Needless to say, they’re not sincere.

“If Australia was sincere about fighting ISIS, it would end the criminalisation of the PKK and other laws that have frustrated attempts at practical solidarity with the democratic resistance to ISIS. The embargo preventing the YPG/J or PKK obtaining heavy weapons would be lifted and Turkish state support for ISIS would be exposed and opposed.”

- Tony Iltis, “The real reason Tony Abbott wants to bomb Syria”

I needed this today.

Thank you, Colossal and Cameron Bloom.

The new cover

Caroline Fourest has been saying that the decision of many US media organizations to blur out the new Charlie Hebdo cover is one of the saddest aspects of the response to the massacre, and she’s absolutely right.

There is nothing obscene, racist, or violent about this image. (I’m actually happy about the Guardian’s warning, since it nicely reveals the utter silliness of these notions.) This is in effect saying that blasphemy itself is offensive, too offensive even to show as part of reporting the news. How stupid our culture looks.

Psychiatric detention and drugging: Fear-mongering in the US, defending human rights at the UN

In a moment when a there’s a shameful and dishonest campaign underway in the US to stoke public fear of people diagnosed with a mental illness and push for their forcible incarceration and drugging, it’s encouraging to learn of positive international developments in protecting people’s human rights in psychiatric contexts.

Tina Minkowitz continues to report from the UN, where the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has made it absolutely clear that “the ‘danger to self or others’ standard cannot legitimize psychiatric detention, and that all legislation authorizing such detention must be repealed.” As Minkowitz explains, Article 14 of the CRPD – which requires that “States Parties shall ensure…that the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty” – prohibits “commitment based on a psychiatric diagnosis plus criteria such as ‘danger to oneself or others’ [or ‘need for care and treatment’].”

Because this prohibition of psychiatric commitment was a dramatic departure from the previous standard, though, “there were many law professors, human rights organizations and, needless to say, governments, as well as the World Health Organization (which is highly influential in developing countries), that misinterpreted Article 14 to re-inscribe the old standard.”

This problem has persisted for some time, and last month Minkowitz went to Geneva to address the Committee. “My intention,” she describes,

was to encourage the Committee to makes its guidance entirely clear on the prohibition of psychiatric detention, and in particular on the prohibition of detention using a ‘danger to self or others’ standard, so that governments would be put on notice that they are committing human rights violations by continuing to apply their commitment laws.

Her efforts met with success, especially in that “the Concluding Observations adopted on the three countries under review – El Salvador, Austria and Australia – all take the resoundingly clear position that psychiatric detention is prohibited under Article 14.” Minkowitz quotes from the Concluding Observations on these three countries – Australia, for example, must repeal “legal provisions that authorize commitment of individuals to detention in mental health services, or the impositi[o]n of compulsory treatment either in institutions or in the community via Community Treatment Orders (CTOs).”

Furthermore, “The issues raised under Article 14 in the criminal context, in particular the prohibition of criminal or forensic psychiatric commitment, are now beginning to be addressed by the Committee and also by the Special Rapporteur on Torture.” Also, “with regard to the Committee’s stance against forced psychiatric drugging and other coercive practices, they are continuing to be quite firm, addressing forced psychiatry as a form of torture and ill-treatment as well as a violation of the right to free and informed consent in health care, the right to integrity of the person, and the right to legal capacity.”

Good policy can be made when decisions are based not on fear and propaganda but on respect for human rights (and just human beings). What’s more, as I think Ted Chabasinski has argued, defending human rights is inseparable from developing positive approaches to psychological problems. Denying governments the option of violent and coercive (and often commercially profitable) measures pushes people to consider, imagine, and create humanistic alternatives.

*This was an appallingly credulous and dangerous segment from 60 Minutes, blithely repeating long-debunked claims and simply refusing to seek out or even recognize other perspectives. To drive the problem home, watching it online I was treated to two ads for the “antidepressant” Pristiq.

Musicians shilling for tobacco

One of the more shocking aspects of the report I talked about in my previous post were the cigarette-sponsored concerts in Indonesia headlined by artists from North America, the UK, and Australia. (Well, not all that shocking, unfortunately.) I was disappointed to see that a public campaign and petition to get artists to pull out of the tobacco-sponsored Java Rockin' Land festival appear to have failed, and the concerts went off this summer as planned. (Other artists, like Alicia Keys and Kelly Clarkson, had previously heeded the message and changed course.)

Seriously, bands? You want to advertise for tobacco companies? You want to be part of getting kids hooked on smoking? You're OK with that suffering on your conscience? A while back I posted about the Sun City campaign by Artists United Against Apartheid,* in which musicians joined together to refuse to play a resort area in apartheid South Africa and produced an album sold to raise funds for the anti-apartheid cause. If the Cranberries and others are so shameless as to participate in this exercise in irresponsibility, other artists should come together to criticize these concerts and state publicly that they themselves would and will not participate.

*It appears the video has since been removed.

Vaccines bad, diseases good: Anti-vaccine activists in all their Orwellian glory

Via Orac. Should come with a blood pressure warning.