It used to be easier...

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, you at least had to dig a bit to find the contradictions. It's a lot easier today. From the New York Post:

After the Canadian general-interest magazine Maclean’s reprinted a chapter from [Mark Steyn's book America Alone], five Muslim law-school students, acting through the auspices of the Canadian Islamic Congress, demanded that the magazine be punished for spreading “hatred and contempt” for Muslims.

The plaintiffs allege that Maclean’s advocated, among other things, the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada’s liberalized, Western civilization. They insist such a notion is untrue and, in effect, want opinions like that banned from publication.

This would seem to be another kind of "if you spread the lie that I'm violent, I'll kill you" moment, wouldn't you agree?

The idea of creating a special class of "hate" crimes, besides being a nifty paving stone on the proverbial road to hell, also appears to satisfy some visceral urge that seems to pervade humankind to punish others for being different while claiming some moral high ground in the process. The hate crimes crowd would appear to be the main contender to displace the anti-smoking crowd as the poster child for this phenomenon, which in its time featured the jackbooted thugs of Nazi Germany.

But anti-smoking is good, you say? Many goals pursued by such ideologies are lofty, if you don't think too much about their implications. Lung cancer kills, but so does obesity (and sure enough, there are a lot of people out there who want to control what you eat). So do extreme sports (and "normal" sports, for that matter). Some folks claim watching violence on TV makes people violent. Others, that any exposed part of a woman's body will induce uncontrollable sexual urges in otherwise normal men. Excessive consumption (typically stuff the speaker doesn't think you should be buying) is said to despoil the environment.

Where do you draw the line, or is everything you do subject to monitoring and control using the carrot and (more frequently) stick?

So, turning back to the subject at hand, who, possibly, could favor speech that's hateful?

If anything stuck from my reading of Ayn Rand, it's this: the right to agree is never an issue in society; the right to disagree is. And this right is being prodded toward the gas chamber by the advocates of "speech codes" and policies to punish "hate speech."

And by the way, do you notice how, according to the story, the cry has been raised to punish Macleans for spreading 'hatred and contempt"?

Could you imagine having a new class of "contempt" crimes? (If so, should "tone of voice" be included in the legislation describing them? And if the answer is in the affirmative, let me tell you, there are going to be a lot of people doing time for poor articulation.)

As it turns out, this is an opportunity for the two Canadian judicial panels (yes, the magazine was brought before two separate panels) to put the kibosh on this kind of nonsense, except for the fact that said panels appear to have a history of ruling against the publication of opinions with which they disagree.

Cheers...

So much for warm-up...

My previous essay was intended to get the synapses firing and fingers flexing as I prepared to translate the French article. A few seconds after posting, I got a call from my client telling me the translation had been scrapped.

Had I been translating instead of musing on the state of human rights in the world, I could have legitimately invoiced some words. Instead,... oh, well... The good news is that a job that had been offered about an hour ago (and refused based on the day's work load) is still open, and it will be of about the same length, so things have (probably) evened out. (Probably, because my client needs to renail the assignment from the end client, which I am told will occur within 30 minutes.)

At any rate, I had spent a couple of hours earlier today researching some of the terms in the article I was about to translate. One of them was "puits de coulée," which occurs often enough in Google to allow me to conclude it has to do with casting metals. Indeed, the French English Dictionary at www.websters-dictionary.org (which looks like a promising source for future reference) offered the English term "casting pit."

But as the subject is aerospace, I decided to refine my Google search to read:

"puits de coulée" lanceur

where "lanceur" means "launch vehicle," whereupon Goggle spit up a site with the line:

Puits de coulée des ergols d'Ariane 5 - bâtiment 304 du centre spatial Guyanais

which is right down my alley. The URL belonged to the Société Antillaise de Forage, and it looked like this:

http://www.safor.fr/FR/Page03.html

One technique that I've found useful in the absence of good online (or dead tree) dictionaries is to replace the "FR" part of the path with "EN". This doesn't always work, but it works often enough to be a useful trick. When I did this with the URL, I was served the English version of the page, where the corresponding line read:

ARIANE 5 propellants run shaft - building 304 of the guyanese space center

This would seem to solve the problem, except that you've got to be careful about the quality of the result, which in this case, to me, for this particular line, smacked of machine (i.e., word replacement) translation. My hunch became stronger when "run shaft" didn't show up in a very useful manner in Google. Worse, the query

"run shaft" Ariane

coughed up only one hit, which (from the Google excerpt) seems more than likely a porn site.

But let's see if we can't salvage something. The reference to "Building 304" at the "Guiana Space Center" serves up an interesting hit from Google, from CNES, with the following:

Another milestone was passed in early December 2002, when the 16-metre-long pit used in the propellant casting process for Ariane 5’s solid booster stages was placed in position. Another pit of the same design will be positioned next to it in 2003.

So it would seem that "casting pit" is what's called for. Too bad the job got canned.

Did someone say "lunch"? No, it's the phone.

The other job is a go.

Cheers...