The Republic of Dissent

Reconciling France to facilitate integration

“France has been reconciled with its role in World War II. It remains for it to be reconciled with its imperial and colonial history. There is no doubt that it will be the responsibility of the next president of the Republic, a man or woman young enough not to have known the pangs of the Algerian war.

It is a history that must be approached without taboos, without complexes; it will go to our capacity as a country to close the wounds of the past and to create the best possibility to face the challenges of the present, first and foremost, the integration of the Muslims of France.” Dominique Moïsi, “Meanwhile: Papon’s the Antirigtheous.”

The necessity of unilateralism

Max Boot argues that the US's unilateralism is necessary because its allies don't spend much on their own national defense while the US does. According to Boot, the US is always the country, which has to carry almost the full load of operations, which are in its interests and in the one of its allies because those countries cannot or do not always help:

Look at Afghanistan, where NATO is always having trouble dredging up an extra helicopter or another infantry battalion to throw into the fray. The British and Canadians are doing more than their share; their willingness to fight hard and take casualties sets them apart from most NATO countries, which prefer to send troops to safe parts of Afghanistan rather than to the front lines in the south and east. But 5,500 British and 2,500 Canadian soldiers can cover only so much ground, even with another 1,500 Brits thrown in. As usual, the United States, with more than 27,000 troops in Afghanistan, is left to carry the lion's share of the burden.

Salaam Bombay

Spiegel has a wonderful article of the contradictions and particularities of the Indian City of Mumbai or Bombay as it is used to called. It is worth ready. Sugary excerpt:

Bombay, or Mumbai as it is now officially called, well-deserves its nickname, Maximum City. It is as avant-garde, trendy and hungry for superlatives as its Chinese counterpart Shanghai, a comparison that Indian politicians are happy to make. The city is home to India's oldest stock exchange, its most important banks, its wealthiest business moguls, its most beautiful movie stars and its most feared gangsters. Mumbai provides more than one third of all taxes the government collects, as well as hoarding vast amounts of illegal earnings. Forty percent of international flights to India land in this city, which already counts more than 18 million inhabitants today. According to a United Nations estimate, it will be the world's second largest city after Tokyo by 2015 -- and will have more inhabitants than either Australia or all of Scandinavia.

Betting on Romney

James Horton is betting on Mitt Romney to win the Republican nomination and lists seven reasons why he will become the next Republican president candidate. Among his seven reasons is the fact that he is young, confident, and fresh and that he’s a former governor.

Preventing a war with Iran

The former German Foreign Minister Joschkar Fischer writes in an article that the world can't wait and that must act now to prevent an American attack on Iran due to its nuclear ambitions. He argues that although Americahas the power to start a war with Iran, it doesn't have the strength to win it, and that Europe must act to prevent war because it will be the most affected by it and by the failure of the United States:

The Europeans - led by Merkel, Blair, and Chirac - should agree to assure the US that Europeis ready to pay a high, perhaps very high, economic price by taking decisive action to intensify the sanctions against Iran. But they should offer this only on two strict preconditions: that the military option be taken off the table, and that all parties involved - including the US- enter into direct negotiations with Iran. [...] It is up to Europe to prevent the two worst developments in Iran- war and nuclear armament - by acting jointly and with determination. Vital European and transatlantic interests are at stake. It is thus Europe's responsibility - and especially Germany's, as the current EU president - to act now.

Becoming a European

Rainer Bauböck has an informative article on European naturalization laws. He shows that great differences exist and that Europeans countries become more integrated and that their borders cease to exist citizenship will need to be harmonized so that it can be easier to determine not only who is a European citizen, but also who can acquire the different European citizenships.

Europe's civil war...

Larry Siedentop argues, unconvincingly in my view, that Europe is in the middle of a civil war, which opposes secularists and religious believers. He chooses to say that both sides shouldn't be fighting for in fact there is not an opposition between secularism and christianity. He argues that secularists have misunderstood secularism by making unreligious or worst antireligious and thus amoral  when there is a moral logic between Christianity and civil liberty, which must be understood and accepted for Europe to be able to face the challenge of Islam. Sugary excerpt:

Secularism, however, is not mere indifference or nonbelief or a “value-free” framework. On the contrary, it rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the blind following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others.  This is also the central, egalitarian moral insight of Christianity.

[…] What will happen to this “civil war” now that Europe is faced with the challenge of Islam? Will Europeans come to understand better the moral logic that joins Christianity and civil liberty? It is important that they do so, if they are to counter the argument that secularism is a form of nonbelief or indifference. Their own self-understanding is at stake.

If Europeans understand secularism merely in the terms favoured by its critics — as consumerism, materialism and amorality — they lose touch with the moral intuitions generated by their tradition. They forget why they value freedom — and therefore risk losing it.

Derrida, UC Irvine and sexual harassment

This article in the La Times about Jacques Derrida, the French Philosopher and creator of Deconstructionism, and his attempts to use his archives as a bargaining chip to force the University of California at Irvine not to purse a sexual harassment case against a university professor by his student is fascinating. I don't know whether to be outraged at Derrida who is no longer alive or to lament the fact that sexual harassment is too often a power tool on college campuses. By the way, the investigator of the university concluded that the sexual relationship between the college professor and his student was consensual, but of course, the damage was done. I guess that more people should read Coetzee's “Disgrace” and learn about the unsavory mixture of sex and academics.

