Archive for July 2011
[LINK] Links on Breivik’s hatred of ex-Yugoslav Muslims and women
Two links detailing how Breivik–and, to a considerable extent, the whole “counterjihad” movement–had hate-ons for Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and for women with any amount of autonomy seems worth sharing.
A look through Mr Breivik’s 1,500-page 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, which he published under the pseudonym “Andrew Berwick”, shows that he had a strange obsession with the Balkans. A word search for “Kosovo” comes up with 143 matches, “Serb” yields 341 matches, “Bosnia” 343 and “Albania” 208. (“Srebrenica”—the site of a Bosnian Serb massacre of some 8,000 Bosniaks in 1995—does not appear in the document.)
The document is best described as a kind of “Mein Kampf” for our times, in which Jews are replaced by Muslims as the enemy which must be fought and expunged from Europe. Drawing on the crudest of warmongering Serbian propaganda from the 1990s, the document describes Muslim Albanians and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) as an evil jihad-waging enemy. Needless to say, its history is convoluted and misinformed.
In one section Mr Breivik says he would like to meet Radovan Karadžić, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs who is currently on trial at the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague. “But isn’t Radovan Karadžić a mass murderer and a racist?!” he asks. “As far as my studies show he is neither.”
The document goes on to claim that for decades Muslims in “Bosnian Serbia” and Albanians waged deliberate demographic warfare, or “indirect genocide”, against the Serbs. This echoes an infamous draft memorandum by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which was leaked in 1986 and widely regarded as a key influence on Serbian nationalists at the time.
[. . .]
In the coming “war” that Mr Breivik foresees, he discusses the deportation of Muslims from Europe and appears to endorse the physical annihilation of any Albanians and Bosniaks that resist. As they have lived here for “several centuries”, he says, “they will not accept being deported from Europe and will fight for their survival. A more long term and brutal military strategy must therefore be applied.”
A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes. He blames empowered women for his own isolation, saying that he recoils from the “destructive and suicidal Sex and the City lifestyle (modern feminism, sexual revolution) … In that setting, men are not men anymore, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess.”
Furious and alone, Breivik plugged into the international anti-jihadist, anti-immigrant right. One of the most notable things about his manifesto is its scant attention to Norwegian politics or authors. Most of those he quotes are American, Canadian, or English, including Steyn, Robert Bork, Rich Lowry, and Melanie Phillips. Rather than railing against Norwegian feminists, he attacks Betty Friedan and even the relatively obscure Ellen Willis. He’s deeply versed in American culture-war issues—at one point, he even rants about the so-called war on Christmas.
Obviously, none of the writers he cites is responsible for his hideous crime. However, reading these authors pretty clearly helped him transmute his anger at women into a grandiose political ideology, and to recast himself as a latter-day crusader. He picked up the argument that selfish western women have allowed Muslims to outbreed them, and that only a restoration of patriarchy can save European culture. One of the books he references approvingly is Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, which argues, “[T]he rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West.”’
It is quite worth noting that the comments at both posts reveal that those two hatreds are disturbingly common. Commenters are the id of the world, after all.
[LINK] Links on Breivik’s hatred of ex-Yugoslav Muslims and women
Two links detailing how Breivik–and, to a considerable extent, the whole “counterjihad” movement–had hate-ons for Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and for women with any amount of autonomy seems worth sharing.
A look through Mr Breivik’s 1,500-page 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, which he published under the pseudonym “Andrew Berwick”, shows that he had a strange obsession with the Balkans. A word search for “Kosovo” comes up with 143 matches, “Serb” yields 341 matches, “Bosnia” 343 and “Albania” 208. (“Srebrenica”—the site of a Bosnian Serb massacre of some 8,000 Bosniaks in 1995—does not appear in the document.)
The document is best described as a kind of “Mein Kampf” for our times, in which Jews are replaced by Muslims as the enemy which must be fought and expunged from Europe. Drawing on the crudest of warmongering Serbian propaganda from the 1990s, the document describes Muslim Albanians and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) as an evil jihad-waging enemy. Needless to say, its history is convoluted and misinformed.
In one section Mr Breivik says he would like to meet Radovan Karadžić, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs who is currently on trial at the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague. “But isn’t Radovan Karadžić a mass murderer and a racist?!” he asks. “As far as my studies show he is neither.”
