“It’s old people fncking with the Canadian film industry.”
by matttbastard
Which is more “nanny-state”: a strong social safety net, or a government that lets fundies decide what art is and isn’t worthy of public funding?
A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government’s move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.
Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, said his lobbying efforts included discussions with Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, and “numerous” meetings with officials in the Prime Minister’s Office.
“We’re thankful that someone’s finally listening,” he said yesterday. “It’s fitting with conservative values, and I think that’s why Canadians voted for a Conservative government.”
Mr. McVety said films promoting homosexuality, graphic sex or violence should not receive tax dollars, and backbench Conservative MPs and cabinet ministers support his campaign.
“There are a number of Conservative backbench members that do a lot of this work behind the scenes,” he said.
[...]
Conservative MP Dave Batters recently urged the new president of Telefilm Canada, Michel Roy, to block federal funding for objectionable films, listing Young People Fucking as a recent example.
“In my mind, sir, and in the minds of many of my colleagues and many, many Canadians,” said Mr. Batters during a Jan. 31 meeting of the Canadian Heritage committee, “the purpose of Telefilm is to help facilitate the making of films for mainstream Canadian society – films that Canadians can sit down and watch with their families in living rooms across this great country.”
Please, take your not-so-hidden “conservative values” and *ahem* do something offensive with them (other than continually fucking with Canadian values, dig?)
Update: more from we move to canada and Dan @ More Notes From Underground, who wonders if right wing defenders of latter-day free speech crusader (snerk) Ezra Levant will also stand up for Young People Fucking?
Bueller? Bueller?
Om nom nom
by boomgate
Last year I decided to go on a voyage. A voyage of discovery and inner harmony. Of love and worship. And eating.
For Easter last year I received a large box of Koko Black chocolates. Koko Black is a small Melbourne chain which specialises in making high end chocolates, as well as selling things like chocolate mousses and rich hot chocolates as part of it’s chocolate cafe. I decided to review some of the chocolates I received. Later I decided to take this idea even further by trying all of the chocolates they have for sale. Apart from marzipan, which cannot be trusted. On to teh reviews
Item: Creole
Product description: Coffee ganache in dark or milk chocolate
I had the dark chocolate version. While I enjoyed it, I was hoping for the coffee flavours to be a bit more pronounced.
Caramel Mousse
Light caramel ganache hand piped into a rosette
Wow, I really enjoyed this. By and large I’m indifferent towards alot of caramel chocolates as I tend to find them too sweet and cloying. Not so this time. The mousse was wonderfully light with the right amount of sweetness.
Rick Mercer is Jesus
by matttbastard
“The Liberals–we’re adaptable!” Fucking priceless.
Alan Wolfe: The Transformation of American Religion
by matttbastard
Alan Wolfe on how “that old time religion” has changed in America over the past five decades.
Wanker(s) of the Day (One Body. One person. One count.)
by matttbastard
The Braintrust @ the Ottawa Citizen (h/t Fern Hill @ BnR).
Miss Vicky nails it in a diplomatic, sympathetic-yet-uncompromising fashion:
My heart breaks for families of murdered pregnant women – people like Mary Talbot, who wrote a piece in the Citizen today. They are dealing with a profound loss, and to them the loss is of two people, to be sure – their daughter or wife or sister, and the potential addition to the family that she was carrying. Believe me, I know the grief of the loss of potential, of a life-not-yet-lived, and all the dreams and hopes and aspirations and possibilities that accompany a pregnancy. But the thing about law-making, especially when it comes to justice issues, is that we have to strip away the emotion from issues in order to write legislation that makes sense for society as a whole. There is little to be gained from charging a criminal with a separate count of murder or assault for the loss of a fetus, except perhaps the satisfaction of a need for vengeance for those who are left behind. And while I can imagine the desire for vengeance is overwhelming in these situations, that isn’t what our justice system is about. And it certainly doesn’t bring back the loved one and the potential loved one in question.
Grief, while powerful and painful and often all-consuming, should not be driving legislation.
Mary Talbot may (may) honestly believe that Bill C-484 has nothing to do with abortion, but that claim is specious. As CC observed, the Unborn Victims of Crime bill doesn’t make any legal sense–unless one is trying to further enshrine the words “unborn” and “child” in Canadian law, putting a woman’s right to choose–and, if the effect that similar laws in the US have had are any indication, her bodily integrity and physical liberty–in jeopardy.
The problems in this Bill are two-fold: they seek to give status to the foetus as a separate entity with rights equal to human beings, and it seeks to re-define the foetus as a child. The wording of the Bill is geared to both. Let’s look at the problems with this Bill.
BILL C-484 – An Act to amend the Criminal Code (injuring or causing the death of an unborn child while committing an offence) 1. This Act may be cited as the Unborn Victims of Crime Act.
