Gordo notes that the United States is about to deport a Mexican in protective custody, who was an instrumental DEA mole in a dangerous drug cartel. If he had served in the US military or in a counterterrorism unit, he’d have been considered a hero, and there would’ve been TV series made about how he valiantly tried stopping the murders the cartel committed in Ciudad Juárez only to be stalled by his bureaucratic agency. But apparently since all he did was provide the US crucial information that it could’ve used against the mafia, he’s deportable.
Belledame and Ezra write about global inequality, which is rising fast. Some of Ezra’s long-time trolls complain that talk of equality is just a cover for Marxism, which would genuinely surprise liberals like Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen. But global inequality is not Rawlsian; it doesn’t make the poor better off. Sub-Saharan Africa actually has a higher GDP per capita than South Asia and had a higher GDP per capita than East Asia until relatively recently; but its regional Gini index is in the 60s whereas South Asia’s is in the 30s, dragging down its level of human development to fourth world levels to South Asia’s third.
Stentor explains once again what is wrong with Deep Ecology. This time, he tackles the notion that if people just expand their sense of self to cover the entire Universe, then all environmental problems will disappear.
Revere posts conclusive evidence that the Tripoli Six are innocent. A meticulous survey published in Nature shows beyond any reasonable doubt that,
the HIV-1 and HCV strains were already circulating and prevalent in this hospital and its environs before the arrival in March 1998 of the foreign medical staff (five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor) who stand accused of transmitting the HIV strain to the children.
And yet, as Shelley notes, the Libyan government is still unmoved; the expected verdict, to be delivered on the 19th, is still guilty, with the sentence being death. The government cares about the evidence to about the same degree medieval priests cared if a given woman really was a witch when they sentenced her to be burned at the stake; it denied the defendants the right to have foreign experts of any kind testify on their behalf.
Amanda reviews her latest read, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Despite the name, the book is not about eating meat versus vegetables, but about eating industrial versus organic food, noting that even organic food growers adopt many corporate norms. You should really read Amanda’s entire post, but just to give you a rough idea, “The first part is probably not news to anyone who’s read other books like Fast Food Nation, but it reads well and has a more environmentalist view of the issues, whereas Schlosser tended to look at the labor issues the most.”
Abstract Nonsense 