The Mitt, the Fox, the Bear and Cinderella

Mitts is on my lap, I'm flicking loosely through the weekend papers, suddenly there's Megan Fox in full page glossy. With several bemused witnesses, Mitts throws his arms out, hands shaped into claws, and says "ARRRRR!!"

I'll say no more.

He's chatting a bit now, getting close to articulating clear words. Actually he uses all sorts of words, I'm just not sure what language they're in. Anderss, Zizzess, Daadahh, DATZ... (well, I know the last one is "cats") ... The proto-words are strung into phrases now, making sense in their own way just like his quite rhythmic table drumming and xylophone pounding.

Close to walking (holding himself up and moving along things) and close to talking, his frustration is palpable.

Random speech-related segue to Bear. Yesterday evening she's opened up a book of Fairy Tales, arrived at Cinderella, and promptly started telling her own story based on the pictures. It went something like this:

So they put the cat up on it and and yeah the cat was on there and.... these ones went over here and then there's the cat. (turns page)

A fairy there is a fairy and she BOUGHT A PUMPKIN there is a pumpkin and the fairy went, yeah! (turns page)

So YEAH there was a wedding and there LOOK they went and there was a WEDDING and, and THERE they are.

A girl is determined to read, I'm as proud of this as her efforts at coming up with a story (she's not familiar with Cinderella yet).

Nobel Nothings- Could Obama become the next Kissinger?

While he made a bad situation worse by defending war during the Nobel ceremony, a nasty possibility is emerging from his decision to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan.

Among the allegations Christopher Hitchens levelled in his book 'The Trial of Henry Kissinger', which I admit I read several years ago, was a fairly convincing argument along the lines of 'Kissinger and Nixon took unilateral steps to flummox peace discussions late in the '60s and drew the war out, largely for political purposes'. Resulting in tens of thousands more people dying.

While it may not be clear for many years, what if Obama is essentially making his decision to continue in Afghanistan against a preponderance of the advice he has received, at least in relation to the likelihood of success there? What if, instead, this Nobel Prize winning Democratic President has made a decision to continue the war, increasing its intensity (and therefore the casualties that will inevitably follow on all sides), because he believes this is essential to his own domestic political survival?

Hugh White's recent article in The Monthly suggests, by implication, that this might be the case.

We might yawn at the idea of becoming upset at politicians acting cynically to get votes, but when it comes to waging war, this could open him up to allegations (as Hitchens tried to do to Kissinger) that he has committed a breach of the laws of war, maybe even a war crime.

Ironically, Bush and Blair may have had better justification for going in at the beginning (to shut down Taliban terrorist training camps, which we know existed and which were used to attack the US) than Obama has for 'surging' the troops at this point.

I hope this hypothesis is wrong, I still have reams of respect for the man, and I hope (against the odds it would seem) that he actually succeeds and brings peace there.

Tuvalu is 'developing', China is a superpower

On Climate Change Tuvalu has a different view to China and India. That is because Tuvalu really care about climate change, for obvious reasons.

'Developing country' is a relative term, so that countries can claim such status if they have less wealth per person than the US or Western Europe. But in the case of China and India, countries that are part of the strategic environment affecting Australia, that choose to spent an astronomical amount of their wealth on military capability and that are nuclear armed, are effectively asking us to take a bigger hit on their behalf.

I think far more than $10 billion should be pledged by the 'wealthy countries' to support poor countries as part of this process, but allowing China to access that support, while racing to built its already ridiculously large military up to intimidate the neighbourhood, seems a bit foolish. The issue probably goes far beyond Copenhagen to a debate about where the world's developmental welfare should be directed.

In my view China does not care much about emissions. They simply aren't that sort of nation, they would see no major issue with replanting millions of people away from the coast. They are an old-style realist strategiser and they are basically looking at this process to advance their position relative to the other players, in particular the US.

Which seen entirely from their vantage point, is probably understandable. But if Australia ends up giving them handouts that would be a bit bizarre.

Sharman Stone was soft on Asylum Seekers

One of those moments where you wonder where some people will stop. Sharman Stone, apparently, was trying to steer a middle course between moderates and "the Right" on this issue.

....?!?

If she was the voice of moderation, I owe her an apology for streams of vitriol already hurled at my TV set. There I was thinking this woman must eat babies for breakfast, and in fact she was a moderate, possibly even being forced to run a harder line than her own conscience preferred?

