The scripts could be a little smaller, but it would really kill readability.

“Get” AJAX Script

1. function a(l,d,u){
2. try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
3. if(r){
4. r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}
5. r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);r.send(d);
6. }
7. }

“Post” AJAX Script

1. function b(l,d,u){
2. try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();} catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');} catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
3. if(r){
4. r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML=r.responseText;}}
5. r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');r.send(d);
6. }
7. }

Combined AJAX Script

This combined script also accepts a fourth parameter ‘p’ that should evaluate true if the data is to be sent by post.

1. function a(l,d,u,p){
2. try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
3. if(r){
4. r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}
5. if(p){r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');}else{r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);}
6. }
7. }

Demo: (Sorry but you will have to go to the full page so the JavaScript is loaded.)
Click here to see the POST HTML of the homepage
Click here to see the GET HTML of the homepage
(they are the same)

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Oder, ich bin ein gummi Bär; ich bin ein gummi Bär.

All right, all right. Back to your regularly scheduled broadcasting.

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There are three forms of equality: equality of outcome, of opportunity, and of perception. Equality of perception is the most basic: it dictates that for people to be equal, each person should be perceived as being of equal worth. Equality of opportunity dictates that all people should have the same opportunities open to them if they put out the effort – this is a central tenet of the “American Dream.” The final form of equality, equality of outcome, attempts to “level the playing field” by forcing people into certain roles and dictates that all individuals should tend towards the mean – this form of equality is evident in socialist theory.

America has enacted laws that are based on equality of outcome to attempt to ensure that “minorities” and women have access to equal pay and to remove glass ceilings, but while these programs have repaired some of the damage, paraphrasing Milton Friedman, equality of outcome leaves most people without equality and without opportunity. This is because forced equality is not equality and only hides the real issue of inequality based on perceptions.

Equality is not saying that all people are physically and mentally equal, nobody would bet an average teenager could win a game of basketball against a professional player, nor can every six-year-old be a physicist because human beings are not inherently equal. However, “true equality” says that potentially everyone should have the same opportunities, that is to say, that potentially the toddler could play professional basketball and potentially the six-year-old could become a future Einstein regardless of superficial characteristics. While these two people may not actually be able to achieve their dreams, this does not mean they should be limited by what people perceive they are capable of. This is equality of perception.

Unlike equality of outcome, equality of perception creates equality of opportunity by dictating that all people should be allowed the same opportunities even if they aren’t capable of realizing them. This allows people to reach their own plateaus without unfair external pressures. However, when one attempts to use equality of outcome to create opportunity, one must take away opportunities from one person to give them to another, rather than allowing both individuals to reach their own, personal, peaks. This is not always a bad thing, during the civil rights era it was an important move to integrate America’s divided society; however, it was a first step, and only a first step. America must move beyond this first step to continue to answer its call as the “land of opportunity.”

Of course, many factors come into account throughout individual lives that change an individual’s capacity for different activities. Equality of perception requires that one realize the way we perceive people based on bias should not limit their opportunities because it does not reflect their abilities. This means that with equality of perception no human being is artificially kept from achieving their goals based on skin color, religion, national origin, or class. Equality of perception cannot be legislated, it can only be taught, but it will create freedom and lead the way to equality of opportunity, but focusing on equality of outcome just limits the freedoms upon which America was founded.

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Imagining the Tenth Dimension

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For example, let us examine a boy who steals a toy at a store. A matter of fact about this situation is that a young human male has taken an item from a store. This is what happened. The senses and reason tell us a few other things too: the toy was a plastic squirt gun; the boy used his hands to take the toy; it took only a second for the boy to do this. Hume argued that no matter what we find about the situation with our senses and our reason, we will never find the actual existence or quality of vice. So then, if morality is not intrinsic to objects in a situation, what is morality?

Hume said that morality can be found within. When you observe an immoral act, you do not find any right or wrong about the situation when you consider only the objects involved in the act. “Only when you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation” will you find a right or wrong about the situation. Hume said that this was only a feeling or sentiment though.

