GODDIDIT! That’s the only explanation for two completely different animals evolving the same gene. God was pissed off about the creation/evolution debate, so he went back a few thousand years and put the same gene into both dolphins and bats. Then he was like “Mwah! Wait until I create the field of genetics and then nudge some smarmy biochem post-doc in the early 21st century into comparing the DNA of these two animals! That’ll show ‘em.”
We love cheap stuff! We love it so much that we’re perfectly willing to let people in different countries (as long as they have different coloured skin) work in places we wouldn’t even walk through – places like the ones we striked to outlaw 50 years ago, for wages that were so horrible that we fought and got shot in the head to raise 60 years ago, and for hours that we deemed inhumane and unjust 70 years ago.
And then, when we get products that are filled with unsafe and dangerous substances that we outlawed 80 years ago, WE’RE FUCKING SURPRISED OR SOMETHING.
The problem is that as far as we’re concerned it’s totally worth the environmental destruction of countries we’ll probably never go to, in working conditions we’ll never have to imagine, so that we can save a few dollars on something that we’ll discard the next time we clean house. Why? Well, we tell ourselves that white people had to go through shitty living conditions too. Fair is fair! Development isn’t free!
Suffering is just what these people should expect if they want to work their way into the first world!
(Of course, it’s bullshit. By the time they get there, there won’t be anything left.)
It’s all because of a syndrome I’ve decided to call “retroactive entitlement,” where we attempt to justify the suffering of others in the name of some long-discredited puritan work ethic. Because now, it seems, people my age believe that it wasn’t actually really wrong to make white people work in horrific conditions for low wages back then, because it has paid for our current late-model automobiles and the roads upon which we drive them. This is what we as smarter, more moral people are entitled to, by having been the children of the people who suffered.
So look at it this way, everybody whose children have been chewing on cadmium-infested teethers: by ignoring workplace standards, by ignoring health and safety product warnings, and by manufacturing things that are full of dangerous – but cheap! – substances, the Chinese are earning their children’s Priuses. It’s not wrong; it’s progress!
I’m enjoying the outpouring of sympathy for the natural disaster in Haiti, from the entire Western world. It’s like, sure, your country was famous for its underdeveloped infrastructure and poverty and disease, but that was your fault. An earthquake that destroys hospitals full of those HIV-riddled children we didn’t give a crap about yesterday? GET THE AID OUT!
But seriously, if you find yourself giving a shit (because our empathy extends to natural disasters, since we can relate: any day now, the entire Pacific Rim is about to slide into the sea), you can help. Just try to keep giving a shit after the aid-dollars trickle out, OK? (Oh yeah, and how’s that rebuilding of New Orleans going?)
The worst thing about the reporting of Harper’s prorogation is the fact that they’re calling it a “suspension.” As if they’re going to get back after the break and pick up their discarded text-books and get back to work.
It’s more like an expulsion.
Seriously, if you kid gets suspended from school she at least gets to come back in a few days and catch up on missing homework. If she’s expelled, she has to go to a new school, and start her courses all over again. That is what’s happening here – a new session will begin, all the bills will die, and the committees can’t sit (and produce untimely and damning reports of the Harper government) in the interim.
Harper has expelled the MPs from the house, told them their work isn’t needed, and told them to start over again in a few months, but he hasn’t just given them a long vacation – no, they have to redo their courses at a whole other school come the Spring.
And yet they’re all getting extra credit for attending The Cool Sporting Event (in a purely ceremonial fashion, with lots of photo ops, natch.) Shows where our priorities really lie.
Economic experts (ie: people who have never worked for a living, but like to talk about it a lot) are talking about what a boost to the economy lowering the minimum wage would be.
Actually, though, the argument works even better if you talk about lowering the maximum wage. Then we can hire more CEOs, at a lower rate. And two is better than one, right?
Hey! The American medical insurance scheme kills babies. Isn’t that awesome? They have actual proof! Babies! Being killed! Because they don’t have universal healthcare!
Why not? Why, it’s too expensive, of course.
Ignore the fact that it’s actually revenue neutral. You have to ignore that fact, because it’s more important that established insurance companies stay in business. They’re in a FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES! Do you realize what universal medicare in the US would do? It would KILL INSURANCE COMPANIES! And what’s a few dead babies compared to that?
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