04w40:4 I loath America Posted October 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 40 number 4 (i loathe america) My website tracking is showing me that Margaret Drabble’s “I Loath America” is currently a hot search, so I figure I might as well bring this one off the archive’s shelf. Written in May 2003, it comes to us from the salad days of the Gulf War II: The Son’s Revenge. Perhaps the search has something to do with the fact that Margaret Drabble will be interviewed onstage October 30th during the Harbourfront Centre’s International Festival of Authors.By the way, I did catch the bug in the posting I sent out earlier this week; the link broke due to a bug in the program I’m using to send out these postings, one that I can’t do anything about except to be vigilant. So apologies for that, but what I’d like to say that all of these postings go up on the goodreads website, which I do have control over, and since I usually find the problems very quickly, there you can find spelling mistakes caught, problems fixed, and an eye pleasing design, all available for the low low cost of clicking on the link below. – Timothy ——————————————————————— I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world | Margaret Drabble http://tinyurl.com/b8y9 “I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes. The liberal press here has done its best to make them appear ridiculous, but these two men are not funny. […] America is one of the few countries in the world that executes minors. Well, it doesn’t really execute them – it just keeps them in jail for years and years until they are old enough to execute, and then it executes them. It administers drugs to mentally disturbed prisoners on Death Row until they are back in their right mind, and then it executes them, too. They call this justice and the rule of law. America is holding more than 600 people in detention in Guantanamo Bay, indefinitely, and it may well hold them there for ever. Guantanamo Bay has become the Bastille of America. They call this serving the cause of democracy and freedom. ” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Friday 01 October 2004 @ 1:20 PM
04w40:3 John Ralston Saul Posted October 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 40 number 3 (john ralston saul) ——————————————————————— LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium Inaugural Lecture | John Ralston Saul http://www.operation-dialogue.com/lafontaine-baldwin/e/2000_speech.html “So long as an NGO – which could also be defined as a corporation of social reformers – remains outside the democratic system, it has no real political levers. Its activists are not there, in the people’s Chamber, to clarify the cause. And there is no practical link between the problem they are devoted to and the real action required to deal with it. PR victories – which NGOs so often win – cannot be converted automatically into law. Nor should they be. Again, we live in democracies. But the result is that there are no direct practical links between the public debate and government action. The public therefore becomes discouraged about the effectiveness of politics because politics appear to be unresponsive to the public debate. And because of their disconnection from the formal political process, the corporations of social reformers themselves begin to look naive. […] In other words, so long as a good cause remains on the outside, it may actually give comfort to those who oppose it. A cause really only makes ethical, utilitarian and social sense when it and its proponents are integrated into the democratic process. This withdrawal of the social reformers from that democratic process is certainly a change in our society, but I don’t think it was inevitable or is eternal. It is merely a side effect of corporatism.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Friday 01 October 2004 @ 12:53 PM
