if no one else blogs a story does it make a sound

With the news of the Obama nobel thing I really can't make sense of the world anymore, I've come to the conclusion that October is officially brought to us by the Onion. The last couple of weeks have truly been surreal. Here's some stories that are far less surprising.

1. Democracy now talks to Iraqi labour leaders about lack of basic rights to unionize without repression. Anyways, lack of labour rights is not just a holdover of Saddam's regime

Decree No. 45 (2003), issued by Bremer's occupation authority, which suspended the election activities of trade unions and put them under the mercy of a ministerial committee, is still in force. Furthermore, the government is still insisting, till this day, on its unjust Decree No. 8750 (2005) that called for freezing of the movable and immovable assets of the unions, in a blatant manifestation of interference in their affairs that resulted in paralysing unions' work and activities. The position of the government has regrettably remained unchanged in spite of many appeals and several meetings between the representatives of the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq and key government officials, and despite the many promises given by these officials to find quick solutions to these outstanding issues.

2. Norwegian press says that Peter Galbraith, architect of Iraq's constitution and fierce advocate of the country's partition, had a stake in Dohuk's oil fields(via Reidar Visser.) You didn't think that anyone actually thought that splitting up the country was a good idea, did you?
ETA: It's come to my attention that there's theories floating around that this revelation about Galbraith is retribution for his having spoken out on Afghan election fraud. . I have no idea if there is any validity to this whatsoever, but if there is him being right about one thing doesn't change anything else, but Visser points out that DNO was being examined far before any of this, and this information came out by chance. Either way this level of corruption among people involved in Iraq is really nothing new or shocking, but it needs to be acknowledged, still, as long as the list is already.

3. New book out on the effects of depleted uranium.

4. Nothing to do with Iraq, this image is from a demonstration in Beirut to rebuild Nahr al Barid camp(see here.) It's already been posted a bunch of places but who will dare stop me from doing the same.

deep stuff

I don't get why everyone got so excited about Sesame Street doing Mad Men-they've done Beckett. So much cooler.

The state of Iraqi Women is a huge subject with so much to talk about. Political analysts have a tendency tend to treat it and other "humanitarian issues" in Iraq as an afterthought as something not all that integral to our understanding of "real" politics, which I think is quite problematic. Their current state is also not something you can talk about without an understanding of the progression of their situation over the last 60 years, unfortunately it's this perspective that's seriously lacking in the (very few) books even remotely touching on the subject that I've seen around.

Enter Nadje Al-Ali's book, Iraqi Women, which I've already namedropped here. Her most recent, What Kind of Liberation, focuses on Iraqi women living with war and occupation, this lecture takes the longer perspective.



I can't embed the full video for some reason, the rest is here.

chutzpah round the world

North America wasn't the only place outraged last week. The PA really outdid themselves this time.



Normally I don't like posting about things when there are already about a million people saying it better than I would but it really didn't feel right having two posts about Hollywood and then sitting this one out. Saree Makdisi's article is a must read.

The most depressing thing about this is talking to people who don't follow this stuff-bring up the UN and they're like 'oh yeah that ass made another Holocaust speech.' Sweet.

important

I need to find this on youtube.

addendum: only in my backyard

Before I let go of this subject and let everyone move on with their lives, Laila Lalami's post on Polanski's support adds some more insight(it makes it worse:)

Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher who once said that the Muslim veil was “an invitation to rape,” has now been confronted with an actual case of rape, but appears to think there should be an exception for genius filmmakers. Levy has drafted a petition in defense of Polanski, and it has been signed by Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, and Paul Auster, among others. It is true that Levy has fought against rape—but in regions like Darfur and Bosnia. Now that the perpetrator is in his own backyard, he talks of his outrage as seeing Polanski “apprehended like a common terrorist.”

-not as shocking as the founder of the Feminist Majority saying he should be let go, but still.

sorry kundera, your books were overrated anyways

Look, everyone knows someone that was raped, and since 1 in 4 women have been assaulted at some point in their lifetime everyone that doesn't live in a monastery actually knows a whole fucking lot of people that were raped, they just won't know who all of them are. The Beauty Myth cited a poll conducted at UCLA in the late 1980s that asked college age males whether they would rape a girl if they were certain they would get away with it-30% said they would, but when the wording of the question was changed from "rape" into the phrase "force a woman into having sex," 58% answered in the affirmative(p. 165.) Language matters; Whoopi thinks that there's rape and RAPE-rape, but just any old rape is bad enough for Chris Rock.

Polanski himself doesn't think he did anything wrong and that we're all just le jealous, but then he didn't rape nobody:

"“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

He never denied anything in the victim's testimony yet, in his mind, this was just fucking. Fucking a drugged child 3 years below the age of consent that told him to stop 3 times is still just fucking apparently.

