Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

Massachusetts Republicans are a fringe party

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While I recognize that state party platforms are often pretty meaningless and individual candidates often don’t agree with them anymore, I think it’s still worth noting — nay, stopping still to stare in open-mouthed amazement at — the fact that the Massachusetts Republicans’ 2014 platform is, drumroll please…

  • opposed to same-sex marriage
  • opposed to abortion rights

Let’s check in on where folks in Massachusetts stand on that:

a September poll [in 2013] found that 85% of Massachusetts voters saw a positive or little to no impact from gay marriages in the commonwealth. In the poll, voters in the state support legalizing gay marriage 60% to 29%.

 
In the same poll, if you go to the crosstabs, you find

  • 78% of Democrats say same-sex marriage should be allowed
  • 53% of independents agree

The platform is actually consistent with the 60% of Massachusetts Republicans saying they do not think same-sex marriage should be allowed…but that’s in large part because everyone else became independents or Democrats to escape the crazy, leaving the Republican Party to be a mirror opposite of state opinion.

And more importantly, identifying with the 29% of overall voters who oppose same-sex marriage — in a state where 85% say it’s been a positive or had no impact a decade after legalization — is not a good way to get Republicans elected in the state. Without significant support from Massachusetts independents, who tend to be fiscally conservative but socially indifferent, Republicans remain a tiny majority out of power.

It seems kind of needlessly self-destructive too, including that in the platform, considering even 61% of Republicans in that poll admitted same-sex marriage had had no impact on their lives.
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Stop talking about “fiat currency.” No one cares.

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one-dollar-billI’m getting real bored by all the libertarians on the internet who won’t stop rambling about “fiat currency” — money that is printed and not backed by precious metal or some other scarce commodity — like they’re privy to some dark conspiracy that no one else has been let in on.

They manage to bring it up in almost any context, trying to explain any economic problem with it or waving away any economic progress as irrelevant in a world of fiat currency. It’s like the internet libertarian equivalent of Godwin’s Law, but instead of comparing something random to Hitler the discussion invariably trends toward derailment by reference to fiat currency.

Here’s an example I recently saw where someone manages to link something that’s basically irrelevant to this:
example-complaint

You can see comments like that all over the internet these days, usually apropos of almost nothing.

We’ve been off the gold standard since the Nixon Administration. The world hasn’t ended. Might be time to let that particular obsession drop.

Aside from all the huge economic problems that result from tying currency to a gold standard or any other non-“fiat” system (which is why we stopped using it), the endless hand-wringing about it is based on a false premise that money is worthless unless back by some commodity or is literally made from it. Money does not derive its true value from what it’s made of and never has. Its power has always been more from the public confidence in and strength of the government backing it.

If everyone is confident in the currency and the government, it won’t collapse or rapidly erode in value. If those two confidences are missing…well, you have a lot more problems to worry about at that point than what the money is made of or backed by.

National Geographic, Crimea, and the politics of geography

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crimea-ukraine
Above: Wikipedia’s map showing Crimea as part of Ukraine.

National Geographic, the venerable and often deeply controversial flagship organization of the American field of geography, has generated a new firestorm over its decision to start mapping Crimea as part of the Russian Federation following its illegal and fraudulent annexation of the peninsula. Other options would include marking it as “disputed” or still part of Ukraine. Nat Geo’s justification was that they “map the world as it is, not as people would like it to be.”

Whether or not the de facto status of Crimea is now that it is part of Russia, that’s a cop-out. And as someone who studied the history of geography at the University of Delaware’s nationally prominent Geography Department, I’d like to point out that this cop-out also conveniently absolves National Geographic of its role in the community and the world, one which has historically been both very important and very damaging (in many cases).
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Cairo University assault illustrates Egypt’s violence against women

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As I’ve discussed previously, Egypt has a pretty big violence against women problem, backed by both the society and the power of the state, which has worsened dramatically under military rule (both in 2011 and in 2013-present).

Here’s a noteworthy stat from Egypt News Daily:

According to a UN report issued last year an overwhelming majority of Egyptian women (99.3%) have experienced some sort of sexual harassment, and 96.5% of women had been sexually assaulted in some way.