The document goes on to claim that for decades Muslims in “Bosnian Serbia” and Albanians waged deliberate demographic warfare, or “indirect genocide”, against the Serbs. This echoes an infamous draft memorandum by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which was leaked in 1986 and widely regarded as a key influence on Serbian nationalists at the time.
[. . .]
In the coming “war” that Mr Breivik foresees, he discusses the deportation of Muslims from Europe and appears to endorse the physical annihilation of any Albanians and Bosniaks that resist. As they have lived here for “several centuries”, he says, “they will not accept being deported from Europe and will fight for their survival. A more long term and brutal military strategy must therefore be applied.”
A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes. He blames empowered women for his own isolation, saying that he recoils from the “destructive and suicidal Sex and the City lifestyle (modern feminism, sexual revolution) … In that setting, men are not men anymore, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess.”
Furious and alone, Breivik plugged into the international anti-jihadist, anti-immigrant right. One of the most notable things about his manifesto is its scant attention to Norwegian politics or authors. Most of those he quotes are American, Canadian, or English, including Steyn, Robert Bork, Rich Lowry, and Melanie Phillips. Rather than railing against Norwegian feminists, he attacks Betty Friedan and even the relatively obscure Ellen Willis. He’s deeply versed in American culture-war issues—at one point, he even rants about the so-called war on Christmas.
Obviously, none of the writers he cites is responsible for his hideous crime. However, reading these authors pretty clearly helped him transmute his anger at women into a grandiose political ideology, and to recast himself as a latter-day crusader. He picked up the argument that selfish western women have allowed Muslims to outbreed them, and that only a restoration of patriarchy can save European culture. One of the books he references approvingly is Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, which argues, “[T]he rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West.”’
It is quite worth noting that the comments at both posts reveal that those two hatreds are disturbingly common. Commenters are the id of the world, after all.
[LINK] “Breivik manifesto attempts to woo India’s Hindu nationalists”
Christian Science Monitor staff writer Ben Arnoldy points out that while Breivik was a “knight” concerned with protecting Europe from Muslims, he was also interested in allying with other groups outside of Europe also concerned with Islam and Muslims. India stands out in Arnoldy’s article, perhaps not coincidentally since the myth of Eurabia–the belief that Muslims, aided by their own fecundity and illegal immigration and abetted by an establishment that’s at best incompetent at worst traitorous, will take over the country–is also strong in India. I blogged about this at Demography Matters back in 2008, something relying on facts laden with truthiness (if facts there are) in a prejudiced and paranoid context.
Mr. Breivik’s primary goal is to remove Muslims from Europe. But his manifesto invites the possibility for cooperation with Jewish groups in Israel, Buddhists in China, and Hindu nationalist groups in India to contain Islam.
“It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical,” he wrote.
In the case of India, there is significant overlap between Breivik’s rhetoric and strains of Hindu nationalism – or Hindutva – on the question of coexistence with Muslims. Human rights monitors have long decried such rhetoric in India for creating a milieu for communal violence, and the Norway incidents are prompting calls here to confront the issue.
“Like Europe’s mainstream right-wing parties, [India’s] BJP has condemned the terrorism of the right – but not the thought system which drives it. Its refusal to engage in serious introspection, or even to unequivocally condemn Hindutva violence, has been nothing short of disgraceful,” writes senior journalist Praveen Swami in today’s edition of The Hindu.
“Liberal parties, including the Congress, have been equally evasive in their critique of both Hindutva and Islamist terrorism,” he adds.
Last week, Breivik detonated a bomb in downtown Oslo and opened fire at a youth camp of the ruling political party, killing at least 76 people. He reportedly said in court today that the rampage was “marketing” for his manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.”
The manifestoBreivik’s 1,500-page manifesto calls preserving traditional European culture by cutting it off from immigration from the Muslim world. While he is against setting up a Christian theocracy, he envisions a revival of Christendom, where the church helps unify Europeans around a shared cultural identity.
In the manifesto, Breivik references India dozens of times. He included a five-page paper written by a man named Shrinandan Vyas that argues the Muslim invaders committed a “genocide” of Hindus in the Hindu Kush region of present-day Afghanistan. Efforts to track down Mr. Vyas have failed.
Invasions by Muslims into South Asia did include bloodshed, but use of the term “genocide” is highly controversial.
Breivik also proposed curbing voting rights within democracy, and both men view their ideological opponents in the media and universities as communists.
