National Sanctity of Human Life Day

You know why I think things like the Prevention First Act are so important? Because things like that act display the beautiful, best humanity of truly "pro-life" people, whether or not they believe that abortion is among acceptable answers to the life-damaging problems that unwanted pregnancies bring.

I salute all of you, this day after yesterday.

Yesterday was both the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, cause for celebration among those who believe that abortion is among acceptable answers and "National Sanctity of Human Life Day," allegedly a day of celebration among those who believe that it isn't.

However, as "Plutonium Page" pointed out, the day, if taken at its title's face value, should not have a darned thing to do with whether or not abortion is an acceptable answer to life-damaging problems caused by unwanted pregnancies. If the title lived up to its words, the day should be dedicated to decreasing suffering in the most effective ways possible (that is, usually as close to the beginning of the problem as possible).

Plutonium Page posted the following gut-wrenching photo commentary illustrating that point:

(Click here to expand this post and read)

Today is a very special day for Mister Bush. He has declared January 21, 2007 "National Sanctity of Human Life Day". Check it out, right there on the White House website, a nice, pretty little message.

I filled in the blanks.

America was founded on the principle that we are all endowed by our Creator with the right to life and that every individual has dignity and worth.

(AP photo)

National Sanctity of Human Life Day helps foster a culture of life and reinforces our commitment to building a compassionate society that respects the value of every human being.

(AP photo)

Among the most basic duties of Government is to defend the unalienable right to life, and my Administration is committed to protecting our society's most vulnerable members.

(AP photo)

National Sanctity of Human Life Day serves as a reminder that we must value human life in all forms, not just those considered healthy, wanted, or convenient.

(AP/Nabil)
Click here for more photos. (WARNING: graphic content).

I call upon all Americans to recognize this day with appropriate ceremonies and to underscore our commitment to respecting and protecting the life and dignity of every human being.

(AP photo)

• Caring for the Wounded in Iraq - A Photo Essay - warning, extremely graphic content.
• Coalition casualties in Iraq

Oh, and Mister Bush? I'll leave you with the words of John Prine:

But your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.
They're already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for,
And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.

I, like Plutonium Page, want to take the focus off of whether or not abortion is an acceptable answer to pregnancy-related suffering in life. I want every day to focus on the more effective ways of reducing suffering in human life--ways like

• the Prevention First Act
• a strong Federal Emergency Management Agency
• a contribution of 0.5-0.7% of our GDP to countries in "extreme poverty" whose governments are doing very well given their financial situations, and
• talks with other countries even though we're not allied with them.

Why I don't want Sen. Hillary Clinton to be president

Here is a quote that describes the types of reservations I have about Sen. Clinton.

Yes, yes, I found it on Daily Kos...I swear I only started reading it because this primary race has me curious to see what the biggest leftytalk site is saying about the candidates, not because I usually agree with the people on there...

Anyway, this particular text did resonate with me:

"too many people think that underneath, she is a would-be aristocrat who would sell out America to the forces of free trade globalization in the same way that her husband did, only with a sterner look. Besides her money, her sex and Bill, Hillary's best asset is probably that she comes across as the most legitimate 'keep-the-oil-flowing' candidate, the one best able to play the Davos game. There is still a powerful lurking fear even among the Left, namely that the oil will indeed stop, so we really need to trust the old guard no matter what. This secret fear is probably what is propping up the Right from total collapse right now."

I have no idea who or what Davos is, and for me not all bad things in the state of worldwide economics have to do with oil per se, but I hope this quote communicates the gist of why, if Clinton is the democratic nominee, I would quite possibly vote third-party.

I've spent the last 3 years learning about nuances of the status quo / "old guard" of economic and social policy, and I've seen so many great ideas proposed by economists and other theorists just...flounder...when they reach people like Sen. Clinton who don't seem to give them the attention they have the power to give them.

I'm tired of that.

Now that I have a better idea of what new paradigms I do like the idea of (such as legislation that moves us closer to getting externalities factored into sellers' costs instead of social costs), I won't settle for someone who is as much of the old guard as Sen. Clinton is.

Race vs. Skin Tone (do you really know what someone looks like if you can only identify race?)

I happened to see an old article from a Twin Cities-area campus newspaper and found it interesting.

Apparently, though no one is complaining about specific descriptors of HOW peach or HOW brown a person's skin color is in crime reports, two students represented complaints about not-actually-physically-descriptive terms like "black" or "African American" being on the little security alert flyers that the college puts up around campus.

West, by the way, spent his major and earned a Rhodes scholarship studying what psychologists and other scholars have figured out about the way people perceive race. Just a little tidbit from other issues of that paper.

Until I read the article, I hadn't thought much about the idea that there were both nonoffensive and offensive ways to report skin color in crime reports, and that there are pretty good English words for showing that they're differentiated based on helpfulness (or unhelpfulness).

Check out how the two students put it at the end of this quote:

[Security chief] Gorman said it is difficult to decide whether to use race when it is the only descriptor that a victim remembers, because he wants to provide as much information in security alerts as possible. He said that victims tend to give very vague descriptions when recounting an incident.

“We’re going to use skin tone colors and other descriptors that could be helpful but sometimes [race is] all people remember,” Gorman said.

West and Littell argue that if a person only remembers the race of the person and cannot remember any other physical characteristics that gave them the impression that they belong to a certain race, then they do not actually know what the person looks like.

Male circumcision helps them avoid getting HIV

Or so says an article I found while trying to get the text of the Prevention First Act.

Weird.

The idea of encouraging lots and lots of people to alter their bodies to avoid one problem when we don't fully know what problems it might increase their chances of squicks me out.

Then again, that's common medical practice. In fact, it's common "naughty bits" medical practice. Women have been advised to do it for years.

Lots and lots of female people have been encouraged to alter their bodies to avoid pregnancy when we didn't fully know what problems it might increase their chances of...and even now that we know, it's still common medical practice to keep encouraging them to do it anyway.

Lots of feminists claim that the traditional reluctance to encourage lots and lots of men to do things with their genitals, hormones, etc. to avoid problems (such as unwanted pregnancy of a partner) is outrageous sexism.


So should we just be glad that at least some human beings are getting treated right by "common medical practice" and keep fighting to get "common medical practice" to stop being so nasty and deadly with the advice it gives to women?

Or is there some inherent value to encouraging these kinds of risky behaviors, as supporters of hormonal birth control have argued for years, that we should be glad that male human beings are finally getting to be the subject of?

Prevention First Act (S.21)

Yippee! Congresspeople want to put through a law increasing funding for birth control and other things that good studies show actually reduce abortions.

Is your senator a sponsor? Ask her/him to be one! If you're behind this even partly for religious reasons, I suggest mentioning that in your letter.

(Click here to see my letters)

Dear Sen. Klobuchar:

Firstly, congratulations on your win! I campaigned and voted for you--in fact, I knew who you were since you first started sending e-mails to the Kerry volunteer mailing list, and I've looked forward to your tenure, believing that you would make a fantastic senator for the Minnesotan people--extremely responsive to constituent concerns.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline on Planned Parenthood and the Daily Kos have made me feel that even if it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged
women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our
country take these next six years!

Dear Sen. Coleman:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

You have won a lot of support from me by sending an individual reply to every one of my concerns, Sen. Coleman. When I voted in 2002, I hadn't thought we had ideologically opposed opinions on social issues, but because of you and your staff's attention, I have come to find how much we have in common! (Every time I think of writing you, I delight in finding out that we, as Twin Cities area residents who have experienced what an unusually beautiful place this is, with safe biking and park views within a mile or two of everybody, no matter how poor, valued the environmental protection and health benefits of biking equally. I wrote to ask you to vote for a bike commuter bill, and you had already beaten me to the punch by cosponsoring it!) I have come to feel that you are a good senator for the Minnesotan people--extremely responsive to constituent concerns.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on Planned Parenthood and the Daily Kos have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next two (or more?) years!

Dear Sen. Dodd:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

I am not a Connecticut resident (though I did donate to the Connecticut senate race last year!) but you are no mere senator, thanks to your membership on the HELP committee, so I hope you will have the time to read my request.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on sites supporting it have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next four (or more?) years.

Dear Sen. Enzi:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

I am not a Wyoming resident, but you are no mere senator, thanks to your membership on the HELP committee. You represent a constituency larger than state borders, so I hope you will have the time to read my request.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on sites supporting it have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next two (or more?) years.

Happy MLK, Jr. Day!

Minnesota Public Radio rebroadcast a fascinating race-related interview in honor of Dr. King today.

