I was brought up to believe that all rights are important and need to be respected, exercised and defended. I was given to believe that there exists no right that cannot and will not be taken away from us should we become complacent about it. Finally I was imbued with the concept that we don’t have a single right that hasn’t been bought and paid for, often in blood and often several times over.
Coming from this set of values, I find it hard to grasp how freely we have yielded our fundamental right to privacy. I watched a documentary last night about Britain’s CCTV or closed-circuit television monitoring network, the most extensive anywhere. Travel through many public places in England today and there’s a good chance someone or something is observing you and yet this inherent breach of individual privacy is actually embraced by the British people.
This month’s Walrus magazine features a lengthy article on privacy in Canada and how it’s been all but lost, largely of our own doing. Every time we use a credit card or a store card or a health care card or almost any card with an individual identity number, information about us is logged and stored away. From this information it’s possible to build a profile of who we are, our preferences and weaknesses, where we travel, with whom and what we do when we get to our destination – the list is endless. Then there’s the internet, instant messaging, chatrooms, blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook. We practically beg to have people intrude on our private lives.
My kids’ generation has the weakest appreciation of the right of privacy but, then again, at least part of that is probably a function of youth. Yet I’ve seen no discernable interest on their part about the wobbly state of their privacy. It seems they just don’t care.
Do we, as a society, continue to value the right of privacy? Are we willing to surrender it even more than we already have? I suspect our understanding of the significance of privacy in the 21st century is so weak as to almost ensure that outcome.
So, why ought we to care about privacy anyway?
Janna Malamud Smith, Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life (1997, states:
“The bottom line is clear. If we continually, gratuitously, reveal other people’s privacies, we harm them and ourselves, we undermine the richness of the personal life, and we fuel a social atmosphere of mutual exploitation. Let me put it another way: Little in life is as precious as the freedom to say and do things with people you love that you would not say or do if someone else were present. And few experiences are as fundamental to liberty and autonomy as maintaining control over when, how, to whom, and where you disclose personal material.” Id. at 240-241.
In 1890, Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren defined the right to privacy as “the right to be let alone.” See L. Brandeis, S. Warren, “The Right To Privacy,” 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193.
In their book, The Right to Privacy, (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995) Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy describe the importance of privacy in this way:
“Privacy covers many things. It protects the solitude necessary for creative thought. It allows us the independence that is part of raising a family. It protects our right to be secure in our own homes and possessions, assured that the government cannot come barging in. Privacy also encompasses our right to self-determination and to define who we are. Although we live in a world of noisy self-confession, privacy allows us to keep certain facts to ourselves if we so choose. The right to privacy, it seems, is what makes us civilized.”
By most accounts we’re entering into an era of prolonged, social upheaval. I would think that, before we get too far down that road, we need to have a clear debate on our rights of privacy and how they’re to be protected, even as against our own governments.
Religious fundamentalist and Harper pal, Charles McVety, doesn’t have a lot of time for homosexuals. He even thinks the homosexual arts community is quietly scheming to “
proselytize young people into homosexuality.”
At issue was a production called “Breakfast with Scot” which is about a gay, former hockey player and his partner caring for an orphaned boy.
McVety told the Senate banking and commerce committee that “(It) is about an 11-year-old boy who is being raised by a homosexual Toronto Maple Leaf to be a homosexual.” McVety believes that Bill C-10 should be used by the government to deny funding to films that, in his view, “promote” homosexuality. It seems that, to McVety, anything that acknowledges homosexuality must surely promote its spread.
Bill C-10 is seen by many as an attempt by the Harper government to introduce a means for political censorship of the entertainment industry in Canada. Do ya think?
It sounds like a “win-win” proposition. Rising grain prices, especially for wheat, may be enough to entice Afghan farmers to grow grain instead of opium poppies. In fact, UN experts say a switchover would allow Afghanistan to enjoy a food surplus instead of the serious shortages now faced.
While much of what we see of the countryside suggests Afghanistan is a region of barren foothills and mountains, the country actually has some good farmland of which some 190,000 hectares is used for growing poppies. The output is about 8,200 tonnes of raw opium which has an enormous street value in the west but earns barely enough to keep Afghan farmers out of total poverty.
That same farmland is estimated to be capable of producing 2.6 tonnes of wheat per hectare, slightly more than 500,000 tonnes in annual production and, at today’s prices of $500 per tonne, that would be a pretty good income for many Afghan farmers. If that same land was put into higher-value crops such as fruit or vegetables, the returns could be even better.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is calling for more foreign aid to be directed into agricultural programmes. Of the $15-billion in reconstruction aid spent over the past six years, a mere $300-million has gone into agricultural projects.
