Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 January 2

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January 2

Ethics of photoshopping

When "North Korea Restore[d] Order to Kim Funeral With Photoshop", the European Pressphoto Agency issued a "mandatory kill" for its clients, meaning they were not to use the picture and explained: "Any kind of digital manipulation violates EPA's code of ethics." (See also this NYT blog for more details.)

Now, incidentally, I just saw this HD request, where we at Wikipedia had no scruples whatsoever to remove a bystander from a picture so we can keep it free from distraction. I, too, would have had no scruples and I agree that the edit was an improvement. But what would the European Pressphoto Agency say to that? Are we acting unethically? — Sebastian 00:45, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Weird. Those North Koreans really do seek an image of some sort of perfection, don't they? It does seem like a deliberate deception. Can't go along with that. The problem with the Jean Carmet photo could have been solved with a pair of scissors, completely removing the background. Such "manipulation" is not new, nor deceptive. HiLo48 (talk) 01:02, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

To me it's unethical to change a picture so as to alter it's meaning, but removing a passerby who has nothing to do with the subject makes sense. However, once any photo manipulation is allowed, then you have the "slippery slope" problem. StuRat (talk) 01:26, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The article says that any photo-manipulation is considered a no-no to the European Press Agency, presumably whether it changes the content or not. And honestly, this change looks pretty much just an aesthetic change as well - it doesn't alter the meaning or subject of the photo. At Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, we evidently have a lower standard. Photo manipulation (other than for artistic purposes) is typically met with some criticism, more so in certain fields than others. A couple years ago, there was a minor fluffle over a new edition of Goodnight Moon having Clement Hurd's cigarette photoshopped out of his picture [1]. Perhaps it meets more resistance when done by a government agency - from Iran photoshopping in a missile that failed to fire [2] to the U.S. removing a man who wasn't in the boarding party for U-505 [3]. We even have a lovely article Censorship of images in the Soviet Union. Buddy431 (talk) 01:52, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Closer to home, so to speak, the famous photo of the American leaders watching the Bin Laden mission was censored by an extreme-orthodox Jewish newspaper in New York, to erase both Hillary Clinton and another woman from the version of the photo they published. When called on that, they said it's their policy not to print photos of women. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:23, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Of course we have an article about that - The Situation Room (photograph). Adam Bishop (talk) 14:42, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The larger question over what degree of manipulation is acceptable in news is not one on which I think there is broad consensus. (Worse off is advertising, of course.) It's generally accepted that you can "touch up" photographs and that is not a new thing at all. But the line between "touching up" and "unethical manipulation" has always been a blurry one, well before Photoshop existed, and exists independent of the specific technique of darkroom manipulation (where you point the camera in the first place makes a huge difference). You may be interested in Errol Morris's latest book, Believing is Seeing, which is all about the difficult question of representing truth in film and photography. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:32, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, fakery in photography (as well as other forms of art) is about as old as the art itself. A lot of that can be regarded as "artistic license". Keep in mind that CGI in movies is another form of artistic fakery. That's not really a problem, as that's fiction. The problem is alteration for political or otherwise fraudulent reasons. Senator Joe McCarthy was caught doing just that as part of his attempt to besmerch someone, and that was a piece of the puzzle in his eventual censure by the Senate. On the other hand, how many kids' high school photos were touched up before being posted in their yearbooks, to make it look like they weren't infested with acne and/or braces on their teeth? Is that fraudelent? Technically it could be. But does it matter? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:21, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

At least one newspaper has rules against photoshopping: The Guardian (UK) allows lightening/darkening but not other manipulation[4].--Colapeninsula (talk) 22:11, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Japanese equivalent to the McCollum memo ?

I'd be very interested in reading any document similar to the McCollum memo, but from the Japanese POV. That is, a document which lays out Japanese strategy and the reasoning behind their attack on Pearl Harbor (the real reasons, not political justifications). I don't know Japanese, so I'll need an English translation.

I'd like this because I've never understood their plan. They didn't have the ability to invade and defeat the US on the ground, and also didn't appear to have the ability to win a naval war against the US (although perhaps they thought they could win the naval war). So, attacking a nation you can't defeat seems like odd behavior, to me. StuRat (talk) 01:22, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Although not the primary source you seek, you might find this BBC article interesting - it asserts that the Japanese wished to take other countries, felt America would defend them, and merely wished to remove the US Pacific fleet from the board for as long as it took to conquer other countries, before then suing for peace - rather than a desire to engage the US in conflict --Saalstin (talk) 02:17, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

