| Saturday, April 13, 2002 | |
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Violent Bloggers
By Diana Hsieh @ 2:30 PM Apparently, Asparagirl is a "violent blogger," as are the rest of us alarmed by the wave of recent attacks on Jews in France and elsewhere. Okay, Asparagirl, time to fess up... How many people have you beaten up since you started your blog? How many French have you killed in your hateful blogging? None? Oh... |
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| Friday, April 12, 2002 | |
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Suicide Bombings
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:39 PM In his March 31st op-ed entitled "Suicidal Lies," Thomas Friedman argued that the suicide bombings of Palestinians amounted to "testing out a whole new form of warfare," one that threatened not just Israel and the United States, but all of civilization. This column was certainly a welcome change from Friedman's unveiling and advocacy of the ludicrous Saudi "peace plan," as this op-ed clearly acknowledged the gravity of the threat faced by the Israelis. In one sense, the kamikaze attacks worked. Many American ships were damaged or sunk by the attacks, and the U.S. Navy was forced to devote enormous resources to fight off such attacks. The suicide bombings of the Palestinians, Finch argues should be regarded in a similar light. They are a desperate last resort, an admission that they cannot win a war with Israel by even remotely conventional means. And so the proper response to these suicide bombings now is the same as it was in World War II: refuse to be cowed and continue to fight. Defeat of the enemy is at hand. Finch is, however, too optimistic about the ease of pursuing that iron-willed strategy in these morally relative times. Apart from the United States' lukewarm support, Israel stands alone in her fight against the suicide bombers. And public opinion even in Israel is more divided than it ought to be. The rest of the world, for the most part, has sided with the Palestinians, and thus with the sacrifice of the Jews -- yet again. So Israel is fighting the suicide bombers with one hand tied around her back. She may still be winning, but the cost in human lives will be greater as a result. Really, it all boils down to the comment of a friend of mine: We want to live, they want to die. Hey, I know a compromise in this war to make everyone happy! We kill them! That's the only sort of compromise possible with suicide bombers. |
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Right Wing News
By Diana Hsieh @ 3:29 PM John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a delightful rant on why he supports Israel. My favorite passage: It's all well and good to sit around at cafes in France and sneer at Israel because you don't think they're living up to some impossible ethical standard that's been applied to them, but it's another thing to be in their shoes, surrounded by 300 hundred million hostile Arabs who want to finish the job Hitler started in WW2. They're not dealing with reasonable, rational, civilized people. They're dealing in large part with terrorists and savages who claim to be thrilled when their own children die as long as they take Israeli civilians with them. To expect Israel to deal with the Palestinians as if they were a bunch of snot nosed globalization protestors at a G8 summit is irrational to the point of insanity. As he says, Israel is just the appetizer, but we are the main course. |
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In Defense of the Intact Penis
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:34 AM Andrew Sullivan has some excellent comments on male circumcision under the heading "The Mutilation of Children." He writes: I may be a broken record on this but the news today that circumcision may have a small effect in restraining transmission of the HPV virus strikes me as likely to be misused. The argument against the circumcision of infants is not that it might not conceivably have some future health-benefits. The argument against infant male genital mutilation is that it is the permanent, irreversible disfigurement of a person's body without his consent. Unless such a move is necessary to protect a child's life or essential health, it seems to me that it is a grotesque violation of a person's right to control his own body. It matters not a jot why it is done. It simply should not be done - until the boy or man is able to give his informed consent. And to perform such an operation to protect the health of others is an even more unthinkable violation. It's treating an individual entirely as a means rather than as an end. I'm at a loss why a culture such as ours that goes to great lengths to protect the dignity and safety of children (and rightly so) should look so blithely on this barbaric relic. Yes, I know there are religious justifications for it. But even so, religions should not be given ethical carte blanche over the bodies of children. Would we condone a religious ceremony that, say, permanently mutilated a child's ear? Or tongue? Or scarred their body irreversibly? Of course not. So why do we barely object when people mutilate a child's sexual organ? Well put. When I first