Dr. John McWhorter discussed his opinions on how to answer the question, "What can we do to help poor black people not be so poor?" which he tried to put into a book.

He mentioned two ways that people generally respond to the question, said both weren't going to change a darned thing, and wanted to advocate a third:


1. Poor people who happen to be black have no reasonable reason to not want to work and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps--that is--they need to just start wanting to work.


2. Poor black people are poor because the factory jobs all moved out to the suburbs (and now to China). What employers remain in the areas where they live won't hire them or won't give them the same amount of flexibility & trust that they'd give to white employees. We have to fix A) these employers' attitudes and/or B) the overall economic structure of the United States before we'll ever be able to help poor black people stop being so poor.
   (Dr. McWhorter feels like this idea came about largely because for the first time in history, during the Civil Rights Movement, black people did get external circumstances making life better.
   He feels, however, that this triumph of convincing external agents to help black people have fewer obstacles to success made people forget how to A) live one's daily life and B) work to help more poor black people succeed under the assumption that external circumstances aren't going to get any better.


3. A disproportionate number of poor black people indeed don't want to work, but their reasons for feeling that way aren't unreasonable. Whatever the reasons were that older generations of young black people stopped wanting to work (Greatest Generation social policy, jobs moving away from the city, discrimination by employers, etc.), young black people today don't think about their predecessors' motivators & demotivators consciously. They just grow up observing it and imitating it, like all humans do. Dr. McWhorter's example of this was a child born to Chinese parents in Brooklyn. That kid's going to grow up speaking English because he/she observed it and that's what humans do.
   
   Dr. McWhorter, therefore, posits that while it's not anybody's fault for being too "lazy" to work, it is possible to retrain people and make them feel differently than their early conditioning caused them to feel.

I wish I had a copy of his book to skim, because I'm putting together his "third view" based solely on what he said in refutation of views 1 & 2 and on one single example he gave of work that people who hold the third view should passionately support ("youth opportunity organizations," if I remember correctly.)


Considering the guy only came up with one example and spent most of his time explaining why he didn't think views 1 or 2 were going to do any good, I don't have much hope that he elaborates View 3 much better in his book. Oh, you silly academics who deconstruct other ideas and forget to clearly construct your own.

I'll find his book later and add to this list based on his words if he does flesh out View 3 examples better, but for now, I'd like to ask you in the blogosphere:

• What people, organizations, etc. (besides youth opportunity organizations) do you think address problems facing blacks from a "View 3" point of view?


• If you agree with Dr. McWhorter that this is the way of approaching problems that's gonna get them solved better than any other, what are your favorite (most effective, best run, etc.) groups, individuals, & projects from the list that could be generated by my last question?
  (I'm always looking for time & money donation ideas.)


• I'm a very privileged and inexperienced young white person from the suburbs. If you agree that organizations, groups, and projects working from this view of problems facing people of color are the most likely to make change, how should I interact with them?
  • Do I, with my background, have any characteristics worth imitating that poor people of color would have a hard time finding examples of in other people?
  • Or should I keep my irrelevant self out of the Boys & Girls Club and just donate my relevant money & goodwill-towards-the-orgranization-when-speaking-with-others-like-me (which are things my background arguably does give me)?
    I mean, it's not like I'm an entrepreneur or a doctor who can mentor an aspiring entrepreneur or doctor. I'm just a specialtyless office assistant myself.
    
    (Anyway, enough about me and my "What should I do?" questions. I'm primarily interested in generating discussion on Dr. McWhorter's ideas.)

Another lovely race-related item I found today is this quote:

A White Guy Honors MLK.

Good Will Hinton grew up in suburban Atlanta. Court-mandated busing, whatever else you may say about it, checkerboarded his friendships and integrated his heart, to the point that when he got to the University of Alabama at Auburn,

it just felt strange hanging out with mostly white people. So I ended up joining the gospel choir and becoming the only white member there. I'm not sure if that was part of MLK's dream for Alabama but I'd like to think that it was.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone.

Why Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, but not Iran, Syria?

I posted variations on this text at a few sites, and I've gotten some great responses, but so far the best has come from Haroon Moghul (dangit, why'd he delete his old blog's archives? Now how am I going to share his incredible Dubai article with people?).

The original text:

I don't get it. This morning on NPR, I heard Condoleeza Rice say something to the effect that we wouldn't be talking to Iran & Syria, asking them to stop funding Iraqi insurgents and seeing what they want in return for that.

Interestingly enough, we're not announcing that we're going to ask Saudi Arabia, etc. them what they want to get them to stop funding insurgent groups--we're going to ask them what they want to get them to do...well...just what I'm not sure...something to stop Iran & Syria from funding Iraqi insurgent groups.

But, hey, if that makes sense, and Iran's side & Saudi Arabia's side are doing the same thing, why not talk to Iran and ask them to stop Saudi Arabia from funding Iraqi insurgent groups? :-)

The point is...why are we on the Saudi-etcetera side only?

Iran has oil, too, so that can't be it. They're both states with a lot of "morality laws" and "morality police" to enforce them. They're both oppressive dictatorships who keep people who want more relevant Islamic principles as well as more liberal principles to rank higher in politics down & unheard. (The "morality laws" are the way the states pretend to be including Islamic principles in politics. They lock up the people who say, "But those aren't the aspects we considered important!" up & throw away the key.)

They just ain't so different. So what's the deal? Why are we treating them as if they were two totally different types of political system with two totally different types of interaction with religion?



What is our advantage in trying to get one side to put the other side's efforts down instead of trying to get both sides to scale their own efforts down?

I'm not asking this as, "Bush sucks!" kind of criticism.

I'm asking this to wonks who might be more perceptive or intuitive than I am.


I want to know of our proposed approach: what's in it for us, according to the approach's proponents?


Only once I know that would I consider starting to critique or criticize the policy.

Haroon replied, in a comment called, "A Few Good Reasons Why:"

When Iran overthrew its Shah in 1979, Americans learned that no native population can be so pliant as to be used, abused and manipulated solely for good as we perceive it to be. This shock, to the system, birthed our role in mutating the monster that was becoming Saddam. This realization has frightened Americans as it has all imperialists in the past: A native population, with a representative government and an ideology of resistance, cannot be crushed. The days of old-style wipe-out-the-native-resistance is gone; weaponry, media and resources are too diffuse for that brief moment in European genocide ahem expansion and Renaissance to come again.

But who then can America's ally be? Israel, of course, can never reject America -- not without ceasing to be the Israel it has, for decades, been; so long as Israelis believe they are like a colony in an alien world, they will never reject American support. (Or, if they do, it will be because they will find a bigger, better sugar daddy - just as Weizmann went from the Ottomans to the British and then the Israelis went to the Americans.) Saudi Arabia is a useful ally in this regard to, for several reasons

Firstly, it is not and never has been a real country; its population is unlikely to revolt against American interference because it has no national idea around which to rally -- and movements that have no national idea, and national base, nearly always (if not every single time) fail and fail miserably. We live in a world of nations. This is why Saudi "resistance" either goes the road of severely parochial tribalism (the reality of Saudi society, the means by which Saudis practice divide) or a malignant, internationalized Wahhabism, a la Osama Bin Laden... the means by which the Saudi royals practice conquer...

Secondly, Saudi Arabia's royal family knows that when the going gets tough, they'll go out Saddam style, albeit properly enough, with a lot more embarrassed knees-knocking. (Saddam, a brutal tyrant? Yes. A coward? No.) Saudi Arabia has no legitimate government -- it is the result of breeding aided and abetted by rentier stipends. When the going gets tough, nobody's going to care about the Saudis. Nobody. Even their support, the Wahhabi establishment, probably does du'a after every salat for a suitably sickening mass decapitation.

Not to mention oil. Oil, oil, oil.

Saudi isn't Iraq, or Egypt, or Iran, or Turkey. It isn't a country. It's a fiction that continues to be imagined by way of oil revenue, and a convenient one for US interests. Israel is too small, too controversial and, increasingly, too militarily weak to hold together the Middle East the way America wants it to be held together. America needs a new ally. But who can America rely on? Has to be a big country, of course, with money and resources. (Qatar is not Krazy Glue, in other words, and Dubai never will be.) But America learned in 1979 it can't trust a secular despot ruling over a proud, nationalistic, generally strongly-Shi'i people. We learned in 2003 that we can't even trust a well-secularized population, namely Turkey, because as a democracy, the Turks will look out for number one.

