A World of Cheese, For your Pleasure

The hypocrisy of diversity; or, the threat of Quebec is everywhere

Actually, I think it's a double-standard, but I prefer that title.

For years people have talked about "diversity" and equating it with a "Good Thing". I am not sure how well this Good Thing was defined in the beginning, and being a minority, it never really occurred to me that perhaps it should be presented as being advantageous to the white majority. It's clearly an advantage to me: I can exist and prosper here, theoretically. But for the white people? I suppose that having black or pink or brown dollars really is a very good thing, but beyond that, I am not sure.

With that in mind, I think that I now have a better idea as to why this vague "diversity" was tolerated for so long, and why it is under fire now.Diversity is fine as long as there are more white people than any other group: specifically, more than 50% white population.

Case in point: Some Chino Hills residents (really, click on that link; the money there is astounding, which could explain a lot of their worries) are worried about the arrival of an Asian supermarket and the resulting potential influx of Asian businesses, people and cultures in their once-lily-white community.

"It will turn into anther Rowland Heights," said Carolyn Matta, 67, referring to the unincorporated community 35 miles west of Riverside where the population is 55 percent Asian. "We're not going to be welcomed in our neighborhood."

Although you could dismiss this as the irrational fears of an old woman, I don't believe that you have to be a senior citizen to feel this way. In fact, many younger people in their 30s and 40s are feeling a little alienated and othered, or at least feeling the threat of such alienation. And to be perfectly honest, I don't care. I don't care not because I want some kind of revenge against white people, but because I like the idea of giving the opportunity of raising the profile and prominence of different kinds of people. If white people have to feel like a minority and different from the localized norm, then so be it. It has been that way my whole life, and my life isn't so bad. Hell, some white people need the lesson.

When tolerance and diversity programs were first put in place so that immigrants and other minorities could get a fairer shake in the world, those programs made and make sense because otherwise, the stakes are too stacked against them. White people are NOT like any other ethnic (which might as well read "other", "strange", "different" or in some contexts, "lesser") groups as long as they determine how all other groups will be treated. Besides, even in some select urban centres, the vast majority of North America is white. At the extreme, I see these Hispanic and Asian enclaves as being little Quebecs; they are the ethnic majority in a relatively small geography, encased as a minority within a much larger geography. They would clamour for special treatment within the larger national or continental community, while denying smaller groups within it the same dignity*. Wouldn't that be interesting?

Maybe that is what this Hérouxville stunt and the reasonable accommodation debates are really all about. The white monopoly on normal society and majority is population is threatened, and therefore things must change back to the good ol' days. Whatever those were for certain ethnic groups, including the white Quebeckers.

* There is no need to remind me of how lucky I am that the francophone majority allows me to live peacefully in English in Montreal. Like I said, diver$ity. And I don't mean to rail against white people or Quebeckers in general. I am simply trying to shed some light on certain legitimate non-white non-French perspectives. The whole mention of Quebec was simply a comparison in the extreme. Or was it really so extreme?

Does this look peaceful to you?

It could just as easily be a chainsaw victim, "wishing you peace". Peace that he never had, obviously. I'd like to see that. Or peace wishes from casualties of war. Hey, I'm no ogre. The proceeds from this little scheme would go to a worthy charity, like our navy.

via Credulous.

Star Wars or Africa?

This is a response, or rather a reaction, to AJ's entry entitled Does the Internet know more about Star Wars than Africa?

So does the Internet know more about Star Wars than Africa?

If you take the question at face value, which, for the purposes of this entry, I will, then the answer is "of course it does". Why? Because the Internet (and the blogosphere) is powered only by those with the means. (I read last year that bandwidth costs of downloading 1 Gig of data are $20 on average in North America, where in Africa it costs a whopping $1800. For many Africans, $20 might as well be $1800.) They talk about things that matter to them, and beyond saying that things should improve in Africa, there's no reason why anyone here or even in Europe should even care about anything that happens there, unless it's their interests being affected.

For example, about a year and a half ago there was some kind of outbreak in the Congo. I was at work when I read it, and thought that it was rather astonishing. I mentioned this outbreak to some colleagues, and when I told them where it happened, I was immediately cut off with "WHO THE FUCK CARES?". His disregard was so thorough and complete that it felt like a slap in the face. The only good thing about that was that he was perfectly honest. I suspect that most of us feel this way to no small degree, much of the time. On the one hand, it's normal to feel this way. Africa truly might as well be Mordor as far as we are concerned, so why care? On the other hand, it's sad when those who use all the world's resources can't even be bothered to find out about those they take advantage of.

Another side to this is what Joi Ito calls the "caring problem". Chris Dahlen's interpretation of this problem is that "people won't follow the news in a foreign land just because they think it's important; they keep tabs on it because they have emotional investment in watching what comes next."