Britishness according to Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (minister of finance) and successor of Blair, had the following things to say on the subject of Britishness and the acquisition of British citizenship:

A strong sense of being British helps unite and unify us; it builds stronger social cohesion among communities. We know that other countries have a strong sense of national purpose, even a sense of their own destiny. And so should we. And it helps us deal with issues as varied as what Britain does in Europe; to issues of managed migration and how we better integrate ethnic minorities.
Today we have a citizenship test for newcomers wanting to be citizens - 24 questions on life in the UK that lasts for 45 minutes. We also have citizenship ceremonies. We will soon have a stronger element teaching us about citizenship in the curriculum.
But I believe when there is now so much mobility between nations and countries, when we feel strongly that being a British citizen is something to be proud of, then we should emphasise that British citizenship is about more than a test, more than a ceremony - it is a kind of contract between the citizen and the country, involving rights and responsibilities that will protect and enhance the British way of life.
Citizenship means there are common rules and accepted standards. There is now agreement with the proposition I made some time ago that for new citizens, learning English should be a requirement. New citizens should have an understanding of our history and our culture.
But in any national debate on the future of citizenship it is right to consider asking men and women seeking citizenship to undertake some community work in our country or something akin to that that introduces them to a wider range of institutions and people in our country prior to enjoying the benefits of citizenship.

What amazes troubles me about this somewhat concentrated and incomplete declaration is that it presupposes that they are a high number of British who haven’t earn their citizenship and who are therefore dirtying Britishness by not trying to join its national community (does it exist?). It seems to me that tide has turned and that there is not so much an anti-immigration bias but a pro-assimilation bias in more Western politicians who have been convinced that the problem in their multi-ethnic society is that immigrants and their daughters are refusing integration, because they want to hold on to their difference and to their own traditions and values. This explains how the debate has shifted since the discourse is not longer about rights and obligations, but about obligations to acquire rights, which the society has the right to deny or rather to withhold. It is fine, but what about discrimination is a barrier to integration or just an immigrant created fantasy to justify separation? Isn’t discrimination becoming justifiable if the state’s discourse puts the burden on the “foreigner” or “the naturalized foreigner” to always overcome biases and to melt in the crowd? The problem is precisely that some people can’t melt in the crowd and will never fit the image of Britishness as it defined today. It is clear that separation is unacceptable and intolerable and that Modern societies shouldn’t accept barbaric and indeed inhumane traditions and differences, but the question is whether they exist some things they should accept and adjust to or rather whether any form of acceptance is a surrender and a betrayal of its identity.

The New Brave and multipolar world

Daniel Drezner writes in Foreign Affairs what he believes to be the attempts of the United States to create a new world order in which China, India and itself formed a great power concert with the US of course remaining the leading power. He argues that although the efforts of the Bush administration to create and to mold this new world order haven't been successful, it is in the interest of the United States to persevere in order to avoid conflict and to facilitate not only cooperation, but also the creation of a fairer and more integrated order than the present one. Sugary excerpt:

From a U.S.perspective, it would be preferable for  China and India to advance their interests within U.S.-led global governance structures rather than outside of them. The United States could get something in return for accommodating these states in institutions such as the UN and the IMF and giving them the recognition and prestige they demand: a commitment by Beijing and New Delhithat they will accept the key rules of the global game.

Global warming is all about hollywood's pompousness and superficiality

Here is amusingly distressing quote from Dean Barnett on Gore, Global Warming, and Hollywood:

It’s only natural that Hollywood has so taken to Gore’s predictions of death and destruction. Gore has been unusually solicitous of Hollywood, even for a politician, and there’s nothing celebrities value more than someone who’s willing to pretend that their opinions are actually relevant.

AS REGARDS AL GORE’S PREDICTIONS OF IMMINENT climatic disaster, I must confess that I haven’t made a careful enough study of the matter to have a well-educated opinion. Unlike, say, Leonardo DiCaprio, I just haven’t had the time or the intellectual curiosity to read all the source studies that doubtlessly inform the conclusions of the Hollywood-types who feel the end is nigh.

But Gore’s theories and his proposals, whether they’re eerily prescient or stunningly misguided, leave me asking some questions. For instance, how much will they cost and who will bear the brunt of that cost?

Dissidence and Islamism

“Hatred for the "decadence" of the West, its capitalism, consumerism and individualism, was as much part of the communist ideology as it is of radical Islam today. In the fusion of belief and social order, of truth, hierarchy and social reality, arose a secular Umma in which the individual is to be collectivised. The individual is suspicious of all ideocratic totalitarianisms. Unpredictable, instinctive, egoistic, headstrong and anarchistic, it must be controlled and dominated for the good of the respective Umma: the national, class or religious community. The communist social experiment cost millions of lives, as did National Socialism and fascism. Learning from this history can only mean remaining vigilant in face of new totalitarian dangers which threaten our painstakingly acquired freedom. This must be defended "in a continuously repeated act of liberation, an eternal battle in which there can be no final victory, because that could only mean the death of all combatants, that means all those living." (Benedetto Croce).” Ulrike Alckermanm, “In Praise of Dissidence.”

