Some concerned people, mostly of the politically liberal persuasion, say that the wars this country is currently involved in are wrong, the growth and spread of terrorist groups is largely our fault by being there and creating a class of dispossessed to be lulled into violence, that we should just leave and maybe then they wouldn't have as much reason hate us so much. The global reach of our policies, our mass consumption of resources, our witness and participation in torture in wrongful civilian death is evil, we have nothing clear and right to fight for, and we need to just stop it. Plus it's a huge money drain.
Sometimes I have thought this, but as I hash it out I find that I actually disagree.
What we have done as a country, directly or not, has often been harmful to people of other nations. Climate change is the one example I keep coming back to. It was us who put the Taliban in power, not noticing the ticking time bomb that was, not recognizing or acknowledging or caring that some things that aren't communist are also pretty evil.
We will never fully match our ideals, and I doubt any human civilization ever can.
But we shouldn't forget what separates us from the people we are fighting these wars to stand against. The individual leaders of terrorist glorify in violence in the name of religion, use fear and control among their own people to grab and hold on to power, violently oppress the female half of their society.
I want my country to truly exemplify the ideals I've no doubt had brainwashed into me, and I know that it falls pitifully short of doing so sometimes. We do seek to spread our ideals into the rest of the world--and you know what I would rather live in a world where a woman I disagree with on pretty much everything can run for vice president and I can just vote against her than in a world where little girls are doused with acid for committing the crime of trying to go to school despite being female. I don't particularly want to be ashamed of a system that works however imperfectly to prevent violence in the face of a group of people who glorify in it.
If we cut our losses and leave those wars, we'd start being able to make some dents in the deficit, for one. Our troops would be safe, for the meantime anyway, and pressure on civilians in those countries caught in the middle might be eased. They could decide on their own then, if they would oppose radicalized Islam or tolerate and potentially be subsumed by it. It many ways they have the right to that decision. Perhaps there would be less terrorist recruitment, as war-torn, jobless, angry young men would not so readily be given reason and opportunity to blow themselves up for Al Queida.
But at this point, I doubt our withdrawal would stop any of it. The leaders want what we hold up as good about our society to burn along with the greed and corruption they so protest.
Does our presence there or not make a different anymore? Does it make it better or worse for the people living there? Does it make us safer from terrorism? I don't know what we should do, and I don't know how to fix it. But I know it's dead wrong to think that if we just leave them alone they'll suddenly stop attacking us. They probably won't even stop harming the civilians around them.
Showing posts with label we humans are crazy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label we humans are crazy. Show all posts
Friday, November 5, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Top 10 Reasons Why I'm Not Really A Hippie
This is an oldie but a goodie from my old blog, resurrected and updated because I've been doing a lot of random and non-committal political and social science reading. The original entry was inspired, as today as been, by my frustration at some of the people in This Lovely Town.
1. I don't smoke. Anything.
2. It doesn't seem okay with me to ask to borrow large sums of money from mere acquaintances.
3. I recognize that people I don't know, don't necessarily want to talk to me about my thoughts on existence while frequenting public areas, and in fact are in public areas for reasons completely independent of the fact that I might also be there, and so can recognize that their potential annoyance if I bother them with these things anyway would stem from reasons other than their being brainwashed conformist sheep.
4. I require structure: not only does too much "chill" irritate me, people who aspire to a certain degree of "chill", irritate me.
5. Nature is cool, and important, and should be protected, but it's not a shining example of peace and happiness and getting along. It's pretty much about resource competition. If humans weren't the ones taking over the landspace for our own uses, some other species might have evolved to fill in that same void.
6. I differentiate between being thoughtful and generous with time and money, and sharing.
7. I especially do not want to share my genitals.
8. I may not like some (or many) government decisions, but I'm glad we have a government. Notice how if you go far enough right or far enough left, the result is essentially "no government." I'm particularly annoyed at the left-side no-government folks these days, a good friend of mine being caught up in a seemingly-normal protest that turned into a wholesale down-with-the-government smash-fest. The arrested smashers then demanded public defenders. The additional irony in the case of my soft-spoken, politically left-but-not-that-far, certainly-not-a-smasher friend is that she trusts the system to not lock her up for being a stupid system-hater just because she ended up in the company of stupid system-haters.
