Leave the kids alone? Ain’t gonna happen

Autoritarianism, Life under Capitalism
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Last night while I was dropping off to sleep, for some reason I started thinking of how I used to walk to school when I was little. I must’ve been four when I started walking on my own to school, which was only five minutes away and how nobody thought this was weird, because everybody did this. In a neighbourhood with lots of young families and small children and little car traffic, this was perfectly safe to do. Had we lived in Amsterdam it would’ve been different, but no doubt I and my brothers and sister would’ve been using the public transport before we hit our teens. All of this is of course several decades ago and no doubt parents have become more uptight here as well, but I sincerily doubt we ever see shock horror articles likes this: Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone (found via Unfogged):

Once upon a time in New York City, it wasn’t a big deal if pre-teen kids rode the subways and buses alone. Today, as Lenore Skenazy has discovered, a kid who goes out without a nanny, a helmet and a security detail is a national news story, and his mother is a candidate for child-abuse charges.

A columnist for The New York Sun, Skenazy recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdale’s in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she’d see him when he got back home. She wrote a column about it and has been amazed at the chord she struck among New Yorkers who remember being kids in those more innocent times.

[…]

Dr. Ruth Peters, a parenting expert and TODAY Show contributor, agreed that children should be allowed independent experiences, but felt there are better – and safer – ways to have them than the one Skenazy chose.

“I’m not so much concerned that he’s going to be abducted, but there’s a lot of people who would rough him up,” she said. “There’s some bullies and things like that. He could have gotten the same experience in a safer manner.”

In the accompanying poll, 51 percent of the people who responsed said they wouldn’t allow their children on the subway at that age. It all seems a bit hysterical. Even in Amsterdam, vice capital of the Netherlands, I see pre-teen kids ride bikes to school and why shouldn’t they? Part of growing up is learning to do things without your parents and if you keep your kids in an overprotective bubble they will never learn to be independent. Yet judging from the article, keeping their children in such a bubble is exactly what many if not most parents want to do.

A related development is the amount of work and pseudowork children, even young children, seem to be saddled with these days. Children of my generation didn’t get homework until the final year of primary school, if at all and while we did have afterschool activities like learning to play guitar or were involved in sports, few of us had more than one or two of those at the same time. these days it seems schools and parents both are deeply involving even young children with what one Unfogged commenter called “the cultivation of personal individuality and resumé-like individual capacities” all in highly structured, cocooned settings but without giving children much freedom to do things on their own, outside a parent or parent-substitute’s supervision.

So you get a generation of children who are expected to have an agenda filled with “career building”highly structured activities alongside their school work, while everything outside these activities is frowned upon, actively discouraged or even criminalised –asbos for youths hanging around shopping centres, zero tolerance anti drugs policies for toddlers, metal detectors at schools and police officers at the door. Does that combination strike you as raising a generation of people able to dissent from what their leaders and betters have planned for them?

Why is NATO? What is point NATO?

Antiwar, Imperialism
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Once upon a time this was an easy question to answer. NATO was either a defensive alliance against the threat posed by the USSR and its allies, or, if you were so inclined, it was an instrument of western imperialism aimed at the people of Eastern Europe and Russia. Then the Cold War ended, not through any NATO effort, and the need for the alliance was gone. So why hasn’t it disbanded, why has it in fact not just continued to exist, but actually grown? Surely as a defensive alliance it is no longer needed as despite efforts to find a new evil empire, none have come to light. Even China is only a third rate military power still happy to buy secondrate Russian equipment and to suggest that an Iran or North Korea is so much of a threat we need NATO to defend ourselves is absurd.

Perhaps we see the real purpose of NATO in the current discussion of membership for the Ukraine and Georgia, something Russia has long objected to. From their perspective the long, steady eastward march of NATO during the nineties and zeros looks remarkably like a slow motion offensive, an encirclement of the motherland. They have some reason to feel that way, having been invaded three times in the twentieth century alone. You can of course reject all this as Russian paranoia and believe the assurances of NATO itself that it’s all perfectly innocent, honest. Myself, I’m not so sure, especially not after what happened in Kosovo.

Kosovo is seen as the great succes in liberal intervention, but remember that it was never sanctioned by the United Nations, featured terror bombing of civilian targets and did not achieve its main goal of ethnic cleansing. Instead NATO served as the KLA’s private airforce in their war against Serbia. The endresult is a combination gangster state/NATO protectorate. Kosovo opened the way for NATO to function as the armed arm of democracy, a role it’s now attempting to fulfill in Afghanistan as well. NATO as security for When the UN is going through one of its maddingly independent phases again; a handy tool to intervene in other countries when the UN doesn’t want to.

It also binds the European powers to the US and its foreign policy and prevents the European Union from following a more independent, perhaps more confrontational course. Many European Atlanticists thinks this is worth it, because NATO also binds America to Europe and prevents it from withdrawing in isolationism again. It’s sort of the old argument that Blair and co used to support the US in the War on Iraq: at least if we’re on their side we can influence them somewhat. Guess how well that worked out in practise.

In short NATO is obsolete and dangerous and needs to be abolished. It’s not needed to fight the real threats of the 21st century and the money wasted on it can be better spend elsewhere. The sooner it’s gone the better.

