Ethics news:
21 September 2005
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Hijab means different things to Westerners and Muslims
Western feminists fought for the freedom to wear clothes of their choice. In 1929 a cartoon appeared in Aussie magazine that showed a young woman stepping off a gutter. As she raised her skirts she realised with pleasure that she had drawn the attention of everyone on the street. The cartoon was captioned, "How she got the notion to shorten her skirts", and it highlighted that women's public visibility was becoming central to their sense of being liberated ...
The Age - 9 September 2005
Is Islam compatible with the west?
As extremists increasingly claim it is not, and attack Western values not only through rhetoric but acts of violence, many Muslims find themselves being forced to respond by re-examining their values. Here two Britons, both born into the Muslim faith, explain why they have ended up following different paths as far as their religion is concerned ...
BBC News - 15 September 2005
It's not unpatriotic to criticise the nation
Do we understand the real meaning of patriotism? Despite its recent resurgence among Australians, the idea of patriotism remains at once wrongly maligned by its detractors and misunderstood by its defenders. It needn't be, but patriotism has often been reduced to either a dirty word or a weapon of sectarian dogma. On the one hand, those critical of patriotism fear it easily slips into an aggressive nationalism ...
The Age - 9 September 2005
Our global house of cards
Despite the advances of modern techology, we remain as vulnerable as primitive societies. Perhaps it's natural to blame humans for natural disasters: the president's out of touch; the emergency services are unco-ordinated; it's all a racist plot. The people who do this are either out of touch themselves - they've never co-ordinated more than a Sunday picnic or, more sadly, are victims of the disaster and are going through the first stages of grief ...
The Age - 19 September 2005
The veneer of civilisation is easily eroded
New Orleans shows us we all have the capacity to be barbaric. Before our attention wanders on to the next headline story, let's learn Katrina's big lesson. This is not about the incompetence of the Bush Administration, the scandalous neglect of poor blacks in America or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters, though all of those apply. Katrina's big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin ...
The Age - 9 September 2005
Survival of the fittest?
After so many years of Social Darwinism, Hurricane Katrina could reawaken the American people's appetite for compassion in government. It takes a lot to shake America to the core - 9/11 did it four years ago this weekend; the war in Iraq still has not. It's 70 years since the satirist Eric Linklater noted in his novel Don Juan that life in America was spread over so vast an area that any number of strange and sinister interludes could be enacted ...
BBC News - 9 September 2005
Katrina reveals the home truth of US politics
Bush is not responsible for the disaster, only for the injustice it revealed. New Orleans shocked the world for several reasons. Politics nowadays is so much about the spin put on events. For a few fateful days after hurricane Katrina, no spin was possible. Events spoke for themselves in the way that earthquakes do. It was a withering insight into modern power ...
The Age - 19 September 2005
The blame game
Who is responsible for natural disasters? God, nature, governments... These days, says Frank Furedi, we are more likely to pin the blame on people in power. But that can leave victims even more traumatised. As we know from the recent tragedy of 11 September, major catastrophes and disasters serve as historical markers. The phrase "after this event nothing will ever be the same again" has been frequently repeated after many other major disasters ...
BBC News - 6 September 2005
Time to stop playing 'pin the blame on the donkey'
Everybody seems to want to use Katrina to settle old scores. The flood waters are slowly subsiding in New Orleans, but there is still little sign of a lull in the storm of bitter accusation and counter-accusation about who and what was to blame for the disaster, and for the disastrous relief operation that followed. Let us try to make a basic distinction here. It is important to account for what went wrong and what didn't, based on the real experience of the past fortnight ...
Spiked-Online - 9 September 2005
Crisis of self-confidence
The flooding of New Orleans has claimed more American lives than the September 11 attack and this time there was no evil enemy, no act of war and no violence that defied precise prediction. The entire event starts and finishes at home. It is an American tragedy and an American failure. Where 9/11 united the US in grief and anger, New Orleans has divided the US because it reveals a nation that has betrayed its own values ...
The Australian - 7 September 2005
Has Katrina saved the US media?
As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing. But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis ...
BBC News - 5 September 2005
Power to the victims of New Orleans
With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city. On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funnelled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes ...
