A pacifist in America

Back in 1987, it was my first flight out of the country.  It seemed never-ending.  I was one of the many passengers who couldn't sleep, nor did I find the movie to be interesting.  It was not a pleasant journey, even though it was one hell of an exciting one.

I wandered over to the magazine/newspaper rack.  I don't remember now whether it was Time or Newsweek that I picked up.  I started leafing through that issue.

I was shocked when I read one report.  It was about freeway shootings in Los Angeles.  I was headed there.  Los Angeles was the city where my graduate school was located.  

Shooting on a freeway?

That, too, was my "welcome to America."  

The land of guns and violence.  The wild, wild, west of the movies was also a real thing.  Cue the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  Well, alright, I didn't know about this movie until after I had arrived in America.

My friend picked me up from the airport.  It was a long drive to his home, mostly on freeways.  I asked him about the shootings.  He laughed.

I was excitedly looking all around.  I was impressed with everything.  I had never seen such an uninterrupted flow of traffic. In India, cows and goats and humans all claimed the road at the same time.  But, not here.  And, all the vehicles were speeding in one direction, and across the barrier on the other side there were vehicles speeding in the other direction.  A gazillion lanes and everybody stayed within their lanes too!

And then the big trucks.  I had never seen such humongous trucks on the road.  Well, except the couple of monstrous heavy-engineering trucks used in the mines in Neyveli.  Whenever those trucks appeared on our street, my brother and I rushed to look at them.  And we always counted the number of tires that rolled past us.

But, here were trucks speeding at sixty miles an hour, and plenty of trucks as well.  Every truck that we passed, I kept staring at it and I always tried to get a view of the driver.  How could just one human drive such a giant with ease!

At one point, my friend mildly suggested that I stop doing that.  "Don't make eye contact with the truck driver."  Ah, yes, the shootings on the freeways of Los Angeles!

A few weeks after my arrival, there was buzz among the Indian students about a group called the dotbusters that had killed an Indian on the east coast.  They shot an Indian?  Was it a continuation of the wild, wild, west, in which they found a new kind of an Indian to kill?

In those first few weeks, I came to understand the American fascination with guns, and about the status of the browns.

Years have gone by.  32 years!

Meanwhile, the American fascination for guns has ramped up with deadlier weapons.  Violence continues against non-whites.  The president says that they are "fine people" and 63 million cheer him on.

This, too, is America!

Incel killers

In the courses that I teach, population growth comes into discussions either directly or indirectly.  In the straightforward discussions on demographics, I often note in passing that we need to watch out for one age segment in the sudden population growth in societies: Males between 15 and 25 years of age. 

I tell them that the biology of being males means that during that age there is one heck of a lot of testosterone rushing around in them and that if there aren't safe outlets for the resulting behavior, well, these young men can be destructive.  In the old days, people got married when they were young, and marriage and sex effectively tackled the testosterone.  And then there were wars to which young men were sent to fight--another outlet for testosterone.

Now, countries rarely wage wars.  We have become a lot more peaceful than ever before.  So, one outlet for testosterone has been preempted.

In most countries around the world where sex outside of marriage is frowned upon, males are marrying much later in life.  And meanwhile, sex is all around--like how a flick of the finger brings up more porn that one can watch in a life time.

And, now, we have a word for them: Incels.

In popular usage, the term primarily refers to the online communities of people who self-identify as involuntarily celibate. These communities are characterized by misogyny, the glorification of violence, and racism

The involuntarily celibates are not merely online though.  "Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can."  And more than a few of them are not mild-mannered people.  I have always worried about the destructive power of the sexually frustrated young men. 

The destructive incels are not that different from other violent actors whose ideology is different from his own, yet whose actions are similar

It is not difficult to spot parallels with the world of jihadism, where women and sex are similarly fixated on to an extraordinary degree.

Quick, think of the photos of terrorists across the world.  How many images of women flashed in your mind?  How many middle-aged men?  You see what I mean?

Like incels, jihadists similarly crave sex, but the circumstances surrounding its consummation are closely regulated by their religious norms, which prohibit sex outside of marriage and same-sex couplings. Among jihadists, even masturbation is frowned upon, although Osama bin Laden famously issued a masturbation fatwa, permitting it in times of urgent need.

