Body Language

Steel Drum

Driving Age

Your blog is very interesint

Having spent a large part of the last 4 years photographing Palestine/Israel, I’m geuessing you’re not someone who has spent a great deal of time there, or who has won any awards for the quality of your coverage. Ah, the joys of armchiar blogging.

Firstly, Hebrew is spoken widely by Palestinians – which is kind of ironic as there are only about 20,000 people now allowed to work in Israel. English is also widely spoken amongst Palestinians, and is taught in school. Illiteracy is lower than China or Syria – though that may no longer be true as the IDF destroyed the statistics bureau. I met a guy who used to work as an engineer for an Israeli/US chemicals company. They had a security review, which said that no Palestinains should work in chemicals. The company offered him a job in the US, but due to family commitments, he couldn’t take it up. So now he’s a taxi driver in Jeruaslem. I have a friend here in London who spent a year in prison during his teenage years, initially for refusing to give information about his dodgy relatives to the Israeli security services, though of course there was never a charge leveled at him, they just took him. Unlike the rest of his brothers and sisters, he never made it to university and worked as a chef in Tel Aviv for many years. Then, being unable to get to and from work during the intifada, he got a job at the Paradise Hotel in Bethlehem, which was subsequently shelled by the IDF. So that job went too.

Secondly, the position of women in Palestine is generally pretty good compared to other Arab countires. Hanan Aswari is in the cabinet of the (pretty much destroyed) PA, women can drive cars, go wherever they want, study at university, work etc. My London friend’s mother learnt to read recently (aged in her 50s), having never been taught in the refugee camps of the 1950s, at the local university.

I’d refer W., who suggests that only a Soviet economist would recommend raising prices to cut gasoline use, to this article in BusinessWeek by Gary S. Becker, 1992’s (non-Soviet) Nobel laureate in economics.

Dean’s web site has decent proposals, in my opinion. However, Dean’s statements in debates are so vague that he could keep them the same if he switched to the Republican party. It leads me to believe that the web site has nothing to do with the person we see on TV.

The living conditions of Palestinians are kept at terribly low levels by destroying their houses, blowing up infrastracture, denying access to water, by isolating them and stifling economy. The conditions can be vastly improved by not investing a single cent, and by discontinuing these policies.

Compare 2001 and 2003 Human Rights Watch reports excerpts on water:

2001
“[Bedouin schools] are mostly housed in tin, wooden, or concrete buildings with insufficient classroom and office space. In general, they are not supplied with running water and electricity, although some are found next to water pipes or electric lines.”

2003
IDF [Israel Defense Forces] operations caused extensive, and often repeated damage to civilian buildings and infrastructure in PA areas, including the partial or complete destruction of roads, sewage networks, water supplies, and electrical grids.

On your original subject – should we watch the candidates on TV or read theire positison on the Internet? Well, what you don’t get from a few pages of policy statement is a sense of what is Dean’s major attraction – he has charisma. But you do get this sense when you see and hear him speak. He will need it not only to win the election, but also to be an effective. It matters more than policy – because without it you can’t get anything done. Ask Al Gore.

So score one for TV (or streaming-media files, if you like).

My main reason for supporting Dean is that he has successfully attracted supporters with a rabble-rousing style, even though the substance of his policy proposals and his record are pretty moderate. This gives me hope that if he pulls out of his current poll slump and wins the Democratic nomination, he can adjust his style and run on his record as Governor of Vermont (balanced budgets! health care! warm fuzzies!) in a way that attracts swing voters without alienating his base. (If he doesn’t get the nomination, well, I hope the nominee does a better job at getting good press coverage.)

If I could wave a magic wand and choose a philosopher-king of America, then Dean, Kerry, Clark, and Edwards would all fit the job equally well equally poorly. Alas, in the real world I can only cast a vote for a politician, and I’m not ashamed to look for the best politician, rather than the one person who has the most sensible policy proposals for everything.

On two-way satellite internet access: no. I tried Starband ($70/mo) and it was so egregiously bad I switched back to dialup. Character-based work is impossible as each char must travel to outerspace and back, so you have to “type blind” over ssh and such. Starband as a company is abominable, so even had I been satisfied with the service I would have cancelled as a matter of principle. They hacked tcp/ip to eliminate handshake steps, and try to add caching to get over the latency, so MS got involved and now demands that you run windows to use the service. In fairness it’s fine for downloading big things, but certainly a challenge for the techno unsavvy.

I reserve judgment on Dean, but I do think free wireless internet access would be the single greatest step towards regaining democracy, so I think you are being overly critical.