June 18, 2007
Back
The site went into a technical black hole while I was traveling last month. I will continue with my irregular posting schedule.Thanks to all who inquired.
Posted by zeynep at 07:00 PM | Comments (2)
March 24, 2007
Hello, apologies and update
Hello blog-readers: it is taking longer than planned for me to get back to regular blogging. I expect I can return in early April. Meanwhile, it is depressing how little has changed. The war (both ours and the rising civil war) goes on with full savagery. At this rate, Iraq will be emptied of people.
I suspect we will not care (or possibly even notice) until the oil flow is more severely impacted.
Posted by zeynep at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2007
back up this weekend
The blog is taking a break until this weekend... Meanwhile, my must-read piece for this week is this story.
This is what we have come to.
Posted by zeynep at 08:55 PM | Comments (1)
September 14, 2006
site back up
The site was down for a bit, but it is now sorted out. (If you can read this post, it means I can post!)
I should be able to continue blogging as of this weekend. (Or maybe I should just gather my old posts, change the q's to n's as in Iraq to Iran, and repost them. Hey, the Washington Post does it, printing last year's A17's as this year's A18's.)
Posted by zeynep at 10:12 PM | Comments (1)
July 02, 2006
Site down, and a repost...
The site will be down for couple more days while my Internet connection is restored (hopefully soon).
Meanwhile, I thought I'd repost a link to a piece I'd written earlier about Navy Lt. Commander Charles Swift, Lawyer of Salim Hamdan -- Hamdan of Hamdan v Rumsfeld, the court case which showed that the current Supreme Court is merely right-wing, instead of monarchist. Even the idea of a career military lawyer who displays a ferocious fight for rights of Osama Bin Ladin's driver all the way up to the highest court of the land is quintessentially, and wonderfully, American. There has been much to be ashamed off lately and I thought that this fourth of July, I'd leave it with a note of hope.
Posted by zeynep at 07:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2006
Back...
Couldn't post for a few days, but now I'm back. I intend to write about the "cartoon" debacle. But this caught my eye. The world is at a warmest point for the past millenium.
Why is this not an emergency, again?
Posted by zeynep at 09:30 PM | Comments (2)
September 24, 2005
site back up
Hello all -- site was down for a few days. Those who tried to post comments got an error message and I could not log on at all. Seems to be back to normal, spontaneously. Some sort of cybermagic for sure.
Posted by zeynep at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2005
Back
Hello everyone -- I'm back. Blogging at regular, ahem, schedule as of tomorrow.
Posted by zeynep at 09:19 PM | Comments (2)
July 24, 2005
Comment Problems
The site is having some problems processing comments. My apologies to all commenters. Part of the problem is the massive amount of comment spam... I'll keep you updated.
Posted by zeynep at 01:06 PM | Comments (1)
May 30, 2005
On the Road
Postings will resume tomorrow...
In the meantime, check this from A Tiny Revolution.
Posted by zeynep at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2005
Comments
I accidently erased a few legitimate reader comments while carrying out my usual chore of deleting comment spam. This site, like many others, gets tons of comments spam each day and I have been manually deleting them. So, my apologies to those commenters (it would have been comments from the last few days).
Also, as you can probaby tell from my postings, I'm terribly swamped catching up with everything since returning from all the travel. Hopefully, things will come under control soon and I will also begin to post Venezuela and Mexico impressions, along with more analysis of current events...
Posted by zeynep at 12:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 19, 2004
Another Trip, Another Guest
I know it's a bit unfair of me to run off to another country before I managed to get together my Venezuela observations but ... here it is...
I'll be travelling to Mexico City and San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas for the next 10 days. I'll be back blogging before the new year. As usual suggestions and recommendations about what to do and where to go are very welcome.
In the meantime, the blog will be hosting the ever-globalist Justin Podur of the Killing Train. Grill him about Haiti, Palestine, Canada, Congo, even Canuckistan...
Posted by zeynep at 06:16 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 14, 2004
Back and Thanks
I'm back. Trying to catch up with news, I was encouraged to learn that steroids in baseball is the issue to take on if you want to be taken seriously:
Sen. John McCain, the straight-talking Republican who often challenges the GOP establishment, has taken on a headline-grabbing issue — steroids in baseball — and generated talk of a presidential bid in 2008.