Of course the UN report fails to address the real problem. There may be a huge difference between what the average Afghan farmer would prefer to do and what that farmer may be allowed to do. A lot of powerful groups including corrupt government officials, the drug barons and even the insurgents rely heavily on the opium production and, while a shift to wheat might make sense to the farmer, it would trigger big losses to those who hold the real power in Afghanistan.
Here’s one you haven’t heard about in Canadian newspapers.
Word is going around Afghanistan that NATO has been caught deliberately supplying weapons and ammunition to the Taliban. It’s an account that’s been carried on several Afghan news services.
The most common version of the story has one or more NATO helicopters dropping AK-47s, machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and upwards of half a million rounds of small arms ammunition and dropped off not 300-meters from the home of a major Taliban commander.
According to these reports, NATO has acknowledged that weapons were dropped by mistake and were seized by the Taliban but legislators in Kabul claim it was no accident. From Pajhwok Afghan News:
Internal Security Affairs Commission of the Wolesi Jirga or lower house of the parliament on Sunday blamed NATO and Afghan forces for supply of arms to the militants in southern Afghanistan.
However the NATO forces and Afghan intelligence in their statement said they had mistakenly dropped items which later were commanded by Taliban.
The parliamentary commission claimed the operation had not been a mistake and the sacks dropped in the southern province were arms the NATO forces offered to Taliban.
Zalmai Mujaddedi head of the parliamentary commission claimed NATO forces from Kandahar province carried several containers of arms to Taliban dominated areas in Arghandab district of southern Zabul province 27th or 28th of March.
In the past too there were some speculations that the foreign forces were supporting the militants in the country, he added.
NATO forces have branded the act as a mistake and that they were going to investigate and punish the perpetrators but yet there is no step taken, he added.
The commission did not accept the act to be mistake, he argued, local Taliban commander Mulla Muhammad Alam had already taken security measures and preparations in the area.
Hamidullah Tokhi representative of Zabul people in the parliament confirmed the Mujaddedi’s remarks”I wonder how does Muhammad Alam on the same night comes to a house 100 meters from the site where the helicopters drop rockets, bullets Kalashnikovs, arms and food and logistics?.” He added.” I dont believe it is a mistake, if the helicopter made a mistake to drop the arms there then who brought Muhammad Alam to this neighborhood.”
Foreign forces were working for their own interests, he reckoned, it is a preplanned thing and the arms were supplied to devastate Afghanistan.”
Now I don’t believe, for a minute, that NATO is supplying weaponry to the Taliban but that’s not the important part of this story. The critical element is that it’s been carried, apparently widely, through the Afghan media which can’t help but increase suspicion that NATO is just another bunch of westerners in Afghanistan to further their own ends. The way things are going over there, that’s the last thing we need.
http://www.pajhwok.com/viewstory.asp?lng=eng&id=53338
About 18-months ago, Nicholas Stern came to public attention for his study of the economic costs of tackling global warming now or later.
The former World Bank chief economist was recruited into the British government by then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. In 2005 Stern was tasked with analyzing the economic aspects of global warming. His core conclusion, that the costs of not dealing with the problem effectively now could be 20 times greater than immediate action.
Naturally the key findings of the Stern Report were rebuffed by the denialists as scaremongering.
Today, Baron Nick told Reuters that the latest research shows his findings were, if anything, unduly rosey:
“Emissions are growing much faster than we’d thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than we’d thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates, and the speed of climate change seems to be faster,” he told Reuters at a conference in London.
Stern said that increasing commitments from some countries such as the European Union to curb greenhouse gases now needed to be translated into action. Policymakers, businesses and environmental pressure groups frequently cite the Stern Review as a blueprint for urgent climate action.
The report predicted that, on current trends, average global temperatures will rise by 2-3 degrees centigrade in the next 50 years or so and could reduce global consumption per head by up to 20 per cent, with the poorest nations feeling the most pain.
Some academics said he had over-played the costs of potential future damage from global warming at up to twenty times the cost of fighting the problem now, such as by replacing fossil fuels with more costly renewable power.
Stern said today that increasing evidence of the threat from climate change had vindicated his report, published in October 2006.
“People who said I was scaremongering were profoundly wrong,” he told the climate change conference organised by industry information provider IHS.
