Our Chinese friends are eating our lunch, and we seem to constantly be looking for ways to make it easier for them to do so. The flagellants are practitioners of an extreme form of mortification of their own flesh by whipping it with various instruments. It was most notably a fourteenth-century movement within the Catholic Church. It served as a sort of self-inflicted penance for the practitioners-penance for sins actual and imagined. There is a Chinese word, baizou (pronounced "bye-tsaw"), which refers insultingly to educated western people who advocate for peace and equality only to satisfy their own feelings of...