Singhal has not corresponded with Breivik, nor does he see much need for alliances to counter Islam’s spread: “Every country will have to find its own solutions,” he says.
Knights TemplarIt’s unclear as of yet who Breivik reached out to in India and what the depth of the interactions was. His manifesto says he is among 12 “knights” fighting within a dozen regions in Europe and the US, but not India. It’s not known yet whether this group, which he calls the Knights Templar Europe, actually exists.
Breivik describes months of tedious work farming “high quality” e-mail addresses off the Internet by friending networks “representing all spheres of cultural conservative thought” on Facebook, then acquiring members’ e-mail addresses. The goal appeared to be to generate a list to send his manifesto to just prior to his rampage.
Officials in India’s Home Ministry would not comment on whether they are tracking down Breivik’s e-mails to India. Mr. Swami, who has sources inside India’s intelligence community, told the Monitor that India does not have the capacity to do those traces easily until Norway provides information from Breivik’s computers.
“I’ve been trying to ask around if anyone knows about a substantial correspondence of any kind and haven’t come up with anything,” says Swami.
The Internet has made it easier for extremists to follow one another internationally, he points out. But, historically, European and Indian far right groups have not worked with each other – nor do they have much practical reason to cooperate now.
“I think irrespective of the Norwegian [attacks], the government needs to keep a much closer eye on the activities of the Hindu fundamentalist groups … and crack down on hate speech whether it’s Hindu, Muslim, or otherwise,” says Swami.
[BRIEF NOTE] On the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians
If not for Facebook’s Lee-Ellen I would have missed this article written by Polly Leger in the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, commemorating the expulsion of the Acadians–the French settlers of what is now eastern Canada, the Maritime provinces, my home turf, ethnically cleansed at the beginning of the Seven Years War.
On July 28, 1755, the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia ordered a roundup of Acadians who had refused to pledge allegiance to the King of England.
From that date into the early 1760s, nearly 6,500 Acadians were forced onto crowded ships and transported to Louisiana or back to France. Families were torn apart, disease plagued the ships and hundreds were lost at sea.
Thousands of Acadians who escaped deportation went into hiding, while others were forced to watch their homes and crops burned.
The Grand Dérangement, as it is called in French, is seen as the cataclysmic event at the root of Acadian culture.
For the past six years, July 28 has been an official day of remembrance, a solemn counterbalance to the celebrations of Aug. 15, the national day of Acadians.
The brutality of the expulsion has been memorialized and mythologized, from Longfellow’s heavily fictionalized poem, Evangeline, to the songs of the band 1755.
Amély Friolet-O’Neil, 22, is the vice-president of the Société Nationale de l’Acadie. As a young Acadian, she said it’s important to her to remember the expulsion, a “founding” moment for the Acadian community.
“It’s always been important for me to know where you come from in order to know who you are, and where you want to go,” she said in French.
“An Acadian doesn’t have to be someone whose family was deported,” Friolet-O’Neil said. “It’s no longer white and black.”
“It’s an important part of the story,” she said, “But l’Acadie isn’t just that.”
Three points.
1. If not for the ethnic cleaning of the Acadians, Canada would be very different, my corner particularly. Imagine a single Province of Acadia, its French colonial population having survived the Seven Years War as functionally intact as the Canadiens, likely Francophone majority, also under British rule. Why not? The deportation closed off entirely probable pathways of development. But for centuries of mutual hostility …
2. In such a Francophone polity I wouldn’t exist. Why would I, when the settlement of Prince Edward Island by British immigrants only began decades after the conquest of New France and the transformation of the former Acadia into a collection of thoroughly British colonies?
3. The comments are worth reading, inasmuch as many of the English Canadian commenters don’t seem to think what happened matters at all to the present day, its relationships of power and patterns of cultural diffusion and interpretations of history, none of it.
[LINK] Three links on Breivik as product of the id
A lot of the more interesting reaction to Breivik’s massacres this Friday past have come through relating the crimes, and the man, and the ideology that bound them both together, in the context of the emergence of what can be called a Western id, angry and devoted to the annihilation or perceived enemies.
First comes Roger Cohen’s New York Times article “Breivik and His Enablers”.
When Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords this year in Tuscon, Arizona — after Sarah Palin placed rifle sights over Giffords’ constituency and Giffords herself predicted that “there are consequences to that” — the right went into overdrive to portray Loughner as a schizophrenic loner whose crazed universe owed nothing to those fanning hatred under the slogan of “Take America Back.” (That non-specific taking-back would of course be from Muslims and the likes of the liberal and Jewish Giffords.)
Breivik is no loner. His violence was brewed in a specific European environment that shares characteristics with the specific American environment of Loughner: relative economic decline, a jobless recovery, middle-class anxiety and high levels of immigration serving as the backdrop for racist Islamophobia and use of the spurious specter of a “Muslim takeover” as a wedge political issue to channel frustrations rightward.
In a June 11 entry from his 1,500-page online manifesto, Breivik wrote: “I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”
Next, Christopher Hitchens tackled, in “A Ridiculous Rapid Response” over at Slate, the symmetry between this Western terrorist and his non-Western counterparts.
Do the extreme jihadists and their most virulent opponents really have a symbiotic relationship? In tapes and sermons from mosques in London and Hamburg, you may find whole manifestos about the need to keep women as chattel, to eradicate the disease of homosexuality, to thwart the Jewish design over international finance, and other fantasies of the Third Reich mentality. Pushed to its logical or pathological conclusion, this would involve something that Europeans and Americans have never seen before: a conflict between different forms of fascism in order to see which assault on multi-ethnic democracy was the most effective.
There were signs of this mentality at work in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other demagogues saw Osama Bin Laden being used to trace the finger of God. And some of the descendant fans of Timothy McVeigh, through the medium of “9/11 Truth” and other arcana, have also tried to confect an overarching theory of illegitimate global power as it was exposed and challenged on that day. Again, though, one notices that the CIA and Mossad drew the plush assignment of actually choosing and rigging the target and organizing collusion and coordination, while leaving lesser rank-and-filers of al-Qaida to perform the lowly tasks of detonation. This sad, self-hating world view dissolves in freeze frame in the Abbottabad villa, with the chief guest wistfully flicking the channel changer and musing on the dear dead days when he was “the strong horse.”
It also culminates in the wretched spectacle of the jihadist websites in Oslo, which had been getting ready with their original posts of joy when they, too, thought that their own holy cause might be involved—and then ceasing and desisting when it became clear that the perpetrator was some loser who had quite different reasons for wanting to slaughter a crowd of young people that day. Headline writers and newscasters should have waited before making any pronouncements, and thereby committing the indecency of suggesting that the killers were being selective, even choosy. So-called “experts” should have been ashamed to reverse-engineer the motive from the modus operandi, rather as Steve Emerson had done in Oklahoma by stating that the maximization of violence was “a Middle Eastern trait.” A pale Christian rider from ultima Thule with a private view of the Book of Revelation may also be said to be infected with “Middle Eastern traits” of the sort that hell has not hitherto boasted.
All this, Hitchens notes, as people in the Middle East are trying to overthrow their dictatorships and become democracies on the Western model (very broadly defined, but not too broadly).
Finally, Anne Applebaum (also at Slate) suggests in “Anders Behring Breivik and the Crisis of Legitimacy” that Breivik’s crimes are driven by the sort of fundamental disbelief in the credibility of society that has driven much worse crimes before.
Breivik was not, in fact, a killer of immigrants or Muslims. He was a killer of Norwegians. The particular set of obsessions that led him to madness and then to mass murder were not merely racist. They also sprang from an insane conviction that his own government was illegitimate.
This particular form of obsession is not new. Nor is it confined to blond, white, racist Norwegians. Raskolnikov, the hero of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, brutally murdered a pawnbroker in the name of a vaguely defined “freedom” that was not available in decadent, czarist St. Petersburg. Since then, revolutionaries and madmen of all kinds, from the Russian anarchists to the Irish Republican Army, have justified the murder of innocent people on the grounds that it would hasten the end of an illegitimate government and bring to power some theoretically more authentic regime.
AdvertisementIn contemporary America, we also have people who are—and I am inventing this word here—illegitimists: They believe that the president of the United States is illegitimately elected, or that the country is ruled by a cabal that is in turn controlled by some other sinister force or forces. In the past, left-wing illegitimists were quite common, and in fact Marxism is a classic, paranoid version of this creed. The illegitimist Marxist argument goes like this: Bourgeois democracy is a sham; bourgeois politicians and the bourgeois newspapers are tools of shadowy financial interests. The entire system deserves to be overthrown—and if a few people die in the course of the revolution, it’s all for a good cause. Though not every Western Marxist advocated violence, this is certainly the kind of argument that motivated the Weathermen, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and other far-left American and European terrorists of the past.
