The Republic of Dissent

Shutting up

I'm brain dead and in a state of panic over the meaningless of my existence so I'm shutting up. I'm taking a few days off. To end on a high note, I like Sara Gruen's writing. I'm not sure that I love it, but I can see myself getting there or just enjoying it from time to time like I enjoy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (an over the top but soulful and necessary american creation). 

Bouche cousue

I'm trying hard to take fully advantage of what is for me the last day of summer so I have nothing say except that I wish it would have rained more this weekend , that I hope that Yankees don't win the World Series and that Nadal is able to make it to the second week of the US Open.

Dreaming on

Well, it's almost Sunday so I guess it's okay to wish for the impossible:

Unless Obama gets over being a great manager in his own mind, and dumps would-be privatizers and executives-of-everything like Duncan--unless, like Ted Kennedy, like FDR, he stands up to the moment, overcomes his own failings and previously-articulated bad ideas--unless he outlines a compelling case founded on  an actual theory of the public good, he’ll end up as what he presently most fears: an historical curiousity, the “first Black president."

Truths, truthiness, and elegance

Sometimes Alexander Cockburn is too cleverly autistic for his won good, but in this case, he leaves me speechless because of his lack of elegance/class:

To this day there are deluded souls who argue that Jack was going to pull US troops out of Vietnam and that is why he was killed; that Bobby, who worked for Roy Cohn and supervised a "Murder Inc" in the Caribbean, was really and truly on the side of the angels; that Ted was the mighty champion of the working people, even though he helped deliver them into the inferno of neoliberalism.
By his crucial endorsement last year he helped give them Obama too, now holidaying six miles from Chappaquiddick, on Martha's Vineyard, another salesman for the inferno. But because his mishaps were so dramatic, few remember quite how toxic his political “triumphs” were for those who now foolishly  mourn him as their lost leader.

A big vagina and a big clitoris are more important than a big penis

I'm still laughing after reading this, come on people, women aren't dolls and having sex isn't like playing football!:

New research from Kim Wallen, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroendocrinology at Emory University, indicates that the distance between a woman's clitoris and vagina may determine how easily she climaxes from sex alone.

Trailer-trash

Ah,...it's a relief t realize that class matters and will more than likely always matter:

(...) many liberal-leftists actually go much further in outlining a rogue’s gallery of ‘degenerates’ in society. Alongside smokers and public drinkers, step forward fast-food takeaway eaters, supermarket shoppers, cheap-flight holidaymakers, 4x4 car drivers, shopping-mall consumers and those who don’t recycle their rubbish properly. For these commentators, acting as if we’re part of mainstream America is all a bit trailer-trash.

Standoffish equivocations

Important simple questions: Is there a difference between considering that women don't have the choice to decide whether to have or not to have a child and to decide that they should remain hidden behind their burkas/burqas? Assuming that they (women) do have those choices, how judgmental is society allowed to be? What level of misogyny is acceptable for a society to be civilized? Does invoking the so-called laws of nature and imperfections of the human spirit when it comes to gender, the biases and all the unacceptable stuff that it creates tell us that women are simply objects in the clash of civilizations that too many seem to want to have? Doesn't this fact tell us that the world doesn't really abhor misogyny, it just abhors the possibility that it might lead to something else that will  in turn lead to what it considers to be real obscurantist/terrorist and manly (because physically destructive) acts. Those are some of the questions that came to my mind when reading Nick Cohen's article on Misogyny (hat tip: Mick Hartley). I love it when people talk about the so-called women's rights (why is there always the temptations to separate women from men as if to say that since physical strength justifies better status or more rights), I just wish they would become fanatically consistent to emphasize the fact that patriarchy, to use an expression that feminists love, is never acceptable even if it is less obscurantist and less barbaric and being a little bit better than barbarians on the issue of misogyny is not acceptable especially when the argument is about values, morality, and hypocrisy.

Defining explosive terms

I almost agree totally with this:

I guess what it all comes down to is that when we say we are multicultural, we exaggerate. What does a multicultural country look like? It looks like India -- there are many different languages there spoken by millions and millions of people generation after generation. Different religions practice their creeds without restraint. It doesn't mean they all get along peacefully all the time -- on the contrary, Pakistan exists because they don't. But here's an example of real multiculturalism -- an old man stark naked walking down a sidewalk thronged with people not taking the slightest notice of him. It turns out he was a monk in a small religious sect that does not allow its monks to wear any clothes at all. What would happen if he were walking down a busy street in Toronto? He would be arrested. And he might say to the policeman: "But my culture requires this and Canada is multicultural." The policeman would answer: "Yes we are multicultural and isn't it wonderful. And you're still under arrest."