The media has no more incentive to improve the dissemination of information from elsewhere than people have to learn about it. Rebecca MacKinnon (who has a CV from hell, I must say) believes that the way that news organizations cover international stories is much to blame. This is probably true: it isn't surprising that pillars of society like the Fourth Estate would be slow to really adapt to rapidly changing realities. But I believe that if readers cared more, news organizations would as well. According to Christiane Amanpour, journastic integrity has waned to the point where news coverage is less about the truth and getting the real story than ratings and profits. It's an old complaint, but still relevant. If we act as consumers for news rather than intelligent and thoughful global citizens, we will get more of what we have, which are nuggets of information in consumable bite-size portions that the least smart among us can consume. This is our fault.

Lastly, there's the guilt factor, or rather, the rejection of guilt factor. [White] people no longer want to hear that they are, in part, responsible for anything bad that happens in other parts of the world. They are, in their view, sick of feeling guilty for being white, and are not taking it anymore. This is probably part of why you have things like the Hérouxville mess. (I can partly relate to this because I am sick of being bade to feel guilty for being male. I would not, however, enact laws requiring maleness, or prohibiting femaleness.) If we are no longer into seeing how our actions might negatively affect others abroad, then we sure as hell aren't actually going to know anything about, say, Africa. (As an aside, people have told me that I should be glad that I am here, and not languishing in the West Indies or Africa in order to make me see the benefits to me of certain barbaric European practices of past centuries. While this may be true, I do not see how this shrinks our responsibilities to those that were exploited in the pat, and who continue to be so exploited. It doesn't make it "all good". And yes, I include myself in both groups: the exploiters and the exploited.)

You know, it won't surprise me if you can get degrees in pop culture studies with specialization in Star Wars. But didn't McGill shut down its African Studies program a few years ago? It came back, but still.

Sex offenders come in all forms

Don't they?

Was justice served?

Finally, one of these sickening people gets a huge sentence for cruelty. But was the sentence appropriate? Think not just about your sense of outrage when answering this question.

As an aside, I can't help but wonder how the sentence would be different if the victim were a different sort of person, but equally innocent, such as a gay adult, a man, a Muslim woman, a black teenager, anything. I wonder if it is right that the sentence depends on the victim instead of simply the crime. Justice is supposed to be blind, right?

Evil parents

These kinds of people are everywhere. They are the reason why death penalties keep coming back into vogue. Here's an excerpt.

Evil Harte was jailed for 11½ years on Thursday for torturing her four-year-old daughter, who has cerebral palsy. Duncan, 27, was caged for 10½ years. Both were convicted of grievous bodily harm at Middlesex Crown Court.

The sick pair abused the girl by scalding her with boiling water, ripping out her hair, and forced her to eat her faeces.

I think that maybe it could have to do with acting out sick power fantasies. I don't know, but I'd really like to. Why doesn't the press try to find out why these things happen? The answer is just, "They are clearly sick in the head." Obviously they are, but I would like to know why or if they thought that what they were doing was okay. How they could do these things, and how they thought they could get away with it.

By the way, Harte is pregnant and it's likely that she will never see that child. Child services will take the child away at birth. When the father would up in jail, we hooked up immediately with another man who thought that the baby was his (she continued to hook up with the father while he was in prison) using the old "Of course the father was entirely responsible, I couldn't do anything about it. Believe me, because I am female." And the guy fell for it. She also seemed to think that the worst she would get was community service, probably for the same reason.

She'll never be safe alone on the inside. Female prisoners view child torturers the way male prisoners view sex offenders and treat them the same way, at least in Britain. I do hope they rot.

Anna Nicole Smith = dead

This does not at all surprise me. I wonder if she was on anyone's dead celebrity's list for 2007. A coworker just went by and said, "I thought you said Nicole Kidman. I was like FUUUCK. Anna Nicole Smith? Pfff..."

I saw her in a recent interview. She was denying that some guy fathered her kid. She could barely string four words together. Glassy eyes. Maybe she was high, maybe she had a fried brain. Either way, her death seems like a blessing in a way. She was a pretty tortured woman. Don't get me wrong: much of this was self-inflicted, but still. A sad, sad woman. May she know some peace.

This NOT a RealDoll™

This is a real human being. Ewwgh. Probably NSFW.

NF

Derrick is a sketch comedy group (troupe?) out of New York. They have created this bit. It kills me.

More women in government = a better world?

I referenced the following article in the previous entry. There was something in it that made me curious about some things. Here's the quote:

More women in government could also boost economic growth: studies show that women are more likely to spend money on improving health, education, infrastructure and poverty and less likely to waste it on tanks and bombs.

I might say that women might be more naturally inclined to do so, but would they? If you assume that women are also more likely to be concerned with their own safety and that of their children, wouldn't war in the same of security (because what is the military for, if not for that, right?) make sense to the women in power? Wouldn't they then spend the money on tanks and bombs the same way that men would? Even if this isn't true, wouldn't the economic and political pressure to do so, which are probably quite real, pretty much require that such women take such action more than they might be normally inclined to do if they had their druthers?

And what about our (North Americans) expectation of women in power? Would we expect them to shift our focus so that it is more woman-, people-oriented, or would we doubt her wisdom and second-guess her at every turn, calling her soft and weak when she embraces health and education spending when she could spend money on tanks and bombs? Was Margaret Thatcher seen as, more or less, male?

Just wondering.