Politblogo

Brief quasi-vacation; hello Pandagonians!

Hello, Pandagonians!  For those who don't know, this post has been added as a guest post on Pandagon right here.  So welcome to any new readers!

I have been on a reduced posting schedule due to travel and the preparations for it.  I'll try to get back in business when I get home again.

Boston Globe article on the cartoon riots

Via a commenter on Brad DeLong's blog, this excellent opinion piece in the Boston Globe re the Danish cartoon violence and its overall context:

Boston Globe - Misunderstanding Muslims: The economics of oil, including the creation of an oppressive local class of Western-sponsored oligarchs, locked the grievous insult in place. As if to be sure it was more sharply felt than ever, Europe imported ''guest workers" from the Islamic world, openly consigning them to an underclass that is as religiously defined as it is permanent.

And then the United States launched its wars. One of the major disconnects in the present conflict is the way in which European and American analysis obsesses with the apparently anarchic outbursts of violence in the ''Arab street" without taking in how brutally violent the post-9/11 ''coalition" assault has been, not only physically but psychologically.

Mobs throw stones through the windows of European consulate offices, and the legion of CNN watchers recoils with horror. Meanwhile, unmanned drones fly across stretches of desert to drop loads of fire on the heads of subsistence farmers in their villages; children die, but CNN is not there.

Billions of dollars are being poured each month into the project of imposing an American solution on an Arab problem, and increasingly the solution looks, from the other side, like annihilation. Muslims, that is, understand the new reality far better than non-Muslims do -- the state of open cultural warfare that ''the West" imagines is a narrowly targeted war against ''terrorism." Muslims, as Muslims, experience themselves as on the receiving end of a savage -- but, alas, not unprecedented -- assault.

Are they wrong? In the argument over ''Enlightenment" values, sparked by the cartoons, some champions of free expression have fallen into the deadly old mistake that led, in the 20th century, to a grotesque betrayal of those very values -- the over-under ranking of human beings, with the lives of some being counted as cheap.

Why are we killing them? As with multiple problems today, this one comes back to the misbegotten American war. It threatens to ignite the century, and must be stopped.

Like I've been saying---abstract worries over Free Speech are a luxury that is, in any case, a red herring. 

Quebec/ROC differences in fiscal awareness

Kevin Brennan wants to see some surveys about the new federal government's popularity given its several initial ineptitudes.  I haven't seen any of those yet myself, but I have seen a report on some interesting tidbits of opinion data in Cyberpresse about fiscal matters.  This is stuff discovered before the election that Cyberpresse has unearthed from the federal Ministry of Finance.

Cyberpresse - Actualités - De nombreux Canadiens ignorent qu'Ottawa nage dans les surplus: Le gouvernement fédéral affiche de faramineux surplus annuels depuis 1997. Durant la dernière campagne électorale, Paul Martin s'est targué à plusieurs reprises d'avoir fait partie d'un gouvernement libéral qui a déposé huit budgets excédentaires consécutifs.

Qu'importe! Même si Ottawa n'est plus dans la dèche depuis quelques années, il y a encore des Canadiens, beaucoup de Canadiens, qui croient que le gouvernement fédéral continue d'enregistrer des déficits.

Selon un sondage réalisé pour le compte du ministère des Finances en août dernier, 37% des Canadiens croient en effet que le gouvernement fédéral dépense toujours plus d'argent qu'il n'en reçoit, bref, qu'il se trouve toujours dans l'ornière des déficits.

It turns out that despite the fact that the federal government has been carrying surpluses---and advertising them vociferously in the case of the Liberals---more than a third of Canadians still believe that the federal government has been spending more than it receives.  ie, that it has been running deficits.  Now you'd think that this was good news, in a sense: the majority of Canadians believe correctly: over 60%.  Alas, no.  The article later says that 20% of the Canadian population believes that the budget is "balanced."  Only 36% correctly know that the government has been in a state of surplus.  (I wonder, however, how many people believe that "surplus" means "balanced" and that the only unbalanced fiscal situation is "deficit.")

However, because of the vociferousness of the Québec government in complaining about this,

De tous les Canadiens, ce sont les Québécois qui semblent malgré tout être les mieux renseignés. En effet, 41% des Québécois affirment que le gouvernement fédéral engrange des surplus tandis que 32% disent le contraire. Et 21% d'entre eux croient que le budget est équilibré, sans plus.

The numbers aren't THAT different, but they are different.  41% of Québécois correctly know that the federal government has been running a surplus, while 32% believe that it's been in deficit.  It's important to note that, therefore, people in Québec are much less likely to view a budgetary surplus as a good thing.  In fact, at this point it may have negative connotations for many people, because of the awareness of the Fiscal Imbalance.

