Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

Turkish toys

One unexpected feature of Istanbul: nightmarish Christmas toys. Sorry for the poor video quality, but it was shot using my digital camera in less-than-ideal lighting conditions.

I am not sure which are the creepiest: the Satanic looking robotic musical Santas, the little boys with assault rifles and grenades, or the crawling shooting soldier. The last is almost certainly the least disturbing, because it is a consistent motif. The middle option is probably the most, because of how the cheerful expression on the faces of the dolls jars with their attire and accouterments.

Ethical consumerism: worthwhile or harmful?

In the December 9th issue of The Economist, which I am just starting today, they come out against organic food, Fair Trade, and the idea that buying locally grown food is superior to relying on big retailers and large commercial farms (Leader and article). Organic food means producing lower yields for the same area of land: a big problem when you have a growing population and a desire to preserve wilderness. Fair Trade keeps farmers in poverty by encouraging farmers to keep growing commodities with volatile prices and low margins; moreover, most of the premium consumers pay goes to the retailer, rather than the farmer. As for local food, they say that large scale farming and food retailing produce food using less energy and resources (sheep are cheaper to farm in New Zealand and ship to the UK than to farm here). The solutions to problems like poverty and climate change, therefore, lie in carbon taxes, reform of agricultural trade policy, and the like.

Fair trade has always been a somewhat problematic concept, in my eyes. The whole basis for the legitimacy of exchange is in the process: the voluntary nature of the agreement means that both people who engage in it must perceive themselves to benefit. Now, there can be problems with this:

The people may be wrong about what is in their interests
Third parties may be affected
The choice to trade may not be voluntary

All of these are real problems in many economic circumstances, but it is not clear why paying more for a label alleviates any of them. If we abandon the idea that the legitimacy of exchange is confirmed through its voluntarism, then we are left with the task of developing a comprehensive framework based on a teleological conception of justice (what people end up with, as opposed to how they get it). Even if that is desirable, achieving it is not simply a matter of paying a few more dollars a week for coffee or bananas.

As for the problems with local and organic food, the issues there are primarily empirical and thus hard for me to evaluate. If the price of carbon emissions was included in that of food (and all other products), I would see little problem in eating tomatoes from Guatemala or apples from New Zealand. Similar criticisms are leveled in Michael F. Maniates’ interesting article Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?. Maniates’ major point is that you will never get anywhere with a few token individual gestures. What is necessary is the widespread alteration of the incentives presented to individuals. Otherwise, you have a few people who salve their consciences by walking to work and buying from a farmers’ market, while not actually doing anything to address the problems with which they are supposedly concerned.

While the position taken by both The Economist and Maniates may overstate the point, both are worth reading for those who have accepted uncritically the idea that important change can be brought about through such ethical purchasing.

PS. Unfortunately, Oxford doesn’t have full text access to the journal Global Environmental Politics. If someone at UBC or another school could email me the PDF, it will save me a trip to the library and some photocopying costs, not to mention the integrity of the spine of their August 2001 issue. Here is a link to the page on their site for this article and another to a Google Scholar search that has it as the top hit.

[Update: 1:10am] A friend has sent me a much appreciated copy of the above requested PDF.

Fresh ‘Papa Fly’ offering

My brother Mica has a new video online: Red Light. This one is heavier on the special effects than any of the previous ones, and I find it quite entertaining. Here’s a direct link to Google Video.

The twenty minute filming time would be the envy of major studios.

[Update: 19 December 2006] Mica has been interviewed about his films by one of the people affiliated with Bopsta (formerly Google Idol).

Back in the UK

Back in the comparative warmth of Oxford, I am enjoying how it feels to be on a computer with a properly calibrated screen and a keyboard familiar enough to require no peeking. It is gratifying to see how much better my photos look when properly displayed.

Since this is my father’s last night in England, I am not going to spend the three hours or so that it will take to sort through my photos from Turkey, just now. You can expect my previous entries to start getting illustrated as of tomorrow, as well as additional batches on Facebook and Photo.net.

