Barbarism in Saudi Arabia

Saudi courts have condemned a victim of a gang rape to 200 lashes and six months in jail for having met a man without having a male relative present. I'm a little dubious about the lashes, since 200 serious lashes is a death sentence, but it's clearly still the kind of ruling one would expect from people whose judicial, ethical, and consequently governmental systems are based on the mores of 7th century desert nomads.

This would be just a quaint, a reminder that there's still a world out there that we would rather not encounter, except that we depend completely on these people to stay afloat. In oil, that is. We cannot afford to say what we feel publicly, although we're quick to condemn the regimes in Iran and Burma.

Our dependence on imports, both the manufactured ones which overseas employers produce with exploited workers and petroleum from countries we really don't trust, is making America weak. We can't really criticize the Saudis because we need their oil. We can't criticize the Chinese because we need everything and we owe them a trillion dollars.

Free trade is an abyss. As someone put it, it involves spreading wealth around the world until every worker has what a Pakistani bricklayer considers a decent income.