Well, apologies to Sharman, I'm sure it's not biologically possible that you are some of the things I called you anyway. But what exactly do The Right want? The Right who are now in the ascendency, apparently responsible for dumping Sharman from her post. What do they want to do to refugees that she wasn't already advocating?

Do they want to kill them? I'm being serious, there's not much left. Do they want us to finally, once and for all, dump the Convention itself and its core rule of non refoulement? Just send people back to war zones, overt oppression, torture, genocide, whatevs?

Go back to picking out the white ones?

Or just burn the boats and shoot them in the water? I mean, Sharman was basically banging on about how Rudd's policy, which still uses offshore detention, is too soft. If she was a pinko by the standards of something called "the Right" that's apparently even further to the right, what exactly do they want?

I can't wait to find out. Race and security politics, the high water mark of Australian civilisation.

Oh Don't Go There

I must admit I was a bit shirty on the phone to my mum last night, putting in the odd dig at my old man that probably could have been left on the shelf. Occasion for the call- to suggest she suggests he calls his old school mate, who he's also been in the process of brushing off and rejecting, because his old school mate is about to die from cancer.

Possibly it wouldn't hurt you to let him chat about what's on TV for ten minutes, Pa?

Anyway, I tell her happily about where Mitts is at: pulling himself up on things, standing (in fact yesterday he started 'stepping' along the edge of the couch while standing, an exciting milestone!), blabbing lots of semi-articulated words like "da da dgggst" and "anderzz" and "itstst", yanking at books, and bashing enthusiastically on the xylophone.

"Ooh dear" she says, unenthusiastically. Then, without directly relating it to her comment, she starts to babble on about how you can start to tell if kids are going to 'be musical' at this age.

Context- Mitts is 11 months old.

She continues. At this age apparently I was waving my arms around like a conductor to my favourite music, Gilbert and Sullivan (I'd like to point out my tastes did evolve, thankfully). Mitts has actually done the same to Mussorgsky but I leave this out, because this already ridiculous piece of historical fluffery takes an ill-advised turn.

"I knew you would be musical then", she slaps in for effect.

... (pause as my blood pressure goes up a few dozen kilopascals)

"Shame that was discouraged" I understate.

"OH but we BOUGHT YOU saxophones and lessons and things" she jumps back, the usual themes. I was bought something. What more could a kid ask for?

"Yes but you-know-who then actively discouraged me" I reply, still holding back about 5 cannons of rising anger.

"Well you've got to get over it sometime" she retorts, again a bit too quickly.

"No. I. DON'T".

She shifts topics and moves away, wisely. I fume long after we finish.

Yes I got some lessons when I was very young, and a guitar, and much later was able to convince them to switch from a small car to a sax for my 21st present. I don't deny this was financially fortunate. But it counted for sweet F.A. because when this became my overwhelming passion, something I was practising several hours of every day, something I was actually getting very good at, my father attacked this love of mine with a venom I still can't fully make sense of, as part of generally attacking everything about me that he didn't identify with.

In fact in a big worked-up rant about how music was a waste of time and I had no talent anyway, he said he would support me studying "anything EXCEPT music".

This in the context of whining on all his life about how his father didn't support him going to Uni, and how I was so lucky because I'd be given all the support I needed. As it happened there weren't any relevant courses available within 1000 miles of where I lived, and the only courses I was aware of charged fees, so just as when he was a boy, in this particular context, a complete lack of support did make a difference (I actually applied for the Army so I could afford to send myself to music school, a story for another day).

Coupled with constant put-downs about how if I had any talent it would be more obvious, I'd go nowhere, be a loser and so on, this kinda fell short of encouragement.

My mum didn't actively participate, but she didn't do much to contradict this message either, until I was in my mid 20s. I remember vividly the day she said something that sounded vaguely encouraging, remember being touched by it, while reflecting on how it was an offer of hay to the horse that had already bolted. I'd ground myself up with frustration and self doubt for about 4 years when music was all I wanted to do. The dreams had blurred, the time mostly passed.

So it wasn't her fault, but in her constant babble about how when I was a little bub I did this and that before I was the age dot, I don't need her to make some claim on me being a child prodigy, or that being something she spotted and encouraged. Leave it alone, for fcuk's sake.

And here's a message to people who have at some point colossally screwed up a relationship: moving on is possible, but don't ever, ever tell us to get over it. That's a way of saying you don't really think you did anything wrong. And that's just a way of inviting a whole pile of visceral anger to leap out of the place it's been buried and fly down your throat.