The now-infamous massive petition demanding his release is outrageous on multiple levels, not just in the how dare they way, but how does a person not see from a mile away how batshit insane they look adding their name to that, and not being able to sense that maybe this is the kind of thing you don't want to be seen publicly speaking up about even if for some godforsaken reason that is how you feel. Maybe like 50 years from now we will look back on people who signed this thing in the same way that we gossip about Walt Disney being an anti-semite today, but I'm not so sure. In the meantime people have started to compile lists of celebrities that have erred on the side of sanity and not defended this dickbag, but the idea that one has to scour the internet to even find people that aren't going out of their way to support rapists isn't all that comforting to me.

The one attempt people seem to consistently make to defend him is that the victim doesn't want to deal with the case anymore, and yeah, looking at what just happened do you really have to wonder why? Guy plead guilty and denies nothing in a case that could not be anymore black and white and yet hordes of extremely powerful (and not so powerful) people are still bending over backwards to defend him, and not even just that but to articulate his entitlement to freedom from all legal consequences. Do you really have to wonder for a second what chance the rest of us have, or why the vast majority of rapes are never ever reported, why the vast majority of those that are never go to any kind of trial and the vast majority of the few that do don't end up being seen all the way through and thus never result in a conviction-but don't take my word for it.

As soon as that petition was released this ceased to just be about him. It takes a village as they say, abuse happens not just because of the abuser but those who continue to legitmize their actions in public discourse. The arguments against his defenders in this case are obvious since they are all pretty damn pathetic, and I don't think I need to tell anyone that this isn't something unique of Hollywood, Europe or some kind of bluestate/redstate bs. It's been clear to me for quite a while that nobody, nobody, has yet figured out how to deal with rape, this case is just one of the more egregious examples. Rape is one of those things everyone is against in theory but when the victim is somebody you don't know and the accused is somebody you do that all seems goes out the window. You don't have to be a survivor to know this for a fact, I can't count how many times I've seen it happen in supposedly radical communities, in circles where people should know better, where they have gone to a million workshops about how to support survivors of sexual assault, and yet still...

In this sitch I am all for activists to start pie-ing people again, beyond that has anybody got any better ideas? I'm all ears.

my government

Minister of State for Tourism Diane Ablonczy is no longer responsible for the delivery of a key tourism stimulus package, and one of her caucus colleagues says it's because her office gave some of the money to a gay pride parade.

Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost, a fellow Conservative, told the anti-abortion website LifeSiteNews that Ablonczy was being punished for the decision to give $400,000 from the Marquee Tourism Events Program to Toronto's Pride Parade, which was held this year on June 28.

ETA: I don't think it's impossible that there were political reasons for this as well.

can't you get a restraining order on this guy

Obama now officially does not give a shit.

All the details of this meeting took me back to the Saddam's time staring with the speeches that were glorifying Maliki and ending with Maliki's instructions to hold celebrations all over Iraq to show happiness as if Iraqis can not experience happiness without these instructions. Yes, most Iraqis are very happy with the withdrawal of the American forces but they don’t need any instructions that remind them of dark era. Iraqis will be happy if they forget the "Miserable Days".

After six years Iraqis are still waiting for the "Achievement Day" when the successive governments provide them with the necessary services.

Hahaha give this man the ten thousand dollars.

thanks for the memo

"The most important misapprehension that people have about Iran is that it's like every other country in the region and it's not. People are better educated there, they're more sophisticated, they are more middle class, there aren't very many truly poor people and in the upper class the women are much better educated and much more active than in any other society in the region."

Hey I wish the Iranian people the best too, at least the best that they can possibly get out of the situation they're in right now(though as anyone who has even the most superficial knowledge of Iranian history knows, they have an incredible capacity to deal with crappy governments.) But why is it when so many liberals and leftists feel the need to convince the right wingers that Iranians are human beings, it's a portrait they paint as a contrast to all those "special" people that they are surrounded by? Not that I didn't already know that that was how they felt, cause believe me, this is not the first time I ran into this sentiment and it won't be the last.

This really wasn't what I wanted my first post on the aftermath of the Iranian elections to be about, but there it is. If anyone cares though I concur with this guy.

iraqi agriculture

Another (older) article on this subject here. Of course, it also hasn't helped that Turkey has been blocking the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates. I think this is just the tip of a much broader policy that was implemented post-2003, which unfortunately didn't get much attention with all the militia action and drama, though they are not unrelated. Something much deeper than simple "regime change" happened here, and more comprehensive than just about oil, or about disbanding the army, though that is a part of it.

alexei sayle is for palestine

I really get the cynicism over celebrities + politics believe me I do but I really could not resist posting this video, which is intrinsically awesome, by someone inherently awesome themselves.


Posts of substance are to come, I swear.

stolen from africville

The story of “Stolen From Africville” outlines the rise and fall of the historic Black community of Africville Nova Scotia. Africville was a peaceful and thriving community whose roots can be traced back to the mid 1700s and the historic Underground Railroad.

However, under the guise of “development”, the Nova Scotia government bulldozed the land in 1969… In 2004 the United Nations conducted an assessment of this tragic injustice and recommended reparations for the Africville community. To this day nothing has been done.

http://stolenfromafrica.com/

(via)