Stern said that to minimise the risks of dangerous climate change global greenhouse gas emissions should halve by mid-century. He said the United States should cut its emissions by up to 90 per cent by then.”
Meanwhile, America’s Neanderthal-in-Chief, George w. Bush, today came out with his own proposal on fighting global warming. Rather than a 90% cut in emissions by 2050, Bush thinks just halting the growth of greenhouse gases by 2025 would be dandy.
In the view of some experts, the reason the west keeps screwing up in the Muslim world is because the west keeps screwing up the Muslim world. We’ve meddled there so much for so long that just about everything we now touch there turns sour.
Georgetown University Prof. John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, helped organize a survey of 50,000 Muslims from 35-countries and churned their findings into a 200-page report. US News & World Report published a few excerpts from their book, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think:
We did a survey of Americans in 2002, asking what they knew about the beliefs and opinions of Muslims around the world. Fifty-four percent said they knew nothing or not much. We asked that same question in 2007, after we’ve had two wars and a great deal more media coverage of Muslims, and this time 57 percent said they knew nothing or not much. We are no closer to truly understanding this part of the world, even as we are more engaged with it.
Asked what they most admired and most resented about the West, they answered first technology and second, democracy. People would mention their support for freedom of speech, the rule of law, and the transparency of government. What they most disliked was the perceived moral laxity and libertinism of the West, which, interestingly, is exactly what Americans said when we polled them on those two questions. There is common ground on that issue.
Even in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, there were only percentages in the single digits that said they admired nothing about the West. When we asked Americans what they admired about the Muslim world, the most frequent response was “nothing.”
Compared with the entire population of Muslims, those who don’t condemn the 9/11 attacks are no more likely to say that they are religious. But they are much more likely to say that the United States is not serious about promoting democracy in their part of the world and that the United States will not allow them to fashion their own political future. When we asked their greatest fear, while the general population will talk about personal safety, this radicalized group most fears political domination and occupation. They have a heightened sense of being threatened and dominated by the West. But those same people are also far more likely to say that greater democracy will help Muslims progress. So, they have a greater desire for autonomy and a greater sense that freedom is being denied.
The important thing about this survey is that it confirms that Islamic radicalism is fueled by those who most want democracy in their homelands. They’re not motivated by some irrational hatred of us. They pretty much want similar democratic rights to those we enjoy. Yet, by our insistence on propping up undemocratic, repressive regimes (Egypt and Saudi Arabia for example) we actually fuel the radicalism that is so essential to the future of Islamist terrorism.
Surely our own experience teaches us that democratic movements aren’t easily crushed and may, if necessary, become revolutionary. This Islamic democracy movement isn’t radical of its own choosing but out of necessity. It’s also ripe for the picking if we want to drive a wedge between Islamist terrorism and its base of support.
When are we going to learn?
Iraq prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has his hands full trying to suppress the rival Shiite militia, al Sadr’s Mahdi army. That’s why news of major concessions to the Kurdish autonomous region seem well timed.
What the Kurds won from Maliki was control of their region’s oil and Baghdad’s agreement to put the 190,000-strong Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga, on the government’s payroll.
The oil deal gives the Kurdish administration the power to sign oil development deals on its own. Until now Baghdad opposed such deals, claiming they would be null and void. This concession opens Kurdistan’s largely undeveloped oil fields to development by foreign companies. Unlike the rest of Iraq, Kurdistan is relatively peaceful and much more attractive to foreigners.
The Kurdish policy has been that all revenues from new oil projects should remain with the Kurds while revenues from any Saddam-era production would be shared with the rest of the country. Given that Saddam punished the Kurds by thwarting oil development projects, it’s a pretty one-sided deal.
As for the Peshmerga, going on the Baghdad government’s payroll won’t see any change of loyalty. These are Kurdish militiamen, openly hostile to their Arab countrymen, who come from a part of the country where flying the Iraqi flag is prohibited.
Few understand the global food crisis better than Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the UN World Food Programme. Below are excerpts from a
Newsweek interview with Sheeran in which she outlines the pernicious link between world oil prices and global famine:
What is the primary factor driving this surge in prices?
“The number one factor I look at is the price of oil. It may seem a strange thing, as I’m in the hunger field, but I wake up every morning and start in the back of the paper and I look at the price of oil, because if the price of oil stays high or goes higher, I know that the energy buyers in food markets will be buying food as an energy input at a very expensive price. That is the world we are in now that is new.”