Saudi Arabia's number one is its ruling family. Saudi Arabia is America's hostage. A rich one, too. Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, they can never be as humiliated, as pathetic, as hypocritical, as militarily lame -- for all the Wahhabi bravado, their record is pretty pathetic -- as Saudi Arabia is and has been for several decades now.

Don't make friends with someone who can give you a bloody nose. This has nothing to do with human rights, with ideology, with some kind of attachment. It's power politics, plain and simple, and the Saudi royals keep digging themselves in deeper and deeper (into American pockets and defense networks.) They're useful precisely because, in the absence of their oil money, they would be useless. They know this, and know that nobody else can use them in quite the same way.

Boy, is that man good at analyzing current events through the lens of how colonialism affects decision-making today without being the annoying kind of "Colonialism is the only factor in everything!" academic that's easy to shoot down. :-)

But what a depressing outlook. Is nothing suggested in this book a realistic proposal?

Or are the suggestions about asking non-allied countries single short-/medium-term requests (modeled off of contributing diplomats' perceived "success stories" from the past) only realistic and possible for the United States when all the other states involved in a situation are of relatively equal "nationness?"


Click here for more answers I've received to my first question and my replies to those answers.
I'd love to see how you feel they compare to Haroon's response--better?
Worse?
Saying the same thing?

Can you come up with anything that could be done to prove them all wrong and get us to make requests of all sides in this situation?

[insert this text later]

Koufax Awards

Lots of people have written about the Koufax awards, but Sage's post acknowledging that she nominated people was the straw that broke the camel's back. I, too, will go public and suck up to my blogrolled favorites draw attention to my nominations.

1. Batch 1
2. Batch 2
3. Batch 3

Speaking of Sage, I sure do love her blog. All my favorite friends in real life speak & write English language usage rants just like this:

In other news: I was reading an article on Britney Spears in the grocery store line today, and she was described as having "functional highlights" in her hair. I'm no English major or nothin', but isn't that an oxymoron of sorts? How do they function? Do they cook her breakfast or whisper sweet nothings to her or advise her on fashion choices each week?

:-)

Iraq deescalation

If you're too lazy to write a letter to your congresspeople, but you wish they'd use funding or whatever other tools they come up with to block the "surge" of troops, you could always sign this. Looks like the people behind it have connections & money to get an ad into a paper that circulates with congresspeople pretty quickly. Or something.



Update: Just saw this. Yuck.

"You probably saw this at the beginning of the week, but just in case you didn't:

Commanders seek more forces in Afghanistan
Taliban prepare offensive against US, NATO troops

[...] President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure. Such an order, Pentagon officials say, would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they man both wars.
A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.
Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.

"Mind you, this is from this week, in 2007, not from 2003 or 2004. Right now, troops are being drawn from the actual 'war on terror' in Afghanistan to instead go fight in Iraq. Again."

I hadn't been up on the news enough to know that there was some particular big battle we pulled out from in 2003 or 2004. Yuck. Stay there, defend the road, people. Yeesh.

More laws I love

Sweet! We've got some really neat ideas floating around the house.

• Instead of waiting for the bill numbers to get up into the thousands, someone has put the failed-to-be-passed-before "Powder-Crack Cocaine Penalty Equalization Act" into the system early--it's #79 this year.
  
  Only thing I can't tell is if it applies to possession. The language looks like it has to do with smuggling, but the history of the bill makes me think it's a street-possession kind of bill.
  
  Okay, so it's not a great law (hey, who knows...making the sentences harsher for the rich white teens' drug might make them even less likely to be convicted and increase racial disparity in the prisons, but I have this feeling that our legal systems are a little too transparent and our society come a little too far on transparent issues for that to be the likely outcome), but in this particular case, I'm for making a small improvement and then, when people see that it's not enough, saying, "Well, let's make another improvement!" rather than doing nothing until the perfect improvement is proposed & funneled through the political system.


• This one looks kind of cool: a GI benefits bill "to amend title 38, United States Code, to provide that members of the Armed Forces and Selected Reserve may transfer certain educational assistance benefits to dependents, and for other purposes." H.R.#81


• Two Native American tribes (the Lumbee tribe--I'm resisting the urge to link this to one of my favorite songs, "Lumby," because it's completely unrelated, even though it's great--and the Rappahannock tribe) are getting official recognition as Native American tribes. NC's done it for years with respect to the Lumbee tribe, and now the USA might, too. H.R.#65 & H.R.#106.


• A bill "to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to expand and extend the incentives for alternative fuel vehicles and refueling property and to repeal the oil and gas production incentives added by the Energy Policy Act of 2005." Sounds like a good start. H.R.#86.


• A bill outlining a particular right for states that doesn't seem too harmful (i.e. it doesn't allow them to trample all over a particular group of people's human rights): "A State may limit or place restrictions on, or otherwise regulate, out-of-State municipal solid waste received or disposed of annually at each landfill or incinerator in the State, except [for the first 2 years after this bill is passed where local agreements are already in place]." H.R.#70.


• A bill "to amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 to require the disclosure of the original source of funds made payable to a lobbyist who is subcontracted to engage in lobbying activities on behalf of a third person or entity, and the disclosure of the identity of that third person or entity." H.R.#90


• *snicker* If H.R.#101 had been a college rule, Tom, my sophomore buddy down the hall, would have had to step down from his Student Government Election Coordinator post in shame. The advice he gave me for running for student government wasn't immorally advantageous to me--but he did give me a leg up by saying, "Oh, geez, Katie, just knock on the door and walk into the boys' bathroom if you want to put signs there" when I lamented that I didn't have any male friends but him around at the time, and I knew he shouldn't be posting flyers. Was that him managing my campaign? Hey...maybe I wouldn't have won without those toilet stall signs!


• "Funds provided by grant under this section may be used--(1) to establish statewide articulation agreements in math, science, engineering, and technology among public 2-year institutions and public 4-year institutions to provide a seamless transition for the transfer of students from the public 2-year institutions to the public 4-year institutions by having both such types of institutions provide and use a common core curricula that reflects the workforce needs of private industry..." H.R.#102.

Surgery is very dangerous. Pills are less dangerous. Save the only pill alternative to surgery for this particular health problem.

While browsing proposed House legislation because I wanted to see if there was an inflation-indexed version of the minimum wage bill instead of the "clean" yet unindexed House Resolution 2, I noticed that there was something called the "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2007."

I'm still reading the bill and reading up on it, and so far it looks like some congresspeople think the drug is dangerous (potentially deadly) and should be pulled off the market until it can be studied better.
They claim that it was hurried to approval and that it really needed to be studied longer in the first place, and better late than never for pulling it off the market and studying it.

It looks like there were also a "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2003" ("Last Action: Nov 14, 2003: Referred to the Subcommittee on Health ... This bill never became law.") and a "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2005" ("Last Action: Mar 3, 2005: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pension ... This bill never became law").

I thought many of my readers would want to know. Though I haven't had an abortion myself, I do remember reading "BB"'s detailed accounts of an abortion on RU-486 after she was denied emergency contraception after a condom broke (partly because many of the medical staff in her rural area thought that emergency contraception was the same thing as RU-486!) She covered the physical feelings of it as well as all of her emotions and the time she spent going over pros and cons and making her decision.

(If you're curious to hear more details, she had to go the condoms-only route because the way her hormones are make it so she can't be healthy on hormonal contraception, and the way her vagina is shaped makes it so she can't use barrier methods inside herself. What's more, she had to go the abortion route once contraception failed because she'd been told by multiple doctors that another pregnancy would probably kill her, and she had 3 kids to raise.)

Thinking of people like BB, I want to say,

"Listen, yes, some people have died because they took RU-486, but other people have avoided dying because they took RU-486.

"How is it different from any other medicine in that respect?

"If you let legislators pull it off the market while it's being studied, people in the latter camp will die while it's away.

"I have a hunch that there are more of them than there are women who'd die because of taking the drug."

If you agree with me, please write your Congressperson and encourage her/him to table House Resolution 63. And/Or please pass on the above reasoning on your own blogs.

( Additional keywords for search engines: mifepristone misoprostol )

Hooray, Canada!

HOORAY, CANADA!

Whoops.

I got really excited, because I thought it was Tanzania whose textile mills had all closed by 2004 on account of dead white men's clothes (stuff that doesn't sell at Goodwill, etc. in North America) undercutting the cost of making clothes locally, but it turns out it was Zambia.

2005: "Textile mills in Tanzania that had previously been mothballed were brought back into action and now employ thousands."

