comment of the day

catdance @ talkingpointsmemo:

somehow i don't think i'd feel all that comfortable dropping my child off into an armed camp every day.

can't believe this is happening

horrifying footage of a 2-year-old girl in china being run over by two separate vehicles and left to die by passersby has stirred outrage throughout the country, with CNN reporting that security footage of the incident has led the nation of 1.3 billion people to do some collective soul-searching.

according to shanghaiist, the two-year-old, who has been identified as yueyue, was run over on thursday outside of a hardware market in foshan in southern china's guangdong province. the driver of the vehicle then backed up over the girl a second time and drove away.

the following video shows more than a dozen passersby walk, ride motorbikes or drive past the young, bleeding girl without stopping to help. they clearly notice the badly injured child, as some motorists swerve to avoid her body. after three people walk past, a different truck runs over the young girl again.

shanghaiist reports that seven grueling minutes passed before a trash collector picked up yeuyue's body and alerted her mother so that she could take the child to the hospital.



... "many people are discussing what they perceive as a loss of morality in chinese society," [CNN's enuice yoon] said to erroll barnett. "... some observers have been pointing out that china education system really has failed here, that it's failed to emphasize and reinforce the need to respect human life at a time when 1.3 billion people all clamoring and rushing to climb up the economic and social ladder."

... [the telegraph's peter foster wrote] "others blamed china's compensation culture for the apparent show of callousness, recalling a famous 2006 judgment when a good samaritan who helped a woman get to hospital was wrongly ordered to pay her compensation.

"they didn’t ignore the girl, they just didn't dare help her," said one comment among many that said that chinese law had helped create a fear of intervening.

[continue reading ...]

a failure of morality? poor education? economic pressure? a fear of lawsuits? i'm not so sure, especially when so many are ready to paint an enormous country with such a sweeping brush. i'd rather hear from the passersby themselves about why they ignored the little victim, if we ever get the chance to. their stories might shock us, but not, i suspect, in the direction that the media is driving the narrative.

i have my own theory. a few years back, i was discussing one of those awful church shootings that periodically grips the attention of the nation. a friend was having a hard time trying to understand why the victims took so long to react to the crisis. i suggested that most of them probably couldn't even believe what was happening. they probably refused to believe it. i suspect that, in an uncertain or puzzling or unfamiliar situation, most people will not immediately jump to the worst conclusion. especially when, in most cases, we're relieved to find out that it's not. so when those first shots went off, instead of running for the doors, i suspect most people first tried to find a safe explanation for them: "is that a car backfiring?"; "are those firecrackers ... balloons?"; "a television?"; "those can't be gunshots ..."; "i don't want to look like a fool ..." i don't think the reality of the situation dawned on anyone until the screaming started. then it could no longer be denied. who wants to believe that a homicidal maniac is in the building? who wants to put themselves in the middle of that?

so, excepting the inital driver, who was either blind, scared or depravedly indifferent, i believe that we're dealing with a suspension of belief, in a way that helps us avoid getting sucked into a horrible situation that might be unfolding in front of us. and if we don't see panic or alarm coming from anyone else around us, it can only help us in our denial. no one in the video becomes alarmed — a reaction that was probably self-reinforcing: "that's not a child lying injured in the street; it's just a discarded doll, perhaps even a toddler-shaped pile of rags ... besides, no one else seems to be reacting as if it's an injured child ..."

if no one else is panicking, then we can assume that everything is perfectly normal. nothing to see here, folks. we can therefore go about our lives as normal. because if what we most fear is true, then our safe routines are gone. we find ourselves forced to be a victim of horror, or perhaps something worse, a witness to horror, in this case burdened with the responsibility of saving a child's life.

still not getting it

just for easter, the embattled vatican manages another baby step ... deeper into purgatory:

a senior cardinal has said the roman catholic faithful will not be swayed by "petty gossip" about child sex-abuse allegations. ... during easter mass in st peter's square, cardinal sodano expressed solidarity with the pope, who has himself come under scrutiny for his role in handling past cases of abuse. "holy father, the people of god are with you and will not let themselves be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes assail the community of believers," the cardinal said. ... the vatican's official newspaper, l'osservatore romano, stepped up its defence of the pope in its sunday edition, publishing messages of support from around the world and denouncing the "slanderous attacks and the defamation campaign surrounding the drama of abuse by priests".