The totalitarianism of gender

More on Caster Semenya, sports and gender:

As long as there have been women's sports, the characterization of the best female athletes as “looking like men” or “mannish” has consistently been used to degrade them. When Martina Navratilova dominated women's tennis and proudly exposed her chiselled biceps years before Hollywood gave its imprimatur to gals with “guns,” players complained that she “must have a chromosome loose somewhere.”
This minefield of sexism and homophobia has long pushed female athletes into magazines like Maxim to prove their “hotness” – and implicitly their heterosexuality. Track and field in particular has always had this preoccupation with gender, particularly when it crosses paths with racism. Fifty years ago, Olympic official Norman Cox proposed that in the case of black women, “the International Olympic Committee should create a special category of competition for them – the unfairly advantaged ‘hermaphrodites.' ”
For years, women athletes had to parade naked in front of Olympic officials. This has now given way to more “sophisticated” “gender testing” to determine whether athletes like Ms. Semenya have what officials still perceive as the ultimate advantage – being a man. Let's leave aside that being male is not the be-all, end-all of athletic success. A country's wealth, coaching facilities, nutrition and opportunity determine the creation of a world-class athlete far more than a Y chromosome or a penis ever could.
What these officials still don't understand, or will not confront, is that gender – that is, how we comport and conceive of ourselves – is a remarkably fluid social construction. Even our physical sex is far more ambiguous and fluid than is often imagined or taught.

Hummmh...I have to admit that I would love to think that gender is just a social construction, but that a part of me (the manly part) is resisting that assertion, although I believe that it is mostly true. What hasn't yet been discussed is the fact Semenya is in some ways been protected from the humiliations of having her femininity/gender questioned because she is a champion, because she's winning. She has something which others don't have and for now that certain something is shielding in part from the viciousness of  the gender cacophony around. I'm wondering what would be happening to her if instead of bringing joy and pride to South Africa and South Africans, she was bringing them shame. It's sad to say, but Semenya is condemned to continue to be a champion for the rest of her life, which is impossible, otherwise she will become a freak or something worse, right now she is the totem of South Africa, but what happens if, when she stops being superwoman?

S/he, s/him

I haven't discussed the case of the South African runner Caster Semenya because I must admit that I really don't care and because I wouldn't have anything interesting/original/meaningful to say, but Mike Labossiere via Talking philosophy has this long sugary excerpt, which puts it all in perspective:

Semenya, a South African runner, is currently the world’s champion in the women’s 800 meter race. The controversy is that it has apparently been claimed that she is not a woman. The basis of this is that her testosterone levels were tested at three times the normal level. She has also been under observation since her racing ability has made incredible advances in a relatively short time. Since natural improvements are generally gradual in nature, this raised suspicions.
One reply that has been given to the charge that “she is actually a he” is that Semenya certainly seems to be a female.
This sports controversy also raises a controversy over the nature of gender. Presumably Semenya appears to be a female (it has been implied that sort of check has been done). However, there are cases in which a person looks like a female yet is genetically male. This is complete androgen insensitivity syndrome and is more common than one might expect. Such people have higher testosterone levels than “normal” women because they have testes (albeit not descended). I must emphasize that I am not making any claims about Semenya, I am merely bringing this up for the sake of the discussion.
Since human societies are generally built around an obsession about gender identity and divisions, this syndrome does create some difficulties. If the syndrome is discovered when the child is young, there is the option of assigning a gender through the use of medical means (including surgery). In some cases, the procedure is delayed until the child can make his/her own decision.
Sports are, of course, not free from the gender obsession. Of course,  the concern over gender can be seen as quite reasonable. After all, males have a general physical advantage over females and for sports to be fair, males should be distinguished from females. This seems to be morally on par with divisions based on age (like age groups in road races) and weight (like in boxing). (...) Because sorting is and will remain gender based, it seems most reasonable to allow a person with the syndrome to compete as the gender they have chosen (or been assigned). It is not a perfect solution, but seems to be the fairest approach. Naturally, the person would have to be “established” in the gender rather than simply deciding to be, for example, a woman for the purposes of competition after having lived as a male.

