Posts by Simon Grigg
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Joe,
I would argue that Pancasila is still the central tenet of the Indonesian nation, and has, in reality, been strengthened by the democratic debate. And a debate there certainly is too, of a sort that Indonesia in its whole history has never been able to have. It's an ironic situation where the one nation in South East Asia that comes closest to the term "liberal democracy" in 2007 is RI.The challenges to Pancasila do come from the Muslim parties, who, I agree, have more of a voice, but this being a democracy with 86% professing the Islam faith, that's not unlikely.
Re Mecca....don't the hundreds of millions of Catholics in South America owe their allegiance to an old man in Rome.
The Saudis may have poured funds into this nation but so have the Japanese (by the billion, some as war repartions..for example the University in Nusa Dua, and the beach in Sanur near here), and the US, who are funding parts of the public education system (and providing every school in the archipelago with Sesame Street as well!)
A good Balinese friend of mine is politically active, and quite vocal. His group was approached with an offer of funding by a US aid person two weeks ago, they declined.
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There's always been this "support NZ music!" attitude, but that only goes so far.
And that I completely agree with. I've always been of two minds about our (voluntary) quota. I'm supportive, in that radio in NZ would not play any New Zealand music if they did not have to, we know that...you need to have a stick there, but I have always had the underlying feeling that the quota system, driven as it is by radio and record companies pandering to those radio hitmakers, has done enormous damage to what is being made by the majors, and the failure of so many NZ albums in recent times my be indicative of that. It certainly has nothing to do with piracy as a quick look through the p2p sites would indicate...you simply can't download any of it APART from Fat Freddy's Drop...who have sold 7 times platinum n NZ..
NZ music sells abroad when it leads, when it is odd & different, when it stands out....hence the FFD success, and How Bizarre and Don't Dream Its Over (which sounded like it came from another planet in 85, and radio in NZ would not touch it)..its why student radio in the US bought into Flying Nun...because it was weird....when you pander to radio playlists and follow the whims of programmers in NZ, it simply doesn't.
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Okay, back to Attorneygate:
This is intriguing stuff. I love the way these US scandals develop a twisting life of their own.
Gonzales was just the first twig on the tree.
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And Simon.... ladyboy-spotting? Not going troppo already?
ha, perhaps, but a 6' 2" ladyboy tapping on ones car window or swaying across the hood of the vehicle is hard to miss.
Do the openly gay nightclubs constitute tolerance....
Poofter bashing (by the authorities and otherwise) doesn't occur outside Islamic society of course.....
I guess what I am saying is that intolerance in religious tracts is not the only relevant factor in any society's treatment of it's gay community
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Upon checking, homosexuality is not even legislated against in Indonesia
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Is there perhaps an islamic country that could serve as an example of tolerance and liberalism?
I think I live in the beginnings of one right now...slowly. Grinding poverty, shitty education, and rampant corruption are, despite the odd aberration, this nations biggest problems.
And yes, homosexuality, whilst illegal as it is in many non Muslim nations, is fairly openly practiced and tolerated...the ladyboys who dance for coins, as they openly tout for trade at the intersections in Jogja are always interesting to watch.
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Darryl,
My major problem with James' position here is that he is able to use religion to absolve the west, by touting Islamic fundamentalism as the root cause of the planetary mayhem we all face and thus remove any requirement to take any responsibility, or even wonder why.He can justify to himself the bombs and missiles rained on a Muslim world from afar by Christian and Jewish nations, but cries extremism when a Muslim blows him or herself up. He can decry honour killings (often tribal in nature) as Muslim fundamentalism, using that to vilify a religion and a race, but ignore the violence perpetrated against women across non-Muslim Africa, and the Americas. I was horrified in one of those links I posted to see that an estimated 41% of US female soldiers suffer sexual violence in their career, and yet the official response to General Janis Karpinski's claim about women in the army afraid to go to the latrine at night for fear of rape, was to turn a blind eye.
Applying the term Muslim fundamentalism is a very nasty catchall that has removed the requirement to take any personal or state responsibility for anything at all. Why did they blow up that bus?....they were Muslim fundamentalists. Why did they bomb Bali? They were m/f..and so on.
The Muslim mainstream I encounter daily (now I read a little Indonesian) shows the same abhorrence to the senseless acts of violence as the non-Muslim world does. But that abhorrence is coupled with an overpowering feeling of hypocrisy, when they look at the West's support for Israel, when they see Fallujah, when they see the US' backing of Mubarak. There is an understanding, ignored by James, that these acts do not happen simply because the perpetrator is Muslim, they don't happen in isolation. The planes did not fly into the WTC because the pilots were were devout Muslim. Their religion may have given them the strength to do it, but It's a cop-out to blame it solely on the religious beliefs of the pilots, regardless of how fervently they express such beliefs.
How often was the Christian god evoked in the days and months after 9/11, and you would be naive to think that soldiers pouring over the border into Iraq in 2003 did not have a fairly heartfelt massed prayer session before they turned the key in the Abrams, paid for with bits of paper with "In God We Trust" boldly inscribed on them.
This is nothing to do with apologising for Islam (or anything at all), it's about reasonable perspective, and hypocrisy.
Damn the lot of them
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I'll also let you read through these without comment James:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/07/women_in_military/
http://www.alternet.org/story/38942/
http://hometown.aol.com/milesfdn/myhomepage/
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/1443232#transcript -
James:
http://www.godhatesamerica.com/index.html
Fifteen minutes looking thru a history of Christendom might help you too.
Che says the rest rather well, although he forgot Christian militias running murderously through Palestinian camps at the instigation of a Jewish military.
Now that the British government has accepted the methology of the Johns Hopkins research, and by extension thus, its result...remind me how many hundreds of thousands of Muslim souls were taken by the forces of a nation, whose money includes the phrase "In God We Trust", pursuant to that research
The United States has, statistically, some of the worst person on person violence in the world, west, east, third or first, although I believe largely Christian South Africa leads in violence towards woman, and murder, in which Catholic Brazil follows.
Hypocrisy, James...
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Neil
My initial point was that there were difficulties with the US and British containment of Saddam.
No, I disgree completely. Quite the opposite. Any military analyst (of which I'm little more than an interested amateur) would tell you that Saddam was absolutely contained by the end of 1991. He had no viable military force, no way to acquire one, and was no reasonable threat to anyone beyond his borders, and there was no evidence he was about to become one. Defectors in 95 indicated repeatedly, and independently of each other, that he had no weapons programs, and these was little to indicate after that that he had begun any. This was still true in 2003.
The no fly zone missions were largely bombing dirt, and the people on that dirt, over and over again after 1991. The pressure I mentioned had nothing to do with any imminent threat, it was more strategic than that, and had to do with bases on the mainland of the gulf region and power projection.. Once Saddam was gone they could be expanded and moved.
The PBS post is interesting in that it talks to that grander strategic design, but little else..the threat, so often referred to over the years, lacks, as always, any real detail and doesn't bear much scrutiny. Certainly there is nothing in that piece.
The concept that the US & The UK invaded Iraq because they were essentially bored with containing Saddam is a new one to me, but you will recall that in February 2003 the Iraqis offered the UN full unfettered and unsupervised access to the whole of Iraq without limit, including Saddam's palaces, but this was dismissed out of hand by the UK & the US. That to me speaks more to the intent of the coalition than the the idea that they had nowhere else to go beyond invasion.