"A continent ages quicly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short space of time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away…The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts…We are the intruders and after we are dead we have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are."
— Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (in which he writes of his awful hunting exploits)
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Feminism, in my view at least, should not use the power of institutions, including the state, to protect women from the right to make up their own minds. Equality must both redress gender biases and redistribute power so we all take on our share of responsibilities as well as rights. Setting up women as needing protection from male-driven sins means denying the role of Eve as the tempting source of knowledge. As an unbeliever, I quote these archetypes to illustrate my objections to some forms of so-called conservative feminism. It is not feminist to infantilise women by removing our right to make the wrong choices.
We need to recognise that all genders have similar capacities to make good and bad choices and need similar conditions in which to make them. While I am no fan of sexploitation, of objectifying and commodifying human beings, I do not see tactics of censorship and banning of particular manifestations as useful. Emphasising women as victims also contributes to gender-based biases in political thinking.
"
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Eva Cox speaks out with her ever-intelligent mind on who gets to use the ‘f’ word. This is in response to the Melinda Tankard-Reist storm started by Rachel Hills which is leading to some nasty in-fighting among the ‘f’ crew of Australia.
For the record, I don’t think you can be a feminist and ‘pro-life’ or anti contraception. Try being a woman in a developing country having your 12th child in as many years, with no access to contraception, and unsafe abortion being your only option? Women need access to family planning resources, and this includes options for safe abortion.
"
The evidence suggests that the truth lies in the in-between: Microfinance works really well sometimes – but not always. It works for some people the way we thought it might, and for others in ways we didn’t anticipate. For some people, microfinance doesn’t seem to have any measurable effect…
People in developing countries don’t always make what we might think are rational savings decisions, just like people in developed countries. They may not save because the future is unknown, because they don’t have the self-control to follow through, because they don’t always foresee their future needs, or because they don’t see the point when they’ll just have to share their money with family and community members. All of these reasons sound familiar to anyone who has had trouble making a decision whether to save or spend – be it on budget, diet, or time and energy.
"
— Leah Stern asks What do we really know about microfinance? The answer - it works for some people, some of the time, and is not the silver bullet it’s made out to be.
"Unlike national markets, which tend to be supported by domestic regulatory and political institutions, global markets are only ‘weakly embedded’. There is no global lender of last resort, no global safety net, and of course, no global democracy. In other words, global markets suffer from weak governance, and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy."
— Dani Rodrik in his book The Globalization Paradox commenting on the flaws of globalisation. Very pertinent in GFC world.
"I remember not long ago hearing Picasso and Gertrude Stein talking about various things that had happened at that time, one of them said but all that could not have happened in that one year, oh said the other, my dear you forget that we were young then and we did a great deal in a year."
— Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book."
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the body. (Thank you, Penny).
"He asked about 40 women and small children what they knew about tuberculosis – how it was transmitted, whether it was curable, and how it was treated. Answers came from all corners. These people knew TB."
— John Donelley, Nepal has lessons to teach on TB, (The Guardian).
"Because it hasn’t been tried, no one really knows whether poverty on a global scale can be overcome by a truly substantial amount of aid provided without political interferences."
— Peter Singer, The life you can save, p.119
"He rocked back and forth, remembering again how to breathe. He wiped his face, his neck, with a handkerchief and found himself in the mirror. His face was pale, his eyes red. He looked bloated, grey and old. He realised he was crying. Snot trickled from his nose, tears marking his cheeks. He didn’t cry - he hadn’t cried since he was a kid. He massaged his chest. I will change, he promised. I will change."
— Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap, p.45.
"When one personality meets another for the first time, there is a period of mutual examination on the intuitive level of empathy and identification. But it was impossible to relate one’s self to Doolie in any way. He was simply the focal point for a hostile intrusive force. You could feel him walk right into your psyche and look around to see if anything was there he could make use of."
— William S. Burroughs, Junky, p.48.
"Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change…We should be helping the heroes."
— Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion, p.96
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
— Herbert Simon quoted in Chris Anderson’s book ‘Free’.
"[PowerPoint is] dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control…Some problems in the world are not bullet-sizable."
— General McMaster quoted in Leo Shanahan, How PowerPoint slides ruined the world at The Punch
