Racism And Internet Comments

Yesterday I read this article on the Toronto Sun. Now, the story is pretty infuriating in and of itself. It’s about a 15-year old Chinese tourist that defaced an Egyptian relic.

But in addition to the story, what also struck me was the comments section. Now, I don’t usually read the Sun, so maybe this is commonplace. Heck, it’s the Internet. I’m pretty sure this is standard operating procedure. But still, I was shocked by some of these blatantly racist comments, many of which were the top-rated comments of the story.

Anonymity breeds courage. It’s just too bad that the Internet is full of the all the wrong kinds of courage. Commenting on news stories was supposed to be a great experiment in true democracy, but I think we can admit that the experiment has been somewhat of a failure. Internet anonymity is the last refuge of backward ideologies, forcing the rational to collectively facepalm at the state of today’s human progress.

Baird in the Middle East

Canada’s foreign policy has devolved under the current government, summarized well by Bob Rae in a recent blog post. John Baird’s meeting this week in east Jerusalem adds another facepalm to the already disgraced state of the country’s foreign affairs.

Baird met with the Israeli justice minister – the government’s chief negotiator with Palestinians. He met with her in east Jerusalem, which is across the Green Line and into disputed territory. Under international law, the area is occupied territory, and past ministers have known the significance of not crossing the line.

Baird held the meeting where he did for one of two reasons. Either he met there to be purposefully provocative and remind Palestinians that Canada is fully on the Israeli side, or he did not know the significance of the Green Line. The latter is worse but much less likely. Baird might be backwards in most of his actions as foreign affairs minister, but he’s smart enough to know what he’s doing. For Canada, this is a frightening prospect.

Iraq: Ten Years Later

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. There is now near consensus on the mistake of the war, but too many people see the mistake as a tactical – not a moral – one. If only less Americans died, if only it wasn’t so expensive or if only more oil could have been secured at a good price – so the thought process goes – then surely the war would have been worth it.

To me, this again goes to show the way that money and economics have permeated every thought process. The ethics of war can’t even be discussed normally; the first point raised is usually about money. Even so-called “opponents” of the war, including politicians, only now stand in opposition to the war because of its exorbitant cost. There is no discussion on the legality or morality of the war, only that it was a financial error.

And when discussing lives lost in the war, there is very little concern for Iraqis. I understand that Americans and American media will tend to focus on the deaths of their own, but how is more than 100,000 dead Iraqis not all that relevant? Almost 5,000 Americans have died in the conflict, and this is obviously a terrible tragedy. The point, however, is that even if 0 Americans died, it shouldn’t change anyone’s opinion of whether or not the war was a mistake. Upwards of 120,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war, so that should really end the discussion there.

I am glad that nearly everyone now regrets the Iraq War. I just wish that that regret was based more on the 2003 decision to go to war, and not the changing circumstances in how the war played out. The war was built on lies and shaky legal precedents. It shouldn’t have mattered how many people died, how much is cost and how it affected America’s standing in the world. There should have been no support for it to begin with.

In 2003, I was a know-nothing high school student. But I knew enough to oppose the war. I knew that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had absolutely no relation to 9/11, despite what George W. Bush was trying to tell us. A simple Google search proved the president wrong. I knew that because Bush’s reasoning for the war changed after no WMDs were found, that there must be another reason for the war that the public was not being told. If it was actually because of WMDs, then finding no weapons should have led to an end to the war’s justification. But it didn’t. Bush changed the reasoning to one of regime change, which, if we consider the amount of worse regimes around the world, is a dubious reason at best. And I also knew that starting a war in the Middle East is not only a bad way to fight terrorism, but it would lead to more terrorist groups. Which it did.

I also knew that the war would cost a lot of money and that lives would be lost. But that wasn’t really the point in 2003. The war had no legitimate justification. Even as a malleable high school student, I could see through the president’s lies and know enough to oppose a pointless and harmful conflict.

