Just another dent in the damage…

I’ve never read such a bunch of total shit in all my life. Read here.

No wonder there are more and more kids self-harming when idiot rich kids desperate for attention like these are spreading messages of self-loathing, depression and suicide.

“There is nothing fake about this dark period of his life, just stark honesty” – Sounds more like stark bullshit to me, how about you?

US secruity have decided that 141 of the 490 prisoners held at Guantanamo can no longer be deemed as a threat. They have been ‘reclassified’ and are no longer considered ‘enemy combatants’. Details concerning their release dates are not yet known however!

Social Theory has gone mad. Click onto any of my weblog links and I’m sure you’ll get just as intrigued by this E-Team business as I am. If you’re (like me) a regular lurker on Comment is Free I wonder if your head is whirling as fast as mine. Down with John Lloyd; Rise Andrew Murray – or at least that’s what I think I’m supposed to think.

Gone are the days when right meant right, center meant sitting on the fence and left meant left. To be a leftist these days is no longer so simple. It seems to me that the root cause of the much dramatised divide in the leftist camp would be the war on Iraq. One is either pro-war or anti-war and this stance will be the sole definition of ones’ leftist ideals. Now as the anti-war mob have proven themselves to be right all those pro-war types can admit they were wrong and we can unite in plans to pull troops from Iraq, kill Bush and make peace in the middle east, right? WRONG. The arrogance of Nick Cohen and Norman Geras has led to something much worse. a new manifesto and a load of pro-war excuses. Andrew Murray notes their ‘non position taken on the Iraq war’ in the Euston Manifesto to be an ‘embarrassing silence’. Although I enjoy reading his Independent comments I’m no great fan of Johan Hari but to openly admit that he was wrong about supporting the war three years on has got to take some doing especially when I’m sure he was well aware of those ready to snap the olive branch.

So what is it about the E-Team that I struggle with? In all honesty I’m not actually that sure (aside from the war thing). After reading its statements I’ve gotta admit that yeah I believe in a lot of it: the support it lends to equality, its belief in human rights and the freedom of speech, principles of democratic elections, a two-state solution, embracing plurality and opposing anti-Americanism (it’s not all bad is it?) But then again I’m not one for sugar-coated imperialism and neo-conservatism or a rejection of the social left. I’m one for the removal of dictatorships like the Saddam Hussein regime but I’m certainly no pro-war type and have never lent support for an illegal war on terror and its rumors of WMDs. I’m for Leninology (because he’s a right on dude) so does that mean I should automatically disagree with Harry’s Place types? I’m for the liberation of Palestine so does that make me an anti-Semite who as John Lloyd suggests is forming ‘close alliances with fundamentalist Islamic groups’? I like George Galloway so does that mean I’m a [insert smear campaign here] believer? So please help me, what camp do I fit into? The real left, the progressive left, the new left, the internationalist left, the red left, the neo-con left, the Blair left, the right left, the center left or the ‘what are all you middle-aged blogosphere men arguing about’ left?

Last week I watched one part of the three part BBC drama, Family Man in which Trevor Eve stars as a fertility expert and revolutionary IVF doctor. One of the families that turn to Dr Patrick Stowe for treatment lost their son in a tragic accident and seek help to determine the sex of an embryo before embarking on the IVF process. With three daughters already the couple are desperate for a boy, not to serve as a replacement for their loss but to ‘fill the hole left by little Nick’. With the Ethics Council, growing public opinion and the majority of his colleagues all firmly opposing such action, Patrick is left to make an agonising decision over whether it would be morally ‘right’ to break the law in order to help them.

The concept of choosing whether to have a baby based upon the knowledge of its sex however is more like common practice in certain parts of India. Yesterday’s Independent featured an article linking the high abortion rates of female foetuses to its modern day slavery.

Indian parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden: the parents have to provide expensive dowry for their weddings, while sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better job prospects.

With only 861 women for every 1,000 men there are just not enough women to marry. This severe shortage of women has therefore led to a growing market of trade in which women are brought and sold as a commodity. Many of the women are brought as ’sexual brides’ from the poorer villages and later sold on at a profit. While abortion in India is legal, testing the gender is not and as strict laws come into force in order to prevent this practice doctors are becoming increasingly more inventive in notifying parents of the foetuses sex.

To get around police, doctors have started using codes to tell the people the sex of the baby: if the ultrasound report is written in blue ink, it’s a boy; if it’s in red ink, it’s a girl. If the report is delivered on Monday, it’s a boy, if it’s a Friday, it’s a girl.

Last week the BBC reported on the first sex selector doctor to be jailed for revealing the sex of an unborn baby and agreeing to abort it. It seems however that the damage to gender ratios has already been done with an estimated ten million aborted female foetuses in the last twenty years! Dominic Lawson goes on to comment that ‘the women’s movement saw this one coming a long time ago’. He refers to the publication of Mary Anne Warren’s Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Science in 1985 as a prediction of ‘the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender)’.

Having asked if ‘gendercide’ would be ‘no less an atrocity than genocide, Warren’s conclusion was that choosing the sex of one’s child was wrong only if its intent was discrimination against women. Or in other words, the act is neither right nor wrong – it is the thought behind it that counts. With the concluding part of Family Man coming up on Thursday I would therefore suggest (using Warren’s model) that in fact the act of identifying the sex of an embryo is neither right nor wrong it’s actual irrelevant when you see that the families need for a male embryo is far from any kind of gender discrimination. However as the family are still in mourning over little Nick and quite clearly suffering psychologically with blame and guilt would it be right to help them if their inability to come to terms with their loss would be detrimental to their new son’s development?