politics

5 things feminists need to stop saying

/ bharatwrites / 25 Comments

We owe feminism for challenging the traditional kinder, küche, kirche role we had delineated for women. As more women went to work, the feminist movement helped make the workplace safer and work schedules flexible: changes that helped men too, says Warren Farrell in The Myth of Male Power. Working women commanded more respect from their husbands and children. Most women in the developed world know and exercise their rights. Efforts are being made to reduce the suffering of women in developing countries.

But feminism in the developed world is running out of dragons to slay. While Rush Limbaugh’s comment on Sandra Fluke was unfortunate and classless, the outrage it provoked and the attention it received suggest that there are few outright gender-discriminatory injustices in the Western world. Devoid of real enemies, feminist zeal and passion are becoming tools for social engineering. Truth has become subservient to the collective female emotion, which, like all forms of collectivism, is set by those who represent it. Even if most women identify as feminists, at least some women are victimized by feminism. Feminist arguments have been used to oppose prostitution and pornography even on occasions where the women were willing. Feminism has taken an ugly turn. Now it is sexist to suggest anything that might displease a woman. We are all supposed to shut up and nod along or get relegated to the doghouse. Whatever women say, say yes or you are a sexist. If you’re eloquent about it, you’re a misogynist. Fine. We surrender. But it’s time to retire some statements –

1. If women ran the world, it would be more peaceful

At the 2007 Emmy awards, Sally Field said, “If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn’t be any goddamned wars in the first place,” to tumultuous applause. Sally Field is just one person, but I’ve heard other women say this. Wendy Schiller, a Brown University professor, said on Real Time With Bill Maher that women are get-together-to-solve-problems kind of people, and hence appointing more women-leaders will make things better. (She has not read this or this. Here is the original research article.) The audience responded with a big female cheer. When Andrew Sullivan tried to argue, she silenced him with petty rhetoric. Shouldn’t any particular woman feel insulted when characterized solely as a group-member, no matter how superficially positive the characterization?

And let’s not forget that history is replete with violent female leaders. Queen Mary Tudor is called Bloody Mary because she burned over 300 Protestants at the stake for heresy. Queen Elizabeth I massacred Ireland. Indira Gandhi had operation Blue Star and imposed the national emergency during which she ruled by decree. Golda Meir had operation Wrath of God. Hillary Clinton’s vote for the Iraq war shows that she is pro-violence at least some of the time. Margaret Thatcher had the Falklands War. These records are among the bloodiest. And by the way, these women sent men to their deaths.

The lady’s not for turning … the other cheek (Wikipedia)

Good politicians need to be ruthless. They need to make tough decisions. These qualities were attributed to men. The political process simply selects for such personalities, male or female. So if only women ran the world, it would be the same. Women are capable of injustice as well. Remember Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib?

United States Army photo from Abu Ghraib priso...

Such a sweetheart (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a bonus, here’s a bunch of women laughing about a man getting his penis chopped off and thrown into the garbage disposal. His crime: asking his wife for a divorce. One woman who notes the blatant sexism is quieted with more jokes. I am for all kinds of humor, and free speech above all; but can you imagine the outrage if the roles were reversed?

2. Government must ensure women earn as much as men

Sounds great right? Who except the purest, most-distilled sack of chauvinistic excrement would disagree with this? For every dollar a man earns, a woman earns 66 cents. Surely something has to be done to fix this injustice. It would solidify women’s presence at the workplace, and cement their rights, right?

Only if you’re unaware that over 95% of the people in the professions with chronic and acute health risks are men. Firefighting, pest-control, construction and other such jobs have over 95% men. Because these jobs are harder and carry higher risk of death and almost a certainty of injury, it’s hard to find people willing to do them. So we need to offer higher salaries. On the flip side, women represent over 95% of dental hygienists, secretaries, speech pathologists, preschool and kindergarten teachers etc. (2010 census report here.) Nobody denies that these jobs have challenges, but they are a lot safer and much less grueling. Men work more hours, commute farther, and do not get pregnant. As sexist as that last one sounds, an employee going on maternity leave is a cost, and employers consider it while negotiating salaries.

I’m sure some employers believe that women aren’t as good as men, and therefore pay women less. But governmental action isn’t going to change them. These prejudiced employers will stop hiring women if they are forced to pay them as much as men, as Milton Friedman explains. Without the government forcing hands, a sexist employer is forced to pay a cost of the higher wage when he arbitrarily chooses a man over a woman. His prejudice costs him. If for whatever reason, a woman is less preferable for a job, the best bargaining power she has is the offer to work for less. Feminism aims to reduce this power thus screwing the pooch for female employees.

Also, one of the best ways to get a raise is to ask for one. Fewer women than men have families dependent primarily on their income. Consequently, a man is more motivated to demand a raise or else because there is a direct correlation between his raise and the improvement in his family’s standard of living. Another instance of this differential earning pressure on men and women is the evidence that self-employed women make less than self-employed men do, probably because they choose other comforts in life that are incongruous with a large profit, according to a 2001 study by Rochester Institute of Technology.

