verging_on_random

Afghanistan

I was always ambivalent about the war in Afghanistan. On the one hand the USA clearly had the right (and arguably the obligation) to respond to the September 11 atrocities. On the other hand, the response needed to be directed at the right target, to be proportionate, and to avoid as far as possible the creation of new problems for the US and its supporters.

Apart from a few diehards, it seems to be generally accepted that the September 11 attacks were the work of al Qaeda, a group of people based in Afghanistan. It was therefore reasonable for the USA to go after al Qaeda. If the Taliban tried to shelter al Qaeda, it was reasonable to use deadly force to overcome whoever got in the way of capturing or killing bin Laden and his accomplices. So far, so good.

After that, unfortunately, things get murky. There are stories that the Taliban was prepared to surrender bin Laden as long as they were given convincing evidence that he was behind the atrocities but the Bush Administration decided it was going to take down the Taliban regardless. Maybe a handful of terrorist lives seemed inadequate compensation for 3,000 American ones, or maybe other considerations related to pipelines and so on intervened.

It soon became apparent that the invading forces did not know how to capture their target. In the end, after dropping lots of bombs and saying “We might have got him … can’t be sure”, someone decided to invade Iraq and we all know what happened after that.

Since then the signs have turned increasingly ugly. If the appropriate term to describe Iraq is ‘occupation’, it’s still apt to refer to a ‘war’ in Afghanistan: one which seems to be increasingly going in favour of the Taliban. In short, the situation in the ‘forgotten war’ is a mess which shares at least one thing with the mess in Iraq: nobody has come up with a plausible scenario in which the mess will be sorted out any time soon.

Two recent feature stories have painted a gloomy picture of the situation. The first is from The Guardian – here’s a taste:

In the provinces, the Americans are running a guerrilla army out of Bagram, trying to kill as many “Taliban” or “al-Qaida” as possible, while the British heroically re-enact the Zulu wars down in Helmand. Neither takes any notice of President Hamid Karzai, whose deals with warlords, druglords, Iranians and Taliban collaborators are probably the best hope of stabilising Afghanistan when the foreign occupation is over. But since that is claimed by Britain to be virtually never, the only certainty is a rising tempo of insurgency.

The New York Times takes a more measured tone but is also far from optimistic:

They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care, education and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”

In short, there appears little reason for optimism that things are going to turn out happily. Indeed if The Guardian is correct, things seem close to anarchy:

A reputed 10,000 NGO staff have turned Kabul into Klondike during the goldrush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves.

People in all the nations with forces in Afghanistan deserve more than mindless pap about The War on Terror and ‘if we lose there, they’ll follow us to the homeland!’ scaremongering. We deserve a carefully researched, evidence-based explanation of the mission, the strategy, the chances of success and the contingency plans. I sincerely doubt that such things exist anywhere on the planet. Hopefully Kevin Rudd as prime minister would demand that they be prepared as a matter of urgency.

Blogging for Dummies

New to blogging? Let me guess … an election is fast approaching and you feel obliged to try to make a difference, right? But you’re not sure where to start. Well you’ve come to the right place to learn the basics.

If you’re venturing into the blogosphere this late in the election cycle I bet it’s because the penny’s finally dropped that the country’s in danger of falling to the socialists. So you’d probably feel a bit awkward with the Bloggers for a Better and More Decent Australia, which is just as well cos they’re fully subscribed with a long waiting list. No, what you want is Bloggers against Rudd, where you’ll be right at home and the procedure is easy.

