With good reason. Female circumcision is a disgusting act – detestable, brutal, and monstrous – even by barbarian standards.

From today’s Washington Post, readers get an anecdote of the practice followed by the quote of a proud supporter, the latter revealing the intellectual origin of said evil.

Yeah… it’s called unconditional blind faith.

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.

“This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.” [emphasis mine]

Italy is bailing out the cheese industry.

The season six winner of “The Bachelor”… Mary Delgado — who was arrested last year for allegedly punching her fiance, “Bachelor” Byron Velvick — was busted again on Saturday night for public intoxication, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct at Lorina’s Cantina in Del Rio, Texas.

We’re told the Cantina called the cops because Delgado refused to leave the bar, saying it was her “constitutional right” to stay as long as she wanted. [emphasis mine]

Golden.

What an utterly warped understanding of rights – that negates the property owner’s rights entirely, replacing them with a fictitious (and seemingly unconditional) set of patron rights.

We need a term for it. Let’s call it pulling-an-Adbusters. It appears to be the foundation for their moral code… and quickly moving outward.

From my least-favorite-2008-presidential-candidate’s brand-new book Do the Right Thing:

The real threat to the Republican Party is something we saw a lot of this past election cycle: libertarianism masked as conservatism. And it threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party.

Of course, I’d frame it inversely, that the real and most damaging threat to liberty is the Republican Party, whose alligients oh-so-casually throw around the small-government lingo but fail to deliver on anything even remotely close.

Instead, decade after decade with their paternalistic impulses, hyper-religious moralism, and corporate socialism, the association continues to bastardize the philosophical reputation of liberty.

Now, I’m not referring to an explicit form of self-righteousness, where one thinks he/she is simply better than most everyone else and inconveniences oneself to express that sentiment. For, ostensibly, change.gov is the opposite. There are various invitations for civic involvement and appeals to democratic inclusion. And these things, when applied competently and spoken authentically, are not self-righteous. Not at all.

But, here, you’re not getting any of that – an invitation for civic involvement that is authentic, let alone practical. The over-the-top degree to which Obama wants to make individuals feel apart of his presidency, like they’re actually helping shape policy, is silly bordering on laughable. There’s Your Vision, a page where one is asked to, “Share your vision for what America can be, where President-Elect Obama should lead this country.” Immediately following, one is asked to invite friends so that they too can “share their visions of what President-Elect Obama should do”. Fine, fine. (Now, there has been a meta-suggestion circulating on how to streamline this (as it stands) terribly inefficient process, a suggestion, in fact, more reflective of Obama’s political philosophy. But until I see some movement on it, I remain dismissive of such an all-inclusive feedback mechanism. [Although, I still shared my vision in the comments of this blog post.])

For those not content with simply contributing policy – as if the transitory team were actually planning on reading the visions – one can help implement policy. Yes, right there on the site one can apply for a position in the Obama-Biden Administration. Not counting the contact info request, the introductory application is all of five questions. Surprisingly, I manged to fit it into my day.

And these syncophantic offerings – masturbatory in that they’ll have no effect whatsoever yet make the public feel good as if they were (i.e. recycling) – certainly mesh well with the overall tone and presentation of Obama’s policy. For instance, take Obama’s education plan. No reform here. It promises the same, an increase in funding of our demonstrably-failed public education system. But it doesn’t come off that way. And it’s all in how he asks citizens to be part of the solution. Marvel at how he makes the same old shit sound revolutionary, important, and courageous. By simply throwing on a touch of hollow civic participation at the end:

But the truth is government can’t do it all. As parents, we need to turn off the TV, read to our kids, and give them that thirst to learn.

Quite the education plan, right? I mean, all Washington had to do was ask!

Obama’s citizenry-empowered prescriptions have no meat to them. Lacking practical implementation, his interest in and advocation for civic participation is surface at best. As Dan Denning at The Daily Reckoning put it:

…the Obama brand has all the depth and staying power of a catchy pop tune. It’s like Mountain Dew, all sugar rush, no nutritional value. You feel better but you’re not getting any healthier.

That such pandering, such fake interest, has the audacity to pose itself as legitimate – assuming this tripe is, indeed, inauthentic (as I suspect) – it’s certainly indicative of self-righteousness.

At least Obama’s honest…well, here anyways.

Lots of quote-gems here for the McCain campaign. I can’t imagine some scaled-down version of this one will go unnoticed.

The tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community-organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

It’s no whitey-tape but pretty damn close.

Check out its Wikipedia page and you’ll find out some straightforward background info:

Hakani is a controversial movie addressing the theme of infanticide in tribal communities in Brazil. The film takes the format of a documentary featuring a dramatic reconstruction of the true story of an attempted infanticide…The movie is part of a wider movement against infanticide amongst Brazilian Amazonian tribes. The pressure brought by the movie has brought the issue into the public eye and as far as the Brazilian Congress with a new law, Muwaji’s Law, being proposed. The law would allow an Indian child to be removed from its parents on the evidence that the child might be the target of a planned infanticide.

And then some information that is, perhaps, more disturbing than the promo. The film has its critics.