There is more than mere correlation in all these.

According to Professor Juergensmeyer, “Nothing is more intimate than sexuality, and no greater humiliation can be experienced than failure over what one perceives to be one’s sexual role.” Furthermore, he argues, such failures “can lead to public violence,” which is performed to cancel out feelings of shame and reassert the claim to manhood.

What to about this?  Definitely not what Ross Douthat writes about!

Ninety years of (In)Fidel

The two major party presidential contenders are no spring chicken.  Senators who ought to have retired long ago continue to run and, even more bizarre is how they get re-elected; there are 25 current senators in DC who are at least 70 years old!  A quarter of the Senate!  I hope this guy, who has become highly unprincipled, is booted out even now--well before he becomes the next Strom Thurmond!

And then there is that one guy chomping away at his cigar:

Fidel Castro used the occasion of his 90th birthday to lash out once more against President Obama.

Wait a second.  Shouldn't he thank Obama for normalizing US relations with Cuba?  And how come thugs like Castro and Mugabe live such long lives?

What was Castro's gripe anyway?

"I believe that the United States' president's speech lacked stature when he visited Japan,” Castro wrote, “and it lacked an apology for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima, in spite of the fact that they knew the effects of the bomb. The attack on Nagasaki was equally criminal, a city that the powerful chose at random. It's for that reason that I must hammer on the necessity of preserving peace, and that no power has the right to kill millions of human beings."

Wait a second.  How many people were killed by Castro and his people?  I tell ya, we live in a world in which the likes of Castro and Putin and Trump can say anything that pleases them.  As my grandmother used to say, "கேக்கறத்துக்கு ஆள் இல்லை" (roughly translating to "nobody to question")

Meanwhile, the post-modernist extraordinaire marked the occasion:

Castro received a congratulatory call from Russian President Vladimir Putin on his birthday, according to the Russian leader's office.

Of course!

So, is it senility, or ideological rigidity, that made Castro rant against Obama?  A Cuba specialist, Ted , thinks it is a lot more basic than those:

To Henken, Castro's aversion to Obama is transparent. "He doesn't like Obama because Obama has stolen his charismatic thunder," he said.

Obama has certainly stolen the charismatic thunder from quite a few people around the world.  I am going to miss him, even though I have had plenty of problems with many of his political decisions--especially about war and peace.
 

Source

OMG! Another mass shooting that was committed by a woman?

A couple of years ago, when visiting the old country, I overheard one middle-aged father remark that his son and his friends were spending time in the internet places in order to watch "dirty stuff."  It was not even a comment that was addressed to me, which all the more became easy for me to ignore it.  I would have liked to tell him that it is only natural for boys and young men to respond to the signals from their internal biochemistry, and that as a parent he ought to teach his son how to deal with that biology, and about respectful treatment of the female.

Over the years, I have come to understand that it takes enormous effort to overcome the role of biology and the hormones.  Women have to deal with their hassles, while we men have to work against testosterone.  When they complain about their PMS and menopause issues, women have no idea how tough it is being a man ;)  It is only through a conscious and challenging effort that we can tame the testosterone within.

The old country was getting away from the terrible practices like child marriage just as Victorian ideas of sex got embedded within the culture.  Later, with the emphasis on higher education, it is not a surprise anymore that while girls and boys are biologically ready for sex even as they turn twelve--or even younger--marriage, unlike with my grandparents, gets awfully delayed.  In a culture where premarital sex is practically taboo, is it any surprise that boys and young men seek the company of the internet?

The good thing is this--owning a gun is difficult for Indian males.  Why is this important?  Almost always, the mass shooter in the US "is socially alienated, and he can’t get laid":

The facts of toxic masculinity are rarely discussed after mass shootings, as we beat the usual drums of gun control and mental health. Or toxic masculinity is blithely attributed to some patriarchal conspiracy that is unconsciously educated into boys. But consider the bigger, evolutionary picture. Social life requires the domestication of men. This is not some contemporary political interpretation of maleness. It’s a biological generalisation that applies to most social mammals. Intermale aggression must be turned into guardian instincts, if primate societies (such as ours) are to attain stability. Males must transform from little tyrants, competing for females, to selfless bodyguards and potential providers.

