Hitchens on Sontag

Mention of [Sarajevo] impels me to say another thing: this time about moral and physical courage. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce martial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face." Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the intellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombardment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. She spent real time there and endured genuine danger. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did.

In Slate, via Gary Farber. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Just do it


=====
UPDATE, 1/12: What Oxfam is doing posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:00:00 PM -- |    

 
The five stages of evasion
Matt Welch read publius' question "Where is the conservative outrage about torture?" too, and decided to put conservative icons William Kristol, Rich Lowry, and Norman Podhoretz ("N-Pod") under the Lexis-Nexis microscope to find out. In an article for Reason ("Who's Tortured?") he finds trace amounts of outrage in Kristol, and nothing in Lowry and Podhoretz. In Lowry's case, Welch provides a useful "Five Stages of Evasion:":

1. Buck-passing (it's because of our culture of pornography)
   
2. Subject-changing (let's reform our abusive domestic prison system)
   
3. Gore-bashing (Gore was a wimp for criticizing Abu Ghraib)
   
4. Pooh-poohing, (values won't endure if we go easy on Al Qaeda)
5. Bad-appling (it's all just Sergeant Graner's fault; why was he such a bad apple?)
   

Collect the Five Stages with many of your own favorite conservatoid pundits and bloggers today! Feel free to substitute "Kerry," "Moore," or "Dean" for "Gore" in step 3. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:00:00 AM -- |    

 
Think globally, act shoppingly
Last week the Washington Post reported that China was playing a particularly reprehensible role in the Darfur crisis by providing diplomatic cover but more concretely billions of dollars worth of arms and money to the Sudanese government. This was picked up by the (excellent) Harry's Place blog, with the comment:

And where does China get these billions of dollars? A large share of it comes from us when we purchase Chinese-manufactured toys, appliances, clothes and computer equipment.

I happened to be the first commenter:

In the U.S., Wal-Mart relies on Chinese imports to keep its prices low and its remaining American suppliers scared. There might be a pressure point there.

Boycott Wal-Mart
I was pleased that this stirred up some discussion -- "What are you suggesting?"; "Why are you picking on Wal-Mart?" -- which I joined in with links to posts on this blog explaining my concerns about that retailing supercompany. The commenter who was concerned about me picking on Wal-Mart wrote, "In my survey of Target, over half the clothing items were made in China ... Tailoring your shopping to a specific store is meaningless when most of them are importing the vast majority of their merchandise."

As I replied, I disagree. I think Wal-Mart deserves to be boycotted both for their own labor practices and for a symbiosis with China that is strongly connected to their ability to control such a large part of the American economy. Their labor practices make Wal-Mart a deserving boycott target in its own right. It's true that other companies share the China connection, but Wal-Mart is number one. Together, it's a twofer: sting Wal-Mart and the Chinese system at the same time -- they're joined at the hip as it is, let's make the best of it. And highlighting China's amoral behavior at home and abroad won't hurt with the Darfur issue either.

Prefer Cambodia over China
But it's a good point that we need alternatives. In a later post, "Harry's Place" blogger Gene brings up the case of Cambodia, which has become a major textile exporter while living up to ILO labor standards -- right to unionize, right to strike, worker safety, etc.* As his post and the op-ed he cites explain, the problem is that the global quotas which have protected Cambodia's textile industry are due to expire at the end of the year. This is a development that is likely to benefit China, whose textile industry operates on economies of scale so vast there's literally a "Socks City" next to an "Underwear City," "Sweater City," and "Kids Clothing City" -- the better to supply the Wal-Marts of the world with clothes made for a pittance by an abject labor force.

Writing for the New Republic back in August, Sheridan Prasso explained the attraction for at least a few companies of buying Cambodian textiles and other goods anyway in "Trading Up":

"The beauty is that we're the only ones who can walk up to corporate America and say, ... 'We don't have five million laborers like China, but we have a safe haven for labor, we don't have sweatshops,'" says Cambodia's Secretary of State for Commerce Sok Siphana. "

The article says Nike and Gap, in particular, have made a point of buying from legitimate Cambodian manufacturers to avoid sweatshop and/or child labor charges that hurt the companies' images in the 1990s. Nike, for instance, now says, "In Cambodia, we will not do business with a factory unless it is a participant in the International Labor Organization’s monitoring program." According to Prasso, other companies buying Cambodian textiles include Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Ann Taylor, Gap, Kmart, and The Limited.

I can't claim I've made a habit of checking where my clothes are made yet, or that I'd know what to think about that if I did know their origins (spot check: Japan, Dominican Republic, Portugal. Socks, underwear: unknown. Be glad you weren't there.) I do think I should care a little more about it than I have until now. Meanwhile, the Wal-Mart and Cambodia/China rules of thumb will apply.


=====
* ILO, April 2004: Garment Sector Working Conditions Improvement Project: Eighth Synthesis Report on the Working Conditions Situation in Cambodia's Garment Sector. For a business view of the end of the quota system, see the Economist article "The looming revolution." posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:30:00 AM -- |    

 
Tsunamis
The ICRC and other organizations need our help with helping the survivors of the terrible Indian Ocean tsunamis. Here's a link to the Red Cross/Red Crescent donation web page, where you can specify "Asia - earthquake and tsunamis" or "Where most needed," among others.

Like many others, I recommend the Command Post for more information about this disaster and other ways to help.

I'm baffled that there was no way to at least try to warn neighboring countries of the imminent tsunami. The Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reported today ("Tsunamis' Toll Might Have Been Lessened: Experts Cite Lack of Warning System") that

...thousands of lives in countries such as Sri Lanka, India and Thailand could have been saved if an early warning system similar to one that exists for the Pacific Ocean had been in place. U.S. officials said that they wanted to warn the countries but that there was no mechanism to do so.

But even if formal mechanisms didn't exist, I would have thought informal geophysicist-to-geophysicist contacts might have had a chance of alerting some of the right people in these countries.

I suppose you want these alerts filtered, so not every Chicken Little can wake up the Indian prime minister. Still, even preliminary readings put this near 9.0 on the Richter scale; this was surely worth a few phone calls or instant messages -- even if it turned out the recipients didn't have an action plan once they got the warning. I hope there wasn't a tragic "Christmas effect" here in the U.S.: nobody on hand who thought they were at the pay grade to try hard enough.


=====
UPDATE, 12/27: Via the U.S. Geological Survey web page on the earthquake (ID "usslav"), a Japanese scientist's animation of the Indian Ocean tsunami waves. The animation implies the earthquake rang the Andaman and Nicobar island chains like a bell, so that the wave appears to have emanated from about a 500 mile line. It took about 100 to 120 minutes to reach Sri Lanka and India. The wave front also wrapped around the west side of Sri Lanka and still appeared intense in the vicinity of Colombo. No legend is provided; I imagine the color codes show positive and negative differences from normal sea level. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:59:00 AM -- |