social change

The veil dilemma

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Speaking out against the veiling of Muslim women is hugely problematic because of the way niqab has been politicised, and also because the experience of North Africa shows that when Western feminists get shrill about Islamic oppression of women it… Read More ›

Education preoccupations

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An article in Thursday’s The Australian caught my eye regarding Labor backbencher Craig Emerson proposing mandatory school-based education until the completion of Year 12 for all students. The ideal of an extended education so school-leavers have more skills and knowledge… Read More ›

Just my Quasimodo costume

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I have rediscovered The Editors, courtesy of Lauren. The Editors revealed the true transcript of the Foley IMs. I thank The Editors for this generous public service. [Link: The MSM’s Foley transcript]

So, it has come to this

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There’s been a sense of dispiritedness in most of my favourite blogs this past weekend. I’ve shared it. Despite several times in the past few years pointing out signs of incipient fascist tendencies in the Bush administration, I always wondered… Read More ›

Rounding up good stuff

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Jill at Feministe has a couple of strong articles on the religious exceptionalists in the US and their increased co-opting of a “warriors for Christ” message for evangelical youth: Where Can I Find Me A Warrior Poet? and her review… Read More ›

How to squander goodwill amongst the liberated

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Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, summarising part of his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, argues that one large contributor to the current distrust and militancy amongst Iraqis is the way that the Bush Administration chose people to oversee the transition from dictatorship to democracy under the aegis of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Jim O’Beirne of the Pentagon vetted who went, and the people he passed as suitable were mostly not qualified experts in the Middle-East or post-conflict reconstruction, but they were known Bush loyalists:

A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest

Tutu on Darfur

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Last week Desmond Tutu wrote a piece for the The Sunday Times to mark the International Day of Action for Darfur on the 17th September. I didn’t know about that Day of Action, despite our fundraising for MSF in Darfur on Larvatus Prodeo not long ago: how many of us did?

Tutu’s article, A blind eye to genocide, makes for uncomfortable reading:

In Darfur 2m people have been ethnically cleansed since 2003, women and girls are systematically raped and tortured daily, there is cholera in the refugee camps and the violence is spilling into next door Chad, and all without the attention, or response, it deserves.

Bloggers gone wild! (with Clinton) alleged by idiots

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Before reading this article, open this link to this picture and guess what has got conservative bloggers all up in arms about a blatant sexual display for the benefit of Bill Clinton. Can’t see anything obvious? Join the reality-based club.

Background: A group of liberal polibloggers were invited to meet with ex-President Bill Clinton for lunch and a low-key brainstorm on policy and blogging. When first reports and photos were released, a few people noticed there weren’t any bloggers of colour there, and the impression this gave and the reasons why it happened without being corrected were starting to be debated.

Enter Ann Althouse, an “ex-liberal” law professor and blogger, who looked at a picture of the smiling group at the lunch meeting, noticed that a young woman with long dark hair was standing in front of Clinton, and made a sniggering allusion which didn’t actually mention Monica Lewinsky, as she knew damn well that her commentors would pick it up.

More Dieboldical machinations

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weezil at Machine Gun Keyboard keeps us up to date on the dastardly Diebold voting machines: in the last week not only have they been proven to be embarrasingly easy to untraceably tamper with electronically, but the much touted lock to prevent such tampering can be opened with an easily obtainable mini-bar key. Read, as they say, the whole thing