Changing normalcy

Heaven on earth... umh no quite just on the US for there are still a couple ways I could think to improve this situation, but in any case, I have always agreed with Baudelaire's assertion that marriage (any kind of categorization of love or sexuality for that matter) was created to disinfect love:

Terisa, 41, is at the center of this particular polyamorous cluster. A filmmaker and actress, she is well-spoken, slender and attractive, with dark, shoulder-length hair, porcelain skin—and a powerful need for attention. Twelve years ago, she started datingScott, a writer and classical-album merchant. A couple years later, Scott introduced her to Larry, a software developer at Microsoft, and the two quickly fell in love, with Scott's assent. The three have been living together for a decade now, but continue to date others casually on the side. Recently, Terisa decided to add Matt, a London transplant to Seattle, to the mix. Matt's wife, Vera, was OK with that; soon, she was dating Terisa's husband, Larry. If Scott starts feeling neglected, he can call the woman he's been dating casually on the side. Everyone in this group is heterosexual, and they insist they never sleep with more than one person at a time.

Matters of equality

Staggering facts from Walter Benn Michaels's article in the London Review of Books about the United States, race, sex, class, and equality:

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

One of the biggest problems of America is that itis unwilling to acknowledge the existence of class in its society in a stubborn and foolish obsession to distinguish itself from Europe and in a refusal to acknowledge that in spite of its Founding Fathers' wishes, it became a society where class matters in a way more than it does in Europe because its politics don't address the problem since it doesn't acknowledge. It is difficult to talk about class politically and constructively in the US without being accused of pursing class warfare and of being un-american for after all the magical symbol of the American dream makes it unpopular to even make the case that the rich and the poor may owe their status to something other than merit.

It's so easy to divide that it's scary

Well, I just got to go one thing to say after reading this article from Leon Wieseltier, boom boom; no I will say more, is it just me but don't culturalism and ethnicization bring the worst in people?:

Jewish self-hatred is another term for Jewish anti-Semitism, for the internalization of the standpoint of the enemy; and this is a genuinely grave charge. Jews who fling it about for political ends are desperate and disgraceful. And they are some of the same people who are outraged when right-wing African Americans are smeared as Uncle Toms.So I wish to attest--I have placed my hand on my copy of The Zionist Idea--that Rahm Emanuel is not a self-hating Jew. I know this. I have never met David Axelrod, but I am aware of no grounds for the suspicion that he has committed "race treason." (I take that charming phrase, which sounds like it was translated from Treitschke, from David Mamet's thuggish book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews. Mamet is another one of the Most Jewish Jews of All.) Differing with Benjamin Netanyahu does not yet make you a bad Jew. If Emanuel is a self-hating Jew because he believes that Israeli settlement in the West Bank should finally cease, then I, too, am a self-hating Jew. Perhaps you will agree, friends, that this is not very plausible.

Culture of fear or fear of culture and humanity

Pankaj Mishra on what he considers to be a culture of fear that is created in too many countries by the increasing popular sentiment that foreigners are assailing their land, their culture, and their national identity as seen in Christopher Caldwell's latest book on the threat of Islam and of Muslims to Europe, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West :

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger that "minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties".
This at least partly explains why a few hundred women in headscarves incited such fierce passions in a nation-state whose geopolitical and cultural insignificance in recent years has only been partly obscured by its hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In The Politics of the Veil, the distinguished scholar of gender studies Joan Wallach Scott explains how the banning of a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck affirmed an "imagined France", one that was "secular, individualist and culturally homogenous" and "whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation". Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were directly affected by the law on the foulard, were "strikingly absent from the debates" in France, which were dominated by intellectuals and politicians frantically defining the dangerous "other" (typically by describing the veil as, in Jacques Attali's words, a "successor to the Berlin wall").
The veil has now been turned into, Scott writes, a highly charged "sign of the irreducible difference between Islam and France". Elsewhere, too, politicians and journalists - self-proclaimed "liberals" as well as unabashed rightwingers - rhetorically ask whether "Islam", which allegedly enforces a harsh divine law on all Muslims, is compatible with "European" values of reason and tolerance, which are supposedly derived from the Enlightenment (or Christianity, as Sarkozy blurted out in 2007, in a revealing breach of republican protocol).

