Soundbites on YouTube

Politicians around the world are gingerly using YouTube to make policy statements, or maybe just to get their soundbites out there while avoiding having to have a press conference.

Now some Catholic seminarians have parodied the Mac vs PC ads (which I already loathed anyway) to convey the Vatican’s doctrine on Natural Family Planning vs Contraception.

They’ve got three videos up now, with more planned.

Now I disagree with the practicality of Natural Family Planning, although I applaud much of the sentiment: avoiding excessive chemical intervention with bodily functions, increased communication and intimacy between partners about avoiding unplanned pregnancies etc. Increased communication about sex before it actually happens can only be a good thing.

Unfortunately, NFP requires abstention during ovulation, which is the woman’s peak time of sexual desire, thus NFP involves a lifetime of women acquiescing to sex outside their peak period of desire and being forbidden from other forms of attaining orgasm during the peak period of sexual desire. Sounds like a recipe for frustration and resentment for me.

I notice that these videos simply don’t mention at all that NFP works (as far as it does work) only for people who are in monogamous committed relationships, which of course to the Church means marriage. So they’re simply not addressing the rather large population of adults who are not yet married but who are interested in sexual intercourse anyway. The unsaid only option for unmarried adults is abstinence. I’m not surprised that they’re not addressing that.

Anyway, it’s a very interesting exercise in propogating a set of policy soundbites. I await the replies that will surely multiply in the next few weeks with great interest. I also wonder when various lobbying groups on various social issues are going to fully embrace the viral aspect of YouTube etc for getting their soundbites more effectively out into the social consciousness. Let’s face it – I’m blogging about the videos above because they were put together with a modicum of wit about a controversial issue. Other people will do the same. If other groups do similiar things, those videos will be viraled and generate discussion. Get your issues out there, folks.

crossposted at LP

Filed under: Media, activism/charity, culture wars, netgeek, performance, religion, reproductive freedoms, technology

Neat graffiti

Via counterclockwise at Flickr, a neat bit of street art.

Filed under: Politics, activism/charity, war

Quicklink: fundraising drive against female genital cutting

Missed this while I was away, and some of you may have already seen the post linked at Alas, A Blog!, but the post is still open: Kim at Larvatus Prodeo is on a comments drive to raise money for NGOs working to educate communities away from the traditions of female genital cutting.

For every comment on this post which discusses the issue seriously without turning it into a political football, attributing motives to bloggers or indulging in disputation about religion, politics, culture wars, or clashes of or within civilisations, I will donate two dollars to The Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development up to a maximum of two hundred dollars.

My hope in doing so is that that money will make more difference to eradicating FGM in Egypt and other countries than two hundred loud denunciations in Australia would. The Foundation also works to eradicate forced child marriages and fistula.

The post is currently up to 90 comments, not all of which are substantive.

Filed under: activism/charity, sexual violence

Picture worth a thousand words of the day, and rally for Aboriginal justice

NAACP GOP Presidential Forum, originally uploaded by by JillNic83

The picture is via Jill of Feministe, and her post title is a cracker: But Abraham Lincoln was a Republican! That’s good enough, right?

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There are rallies around Australia today (and internationally) for a National Day of Action For Aboriginal Justice to mark the end of NAIDOC Week. Being the anniversary of Bastille Day won’t hurt the symbolic significance either. I only found this out from New Zealand blogger Maia, and the Sydney march starts with a gathering at The Block in Redfern in half an hour!

Stand up with the Aboriginal community on Saturday 14th July at 10:00am at the Block to demand:
* Stop the genocide, end Indigenous deaths in custody
* Land Rights not mining rights – no mines and no dumps
* Funding for community controlled services not cops and troops

Rally at 10:00am at the Block (next to Redfern Station) for the march

I’m too late to get to the rallying point, and I can’t find any information about the march route. Bugger.

Filed under: Politics, activism/charity, indigenous

Sex ed – the facts

Further to Lauredhel’s post about a UK judge’s strange views on the sexual precocity of a 10 year old girl, which became a discussion on young people and sexuality (and the negatives of viewing adolescent sexual experimentation through a lens of adult sexuality), I’ve just become aware of this terrific website from the UK, from sexual health charity Brook. As parent to two kids in their tween-to-teen years, such websites are of great interest to me, and I suspect to many other parents.

