The leader of Hamas is Not a Nice Person

The Leader of Hamas has urged people all around the world to kill Jewish children.

I stand by what I’ve said before: the ideas and beliefs and utterances of a political group are less important than the objective role they play. Someone who dies is equally dead if their killers were spouting and/or believing liberal pieties as if they were spouting and/or believing racist bigotry.

Nevertheless, it’s important to face up to just how despicable some of the things that Hamas says are.

They are also very stupid, given that, as Red Bed-Head at Lenin’s Tomb documents, Jewish people are not overwhelmingly pro-Israel and often strongly oppose its government’s policies, as do many Israelis.

The rise in anti-Semitic attacks also shouldn’t be ignored. The goal of the left must aways be solidarity against oppression across all boundaries of race, religion, and nationality.

These facts don’t change the central issues and dynamics of Israel-Palestine, but they deserve to be mentioned.

No Answers on Sri Lanka

So it’s looking pretty clear that the Sri Lankan government is going to finally win its civil war and destroy the Tamil Tigers.

Is this a good thing?

On the one hand, the Tigers seem to me to be pretty clearly no-hopers – they don’t offer anything much for anyone. Their main contribution to humanity has been to popularise the idea of suicide bombing. Thank you very much, Tamil Tigers.

On the other hand, have any of the factors that led to vicious pogroms and systematic discrimination against Tamils disappeared? Can Sri Lankan Tamils expect that the coming period of rule by a Sinhalese governmen will be different from the past?

On the one hand, an end to civil war is a very good thing – this civil war in particular has supposedly caused 70,000 deaths.

On the other hand, could a ceasefire have worked in the long run? Could concessions have stabilised the situation, or a compromise around federal autonomy ended the conflict peacefully? Is it perhaps that the Sinhalese electorate wouldn’t have allowed it – or is it more the monks and chauvinists who manage to get hardliners elected?

And will victory bring peace? Or will the remaining Tigers shift to a different form of warfare, operating covertly. The Hindu al-Qaeda?

The war that is soon to end cost a lot of lives. The offensive that will soon end it has cost a lot of lives. Who knows what the peace that will follow it will cost?

*shrug*

EDIT: there’s an article about this at Znet. Points it offers include:

-This does not mean the end of the Tamil Tigers, although it weakens them.

-President Mahinda Rajapakse, who already holds the portfolios of defence, finance and nation-building, has just made himself minister of the media as well” – this comes together with the news that an unpopular TV station gets attacked by unknown assailants.

-The suggestion that “the EU also recognises that they speak for many, if not most, Sri Lankan Tamils in denouncing the discrimination that Tamils suffer…the Tamil diaspora is unlikely to end its funding for the Tigers any time soon.”

In relation to that last point, I am put in minds of reports that described that LTTE’s foreign agents as forming a sort of mafia that extracted money from foreign Tamils through threats and violence.

Objectification and the Media: Imagining Equality

This is going to be similar in intent to my recent post on the legal system – a speculative attempt to consider possible ways that a system adapted to patriarchy could be changed to make it fit with sexual equality. In particular, I want to think about the media, in particular pornography, advertising, pornography-as-advertising, etc.

One way to conceptualise ‘oppression’ is in terms of the traits possessed by “the social subject”. (‘Subject’ here is a philosophical term, the opposite of ‘object’) The social subject is the person who thinks what “everyone thinks”, who knows what “everyone knows”, who does what “you do”, who notices what’s “obvious”. When a person is mentioned without any specific features being given, they will tend to be imagined as the social subject. Heidegger talked about ‘das Man’, everyone-and-noone’ (‘Man’ is German for what we would call ‘one’, as in, ‘whatever one does, it’s not enough’).

As is made obvious by our language, the social subject is, by and large, on the whole, in general and overall, a straight man. He also has class and race features but that’s not my focus right now. Because the social subject is a straight man, straight men find it easier to be subjects (to be people, to do person things, like decide, choose, act, take control, learn, be listened to etc.) while other people find it harder. Hence oppression in its various aspects.

Now one of the key things that subjects do is to look and to see. Objects on the other hand do not look – they are looked at. So from the beginning, in considering visual media, there is the basic ideology: men look at women. That’s why women’s magazines are full of pictures of women, while men’s magazines are full of pictures of…women!

Cruelty is not the Point

Feministe has an article about “crush porn”. That is, in order to sexually arouse viewers, you get someone, often a woman, often in high heels, to stand on small animals and listen to them squeal as they are slowly killed.

Hopefully you can already guess how I see this. The very fact that the issue of whether such snuff films can be banned without violating “free speech” has gone to various courts and judges to decide upon indicates how fucked up our society is.

The main thing that gets me is that this is all framed in a discourse around ‘cruelty’.

Cruelty is not the point. Talking about cruelty, or compassion, re-inforces the legitimacy of ‘humanely’ murdering or abusing animals when it is ‘necessary’.

If I rape someone, whether or not I slap them or rub chilli sauce on their eyes while doing it is not the main point.

If I own slaves, whether or not I deliberately and sadistically torment them is not the main point.

If I execute political opponents, whether or not I do it ‘humanely’ or painfully is not the main point.

Violating someone’s rights is the point. Killing and enslaving them is the point. As long as the structures of thought and institutions in which it is considered appropriate to enslave and kill animals persist, cruelty is an inevitable by-product, the froth on the stinking pond.

Animals do not deserve ‘compassion’ or ‘humaneness’ they deserve respect.