The whole Tunisian thing

[sqbr]

Al Jazeera has good coverage of the revolution (if it still counts as one, the way things are going?). I finally got around to subscribing to their RRS feed and it makes a nice adjunct to the more local focus of the ABC news, even if in both cases I mainly skim the headlines too sleepy to pay much attention.

Women in Tunisia’s Revolution has some nice criticism of the form of some of the attention it's gotten, and that lead me to Secular Good, Muslim Bad (nb: title is sarcastic) I do think it's a huge mistake to see countries as being on a one dimensional uncivilised/civilised dichotomy, with Western style secular capitalistic democracy etc being the pinnacle everyone should aspire to. I find this particularly obnoxious when Americans posit the US as the epitome of that pinnacle(*), because no (especially not in terms of secularity!)

Also, in other "things happening to in other countries that could maybe stand to have more attention" news, there is significant flooding in Brazil and Sri Lanka (and possibly other places I forgot, sorry :/). It seems in general like a good time to make unrestricted donations to general aid agencies such as the Red Cross, here is a post with some places to donate (I am sleepy and lazy, sorry)

(*)This metaphor got away from me a bit. Highpoint of that pinnacle? Hmm.

Comments

[bunny_m]

Part of the 'In The News' section on Wikipedia's front page for the past few days:

More than 610 people are killed by flooding and mudslides in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro.

And yet, if not for the fact I always have wiki open in tab, I wouldn't even be aware there had been floods in the area.

The western media, *especially* ABC News Radio have a huge case of fail with this. Spend hours relaying QLD local radio around the entire country but forget to mention several hundred people have been killed in Brazil?

I'm very disappointed in you, ABC/BBC/etc.

[sqbr]

Yes, I only heard about it through politics.

[djkittycat]

I would not exactly call Brazil "non-Western" but I get your point.

[sqbr]

Good point. Hmm.

[djkittycat]

See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Brazilian

What the article mentions vaguely that is very telling is that at a certain point the Brazilian government had an official policy of "Whitification" in that they encouraged more Europeans to come to the country to make it whiter.

So yeah, Western country. Different than the states in some ways, but not really in others. Things just were/are pretty overt, both the good and the bad.

[sqbr]

*nods* Thankyou.

I've edited the post to just say "other", better to be vague than inaccurate I think.

[lilacsigil]

It's annoying me right now that my area is flooded (in Victoria, my actual town is fine) and we can get vast amounts of general information but nothing useful like road closures or flood levels outside the bigger towns. And yet, that general information (along with stories like the guy at Allansford who raised his grand piano on tiles) is crowding out stories about places like Sri Lanka and Brazil. If it was a lot of useful local information that would not bother me so much, but instead it's a dramatic narrative.

[sqbr]

Wow, yeah, that is pretty much the worst of both worlds, hope you managed to get some real info on both counts :/

[lilacsigil]

I left an extra hour to go to the dentist (40 minutes away normally) and arrived with 8 minutes to spare! Two roads were closed on the way. One of them has severe damage to a bridge and will be closed for weeks, but I only learned that from talking to the woman with the STOP sign!

[sqbr]

Ack!

[whatistigerbalm]

Pinnacle of that ideal, perhaps? I was just going to quote that bit to agree with it hard. Now I don't think that any other system is made of flowers and rainbows either, or that they're necessarily better than what we're trying to do, but it really doesn't help to go "this is the one true way" to the whole world.

[sqbr]

Absolutely. And it definitely doesn't help to choose one arbitrary measure of "civilisedness" (in this case secularity) and judge societies/governments etc purely by that metric.