3. Women are smarter because they don’t hump everything they can

This popular refrain seems anecdotally true. Most women could go outside and suggest sex, and guys would line up to oblige. Hence we assume that men are slaves to their primal nature and that women are cerebral and ethereal beings who cannot be distracted from their goals. The most sophisticated of men, on the other hand, turn into blithering idiots by a glimpse of cleavage.

That conclusion is premature. In our society, sex for sex’s sake has consequences. People who get a lot of action are often assumed to have some moral deficit or a self-esteem deficiency for which they overcompensate with promiscuity. So people weigh the risk of getting labeled against the benefit of a dalliance.

When guaranteed a good sexual experience, women are as promiscuous as men, says Terri Conley at the University of Michigan. Of course, this guarantee is often more easily available to men. Most men can gauge with one look whether a woman will please them in bed. A quick head-to-toe scan isn’t enough for women. Given the social price of sex, the high cost-to-benefit ratio for women makes them more discerning. There goes that female philosophical high-ground, which brings us to…

4. Women are more spiritually evolved than men

This is classic question-begging. First, few people can define spiritual evolution, and they are all meditating under Himalayan icicles not to be disturbed. If we can’t even agree on a definition, how can we go about laying men and women on a continuum of spirituality. But some feminists love spouting this party line. Men are impulsive, women are thoughtful. Men are stupid, women are smart. Isn’t this what we see on TV? From Everybody Loves Raymond to Scrubs and even How I Met Your Mother, the woman in the relationship is a genius who swoops in and solves the problem while the husband is busy screwing up. (You gotta love Everybody Loves Raymond. They showed nine seasons of a housewife who never kept a clean home, couldn’t cook to save her life, but yelled at her husband for not contributing.) But it makes sense why TV shows are like that. Women watch more TV than men in any time slot. Women also shop more than men do. No sponsor would want to mess with that. Women need to see this for what it is: a ruse to make them swipe that credit card. As Bill Maher asks, “If women are more evolved, why are they so impressed by shiny objects?”

I’m trying to imagine the mixed emotions of an evangelical feminist about this pic.

Side note – No present species or sex is more evolved than any other. Humans of today are no more evolved than the chimpanzees of today. Humans and chimps  simply have common ancestors. Read The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins for more information. (Side side note – I don’t support Professor Dawkins’ condescending reply to Rebecca Watson regarding Elevatorgate. However, the ad hominem attacks on Dawkins for expressing an opinion were disturbing. Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon.com called him a dick: sexist lingo, which apparently women are allowed to use, you know, when the guy deserves it.)

5. You can’t say that because it’s offensive to women

My favorite argument. Anything that offends women is now off the table. When Larry Summers was President of Harvard, he asked if the poor representation of women in science could be due to inherent differences in aptitude between men and women. To be clear, this was one of his theories. He was booed off the academic stage followed by crucifixion in the press, which ended only with his resignation. Such sentiment is rife in colleges today. Suggest an idea a woman might find repugnant, and you’re a chauvinistic pig.

German designer Karl Lagerfeld was given the collective middle finger for calling singer Adele ‘a little too fat’. What he said was, “The thing at the moment is Adele. She is a little too fat, but she has a beautiful face and a divine voice.” I’m probably standing too far, because this looks like a compliment. (They make it sound like he camped outside her house with Atkins pamphlets.) Adele responded that she was happy with the way she looked and how she represented most women. She has since hired a trainer to help her get healthier, according to a source of the Daily Mail.

A few years ago, conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager was accused of endorsing marital rape. I immediately pictured a grinning Prager motivating a large congregation of rapist husbands lauding their tireless pursuits and egging them on while lecturing on combinations of physical force and emotional blackmail simmered to perfection.

Tomorrow: alibi practice and crime-scene cleanup.

His article (Part I and part II) was about how sometimes for the health of a marriage, a woman should consider having sex with her husband even if she’s not ‘in the mood’. Prager also argues that we rarely leave other important things in life (going to work, taking kids to school etc.) at the mercy of our moods. I don’t agree with everything he said in the article, but he never endorsed any form of force. The feminist argument assumes that women are animals who have sex when and only when their monkey-brains tell them to, and a woman having sex for any reason other than raw desire is being raped. If that’s true, all prostitutes are rape-victims. Shouldn’t it be anti-feminist not to distinguish a woman’s free will from her feral instinct? Yet, feminists were happy to take this position and over-simplify women. Prager simply suggested that women make a conscious decision to have sex in spite of their mood. He respected a woman’s volition more than his critics did. Men are constantly told to cuddle and hold their partner after sex, buy flowers, give back-rubs, foot-massages and the like, in spite of their moods or lack of them. But they comply for the health of the marriage. And they should. Being aware of one’s desire and going against it for a good reason is a sign of maturity. Women cannot expect equal treatment (neither can men) and demand qualified speech. That is injustice.