Brook Advisory Centres – commonly known just as Brook – is the only national voluntary sector provider of free and confidential sexual health advice and services specifically for young people under 25. Brook is a registered charity, and has 40 years’ experience of providing professional advice through specially trained doctors, nurses, counsellors, and outreach and information workers to over 200,000 young people each year.

They have an excellent set of information pages (based on leaflets they supply to young people around the UK): Contraception, Emergency Contraception, Pregnancy, Sexually transmitted infections, Abortion, Your Body. They also have a comprehensive section on the rights of young people regarding sexual matters.

I really like the way they’ve laid out the information so clearly and simply. In Australia accurate information is a little more complicated because of different State laws regarding various aspects of sexuality and reproduction: Sexual Health and Family Planning Australia coordinates policy statements for the State Family Planning organisations linked to on their homepage, and each State organisation has Factsheets/Brochures explaining how various State laws affect sexual health matters as well as the basics of sexual health education.

Filed under: activism/charity, health, sexuality

Hating on “contextual” advertising

The way much online advertising is structured to respond to words used in text on the page, all in the service of consumerism, is often jarring.

Fat-acceptance blogs, for instance, tend not to have such advertising (which would help them fund their activism) because the ads would all end up being for the exploitative weight-loss and cosmetic surgery industries, which is exactly the sort of pressures they wish to educate readers away from. Feminists also tend to shy away from such contextual advertising because they end up with a sidebar full of ads for lapdancing and XXX-online services.

Other publishers aren’t so careful. I went looking for Sara Vowell’s well-known 2001 essay on white Americans comparing their pet causes and activism to the American civil rights movement: You, Sir, Are No Rosa Parks and found a nasty example. To begin, here’s a quote from Vowell’s essay:

Filed under: Media, activism/charity, racism

Harradine’s poverty legacy continues

Sue Dunlevy writes an excellent column today on the legacy of Senator Brian Harradine, who held the balance of power in the Australian Senate for long enough to drag our foreign aid policy into a position whereby, Dunlevy argues, we actively perpetuate poverty through being forbidden to provide family planning services as part of foreign aid programs.

Harradine left parliament in 2004 and the Howard Government now controls the Senate in its own right, but Harradine’s legacy lives on. A pity that can’t be said for scores of women worldwide, some 186 of whom die every day – according to one estimate – from unsafe abortions.

Edited to add: I missed the story last week whereby Harradine has denounced plans to lift the Harradine Amendment on funding that promotes family planning to alleviate poverty:

“Any attempts by members of the House of Representatives – (Mal) Washer and (Warren) Entsch – to allow scarce foreign aid funds to be used to, quote promote abortion as a method of family planning, should be condemned,” Mr Harradine told AAP.

More on the Washer/Entsch movement to lift the Harradine Amendment [here].

Dunlevy’s column points to her own family history of women relatives mired in poverty through having too many mouths to feed, and goes on to note

Being able to control our fertility is what has made the feminist revolution possible.

But in hundreds of countries around the world today, still millions of women are enslaved, like my great aunts, by their fertility.

They don’t have access to the contraception which would stop them getting pregnant in the first place.

And when their abject poverty leads them to abort the unwanted babies they can’t support, 13 per cent of them will end up dead.

Aid agencies from the World Health Organisation to the UN now recognise that birth control is one of the primary solutions to world poverty.

As policy currently stands, we are saying to the poor people of our region that we don’t care about promoting a blatant double standard in our foreign policy:

Filed under: activism/charity, culture wars, health, law, medicine, reproductive freedoms

Engage obstreperal lobes

Lauredhel has updated her post from last month about the lack of transparency surrounding ProLacta’s International Breastmilk Project with the latest news. As thought, they couldn’t lie straight in bed.

Feed the wo-orld… one baby, anyhow.

UPDATE (8 June 2007) by Lauredhel: Salon has taken up the story.
Milk Money

After May 31, however, IBMP will send 25 percent of all donations received to Africa, and 75 percent will be sold to Prolacta for $1 an ounce. What kind of profit margin does this mean for Prolacta? Potentially a motherlode. If, as Elster told me, the average donation runs around 180 ounces, then that would mean that 135 ounces (75 percent) “sold” to Prolacta would generate around $4,725 (at $35 an ounce) for the company, or about $3,890 after subtracting the expense of donor processing (about $700 per donor) and the cash payment to IBMP.
[...]
Is giving 45 ounces of breast milk at a cost of $135 to African babies really a good exchange rate for a commodity that can deliver $3,890 to a for-profit company?

