My published comment #102.
May 03, 2009 10:27 am
Link
May 3rd, 2009 0:10 am
Horror Terror Torture: The American Way
Q. Is torture by waterboarding to be set apart and conveniently isolated from the "banality of evil" of US foreign policy?
Q. Was "shock and awe" mass torture?
Q. Are today's drone raids that routinely kill civilians in Swat fly-by torture?
Q. Shall we continue to make convenient comforting distinctions between horror, terror, torture in US nation-state relations?
Maureen Dowd focuses on waterboarding torture as one example of Republican leaders' character corrosion. But really, is it just about torture or more broadly about the aforesaid 'banality of evil' in the US national political character? Is this corrosiveness a Condi-tion found just in Republicans of the Bush-Cheney era or widely distributed throughout the Beltway and beyond? That banality of evil is represented by the US nation-state, in which horror, terror, torture at the existential level, are inseparable. Ask the bleached bones at Hiroshima, the napalm burned skin in Vietnam all the way to today.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/05/03/opinion/03dowd.html
Op-Ed Columnist: How Character Corrodes
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Republicans new-found concerns about checks and balances is touching, given what the Bush administration did to undermine the process.
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Saturday, May 2, 2009
A Language & Practice of Earth Justice
My published NYT comment #54.
May 02, 2009 6:43 pm
Link
May 2nd, 2009 10:51 am
A Language & Practice of Earth Justice
This NYT article (see link listed below) mistakenly takes a top-down approach to Earth Justice (preferable in my view, to "conservation") by focusing on EcoAmerica, a corporate consultancy that basically is in cahoots with the Beltway.
As a participatory citizen in Democracy, whether in India or the US, I don't rely on govt, or its corporate clients, both of whom are major polluters. However I do hold these two powerful entities accountable, (with my activism and my ballot), for their policy and implementation priorities.
Instead of a top-down approach, we need a wide ranging grassroots level daily accountability from ordinary folks like me. For example, you and I can and must exercise an obligation to:
1) use less
2) recycle more
3) leave a measurably smaller footprint on the earth, on which we live, for a glorious but transient moment.
The US is undoubtedly the most wasteful and most avaricious user and disposer of resources of any nation-state on earth. All the self-promoting politicized jargon developed by EcoAmerica will not change that one iota. Unless WE, the People, do.
I'll give an example. I work at a huge urban public university. This university doesn't even have a simple directive mandating everybody on their campuses from the President to the freshman student, to print on both sides of their paper. The uni. refuses to even set their thousands of printers to print on both sides of a page. Multiply that reckless waste a hundred-thousand-fold across the university systems of America.
I once suggested double-sided printing in a memo (which I still have in my email) to my college president, but the idea, while lauded on paper (yes, more paper) predictably fell by the wayside. The conservation directive was never issued.
Education or information or 'new' language as EcoAmerica wastefully purports to do, doesn't change anything if that knowledge does not impact our lived practice in this Earth we share.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02enviro.html?scp=1&sq=EcoAmerica&st=cse
Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: May 1, 2009
=====================================================================================
May 02, 2009 6:43 pm
Link
May 2nd, 2009 10:51 am
A Language & Practice of Earth Justice
This NYT article (see link listed below) mistakenly takes a top-down approach to Earth Justice (preferable in my view, to "conservation") by focusing on EcoAmerica, a corporate consultancy that basically is in cahoots with the Beltway.
As a participatory citizen in Democracy, whether in India or the US, I don't rely on govt, or its corporate clients, both of whom are major polluters. However I do hold these two powerful entities accountable, (with my activism and my ballot), for their policy and implementation priorities.
Instead of a top-down approach, we need a wide ranging grassroots level daily accountability from ordinary folks like me. For example, you and I can and must exercise an obligation to:
1) use less
2) recycle more
3) leave a measurably smaller footprint on the earth, on which we live, for a glorious but transient moment.
The US is undoubtedly the most wasteful and most avaricious user and disposer of resources of any nation-state on earth. All the self-promoting politicized jargon developed by EcoAmerica will not change that one iota. Unless WE, the People, do.
I'll give an example. I work at a huge urban public university. This university doesn't even have a simple directive mandating everybody on their campuses from the President to the freshman student, to print on both sides of their paper. The uni. refuses to even set their thousands of printers to print on both sides of a page. Multiply that reckless waste a hundred-thousand-fold across the university systems of America.
I once suggested double-sided printing in a memo (which I still have in my email) to my college president, but the idea, while lauded on paper (yes, more paper) predictably fell by the wayside. The conservation directive was never issued.
Education or information or 'new' language as EcoAmerica wastefully purports to do, doesn't change anything if that knowledge does not impact our lived practice in this Earth we share.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02enviro.html?scp=1&sq=EcoAmerica&st=cse
Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: May 1, 2009
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