{"id":2011,"date":"2009-04-21T09:36:35","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T15:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/?p=2011"},"modified":"2009-04-21T09:36:35","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T15:36:35","slug":"lucky-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/2009\/04\/21\/lucky-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucky girl"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On NPR this morning, they were covering reactions to President Obama&#8217;s recent trip to the Middle East.  Most accounts consider it a disappointing visit.  But I wondered at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allacademic.com\/meta\/p_mla_apa_research_citation\/3\/6\/4\/0\/1\/p364014_index.html\">this effort to fit the square peg of Democracy into the round hole of thousands of years of theocracy and sectarian struggle<\/a>.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThings are especially bad in the Middle East, it seems to me, if you&#8217;re a female.  I read things like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Three hundred women in Kabul protested a new law<br \/>\nmaking it illegal for a woman to refuse her husband&#8217;s<br \/>\nsexual advances for more than four days in a row unless<br \/>\nshe is ill or menstruating. &#8220;Get out of here, you whores!&#8221;<br \/>\nyelled counterdemonstrators.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>and marvel at how different Ava&#8217;s life is going to be (and is now) compared to most of her Middle East counterparts.  If there were even the serious belief among anyone in &#8220;The West&#8221; that people in these cultures desired some other form of government, how&#8217;s it possible to estimate how long such a transition would take?  Is there any logic in attempting to promote this change from outside those countries?  I wonder what the Middle East will look like by the time Ava graduates from high school in 14 years.  What could possibly happen in such a relatively short period?<\/p>\n<p>This is <em>not <\/em>a political blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On NPR this morning, they were covering reactions to President Obama&#8217;s recent trip to the Middle East. Most accounts consider it a disappointing visit. But I wondered at this effort to fit the square peg of Democracy into the round hole of thousands of years of theocracy and sectarian struggle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ava"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9oLlO-wr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2012,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions\/2012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}