Therefore morality is not something of our reason, for we could not find the existence of good or bad while examining the situation with our reason. Our reason only told us facts about what happened and how it happened. Morality then must a sentiment or feeling. Hume uses the example of the philosophical view of colors, heat and other such “qualities”. Hume says that modern philosophy considers such things as colors, heat and sound as simply perceptions and not definite qualities of any object. Colors and heat are objects of our observation, to be sure, but it can not be said for sure that such things are properties of an object. Take an apple for example. We see red, but red is our perception and is not necessarily an actual quality of the apple. To go even further we cannot even say for fact that an apple exists, and if the apple does not exist than surely red can not be a quality of it. All we really know is that we perceive an apple and in our perceptions it is red. This does not also imply the existence or qualities of the apple. Hume compares this type of thought to morality. Hume is trying to show that like observations of color and heat, morality is not something that can be found, for us, in an object, but instead morality is something which only exists within our world and comes from the sentiments in us.

Hume seems to be correct in declaring morality cannot be judge through the senses. We can only know what is afforded to us by our senses and our senses do not tell us when something is wrong or right. Something only becomes wrong or right when someone applies their feelings about certain actions to what they have seen or heard. The evidence for this is the disparity in people’s moral beliefs: what offends one person’s moral sentiments does not always offend another. While many people believe it is morally offensive to commit suicide in any situation, but in many cultures thought it more honorable to kill oneself than to admit defeat in a battle. These people did not see suicide in that situation as immoral. Morality is not something that is intrinsic in the objects or the action, since two different people would come to two different conclusions about the action of suicide. Instead it must be as Hume says; morality must be within us as a personal sentiment

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Conrad is described very similarly to the way most would describe Byron: a man of few regrets and pleasures . He is seen by those closest to him as, “[t]hat man of loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile and seldom heard to sigh” (I.173-4). While Conrad is physically a normal man – “in [his] form seems little to admire,” – his persona demonstrates that something “more than marks the crowd of vulgar men,” and “[t]hough smooth his voice, and calm his general mien, / Still seems there something that [others] would not have seen” (I.195; I.200; I.206-7). Conrad is also described as being able to perceive into a person’s soul:

“He had the skill [...] to probe [ones] heart and watch [ones] changing cheek,
At once the observer’s purpose to espy,
and on himself roll back his scrutiny,
Lest he to Conrad rather should betray
Some secret thought…” (I.217-21).

Byron is seemingly describing both Conrad and himself simultaneously. Conrad is more than just an outlaw fighting his personal chivalrous war against oppression, he is a part of Byron, and Byron attributes some of his most public personae to Conrad.

Conrad is the most “Byronic” of the characters in the story, but the behaviors of other characters also illustrate the way Byron inserts himself into his art. The story of “The Corsair” easily could be seen as a traditional damsel-in-distress story but Byron twists this: Conrad is the poetical hero, but he does not conquer the evil he fights and his quest fails. Gulnare must kill Pasha Seyd and rescue the “hero.” Conrad would rather allow himself to die than to lose his chivalrous beliefs, so Gulnare must step in and perform the fatal act of murder.

Byron presents Gulnare as a feminine mirror to Conrad. At first, she is passively and typically feminine, but in rescuing Conrad, she immediately shakes off the burdens of defined gender roles and becomes something more than just a damsel. In making up for Conrad’s inability to overcome his chivalrous absolutes, the more restrained he becomes the less she restrains herself. Byron could have reduced her role to that of a plot devise to allow Conrad to escape Pasha Seyd’s dungeon, but by allowing her to abandon her given place in life, she becomes the driving force of half the poem taking on an aspect that rivals Conrad’s own in importance. Conrad, for a moment, is almost the prop upon which Gulnare is allowed to grow.

