Freedom? I'm just asking...

So, I've been wanting to try this blog thing for awhile, mostly to free myself from the 'confines' of Facebook and a large number of friends I haven't seen in ten years who might not feel like hearing my advocations/provocations to save the panthers in the Everglades every time they feel like checking out their wall again. But more because, living as an expat for these past years causes small, sometimes huge, explosions of maddening, rediculous, inspiring thoughts everyday that make me smile even as I'm riding the bumpy, crowded bus, or make my eyes well up with tears, or both at the same time, and that I feel the need to release from my long, sometimes shaky fingertips. But maybe its not expatism, maybe I was always like that.

Ah, sweet liberation for me and you.

So if you don't want to read this, then well, don't. Actually do, even if you dont. So it seems you're still reading...

and me, I'm still writing, and using punctuation, that's strange. I wonder how long this will last.

So here I am/we are. Together.

The reason that inspired me to actually get on here and do this was for a paper that I just submitted at 2:46 am budapest time for a class on news media and political power.

What? This is going to be boring you're thinking, and perhaps so.

But I've redacted it for you. And I appreciate any commentary.

The US and Russia are both democracies..., Roumeen Islam says in his book "The Right to Tell: The Role of Mass Media in Economic Development." In our comparative politics course we just spent two weeks trying to define democracy (if you’re thinking that’s way too long for graduate students, you're right), and using all the different characteristics of democracies to classify them into different types, so now when I hear anyone say ‘democracy,’ its become so thick in my mind it cant be thrown about anymore, especially when Russia is involved.

Roumeen also has a whole section about Freedom of Information, or FOI law, which brought back bitter memories of my FOI study for another class where I 'claimed' information from different agencies of the US Department of Defense and after 3 months of waiting (20 days is the legal limit) I received a link to Wikipedia as my response. ( I was claiming information on civilian casualties in Iraq, and any pre-invasion information on this topic, i.e. any paper documents on how the decision to not count casualties was made, how the government distinguishes between 'insurgent' and 'civilian'. This research is in the process of being published -yay!- but maybe I'll post it here soon.) So Wikipedia, eh? Now why didn't I think of that? Oh, wait I did. But I didn’t want ‘that’ public information, I want the public information inside your offices that you have yet to make public. Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz tells us that "the information gathered by public officials at public expense is owned by the public, and that using intellectual property for private use is just as serious an offense against the public as any other appropriation of public property for private purposes," and I agree.

These thoughts swung me back to democracy and what my sense of complete failure of FOI law in the US, meant for the US. In regards to FOI, the author says that the key question for FOI law in developing countries is how the country implements it, such as institutions designed and accountability measures. I would suggest that the author add as necessary a question number 2: do these measures actually work? And in what sense does the US get to espouse freedom of information, and claim its place as an advanced democracy if they don’t? And what can this advice lend to authors such as Islam who are advocating FOI laws, on how we can actually make them effective, when institutions fail? (And to be honest, that's a bit of the reason I'm writing right now. Government accountability mechanisms did fail, what will the public have to say?)

Next, we read a chapter from Klausen's "The Cartoons that Shook the World," about the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammed from September, 2005 that I'm sure we all remember. On pg. five, in reference to the Dreyfus affair in France of 1894, he suggests that “It is conceivable that the “cartoon affair” may one day end with some symbolic act of restitution to Muslims..” To be honest, I would not be happy to see this happen. I prefer not to believe that I can’t take my “Western” lens off, or that I’m a cultural imperialist, but this is 116 years after the Dreyfus affair, where the relevancy to Muslim extremism and cartoons is not even blatantly clear, and I would like to believe that we have evolved into a global 'civil society', or at least a Western one, that is not going to cede our human rights, and their underlying beliefs which we, as citizens, states and allies, have fought long and hard for, and that form the basis of our democracies, whether they be thriving, struggling or whatever state they are in, we believe in them.

My final point this evening to draw it all together: Leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush repeatedly proclaimed that the terrorists (i.e. Muslim extremists) were at war with our freedom. I'm pretty sure I remember the words "They hate our freedom."

If ANYONE was at war with OUR FREEDOM it was Bush himself (and friends, of course.) He was the one who went around telling us we were going to die, be afraid!, and stealing our rights and civil liberties from right beneath our eyes. Actually, he really didn't have to steal them, we gave them up. Iraq has WMD's and we can save our skins by letting you flout our constitution, and illegally wiretap us, and torture people, and break the rules that you are claiming to protect? It wasn’t “them”, but he sure used them well as his justification.

The effects of the “cartoon affair” can already be studied. Even Klausen notes they have had an effect on artistic expression, and freedom of expression, and I myself wrote another paper for Molnar's class on hate speech, and how the Islamic states in the UN are bringing forward measure after measure to protect themselves from what they see as religious defamation, without much or any concern at all for free speech.

A symbolic act of restitution for a cartoon? We might lose (we are losing?) the 'war on terror,' (if it was ever possible to wage war on an act), but lets not lose the war on freedom, whoever is waging it.

So, that is one excerpt, that is inherently tied in with a lot of other things I've been working on here at this wonderful university here in Budapest. There will be more blogginess soon. Some nice pictures perhaps...