Yes, I am one of them. And yes, I just might smell like them. But. I. Want. Out!!!!
As most of you know, I just returned from a blissful five days in the great Lone Star State. I had not a worry or care in the world. (Oh, except for the series of mini-disasters that plagued our Team Awesome on Friday...but that's another story.) After less than 24 hours back in D.C., I realized why most of us are absolutely, positively, completely OUT OF OUR MINDS FOR LEAVING TEXAS!!!
I could rant for pages, which I have before. But I'll spare you and instead just regale you with a few juicy tidbits from this year's 16th Telegu Association of North America Convention, or TANA. (No, I'm NOT Telegu. I'm Marathi. But after today, I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes.)
So I heard about this guy, Vinay, who was diagnosed with leukemia a few years back. He's stopped responding to chemotherapy, and now his friends and family are trying frantically to find a bone marrow match. Not surprisingly, a match is most likely to come from a donor of South Asian descent. So TANA seemed like a logical place to look for potential donors.
Many people I approached were perfectly polite, even if they had absolutely NO intention of ever donating. Hearing "bone marrow donation" can be frightening. And people are always wary of any kind of medical commitment. Yet what struck me the most was how dismissive many of the young people were. I mean, I was talking to my peers, trying to get them to donate on behalf of a guy just a couple years older than them. And they seemed so bothered. I had 2 guys, dressed in Fubu and S. Carters' actually turn their backs to me when I was mid-sentence! What the hell is that about?!
Maybe it was just the event, or just those guys. Whatever it was, I've noticed a peculiar trend among young folks in the Indian community that drives me batty. At any given cultural function, there are 4 discrete groups: the adult men; the adult women; the FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat); and the ABCDs (American Born Confused Desis). Each group will occupy different areas of the banquet hall--and sometimes different halls--to engage in a unique kind of socialization.
The men will discuss politics, whose kid got into what school, who has the best investment portfolio, etc. The women, of course, busy themselves with talks of engagements, weddings, and everything in between. And then there are the young bucks.
You recognize the FOBs by their slicked hair, gold medallions, sequined shirts, and linen suits. (Sidenote: The MC of my cousin's wedding was actually wearing a shirt that had sequined palm trees and pineapples. I went up to talk to him just to confirm that there were just pineapples and not other fruits of the tropics. But I digress.) FOBs sometimes attempt to mingle with the ABCDs but generally with very little success. They are usually shunned as unhip country cousins sent by your mother to embarrass you in front of the hot ABCD girls/boys.
I am an ABCD. That means many things, but for the purposes of a function like TANA, it means distancing yourself from the culture far enough to seem above it. You have to pretend that you are as white (or in most cases, as black) as you want to be. You're too good to be attending this event. You're too popular to deign to mingle with other nerdy Indians. And no that wasn't your mother talking about how you won a full ride to MIT on an engineering scholarship. No, no. You're the dude with the fly jeans, Movado watch and 2-carat pinky ring.
What's sad is that TANA is probably the one place that these cats can bust out the "too cool for school" routine. I have no doubt that they'll go back to their respective hometowns (probably all in Northern Jersey) and resume their roles as the braniac next door. But for these blissful three days, they're as bad as they wanna be.
And I'm perfectly fine with that. It's just that I would rather that they let me finish my damn pitch! Or just let me stick a Q-Tip in their mouth for a few seconds and then run like a bat outta hell...
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Stupid Desis...
Back from Tejas
Hey, y'all!
Temporary hiatus is over. Everyone besides mathgimp has returned from the Tejas festivities, so now it's back to work.
I don't know how many of you caught this, but Keith Olbermann, host of Countdown and my future husband, demanded Bush and Cheney's resignation on July 3rd. It makes me kinda shivery to hear the words out loud.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Facebook: Just a Better Class of People
CalTech grad student Danah Boyd wrote a blog essay based on trends she was noticing after four years of research. The point? "The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. [...] MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers." Actually, it's an interesting read for anyone interested in emerging social divisions and trends. Facebook jocks, what, what!
