Politblogo

Without his daughter

Most people who even vaguely follow Middle East politics will know of the movie Not Without My Daughter, based on a book by the same name by Betty Mahmoody and a helper.  The book recounts the story of how Betty escaped from just-post-revolutionary Iran with her daughter, when her husband tricked her into going to Iran and would have trapped her there or, worse, made her leave Iran without her child, who would then be raised in a horrible fundamentalist Islamic country. 

Anyway, I came by this book in a public library, and my curiosity was piqued.  So I picked it up and skimmed it.  And by "skim", I mean to say that I spent a good hour on it at least.  (I lose track of time in public libraries...)  The book was detailed and personal, and I was elated at the happy conclusion: Betty and daughter Mahtob escape, passing through extreme peril, to achieve a prosperous life once again in America. 

But, as is so often the case, the story seemed incomplete to me.  Because while Betty had her daughter, somewhere in Iran, a father, the villain Moody (Dr. Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody), came back to an empty house, having never had the chance to say goodbye to his child.  And Betty had little knowledge of or interest in telling us what happened on the Iran end after that.  So we had an incomplete picture of the villain.

Google to the rescue then!  I find out that, much more recently, Moody's story has indeed been told.  It was told in a Finnish film called Ilman Tytärtäni (Without My Daughter).  I excerpt a review below: 

Variety - Without My Daughter: Alice Sharif, an American in Tehran who's married to an Iranian, and whose daughter Samira played with Mahtob, says the American women in her circle were outraged by the flagrant lies in Betty's book - such as the alleged Iranian habit of bathing only once a year. Sharif & Co. contend such fabrications were tailored to feed anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S. She adds there was never a hint of Betty being beaten (as she claimed in her book), and she seriously doubts whether Betty and Mahtob could have crossed the mountains in winter without special gear. Sharif's husband says they could have left the country "the normal way."

Having visited (and having family) in similar parts of the world, I also have to wonder about the "bathing once a year" thing.  If by "bath," Betty means a luxurious 5-star hotel deal with expensive salts and designer bath robes, then yes, I imagine it unlikely that the average Iranian has even one a year.  In Pakistan, at least, people pour buckets of water over their head while standing ina bathtub fairly regularly---those that don't live in a more modern home with an actual shower.  Of course people conserve water and try to use what they can afford to use (there are an unimaginably large number of poor people)...but Muslim countries put great value on cleaning with water regularly.  She even acknowledges this when she notes that Moody wanted to shower after sex as a matter of religious custom.  And somehow I doubt that most Iranians have sex only once a year.

But this is trivial.  More importantly, I found a lot of places where Betty paints the behaviour and Moody's family and Iranian culture in a negative light, but I could just as easily see how the same incident could be taken as confirmation of the Ugly American stereotype.  For instance, she recounts how she attempted to make an American meal for Moody's family, and how her sister-in-law complained about the fact that she used beef.  She acknowledges that, apparently, in Iranian culture, beef is looked down upon as a lower-class meat.  But at the same time, she takes her sister-in-law's behaviour as a rejection of herself.  I put this in the context of other incidents where she paints her in-laws as mocking her, when it could just as easily have been indulgence of arrogant tantrums...  (Other criticisms appear on the IMDB message boards.)

Of course, you could accuse me of being too charitable to Moody.  After all, alternative interpretations of the events that Betty describes could be just plain wrong.  This accusation is quite valid.  Moody could very well be a jerk.  Quite likely, there was something wrong with both of them---first of all, it is quite likely that he believed he had told her that they would be leaving permanently for Iran (this is what he claims), and quite likely that she had another interpretation in mind. The problem is that we have a bit of a role reversal here: Betty, by virtue of being an American woman with a dramatic story, has the power to paint an easily-hated post-revolutionary Iran as the abode of monsters, and there is nothing Moody can do about it.  So we'll never know whose side of the story is the real one, and whose is the media creation/self-pitying lie.

What we do know, though, is that Betty allowed her story to become the very emblem of the popular American conception of Iran, and indeed seems still to be making money from it. That time was an opportune time indeed to take Iranian society out of its entire context and demonize it and the revolution.  And we cannot entirely blame them, since it is the Iranian revolution itself that gives frequent opportunities for demonization.  But removing the entire context of the Shah, Western power, and so on and replacing it entirely with symbols like this did a disservice to the world, particularly in the context of a possible attack on Iran.