They're exporting them, too, which means that Zambia's probably still got no employment for textile workers and no up-and-coming textile factories making mosquito nets, but overall, still a great story. It's not like Tanzania wasn't hit at all by the "dead white men's clothes" markets. They lost a lot of textile mills, too, as implied by the statement "brought back into action." I don't quite understand how the economic policies worked, but work they did, so God bless whoever in Canada, Africa, etc. thought this up.

(Mosquito nets, are one of the most promising methods we have of reducing population growth in Africa.
1) People pop out kids to replace the ones they think will die, only people aren't very good at those predictions and always overestimate their dead kids, so the population grows. Population growth specialists seem to have determined that knowing your kids will live is the most effective incentive to take contraceptive action.
2) When parents die before kids know how to run a farm, carve shoes, or whatever it was they were going to learn as a skill for making a living, the kids end up dispersed, hopeless, living on the margins, and exposed to fewer reasons to take contraceptive action. Population growth specialists seem to have determined that keeping parents alive & healthy long enough to apprentice kids well also dramatically reduces population growth.)





Oh, and by the way, does anyone know if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is as into funding attacking-the-viruses-themselves research & development as this guy says it is? They were so highly praised by Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who is all for biomed miracles if they work but wants people to focus fastest and hardest on technology & methods that keep things simple, that I can't imagine they'd get that kind of praise from him if they weren't contributing to things like mosquito net distribution.

I can't decide if this article is a complete misunderstanding of what "donating to medical/technological solutions" often means in practice (is this one of those guys who also thinks no doctors anymore recommend diet & exercise? He's wrong!) or if I'm just ignorant of Bill & Melinda Gates dangerously taking "medical" and "technological" to mean only "fancy creams & injections" and not taking it to mean "nets and roads."

*snortle*

...
“That mosque is why I’m here today Ali Eteraz,” said The Jafi. “Because I am convinced they are all practicing [dissimulation], today at 2 pm someone I know will be calling the Feds on the mosque. That den of dissimulation has existed in our midst long enough.”

Ali Eteraz grew silent and then spoke up. “But sir, today is Friday and that is the time for Friday prayer. Even I will be in the mosque at that time. Won’t I also get arrested and charged?”

“Such things are necessary, Ali Eteraz,” the great Jafi headed out the door. “I always told you that you needed to do more to make them more like you. You needed to do it faster. I gave you three whole months and yet none of them appear any different to me, none of them come by to kiss my feet. It must mean that they are dissimulators and potential terrorists!”

“But what if there is a shoot-out sir? What if an accidental bullet goes off? My reputation will be tarnished at the least! What about my career? My family? Who will pay for my bail?”

“I don’t have time for this Ali Eteraz,” said The Great Jafi who had no time for such petty concerns.

“Sir please!”

“Sorry Ali, but you and the mythical moderates didn’t do what you were supposed to do. Now we must protect the homeland.”

“Sir I thought you said I was an integral part of the future of the world.”

The Great Jafi was almost out of the door. “Yes, I said that but only in one potential scenario. In the other scenario, the one taking place today, you are collateral damage. Goodbye Eteraz, you failed me. When all of your humanity is taken away blame your people. It was their inherent prowess in lying that made me do this. When you are in jail, blame Islam.”

The Great Jafi reminds me of O'Brien in 1984. I wanted to throw the book at walls and scream, "No! You.Don't.Make.Sense! Stop it!"

This story (of which I quoted the end) is fucking hilarious when you get absorbed and feel it like fiction; irritating enough to make you want to scream and cry if you think about the possibility of people really interacting like that.

Cross-post from an Eteraz.org writer

I oughtta post this here for now, but I'll probably hide it behind a "read more" or delete it altogether in a while. I think it'd be more useful being cited on the big blogs, since that's where feminist theory gets read about and talked about. I'll e-mail it to them later today or tomorrow, I hope.

I'd like to share this with all the women over on the Sparkle*Matrix who remember extremely oppressing experiences and let you know that it made me think of you. You've gone through far more oppression than I have on account of the "gender" social category you're perceived as belonging to, and you might have gone through far more oppression than I have on account of other social categories you're perceived as belonging to than I have. Nevertheless, when I read your blogs and comments, I notice the "agent" in you, too. And I hope that when you read this article, you'll be reminded of the fact that you've been agents all your lives, even sometimes during the same situations in which you were being oppressed--or within hours before or after them. I hope this gives you hope that, through activist efforts, your lives' balances will shift towards experiences of less and less oppression and more and more agency. I have that hope, and I hope this article makes you look forward to it, too.

I'd like to pass on the same message to taught_to_despise at The Tree Remembers. This post you wrote is the kind of speech that every good person in the world who thinks he/she hasn't had intimate dealings with abuse but suddenly finds himself/herself thrown into the position of counselor/comforter/tattletale for a son's or daughter's best friend needs to have running around in the back of his or her head. This is the kind of speech that every good person in the world who isn't sure how to look for dangerous implications in what another person says (for example, let's say your stepmother were an innocent dupe--not saying that she is, but this is just an example--she would be the kind of person I'm thinking of, the kind of person hearing only your father's side of the story) should have haunting him/her. Hearing both sides of the story juxtaposed is one of the most effective ways we can catch bad people even when we only hear their sides of the story. So bless you, taught_to_despise, and don't you ever forget what action you're taking to make the world a better place. Don't you ever forget that what sometimes just feels like "whining to vent about oppression" to you might really be agency happening right in the midst of oppression. You are a person who's making an impression on me and on people like G. Willow Wilson as a complex individual who could use a bit of oppression taken out of her present and future life but who, nevertheless, has been, is, and will always be throwing part of the oppression off your own shoulders through actions you yourself decide to take.

The Post-Post-Feminist's Eteraz

By G. Willow Wilson

I want to begin with a story.

In the months leading up to the Egyptian presidential elections in 2005, I spent some time reporting on state media coverage of the increasingly frequent demonstrations and clashes between rival parties that accompanied the campaign season. Local state-controlled television channels were providing only cursory and contradictory information about these events, such that it was often impossible to know for certain what the aim and constituency of a demonstration was unless you had been standing in the thick of it yourself. This is exactly what I did on several occasions.

One incident, a protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that attracted hundreds of black-clad riot police, was difficult to pin down even then. State media outlets were claiming that it was organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, and refused to cover the event on the grounds that the Ikhwan were an illegal party. The protest itself was so chaotic that it was difficult to make heads or tails of its ideological thrust.

I left and took the metro home, overheated and frustrated. In the women’s car, I ran into my cousin-in-law. We were surprised to see one another downtown at that time of day; we both lived on the southern outskirts of the city, I worked from home, and she was still a university student. She asked me what had brought me to Tahrir on such a hot afternoon. I hesitated before answering. She knew what I did for a living, but I had always thought it best to be discreet about the details of my work around our family. The prevalent opinion in the social strata we both inhabited was that a woman did not, strictly speaking, have the right to put herself in potential social, political or physical danger.

“Covering the protest,” I said finally, deciding the truth was simplest, “What about you?”

She looked me right in the eye. “Participating in the protest,” she said. And that is how I discovered my soft-spoken muhajeba cousin-in-law was an Al Ghad party member.

I am reminded of this incident whenever I read about the Plight of Muslim Women. I am rarely comfortable with the way in which the very serious issues facing modern Muslim women are rhetorically addressed, both within and without the community. Reformists have yet to paint a picture of the Plighted Muslima that describes my cousin, acknowledges her complexity, her agency, the breadth and depth she brings to the word ‘femininity’.

I will not argue the Stockholm Syndrome-esque position of some traditionalist Muslim women, and say she is in no way oppressed: she will have a curfew all her life, there are ideas that she will not be permitted to impart to her children, and her husband will have an absolute social right to veto clothing or friends or habits of hers that he finds unacceptable. There is no way to soften or rationalize this reality, nor should it be softened or rationalized.

What I will argue, however, is that ‘oppressed’ is not a sufficient description of the person she is, or of the life she is building for herself. Whether she had to lie to attend the protest, or reasoned or coaxed her way into permission, or simply held her chin up and left the house, she was an actor in her destiny that day. She is proof that a clever woman, a capable, kind, brave woman, is never ‘simply’ a victim, no matter how dire the circumstance in which she lives. My cousin isn’t alone, either. I have yet to meet an ordinary woman. I am beginning to think there are no ordinary women; only extraordinary women in excruciatingly ordinary circumstances.

