"... a security officer burst in, grabbed the magnifying glass, and then climbed a ladder up onto the roof of the auditorium, where, peering through the glass, he scanned the horizon for any sign of hostile activity, such as a pending attack by some rival militant faction. That image of a man trying to use a magnifying glass as a telescope has always stayed in my mind as an example of the ignorance and folly of the Cultural Revolution years."
From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei.
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32 comments:
"a sentencing rally"
The mind boggles.
You can use two magnifying glasses as a telescope.
The people that think they can stomp on others and persecute them and force them to submit generally don't think very far ahead.
They are barbarians and destroyers.
They are stupid enough to vote for people like Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau and Mitch McConell.
"things that won't work" indeed.
Forget it, Jake.
I have no doubt that the Cultural Revolution possessed both ignorance and folly. However this particular anecdote might not be quite the example of them that the author supposes. While it is true that a magnifying glass cannot be a telescope, it is also true that two magnifying glasses (a larger one and a smaller one) can be a telescope -- in fact every telescope is a set of two such magnifying glasses. So maybe that officer on the roof already had a smaller glass (perhaps a pair of reading glasses?) and just needed to borrow the larger one to MacGyver himself a telescope.
I was watching Bloomberg Asia yesterday, and they interviewed a guy who was a member of the Chinese Communist "People's Congress," or whatever you call it. They interviewed him for like 20 minutes, and it was like listening to some loud yob on a barstool somewhere. The ignorance. He had this plan to shut down Hong Kong hard for nine days, and that would work, against omicron. It's like the last two years never happened. I kept expecting the interviewer to cut him off, but I guess, as a CCP official, that wasn't going to happen.
The concept of a "sentencing rally" is rather odd.
Ai Weiwei's 草泥马style (Caonima Style)
"an example of the ignorance and folly of the Cultural Revolution years"
Well, yes. But it wasn't folly for Mao. He used the Cultural Revolution quite effectively.
And it was a learning experience for many people. Take Xi. Having suffered, he learned not that the CR was bad, and that one shouldn't do such things, but that one needs to be and stay on top. China is a country of hard men.
The left has been effective at projecting their increasing darkened reasoning onto the right but it won’t last. My liberal neighbors — and they are legion — are all medieval peasants screeching snippets of Latin they rotely memorized from the priest’s weekly “homilies.” They are all college-educated and dumber than rocks.
I say this, of course, with all due respect.
@ Sean Gleeson
That is one of the best comments in the history this blog!
Re “sentencing rallies”:
“The Cultural Revolution, launched in Beijing, had quickly spread across the whole nation, everywhere stirring boorish, vengeful crowds. Like dry kindling, they were just waiting for a spark to light their fire. On such days, Father would have to walk several miles to the performance venue, where he would join the other “ox demons and snake spirits” from far and wide, who all stood in a row in front of the stage, facing the revolutionary masses already primed to voice their righteous indignation. Sometimes, public denunciations of miscreants would be paired with the announcement of verdicts regarding “active counterrevolutionaries,” who would be immediately dragged off to the execution ground, where their deaths would be observed with ghoulish fascination by spectators of all ages.”
... boorish, vengeful crowds. Like dry kindling, they were just waiting for a spark to light their fire. On such days, Father would have to walk several miles to the performance venue, where he would join the other “ox demons and snake spirits” from far and wide, who all stood in a row in front of the stage, facing the revolutionary masses already primed to voice their righteous indignation. Sometimes, public denunciations of miscreants would be paired with the announcement of verdicts regarding “active counterrevolutionaries,” who would be immediately dragged off to the execution ground, where their deaths would be observed with ghoulish fascination by spectators of all ages.
Kind of like the George Floyd trials in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
It would not be that hard to scare up a crowd like that in Canada for sentencing rallies around the punishment of the demonstrators for bodily autonomy there.
"That is one of the best comments in the history this blog!"
But didn't rhhardin just make the same point, with minimal mansplaining?