investigated the issue of male circumcision, the barbarity and pointlessness of the practice was immediately and painfully obvious to me. (Actually, the practice isn't really pointless, as it does serve the purpose of diminishing sexual pleasure.) Circumcision is a rights-violation, in either boys or girls. The justifications often cited for the practice were transparently ridiculous, as such arguments would never be used to justify other types of child mutilation. For example, circumcision is falsely said to eliminate the (already very low) risk of penile cancer. But it would be unthinkable to remove the breast tissue of newborn girls (if possible) so as to reduce the much greater risk of breast cancer. Life comes with risks of disease. We do not remove useful body parts in advance of any problem, particularly not without informed consent, so as to reduce those risks -- except in the case of the male foreskin. Nor do we remove body parts because parents are squeamish about teaching cleaning procedures or because young men might not be so diligent about performing the necessary cleaning -- except in the case of the male foreskin. As Andrew Sullivan indicates, circumcision is a glaring exception in our generally respectful attitudes towards the bodies of children. The gross inadequacy of these arguments is yet another instance of people failing to develop or apply the all-important philosophical skill of thinking in principles. People simply don't often-enough ask questions like: Would this sort of argument hold water in other, similar cases? As a result, they accept all manner of ludicrous conclusions simply because the arguments, taken in stark isolation, seem unobjectionable. As a result, people who would never dream of cutting off a child's ears so as to eliminate the problem of dirt collecting behind them are willing to cut off the foreskin so as to prevent the collection of smegma. For many, however, the problem may be more psychological in origin. As a woman, the most mind-boggling aspect of male circumcision is that most men seem to be suffering from a variant of Stockholm Syndrome as a result of the procedure. They generally steadfastly refuse to admit even the possibility that the circumcision was harmful to them. They deny that the removal of foreskin might have reduced their capacity to feel sexual pleasure, even though they clearly have no way of knowing a priori what it would be like to have sex or masturbate uncircumcised. They seem determined to ward off any thought that their parents might have seriously damaged them at an age when they could not even be aware, let alone protest, the injustice. As a result, these men go on to circumcise their own sons. It is abominable. Men need to start standing up for their own sex. |
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| Thursday, April 11, 2002 | |
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Sensible Shoes Libertarians
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:15 PM VodkaPundit blogs on things he knows but cannot prove. The best, by a long shot is... Virginia Postrel is the hottest "sensible shoes" libertarian. Ever. He then notes: NOTE: Newer readers, or humans in general, might take "'sensible shoes' libertarian" as a slur on Virginia's wardrobe. Far from it. Nothing to do with clothes at all. Sensible shoes libertarians are real-world reformers. Then there are Combat Boot Libertarians -- revolutionaries still clutching dog-earred copies of Atlas Shrugged. And Golf Shoe Libertarians, who are just Republican wanna-be radicals. This opens up a whole world of possibility concerning the classification of Libertarians. How about Thigh Boot Libertarians? Or Dirty Old Sneaker Libertarians? Slipper Libertarians? The Shoe Libertarian Ideology Classification System (SLICS) must be developed further! |
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A Petition Worth Signing
By Diana Hsieh @ 6:00 PM I just signed the petition against banning theraputic cloning of Franklin Society. It reads: Therapeutic Cloning Should NOT Be Banned It's worth a look -- and a signature. |
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| Wednesday, April 10, 2002 | |
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Unspeakable Evil
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:30 PM Yesterday's Best of the Web includes some mind-boggling stories of anti-Semitism. Most distressing is this story from Norway: Ingmar Tveitt, a friend of Norwegian Parliament member Jan Simonsen, was ordered yesterday by Parliament security guards to remove his jacket because a Star of David was displayed on the chest pocket. Go read the detailed account from Best of the Web, as the news story is not in English. In light of my strong support of Israel's right to defend itself and the growing threat of anti-Semitism, I have idly thought of wearing a small version of the flag of Israel, similar to Ingmar Tveitt's. Not being even remotely Jewish myself, it would be something like the apocryphal story of the Danes all wearing the star of David so that the Nazis couldn't identify the Jews. (However untrue that particular story may be, the Danes did protect their Jews from the Nazis, unlike the people of other countries.) I wonder what sort of reactions I might get. |