However, the article continues on to note that Alberta is considerably more out of line compared to Alberta's ROC (ie, including Québec).  44% of Albertans think that the federal government has been running deficits.  Apparently, this is a manifestation of the general belief that the federal government simply spends without limit.  It's presumably a part of the "we worked very hard to put the oil underneath our living room floor" phenomenon.

Last, there's an interesting tidbit about the NDP-Liberal fiscal pact that kept Paul Martin afloat for a little bit.

C'est au Québec que ce pacte budgétaire est passé le plus inaperçu. Malgré tout le battage publicitaire entourant l'accord conclu entre Paul Martin et Jack Layton, 60% des Québécois ont affirmé n'en avoir jamais entendu parler.

60% of Québécois had never heard of the Liberal-NDP pact that kept the government afloat.  At this point, we have to note some of the dangers of taking surveys---and newspaper articles on surveys!---too seriously.  The most important piece of information---the Québec/ROC distinction---on this particular topic is absent, so we have no idea whether this is significant.  I wouldn't be surprised if it's roughly the same number, in which case this number is much less interesting than it would otherwise have been; the report does mention that ignorance of it is higher in Québec, but by how much?  Actually, if you think about it, you'll see lots of these sorts of questions to do with this report.

North, Women, South, Media

Twisty Faster writes:

I Blame the Patriarchy - European Honky Dudes Whacking Wives At Alarming Rate: I say this because our racist conceits are more thoroughgoing than we care to admit. As I have oft opined, Americans display a notably high tolerance for the suffering of others, especially when those others are brown. Like white dudes and their birthright of male privilege, Westerners are indoctrinated from birth with a sort of first-world entitlement. This allows us to keep “exotic” cultures at arm’s length, to luxuriate in a cavalier unfamiliarity with their strange, primitive ways, and ultimately, to think of them as ideas rather than people, as less real than we are, and therefore less important. My own unscientific, blog-centric survey, based on the much-lower-than-average number of comments generated by posts that focus on violent misogyny in “third-world” countries, is that even seasoned patriarchy-blamers are rather less outraged by ritual stonings in Pakistan or mass rapes in Rwanda than they are by Dove soap’s attempt to pass off skinny white models as fat girls.

A lot of very good comments ensue about how women are represented in developing countries and the relation to women's rights in the West and matters of imperialism, colonialism, and violence.  Most of the commenters understand why Western feminists commenting on developing countries can be a bit of a minefield.  I'd like to point one very important thing out, though, at least regarding the usual subject of Western handwringing.

Someone pointed out earlier that women's rights are a point of conflict between the West and the Muslim world.  I'd like to emphasize that this is very much a two-way street.  Hypocritical Western powers/media/etc use women's rights as a bludgeon against extraneous interests of the Muslim world.  This has caused a lot of the Muslim world to regard women's rights as an instrument of Western domination---a totally predictable effect.  A lot of progress that might have been made has been retarded by this perception. 

In the media, women's lives in the Muslim world are treated like some form of prurient horror show---in relation to the lives of Western women.  I mean, we see an unrelenting parade of misery.  All of my family comes from that part of the world, and, truth be told, there isn't much more misery there as far as I can tell as there is here.  Not THAT much more misery, that's for sure, and in some cases perhaps less (options for women vary a lot by class and geography).  And, unfortunately, even Western women who consider themselves feminists contribute to this, such as, for instance, people like Irshad Manji. 

What it does is provoke resentment about the West, even for women.   Women in my family can do nothing but shout at the TV in frustration when the plight of women in their countries is used essentially for propaganda.  I remember in a CBC TV report about Pakistan (perhaps more than one), some of the women were speaking Urdu, but the translation captions were deliberately skewed to make things sound much closer to Western stereotypes than what was actually said, and some important sentences were simply glossed over.  It's hard to see this as anything but propaganda, and a lot of the Muslim world resents the hypocrisy and associates feminism with it.  And, in any case, it necessarily obscures the search for solutions.

Of course, I am not denying that there aren't problems.  Big problems.  But I can presently count few successes brought about by foreigners, even women, in addressing these concerns.  The best successes are typically brought about by the women who live there, on the ground.  That doesn't mean necessarily that successes can't come from outside, or at least support and honest advice can't come from outside.  But we haven't really seen it that often.

Spitting in eyes

I was going to write my own post on the Danish matters, but a number of other bloggers have written posts that are better than mine, despite their relative distance (relative to me) from the focus of the conflict.  In particular, Steve Gilliard's view:

Refusing to meet with the Arab ambassadors was a serious mistake. The Syrians showed how seriously

I have been amazed at the way people, first, refuse to understand that depicting Muhammad in any form is a grave insult, second, this was done by a right wing newspaper to piss people off, and third, how shocked Europeans are at the way Muslims feel about a grave insult to their religion.

Now, the Europeans play the innocent party, and people suggest that Muslims should leave if they don't like being insulted in the West.