I wish I did.
9.I often contemplate gun ownership--in the sense that I consider gun ownership for myself. (The God-Damn-It My Way or the High-Way attitude of many of the outspoken gun owners would put me off from wanting to affiliate with them, however)
10. I don't stand in a public place and pretend to be a tree.
1. I don't smoke. Anything.
2. It doesn't seem okay with me to ask to borrow large sums of money from mere acquaintances.
3. I recognize that people I don't know, don't necessarily want to talk to me about my thoughts on existence while frequenting public areas, and in fact are in public areas for reasons completely independent of the fact that I might also be there, and so can recognize that their potential annoyance if I bother them with these things anyway would stem from reasons other than their being brainwashed conformist sheep.
4. I require structure: not only does too much "chill" irritate me, people who aspire to a certain degree of "chill", irritate me.
5. Nature is cool, and important, and should be protected, but it's not a shining example of peace and happiness and getting along. It's pretty much about resource competition. If humans weren't the ones taking over the landspace for our own uses, some other species might have evolved to fill in that same void.
6. I differentiate between being thoughtful and generous with time and money, and sharing.
7. I especially do not want to share my genitals.
8. I may not like some (or many) government decisions, but I'm glad we have a government. Notice how if you go far enough right or far enough left, the result is essentially "no government." I'm particularly annoyed at the left-side no-government folks these days, a good friend of mine being caught up in a seemingly-normal protest that turned into a wholesale down-with-the-government smash-fest. The arrested smashers then demanded public defenders. The additional irony in the case of my soft-spoken, politically left-but-not-that-far, certainly-not-a-smasher friend is that she trusts the system to not lock her up for being a stupid system-hater just because she ended up in the company of stupid system-haters.
I wish I did.
9.I often contemplate gun ownership--in the sense that I consider gun ownership for myself. (The God-Damn-It My Way or the High-Way attitude of many of the outspoken gun owners would put me off from wanting to affiliate with them, however)
10. I don't stand in a public place and pretend to be a tree.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Yard Waste
A few years ago I went to Australia. Sister descendant of the British motherland that it is, although the eastern half (and probably the western half too) had been experiencing one of the most severe droughts in the country's history, still the Australians clung to that stately British idea of well-manicured grasses as ground covering for human-occupied spaces.
Seeing as the drought had caused the government to implement severe water restrictions (how socialist of them), that dream was clearly clung to with considerable delusion: most everybody's short (and not because they mow it) lawn was yellow-brown.
Quite a few of my Australian friends apologized to me for all the dead grass, some even profusely. As if I, hailing from one of North America's temperate rain forests, would find it some ghastly breach of etiquette, some indication of Australian society's inferiority due to lack of ability to control nature.
On the scale of things, I find lawns a somewhat absurd idea. They keep the wildness of Real Nature (which is considerable, in a temperate rain forest) from encroaching on your house, and they look nice--when you're living on a continent to which the species used are remotely adapted. But with things in mind like global food and water shortages, not to mention that Climate Change thing that gets you labeled as a no-good-hippie-alarmist if you mention it, dedicating sections of land to short green grass really does seem, well, extravagant and wasteful. Millions barely get by with subsistence farming on marginal soils, and here some folks dump nitrogen and all-valuable drinkable water into already-pretty-decent soil with no intention of using that space for food production. We go on and on about needing to cut our carbon emissions for the sake of our future, yet we fail to see the hilarity in using gas-powered engines once a week or so just to forestall the undaunted efforts of a plant to get a little taller.
According to 2000 census projections, in 2008 there were 112 million occupied American households. 63.2% of those were detached, which for simplicity will be my only area of focus--even though apartment building, mobile homes, government areas and businesses often have lawn areas as well--so we can estimate that there were 71million American lawns of some size or other. According to the American Housing Survey data tables, the median lot size of occupied housing in 2008 was 0.36 acres, and the median house size was 1800 square feet. Subtract house square footage from 0.36 acres * 43,560 square feet per acre, and you get a rough estimate of 0.32 acres of yard per household. Multiply that by 71 million occupied households, and you get 23 million acres of private lawn.