Gore and Democratic politics

Daniel Gaste speculates on an Al Gore's hypothetical candidacy and writes:

[…] there is nothing Democrats love more than a politician who isn’t actually running for President. Ever since liberals began mythologizing JFK, the party’s nominees invariably fail to measure up. It’s as if any politician who has the guts to enter the arena and dirty his hands immediately loses “purity,” and faces a cynical column from Joe Klein. As a result, come primary season, the Democratic chattering class always falls in love with a hypothetical candidate: Mario Cuomo, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Colin Powell, The West Wing’s Josiah Bartle.

I would argue that Gore has a shot in becoming the next Democratic nominee because he has now had a life outside of politics and what a successful one it is. If Gore chooses to run for president, he may not win, but nobody will accuse him of being the normal Washington politician who has run for president all of his life. I remember that in 2000, George Bush went to Tennessee and argue that Gore was from Washington and not from there because he had spent his youth in Schools in the capital and because he was a fake. I bet that nobody will be able to make the case that Gore is not an authentic character. However, I have the feeling that he will not run.

D'Souza and Abu Ghraib

Dinesh D’Souza makes me laugh because I don’t think he believe in what he says. Here is what he has to say about Abu Ghraib and “the Muslim world”:

Now we are in a better position to understand the Muslim reaction to Abu Ghraib. Most Muslims did not view it as a torture story at all. Muslims were not outraged at the interrogation techniques used by the American military, which are quite mild by Arab standards. Moreover, many Muslims realized that the most of the torture scenes in the photographs—the hooded man with his arms outstretched, the prisoner with wires attached to his limbs—were staged. This was simulated torture, not real torture.

The main focus of Islamic disgust was what Muslims perceived as extreme sexual perversion. For many traditional Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring. In the Muslim view, this perversion is characteristic of American society.

Moreover, many Muslims viewed the degradation of Abu Ghraib as a metaphor for how little Americans care for other people’s sacred values, and for the kind of humiliation that America seeks to impose on the Muslim world. Some Muslims argued that such degradation was worse than execution because death only strips a man of his life, not of his honor.

D’Souza likes to use the expression “sexual perversion” because to him that is what liberalism is all about and because it helps him to make the case that in fact liberalism are responsible for everything including Abu Ghraib because the torturers in Abu Ghraib were just imitating liberal behavior. I wonder what makes D’Souza an expert on liberalism and on Muslim society.

Peter Galbraith and the surge

Peter Galbraith critiques the surge in Iraq and argues that it is a way for President Bush to avoid admitting defeat in Iraq by just punting away the ball to the next president:

President Bush's plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems as the Americans, including an inability to communicate in Arabic.

[...] At best, Bush's new strategy will be a costly postponement of the day of reckoning with failure. But it is also a reckless escalation of the military mission in Iraq that could leave US forces fighting a powerful new enemy with only marginally more troops than are now engaged in fighting the Sunni insurgency. The strategy also risks extending Iraq's civil war to the hitherto peaceful Kurdish regions, with no corresponding gain for security in the Arab parts of the country.

Predicting the Future

“The future isn’t what it used to be,” George Burns once said. And he was right. This century we are peering over a precipice, and it’s an awful long way down. We have unleashed forces into the world that it is not certain that we can control. We may have already done so much damage to the planet that by the end of the century people will live in a world ravaged by storms, with large areas flooded and others arid. But you have to add in nuclear proliferation, and new diseases that we might have inadvertently created. Space might become militarised. The emergence of mega-computers, allied to robotics, might at some point also create beings able to escape the clutches of their creators.
Against that, you could say that we haven’t much clue what the future will bring, except it’s bound to be things that we haven’t even suspected. Twenty years ago, Bill Gates thought there was no future in the internet. The current century might turn out much more benign than scary.
As for politics, left and right aren’t about to disappear—the metaphor is too strongly entrenched for that. My best guess about where politics will focus would be upon life itself. Life politics concerns the environment, lifestyle change, health, ageing, identity and technology. It may be a politics of survival, it may be a politics of hope, or perhaps a bit of both.” Anthony Giddens.

Immigration and Evangelicals

Alexander Zaitchik explains why the majority of Evangelicals are anti-immigration even though it would seem that their faith would make them more charitable. He argues that the reasons for these anti-immigration feelings have to do with the belief that immigration is destroying the “American's cultural fabric” and making it a less Christian country. Sugary excerpt:

Thomas Fleming, president of the Christian-flavored Rockford Institute and, like Buchanan, a Catholic, says "culture" sits at the heart of his anti-immigration position. At a September institute-sponsored conference in Washington where Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) delivered the keynote address, Fleming said that "the cultural ambience aspect of [the immigration debate] is the only one that interests me." Writing in the Rockford Institute magazine Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Fleming was plainer about what he means when he says "culture," admitting, "Whatever we may say in public, most of us do not much like Mexicans, whom we regard as too irrational, too violent, too passionate."