Finally, the adversarial interaction between feminists, masculists and those in between keeps everyone in check. (I ignore the squiggly Microsoft Word uses to nudge me to reconsider ‘masculists.‘) Stifling opinions for their apparent repugnance only drives prejudice and bias underneath. Say whatever you want, but when contrary evidence is presented, evaluate it, and change your opinion if necessary. Stop being loyal to a fault.

Benevolent dictatorship

/ bharatwrites / 6 Comments
English: india against corruption

Anna Hazare (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The blogosphere and Facebook and Twitter are abuzz with support for Anna Hazare and his hunger strike against corruption. Thousands have signed up to show solidarity with this anti-establishment movement. So far, so good. After all, democracy allows us to voice unpopular opinions, be they against the government, its decisions, its policy or democracy itself. Democracy is the only system that tolerates criticism and even encourages it.

But what is Anna Hazare’s answer to the problems of the current establishment? More establishment. He and his supporters are asking for an independent body to oversee government actions and protect us from those who have a preferential access to government.

Before I go into why I believe Anna Hazare’s approach is flawed, let us tackle the fundamental question. What is corruption and why does it happen?

Now I’m sure that there are intellectuals out there who can define corruption better than I can imagine it, but let me rustle up a working explanation.

Corruption is government employees performing their duties and exercising their discretion for or against the law in exchange for compensation from the party directly benefiting from said duties or discretion. This ranges from a policeman pocketing Rs. 50 instead of a legal Rs. 500 fine to a stamp duty officer who won’t let your file move up until you put money on his table.

But why does this happen? Are all government employees inherently evil? Is there a special screening in these job interviews that ensures the exclusive entry of psychopaths and purges the system of all honest and responsible people? And what of these citizens, who encourage venality by rewarding it with bribes? Are they the cause or a symptom of this horrible situation?

The answer, of course, is a lot simpler, and depending on your perspective, either heartening or disheartening. People, as Steven Levitt often says, respond to incentives. A tiny, insignificant fraction of us actually do good or evil for its own sake. We do things that benefit us. Sometimes that benefit is obvious.

The problem with government officials who can be bribed is that they have powers to grant you permissions or hand you prohibitions regarding property that’s not their own. A policeman who ignores your speeding (for a small bribe) doesn’t personally stand to lose from its adverse consequences. So he barters his power to excuse your transgression against the importance you place on reaching where you want to on time (which can be correlated well with the amount of bribe you’re willing to offer). The same goes for the stamp duty officer, or the MTNL guy we had to bribe to get our dead telephone line working after an outage.

Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited

MTNL — We remind you of a time before phones (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The more a person controls what you do over property he doesn’t own, the more the incentive for him to look the other way when you grease his palm. This principle can be applied for almost all but the very necessary functions of government. The solution to corruption is to check the growth of government, which first taxes you to establish organizations which control your actions, and then imposes a secret tax in the form of a bribe to remove those controls.

Let’s now take a look at Anna Hazare’s panacea. He believes that if we appoint a group of the right people with power to look over the government’s shoulder, we will achieve a corruption-free India. He also wants to dole out brutal punishments to strike fear in the hearts of the corruptible. Despite Arvind Kejriwal’s false equivalence of the Lokpal with the income tax department that oversees the finances of the nation’s top officials without — he believes — being influenced by them, I’m quite convinced that given enough time, the Lokpal can be corrupt too.

And then businesses will have more palms to grease than they do now. As Milton Friedman once reproached — and I paraphrase —  “What is business? Any costs that a business pays is borne by its stockholders, employees or its customers.” Have no doubt — we the customers of India Shining will pay for this extra red tape, probably more than any bribe.

Let’s take a look at our kind martyr, the genial old man supposedly on a Gandhian route to clear our national conscience. The village of Ralegaon Siddhi is Anna Hazare’s first claim to fame. It is not common knowledge that Anna Hazare endorsed the public flogging of alcoholics to shape them up, and he personally flogged some of them with his belt. When questioned about this, he nonchalantly replied that rural India was rough, and such measures were needed. Distillers who sold alcohol in the village were told to shut shop or else. This man fighting for freedom made his bones by curbing the free enterprise of people who did no bodily harm by threatening them with just that.

I’m glad that this man was instrumental in getting us the Right to Information Act, but it is worthwhile to note that many of his past collaborators don’t support him now.

While I’ve stated my case for the lack of justification for Anna Hazare’s ends in this situation, we must also examine his means. Make no mistake, fasting unto death is extremely violent. It is nothing but blackmail and coercion. This is where the comparison with Gandhi falls apart. Gandhi’s fasting was violent and coercive too, but it was violence against an imperialistic establishment, one that treated Indians as almost sub-human, subjected us to taxation without representation, and curbed our basic human rights. Anna Hazare is practicing coercion against a democratically elected government (however corrupt), which democracy has done almost nothing to curb his freedom. I say almost because I vigorously oppose his arrest, but when we put it in perspective, the matter was resolved quickly, and it gave him more publicity and sympathy.

Finally, we will truly be free, safe and democratic when we rid ourselves of the notion that the ‘right people’ in power will make things rosy. The benevolent dictator is, all said and done, a dictator, and that’s not what we signed up for.