It's the "suing for peace" bit that makes no sense at all to me. Why on Earth did they think the US would want peace after Pearl Harbor ? StuRat (talk) 03:15, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Maybe it's one of those things that "seemed like a good idea at the time" - such as the invasion of Afghanistan. The Japanese rulers wanted to extend their empire all along their side of the Pacific Rim, and they figured that disabling our navy would further that end. It's easy to criticize the Japanese (and they had their own internal critics at the time), but that's because we know how the war turned out. It was by no means a foregone conclusion in 1941. And if we hadn't developed The Bomb, we would have had to conduct another D-Day invasion, which could have been disastrous for the Allies. So the Japanese strategy was not as crazy as it might seem. In addition to the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese military developed a program of airplaning and ballooning bombs over the west coast, primarily to intimidate Americans. That was a bluff in some sense, and it failed because wartime censorship stifled widespread discussion of those attacks. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:17, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Those balloon bombs sounded like a bad joke. Did they really expect to win the war like that ? I believe they managed to kill a grand total of one person that way. StuRat (talk) 07:00, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

They didn't exactly expect to win the war like that, they expected to terrorize the public. Thanks to wartime censorship of the American press, it didn't work. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:55, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The Japanese thought the US would want peace because that's how colonial wars worked: one side would declare war and attack the other (typically after a suitable build-up of tensions), a number of battles would be fought, and a peace would be negotiated in which the losing side would give a number of colonial territories to the winning side. --Carnildo (talk) 03:54, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Hawaii wasn't an integral part of the USA at the time, it was just another colonial possession that had been annexed in 1897, 44 years before Pearl Harbor. Consider today if someone attacked the Northern Mariana Islands; how many Americans would even know where it was? According to History of Hawaii, most Americans had never heard of Pearl Harbor. --Colapeninsula (talk) 22:20, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

This is complete wp:OR, but I think this was a generic problem with Axis strategy. The lesson learned from WWI was that technology was outstripping the strategy of conquering and securing territory piece by piece - the tools of trench warfare had simply obsoleted the idea of massed armies slowly marching their way across a country. So the Axis went in for a new strategy (what we call blitzkrieg) in which securing territory was secondary and the main goal is to disrupt the enemy's internal cohesion and destroy key strategic facilities as rapidly as possible. Sweep across the territory making a mess of it, and then you can slowly secure that mess piecewise once the possibility of cohesive retaliation is eliminated. The problem with the strategy on that scale (as all the Axis powers found out, in their own way) is that the job has to be finished quickly and well. it's an intentional over-extending of available forces, relying on mobility to compensate: If the opponent isn't sufficiently disrupted and can muster enough opposition to bog down forces in a given arena, the advantage of mobility is lost, and what's left is over-extended supply lines crossing unsecured territory. In the Japanese case, I suspect they were intending to more-or-less wipe out the American presence in the Pacific, at least long enough so that they could secure all of their island annexations. had the US response been delayed even a year (allowing Japan to fortify and stockpile resources) it would have been a much uglier contest (even given how ugly it was). --Ludwigs2 06:37, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

But the Japanese didn't seem to even have a plan to destroy the entire American Pacific fleet. I'd expect that, at least, this would have involved destroying the shipyards at San Francisco and the Panama Canal, as well as Pearl Harbor, to prevent rapid repair and replacement of damaged and lost ships. Everything I've read also indicates that the US industrial capacity vastly outstripped that of Japan, which, of course, was already bogged down fighting in China and elsewhere.

Europe seemed to be a different case. The axis powers there appeared to have a real chance at winning, had they made a few decisions slightly differently, like destroying the British forces before they could evacuate from Dunkirk, then finishing off the British before attacking the Soviet Union, etc. StuRat (talk) 06:55, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Hmm… well, as I said, this is just me thinking out loud. however, the goal in blitzkrieg is not to destroy the enemy completely, but merely to disrupt operation sufficiently that the enemy can't raise an organized resistance. Sealing off Pearl harbor and decimating the standing pacific fleet should have been enough to hogtie the US (ships-in-production are not an immediate threat, and having to route ships through the canal would have created a major bottleneck - both issues the Japanese could have dealt with as they arose). It would have bought the japanese time to solidify. That might not have been enough - the raw industrial power of the US was a force that was going to have to be reckoned with sooner or later - but what eventually did the Japanese in was that they didn't have time to capitalize on the huge territories they'd taken control of. --Ludwigs2 18:46, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