quote of the night

joe sudbay @ americablog:

the vatican has tried to distance the church from those remarks [comparing criticism of the church to anti-semitism]. but, the priest gave those remarks in front of the pope and his words were reported by the vatican newspaper. that would be like [press secretary] robert gibbs making a statement in front of obama, which was also posted on the white house website — and have the white house say gibbs wasn't speaking for them.

victims

the vatican cries "foul!" in response to withering criticism for decades of sheltering pedophiles:

the "coincidence" that passover falls in the same week as easter celebrations, said cantalamessa, a franciscan who offers reflections at vatican easter and advent services, prompted him to think about jews. "they know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms," the preacher said. quoting from the letter from the friend, who wasn't identified by cantalamessa, the preacher said that he was following "'with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful of the whole world.'" "'the use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-semitism,'" cantalamessa said his friend wrote him.

pope benedict:

the vatican:

jews:

see the analogy?

in what respect, charlie?

guilty as sin but free as a bird, rapper r. kelly opines (in sep. 2008) on his taste in girls women and the justice system.

the interviewer's double-take when kelly asks "how old are you talkin'?" is priceless: it is the look of a man who realizes he's talking to, if not a complete moron, then a man who has failed to grasp the meaning of his predicament.

BET:	do you like teenage girls?
kelly:	[after a pause] when you say teenage, how old are you talkin'?
BET:	girls who are ... teenagers.
kelly:	19?
BET:	19 ... and younger.
kelly:	i have some 19-year-old friends ...

kelly:

if you was charged with something, and you were found innocent ... then you can't be found guilty, for being found innocent.

an educational comic

ec comics, king of crime, horror, sci-fi, satire and war comics of the '40s and '50s, was put out of business by rising anti-crime sentiment and opportunistic rivals, a purge which tossed out many babies with the bathwater, such as this expertly-developed 1953 lesson in crime and punishment — from a child's perspective.

(story by bill gaines and al feldstein; art by jack davis; cover by johnny craig, jack davis and graham ingels)

quote of the day

researcher joseph strayhorn of drexel university college of medicine and university of pittsburgh, on the high teen birth rate of religious conservatives:

we conjecture that religious communities in the u.s. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.

(hat tip to p.z. myers @ pharyngula)

formative albums: decade zero

inspired by my friend margie's facebook note "25 formative life-changing albums". click images to enlarge. dates are release dates.

peter and the wolf (1957)

the version currently on my ipod is by leonard bernstein and the ny philharmonic.

the three little pigs: favorite children stories (1961)

mother goose favorites (1965)

sesame street original cast record (1970)

the amazing spider-man: a rockomic! (1972) — now this was awesome!

some stuff from my parents' collection that in some part made it onto the ipod:

whipped cream and other delights (1965)
"whipped cream" and "a taste of honey" were the big hits but the masterpiece is the criminally short (1:32) "green peppers".

they also had the herb alpert's ninth (1967) and beat of the brass (1968) but not !!going places!! (1965). "whipped", "beat" and "going" made it onto the ipod.

the best of sam cooke (1962)

the supremes: where did our love go (1964) and i hear a symphony (1966)

make way for dionne warwick (1964) and here where there is love (1967)

four tops: second album (1965)

temptations: gettin' ready (1966)

the 5th dimension: stoned soul picnic (1968) and greatest hits (1969)

jackson 5: abc (1970)

soul train: hits that made it happen and soul train: hall of fame (1973)

note: they also owned a (relatively) sizable collection of popular classical recordings that i don't remember hearing them play, many of which nonetheless made it to the ipod.

from the mouths of babes

(cross-posted at daily kos)

from today's "grim" new unicef report on child welfare in the the top 21 industrialized nations, in which the netherlands and scandinavia came out on top, while the united states and britain sat "roundly bottom":

peter marshall, narrator: in the netherlands, home of liberal views on sex and drugs, their young people rank at the top of unicef's survey for well-being. we went to a school in the heart of amsterdam to talk to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. laura vos, student: in this country it's very free. you can do what you like, you can smoke when you're sixteen, you can buy pot in the store next to the school — [laughter] because it's not illegal, it's not that interesting for us to just — to provoke our parents with.

are you listening, mr. social conservative, mrs. moral majority, uncle christian coalition and auntie no-child-left-behind?

probably not.

still, miss vos does leave us with an interesting question: just what do dutch kids have to do there, to provoke their parents?

