Comprendre que nous avons le choix
Bâtir son propre toit.
Être fier de soi.

The Bleeding Cowboy.

aacemosp…

Female circumcision will never be stopped by promoting male circumcision. Circumcision of boys and girls is a psycho-sexual cultural disease, passed on from one mutilated generation to the next.

I have absolutely no idea if we could convince them to “switch”. We need more data on FGM amongst Canadians. I assume that they do not all just abandon the practice once they immigrate here; it’s the kind of thing that’s kept in the dark, so it’s impossible to know and thus we must be careful not to engage in wishful thinking. I doubt it’s the kind of thing that would last through the generations: I expect that second generation immigrants would be far less likely to get the procedure done.

Even amongst African countries, there are a lot of differences on the details behind the practices as well as in the beliefs that fuel them. The WHO has some data on the different “types” of FGM and their prevalence, but I don’t like how the different types are organised and it doesn’t tell us how they see the whole thing.

But, at the very least, it might be easier to convince them to modify the procedure than to stop it; though the sewing of the majora lips is probably hard to replace, since this has a clear “mechanical” purpose, while removing the clitoral glans — the other “problematic” form of FGM — could be removed, all while keeping the removal of the clitoral hood and labia minora (the girls often get a “package deal”).

The issue here is that there’s no way to enforce this. An educational campaign in these countries would be more useful than laws that can not be enforced and, rather than advocate a total ban, it would be easier to focus efforts on ending sub-sets of FGM so that people who practice it do not feel completely alienated. But maybe it’s better to just focus on ending FGM as a whole; it’s really hard to say.

Egypt, where the practice is almost universal, appears to have banned it in 2007. We’ll have to see how this turns out.

For my part, the line depends on the circumstance. Obviously we need some amount of government. The problem with mankind is that we are incessantly driven to mind each other’s business. Since that will never change, we need a government that is designed to be restrained in its actions. This core principle has been almost entirely abandoned in America.

I worked for Burroughs Corporation in the 1970s. It was founded by William S Burroughs (not the “Naked Lunch” one, but his grandfather), who invented a major improvement to mechanical adding machines. It went on to manufacture and sell cash registers, mechanical ledger accounting machines and electronic calculators. (It accidentally strayed into the computer manufacturing market – which is why I was there – without conspicuous success, and later became part of Unisys.)

Anyway, one of the old-guard salesmen told me that when he first joined, it was compulsory for salesmen (there were no saleswomen) to wear a hat (a real hat of the sort that went with a suit in the 1950s and 60s and that you tipped to a lady and took off indoors, not some crap LA backward-worn baseball cap).

In calling on a prospect in an effort to sell a machine, if unsuccessful the salesman was supposed to leave his hat behind so that he could make an appointment to collect it and try his sales pitch again.

Since the price and functional difference between Burroughs, NCR and what other brands of accounting machines that existed were minor, persistence probably paid off.

If the only girl in her early 20s I know is any guide, with her, it certainly wouldn’t.

For the example at hand, riding a bicycle without touching the handles. The spectator is left to his self-interpretation of the scene, he decides whether or not he cares and whether or not he finds it pretentious. To decide, he can only rely on the image you project : your expressions, where you look, how well you’re doing the action, whether you give attention to people around you, etc, and all of those things can be very subjectively interpreted.

With friends, the basis of interpretation is much more detailed, they can relate your present actions to your past actions, to how they perceive the way you think about those things, etc + all of the things related to the image you project at the moment.

With lovers, the basis is even more detailed, since honesty is much more present (in general). For instance, I might tell things which aren’t 100% true to my friends, to either protect myself, or just save time or any other reason. But those little lies or omissions should, in an ideal relationship, not be there. My conception of an ideal relationship is one of pure honesty, unbridled communication. Something hard to attain because it leaves each person very vulnerable to the other.

To get back to the point, we may represent this situation in a very practical and simple analogy.

To determine what someone is thinking, we need an exchange of information. Suppose two persons are placed in two separate rooms, the rooms are linked with a corridor blocked by a significant number of windows. One person (Actor) is doing an action and the other (Spectator) has to determine what the action is. Now if we relate to the bicycle situation, you are the actor, the person seeing you is the spectator (obviously ..) and what you are thinking is the action the actor is committing.

