Today, while watching the news about the protests, Tony Blair was shown saying more or less the only reason why we should go to war: "Even if there are 500,000 protesters out there on the streets, that is fewer than the number of people Sadam Hussein has killed with his tyranny."
I am painfully split on this issue. On the one hand, I do not like George W. Bush. Not for the reasons most people who dislike him seem to. His foreign policy is more or less not relevant to my dislike for him. I dislike George W. Bush because he's anti-capitalist.
George W. Bush is a businessman. The steel bill put millions of dollars into the crony pockets of industrial stockholders, delaying for a few years longer the inevitable collapse of old-style steelmaking in this country. Delaying it, but not preventing it. Modern so-called "micro-mills," such as those used in other countries, produce US steel much more efficiently than than older mills, but steel companies are trying to put off the need to invest capital in the new high-technology systems as long as possible. Bush made that possible.
That's not capitalism. That's crony business. The same is true of the farm bill. In the short term, it makes super-huge farms like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midlands "viable" but the price to taxpayers is horrendous, and it only puts off the collapse of the farm system's current price/product ratio by a few years. In fact it does it just long enough to make it a real crisis: fifteen years from now, millions of people will hit their retirement years only to learn that the federal government has squandered-- "borrowed" against the social security trust-- to keep our system clanking along.
And I'm not in favor of George W. Bush's war. I don't see why we should choose attack Iraq, of all places, except that he's out to "avenge" his father's failure to go all the way to Bahgdad. There are plenty of worthwhile targets out there, and plenty of ways to go about it. This need to illustrate U.S. military might is, well, another clear example of Bush squandering our reputation and capability on short-sighted goals.
On the other hand, I'm all in favor of actually doing something serious about Iraq... and Libya, Iran, North Korea, and a whole slew of other places. This is why I applauded Tony Blair's comment. Iraq is a particularly heinous example of a nation that tortures its citizens, imprisons its dissidents, and holds up a cultural standard that cripples the human potential of its women. The peace rally had signs like "War kills the innocent." Well, so does a peace that permits vicious tyrants to keep behaving the way they do. Do we really believe that Saddam will change his mind, that the people underneath him will even let him?
(For that matter, how sad is it when the U.N. general assembly nominates Libya-- Libya!-- to head the U.N. Commission on Human Rights? Khaddafi's a predatory, dictatorial thug who's only slightly smarter, but no more "humane," than Hussein.)
An acquaintance of mine snidely referred to my comment as "The white man's new burden: white people stopping brown people from killing other brown people." Let's take out the adjectives and it'll still be true: Stopping people from killing other people. How many more tragic genocides do we have to observe-- in Germany, in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia, in Rwanda-- that could have been stopped if someone had had the moral courage to say "This is wrong and we must do something about it?"
It's the day after Valentine's Day, and already reports have come out that 44 couples in Tehran were detained by police, beaten by authorities, and in at least two cases the woman was beheaded by her father for threatening "the honor of the family." Shops were burned and the Iranian "Police for the prevention of vice and the preservation of virtue"-- the selfsame office we decried so loudly when it was talked about in Afghanistan, but is apparently a commonplace feature of many Islamic nations-- swept through parks and popular lover's lanes, looking to discourage this "Western holiday."
So I'm split-- on the one hand, I want us to pull the levers of moral and economic power and say, "There are good and there are bad ways to live"-- and if you don't believe that, why do you live the way you do?-- and intervene in those places where women are subjugated, where children are abused, where collectivist notions trample the human rights of individuals-- and on the other hand, I loathe George W. Bush's method of going about it.
While watching the channels this morning, I saw a classic example of biased reporting on FOX, the channel that regularly depicts itself as being unbiased. MSNBC called the protest crowd in NY "thousands," and showed an overhead shot of the crowd. CNN called the NY protest crowd "maybe tens of thousands," and more or less the same shot.
FOX's correspondence says, "The protest organizers have a permit for 100,000 and there aren't that many here today."
WTF? Okay, on the one hand, it's a true statement. But so are CNN and MSNBC's. CNN and MSNBC tried to show that there were a lot of people. FOX, in contrast, tried to pooh-pooh the crowds, to make it seem as if the organizers had overshot their ambitions.
Y'know, I bet, in New York City, crowd permits come in allotment intervals: 10,000; 30,000, 100,000. And I bet the organizers had commitments for guaranteed appearances of at least 30,000 but probably less than 100,000, and got the permit required by law. For FOX to make law-abiding look bad is, well, entertaining.