Good to be back to such political and moral courage. By the way, did Iraq sink while I was gone? I mean the country that we are occupying? One could be confused, if one relied on media coverage. Most news about it seems to be in the format of "bombing in city ____ in Iraq has killed __ people." Replace name and number, republish, repeat. Name this enterprise journalism.
I'll start posting my Venezuela observations shortly. Meanwhile, a heartfelt thanks to Jonathan Scwhartz for making the blog a place I wanted to keep coming back to read -- while I was gone. In fact, I was kind of tempted to ask him blog a bit more:-) For those who got used to his, ahem, sick sense of humor, continue checking out Tiny Revolution.
Posted by zeynep at 11:08 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 03, 2004
¡Hola!
First things first. Absolutely no smoking in the comments section, no matter what Jonathan says.
I will try to post more later, but a brief update now. I spent the day in the barrios, the shanty-towns in the hills, visiting newly-formed small health clinics and later a large, PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela) subsidized community development center. The small neighborhood clinics are wonderful, and badly needed. The clinics may be among of the most important things Chavez initiated, and they obviously also greatly help increase his political popularity. I was a bit mixed about the larger development, which included a textile and a shoe factory, sustainable (so it said) farm, sports fields, larger clinics, supermarkets etc. The "work" portion, textile and shoes, clearly depended on PDVSA subsidies. ¿How long can that go on? ¿How can one best use the current windfall from the $45 a barrel oil -- the same condtition that is breaking the backs of many other third world countries? ¿Can Chavez and his administration find a sustainable way out ot he desperate poverty so many here live under?
I will report back as often as I can, but expect the bulk of my observations for after I return. I am also taking lots of pictures which I may be unable to post (or download) before I return. We will see. Meanwhile, feel free to leave your recommendations about where to go and what to do!
Posted by zeynep at 05:44 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
December 02, 2004
Off I Go
I think that if I also post about the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, after the last posting about AIDS and Sudan, the readers of this blog will stop reading... Or just start screaming as soon as they even see the orange/pink background color in the distance. Honestly, I don't mean to write about horrors all the time, but you know how it happens.
So, Jonathan of the Tiny Revolution will be guest blogging for about 10 days -- while I go off to see if there's any good news anywhere.
I'll be in Venezuela:-)
I'll try to log on and post from there but I have no idea what the conditions will be like.
See, Jonathan also writes about the scary stuff but he's funny. So, have fun and enjoy and we'll catch up when I get back, if not before.
Posted by zeynep at 09:25 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 03, 2004
Counterspin, New York
I just taped a brief interview with FAIR's Counterspin. It airs at different times at different locations. The question that stumped me was "where should listeners go for accurate information?"
Umm, blogs, some alternative media and such but really, I don't know. Gotta do your own legwork. That's what happens when there is no real media doing it's job. Sure, there is good stuff here and there but it's very patchy and relatively small. There is no one comprehensive news site I trust. That's why I end up reading the actual text of UN resolutions plus many, many different sources to try to put together a semi-sensible picture of what's really going on.
I'm in NY for a few days. Every time I come to this city I have this enormous urge to pitch a tent in a corner and just stay. I start wondering why I ever left -- even though I've never lived here.
Yup, that bad.
My posts may be a bit sporadic while I figure out Internet access. If I am not heard from again, look for the story about the woman dragged away --kicking and screaming, I promise-- while roaming around Central Park looking for a good camp site with an open wireless signal.
Posted by zeynep at 03:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 28, 2004
Reclaiming Our Sanity
After I wrote phrase "the better [the site] will become" in the previous post, I started wondering what I meant by "better." Better written, better known, more widely read? Well, sure, but something else.
It's a world where an insidious form of immorality is pretty much the reigning norm, it’s hard not to feel insane of sorts. To effect change in such a world thus requires a double-bootstrapping: one has to regain one’s sense of self and one has to find ways to come together with others.