Lawn mower efficiency is a pretty difficult concept to pin down, because it varies based on size, type, and age, and isn't generally advertised or noticed. Because they are smaller, lighter, and have a less complicated cycle than car engines, one could argue that they are much more fuel efficient than cars; however, they burn a heck of a lot dirtier, not being as as regulated as car engines. For the sake of forging ahead, and at risk of making this whole thing even more arbitrary than it already is, I'm going to throw out a guess of one cup of gasoline per acre, based on minimal experience mowing a 1.5 acre yard with a tiny 1980s push mower. So that's 23 million cups of gasoline, burned once a week throughout warm months, we'll say half the year. 598 million cups of gasoline. According to the EPA, 1 gallon of gasoline yields 19.4 pounds of CO2--that varies too based on the efficiency of combustion, which for lawn mowers probably is not particularly great. But lacking a better number, we'll take that one, so that 598 million cups of gasoline * 16 cups to a gallon * 19.4 pounds of CO2 to a gallon gives you a grand and arbitrary total of...186 billion pounds of CO2 in a year. 84 million metric tons, if you like.
All based on not-well-pinned-down numbers, but we can't deny that is is a darn lot of CO2, thrown up there in the name of neatness and conformity. Considering the supposed scope and potential of human ingenuity, it is pretty darn silly.
Seeing as the drought had caused the government to implement severe water restrictions (how socialist of them), that dream was clearly clung to with considerable delusion: most everybody's short (and not because they mow it) lawn was yellow-brown.
Quite a few of my Australian friends apologized to me for all the dead grass, some even profusely. As if I, hailing from one of North America's temperate rain forests, would find it some ghastly breach of etiquette, some indication of Australian society's inferiority due to lack of ability to control nature.
On the scale of things, I find lawns a somewhat absurd idea. They keep the wildness of Real Nature (which is considerable, in a temperate rain forest) from encroaching on your house, and they look nice--when you're living on a continent to which the species used are remotely adapted. But with things in mind like global food and water shortages, not to mention that Climate Change thing that gets you labeled as a no-good-hippie-alarmist if you mention it, dedicating sections of land to short green grass really does seem, well, extravagant and wasteful. Millions barely get by with subsistence farming on marginal soils, and here some folks dump nitrogen and all-valuable drinkable water into already-pretty-decent soil with no intention of using that space for food production. We go on and on about needing to cut our carbon emissions for the sake of our future, yet we fail to see the hilarity in using gas-powered engines once a week or so just to forestall the undaunted efforts of a plant to get a little taller.
According to 2000 census projections, in 2008 there were 112 million occupied American households. 63.2% of those were detached, which for simplicity will be my only area of focus--even though apartment building, mobile homes, government areas and businesses often have lawn areas as well--so we can estimate that there were 71million American lawns of some size or other. According to the American Housing Survey data tables, the median lot size of occupied housing in 2008 was 0.36 acres, and the median house size was 1800 square feet. Subtract house square footage from 0.36 acres * 43,560 square feet per acre, and you get a rough estimate of 0.32 acres of yard per household. Multiply that by 71 million occupied households, and you get 23 million acres of private lawn.
Lawn mower efficiency is a pretty difficult concept to pin down, because it varies based on size, type, and age, and isn't generally advertised or noticed. Because they are smaller, lighter, and have a less complicated cycle than car engines, one could argue that they are much more fuel efficient than cars; however, they burn a heck of a lot dirtier, not being as as regulated as car engines. For the sake of forging ahead, and at risk of making this whole thing even more arbitrary than it already is, I'm going to throw out a guess of one cup of gasoline per acre, based on minimal experience mowing a 1.5 acre yard with a tiny 1980s push mower. So that's 23 million cups of gasoline, burned once a week throughout warm months, we'll say half the year. 598 million cups of gasoline. According to the EPA, 1 gallon of gasoline yields 19.4 pounds of CO2--that varies too based on the efficiency of combustion, which for lawn mowers probably is not particularly great. But lacking a better number, we'll take that one, so that 598 million cups of gasoline * 16 cups to a gallon * 19.4 pounds of CO2 to a gallon gives you a grand and arbitrary total of...186 billion pounds of CO2 in a year. 84 million metric tons, if you like.
All based on not-well-pinned-down numbers, but we can't deny that is is a darn lot of CO2, thrown up there in the name of neatness and conformity. Considering the supposed scope and potential of human ingenuity, it is pretty darn silly.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Wow
I don't want to go too far down into the realm of politics here and all, but...wow.