I'll finish on a lighter reflection, on the merits of the internet. At the time of the arguments above I was living in Darwin, and my knowledge of the courses available to me was limited by what was on offer, or in the library of, the local Uni-Tafe. I did not know, and had no immediate way of knowing, that there were courses at places like Box Hill College that taught exactly what I wanted to learn.

It is sometimes hard to imagine that just a few years ago that sort of functional information simply wasn't available. If you didn't know something was out there, or where to start looking, then that was that. All I knew about was the Conservatorium in Sydney, and a whole bunch of fantastic music schools in the US that I could attend if I saved about a year's salary....

Turnbull is no crusader for moderate liberals

Not this time. He had the potential. But even as he started tying the rope for himself on the ETS, he was still reffo bashing and playing to an even darker, more right wing audience than the ETS doubters.

So it actually makes no sense that he made a stand here. And while it may be tempting for we of the left to allow him the glory of his purported martyrdom, seen in context his conduct has little to commend it.

He chose to join the party that hogs the nomenclature of 'liberal' while taking, in most cases, conservative positions. He then fought hard, successfully, to lead it. True, he argues that he came to reform and modernise, but if anyone out there had the contacts, wealth, reputation and sheer bull headed confidence to start a new party it would have been him.

More importantly, when things started to sour, post Utegate, he did not hesitate to go into the muck with the very worst of the Right's dog whistling, race baiting, divisive, misleading use of the wretched asylum seeker as political pawn. Never mind the ETS, this was the real test of his 'liberal' character, ethics and bona fides. He failed spectacularly. He got into bed with Sophie Mirabella, she gave him fleas then unsurprisingly joined the deserters yesterday.

The 'fleas' will never leave him. No matter how high minded he feels about his present stand, it will always stain his record that he failed a handful of miserable people, fleeing a well documented war, well documented concentration camps in Sri Lanka, well documented bigotry and official discrimination, and in the process failed small L liberalism and any notion of modernising his party.

Which begs the question- why such a vehement stand on the ETS? I think it is an incredible case of pride and poor political judgement, rather than a noble stand for the future of humanity. I may be wrong, none of us can see inside Turnbull's head. But leaving the policy aside, and my personal preference for progressive action on emissions, his conduct in relation to his party and fellow parliamentarians was appalling, aggressive, and ultimately delusional. And surely if he had offered a conscience vote on the issue there would have been enough votes to get the ETS over the line, while allowing the god-and-sheep botherers their own version of integrity.

He's on his way down now. I don't mean to dig into him too hard, because on his failings I feel disappointment as much as anything. I resent, but understand, the unpleasant pressure and political compromise that led him to the path he took on refugees. I don't believe he believed in the gutter trawling policy position he allowed attack dogs like Mirabella to take.

He may yet spring up in politics somewhere, in a guise that more closely matches his more progressive liberal politics, perhaps even a party or organisation that would swear itself off race baiting, flag waving, god bothering and reffo bashing. You never know. And if he does, good luck to him...

Blood as Bear bites tongue badly

It happened so fast I barely turned my head and it was done. She was wriggling forward on a fold-out chair, not minxing, just moving to the edge to get down, when it unbalanced- slammed - forward, her mouth hit the edge of the table, her head flew back and she fell underneath onto the paving.

She cried hard, in wave after wave, for a long time. Blood streamed out of her mouth, reminding me of the rivers of blood when I once bit through my own tongue, slamdancing to Lithium in the Sari Club back in the old days in Bali. My shirt was bright pink. I swapped her to the other side so she wouldn't see it, I held her for a long time, swaying, trying to say soothing stuff, failing.

I plopped her on the couch, she sobbed and sobbed there until, exhausted and shell-shocked, she fell asleep. We didn't have any kids' painkiller. Parents, simple lesson, always carry some baby Panadol or Nurofen when you travel. I walked with one of our nice hosts down to the nearest Chemist. It was closed. He drove me to another, where I nearly bought the older kids version before learning that Baby Panadol is more potent. Went for potent.

Beloved administered a generous dose to a rewoken Bear, who was sobbing again. Then we had to go to a wedding and leave Bear and Mitts with our trusted friends. I felt a bit sick.

The friends were wonderful, and soon after we left Bear calmed, perhaps helped by the drugs. She sat up past bedtime watching Monsters Inc, whatever that is, then announced when she was ready that she'd like to go to bed. I meanwhile spent the whole wedding telling people how I was the kind of dad who sits next to his daughter but fails to grab her in time as she falls off chairs and sustains bloody injuries.

