Class Roundup: Humanity

Humanity in Globalization ended on a high note in all regards. The final I felt I did quite well on, having used the entire two hours to compose two solid essays. There is one service here at HKU where you can pull up old examinations from previous terms, but being that the first time this class was taught, this particular resource became more approximate than anything else. For part of the course content, our professor said to look up exams from a different class, Human Security, to get a good idea of what that will look like. Some questions were almost exactly, if not entirely, word for word the same.

To study, I went over all the readings (again) as well as my class notes. Being that most of the lectures were guest speakers, my notes were kind of sparse and largely irrelevant. However, for the optional review session, the professor gave us a thorough outline of the class with which we could structure our studying better.

Besides the final examination, there were also the term research paper, which I did on language rights and language evolution in the wake of globalization, as well as participation grades in lectures (based mostly on attendance) and tutorials.

For the last two tutorials, we did a role-playing exercise called Zanda. Zanda is a multinational state with a president who bombs tribal people to get them off their well-endowed mining lands, which the government has leased to a multinational corporation. Yanda is a neighboring country that has national security on its mind with the instability of Zanda yet supplies rebel armies with weapons. Wanda also borders Zanda and has had an influx of tribal people coming in as refugees. Queensland is the ex-colonial government that owned Zanda up until recently.

We got roles from tutor, ranging from nurse with multiplex relationships to heads of state and United Nations officials, along with NGO leaders, journalists, and the head of that multinational mining company. I was given the role of President of Wanda.

The whole exercise was quite amusing, with us debating for our interests and attempting to reach solutions. The problem was that we had no idea if we were allowed to reach solutions, meaning that we had no idea how much action we could take or if we were just talking.

The funny thing is that we were told that we were allowed to bring up Zanda as an example for our final examination. I thought it was funny to use such a frivolous activity as evidence for such an examination. Needless to say, I didn’t use it at all. Instead I referred to readings and guest speakers. Anyways, Zanda was mainly done to show how much work it is to reach consensus and get action done on such levels. I think that most of us already understood this concept though, seeing that not much gets done on the macro level on a day-to-day basis in the world.

The class ended on a positive note in all regards because my little dispute with Globalpost.com has been resolved. To refresh, they republished this blog by automated means consistently and without permission. To make things more irksome, they in no way acknowledged the fact that they did not own my content, claiming copyright over absolutely everything on their site. And on the monetary side of things, they were ostensibly making money off of my original work. After persistently emailing their blog coordinator for about a month, informing them of my position, they finally got back to me.

They apologized profusely, saying that they thought they got permission from all the authors of the blogs they copied onto their website to do so and that mine just fell through the cracks. They also said that if I would like, they would keep my posts on their website, praising my writing, lol. Maybe if they had said it the other way around, that they would like to publish my posts on their website for whatever reason, I would have gotten off my high horse and granted it.

One more final to go now!

Seventy-eight, Part 2

An upper or a downer? I thought at first that it was an upper like most of my classmates, that that means that we as a world are coming closer together and being more open, but now, I’m conflicted.

In Humanity in Globalization, the professor brought in Tom Crampton as a guest speaker. He actually turned out to be the first guest speaker of the class to be more of a guest lecture. Whereas Professor Reyes would usually sit the guest down and ask questions to solicit information and discussion, he then opens it up to the class as a forum. Tom Crampton came with his own PowerPoint and lecture and it was frankly surprising.

This last week’s topic was about social media, in which almost all of you (blog readers) participate. I can hardly think of a friend not on Facebook; Everyone had facebook before; I myself just joined Twitter, silly as it is, about a month ago. I have my blog, which to my surprise has popped up in some funny places. One person stumbled across my blog while searching for Hong Kong bus routes. More friends than I expected now read it. A lot of people I did not think read for pleasure (debatable, I know) I found read this blog. One was the most surprising; one was the most disappointing.