All you have to remember is to carry the following simple principles with you everywhere and apply them to all your comments on leftie blogs (don’t even think about starting your own, who do you think will read it?):

1.    The Howard Government has never made a mistake.
2.    Any mistakes the Howard Government has made would of been made by Labor too only twice as bad with a cherry on top.
3.    Kevin Rudd is only a puppet who’ll get replaced by Julia Gillard straight after the election (implying you know what’s really going on in the opposition is always impressive. You can also say Rudd doesn’t mean what he says - hey your bloke couldn’t lie straight in bed so naturally you assume Kevin is the same).
4.    The states are run by Labour (make sure to misspell it, it drives the lefties crazy) and they’re a hopeless joke.
5.    The Howard Government is responsible for every good thing that has happened in living memory and there’s no point trying to explain how to people who are too thick to get it themselves. Practise writing ‘You really don’t get it do you?’
6.    Anything in people’s lives that is slightly bad would be way worse under Labour.
7.    Trade unions control the Labour Party (always imply that this is a hitherto well-kept secret that Kevin Rudd is desperately trying to conceal).
8.    The Howard Government is completely and totally responsible for the great state of the economy because it works 24/7 at adjusting a lever here and pressing a button there.
9.    All economic decisions that have adverse decisions on voters are made by independent authorities that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Howard Government.
10.    Interest rates were 17% under Paul Keating, John Curtin appeased terrorists or would of done if there’d been any, James Scullin caused the Great Depression and Chris Watson smelled bad.

If all else fails, link to the latest piece by Gerard, Dennis or Piers with a comment like ‘Food for thought’ or ‘Read the whole thing’.

Congratulations on joining the grassroots move to stop the union bosses who are intent on taking over the best country in the world, and happy blogging!

Politicians and emotional labour

A comment by gandhi over at LP got me thinking about the life that politicians live.

In recent years, a few scholars have been researching what they call ‘emotional labour’. This is an expression used to describe work where the most valuable element is the worker’s ability to act out an emotion that s/he doesn’t really feel. For example, flight attendants have to act caring and attentive to customers for 8 hours at a time even though they detest some of their passengers and in the reverse way, prison guards have to be tough on inmates no matter how much they might secretly like or admire some of them.

Lots of people get by with what’s known as ’surface’ acting. This is like the checkout operator who looks past your shoulder with a mechanical smile and asks “How are you today?” You know they don’t give a shit if you’re dying, and they know you know … it’s just an act.

However when people engage in what’s called ‘deep’ acting, they convince themselves that they genuinely do feel the emotions they are supposed to feel. Thus a nurse might persuade herself that she isn’t affected by the deaths of patients because she has cultivated a sense of professional detachment; or a counsellor might persuade himself that every child he tries to help is a victim of something or other and deserves care and compassion.

Problems arise when deep acting clashes with someone’s genuine emotions: for example, deep down the nurse actually does feel anguish over the death of her patients, or the counsellor’s spontaneous gut reaction is that some of the kids he sees are appalling little shits who should have been strangled at birth. When someone’s real experienced emotions clash with the emotions they are deep acting, the result is emotional dissonance and a phenomenon known as self-estrangement. In other words, the person is unable to tell who they truly are because they can no longer distinguish genuine emotion from the emotion they believe they are supposed to feel.

When you think about it, politicians spend virtually all their waking moments engaged in deep acting. It’s inevitable that some of them will experience a sense of self-estrangement … or as gandhi put it in his comment about John Howard that prompted this post:

What stopped me in my tracks was the crazy look in his eyes: it was kind of pathetic. Shouting at him would have felt like harrassing a mentally ill person. His eyes were fearful and darting, but his body language was desperately trying to convey his sense of self-importance. It was sad, in a deeply disconcerting kind of way.

Self-estrangement would be a possible explanation, I believe.

Life imitates art

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 59-year-old German woman has had most of a pencil removed from inside her head after suffering nearly her whole life with the headaches and nosebleeds it caused, Bild newspaper reported on Monday.

Margret Wegner fell over carrying the pencil in her hand when she was four.

Sorry Margret, it’s already been done.

You’re special to your mum love

I really enjoy Australian Idol. Somehow it strikes a rare balance between people making complete prats of themselves, all the usual human failings of vanity and pretentiousness and immaturity, and regular heart-warming moments where someone who presents as a really likeable person is overcome with delight at getting recognition.

