06.15By far the saddest thing I’ve read today
From the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof today:
“Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs.”
Makes me wonder not only about their priorities, but maybe mine a bit, as well.
2 Responses to “By far the saddest thing I’ve read today”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This has been bugging me for a while. Every time I feel myself getting outraged – such as happened with the recent announcement of the ‘Canadian DMCA’ – I always feel this twinge of guilt, as if I’m somehow missing the point. After all, simply having consumer rights, let alone complaining about their erosion, means that my life must be pretty damned easy, right?
And I suppose this is the years of reading marxism coming out, but I still can’t help but feel that all of this ‘consumer advocacy’ is often a distraction. Yes, I’m annoyed that all of a sudden if I were to rip Ratatouille to watch it on my PSP, I’d be breaking the law. But shouldn’t I be more annoyed about how corrupt our political system is? Or the feet-dragging on alternative energy? Or the rampant sexism, racism and homophobia I seem to casually stumble across every day?
Probably. But, to be totally honest, I actually punched some numbers into a spreadsheet yesterday to see if I could afford the iPhone 3G. I guess I just hope that at some point, that’ll change. I dunno’. Theorist/thinker Slavoj Zizek once suggested that one of the primary ways in which capitalism works is to beckon you to enjoy things: do this, it feels good, stay away from things that feel bad.
So is there a risk that in this re-affirmation of ‘our values’ – i.e. the inalienable rights of the individual consumer – we’re inadvertently focusing our energy on the wrong targets?
June 15th, 2008 at 8:13 am
After reading the article, I came up with this conclusion…
To legislate against easy targets [consumers] generates money…
To legislate against hard targets [foreign regimes] costs money…
Political ideals may be formed under an altruistic umbrella but this certainly highlights that the global divide in emphasis concerning human rights is off kilter somewhere.
June 16th, 2008 at 11:43 am