Her transformation from clichéd former damsel-in-distress enamored by her rescuer: “[I] long to view that chief again, / If I but to thank for, what my fear forgot, The life – my loving lord remember’d not!” to vengeful murderer “That hated tyrant [...] he must bleed” illustrates her total change from feminine victim to something more (III. 270-3; III.319). This change does not illustrate any feminist sympathies on the part of Byron because in becoming something more, Gulnare emasculates Conrad and destroys her innocence: the “spot of blood, that light but guilty streak, Had banish’d all the beauty from her cheek” (III.426-7). However, even by raising a woman to the status of Byronic hero, Byron blurs the line of gender roles. His attitude toward women in general is seen plainly when he requires that Gulnare sacrifice her feminine soul as she attains a masculine superiority and in the fact that he allows her voice to reach a fevered pitch before silencing her; thus, placing her voice subservient to Conrad again. This is also demonstrated when Conrad rejects Gulnare after the murder seeing only, “Gulnare, the homicide!”² (III.463). Gulnare has emasculated him, so he rejects her seeing only the negative aspects of her even after he realizes that “she for him had given / Her all on earth, and more than all in heaven!” (III.529-30).

Unlike Conrad, Gulnare is not specifically Byron; she is a powerful voice for a time, but not entirely that of the author himself. However, she could have been: as her personality shifts from feminine to masculine, her personality shifts towards that of Conrad, and thus, comes closer to Byron. The Byronic hero torch almost passes from Conrad to Gulnare with “Conrad following, at her beck, obeyd” (III. 448). The balance between the characters of Conrad and Gulnare come to its own conclusion as, “He clasp’d that hand – it trembled – and his own / Had lost its firmness, and his voice its tone.” (III.539-49). The shifting personalities had already blurred the two, and with that moment they physically merged as she “sunk into his embrace” (III. 544). The two personalities become one as Gulnare leaves the poem never to return. The shifting between the masculine and feminine reflects Byron’s own inability to fit his own identity within the narrow confines of European culture which required that his own impulses be subservient to a specifically masculine personae.

The characters themselves are only one way that the Byronic personae infiltrates his poetry, he also uses the trappings of poetry to twist the meanings and intonations of the final product: his childe is not much of a pilgrim, his ode is more satiric than honorific. The final words of poetry demonstrate the finality of Conrad’s position: “His death yet dubious, deeds too widely known. [...] Link’d with on virtue, and a thousand crimes” (694-6, III). However, the final words of “The Corsair” are not intoned by the narrator or Conrad, but by Byron himself in a footnote of nearly 2,000 words whose importance to the piece is negligible at best. By inserting generic and unimportant footnotes into emotionally charged scenes such as Medora’s plea for Conrad to remain with her, he can control the way the reader reacts. Through devices such as the introduction, epitaphs and footnotes, Byron inserts even more of himself, but he also asserts his control over the reader by leading them where he wishes them to go.

The epitaphs are seemingly innocuous Latin quotes, but when one considers them in the context of the poem the epitaphs of “The greatest of all woes / Is to remind us of our happy days / In misery [...]”, “So as his dim desires to recognize?”, “as thou seest, yet, yet it doth remain” for Cantos I, II, and III respectively take on new meanings that illuminate the events within.³ The first epigraph clearly foretells that Canto I is to be considered the “happy days,” and highlights the coming doom. The third illustrates finality: there is no going back, but the second is a little less clear. If one takes dim to reference the clarity of Conrad’s desires, the second offers a muddle. What one desires should be clear, but for Conrad and Gulnare, it is not so. These three epitaphs set the emotional charge of the succeeding Canto, but they only do so after a second reading when their connotations are less “dim;” thus, simultaneously spoiling the story for the reader and asserting the creator’s superiority.
Byron further manipulates the reader using conventions, especially in the form of verse he uses, but he wholly admits this in his introduction:

I have attempted not the most difficult, but, perhaps, the best adapted measure to our language, the good old and now neglected heroic couplet. The stanza of Spenser is perhaps too slow and dignified for narrative…The heroic couplet is not the most popular measure certainly; but as I did not deviate into the other from a wish to flatter what is called public opinion, I shall quit it without further apology…

As stated earlier, heroic couplets are almost entirely based on rhymes whose final syllables are stressed, and used solely for “heroes,” but Byron uses unstressed rhymes and uses heroic couplets not only for his vagabond corsair but also for his feminine heroine. While it could be true that these minor things do not illustrate anything more than Byron’s own artistic choices, combined with his disregard for most other conventions, one may see this as just another way for Byron to insert a little more of himself into his art. Byron’s art is entirely Byron, even when he mimics other poets, the poetry is infused with enough of Byron’s own personality that it is clearly his own work.

