Framed

Mutilation

Here we are again at the question of whether there really are universal human rights or whether there are only culturally-normative rights:

Should African women be allowed to engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision? Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital mutilation, justified in trying to outlaw it, or are they guilty of ignorance and cultural imperialism?

Those questions will be debated Saturday morning in Washington at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. Representatives of international groups opposed to this procedure will be debating anthropologists with somewhat different views, including African anthropologists who have undergone the procedure themselves.

And once again, as with the issue of this go-round involves the question of whether doing horrible things to women--but not to men--is really OK just because a particular culture has been doing it for a long time.

I would be a little bit tempted to go along with the  cultural relativists  on issues like this if they didn't seem to so frequently involve disadvantaging women.  But given men's sorry track record on the treatment of the generally smaller and weaker sex, and the lack of cognate restrictions on men in the societies that cover, burn, restrict and beat women with impunity, there's no other valid way to see cutting off a woman's clitoris for anything but a barbaric act of a misogynistic and backwards culture.

In this case, the cultural relativists have already scored something of a coup vis-a-vis the New York Times, which refers to the practice of cutting off a screaming girl's clitoris with a shard of broken glass or a dull knife as "circumcision," rather than "mutilation."  In framing the issue thus, the Times suggests an equivalence between the common Western practice of slicing off the male foreskin with the what is in effect a clitorectomy.  "Castration" would be a more appropriate comparison. 

39 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary. 

The amount of time devoted to discussions of theology at the Republican debate the other night was just crazy.  Are these guys running for abbot or for President?  The candidates were asked if they believed every word of the Bible and then fell all over themselves assuring people that they believed that the Bible was indeed the Word of God®.  One of PZ Myers' readers,  Kseniya's Ideal Candidate, has come up with the proper answer to that asinine question:

I support your right to ask me that question, but I must insist that it is an inappropriate question to ask during a political debate.

I believe in the Constitution of the United States of America, and if elected I will swear by oath and affirmation to uphold that Constitution, including Article 6, which states that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust."

I believe in the Separation of Church and State - not the one-way separation imagined by those with a predilection for poor scholarship and wishful thinking, but the two-way Wall about which Jefferson wrote in 1802. I believe in the Constitutional right to freedom of and freedom from religion, and whether or not I believe every word of The Bible or any other religious text is nobody's business but my own. Thank you.

Looking for Zefram Cochrane

I have no idea if this Theory of Everything is even plausible, or if it is the work of  crackpot. What's interesting, though is how the publicity attending this theory and its author has revealed a hunger in the news media--and, I suspect, among the general public--for a non-traditional, non-academic scientist to upend scientific tradition.

This hunger has been both documented and fed by movies such as Star Trek: First Contact (a family favorite in my house).  The film (which is either the best or second-best of the Trek flicks) deals primarily with the conflict between individuality and conformity, and definitely comes down on the side of the former.  Along the way, though, it also touches on obedience to authority vs. doing the right thing, flawed human nature vs. mechanical perfection, obsession vs. reason, and the meaning of heroism.

All of those themes are present in the case of Garrett Lisi, a 39-year-old unemployed surfer physicist, and his suggestion that the four basic forces in the universe--gravity, the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism--and the dozens of subatomic particles that have been discovered so far fit into a beautiful 248-point mathematical pattern that looks like something produced by a super SpiroGraph.

Even among the more relentlessly rational of us, there still lurks a desire for the heroic.  We live in an era of huge laboratories, scientific collaboration, and hierarchical research institutions.  Even so, we still pine for the Heroic Lone Scientist, someone who through his own brilliance, iconoclasm and originality will shatter old scientific assumptions.  We all want the next Einstein, a guy who did his more brilliant and original work while he was a clerk in a patent office.  We want to know that the individual is occasionally more powerful than the collective, that even brilliant scientists have quirks and flaws, that obsession at least occasionally leads to truth, and that sometimes credentials don't mean squat.

We're looking for Zefram Cochrane, a man whose scientific discoveries usher in an era of human unity, discovery and understanding.  And we're looking for god, a theory that explains everything.

It is these yearnings, rather than any real understanding (at least on my part, unfortunately) of the science involved that has put so much air in Garrett Lisi's sails of late.

Venn

Finally, a diagram that explains it all:

(h/t to bluegal at Crooks and Liars)

It's Friday . . .

. . . and the streets are ours.  While I'm glad Eddie Vedder rescued Big Hard Sun from oblivion--and while he does a very nice job of it--I think the original Gordon Peterson (a/k/a Indio) version is better.  What do you think?

I first heard this song back in 1990 on WBOS, but I'd have been at a loss to tell you who sung it.  Here's Marc Hirsch's take on Peterson's one and only album:

Indio, Big Harvest (A&M, 1989)

You are not Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon, but you have an abiding love for the music of non-Western cultures and a wealth of industry contacts (including a bunch of session pros and, astoundingly, Joni Mitchell). You also have the crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, it is possible to make an actual rock album incorporating nontraditional instruments that doesn't ignore, patronize or insult the sources. What do you do? If your name is Gordon Peterson, you made your single shot (before vanishing completely) a spectacular one, writing fully realized songs about love and life and layering them with instrumental textures that scare the hell out of the little kids and confuse the grownups, ensuring that your one brilliant statement became anti-pigeonholed straight into oblivion. You can still sleep nights with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Today there is still no entry for Gordon Peterson on Wikipedia and his album goes for $99.99 used at Amazon.com.

40 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

David Mizner makes a good case for John Edwards by conducting a thought experiment: contrast how would the media interpret a Clinton victory in Iowa with how they would interpret an Edwards victory. 

If Clinton wins, this is what we'll be reading on the morning of January 4:

Observers said the [Edwards] loss called into question Edwards's strategy of using a populist message to try to appeal to the party's activist base. "He made the same mistake that Howard Dean made in 2004," said Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute. "You can make some noise running left but you can't win a primary. Will these candidates ever learn?"

But if Edwards wins, the narrative is different:

Although Edwards had campaigned heavily in the state and pinned his hopes for capturing the nomination on a win here, it was still a striking upset, one that validated his emphasis on economic inequality. Crisscrossing the state he relentlessly sounded his populist themes, railing against corporate interests which, he said, had corrupted the political system and rigged it against middle and working class Americans.

"This is a real wake up call for the moderates in the party," said political analyst Stu Rothenberg. "This is not Bill Clinton's party anymore. Which means it might not be Hillary Clinton's, either."

I know which paper I'd rather read.

Homeland

Have I ever told you how much I despise the term "homeland"?

Before 9/11, if I encountered the word at all, it was generally in the context of the apartheid South African regime, which used it to designate the barren resource-poor zones within which the white ruling class dreamed of corralling all the blacks.

In 1951, the Bantu Authorities Act established a basis for ethnic government in African reserves, known as "homelands.'' These homelands were independent states to which each African was assigned by the government according to the record of origin (which was frequently inaccurate). All political rights, including voting, held by an African were restricted to the designated homeland. The idea was that they would be citizens of the homeland, losing their citizenship in South Africa and any right of involvement with the South African Parliament which held complete hegemony over the homelands. From 1976 to 1981, four of these homelands were created, denationalizing nine million South Africans. The homeland administrations refused the nominal independence, maintaining pressure for political rights within the country as a whole. Nevertheless, Africans living in the homelands needed passports to enter South Africa: aliens in their own country.

Like Linda Lewis, I also associate the term with Nazi propaganda:

[T]he word "homeland" conjures a kind of antediluvian primitive nationalism (tribalism) based on blood and soil, not a people united by their devotion to political ideals like liberty and free speech.

Indeed, there is something very reminiscent of Hitler's Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! slogan about the word. It feels like a remnant of 1930's propaganda.  "Home" conjures up warm associations of belonging and of nurturing; "land" suggests something primal, something owned.  Put together, the resulting compound suggests a place that is ours in the deepest possible sense.  The word "homeland" is much more vivid than "United States," a name comprised of an abstract adjective and a politicolegal construct.  Thus an attack on "the homeland" is much more like a rape or the murder of a family member than an attack on the "United States" would be. 

And so I get agitated when I see things like this PowerPoint slide:

This slide is part of a DHS workshop presented to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in September.  The (capitalized!) word "homeland" in the first two bullet points could be replaced with "United Sates" or "U.S." without causing any grammatical difficulties.  But then the slide would lack emotional oomph--and more importantly, would potentially subject the government or the people to criticism.

Let me explain.  The "United Sates" can make mistakes.  It can fail to protect its people and it can adopt foreign policies that make terrorism more likely.  But the "Homeland" can't make a mistake.  It can't fail, and it can't be misguided.  Nothing is ever its fault.  Hence the term becomes a sheild behind which politicians hide.

It's probably politically impossible to abolish the Department of Homeland Security now.  At the very least, though, it could be--and should be--renamed.  Replace "Homeland" with "Interior," "Domestic," or "National" and the agency would lose some of its Orwellian creepiness.

41 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

In his effort to out-tough Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney has made it public that he supports employment discrimination against Muslims, at least as far as his cabinet is concerned:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

Steve Benen thinks this position will actually help Romney in the Republican primary:

It’s painful to recognize, but in modern Republican circles, there is widespread tolerance for intolerance. Open and unabashed discrimination towards certain Americans — Muslims and gays, among others — is not only acceptable to too many conservatives, it’s expected. It’s why Romney’s vow to discriminate against Muslims will probably not hurt him politically — given the ideology of the GOP base, it might even help him.

Although Benen and others have made the point that as  a Mormon, Romney ought to be the last person to suggest that members of minority religious faiths should be disqualified from national service, I think his comment was made precisely because he is a Mormon--not in spite of it.   Romney is so anxious to convince evangelicals that he is really just like them, despite his Mormon faith, that he has adopted what is actually a fairly widespread belief that non-Christians should not sit anywhere near the levers of American power.  This is discouraging and depressing--but that's politics.

42 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

Mike Huckabee has apparently made that most difficult of leaps: from asterisk to contender in the Presidential primaries.  As befits his newfound status, he is starting to draw more scrutiny and criticism. 

This piece by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone is interesting for what it doesn't do.  Entitled "My Favorite Nut Job" (in the print edition), it's certainly long on epithets ("kook," "full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order," "dangerous," "commitment to religious wackohood," "batshit," "thin-skinned and petty," "obvious and undisguised lunacy," etc. ).  But it almost seems like Taibbi is trying too hard.  Yes, Huckabee doesn't believe in evolution, is staunchly anti-abortion, opposes gay rights and stands accused of using public money to buy some personal items while he was governor of Arkansas and other penny-ante ethical lapses.  But even while penning what is billed as a hit piece ("The GOP's Weirdest Nut Job" is the cover teaser), Taibbi can't seem to help but serve up a lot of very positive factoids about Huckabee:

Rather than employing the ­patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-­income Christians into supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely new — a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the working poor.

*  *  *

Choosing that strategy also allows Huckabee to do what no evangelical since Jimmy Carter has, which is talk about his faith in terms of sympathy for the underprivileged. "You can't just say 'respect life' exclusively in the gestation period," he says. Huckabee also edges openly into class politics, criticizing his own party for harping on the supposed success of the overall economy. "The reality is, there are many families that ­really are working as hard or harder than they've ever worked in their lives, and they're not seeing that pay off," he says.

For Huckabee, such lines aren't just lip service. As governor of Arkansas, he outraged Republicans with his plan to expand health coverage for children, his embrace of refugees from Katrina and his support for subsidized higher education for the children of illegal immigrants. Worse still, from a Republican standpoint, Huckabee showed little hesitation in raising taxes to pay for such programs — one analysis claims that new taxes initiated during his tenure resulted in a net tax increase of $505 million.

Really, that doesn't sound so bad.  And apart from its passing mention of issues such as abortion, evolution and gay rights that most Republicans and Democrats are going to disagree on, there was little in Taibbi's piece to show that Huckabee is weird, crazy or corrupt.  In fact, remove the name-calling and the article is actually fairly flattering.

The adjective I'd use to describe Huckabee is dangerous--dangerous to the Democrats' hopes of recapturing the White House.  Far from being The GOP's Weirdest Nut Job, Huckabee seems both politically and personally normal.  He's certainly much less kooky than Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney.  If this election is to be won or lost in the center of the political spectrum, I think Democrats have real reason to be alarmed if Huckabee improbably got the Republican nomination.

I still think that his weaknesses will preclude him from capturing the Presidential nomination.  He's underfunded and not well-known (although that could change in the matter of a few weeks).  He's got no foreign policy experience and doesn't seem to have thought deeply about international relations and the war in Iraq.  Still, Democrats cannot afford to take this man lightly.

Back in mid-May, I was impressed by Huckabee's performance in one of the early debates.  I noted the obstacles he faced, but suggested that he'd make a strong VP candidate.  He'd help shore up the votes of Christian conservatives, people who feel uneasy about Giuliani's relative social liberalism, Romney's Mormonism, and McCain's centrism.   I'll stand by that.  But if the piece in Rolling Stone, written from a frankly liberal perspective, is the best that can be done to convince the world that Huckabee is a menace to the republic, then Huckabee just might ride the balloon that he's been floating on lately all the way to the top.

43 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

If you're a Clinton supporter, this isn't good news:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton trails five top Republican presidential contenders in general election match-ups, a drop in support from this summer, according to a poll released on Monday.

Clinton's top Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and John Edwards, still lead Republicans in hypothetical match-ups ahead of the November 4, 2008, presidential election, the survey by Zogby Interactive showed.

Clinton, a New York senator who has been at the top of the Democratic pack in national polls in the 2008 race, trails Republican candidates  Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain and Mike Huckabee by three to five percentage points in the direct matches.

All along, we've known that there are a lot of people who won't even consider voting for Hillary Clinton.  I doubt their numbers have grown recently.  What has changed, I suspect, is that Clinton's opponents have succeeded in painting her as the incumbent in a throw-the-rascals-out kind of primary.  In such an environment, a lesser-known candidate (which would include the entire Republican field) has an advantage.