I'm annoyed at the "How Republican Are You?" quiz. I identify as moderately center-right. I dislike collectivist premises that allow others to claim a moral high-ground that overrides individual rights; I'm deeply suspicious of government power and authority. I writhe in agony every time I go a Republican organizational meeting because there are always folks there who want to know what church I belong to or whether or not I'll support the effort to get "Darwinism" kicked out of schools; on the other hand, I know that I wandered into a Democrat's meeting I'd be greeted with open arms for my sexual history and long hair and eventually driven out with pitch and feathers for daring to claim that meritocratic paradigms should not be sacrificed to egalitarianism, and the former gives us progress and comfort and the latter never has.
So when the quiz not only tells me that I'm "Not a Republican at all" (I scored a zero-- I could have hoped that the "I'll sell a prime piece of real estate to the highest bidder if I can't find a way to to make a profit off it otherwise" would have gotten me some kind of score), but tells me that I'm a "Saint", and shows me Mother Theresa...
Well, I'm annoyed.
I don't think that Mother Theresa was a particularly nice woman. I think she was tortured by her beliefs and and never fully reconciled to herself. She never cured anyone, never helped anyone with their ailments. She swore herself to poverty but flew about the world in luxury and hung out with vicious tyrants like Ceausescu and Duvalier, who found her a convenient package of publicity by giving her a few dollars that they raped from their own people. While her clinics warehoused the dying, keeping them off the streets of cities in India and giving them, at most, aspirin, she was flown to the Mayo Clinic and given the best doctors in the world when she had her heart attack. A publicity machine turned her into a charity nexus to which millions of dollars flowed but only a third of which actually went to caring for and feeding the ill. One-third, according to ex-sisters of her order because there is no official oversight outside the Church and we will never know the truth, went to feeding a political machine dedicated to shutting down India's public health system's birth control distribution and overturning laws permitting divorce; the final third went to building Catholic infrastructure in southwest Asia, millions of dollars in Church buildings that to this day remain locked and empty because there aren't enough priests to staff them.
I could go on. Mother Theresa was a Catholic Saint. That actually means something far less pleasant than most people think. She did not care about people's suffering in this life; her only goal was to keep dying men and women in her clinics so that sisters of her order could convince them to mouth the world Catholics believe would get them into heaven. If you believe the Catholic story, this makes all the sense in the world. If you don't believe it, it seems like monstrous cruelty.
I am painfully split on this issue. On the one hand, I do not like George W. Bush. Not for the reasons most people who dislike him seem to. His foreign policy is more or less not relevant to my dislike for him. I dislike George W. Bush because he's anti-capitalist.
George W. Bush is a businessman. The steel bill put millions of dollars into the crony pockets of industrial stockholders, delaying for a few years longer the inevitable collapse of old-style steelmaking in this country. Delaying it, but not preventing it. Modern so-called "micro-mills," such as those used in other countries, produce US steel much more efficiently than than older mills, but steel companies are trying to put off the need to invest capital in the new high-technology systems as long as possible. Bush made that possible.
That's not capitalism. That's crony business. The same is true of the farm bill. In the short term, it makes super-huge farms like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midlands "viable" but the price to taxpayers is horrendous, and it only puts off the collapse of the farm system's current price/product ratio by a few years. In fact it does it just long enough to make it a real crisis: fifteen years from now, millions of people will hit their retirement years only to learn that the federal government has squandered-- "borrowed" against the social security trust-- to keep our system clanking along.
And I'm not in favor of George W. Bush's war. I don't see why we should choose attack Iraq, of all places, except that he's out to "avenge" his father's failure to go all the way to Bahgdad. There are plenty of worthwhile targets out there, and plenty of ways to go about it. This need to illustrate U.S. military might is, well, another clear example of Bush squandering our reputation and capability on short-sighted goals.
On the other hand, I'm all in favor of actually doing something serious about Iraq... and Libya, Iran, North Korea, and a whole slew of other places. This is why I applauded Tony Blair's comment. Iraq is a particularly heinous example of a nation that tortures its citizens, imprisons its dissidents, and holds up a cultural standard that cripples the human potential of its women. The peace rally had signs like "War kills the innocent." Well, so does a peace that permits vicious tyrants to keep behaving the way they do. Do we really believe that Saddam will change his mind, that the people underneath him will even let him?
(For that matter, how sad is it when the U.N. general assembly nominates Libya-- Libya!-- to head the U.N. Commission on Human Rights? Khaddafi's a predatory, dictatorial thug who's only slightly smarter, but no more "humane," than Hussein.)