I am somewhat uncomfortable with the occasional bit of American triumphalism that creeps into the rest of his post, but by and large he is correct---perhaps even including European models of social integration of immigrants.  His coblogger Jen intercedes with some of the shallower criticisms of the riots, but he deals with them quite effectively.

Now, as a Muslim myself, I am perhaps somewhat closer to the focus of this conflict, as I said above. It's clear that the Danish paper was intending to slap people when they were down.  But a lot of Muslim negative reaction to Western media has a history with which Western commentators are often totally unwilling to deal: Israel.  Namely, saying certain things about Israel are rightly or wrongly considered taboo in the West, but saying analogous things about the reasons for opposing Israeli policy (and, frankly, the legitimacy of the Israeli state) are not.  Rightly or wrongly.  This is considered a cosmic double standard, because Israel is quite frankly the prism through which most of the Muslim world sees global politics.  To make use of the Prophet Muhammad himself in this double standard would widely be considered one too many injuries to bear.

(And, of course, some people are suggesting that certain interested second-and-a-half parties are actually instigating this.  We'll see if such suggestions pan out.)

The Wonderfulosity of Cheese, Part 7: Bulgarian rhapsody

Today we embark in a new direction for our exploration of the world of tasty cheese.  Yes, we are talking about sour crumbly cheeses, of which there is but one
widely known type: feta.  But not just any feta: Bulgarian feta.

(This was actually intended for a couple of days ago, but I was having technical problems.)

I was alerted to the existence of Bulgarian feta cheese in a conversation with someone hailing from some obscure Eastern European principality.  I think it was called Bulg...ravia?  ...oria?  Can't remember the name of the country.  (Just kidding, M. P.)  Anyway, when I mentioned my love of cheese, we got down to discussion of eastern cheeses, and I mentioned Greek feta.  Now, up to this point, I had been conditioned to believe, perhaps by Greek propaganda, that the only correct feta was Greek feta, and the rest were inauthentic imitations of it.  After all, the European Union itself denies the existence of non-Greek feta.

Not so, apparently.  My friend waxed eloquent (just like one waxes cheese!) about the superior merits of Bulgarian cheese over its Greek equivalent.  And I resolved to see this for myself.  Alas, the only way to get Bulgarian cheese was to order it over the Internet.

Not so, again!  For I was shopping the other day at a local halal grocer, and I came upon imported Bulgarian cheese in one of the fridge cabinets.  Naturally, I immediately purchased a block of it (which is quite a bit). 

But now for the part you've all been waiting for: the taste.  It is quite unexpected.  I was used to Greek(-style) fetas, as I said.  And yes siree, this was QUITE a bit stronger, to say the least.  More sour and sharp, with a slight aftertaste of...bitterness, maybe.  Just a hint.  And in terms of texture, smoother, but still crumbly.  My friend from the mysterious "B" country claims that his people find foreign fetas to be surprisingly bland, comparatively.

It took a bit of getting used to.  But now I'm used to it, and I even think it's quite good.  With stronger cheeses, see, you often get more bang for your buck, and this was actually quite affordable in the first place, at least compared to a lot of the aged hard imported cheeses.

Anyway, I tried it on pizza and it worked well.  And I tried it in a salad.  Pretty good too.  Under the fold, I give a recipe for a very simple salad.  Quick and easy!

Dion rising

Simon Pole thinks that maybe Stéphane Dion might be the one to lead the Liberals out of the wilderness, such as it is.

Simon Pole - Dion Attacks Harper's Achilles Heel?: Consideration of Stephane Dion as the most appealing of possible Liberal leadership hopefuls continues to gather steam. Today in the Toronto Star, Chantal Hebert, who unflinchingly critiques the performance of federalist politicians in Quebec, gives a cautious endorsement to the argument that Dion is the one to resurrect Liberal fortunes in that province, and by extension the ROC.

There is one other positive aspect of Dion's possible candidacy that I believe is being overlooked, especially when one keeps in mind that, as Harper moves the Tories to the middle, there are fewer issues that differentiate the Cons from the Liberals. This is certainly becoming true of social issues.

It is not true, however, of Kyoto.

The environment so far has never been a major plank on which the Canadian public votes, or we'd have had Green breakthroughs or something, and it's not like the Liberals' talk on the issue hadn't been much more than hot greenhousey air.   Interesting, though, that Chantal Hébert thinks that Dion is credible.  I find it hard to believe, actually.  I want to know how she came to that conclusion.

On the other hand, it's pretty grudging.  Being in the race is almost as important as winning it, this time?  So maybe she's not really saying much, or even damning with faint praise.  Because as far as I can tell, Dion's going to have to be pretty lucky to be the Liberal Party's saviour in Québec, especially since, as Hébert notes, the Constitution is where the Liberal Party has fallen down in Québec, and Dion is the unabashed heir of Trudeau and catspaw of Chrétien on this file.