The word “child” would re-define a foetus and a zygote as a human being. Similarly, “unborn victims” would give them a status independent from the woman. If the Bill was truly concerned only with protecting the woman from an involuntary miscarriage while being the victim of a crime, wording of this Bill could easily be changed to reflect an additional crime against the woman, that of causing an unwanted miscarriage. Wording here is clearly to establish the rights of a foestus and zygote as independent from a pregnant woman. That Bill continues to use such wording throughout, leaving no doubt that such a Bill will indeed view the foetus as a separate human being, and a child, at that.
3. The Act is amended by adding the following after section 238: Causing the death of an unborn child while committing an offence 238.1
(1) Every person who, directly or indirectly, causes the death of a child during birth or at any stage of development before birth while committing or attempting to commit an offence against the mother of the child, who the person knows or ought to know is pregnant,
(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of 10 years if the person
(i) means to cause the child’s death, or (ii) means to cause injury to the child or mother that the person knows is likely to cause the child’s death, and is reckless as to whether death ensues or not;
Just in case you still have doubts that the intent of this Bill is to declare a foetus/zygote a human being and give it rights as such:
Exclusion of defence
(5) It is not a defence to a charge under this section that the child is not a human being.
And in case you still don’t get it:
Separate offence
(6) An offence referred to in this section committed against a child is not included in any offence committed against the mother of the child.
[...]
It will be difficult to argue later that a “child” is a child in the case of crimes committed against a woman, but is not a child any other time. If the foetus is given independent rights in this case, it will be hard to argue it has none any other time.
[...]
[Bill C-484] is an unnecessary Bill since the extra charge of causing an unwanted abortion already exists in our laws. It is a dangerous Bill because it re-defines a foetus/zygote as a child and gives it independent rights. This will absolutely lay the groundwork for arguing to re-open the abortion issue.
Look, “what about my unborn granddaughter” is not an argument; it’s a deliberately manipulative fallacy that is being used (whether deliberately or otherwise) as part of a coordinated effort to incrementally chip away at reproductive liberty in Canada.
Once again: “Grief, while powerful and painful and often all-consuming, should not be driving legislation.”
The Ottawa Citizen has essentially given Mary Talbot an unchallenged forum to wack Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada over the head with grief just because Talbot has suffered a terrible loss. So, a challenge to the Citizen (and/or the folks in Winnipeg): allow Joyce the opportunity to respond to Talbot’s all-too-personal attack; let facts collide head on with emotion.
The women of Canada–and Joyce Arthur–deserve nothing less.
And the F-Word Goes To…
by matttbastard
…someone else. Always a bridesmaid, etc.
*sob*
Anyway, congrats to all the winners, and many thanks to pale and Prole for putting so much time and effort into throwing this grand soiree. You goils kick ass. UPDATE: And a VERY huge thankee to April and JJ for the nominations, and to everyone who voted for bastard.logic/moi! MUCH love!!11 (heh, was so busy grooving to the choonz that I forgot my manners).
But enough blather from yours truly–the real party’s over @ ACR!
Better Living Through Chemistry
by matttbastard
Via Dana @ The Beav (who wishes our so-called liberal media would also have the courage to highlight the ugly truth re: what Canadian soldiers are facing in Afghanistan), Elizabeth Rubin in today’s New York Times Magazine:
One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage. He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks, the garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. “I hate this country!” he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. “He’s on medication,” Kearney said quietly to me.
Then another soldier walked by and shouted, “Hey, I’m with you, sir!” and Kearney said to me, “Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour.” Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. “Medicated,” Kearney said. “Last tour, if you didn’t give him information, he’d burn down your house. He killed so many people. He’s checked out.”
As I went to get some hot chocolate in the dining tent, the peaceful night was shattered by mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire banging and bursting around us. It was a coordinated attack on all the fire bases. It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants. The soldiers were on a 15-month tour that included just 18 days off. Many of them were “stop-lossed,” meaning their contracts were extended because the army is stretched so thin. You are not allowed to refuse these extensions. And they felt eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: “We don’t get supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business.”
And, surprise, surprise, the overworked and over-medicated soldiers in question are apparently this close to going all My Lai on the Korengal Valley:
Just before I left, Kearney told me his biggest struggle would be holding his guys in check. “I’ve got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people,” he said. One of his lieutenants wanted to shoot every Afghan in the face. Kearney shook his head. He wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage. He tried to tell them the restraints were a product of their success — that there was an Afghan government with its own rules. “I’m balancing plates on my goddamn nose is what I’m doing,” he said. “All it’s gonna take is for one of these guys to snap.”
Is that the march of Freedom™ I hear tramp-tramping over someone’s fragile psyche?
Related: Tara McKelvey on the dearth of effective mental health care available to US military veterans suffering from PTSD. As one veteran puts it, “I felt like I was dealing with a M-A-S-H episode. There is this comedy of errors, and it culminates with this guy going home and blowing his brains out. And they say, ‘Oh, well, he was depressed.”