There is still a big flap loose on her tongue. The nurse at Royal Children's said it's fine. But every time I think about it I feel a little queasy.

Institutional Care - stuff we still do

Watching ABC2 this morning brought out historical experiences involving trauma, separated families and socially-endorsed institutionalisation. It was very moving. So were the stories from the people who experienced that in the past.

The earnest voices talked, with grave condemnation dripping from every word, of a time when children would be removed from home and placed in institutional or foster care, not because they were being raped or bashed by their parents, but because dysfunction or socioeconomic circumstances meant they weren't able to take care of their kids. We didn't have the same social welfare back then, they said.

I thought 'What, 5 years ago?' And did it really get better under the dying days of Howard as the pressure on the unemployed, single parents and the disabled was ramped up exponentially? Because I've encountered, for example, a situation where the only thing preventing a child from being with their family was the need for a particular support (for example drug and alcohol monitoring, or anger management counselling), but because of a waiting list or some other funding-related obstacle that support was not available, and so a child, a vulnerable, developing child, was removed or kept out of their family home.

We've all observed (or quietly looked the other way as it occurred, the natural consequence of hard nosed policies endorsed by the polity at the ballot box) the state going hell for leather to recover debts incurred accidentally by poor people who are supporting children- that is, to be clear, hauling those debt amounts out of the meagre budgets that would otherwise put food in kids' mouths.

The link between poverty, dysfuction and the state removing children is still alive and well. Choices, based on considerations ranging from budget priorities to voter-friendly headlines, are still made to the detriment of the individual family as a coherent entity. Or to the detriment of the 'best interests of the child'.

The story also included footage and discussion of these poor institutionalised kids being forced to march, decked out in military gear. Awful, said the tone of the announcers. Well, it seems it's horrific if decades ago they were doing that to orphans and wards of the state. It's not horrific if a kid today is sent to boarding school, or enrolled in cadets and taught to march and fire weapons, that's different because they have a choice. Their parents might make it for them, and they might do so under illusions created by fallacious notions and glossy brochures, but they are somehow part of a 'choice' that distinguishes them from other institutionalised kids.

We're so much better today, aren't we? I don't even need to get started on asylum kids, those queue-jumping ratbags aren't worthy of empathy until they have permanent residency.

Sure, things are better. Even between when I went to school and got the cane for being punched in the head, or for not making my bed in time, and the present, there has been notable improvement. But with such ritual distancing of the past as we are seeing today, we seem to be saying we're now civilised, that such things can't happen today.

Which is utter crap.

Update: Senator Fielding reveals his own abuse at the hands of a scoutmaster. There are not many times when I'm going to give him credit, but I think discussing this would be extremely painful and humiliating for him and he's brave for bringing it up.

Lest We Forget - The Abject Horror of Total War

What do we remember? What are we trying not to forget?

It is never clear if we are remembering solely to honour the fallen, a worthwhile task in itself no doubt, or whether we are remembering the democidal horror of war, of total war in particular, and the extraordinary folly and evil that combines to unleash it on humanity.

Memory is selective. Reflecting on my past couple of posts, there a proposition out there that anyone who reaches for the 'Hitler/Nazi' analogy should automatically lose an argument. I have some sympathy with this, but there is also an argument that says we have not learned the lessons of the past, whether from Nazism, Vietnam, or the Great War, and that lively recollection and debate about their relevance does no harm.

History weighs on my mind in many of Australia's racial, ethnic and population fault lines. I don't think about it because I want to be specious, I think about it because I've always been interested in history and I feel a certain churn in my stomach when I see things I thought and hoped I wouldn't see in my country. The Right has long relied on an extraordinary link drawn between the brutal totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th Century and wet, soft, democratically accountable government interference in the economy or the like. If such a self-evidently long bow, no not even a bow, a bamboo suspension bridge drawn into a hoop, can be given credence by any sane person, what is it about the Cronulla riots, the targetting of anyone of vaguely mediterranean appearance for brutal violence, the overt racial nationalism, that doesn't bring to mind the horror of the late 1930s and the vicious, paranoid bigotry unleashed upon the Jews?

It is not that there are pogroms, or mass murder. It is however that one thing led to another.

Behind such particular, smaller scale, analogies and partisan arguments, played out in nations largely benefitting from a sustained pax, there is the big thing that happened in the two World Wars. There is total war. Slaughter of millions. Loss of entire generations. Loss of cultures, great historical buildings and artifacts, loss of humanity.