Weird week update

/ bharatwrites / 1 Comment

I must disclose first and foremost, that this June is a month of relaxation for me. My sister’s visit from India means we’ll do most of the touristy things along with meeting family and seeing some understated NYC places that are familiar only to people who’ve lived here, breathed the air, experienced the essence of the city, or attempted a perfunctory glance of nymag.com.

Meeting family in DC

No visit with family is complete without beer, political arguments turned into shouting matches and ridiculously early bedtimes. My uncle and aunt took us bro and sis to the national arboretum, of which we saw a small part, namely the bonsai exhibits (there were trees as old as 500 years grown to an impressive height of two feet! Wait what? You know, bonsai is the Japanese art (or is it science?) of growing small trees and re-potting them so they live to impressive ages).

With some family members, you find yourself hunting for topics to talk about simply because while there is no dearth of love between people, conversational gelling isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I am usually particularly handicapped in this department. With my uncle, however, there’s no such handicap. Usually our peaceful conversations that begin about the weather escalate to shouting matches that are tie-broken by a scream of “Zip it!” from my aunt. Thank god for her, because we are usually quite out of new material by then and are spouting opposing rhetoric at each other hoping to hose our adversary down with condescension and categorical theses instead of arguments.

Weinergate

Courtesy: Wikipedia

Just in case we might have run out of topics to talk about, our friendly New York Congressman Rep. Anthoy Weiner (D) showed us the true zenith of surname oriented jokes. In simple words, he tweeted to the public (accidentally of course) a picture of his crotch area (clothed) as opposed to sending it as a direct message to a 21 year old girl. No crime, so far. As usual with politician sex scandals, people start to gather and question the regularity with which these guys put their feet in their mouths (not literally, that would need some serious Yoga). Some of course, go on to make sweeping generalization about men.

My opinion on this is as amateurish as it is unsolicited. Good politicians are go getters, and it takes a certain pushiness to climb up to the top of any ladder. The characteristics that propel people to such heights also seem to correlate with predilections of deviance. As such, in a highly competitive society, the people that get ahead are those who think outside the box, interpret the rules differently, and any more cliches I could use that those winners wouldn’t ever. Of course, their real smartness lies in keeping their indiscretions secret, and never ever using a cent of public funds for any such activities. In the latest news, while various Democratic politicians are taking turns to throw Weiner under the bus, a stark difference between the Clinton era and today is revealed. A difference that is heartening, I might add. While Clinton was nearly put out of commission for getting oral appeasement from an intern, Weiner might just get away with a leave of absence for treatment. My whole sense of pride that comes from being a New Yorker (almost four years now!), stands to be blasted to smithereens at the edge of a cliff if the people of my current city start calling for Weiner to resign. What we need to respect, and this sounds like such a given that I’m exhausted just typing it, is that it is his personal life, and that he didn’t use government funds to do this, nor did he let his affair affect any political decisions he made. He did not use his position to obstruct any sort of investigation into his private life (something Clinton has been accused of doing).

(Update: Anthony Weiner has since resigned, the pressure from fellow Democrats being too much. I guess times haven’t changed that much since Clinton, except that people might have to resign for smaller sexual indiscretions than earlier!)

Tracing Morgan?

Courtesy: entertainmentrundown.com

Tracy Morgan, who plays Tracy Jordan in the super-hit NBC laugh-riot 30 Rock, recently made some seriously anti-gay remarks during a stand up act (yes I understand how stupid the use of serious and comedy in one sentence sounds, I am not back-spacing, forget about it). He said that the president should stop being soft on bullied gay kids, and that he would stab his own son should he be gay. I am paraphrasing of course, but you can see how this set of statements couldn’t be mangled no matter how poor the translation.

People like Chris Rock have made it clear that the freedom of speech is especially relevant to unpopular speech, and this should be protected as well. Other comedians like Wanda Sykes have openly chided Morgan for these statements. I don’t think this should be turned into a referendum on free speech simply because Morgan got carried away. It happens. Comedians all over are pushing the envelope of edginess in order to shock people into laughter, and the only test they’re supposed to satisfy is, “It better be funny.” This is why George Carlin and Chris Rock get away with some of their routines, while Joel Stein and Michael Richards get universally chastised. Some of these people are funny, and others aren’t. Comedy is a rough business, and sometimes they don’t laugh. You keep going, pushing the PC barrier harder and harder, till you realize that there’s nothing funny about your train-wreck of a bit, and that you’re gonna pay for this. While this Tracy business will blow over, it just makes me respect even more the comedians who are edgy and steadily funny. Tina Fey, the head honcho of 30 Rock has helped dispose of this issue with her recent comment.

That’s it for the week update. Maybe I should make this a regular thing?

The aftermath

/ bharatwrites / 4 Comments

The ISI has leaked to the media the name of a CIA agent stationed in Pakistan as some sort of childish retaliation to American forces violating the sovereignty of their country. Apparently, the fact that the world’s most wanted terrorist was hiding in their country in a large villa opposite a military base isn’t bothersome enough for them. They are way more worried about how US helicopters entered their country undetected, and executed a surgical mission to kill a man who was responsible for the death of many Americans directly and indirectly responsible for bankrupting the country by leading them into two wars.

