Links within this post, to the headlines:
The Single Biggest Problem With America’s Labor Force
New serial killer in Cleveland
Troubling official statements in Burma violence
Report Finds Gradual Fall in Female Genital Cutting in Africa
T. Rowe Price raises downtown safety concerns
Rae Dawn Chong Blasts Oprah Winfrey
Underemployment
I had never heard of Anthony Sowell before. I have to wonder whether the ethnicity of his victims plays any role in his relative obscurity as compared to, say, Ted Bundy.
Troubling quotations:
He is the chief proponent of a movement known as 969, which reformist President Thein Sein’s office has described as a “symbol of peace”.
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Reuters investigations in two of the hotspots of unrest – Rakhine state and the central city of Meikhtila – have revealed the violence was on both occasions fanned by monks who led Buddhist mobs.
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The president’s office, which says it wants to foster peace, tolerance and unity in ethnically diverse Myanmar, has described Wirathu as “a son of Lord Buddha”.
Previous post: “Sitra Achra, the Flipside”
Those who don’t know what the term means can consult this Wikipedia article. In many nations it’s a routine practice to take a razor and shave off a girl’s clitoris, normally in early childhood. As a result, when she becomes a woman, she will have no access to sexual gratification. All sexual intercourse, then, is for her in effect no different from rape; all sexual gratification in relationships is the sole privilege of her male “partners.”
The report finds a generation gap in attitudes and practice: younger women in some places are less likely to have been victims of this procedure, and also less likely to approve of it. Yet the quotation unsettles me: “We need to create conditions so they can act on their beliefs.” As reprehensible as the practice is, I am not sure Western folk have the right to impose Western values on anyone.
But Elspeth Reeve seems to me to want us to believe there is no crime in America.
I never heard of Rae Dawn Chong before, and am no particular fan of Oprah Winfrey. But for Ms. Chong to spew this language in any public forum about anyone degrades her mightily in my esteem.
I never encountered the term “field N—–” before. Now I grasp that it is the counter-partner to the term “house Negro,” which Mohamad at the shelter used to use to dismiss the President. The “house N—–” was a slave suitable to work in the master’s house, given her or his propensity to seemly rather than unseemly manners and conduct. The “field N—–” would be kept in the fields, given his or her opposite propensities.
No slave has toiled on a plantation in this country since 1865, and it offends me to hear such terms used to disparage anyone. The N-word itself simply perpetuates the slave mentality, and diminishes everyone who uses and hears it. IMO no one has any right to use it.
Trojan Horse Productions 