I don't think we remember that, not really, and I don't think it's an issue of left or right. My greatest fear is not World War II, the model of the rampant dictator who can't be placated, but of the Great War, the combination of belligerent (if not quite Hitler-esque) leaderships, appalling diplomatic blunders, and the suction created by a set of interwoven alliances that draws nations that have no real gripe with each other into an unending slaughter.

Over all the others, all the other sacrifice, all the blunders and all the worthy causes properly fought for, it is the Great War I remember.

It is the Great War that we are most at risk of repeating. We, being Australia, not America, not China, not Japan. Australia. Lest we forget.

More comment on what I've suggested here over at LP.

Learning to Love Ratios - border security edition

240,000,000:21,000,000

1:120

9:10

(all approximates)

Clues: Indonesia, boat arrivals, successful asylum seekers, overall migration, Australia.

Non-refoulement- just like Climate Change, only crunchy!

Barnaby Joyce is right, of course. The solution is we should send them home. They include terrorists, there are millions of hundreds of them, we can't fit them all, there's a queue after all, just inside the gate of the biggest Tamil internment camp, self determination is a lefty plot to overthrow the world and replace it with latte, imagine if we'd said yes to all those Jews back in the late '30s, after all?

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, took place on this date in 1938. Jews weren't particularly popular with the moral majority back then...

Codified within the 1951 Geneva Convention and 1967 Protocol, the principle of non-refoulement arises out of an international collective memory of the failure of nations during World War II to provide safe haven to refugees fleeing certain genocide at the hands of the Nazi regime.

Memory indeed, lest we forget.

Stay at home dadding

I've take a few days off to cover Beloved's return to work, a day a week, up to the end of the year. I took the first last week. Though as longer term readers will know I was on a 4 day week for a while with Bear alone, this was the longest I've spent on sole care of the kids, now there are 2.

It was hard of course, but fun. I had learned a lesson from the early days with Bear that if you try to fit complex things into your day it can all go pear shaped. This is more flexible once you've been doing it for a while, know the routine inside out and can balance 2 poos in one hand while finishing off a Thomas the Tank Engine jigsaw with the other.

As a moment of relief from my gibbering, I present an old school friend, one of the recipients of the email that led to my reunion post, who is now a proper home dad and blogging about it: Aussie House Dad.

Beloved is sometimes pretty strained on those long days at home with 2 kids, especially when Bear decides to push the boundaries at crucial moments of stress. I did appreciate this, but lasted approximately 3 hours before my own best efforts started to deteriorate. Mitts was starting to holler for food (quite reasonably) and I was zooming around pulling lunch together in the kitchen. I'd agreed to make Bear some eggs (a fave, along with sushi -!?!) and the balancing act was getting delicate. Bear decided to start pulling everything out of the cupboard and the poor girl accidentally poured couscous everywhere. In a slightly raised, firm voice I said something like "If you do that again SWEETheart I will NOT have time to cook your eggs!"

She ran immediately out of the kitchen and I followed her, realising instantly I'd been a bit too harsh. She went straight to the naughty corner and stood there, looking mortified. I didn't have a mirror dear reader but I am sure I looked pretty mortified too! A few hugs later and we were back in business (with another hug for Mitts of course on the way through) and food did, eventually, get served.

*LONG EXHALE*

Bonding. Through triumph over adversity (my incompetence being a specific case of force majeure in the children's lives that must be overcome) we will have us some bonding.

Boi-Boi's daddy phase

We spent a week on the road, long hours in the car up to the farm, onto Canberra, and back again through the rolling countryside of Yass and back down the Hume. Beloved drove while I pulled faces, poked, tickled, made oddball noises, passed food and toys and generally tried to stave off the worst-case scenario of 2 kidlets screaming with frustration in a splendid duet. I largely succeeded.

In Canberra there were Beloved's old friends to catch up with, there was my mother-in-law's wedding to prepare and attend, and for much of the time I was the one on primary kidlet duties. It wasn't easy but it brought us closer, and seems to have triggered a daddy phase in Mitta, Boi-Boi, Big Rocks or (if you ask Bear) variations on Lalilolilo.

We talked a lot- he said urgh, grunt, dadada, a-Dah, and I explained exactly why, what, how or where. I lolled around on the floor, playing absently. We trashed newspapers together. And while I did and have done all this with Bear as well, it was, for father and son, an unusual amount of bonding time. We bonded.

He is reaching for me as I walk past, leaning out and extending his arms. He watches me moving around the room, smiles when I speak to him. He does for me what he has done so consistently for Beloved. It's all goodness.