What I don’t get in this whole scenario is why America keeps funding Pakistan so much when it is seems that the Pakistani army and intelligence are definitely incompetent, and/or quite likely that there are some bad apples in the ISI.

Who cares? Let them cry foul and throw a tantrum. When they want to buy weapons to arm themselves against India, they’ll know whom to kiss up to. Cui bono is an important question to be asked in political debates. It basically means to whose benefit? It is in Pakistan’s financial interest and political expediency to foster terrorism within their borders. Keeping militants happy in their country ensures the death of a few Indians every year and guarantees the flow of cash from Uncle Sam to stem terrorism as it were.

The sovereignty of Pakistan is a tricky question. In a civilized world, it shouldn’t be legal for agents from one country to enter another and commit murder. Surely there’s something wrong with that. It would have been a different thing if CIA agents in disguise had entered the compound and killed bin Laden in some guerrilla way and quietly exited the country without a trace. Kinda like how Mossad runs things. The Obama administration needed a nice victory. No one would say that they killed bin Laden to increase polling numbers but publicizing this as an American effort and painting red, white and blue all over the news does reek of opportunism.

On the other hand, had this been a special OPs kind of operation, the Pakistani intelligence or army would’ve taken credit for this, further obfuscating their role in the war against terrorism. It must have been a dicey situation.

Now we have another question to answer. Did the enhanced interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration directly or indirectly lead to this operation? If it did, is it still fair for a democratic civilized nation to torture people for information, whether it is reliable or not?

There is some evidence to say that important information obtained about bin Laden’s courier was a product of torture, but the people who were waterboarded the most like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, produced very little usable information at best. They also misled the investigation more. This leads credence to what was said by Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, “If you f**king beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don’t necessarily make it f**king so!”

It is expedient, and not just politically, to do whatever measures seem necessary to protect innocent people. I just end up thinking that in that zeal, we might turn into the very people we are fighting against. We must draw a line. There are some things that civilized people just won’t do. Something as barbaric as torture should be one of them.

I think it is best summed up by Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, “The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003.”

bin Laden ke: my thoughts

/ bharatwrites / 5 Comments

My first reaction to the news was surprisingly nothing. I mean, I wasn’t really concentrating. I was on the phone and simply checking my google news feed during a lull in the conversation, but I must say that it took me to the moment I was checking my mail in 2001.

I was still using a dial-up internet connection and was logging into my rediffmail account, for which I had to go through rediff.com. While I was entering my username and password, I inadvertently noticed a piece of news saying something to the effect of “Plane crashes into World Trade Center building”. I barely took notice of it, and the page refreshed quickly anyway to my email inbox, which preoccupied me completely. I basically did nothing productive, just replied to a bunch of emails and logged out. I was brought back to rediff.com and by now the news had changed to “Second Plane crashes into World Trade center” or something like that. Now, my interest was piqued.

As I read about what would probably be the largest single act of terrorism I will ever see, I felt a kind of fear I didn’t understand. Sure, people died needlessly on the streets of Bombay and Delhi etc, but America was untouchable…or so I had thought.

Living in a developing country makes us susceptible to a bunch of misunderstandings about the developed world. To us, places like America seemed like a large playboy mansion where everyone was comfortable and getting a lot of nookie. Of course, I was 16 in 2001, so you can excuse my sweeping generalizations. But most of all, I was under the delusion that people in the Western world were a lot safer than us. This event scared me a lot because I just realized how far from the truth I was.

While I was but 16, I couldn’t understand what force could be so strong as to motivate 19 young educated people to giving up their lives and their futures while taking so many people with them. It was later revealed by the media that the planes were to hit the buildings at exactly the right height and angle, and with the right amount of speed in order to inflict the damage that they ultimately did. So this wasn’t some spur of the moment hot-headed act. It was planned, cold-blooded mass murder.

And now the perpetrator of that was dead. What bothered me so much was that all we heard was that he died. Sure, there were some details as to the incident, but was there an attempt to capture him alive? They said he resisted, but he didn’t seem to have a weapon. Just how do you resist capture by armed forces without weapons?

The reason I did not feel the closure I wanted to feel was that I wanted him captured. I wanted him handcuffed, held against his will, pleading for the right to live and be free. I wanted him tried in a court, so that we can show the numerous other misled folk what happens to people who hurt us. I wanted it to be clear that while we will avenge our wrongs, we are not barbarians. We will not deign to deal with scum like him the way he deals with our people. And most of all, I wanted his followers to see what a common man he was, who lived secretly and died a joke, and not the martyr they probably think he is now.