In the latest high-profile incident — as opposed to the daily struggle for basic safety many of Egypt’s women face quietly — a female Cairo University Law student was sexually assaulted in plain sight by a dozen men on campus, who brazenly filmed their attack. She only escaped worse because some individual members of the campus security had the decency to intervene (something that can’t be said of much of Egypt’s local and national security forces).

The appropriate response would be: “Wait, we have a horrific problem where some of our male students feel secure in sexually assaulting our female students right out in the open on campus in front of security cameras and their own! What are we doing wrong? What can be done to change the culture and behavior of our male students?”

Instead, Cairo University’s president helpfully called her attire a “mistake” that was “out of the ordinary” for the dress code. He added that campus security should have removed her from campus or told her to change her clothes, before she was assaulted, rather than after. Sure he also said they would look into it, or whatever, and maybe think about some prosecutions because they shouldn’t have done it, but really he seemed to feel it was fundamentally attire-related.

Media treatment

Egyptian news media, closely aligned with the military government, extensively blamed the victim and gave her what might here be dubbed the full Rush Limbaugh treatment (with eerie parallels to his Sandra Fluke rant), calling her a “hooker” who should be in the “red light district” instead of at law school. At least one channel also obtained video footage — probably from one of the attackers — showing her walking around campus so the audience could see how she had been dressed. (Perfectly normal or even conservative campus attire, of course, by U.S. standards… not that it in any way matters.)

Egyptian pundits also wrote off the Cairo University assault using the tried-and-true method of rape apologism that dehumanizes everyone involved including fellow men, by suggesting that no man could possibly not try to rape a woman who crossed his field of vision. Below is newscaster Tamer Amin, mid-rant, on that line of attack:
tamer-amin-egyptian-rapist-apologist-newscaster
Statements like that always raise more questions than they answer.

Questions like “Tamer Amin, since you clearly believe every man lacks all self-control and is a rapist at heart, is that belief from personal experience?”

Or, “Tamer Amin, how many women have you yourself raped and assaulted? Too many to remember?”
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Ending solitary confinement

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The previous Colorado chief of Corrections was shot and killed in his own home by a former inmate who had spent years confined in solitary confinement (a punishment which is pretty well known at this point to make most people very mentally unstable), after the latter man was released from prison straight out of solitary when his sentence ended.

The victim, ironically, had expressed concern about the state’s excessive use of such treatment (and in particular the habit of releasing people directly without transition like that) and had cut the number of solitary inmates in half before his death.

To me it has long seemed that solitary confinement is probably one of the most heinous practices in the American prison system, and one that should probably be banned at least for general use under the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” It must be particularly traumatic and damaging for inmates who are serving less than a life sentence and are eventually supposed to be released back into ordinary society.

The new executive director of Corrections, Rick Raemisch, is so opposed to the practice that he is using the job to campaign against it. As he said, “Everything you know about treating human beings, that’s not the way to do it.”

Raemisch even spent 20 hours in solitary himself in January to protest the practice. It’s part of his broader agenda to shake up the state’s correctional system so it might actually rehabilitate people rather than worsening the problem.

All of it calls to mind a biting satirical article from The Onion not long ago, headlined: “15 Years In Environment Of Constant Fear Somehow Fails To Rehabilitate Prisoner.”

I have solution to all our ills, says Russian white supremacist

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Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a lunatic elected white supremacist Russian politician (born in often race-troubled Kazakhstan) has identified the source of all Russia’s global image problems as that goddam Mongol letter (“ы”) being in the alphabet, goshdarnit!

“Only animals make this sound, ‘ы- ы,'” he said, adding that the regular ‘и’ (‘i’) is enough for the Russian alphabet. ‘Ы’ doesn’t exist in any other European language, argued Zhirinovsky. “This primitive, Asiatic sound is the reason people don’t like us in Europe,” he told lawmakers.

 
Yep, nailed it. THAT is why “people don’t like” Russia “in Europe” these days. Nothing to do with invading Crimea.

The politician seemed to have a longstanding issue with the “guttural” letter, which he claimed his son wasn’t able to pronounce as a child. “He once told me, ‘Dad, dad, look, there’s a ‘мишка’,” the Russian word for ‘bear.’ “I thought ‘What ‘мишка’? A bear? But he meant ‘мышка’,” the word for “mouse.”