Lazy comix video Tuesday

Comix, Feminism, video
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You know what they say (but what do they know): three videos makes a post, so let’s have it then. Three Youtube videos on a common theme: comics. The first is a very suitable song considering the date, showcasing brilliant but unknown to me until now seventies feminist funk group Isis, over a montage of seventies superchicks, to stay in the vernacular of the day. Isis sounds like a cross between Jethro Tull and Funkadelic, with a dollop of Davis, both Miles and Betty. Thanks to Palau (of Prog Gold fame) for finding this.

Another brilliant Youtube marriage of music and comics is Thor – GOD OF METAL!. No, it’s not the one you might be thinking of, the this Thor, it’s the real one, the blonde surfer dude with the faux-Shakespearian speech patterns, rocking out to some Slayer. Watch out for the Beta Ray Bill and Eric Masterson cameos.

The same people behind the first video also did a homage to secret agent/detective heroines, featuring a real find: the Kane Triplet’s version of the Mission Impossible theme tune, with lyrics. Very catchy it is as well.

Finally, something with no redeeming value at all and nothing to do with comix other than that its creator, David Campbell, is a dancer for comix:

All because Dave runs one of the more popular comics blogs and needed some scans from this man. He’s evil I tell you, evil.

Books read in March

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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Another month gone by means another list of books read.

The Thief of Time — Terry Pratchett
The first time I reread this. A typical late Discworld novel.

Flat Earth News — Nick Davies
Nick Davies is an acclaimed journalist who here exposes the news media for the shallow spreaders of lies they are. Something of a Manufacturing Consent for the 21st century, though with less analysis and more anecdotes.

Vellum — Hal Duncan
A brilliant fantasy novel that will annoy the fuck out of a lot of people for being so deliberately vague and confusing.

Matter — Iain M. Banks
Banks’ latest Culture novel, which doesn’t disappoint.

Last Days of the Reich — James Lucas
This details the last phase of the struggle in Europe during World War 2, from the battle for Berlin until the final surrender of German forces on May 9, 1945. It’s somewhat marred by the author being slightly too keen to document the outrages undergone by Germany at the hands of the Russians while largely omitting the context in which these outrages happened.

Farthing — Jo Walton
A cozy murder mystery set in 1949, in a world in which Britain and nazi Germany made peace in 1941. The horror of the situation creeps up on you.

Petty Pewter Gods — Glen Cook
An entertaining hardboiled detective story set in a fantasy worlds where the Gods come quite literally knocking on our hero’s door…

Imperial Earth — Arthur C. Clarke
Dated but still interesting late science fiction novel by the last of the Big Three.

The Compleat Enchanter — L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Yngi is a louse! Classic fantasy stories from a time before Tolkien.

The Testament of Andros — James Blish
Classic science fiction stories, some of which now hopelessly dated, some of which deserving of being called classics.

Frederick the Great — Nancy Mitford
Mitford’s classic biography of the great Prussian leader.

The Secret of Sinharat — Leigh Brackett
Eric John Stark, fugitive from the law for supplying the Mercurian tribes with guns, has to stop the Martian lowlanders from rising in revolt in return for his freedom.

Preparation for future wars

Antiwar, War on Iran, War on Iraq
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I’ve talked about the failure of the antiwar movement before, in that it failed to stop the War on Iraq from happening, despite the protests held by tens of millions of people all over the world in the months before the start of the war. One common complaint heard at the time was that the protests came too late, that the troops were already in place, the preperations made and that therefore war was inevitable. I’m not sure this was entirely true; the protests did keep the Netherlands out of the war proper, though sadly not out of the occupation and I can see that if the Stop the War campaign had made different tactical and strategical choices in 2003 it might’ve kept the JUK out as well. There is however a kernel of truth in the idea that anti-war protests usually come too late, when the war is already started or preparations are so advanced stopping is impossible. It doesn’t help that for the most part anti-war movements are created largely adhoc, in response to a threatening war, that they die down in times of “peace”.

When you stop to think about it, it’s absurd that we live in a time when it’s assumed normal that even a country like the Netherlands, with no real enemies nearby is spending millions if not billions of euros each year on defence. Moreover we’re spending it not to defend our own country, but to enable our army to invade and occupy other countries. During the nineties, while our attention was elsewhere, the Dutch army transformed itself from a tank heavy Cold War style “defend the Fulda Gap” army into a lean, mean humanitarian intervention fighting machine, laying the foundations for getting involved first in Yugoslavia, then Kosovo and finally Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s the status quo, in which criticism of defence spending is seldom on a fundamental level, but mainly on issues of cost or choice of spending.

What brought this to mind is the news that the UK ministry of Defence is going ahead with a thirteen billion pound tanker investment, in which it gets over a dozen new tanker/transport planes. These planes are not needed for the defense of the United Kingdom, certainly not in that number. Instead they’ll be invaluable for the next Iraq or Afghanistan… That’s why we need an anti-war movement that doesn’t just mobilise when war is imminent, but that opposes defence spending from the start. If we have an army that’s capable of “humanitarian interventions”, interventions is what we get. We need to take away these tools that enable our armies to start wars. We need to stop the preperations for future wars, not just the current war.