While the Republicans are scrambling for photos of his body, I do believe that releasing them to the public would be a bad idea. Photos of bin Laden with a bullet hole in his eye are inflammatory. Representative Duncan Hunter of California says that terrorists who want to hurt innocent people will not be dissuaded by the lack of these photos. Perhaps. But photos like these are great recruiting material for the Muslim fundamentalists. These people are easy to rile up. Mere Danish cartoons generated unbelievable vitriol, and actual photos of their hero’s corpse will shore up Al Qaeda’s enlistment numbers.

While I’m pissed off with President Obama for a bunch of things, I do believe he made the right call here. We all just need to move on.

Update: Chembelle argues that bin Laden could’ve had bombs strapped to his chest which he could’ve detonated at any time. Maybe trying to capture him alive would’ve been too big a risk to take.

Either way, hope this issue is settled now, and we can focus on real stuff.

Birthers aborted?

/ bharatwrites / 6 Comments

The White House finally made public the long form birth certificate of Barack Obama. This whole non-issue has been stirred by a lot of people on the Republican side suggesting that the president wasn’t born in Hawaii but in Kenya. There was never any truth to these allegations, and there was an implied tone of racism there. I can’t imagine a white president being asked to prove his citizenship by birth.

Article II, Section I, Clause V of the US Constitution says, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” So, if Barack Obama had indeed been born outside the US, he would be automatically disqualified for the office he currently holds. Hence the whole controversy. It has been discussed that the original reason this clause was put in the constitution was to prevent a member of the British royal family from becoming president and then turning the country over to the very same imperialists it was fought and obtained from. Makes sense right? Except when it tends to discriminate against naturalized citizens who might otherwise be extremely qualified for the post. That of course, is a topic that deserves its own post.

Courtesy: Jerry Breen (newbreen.com)

IMHO, it’s quite sad that some of the people who’ve been clamoring for more liberty and less taxation have chosen to align themselves with the nuts who believe that the president wasn’t born in the US. If anything, it takes away from any morality that existed in their political stand. Of all the people who’ve taken on this ridiculous project of questioning the president’s birthplace, Donald Trump has been the most disappointing but not very surprising. He actually had fueled a lot of this controversy by pandering to the ‘birthers’. He even apparently released his own birth certificate in a tongue-in-cheek way. Now that the president has released the long form of his birth certificate, Trump has the gall to take credit for helping settle the issue. My opinion of Trump’s arrogance is better expressed by Mr. Jim Mitchell. In any case, people who attack the president on policy and question his methods of resolving the debt and jobs crisis were being drowned out by this incessant yapping from a faction of the right. I must admit that I too was wondering why Obama doesn’t release the long form of his birth certificate for all this time. I thought of some good reasons:

  • Apparently, the state of Hawaii doesn’t release long forms often
  • Obama didn’t want to dignify this non-issue by reacting to it
  • Obama wanted the birthers (and the Republican candidates who align themselves with the birthers) to collect enough rope so he could hang them at the right time
All of the above could be reasons for his hitherto silence. If it is the third reason (which would be serious realpolitik by the way!), perhaps Obama would have been helped by waiting a little longer. Trump seemed like he was gonna take this issue further, and cutting him to size would have been better if done closer to the beginning of the 2012 campaign.
Either way, hope this issue is settled now, and we can focus on real stuff.

Proportional responses

/ bharatwrites / 1 Comment

Whenever I write on a serious issue, I usually start by quoting an article written by a better writer and paraphrasing some of it before segueing into my own thoughts on the subject. What can I say, I’m a slave to routine: Here is the article by Kanchan Gupta on a topic that most people are passionate about, as it involves life and death. Our lives and the deaths of those who will not sit still until they decimate us.

Let me preface by saying that terrorism is never and can never be justifiable. Nothing, no kind of torture or enslavement, or infringement of any right whatever, gives one the right to kill innocent people. We have reached a point in evolution where we must be above killing someone’s loved ones to motivate or deter them. This, seems so obvious right?

What we face today is something no one has imagined before. Sure, the developed and developing world has faced threats to its life from various organizations before. The Nazis, the imperialist British juggernaut, and various separatist revolutions of individual nations come to mind. Many of such threats involved people who believed they were martyring themselves for a cause, for freedom, for independence or a life without persecution.

The extremist Muslim fundamentalist threat we face today is completely new. Before I go further, let me clarify some words and their meanings.

  • Fundamentalism refers to a belief in a strict adherence to specific set of theological doctrines typically in reaction against what are perceived as modern heresies of secularism
  • Extremism is a term used to describe the actions or ideologies of individuals or groups outside the perceived political center of a society; or otherwise claimed to violate common moral standards.

Both definitions are from Wikipedia, so you’re free to criticize their correctness, but I am including them here to indicate what I mean when I use these words.

Kanchan Gupta starts with exploring the meaning of targeted killing, and how legitimate they are. He swats like a fly the argument of apparent immorality of killing a terrorist by saying, “…since terrorism is neither morally right nor a legal expression of dissent…” Very well said. I would like to elaborate on this point more.

We cannot go eye for an eye against Islamic extremists. They believe they are in a cosmic war between good and evil, and their book tells them they’re on the good side. As Reza Aslan says (I don’t agree with him on most points, but I do on this one), “We cannot legitimize this viewpoint. We are not going to out-fanaticize these fanatics.”