The war was a moral, political, financial and strategic failure. But let’s remember that first and foremost, it was a moral failure.

Book Review: The Long Way Back

I recently wrote a review for Chris Alexander’s The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace. You can find the review at this link.

Mark Driscoll

Consumerism is a religion. Stores are temples. Right now people are out shopping for an identity trying to make earth heaven.

— Mark Driscoll (@PastorMark) January 17, 2013

Kicking off a week of giveaways with a free iPad mini. Enter to win before midnight: jesus.to/Wbc1RK

— Mark Driscoll (@PastorMark) January 21, 2013

Israel and Forced Birth Control

An article this week from The Independent says that Israel has reportedly admitted to administering birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent.

Uh, what? Seriously?

I think it’s a bit early to fully confirm the validity of this story. But if it turns out to be true, this is truly sickening and is an eery reminder of the eugenics that European Jews were once subject to. For any country (let alone one dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people) to systematically reduce the birth rate of an ethnicity is shocking in today’s day and age.

The report states that approximately 100,000 Ethiopian Jews have come to Israel since 1980, but that their “Jewishness” is questioned by some rabbis. Birth rates in this community have fallen dramatically, and apparently it is because these women were forced or coerced into take the Depo-Provera drug.

I bring this all up simply because it is not getting enough media attention. I am in full support of the Israeli state, but it, like every other country, should not go without critique. And if this story turns out to be completely accurate, there is more to critique about Israel than I originally thought.

Today in the News…

Considering the conflicts currently taking place in Mali and Syria as well as important political events in Pakistan and Egypt, I thought that today I would see how these are being covered by major American news outlets.

CNN – “the worldwide leader in news” – decided to run with Lance Armstrong on the front page.

Part doping, part Oprah

Now, it’s not that CNN doesn’t have a story on Mali; it’s just that it’s hidden underneath 10 feet of rubbish.

Praise the Lord

If you bother to have a “RidicuList,” please also include the “worldwide leader in news” slogan

And while I found a Mali story on CNN, there was nothing to be found on Syria, Pakistan or Egypt. Too much news on moisturizing jeans I guess.

ABC News does not fare much better. More Lance, less Pat Robertson wife pageantry and a slide-show dedicated to nipple slippage. Luckily, these stories are not the top headlines. These are.

Okay, that’s not much better

Depressed with ABC, I thought that maybe Fox News would be a better source for today’s events (no I didn’t). Being mavericks, Fox decided that its headline should be different, so they led with a plane story.

Give them credit, it’s refreshingly not racist

Not bad, although I still don’t think that it’s the most important story of the day. But I guess I can take solace in the fact that these headlines were only secondary.

By turning down the crazy

NBC and CBS’s headlines are on the hostage crisis in Algeria, which is fair enough. Although I can still make fun of them because of stuff like this.

Tough life

Even the Washington Post’s main story is puzzling. Is this really the best you can come up with?

Sigh

All of this to say that I’m not surprised. I understand what drives the media (profit) and I understand that more hits are generated by talking about a disgraced bicyclist and his shrunken testicle(s) than something that actually matters (a civil war, perhaps). And I guess we can blame ourselves. Today’s most popular stories on Huffington Post had more to do with male contractions than about international relations or political instability.

I read none of these

At some point, though, shouldn’t we demand more from the media? Shouldn’t they be informing us rather than entertaining us?

I’m enough of a realist to know that this won’t happen under our current system of economic incentives, which is why I support the idea of a publicly funded media outlet. The incentive of a public broadcaster is not simply profit (say goodbye to news stories about moisturizing jeans), but about informing the citizenry.

As more and more news outlets attempt to increase profit by running sensationalist/meaningless/partisan banter, there are fewer reputable options available to find informative news. But the fact that it’s more difficult to find good news is less of a tragedy than the fact that our economic system is turning news into entertainment and, thus, making the public more ignorant about the world today.