Shrinking U.S. Cities Find Splendor in Green

The article below is one of several I have seen recently along the same lines:

World Environment News - Some Shrinking U.S. Cities Find Splendor in Green - Planet Ark

I am aware that there are many millions of people, particularly in South America, Africa and parts of Asia, who would experience a vast improvement in their quality of life were they to be given the opportunity to live in these abandoned neighbourhoods. Is it ethically more sound to raze the houses to make green space, or to provide shelter for people who have none?

I am slowly but increasingly persuaded that no-one should be given the right to exclude other people from land that is not theirs: Israelis should have no right to exclude Palestinians from living in Israel; nor supporters of the British National Party [Front Nationale, Vlaams Blok/Belang] to prevent people with darker-coloured skin from living in western Europe. I guess that there are residents of Flint, Michigan, who would object to people from elsewhere in the world (such as refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants) taking up residence in abandoned neighbourhoods.

A related, though separate, issue concerns social welfare. Were familes say, from Timbuktu, to relocate to Flint, Michigan, or to Pennywell, Sunderland, who would be responsible for their social welfare?

[To be continued ...]

European invasion of the Americas (1)

My two visits to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, prompted me to consider the ethics of the European invasion of the Americas from 1492 onwards. I have been journalling about this issue in detail on paper, but have been reluctant to date to commit any of my thoughts to publicly-accessible electronic form. However, having just read the article reproduced below, I thought that it would make a good start to the process of placing my thoughts about the issue in the public domain. The article is in Planet Ark, world environment news, which I believe to be a subsidiary of Reuters.

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BRASILIA - Isolated native Indians in the Amazon forest of Brazil and Peru remain threatened by advancing loggers despite growing international attention to their plight, a senior Brazilian official said on Thursday.

"Pressure from Peruvian loggers continues, it's a concern," Marcio Meira, head of the government's Indian affairs agency, Funai, told the foreign press association in Brasilia.

Brazil's Acre state along the border with Peru is one of the world's last refuges for such groups, but increasing activity by wildcat miners and loggers puts them at risk.

Dramatic pictures of pigment-covered Indians from the region threatening the photographer's aircraft with bows and arrows were carried in May by media worldwide.

The Peruvian ambassador to Brazil subsequently told Meira his government was concerned about the issue and preparing measures, without detailing what these were.

Brazil has 26 confirmed native Indian tribes that live with little or no contact with the outside world. There are unconfirmed reports of an additional 35 such groups.

Many of them live in the forest like their forefathers did centuries ago, hunting and gathering.

More than three months after the photographs sparked an international media frenzy, Funai officials continue to witness logging activity in the region. "There is evidence. We see timber floating down the river which originates in Peru," said Meira.

Survival International, a group that campaigns for tribal peoples' rights, said last week that the Peruvian government had not lived up to its promise of publishing an investigation into accusations of illegal logging.

"The Peruvian government must not be allowed to bury this issue, or to turn their backs on the uncontacted tribes," said Survival's director, Stephen Corry.

The issue will be discussed at an international conference on native Indians in Georgetown, Guyana, later this month, Meira said.

Advancing loggers also threaten isolated tribes in Brazil's northern Mato Gross state and along the upper Xingu river in Para state, Meira said.

(Reporting by Raymond Colitt, editing by Ross Colvin)

Story Date: 15/9/2008

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Thoughts about a comment

I received the following e-mail from Blogger:

earnest has left a new comment on your post "The Death Clock is ticking":

your fuckin retarted, death clock .com is not real,

Posted by earnest to Digitation at 26 March, 2008 22:25


I found the comment in response to my posting about the Death Clock (which I have since reread, and found straightforward) unhelpful and unenlightening. Apart from intending to be offensive and insulting, I was and remain puzzled about the purpose of the comment. Why go to the trouble of posting a comment that is neither supportive, nor constructive, nor positional?

I am also unclear how the commenter came to be reading the weblog posting. The time stamp says 22:25, which suggests recreational browsing. (I also note from the time stamp that program writers in the US find it nearly impossible to set out the time and date in a rational fashion. What is wrong with logical, rational, well-punctuated, elegant and unambiguous European time and date format: 22:25 Wednesday 26 March 2008?)

I checked the identity of the person who made the comment, 'earnest', but they have made their profile invisible, a practice discouraged but not forbidden by Blogger. Interesting choice of name: not Ernest, but earnest, and with the e.e.cummings lower case initial 'e'. For someone with that choice of screen name, the comment itself seemed incongruent: my posting about the Death Clock is quite earnest.

The facts that the comment starts with a lower case 'y'; the first three words are misspelled, the name Death Clock or deathclock.com is handled uncomfortably, and the comment ends with a comma, all point to someone whose first language is not English, or else whose English is limited to a vernacular restricted code.

I am perplexed by the idea that the Death Clock "is not real". In context, it is quite complex to identify what is meant by the term "real". Of course, the most obvious answer is that the Death Clock does not possess some kind of supernatural prescience, but as I acknowledge and explore the issue in my posting, that answer makes little sense.

The emotional power packed into the comment suggests extreme contempt. I had two thoughts about this. First, that 'earnest' had seen the Death Clock and been seriously spooked by it. By rejecting my posting about the Death Clock, he was attempting to regain a sense of control. Second, as 'earnest' is obviously a Blogger member, he has read my Profile and disliked what he saw. I am aware from having read material placed by the British National Party (a largely English extreme right-wing, ultra-nationalist political movement) on their own website, that as an educated, liberal, middle-class pluralist, I could be seen as a traitor to white-skinned people, and undoubtedly represent the values they most detest. I am not trying to suggest that 'earnest' is sympathetic to the aims of any particular political movement. Instead, I am suggesting that some people do take offence to who I am, and maybe 'earnest' is one such.

A final, and perhaps the most important, point. I find it hard to understand why so many people use as terms of abuse language relating to learning disability. At the end of 101 Dalmatians, Cruella de Vil calls her henchmen, Jasper and Horace, morons and imbeciles. What makes is acceptable to use these terms, along with the terms 'retard' and 'retarded', as insults. Surely the people to whom they should correctly refer deserve our respect and compassion. For many people with a learning disability life is already hard enough without people stigmatising their disability.

I have no way of knowing whether my musings about 'earnest's' comment approached any truths. However, I have done what I can with the comment. I might write another Death Clock posting, as it is a while since I wrote the first one.

On making fun of disability

At the end of the daily electronic newsletter of the BBC's flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, some weeks ago, was printed a 'joke' about Van Gogh having severed his ear. I found the 'joke' to be in very poor taste, for the reasons set out below, and wrote the following in the Newsnight weblog feedback.

I found the Van Gogh 'joke' offensive: it colludes with people who laugh at my uncle as "foot-loose" because his foot was amputated as a result of advanced diabetes; with the people who laugh at injured war veterans being "legless" or "'armless "; with people who mock the spasms associated with cerebral palsy; with people who laugh at the disturbing effects of mental health problems. Making these circumstances into 'jokes' might relieve tension in those not directly impacted by disability, but it also brazenly stigmatises. There is so much in life at which to laugh without any need to descend to stigmatising.

I recently read a report on a BBC news webpage 'Humour comes from testosterone' about some research recently carried out that concluded that much humour is sublimated aggression.