In lecture, Tom Crampton was being introduced by Professor Reyes. He was described as being a (former) journalist who is now a consultant for businesses looking to make inroads into the social media world (in which spamming is a failure). Professor Reyes introduced the topic—social media. He briefly defined it. He proceeded:

“So who in this class has a Facebook?” All hands went up.

“So who in this class has a blog?” Hardly a soul’s hands went up. Mine didn’t, and many people who I knew were serial bloggers didn’t raise their hands either. It was not because I’m ashamed of what I do in my spare time at all. It’s not because of what I put in my blog either. It’s just that I didn’t really want the attention—and since no other bloggers were raising their hands, I wasn’t about to either. Cool.

When no one’s hands went up, the professor took a quick glance around the room and centered on the center of the lecture hall. I happened to be sitting in the dead center of the lecture hall that time around.

He pointed at me and said, “I know you have a blog!”

Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. I looked behind me to see if he was pointing directly behind me. There was no one behind me. He was pointing at me.

“Yeah, you!” he said, as I quizzically pointed my finger towards me and my beating heart. What was I to do? I’d never been pointed out of a lecture hall of students before.

“Yeah, I guess I do blog,” was the only thing that would come out of my mouth. Casual.

“Yeah, you talk about this class on your blog, don’t you?” he pressed on. I was silent. “It’s really not that hard to find this stuff,” he concluded in stride.

People in my row, most of whom friends of mine glanced over at me. While it was surprising and moderately frightening, I appreciated him doing that. First off, let me say as I’ve said to many of my friends in that class, that I feel that even though I do not write the most positive opinions, I always try to back up and substantiate my claims. And as you can see, his distinguishing me in such a light had no effect of slowing down my writing.

In that lecture, we went on about how print media faces some serious challenges now and though the foreseeable future, how the Internet as a medium has allowed online individuals and companies to proliferate news and other information in a manner much faster than even the next day as the presses can only do. Whereas at first these newspapers published their news online, charging a fee, in addition to in print, they’ve found that they can’t really charge money because the news will just be spread by online companies with smaller payrolls, supported by earning ad revenue. News can also be spread and reported more easily by bloggers (like me, though I claim not to be a journalist in this regard).

And speaking about blogging, I decided to search for my blog online. I typed in my full name and the first results were related to my blog. The first was the link that UCSD posted on its website for my blog. The second was my blog itself. The third was a website called globalpost.com that had my full name and the full title of one of my blog posts.

I clicked on this third one, and to my alarm, I found that all of my recent posts are being reproduced in their entirety onto their website. The fact that my entire text in such a manner is only partly mitigate by the fact that they cite me and link to my blog. The thing is though that in the fine print, globalpost.com claims copyright over everything on their website, including my blog. Equally annoying is that they are potentially earning money in ad revenue from my work.

Copyright of the entirety of my original text is mine by virtue of my having created it, and as such it is illegal for them to reproduce my blog, even in part, without appropriate permission. Though arrogant as it may seem, the principle of the matter requires me to push through. The company still has not responded to any of my emails (they do not list an address or give a phone number).

So why don’t you decide? Was that day an upper or a downer?

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author. 

Seventy-eight, Part 1

Continuing on talking about classes, I figured I’d come back to Humanity in Globalization, coded POLI0078. This class has been by far the most applicable to what I studies overall, and continues to surprise me (and did surprise me, see part 2!) every day.

In response to genocide (specifically talking about Rwanda), we began talking about the Responsibility to Protect, lovingly abbreviated as R2P. This article itself came as, in part, a result of the Rwandan Genocide. Apparently, it seemed, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafted back in the day (itself a response in part to the holocaust), forming an integral part of the United Nations, was no longer effective, so another piece of whatever you’d call it was drafted same in scale, larger in implications, would remedy the situation.