There is also a right-wing version of this argument, one that has been honed to perfection by novelist Charles McCarry (in Lucky Bastard, he imagines that the Bill Clinton-like American president is a Communist agent and his Hillary-like wife is his controller). More recently, right-wing illegitimism has taken the form of birtherism. The attempt to prove that Barack Obama isn’t American-born was, at base, an attempt to prove that he is illegitimate and that he therefore deserves to be removed from power—somehow. birtherism is also linked to other forms of illegitimism, such as the belief that Obama is a Muslim, and is thus controlled by international jihadists, or the belief that he is “Kenyan” and thus motivated by anti-colonial hatred of white people in general and Americans in particular. It is not accidental that the one note of sympathy for Breivik in the U.S. media came from the lips of birtherist and illegitimist Glenn Beck, who helpfully compared the young Norwegians murdered by Breivik to “Hitler Youth.” Presumably if they are Hitler Youth, then they deserved to die?
[DM] “Demography’s misuse, or, going from Eurabia to mass murder”
I’ve a post up at Demography Matters taking a look at how Eurabia–fundamentally a misuse of demographic language to justify bigotry and paranoia–inspired mass murder in Norway.
[H&F] “The Massacre and its Context”
Over at History and Futility, my co-blogger Jussi Jalonen has written about how the ideas that inspired Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik to go about his mass murders this Friday past are pretty far from being idiosyncratic to him, that they are actually the product of a disturbingly broad and productive Internet-based movement of ideologues proclaiming the existential threat posed to Europe by anything and anyone at all relatable to Islam.
The entire essay is well worth reading, three paragraphs of which are copied below.
Breivik wrote a manifesto where he openly stated his motives and clarified his political opinions in detail. Published in the internet, the “European Declaration of Independence” – which can be downloaded from here – is essentially a grotesque compendium of blog posts and columns, tied together with Breivik’s own narrative. The quoted writings all have in common an openly islamophobic, anti-immigration theme. According to Breivik’s twisted, but coherent logic, the “multiculturalist Marxist establishment” is attempting to convert the European Union into a “Marxist superstate, the EUSSR”; these “cultural Marxists” are also responsible for the “mass Muslim immigration” and “islamization” of Europe. Breivik is, in other words, a true believer in the so-called “Eurabia”-predictions previously discussed also on this blog, and he also believes that an open discussion of these threats was impossible due to the pervasive European “political correctness”. In his own words, Breivik was using the mass murder as means to “send a message” to the “Marxist, multiculturalist elites”. His chosen method was to wipe out the next generation of the left-wing politicians whom he saw as the culprits of the immigration policy and the destruction of his cherished European civilization.
What’s important to remember is that Breivik’s ideology was not original, and his sick ideas were not of his own making. In essence, he was a product of the internet age, a dedicated consumer of the radical anti-Muslim political propaganda which has circulated around the websites and weblogs ever since the 9/11 attacks and the controversial Muhammad cartoon episode. Breivik maintained a lively interest in the most notable anti-Islam bloggers, such as “Fjordman”, with whom he occasionally seems to have corresponded, advertising his book project; one example of their dialogue can be found here, in the comment section. The title of Breivik’s book, “Declaration of European Independence”, is actually borrowed from a column which “Fjordman” wrote for the cultural-conservative “Brussels Journal”-blog. Breivik describes his ideology by the name “Vienna School of Thought”, which is a reference to another well-known paranoid anti-Islam blog, “Gates of Vienna”.
This internet sub-culture where Breivik spent his pastime has not been without political significance. The very same post-modern, radical, fanatic cultural-fundamentalist atmosphere which produced Breivik has made serious inroads to the mainstream politics in the Western World, basing its success on populism and fear. The writers who inspired Breivik included known Muslim-baiting hate-mongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes, and he was fascinated by the Tea Party movement. Geert Wilders, the head of the Dutch PVV and the producer of Fitna, was among Breivik’s heroes, and his book even mentions – in one of the quoted posts from “Fjordman” – Jussi Halla-aho, a Finnish anti-Islam blogger who was elected as an MP of the populist “True Finns” party in the last elections and became the chairman of the parliamentary committee in charge of police, border guard and the immigration affairs. Breivik’s book endorses several “anti-immigration, cultural conservative organizations”, ranging from the Sweden-Democrats to the Polish PiS, all of which he saw as the possible salvation of the Continent from the supposed evils of multiculturalism and immigration. The only thing which made Breivik special was his conviction that this parliamentary political activity needed to be supplemented with direct action, and he saw himself as the man who could provide it.
