alex chiang: web 6.0

Another interesting free speech “acid test” has been in the news lately — that of “Holocaust denier” David Irving, who was was sentenced to three years in jail by an Austrian judge for denying [...] the existence of the gas chambers of the Second World War and the murder of six million Jews.

I write “acid test” in scare quotes because Irving’s case isn’t really a groundbreaking test of the limits of free speech, since he was tried in Austria, where it is against the law to deny that the Holocaust occurred (Germany too, btw).

Although what Irving postulates is both ludicrous and in the worst possible taste, he should still be allowed to say and think what he believes. Had this happened in America, he’d be a free man today. The German/Austrian law is pretty stupid, in my opinion, and Irving is an example of what happens when a society decides to censor itself from “dangerous” opinions.

The last paragraph was incomplete, in my opinion:

By evening, Irving was a broken man, his career at an end. Distraught and stunned, he was escorted from the courtroom to return to his 19th-century cell.

It should have been appended with “by the thought police”.

I don’t really keep up much with my alma mater these days, so when I opened up Andrew Sullivan’s blog last week and read about two college editors getting suspended for publishing the infamous Danish cartoons, I was surprised when I found out it was two editors from the Daily Illini.

I had mixed feelings about this incident: proud that two editors at UIUC had the balls to publish the comics, and dismayal that they were suspended for doing so. The controversy specific to the DI is not merely the publication of the cartoons themselves, but moreso that the two editors supposedly did so without authorization from the rest of the editorial board. Who knows what the real story is…

Here are two links describing the brouhaha:

• Two editors suspended over cartoons
• Illinois Student Paper Prints Muslim Cartoons, and Reaction Is Swift

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Illini, but to date, it hasn’t been published. I’m not sure why, because I thought it was pretty good. :)

An open tripartite letter to the following:

Editors Gorton and Prochaska:

Thank you for taking the courage to do what the mainstream media
will not, by publishing satirical cartoons meant to illustrate
the sad state of free speech and thought in today’s world, where
an open society permits itself to by tyrannized by a violent,
vocal, and insistent minority who insist that we obey their
conventions, norms, and taboos.

offended Muslims of the world:

Welcome to our society where freedom of speech and thought are
not only permitted, but celebrated. Please understand that
“freedom of speech” also includes freedom to criticize, offend,
and insult. We set it up this way on purpose because the good
outweighs the bad. The marketplace of ideas can be a confusing
din at first, but you’ll soon get used to it, and then you’ll
wonder how anyone could live differently.

anyone interested in a free and open society:

Remember when Voltaire said, “I do not agree with what you have
to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”? Now
would be a good time to step up.

Alex Chiang
alumnus, college of engineering, 2002

I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s day, since in my opinion, it’s just a made up bunch of hooey to sell gift cards, flowers, chocolate, and diamonds. However, one doesn’t always get to choose which holidays in which they participate. That, combined with the fact that I liked to cook, lead me to create the following menu last night:

• Strawberry Avocado Salad
• Wine Sauce Chicken
• Death by Chocolate III

A few notes…

I stared at the strawberry avocado salad recipe for a while, thinking to myself, “man this is gonna be so nasty because the dressing is made of white sugar AND honey — way too sweet!” I was pleasantly surprised, as it worked quite well. The tartness of the strawberries helped knock down some of the dressing sweetness. I didn’t have cider vinegar on hand, so I used rice vinegar. I think you could use any common vinegar (other than maybe balsamic), since it really only serves to further knock the sweetness down. I used a base of baby spinach rather than mixed greens, since I hate iceberg, and it was lovely.

The wine sauce chicken was good, although I didn’t have mayonnaise on hand for the sauce. No matter, as I didn’t really taste any difference. I used sherry for the wine, which was nice because it’s a bit dryer than, chardonnay (too sweet) for instance. This recipe was really simple, and tasted great over a bed of roasted garlic wild rice.

Death by chocolate… what can I say? It was ridiculously good, and deceptively filling. Eating what I thought was a small portion pretty much rendered me incapacitated for the next few hours. I used a walnut-fudge brownie mix as well as regular instant pudding. Heath bars are a good source of “chocolate covered English toffee”.

Regarding the prep time… I think it took me about 3 hours total to prepare it all, so it’s definitely something that can be done semi-last minute, especially in a non-pro kitchen where you only have one oven. You’ll want to make the dessert first, and have it chill in the fridge while you prepare the other things. In other words, baking the brownie mix first frees up the oven for the chicken which comes next. You need to allot for both cooking the chicken and sauteeing the mushrooms in addition to the one hour of bake time. The salad is easy and is pretty much a no-brainer.

Because the chicken requires baking, if you’re clever, you can actually play cook and diner at a multi-course meal with equal aplomb, compared to the normal situation where the cooking requires constant attention. In those situations, you’re getting up every five minutes to check on the food and interrupting your meal. Not so great for Valentine’s day.

With this menu, if you have everything prepped beforehand, and have your date arrive about half an hour before the chicken is done baking, you’re golden. Kick off the rice (as it probably takes about 30 minutes for the Uncle Ben’s stuff) just as your date arrives. You can start on the salad (and wine! (we had Toasted Head, which at $15, is a pretty reasonable priced bottle of Merlot, Paul Giamatti’s whiny bitchrant in Sideways notwithstanding)), and relax for a bit. In half an hour, the chicken and rice will be done, and nice and hot, and you can take as long as you like to polish those off. The longer you take, the more time your dessert will have to chill — you win all around.