That is what I say to all those who tell me that the correct response to Islamic terrorism is to go there and rampantly kill their civilians, show the wrath of the world, show what happens when the civilized world gets uncivilized. It won’t work. It might make us feel good, assuage our outrage when we see television footage of some Arab village getting blown up as our wounds of 9/11, 7/11, 26/11 are still raw. In reality, all it will do is motivate the ones remaining against us even further.

Let’s not forget that this is not a group willing to give its life for the betterment of the remaining members alone: it is a group that believes that they will be honored in the afterlife for every non-believer they kill. So, they aren’t just willing to die for their cause, they’re eager to.

We cannot use fear to motivate them; they have none. They want to die and take with them as many of us as possible. There is only one way to truly control this problem. Treat it as an infestation.

Taking a leaf out of Israel’s book

As and when terrorist groups are formed, we must find ways to kill their leaders. This will prevent them getting organized. Kanchan Gupta cites the example of the assassination of a Hamas leader in the end of his article. It is widely believed to be a Mossad operation (as intelligence agencies go, they are probably the best). The agents entered Dubai 24 hours before the leader reached there to make an arms deal. They checked into the room opposite his, choked him when they got the opportunity, and left the country that very afternoon. Amazing.

Remember Operation Wrath of God? A Palestinian terrorist outfit called Black September had killed 11 Israeli athletes after hijacking their plane. The Israeli Prime Minister had apparently said, “Send forth the boys.” A small group of agents were sent out to kill key leaders of the group. David Kimche, the former deputy head of Mossad said, “The aim was not so much revenge but mainly to make them [the militant Palestinians] frightened. We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. And therefore we tried not to do things by just shooting a guy in the street – that’s easy … fairly.” The idea was to kill them in places where they felt most secure. What makes this approach brilliant is the clinical nature of it. There was a reason for every action. This wasn’t murder motivated by revenge or an animal desire for blood, but a surgical move based on cause and effect. They wanted to kill certain people, important people, the absence of whom would set a terrorist organization back and hence reduce the danger from them.

India Vs. The government of Pakistan

No one really doubts that our northwestern neighbor is sympathetic to the terrorists’ interests. The ISI has been linked to many groups responsible for acts of terrorism in India.

I titled this post based on an episode of The West Wing I had seen a long time ago. The newly elected Democrat president is required to authorize an American response to an act of Syrian terrorism. The president (in the show) is supposed to be a democrat and hence is afraid of being perceived as soft-on-terrorism, which is compounded by the fact that one of the American casualties was his own personal physician (who had a small baby at home). Martin Sheen, who plays the president, says, “Let the word go forth, from this time and place, gentlemen – you kill an American, any American, we don’t come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster!” Of course, in the show, he actually cools down and decides to adopt a proportional response, realizing that his earlier outrage was more personal than presidential.

We all go through that cycle. When the 26-11 happened, I wanted the Indian government to bomb Pakistan just like the US started bombing Afghanistan after 9-11. That was my belligerent knee-jerk response. After sobering up a little, and with more clear thinking, I realized that if we don’t maintain a clear distinction between us and those groups based on what we won’t stoop to no matter what, we will soon end up blurring the line between good and evil. Under no circumstances should we formulate a war plan that revolves around killing civilians. It is not worth it. It is a Pyrrhic victory at best and will germinate more terrorism at worst.

The youth

When Ahmadinejad visited Columbia University in 2007, the President of the university, Lee Bollinger, in his introduction, flamed the man so much that pundits predicted that it would end up endearing him to the youth of Iran. The young students and adults of Iran were impressionable, and introducing them to social liberalism would have been a much better idea, as it would have helped them distance themselves from the Islamic rule of the Shah and Ahmadinejad. Instead, the president of Columbia University, as well as a lot of the American people, insulted Ahmadinejad categorically and ended up insulting the pride of every Iranian. That is sooo not the way to approach this.

I bet the youth of these countries are interested in free speech, the right to do what one wants as long as he is not encroaching on others, the rights of women, the right not to be cruelly and unusually punished. We can engage them in friendly dialogue and develop lasting harmonious relationships with them. Of course, this is hard when you’re bombing their families to hell and back.

Conclusion

Islamic terrorism is unlike any enemy encountered before. They cannot be intimidated, or blackmailed. The only way to control them is to keep trimming their groups. The militant groups need to be spied upon more efficiently, and their leaders need to be neutralized as soon as possible. If they elect new leaders, they should be sanctioned promptly. As Dumbledore said to Harry about Voldemort in The Philosopher’s Stone, “[W]hile you may only have delayed his return to power, it will merely take someone else who is prepared to fight what seems a losing battle next time – and if he is delayed again, and again, why, he may never return to power.”

This only seems like a losing battle. If every member of society put his two cents each time, and keeps doing so, we might be able to get a world as peaceful as possible.