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A Tasty Snack for James Taranto
By Diana Hsieh @ 3:40 PM This week's "What Do You Think" in The Onion serves up Yasser Arafat as a tasty dish, sure to be loved by the folks over at Best of the Web. Mary Putnam, Graphic Designer, says: "Arafat would never be behind any acts of terrorism. This is a Nobel Peace Prize winner we're talking about here." James Taranto's almost daily reminders that "Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994" seem to have sunk in! |
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Self-Destructive Culture
By Diana Hsieh @ 1:17 PM Juan Williams opposes reparations for slavery in an op-ed of arguments of variable quality. He makes the idiotic claim that reparations may have the harmful effect of ending "the moral responsibility that all Americans, especially white Americans, have for the history of slavery, legal segregation and the ongoing racism in our national life." Apparently eliminating unearned guilt, guilt for inhumane and racist acts committed by people wholly unconnected to you, is a bad thing. Despite this boggle, Mr. Williams does make some interesting comments about reparations fostering racism. He writes, If reparations become a reality, black Americans already battling presumptions of inferiority (they are less hard working, less intelligent and less patriotic, according to whites questioned by pollsters) will also bear the weight of being demeaned as less able than any Mexican immigrant or Bosnian refugee. The newcomers, after all, are not asking for reparations -- they only want a chance to make it in America. The result will be a further segregation of low-income black people from the mainstream. Mr. Williams certainly has a good point about the push for reparations fostering ideas of the inferiority of blacks. Millions of immigrants, even those subjected to terrible racial bias, have succeeded in this country without payments for comparable injustices. The reparations movement thus subtly hints that some aspect of black people themselves is responsible for the proportionally higher rates of poverty, criminality, illegitimacy, and school dropouts among blacks. Predictably, racists will use the ideas reparations movement as confirmation of their view that blacks are inherently too lazy or stupid or criminal or whatever to succeed. (I ought not have to say it, but I will, that such racism is completely irrational and reprehensible.) For reasonable people willing to distinguish between race and culture, the reparations movement may have an unintended benefit, attracting attention to the ways in which black culture damages blacks themselves. Such damage is partially the result of the intellectual corruption of anointed black leaders wholly invested in the cult of black victimhood, like Jesse Jackson. Black intellectuals who do not tow the line of racism as responsible for all ills, like Larry Elder, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Clarence Thomas are regarded as sellouts, as not really black. More insidiously, however, black culture damages children by too often pegging academic and material success as a failure as a black person, because such success is merely an imitation of white people. A disturbing 1998 story from The Washington Post details the pressure cooker forced upon black students who value academic achievement. High-achieving African American students also complain about being ridiculed by fellow black students who tease them if they expend a lot of effort to earn good grades. Thank goodness for committed parents. In my two years of public middle school, I was nearly ruined intellectually by much more subtle pressure against academic achievement. I remember telling my mother that I wouldn't get grades higher than Bs, because I was already in the "Gifted and Talented" program. Girls were simply not supposed to be overtly smart. They weren't supposed to be interested in learning. As a result, I was desperately trying to maintain a balancing act that would have ended up destroying my opinionated self. I was saved by a last minute switch to a private all-girls school, Garrison Forest, for 8th grade and high school. Most people simply don't believe that my intellectual life would have been seriously and most likely permanently stunted by continuing in the anti-intellectual environment of public school. But they are wrong. I would have ended up like the vast majority of girls at WashU: never speaking up in class, never able to do anything alone, never confident in judging independently. And, as with the other girls at WashU, no one would have ever noticed anything amiss. So I was "saved" -- in an almost religious sense. My greatest gratitude towards my parents will always be for that change of schools. So I have some sense for the damage that such pressure to conform to ideals of mediocrity can do to a child. And I feel a sense of vicarious gratitude to every black parent who demands success from his/her child. In short: Blacks don't need reparations. They don't need affirmative action. They don't need the welfare state. They need a cultural revolution. |
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