Jenny’s Pennies

What you should read this weekend:

“The Beautiful People Are The Skinny People”. Mo at Big Fat Deal got a question from a 14 year old girl about how to accept your body. It got some real thoughtful and beautiful responses. Found via Shapely Prose, where the question also got great comments.

Every where I look the beautiful people are the skinny people! Everyone just..accepts them!

I know I’m talented…but that doesn’t make the girl in the mirror look any better

and everytime my mom tells me I look pretty…I just can’t believe her!

Is this just a “fourteen year old phase”?
What’ll it take for me to love my reflection?
‘Cause everytime I say to myself “You’re beautiful” it feels like a lie…

How do you do it? How can you just totally accept yourself exactly the way you are! What your secret? Will you share it with me?

“They all had to be eliminated” (from The Independent, UK). About Kang Khek Ieu, know as “Duch”, a top Khmer Rouge official who oversaw the deaths of 17 000 people in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime. He is now facing trial, and has been interviewed by Valerio Pellizzari:

I wanted to know if Duch had any moments of uncertainty, doubts, feelings of rebellion while he was wiping out his country’s entire intellectual class.

He admitted the idea had crossed his mind. “When the work started at Tuol Sleng, I asked my bosses now and then, ‘Do we really have to use all this violence?’ Son Sen never answered. Nuon Chea, the No 2 Brother in the power structure, who was above him, told me: ‘Don’t think about these things.’

“I personally had no answer. Then with the passing of time, I understood. It was Ta Mok who had ordered all the prisoners to be eliminated. We saw enemies, enemies, enemies everywhere.

“I was cornered, like everyone in that machine, I had no alternative. Pol Pot, the No 1 Brother, said you always had to be suspicious, to fear something. And thus the usual request came: interrogate them again, interrogate them better.”

“Reflections on indigenous issues by a non-indigenous person for the consideration of non-indigenous people.” Paradigm Oz about the apology issued to Australia’s Aboriginal population and about the reconciliation process:

The reconciliation process has been a white commentary on black Australia, perhaps easing some of White Australia’s anxieties but it has not connected in any meaningful way to Aboriginal Australia.

The reconciliation movement has achieved no positive change in Aboriginal Australia, except of course for the Apology, which while spiritually significant, does nothing to address issues of Aboriginal poverty, disadvantage and ill health.

“Rowan Williams has shown us one thing – why multiculturalism must be abandoned.” Johann Hari on the British Archibishop of Canterbury’s idea of allowing sharia law in Britain (found via Cruella):

Yet many people feel instinctively uncomfortable when we talk about ditching multiculturalism – for a good reason. The only alternative they are aware of is the old whiter-than-white monoculturalism. /…/ Multiculturalism was formed with good intentions as a counter-reaction. But it has become a mirror-image of this old racism, treating Muslim women – and others – as so different that they do not deserve the same rights as the rest of us. As the European-Iranian feminist Azar Majedi puts it: “By creating different laws and judicial systems for each ethnic group, we are not fighting racism. In fact, we are institutionalising it.”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Friday food for thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.