"Some American Catholics think we should welcome the hordes of pro-life Catholics swarming across our southern border," continued Fleming. "But this is a mistake. Mexicans quickly become acclimated to America's culture of consumerism and infanticide. What they do not appear to relinquish is their own traditional style of violence."

[…]The issue of immigration, it seems, not only threatens the success of the religious right's larger culture war by alienating conservative Latinos. Immigration is also a growing component of that culture war.

Violence, immigrant brides and silence

Sunny Hundal writes in the Times of London what I believe in an important article about what he calls “the conspiracy of silence,” which permits immigrant brides to be treated violently in Britain even such a treatment is against not illegal and inhumane, but unacceptable in a country such as Britain.

Basra is to Blair what Waterloo was for Napoleon

“Only the fantasy world inhabited by Blair and Des Browne, his defence secretary, can now claim the four-year British occupation of Basra a success. A country that can be patrolled only by air or in armoured columns is not controlled, let alone governed. Blair promised last week “to publish a plan to develop the port of Basra later this year”. This is outrageous. Where was that plan before the invasion? The one happy note is that when the British leave the Shi’ite south, it should at least be spared the fury of the Shi’ite/Sunni conflict in the north. Mere gang warfare will ensue.” Simon Jenkins, “Basra is the Waterloo of the Napoleon of Downing Street.”

Americans and culture

This video doesn't make the point that Americans are stupid, but rather that they know very little about the world. It also proves that the American media and the American Education aren’t doing their job, who can doubt that after realizing the number of hours spent discussing Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears. That was the point of the Borat movie; America is a country where culture is expensive and it only accessible to the masses. After all, it cost more than fifty thousand dollars to get an undergraduate education in George Washington University; this means that education and culture are becoming a luxury when they should be a public good. However, I have to say that Americans are the most open and the most easygoing people in the world. It is easy to start a conversation in America with somebody that you don't know and to exchange pleasantries and smiles in the subway. In Europe, particularly in France, it is a lot harder. People aren't willing to talk to people that they don't know.

Blair and denial

Marina Hyde compares Tony Blair unfavorably to Baghdad Bob and argues that he has lost touch with reality. Blair is going away and it seems to me that the harder people pound Blair when he is so close to the end, the more difficult it becomes to see the whole picture. Is it possible to argue that Blair's political career is going to be summarized in one word: Iraq? I don't think that it will be.

Europe's quest to find itself

“Europe is lacking ideals. It is gradually getting rid of the religious ones without replacing them with others. It is indulging in wellbeing and luxury. Nobody wants to be more modest, to give something away, and nobody even has the feeling that they should. Moreover, it is beginning to become clear that the way Europe should open up to other cultural influences was not thought through. It is obvious that unless a change occurs, Europe might become completely estranged from its historical and intellectual direction as well as its democratic heritage in the future. There is no sense in concealing the fact: fanatic Islamism is a threat, it is necessary to hold out. As I see it, the solution is in the integration of minorities into society, not in their marginalization into separate communities, the rules and customs of which may not comply with a democratic legal system. It is easy to say, harder to carry out. Multiculturalism, as we understand it today, can throw Europe into endless conflict. [...] Today, European democracies introduce censorship of their own accord, political correctness has become an idol. One has a feeling that it is necessary to make apologies all the time while we should insist on everybody's respecting the rules uncompromisingly. If someone wants to achieve full acceptance and makes claims, they must be willing to provide the other side with the same acceptance and respect.” Leo Pavlát, Director of Jewish Museum of Prague.

Irène Némirovsky as a self-hating and anti-semitic jew

Stuart Jeffries investigates in the Guardian the charge that Irène Némirovsky, the author of Suite Française, a book, which I think is one of the best French books of the past 10 years, was anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew in spite of the fact that she is Jewish and that she died in a concentration camp. This controversy has been created by a book, which she wrote before her death in Auschwitz and some of the things that she did to avoid being sent to a concentration camp. Jeffries concludes that the evidence is mixed and that there is no clear evidence that she was anti-Semitic even though it is clear that she has some issues with her Jewish identity as she did with Catholicism, a religion, which she chose for herself:

[…] Némirovsky excoriated Catholics even more than Jews or mothers. Smith finds a passage in Suite Française depicting wealthy Madame Péricand fleeing Paris from the Nazis and preventing her children giving away chocolates and sweets to starving folk they find on their way. Némirovsky writes: "Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilisation, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her children. Nothing else mattered any more."

But maybe this is no proof of anti-Catholicism, just as David Golder offers no conclusive proof of its author's anti-semitism. Instead, what interested Némirovsky most in these two portraits is the specific and sometimes shabby ways people behave in extremis. Hers was a novelist's eye, not a bigot's.

That said, what accommodations she made with anti-semites in France is another story and what she felt about doing so something that she took to her grave. We will never know if she hated herself for what she did. "She certainly mixed with people who were anti-semites, but she ignored it. She certainly made a lot of mistakes, but given her times and her circumstances, they might well be excusable," says Callil. "Who are we to judge?".

