Before this Mutiny started I took a solo trip to North Dakota to find a suitable location in which to establish our world blogging headquarters.  The choice of North Dakota was obvious.  There were many existing underground bunkers where we could make a home for ourselves, far away from the prying eyes of  “others.”  I found one facility in particular that immediately caught my attention and won my heart.  I knew I had found our home.  It was a fixer-upper though.  In addition to being a mess, which took days of back-breaking labor to clean up, it featured some old electronic equipment left behind by the previous residents.  Among the bookshelves I found a video cassette which I played out of naked curiosity.  In hindsight this was a bad idea.  The video said that something horrible would happen unless I pressed a red button (which was embedded into a table in the conference room) every three hours.  This helped explain why the previous owner was in such a rush to leave and offered a great deal on the place.  This button reminded me of an old Twilight Zone episode I had once seen titled, “Button, button”:

The 1980s revival of the Twilight Zone series featured an episode entitled “Button, button”, based on a short story by Richard Matheson. In the story, a gaunt, black-clad gentleman arrives uninvited at the cramped apartment of a financially destitute couple and presents them with a tempting though somewhat ominous offer. He gives them a simple wooden box with a clear plastic lid overtop a large red button – the type of nondescript contraption teens might build in a high school Woodshop class – and explains their options: 1) Don’t push the button. Nothing happens; the man will come back tomorrow to claim the box. 2) Push the button and get $200,000 – tax free – and someone will die. “Who?” the wife asks. “Someone you don’t know,” the man replies. He then leaves them to think about it. The husband decides it’s unconscionable, but the wife wants to go for it. After all, what is the death of someone they don’t know? People die all the time, don’t they? Maybe a bad person will be the one to die. “And maybe it’ll be someone’s newborn baby,” the husband counters. [Link]

By the time the rest of my fellow mutineers moved in to our bunker I had become obsessed with the red button.  Anna makes fun of me.  She wants to see what will happen if I don’t push the button.  Ennis helps me out from time to time.  If I fall asleep he pushes the button for me.  Anna is probably right, and nothing will happen.  Still, I am both a man of science and a man of faith.  Why am I telling you all of this?  Because today SM tipster Shashi Kara sent us another button to press and it has got me thinking.

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Often times when we post about immigrant rights on SM I see a conflict develop between those that believe that even certain basic rights should only be granted to, or expected by citizens, and those who believe this policy is too harsh.  As one commenter pointed out, the U.S. Constitution does not consider immigration status when dealing with certain freedoms.  The reason I bring this up is that governments around the world have been using the “citizenship loophole” to deny large populations of people the right to have rights.  The Christian Science Monitor explains by citing the example of Geneva Camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh:

Borders have made all the difference in the life of 25-year-old Noor Islam. He was born in Bangladesh, but an invisible line has virtually confined him to Geneva Camp, a squalid enclave in the capital, Dhaka.
Shifting borders dictated this fate. In 1971, when East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh, Islam’s family and some 300,000 other Urdu-speakers found themselves without a nationality in the new Bengali state.

“In Geneva Camp, we don’t have much access to education and jobs,” Islam says, adding that citizenship would dramatically transform their lives.

The so-called Stranded Pakistanis are one of the largest and oldest communities of stateless people, a group estimated to number 11 million across the globe. Their predicament deserves more attention, say experts, since national identity is the most fundamental of human rights – indeed, the very right to have rights.

“They are the ultimate forgotten people,” says James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York. The problem persists, he says, in part because nation-states still enjoy broad discretion under international law to grant or deny citizenship as they see fit.

It’s really easy to exploit citizenship status actually.  Even our own President uses it to a degree.  If you change a person’s status from citizen to something else, say an “enemy combatant,” they no longer have the right to have rights.  They become a stateless person.  Governments all around the world are getting in on the action to make their “problems” go away (and have been for decades).

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Anna posted earlier about the IIPM affair, where a degree mill in India has pressured a blogger into leaving his job by threatening his employer, simply because they didn’t like a site he linked to.

One thing has been bothering me about this kerfuffle: we have long called for commercial boycotts, e.g. of advertisers with racist radio stations, as preferable to government regulation. At first blush it seems like the IIPM, however false their case and however toady and odious their tactics, were within their rights to threaten to protest at IBM/Lenovo.

But here’s the key difference. When we called for a boycott to get a racist DJ fired, we weren’t going after the DJ’s personal hobbies or his family. We were calling for it because of actions directly in the course of business, actively supported by the DJ’s employer.

In this case, the IIPM didn’t respond to the original article in JAM magazine directly. It didn’t talk with Gaurav Sabnis, the hobbyist blogger who merely cross-linked. It didn’t post a comment with a point by point refutation of the article. That’s what a credible response looks like.

It didn’t, in fact, backing up its assertions in any way whatsoever. Instead it went stalker by going after a completely unrelated party, his day job, his employer, and issuing filmi, melodramatic threats. Burning laptops? Please. That’s like the Indian college students who threaten self-immolation over a minor fee hike. The more nuclear and disproportionate the threat, the less credible, and IBM/Lenovo knows it.

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An Asian-American college student cries brutha-on-brutha violence:

Who are Asian girls dating? Whites and South AsiansIn one of the discussion classes I taught last year at Berkeley, half of the Asian girls in the room stated that they do not prefer to date Asian men… who are they dating?… The most obvious [answer was] white men… The second most common answer from the girls was Indian men (South Asians).

… their responses centered around… economic status and physical attractiveness… the Asian girls said that both white men and Indian men in our society (especially here at Berkeley) were viewed as successful, intelligent, and confident….

… the girls said that they found these two groups of men to be physically attractive… My conjecture in this case would be that both groups tend to share the same sharp features (Greco-Roman noses/eyes) that the media tends to value.

… Asian women are “up for grabs”… Asian men are getting the axe on two levels here. First, they are only seen as being able to date their own kind… At the same time, their own kind, at an increasing rate, tends not to prefer them sexually. [Link]

… the Asian male as sexually impotent voyeur or pervert is a reoccuring icon, appearing throughout American cultural history and especially in film. Notable examples of this include Mickey Rooney in “yellowface” as the bucktoothed Japanese landlord who sneaks peeps at Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) or the pathetically asexual nerd Long Duk Dong in John Hughes’ adolescent classic Sixteen Candles (1984). [Link]

 

Last week, I wrote about my disgust with all things Mushie. When women rightfully rallied against him in New York on September 17th, he criticized them as if they were just anomalous Vestern Feminazis:

As the human rights and women groups protested outside the Roosevelt Hotel against the treatment of rape victims in Pakistan, Gen Musharraf said that such protests should be held in and not outside Pakistan.

Okay, fine.

On Thursday, women in Pakistan protested his utterly inappropriate remarks and I wholeheartedly supported their rage against an insensitive jerk. Ever-excellent and on top of things, The Acorn points me to an editorial which I missed, since I haven’t opened the Saturday paper yet (Note to self: retrieve newspapers or purchase canine for said task).

I’m pink-cheeked with joy over how the Washington Post let him have it:

PAKISTANI President Pervez Musharraf complains that his country is unfairly portrayed as a place where rape and other violence against women are rampant and frequently condoned. In fact, it deserves such a reputation. According to Pakistani human rights groups, thousands of attacks are reported every year, including gang rapes and “honor killings” of women who are accused of having affairs or who refuse an arranged marriage. Most of these attacks go unpunished. So retrograde are Pakistan’s laws that there are more than 1,500 women in prison as a result of rapes — they were prosecuted for adultery — while arrests of men occur in only about 15 percent of reported cases. [WaPo]

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