Real Political Protest

I'm about out of good teabag jokes and I have a Very Important Interview in the morning (cross your fingers for me, OK?). I've spent a bit of time pissing off conservatives on Twitter by posting very good reasons to pay taxes, but honestly, there was a far more significant political protest today, far from the bloated white folks who don't want to pay taxes don't want their tax money going to brown folks want to secede from the union.



It was in Afghanistan, and these are women protesting their repressive treatment.

The New York Times reported:

The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”

The women scattered as the men moved in.

“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”

The women ran to the bus and dived inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

“Whores!”

But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

Read the whole article. It'll make you cry, and make your own problems feel very insignificant. There's video, too.

This week's issue of The Nation offers Ten Things you can Do to Oppose the War in Afghanistan, and includes links to women's organizations in Afghanistan that we can support, and I pass them on to you.

Afghan Women's Mission, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the Afghan Women's Mission Newswire and MADRE.

I'd like to be able to say that my tax dollars help Afghan women gain freedom, but we're not there yet. So at least a few of my spare dollars will.

Conservapedia's Entry on Henry Kissinger

In the comment thread to this Dave Noon post over at LG&M, many people were playing with Conservapedia ("The Trustworthy Encyclopedia"!) and laughing about the Obama entry there. Obama's entry is indeed a gold-mine of laughs -among other things, he was "allegedly" born in Honolulu, he has referred to "my Muslim faith," and he could be sworn in on the Koran! (And the footnotes for every one of those is as funny as the claim they support).

However my favorite part of the Obama entry is the claim "President Obama will be the first person having ties to a known former terrorist to gain control over America's nuclear weapons." Of course, I thought of a previous member of the cabinet whose activities could be called "terrorist," so I went ahead and looked up Henry Kissinger's entry at Conservapedia.

Not so surprisingly, it's not as long as one might think (Wikipedia's entry being far more detailed). For example, in dealing with Latin America, the entry devotes an entire 169 words, and only mentions Chile in detail - no Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico - nobody. And on Chile, it simply claims, "Kissinger and Nixon permitted covert operations by the CIA and military]] designed to destabilize the anti-American Allende regime in Chile. Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military with no help from the U.S., but hatred of Kissinger on the left escalated another notch as their favorite regime collapsed. " Nevermind those declassified documents that show how close Kissinger and Pinochet were in bed after the latter launched mass murder and torture, and nevermind those documents that put CIA agents on the ground when the coup took place. Kissinger is just blamed because of the hatred of Kissinger on the left!

No doubt, Conservapedia defendants would claim Wikipedia's length and detail is just due to "leftists filled with hatred" for Kissinger, but given how vaguely Conservapedia glosses over some key portions of Kissinger's acts, or even totally ignores them (as in the case of the Khmer Rouge, East Timor, or anywhere in Africa, particularly Angola), it seems far more likely that Kissinger is such an unforgiveable piece of filth, even Conservapedia doesn't have that much good to say about him. And that truly is amazing, given the steaming piles of allegations that pass at Conservapedia.

That's Not a Contradiction; That's a Failed Method

Just whittling my time away while waking up to coffee this morning, I read this meaningless, fluffy little article on the "reddest" and "bluest" cities in the U.S. Among the "reddest" cities, they included Lubbock, Texas (No surprise here; 3 of the 4 they listed were in Texas, and the fourth was Provo, Utah). One of the ways they described Lubbock was "contradictory," and one of their two examples of Lubbock's "inherent" contradictions? "The city has a high rate of teenage pregnancy but an abstinence-only sex education policy."

There's nothing contradictory about this, and these aren't mutually exclusive things. Time and again, people have shown that abstinence-only sex-ed doesn't stop teenagers from having sex. While I have no expectations for an article of this type, it's still really frustrating to me that this article can espouse abstinence-only as a valid form of sex-ed even while its own evidence (Lubbock) shows that the approach doesn't work. It's one thing for right-wing nutjobs who believe people and dinosaurs lived side-by-side and that the rapture is dependent upon Israel's independence to espouse this crap, but for an "article" of this sort to also blindly accept and puke up abstinence only as a valid program and remain befuddled as to why teenagers get pregnant so often in a city with such a program is just mind-numbing and counfounding.

This Has Been Tried Before

Charles Krauthammer:

Maliki & Co. are afraid we are arming Sunnis for the civil war to come. On the other hand, we might be creating a rough balance of forces that would act as a deterrent to all-out civil war and encourage a relatively peaceful accommodation.

Blackadder Goes Forth :

Blackadder: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent a war in Europe, two super blocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast, opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war.

Baldrick: Except, well, this is sort of a war, isn't it?

Blackadder: That's right, there was one tiny flaw in the plan.

George: Oh, what was that?

Blackadder: It was bollocks.

Aww...

Mark Steyn objects to the president's suggestion that those against the immigration bill "don't want to do what's right for America":

I respect the President and I appreciate that his sincerity on this issue has been obvious for his entire political career. But I don't think he should impugn the good faith of those who, equally sincerely, disagree - not on "narrow slices" but on the central proposition: that drive-thru legalization for millions of people subject to desultory background checks by an agency without the resources to conduct them is not "what's right for America".

Uh huh. I'm pretty sure Steyn still considers it okay, though, to impugn the good faith, and patriotism, of those who sincerely disagree (and who have been largely vindicated in their disagreement) on the central proposition: that invading and occupying Iraq will not inspire democratic reforms throughout the region, and will serve as a recruiting poster, boot camp, and proving ground for violent, radical jihadism.