Friday Star Trek/Pirate Blogging

Bless my guts, today was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Very well, hear ye this:



For an alternative view, read this and this.

Bush to Do Too Little, Too Late for War-Fatigued Troops

The Washington Post reported today that President Bush will cut Army tours of duty from 15 to 12 months:

"President Bush plans to announce today that he will cut Army combat tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months, returning rotations to where they were before last year's troop buildup in an effort to alleviate the tremendous stress on the military, administration officials said."

Good idea, but not enough. Let President Bush also consider ending the policy of involuntarily extending service-men and women's enlistment contracts beyond their normal ETS. If this war is worth fighting, we should be drafting young single men and women who have not yet served, not forcing those who have to stay in the armed forces beyond the period for which they signed up.

This policy and its effects on troop morale is detailed in this new film. Go check it out.

"Ender's Game" and Human Security

A funny thing happened when I first told some friends and family about this blog and explained the title and epigraph: some were shocked.

This is because the epigraph is drawn from a book that apparently "glorifies child soldiering." [Admittedly, in Card’s Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin enters “Battle School” at age six and battle itself at age nine, and by age ten is a full-fledged, if unwitting, xenocidaire.] My admiration for the story puzzles people because I run with a pack that tends to lobby against child recruitment as it is practiced by certain countries and rebel groups today.

The easy answer to this question (besides: "duh, it's just a book") is that the Ender series doesn’t so much promote the conscription of children as suggest that children can be and are moral and political actors much like adults.

But this frame does indeed have political implications. These will no doubt be revisited by critics once the Ender’s Game film, now in the screen-writing stages, hits the box office. After all, if the original novel can be interpreted as pro-child-recruitment (debatable), it’s certainly easy to suppose a bastardized film version will.

An obvious “negative” side-effect from a human security perspective is that images of child combatants as heroic political agents could adversely affect international standard-setting against child recruitment. It might do so by problematizing the simplistic stories transnational advocacy groups trade in: stories that tell us children are victims not actors, abductees rather than willing volunteers, and innocents rather than strategic, rational actors.

Then again, isn’t challenging stereotypes also perhaps a good thing?