One wonders if Iraqis and Afghans are “depressed”, too.
Update: Another dispatch from the Korengal Valley by Sebastian Junger, which takes place just before the events chronicled by Rubin.
PSA: John McCain’s Lobbyist Friends
by matttbastard
John McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, and yet he said “I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to.”
Sign the petition demanding McCain return the millions of dollars raised by lobbyists.
Wanker of the Day (Anticipating Atrios)
by matttbastard
This could really hurt Al Gore. *crickets*
Update: So much for my powers of prognostication:
Who cares?
.38% in 2004.
I could get .38%.
Oh, snap! That’s gonna leave a mark.
“The only reason to call that…a ‘demographic winter’ is if you’re overly focused on which babies are being born.”
by matttbastard
Kathryn Joyce on anti-choicers, European xenophobia, and the “The Demographic Winter”.
The Wingnutosphere: Manufacturing Outrage Since 2004
by matttbastard
Barack Obama at this past Thursday’s Democratic debate in Texas:
I heard from a Army captain, who was the head of a rifle platoon, supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24, because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition; they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief. Now that’s a consequence of bad judgment, and you know, the question is on the critical issues that we face right now who’s going to show the judgment to lead.
Shorter pajama-pissing fact check platoon company brigade:
“Dan Rather The Associated Press The New Republic Barack Obama is so lying! We measured the margins! Times New Roman font!!11 Jamail Hussein!!1 SCOTT FUCKING BEAUCHAMP!!111″
(click the prairie dog for the real fact check courtesy Jake Tapper @ Political Punch)
Sez (Iraq veteran) Phil Carter:
I talked this morning with two friends who led rifle platoons in Afghanistan. Both confirmed to me that they did, at times, use captured or found weapons or ammunition. One relayed the story of mounting a Soviet 12.7mm heavy machine gun (the equivalent of a U.S. .50 caliber machine gun) on his HMMWV because it was too difficult to get the spare parts needed to fix their G.I. (government issue) .50 cal. Another told me his platoon carried AKs anytime they patrolled with their Afghan counterparts, and that it was always much easier to get 7.62mm ammo for the AKs than to go through the U.S. bureaucracy for ammunition requisition. These stories are timeless; you’ll see similar ones in the narratives from WWII, Korea and Vietnam vets too. Anyone who’s dealt with the Army supply system – particularly at the pointy end of the spear – ought to be able to sympathize.
[...]
In light of my experience in Iraq, Sen. Obama’s comments last night are eminently believable. Sen. Obama is also absolutely right to use this anecdote as a critique of the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. It is incontrovertible that the war in Iraq diverted scarce military resources (manpower, equipment, etc.) from Afghanistan to Iraq. The cost for that diversion was paid by America’s sons and daughters, and our Afghan brethren, who continue to fight in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We owe our troops better.
John Cole FTW: “Seriously, is there a more useless bunch of douchebags than these right-wing hacks?”
I know the question was rhetorical, but, no, John, there isn’t a more useless bunch of douchebags than these rightwing hacks. Simple answers…
“We’ll find this mysterious so-called ‘Captain’ and his so-called ‘platoon’ if it’s the last thing we do!”
“Both of these belief systems are self-delusional.”
by matttbastard
Chris Hedges on “secular fundamentalism” and creeping fascism.
Referrer Link Follies
by matttbastard
This is definitely not a credible source. First of all, the website is called “bastard.logic.” Secondly, their news headline is “Obama ‘bout ta pop a cap in jeff Zeleny’s Azz!” It seems to be a personal blog, and apart from using a lot of profanity and slang, it also is full of typo’s [sic]. Furthemore, it lacks any credible outside sources.
If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off in the corner crying alongside the folks @ Talking Points Memo (who apparently get no quarter re: credibility, despite winning a Polk Award earlier this week).
PS:
Damn kids.
Quote of the Day: Splitting the Binary
by matttbastard
The truth, though disappointing from the point of view of journalism, is that the most promising humanitarian elements of foreign policy tend to be the boring ones. Timely and effective diplomacy can often avert humanitarian catastrophes before they break out at much lower cost than coercive force can end them once they’ve started. And the U.N.’s traditional peacekeeping operations, where parties to a conflict request third-party troops to help monitor and enforce a peace deal, have a solid track record of success but are perennially under-resourced by an indifferent United States. Greater commitment – political, financial, and (when appropriate) military – to these kinds of operations would bring much larger humanitarian benefits than would any hypothetic humanitarian wars.
- Matthew Yglesias, Kosovo and the Rise of the Humanitarian Hawks
“And the words don’t leave my mouth till I’ve had a Dram”
by matttbastard
The theramin hook alone kicks this one into the ‘win’ column.