Filed under: activism/charity, breastfeeding, ethics

3000 votes: Boot Howard out of Bennelong

I like this local initiative from some voters in the Prime Minister’s electorate of Bennelong, whose major slogans are:

A Future without John Howard? It all hangs on 3000 votes.

Just because Howard is the PM, doesn’t mean he has to be our MP.

Campaigning for Fresh Apples in Bennelong

There are apples all over the 3000 votes website – the Granny Smith apple is the emblem of the greater Ryde area, which is most of the seat of Bennelong, so the locals are familiar with the symbology.

At the upcoming 2007 Federal Election, the residents of Bennelong face a simple choice. To re-elect our incumbent MP and PM John Howard only to have him step down twelve months later if the Coalitions wins (or to step down 12 minutes later in the likely event Labor get up) or to cast their vote with another candidate and save themselves the inconvenience of a by-election.

Bennelong voters are also faced with some slightly more complex choices. Do we, as a socio-economic and cultural microcosm of Australia, wish to endure more of the same tired, outmoded rhetoric and policy spearheaded by John Howard or do we desire change and a forward-thinking approach to government?

3000 Votes is a non-partisan campaign formed by a group of young Bennelong residents who do desire change. We, as the adult children and teenage grandkids of the baby boomers understand that it will be our generations who suffer most from the Howard Government’s years of skepticism and inaction on climate change and it is our peers who are most vulnerable to John Howard’s ‘WorkChoices’ legislation.

And that’s just for starters.

The articles on the campaign skew youth and Green-ish, which may not be to all potential Bennelong voters’ taste, but with a bit of luck the message that it will only take 3000 votes to unseat Howard will nonetheless ring loud and clear to all. Onyas.

Filed under: Politics, activism/charity

Feed the wo-orld… one baby, anyhow.

UPDATE: 4 June 2007
Jill Youse has finally responded in the Mothering forums.

We were absolutely correct.

Prolacta is skimming off 75% of milk donated by mothers for Africa, for sale and for profit within the USA.
Prolacta is “reimbursing” the International Breastmilk Project the princely sum of one dollar per ounce that they take.

Prolacta sells its breastmilk product to US intensive care units for around thirty dollars an ounce (Some published figures have been in the forties, I have chosen the lowest figure).

—————————————————————————-

I’ve posted in the past about Prolacta’s for-profit breastmilk-mining enterprise in the USA, and their efforts to “partner” with “non-profit” organisations to provide an altruistic veneer for their activities.

Prolacta is now involved with the International Breastmilk Project, which ships (some) donated milk overseas to Africa, and the process is shrouded in mystery. It’s obvious to anyone involved in charity work that such an effort is destined to be unbelievably inefficient, and perhaps more than a little condescending – white wealthy women’s milk being shipped in to “save” sick black orphan babies. Much has been made of Prolacta’s “altruistic” involvement, which we have been told they “are not making a dime off”.

For an idea of scale, 5 000 ounces of milk every six months, the commitment the IBMP has made (according to The Lactivist), is about enough to feed one baby for 166 days, or six babies for 27 days. So the IBMP, with all its global publicity and PR, has reportedly committed to feed … one baby.

Donors signing up to the IBMP are required to sign a release for Prolacta to use their milk for research. The nature of this research is not elucidated in the consent form. Women I have spoken with usually believe that it must be altruistic research designed to increase the world’s knowledge of breastfeeding. In fact, venture-capitalist-funded Prolacta has an aggressive patenting program grabbing intellectual property rights to the various components of mother’s milk, with a view to formulating proprietary pharmaceutical products and (most likely) mother’s milk substitutes.

Let me make this clear: women are not paid for their milk. They donate it for free.

A number of people in the lactation support world, including me, have been questioning the transparency in the International Breastmilk Project – and answers have not been forthcoming.

Read what The Lactivist has to say. Lacking answers from the IBMP and Prolacta for her questions, she has started to do some research, and what she has managed to find isn’t promising for the altruism of this new partnership.

Filed under: activism/charity, breastfeeding, ethics, racism