Are you saying that because people are buying ethanol—
“The demand for food as an input into energy production, whether it’s biodiesel or bioethanol or any of these, is a global phenomenon. And it affects everything from palm oil to cassava to everything else … There isn’t much marginal room in the global food supply system. We’ve been consuming more food than we produce for the last three years. “
“We” meaning the world?
“Yes, we the world. Now, there’s a point at which it doesn’t economically make sense to buy food as an energy input. It’s pretty low; it’s apparently when oil hits about $70 a barrel. So anything above that makes food a very viable energy production input.”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/132013
Maybe Canada should have 12-month long election campaigns. One thing is sure, the more you see of any particular candidate, the less you’re apt to like them.
Running for president in the United States is a terrible grind. Hillary Clinton shows the wear and tear more than the others. They’ll all probably look a lot worse by the time the summer is over.
No candidate’s fortunes have changed as much as Hillary Clinton’s over the past year. Once considered a shoo-in, she’s now pretty much washed up. Her problems, however, extend well beyond the Democratic primaries. A significant majority of the American people find her dishonest and untrustworthy. The Washington Post:
“Clinton is viewed as “honest and trustworthy” by just 39 percent of Americans, according to a new Washington Post – ABC News poll, compared with 52 percent in May 2006. Nearly six in 10 said in the new poll that she is not honest and trustworthy. And now, compared with Obama, Clinton has a deep trust deficit among Democrats, trailing him by 23 points as the more honest, an area on which she once led both Obama and John Edwards.
Among Democrats, 63 percent called her honest, down 18 points from 2006; among independents, her trust level has dropped 13 points, to 37 percent. Republicans held Clinton in low regard on this in the past (23 percent called her honest two years ago), but it is even lower now, at 16 percent. Majorities of men and women now say the phrase does not apply to Clinton; two years ago, narrow majorities of both did.”
Like Obama, Clinton has enough hurdles facing her in this race to the White House. A loss of trust among the electorate may be one hurdle she has no hope of clearing.
Of course it’s not our book they’re using. Jonathan Landy of
McClatchey Newspapers reports that the Taliban and al-Qaeda seem to have gone back to classic insurgency tactics, “…
of avoiding U.S and NATO forces and staging attacks in provinces that haven’t seen major unrest and on easy targets such as aid organizations and poorly trained Afghan police.”
In essence, the insurgents are exploiting our main and possibly fatal weakness – our lack of numbers. We’re long on firepower but very, very short on soldiers and that means we can’t do the one thing our side has to do in this sort of conflict – secure the population.
Because we can’t secure the villagers against the Taliban, the insurgents are free to control these communities, running the show when we’re not there. Once your survival and that of your spouse and your kids depends on the whim of one side, the one that is constantly in your life, do you think you would support the other side, especially if you saw that other side, the government side, as corrupt and predatory anyway?
But aren’t these Taliban religious nutjobs? Sure they are but, in Afghanistan, who isn’t? Tribal peoples who pay fealty to warlords and hold sacred the right to sell their children might be excused for finding our values, our ways just a little curious. They may not like the Taliban any more than they like Kabul’s marauding police and security services but I’m sure they don’t see the Taliban anything like the way we see them. We just expect the Afghan people to see them the way we see them.
While the brilliant, pseudo-journalists of the National Spot may proclaim that we’ve got the Taliban “on the run” in fact they’ve just moved on to target NGOs and the police and bringing their war to new corners of Afghanistan.
“Operationally, the Taliban appear to be putting more resources into attacking in provinces where allied forces are weaker and which are less accustomed to clashes,” says an April 6 analysis written by John McCreary, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for dNovus RDI, a Texas-based contracting firm.
“They are starting to show the manifestations of a strategy” of keeping under-strength U.S. and NATO forces tied down in the south and east while stoking instability elsewhere, McCreary said in an interview.”
Spreading out of the south and east means moving out of the Pashtun homeland and into the turf of the supposedly rival Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara – the Taliban’s mortal enemies, the former Northern Alliance. With different language, different customs, even different ethnicity than some of these other tribes, it’s hard to imagine how the Taliban could operate in these other territories without the support of these former enemies.
Is this the first sign of a Pan-Afghan insurgency, one in which NATO will be placed in the same spot as the former Soviet forces and the Kabul government of Karzai in the same, unenviable position as the former Marxist government?
In a nation built on a history of shifting alliances serving narrow self-interests, just about anything is possible. But, of course, we don’t see it that way.
The Mound of Sound 