Situational Ethics
by matttbastard
As Rush and the rest of the rebellious right do a 180 by rallying ’round the Maverick (nothing says “common cause” quite like hatin’ on teh librul Grey Lady), Greg Sargent conducts a little thought experiment:
Let’s take the meat of the big New York Times story and substitute the words “Dem Presidential Hopeful” for “John McCain”:
Early in Senator Dem Presidential Hopeful’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that Mr. Dem Presidential Hopeful had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
Mr. Dem Presidential Hopeful, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. Dem Presidential Hopeful led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
If these words had appeared on the front page of The New York Times, wouldn’t we all be yelling and stamping our feet about “panty sniffing” and condemning the use of anonymous sources who suggest a possible affair that may or may not have happened and wasn’t directly alleged by anyone?
That’s a sincere question. Wouldn’t we?
Conversely, would the wingnuts be circling the wagons in the name of journalistic integrity? IOKIYAR, natch. Regardless, even if there’s no substance to allegations of sexual impropriety, Stephen Bainbridge wonders if the “values” wing will eventually grow tired of GOP relativism:
The social conservatives in the base already have problems with McCain. Don’t you think that someday that part of the base is going to get tired of the “values” party being led by divorced womanizers?
Now that is a sincere question.
More High Brow Panty Sniffing
by matttbastard
[W]hy can’t the press hit the man over his support for torture, his myopic views on the war on terror, his flipness about bombing other countries, or his campaign finance hustling? Why is it that only by cheating on your spouse can an American politician dishonor themselves?
Train Kept A-Rollin’
by matttbastard
Ryan Lizza in this week’s New Yorker:
It is bracing to drop in on the McCain campaign after covering the overly managed productions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Democratic candidates rarely speak to the travelling press. McCain not only packs his bus with reporters (whom he often greets with an affectionate “Hello, jerks!”) but talks until the room is filled with the awkward silence of journalists with no more questions. The Obama campaign, like the Bush White House, prides itself on message discipline and tracks down leakers with a frightening intensity. McCain and his aides openly discuss strategy, whether it’s Brooke Buchanan, McCain’s travelling press secretary, prepping him for a press conference (“ABC might ask about that”) or McCain discussing his targeting strategy for Tampa (“I thought we did a robo-call to tell people about Schwarzkopf”—referring to the endorsement by General Norman Schwarzkopf).
The intimacy of the bus means that McCain’s family life is an open book. (Cindy is dismayed that their son Jack recently split up with his girlfriend; John has turned his daughter Meghan’s status as an unemployed art-history grad into a punch line.) The chumminess with the press usually spills into the evenings, and McCain’s senior advisers dine almost nightly with the people covering the candidate.
McCain’s open-access policy is partly strategic. After all, he is able to hammer talking points like any politician. (It’s not just his jokes that he repeats.) But, by engaging reporters in long, even substantive conversations, he also disarms them. The incentive to ask “gotcha” questions that feed the latest news cycle is greatly reduced, and the hours of exposure to McCain breed a relationship that inclines journalists to be more careful about describing the context of his statements. Mark Salter believes that McCain’s back-of-the-bus rambles rarely produce gaffes. “Ten per cent of the time, something like that is going to happen,” he said. “But ninety per cent of the time it works out fine. If you just make your case, and reporters are familiar with you and know how you talk and know what you mean when you’re bouncing around on a bus and you truncate your sentences or something, then they know what you’re driving at, and you’re going to be fine.”
Keep that in mind as you watch the members of the Fourth Estate twist themselves into knots debating whether the “breaking news” about McCain’s possible compromise of his vaunted “principles” constitutes a scoop or a “hit-and-run smear campaign” (Monica who? Oh, that was a real scandal–IOKIYAR, natch).
The Man Crush Express rolls on (also, what Marc Cooper said).
More from Josh Marshall, publius, Steve Benen, and a virtual avalanche of digital opinion scribes over @ Memeorandum.
Dream a Little Dream
by matttbastard
Contextural Margins
by matttbastard
Well, bastard.logic–and *ahem* yours truly–have made it to the finals of the Canadian F-Word Blog Awards (final round voting takes place February 22-23–w00t!) Fellow nominee Pomegranate Queen did not make it past the first round (too bad, as her blog kicks ass). While expressing her gratitude for the acknowledgment she took the opportunity to explore some personal concerns the nomination provoked: namely, that having a separate Women of Colour category others WOC who may (or may not) identify as feminists; how the awards serve a microcosm of feminism in general; and how WOC have been marginalized throughout the history of the movement.
Prole from ACR shows up in comments to address the matter of the WOC category:
I’m really sorry to have offended you or anyone – to be honest, I had questioned the category also when we were putting this together. We consulted some other bloggers while coming up with the list, and the WOC category was insisted on, by a person of colour. We deferred to their judgement.
First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I am the person of colour in question.