I have always thought that the debate about culture, assimilation, and identity masks what I believed to be the essential debate of our time, which is how free are we allowed to be when choosing who we are as people, citizens or whatever else? Because if one really thinks about the subject, one has to come to the realization that only people who believed in the totalitarianism of the Good./traditions/God are really obsessed with culture and with the idea that civilized people/nations can become barbarians or barbaric. The idea that if there is no God, no moralistic state or culture then everything is permissible is laughable and obscurantist because it dooms humanity since it asserts that people are incapable of making good decisions and that there is nothing that they won't forbid themselves to do if something or someone doesn't forbid them to do bad things or rather things that are for them. I may be stupidly or charmingly naïve but I don't think that banning the veil in France solves any problem with Islamism and I don't even think that it is the goal because otherwise, Sarkozy would have had the wildly imaginative idea to just ban Islamism and to therefore put the State at the center of deciding what kind of Islams are compatible with French Society.

Ted Kennedy

Ted Kennedy died last night. The one thing I will say about Ted Kennedy is that he made the most of what he had and that makes him in my view not only the greatest Kennedy, but also a great American.

Radicalism and aseptic politics

Norm Geras on the Radical left:

The only radical left worth the name today is a left which recognizes the disasters that political formations of the left brought upon themselves and others by their constantly belittling references to liberalism, a left which has learned to understand that liberalism is an essential starting point for those with any genuine commitment to democratizing both state and society, and which knows that for all of liberalism's historical shortcomings, a left that is not now itself liberal is not radical at all, it is deluded and lost.

I have to say that I'm having trouble associating radicalism with any viable/visible political ideology not only in  the US, but on the international scene. Politics has been increasingly sterilized and that what it called radicalism today is simply what doesn't any other category no matter how anti-intellectual and irrational it is. Nowadays, politics is like religion and politicians feel the masses baby food or hypnotized them with glamor, eloquence or style to avoid radicalism, which would would take them out of their comfort zone. I'm not a true believer of Chomsky, but I believe that he is on to something when he asserts that in failed states, politics is not about issues and that people vote against their interests because they focused on the glitz.

Delusion is good for your health

You don't say!:

Religion is good for your health. That’s the finding of this new paper (pdf) by Angus Deaton.[...]being religious is associated with things that are good for you. For example, in Deaton’s sample, religious men are less likely to smoke, more likely to feel they are respected by others, and more likely to be married - and these things are good for one’s health. Because these correlations are weaker for women, he found no evidence that religion improves women’s health - although the other research does find this.

For some reason, this reminds of Ted Haggard when he was asserting that there is no better sex than Evangelical sex. We know now where that belief was coming from...

Liberals and patience

I hope that Michael Tomasky is right when he writes the following and that time heals all wounds and leads to change, but something tells me that he is wrong, may be because his words are familiar for they echo the same placating and patronizing words liberals have been hearing for years even after they help elect the American president. One of the lessons of the current state of American politics is that people get the change that they deserve and that believing blindly in a political leader and her/his ability to bring you the moon is naively and jaw-droppingly stupid :

Liberals in my country tend to have a deeply romantic view of political movements. When we think of the civil rights movement, we think of the highlights, the stirring moments. Memory tricks us, and the media, which speak in such shorthand, help perpetuate the trick. So we tend to think that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks's act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work. And even then, the civil rights bill didn't really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act. (...) In the coming weeks, building toward a possible congressional vote in November, progressives will have to get out in force to show middle America that there's support for reform as well as opposition, even though they may find the final bill disappointing.
This is what movements do – they do the hard, slow work of winning political battles and changing public opinion over time. It isn't fun. It isn't something Will.i.am is going to make a clever and moving video about, and it offers precious few moments for YouTube. It takes years, which is a bummer, in a political culture that measures success and failure by the hour. The end of euphoria should lead not to disillusionment, but to seriousness of purpose.

Integration in Canada and the US

Fascinating...:

The reality is that Canadians talk about multiculturalism but don't practise it. That does not mean we don't embrace diversity. Both Canada and the United States, because of high levels of immigration, are diverse societies, but diversity and multiculturalism are not synonyms. Diversity encompasses a variety of characteristics that differentiate people, including dress, culinary and musical styles. An example is Toronto's hugely successful Caribana festival. Such events are hardly unique to Canada; several major U.S. cities have Caribbean festivals too.
Diversity is not divisive in secular democracies that respect individual freedom, such as Canada and the United States. On the other hand, culture is not just about superficial differences but also about core values. The people who were attending cock fights in Cloverdale simply don't understand our tender feelings toward animals. This is a difference in values and there is no room for compromise.
The notion that Canada is a mosaic while the United States is a melting pot does not survive scrutiny. In 1994, a study by two University of Toronto sociologists, Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton, found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent in both countries. This was significant. One would expect foreign languages to dissolve into the American melting pot. But Canada is supposed to be a mosaic: a set of separate and distinct cultural entities. If it really were a mosaic, ancestral languages would survive through the generations. But they don't, because the offspring of immigrants are quickly absorbed into the dominant language milieux of North America.