It's not my area of knowledge, but I do know that Roosevelt said in the mid-30s: "[there should be] no expectation that the United States would ever again send troops or warships or floods of munitions and money to Europe". If this attitude was repeated in discussions with Japan, then one can easily see why they did not expect the US to respond quite the way they did (although as we know, Pearl Harbour didn't go quite to plan anyway). Ultimately the war required a flood of US troops and warships and munitions to the Far East. It was quite a commitment. Of course, attacking someone does not help them stay out of things, but otherwise the US could have spring the War Plan Orange or something. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 20:54, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Wilson and LBJ also made promises to keep our boys out of harm's way, in contrast to their war-hawk opponents in their respective elections. Things have a way of changing once an election is over. The accusation that FDR basically "allowed" Pearl Harbor to happen was echoed by similar sentiments regard 9/11. And regarding Pearl Harbor, Richard Armour said in It All Started With Columbus, "...the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, whereupon our forces landed in North Africa to confuse [them]." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:14, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Sounds a lot like 9-11, where we confused bin Laden, who was hiding in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, by sending our troops to Iraq rather than attacking him. StuRat (talk) 04:01, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

How exclusive is the path to enlightenment?

From the perspective of all those religions which strive enlightenment, Buddhism for example, how exclusive is their path? Do they accet that other paths of similar religions can also be valid? And do they accept the existence of other paths, unknown to them, to enlightenment? (like playing music, doing sport, taking LSD while dancing or whatever). 88.8.76.174 (talk) 00:46, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

While I can't answer the question, I can point out that a recent sevey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that the majority of all Americans of all faiths other than Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses agreed that 'Many religions can lead to eternal life' ([5] page 4) - amongst Buddhists, the statement was supported by 86% of those taking part. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:01, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, you have to remember that Eastern faiths (those derived from ancient Vedism in one way or another) don't have quite the same do-or-die attitude as Abrahamic faiths. According to the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam…) people get one shot: if they choose the wrong behavior in this lifetime they get dealt with badly on the Judgement Day, and that's that. That makes following the 'right' religion (and avoiding the 'wrong' ones) a matter of great concern, and drives them to be very unsympathetic to competition. According to Eastern religions, however, one keeps getting reincarnated until one gets it 'right', so getting it 'wrong' in a given lifetime is not a big deal (and is, in fact, perfectly natural). For instance, Buddhists would (and do) say that the only path to enlightenment is by following the Buddha's teachings, but there is no compulsion for anyone to do so in this lifetime. For Buddhists, there's nothing wrong with any religion except to the extent that religious beliefs draw you into attachment. If you decide you want to seek enlightenment through music, sports, LSD, or what you will, a devout Buddhist will inform you that that's not what the Buddha taught but won't be overly concerned if you try it anyway.

That being said, there are may, many different sects of buddhism, and significant differences between lay (religious) buddhism and monastic (philosophical) buddhism. In the west we are mostly exposed to monastic buddhism from three or four prominent sects, with a particular emphasis on high-minded philosophy. You should not expect all buddhists (particularly traditional religious Asian sects) to be as open-minded as I've presented it. If you end up in a village in Thailand talking to a local Buddhist priest and tell him that you plan to reach enlightenment by taking psychotropic drugs, don't be surprised if he beats some sense into you with a bamboo switch. From his perspective, that might be necessary and right. --Ludwigs2 02:40, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Buddhism afirms at least the possibility of members of other religions ataining enlightenment, although their relevance is a matter of dispute. See Pratyekabuddha. As for other paths leading to enlightenment, it would depend on what exactly that path is like. According to my understanding of the sect that I follow ( Theravada , for the record) such a path would have to empasize meditation that is based at least in part on the four satipatthana in order to lead to enlightenment, but almost all paths that emphasize meditative states will lead a person to rebirth in a very nice heaven for quite some time. Rabuve (talk) 03:39, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The Buddhist Zen teacher I learned a bit from, John Daido Loori, did not think Zen had any special validity over and beyond other paths. He often compared Zen to Catholicism, which he had been raised in. During one talk he essentially said the two paths aimed for the same thing, but he had come to prefer Zen because it began from a more pleasant axiom: Rather than striving to be "saved" from "original sin", he said, Zen starts off saying everyone is already enlightened from the start; all you need to do is realize it. But he dismissed the difference as little more than semantics and philosophy. However, every teacher and practitioner is different, and there have certainly been bitter disputes over which path is the "true path" in Zen, let alone Buddhism in general. Pfly (talk) 09:39, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