Prole, please don’t take this the wrong way, cause I love your guilt-ridden cracker ass (grinz), but “my black friend sez” is never a valid explanation (not that you’re the first to fall back on it). I’m certainly no proxy for all the brothas and sistas out there, and apologize to all concerned if I presented myself as such. I hold opinions that many would disagree with (obviously), regardless of ethnicity, identity, gender, or orientation.
With that out of the way, speaking solely for myself, I do happen to believe that (for whatever reason, right or wrong) there IS a difference between mainstream middle-class liberal white-centred feminism and the sort that is practiced and written about by WOC bloggers (to say nothing of the perspectives that are highlighted by black male, LGBT bloggers, or disability bloggers). By itself, having a distinctive category highlighting and celebrating the unique contribution to feminist blogging made by Women of Colour isn’t necessarily othering; however, the lack of nominees in the WOC category is indicative of the fact that white feminist bloggers (and white feminists in general) do need to expand their horizons with regards to interacting with bloggers who reside out of the so-called mainstream*, to redefine the boundaries of what feminism(s) is (are).
What does lend credence to the charge of othering (and I should have thought of this when I pushed for the category) is the lack of a parallel “Best Mainstream Middle-Class White-Centred Feminist Blog.” Having an unqualified “Best Canadian Feminist” category alongside categories specifically devoted to racial/gender identity makes “Canadian Feminist” the default stand in for “white”, illustrating the fact that, to too many folks, “white” is synonymous with “normative”. PQ is right: what needs to be discussed isn’t that the F-Word awards othered WOC, but rather that WOC are already marginalized from so-called “mainstream” (read: white middle-class) feminist discourse (and discourse in general) to the point where POC have to cause a ruckus in order for the experiences and issues that affect them (us) to be acknowledged.
Would any WOC-authored blogs have been nominated otherwise? I suppose we’ll never know, and perhaps my (unwarranted?) cynicism was precluded by witnessing too many battles within the USian femisphere where the voices of WOC were reflexively marginalized to the point of non-existence.
The issues explored by POC/WOC bloggers, like all issues, are simultaneously universal and unique; that people default to “white” as being “the norm” is a product of a white supremacist (and no, I don’t mean skinheads and white sheets, lol) patriarchal discourse that has been imposed upon–and willingly embraced by many in–our society. And, much like oblivious Popular Male Liberal Bloggers, white feminists (and, to varying degrees, POC) aren’t immune; having a vagina (and/or darker complexion) doesn’t mean one can’t be affected. But if Feminism(s) truly represent a radical discourse, then the idea of the existence of an inherent “norm”–rather than lazy assumptions born of unconscious and deliberate social conditioning–needs to be challenged.
And that includes lazy assumptions that exist within a radical discourse, even if the privilege is affirmed by somebody who should know better (doh!)
* One thing that I’ve realized throughout all this is that I don’t have much interaction with other Canadian bloggers of colour. That fact was made apparent when I tried to think of blogs to nominate in the category and was stumped–ironic, huh? Which, as I said, is partly the point of the awards: expanding one’s horizons.
Farewell, Fidel
by matttbastard
Castro quits, Cuban exiles yawn ( “It’s very good that Fidel resigns. But if Fidel dies, it’s better”–geez, tough crowd.) UK journo John Harris notes the enigmatic record Castro’s time in office presents to both leftists and free-marketeers:
Hagiographies are surely being hacked out as we speak, full of awed tributes to Cuba’s long-standing defiance of the US, Castro’s signature mixture of revolutionary romance and crafty realpolitik, and the achievements of Cuba’s health and education systems. On the other side of the argument, plenty of people will be roundly decrying his record, looking forward to Cuba’s belated opening-up, and chastising those who’d have you believe that Castro’s retirement represents the beginning of the end of a glorious story packed with emotive abstract nouns: courage, strength, indefatigability … you name them.
This, needless to say, is all pretty pointless stuff. Not that you’ll read it in a lot of today’s coverage, but much the most rational response to Castro’s record is a profound ambivalence. If you’ve been to Cuba as a tourist, you may be familiar with the beguiling sense of a society run according to a communitarian ethos, tempered by a nagging fear that you’ve essentially enjoyed a cheap holiday in other people’s misery. One minute, a seductive mixture of revolutionary iconography and jaw-dropping health statistics threaten to pull you towards the idea that the revolution has a lot going for it; the next, you’re reminded of the regime’s truly malignant aspects. As of a sobering reminder to leftist romantics, the absence of free trade unions and lack of recognition of the right to strike usually does the trick.
Sober social democrat Cernig explains why Castro’s resignation may ultimately prove beneficial to socialists of a less dictatorial bent:
One of the ways in which Castro was useful to the American Right – as people like Chavez are now – is in enabling them to muddy the waters of American debate by pretending that modern socialism and dicatorial communism are identical – a meme that has widespread currency in the U.S. How often do you hear rightwingers complain about Tony Blair being a socialist, for instance? Yet the Labour Party which he was head of has always been avowedly a socialist party. Gordon Brown is the current party leader and British PM. How often does his socialism come up in US mainstream reporting?
