A World of Cheese, For your Pleasure

Muslim Barbie

"If the girls put scarves on their dolls when they're young, it might make it easier when their time comes. Sometimes it is difficult for girls to put on the hijab. They feel it is the end of childhood." - Fatima Ghayeh

On the other hand,

"every single girl in Saudi looks like Fulla, with the dark hair and the black scarf. What's so special about that?" - Jyza Sybai

Would you buy your kid a Fulla doll?

Boisclair, sniffeur responsable

So André Boisclair admitted to sniffing coke when he was in the PQ cabinet. And it conveniently came out when Pauline Marois was trailing in popularity both among voters and delegates in the leadership race. But here's the thing: Lots of people are saying that his responsible coke use should have no bearing on whether or not he could lead. (I am going to turn this into a cultural thing now.) My question lies here: Many French people in Quebec talk about the English as being tight-assed moralist stuck-up prigs. Only THEY would allow something like a little cocaine to get in the way of having a good leader. Well.

Did anyone see him on Tout le Monde en Parle Sunday night? He was very appealing to just about any demographic here. He's got the plans and the charmisma to pull off just about anything. He SHOULD win.

If that's true, and only us blokes would have a problem with Boisclair's coke use, then he had better fucking win the leadership race AND the election, because otherwise I will assume that the coke had something to do with it. And if that is true, then this could imply that separatist Quebeckers are more similar to the rest of Canada than they would like to admit.

They didn't leave because they are poor

John Scalzi over at Whatever brought us a picture of what it is like to be poor in (North) America. If that is what it means, I haven't really been that poor for very long, nor am I poor now (although my apartment SUCKS). Nick Mamatas pointed out that while being poor in North America sucks, being poor in other parts of the world is pure hell. Like he said, there's poor, and there's poor.

The best things about posts like these are the comments. I enjoyed this one:

I think the issue is interference in the decoding, and it's the same problem here and on Scalzi's blog.

I actually don't see the complaints about the absolute poverty list as qualitatively different from the complaints about the relative poverty list Scalzi presented. Both seem to be based upon a taboo violation -- one doesn't talk about poverty without magical recitations about the "exceptions" and "personal responsibility" and all that other stuff.

Some people wish to believe that their good fortune is earned through the quality of their person or intelligence, while their bad fortune is external, the end result of a chain of chance. At the same time, they seek the "lucky break" that those even more fortunate have received, unearned. Further, they want to believe that the poor fortunes of others are somehow explicable -- if only they didn't do what I'm too smart to do, they wouldn't be in that mess. Thus, I know I'll never be in that mess.

Many individuals see their good fortune as earned and their bad luck as unearned. At the same time, they see the good fortunes of others as unearned and the bad luck of others as richly deserved. This is where the taboo comes from.

In discussions of relative poverty, this argument even has a small amount of traction; one can make, in a tightly constrained way, better or worse choices. Absolute poverty -- and indeed, this is part of why the term "absolute poverty" is used to differentiate the sorts of things I mentioned from the poverty faced by people in the West -- eliminates any such psychological protection from Fortuna. And thus, people get upset and think such obvious banalities about the inability of 10 year-old whores posting to blogs means something.

All of this, of course, comes from people asking why didn't people simply leave New Orleans before the hurricane hit. In fact, there's a racist talk show host whose name I won't mention that suggest "those people" are getting everything they deserve. Which leads to my own addition to the list:

• Being poor means either being unable or not even allowed to leave a disaster zone.

In this account of some people who were trapped in NOLA after the events there (link provided to me by Paolo), people who had nowhere to go camped out in clear view of passing helicopters and cameras, as well as the local authorities that were at best, refusing to help them. (If anyone can show me that this account is bogus, please let me know.) These authorities lied to the people saying that there were rescue buses waiting for them at the Pontchartrain bridge in order to get them to move (and stop embarassing them, I'm sure). They were greeted by gunfire and the following statement:

They responded that the West
Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in
their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are
not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New
Orleans.

****

Today, President Bush admitted incompetence and failure in dealing with this hurricane. This is him taking responsibility:

I must say that I am a little shocked that he is admitting some kind of mea culpa, but I guess it's not like he had a choice. He can't really say that the residents were terrorists or anything. He can't blame it on the darkies, at least not the external ones. No one can blame it on the liberals. It's him. Apparently some of the Army people made mention of that fact that they could not complete their duties adequately because almost all of their people were in Iraq. I wonder if Bush is going to be taking more shit for this, then.

****

In other news, a couple was charged with negligent homicide when they left 34 people to die in their nursing home. They "turned down an offer from local officials to take the patients out by bus, and did not bother to call in an ambulance with which they had a contract", the attorney general said. The vics were in an advanced state of decomposition.

****

Shouldn't former head of FEMA Michael Brown be facing jail time, or at least huge fines?

Six year old leads children; no Lord of the Flies scenario takes place

Six year Deamonte Love rescues a baby and five toddlers, leading them to safety over a number of days. He must have had to do almost everything for them. How did he take care of the baby by himself? Why were they left wandering? It's a miracle that the savages-those responsible for much of the looting and violence, not the ones that allowed this to happen to this degree-didn't get a hold of them.

It's only a matter of time before more reports of heroism trickle in. But first, more reports of incompetence, racism and a general lack of caring.

Machine saves drowning girl

This is unbelievable. Just watch the video. Craziness. Sometimes technology doesn't suck the life out of you, but rather, something approaching the reverse.