Friday, June 29, 2007
How I feel:
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Genocide tangent
This is amazing to me.
H.CON.RES.21: Calling on the United Nations Security Council to charge Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and United Nations Charter because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.
This passed the House 411-2 on June 20. Only Kucinich and Ron Paul voted against it.
Outlook Neophyte Seeks Accomplished Emailer
Dearest HON, can you help me navigate the cruel ways of Outlook?
So, I need to save about 600 emails onto our network drive. I selected all the emails, and entered "Save As" and saved it onto my desktop (which I can easily move onto our network drive later). However, the file I saved was actually a consolidated "notepad" file. It has all of the emails, but unfortunately, it appears that I need to be able to save as individual emails. Is this possible?
Please, please, please don't tell me that I need to individually save each email. My sanity would greatly appreciate that...
Genocide and Iraq
I thought mathgimp's post was pretty interesting, and it got me thinking (again) about definitions of genocide and war crimes. More on that after the jump.
But, as an incentive for participation the first person to post or comment today (that's not mathgimp or I) gets a round of drinks on me, either in ATX this weekend or the next time I see ya round the District. We've had 369 unique visitors to the blog, which is pretty rockin' - yesterday alone we had 52. Who are you people? Why don't you write things?
Before obsessing about whether people validate me by visiting my blog, for a very long time I was fascinated with the way that genocide is defined and deployed. I wrote a paper about it but the paper's saved on my home computer, so I'm going to ramble instead. What follows is a roughly synthesis of my thoughts on genocide, Iraq, and war crimes.
I've always found the UN definition of genocide kind of strange. Let's read the definition backwards. The following are acts of genocide:
Under this part of definition, when you're just evaluating action and effect, the sanctions in Iraq, the famine in Bengal, the occupation of Ireland, and some of the "more debatable" genocides like East Timor certainly qualify, but really, any war or skirmish or border clash does as well. As mathgimp points out, there is a tricky distinction between war and genocide, which is where part one of the definition comes in. It says: "genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Cool. So, when you're thinking in terms of the Holocaust, this definition makes perfect sense. Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews (genocidal intent), and so he employed a vast array of genocidal actions to fulfill his goal.
Things get more complicated, though. There are easy criticisms of the definition, such as the fact that political and social groups aren't covered, and probably should be. Would it be genocide to kill all of the Republicans or Democrats in the US? Gay folk? The bourgeois/intelligentsia (one of the populations specifically targeted in CambodiaCambodia)? Additionally, the phrase "inflicting on the group conditions of life that.." does not specifically condemn environmental or indirect actions that target a specific group and lead to their extermination (like sanctions: see, for example, former US AG Ramsey Clark's arguments that the Iraqi sanctions in the 1990s were genocide).
Before we talk about Iraq, though, we have the troubling notion of intent, which is considered the most important part of the UN definition of genocide. Ya gotta have genocidal intent to commit genocide. Hitler's intent was obvious: the complete eradication of Jews from Europe. Same is true of Rwanda: Hutus mobilized to directly target and kill every Tutsi in Rwanda, leaving up to 1 million dead in 100 days. But what if you have a would-be genocide, but with more complex motivations? The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, wanted to "restructure Khmer society." The Indonesians wanted to "civilize" the East Timorese, and bring them back under control. In my mind, genocide occurred in East Timor and in Cambodia, but had multiple layers of intent. Much like British occupation of Ireland, the ruling parties were perfectly willing to sacrifice 20 or 30 percent of the population to achieve their grander goals of assimilation and control. The definition of genocide should be elastic enough to describe more than the Holocaust, but probably should be narrow enough to exclude slavery, abortion, class warfare, etc. Somewhere in between fall the interesting and horrible examples: are sanctions a genocidal act? Did Indonesia intend to "civilize" the East Timorese, or to murder 1/5 of the population?
