Canada’s Debate

You know, the more I work (more on that when I have good news to share) the more I find myself feeling stagnant during my free time. For some reason playing the same old computer games and watching the same old tv shows doesn’t satisfy (even if they are among the best) as much as honest intellectual endeavours. Now, as it turns out I’ve had this blog-thing all this while… and that seems like a pretty good way to involve myself a bit. So I’m going to get back to more regular posting… for what it’s worth. Just a few quick hits for tonight:

1. Are these the dumbest people on earth?

   The intensified discussions are being prompted by several deputies of Cabinet members and reflect a growing belief that the continued use of the detention facility is tainting the image of the United States, and as a result hampering America’s campaign against terrorism, the officials said.

   This is a realization? Where have these “leaders” been for the last five years? Every single conflagration of Muslim anger (or political anger in general) directed towards the United States has carried mention of Guantanamo Bay. It is beyond comprehension that this is news… which begs the question? Does the Bush administration not care, or are they all in some sort of prolonged spell of hysterical blindness?

(more…)

Apologies for not posting yesterday. Dreamhost has apparently dropped the ball, and I’ve been having server problems all weekend long.

With the “please God don’t vote for the Liberals” budget set to drop, I find myself curiously disinterested. Rather, I find myself turning towards this story, appearing today in the New York Times:

Cloistered by two decades of war and then the strict Islamic rule of the Taliban, Afghanistan was long shielded from the ravages of the AIDS pandemic. Not anymore.

H.I.V. and AIDS have quietly arrived in this land of a thousand calamities. They remain almost completely underground, shrouded in ignorance and stigma as the government struggles with the help of American and NATO forces to rebuild the country in the face of a new offensive by Taliban insurgents.

This is a subject I’ve written about in the past, although mostly in a speculative fashion. The tragedy of AIDS is one that has been told by countless others, but the connection between infection and morality is a subject that usually triggers stronger passions than arguments. The argument often goes that the prevalence of AIDS is a function of weak or relaxed moral laws and attitudes. This argument unfortunately ignores the case of AIDS in the Arab world, a growing calamity with a shrinking spotlight.

In 1995, for example, Indonesia’s Council of Ulemas urged that condoms only be sold to married couples with prescriptions from general practitioners. It was felt that strong religious convictions would prevent people from having extramarital sex. Members of the international public health community, for their part, have not only seemed to accept the presumptions behind those arguments but on occasion have also espoused them. As recently as February, an official Pakistan’s National AIDS Control Programme asserted that HIV prevalence was lower in Pakistan than in other countries thanks largely to “better social and Islamic values.”

I don’t have much to contribute to the AIDS debate, either in terms of perspective or discourse, but if there’s one thing that I can do it’s fault specious reasoning from a mile away; and the foolish notion that strong social morals informed by religion can innoculate a society from AIDS is a prime example. Whenever someone makes such an argument I invite you to refer them to this passage from July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Policy:

An instructive tale for the Muslim world lies in the differing responses to HIV/AIDS in Thailand and South Africa. Int he early 1990s, both countries had an official national prevalence of between 2 and 3 percent. Thailand embarked on an aggressive anti-HIV campaign that reached all sectors of society…. As a result of this campaign, HIV rates remained low throughout the 1990s. By comparison, South Africa did little to halt the spread of HIV until the dawn of this millennium and now has the nightmarish task of controlling a disease that already infects nearly a quarter of its adult population.

The relationship between democracy and freedom is a very deep one, but the two are not the same. Never have been, and never will be. It is entirely possible to have democracy without freedom… so, the question remains, is it possible to have freedom without democracy, or more pointedly, is it possible to have democracy with no freedom? The reason I ask is simple. For the past thirty years the West (and the United States has led the charge) has been trying to fashion Democracy wherever it could. I use Democracy to denote a specific iteration of democratic government: a stable political regime with formalized public institutions, that is open to Western interests, and features enough participation to dispel potential social upheaval.

Now, whenever someone talks about “spreading democracy” they either do so in terms of benevolence or extreme distrust, but the reality of the “project” is much less idealistic. The truth is that western liberal democracy seeks to replicate itself in the same way that Communism does. Those in power in our democracies view them as the pinnacle of social development and naturally seek to replicate that success elsewhere.

So lets talk about freedom for a bit. There are two “types” of freedom employed by the Political analyst crowd: Political Freedom and Economic freedom… and while nobody knows the formula itself, the idea is that real democracy isn’t necessary so long as there is sufficient freedom of one sort or another. (more…)

Seeing as I have only one X chromosome, I don’t have any great insight or wisdom to share on what life is like for women. However, understanding women and understanding the circumstances that women face are entirely different; and that is the reason why we should all take some time to consider International Womens’ Day.

I am not going to delineate the status of women world wide (although Redjenny has a pretty good brief on the subject up), or provide some sort of comparative evaluation of the womens’ movement here or elsewhere. Instead, I direct your attention to this story (emphasis mine):

More than 600 Guatemalan women a year are murdered. The figures have quadrupled in the last five years, while the murder rate among men has remained constant. Since January, 102 women and girls have been killed, among them a 7-year-old who was raped and beheaded….

Director Giselle Portenier went to Guatemala after reading an Amnesty International report on the escalating violence against women in this country of 12 million people.

That so few of the female murders are even investigated only adds to the sense that killing a woman is “a third-class crime.” Not one of the 665 reported cases in 2005 was ever solved.

If that doesn’t give pause, then no amount rational discourse will.

The term All Politics is local goes back quite a while, and has served a lot of pundits and quip-artists well.

Now, as I was sitting on the couch and engaging in one of my unconscious internal debates I came to toy with the idea that All religion is local too. Now, before I explain I should spell out what I mean by local. “Place” can be understood not just as a geographic position, but rather the space that we occupy at any given time; subject to all of our interactions and identities. Our “location” then is environment created by our place and the surrounding community. For example, a black person and white person living in the same building in Harlem could be said to live in the same spot, but both are living in entirely different places, and therefore their locality is different.

Ok, needlessly hermeneutic digression aside, lets talk about religion. As I was engaged in my running internal monologue I got to thinking about the various iterations of Islam, and the various misrepresentations of it. A Pashtun man will practice Islam entirely differently than Lebanese man, or a Morrocan one for example. Wahhabism is heavily influenced by the Arab tribalism of the people that originally adopted Islam, just as Persian cultural has influenced the practice of Islam in Iran. (more…)

I just came across this post at Red Jenny’s blog and it is DEFINITELY worth checking out. I don’t agree with everything the author says, but his case is incredibly persuasive; the West needs to withdraw from Afghanistan quickly and completely.

Washington’s strategic aims in Afghanistan appear to be non-existent unless they need the conflict to discipline European allies who betrayed them on Iraq. True, the al-Qaeda leaders are still at large, but their capture will be the result of effective police work, not war and occupation. What will be the result of a NATO withdrawal? Here Iran, Pakistan and the Central Asian states will be vital in guaranteeing a confederal constitution that respects ethnic and religious diversity. The NATO occupation has not made this task easy. Its failure has revived the Taliban and increasingly the Pashtuns are uniting behind it.

The lesson here, as in Iraq, is a basic one. It is much better for regime-change to come from below even if this means a long wait as in South Africa, Indonesia or Chile. Occupations disrupt the possibilities of organic change and create a much bigger mess than existed before. Afghanistan is but one example.

I’ve seen this sort of talk quite a bit, and I don’t understand it. Is Iraq engaged in a Civil War? Perhaps. Is the Middle East? Of course not. Time magazine goes so far as to ask on its latest cover what is driving the Civil War in the Middle East.

Correct me wrong, but the last time I checked there is no Middle East society. It is not a country or a nation, it is a loosely defined region. How foolish would I look if I called the Counter-Reformation a Civil War? Start talking about the War of the Rose and you have a case, but that was an internal conflict that played out as a result of a larger conflagration, and the same is true of Iraq and the Middle East.

The truth of the matter is that this sort of dialogue is just more of the same screwy orientalism that isolates (at least intellectually) and quantifies Islam in ways that legitimate the current “War on Terror,” and it’s numerous tertiary endeavours in the Middle East.

I’ve talked about a carbon market several times in recent weeks. I’ve argued before (and I’ll say it again) that emissions trading may not immediately reduce emissions, but the long-term effect of trading is both investment and cleaner technology. I say “argued” because I of course have been challenged on every turn with these assertions.

Anyways, I just thought I’d share with you another writer’s take on the system.

Europe has done it, with the result that there are 11,500 companies that are required to meet specific emission targets. Consequently, there are 11,500 companies deciding every year whether they are going to pay a penalty for exceeding their emission limits, pay the capital costs of upgrading their operations to reduce emissions, or pay a lot less to get a one-year exemption by buying emission credits that will count toward meeting their annual cap.

The market has delivered its verdict, and buying and selling emissions is a flourishing business. In 2005, trading in Europe reached $9.6 billion. Worldwide, the value of trading in the first nine months of 2006 doubled the entire trading of 2005 ($24.6 billion compared to $12.7 billion).

Why is this trading important?

In the first nine months of last year, firms, mostly from Europe and Japan, were involved in emissions trading that was responsible for reducing Chinese emissions in an amount equal to the total emissions in Canada for generating electricity, and almost equal to the total emissions for transportation. That was a huge accomplishment, and it’s too bad Canada couldn’t participate to improve the record even more.

Pretty much dispels the “it won’t make a lick of difference as long as China and America are exempt” argument…