Go, read.
[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Why I’m glad the space shuttle is now of the past
Wikipedia’s article on the space shuttle program now uses the term “was”, as in “NASA’s Space Shuttle program, officially called Space Transportation System (STS), was the United States government’s manned launch vehicle program from 1981 to 2011.” The Space Shuttle Atlantis has landed, and an era has ended. alexpgp is to be thanked for pointing his readers to the below stunning image of the Orbiter’s reentry, taken from the International Space Station.
It’s a bit sad that the space shuttle is no more, I suppose, insofar as the idea of the space shuttle as a rapid-turnaround bus into space is appealing. It’s just doesn’t strike me as important, certainly nothing to justify the “end to manned spaceflight, forever” that seems to be sweeping the Internet. Wired Science’s David Axe makes points I quite agree with.
Listening to some critics, you’d think America had just retreated from space, forever. “We’re basically decimating the NASA human spaceflight program,” former astronaut Jerry Ross told Reuters. “The only thing we’re going to have left in town is the station and it’s a totally different animal from the shuttle.”
Today many observers consider the Shuttle the ultimate expression of American technological prowess, and see its demise as a signal of America’s decline. In one sense, they’re right: With its huge size, distinctive shape and fiery launches, the shuttle has always been an impressive symbol. But as a practical space vehicle, it has long been an overpriced, dangerous compromise.
There’s a reason the Soviets canceled their space shuttle, and that the Chinese have never attempted one. Even without their own shuttles, both nations are now nipping at America’s heels in space. Russia has increasingly reliable rockets and capsules; China began manned spaceflights back in 2003 and is mulling a space station and a moon mission. Both countries are working hard to expand their satellite fleets, though they remain far behind the United States with its roughly 400 spacecraft.
In truth, the shuttle’s retirement could actually make the U.S. space program stronger, by finally allowing the shuttle’s two users — NASA and the Pentagon — to go their separate ways in space, each adopting space vehicles best suited to their respective missions.
“When I hear people say, or listen to media reports, that the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human space flight, I have to say … these folks must be living on another planet,” NASA administrator Charlie Bolden said in a July 1 speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
For NASA, future manned missions will ride in upgraded 1960s-style manned capsules: first Russian models, then potentially American-built ones. Missions that don’t require a human passenger will fall to rockets of various sizes. The military will use many of the same rockets, and could also expand its brand-new fleet of small, robotic space planes.
Together, these vehicles will make space flight cheaper, safer and more flexible than was ever possible with the shuttle.
Maintaining a primitive space vehicle that isn’t especially economic doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing that would support a manned presence in space, or a substantial presence in space. Rather, it’s the sort of thing that would make either rather more difficult. It’s hardly, as Douglas Muir wrote earlier this month, that interest in space has been dropping off since the supposed halcyon 1970s of the Apollo mission. He points out that not only has the global space budget almost doubled between 1975 and 2011 (in constant 2007 dollars), with NASA’s spending going up nearly by half and the European Union and China and Brazil and India and Japan all appearing as new spacefaring powers, but exploration is really taking off. Space is no longer an exclusive preserve of the two Cold War superpowers.
We’re living in a golden age of space exploration. We’re bombing the Moon for water, mapping methane lakes on Titan, and watching solar flares in realtime in 3-D. We’re getting ready to fly by Pluto and drop an SUV on Mars. We’re mapping the inner solar system down to a few meters of resolution and doing sample returns from comets. We’ve got the International Space Station (ISS), now into its second decade of operation and approved at least a decade more. In terms of technology, we’ve got fully functional ion drives, a working prototype solar sail, and the ISS solar panel systems producing enough electricity to light up a small subdivision.
We’ve put landers on Titan and the polar regions of Mars. We’ve watched geysers erupt on Enceladus, lightning strikes on Venus, and found a frickin’ hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.