And, of importance today, what in holy hell is happening in Iraq? Using the word genocide in relation to Iraq isn't unique; Saddam Hussein was executed for committing genocide against the Kurds, Ramsey Clark, amongst others, labeled the US-led sanctions policy of the 1990s as genocide, and Samantha Power (who is, to my mind, the world's foremost expert on genocide) has warned that the current violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites demonstrates genocidal intent. Indeed, Republicans (such as John McCain) argue that the US should remain engaged in Iraq in order to prevent genocide - an argument that Samantha Power critiques in her LA Times editorial back in March.
What's less clear to me is whether the US and allied forces are currently engaged in genocide, which is the argument made in yesterday's article. The author makes the argument that civilian deaths were avoidable, that the occupying forces did not take reasonable steps to preserve the quality of life of civilians, and that lots of people are dead and displaced. He says that the "Iraqi Holocaust" has reached 3.5 million deaths, which is comparable to the 5-6 million victims of the Jewish Holocaust. Hault. Stop. Back up. It's different, different, different. I am NOT proponent of Holocaust uniqueness, but numerical comparisons DO NOT make it genocide. The Holocaust was characterized by the systemic eradication of a group based on ethnic, social, and religious characteristics. In Iraq, we lob bombs and don't care where they go. There is not systemic eradication. The author says we're waging a war that disproportionately affects Muslim women and children, which is true: the US has a policy of hostile indifference towards quality of life. If the entire country would just be democratic already, then we would stop bombing and let folks live. It's not our intent to exterminate everyone in the country, but it is our intent to show that we're willing to. I'm not convinced that our actions there, as horrendous as they may be, are actually genocide.
The second point Dr. Polya brings us closer to the truth, and to an actionable argument. The US has violated Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War. Despite the fact that the Convention is a quaint little document, we signed and ratified it. We owe it to the people of Iraq, and any other countries we choose to invade, to follow its precepts as a doctrine for occupying another country.
So how do we hold our government accountable to the Geneva Convention? How can we condemn and punish the actions of nations that refuse to adhere to international law? How can we nuance the debate in the public arena WITHOUT using genocide as a trump card? We need to develop language that allows us to label, condemn, and punish events like human made famines and violent occupations without to reverting to the term genocide. Our willingness to apply the term where it doesn't belong is a failing of the language we have to discuss atrocities: we have "war" (which ain't no thang) and "genocide" (the ultimate horror) and nothing in between. Enriching our understanding, use, and persecution of crimes against humanity might preserve the label of genocide, while allowing more room to condemn, punish, and work to change atrocities that aren't genocide.
A unique spot international law and international morality should be reserved for condemnation of genocide, but that does not absolve us of our obligation to condemn outrageous acts of war and oppression that do not fit our definition.
If what's going on in Iraq IS genocide, then we need to work hard to change the definition in the UN, or to prove why the actions of the US and allies meet the current definition. But it's not just a numbers game. And accusations of genocide should not be the "nuclear option" that the left or the humanitarian community resorts to because we can't figure out how else to describe the depth of our horror at the situation.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Famines, Wiki Wierdness, and Iraq
I found a number of links while I was looking into nuraido's post (below). What with my fascination with Irish history, along with my long-held belief that the British were worse to the Irish than they were to the Indians, I was surprised to find out what I did. After the jump, I'll tell you what the hell I'm talking about, and then ramble for a while. Very exciting!
The Bengal famine occurred in 1943, and killed an estimated 3-5 million Indians (numbers vary from site to site), although I'm not sure what percent of the population this represents. This is about twice as many deaths as in Ireland during the Hunger, but pales in comparison to Stalin's 5 year plan (7 million in the Ukrane in 1933).
As the Bengal Famine occured during World War II, and particularly due to the proximity of Bengal to the Eastern front, the war clearly must have had some effect on the famine. However, it was not the ultimate cause. From the few articles I have read, this was an almost entirely man-made disaster. Amartya Sen won the Nobel prize in Economics in '98 for his work on the idea of man-made famines, and lived through this one.
