are missiles bad for your health?

Doctors attack Lancet owner's arms fair links
Polly Curtis, health correspondent
Friday March 23, 2007
The Guardian

The publishers of The Lancet are under fire from leading doctors who are complaining about their escalating involvement in arms fairs. Across three pages of today's edition the medical journal publishes letters from top doctors, led by the Royal College of Physicians, who say that Reed Elsevier's commercial interest in the arms trade undermines the journal's efforts to improve health worldwide.

The editors of the journal also call on their proprietor to drop its work with the defence industry, claiming that the association is damaging The Lancet's reputation. The Lancet's international advisory board is now considering an "organised campaign" against its own publisher.

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I work for doctors, and most of the time, it makes one bitter and cynical to be constantly reminded that most people become doctors not out of some humanistic impulse to heal, but because they can make a lot of money. So when this kind of thing happens, it warms my soul to know that sometimes, even doctors have principles and are willing to stand up for them. But here, some words of wisdom from one great doctor:

"In moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response to moral stimuli; but for them to retain their effect requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new priority of values."
- Che Guevara

snooping ladies

I read on the funky ghetto hijabi's blog that there’s this list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th century. It was cool to check it out and find that my taste in literature can’t be all bad if most of the African writers I’ve read (although not a lot) are actually on there.

It’s interesting to come across this now, though, cos I’m currently reading The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. It’s pretty light reading, with fairly simple language and a narrative that’s paced like linked short stories, which is great for a tired mind on the train ride home. But it’s becoming a rather problematic read.

The basic premise, easily guessed from the title, is that this is the story of Precious Ramotswe, a woman in Botswana who decides to open up her own detective agency – the first of its kind in the country. This seemed interesting enough to me, and I’d glanced over a Sunday Times interview with the author who was recently in town to promote his new book, so picked it up when I saw it going for $4.50 at a garage sale a few weekends ago.

One of the problems I am having is that the language just seems a little too simplistic. It’s obvious the guy can write, but his writing style makes it seem as if he is trying to “dumb down” his language. This may be because the book is meant to be ‘young adult fiction’, but a quick Internet search tells me that it’s not marketed to that specific reader demographic. Is he trying to mimic the way people in Botswana talk, if they even speak to one another in English? I say mimic because, in case it wasn’t already obvious, Alexander McCall Smith is a white guy – an older, Scottish medical law and ethics academic who was born and grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe to be exact.

And therein lies my other major discomfort with the book. What is it about white guys writing colonized women? (Think Memoirs of a Geisha.)

Smith’s heart seems to be in the right place – he says he wants to write positive stories about Africa, he wants Africa to be known not just for AIDS and poverty and blood diamonds, he wants to tell feel-good stories because isn’t the world full of so many terribly depressing things already that we need some happy thoughts in our lives. His well-meaning intentions just aren’t enough though. Wasn’t the entire European colonial project propped up by an ideology of well-meaning intentions?

Where is Smith’s cultural knowledge of the ‘good side of Africa’ coming from? His portrayal of middle class, working class and peasant Africans will necessarily be a portrayal as seen through the eyes of an upper class English-educated white man living in Zimbabwe. He cannot simply erase his identity and ignore his position in the race-class-gender hierarchy in Southern Africa. For instance, I remember reading in the Sunday Times interview that Smith chose to set the story in Botswana rather than his home of Zimbabwe because Botswana is an economically stable country with decent infrastructure and no military conflict. As an upper class descendant of colonizers, I am sure Smith would much prefer if the locals did not fight for autonomy and simply integrated quietly into the global capitalist economy. Funny how Smith never mentions that the single largest foreign contributor to the Botswana army is the United States, or that HIV/AIDS is a major healthcare crisis in Botswana, and although he describes the difficulties of working in a diamond mine (Precious Ramotswe’s father worked as a diamond miner), he never takes the mining companies to task for the exploitation of their workers and the land.

It just seems as if it’s a lot easier to look at the good in the world when you’re not intimately affected by the bad. The book’s attempt at humanizing Southern Africans only results in objectifying them further, in this cynic’s view.

Flee!

SGSELLTRADE FLEE! Market #7

Date: Saturday, 24 Mar 2007

Time: 12-6pm

Location: Gashaus, 114 Middle Road

Sis has a stall. Will be there helping her. Come say hi and buy cheap stuff!

my letter on barking women

On Sunday I sent the below letter to Today newspaper. They didn't publish it.

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I refer to the article by Nazry Bahrawi “Woman barks up the right channel to find lost pooch” (Mar 9). I am deeply disappointed that Today has allowed such callous reporting to make it to print. Even if the pun was intended, the headline is extremely offensive to women by referring to them as dogs. The story about one woman’s attempt at finding her missing dog is unfortunately tainted by irresponsible reportage that is disrespectful and objectifying to all women, and whose logic continues to fuel greater injustices that include harassment, abuse and violence against women. The fact that this comes just one day after International Womens’ Day is even more tragic. The media plays a large role not just in reflecting, but also in shaping, the ways that Singapore society treats women. I hope that in the future, Today will consider with more gravity the ways in which its headlines and framing of articles shape and affect the way we perceive women.

a friendly IWD reminder

"We should look to the confrontational style of previous feminist movements and actions for inspiration. We should once again make the personal political and look at the ways in which our individual experiences with sexism are part of a larger system of domination. In other words, as women continue to lose rights won for us by previous generations of feminists, young feminists need to once again make feminism dangerous. We need to stop worrying about being nice and pretty and start to challenge not only the misogyny and sexism deeply ingrained in our society but also the racism and class bigotry. We need to reframe feminism as a movement that is deeply political and that courageously challenges all forms of oppression."

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The ageing population

I don’t understand the underlying logic. Currently we are having this problem called ‘an ageing population’, which essentially means that in a couple of decades or so, there are going to be many more old people than there should be in society (according to some human geographical theorists) and not enough people to look after them. Plus, the fact that the population will be made up of more old people than it does now means that there will be less young people, which means that there will be less workers, which is – roll the drums – “bad for the economy”. I suppose this is because when there are less workers around to push the paper, press the buttons, insert the microchips, clean the hotels and serve the coffee, there will be less profit, and we know how much dem bosses wan dey profit.

But this is the part that I don’t get. If there are going to be more old people, and if the solution is to make sure that there are even more young people, then doesn’t that mean that in another few decades those more young people will become more old people that need even more young people to replace them with? You follow? The way the wind is blowing, if you think catching a cab at 5:45 on a Friday evening is tough now, just wait another 50 years…

I thought the world is already overpopulated (and I’m not even gonna go into an existentialist diatribe about whether life is so great that we need to bring even more poor souls into it, or a feminist rant about how population planning is oppressive to women, or a tirade about how immigration regulations discriminate between different classes of immigrants and create a destructive antagonistic nationalistic environment of foreign versus local). I thought that Singapore has already almost reached its peak population density (although some people seem to think we can squeeze another 2 million people in here – obviously they’ve never tried getting on the MRT at Simei at 8 in the morning).

I just wanna know – if we think we got problems now, aren’t the solutions the government is proposing just gonna make things worse in another 20, 30 years?