Ethics news:
8 June 2005
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Bring back the polite state
Good manners have become unfashionable. It's thought authoritarian to point out that someone's behaviour is bad, that there is a right and a wrong way to do things. Being called judgemental is an accusation. There were good reasons for this. Many of us used to be judged by who we were, not how we behaved. But in the last century, we saw an explosion of personal freedom, which enriched our lives beyond measure. However, we have come to value individual freedom far above the collective good. As a result, we are in danger of having no manners at all ...
The Observer - 5 June 2005
When pop stars get political
"No matter what happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world," said The Who guitarist Pete Townshend. The Live 8 concert may not quite put his forecast to the test, but it once again raises the question of whether microphone diplomacy and a pair of wraparound sunglasses cuts any ice with world leaders. The first Live Aid centred on fundraising in the wake of television pictures of African famine. Twenty years on, the rock campaigners are more political. Geldof's "just give us your f-ing money" cry is aimed not at the public but at the leaders of the world's richest countries, the G8 group ...
BBC News - 1 June 2005
Should we 'Make Poverty History' history?
The problem with the Live 8 jamboree is not the self-important rock stars, but the politics of low expectations. It isn't often that Peter Hitchens, the usually dry, sometimes irate man of letters, makes me laugh. But he did on Sunday, with a newspaper column headlined: 'Can the starving children of Africa save our has-been pop stars yet again?' Hitchens' witty conceit was that Live 8 - an international music-fest fronted by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to 'raise awareness' about the Make Poverty History campaign - was more about feeding pop egos than feeding the world ...
Spiked-Online - 7 June 2005
The tipping point
We should welcome Geldof's protesters, not scorn them. So, the guest list for the G8 demonstrations is getting out of hand and nobody wants to leave for days? It sounds like a good party. Bob Geldof's call - repeated on Friday - for a million to march on our little capital has added a zing to spring. Edinburgh's deputy provost called it 'irresponsible', and the Chamber of Commerce is outraged. According to a newspaper diary, mothers at Edinburgh Academy's junior school are having their summer bake on 2 July, and are unsure whether they are in for hell or the best trading conditions since the Great Disruption of 1843 ...
The Observer - 5 June 2005
Keep fighting for human rights
Is Amnesty International forsaking its time-honoured role as champion of the oppressed? 'Sir,' wrote Mr HW Scott of Hemel Hempstead to the editor of the Daily Telegraph last week, 'Bob Geldof hopes to raise an army of a million protesters against world poverty. Instead of sending them to Scotland to lobby the G8, he would do better if he divided his troops into groups of, say, 50,000, and sent them to protest repeatedly in front of the London embassies of the countries everyone knows to be the worst offenders in failing to reduce poverty in their own countries' ...
The Observer - 5 June 2005
Make tyranny history
Live 8's aims are laudable ... but Africa's tarnished leaders must first be held to account. There's a puzzling idea doing the rounds on Africa. It occasionally surfaces in Tony Blair's speeches as Britain gears up for a G8 summit at which he will be pushing for debt write-off and a doubling in aid to African countries. I spotted it when Bob Geldof unveiled his Live8 concert plans. It's pretty much a constant theme in the pronouncements of Hilary Benn, Aid Minister ...
The Observer - 5 June 2005
The lie about liberty
Uzbekistan has shown former Soviet states that the west tolerates the repression of peaceful protest in return for oil. The Kyrgyz official stood in his office and surveyed the angry crowds circling the presidential administration below. "Akayev will not shoot his own people," he said, accurately predicting the decision by Askar Akayev, the former Kyrgyz president, to flee the building and country on March 24 rather than shoot the few thousand protesters who went on to loot his palatial White House ...
The Guardian - 31 May 2005
A nation dispossessed
Australia will not achieve national maturity without a just settlement with Aboriginal people, writes Pat Dodson. We as an indigenous nation have searched our horizon for the national leadership and the national courage that will provide all Australians with a resolution of that Unfinished Business that remains as a barrier between our peoples - a barrier that is constructed on the utter failure of the Government to demonstrate the courage, the will and the intent to achieve real justice and subsequent reconciliation for this nation ...
The Age - 1 June 2005
When justice gets lost in translation
Is Schapelle Corby the victim of rough justice? She was jailed for smuggling drugs into a foreign country. She claimed somebody else put them in her bag, but the judge didn't believe her. Her lawyers fought language and cultural problems to put her case, but their efforts came to nothing. Schapelle Corby? No, her name is Chika Honda. Arrested in Melbourne, she served 10-and-a-half years in Victorian jails before being deported to Japan. Thirteen years on, she is still trying to clear her name. Miscarriages of justice, if that is what has happened in the Corby case, can happen in any country ...