Separate, but equal?

I agree with this:

The only thing to be said against Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, coming top in the Forbes list of the 100 most powerful women in the world is the nature of the list itself. Just think about it. Power isn’t like tennis: why should women be hived off into a separate little power category all of their own?
In any list of the most powerful people on earth, Merkel would be right up there with the men: her fellow German the Pope, and not far behind Barack Obama in terms of the list’s criteria of career accomplishments, economic clout and public profile. She can hack it with the men, so why put her in the women’s section? It’s like posthumously awarding Virginia Woolf the Orange prize for women’s fiction.

The earth didn't move

Thought-provoking, I guess change is more a state of mind than anything else.

Psychologizing Madoff

Now that Adam Lebor has explained Madoff's motives, everything miraculously makes sense; nevertheless I wonder if there is a danger with this creepy trend of psychologizing every single thing and every single actor nowadays:

Madoff intentionally defrauded the Jewish establishment in what is known as an “Affinity Fraud”. This type of fraud targets the members of a specific religious or ethnic group, abusing the trust and acceptance of insiders to defraud other members. Madoff developed a sophisticated network of contacts across Jewish communal institutions including charities, schools, universities, synagogues, and country clubs and stole their money.
His gateway to plunder was the modern Orthodox Fifth Avenue Synagogue, home to one of the richest and most powerful congregations in America. That led him to Yeshiva University, where he was a valued member of various governing committees; the Ramaz day school; and numerous Jewish charities and foundations.
He even defrauded Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, of much of his personal wealth, and the assets of his charitable foundation. A century after Bernard Madoff’s grandparents stepped off the boat to be slighted by the Yekke establishment, Madoff the shtarker wreaked a revenge of almost biblical proportions.

Unsavory truth

Sugary excerpt of the day:

In the twenty first century, some women have to be enslaved and imprisoned in the household so that others can be freed from it. An unpleasant, but a tried and tested truth.

International justice, politics, and money

Rob Lyons on the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the sole convicted culprit of the Lockerbie bombing, international justice, and politics :

(...) from a political point of view, the release of al-Megrahi in this way seems the best option. The US and UK governments avoid any awkward revelations at an appeal hearing. The Scottish government gets to assert itself as an independent force in world politics, even though it has no foreign policy authority as such, while appearing to be principled and humane. The Libyan government is presenting the release of al-Megrahi as a diplomatic triumph, as yesterday’s welcome party for him shows.
The driving force behind every episode in this case has been the interests of governments, particularly the major Western powers, not the lives of the people unfortunate enough to get caught up in their machinations. Sadly, justice has got nothing to do with it.

I'm only wondering whether al-Megrahi would have been released if Libya was still viewed as a sponsor of international terrorism and if it wasn't an oil-rich nation. I don't think he would have no matter how sick he was.Unfortunately, the lesson of this case is that la raison d'état always prevails over much everything else especially when economical interests are at stake. It is hard not to be impressed over the way Qadaffi has been able to buy himself a new image.What does it say about our world if it is possible to buy respectability without ever fulling atoning or even acknowledging the mistakes of the past?

Neo-cons and France

Well this is odd, but unfortunately, odd doesn't mean untrue even though the analysis here is too simplistic and too cute to clarify Poulos's point.

The level of the political debate in America part II

Hat tip Harry's Place

Distinctions and differences

Nadeem Aslam on Islam, Al-Qaeda and the West (hat tip: Seher Hussain):

Not everything that is wrong in the Islamic world is the West’s fault. We must understand this. Within all societies there are elements that will get out of hand. It is all coming from Pakistan, and the tribal areas. They have hijacked something very important. They have hijacked people’s core beliefs and they have somehow tried to link their brand of Islam to the true Islam. If you study Osama bin Laden’s speeches sequentially, and also those of al-Zawahiri [former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad], al-Qaeda is, I think, tormented by the fact that the world, for better or worse, has managed to make a distinction between Islam and them, the Islamists. It is still way short of the ideal, but the world has understood that what al-Qaeda represents is not Islam. They want the West and the world to think that Muslims are all terrorists. But it is not going to happen.