An acquaintance of mine snidely referred to my comment as "The white man's new burden: white people stopping brown people from killing other brown people." Let's take out the adjectives and it'll still be true: Stopping people from killing other people. How many more tragic genocides do we have to observe-- in Germany, in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia, in Rwanda-- that could have been stopped if someone had had the moral courage to say "This is wrong and we must do something about it?"
It's the day after Valentine's Day, and already reports have come out that 44 couples in Tehran were detained by police, beaten by authorities, and in at least two cases the woman was beheaded by her father for threatening "the honor of the family." Shops were burned and the Iranian "Police for the prevention of vice and the preservation of virtue"-- the selfsame office we decried so loudly when it was talked about in Afghanistan, but is apparently a commonplace feature of many Islamic nations-- swept through parks and popular lover's lanes, looking to discourage this "Western holiday."
So I'm split-- on the one hand, I want us to pull the levers of moral and economic power and say, "There are good and there are bad ways to live"-- and if you don't believe that, why do you live the way you do?-- and intervene in those places where women are subjugated, where children are abused, where collectivist notions trample the human rights of individuals-- and on the other hand, I loathe George W. Bush's method of going about it.
While watching the channels this morning, I saw a classic example of biased reporting on FOX, the channel that regularly depicts itself as being unbiased. MSNBC called the protest crowd in NY "thousands," and showed an overhead shot of the crowd. CNN called the NY protest crowd "maybe tens of thousands," and more or less the same shot.
FOX's correspondence says, "The protest organizers have a permit for 100,000 and there aren't that many here today."
WTF? Okay, on the one hand, it's a true statement. But so are CNN and MSNBC's. CNN and MSNBC tried to show that there were a lot of people. FOX, in contrast, tried to pooh-pooh the crowds, to make it seem as if the organizers had overshot their ambitions.
Y'know, I bet, in New York City, crowd permits come in allotment intervals: 10,000; 30,000, 100,000. And I bet the organizers had commitments for guaranteed appearances of at least 30,000 but probably less than 100,000, and got the permit required by law. For FOX to make law-abiding look bad is, well, entertaining.
I'm annoyed at the "How Republican Are You?" quiz. I identify as moderately center-right. I dislike collectivist premises that allow others to claim a moral high-ground that overrides individual rights; I'm deeply suspicious of government power and authority. I writhe in agony every time I go a Republican organizational meeting because there are always folks there who want to know what church I belong to or whether or not I'll support the effort to get "Darwinism" kicked out of schools; on the other hand, I know that I wandered into a Democrat's meeting I'd be greeted with open arms for my sexual history and long hair and eventually driven out with pitch and feathers for daring to claim that meritocratic paradigms should not be sacrificed to egalitarianism, and the former gives us progress and comfort and the latter never has.
So when the quiz not only tells me that I'm "Not a Republican at all" (I scored a zero-- I could have hoped that the "I'll sell a prime piece of real estate to the highest bidder if I can't find a way to to make a profit off it otherwise" would have gotten me some kind of score), but tells me that I'm a "Saint", and shows me Mother Theresa...
Well, I'm annoyed.
I don't think that Mother Theresa was a particularly nice woman. I think she was tortured by her beliefs and and never fully reconciled to herself. She never cured anyone, never helped anyone with their ailments. She swore herself to poverty but flew about the world in luxury and hung out with vicious tyrants like Ceausescu and Duvalier, who found her a convenient package of publicity by giving her a few dollars that they raped from their own people. While her clinics warehoused the dying, keeping them off the streets of cities in India and giving them, at most, aspirin, she was flown to the Mayo Clinic and given the best doctors in the world when she had her heart attack. A publicity machine turned her into a charity nexus to which millions of dollars flowed but only a third of which actually went to caring for and feeding the ill. One-third, according to ex-sisters of her order because there is no official oversight outside the Church and we will never know the truth, went to feeding a political machine dedicated to shutting down India's public health system's birth control distribution and overturning laws permitting divorce; the final third went to building Catholic infrastructure in southwest Asia, millions of dollars in Church buildings that to this day remain locked and empty because there aren't enough priests to staff them.
I could go on. Mother Theresa was a Catholic Saint. That actually means something far less pleasant than most people think. She did not care about people's suffering in this life; her only goal was to keep dying men and women in her clinics so that sisters of her order could convince them to mouth the world Catholics believe would get them into heaven. If you believe the Catholic story, this makes all the sense in the world. If you don't believe it, it seems like monstrous cruelty.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}