So: the global space budget has grown steadily for nearly two generations now, roughly doubling over 35 years, with the number of active countries rising from two to around a dozen. As a result, we are currently in a glorious Magellanic age of space discovery.
And it’s a global age. Here’s a thing you’ll notice, if you hang around space enthusiasts for long: there’ll be a conversation about “space exploration”, and after a bit you realize that half the people in the room are taking that to mean MANNED space exploration BY AMERICANS, with any other sort being at best a bit disreputable and at worst vaguely threatening, and the “failure” of manned US space travel seen as some sort of failure of will.
[. . . T]he fact that the rest of the world is going into space is, and that its no longer a simple binary US/USSR competition… well, how is this a bad thing? India, China and Brazil are becoming rich enough to afford serious space programs, and they are choosing to spend some of their new wealth in space: why is this not a cause for celebration? (Incidentally, China is planning to build its own manned space station over the next few years. If you think that’s a bad thing, you need to explain why Americans in space are a victory for the future of humanity, while Chinese in space are kinda creepy somehow. Please do. I’ll watch with interest.)
Points, all good points. Better and cheaper technologies makes space more accessible for everyone. It’s a virtuous circle, I suppose, the cheaper space travel letting more people get into space and making space travel cheaper, et cetera. Keeping an archaic expensive technology in use isn’t going to make things better, somehow. If anything, it keeps space more exclusive.
The space shuttle is gone, long did it live. Now, let’s wait for the next, the better, the more accessible to appear!
[BRIEF NOTE] On the uncanny valley
Have we come up with a new explanation behind homo sapiens sapiens‘ singular existence and the fear of robots? Wired UK’s Mark Brown has reported on a recent study that provides non-anecdotal evidence of the existence of the “uncanny valley”. Wikipedia, below.
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.
The term was coined by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as Bukimi no Tani Genshō (不気味の谷現象) in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch’s concept of “the uncanny” identified in a 1906 essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Jentsch’s conception was elaborated by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay entitled “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”).
[. . .]
Mori’s original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, a human observer’s emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.
This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that an almost human-looking robot will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction.
Says Brown,
Saygin also recruited the help of Repliee Q2, an especially human-like robot from Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. Q2 has 13 degrees of freedom on her face alone, and uses her posable eyes, brows, cheeks, lids, lips and neck to make facial expressions and mouth shapes.
The team made videos of Repliee Q2 performing actions like waving, nodding, taking a drink of water and picking up a piece of paper from a table. Then, the same actions were performed by the Japanese woman whom Q2 is based on. Finally, the researchers stripped the robot of its synthetic skin and hair to reveal a Terminator-style metal robot with dangling wires and visible circuits.
The subjects were shown each of the videos and were informed about which was a robot and which human. Then, the subjects’ brains were scanned in an fMRI machine.
When viewing the real human and the metallic robot, the brains showed very typical reactions. But when presented with the uncanny android, the brain “lit up” like a Christmas tree.
When viewing the android, the parietal cortex — and specifically in the areas that connect the part of the brain’s visual cortex that processes bodily movements with the section of the motor cortex thought to contain mirror (or empathy) neurons — saw high levels of activity.
It suggests that the brain couldn’t compute the incongruity between the android’s human-like appearance and its robotic motion. In the other experiments — when the onscreen perfomer looks human and moves likes a human, or looks like a robot and moves like a robot — our brains are fine. But when the two states are in conflict, trouble arises.
“The brain doesn’t seem tuned to care about either biological appearance or biological motion per se,” said Saygin, assistant professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. “What it seems to be doing is looking for its expectations to be met — for appearance and motion to be congruent.”
Over at the article, there are two comments of particular interest.
- Might the existence of the uncanny valley help explain why homo sapiens sapiens is the only hominid species still around? If “nearly-but-not-quite” human beings were around, the commenter suggested, might the reaction have been to kill them off? Maybe, I suppose–certainly there’s enough evidence of racism motivated by anger that different population groups don’t behave the way that normal people should–but then the latest genetic researches have demonstrated that Neanderthals and the like did interbreed, maybe even that they didn’t go extinct so much as get assimilated.
- The second commenter refers to the works of Isaac Asimov, famed science-fiction pioneer of robotics, and his suggestion in his future history that people eventually rejected the “humaniform” robot because it was too uncannily human-like. Did Asimov make a successful prediction about the future?
And, of course, don’t forget the Cylons!
A Bit More Detail 