Hey, fuck the champagne-sipping Commie symps–as Jon Swift modestly illustrates, this is truly a momentous victory for–and vindication of–proponents of the US’ harsh myopic counterproductive freedom-affirming Cuba policy:
All of those liberals who complained that sanctions were not working and said Castro was thumbing his nose at the United States should apologize to the ten Presidents who have methodically plotted Castro’s downfall since 1959 now that Castro has finally said, “Tio.” While it may have appeared to some that Castro emerged unscathed from the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 638 attempts by the CIA to assassinate him using poison cigars and exploding, mollusks, the embargo, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Mariel Boat Lift, which deprived the country of some of its finest criminals and mental patients, we can now see that each of these incidents chipped away at Castro’s power little by little until he had no choice but to surrender.
So does this mean that the wingnut welfare scheme better known as the Office of Cuban Broadcasting is now doomed to be scrapped on the slagheap of dubious history? And, more importantly, will legal Cuban cigars be puffed by powerbrokering superdelegates in the smoke-filled rooms @ this year’s Democratic National Convention? As Edward Abbey famously quipped, “Democracy—rule by the people—sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.”
Update: Sheesh– Miami resident Mustang Bobby sure is a killjoy. Homeboy seems less than impressed with the blessings of liberty that have been bestowed upon the oppressed Cuban populace over the years by the US:
In terms of oppression and denial of freedom, Cuba is in the same league with China, Vietnam, and a host of other countries that we not only do business with but welcome their leaders to our country to sign lucrative deals for the buying and selling of watches, bicycles, and child-labor-produced sportswear. If we had bombarded Cuba with McDonald’s and NAPA Auto Parts instead of John Birch Society rhetoric and Radio Marti, chances are that Fidel Castro’s revolution would have been marginalized by a stampede of Nikes and iPods. As it is, we have left the natural flow of exporting capitalism to Cuba to Canada, the EU, and the rest of the Americas, leaving our influence fifty years to leeward. It’s a lot easier to effect a change in a country when you’re standing in the middle of it counting your money rather than standing outside the fence and screaming at them.
On that note, the embargo will continue for the foreseeable future, as per Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte. Hey, why mess with a successful formula?
Via Memeorandum
Read This Now
by matttbastard
Shark-Fu (who recently landed a gig @ RH Reality Check) debunks the “black genocide” myth re: family planning initiatives:
Charges that reproductive health service providers are conspiring to commit black genocide are a kind of intellectual mold that flourishes in the absence of the facts. Either by design or circumstance, legislation seeking to restrict access to clinics and end educational outreach programs often acts in concert with campaigns like The Genocide Awareness Project to cultivate fear of abortion providers and resentment. Constant harassment by anti-choice groups and the very real threat of violence also prevent clinics from being visible within the communities they serve, exacerbating the sense that they are not true partners and perpetuating mistrust.
Reproductive health service providers and pro-choice volunteers must continue our outreach into communities of color to prevent such claims from being accepted as the truth. In keeping with that goal, the history of eugenics and sterilization abuse in America requires that claims like those of black genocide made against reproductive service providers not be met with casual disregard. Such claims must be challenged head on even as we acknowledge a tragic history and work to insure that such acts never happen again.
As they say, read the whole damn thing.
h/t Bitch Ph.D.
More on the Demographic Winter
by matttbastard
Well, it’s sad to see this creeping into Europe, but there’s always been a strong streak of racism among the fetus fetishists in North America: ‘Too many of Them and not enough of Us are breeding.’
Yup. Peel off the “innocent unborn” rhetoric and a lot of ‘em are simply selling good ol’ fashioned white nationalism under the noble guise of saving Western Civilization™ from imminent collapse. Of course, for anyone who doesn’t fit the proper socioeconomic/ethnic standard, reproduction should be considered a privilege, to be strictly *ahem* regulated by those who claim to always support Life™ (except when they don’t).
‘We’ must make sure we’re only loading our quivers with proper arrows–and don’t get any funny, Feminazi-inspired thoughts about betraying your country and your biological destiny by putting on your shoes and leaving the kitchen, ladies.
“Things that can’t go on forever don’t.”
by matttbastard
Related: More from Johnson on “military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy” and why American hegemony is an economically unsustainable “suicide pact”.
The Demographic Winter
by matttbastard
The latest issue of The Nation features a disturbing cover story by Kathryn Joyce on how the American religious far-right is tapping nativist insecurity in Europe to take its made-in-the-USA anti-choice message global.