The Age - 2 June 2005
Legal reason taken prisoner by compassionate spin
A national day of protest to mark Schapelle Corby's birthday? Surely that suggestion from Team Corby marks the nadir of this saga. What a triumph of emotion over reason it has been. Fuelled by the media, lapped up by audiences and pandered to by politicians, that triumph matters because it has not helped Corby, it may damage Australia's relationship with Indonesia and it is grossly unfair to other nameless Australians sitting in foreign jails, far away from cameras. Compassion, it seems, has its costs ...
The Australian - 1 June 2005
Now the ugly Australian
Irrational responses to the Corby verdict are fuel for extremists in Indonesia. The parcel of white powder sent to the Indonesian embassy in Canberra is a gift to the extremists of Jemaah Islamiah. Abu Bakar Bashir could not have planned it better himself. For all his organisation's efforts to incite fear and loathing between Indonesia and Australia, for all the violent provocations, Bashir had been unable to bring about the brain snap in either culture that would generate the cycle of tit-for-tat retribution that he and his fellow religious warriors so deeply craved ...
The Age - 3 June 2005
Knee-jerk threats to Indonesia help no-one
Growing in strength and independence, Indonesia's justice system needs our support. Vitriol may impede its progress. Xenophobic shock jocks are calling Indonesian judges monkeys and ridiculing them for not speaking English. The Indonesian embassy, having received death threats last month, shut down last week and quarantined staff when biological material accompanied an abusive letter in the post in an act that has the whiff of terrorism. In April, bullets were sent to the Indonesian consulate in Perth ...
The Age - 5 June 2005
Secrets and lies
Are whistleblowers such as Deep Throat, who unravelled Nixon's presidency, really such heroes? The biggest pleasure of the past week - no, of the past year - was the admission by W Mark Felt, former assistant director of the FBI, that he had been Deep Throat, the man in the underground car park who, a third of a century ago, helped journalist Bob Woodward to uncover the Watergate plot. I loved finally knowing this, just as I love the once-every-five-years moment in The Archers when the wronged spouse finds out what we knew all along, about what her husband and the Irish bint have been up to behind the woodshed ...
The Observer - 5 June 2005
They're all Deep Throats now
What made the Watergate mole decide to come clean? We now know that W Mark Felt, the second in command at the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Nixon administration, was 'Deep Throat', the infamous Watergate mole who brought down a president and all of his men. Apparently, Felt, a longtime civil servant, had been personally unhappy that Nixon chose a political appointee instead of Felt as the replacement for J Edgar Hoover as FBI chief ...
Spiked-Online - 2 June 2005
A woman's approach to ending a perilous rite of passage
Eunice Sitatian Kaelo was proud to be circumcised when she was 15. Despite the pain of the procedure, she says she respected the ceremony that brought her Masai community together to celebrate her passage to adulthood. Three years later, Ms Kaelo has learned about the dangers of female circumcision - which, even among Masai, is now commonly called female genital mutilation, or FGM - but she still sees her status as a circumcised woman as beneficial. "I am glad that FGM was performed on me, because now I can talk from experience when I campaign against it," she says ...
Christian Science Monitor - 8 June 2005
It's the Big Bully - on and off TV
Merciless elimination of contestants sends all the wrong signals. Our schools may have a clear-cut anti-bullying policy, yet the message being given through television and recent real-life stories suggests that bullying is rife in a society seemingly centred on survival of the fittest. During the nightly viewing hours, the decree is brought to our lounge rooms as Gretel Killeen cheesily invites viewers to give the verdict with "you have the power to decide who leaves the Big Brother house" ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 2 June 2005
O Brother where art thou: an Uncut version of sexual harassment
With drunken antics and body parts where they shouldn't be, it's time television had a reality check. The TV show Big Brother is regularly accused of being boring and it is certainly one of the more tedious examples of the laboured genre of reality television. This stems not only from the format - a bunch of people sitting on a couch having the type of low-grade quotidian discussions that could happen on anyone's couch - but also from the number of programs it has spawned ...
The Sydsney Morning Herald - 8 June 2005
Big bad Brother
Family organisations and women's groups have slammed the latest season of Big Brother, with one group branding it "sewage" TV. Evictee Michael created a storm when he dropped his pants during last week's adults-only Uncut version of the Ten Network's reality program. The 27-year-old demolition man - who was evicted on Sunday night - was seen massaging fellow housemate Gianna's shoulders, his penis exposed all the while. The incident sparked cries of sexual harassment ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 6 June 2005
Save the whales, harpoon a Japanese sushi hunter
Members of Japan's pro-whale hunting lobby aren't a popular bunch. Their critics just can't seem to get a grip on the fact that luncheon meat is a perfectly acceptable byproduct of scientific research. In 1 1/2 weeks, the International Whaling Commission will meet in South Korea, where Japan will argue that it be allowed to double its minke whale massacre and add endangered humpback and fin whales to its sushi trains ... sorry, legitimate scientific laboratories ...
The Australian - 8 June 2005