For comparative purposes, the Irish Potato Famine killed on the order of 2 million people (about 20% of the population), and displaced another 2 million. The origin of the famine was not directly man-made, but caused by a mold introduced to Europe around that time. Both famines lasted for multiple years, and affected an almost entirely impoverished population.
I most certainly have not read enough about this to make any kind of intelligent statement about the causes of the famine in Bengal. From what I gather thus far, though, it would appear that there was a relatively mild food shortage. Inflation and unemployment in the area made rice unavailable to virtually everyone, and the local government was (as far as I can tell) ineffective to the extreme. Many of the above sites put the blame more on the local Bengal Ministry than on the British.
There are, however, many parallels between the Indian and Irish famines. The British government did absolutely nothing useful in preventing the massive death tolls in either situation. In both cases, regular food shipments out of the affected regions were required. So, I may need to revise my statement about the relative evils inflicted on both colonies. More reading to do.
I bring this up only because there are many smart readers of this blog. So, a couple of questions. First, have you ever heard of this? Second, can you point me to good, and complete, sources to understand this better. Of course, while there are many smart readers, there are very few commenters. Oi! Comment!
As a complete aside, I always find the internal Wiki links somewhat fascinating. Here's a block from the article on the Bengal Famine:
Severe food shortages were worsened by the Second World War, with the British administration of India exporting foods to Allied soldiers. The shortage of rice forced rice prices up, and wartime inflation compounded the problem.
I would think the food shortages that occured during WWII, the British administration of India, rice shortages during the Famine, and wartime inflation would be the most interesting concepts in these two sentences. The links were for "the Second World War" (valid), "Allied" (a bit useless), "price" (a definition of this bizzare concept of monetary value), and "inflation" (again, a definition). What the hell?
I spent virtually no time looking into nuradio's actual question. But, I'm of the opinion that Iraq is a war zone, plain and simple. Hunger is a problem, as is adequate health care. However, both of these are (in my opinion) caused by two factors. The first is the idiotic and unnecessary invasion that involved demolishing the infrastructure, coupled with a civil war which harms many civilians, and our (very poor) response to that civil war. I'm unclear on how many civillians we kill nowadays, vs. how many are killed by insurgents. The second factor is that Americans consider the plight of the Iraqis irrelevant. Not in the "they should be exterminated" sense, but in the sense of doing the minimal amount of work to "alleviate" their suffering. While I think this is remarkably callous on our part, I don't think it approaches the intentional extermination of a people (Hitler, Rwanda, etc), nor does it qualify as a working a people to death (i.e. Stalin).
While my response may not be a wonderfully well thought out idea (or a well presented one), I don't buy the genocide argument in Iraq any more than in any other war between two nations. This war is remarkably stupid, illegal under international law, and remarkably poorly prosecuted. War is a generally bad idea in many cases, and was a remarkably bad idea in this case. It's not genocide, though, in my opinion. Just more pointless death.
Good morning
Hope you're all doing well. I heard from Tommy and Joey at about 8 am, and they were in Iowa, about 2 hours out from where ever Dean is getting married. They are administrating an early morning poetry quiz to everyone in their phones. Just as a warning. The answer is after the jump.
Robert Frost. Unless they change the question.
In other news, I was delighted upon waking to find someone had posted a reply to my "Ann Coulter is an evil, evil woman" post, and even more intrigued that it was in Portuguese. I felt an overflowing of warmth toward humankind - hatred of the spawn of Satan knows no linguistic boundaries. Sadly, upon googling the comment, it was an ad for t-shirts.
So, I've turned on comment moderation. Basically, it means that we (all of us admins) can post whatever comments we want to. Anyone that is not a member of the blog has to have their comment approved by one of us before it gets posted. There's now a handy little tab under settings called "Moderate Comments." Remember that any of you can give anyone admin privledges any time you want (in fact, I think we should start inviting more people to at least read the blog, but we can talk about that this weekend). I'm inclined to allow all posts that aren't trying to sell us something through, but I'm open to suggestions about that. I just don't feel like getting more spam comments.
Thoughts? Ideas?
Love
me