Today, it is finally acceptable to suggest that the bra-burning era of western feminism—which, along with economic experiments like socialism and communism, made a significant impact on the Nasserite Middle East during the Sixties and Seventies—inappropriately and ironically devalued femininity. The idea that women may have different needs than men, but possess an equal right to have those needs met, proved too complex for public consumption, and a wretched but expedient proposition took its place: women are exactly the same as men, and are thus entitled to the same things.

I vividly remember how this proposition manifested itself: when I was an adolescent in public school in the US, having your period was not considered a sufficient excuse to sit out of gym class. This would be admitting that girls were ‘weaker’ than boys. Encumbered with medicine balls and batons, girls would double over in pain, weeping, and be ignored; however, as soon as one had a sports injury, she could sit out for days on end, the lauded product of the new girls’ sports programs. It should come as no surprise to the belligerent architects of this experiment that the young women of my generation are ready for any amount of patriarchy if it means they can menstruate in peace. They have run screaming back into the institutions their mothers abandoned, and having suffered month after month in feminist gym class myself, I hardly blame them.

Yet the backlash against western feminism has been as unnatural, as insufficient, and as short-sighted as the movement it rebels against.

In the West and among Muslim women (and yes, among western Muslim women) it has become fashionable to objectify oneself, without even waiting for a man to demand it. We have willingly hinged our identities on pieces of clothing: the micro-skirt and the jilbab, the stiletto and the hijab, and we pantingly scream ‘we are not ourselves without these!’ as soon as someone raises an eyebrow. As if this should be a source of pride. As if it is a good thing to be so much a shrine to oneself that a change of clothes would destroy one’s identity. (Full disclosure: I wear a headscarf [with western clothing], but I take it off when I’m in small-town America and I think it will scare people. I love my scarf, but I can’t honestly say I feel less Muslim without it. Nor do I think I should.)

Women themselves have participated in the return of the ideal of the oversexed housewife, the black-shrouded virgin, the psychological emptiness that is womanhood when woman’s sole purpose is to serve man. In the rush to re-assert the public primacy of the male gaze, whether through a western standard of total feminine obedience or an Islamic one, women have put man before God, or, if you prefer, before truth. We are all, post-feminist Muslim and Christian and eastern and western and secular and faithful, guilty of a little blasphemy.

We struggle, always, with an image: what is woman? What should she look like? Say? How should she act? We struggle with an image because we have decided we are not equipped to struggle with something as dynamic as a personality. I am not, my cousin is not, the women I admire are not, symbols to be analyzed incoherently. Yet this is what the dialogue surrounding the Plight of the Muslim Woman has done: reduced us to our obstacles, our clothing and our genitalia. I am still waiting to meet the reformist who can look my cousin in the eye and say ‘You are no type, you fit into no bell-curve, and you move between oppression and independence with a dynamism no theory of mine can explain or resolve.’ To acknowledge, in other words, that her identity is not a static set of symbols (Muslim, woman, Egyptian) but an interplay of experiences, powered by something that exists in spite of gender or religion: that she is a person. Before she is anything else, she is a person.

This is something the women’s movement, particularly as it pertains to Muslim women, must address: when one speaks of women one speaks of several billion individual histories. Let us create no more mass narratives and no more simplistic fixes: women are not men with wombs, nor are they wombs without minds, and we should no longer act surprised when treating them as such, en masse, fails to adequately address their problems. Perhaps it is time for the women’s movement to enter the greater conversations: to write not ‘women’s literature’, but literature; to address not ‘women’s issues’, but issues of universal human importance. Dealing with women in isolation has only taken us so far. Today, I believe it is much more vital to address in their entirety the systems that produce both underprivileged women and men who are petty tyrants: poverty, lack of education, political and religious repression. I am of the opinion that the Grameen Bank does more for women than the Vagina Monologues. (I saw the latter when it debuted in Cairo and found it absurdly and laughably out-of-context. Let’s get these women running water, basic healthcare and literacy classes before we tell them that they will only achieve personhood when they can go on display before an audience of men and scream at full volume about their labia.)

Men cannot go forward without women, women cannot go forward without men; to treat the ills of one without treating the ills of the other is to ignore the disease in favor of its symptoms. If we truly want to pull down the obstacles faced by women—Muslim and otherwise—we must tackle the obstacles faced by humankind. Anything less will only be another temporary solution; a memetic, theory-driven bandaid made of stiletto heels, headscarves and manifestos for a wound made of war, disease and ignorance. We as women must come into our powers as individuals and work for something better.

Photos of the day

Sly Civilian's post on institutionalization at one of the "better mental institutes" in America had me reading a lot of bad things into some pictures of kids at the Novinki Asylum in Belarus (where lots of kids are not only deemed insane, apparently, but also have physical handicaps thanks to Chernobyl).

However, this picture really brightened my day and gave me hope that, one good worker by one good worker, holding onto patience and love even when the challenges of working with kids who defy all the rules of human behavior that he/she was raised to think of as "right" and "normal" become stressful, things can turn around and people won't have to write posts like Sly's someday.

I thought this was a picture of a kid being restrained until I read the caption.
I don't even know what to say.


Oh, just because I like it, here's one more picture: a worker in a hospital making sure that every kid gets the wonderful feeling of being hugged.

The kid gets the feeling of large arms and a bit of squishy fat (around the arms, on the breasts, etc.) as part of her hug, but you know what? I'll bet that that nurse feels just as much warm fuzziness with skin on bones against her as she does with healthier skin-on-fat-on-bones against her. It's amazing what you can get used to and start to crave that other people find squicky. Maybe I should look into "cuddling volunteering" around here. I've heard that they ask non-professionals to do that with abandoned babies. Don't know about other populations (like 3-year-olds with MS). Hmmmmmmm.

Pictures found on Cecilia Hansson's blog

Welcome, new visitors

I think I'm about to have company, and this house is a mess.
No working links at the top, no background image for the title, no real title, no working "read more" links, no font improvements so long posts are easier to read...

I'm SO sorry! But if you can have the patience to deal with this eyesore, I think you'll like what you find.


Maybe someday I'll finish getting this blog to look the way I want it (1-column, like a pretty Wordpress theme, and highly legible).

Welcome, Shrub.com readers!

Iran

Ooooooh, betcha didn't think this was an international affairs blog, didja?!

Yeah, I was interested in that stuff long before I twiddled around with gender studies, gender relations, & feminism.

I finally got my act together to put together a smorgasbord of my favorite articles on what we should be doing with respect to Iran. I posted it in response to a thread on a message board called, "The Iranian Threat."




From this article I took away the idea that everybody needs to pick up on what Ali Eteraz has found on a smattering of blogs, including a smattering of (though certainly not enough) left-leaning blogs.

Eteraz.org, one of the best sites ever on the Muslim world wrote:
This week the rightosphere was all agog over one particular news story: Iranian students protesting Ahmedinejad and the Iranian mullahocracy.

Norm wrote on it; so did Dr. Yes; also the Bear of Truthiness; Gateway Pundit did; so did RegimeChange Iran.

Question: what lesson did they draw from this? Aside from the brisk conclusion that there are people in Iran who do not like Ahmedinejad, nothing. Further, upon seeing a totally native outpouring of dissent in Iran, none of them became intrigued enough to revisit the Invade Iran debate. These bloggers could have wondered one simple thing: perhaps invasion is counterproductive in light of the fact that given the right circumstances, Iranians themselves will put appropriate leaders in place (whereas a war started by outsiders would likely destroy any chance of these dissenters succeeeding).

This is not the first time that the rightosphere has stopped its investigation of Iran despite the discovery of dissent in Iran. A few weeks ago bloggers found another Iranian dissent worth clapping for; namely, Ayatollah Boroujerdi -- a traditionalist Shia ayatollah who hates the Iranian regime. Back then Gateway covered him. So did the FreeRepublic. So did Pajamasmedia (with a video no less!).

Again, what lessons did the right derive from the presence of this dissenter (with a very large following clearly)? Did they revisit the Invade Iran debate to ask the simple question: does, or does not, a war against Iran advance the chance of people like Boroujerdi and the student dissenters? (The answer is that a war derails any chance these guys have, but I would have been satisfied with any kind of introspection).

It also became pretty clear to me that it was the Left which was doing the best analysis of dissenters in Iran. The Left. It was the Left which broke the Ayatollah Boroujerdi story (Soros owned), for example.

Not only that, it is again the Left which has broken another huge story about a very important Iranian dissenter, who is being called the Iranian Gandhi, namely: Ramin Jahanbegloo.

Open Democracy (Soros owned), started talking about him and his non-violent approach in May. They followed up on it in September.