The multitude of voices that are present within Byron’s poetry can be daunting, but as one reads they find that the voices all come from a single source: Byron. Either intentionally or unintentionally, Byron inserts his many personae into his poetry – sometimes they flow together undetectably and others they create confusion jarring the reader with the abrupt shifts. The characters and the events are so completely “Byron” that it is hard to resist drawing parallels to Byron’s own life because at times, the poem seems to illustrate Byron’s past and future . While we cannot assume that Byron intended this to be so, the mirroring of Byron’s personality and life with the lives and personalities of his characters evidences a far deeper connection between the two than that of creator and creation. The tragedy that affects the lives of all of the characters in “The Corsair” mirrors the constant tragedy that seemed to follow Byron throughout his life. Byron’s constant searching for happiness was simultaneously defeated by his own shortcomings and the confines of society just as the Corsair’s happiness was impossible because of his own shortcomings and those around him. Through these and other examples, one can see that the entirety of “The Corsair” and other poems are not just stories, but Byron speaking through his many personae which are all pieces of him, but none entirely so.

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Notes:

1. Aside from the artistic uses of the multiple Byronic personae, they also seem to argue that he was, as believed, bi-polar. At times, his poetry seems less of an argument with others than an internal conversation he was having with himself. A conversation that the reader just happens to overhear. In “The Corsair,” one sees the various Byronic personae fighting for artistic dominance with none seemingly coming to the forefront.
2. An interesting note is that the rhyme of “homicide” with the word “bride” of the previous line forms the following couplet: “He thought on her afar, his lonely bride; He turn’d and saw – Gulnare, the homicide!” Thus, it foreshadows his lonely bride’s death, and, in a way, placing the blame for her death on Gulnare and her relationship with Conrad. Symbolically, the death of Medora may represent the betrayal of Conrad’s spirit when he kisses Gulnare because Gulnare is his true match. Medora and he are in love but they are not really “made” for each other, and Gulnare is Conrad’s equal both mentally and physically.
3. Epitaphs were translated by Byron in the poem “Francesca of Rimini” in lines (25-7), (24), and (9) respectively for Canto I, II, and III.

The spread of the most powerful culture to the rest of the word has been occurring for all of history. Those without power mimic those who have it to improve themselves. The Mayans, Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Hindus, Arabs, Romans, French, British etc ad infinitum have all been mimicked at one point in time or another in the past 4,000 Years. At no point did the world’s cultures fuse into a super-organism: coliseums were built and gladiators were trained, but provinces didn’t cast off their traditions and become purely Roman — had they done so the Roman Empire would have lasted beyond 1,500 C.E. As anyone who has listened to Hindi Pop will notice, just because the world mimics American popular culture, it does not destroy the cultural influences. Drinking Coke and eating a Big Mac does not mean a person abandons their culture.

While not specifically stated, it is a subtext of most discussions of globalism. Culture is often seen as a static institution that should not be allowed to change lest some “unique” features of it are lost to history. However, cultures have come and gone for millennium because its practitioners have changed or found a “better” way to live. The spread of the internet and globalism does not damage cultures, but allows them to adapt to the changing world. While one may bemoan the passing of cultures, sociology as a whole should not forget that its origins are based on “rapid social change.” The way cultures adapt reveals far more about a society than the way it stagnates itself.

Globalism has beneficial effects on societies, as information spreads it is able to penetrate all corners of the world instantaneously. It took 5 centuries for the concept of a ‘0′ to spread from India to Europe: a distance than can now be covered by a person in only a couple hours. Now it takes an hour for the latest news from Tibet — and most of that is because it takes time to write an article. The negative aspects of globalism are far outweighed by the positives, and although the anthropologist can bemoan the lose, sociologists should revel in it.

Image credit: woodleywonderworks

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The Earth purifies the poisons put into it, and it is capable of still putting forth the “grasses of spring,” but this is not an endless cycle. Eventually, the Earth will be corrupted by the poisons thrust into it, but the Earth will recover. If only after the sources have destroyed themselves.

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