Flushing More Freeper Fiction

(I was posting about food earlier, so I guess it makes sense in a way to post about one of its byproducts also.)

Did you know that the World Toilet Summit was recently held in New Delhi, India, attended by representatives from 39 countries (though I don’t believe that the United States sent a representative; I can’t find that information anyway)?

Well, it was, as it has been in a participating World Toilet Organization country every year since 2001 (44 countries are members, as noted here).

And the World Toilet Summit was allegedly the topic of this Philadelphia Inquirer editorial by Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (and since we’re talking about the Inky, rest assured that this organization is a right-wing “think tank”; a prior Rosett column that assaulted common sense appears here).

As Rosett tells us…

If (the World Toilet Summit) sounds like a joke, sanitation is no laughing matter. According to U.N. estimates, 2.6 billion people worldwide lack access to hygienic toilets. The U.N.'s aim is to halve this number by the year 2015, as part of a broader agenda of halving poverty. By its own account, the United Nations has been falling behind in this goal. At least six major U.N. agencies have now been enlisted, and will seek more funding, to hurry up remedies to what one of them, UNICEF, is calling the "global sanitation crisis."

It’s nice that Rosett identifies the number of people lacking access to hygienic toilets, but please take note of how she demeans the importance by stating vaguely that it is “part of a broader agenda of halving poverty” before he quickly launches into another freeper attack on the U.N. (and putting the phrase “global sanitation crisis” in quotes the way she does diminishes the true threat).

This should tell us the extent of the problem (not that we would hear this from Rosett, of course)…

The United Nations claim that more than 5 million children die every year from sanitation related diseases such as diarrhea. More than a billion people without sanitary facilities relieve themselves on streets and in rivers, heavily polluting the water. The most important source of water contamination in developing countries is due to the lack of adequate sanitation facilities. Although public toilets are available in most countries, most of them are poorly maintained.

Also, Rosett uses the story of the latest World Toilet Summit to launch into a tale of how Taiwan was thrown out of the United Nations in 1971 (as if departing from that body led to better toilets, among other benefits). Perhaps, but if so, why does Taiwan continue to participate in the WTO (they hosted the 2003 summit in Taipei)?

And on top of that, we receive this mystifying analysis from Rosett…

For those individuals privileged to be flown to U.N. conferences and to sit in U.N. assembly halls, the Year of Sanitation represents yet another potential pot of funding. From it will flow employment, consultancies and per diems for people who already have toilets. It dignifies the fiction that regimes such as those of China, Belarus and Zimbabwe are dedicated to serving their people.

Oy…

To get a better idea of what went on at this year’s World Toilet Summit, feel free to access the information from this link; somehow I think the summits have and will accomplish more good than Rosett will ever admit.

Only our own immaturity about this subject gives us the illusion that we can poke fun at others because of an amenity that we take for granted. When all is said and done, this is a public health issue first and foremost, not an easy target for a cheap conservative laugh.