All in all, highly recommended.

I’ve never really thought of Bruce Willis as a hero. Sure, he’s kicked a lot of ass in some sweet movies (Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, and Sin City) but I always figured that he was just another Hollywood actor type with the intelligence of mashed potatoes.

Not so.

He went over to Iraq to meet the troops of the Deuce Four (where we find out that he actually tried to enlist, but was turned down due to age), and he gives a hilarious interview over at chud.com. My favorite quote:

Q: Entertainment Weekly says…

Willis: Did you just say Entertainment Weekly? Do you work for them?

Q: No but they said one of the films they never want to see is Die Hard 4. Does that surprise you since all the want to see it? And would you still do it?

Willis: Entertainment Weekly hates me. They’ve hated me since they’ve been a magazine. Fuck ‘em. And you can go and tell them that.

Q: Why?

Willis: Because I’m a threat to them. Why does anybody hate anybody? Because they have some beef. Who cares? They can all blow me.

There’s some good stuff about his idea of being a Republican too. Check it out. Bruce Willis is the new Chuck Norris.

Thanks to Google, I have a nifty personalized homepage where I get to select from various RSS feeds to populate it. One of my selections is the “How To” of the day. Today’s selection was How to make a diaper cake.

What the hell?

(btw, I also subscribe to the recipe of the day, and diaper cake wasn’t listed there)

I tried as hard as I could — before opening the link — to think of what that could possibly mean, something that didn’t involve diarrhea frosting and turd log flambe, but was completely and utterly unsuccessful.

Giving up, I clicked, and it turns out that you can take clean diapers, bundle them up, and turn them into a facsimile of a cake with towers, for the purpose of presenting something useful and aesthetically pleasing (??) to an expectant mother at her baby shower.

Color me disappointed.

A buddy of mine writes (insightfully, I might add):

there is a major disclaimer that appears to be hidden from many within this freedom of speech idea, and it’s that freedom of speech does not equate to freedom from consequences.

Good point. But I replied with this…

This is true… but not true at the same time.

Even in America, where the right to free speech is guaranteed in our constitution, we still have restrictions. You can’t libel or slander, for instance, nor can you yell “fire!” in the proverbial crowded theater.

If you were to ignore those restrictions “in the name of free speech”, then yes, there are certainly consequences that must be paid.

This cartoon brouhaha is a beast of a different ilk. One of the reasons why free speech resonates so much with me is that the other unstated assumption is freedom of thought. We as a society have decided that it’s ok to think whatever you like, and not be forced to conform — if you don’t want to.

We’ve realized that there are a multiplicity of ideas, thoughts, what have you on anything and everything, including ideas about god or yahweh or allah or whatever, but that as a society, we’re not going to make claims one way or the other about them.

Most importantly, we’re free to criticize the ideas we don’t like. You CAN’T DO THIS in other countries, like China, Cuba, most Middle Eastern countries, etc. There are superficially different reasons as to “why”, but in the end, it boils down to an authoritarian system of rule. You got the communist party in China and Cuba, and fundamentalist imams in the Middle East, but they’re just variations on an authoritarian tune.

Sadly, the people in fundamentalist Islam seem to like this restriction. Were I to engage in pseudo psychoanalysis, I’d say that it’s a mix of getting comfort in knowing that if you “follow all the rules”, you get to go to paradise (and thus why try too hard when you’re on earth because your lifespan of 60 years is a helluva lot shorter than all of eternity) — and being manipulated by the power-craving status quo in charge.

If those folks want to live that way, fine, but don’t tell US to obey your conventions. As Sullivan says, “your taboo, not mine”. It may be disrespectful in your culture, but you know what, that’s too fucking bad cuz it ain’t in ours, and we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree. Aiming for the lowest common denominator, race to the bottom, no one wins.

One final thought — if fundamentalist islam is getting upset that their culture is getting eroded by “western values”, maybe they ought to step back and try to figure out why. Here’s a hint — MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE YOUR CULTURE SUCKS.

rant over.

love,

/ac

I’ve decided that the best way to end religious strife, once and for all, is the empirical method. Everyone who thinks their deity is the supreme being goes to Antarctica. The rest of the world donates used land mines (solves that problem), guns, knives, and other weaponry. Then, we place a huge plexiglass bubble over the entire continent and call it good.

All the fanatics kill each other, after which they get to find out if they picked the right deity, and can be either smugly blissful or burning in hell for the rest of eternity, while the rest of the world goes about its business.

The only drawback to this problem is who will save the penguins? Because they are soo darn cute. Maybe we’ll just medevac them all outta there before the religious nutjobs arrive.

Some links to entertain you regarding the recent furor over the Danish satirical cartoons about Mohammed and Islam.

• the actual cartoons
• CSM article describing ruckus
• Sullivan’s excellent editorial: Your Taboo, Not Mine
• Collection of cartoons mocking the intolerance of radical Islam
• You want blasphemy? I got your blasphemy right here

And finally, the picture here indicates the fundamental misunderstanding between the rioting Muslims and… well, everyone else in the world, I suppose.

Update: upgrading links as I find better ones.