If you have a big magnifying glass you can project an upside down picture of a scene on the wall or a piece of paper. Or of course torture prisoners by burning little holes in them in the sunshine.
That image of a man trying to use a magnifying glass as a telescope has always stayed in my mind as an example of the ignorance and folly of the Cultural Revolution years.
I can picture Antifa doing that.
Well, Ai Weiwei didn't say the man had another magnifying glass and was holding one in each hand and scanning the crowd, now did he?. The words were "using A magnifying glass." A single one does not work as a telescope, but by all means we'll just invent things out of whole cloth so we can get a "well AKSHULLY" out of it.
So maybe that officer on the roof already had a smaller glass (perhaps a pair of reading glasses?) and just needed to borrow the larger one to MacGyver himself a telescope.
If anyone has attempted this (I have) you know that it is very difficult to line them up correctly and at the right distance from you eye and each other. It would require both hands (how did the officer climb the ladder) and would be an extremely odd set of motions to do in front of a crowd; it simply does not match up with Ai Weiwei's description of the event ("climbed a ladder up onto the roof of the auditorium, where, peering through THE glass, he scanned the horizon for any sign of hostile activity").
The "well akshually" desired here is tantamount to calling a direct witness to the event a liar by someone who was not there...
But didn't rhhardin just make the same point, with minimal mansplaining?
Perhaps, but because of the lag in comment approving, there were no published comments here when I posted my own. At any rate, the fact that two magnifying glasses make a telescope is not a closely held secret.
...Ai Weiwei didn't say the man had another magnifying glass [etc.]
No, he did not. But my speculation (which I mansplained "might be" the case, not asserted that it was) seemed to fit the events he did recount more plausibly than his own explanation. Consider, first, that the officer had climbed a ladder to the roof. This tells me that young Ai was looking up at the man from some distance, and might easily not have noticed another, smaller magnifying glass held close to his eye or even worn on his face if they were eyeglasses. And second, he said that the officer "scanned the horizon" with this apparatus. So he did not merely try to look through the glass and notice it was worse than just using his bare eyes; he kept looking through it. This strikes me as evidence that he was really seeing better with the magnifying glass than without it.
Sebastian said...
"That is one of the best comments in the history this blog!"
But didn't rhhardin just make the same point, with minimal mansplaining?
rhhardin frequently makes Ann uncomfortable.
Mike Sylwester said...
The concept of a "sentencing rally" is rather odd.
To you maybe.
But to Karen it is the meaning of life.
The chance to crush someone's life give the average lefty meaning in life.
I like how casually this is thrown out in regard to the time the anecdote comes from. The person quoted was apparently a very nice guy
from a Free Thoughts interview [How Mao Broke China (with Frank Dikötter) Oct 2019]
18:00 Frank Dikötter: The key point about the Great Leap Forward is really… I mean, Li Rui, Mao’s secretary, put it… He passed away earlier this year, wonderful man, I think he lived to the age of 100. He said it in a review of Mao’s Great Famine, my book, he said, “The core reason of all this is because human beings didn’t treat other human beings like human beings, they were treated just like cattle.”
@Sebastian: first, that the officer had climbed a ladder
While holding two magnifying glasses?
worn on his face if they were eyeglasses...
Only reading glasses could do this (for distance correction you use diverging lenses which wouldn't work), and so he'd have needed to put on reading glasses because you don't normally wear them walking around... glasses that you invented just now, and Ai Weiwei doesn't describe....
And second, he said that the officer "scanned the horizon" with this apparatus.
I don't think you have tried this. You have to have your two arms stretched out to different distances keeping the lenses perfectly aligned. It is very difficult and looks very odd.
So he did not merely try to look through the glass and notice it was worse than just using his bare eyes; he kept looking through it. This strikes me as evidence that he was really seeing better with the magnifying glass than without it.
The man was trying to intimidate. He didn't need to actually see. He needed to make the crowd think he was scrutinizing them closely, a crowed that probably didn't have optics in physics class. Ai Weiwei's description explains it quite well, I think, and in order for yours to work you have to invent a bunch of evidence that contradicts what Weiwei says he saw.
