Typo?
Hmm. Should I do the charitable reading thing? Or should I just yell is Peter Singer nuts?
Let’s try the charitable reading. He mis-spoke. He left out the qualifying phrase. He forgot a crucial adjective or two. He – um – lives in a hole in the ground and has all his news filtered by hooded agents of a secret international organization?
Singer sought the clash with neo-con America, partly to revive a career that was going stale. True, when he was appointed Ira W de Camp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University in 1999, Bill Clinton was in the White House, but still Singer had been lured from the relatively liberal milieu of academic Melbourne because he thought the challenges in one of the world’s most selfish, reactionary societies would galvanise him anew as an ethical person.
Maybe it’s the reporter who left out the adjective or two, since that is a paraphrase or indirect quotation rather than an actual quotation. Surely. Because I have to say – bad and regressive as things are here, this is not even close to being one of the world’s most reactionary societies. (Selfish, possibly, depending on how you define it, but that’s not what I’m taking issue with.) It’s really not. I could give a great long list of examples of why not, but it’s so obvious I won’t even bother. I’ll just say – look at the lives of women and girls in a long, long, long list of countries, and then look at their lives here, and tell me the US is more reactionary than all those countries. Neither in practice, nor in law, is that remotely the case.
Why would Singer possibly “look at the lives of women and girls?” After all, he’s an Australian male.
I now its a cheap shot, but if the U.S. is going to be stereotyped as selfish and reactionary . . .
mmph
Well he could always look at the ‘lives’ of women and girls at Bondi beach, I suppose.
Cheap shot #2.
Yes, more accurately, he should have said, “one of the world’s least informed, most gullible and superstitious societies.”
It’s funny about this, because I just heard very similar anti-American thought from a twenty-somethingish, sideburned clerk at a hemp store in Hawaii. Really, I did.
My wife and I stopped there to look around while we were in a small town in Maui, and this clerk took the opportunity to enlighten us about America being the “most oppressive, evil country in the world.” Not surprisingly, he’s been reading lots of far-left stuff like Chomsky, and doesn’t believe there can be alternatives to that kind of worldview. I was starting to tell him something almost exactly like what you wrote here – that there’s a long list of countries much more evil in every possible way than us. But then his girfriend called, he had to go, and we went back to our hotel for the day.
It is strange how certain people can say such ridiculous and self-evidently false things about this country without even batting an eyelash.
Phil
MK, don’t be ridiculous. Look up some statistics on literacy rates, for example.
Phil, yeah. It’s a tad disconcerting coming from Peter Singer though!
Mind you, I think hostility to much of our foreign policy since 1945 is sane enough, and since we’re so powerful, I can see thinking we are more oppressive globally than anyone else. But if the idea is that we’re also the most internally oppressive evil country in the world – that takes some serious pie-eyed ignorance of the rest of the world.
Peter Singer is usually pretty careful about word choice, so I think that’s probably the Guardian writer extrapolating from something more mundane Singer might have said or written. I could see the US being the most reactionary, say, English-speaking society.
Philip – countries where English is the official language include Liberia and Swaziland. Even if you want to discount Liberia as a ‘society’, this might cast enough reasonable doubt on your proposal…
I was thinking he must have meant the usual standard ‘of industrialized nations’ or First World countries or the like, in which case I wouldn’t have made a peep. We don’t even have a national health, for chrissake.
Singer is, of course, just nuts.
The fact that he left Australia (and the girls of Bondi Beach!) for the US proves this beyond reasonable doubt.
(#1 on the return.)
(Actually, I think Singer just likes the notoriety.)
Merlijn: I did not know that about those countries. So much for the English-speaking qualification.
But as far as First World/industrialzed nations go, I think Japan has one up on the US. Birth control pills qua contraception were only recently legalized, anything that even resembles an amphetamine is banned (even Sudafed!), and sexism is rampant. But I doubt Singer, who probably doesn’t speak Japanese, considered teaching in Japan.
New hypothesis: The US is the most reactionary of the industrialized English-speaking societies.
OB,
You can’t be literate AND superstitious?
And what happened to your sense of humor? My comment was mostly tongue in cheek. I don’t go for the whole “most” this or that. We are indeed reactionary and superstitious and gullible. One of the most? Please.
We are also quite advanced, of course. We’re a paradox.
MK,
Oh, uh, er – my sense of humor got slammed in a door? Sorry – sometimes on the screen irony looks like non-ironic absurdity, and v.v. Plus I’m gullible. Beg pardon!
Japan, true. The parents of a Japanese woman I know (double PhD in medicine and genetics) moved here when she was about ten (I think) because of the sexism thing – they wanted her to be able to be something more interesting than an Office Lady.
Bondi? Any self-respecting Melbournian wouldn’t be seen dead enjoying themselves on a Sydney beach! Try St Kilda beach instead. Though not at the moment – it being winter-time. And night-time, for that matter …
Sexism it Japan? But if you look at Japanese manga, anime, “art” films, and other pop culture effluvia, you’ll find that the women tie up, torture, and urinate on the men just as often as vice versa. Why, it’s a very liberated place.
I never look at effluvia, nor manga either. What kind of person do you think I am, anyway?
‘I’ll have an effluvia and manga sandwich on a brioche, please, with extra kiwi salsa.’
‘Okay, pack up the effluvias and the mangas, we’re off for St Kilda beach. Throw in my anime, too, wouldja?’
“I never look at effluvia, nor manga either.”
If you lived in Japan, you wouldn’t have a choice; it would be shoved into your eyesockets and earholes during your every waking moment. In Japan, I envied the blind and deaf.
“What kind of person do you think I am, anyway?”
Last week, I would have said “a fine, decent, upstanding person”. But since my recent conversion to the true path of Islam, I’ll say “a foul temptress and Satan’s minion”.
It’s that bad? Sounds irritating as hell. But then I’m easily irritated. I hate it that supermarkets force me to listen to their taste in pop music just in order to obtain necessary foodstuffs.