Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:Acid-in-the-face attacks, of course, are associated with Taliban/Muslim extremists suppressing women.
That's really only an "of course" to people who also associate french fries and the sitting President of the United States with Taliban/Muslim extremists. IOW; People who get all their information from Fox News, right-wing radio talk shows and the wingnut blogosphere. As far as I can recall, there was one (1) moderately widely covered news story about one (1) acid attack by the Taliban on Afghani schoolgirls a couple of years ago.
And I would never ever have recalled it if you hadn't billboarded the association for me. Because I've had decades of exposure to news stories that emphatically associated acid-in-the-face attacks on women in the India-to-China part of Asia with the personal vendettas held against them by their attackers, whose advances they'd rejected.
I've also always kind of vaguely assumed that it's also the kind of assault that their husbands might commit. Or their families or their bosses or whoever the mostly-male-but-conceivably-female figures who have a claim to personal dominion over them as a socio-cultural/socio-economic matter and not a religious/political one happen to be. Which appears kind of vaguely accurate, per a vague perusal of search engine results.
Except that -- as I've just learned via G--gle -- it extends to other continents and countries that meet the same societal criteria as the ones I associate with the phenomenon, which are basically a formal or informal caste system, a very large permanent economic underclass, and an unquestioned and unreconstructed full-on patriarchal worldview that classifies women as someone's property first and as people second, if at all.
Looks like 9/11 agit-prop by a certain American alphabet agency, doesn't it?
I'd say that you can't really call a violent crime committed for political reasons by the state "agitprop." Because it would kinda be more like "terrorism," if that's what it was.
As it may be. Or may not be. I mean, I'm sure that the association will be manufactured and billboarded by everyone who has something to gain by doing so. Which includes the political hard-right and practically all of the media. But it's not like they need any agency direction to know what's in their own institutional best interests. They're already in the full-time business of knowing that. By definition.
So, no. It doesn't particularly look like that. And there's not a single quantity or quality in the whole of humanity that's at all worth championing or supporting that wins as a result of efforts to portray it that way to the exclusion of every other consideration.
Because -- obviously -- it impoverishes rather than enriches people's understanding when you preempt their perceptual autonomy by suggesting that something that's largely opaque looks like one thing and one thing only. In every way and at every level.
For example, a certain three-letter agency has been regularly in the news for illegally committing numerous documented atrocities against people who didn't happen to be exceptional Americans. And wholly without the assistance of anti-Castro Cubans, too, shocking though that idea is to contemplate. Why, just yesterday I was reading about how two ex-spooks who quietly left government service after the DOJ decided not to procecute them for using a handgun and a power-drill in a mock execution they staged during the interrogation of Abd Al-Rashim Nash'ri are now both back on the payroll as private contractors.
But people'd sure never learn about that by reading RI's resident expert on objectionable illegal CIA operations. You do know that they didn't drop the international-activities part of their brief when Clinton beat GWHB, don't you?
Good. Just checking.
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Sep 10, 2010 3:14 am 
