Tag Archives: human rights

Kissinger – yes, still alive

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Kissinger. The Wall Street Journal had an article in which Henry Kissinger made some attention-getting statements about the insanity of current nuclear risk taking. Kissinger is apparently 99 so we may not have the arguable  benefits of his instincts much longer. (Although, I suspect he has whatever cyborg implants are keeping Dick Cheney alive.)

Basically, I see Kissinger as an immoral calculated risk taker. He has the blood of millions of human beings in Southeast Asia and South Asia on his hands because he believed the potential benefits to the United States was worth the risk and ultimately suffering and death that resulted. The immoral part was putting next to no value on those lives, in my view. There was a rational calculation involved, at least in his mind.

Assuming he has not become a more moral person with age, and assuming he is still rational, what he is saying is that the risks we are taking now are not worth it and are therefore not rational.

I don’t believe the ends justified the means even in Kissinger’s time, but one thing this highlights is the loss of any significant peace movement in our society and politics. It is rational to work towards peace and stability in the world. This has benefits to our country and to everyone else. Then add the moral layer for those who think morally and it seems like something we should all be able to agree on. Only the irrational AND immoral should support these policies. I consider myself a realist about human nature, but I still believe this is a relatively small minority. Everyone else is being manipulated, marginalized, or drowned out.

The rare earth rush

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Rare earths. They’re in all our electronics and mining them has been called the new “gold rush”. They’ve also been called the new conflict minerals, as in peasants are brutally massacred and driven off their land for them, and mining them irresponsibly is an environmental nightmare. Way too nightmarish for China, apparently, but not for Myanmar. And what is mined brutally and irresponsibly in Myanmar can be passed through companies in China and along to major household name electronics manufacturers who do not ask too many questions.

Ramping up recycling would seem to be an obvious answer. These minerals are valuable, and extracting them from existing products where they are already concentrated should be a no-brainer. There should be viable business models to get this done. And if that is not easy enough, recycling should be considered from the very beginning of the design and manufacturing process. If amoral companies aren’t interested, you can regulate them or tax them, at international borders and by international agreement. Easy peasy right?

Longreads Best of 2021

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(Too)Long(didn’t)reads.com picks a best article every week, and once a year they list all of them from the past year. I probably won’t have time to really dig into many of these, but there are certainly interesting topics here and they provide a look back on the year.

  • a look back at the January 6 attack on the US Congress by a fascist mob, just a few days after it happened
  • the story of the Covid vaccine development, and on a much less happy note, the Covid carnage in US prisons, and the crisis in India as it was happening
  • “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State” – I think I may have actually read this. What is happening there meets the UN definition of genocide and must stop. A wrinkle is that its genesis came shortly after the 9/11 attacks and U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Almost anything could be justified as part of the Global War on Terror at the time. Xinjiang is next door to Afghanistan, and is home to a Muslim ethnic group, and within that ethnic group a resistance/terrorist group formed which perpetrated attacks on the imperial capital. The parallels are surprising when you think about it. The Chinese approach is not acceptable, but did that make the American approach in Afghanistan any more acceptable?
  • Anti-Asian-American violence. I continue to be a bit puzzled by this. I am not questioning its reality, it just doesn’t seem to be happening in the places or to the Asian-Americans I cross paths with. I wonder if it is really new or something like shark attacks that happens periodically and the media suddenly picked up on and made a big deal of for awhile. People could also be reporting it more often now that they feel someone is listening and something might be done about it.
  • Salem, Massachusetts witch tourism

making people disappear is wrong

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This article in Project Syndicate is called The New Disappeared and is about dictatorships around the world that are making political opponents disappear, including Saudi Arabia. It’s certainly wrong, but it’s not only dictatorships doing it. Let’s not forget “extraordinary rendition”, where the U.S. kidnapped people off the street in friendly democratic countries, drugged them and bundled them onto airplanes, then delivered them to be tortured and murdered in secret prisons in places like Thailand and Egypt, all without any sort of due process.

Frontline in Yemen and Mosul

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PBS Frontline probably makes the most consistently depressing documentaries. They also somehow get consistently amazing access to war zones. They did an episode on Yemen recently, and they have one on Mosul coming up. I find these extremely disturbing – if the measure of success in fighting terrorism were taken to be the cost in civilian lives and human rights, I am not sure any of these wars would be worth it. Humanitarian war is an oxymoron – if our political leaders are waging war to achieve geopolitical objectives with little regard to human rights, the people need to understand how horrific that is and try to come to terms with it. These documentaries do a pretty good job at that.