GORDON: Ladies and gentlemen, things are happening in England.
No, no that.
I’m talking about the recent decision by the Cameron government to make pornography blocked by default on British internet service.
EVAN: To segue into us talking about this in earnest, I thought it’d be good to go into our personal experience with this.
No, not that. Continue reading
Posted in bizarreness, Europe, Evan and Gordon Talk, internet, morality, politics, pornography, sex
Tagged Block, BNP, Britain, Cameron, censorship, children, commercial, current-events, Daily Sun, David Cameron, EDL, government, Internert, law, parenting, parents, politics, porn, pornography, society, State, Tabloid, UK, under-age, Web, Youth
Do you know what an obstetric fistula is? I sure didn’t before I lived in Niger. It’s not really a term we hear often in North America. This is primarily because most of us have access to pretty great health care, but also probably because most of us don’t give birth before we are in our late twenties.
Nicholas D. Kristof, journalist and co-author of Half the Sky describes the situation of a patient with obstetric fistulas in an article he wrote called New Life for the Pariahs:
This is a childbirth injury, often suffered by a teenager in Africa or Asia whose pelvis is not fully grown. She suffers obstructed labor, has no access to a C-section, and endures internal injuries that leave her incontinent — steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.
She stinks. She becomes a pariah. She is typically abandoned by her husband and forced to live by herself on the edge of her village. She is scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God. Continue reading
Posted in Africa, health, media, money, morality
Tagged Ali Heller, anthropology, blog news, child marriage, Culture, Danja, half the sky, internet, media, Nicholas D. Kristof, Niger, obstetric fistula, Poverty Porn, racism, sex, Short term missions, teen mom, Violence, West Africa, Worldwide Fistula Fund
We all screw up.
It’s a simple and inevitable fact of life. Some of us have a few, major blunders, others are stuck with a seemingly unending trail of little errors, but the point is, everyone makes mistakes.
We’re going to be grappling with that issue, so upfront I want to declare that nobody’s perfect.
Then again, not everyone has a racist meltdown in a crowded comedy club.
Posted in America, celebrity, media, morality, news
Tagged 2013, America's Got Talent, Anthony Weiner, apology, celebrities, Chris Brown, Christian Bale, Congress, Elizabeth Colbert, entertainment, homophobic, Howard Stern, jews, Klu Klux Klan, Kramer, Mark Sanford, Mayor, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, new york, racist, rant, Robert Byrd, Seinfeld, sexist, Terminator IV
Recently, the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone was revealed, picturing a portrait shot of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, on trial for the Boston marathon bombings that left three dead and nearly 300 wounded. A wave of outrage has erupted against the magazine, with many major chains refusing to carry the issue. Indeed, one Massachusetts police photographer was so incensed that he took it upon himself to leak this photo in response:
Sgt. Sean Murphy is reported have been “relived of duty” since the leaking of this photo to Boston Magazine.
Posted in America, media, morality
Tagged banality of evil, Boycott, charles manson, cover, crazy eyes, doors, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, issue, jim morrison, manson, Michelle Bachman, Newsweek, OJ, OJ Simpson, oscar pistorius, photo, photography, photoshopped, Rolling Stone, sean murphy, sgt sean murphy, Time, Time Magazine
These are some of the kids at the Place of Rescue orphanage in Cambodia.
The reason I want to talk about these kids is because on June 20th one of my best friends was evacuated from her home in Calgary, B.C. due to extensive flooding.
There was actually a lot of cool stories I began hearing after the flood. Like the time the city asked for a few hundred volunteers to come out and help clean out flooded homes and a few thousand showed up instead.
But the coolest story I heard was actually about those kids at the orphanage in Cambodia. About six days after my friend was evacuated kids and staff at the place of rescue pulled together and sent a total of $900 to help with flood relief in Calgary. Apparently they had each been given the equivalent of about $12 Canadian money by the Cambodian prime minister’s wife not long before the flooding here in Canada. When they heard about the damages they decided to send some of the money they had been given to help with flood repairs. The reason I find this so exciting is because here in North America we tend to think we don’t actually have any real problems.
And we are constantly told about the horrible things happening overseas and why we should send money to help stop these horrible things from happening.
I’m not saying these horrible things aren’t happening. I’m not saying there isn’t a real need, or even that we shouldn’t send money overseas. All I’m saying is that we need them just as much as they need us. When the discussion of poverty is constantly framed in a way that leads us to believe we have the power to save lives it tends to lead to a bit of a god complex.
Not to mention that it also allows us to forget that often we are part of the problem. According to Blaine Sylvester, director of the Calgary-based Canadian
Foundation Place of Rescue, the kids at the orphanage don’t feel like they are so poverty stricken that they can’t share with their Canadian friends: “The children may live in spartan conditions and sleep 10 to a house with a house mother, but they’re safe, they’re secure and they’re loved.” While Canada and the States are ranked well below countries like Fiji, Nigeria and Ghana on the Global Happiness Index we still assume North Americans need to teach countries we perceive to be “3rd world” how they ought to live.
But while more and more North Americans begin to suffer from donor fatigue, the kids at Place of Rescue seem more than happy to teach us how to give.
Many people were introduced to the concept of Human Trafficking via the movie Taken where Bryan Mills’ (played by Liam Neeson) daughter is kidnapped and groomed for prostitution and he has to save her by killing everyone who has an accent.
Good Luck
Around the same time I watched the movie Taken I read a book called Invisible Chains by Benjamin Perrin. The book is a well documented account of Perrin’s investigation into human trafficking in Canada, an investigation that began internationally but ended up in his own backyard when he was “shocked to learn of a case of human trafficking in his hometown.” The book delves into several specific cases, and by specific, I mean horrific: “a 14-year-old from Ontario sold for sex on Craigslist; young women from the war-torn Congo and Colombia trafficked to brothels and massage parlours in Canada; a 21-year-old from Alberta who went missing in Las Vegas in 2006.”
Posted in Canada, Europe, morality, politics, sex
Tagged abolitionists, Canada, Culture, decriminalization, feminism, human trafficking, Invisible Chains, legalization, morality, Nordic Law, politics, prostitution, Red Umbrella, regulation, regulation model, sex, sex trade, sex work, sex workers' rights, Taken, victimization, Violence
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