A sample:
The imminent demise of Europe is a popular prediction these days, with books such as Catholic scholar George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral, Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan, Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept and Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West all appearing since 2001. The 2006 film Children of Men sketched a sterile, dystopian world thrown into chaos for lack of babies (though with less blatant antiabortion implications than the Christian allegorical P.D. James novel on which it was based). The media increasingly sound the alarm as Eastern European countries register birthrates halved since the last generation. And on February 11, the Family First Foundation, a profamily group in the same movement circles as [Steve] Mosher and [Christine] de Vollmer, released a documentary dedicated to the threat: Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family.
What was a conservative drumbeat about Europe’s death has become mainstream media shorthand, complementing ominous news items about Muslim riots in France; Muslim boycotts in London; Muslim “veil” debates in Denmark; and empty European churches transformed into mosques, with calls to prayer replacing church bells. Evangelical luminary Chuck Colson, head of the vast Prison Fellowship ministry and a close ally of George W. Bush, espoused a conspiracy theory in which he construed an Islamic Council of Europe handbook for Muslims trying to keep the faith abroad as a “soft terrorism” plot for takeover. The late Oriana Fallaci lambasted Europe’s transformation into a Muslim colony, “Eurabia.” And in a recent political match in Switzerland, a campaign poster depicted a flock of white sheep kicking a black sheep out of their pasture, “For Greater Security.” The refrain is that the good-faith multicultural tolerance approach of the Netherlands has been tried and has failed, which is arguably a few polite steps from Mosher’s summary of the problem: that Muslim immigrants are simply “too many and too culturally different from their new countries’ populations to assimilate quickly…. They are contributing to the cultural suicide of these nations as they commit demographic suicide.” Or, as he declared while rallying a gathering of profamily activists last spring in Poland, “I want to see more Poles!”
Or more Russians, or more Italians, as the case may be. The fever for more “European” babies is widespread. The last two popes have involved themselves in the debate, with John Paul II pronouncing a “crisis of births” in 2002 in an anomalous papal address to Italy’s Parliament and Benedict XVI remarking on the “tragedy” of childless European couples and beatifying an Italian peasant woman for raising twelve children.
At the national level, in 2004 Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi offered a “baby bonus” of about $1,000 to parents who had a second child, and Russia, which has a history of pronatalist policies, including its 1980s-era “motherhood medals,” sweetened the offer to its citizens with several birth initiatives for hesitant couples, including an $8,900 award to families who produce a second child and a stipend of 40 percent of salary to women who leave work to become stay-at-home moms. One Russian province made novelty news worldwide with its Day of Conception on September 12, when residents of Ulyanovsk got time off work to “conceive a patriot” for the country. Prizes for successful delivery nine months later include refrigerators and cars. The theme is present enough in the popular consciousness that a Swedish underwear company cashed in on the anxiety with a provocative ad campaign featuring a cast of Nordic men wearing EU-type lapel pins, commanding Swedes to Fuck for the Future and Drop Your Pants or Drop Dead.
The nativist motivations for such campaigns move beyond the subliminal at times. Elizabeth Krause, an anthropologist and author of A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy, tracked that country’s population efforts over the past decade and found politicians demanding more babies “to keep away the armadas of immigrants from the southern shores of the Mediterranean” and priests calling for a “Christian dike against the Muslim invasion of Italy.” The racial preferences behind Berlusconi’s “baby bonus” came into embarrassing relief when immigrant parents were accidentally sent checks for their offspring and then asked to return the money: the Italian government hadn’t meant to promote those births.
The American Christian right, increasingly seeking influence abroad, has recognized that this anxiety over shifting national identities creates fertile terrain for spreading its ideology of traditional sexual morality as a quick fix for a postmodern age.
Related: Chris Hedges has more on the “creeping Christian chauvinism [that] has infected our political and social discourse” and how “[t]he public denigration of Islam, and by implication all religious belief systems outside Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the [US] since the 9/11 attacks.”
Saturday Blogwhoring
by matttbastard
47 Days into 2008 and I’ve yet to spread the <3. Mea culpa–shall post a more extensive link farm later this week.
Love always,
mb.
(Shakesville = WINville).
Natalia Antonova: Shorter danaseilhan: “Sexual assault and harrassment are bad things. Unless they happen to a mouthy stripper.”
A Secret Chord: Brazen Sex-Positivity (aka “Not Being an Asshole”)
Jon Swift: RAMs and SHEEP
A Creative Revolution: Honour.