The Guardian - 6 September 2005
After catastrophe, lessons from lives rebuilt
Some who have lost everything to storms, fires, or earthquakes learned the value of people - as well as photos and personal files. Mimi Doe was only 10 years old in August 1969 when hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, pounded the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It leveled her family's beachfront home in Pass Christian, Miss. In an instant, the antebellum-style house with white pillars was gone. So was everything in it...
Christian Science Monitor - 14 September 2005
A measure, but not of wellbeing
Gross domestic product calculations put too much spin on society's progress. Today is one of the biggest days in the economists' year. Today economists get to see what we've come to think of as the result of all our labour, the bottom line of the grandly named "national accounts". At 11.30am we find out by how much gross domestic product grew during the three months to the end of June ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 7 September 2005
Taking away freedom won't make the country safer
The question is: do the changes to the Crimes Act and the associated anti-terrorism measures announced by the Prime Minister last week suggest a Government that is more alarmed than alert, or are they further evidence of political virtuosos who can spin the community's security concerns into political advantage? The answer is: it is a bit of both ...
The Age - 12 September 2005
Pacifist tourists, the new big threat
Moves to deport a US anti-war activist are a serious abuse of power. Last weekend our nation crossed a line. On Saturday, a visiting tourist was arrested in Melbourne by the Australian Federal Police, on instructions from the Department of Immigration and ASIO. His visa has been cancelled and he is to be deported on security grounds. Who is this threat to our security? He is not a person with any history of violence ...
The Age - 13 September 2005
The reporter's right not to tell supports the public's right to know
When freedoms are at stake, the media can justify not revealing their sources. On February 20, 2004, two journalists on Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper, Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus, published a story of a leaked Government report that proposed rejecting a recommended $500 million increase in pension entitlements to war veterans ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 13 September 2005
The cost of online anonymity
In the second report looking at privacy and the internet, Dan Simmons examines whether it is possible to be totally anonymous and asks if this is really a desirable thing. In London's Speakers' Corner, the right to freedom of expression has been practised by anyone who cares to turn up for centuries. But in countries where free speech is not protected by the authorities, hiding your true identity is becoming big business ...
BBC News - 12 September 2005
Indecent proposals
It's not just perverts who should be worried about the government's proposed ban on violent pornography. The latest attempt by the UK authorities to regulate internet pornography is a proposed 'new offence of simple possession of extreme pornographic material which is graphic and sexually explicit and which contains serious violence towards women and men' ... This proposal is not a response to a surge in concern about violent pornography ...
Spiked-Online - 1 September 2005
Old world order
We need a modern way to recreate religion's respect for the earth. In the eighth century BCE, the Chinese became concerned about a disturbing change in their environment. Hitherto the Yellow River valley had teemed with wildlife: elephants, lions, tigers, rhinoceroses, monkeys and all kinds of game had inhabited the woods and swamps. After a hunting expedition, the king and his nobles consumed hecatombs of beasts in huge, drunken banquets ...
The Guardian - 10 September 2005
It would seem I was wrong about big business
Corporations are ready to act on global warming but are thwarted by ministers who resist regulation in the name of the market. Climate-change denial has gone through four stages. First the fossil-fuel lobbyists told us that global warming was a myth. Then they agreed that it was happening, but insisted that it was a good thing: we could grow wine in the Pennines and take Mediterranean holidays in Skegness ...
The Guardian - 20 September 2005
Cloning has a good side . Let's talk about it
Other countries allow therapeutic cloning. Why don't we? Now is the time for a serious debate on cloning in Australia - for at least two reasons. The laws on stem cells and cloning are being reviewed and the public has only until September 9 to send opinions to federal court judge John Lockhart's committee. And cloning is already literally on our doorstep ...
The Age - 7 September 2005
Why people hate fat Americans
Today's attacks on obese Yanks are motivated by a broader unease with affluence. If Americans had to be described with one word, there's a good chance it would be 'fat'. Americans, we are constantly told, are the fattest people on the planet. Obesity is rife. Compared with other nations the Americans are not just big, but super-size. Yet this obsession with obese Americans is about more than body fat ...
Spiked-Online - 9 September 2005