overall rankings from the report:
1. netherlands 2. sweden 3. denmark 4. finland 5. spain 6. switzerland 7. norway 8. italy 9. ireland 10. belgium 11. germany	12. canada 13. greece 14. poland 15. czech republic 16. france 17. portugal 18. austria 19. hungary 20. united states 21. united kingdom

all kidding aside, it is of course simplistic to attribute the success of the dutch solely or even primarily to its liberal attitudes. after all, a number of conservative and strongly religious nations like spain, italy and ireland made it into the top ten.

but what's noteworthy is how the report discredits the long-standing conservative-religious argument that morally permissive societies are dangerous to its children's moral and physical well-being. presumably this is the argument propping up their endless campaigns against hollywood, music, drugs, sex education, birth control, abortion, and the rest of their entire program. it's all about saving the children, don't you see?

and uncle christian coalition and auntie no-child-left-behind would have us all believe that only a strict country devoted to dogma can protect the young, not that a "decadent" country like the netherlands could ever rate such a list, much less come out on top.

the architects of human destiny

dreams die hard when you're a neocon. it's just that the rest of us do the suffering.

in francis fukuyama's recent eulogy to neoconservatism, the newly repentant and newly retired acolyte laments that "the idealistic effort to use american power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback." "The problem with neoconservatism's agenda," he has come to realize, "lies not in its ends, which are as american as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them."

it would be snide to suggest that fukuyama and his shadowy braintrust neither appreciated nor calculated, in their machiavellian way, the negative consequences of unleashing upon the planet yet another series of ideological wars, with their attendant destruction, mayhem, atrocities and moments of brazen television horror.

nonetheless we are forced to wonder if they also anticipated the renunciation of long-established international legal norms, the kidnappings, the secret gulags, the extra-legal detentions and last but never least the torture. did the constriction at home of civil freedoms that are "as american as apple pie" in order to expand them abroad enter into their cold calculus? how much of the neocons' original thought went into the actual implementation of american strategic policy, the so called "bush doctrine"?

while we may not know for decades the bush administration's real goal for intervention in the middle east, for the sake of this discussion let us temporarily put aside dark murmurs of oil and schemes of american hegemony. let us for the time being grant the administration its stated mission of furthering the development of freedom and democracy across the globe, even so far as to grant the terms "freedom" and "democracy" with the best possible meanings and all the visible blessings that go with them. are not these goals in themselves worth the price?

"imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death one tiny creature — that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance — and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?" — fyodor dostoevsky, the brothers karamazov, 1880

in the 2001 action film swordfish, john travolta's super-slick and super-glib super-spook starkly justifies himself by citing the classic theologic defense of god's apparent tolerance of evil, which defines evil as a necessary means towards a greater good. his character's name suggests, despite the hellish and high-casualty havok his plots unleash, that gabriel the spook, like his namesake the archangel, is in the service of a force for benevolence:

"[you're] not lookin' at the big picture, stan. here's a scenario: you have the power to cure all the world's diseases but the price for this is that you must kill a single innocent child. could you kill that child, stanley? no? you disappoint me. it's the greatest good."

neither dostoevsky nor poor stanley could take that step, but for others, like gabriel and the neocons, the question proves too compelling and the logic seems inescapable: indeed, how could one deny peace to the long-suffering billions of earth for the sake of only a single life, one child?

however, the logic is inescapable only if one presumes the power of a god: that one has perfect control over events and perfect knowledge that the intended outcome is absolutely guaranteed. since mere mortals, even neocons, are blessed with neither omnipotence or omniscience (much less omnibenevolence), that any human should answer such a question with not simply "yes, i would kill that child" but righteously "yes, i would kill untold thousands of children" demonstrates the epitome of arrogance and the source of the hubris only now admitted to by neocons like fukuyama:

"... successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while america's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. it is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the national security strategy document."

so without any guarantee that our goal, the spread of freedom and democracy, is achievable, can we still justify these machiavellian visions, the failures of the bush administration nonwithstanding? after all, though repentant he may be, fukuyama still sees, as quoted above, the failure of the neocon dream as a failure only of implementation:

"the problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as american as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them."

so long as men like fukuyama continue to believe that even though the execution be flawed, the neocon dream remains worthwhile, the rest of us shall remain the pawns of the would-be architects of human destiny.

to the architects then let us honestly restate dostoevsky's conundrum, and ask them to take into account the limits of human knowledge, power, competence and will:

if you believed that you might be able to make some men somewhat happier by torturing to death thousands of tiny creatures — those babies beating their breast with their fist, for instance — would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?