was taken away, the subject described the two spools as “small amount” [1].
It wasn’t just a language thing. Without numbers or a writing system, there’s no way to track quantity. When Pirahã subjects were shown a group of 1-10 spools, and then asked to identify whether or not a second set had the same number of spools, they failed for quantities greater than three.
Researchers have observed this lack of numerical vocabulary in multiple indigenous groups. Possibly all the early humans were like this. But if primitive people had no concept of quantity, how did they exchange goods with other humans?
Adam Smith popularized the theory that money evolved from barter – people needed a store of value when there was no coincidence of wants. Socialists have a competing theory that money came from theft – people needed a unit of account to quantify how much they were owed after being robbed. The social anarchists might be right on this one.
In the Amazon, river traders come by daily looking for jungle things like Brazil nuts and sorva fruit. They get these from indigenous people in exchange for clothing, manioc flour, and booze.
As far as the Pirahã are concerned, fruit and nuts are all over the place; it just takes time to gather them. Their culture has no sense of time, so they’re not exchanging a scarce resource here. The stuff they really want is the sugarcane rum, which is quite cheap to the river traders. Both sides think they’re getting a good deal, when really the indigenous people are getting ripped off if you take market prices into consideration. It’s like how the Native Americans gave Manhattan to the Dutch for some stupid beads.
Wolfe says the Pirahã asked their resident researcher to teach them numbers because they thought the traders were cheating them. They couldn’t possibly know the market price for Brazil nuts versus rum, but at least they could figure out which traders were the stingy ones.
Anyway, after eight months of lessons not one Pirahã could count to ten [2]. If it turns out that counting, and hence recursion, is an artificial construct, then there’s no such thing as a universal grammar that lives in a language organ. Tom Wolfe managed to write a whole book about the controversies around this debate. As they say in academia, the fights are vicious because the stakes are so low.
References:
1. M. Frank, et al. Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition, Volume 108, Issue 3, September 2008.
2. Daniel Everett. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. 2009
3. The Interpreter –New Yorker, April 16 2007