PS. Both my iPod Shuffle and my USB flash drive picked up a few viruses over the course of visiting hostel and internet cafe computers. Thankfully, they are all viruses that only affect Windows machines. Travelers with laptops (or computers running Windows back home) beware. I do feel bad about spreading viruses between all those machines; no wonder they were so slow.

Muttering Turkish conclusion

Those feeling ill should consider eating 100g of double pistachio Turkish Delight, five pimento stuffed green olives, a cup of apple tea, and a single white peppercorn from the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul. Even if it does you less good than it seems to have done me, the search for these items will lead you into and through one of the most interesting parts of the city. Perhaps because it actually sells useful things, in contrast to the touristy trinkets of the Grand Bazaar, the place has a much healthier and more enjoyable air. I now have over a kilo of various vacuum sealed fresh spices to share with friends in England.

This morning consisted of a second long foray into the Grand Bazaar. Never a real fan of shopping, it became pretty grating quite soon. That said, it is just the place for those souls who really delight in the art of haggling. During the afternoon, we saw the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (which had two guards and one staff member for every guest). Unfortunately, I wasn’t entirely in a state to appreciate it, though some of the calligraphy included was undenialy very fine. All day, I have felt like a spiky ball has been inside my head: when I move forward, it hits the back of my head painfully. Likewise if I turn or move around. When I cough, as I have been doing often, the spiky ball doubles in size and pierces the inside of my skull from all directions. Massive doses of vitamin C, purchased from a local pharmacy this morning, have not been an effective counter thus far. Part of the problem is that it so cold in the rooms of the Sultan Hostel that my father and I were waking one another up every few minutes, as we fought over shared blankets all night while wrapped in warm clothes and woolen hats. Perhaps this is a concealed blessing, serving to make the return to Oxford seem more welcome.

This evening’s Spice Bazaar visit, along with tea, backgammon, and lentil soup in the simple restaurant where we have been finding ourselves once a day, made for a good end to our last day in Turkey. It is unlikely that I will have the chance to return any time soon, but I definitely recommend it to curious and adventurous travellers.

PS. My standard internet cafe has been without access for three days and the staff seem utterly unhurried about repairing anything. At the best of times, their total revenue is less than four Canadian dollars an hour. The fact that they seem to be open all the time is at least odd and at most suspicious. The upshot of all of this is that I only get a fifteen minute burst of hostel internet time, which has now very nearly expired.

I will write more and post additional pictures from Oxford tomorrow night.

Madness and unlikely meetings

Aside from the man at the tourist information booth where we left our bags, the first person who we met in Goreme was Harun: a 24 year old banker from Istanbul off on a vacation in Cappadocia with his friend for a few days. During our time there, we saw them constantly. We got onto a tour bus and there they were. We stepped into a restaurant or walked down a street and his distictiely dyed grey hair would appear.

This evening, my father and I took a ferry across the Bosphorus to Kadikoy on the Asian side. At a Red Crescent blood donation centre, my father met a huge and friendly officer in the Turkish naval special forces who gave us a tour of the area. We visited his favourite nut shop and had tea. Shortly after leaving him so that he could go to his Aikido practice, my father and I were astonished to see Harun. In a city of fifteen million, we ran into the same guy who we saw constantly in a small town 800km away.

We shared our astonishment, then got coffee in an area that could have been transplanted anywhere from Helsinki to Robson Street in Vancouver. There was a Starbucks that could have been shrink-wrapped and shipped from Seattle. In the coffee shop we visited, everything was equally familiar, barring the photo of Ataturk on the wall.

This morning, we took a much more thorough tour of the Topkapi Palace, former seat of the Ottoman Empire. One notable feature, in the harem, is “The Cage.” Hoping to avoid the need to commit fratricide, a sultan decided to simply imprison all relatives with a claim to the throne along with food, opium, and concubines. To prevent the generation of any additional claimants, any women impregnated by those in the cage would be swiftly drowned. Unfortunately, those who emerged after decades in the cage, after a previous sultan died, were often mad. One had the grand vizier executed after a complaint that the harem was too cold one day; he also had all 280 palace concubines drowned in the Bosphorus (though one did escape from her weighted sack and get taken to Paris by a passing French merchant vessel). I joked to my father that prime ministers in Westminster style democracies might see merit in such a cage for finance ministers.