And what we do know, also, is that Moody has not seen his daughter in many years, and if there's any truth to the notion that Betty's version is not entirely fair, but instead the partly the product of American power and privilege, then Moody's discovey of an empty house is an injustice.  That this context exists means, unfortunately, the Betty's claims have to be viewed in that light of her privilege as an American.  Moody has had story told about him in the world that he can never counter.  Well, with this video, apparently he has had some small opportunity, but this will never be a Hollywood production

But even if he is at fault to some extent, which he may very well be, I can wish him a second chance with his daughter in the future.  A second chance is something I can wish for almost anyone.

Comforting

Every time I start feeling down about the overall state of the world, indeed, down enough to say that I'm depressed abou it, I visit JunkScience.com.  I don't believe most any of it, and can see the transparent way it operates: in order to distract from the vested interests it represents, it spends a lot of time vociferously claiming that environmentalists are a powerful industry helping to oppress the entrepreneurial spirit.  A particularly inspired post:

Concerned about the Amazon burning they're going to... set fire to it? "Woods Hole Research Center plans controlled burn in Amazon rainforest" - "Fire is an important agent of transformation in the Amazon landscape. Every year, low intensity fires burn thousands of square miles of Amazon forest. To study the effects of these, and the forests' ability to recover from repeated burning, Woods Hole Research Center scientists will burn two and a half square kilometers of forest in the transition forest of northern Mato Grosso state, at Fazenda Tanguro in Querencia, from late August into early September." (Woods Hole Research Center).

So obviously if you're concerned about the burning of the Amazon forests, then the correct response is to do no research whatsoever as to the consequences of it.  Right. Note that their primary complaint against environmentalism is an alleged lack of research.   The ignorance being license to continue on the same course, naturally...hmm, it all starts to make sense now.

But like I said above, the site is such a comfort to read.  Because if they're even a little bit right about anything, it should be a major relief to all well-intentioned people.  Even if they came to those conclusions for the wrong reasons.

Roberts nomination conflict

The US Democratic left is somewhat divided on the Roberts nomination to the supreme court.  On the one hand, we have feminist bloggers concerned that the Democratic leadership and prominent male bloggers might decide to drop support for Roe v. Wade (by allowing NARAL-unacceptable choices like Roberts into the Supreme Court)  in order to save political credit for other issues.   Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon expresses this fear in more than one post, including the linked one. 

On the other hand, we have bloggers like General Glut who believe that the Democratic leadership panders to the centrality of Roe v. Wade at the expense of economic issues that are pressing parts of the middle and lower classes in the US.  They are afraid that the economic evils that Roberts et al. would induce in the US are drowned out by concern over Roe, and they are incensed by the idea that a social liberal judge would be passed by the Democratic leadership (and feminist bloggers...) even if they have a terrible record on regulatory matters. 

So which to believe? Are the Democrats too obsessed by Roe or too unconcerned?  Would most US feminist bloggers view economic matters as sufficiently important that they would also fight tooth and nail against an economically right-wing judge as much as they would against a judge that threatens Roe?  Are bloggers like General Glut too willing to ignore the centrality, as most US feminists see it, of the matter of choice?

A problem with self-determination

One of the cornerstones of human rights and global justice discussions is the notion that peoples have each an inalienable right to self-determination, be that separation, decolonization, and so on.  And this is a notion that I support in principle, because the opposite choice is majoritarian domination, colonialism, and other evils. 

The problem is, however, that situations are more complicated than that: a self-determination claim usually contains a territory claim.  And a territory may have other groups on it that themselves have a right to self-determination.  So self-determination, a validation of rights, necessarily itself entail privileging the rights of one people over possible others.

We see this story many times.  Québec nationalists, for instance, always claim that minorities in Québec do not meet the criteria for nationhood, which are usually indistinguishable from a description of Québec's specific situation.  This is a mild version, but there are in other parts of the world much more lethal variants of this problem.

But here is an opportunity to point out another twist: Feministe notes that the new Iraqi constitution risks curtailing women's rights due to provisions that may puts aspects of those rights in the hands of conservative religious exigetes.  In other cases where a minority within a minority has conflicting interests with the self-determining outer minority, the dispute is often over territory or cultural and linguistic expression, and can be solved territorially or through constitutional measures designed to carve out a separate political/cultural space for the inner minority.