-If the person seeing you on your bicycle is a stranger, the windows in the corridor are dirty and sometimes deforming glasses, very little information gets by, so it’s hard to see what the actor is really doing.

-If the person is a friend, the windows are much cleaner and you can approximately see what the actor is doing. So the spectator can pose a mildly accurate judgment of what the actor is doing. Like your friends can pose a mildly accurate judgment of what you are thinking while riding your bicycle.

- If the person is your lover, the windows are very clean and it’s pretty obvious what the actor is doing. The spectator can then pose an accurate judgment. Akin to the judgment a lover might pose on your thoughts.

- In an ideal situation, with ideal lovers, then the corridor might as well be completely empty, without any windows to block out the information.

The percentage of chance to have an accurate judgment is directly related to the quantity and quality of the information we receive.

In a public situation, one way to project a more accurate image of yourself is to maximize the information you send, if people sending suggestive stares, tell them you’re not doing that to impress them … and/or be expressively clear in your attitude that it is not your objective.
Another pertinent question is to ask yourself whether you care or not what strangers might think of you. If you don’t care, no need to bother monitoring the information you send out.

It seems logical to say that transparency is the best way to ensure people don’t misinterpret you. If everyone could be sure what another one is thinking, many of the worlds problems would go away. In our society, a large part of our energy is sunk in ensuring everyone is honest, that no one tries . The justice system, government, locks or barriers of all kind, paperwork, MONEY, bureaucracy in general, etc etc. All are forms of communications or way to make this communication clear and unambiguous.

But in our society, with the way things work, with the fact that we know we can do things and get away with them without anyone knowing the what or the why, we will of course be pushed to hides our motives at some point or another, for sometimes very valid reasons, even sometimes just for fun, being mysterious can be a major character trait.

Just for fun, ask yourself this, what would you do, if you were sure everyone was going to know the what and the why of your action, as you were doing it. Privacy is one of the petty things we cling to in our petty human condition.

Rawr_Inc

However, this case does not justify subsidising a sitcom.

This, however, could be isolated by comparing national rates of family murders (mother kills daughter, man kills wife etc). I’ll have to look around later. I think that Statcan has numbers like these and if anyone else has such stats it’s the US.

As for a genetic basis, I can’t imagine how you could reasonably argue that. Cultural perhaps, but genetic? Extremely improbable. If it is true, then there should be little difference between Haitian immigrants in Canada and the United States.

Cheers,
Dussault.

Background news reports at http://www.guardian.co.uk/irving/

Why the high murder rate in the US? It’s genetic: http://www.politicsandcurrentaffairs.co.uk/Forum/us-politics-forum/64793-two-dead-shooting-college.html

Disagree. I have never been pregnant so I have never needed obstetric services. No have I ever required an organ transplant. However I don’t begrudge a share of our taxes going to help people who do need these services.

“For example, Radio-Canada (a francophone television network) is funded by the government. I don’t care for television, but it’s popular enough, though far less than its private counterpart, TVA. This goes to show that a private network can indeed provide these services, and apparently, in a way that is better linked to the wants of people (and let’s not speak of the popularity of US-based television shows).”

Again, disagree. Australia has a similar organisation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, http://abc.net.au, which runs 2 TV channels, 7 sound networks (2 of which are web streaming only), an extensive web site, but its content, especially in the case of radio, is quite different from anything provided by commercial broadcasters.

To equate the two kinds of service is like saying in the US that because there is Fox News you don’t need National Public Radio, although its audience is eight times that of Fox.

Interestingly NPR is not government funded, but it is not provided by a commercial enterprise either. (In 2003 Ray Kroc’s widow gave an endowment of $200 million, the largest gift ever to a US cultural institution. This has given it a degree of financial stability.)

“Agricultural subsidies are well-supported, in some countries the mix between Church and State is encouraged by the people, but the popularity of policies can not, in itself, serve as a justification.”

Popularity is often an important element of justification, but it needs to be balanced against collateral harm that the policy might cause. Agricultural subsidies are popular among US the farmers who receive them. They are also popular among US congressmen and senators who receive large campaign donations from subsidy recipients, but they are not popular among farmers in Mexico and elsewhere who have been driven off the land by subsidised US products that are priced lower than farmers’ cost of production.