Ann claims Sean's comment was the best in the history of this blog but I am quite certain she forgot about the one I made on May 14, 2013 about Hillary Clinton. Many people said, I presume, that IT was the best comment in the history of the blog, myself included. Further, reasoned analysis comes to the same conclusion.
I would reprint that comment here except for the simple fact that I have been hacked by the US government and it was erased from my computer and I think from Ann's as well. This is the 113th time I've been hacked, each time at a crucial point in my life when I needed the hacked (and erased) data to prove a point about how smart I am/was.
I have a feeling this comment will be hacked (erased) as well. I can feel it in my bones.
""But didn't rhhardin just make the same point, with minimal mansplaining?"
Perhaps, but because of the lag in comment approving, there were no published comments here when I posted my own."
Sean! I understand! There was nothing wrong with your post! Though I seem to recall M Jordan making equally brilliant observations that got hacked away by some hackers. My comment was directed at Althouse, really, with a bit of an in-joke, man doing humor and all that. We cool?
Good points, Gabriel.
OK, help me out here.
Have we decided that this Commie official was an ignorant power mad yokel,
Or,
Was he a MacGyvr-like people's hero protecting the revolution?
Only reading glasses could do this (for distance correction you use diverging lenses which wouldn't work),
Yes they would, and in fact Galileos’s first telescope was of this type: (From Google):
A Keplerian telescope has a converging lens eyepiece and a Galilean telescope has a diverging lens eyepiece.
@Smilin' Jack: a Galilean telescope has a diverging lens eyepiece.
We're working really hard for this "well akshually"--it's the classic internet Gish gallop where people can propagate disinformation faster than real information can keep up...
You can't just grab any two random lenses and expect to get a telescope. The focal lengths have to be carefully chosen. Have you heard the expression "wrong end of a telescope"? It matters which is in front and what their focal lengths are.
The magnifying glass would have to have a long focal length (i.e. be not that good a magnifying glass). The eyeglasses would have to have a much shorter focal length. Even very severely nearsighted people would not have a focal length shorter than is typical for magnifying lenses, so now we've gone from imagining a second magnifying glass (which is a converging lens) to now imagining that the security officer grabbed a random magnifying glass that just happened to match the focal length of his just-imagined-for-the-purpose freakish eyeglass prescription which might not even be possible to make out of any materials plausibly available. Otherwise it a) won't work as a telescope because the image won't actually magnify or b) his arms might not be long enough to combine them and get an image.
I suppose it's possible that all magnifying glasses in China were measured and catalogued by refractive index and owner, and our thoroughly-briefed-and-vetted security officer was chosen specifically for this mission on account of his freakish eyeglass prescription, which was the product of a crash materials science project and knew exactly what he was doing when he confiscated Weiwei's dad's and no one else's? It's not much bigger a camel to swallow than the ones presented so far, but the gnat that represents Weiwei describing accurately what he saw is apparently too big to go down with this crowd.
But even if we grant the invented-just-now freakish advanced eyeglasses and the cataloging, vetting, and briefing, he'd have had to be holding the magnifying glass at distance from his invented-just-now freakish advanced eyeglasses, not "peering through it" as Weiwei describes.
I happen to own eyeglasses and magnifying glasses and I cannot combine them for a useful telescope, because I don't have a freakish prescription though I am quite nearsighted. What I see when I look at a distance through a magnifying glass is a magnified inverted blur. What I see when I take my glasses off and try to combine them with a magnifying glass is a small, sharp image and I can only get it by taking my glasses off and holding them out from my eye. It is not easy to use two magnifying lenses that are compatible because first you have to align and get the image and then when you sweep the crowd you keep losing the image and have to realign.
At some point Occam's razor should kick in even for those with terminal Dunning-Kruger. I think it's far more likely that what Weiwei saw is what he saw.
A wiser man than myself said
Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.
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