In the old days, we had wars that provided an outlet for the testosterone.  We sent the hormone-raging young men to go kill others.  Of course, the wars also led to raping the females--young and old alike.  Thankfully, that kind of killing and raping is in the past.  But, it means that we need to work that much harder to make sure that the testosterone-filled young men are being tamed, or are getting laid, or both.

Without a partner or sexual fulfilment, many men remain emotionally juvenile – aggressively impulsive, self-serving and potentially violent.
Young men who cannot find a place in the socialisation process will often take up a disdainful hostility towards domestication itself. The terminal rebel takes shape.

 In the old country, rapes and "eve teasing" are certainly tied to this dynamic.  Here in the West?

in the contemporary West, natural sexual frustration is intensified by a culture that throws sex in your face at every turn, reminding you that you’re not getting any. These are existential issues because they resonate – rightly or wrongly – at the core of how many men see themselves. The problem is that many of our social norms and cultural narratives increase rather than defuse resentment. And resentment is the psychological fuel that gets the fire of violence going, whatever the ideological justification.

So, any concluding thoughts?

Male desire and craving are not intellectualised away with some didactic lecture about how the brain or the economy works, or some sermon about what Jesus or Muhammad want from you. Desire must be redirected into some form of non-destructive expression, or defused, not just talked about. It’s the job of culture to help with this redirection, and the Abrahamic cultural traditions have outlived their effectiveness in doing so. We need to get working on some new cultural inventions to domesticate resentment and the hydraulics of hate, or the growing pack of weaponised losers will make political terrorism look tame by comparison.

Exactly.

One of the old jokes about the higher education system is that nobody cares about the education itself as long as the young men are able to have sex and if the alums and the public are happy with the ballgames.  The ballgames are also outlets for the testosterone; anybody who watches team sports--or better yet, been to a meet--knows well the war-like parallels.  Which is also why the author quotes my favorite intellectual, George Orwell, who "referred to international sport as ‘war minus the shooting’."

I have been saying all these for years; but, hey, who listens to me!  If only the wuss that I am had enough testosterone for me to beat the crap out of people who don't listen to me ;)

Freedom is normal

As a kid growing up in a left-leaning India, I was fascinated with Fidel Castro, and the legends of Che.  I distinctly recall watching on television--which was new to us back then--a meeting of the Non-Aligned countries that was held in New Delhi.   Fidel Castro went on and on, and I am now amazed at how I sat through and watched most of that rant speech on TV!

Fortunately, I grew up, and grew out of my socialist fantasies.

That conversion happened not because I read about America and how awesome the country is. I rarely read any American fiction back then.  I walked away from the left thanks to mostly Russian writers and, of course, George Orwell.

The Soviet Union that Solzhenistyn wrote about, and Orwell's Big Brother deeply worried me.  The older and wiser me couldn't understand the violence that the Stalinists and Maoists inflicted upon their own people, leave alone those on the outside.  The communist regimes were nothing but killers and anti-democratic rulers; Fidel and Che, it turned out, were no different from the violent and maniacal Stalin.

In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power.

I was, therefore, shocked to find Che as a beloved symbol in the American college campuses.  Did people not know about the violent Che?

Later, after the events of the fateful 9/11, Che's use of violence to achieve his version of utopia came across to me as no different from how Osama bin Laden didn't find anything wrong in killing civilians.  Yet, while no rational person would walk around wearing an Osama t-shirt, thousands all across the world, including here in the US, think it is cool to wear a Che t-shirt.  I suppose Osama, too, would have gladly worn a Che t-shirt if only Che weren't an infidel!

Source

In the years since 9/11, violence has not been caused by commie radicals but mostly by maniacal radicals who falsely believe they are working on behalf of their prophet and the Islamic State!  I suppose if Fidel, Raul, and Che could create a Communist State, and maintain it for decades, then we should not be surprised at the Islamic State and its ability to lure young men to its cause.