A new crisis was subsequently created when the US introduced a subsidy for corn-based ethanol, causing the price of corn to skyrocket on world markets.

And if there was a referendum asking US taxpayers whether they wanted $20 billion a year of government money to go mainly to a few hundred farmers, I’m not sure there would be overwhelming support.

Interesting article on subsidies at http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/article.php?article_id=315

Good article also on US health system reform at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

Super ton site. Je n’ai pas tout lu encore, mais ça semble très intéressant. Tu écris bien alors ce sera un plaisir de te lire.

For example, Radio-Canada (a francophone television network) is funded by the government. I don’t care for television, but it’s popular enough, though far less than its private counterpart, TVA. This goes to show that a private network can indeed provide these services, and apparently, in a way that is better linked to the wants of people (and let’s not speak of the popularity of US-based television shows). And even if this meant that the television industry should collapse: are sitcoms, talkshows, reality TV and dramas — typical, trashy television — a fair reason to redistribute wealth? I believe not. I believe that some things are, but certainly not for television, which is mere entertainment, often said to be one of capitalism’s most crass forms of entertainment. We might as well subsidise circus’ (no offense intended towards clowns).

This said, you are right that we live, after all, in a democracy, but it is good to keep in mind that we live in a liberal democracy — a certain balance between individual rights and majority rights was intended –. In this case, people in Quebec are asking for the federal government to subsidise art (not that I’m happy to consider television “art”). I don’t see how that’s a federal matter, but the lobby is indeed strong and central government feels that if it taxes money to give back to us, that we will feel more “dependent” on them and thus maintain Canadian unity.

But I’m getting sidetracked: do you believe that democracy is necessarily right, because it seems that you are using “democracy” not just to explain why these policies exist, but to justify them. Agricultural subsidies are well-supported, in some countries the mix between Church and State is encouraged by the people, but the popularity of policies can not, in itself, serve as a justification. We need to look at the economics of agricultural subsidies, we need to look at those individuals who want no part of a Church/State mix.

Relativism is comfortable and it is even necessary for personal comfort, due to the fact that things are not always as we think they should be, but I believe that it hampers one’s motivation to find truth; we must look not just at what is popular, but at what is right, and though these, to a large extent, will match, they will not always do so.

Thanks!

In contrast to that mean-spirited parsimony, it budgeted to lavish a huge $10 million on films, http://www.budget.finances.gouv.qc.ca/budget/2007-2008/index_en.asp

Hmm.

A good government will take some account of the various wishes of its citizens in deciding how its money should be spent. In a democracy, if the citizens are sufficiently disenchanted with how government does this, it will vote those politicians out and elect some more.

The opera-lovers’ lobby is small but vocal in Australia and I dare say the same is true in Quebec. Making a big effort to attract government attention and government funds is not unreasonable as long as the process is transparent and it is not carried too far.

The mood in the English-speaking world, and indeed stretching to nations as remote from world financial centres as Iceland, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904, has been over the past couple of decades that if governments got out of the way, the market will take care of everything – whether it be an adequate supply of music CDs, poetry or Guinness.

The current financial crisis, while neither Australia nor Canada is as severely affected as many other countries, is a direct consequence of belief in the power of markets.

So there are occasions when the markets fail to provide adequately for needs. There is virtually no service that government *must* provide although there are many services that, if government does not provide them directly, it must engage firms on its terms to do that.

The US health care system is an example of what happens if health care is left primarily to employers and health insurance companies without governments taking an active role.

Whether a government decides to inject money into the market for opera or for movies; for art galleries or orchestras; to subsidise poets or subsidise farmers: that shapes the kind of society that that state becomes.

There are no grounds for saying that it is wrong for a government to put money into any of these, apart from the fact that many citizens think that it is a good idea. What you can say is that your personal preference would be that it subsidises none of them. If enough of your fellow citizens agree with you, eventually your government will get the message, and stop.

In the 18th century France was considered the centre of the arts. As Napoleon disparagingly remarked of the British, “L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers”.

It would be ironic if in the 21st century, Quebec discontinued all funding and government encouragement for the arts, leaving the province’s inhabitants, standing out from the rest of Canada, as “a society of shopkeepers*.