I agree with Jeffries. Who are we to judge her? After all, she isn't here to defend herself against those who are accusing her of being anti-Semitic even though she died in a concentration precisely because she was Jewish. Was Irène Némirovsky a saint? Of course, she wasn't and I'm sure that she was an individual like the rest of us with many faults and contradictions. However, isn't that the point of Némirovsky’s story and what we should learn from her story and from the Holocaust? That more than 60 years ago more than six millions people who were just people like us died in the most horrific ways precisely because too many people denied their humanity.

Fighting for Muslim women

“But Muslims need to do a reality check between this utopia of Islam that exists in our heads and the reality of what it is truly like to be a Muslim woman. And I say this with compassion rather than scathing critique. If we truly wish to create the spirit of Islam we need to at least acknowledge where we are today rather than kid ourselves that we are living in the perfect Islamic scenario. The destiny of the Muslim community is founded on the balanced contribution of both men and women. If women are not participating, contributing and living their lives to the full, then ipso facto, neither are men. This principle applies to both Muslim and wider society.
Much of the time when you hear Muslim women, or indeed any women, talking about their rights, and their abuses, it is women talking to other women, complaining about the situation of women. This is simply preaching to the converted. Men - whether in the Muslim community, or in wider society - need to be involved in these conversations about women's experiences. We may live in the same families, work in the same environments, know the same people, visit the same shops, schools and places of worship, but how we are treated, what we experience may be completely different.” Shelina Zahra, “The War over Muslim Women.”

Churches' internal struggles

Jay Akasie writes in the New York Sun about the global battles, which several churches such as the Anglican church and the Episcopal church are facing about ideoligical issues, which create tensions between its members from different countries and oppose again America to the rest of the world. Sugary excerpt:

What's really going on is a global shift in American power and influence over the rest of the world. In this case, it's being played out in the context of a church.

The world is fortunate that America remains the only superpower. But if this Inter-Anglican controversy stands as any example, it's that Americans often live up to their image as bullies. Like it or not, the tremendous clout that our nation and its institutions currently enjoy on the world stage rests on how mindful we are of how others perceive us in the future.

Many Anglicans in other parts of the world, including those in the Church of England, have cringed at the in-your-face attitude of their American counterparts. A few years ago, the Episcopal Church approved the consecration of an openly gay man as a bishop.

Focusing on shared interests

Jeffrey Sachs writes in an excellent article published in Scientific American.com that to avoid the spread of war and further chaos in our world, today's leaders must follow the example of John Kennedy in the Cuban Missile crisis. According to him, world leaders and countries must recognize that in spite of their differences, they do have shared interests. Sugary excerpt:

Kennedy's sentiments were radical at the time, but he believed that the potential for cooperation was grounded in our common humanity. "For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal." As we face today's challenges and threats, we will do well to grasp the insight that our counterparts and adversaries, like us, are searching for survival and for a future for their children. As occurred 45 years ago, that critical insight might prove to be the key to keeping us alive and secure

Dirty games

The New Times has an article about a game, “to catch an illegal immigrant” which a group of College Republicans started on the New York University’s campus and the protests that it drew. The purpose of the game was for one student to chase a student with an illegal immigrant tag and to catch him. Many students protested and argued that the game is racist and disgusting. I’m not sure that it is a racist game, but it is a disgusting and offensive game not because of its point of view, but because it caricatured an important issue by making it seem as though it is fun to catch illegal immigrants and by dehumanizing them.

Public Ignorance and the lack of international news

“Nowhere was the American public's ignorance of international issues more on display than in a recent piece by the New York Observer's George Gurley, who set out to question a group of people about a foreign story they should know well -- the war in Iraq-- at a Manhattanclub. One brain-dead club patron called the war, an "unpleasantry of life," while another geographically mixed-up waste of space, not engaged enough to realize he was putting a city in the wrong country, felt bad for the Iraqis who can't to clubbing: "Do you think the Iraqis, little villagers in Kandahar, are doing this?...None of them are. And that's the sad, awful truth."
There is something sad about all of this, and it has nothing to do with the inability of Afghanis in Kandahar to partake of bottle service.” Paul McLeary, “Some Creative Efforts to Take Back Foreign News.”

Peeping Tom, the Internet, and their victims

Spiegel has a troubling article on women who became cyber-porn stars in spite of themselves. The article is alarming because it shows that internet can destroy somebody's life and that it is a lot easier to violate a person's rights on the internet precisely because it is still the wild wild west.

Science, gay sheep and homosexuality

The Guardian has an article on what the impact of the research of gay sheep will add to the homosexuality debate and it will prove that homosexuality can be prevented in sheep and in humans. Sugary excerpt:

Which brings us to the animals whose breeding we really care about: our children. Passing on genes is life's deepest drive. You don't just want kids. You want grandkids. To many parents, "I'm gay, Mom" means "No grandkids."

Roselli offers evidence that human homosexuality is linked to biological conditions, some of them genetic. If he figures out how to manipulate sexual orientation in sheep, will others try to manipulate it in humans? Doctors used to "treat" homosexuality with hormone injections. Some still do. This idea failed miserably in adults, but it might work in foetuses. And if we can't engineer sexual orientation, maybe we can select it. In Asia, millions have used modern tests to identify female foetuses so they could be aborted. If we learn how to recognise gay brains in development, look out.

The sustainability of Capitalism

Timothy Garton Ash writes in an article in the LA Times that although Marxism has been unable to provide a working and acceptable opposite to Capitalism, Marx was right about its ills. He argues that capitalism has swept the world, but that it may be unsustainable because it leads to great inequality. Ash ends the question wondering whether people in spite of capitalism's ills would be to abandon it and my answer to it is no for capitalism is addictive, it is for all of its faults, like democracy is the best form of government, the best regime for an economy.

The US and the Middle East

Leon Hadar argues in an article that the US's lack of involvement in the Israel- Palestinian peace process is a sign of the erosion of its power in the region and of its increasing inability to contribute to stabilization of the region.

Anti-Americanism and Terrorsim

Stephen Pollard argues in an op-ed in the Times of London that too many people are refusing to acknowledge the threat of Islamist terrorism because of their anti-Americanism and because it doesn't fit in with inflexible and radical word view. Sugary excerpt:

Take those who argue that the threat of Islamist terrorism is somehow exaggerated. The evidence of such terror, and the real threats of the terrorists, are simply ignored as if they did not exist because they do not fit in with the worldview of “US bad, antiUS good”. The denial of the threat posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb is in a similar vein. Existing Iranian terror, and the words of President Ahmadinejad, are simply brushed aside. If the West is always the guilty party then his words and deeds do not fit.

President Bush and Conservatism

“In truth, no branch of conservatism has prospered much under Bush, particularly since the beginning of the Iraq War. Economic conservatives have had several victories, particularly with tax cuts, but on their fundamental worries about bloated government spending, they’ve been routed. From 2000 to 2006, the Republican Congress proved as financially undisciplined as its Democratic predecessors-and occasionally even less disciplined, as the prescription-drug entitlement and Katrina relief showed. And that’s to say nothing about the scandals involving Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, and all the rest. The Gingrich Republicans used the long parade of congressional corruption to help defeat the Democrats in 1994, but they seemed all too ready to join it themselves once they had held power for a few years.

Even the neoconservatives have suffered. The original agitators for the toppling of Saddam Hussein-and the first to see clearly the threat of global Jihadism-they seemed to the media to have gotten what they wanted with the invasion of Iraq. But the Bush administration did not give them the kind of war, much less the kind of peace, for which they had called.” Joseph Bottum, “The Leadership of George W. Bush: Con & Pro.”

Western culture and Christianity

“[…] Western culture cannot be understood without Christianity. The two processes mentioned above spell a direct relationship with the presence of the Christian religion in the history of our societies.
It isn't possible to speak of Voltaire, Nietzsche or Marx without their position on Christian revelation. In this connection, secularization is characteristic of a culture of Christian origin, as is the Western. In other cultures there have been different processes, and the elements of secularization taking place in Asia or Africa have a Western origin.” Mariano Fazio, author of “History of Contemporary Ideas: A Reading of the Process of Secularization.”

The rightness of being a homophobic

Michael Medved argues that Tim Hardaway was right (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) because it is understandable and natural  to hate male on male sexual attraction. Sugary excerpt:

Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn’t welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they’d welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright “hot”) most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she’s grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her.

Many gay activists suggest that this near-universal straight male repulsion at the idea of sex with another man is merely the product of cultural conditioning: a learned prejudice that ought to be unlearned. This represents the core message of gay pride parades and even the drive for same-sex marriage: an effort to persuade all of society that gay sex is as beautiful as straight sex, and to “cure” men of their visceral disgust at the very thought of what two (or more) male homosexuals do with one another.

Airbus and national interests

The troubles of Airbus in my opinion just shows how difficult it can be for a company to represents the national interests of two interests, in this case of France and Germany. Airbus has announced that it will need to cut its workforce and yet the French and the German governments are obsessed not with the competitivity of the company by about where the cuts will come from, that is which country will have angry workers on its hands. The following statement by Rainer Wend, the spokesman of the German Social Democratic party illustrates perfectly this point:

We need to ensure that the French, who practice a very interventionist industrial policy, do not come out of the process as the only winners.

Being an ex dictateur is a hard job

The London Review of books has an interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ex president of Haiti. The interview is interesting because it shows that ex president especially when they were dictators and in the case of Aristide, a “soft dictator”are obsessed with remaining relevant even when it is clear that time has passed them by. Does anybody remember and miss Aristide? Nobody, well except his family and his ex cronies.