One morning about 4am, Beloved had gone to pat Bear and had fallen asleep in her room (as an aside, no, sleep wasn't part of the package on this trip!). Mitts cried, I picked him up. I was too tired to stand and rock so I collapsed back into the bed, my arm wrapped around him and his head on my shoulder. We both drifted off to sleep, pretty much where we'd landed. I listened to his breathing, felt the instinctive relief all parents must feel from the immediate proximity of a safe, content, healthy child.

He is Zen with the world, but he also gives Zen back.

John Safran's race and panty sniffing oddities

Hi, I'm John Safran. I'm latching onto the noble cause of tolerance and general inter-racial fraternisation. We're naturally attracted to other races.

No way, you say, because you're all so conservative compared to me. Well, I'll pass on some astonishing facts.

Did you know lots of white women are attracted to black guys?

... pick yourself up, there's more:

I, John Safran, am attracted to part Asians.

NO WAY, OMG! I know, I know, this completely tips on its head all cliches out there. Oh did I mention, part Asians go for me, look at my photos, here's 3 I've been dating... etc etc. OK, let me steal some panties and sniff the genitalia of women without their consent and we'll see what I can prove...

Is it just me or was this a string of sometimes offensive splats that failed to connect? I'm up for being shocked. Love any topic to do with the juice of attraction, don't mind getting into the way people of differeing races do it, etc. I read Houellebecq, I'm not particularly sensitive on this stuff. But I think interracial p00rn probably makes a more compelling case for love between colours than what was served up on ABC last night.

The sperm donor stuff was a bit foul, and proved nothing. Other than reminding us that so many people still could not give a rat's about the child's right to know anything. To me it was hard to separate conceptually from the 'purpose' behind the rapes carried out by Serbian and Croatian soldiers as part of the ethnic cleansing that went on there. Consent, effectively, was removed, so a different race could be promulgated. Witty stuff.

The p&nty sn1ffing escapades are a set up I'm sure, it would certainly be a criminal offence to do that, probably acts of gross indecency as well as theft, so he's either faked those bits or sought permission. If he didn't it's sexually invasive and abusive.

And why did he bring the Minister from Togo into it? I found that just, well, here's a white guy from a rich country granted an audience most likely because they're poor and desperate for any recognition, and he just wants to bang on about why black guys in Australia get an unfair advantage?

His obsession with part Asian girls does not bear out his theory. It just shows he has an obsession with part Asian girls. As a white male obsession it's about as novel as white women into by black guys. In a general sense, Asian girls look very young by Caucasian standards. Black men look particularly physically strong and imposing. Viewed that way, neither is a particularly novel source of attraction signifiers.

His theory, about genes and opposites, would be better demonstrated by people who go for people of all other racial backgrounds. Which, based on last night, he is not.

My limited knowledge of the whole genes and opposites thing is that there's truth there, but 'race' is just one way to find such 'opposites', and is a means to the priority ends from a genetic point of view which is strengthening immunities and eradicating weaknesses. So a Jewish girl who had complementary immunities to him should be just as attractive to him. And given he lives in a city full of people from all corners of the globe, if it was all about being attracted to the 'other' why did he keep bounding back to one particular obsession?

I don't know, it was all just a bit um really. I have liked a lot of Safran's stuff, but in this case I didn't think the ends connected at all to the means. It just seemed an indulgence of a privileged, powerful man having fun at others' expense and acting like an adolescent boy. Clearly I missed some witty connection between the dots so I'll wait to have it pointed out...

A Silly Peace Prize

I have nothing to add to debates out there. I certainly think it is telling that the paranoid right in the US is able to use this against Obama. It isn't his fault.

In his statement where he offered to share the prize with the woman walking silently, taking a bullet, he got to the nub of what is wrong with many of the nominees and winners of this prize. Whether it is those idiots in Israel/Palestine being rewarded for merely acting like human beings for a change, or Obama being rewarded for not being the most hated man in the Western world, the prize often seems to simply fail to get to those who actually do the important work in seeking and maintaining peace.

Sure, the hawks are not going to like most deserving recipients. Being hawks, that is having a propensity to seek and support military solutions to international problems, their notion of 'peace' is unlikely to dovetail with any notion acceptable beyond the borders of their own nation.

But particularly political decisions just give them ammunition, damage the award's credibility and most importantly fail to identify and shine light on the work of those truly putting everything on the line for a better world.

Just. Silly.