On the one hand, I think we have to start with individual moral agency -- if for nothing else, as humans, we are individuals in separate minds and bodies. I'm not a transnational entity, neither are you. On the other hand, no matter what one does, as long as the "I" in the "what can I do" isn't pooled into something larger than each of us, there is no good answer -- if for no reason other than the simple fact that forces arrayed against us are so large. Not that there is a nice, easy answer in collectivity but there is a distinction between choosing the most moral path open to an individual and achieving effectiveness. And effectiveness does require some form of collectivity. And morality without effectiveness can, and often does, induce despair, hopelessness and inaction.
So, where do we go from there? Faced with massive forces, seemingly impossible odds and made to doubt our sanity, our basic moral truths?
First and foremost, I think that we have to believe in our understanding of the world. In spite of all this massive ideological onslaught, we have to accept that, in this world, under these conditions, these are the sane positions, these are the moral considerations. It is sane and moral to be centered in this way. The greatest success of the ideology disseminated by the current power structures is in the way they make us feel uncentered, weird, a little loony, corny, pretentious or well-meaning but stupid for feeling this way.
I’m not saying we have a monopoly on immutable and transcendent truths. But not all moral beliefs are equally thorny and complicated. One can start somewhere while conceding a lack of full and comprehensive answers to everything.
Here's a few. It is simply wrong, wrong, wrong to have almost a billion malnourished people while a part of the world is drowning in almost obscene levels of cornucopia. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong to have millions die of easily curable or controllable diseases when the global luxury retail market alone is upwards of $100 billion. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong to be the five percent of the planet’s population while consuming from 25 to 40 percent of its resources -- and going to war under these set of circumstances in the heart of the region producing the most strategic resource in the world.
That's all wrong and I think we all know it. And most everything in the modern, affluent lifestyle and cultural climate that surrounds us is designed anesthetize us to that knowledge. We have to take back our own hearts and minds before worrying about who else’s we’re losing or winning.
What to do about it all may not be simple but it has to start with reclaiming what we do know as that which what we do know. (And, no, I don’t mean that as a tautological statement. It might be one for a machine but it’s not one for us humans who often hold multiple levels of beliefs filtered through inconsistent ideologies.)
As a friend of mine once put it, it's like there is this evil person/machine throwing kids to a raging river. Do you go try to save one? What about all the others? If you decide it's more important to stop him for once and for all, what about all those kids who drown while we gnaw at his ankle, relatively unnoticed? And why not just give up rather than take responsibility, confront difficult choices -- and pretend not to have noticed?
And, yes, there are many thorny issues beyond that. But how does one even start thinking, start doing something about it all before being able to stand on some ground that feels like it’s there -- rather than in our loony heads?
I think the way out is the way we know anything else in this world: we reference our minds with other people’s minds. That’s almost how one can define insanity: it’s that state when your reality is so distinct, so incommunicable to others that you become trapped in your own mind. In the same way, being able to share the reality reflected in your mind with kindred souls is how people achieve that state of mind called sanity.
So, in many ways, that what the effort in this site is about; it’s not just about writing and it’s not just about being read. It’s about reclaiming both a sense sanity and a knowledge of that moral center -- mine, yours and ours. The more we get there, the better it is.
Posted by zeynep at 01:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Colors, Pictures
As you might have noticed, the site recently went through a visual makeover. I know a few of you liked the bright, blinding orange that it used to be, and asked me to keep it. Unfortunately for you, and fortunately for the rest of you who wrote in to complain, the webmaster or this site and I couldn't find a way to make the text readable in all the pages against that background...
Same with the semi-transparency. I liked the idea of having those school kids from Wamale, Ghana as the background but we couldn't make it work for all the browsers and all the platforms that are in use out there today. Well, specifically, it wouldn't work on MS Explorer so there went that idea...
Last, but not least, thanks much to all of you who wrote or posted encouragement, comments and criticism. This site is very much a work-in-progress and I believe the more collective --and reflective-- that work, the better it will become.
Posted by zeynep at 12:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Correction to Rumsfeld Bans Digital Cameras story
A reader has pointed out the "Rumsfeld bans digital cameras" story may not have been true. I had checked it out and traced it to both an UPI and AFP story -- but turns out both of them had used the same source so it wasn't multi-sourced. As far as I can tell, the story is not true.
