- Via Radley Balko at Reason, the Chicago Tribune: pregnant inmates forced to remain handcuffed or shackled during childbirth. Most of the women profiled in the piece were non-violent offenders and even if they hadn’t been, it’s ridiculous to think that a pregnant woman on the verge of delivering a child and surrounded by guards really needs to be restrained. One of the women quoted had a particularly horrible experience: “‘I couldn’t push the placenta out because I couldn’t position my legs,’ Walton said. ‘It is not fair to treat a person like this. I did a crime … but I’m not willing to be treated like a dog. I was treated like I wasn’t human.'” Liberal democracy with a inhuman face.
- Andrew Sullivan: reacting to Time‘s new cover, which uses a picture of a girl who had her ears and nose cut off by the Taliban just in the past year to take on the cover question of “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” That people are capable of holding down a teenage girl and calmly sawing off her ears and nose for running away from her in-laws is stupefying. But to say that Western armies should continue to occupy a country in which they are dying and also killing innocent citizens of that country because it’s better than the alternative strikes me as unfair. Remember–Aisha, the covergirl, was maimed in the past year. We aren’t saving these people even now, so what’s the point of keeping up the charade when we are actively responsible for killing other innocents?
- NYT: Obama goes to Detroit and proclaims the auto bailout to have been a victory. If Detroit’s Big 3 represent success, I’d hate to see failure. How long will it be until they need a bailout again? And how unfairly preferential towards labor unions will that bailout be compared to this one? But hey, maybe it will never become a problem again if the government can keep propping up Big 3 auto sales by encouraging baseless witch-hunts against foreign manufacturers for safety “problems.”
- NYT: a look at the military’s suicide prevention hotline. This is the other side of the horrors of war. Active duty suicides reached an all-time high of 32 in June. We don’t even keep track of suicides among veterans. When you put teenagers in a position in which they see their friends getting maimed and killed and they might be responsible for maiming and killing innocent civilians themselves, you’re going to have a lot of suicides. Don’t act like this was a surprise.
- China from two different angles: People’s Daily does a “move along, nothing to see here” puff piece on Beijing’s irresponsible and sloppy exploration of taking Cantonese out of broadcasts in the Cantonese heartland of Guangzhou. South China Morning Post puts the issue in the proper context of other authoritarian regimes and their uniformitarian, assimiliationist leveling campaigns of suppression against minority languages. This sort of garbage has been going on at least since the French Revolution. It will continue to plague humanity until nationalism is crushed once and for all.
- Jesse Walker at Reason: links to two new free etexts of books on American anarchism.
- Via Andrew Sullivan, Richard Posner at The New Republic: critiquing WaPo’s much-vaunted “Top Secret America” series. Posner’s complaint is primarily that two years of investigative work led to a very dry bit of reportage that mainly summarized statistical aggregations of the intelligence bureaucracy. He’s not the only one working this angle. Color me disappointed in the series.
- National Post: Ontario makes it illegal for drivers under 22 to consume any alcohol and then drive. The only thing better than Committee of Public Safety-style anti-choice overkill is when you do it for age-discriminatory reasons. Push back against this law, Ontarians–failure to do so makes the slope more than a bit more slippery.
- AlterNet: meet California Prop 69, the law that made it mandatory for police to collect and store DNA samples from all people brought in for a felony. So if a cop gets the wrong guy and brings you in for a felony and you get released the next day, the state still puts your DNA in the Big Brother database. The really scary thing is that this was a proposition–voters passed it into law. Why would you want to give the cops and the security apparatus more power than they already have?
- Western Standard: Canadian Transport Ministry bans cheeky luggage stickers that superimpose photo-quality images of things like cocaine and sex toys on the outside of a bag. I don’t know which is more acute for the security bureaucrats: their lack of a sense of humor or their desire for more power?
- Socialist WebZine: there’s a huge degree of irony inherent in linking to a Socialist Party-authored piece in defense of civil liberties, but I did like this article. It doesn’t have any of the measured language or condescending “grown-up” talk on wars (e.g. “We couldn’t possibly stop the wars now, it will take us years to withdraw”) found amongst the normal punditry. Oh, and when they talk about using the peace dividend they would recoup from cutting military spending by 50% on social services, just imagine they said “debt service” instead and it makes the whole thing much more palatable.
- NYT: a profile of Aleksei Dymovsky, the Russian cop who posted anti-corruption and bribery videos on YouTube and was immediately fired. Going back to Soviet times, the police have been underpaid but have felt entitled to make up the difference (and then some) through bribes. This led to one of my favorite Soviet jokes, in which first prize in a policemen’s raffle is a portable stop sign. But the corruption matter is no joke–since the videos went up, former colleagues tried to plant drugs on Dymovsky and he was made to undergo psychiatric examinations (this in the land that put punitive psychiatry on the map). Oh, and he went to jail for a while. Until the Russian government gets serious about reforming the police force, average Russians will continue to use slang terms like “garbage” for them and treat the proper word for police, militsiya, as a near-pejorative.
- Via Jesse Kline at Reason, the Daily Telegraph: North Korean men’s national soccer team publicly shamed, coach expelled from ruling party and made a construction worker. Why? Because they lost in the first round of the World Cup. This story is why part of me bristled at the way people we were treating North Korea’s presence in South Africa as some sort of ironic joke, right down to the fake fans/actors they imported for the occasion. They didn’t qualify in strong form, I suspected they would lose quickly and given the chauvinistic regime’s track record on human rights, I was legitimately afraid for the players and coaches. And now those fears have been confirmed. Make Team America puppets out of Kim Jong-Il all you want, but communism is not a joke. There is no ironic humor in people being treated this way.
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Posted in Miscellany, tagged Aisha, Aleksei Dymovsky, auto bailout, Beijing, Big 3, bribery, brutality, Cantonese, corruption, DNA database, female prisoner, Guangzhou, human rights, luggage stickers, Mandarin, military suicides, North Korea, occupation, pregnant prisoners, prisoners' rights, Proposition 69, public shaming, punitive psychiatry, Russian police, soccer team, suicide prevention, Taliban, Top Secret America, Transport Ministry on 08/01/2010| Leave a Comment »