DISCLAIMERS:

  1. While I think this goes without saying, let me make extremely clear the pain I feel for most of the Muslims in this world, who, like the rest of us, want peace more than anything else, and are unnecessary maligned by the few who use this religion to do harm. I apologize to any and all such non-violent Muslims for any affront they might have felt while reading this post.
  2. I must also make it clear that while all the evidence I have seen leads me to believe that the establishment in Pakistan is sympathetic to terrorism, I don’t believe for one moment that the entire population of Pakistan supports it. I am sure most of Pakistan is like most of India: people who want to go to work, make their money, enjoy their life, and mean something to the people who mean something to them.

 

 

The French Burqa Ban – My take

/ bharatwrites / 18 Comments

“I was a fan of Nicholas Sarkozy, but what he’s pushing for now is reprehensible,” said a friend – a Muslim who chooses to wear the head scarf. We tend to banter on religion, and for a religious person, she’s a good sport. My jibes and taunts are often well received, and now and then, when one remark steps innocently over the line, I am gently but curtly reminded of the distance we should maintain for an argument not to turn personal.

The French ban on the veil is famous, and has polarized the public. Let us exclude the opinions of devout Muslims from this analysis, for they can hardly be expected to be disinterested in this issue.

I myself find the burqa to be an abomination: a image of imprisonment that we should have evolved out of by now. Political correctness aside, Islam and women’s rights have always seemed like oil and water to me, but that’s a topic that requires a blog of its own.

Today, the issue is of liberty. People often view the Western (developed) world as a land of plenty, where the basic conditions are good enough, and hence our laws can favor the rights of the individual over the rights of the population as a whole. The idea of a government telling us what not to do is an indirect way for everyone else to control us – for a majority to determine what is good or necessary.

There are many reasonable arguments for this ban. Most people connect the overt religiosity of many Muslims to a refusal to assimilation. Wherever they go, they are Muslims first. Hence the wearing of the burqa is regarded as a slippery slope to madrassas proliferating and even to imposing Sharia law among the Muslim diaspora. Our bogeyman is the honor rape/murder that is a product of a conveniently literal interpretation of the Qur’an. There is no proof linking madrassas directly with terrorism. They do produce fundamentalists, but no one has proof of them breeding terrorists. Hence, I am not thoroughly convinced that the slope between legalizing the burqa and the festering of terrorism is slippery enough to ban such an important civil liberty. Frisk them as much as you want at airports, and select them for additional screening, but such a huge step is not warranted now.

Imagine a woman who wears salwar-kameez exclusively, and is forced by law to wear skirts. She would view this as violating her modesty. She would either wear the skirt grudgingly, or leave the country that legislates her wardrobe, or, worst of all, never leave the house; a giant leap in the backward direction. A woman who’s used to wearing the burqa all her adult life (regardless of whether she was brainwashed into doing so), would be even more skittish about showing her body to other men. Of course, there are various groups arguing that any woman who’s wearing a burqa is doing so out of compulsion or out of some kind of Stockholm-syndrome to a victimizing religion. Based on whatever I have read on this subject, and the arguments of Muslim women who’ve chosen to wear the burqa, I would agree. This doesn’t seem like complete free will.

However mean this might sound, emancipating Muslim women is not my problem, and I certainly don’t want the government to spend taxpayer money on researching which woman is acting out of her free will and which one has been brainwashed. Let the privately funded NGO’s do all that. I would even volunteer my services.

Forcing a Muslim woman to shed her religious attire is violating her free expression and the freedom of religion. Readers of this blog know what I think about religion. Freedom of expression, no matter what the expression, is sacrosanct to me, and curbing it using the might of the law needs more justification. The ban on the veil is unconstitutional, and does not behoove a free country.

I apologize for the offense any woman has felt while reading this post.

P.S: This topic was on my mind for a long time, but I decided to write a post on it only after reading this fine post by Greatbong. His arguments are different from mine, but we both seem to agree that the ban violates freedom.

The better ‘one-third’

/ bharatwrites / 9 Comments

Courtesy: manjunathsinge.com

I have been commenting on various blogs for the past few days steadfastly opposing the bill to reserve one third of parliament seats for the fairer sex. I guess I was taking a sledgeghammer approach to a subject that does require some fine observation. So, here is my nuanced opinion. As such, I oppose reservation of any kind, and it annoys me to no end that people can get to certain positions through shunt-pathways that others simply have no access to. Also, I do believe that corruption in politics is widespread, and highly profitable. It doesn’t matter whether the perpetrator is a man or a woman.

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Pakistan, politics and cricket

/ bharatwrites / 10 Comments

The recent snub of the Pakistani cricket players by IPL teams was unbelievable and believable at the same time. I remember as a young cricket fan listening to my father complain that we should not play cricket with Pakistan while they’re condoning the terrorist activities against India. I, of course, was so young and myopic that all I cared about was watching Wasim, Waqar, Saqlain and their ilk in action.

Over the years, as I (hopefully) got wiser, and as terrorist activities meted out against India by groups enjoying the sympathy of the Pakistani government have got more frequent, I saw more clearly into what my father had said.

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