The Department of Defense has issued a denial of sorts but it's not clear whether they are just saying that there is no new ban on cameras or that there are already existing guidelines that govern their usage -- which may ban them:
The Department of Defense denied adopting a policy against camera phones, saying imaging devices are already covered by guidelines for wireless communications by the military and the Geneva Convention’s treatment of prisoners of war. ... “As to cameras in prisons,” added McClellan, “Gen. [John] Abizaid or his commanders and lawyers may be looking at the risk those devices caused, but that would be a totally separate discussion.”
I think Rumsfeld's outburst during the testimony, quoted in the post about the camera banning, shows that he would certainly liked to not have them around.
My apologies for not checking the story out further before posting it and thanks to Alan for bringing it to all of our attention.
Posted by zeynep at 11:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2004
The background picture
People ask me about the background picture. Those are school kids in Wamale, Ghana and the picture was taken during the relatively heavily publicized trip to Africa by AIDS activist Bono and former treasury secretary O'Neill.
At the time of the visit Ghana's debt burden was about $3.9 billion. About 19.3 percent of its export revenues went to the never-ending servicing of that debt -- all the while one child in ten died before her fifth birthday.
According to my rough calculations O'Neill was trying to collect roughly $215 from each and every one of those kids. (Per capita income in Ghana was around $290 at the time).
I put that picture up not simply because those kids are sweet, like all kids everywhere, but because I think we all need to be reminded who we're demanding payment from. Read all the economic analysis, World Bank papers, Financial Times articles and what-have-you regarding the debt crisis you want -- and I do read them. It all comes down to something this simple and this uncomfortable: we are loan sharks and those are our victims.
I wrote a short bit about the media coverage of that trip in Extra!, the media criticism mag published by FAIR, but I see that it's not online. I'll dig it up and put it up.
Posted by zeynep at 02:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Welcome and intro
Welcome. This site has just been put up so a bit of patience in the beginning is required while things are tweaked and colors adjusted. I promise the orange will be less bright.
I've posted some of my articles from the last few years -- they are listed to the right under recent entries. Categories aren't fully functional yet.
The topics I have written about have mostly been AIDS, Africa, famine, and war but this site will be discussing many more topics in a part blog, part essay style.
Actually, most everything I write or think about is connected in my mind but they span over many categories.
My fundamental belief is quite simple: every life is worthy of equal consideration and everyone's time on earth is equally precious. The AIDS holocaust represents the most striking violation of this principle in my lifetime; that's why I end up writing about it a lot.
I have never forgotten my visit to the Dachau concentration camp as a child. I still choke up even thinking about it so I'm going to skip to the point I want to make.
In the camp, there is a structure built by Yugoslav Partisan Glid Nandor that looks like barbed wire from a distance but it's actually composed of starving, skeletal human bodies in pain twisted into the shape of barbed wire. Right next to it is an inscription that says "never again" in five languages. I have never shaken the feeling of standing right there, infinitely despairing and infinitely hopeful.
I still think of Dachau quite often -- that visit imparted on me an existential awareness which, quite honestly, most of the time, I find very liberating although from time to time it does feel crushing. I realize such an awareness could take a hedonistic turn but I do try to center it around the "never again."
And let me end this round of self-disclosure, carried out mostly because I believe any attempt to communicate should include some, with one more anecdote. During a class in college, each of us in the class was made to write ten attributes that were important to our sense of self on index cards and meditate on them as we tried to sort the bunch in order of importance, contemplate discarding some them, etc.
I could only come up with three major ones: empathy, curiosity and passion. Everything else was a mile away.
That is not to suggest that I'm capable of infinite empathy, boundless curiosity and endless passion! Rather, I am in awe of those qualities; even writing the previous sentence kind of took my breath away. What I mean is that, in this world, empathy, curiosity and passion are what I look to with appreciation, and sometimes envy, when I notice them in others and what I find gratifying to share -- hopefully through this site as well. (Well, okay, okay, enough with the pretentious stuff. I also do really, really envy people with perfect pitch, sense of rhythm and/or exceptional memory. I turn green with jealousy around them. Please do not tell me you know someone with all three. If you are one, feel free to not mention it. The list used to include the ability to do chin-ups but on March 31, 2002, I conquered that one after only a measly year of training.)
Posted by zeynep at 11:58 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
May 14, 2004
hello, world
hello, world
Posted by zeynep at 04:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack