Monday, June 8, 2015

New Blog!

Thanks to all the Donkeylicious readers who have followed us over the years! Those who are interested in more posts by me might enjoy my new blog at neilsinhababu.blogspot.com. It'll have some political content like you saw here, plus some philosophy posts. There will also be random trivia about cool stuff, and music on Fridays.

Thanks also to Nick for being a wonderful co-blogger. Our complementary skills and fundamentally similar outlook are what any team of comic book heroes needs for success. If the creation of more happiness for everyone requires that we someday blog together again, I'll be among the happy ones.

- Neil Sinhababu

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Fox News And Paris Muslim No-Go Zones

If I ran a cable channel devoted to misinforming Americans about other countries, I'd spread whimsical false beliefs instead of terrifying ones. Like, maybe in Paris there are Muslim Pogo Zones where everyone bounces to work during Ramadan!

I guess the trouble is that people might go to Paris to see wacky things that aren't real, and lose their money. But that would still be better than going to Iraq to protect us from nuclear threats that aren't real, and losing their lives.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Scotland Decides

It looks like a really close independence vote in Scotland. I guess I would've come down on the 'No' side, mainly because of the currency issues. If Scotland keeps the pound, it seems that Scotland's economy is still ruled by London bankers, and it loses what little ability it had to control them. But the future is hard to figure out -- maybe they don't keep the pound, or any one of dozens of considerations overrides that. I'm glad I don't have to make these decisions.

My own postcolonial attachments to the idea of independence from England make it hard for me to be a 'No' supporter. As the American-born child of Bengali parents, I'm at the intersection of two spectacular stories of throwing off English rule. The American story is familiar, but the Indian story may be even better. Over centuries of being ruled by well-educated Englishmen, famines that killed millions were common in India. In the Bengal famine of the early 1940s, Churchill shipped the grain out of the Bengali countryside to fortify Calcutta against a Japanese siege that never came, starving millions of Bengali villagers. (Leo Amery, the British Secretary of State for India, recalls Churchill saying, 'I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion'.) Then after India becomes an independent democracy, famines that kill millions are a thing of the past. When severe drought hit Maharastra in 1972, the government responded to popular pressure for relief, and mass starvation was avoided. The US and Indian success story is basically the success story of democracy -- the people may not be geniuses, but they'll stop you from starving them. I guess if Scotland were to lose all democratic control over its monetary policy, the democratic lessons of America and India might actually apply against independence.

To a utilitarian like me, political systems are broadly like sewer systems. Their proper functioning is tremendously important to human life, and sometimes it's best to build your identity around them. Seriously, with the sewers. If your regime won't let you ever build sewers, becoming a violent sewer revolutionary and murdering people who won't let you do what's needed to build them may be better than letting millions die in endless cholera epidemics. But it's best for the structure of political authority and your identity to come apart if sticking them together doesn't achieve good consequences.

There's all kinds of cool arguments I've heard for independence, including my friend Alfred's argument that an independent Scotland could fill its underpopulated areas with enterprising immigrants (he pointed at me and said "we need more clever fuckers like you!"). Maybe some of these arguments point to systematic reasons why Scottish nationalism is a force for good. It's not impossible. Indian nationalism a hundred years ago was well aligned with the betterment of India, and very likely humanity as a whole. But if that's true of Scotland now, it's not something I can clearly see.

Scotland will always be the home of my favorite British things. There's MacPherson's Farewell, and Fear a Bhata, and the Loch Tay Boat Song. There's David Hume, and more recently, my buddy Aidan McGlynn versus this English knowledge-first thing that looks more useless on issues the better I understand them. There's the beauty of Edinburgh and the Highlands and girls with skin like milk and hair like fire. And I expect them to remain just as beautiful no matter what Scottish voters chose.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Unionization and An End to Corporate Welfare: Two Great Tastes That Go Great Together

The UAW is attempting to unionize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Republican elected officials are threatening to stop giving out "incentives" in the form of mammoth tax breaks if the union vote succeeds. I don't know about you, dear reader, but to me this sounds like having your cake and eating it too.

There are good reasons to recruit large manufacturers to your municipality. The jobs they create pay good wages; the plants are very "sticky" so the jobs will last a decade if not much much longer; and you can use it to boost an ecosystem of manufacturing employment. But the tax breaks and free land that are the large attractions in these deals are a little unseemly. We'd be much better off if governments focused on providing quality public services that these manufacturers need--education, transportation, management of health care costs--rather than just tossing money from the "Economic Development" slush fund at large corporations.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Racist, But...

As people have noticed, "I'm not racist, but..." very often precedes racist opinions. Anyway, it would be sort of refreshing to see the reverse: "I'm racist, but the mayor ought to take a stand against police harassment of young black men."