This is bad. If it's actually true, that is, and not just an angry media touch-point blown out of proportion--which they do make it out to be by the titles, ("Utah Bill Criminalizes Miscarriage") before going on to explain that it is induced miscarriages.
Well, let's be devil's advocate. If you're not a (questioning) pro-choicer like I am, why is such a law so bad?
For one thing, how do you prove induced miscarriages? In some cases perhaps it is cut-and-dry; in most, I'm sure it's not. My cousin had one: miscarriages are utterly devastating to the people who didn't want them to happen. Getting and staying pregnant is not always that easy of a thing. If the burden of proof is on mothers to satisfy questions of intent, then that is the most draconian thing I've heard of since the days that women were considered the guilty parties for being raped while walking public streets by themselves. (There were more than one court case at the turn of the last century which ruled thusly, according to American's Women.)
Actually, that idea is so utterly draconian that I cannot seriously believe anybody (in a western liberal democracy, anyway) would interpret it that way.
But still, there are issues as is. Obviously, I'm a proponent of one's right to do what one wants with one's body, of abortion as a safe, legal option and all that, of the removal of abortion being as an unfair burden on abused and low-income women in addition to being an unrealistic lack of acknowledgement of the desperate situations our society still heaps onto its women--but even if we could come to a national consensus that abortion is wrong and should be illegal except in life-threatening situations, there is so much gray in this particular Utah law.
What if a woman fell down the stairs when she was at home by herself? How is anyone going to know whether or not that was intentional? Are you really going to waste state funds trying to work that out?
What if a woman has an abusive husband? If she stays with him because that's what so many victims do, and loses her child, is anyone really going to call that her fault? Sure, you could argue she has some responsibility in that case, but the abuser has a hell of a lot more, and is the one who chose to stray outside of the law by using violence. Do we really want to give government the power to make victim-at-fault judgments about people's lives and choices? Do we want to give the government that much power over deeply personal questions?
What does putting these women in jail do for society? The vast majority of people who attempt to end pregnancies are one or more of a) young, b) poor, c) in relationships with unfair power dynamics, if relationships at all, or d) desperate for any other of a whole host of reasons. And let's not kid ourselves, those options are distinctly related to a denial of access to birth control and information about it. Throwing such people in jail is only going to exacerbate the social problems that lead up to the demand for pregnancy termination. This does not do one damn person, especially any unborn child, one lick of good.
The articles that I found about it have very different descriptions, the Salt Lake Tribune article speaking only about illegally (as in, not through the allowed clinics) obtained abortions, while the admittedly biased (though biased toward my personal belief in the matter) blog articles state that it is a law against induced, and potentially accidental (depending on your definition of "reckless", which I agree is a disturbing word to use, because of the questions raised above) miscarriage. I suppose it depends on your definition of "illegal abortion" verses "induced miscarriage" as well, which sound like separate terminology to explain the same thing. The thing they are explaining is a hell of a gray area, in my book.
So I'm not sure who to believe about the actual details of this law, and it's not my state, and to some degree it seems within state's rights to contemplate such issues individually. My inner libertarian proclaims that reproduction is a personal, nobody-else's-business affair which no level of government has the right to stick it's nose in, but people used to say that about beating your wife, and that's no longer acceptable by the standards of anybody who deserves to be listened to. What changed was who the rights got extended to, and it doesn't seem unfeasible to me to extend rights to something that, if left to it's own devices, will become a person. Should we wait until it actually is a person? Maybe, because of all the gray areas and rough issues associated. Like the women who wrote the blog articles, I remain troubled by all of this law, but particularly object to the use of the word "reckless", and how loosely that has the potential to be applied.
In response to the event that apparently spawned the law, in which a woman paid a man $150 so that he would beat her into having a miscarriage, it seems fair and right that if the man could be charged then so should she, and certainly vice versa, though I railed on the stupidity and futility of criminalizing desperate mothers. That case gets directly into the flash-point question of abortion; regardless of whether it's legal, or of the coat-hanger variety; and the question of when you draw the line between a bunch of cells and a child. I admit that despite my strong feelings on the subject I don't have satisfactory answers to these questions, that my convictions are based on compassion and empathy and thus are quite thin and unsure.