Simultaneously Ramin Jahanbegloo got picked up by a quasi-Left (certainly not Right) publication called Logos (its board of advisors includes Drucilla Cornell, an uber-feminist). Logos interviewed him. They followed up on him and argued that he was creating a Velvet Revolution in Iran. Meanwhile, that Soros owned publication set up an Open Letter for Ramin's release which was signed by, which was signed by such Right luminaries and Mr. No One, and Miss Not Available and by such Left luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Howard Zinn, Shadia Drury, Umberto Ecco and Immanuel Wallerstein.

So, who would you rather listen to when it comes to Iran? I say go with the Left. Please keep in mind that I don't hate the Right. I pick up many great stories from them not available elsewhere and I share their hawkish position towards terrorism. However, ultimately I consider myself Center Left, and it bears demonstrating that the Left is at the forefront of democracy promotion and dissent when it comes to Iran, and they do it without the need to talk about Invasion from morning till night.

Anyhow, please go and follow up on Ramin Jahanbegloo:

Here is one of his offending articles which talks about Auschwitz.

Here is his website with his articles.

Here are some secondary sources on Ramin.

Here is the website of the Ganji you do need to know about: Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissenter.

(Go to the original article for the hyperlinks originally in the text; I'm in a hurry to get to work and am not going to paste them all back in here.)


Now, one of the better posters on that site, Samaha, does bring up a fair point:

We had been waiting for that revolution for ages, it was supposed to be the first domino to fall for change. So, so, so close and what happened? How did they end up with Almanamanadingbat?

But anyway, my point of posting all this is that the growing opinion among scholars and people who get their news from scholars--especially ones who have studied how international relations & politicking play out--aren't worried about a "threat" from Iran.

They feel like it's not a country most of us here would like to live in, but that they're not going to wipe Israel off the map and that they're not going to attack us, either.

They feel like we should be asking, "How did they end up with Almanamanadingbat [when they don't seem to like him]?" perhaps, as a question that could guide us to sensible policy in the future, but not asking, "How do we interact with the rest of the Iranian government and the part of the Iranian government that will probably come into power in the next 5-10 years?"



This article, also posted on Eteraz.org, especially makes me feel like we should be as interested in what kind of Iranian government we could be interacting with if we just lay off the "threat" thing (since the experts, even if not the mass media, are saying that that's perfectly reasonable to do):

Eteraz.org wrote:
The similarities between Bush and Nejad do not stop. They started off merely looking alike: short beady eyed weasel with combovers and stupid laughs; they both tricked their populations into voting against their own interests by using social values; they both became apocalyptic psychos; their approval ratings sank to equivalent lows simultaneously; and they both, now, have suffered beatings at the midterm elections at the hands of the "progressives" and "reformists."

But on Thursday, Ahmadinejad had no reported comments on the final election results, which showed moderate conservatives opposed to his policies had won a majority of seats. The second biggest bloc of vote-getters were reformists, making a comeback after being driven out of local councils, parliament and the presidency over the past five years -- a result many analysts interpreted as a repudiation of the status quo.

Instead, Ahmadinejad spent the day in western Iran, telling crowds that Iran would never dismantle its nuclear program and referring to President Bush as the "most hated person" in Iran -- the kind of fiery focus on international issues that a number of analysts said was behind his loss at the polls.

Similar anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment appeared in final results of a parallel election for the Assembly of Experts, the body of 86 senior clerics that monitors Iran's supreme Islamic leader and chooses his successor.

"We consider this government's policy to be against Iran's national interests and security," said Saeed Shariati, a leader of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, Iran's largest reformist party. His party seeks democratic changes within the ruling Islamic establishment and supports resumed relations with the United States.

A big boost for moderates was the large number of votes for former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who lost to Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election runoff. Rafsanjani, who also supports dialogue with the United States, got the most votes of any candidate from Tehran to win re-election to the assembly.

Hey Ahmedinejad, keep focusing on Israel, ok? Just like Bush focused on Iraq. Focus your way straight out of office.

If this parallel is true (whether or not you like Bush and whether or not you like Democrats and whether or not you like progressives), it would behoove us to pay as much attention to what it would be like if we were dealing with the potential takers-over as it did for the Muslim world's media to pay attention to our potential takers-over--that is, to assume that not all administrators of a country want the same things, and that we need to be prepared for all sorts of "Irans" the same way they debated in preparation for all sorts of "USAs"



And, lastly, though on account of having read about how diplomacy works (and doesn't ever get around to the "talking" part that would make it work far too often!) in this book, I thought I'd throw in one US soldier's opinion about a particular question our diplomats should ask to Iran's diplomats:

We want Iran to stop sponsoring militias in Iraq and Lebanon and other terrorists. They want us to stop calling for regime change. If we are willing to do the one, are they willing to do the other? Has anyone ever freakin' asked them?

He goes on:

Now, there is also the question of Iranian nuclear status. Perhaps it is time to make realism the guiding light here. Nuclear bombs can be built by crappy little countries run by goofy-looking degenerates who can't even manage to get a decent haircut. It is unrealistic to expect that we can keep them out of the hands of determined countries. What we can do is make the consequences clear to Iran--that with the power will come a certain level of responsibility to control their nuclear power, and also that the United States will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if forced to a direct confrontation with another nuclear power.

The United States can posture all we like about the Axis of Evil and war to the death with Iran. It's not realistic, and if we meant it, we'd be working a lot harder for regime change. Hence abandoning a rhetorical stance that serves no one and means nothing in favor of a no kidding offer of substantive negotiations in good faith (an approach not yet tried in dealing with Iran) costs us nothing but has the prospect of huge payoff. Maybe it is time to realize that the Shah fell the year after I was born, and nothing is going to put him back. We can't have a puppet government in Iran, but maybe we can have one we can get along with. After all, the French are just as hostile and George isn't calling for regime change in Paris.

And heck, let's get real honest. If they don't play ball, we can always nuke them into glass.

But the Persians were a civilized people when our ancestors were painting themselves blue and running around naked. Treating them like they are defined by a handful of religious nutjobs doesn't get us anywhere.

We are more likely to cause Iran to evolve in positive directions (secular, democratic, free) by having contact with America and Americans through diplomacy, trade, even tourism than we are by ranting in their direction while they rant at us. We can support economic and human rights reforms more effectively within the framework of normalized relations than we can from the otherside of a self-imposed moat.

(He is not the only person I've seen who says that

1. the Iranians have the democratic process down better than any other Middle Eastern country, despite what it looks like from over here and
2. the form of Islam-as-an-important-guiding-principle-for-our-country that this democracy brings to power is not the kind that we need to get our panties in a bunch over; it's actually a bunch of people saying, "What's this shit that you've been saying is Islamic? How about the Islamic principles of free speech in the community, popular participation in decision-making, etc?")

Much like our "liberal Christians" have been trying to voice their opinions about Christianity and feel that "real Christianity" could make our policy a lot better. (Whether you agree with them or not, I hope this is at least a useful illustration of what type of Islamicization the experts are predicting over in Iran through its democratic processes.)

Unfortunately, I lost the main link I had reflecting that opinion. Please forgive me. I'll look it up later!

This post is long, so I'll summarize what happened at the bus stop last night very briefly. A bunch of strangers were being relatively social for the mix and place, probably because a man with a Stephen Hawking-style voice box was very jolly and keeping the conversation going, and because it was Christmas and everyone felt like they're supposed to step outside their "I don't bother talking to strangers" bounds on Christmas.

Plus, it was bitterly cold, so we had something to talk about.

Eventually, a black man I took as long American came into the bus stop, greeted a black American man, joined in the conversation (whence comes my QotD, "Man, think about me! I'm not used to this! I'm from East Africa!" "I'm from East Chicago.") and after some silence diverted the conversation to his situation by leaning against the door and proclaiming, "I'm drunk."

The newcomer revealed that he was drunk, Somali, was born and raised and therefore felt he was Muslim (therefore not supposed to be drunk), had killed his parents, and wished he were Christian, "like you [all]." I forget his words, but he felt like we'd learned happy things, and that he'd learned to hate and do bad things. I couldn't tell if he felt like most of these messages that it was religious to do things he later felt were wrong came from his time in Somalia or his time here or both equally.

About killing his parents, maybe he was talking shit to sound scary, but maybe he'd gotten on the wrong side of a civil war and now hated the people who taught him whatever led him to that side of the war.

The black man he'd greeted (whom I think perhaps the Somali man didn't already know after all) tried to console him and tell him that God--Allah's--whoever's--light had been shining upon him and would continue to shine upon him here.