The level of the political debate in America

No words are necessary, but wow, are we really so far away from Nazi Germany for people to have amnesia or to just be too ideological to care about reality and abusive metaphors? I guess Clive James was right to talk about cultural amnesia.

Disgusting stretch marks

Informative quote:

I don’t know if I ever recovered from first seeing the image, shown here again, of Ms. Suleman’s [Octomom] Hyundai-sized belly during her final months of pregnancy, ridden with enough stretch marks to look like a Nascar track.

I'm wondering if a woman's body is just an object meant to be desirable, to excite and to incite...

Allergic reaction

I had a strange allergic reaction to something I ate last night and what scares me is that I still don't know what it is. I just reminds me that even in New York, one has to be careful about one eats especially when eating raw food such as Sushi.

Amish country and the Internet

Interesting...:

In a world where news still travels at a mail carrier's pace, the farmers, preachers and mechanics responsible for filling The Budget threatened to go on strike if the 119-year-old Amish weekly went ahead with its plan to go online.
The writers, known as scribes, feared their plain-spoken dispatches would become fodder for entertainment in the “English,” or non-Amish, world. The editors hastily rescinded the plan shortly after proposing it in 2006, and today, only local news briefs appear on The Budget's bare-bones website.

Easy and sterile arguments

Glenn Hubbard on Africa and its difficulties to develop economically:

A whole contingent of aid advocates admit the faults of African governments, but trace them back to colonialism. Under colonial rule, they say, foreign governments and businesses exploited Africa and left it poor. Pro-business policies, they worry, would lead to a new colonialism, with foreign companies exploiting Africa anew.
This argument flies in the race of reality. First, Africa was poor before colonialism, and for many countries, colonialism may well have made Africa richer. There were some exceptions, such as the Belgian Congo in the early 20th century, where forced labor for rubber extraction made the people poorer. But overall, Africans in 1960 were healthier, lived longer, and had higher incomes than Africans in 1900. Ghanaian economist George Ayittey calls the colonial era the "golden age of peasant prosperity" in Africa, when the vast mass of rural Africans joined the world economy for the first time. By 1960, this was even true in the Belgian Congo. The hospitals, ports, schools, railways, and roads of Africa date from the colonial era. Certainly Europeans benefited unfairly from colonialism, but for Africans the result was still an improvement over their former poverty.
What has not made Africans richer, however, are their countries' own governments, which have cut off that prosperity in favor of government and NGO assistance and foreign investment that benefits only the elite. Enabling the majority of Africa's population to access and participate in strong local businesses, through a Marshall Plan, would be a welcome breath of fresh air -- not to mention a good revenue stream for the common man and woman.

This is an easy and I have to say tiresome argument, which people make usually to ignore real issues and to avoid acting in order to either deify Africa or to marginalize it by choosing to see it as a place where change isn't possible or where poverty is a choice. It reminds of  both Obama's and for that matter of Sarkozy's speeches in Africa in which leaders who have visited the continent a few times pretend arrogantly to know it full well and offer empty moralizing words about what has to be done for Africans to get with the program. It's sickening and depressing because what is needed at the moment aren't grandiose speeches, arguments or charitable actions, but rather the acknowledgment that, at some point, in spite of history, of traditions, of whatever else, Africans and the people who want to help them help themselves are just going to have to do what works instead of choosing deification, victimization, misplaced pity or patronizing scoldings.

Reform and Trust

I agree with this:

To the extent that the healthcare debate has been about the issue itself, Obama’s leave-it-to-Congress approach has not helped address such concerns. With so much uncertainty, the only conclusion is that people must trust the administration and its allies in Congress to sort things out.
That gets to the crux of what’s behind today’s bombastic debate – anxiety about change and a lack of trust. This sentiment is shared by Republicans, Democrats and independents alike; it just takes different expressions. The economic crisis, and the speed with which the government moved in to take over the banks, insurance companies and auto companies, has certainly contributed to the instability, but it is more than that. It is a sense that society is moving, and people do not have control over its direction.
On his latest town hall stump, Obama has returned to his election theme, saying that healthcare reform requires choosing hope over fear. But, as during the election, this involves hyping up the ‘fear’ of an unruly mob, and asking people to have ‘hope’ in something unspecific – and to the extent that you do learn some details, you find that is an incrementalism that is not going to bring much progress.

