Quoted: Michael Maren on the completely ineffectiveness of foreign aid

From a fantastic interview which argues convincingly that all international NGOs and US aid projects are doing much more harm than good.


On the work aid organizations do:


[Aid organizations] know how to set up refugee camps, so they do it. And they also horribly underestimate the local people, the skills and abilities of the local people, and the ability of the people to save themselves and to take care of themselves. If I learned anything in the Peace Corps, it was that people basically know what they're doing. Ads that we see for these organizations tend to give the impression that all these Africans are a bunch of infants. That they're gonna starve to death if we don't send a bunch of 25-yearold volunteers over there to take care of them. The ads really rely on something I find somewhat racist. The whole aid industry is built on this conceit that Americans can go into a village of Africa and, by virtue of some innate quality of American-ness, have something to offer people, something that you can teach people there. As if these people couldn't survive without you. And that's sort of the hidden attitude when I get these questions: Aren't these people gonna suffer if we pull the aid organizations out? And I always have to say, "Do you really think people can't take care of themselves?" Where do people get the idea that Africans are gonna really suffer if a bunch of American volunteers go home? It's an absurd notion.




And on how this serves the US government's interests:


It lets us off the hook. "We're doing something. We're building schools over there. That's our obligation to this country"-when we're pursuing macroeconomic policies that are causing these problems to begin with, such as massive structural adjustments and debt burdens. That's really the problem, and that amount of money dwarfs the money coming in through these charities. You have to think about development in terms of larger economic issues. That's where the problems are.

Quoted: Lierre Keith on liberalism and the necessity of oppositional culture

I'm currently reading Deep Green Resistance, which is a joint effort of Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derek Jensen. All three of them are radical, anti-civilization, deep green activists. I've loved their other stuff (Lierre wrote The Vegetarian Myth, Derrick wrote Endgame, which is 900 pages about why civilization is killing the planet, and Aric and Derrick teamed up to examine waste in What We Leave Behind). But this book is knocking it out of the park. Anyone who has ever thought about being a serious activist for any social or environmental issue should go read it right now.

Lierre has an awesome chapter in which she discusses the history of the left and liberalism and the difference between an alternative culture (one which rebels against the mainstream in matters of culture, art, etc.) vs. an oppositional culture (one which challenges mainstream economic and political power structures):

"[The] focus on individual change is a hallmark of liberalism. It comes in a few different flavors, different enough that their proponents don't recognize that they are all in the same category. But underneath the surface differences, the commonality of individualism puts all of these subgroups on a continuum.


[The continuum] ends at the far extreme where personal lifestyle becomes personal purity and identity itself is declared a political act. These people often have a compelling radical analysis of oppression, hard won and fiercely defended. This would include such divergent groups as vegans, lesbian separatists and anarchist rewilders. They would all feel deeply insulted to be called liberals But if the only solutions proposed encompass nothing larger than personal action--and indeed, political resistance is rejected as "participation" in an oppressive system--then the program is ultimately liberal, and doomed to fail, despite the clarity of the analysis and the dedication of its adherents."

Quoted: "Phaedra Starling" on approaching strange women

Phaedra Starling (not her real name) explains how men should go about approaching women in public in this awesome piece (Schrödinger’s Rapist).

You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. 

If you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.

Quoted: Naomi Klein on the de-politicization of human rights

I've been reading Naomi Klein's excellent book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is basically a re-telling of the history of neoliberal economics. Klein's thesis is essentially that every country which has adopted neoliberal, Chicago School economic policies (privatization, trade liberalization and dramatic cuts in government spending) has done so via fundamentally undemocratic means, and that enforcing these policies has often required brutal repression. Here, she talks about the Pinochet regime in Chile: how the brutal torture and murder carried out by the government was condemned by the Ford Foundation and human rights groups, but how none of these groups drew the connection between the repression and the economic policies served by it.

“When Ford rode to the rescue, its assistance came at a price, and that price was—consciously or not—the intellectual honesty of the human rights movement. The foundation’s decision to get involved in humans rights but “not get involved in politics” created a context in which it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests?

That omission has played a disfiguring role in the way the history of the free-market revolution has been told, largely absent any taint of the extraordinarily violent circumstances of its birth. Just as the Chicago economists had nothing to say about torture (it had nothing to do with their area of expertise), the human rights groups had little to nothing to say about the radical transformations taking place in the economic sphere.”

Quoted: Raj Patel on poverty and obesity

Normally, I wouldn't quote the same book twice, but Raj Patel had some awesome stuff to say about the poverty-obesity issue in Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the Global Food System:

“Under apartheid, it was easy to see how space was legislated, how blacks were denied control of the rhythm and pace of their lives. The statutes were in the books, the police forces would make damn sure that the spatial order was adhered to. The problem, everyone could easily and readily acknowledge, was a social one and it was to be addressed not through individual transformations but by social protest, subversion and widespread change. Today, when a growing number of working poor people are forced into similar conditions, the target is not the social and political substrate of the problem, but its most cosmetic and superficial effect: obesity. It’s like suggesting that the reason blacks had it bad under apartheid was not because of apartheid, but because they were poor. And that the remedy was not to challenge apartheid, but to become rich.

We are encouraged to understand obesity to be, at the end of the day, an individual failing, an inability to deal with the farrago of choices offered to us, a deficit of impulse control. Conventional wisdom sees obesity as a symptom of an impoverished faculty of choice, never a result of an impoverished range of choices.”

Quoted: Sherman Alexie on YA literature

From his amazing essay Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood:

When some cultural critics fret about the “ever-more-appalling” YA books, they aren’t trying to protect African-American teens forced to walk through metal detectors on their way into school. Or Mexican-American teens enduring the culturally schizophrenic life of being American citizens and the children of illegal immigrants. Or Native American teens growing up on Third World reservations. Or poor white kids trying to survive the meth-hazed trailer parks. They aren’t trying to protect the poor from poverty. Or victims from rapists.

No, they are simply trying to protect their privileged notions of what literature is and should be. They are trying to protect privileged children. Or the seemingly privileged.

Quoted: Raj Patel on industrial agriculture

From Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World's Food System:

"To turn agribusiness loose on organic food is to legitimate their rule, to concede that no kind of food system is possible without their participation, just as to choose between high-pesticide farming or GM farming is to admit that, either way, the pesticide companies are part of our food system. But there have always been alternatives.

Corporations can only comprehend the potentially radical call for sustainable agriculture as customer demand for processed food grown with fewer pesticides. This sets at zero the importance of social relations through which the food is produced, and the politics that permits these relations.”

Quoted: Agriculture and Environmental Studies for Senior Secondary School

I'm starting a new blog feature: approximately every day or so, I'll be posting a particularly insightful, profound or hilarious quote from whatever I've been reading (books, other blogs, the news, etc.).

So, in that spirit, here is an excerpt my new Agriculture and Environmental Studies textbook for Ghanaian senior secondary school:

A healthy goat shows the following characteristics: seperate feces which drop in pellets, clean and fairly moist anus, tendency to climb and a tendency to defecate during walking while wagging the tail.


Why didn't we cover this at my high school? It's so much cooler than literary analysis or stoichiometry. Though I think the real question is: what qualifies a goat anus as "fairly moist", and how should this be assessed before purchasing a goat? Hmm...