I needed solace after the Orlando shooting.  I had to get out of the madness of this world where a country allows military-style assault weapons to be sold to civilians at the neighborhood store.  I wanted to understand the insanity behind a human killing dozens of people only because they were dancing and enjoying life.

I hit the books.  The summer reading list, that is.  I reached out to my trusted authors from the part of the world where suffering was a way of life.

Svetlana Alexievich turns out to be wonderful counselor, even in the introductory pages.  She writes:

I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them.  Do they know what communism is?

I particularly like one line that Svetlana Alexievich has in those first few pages.  When writing about what freedom is, she channels this:

it's when you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.

Thus, with a mass shooting in Florida, the cosmos figured out for me which of the three books I will read first.

Choosing the first book was my biggest problem, which means that I have a darn good life.  Especially, when I project this against the backdrop of the tragedy in Orlando, where no amount of books and talk can ever replace the lives that were lost and the lives that have been traumatized.

Some day, soon I hope, we humans will understand violence for what it is and work towards peace on earth.

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood ... not!

I woke up in the early hours of the morning as I always do.
I made myself coffee and breakfast, and had them while reading the paper, as I always do.
Yet another morning, and yet another day.
For me.

But, it is not yet another morning and yet another day a few miles down the road from me in a town called Roseburg.

A gunman killed nine people and injured seven others during a shooting rampage at Umpqua Community College on Thursday morning, shocking residents statewide and drawing the eyes of the nation to the stunned rural community.

For me, this is merely yet another morning.  But there in Roseburg, and to the families of the nine who died, this is the first morning of the many that they will have to face with heavy hearts and with tears on their faces.

When a death happens within our immediate circles, it is one of the most devastating events of our lives.  "When you lose someone very close to you, the very fabric of your life is ripped to shreds."  When it happens to a neighbor, we feel the death for a few minutes perhaps.  When it is in a town over, maybe it is fodder for conversation.  When people die unnatural deaths in a Syria or Iraq, we merely shrug our shoulders and go on with our lives.

Such is life and such is human behavior!

Ironically, yesterday began remarkably optimistically.  I scanned the New York Times, as I always do, and read Nicholas Kristof's column.  Ever since I came to know about Kristof's Oregon connections, I have a special warm, soft, corner for him.   His column was celebrating the most important thing in the world that we do not talk about enough: "a stunning decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease."

I was pleasantly shocked.  After all, Kristof usually writes columns that are depressing to read--they are about prostitution in Cambodia, or fistula in Congo, or the stoning of women in Pakistan, or ... Even he acknowledged that in his column with "You’re wondering what I’ve been smoking!"

I then tweeted about that column:

What? @NickKristof writing that the world is ok and is getting even better? What has happened? Good for him and us http://t.co/LySZHO5CwO

— sriram khe (@congoboy) October 1, 2015

Soon, I was getting email updates about that tweet--all because Kristof had re-tweeted it.

That's how yesterday began.  I then went to the classroom to engage with students for two hours.  I came back and checked the news feed.  The day was no longer yet another day.

By then it was already the second of October in the old country.  It was the birth anniversary of Gandhi, who lived preaching and practicing non-violence.  But then his life, too, was ended by a bullet, as were the lives of the nine in a town a few miles south of where I live.

This too shall pass.  Many more will die unnatural and violent deaths.  We won't really care about them unless it happens to one of our own.  Such is life and such is human behavior!

On sex and violence

A while ago, I was, yet again, the eldest in a group of five adults.  I am getting old.  I mean, OLD!

It was down to a serious question for the evening--which movie to watch.  As with the times, it was a decision not about going to the movies but to bring the movies home.  And, as with the times, not to bring the movie home by first going to video rental place but to stream the movie via Netflix.

When I can easily recall the old days in such mundane situations, well, I am OLD!

In her list was the movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno.  "My friend watched it and said she really liked it" the young woman said.

"Oh, it is an enjoyable movie, and at times hilarious too" I replied.  I told them how I ended up watching it a second time with my daughter and son-in-law.  Plus, I like Seth Rogen and, of course, Elizabeth Banks who is so wonderfully gorgeous with an awesome easy style.