In this case, for some reason women are harder to separate from the population: at some point men and women must interact.  And part of the self-determination of Iraqis has to be in the legislation they pass regarding how their society is going to be run.  And part of that legislation has to do with relations between men and women, such as divorce and custody law.  But that self-determination now may have an effect on women's autonomy in the same manner as described above.  But we cannot solve the problem by carving out self-determining provisions for women, since all the disputed areas involve men in some way! 

So is this another flaw in the notion of self-determination of peoples as a component of global justice?  Is it possible to resolve this conflict with gender equality?   Which takes precedence, democracy or human rights?

The "blue-collar" white male problem

There's been a lot of worry (or hope) among different factions of the US Democratic Party's blog presence about strategies for reframing or refocusing the party's image among voters that might help them escape from their apparent geographical handicap in US presidential elections.  It is often remarked that the geographical problem masks a deeper problem, which is a gender problem: in parts of the country the "white male" vote dominates to make the Republicans win.  Hence the angst: should Democrats soft-pedal the feminist and minority issues that are supposed to distinguish them from the Republicans? 

I would argue that this is a hole into which the Democrats themselves have dug, assuming that the Democrats do have a white male electoral problem that is seriously impeding their ability to win what should have been, in a sane world, a much easier contest than it was.  Here's what happened: the Democrats, to their credit, became known as the home of civil rights and feminism in mainstream US politics, and this is perceived as, rightly or wrongly, costing white males some opportunities that they used to have.  (If so, probably rightly, since discrimination meant they had greater access to them.)  At the same time, however, the Democrats eventually started to embrace free trade dogmas, whose material effects have been to remove a lot of jobs disproportionately held by white males in manufacturing and so on to other countries.

So not only has the mythical average US white man lost some opportunity due to discrimination-correction, he has lost opportunity to Mr. Wang and Mr. Lopez and Mr. Bhavan.   And this has made him feel undermined at home and at work, in one way or another.  And what the Democrats collectively forgot is that if one is going to pursue such policies, one has to let the losers (even if, perhaps, rightful losers with regard to affirmative action, etc) at least perceive they are being compensated or given some way to save face.   Now I would oppose measures that undermined the correction of discrimination...but even on the trade front, none of the promised cushions or benefits of free trade seem to be playing out.  Wages are stagnant, unemployment undercounted, benefits shrinking...

Obviously, this is a major opportunity for the Republicans.  It's an opportunity for them to appear to be on the side of the white male in something.  It allows them to say, "They undermine you in your home, they hate your sexuality, they hate what you want for your children, they hate the fact that you aspire to live like your father and grandfather, they give your opportunities to the lazy underclasses and encourage your wives to leave you, ..." and other such noxious whispers.  None of this really returns the sense of opportunity to this segment of the US population the (in particular) "blue-collar" white male.   In fact, the Republicans give away the farm even more enthusiastically, to rich white males in particular.  But it returns a sense of hope through revenge, and perpetuates the vicious cycle that brings about this malaise in the first place. 

Democrats have invested a lot in economists and abstract economic theories.  But it is high time that they noticed that this isn't working: they shouldn't have to start talking about sacrificing social justice, feminism, etc. on the altar of stopping Bush et al.  If they do, then they've made a terrible mistake somewhere else. The compensatory policies that the rank-and-file supports will never be passed...because of the politics and interests behind those who most strongly benefit from free trade in the first place.  But it may be too late to extricate the US from this mess.

The Judith Miller Show

Wow, Ian Welsh takes a pretty strong stand against Judith Miller:

Tilting at Windmills - Miller and the Public's Right to Know: Judith Miller has acted directly against the public interest. She is going to jail, not to protect your right to know, but to protect people who have used her as a disinformation asset. She is going to jail to protect her right to continue to lie to the public and to protect those who have used her to lie to the public.

In the specific case of Judith Miller, I agree totally.  Her role at the NYT has been deplorable throughout.  However, let me play devil's advocate: in this case Miller is taking a blow for sources that we consider to be mendacious, but it's still the case that reporters do and should seek well-connected sources and vice versa.  If reporters can be coerced through a legal proceeding to reveal the sources (even if the sources are dangerous liars), wouldn't this put a chill on reporter-source interactions, assuming this is a bad thing?  I mean, a court could turn around and do this to reporters working with non-lying sources...

Game of doom

There's a lot of depressing news going on these days.  But it was ever thus.  However, there's something a little bit worse in character about present-day bad news.  In the past, we could rely on the hope that whatever bad happened now, there was a "progress" way out; time and ingenuity would solve our problems.  But with Peak Oil apparently looming over our shoulders, now seeming to overshadow the long-term threat of global warming, it seems like the opposite is true: it's all downhill from here.

