Daily Archives: February 3, 2012

by

❊ Should We All Start Shaming MTV?

I’m having an internal debate about whether or not I want to actively shame and boycott MTV over their now established trend of reckless racism. The reason I’m finding this difficult is because I know many people who work there who are really decent and nothing like the racist pigs they’re being portrayed as.

MTV is an excellent news and entertainment tv station. It’s also the station that most “gets” the internet and is most smart about it. It’s really sad that a majority of bright and professional people there are getting tarnished because of a few idiots whose idea of comedy is to make fun of people’s misery, enslavement and suicide.

So what does “actively shame and boycott” MTV mean? Here’s what I’m thinking:

  • Unfollow all MTV employees on Twitter and ask people who follow me to do the same
  • Delete the MTV app from my iPhone and iPad and ask all my readers and family members and friends to do the same
  • Delete Beirut Spring posts that recommend watching MTV and downloading their app
  • Ask everyone to go to the iTunes store and give their app a 1 star rating
  • Appeal to readers who can pull strings to ask businesses not to advertise at MTV
  • Stop watching their news bulletins online and reading their website
  • Unlike them on Facebook and ask friends and friends of friends to do the same
  • Ask all my readers and friends, especially bloggers and activists to actively shame and boycott MTV, as detailed in the points above.

I know I’m just a regular guy and that these measures won’t affect a big corporation like MTV. I don’t want to get all sensational and call the station names, but I want to believe that at least I’m making a small difference in furthering the cause of racial equality, compassion and harmony in Lebanon.

by

Do we Need a Lebanese Senate ?

Elias Muhanna (a.k.a Q.N.) on why Lebanon needs an upper chamber in parliament:

The classical benefits are in a country like Lebanon where you have minorities that are construed as confessional, you have a weak center and communities that are concerned about the loss of their freedoms, their ways of life. The idea is that the senate provides a check against all of that. You basically open up the Parliament so that it’s one person one vote so it’s equal suffrage across the country. [...] Anything that bares on confessional issues [has] to be passed through the senate as well. So that way every community no matter how small has a say in the affairs and destiny of the country.

This is great in theory but there’s a big catch: As the standoff between PM Mikati and the FPM demonstrates, the sectarian problem in Lebanon is not simply one of representation, but also one of patronage. The Various sectarian zaims want to have their people represented in the official bureaucracy.

Put another way, imagine an extreme situation of one-man-one-vote suffrage that results in a parliament of 100 Muslims and 28 Christians. The question to ask is: If a Shiaa block has 50 MPs and the Druze only have 5, can you make an argument for equal quotas for the Druze and Shiaas in the high posts of government, even if they’re equally represented in the Senate?

Besides, we already have a sort of defacto Senate. These are the various religious bodies (the council of Maronite Bishops, the higher Shiite council, Dar el Fatwa..etc) which traditionally get up in arms and mobilize the faithful whenever an issue is perceived to threaten the influence of their faith.