Tunisia : Where do you belong? [Part 2]

A couple of months back, I asked myself this very same question in this post. I happened to discuss this topic again with a friend last week end and we explored some interesting new ideas.

Media is a big part of what shapes a country's identity. Most people would just reflect back what they see, read or hear about any topic. This is even more true when it comes to identity.

However, there isn't one identity but many identities within any group. In addition, identity is an elusive concept, it's dynamic and changes happen at different paces across society: Older folks adjust slower than younger ones (that's why older people are considered conservative, as in "attached to identity characteristics such as values").

When media allows people to express themselves and debate issues, people tend to more or less agree on many fundamental issues and that is then considered the "Mainstream". If you strip people of the ability to control what defines the mainstream, identity problems arise.

Case in point, the tunisian society is not characterized by the availability of free media or the ability to freely debate social issues in an open manner. Media, for the last 20 years, pictured tunisia as a moderate society where everybody enjoys a good quality of life. The identity projected by the media started to get disconnected from the day-to-day life when fundamental issues such as human rights, corruption, social and religious values or the high cost of living for the middle class went missing from the public media scene. Any event that disturbed that picture perfect story was omitted by the media whether that's a terrorist attack in Djerba, a recent plot to attack american military training in Tunisia or this unbelievable yacht-gate story [French]. The result of all of this is that people feel alienated from any "government-sponsored" identity and therefore, they try to find refuge in what they feel most comfortable in which is usually a mix of conservative values and religious fervor. There's no risk the government would interject or try to influence an identity that is dominated by spiritual beliefs.

Political and Media freedom, or lack thereof, can lead to side effects that can have long lasting consequences. Tunisian identity is the last 20 years has been shaped by clear economic success (albeit wealth distribution hasn't been ideal), lack of political freedom and the fragmentation of society into western-leaning and eastern-leaning progressive groups on one end and a much more conservative group on the other end of the spectrum. Moderates are lost in the middle with fingers pointed at them from all sides. The country needs more openness and more communication among these groups or risk a lebanon-style fragmented society (but hopefully a democratic one...).

Real long-term Healthcare Reform: make people pay for their healthcare upfront!

Healthcare is the hottest issue these days. President Obama is making it the focus of his political agenda and is even forcing the legislative branch to act fast, something they've never been famous for. But what's the rush?

Cost of healthcare has ballooned in recent times and the share of healthcare costs in businesses operating expenses is preventing them from distributing more profits to their workers, therefore keeping the economy in check since it's main engine is Consumer spending.

But why are these costs skyrocketing all of a sudden? Various reasons, among them: over reliance on individual motorized transport vehicles, bad diet, serious lack of exercise, healthcare system that is run with a focus on profits not on the population's well-being, lack of IT systems integration between healthcare providers leading to inefficient processes and more.

The economist published an article this week about this issue with an interesting twist. The hypothesis is that people's behavior only adjusts to the cost of their lifestyle. To force people to eat healthier, you gotta make the bad stuff (i.e. junk food) more expensive than the good stuff (i.e. greens and low calories meals). The conclusions of the article are that the effect of such an approach would be gradual at best (think 10-15 years) and that the most "addicted" people are either not price sensitive or can't afford anything else and would therefore see their real income fall.

The parallel that is drawn here is with alcohol and tobacco consumption. The die-hard smokers don't care if a pack of cigarettes costs 20$, they'll keep smoking no matter what, despite the risk to their health. That being said, this doesn't mean that we can't implement such an approach that puts the burden on every person to make the right choices for themselves knowing what they're paying for.

I believe that people are free to disregard the warning about the impact of their diet or smoking/drinking habits on their health. The issue is that the healthcare system should not make me pay for their poor choices. How can the system reconcile one's personal choices (say to smoke for years) with an efficient system to provide well being for society as a whole? Is it a good allocation of healthcare $$ to pay for a heavy smoker's heart bypass surgery instead of treating somebody for a cancer they had a genetic predisposition for?

In some way, this is the same debate with respect to a flat sales tax vs a geographically uniform tax bracket where everybody pays based on their base income, not their "real" income. What you buy is a better measure of your wealth. Someone who makes 100K$/year in indiana is MUCH richer than somebody who earns the same amount in california but they do pay the same federal income tax at the end of the day (and medicare and social security for that matter). So make people pay for what they consume healthcare-wise, the system gains in the long run, despite the persistent outliers who will never change their ways.

Maybe somebody from the Obama administration read this very same article and is considering such reform. One can only hope ...

Update 8/4/09 : It occurred to me that another theoretical idea that could be considered at is a "cap and trade" system for healthcare credits! There is a fixed allocation of credits you get at the beginning of every year, you can increase your credits with exercise, walk to work, etc and you lose credits for eating junk food for example. Credits are transferrable to other people on an online market place so people who exercise a lot or don't get sick, can pass credits to others. The point of all of this is that lazy people or people who just can't pass on junk food end up paying a much higher price to access healthcare services. The healthcare costs for the whole society can stay constant or just grow at the same rate as the population grows, not 5 times faster! Now good luck explaining this approach and implementing it :)

Islam in the US victim of common fear tactics

Sitting through the atrocious exercise of reviewing the videos my friends share everyday on Facebook, I stumbled upon one that caught my attention.

The story here is that a couple of guys showed up with cameras to a Muslim Community Festival in Dearborn, Mi (which happens to be the city in the US with the highest ratio of muslims in the population) to ask questions about islam and more specifically about a pamphlet entitled : "What does Islam say about Terrorism?". Check out what happens.

The last 10 seconds of the clip are choking to me. How can somebody conclude from an encounter with some idiots who are not thinking straight that a religion that has a Billion followers, mostly peaceful, with some bad apples (many of them as of late, granted), is a threat to the United States?

These are right-wing style tactics used to inject fear. The intentions may be noble, asking questions is anybody's right, but the conclusions make me question the motives.

I decided to track the group of people who made the first video and it turns out that they posted another video later that explains what the issue was with the pamphlet (which wasn't clear to me in the first video). Here,they get into some kind of a rational dissection of the verse of the Koran that is quoted in the pamphlet. Watch on ...

I started thinking, who is actually this Nabeel Qureshi? Turns out the guy is a Christian convert who was formally Muslim. He started a group named Acts17 with this mission statement :

The mission of Acts 17 Apologetics Ministries is to glorify God by defending the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the ground up. We present evidence for the existence and attributes of God, the inspiration and historical reliability of the Scriptures, and the death, resurrection, and deity of Jesus Christ. We also refute the arguments of those who oppose the True Gospel, most commonly the arguments of Muslims and atheists.

When somebody clearly states that their mission is to refute arguments, you can consider that they may not be the most impartial individual to draw conclusions from the questions asked.

I see two issues with these videos :

• Somehow a large part of the muslim community just doesn't know how to dialogue. The first video shows people preventing the Act17 guys from doing what they planned to do peacefully. No harm intended but still the security guards are just stupid to mess with their equipment and harass them physically. Is this cultural? related to the average education-level? lack of freedom of speech in home countries? Probably a combination of the above.
• On the other side, it seems so easy to draw grandiose conclusions from incidents that happen all the time in public events like the one in Dearborn. When somebody comes up with an all encompassing conclusion like: "What's the US going to be like if the muslim population keeps growing? No FREEDOM of speech!". This is shaky at best and ridiculous in my opinion.

That being said, I don't get why nobody is presenting the counter-point to the statement Mr Qureshi is making. He's done his job to attract attention to his point of view, the muslim community should pay attention and use the proper tools to answer back.