I could sense the hesitation because of the "porno" in the title.  And with me as the old man in an otherwise youthful gathering of four that evening.  Talk about being the fifth wheel!

I wanted to engage them in a discussion of nudity and sex.  And compare those with violence.  This young crowd routinely watches violence in movies, and plays violent video games. People are tortured. Heads are blown off.  Blood oozes out.  I wanted us to talk about how and why they were ok with all that violence, and even enjoyed them, but they were hemming and hawing about Zack and Miri because of the word porno in it.

But, I didn't get into those discussions.  I am OLD and an academic, which means it is best to shut up in the company of youth!

I was never a fan of violence to begin with.  And with every passing year, I am even less interested in watching violence on the screen than ever before.  Getting OLD means such transformations too?

A couple of days ago, I was watching this C-Span interview with Dr. Hassan Tetteh, which made me think more about violence.  In the comfort of our homes, we are so disconnected from violence and war.  Thankfully, yes.  But, in my mind, the violence in movies always end up reminding me of the real violence. When Tetteh described the kinds of trauma situations, I felt my stomach in knots--and this was without viewing any visuals of the violence.  

I suspect that I would literally throw up were I to witness something like a car-bomb blast with people losing limbs.  Tetteh replies with a yes to Brian Lamb's question on whether even medical professionals really do sometimes throw up when the trauma victims come in--despite all the training they go through in which they would have seen plenty of blood and gore.

Zack and Miri has nudity, yes. Breasts jiggle and the penis dangles.  And, yes, the simulation of sex.  They all fit into the storytelling, which is about the emotions that Zack and Miri feel for each other.  It is a love story, perhaps told in a tad arty manner.

Yet, the make-believe sex scenes, where there is no real sex act, threatens our morals immensely more than the make-believe violence and death, where no real blood is drawn and nobody really gets killed?

In the news feed, I read about a movie having to go through edits in order to avoid the NC-17 rating and go with a market-friendly "R" rating.  Evan Rachel Wood, the lead female actor in that movie, had this to say in protest:

After seeing the new cut of Charlie Countryman, I would like to share my disappointment with the MPAA, who thought it was necessary to censor a woman's sexuality once again. The scene where the two main characters make "love" was altered because someone felt that seeing a man give a woman oral sex made people "uncomfortable," but the scenes in which people are murdered by having their heads blown off remained intact and unaltered.

I am no flower-power pacifist who chants that old slogan of "make love, not war."  But, ...

Violence and humanity. Some are more important than others?

There is not a day when there is no violent act anywhere on the planet.  Humans being humans we kill and rape and do things that many of us might not even be able to imagine.

As atrocious and horrible those incidents are, I suspect we never get to hear and read about most of them because they just don't get reported.  Or, if they do show up in the news, it might be geographically restricted.  And then there are some that get global coverage.

Almost always, the tragedies that strike the poor countries get very little coverage compared to events in rich countries.  Here too we display that human trait, I suppose, in being a lot more fascinated with the lifestyles of the rich and famous while condemning to anonymity the poor and the disadvantaged.

The Boston violence was an awful act.  Horrible and senseless violence.  I certainly would like to torture the life out of the crappy humans who carried that out.

But, even within the US, we have witnessed a lot of violence.  The killing of children and adults at a school in Connecticut.  The killings at a Gurudwara.  The movie theater killings.  The reactions to each of these events seem to be very different.  It is almost as if we have some kind of a metric that guides the media, social, and political responses to the killings.

Now, all those are within the US.  Meanwhile, bloody violence happens on a daily basis all around the world--a lot more in some countries than in others.  In Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Congo or ... the magnitude of violence against civilians is a lot more, and on a daily basis.  Most of those don't even blip in our radars.  And even if they do, they don't stay on the radars for long.

The violence itself depresses me.  As one who even prefers to avoid verbal conflicts, and as one who doesn't even like the idea of water pistols, I literally feel weakened when I watch the blood and gore of the violence. I force myself, sometimes, to read and watch news items about them because I tell myself that I can't simply close my eyes and wish them away.  I owe it to my fellow humans to understand such suffering.  And, of course, I need to do this so that I can be a better educator.