It's an immobilising sentiment.  And you'd think that that was irrational---a sentiment generated by the scale of the problem, but I'd like to play the "Devil's advocate" and say that it is, in fact, the rational response.

Like most people, I'm used to many of the comforts of technology.  However, there are some I do without: I don't own a car, which is a biggie, and in fact most of my day to day travel is done on foot.  (Let's leave aside the plane travel for now...)  But I cannot imagine living in or surviving a world in technological and economic decline.  And if I cannot imagine it, how can the masses who rely even more than I on cheap energy would be able to go without, let alone actually choose to do what needs to be done and let go early enough that there is sufficient available energy for the truly important things, like health care and so on.

In fact, I cannot imagine human (North American) society as a whole choosing to scale back in advance.  There's always one group or another that thinks it's sufficiently important to continue to consume ever-increasing amounts.  The only scale-backs I can think of are those which are forced by supply: Peak Oil.

The optimists tell us that there is a way out: the Julian Simonesque dictum that human ingenuity and the market are sufficient to solve most problems and can be assumed to work.  As the price of energy goes up, so does this incentive to find new, hitherto unknown (not-so-)cheap sources, and this can be reliably counted upon---inventiveness given demand seems to be quite powerful through history.  However, this seems like a risky fantasy to me.  So much safer to conserve, isn't it?  But let us survey the existing options for action:

1. The pollyannas are wrong, and there is no cheap energy escape hatch from the Peak Oil Problem.  Then we're doomed (assuming I'm right that people won't stop consuming).  Then the smart thing to do is to continue to enjoy life as before---worse, yet, perhaps to consume even more before it becomes impossible to do so.
2. The pollyannas are right, and the supply problem is solved by the ingenuity of demand.  In which case, it is still appropriate to consume as before.  Perhaps, to consume more than before, in order to hasten this economic process!

Either way, it seems to be worth it to be consuming, not conserving.  Make of that what you will.  But if the truth lies in between the two, then the calculation is a little different.

A very important cause...

...and one I stand behind, even if it takes millions of years.

(Saw a similar bumper sticker on an actual car, and I thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world, particularly since so many people won't get it.  Apparently it's been a running joke for many years now.  Many versions of it around the Internets.)

Screwed up TypePad

I just noticed how badly TypePad screwed things up while I was away when I tried to click on some of my old posts, and they no longer appear in the correct style.  I'm going to launch a complaint about this, since lavendar on black text is unreadable.  I mean, seriously.  Why do the software quality people at Six Apart have to take a vacation at the same time as I do?  (Actually, I wasn't on vacation, really, but I was travelling.)

UPDATE: It's fixed by republishing.  So I won't complain.  But still, they should autorepublish if they are going to tinker so drastically with the internal machinery.

Junk Food Outrage

Ever since I moved to the US (from Canada, if my non-Canadian readers hadn't noticed), I've had to make do without Clamato juice, and, therefore, Caesars.  Bloody Mary Mix doesn't count, because not only is it way more expensive than Clamato juice, it doesn't have the fishy taste of clam juice, and it doesn't go down nearly as smoothly, and Marys are simply not the same.  (Virgin Caesars and Virgin Marys, I don't drink the Bloody kind on account of not drinking alcohol). 

But now I have discovered a new outrage: the Oh Henry bars are different.  It's been years since I had an Oh Henry bar, so I decided to get one from the office vending machine.  And what did I find!  A vague, in fact inferior, clone of the Snickers bar.  Yes, it has peanuts.  Yes, it has nougat.  But not only is the nougat not tough, it is diluted with caramel, and the peanuts are mixed with the nougat-thing.  The chocolate coating seems inferior too. 

Yeesh, not only is it hard to get fresh produce in the US (ironically, imported produce is fresher in cold Canada even in winter!), but it's also difficult to get good junk food.  Well, at least US Taco Bell's are superior to their Canadian equivalents.  But I think that Canadians just have more discerning palates*.

*Including poutine.  Yes, I know that poutine is a crime against nature, good health, and culinary sanity.  But Canadians know how to do this correctly and with style and flair.  So a truly awful food concept becomes a brilliant invention.  And it is oh, so satisfying in the winter.  I have it no more than twice a year, usually after a long winter walk, because that's the maximum I can take without incurring the terrible negative side effects.