Opposition to a film effectively decrying infanticide? On what basis? Well, the most vocal of them is a purported “human rights” (uh…) organization called Survival International. Now, for SI, what legitimizes this viciously cruel, superstitiously-inspired sacrifice of an innocent life?

The organisation claims that the film is a tool for evangelical Christian groups to increase their ability to spread religious belief despite the Brazilian government’s concerns about their methods.

You know, when it comes to being buried alive or receiving theological proselytizing, I think I’ll take the proselytizing.

A symptom of ethical relativism. Really. That’s disgusting.

Abusters lost the case and, in realizing that you can’t simply force another into business – that it, in fact, takes the mutual consent of both parties to make a contract valid – apparently now rejects the very concept, evident by one of the latest ABTV videos.

Titled Ad-idas, the 5-minute video documents Neil Boorman’s quest “to claim due advertising fees from a brand giant”.

The brand giant in question is Adidas and the “due advertising fees”? According to Boorman, it amounts to 10,000 pounds based upon – nothing consensual, of course, but rather – the 10-15 years Boorman has voluntarily spent being a “human billboard” for the company. You know, wearing Adidas shirts, shorts and shoes out in public.

Now obviously, Mr. Boorman isn’t a true Adidas fan. He isn’t a fan of any corporation. In the same vein as Naomi Klein, he’s a hardcore anti-consumerist borderline luddite; and in the same vein as Michael Moore, the video is dishonest in strategy but authentic in message. But yes, Boorman believes this garbage. As the tagline states, “Why do we buy clothes that advertise brands? They should be paying us!”.

Yeah!

Companies should be paying consumers who choose to buy their branded products for the subsequent advertising that the aforementioned companies never asked for. The consumers deserve it. It’s just!

Yes. In fact, tomorrow I’ll be sending Adbusters an invoice for showcasing the crappy Neil Boorman video in question.

Take a look. Or don’t! It doesn’t matter really. There isn’t a contract or any criteria whatsoever I have to meet. I don’t even have to speak highly of the content. I determine what they owe me. It’s that simple!

Anyways, check it out. It’s actually somewhat scary: a video – posted a few hours ago at youtube – of “Recreate 68″ protesters physically assaulting Fox News staffers outside the DNC.

Effing brutes.

(As an aside, the weirdest part of the video is at 1:32 where an old hippie with sunglasses and a French beret awkwardly yells, “Some people say Fox is a corporate whore.” Haha…”Some people“? You sure about that? Clearly, this is someone who never took the dictum “owning your words” to heart.)

Anyways, it totally reminds me of ISO. Back in 2006, I wrote up an essay regarding my experience of the organization, which I’ll excerpt below.

One of the few thriving organizations at UIC is the ISO (an acronym for International Socialist Organization), a rather confrontational left-wing group that has recently dedicated all its efforts to expelling military recruiters from campus. Possessing a passion that seems to interpret everything as black or white, the socialists see the recruiters as a deceptive and destructive force (which may or may not be true), and – as such – an evil that must be purged. When word gets out that the recruiters are on-campus, in a heartbeat, the ISO is on the scene: actively screaming, yelling and – when necessary – even exerting physical force, whatever it takes to abolish what they perceive to be a non-negotiable evil. At the very least, this translates into censorship, into stifling the recruiter’s right to free speech.

Concerned with what I continuously observed to be a complete disregard for a fundamental freedom, I went to one of their meetings and asked why two opposing views couldn’t co-exist – why they couldn’t simply respect the recruiter’s the right to speak while simultaneously providing the student body with contrasting information. This way, two vessels of purported knowledge would be at work and it would be up to the rationale of the college student to decide the superior. In response, I received not an answer but a fanatical reaffirmation of their position: that the recruiters were lying “monsters” coercing our young people to die in the name of a criminal war.

During the spring, I bought The Killing Fields following a friend’s recommendation.

Just recently, I was able to sit down and watch the film, which – to say the least – is pretty powerful. Not exactly what I expected – less objective or documentary-style and more Hollywood, giving particular focus to the friendship of NYT reporter Sydney Schanberg and Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran, all within the context of the bloody historical event.

Despite the focused personal touch, there is a great section that takes viewers into what it was like to have lived through the Khmer Rouge and, moreover, Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” ethnic cleansing campaign (which killed over two million human beings). In a letter to Schanberg, Pran writes:

Sydney, I think of you often, and of my family. They tell us that God is dead and now the party they call the Angka will provide everything for us. He says, Angka has identified and proclaims the existence of a bad new disease – a memory sickness – diagnosed as thinking too much about life in pre-Revolutionary Cambodia. He says, we are surrounded by enemies. The enemy is inside us. No one can be trusted. We must be like the ox and have no thought except for the party. No love, but for the Angka. People starve, but we must not grow food. We must honor the comrade children whose minds are not corrupted by the past.

Sydney, Angka says that those who were guilty of soft living in the years of the great struggle and did not care for the sufferings of the peasant must confess because now is the year zero and everything is to start anew. I’m full of fear, Sydney. I must show no understanding, not of French or English. I must have no past, Sydney. This is the year zero, and nothing has gone before.

The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love, Sydney. And those who confess to the Angka vanish, and no one dares ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive.

To think, this really happened…

Check out the film’s trailer below.