It reminds me of a problem that we have back in Los Angeles. It isn’t dealing so much with human rights as with convenience, but the same logic can easily be applied for both. In Los Angeles, we lack serious public transportation. Yeah, there are tons of bus routes that I’ve yet to hear any one I know of take, regarding what I’m talking about, buses crowd the roads too. It’s pretty apparent that we love our cars in (Southern) California. We have our sprawling freeways that traverse the landscape that frequently get clogged to the point of stopped traffic. For years and years, the solution has always been to expand the freeways, costing billions of dollars in the end, more often than not requiring the acquisition of additional right-of-way to accommodate the additional 12-foot-wide lanes.

In Thousand Oaks, California, my hometown, the secondary freeway was expanded from two lanes to three just a year or two ago and just a few months later began experiencing massive congestion again. Yeah, cars moving off surface streets onto freeways create a lot of the additional traffic, but the fact of the matter is that cars are big and roads are bigger, and creating more efficient infrastructure by expanding roads rather than building light rail/a subway system proves both illogical and inefficient.

For a city of Los Angeles’s size, it’s amazing that there are only a handful of light rail/subway lines. There is one dedicated bus route running at street-level that encountered more than its share of accidents in its first year of opening as well. The one (or two as they’re labeled) subway lines barely go anywhere, though I think that in the last I’ve read they’re in the process of being extended.

The Responsibility to Protect is, in essence, an expansion of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and while it purports increased accountability for states failing to intervene in critical situations, the fact of the matter is that in the current state-system set-up, it really can’t.

Take what France and Belgium did during the Rwandan Genocide. As people were being slaughtered in the country, they sent a surprise mission to rescue all the French and Belgian nationals, despite the fact that the Tutsis were in more dangerous than either.

Take what Bill Clinton, president of the United States of America did during the Rwandan Genocide. After all the Americans were successfully evacuated, he managed to say that there are no more American interests in Rwanda, so it would not be necessary to continue any further in the Rwanda conflict.

So what makes this piece of pseudo-legislation any different from the former? As I posted on the Humanity in Globalization class blog in early October, I said:

“What stands out to me the most in reading about R2P and watching Lloyd Axworthy go about this ‘responsibility’ is the thought that changing the words regarding such acts does nothing but change the words regarding such acts. Codifying rather than broadening the scope of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, it seems, in my opinion, to serve as a feel-good measure ultimately lacking teeth.

“I would have to agree with Hannah[, friend and fellow blogger,] in saying that R2P seems rather difficult to fully implement. Ultimately the differences between a ‘right to intervene’ and a ‘responsibility to protect’ dissipate as leaders contemplate spending resources on something that has little national benefit.

“In the documentary ‘Ghosts of Rwanda’ that we watched in class, change of wording would likely do little to push states into protecting another state’s nationals. The original wording of the term ‘genocide’ was a majorly insignificant issue that turned politicians into lawyers as while people were being murdered, the official line of United States leadership was that what was happening were “acts of genocide” but not genocide itself, hence no right to intervene.

“To say that countries now have the ‘responsibility to protect’ would then have bureaucrats defining ‘responsibility,’ no matter how well or narrowly defined the term is in the appropriate documents.

“Not to sound overly pessimistic, but it appears that in the international community it is easier to do nothing and then apologize afterwards. And it makes sense (devoid of morality). If country A intervenes in country B’s business, it would be difficult to justify, not to mention resources would be diverted to something that may not have any benefit for country A. Alternatively, country A, not having any interests in the affairs of country B would not intervene, choosing instead to abstain from the conflict and apologize for not having done something after the fact. Apologies cost no money.

“And as a last point, to say that there would be some sort of framework so that developed countries intervene when appropriate, such as fines, would be to say that an organization such as the United Nations is entirely effective. Ultimately states are their own sovereigns and do what they please in our accepted international law framework.

“So in my logic, where would the solution be?

“Well, there is no easy solution of course. In order for us as a people and as a world to be entirely effective at preventing such events from occurring, we must see ourselves as a collective whole in the cosmopolitan sense, and by extension, the government.

“And unfortunately, there is no legislation for this. (Though R2P seems to promote cosmopolitanism.) We can try our best, but ultimately only time and our future history will tell.”

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.