The Somali man interrupted him and said, "They say I'm not supposed to talk to you. Are you a Christian? I don't believe them. But they say I'm not supposed to talk to Christians!"

I felt like he had so little knowledge about the variety of Christians that what would be best would be to try to help guide him to the Muslims who felt more like he does.

Help him find the variety that exists in the religion of his raising.

Help him find the love he expects out of morality and the moral teachings he expects out of religion at the same time.

The black man across from me had already tried to do that, but he'd failed. I knew I couldn't speak any better words in a hurry, but I had a whole book that could.


I mean, I'd only seen one page of it, and look at what it says:

"Thus the [____] engages in blatant justification--he justifies his heinous act by convincing himself that this is God's will, when in reality, it is [his] own anger, vengeance, and shame that are driving his actions. Very often the [____] strongly believes that the death of the [________] is satisfactory or even pleasing to God. Assuming that the perpetrator is a devout and religious man, as a necessary prelude to the murder, the perpetrator had in effect projected his own human sentiments onto God, and therefore he was able to assume that what made sense to him, what shamed him and his family, and what vindicated him and his family were identical to what God wants. Rather than thinking of God as merciful, forgiving, and compassionate, he imagines God to be angry, enraged, and vengeful. This imagined view of God was possible only because this supposedly pious and devout man heedlessly projected his own emotions and attributed them onto God.

"Furthermore, if through lack of self-awareness people project themselves onto God and see God through an entirely idiosyncratic and subjective lens, they will in all probability not love God at all. Rather, they have fashioned a god in their own image and then fallen love with that image. In this case, God is exploited in an entirely narcissistic process, and the purported partnership with the Divine becomes the means for egotistical empowerment and arrogance."

Here I stood before a man whose entire close social circle was Muslim, but who thought that people who had Islam right taught that God was angry, enraged, and vengeful and that people who had Christianity right taught that God was merciful, forgiving, and compassionate.

I was carrying a book by a Muslim teaching that God was merciful, forgiving, and compassionate and teaching a clear explanation of exactly why this Somali man's teachers could seem "devout and religious" and yet have convinced themselves of things that he now knew were wrong.

I was carrying a book by the kind of person that this man seemed to want to be--and a Muslim one, at that, just like this man was raised!



What'd I do?

Nothing.

I thought, "My book! I just got this. It'll take me forever to get one again at a decent price, and I want to read it."




When I got home, I called my boyfriend to tell him about my regret that I didn't give him my book.

My boyfriend, though, has been feeling rather selfish himself lately and wants to get back into volunteer and giving work. "Whether it does much good or not, I just need that better-person place it puts me in to get going again." Or something like that.

While on the phone, I also realized that part of my "Mine! My book!" attitude comes from a psychological problem caused by conditioning. It also occurred to me that it can probably only be cured by the conditioning that hands-on experience will bring. After all, an experience is worth a million words when it comes to counteracting negative messages that a person has integrated into her/his worldview.

When I thought with a laugh, "Man, there's no way I could tell Mom that I held back from giving away the book she just gave me," I knew it wasn't just because she'd get her feelings hurt that I almost gave away something "from her." No...I knew she'd be disappointed in my actions because they'd deviate from everything she'd tried to raise me to believe: that my ability to do good in this world comes mostly from the fact that I'm better than most other people, and that this person was definitely one of the people that I'm better than. I deserve nice presents, and I shouldn't be giving them away to people who are "less capable" of doing something in the world with those presents.

And thinking about that, I realized that it wasn't just, "Mine!" or sentimental, "Mom gave me this!" that kept me from giving away my book last night.
It was, "I'm more educated and more curious about the world around me than him. This book is more likely to get read by 1 person in my hands than it is to get read by 1 person in his hands. And its ideas can't be shared unless they're read. So even though I want ideas like that to go to people like him, I'm not going to give him my book, because I don't trust him to make as much of a world improvement with it as I will make."

FOR PETE'S SAKE, what was I thinking? This guy was dealing with psychological issues that are addressed right in the book. I'm not.

How on earth can my education & curiosity hold a candle to direct life applicability?

What a moronic subconscious thought I let ruin my opportunity last night.



I realized how much more use he could have made of it than me--and regretted not giving the book away--when, after he left and another bystander was behind me waiting to get on the bus, said, "Brotha's got problems. Sheeyt. People tellin' him to do stuff, callin' it God..."

That comment made me realize that I'd been right about the book being relevant to him. I mean, if someone else of a rather different background (male, black, potentially a different economic class (guess based on the way he was dressed)) had my exact thought, I must have been onto something.

And I must have made a real stupid decision when I decided not to run with my intuition.



Anyway, as I said, a few hours later I dug into my conditioning and realized part of why I did something so stupid. (That idea that education & curiosity make me one of the "best possible readers" of a book with ideas in it that can improve lives.)

This is a big part of why I "give conditionally," as my boyfriend put it.

My boyfriend said, "We need to set aside some times, some afternoons. And we can't say, 'But I want to save my energy for our workout tonight!' Bullshit."

I think that going along with my boyfriend on ideas he comes up with--which, by luck of the draw, are not all going to appeal to me--will present me with times when I want to say, "But I want..." and he can shoot me a look that says, "Bullshit."

And then I'll do it, despite the conditions that I wanted to use to avoid it.

Then force of habit will get me used to being a more unconditional giver.* And that's exactly what I prayed for God to help me become more quickly on the airplane last night, since I felt like I've been wishing it would happen for a year and a half but failing to make it happen at a decent rate.

I suppose I should thank God for his extremely generous providence last night, Christmas night. He sent me an opportunity a mere hour after I prayed with it. I blew it. And then he sent me the words of a best friend saying, "I feel wise but selfish...will you come be foolishly generous with me?" I missed one opportunity and God sent me a promise of 5-10 more.

* An example of a relatively "unconditional giver" would be that priest or nun that you see (or at least read about in 1800's novels) just give even when they have really legitimate worries that they themselves might not make it through another day if they do.

Debating with people who like masculinity, femininity, and all those ramifications of them in the world of violence as it intersects w/ sex

If I had a blogroll and treated it like Myspace, adding everyone I read, I might be on enough reading lists that this would get around the internet.

However, I want my blogroll to be more like a "links" page, with comments & annotations--it'd be like the right-hand bar of Shrub.com, only on a completely different page from my main page--or at least in a CSS/Javascript drop-down menu at the top. And I haven't bothered to do that yet, so I have no blogroll.

Anyway, maybe I'm happy that people won't be forwarding this all over. I'm kind of proud of the way I've been trying to engage people who are at all sorts of positions when it comes to gender--especially people who are interested in arguing the way I do.

So I don't think I want this bashed all over the internet. I think I want it discussed--even if that ends up meaning "bashed"--right here. Or at least on some of the moderate blogs--for example Sage's, Shrub, "I'm Not a Feminist, But...," "Thinking Girl," etc. The ones where people sympathize with the logic behind what a radical feminist would say but also sympathize with the logic behind "the way we handle social questions right now is good--or at least has good elements worth preserving through any changes" approaches.

So, yeah, if you take this elsewhere, please not only backlink but also leave a comment, since Blogger doesn't track backlinks very well! Thanks a lot.

On Muslim Wake Up!'s message boards, a very right-wing person posted this article on what might be the first prosecution under the new Women's Protection Act in Pakistan.

I almost didn't say anything about sympathy for victims, but I think I finally managed to work in in at the end in a way that is palatable even for someone who likes to abstract real humans into "rightdoer" and "wrongdoer" hypotheticals & projections.

That writer wrote:
Man lands in jail for admonishing neighbor
20-Dec-2006, 28/11/1427

23rd Ziqad, 1427 – December 15, 2006
ISLAMABAD (Shabbir Ahmad Salafi - Ghazwah Special Reporter)

In the first ever case registered under the new Women’s Protection Act, a very respectable man was sent to jail on the complaint of a woman of questionable character. Being the first case to be registered under the much publicized Women’s protection Act, Ghazwah took an extraordinary interest in the case. Here is what our special reporter uncovered:

A woman in Islamabad called the police and complained that Nazir Ahmad, a man living in a portion of her house which she had rented out to him, had committed Zina (illegal sexual intercourse) with her. When an investigative police team reached her house, number 984 in Sector I-10/1, at three O’clock in the morning, the accused Nazir Ahmad was sleeping in his portion of the house. When the police woke him up and told him that a complaint has been made against him by his landlady for raping her, he was utterly surprised, appeared totally ignorant of the accusation, and said this was the first time he is hearing about it. He requested the police to call the woman so that the accusation could be verified there and then, but the woman, named Maimoona Anjum, was absent from the house, along with her two sons. The police told the Ghazwah reporter that the complainant had arrived at the police station accompanied by her two sons from an unknown location. Ghazwah was amazed to find out later, that the woman, instead of going directly to the police station, had, curiously, gone to the PIMS hospital to get a medical report as proof of rape. It was also astonishing that the police, after briefly questioning Nazir Ahmad, returned without arresting him.