FWIW "Truth is not something in the distance; there is no path to it, there is neither your path nor my path; there is no devotional path, there is no path of knowledge or path of action, because truth has no path to it. The moment you have a path to truth, you divide it, because the path is exclusive; and what is exclusive at the very beginning will end in exclusiveness. The man who is following a path can never know truth because he is living in exclusiveness; his means are exclusive, and the means are the end, are not separate from the end. If the means are exclusive, the end is also exclusive. So there is no path to truth, and there are not two truths. Truth is not of the past or the present, it is timeless; the man who quotes the truth of the Buddha, of Shankara, of Christ, or who merely repeats what I am saying, will not find truth, because repetition is not truth." (Krishnamurti).--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:41, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Liberation of St. Peter question

It seems to me that if an angel did not get Peter out of prison, then Peter was lying and was most likely released by his jailers at the price of becoming, if he wasn't already, a Roman informant in the Christian church. It is possible, or conceivable anyway, that an angel did let him out and Peter was telling the truth. But I think there have got to be many others besides me who've been sceptical and speculated similarly. Does anyone have any references? Thanks. --Richard Peterson76.218.104.120 (talk) 08:07, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

I think skepticism as to "angelic intervention" is normal in our modern age, and I would be willing to bet that there are indeed sources that "explain away" all biblical references to miracles, angels, etc. I am not sure your conclusion as to what must have happened if an angel was not involved (ie that Peter must have lied and must have been some sort of informant) holds up, however. There are lots of far simpler "non-angelic" explanations that could account for the story... ones that do not involve the idea that Peter was some sort of informant (which, quite honestly, strikes me as bordering on conspiracy theory type logic).

For example: it could be that the biblical reference to an "angel" is metaphorical... Peter is freed by a human (such as one of his Roman jailors) who was sympathetic to the Christian message. This is seen as "miraculous" by his friends (Someone let you out?... A Miracle! Must have been an angel). Another simple explanation is that the entire episode never happened, that the story is an invention of later hagiographers, created to conform Peter's story to religious-mythological traditions of the time (the hero escaping from prison through divine intervention is a fairly common religious/mythical plot twist after all). My point is that if you want to be skeptical, try to find the simplest explanation... and there are several that are far simpler than the one you came up with. Blueboar (talk) 16:28, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

• The problem with Occam's razor is that you can't linearly order simplicity.-Rich Peterson76.218.104.120 (talk) 20:24, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

How many times have mere mortals broken out of jails, bribed their guards into letting them out, or been let out by sympathetic guards? I'm not sure why it's so hard to believe that someone 2000 years ago got out of a jail when some people in the modern age can break out of maximum-security prisons or concentration camps. --184.66.8.204 (talk) 07:53, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

A few chapters later, in verse 16:26, it was an earthquake... AnonMoos (talk) 17:33, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Should the stuff about the earthquake be put into the articleLiberation of St. Peter?-Rich Peterson76.218.104.120 (talk) 20:24, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Translated in English Wikipedia article

Hello The English Wikipedia has an article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_warfare. In the Russian wikipedia this article in more detail: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%B0. I suggest you move to the English Wikipedia. Странник27 (talk) 15:51, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

I think we could probably expand the article without transcribing and translating it from the Russian Wikipedia. I am sure there are lots of English language sources we could use. Blueboar (talk) 16:35, 2 January 2012 (UBold textTC)

Personally, I look for problem sources and write articles in English. Russian paper in more detail. Sorry to bother you, I just suggested. Странник27 (talk) 16:38, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

See Requesting a translation for how to request a page be translated from a foreign language and incorporated in English Wikipedia. --Colapeninsula (talk) 22:22, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

History book about South Korea?

Can anyone point me to a good book (in English) about the general history of South Korea?

I have a history degree but I don't know much about South Korea. So a academic introduction would be good, as long as it reads like a book and not a textbook (I heard bad things about George Buzo's book)

The History of South Korea article is nice but I wanted to know in more detail about how S Korea developed as a society... dictatorship to democracy, but how, why etc?

Thanks! Ilikeredirects (talk) 20:11, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

I found This book titled "The spirit of independence : a primer of Korean modernization and reform", which appears to have been written by Syngman Rhee, so it may have a "spin" to it. However, that link is from WorldCat, and it has some subject search functions. If you look off to the right, under the column "more like this" you may be able to find something. --Jayron32 21:31, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The semi-standard older survey of Korean history as a whole seems to be "A New History of Korea" by Ki-baik Lee (ISBN 0-674-61576-X), published 1984... AnonMoos (talk) 21:51, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Oops, just figured out that that book ends with the events of 1960 (or my edition does), so it may not be the best book for South Korean history specifically (as opposed to Korean history in general). AnonMoos (talk) 02:06, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Mark Clifford's "Troubled Tiger" (1998) is a good history / analysis of 1980s-1990s developments.DOR (HK) (talk) 00:43, 8 January 2012 (UTC)