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The invisible crisis

March 8th 2010 05:07

“Woman Abandons Baby in Dumpster, Goes to Party” screams a link on the Fox News website. You don’t need to read it to know what its content is. You’ve read a thousand articles like it before. Its tone encourages readers to shake their heads, make that impatient click noise with their tongues and teeth, and marvel at what kind of selfish failure could do something so callous. It’s a lot like those episodes of Maury Povich where he drags “out-of-control teens” on stage, interrogates them about their private life, and calls on D West to stand over them and shout slogans: self-righteous voyeurism, streamed directly into your home at broadband speeds.

It has no discussion of the fact that this is exactly what you would expect to happen in a society that refuses to make birth control available. It has no discussion of the fact that infanticide has been commonplace since the beginning of the last Ice Age, and that the conception of the maternal instinct as universal, all-encompassing, and overwhelming has been forced on us relatively recently, to make women feel bad about themselves either in comparison to other women or to their boyfriends’ or husbands’ expectations. It makes no comment on the fact that such an action is quite extreme, and must therefore have had some sort of a prelude, and features no discussion of what the person’s background or situation might be like.

That article is one of the most read on Fox News’ entire website for the last week. Even as I write, people are e-mailing it to their friends, so everyone can shake their heads, make that impatient click noise with their tongues and teeth, and wonder who’s going to put selfish young women like that back in their place. Nobody asks questions of the people in our country who hold the power to ameliorate this and every situation like it but choose not to. America takes its blue pill, and the young, as they ever have, suffer.

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One corpse, 11 people, and 450 mllion critics

February 19th 2010 03:50

Do you remember when Hamas was considered a proscribed Islamic terrorist organization and Israel a legitimate government? Ah, those were the days. And they took one step closer to ending forever today.

I’m astonished by the scale of the furore over this for two reasons. One, the dead man in Dubai was a commander of Hamas, whose mindset is illuminated by considering some of its allies. In particular, consider President Bashar Assad of Syria, whose office foyer sports a life-size statue depicting Saladin expelling Crusaders from Palestine. He, and his allies in Hamas and Iran, are at the vanguard of what is already a wide Islamic front against the West and its interests, in practice if not in name. They see themselves as modern-day Saladins, and they see Assad’s statue as both the model for their actions and the prediction of their outcome. And once they finish with Tel Aviv and Ashkelon, they’re going to move on to Rome and Paris.

And Israel is condemned for striking first at that front? Ridiculous.

Second of all, I am nauseated by the repeated claims that the incident is being investigated as a “normal” case of murder and fraud, and that the upcoming diplomatic spats between Israel and Britain, Ireland, Austria, and others are because of the use of falsified passports and telephone networks in those countries. If that’s so, Gordon Brown, answer me one question: why don’t you summon ambassadors when Chinese hackers do the same thing, or the al-Quds “newspaper” operatives? Because you have a twisted pro-Third World bias, where Middle Eastern, African, and Oriental players are not only exempt from the rules but have to be protected from them. Israel’s sin is, in this narrative, more than “just” defending itself – it is striking at a Third World enemy in a Western manner, and taking at face value their assertion that there is a war going on, forcing Hamas to deal with said war in the same way Western countries have to.

As I noted above, the connection to Austria may have been to do with telephone communications that co-ordinated the operation. It will be ironic to me if they join in the dogpile on Israel, considering that it was at the gates of Vienna that Suleyman the Magnificent’s advance into Europe was halted in 1529. If, heaven forbid, the next Suleyman reaches Vienna, it will not be for the lack of attempts to prevent it by some – and bewildering apathy on the parts of others. In short, when Islam comes knocking on Europe’s door, they’d better not come crying to Israel.

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In the shadow of Botany Bay

February 3rd 2010 06:46

“I came upon the prison ship, weighed down by iron chains;
I fought the land, I tilled the soil, and waited for the rain.”
-- From “I Am Australian,” written by Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton

I’ve lived in Australia for about half my life now, but even after all these years, I still want to cry whenever I hear the song “I Am Australian.” It reminds me that the country which I have made home for that time was once one giant prison for the British empire's “undesirables,” and I can’t help but wonder what scars it has left on Australia’s national psyche.

Y’know who else deported criminals and malcontents to a wilderness on the other side of the world? Stalin.

Australia made the best of its situation, and managed to find good in the results of the British crown’s atrocities. The question is not what can be done about it now, but why does nobody ask what can be done about it now? Considering that some countries hold grudges and base modern diplomacy on incidents that happened over a thousand years in the past, why should Australia (and America, Ireland, and Scotland, for that matter) be compelled to whitewash or forget things that happened only a century ago?

It’s easy to forget that the NATO system and worldview whereby everything west of Bavaria is “like us” dates only to World War II. It’s even easier to forget that America’s last major interaction with Britain prior to World War I was fighting the War of 1812. Seventy years is a long time, but not as long as even a young country like America or Australia’s history. If we were starting new today, would we find anything in common with any of our current “staunch allies?”