Not sure yet about this year’s offering. That annoying Lisa chick from 2006 has a lot to answer for if all this talk about an eruption of singer/songwriters on the show is any indication. There’s a limit to how many third-rate Damien Rices I can tolerate … one every four weeks is about right.

But already the show’s provided one of the highlights of the year, an absolutely sparkling example of contemporary self-obsession: an unattractive girl sobbing brokenly “I thought I was special but obviously I’m not”.

Sorry love, I know that’s a cue for the “of course you are” response but I was brought up never to tell a lie.

SBS rolls in tabloid gutter

The SBS network’s ‘Dateline’ program on Haneef Mohamed was a disgrace. The reporter, David O’Shea, should be ashamed of himself, as should the show’s editors and producer. It was sensationalist reporting of the lowest kind, ignoring the most basic standards of fact-checking.

Midway through the program, out of the blue, O’Shea blandly tells us about ‘a document’ that has since been plastered all over the Australian media as ‘an Indian police file’ that ‘links Haneef to al Qaeda’. It is still available on the SBS website, linked to one of its headline stories on its home page.

When you watch the show, O’Shea reveals nothing whatsoever about the mysterious document. He just says that while in India, “I was handed this document and was told it was the official dossier on Haneef”. The document itself looks as if it is meant to be some kind of police form but extraordinarily, the document has none of the things you would expect to find on an official form: no name of the police service, no file number, no headers or footers. In fact, it’s a document that anyone could knock up at home, right down to the picture of Haneef which appears to be a poor copy of the photo that was used by the Australian media for weeks.

In other words the document looks a lot more like an amateurish forgery than the official form O’Shea claims it to be.

SBS recognised the obvious deficiencies in the document and George Negus interviewed O’Shea in the studio about it. O’Shea claims he was given the document by ‘a senior Bangalore police officer’ who printed it off and gave it to O’Shea while the latter was in the police officer’s office. Yet O’Shea seems not to have asked any questions about it. His pissweak comment was that he put the document in his bag before the officer asked for it back.

Why would a police officer ask O’Shea to return a document that he’d just given to him, presumably because the policeman wanted him to have it? O’Shea reckons he saw the words ‘al Qaeda’ on the document before he put it in his bag. Does he seriously expect us to believe that a reporter glimpsing such a sensational scoop would not follow it up by asking more questions? Instead, he would have us believe that he put the document in his bag and didn’t make any attempt to get more information about it. Well if that’s true, SBS should get rid of him and engage a more competent reporter.

In the Negus interview, O’Shea speculates about what the document means. He never mentions any attempts he made to clarify or get more details. Moreover, anyone who thinks Haneef’s body language in his 60 Minutes interview suggested that he was not being completely frank should have a look at O’Shea’s performance.

The show was a mildly informative insight into the Haneef affair from his wife’s perspective. The startling ‘dossier’ interrupted the flow of the story; it came out of nowhere and led nowhere. It had all the hallmarks of a late insertion added to provide a sensationalist element and give SBS some cheap ratings. It discredits everyone associated with it.

I ceased to support public funding for ABC television quite a while ago. The sooner they sell the bloody thing the better. As far as I’m concerned they can put SBS on eBay at the same time.

More moral panic

OMG NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Is there no end to the depravity that the intertubes are bringing to society? Will nobody think of the children???

Well yes, actually, we are still lucky enough to have a few people in public life who will fight against the filth threatening to engulf our kids.

In the latest outrage:

School students are accessing Internet pornography on Bega Valley Shire Council library computers on the New South Wales far south coast, according to new claims.

Member for Bega Andrew Constance says he has received complaints that students are viewing “unacceptable material” at the Eden branch library.

Nurse … the smelling salts, quickly!

Mark my words, unless Teh Authorities take swift strong action to stop this kind of thing, it could lead to all kinds of social ills. Why kids might do all kinds of stuff … make penis pictures in wet concrete footpaths, start taking suspiciously long showers … who knows where it could end.

Let’s just hope the kiddies haven’t been exposed to vile filth like this … it might corrupt them beyond redemption.