 
Curiously, the same man just last month called for Russia to annex back its Central Asian republics as “subject” states. Because nothing gets rid of “nasty Asiatic” influences in your culture like re-occupying your imperial-era Asiatic conquests.

Then again, as he is also famous for advocating that people only kiss one another on the forehead, I guess he’s not one for embracing bulletproof logic. Not that racists typically are, really, I suppose.

Such irredentist rhetoric — advocating for seizing territories formerly held by one’s country, to reunite with ethnic populations abroad — is swirling around Russia’s political class in full fury right now to justify the Crimea invasion. He’s far from alone on that point. Small wonder then that many non-Russian folks in Central Asian countries with large Russian populations, such as Kyrgyzstan, are starting to worry that they are next.

And Kyrgyz and Kazakh speakers are definitely not nostalgic for the idea of returning to direct rule by those who see their languages as inferior and “primitive,” as Zhirinovsky labeled them.

Beside the Russian and Belarussian Cyrillic alphabets, the letter ‘ы’ also exists in most of the Turkic languages spoken in former Soviet republics, including Kazakh and Kyrgyz, which use the same alphabet.

The vowel is widely used in Kazakh and Kyrgyz, sometimes several times in the same word. “Ырыс алды—ынтымақ,” (“Yrys aldy—yntymaq”) reads a Kazakh proverb, which translates as “There is no abundance without solidarity.” The letter ‘ы’ also makes up most of the vowels of a well-known Kyrgyz saying— “ырысы жоктун ырымы күч” (“yrysy zhoktun yrymy kuch”)—that means “a person with no confidence believes in superstition.”

 
The history of Russian rule over Central Asia is largely one of Russian white-euro supremacy being inflicted on the local populations to try to stamp out their languages and cultures.

Sweden after Crimea: Sure would be nice to have that empire again

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swedish-empireThough more recently known for its relative impartiality and determined neutrality (during World War II, they wedged themselves peacefully between occupied Denmark and Norway, and bitterly contested Finland), Sweden was once a powerful northern European empire dominating (or attacking) Norway, Finland, Denmark, the German states, Poland, the Baltic States, and Russia.

During the Thirty Years War of the 17th century, the Swedish Empire captured half the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire and sent colonists to the Mid-Atlantic in North America. Those days are long gone, and in Baltic Europe, Russia picked up a lot of the slack in the vacuum left by a receding Sweden in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the post-World War II era, Sweden has maintained a relatively small military but tried to stay out of foreign entanglements, apart from some peacekeeping missions in Africa or international non-combat military roles, such as in Libya or Afghanistan.

Right about now, though, the Swedes seem to be wishing they were back to their old imperial glory days — or the next best thing: being a NATO member, something they previously have had no interest in. If Russia’s going back to the no-rules imperialism of yore, Sweden would like to be protected.

Non-aligned since the early 19th century, Sweden’s “splendid isolation” has endured two world wars and even the five-decade superpower slugfest that dominated the late 20th century. That could change, however, in the wake of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Last week, Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg indicated that the defense budget, to which he had recently announced cuts, would be increased as a result of the crisis. Deputy Prime Minister Jan Björklund also publicly floated the idea of Swedish membership in NATO, warning that Russia could attempt to seize Gotland, a strategically located Swedish island province in the Baltic Sea, if it chose to attack the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

 
Without international military help, Sweden’s military publicly believes it could hold out in an all-out conventional war for only one week. NATO membership brings a guarantee of international defense if attacked. So right now the old neutrality plan, translating to the go-it-alone approach, is looking pretty dicey.

Russia’s Gazprom conglomerate owns Nord Stream, an $11-billion pipeline running along the Swedish island that pumps 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas each year to Western Europe. Russian President Putin vowed to defend the strategically vital pipeline with the Russian Navy in 2006, and in one March 2013 incident reminiscent of the Cold War, two Russian heavy bombers and their fighter escorts skirted Swedish airspace and simulated a bombing run against the island. NATO’s Baltic air patrol responded. Sweden’s did not.

 
Russia was legally committed to uphold Ukraine’s neutrality and blew right through that stop sign. What’s to stop them from going after Gotland? International norms seem to be a voluntary thing for Russia these days.

Update: Following the September 2014 parliamentary elections, the incoming government (from the center-left) abandoned the previous government’s idea of having Sweden join NATO.