Moreover, for some strange reason, the FIR (First Information Report) was registered at 6 O’clock in the morning instead of being registered right away. The police party left the station at 7 O’clock in the morning to arrest Nazir Ahmad. Meanwhile, Nazir Ahmad stayed at his house and did not try to flee. A police officer, on condition of anonymity, told the Ghazwah reporter that the police contacted the Ministry of Law for guidance as to which clause of the new Women’s Protection Act was applicable for the arrest of the accused. Upon the advice of the Ministry of Law, the accused was booked under Clauses 375 and 376 of the Pakistan Penal Code. Theses Clauses has recently been added to Article 374 of the PPC which addresses to crimes of rape.

The accused Nazir Ahmad, who is a Grade 18 officer in the Ministry of Science of Technology, was arrested around 8 O’clock in morning by the police from his home. A police officer told the Ghazwah reporter that Nazir Ahmad’s cheeks were wet with tears when he was brought to the police station. Most of the policemen expressed sympathy towards Nazir Ahmad, but none of them was ready to talk about the case off-the-record. The Ghazwah reporter also contacted the SHO (Station House Officer) of the Sabzi Mandi Police Station, Khurshid Ahmad, Investigating Officer, Sub-Inspector Abd-ur-Rahman, and DSP (Deputy Superintendent of Police) Jameel Hashmi, for comments, but they all refused saying that they did not have permission to discuss the case.

Another interesting aspect of this case was that one of the investigating officers told the Ghazwah reporter that as yet the complainant had not been questioned. The medical tests on the complainant had been conducted by Dr. Sobia Luqman. The Investigating Officer, Sub-Inspector Abd-ur-Rahman told the Gazwah reporter that the medical report confirms that the complainant had had sexual intercourse, but it does not show that it was a forced act. Nazir Ahmad, meanwhile, immediately after his arrest, sent an application to DSP Jameel Hashmi, requesting him that a DNA test be conducted on the accused, as that would conclusively prove whether he is guilty or innocent of the crime. Surprisingly, even though six days have passed since the case was lodged; the tests have still not been conducted on the woman. Moreover, Nazir Ahmad was sent to Adiala Jail without presenting him before a magistrate. When the Ghazwah reporter asked the Investigating Officer, Sub-Inspector Abd-ur-Rahman as at which clause of the PPC allows for an accused to be sent to jail without being presenting him before a magistrate, the Sub-Inspector replied that he was sure his superiors were aware of the relevant clauses.

When the Ghazwah reporter visited Nazir Ahmad in Adiala Jail, he told the reporter that the house he was living in now was previously owned by another man. The complainant had bought this house about a year ago and had moved in with her three sons about a couple of months ago. Her husband works in Saudi Arabia. He said he lives with his family in the upper portion of the house. He said the staircase to the upper portion used to be within the lower portion, but when he observed that the woman lives alone without her husband; he had another staircase constructed outside the house at his own expense. He said the woman was very resentful when he had the staircase constructed. During all this time, he said, men, apparently strangers, would often visit her house. He said he advised her that since her husband is away, it did not seem proper that strange men should visit her all the time, nor would it reflect positively on his own family.

Nazir Ahmad said the woman gave him a notice to vacate the house the very next day after he had given her that advice. He said he had paid the rent up to the 31st of December, but the complainant insisted that he vacate the house immediately. Nazir Ahmad wanted the woman to increase the rent rather than have him vacate it. He said this is what became my crime, and the woman accused him of rape. He said that he had requested that a DNA test be conducted on the complainant to conclusively prove that he had not committed the offence, but even though many days have passed no action has been taken in this regard.

The Ghazwah reporter then visited the neighborhood where the supposed crime had taken place. Everyone in the neighborhood said that Nazir Ahmad is a very pious man. They said he had been living in this neighborhood for the past five years but no one had ever observed anything bad about him. In fact, they said, he used to lower his gaze when he passed by the young women of the neighborhood. When the Ghazwah reporter inquired about the complainant, no a single woman of the neighborhood offered a good word about her. One woman said that the complainant, Maimoona Anjum’s husband has been abroad since the last three years, and he is so fed up with his wife’s antics that he prefers not to be associated with her. One woman, on the condition of anonymity, even said that Maimoona’s husband had called one of her neighbors and told her that he is not responsible for what she does anymore, and that he is sick and tired of her actions behavior and activities.

When the Ghazwah reporter visited the complainant to find out her version of the story, her eldest son adopted a very harsh attitude and said he cannot talk to anyone, nor is he ‘allowed’ to talk to anyone regarding this case. He did not mention who had prohibited him to talk, but it was apparent from the rest of the conversation that the police had prohibited them to talk to the press. In her FIR, the woman said she was alone in the house when the incident happened, but she goes on to say that she went to the hospital with her son to have the medical tests conducted. One wonders where her son was before he came home, and also, where were her other two sons when the incident supposedly took place. Interestingly, the medical examiner who conducted the tests has also been prohibited by the police to talk to the press.

Discussing the case with our reporter, Habib Wahab-ul-Khairi, a famous lawyer, and a senior advocate, said, if the woman complainant has really been raped then the offender should definitely be punished, but the biased attitude of the police and senior officials in favor of the complainant is shameful. He said it seems the authorities want to make this case an example for the promotion of the Women’s Protection Act, even if in the process an innocent man gets punished for a crime he never committed.

In response, I wrote:

previous commenter wrote:
...the medical report confirms that the complainant had had sexual intercourse, but it does not show that it was a forced act. Nazir Ahmad, meanwhile, immediately after his arrest, sent an application to DSP Jameel Hashmi, requesting him that a DNA test be conducted on the accused, as that would conclusively prove whether he is guilty or innocent of the crime. Surprisingly, even though six days have passed since the case was lodged; the tests have still not been conducted on the woman.
...
He said that he had requested that a DNA test be conducted on the complainant to conclusively prove that he had not committed the offence, but even though many days have passed no action has been taken in this regard.

First conducting the test that was conducted, and second conducting the test that Ahmad has asked to be conducted, makes perfect logical sense to me.

The parts that sadden me most, though, are 1) that this kind of testing is invasive to the complainant and I wish that people had had the foresight to take swabs for both tests at once, and 2) if jails are inhumane there (I have no idea whether or not they are), then indeed waiting for the test results in an inhumane place is NOT "due process."

However, just the very basic idea of being detained where you can't get away until the test results about if it's your sperm come back does seem like due process. It'd only be the conditions of the detention that might make me change my mind about fairness & that "due" part.

So yeah, I feel upon reading this that there's a lot of potential for great due process, but that issues of poor treatment along the way (for example, having repeated tests when geez louise, someone could've thought of the next logical test and made sure a swab was taken, and for example, the condition of a detention center) might completely undermine that potential and turn the reality into something quite undue and unfair. If I were in charge, man, I'd start on the bases that I agreed with above but do everything I could to make sure that people are treated very well given those bases.

previous commenter wrote:
a famous lawyer, and a senior advocate, said...it seems the authorities want to make this case an example for the promotion of the Women’s Protection Act, even if in the process an innocent man gets punished for a crime he never committed.

For all the "show people the other extreme and they'll get what we're talking about when we complain" ideas I do support (for example, publishing advertisements that break men into body parts and subject them to bodily objectification and the message, "Your body is the only ultimate criterion about whether you're worth of praise or not" so that they will see how nasty it is and start fighting against such advertisements for everybody, man or woman), I do not support that approach as done through legal systems. The ultimate authority of legal systems to use force makes this too extreme an arena to play around with "making examples."

Absolutely no.

I do hope that that's not what's going on here. I do hope that this is a genuine attempt at due process and creating a balance where there can be victim-compassion-giving and yet "accused-compassion-giving" at the same time--in other words, due process for ALL.

If it's not...SHAME ON THEM.

I just feel like if one person says, "Ooooooh, bogeywoman is suspicious because she got a test before she went to the police," the best answer is, "No, actually, that doesn't seem suspicious to me--seems reasonable." And so on. Isn't that the answer that, if heard enough, is most likely and fastest to change someone's mind?