Birth Pangs: “Unborn Victims” + political manipulation = Same Old Sexist Morality
Too Sense: McCain’s “Jew Counter”
A Woman’s Ecdysis: The State of Brownhood
Black Looks: Closing the gates on Black women in Britain
Automatic Preference: I Am Rude
AngryBlackBitch: Supercalafragilistic Fubardemocractus
ThePoliticalCat: Berkeley Protests at Marine Recruiting Center: REFOCUS
La Chola: Links and more
The Gimp Parade: Cop dumps quadriplegic man out of his wheechair
Muslimah Media Watch: Adventures in Muslim Dating
skdadl @ pogge: How to think and talk clearly about the Taliban
I Wanna Be Trash
by matttbastard
Mancunian dance commanders shatter the Sasha Frere-Jones Score into a thousand tiny shards of pretentious Upper West Side stupidity. I dare you to keep your booty in a static position. Double-doggy stylez, y0.
Bonus: Official promo vid:
SMV™: “Make Jesus King of America!”
by matttbastard
Unintentionally comedic (if not disturbing) footage taken at the March For Life in Washington, DC, 01/22/08.
You really can’t make this shit up.
Related: Zvika Krieger reports from pro-life ground zero, showing that a number of marching baby lobbyists were less than enamoured with the *ahem* choices available at the time to fetus fetishizing zygotists in the upcoming presidential election. And, of course, the field has since narrowed even further, with McCain having been (unenthusiastically) anointed the Republican Chosen One (GHWB FTW!). But perhaps the GOP should take heart–the positive response that the shoutout from everyone’s favourite ideologically mutable faux-Maverick (c/o Religious Right rockstar Sam Brownback) received at the March–along with the animus directed towards Democratic baby-eaters Obama and Clinton–seems to indicate that the clinic bombers could still be convinced to hop aboard the Man Crush Straight Talk Express.
TGIF Bloodbath
by matttbastard
‘Upper West Side Soweto’? Don’t believe the blog-fueled hype; this ain’t Graceland in thriftstore drag. But they definitely possess an itchy pop-virus quality, catchy like a drug-resistant superbug.
Quote of the Day: A Movement of Hearts and Souls
by matttbastard
(Originally uploaded by Barack Obama)
What’s going on is that we’ve finally got a Democratic candidate who understands exactly how the Republicans did it. As I pointed out my very first week on this blog, the GOP didn’t come to power by talking about plans and policies; they did it by using strongly emotional appeals that grabbed people by the gut and didn’t let them go. Theirs was never a movement based on reason. It was, from the very beginning, a movement of hearts and souls. And it was that deep, emotionally sustaining commitment that drew people in so deeply that they were willing to give 25 years of their lives to bringing about the New World Order their leaders promised them. We may hate what they’ve accomplished — but we’re never going to be able to do better until we can inspire that same kind of passion for change.
And Obama’s doing just that. He’s tapped into a deeply pressurized seam of repressed fury within the American electorate, and he’s giving it voice, a focus, and an outlet. Are the results scary? You bet: these people want change on a scale that much of the status quo should find terrifying. Are they unreasoning? The followers may be — but as long as their leader keeps a cool head, that’s not as much of a problem right now as we might think; and the heat will dissipate naturally in time. Is this kind of devotion even appropriate? You bet. You don’t get the kind of deep-level change we need without first exposing and channeling people’s deep discontent. Obama’s change talk may be too vague for most people’s tastes (including mine); but the fact is that if we’re serious about enacting a progressive agenda, rousing people’s deepest dreams and desires and mobilizing that energy is exactly how it’s going to happen. And Obama’s the first candidate we’ve had in a generation who really, truly gets this.
The energy of Obama’s rallies scares the hell out of reason-bound, well-educated liberals; but it’s nothing new to anyone who’s spent time in the overheated revival-meeting atmosphere that conservative politicians have used to rouse their voters for decades. Stirring up their base in exactly this same way is how they won. Our chronic inability to move people like that is why we’ve continued to lose.
- Sara Robinson, The Cult of Obama (h/t Oliver Willis)
#rebelleft
GlobalComment
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- Sex Online? The Ultra-Orthodox Rally Against the Internet Emily Manuel
- A Study in Pink: Sherlock and Steven Moffat’s Woman Problem s.e. smith
- What’s behind the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece? Feature Writer
- Reflections on an Arab Spring in Peril Nasser Ali Khasawneh
Alterdestiny
- All The Power To The Top noreply@blogger.com (Redbeard)
- Now The Serpent Was More Subtil... noreply@blogger.com (Redbeard)
- Who Made That Butterball For You? noreply@blogger.com (Redbeard)
- Historical Image of the Day noreply@blogger.com (Erik Loomis)
- Reagan by Eugene Jarecki noreply@blogger.com (Redbeard)
WorldBridge: Refugees International’s Blog
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LabourStart
- Chile: Outsourced Chilean Copper Workers '21st Century Slave Labour'
- Egypt: Union movement finds its own strength; workers are now crafting a new network to secure workplace rights
- Australia: World's richest woman makes more profits by off-shoring Australian jobs
- Korea (North): Amnesty report: 200,000 prisoners in Kim's Gulag
- Cambodia: Security guards clash with workers at factories that supply Levi’s, Gap and H&M
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