In praise of scepticism

Stuart Sims answers Paul Cliteur by defending the postmodernists against the claim that they are relativists and that they contribute to the decline of Europe and Western civilization by advocating Multiculturalism without defending strongly western values and excusing inexcusable intolerance. He defends scepticism and argues that it has a major role to play in the multiculturalism debate and in the evolution of Western society. Sugary excerpt:

I'd like to make the case for a role for scepticism within the debate on multiculturalism, and also to defend the reputation of postmodern thought after what I consider to be unfair treatment at the hands of Paul Cliteur. If multiculturalism can be persuaded to take scepticism on board, and to acknowledge that all religions and belief systems have a history of scepticism that can be activated against their tendency towards dogmatism, then it can still contribute to constructing "'a new European story." The problem isn't Islam, or Enlightenment, or multiculturalism, or postmodernism, or relativism: it's dogmatism, and unless that is addressed we're treating symptoms not causes.

The Veil, a barrier to integration?

“There is nothing in the Koran to say that the wearing of a niqab is desirable, let alone compulsory. It's purely cultural. It's an identity thing which has been misinterpreted. […] They were supposed to be worn so that women wouldn't be harassed. But my argument is that women, and communities as a whole, are now being harassed because they are wearing them. They are a physical barrier to integration.” Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, Britain’s first Muslim Peer.

The pettiness of ridiculing Blair

John Crace has a wonderful digested read  of George Wheatcroft "Yo Blair" that shows how pettiness and foolish some can be in attempting to ridicule Tony Blair and to make him into a diabolical and caricatural figure responsible for all the ills of the world. Sugary excerpt:

More disturbing still, Blair's lineage can be traced back to no less a vile dictator than Adolph Hitler. Listen to how Blair's oft-quoted mantra "one thousand days to build a thousand years" resonates with Nazism. Is not the Third Way a reverential echo of the Third Reich? And what is Alastair Campbell if he is not a latter-day Joseph Goebbels?

Yet despicable as Hitler and Thatcher may be, Blair is not even fit to lick their jackboots. Where both these despots had a vision, Blair has nothing but a moral and intellectual vacuum at his heart. He only knows what he believes and as he believes in nothing, he knows nothing.

Immigration and abortion: defiining an American baby

Priscilla Huang has an article on immigration and reproductive rights. She focuses on the attempts by some anti-immigration groups to argue to immigrants come to the United States solely to have babies, to invade the country, to exploit its welfare system and are trying to make the link between abortion and immigration. Sugary excerpt:

Anti-immigrant policy makers and advocates are also trying to exploit anti-immigrant hysteria as a vehicle for denying all women the right to reproductive autonomy, and are manipulating the issue of immigration reform to advance an anti-choice agenda. In November 2006, a report from the Missouri House Special Committee on Immigration Reform concluded that abortion was partly to blame for the “problem of illegal immigration” because it caused a shortage of American workers. As the author, Rep. Edgar Emery (R), explained: “If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it’s not too surprising we would be desperate for workers.”

The real question is whether there will ever be serious attempts to change the jus soli basis for acquiring American citizenship, that is the rule that an American baby is one that is born in America. The abortion issue is already a divisive issue and tying it to immigration will only work if people doubt that children of immigrants born in America can become “real” Americans.

Slamming Sam Harris and Atheists

“I have seen the customers who fondled your book and read the jacket with self-satisfied expressions. These were the ones you blessed as “progressive” in your pages. Your condemnatory letter was not addressed to them. Your little tome at $16.95 graces their bookshelves along with those by Bill Moyers and the atheist authors you recommend. These progressives proudly display their reading material as they serve canapés and cocktails to similarly correct-minded, nipped and Botox-ed activists, who only really just want what is good for us. Your slim, easy-to-read pamphlet is just right for trips to the salon, masseuse, and transcendental meditation retreat. Your fans cluck over the ignorance and benightedness of those like me—their gold and diamonds shining in the ambient light of their converted warehouse condos. You amaze them with your profundity, your ability to string together clichés and tired arguments, and in 91 small widely spaced pages tear down the foundations of the civilization put in place by millennia of thinkers and the Church Fathers. For your book, they whipped out the credit cards from Louis Vitton bags.

They also paid to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and thought it was a documentary.” Mary Grabar, “Letter to a Stupid Atheist. ”

Conservatism's superiority

Fred Hutchinson has a fascinating (but erroneous) article on "The rise of Conservatism and the decline of Liberalism." He argues that Conservativism has been and will always be the superior political philosophy because it is in touch with the real world and people. Sugary excerpt:

Conservatism has always been superior to liberalism in the correspondence of conservative ideas to the real world of people and society. Liberal progressives have always been crippled by a discontinuity between theory and practice. For example, in order to survive in the real world, liberals have to behave as though man is not inherently good, while denying that their behavior contradicts a first principle of their world view.
Liberals have had remarkable historical success is glossing over the internal contradictions of their ideas — such as the contradictions that Rousseau never bothered to explain. Liberals achieved this conceptual tour de force with their romantic belief in the inevitability of progress leading to a future utopia and their sentimental belief in the innate goodness of man. As a result of this romantic triumph of feelings over reason, the various strands of liberalism held together for two centuries.
Interestingly, liberalism coalesced as the political branch of the Romantic movement. Liberalism retained its romantic appeal as late as the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In 1969, art historian Kenneth Clark said that "we are the nearly bankrupt heirs" of the Romantic movement. At that time, the liberal world view was already in crisis. Liberalism might not survive the death of the Romantic movement.
The liberal world view has been unraveling in Europe since 1920 and in America since 1968-70. In contrast, the five camps of conservatives still adhere to the presuppositions of their world view. Their faithful adherence to first principles gives them a logical consistency and coherence that liberalism no longer has. This is the conservative advantage.