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
-- Winston Churchill

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Gaea's revenge

January 14th 2010 02:06

People come to universities to hear interesting ideas – and, increasingly, conspiracy theories. Just today, for example, I overheard someone explaining to their acquaintance that the real cause of world hunger is high food prices, engineered by large multinationals to squeeze the maximum possible profit out of recent all-time record harvests which were apparently enough to feed the entire world. I didn’t have time to stop and ask the obvious questions (what sort of nutrition value would each of the 6.3 billion people on Earth get? How do you expect farmers to make a living if they just give their crops away? etc.), and I wonder if they even had the answers to them.

I always try to understand the arguments in favor of positions I don’t agree with, but I must admit to being absolutely perplexed by claims that any country needs more population. Anyone who claims with a straight face that this planet is not overpopulated already has clearly never been to Hong Kong or Bangkok. Even Melbourne has severely strained water supplies and public infrastructure, despite having a population of “only” around three million and a much larger land area (which makes Kevin Rudd’s repeated claims that Australia needs more population especially confusing and irritating). Given that overpopulation and the resulting conflict over resources has been shown to contribute to not only elevated stress, anxiety, and dysfunction in individuals but also conflict between nations and ethnic groups, there is no basis to claim that any country needs to grow its population for economic or security reasons. There is not even, in truth, any historical evidence to support this; unless you have a different explanation for why Switzerland has traditionally been considered a more successful country than Russia, or how a few thousand Dutch merchants and soldiers controlled tens of millions of Indonesians for more than four centuries

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South Park: bigger, wronger, and unhelpful

January 3rd 2010 00:01

Remember the discussion a few years ago about ”South Park Republicans?” Notice how it completely disappeared without further discussion, right when the Republican Party is considered to be needing a new direction and image?

Part of it is just alignment incompatibility between the mainstream media on the one hand and Trey Parker and Matt Stone on the other. There seemed to be some hope that the new face of the Republican Party would be overall less conservative, a sort of “Democratic Party Lite;” hence the initial interest in South Park’s support for gay rights. But their interest cooled as other episodes lampooning Democrats were released, and some of their other opinions are either conservative or downright illiberal. (Ever see the one where Stan’s parents get divorced? Even James Dobson would probably say they could stand to be a little less militant about it

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One of a kind

December 17th 2009 00:31

There’s a certain country that’s beginning to get a bad reputation in many parts of the world. It overwhelms local cultures with its business and products. It props up unpopular regimes to further short-term interests. It demands ever-increasing amounts of primary resources, often resulting in environmental devastation. It pursues petty territorial disputes, often in places it has no real connection to, solely to exert dominance over its smaller neighbors. It’s called China, and –

Oh, wait. You thought I was talking about America? Understandable, as we’re not really encouraged these days to examine any other country’s foreign policy in this way. It’s sort of a strange dark mirror to the idea of American exceptionalism: the United States is not just another country, but a unique exemplar of expansionism, greed, and dishonesty. As such, we lose sight of some elements of other countries' foreign policy, even the bizarre and pernicious ones. If you ever paused to wonder what the hell the Chinese government was thinking by claiming that part of the Philippines belongs to it, or why the Moroccan government allows its sanctioned imams to publicly dream about reclaiming Andalusia, or how the ayatollahs of Iran could even imagine nuking the supposedly holy city of Jerusalem, you might conclude that America’s financially-motivated meddling wasn’t so bad after all

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Epic fail

November 25th 2009 23:16

Did you read Phillip Levine’s article about Bart Stupak’s anti-abortion amendment to the health care bill? If so, could someone tell me how it ended? See, I tuned out after he started counting the number of women of childbearing age covered by Medicaid, and the number of women covered by private insurance who actually seek abortions. (If one of my students threw quotes around without citations as much as he does, I’d penalize them – but apparently the New York Times has a less strict marking guide.)

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Up the creek

November 8th 2009 06:51

I just canceled my subscriptions to Planned Parenthood’s and NARAL Pro-Choice America’s online newsletters. If you think reproductive rights are important, I’d advise you to do the same.

They’ve done things that raised an eyebrow in the past. Recently, for instance, they failed to denounce Barack Obama when he made a callous, misogynistic slur about “feeling blue” back during the primaries. But the passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and its language which Democratic Representative Diana DeGette described as “the greatest restriction of a woman’s right to choose to pass in our careers,” represents an abject failure on the part of the organizations who claim to be the flagship of all pro-choice Americans. They were the same ones who urged us over and over and over to vote for Obama, vote for Democrats, because things like this were not supposed to happen

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Down the memory hole

October 23rd 2009 05:02

“We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results, that elect a fictitious president.”
-- Michael Moore

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Reports of our death

October 13th 2009 05:14

“Mr. Burns was rushed to Springfield Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was then transferred to a better hospital, where doctors upgraded his condition to alive.”
-- Kent Brockman

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