Tomorrow may well involve an expedition across the Sea of Marmara, but that remains to be planned over a few glasses of apple tea.

Cursing Nicotiana species’

During the last couple of days, I have started reacting very badly to tobacco smoke. It makes my nose run, my eyes water and turn bloodshot, and my face burn and itch. It is just like the allergic reaction I sometimes get in the presence of lots of dust. This is especially bad because everything here – from the ferries to cafes to bars to palace courtyards – is saturated with smokers and toxic fumes.

That humanity has embraced such a disgusting and anti-social practice so broadly is a fairly strong indictment of our good sense and compassion. The smoking of tobacco surely ranks among the worst of all human discoveries, along with biological warfare and ethnic nationalism.

A friend on the air

Alison Benjamin, a media savvy friend of mine who I’ve known for more than a decade and a half, is dıscussed extensively in this article in UBC Reports. She is the president of CıTR, the student-run independent campus radio station at the University of British Columbia, and the article is about the role the station played. 2007 will be the 25th anniversary of the station. Those outside the standard transmission range can still benefit from the free web content including podcasts. A station that “helped launch Neko Case” is surely worthy of respect; I have been enjoying her latest album almost daily for months.

My thanks to Meghan Mathieson for bringing the article to my attention.

Two people, and three days, left

After getting knocked out of whack by the bus trip, today was fairly light on sightseeing. Before Ivanka caught her flight back to Crimea, where she is working on a CIDA-sponsored project to better integrate children with disabilities into the education system, we spent most of our time buying gifts for family members. I originally planned to pick up a couple for people in Oxford, but I have always found shopping exhausting. It is especially bad when you are being constantly lied to about prices, manufacturing methods (everything is ‘handmade’), and the materials from which products are made (that ‘pearl finish’ is clearly a plastic sticker).

One interesting thing we did see, in the evening, is the 80,000 cubic metre cistern built by Emperor Constantine underneath the Hipodrome and the site of the Hagia Sophia. While the site includes no educational information at all, it is pleasantly creepy.

Tomorrow, we are to visit some museums, see the harem in the palace, and walk a portion of the city walls.

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Irksome spammers

My spam problems have become very acute, with five or so spam comments appearing on commonly visited posts each day. In response, I have kicked up the sensitivity of Spam Karma 2 by a couple of notches. My apologies if this makes it more difficult to leave legitimate comments.

Judging by some of the search strings that are leading people to the site, I think blogs that use Spam Karma 2 are being specifically targetted. I may need to adopt a new system once I get back to Oxford on the 16th or 17th.

[Update: 29 December 2006] I am having two spam problems now. One is annoying and one is just odd. The first is that some spam comments are getting through Spam Karma 2, even with the Akismet plugin. They have karma values of over 1000, which I think must be the result of a clever hack. I changed the page footer with the number of spams caught, to make it less obvious that I am running SK2. The odd thing is that the number of spams caught figure just doesn’t go up anymore. I have no idea why, or how to fix it.

[Update: 31 December 2006] For no comprehensible reason, the spams caught count has started rising again: jumping immediately by forty points. The best thing to do seems to leave it alone.

[Update: 2 January 2007] For some reason, today involved a veritable cascade of comment spam. At midnight yesterday, my filters had caught 870 spam comments. 24 hours later, they have caught 1065. That is 22% of all the comments received thus far, all on a single day. I am impressed that my new combination filtering system (details top secret) managed to catch every single one, without catching any real comments by mistake.

[Update: 21 January 2007] Because of aggressive spammers, I had to disable the ability of people in general to register accounts with the WordPress installation for a sibilant intake of breath. People who want one should ask me by email, and I will set one up on their behalf.

[Update: 15 April 2007] I am surprised to see that I thought five spam comments a day was a large number, back in January. Now, I get more like 50. Thankfully, I have some better protections in place. As such, I am allowing user registration again. We will see how it goes.