On top of the violence that depresses me, I find it terrible that a human life is not the same anywhere on the planet.  There seems to be a collective ennui when it comes to the loss of the lives of humans who were doing nothing but tending to their daily lives in some parts of the world.  The innocent civilians who die by the hundreds and thousands in many, many countries of the world do not make it even to the back pages of the papers, leave alone the front pages.

A strange interpretation of "what it is to be human" that we walk around with when we do not pay attention to, for instance, the following from recent days:

• An explosion in Pakistan has killed at least 16 people and wounded dozens more
• Blast in Bangalore injures 16
• Meanwhile, at least 35 dead and more than 150 injured as a result of an earthquake in Pakistan
• And last Sunday was that horrific attack in Mogadishu
• The civil war in Syria rages on ... 

A human's life in one part of the world is not the same as a human's life in another part of the world?  How can that be!  As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice:

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that

Well, here is to hoping for peace on the planet.  Everywhere on the planet.

Quote of the day: on life

the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room. There is this complexity which seems to me to be part of the meaning of existence and everything we value.

Chinua Achebe

BTW, in the interview, reference is made to the incident at Jos.  A horrible massacre, which is, unfortunately, the latest one in a long series of violent incidents:

332 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the village of Dogo Na Hawa, the Nigerian Red Cross said Wednesday. Human rights groups and the state government say that as many as 500 people may have been killed in the early hours of Sunday morning, in three different villages.
Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.

Death and violence continues ...

So, at the risk of sounding like Nicholas Kristof who increasingly seems to report on nothing but the macabre, here are some recent developments from some of the geopolitical hotspots where the US has some serious involvement:

• A bomb attack on the last day of a major mourning ceremony in Iraqkilled 41 Shiite pilgrims and wounded more than 140 on Friday in an atrocity blamed on Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein loyalists.
• Two bombs in the Pakistani city of Karachi have killed at least 25 people and injured more than 50.
• A motorcycle bomb struck a crowd watching a dog fight Friday in southern Afghanistan, killing at least three people and wounding more than two dozen others.
• Pakistani Taliban claim bombing that killed 3 Americans
• And, in a news item that is stranger than a report from the Onion, "Stone pelting in Kashmir valley appears to be fast turning into a lucrative 'business' for some unemployed youths offering this 'service' for a price."

Have a nice day!

We come in peace. Really!

In my intro classes, when I discuss demographic transition, I point out that as much as we like to think that humans are large-scale killers, well, the more time progresses, it seems like wars and the like kill fewer percentage of humans than in earlier centuries. Life is, by and large, quite peaceful for most humans on the planet.

Steve Pinker begins his essay on that very note. He writes:

Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

So, what is the reason for this decline in violence, while we walk around thinking that life is getting worse? Hmmm ..... can you do some work and read his essay? Pinker concludes:

We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

Thanks to A&L Daily for the link.

Fox News v. Al-Jazeera: The war of the worlds :-)

I simply wonder how the world might be if all the nearly seven-billion people could watch only two television news channels: Fox News and Al-Jazeera.  I find even the thought experiment too much to handle--maybe I am not brainy enough, eh!

Both the news channels are openly partisan.  Of course, Al-Jazeera beats Fox hollow in terms of its total disregard of neutrality and objectivity.  But, it will make quite an interesting study.  Maybe subject volunteers to news only from these two channels for about a month, and then have them read newspapers or watch CNN.  What do you think will happen to those volunteers?  Brought a smile to your face, right?  

In a well-written piece in the Boston Globe, Eric Calderwood, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, discusses Al-Jazeera, and ends with:

In a way, that's the paradox of Al-Jazeera's war journalism: It is flagrantly political, but accompanied by a real curiosity about other perspectives. It also makes me wish for something else: A TV network with the bravery to show the war imagery you can see on Al-Jazeera, but the integrity to do it in the service of peace, rather than the service of a side. Its violent imagery, however unpleasant, would be a strong stand for the individual against violence, and for human compassion against easily fanned hatreds.

Want a taste of it?  Here is an Al-Jazeera report on the Gaza situation: