Tag Archives: politics

Macaca and George Allen

Posted on by

Senator George Allen (R-VA), in reference to an American-born citizen, S.R. Sidarth :

This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent… Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.

This casual racism gives lie to the claims of “non-racism” made by so many people in the US. In the case of the American who has never met a person of South Asian descent, such bigoted remarks may best be explained by ignorance combined with immersion in a culture that resists difference. But for an elected representative who cannot possibly claim inexperience, it reveals a deliberate and ingrained racism that colors every decision. Maybe he hasn’t really outgrown his high school years, when he sported the confederate flag. Via TPM.

Update : Video.

definite articles

Posted on by

The columnist J. Grant Swank, Jr. writes:

Now that the Spanish have decided to take over our national anthem, watch out, America. This is just the start.

The Spanish? As in tapas-eating, sangria-drinking, Gaudi-loving Spanish? It’s almost like a Horatio Hornblower novel, with their talk of “frogs” and “dagos” and 9-pounders.

The more plausible explanation is that we are entering a new era in which “the Spanish” is like “the gay.” Although I’ve only heard of “the gay” in an snide putting-down-homophobes context.

Or maybe conservative commentators are getting hip to internet slang. The National Review will complain about Democratic proposals being “teh suck” and No Child Left Behind as “teh r0xx0r.”

We need a semidefinite article to provide a middle ground between the indefinite and definite. The question is, how would such a semidefinite article look? [There’s a certain answer I’m half-expecting…]

freedom on the march

Posted on by

According to Fafblog, the justification of our presence in Iraq is a kind of Groundhog Day experience. Here was a laugh-out-loud snippet:

Q. Why are we in Iraq?
A. For freedom! Recent intelligence informs us it is on the march.
Q. Hooray! Where’s it marching to?
A. To set up a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and held in check by strict adherence to the laws of Islam.
Q. Huh! Freedom sounds strangely like theocracy.
A. No it doesn’t! It is representative godocracy, in which laws are written by the legislative branch, enforced by the executive branch, and interpreted by an all-powerful all-knowing deity which manifests its will through a panel of senior clerics.
Q. Whew! Is democracy on the march?
A. Democracy was on the march. Sadly, freedom and democracy were caught in a blizzard and freedom was forced to eat democracy to survive.

Just think about that for a moment — freedom was forced to eat democracy to survive. It’s an elegant and damning metaphor. For all the bluster about the new realpolitik of our post 9-11 world, the neoconservative agenda is fundamentally a pie-in-the-sky approach to foreign policy. As Publius writes while commenting on the NY Times Fukuyama article,

The actual invasion of Iraq (and the greater neocon vision for the Middle East) depends entirely on idealism in that it bets the house on imposing Western ideas top-down rather than helping them develop from the bottom-up… Because liberal democracy “recognizes” the dignity of each individual in a way that no other system does, it represents the final stage of History and has, ideologically speaking, triumphed over competing systems like socialism.

Rather than getting down to brass tacks and figuring out what is actually achievable, we’re fed some heavy-duty koan-like analyses that beggar explanation. And so here is your moment of Zen:

Q. Why are we in Iraq?
A. To prevent the failure of the occupation of Iraq. If we pull out now the occupation will be a failure!
Q. Would it have been easier to have never occupied it in the first place?
A. Ah, but if we never occupied Iraq, then the occupation certainly would have been a failure, now wouldn’t it?
Q. [meditates for many years]
Q. Now I am enlightened.

medical exploitation of India

Posted on by

Via Krish, a story in Wired about how India is now the big site for clinical trials and drug development. Costs there are low, and as the editor of the American Journal of Bioethics noted:

Individuals who participate in Indian clinical trials usually won’t be educated. Offering $100 may be undue enticement; they may not even realize that they are being coerced.

I heard a radio program on this a few months back and tried to get my mother riled up about it, but it’s really just another strand in the rich and varied tapestry of India’s exploitation by the West/North/what-have-you.

As with most issues surrounding technology development, it boils down to an issue of pragmatics versus ethics. Pharmaceutical companies in Europe and Asia can’t find people willing to do clinical trials of their drugs in the US, even with some generous incentives. After all, who wants a placebo? On the other hand, you can get lots of volunteers for just $100 a pop in India plus paying the doctor to administer the trial, and the FDA will approve your trial. You get your drug approved, patent it, and prevent anyone in India from actually being able to afford it.

It’s not a problem specific to India either — patients in Russia are exploited in similar ways. When access to quality healthcare is limited, desperation is the primary motivating factor. Is it ethical to give a placebo in these situations? Should there be restrictions on how these studies are marketed to the public? Bioethics is going out the window in our rush for progress and refusal to shoulder the risks ourselves.

NYU Strike

Posted on by

From PhD Comics and MetaFilter I read about the NYU grad student strike that has apparently started getting ugly.

There are several divisive strategies that the University (read : the Man, the Bosses, what-have-you) has to break the TA union’s efforts to get a contract negotiated. The first is to convince the undergrads to blame the TAs. In a normal strike, many customers will not cross the picket line because they can go to another business. This doesn’t fly in the university setting — students (or their parents) are paying big bucks, and the university can punish undergrads by telling them that their coursework won’t count for this semester if the strike continues. The undergrads will turn around and blame the TAs, lending support for the university’s position.

A second problem is institutional. Graduate students in the sciences and engineering are most often supported by research assistantships for the bulk of their time. TA-ing is considered an obligation for graduation or as a means of support when grant money is thin or you are working on your dissertation. Graduate students in those fields are sometimes ambivalent about the union, because “it doesn’t really affect them.” The GSI (read: TA) union at Berkeley is pretty strong, despite the off-putting sloganeering and obligatory “in solidarity” at the end of every email. I’m very pro-labor, but they use rhetoric that was in vogue back when the Wobblies were news. I know a lot of people who did not join the union simply because they didn’t see the point. The workload for TA-ing varies widely across departments — richer ones hire separate graders, for example. By encouraging this heterogeneity, the inclination to authorize or participate in a strike is reduced.

Finally, the university will invariably give a misleading characterization of the benefits offered to graduate students. Since their whole position is that TAs are students first and employees last, they lump in tuition, fees, and all other benefits as the total compensation given to graduate students. These figures show the truth of the situation — without paying TAs, they wouldn’t get the tuition money anyway and they’d have to hire adjunct faculty who are on average more expensive. But by just trotting out the figures they can make it seem like grad students are handsomely compensated for their time. Again, these figures are for the consumption of undergrads and parents — my tuition is much less since I’m in-state at a public school, and wouldn’t look quite as impressive.

Anyway, more power to the union, and I hope the university comes around.

stopping imperialism, stopping attacks

Posted on by

Via Kevin Drum, an excerpt from an interview with Robert Pape of UChicago that is perhaps apropos to my earlier post. Pape’s claims are that

  1. “… overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”
  2. “In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community.”
  3. “Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop — and often on a dime.”

The overall argument is that once the physical fact of empire dissolves, support for suicide attacks dissapates. And indeed, the most effective rhetoric by Al-Qaeda and others is focussed on this issue. I’m somewhat dubious that the effect of cultural imperialism can be so easily swept under the rug. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to live and let live if you don’t have foreign soldiers down the street from you.

the imperialism/oppression dialectic

Posted on by

I’ve decided that I have a problem with the imperialism/oppression dialectic that is a prominent feature of the discourse in “radical progressive” discussions, post-colonial studies and other areas. The problem I have is not with its use as an analytical tool, but rather as a shield (less charitably, crutch) to assign blame or a “good guy”/”bad guy” role to actors in contemporary events. The crux of the argument as I understand it as as follows: actor A (the imperialist) coerces via economic/military/other means a collection of people B (the oppressed). A backlash falls upon A as a result of these actions. Because A has more agency than B due to its greater power, the supposition is that the empire has brought this backlash upon itself.

The primary problem with this is that it supposes a parallel history in which A never oppressed B and they lived happily ever after. That is, the status quo is A’s fault and thus A is permanently in the wrong. The secondary problem is that too little attention is paid to the nature of the backlash, who is the agent of this backlash, and what relationship they hold towards B.

Let us take the recent bombings in London as an example. One interpretation of those acts is that the government of the UK was reaping what it sowed by its support of the imperialist agenda as set forth by the US. Or taking a longer view, by its imperialist history. This is not to say that the people in those buses and trains were reaping what they sowed, but as an action played out by institutional agents (the United Kingom/Al-Qaeda), the UK was “asking for it.”

I find this sort of analysis dehumanizing, illogical, and misguided. What are the people in London supposed to do? They should “blame their government,” or so I am told. The UK is a democratically elected government whose actions represent the will of its citizenry. Al-Qaeda is a non-state actor whose actions represent the will of a small minority in most every state that they have a presence. The statement is then that should they choose, a group with little popular support may kill hundreds, even thousands of citizens of a democracy in an effort to influence the political actions of that democracy. This action is the “chickens coming home to roost.”

I have at least two problems with this — the first is that it is absurd to hold a private club with a penchant for blowing things up and killing citizens of countries to weaker humanitarian standards than those countries themselves. As long as you decry the abuses of your own country, you should not give a rhetorical shield to those who are perhaps reacting to those abuses. Unless you are willing to provide a calculus for measuring what constitutes equal retribution. To be trite, should it be an eye for an eye?

The second problem is that those bombs are not the same chickens! The goal of Al-Qaeda is not to correct the ills of imperialism by the West or end the imperialist program, but in fact is to impose a Muslim theocracy on all nations. Just because their letter claiming responsibility cites the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan as the reason for targeting London doesn’t somehow make them the officially sanctioned actors for those oppressed peoples.

In the end, my fundamental problem with this description is that it somehow makes it OK to bomb trains or buses, and I don’t think it’s ever ok to do that. And most of those who call these recent events “chickens coming home to roost” would agree with that statement. But I find that characterization too reductionist for this event, and reductionist in a rhetorically dubious way.