One phrase says it all

"Faith-based economics"

Slaves & Statues - The American Edition

My friend Avinash likes to talk about the innate hypocrisy of Western thought; that unique ability which allows Western societies to convince themselves of being the morally superior civilization while simultaneously being the inflictors of the worst moral abasements. He will readily quote V S Naipaul's classic metaphorical analysis of the phenomenon, from A Bend in the River:

“Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.”

This chilling analogy comes to mind every single time I hear Americans (theirs being the only state to have used an atomic weapon on a civilian population) taking the moral high road on the subject of Iran's bomb, when I ponder on how the democratic Western bloc failed to recognize the democratically elected government of Palestine and then actively undermined it via a less popular puppet, and when I see that those who set out on freedom- and justice-seeking enterprises half a world away do so from a land which saw shameful racial injustices barely a few decades in the past.

I thought of it again this morning while listening to commentary about the Senate confirmation hearing of Admiral Dennis Blair, President Obama's nominee for the director of national intelligence. Responding to a question about the use of torture by America's intelligence agencies, it is reported that:

Blair said the immediate tactical benefit gained through harsh interrogations is one thing, but then he raised the larger question: "What about the effect on America's reputation?"

Wow. 95,000 civilians dead in Iraq as a result of unwarranted and unprovoked American military action. There is not even a sorry for that. And we are worried that the torture of a handful of terrorism suspects will harm America's reputation?

My Google News bitchlist

Anyone who uses Google News will agree with the sentiment that news aggregators are the second-most useful gift of the internet (after free porn, of course). For the benefit of the unaware - Google News and suchlike news aggregators offer the facility of setting up an account and choosing your preferences about what kind of news you are interested in. Then on, whenever you log on, you will get a filtered display of those news items that are topmost among your chosen interest areas. Words cannot describe how better-informed I am, in indirect proportion to the amount of effort I have to put in to reach there, thanks to Google News.

Of course, the technology is not yet perfect. If your chosen interest area is broad-based (for example, "US Top Stories"), there is no way to suppress a certain sub-area of news that you have no interest in (for example, news with the keyword "Britney Spears"). It doesn't help that at any given point of time, American news media seems to have a collective fascination for an event or individual that has no apparent newsworthiness (for me, at least).

Since Google News already bunches together news items by subject, it seems it would be easy enough to provide a small button next to each news type which says something like "Don't show this again", like Pandora's "I don't like this song" button. But no, every time I go there I have to be subject to a protracted bombardment of non-news about the Jonbenet saga or Obama's Hawaaii vacation. It seems Google News does recognize this; the feedback page features a preset suggestion - "Filter out specific sources or topics".

But till the time that I am empowered to filter out such seemingly popular but completely useless news items, I have decided to vent here by showcasing those non-news that I wish were not showcased (ironic, eh?). I shall kick off right away with not one but two peeves.

(I do recognize that singling out Google News for all this bitching is unfair. All traditional media sources - newspapers, TV, radio - are essentially news aggregators albeit with substantially less control over customization. But I just feel libelous today.)

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Enough Already! #1

Obama's coronation
Yes, yes, I know its called an inauguration, but I am just saying what it seems like. I knew the shit had hit the fan when even I found NPR, which is normally restrained, going totally nuts about it. It is still a few days before King Obama takes the oath, but I am already sick and tired of hearing about it. Enough already!

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Enough Already! #2

Making a demigod of Chesley Sullenberger
I have no doubt that it takes skill to land an airplane in a river. Like millions other, I also saw the remarkable picture of people standing, seemingly calmly, on the submerged wings of the airplane and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. But believe me, I don't want to know what the pilot's elementary school scores are. Enough already!

When militants get elected to rule

No, I am not talking about Hamas.

Gopal Kiranti, a member of the Nepali government's cabinet who belongs to the ruling Maoist party, says that all Nepali citizens should be given the right to carry arms for protecting themselves against colonial powers.

What does it remind you of?

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Kiranti was also behind the recent tamasha about Indian priests in the Pashupatinath temple. The godless Maoist government, at Kiranti's call, had fired (or accepted the resignation of, depending on where the story comes from) the head-priests of the temple who have been, since 1747 , of Indian origin - the temple itself was probably built in the 3rd century. There was a lot of domestic opposition to the act, but the louder one was from across the southern border.

Bhishma Pitamaha LK Advani was disappointed at the move and commented thus:

A tradition going back three centuries...has been trampled upon in a most clumsy and undemocratic matter by the Government of Nepal.

That's funny. There are few authoritative sources on the internet about this, but it seems that the custom of Indian priests started because the death of Nepali kings would make Nepali priests unfit to perform pooja because of the temporary impurity bestowed by shradhh. However, in 2007, Nepalish abolished monarchy and the former monarch lost his position as patron of the temple. Surely, Advaniji, you must have noticed it too. What is the point of a tradition if its raison d'etre doesn't exist any more?

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On the subject of LK Advani, read his first blog post - it is excellent piece of reflective writing, the kind that one would associate more with AB Vajpayee (link via India Uncut).

Be afraid, be very afraid

From today's Washington Post:

President-elect Barack Obama warned yesterday that the nation is sliding into the deepest economic crisis since World War II and urged Congress to pass a stimulus package quickly or risk an entire generation of Americans losing any hope of prosperity.

Clearly, fear-mongering is not the exclusive domain of the Republicans.