This is bad. If it's actually true, that is, and not just an angry media touch-point blown out of proportion--which they do make it out to be by the titles, ("Utah Bill Criminalizes Miscarriage") before going on to explain that it is induced miscarriages.
Well, let's be devil's advocate. If you're not a (questioning) pro-choicer like I am, why is such a law so bad?
For one thing, how do you prove induced miscarriages? In some cases perhaps it is cut-and-dry; in most, I'm sure it's not. My cousin had one: miscarriages are utterly devastating to the people who didn't want them to happen. Getting and staying pregnant is not always that easy of a thing. If the burden of proof is on mothers to satisfy questions of intent, then that is the most draconian thing I've heard of since the days that women were considered the guilty parties for being raped while walking public streets by themselves. (There were more than one court case at the turn of the last century which ruled thusly, according to American's Women.)
Actually, that idea is so utterly draconian that I cannot seriously believe anybody (in a western liberal democracy, anyway) would interpret it that way.
But still, there are issues as is. Obviously, I'm a proponent of one's right to do what one wants with one's body, of abortion as a safe, legal option and all that, of the removal of abortion being as an unfair burden on abused and low-income women in addition to being an unrealistic lack of acknowledgement of the desperate situations our society still heaps onto its women--but even if we could come to a national consensus that abortion is wrong and should be illegal except in life-threatening situations, there is so much gray in this particular Utah law.
What if a woman fell down the stairs when she was at home by herself? How is anyone going to know whether or not that was intentional? Are you really going to waste state funds trying to work that out?
What if a woman has an abusive husband? If she stays with him because that's what so many victims do, and loses her child, is anyone really going to call that her fault? Sure, you could argue she has some responsibility in that case, but the abuser has a hell of a lot more, and is the one who chose to stray outside of the law by using violence. Do we really want to give government the power to make victim-at-fault judgments about people's lives and choices? Do we want to give the government that much power over deeply personal questions?
What does putting these women in jail do for society? The vast majority of people who attempt to end pregnancies are one or more of a) young, b) poor, c) in relationships with unfair power dynamics, if relationships at all, or d) desperate for any other of a whole host of reasons. And let's not kid ourselves, those options are distinctly related to a denial of access to birth control and information about it. Throwing such people in jail is only going to exacerbate the social problems that lead up to the demand for pregnancy termination. This does not do one damn person, especially any unborn child, one lick of good.
The articles that I found about it have very different descriptions, the Salt Lake Tribune article speaking only about illegally (as in, not through the allowed clinics) obtained abortions, while the admittedly biased (though biased toward my personal belief in the matter) blog articles state that it is a law against induced, and potentially accidental (depending on your definition of "reckless", which I agree is a disturbing word to use, because of the questions raised above) miscarriage. I suppose it depends on your definition of "illegal abortion" verses "induced miscarriage" as well, which sound like separate terminology to explain the same thing. The thing they are explaining is a hell of a gray area, in my book.
So I'm not sure who to believe about the actual details of this law, and it's not my state, and to some degree it seems within state's rights to contemplate such issues individually. My inner libertarian proclaims that reproduction is a personal, nobody-else's-business affair which no level of government has the right to stick it's nose in, but people used to say that about beating your wife, and that's no longer acceptable by the standards of anybody who deserves to be listened to. What changed was who the rights got extended to, and it doesn't seem unfeasible to me to extend rights to something that, if left to it's own devices, will become a person. Should we wait until it actually is a person? Maybe, because of all the gray areas and rough issues associated. Like the women who wrote the blog articles, I remain troubled by all of this law, but particularly object to the use of the word "reckless", and how loosely that has the potential to be applied.
In response to the event that apparently spawned the law, in which a woman paid a man $150 so that he would beat her into having a miscarriage, it seems fair and right that if the man could be charged then so should she, and certainly vice versa, though I railed on the stupidity and futility of criminalizing desperate mothers. That case gets directly into the flash-point question of abortion; regardless of whether it's legal, or of the coat-hanger variety; and the question of when you draw the line between a bunch of cells and a child. I admit that despite my strong feelings on the subject I don't have satisfactory answers to these questions, that my convictions are based on compassion and empathy and thus are quite thin and unsure.
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