Al Qaeda isn't back...

James S. Rubin has an article on the site of National Review in which he argues that yesterday's article in the New York Times, which concluded that Al Qaeda is regaining power wasn't rooted in reality, but on a misunderstanding of the war, which the US is fighting again terrorism. His argument is simply that the fact that Bin Laden is still alive and that Al Qaeda still exists, doesn' t mean that they are winning or rather that the US is losing for what is important is their ability to strike not to survive:

The U.S. is more involved in the region than ever before. No regimes in the region have been overthrown by al Qaeda or its minions, or are even close to being taken over. Israel is not about to be destroyed. And al Qaeda is finding that exporting the revolution is not as easy as they expected. They have lost their primary state sponsor, lost the initiative, lost their ability to make attacks of strategic significance, and their leaders are hunkered down in safe houses afraid to be seen in public and wondering day by day who around them might betray them. So by their own standards, what have they achieved?

Defining the West

David Gress reviews Philippe Nemo's book “What is the West?” . It offers an historical analysis of what defines the West and emphasizes the importance or rather influence of Christianity on Western civilization . Sugary excerpt:

The question Nemo poses in What Is the West? is this: By what series of historical encounters did Western civilization become the combination of "the rule of law, democracy, intellectual liberties, critical rationality, science, and economic freedom founded on private property?" The West evolved as a series of elements joined in a synthesis greater than its parts. Christianity, Nemo asserts, entered not as a religion but as an "ethical spirit within secular society." The West was never coterminous with its faith. Always the believers found themselves in a world they had partly made and partly inherited from the classical past. Always they were challenged to adapt to what they believed to be the exigencies of a political and social world they respected too much to want to subordinate to a theocracy.

Gress concludes that not only does Nemo writes clearly and vividly, but that “Another great value of his exposition is that he understands how the logic of human liberty is not just spiritual or just political but is spiritual, political, and economic at the same time.”

China's African policy and double standards

“Misspent your country's wealth? Waged war against an ethnic minority? Or just tired of those pesky good governance requirements attached to foreign aid by most Western governments and multilateral institutions?

If you run an African country and have some natural resources to put in long-term hock, you've got a friend in Beijing ready to write big checks with no embarrassing questions. That's nice for governments, but not so nice for their misgoverned people. [...]China isn't the first outside industrial power to behave badly in Africa. But it should not be proud of following the West's sorry historical example.” International Herald Tribune Editorial,“China’s Callous Diplomacy.”

Models, weight, and stature

Emily Nussbaum has an article on "the Unbearable Shrinking Model" in New York Magazine. She deals with the current trend of alarming skinny model in the fashion industry and she argues that models' weight loss has everything to do with their loss of stature. Sugary excerpt:

These days, fashion people do not talk about models with awe. Instead, they speak of them with condescending affection, as if they were lovable circus folk. Again and again, I hear that they are “beautiful freaks,” “genetic anomalies”—girls born to be bone-thin, with giraffelike necks and the wide, pretty doll faces that are the latest visual sensation. But there is also pity for the models, who are, many people pointed out to me, basically high-school dropouts, teenagers from poor countries, whose careers last a very short time. They are infinitely replaceable. Although top girls can make up to $100,000 in a week of shows, the vast majority get nowhere near that; some of the more prominent designers pay the girls only in clothes.

Censorship and political correctness

Maria Grasso has an article lamenting the fact that students in Oxford can only use the word “gay” to designate a gay person. Sepia Mutiny had a post last week on the expulsion of a Student from American University for calling using a homophobic slur after being told to “go back to India.” All of this leads me to wonder where the proper balance between freedom of speech and decency not only on a college campus, but also in a democratic society. It seems to me that by censoring someone for using offensive or inappropriate, Universities are in fact giving up on their primary mission, which is to educate. Censorship or attempts to impose political correctness through inflexible rules are in fact asserting that you are not only what you say, but more importantly, that one is born a bigot and thus can never be change.

Interpreting tolerance

“[…] the demands of all "cultures" are not compatible. Of course monotheists, atheists and polytheists should (in the ideal case) be able to live peacefully side by side. But Sharia law and western democracy, orthodox biblical family law which demands capital punishment for gay relations and modern family law – which in most progressive countries permits sexual relations between persons of the same gender – are certainly incompatible. There is no way to talk away this incompatibility by vague reference to multiculturalism.
There is an interpretation of the concept of tolerance where the word becomes meaningless and the concept becomes empty. That occurs when it is applied to anything and everything without discretion. To claim that we owe tolerance to everything and everybody is mindless in the same way that it is pointless to say that everything we encounter is an illusion. Which makes it senseless to make a distinction between true and forged money, hallucinations and everyday experience.” Lars Gustafsson“The logic of Tolerance.”