Nation-building and democracy

Interesting assertion from former German Defense Minister Volker Rühe, but is it true that democracy is essentially about culture and that therefore it is a waste of time to facilitate/enable its establishment in some parts of the world?

In the Balkans, the real issue is democracy in Europe. But that kind of nation-building is not going to work in Afghanistan. If you walk up to someone in the Hindu Kush and explain to them that you are trying to introduce democracy in Afghanistan, they will laugh themselves silly.

The magic of television

Just watching TV this Sunday (Golf). It's too hot outside and I'm too tired to take the chance of falling in the streets of Manhattan. I can hardly wait for the Fall.

The manly man

I love Pepé Le Pew. To me, he is the epitome of the manly man who so sure of the superiority of  his manliness that he can't see that he isn't seducing the creature of his desire. In other words, when I watch Pepé Le Pew, I see Harvey Mansfield.

Racism and gas

Quote of the day from John McWhorter:

The racism of interest is that which deprives people of their rights. To seek a society where there is no racism whatsoever of the parochial barstool sort is to seek a society where no one passes gas.

Black women as exotic animals

Troubling...:

The French artist Jean-Paul Goude shot that last image of Jones; the two were involved in a tempestuous and sometimes violent relationship. The objectification and exoticization of black women isn't incidental to Goude's art: it's the whole point. "Blacks are the premise of my work," the artist told People in 1979, "I have jungle fever."
In case anyone thought that was a joke, Jungle Fever was also the title of Goude's 1982 book. The shot of a caged Jones made the cover.
So it's no surprise that Goude shot Jones surrounded by raw meat, under a sign that reads "DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL." But why would Complex choose to emulate images, some of which come across as not just dated, but riven with deep and troubling statements about black women as animalistic, primitive, and uncivilized creatures? (...)
The industry's general unwillingness to embrace models of color as anything besides the exoticized "other" is thwarting the development and popularization of other kinds of black beauty. Even Alek Wek, the Sudanese supermodel, noted that she was often asked to pose in spreads that she felt fitted into a wider and more troubling tradition of black people's representation in the mainstream media, particularly with regard to a Lavazza calendar where she posed inside a coffee cup, her skin intended to represent the espresso. As Wek wrote in her memoir, "I can't help but compare them to all the images of black people that have been used in marketing over the decades. There was the big-lipped jungle-dweller on the blackamoor ceramic mugs sold in the '40s; the golliwog badges given away with jam; Little Black Sambo, who decorated the walls of an American restaurant chain in the 1960s; and Uncle Ben, whose apparently benign image still sells rice."

TGIF

I'm not thanking God for it, but I'm just glad that it's Friday.

Real people and literature

Sugary excerpt of the day from AS Byatt;

I know at least one suicide and one attempted suicide caused by people having been put into novels. I know writers to whom I don't tell personal things – which is hard, as these writers are always the most interested in what one has to tell. Now we have the blog and the facebook everyone is a writer, and everyone's idea of anyone else, kind or cruel, just or unjust, is available on the web, to be believed, or mocked. Blogs and facebooks, too, have caused suicides. Writers often realise the power of writing too late.

Les femmes sont abominables

I have given up on trying to understand why women have no problem being vicious to other women. I'm not going to comment this video and on the speakers but I will say is that they are the reasons why I have stopped watching flashy, fluffy, empty, and debasing political shows especially on cable. TV can be an addictive drug, but if you have to be addicted to something, it shouldn't be crack.

Identity and trust

I agree with Paul Krugman on this, but agreeing with him doesn't give me any satisfaction:

How did Madoff pull off his scam? A lot of it probably involved affinity fraud: Madoff’s victims, largely affluent Jews, trusted him in large part because he seemed like one of them.
What I think is going on here, at least partly, is that the peddlers of anti-progressive lies are managing to convince a certain kind of American — white, socially conservative, etc. — that the hate-mongers are people like them; and, even more important, that progressives are Those People, people not like them.
Obama’s skin color makes this easy; but the Clintons faced the same kind of thing. Why? Well, the old line about Clinton being the first black president gets at something: even if Bill Clinton had a regular skin and name, he was obviously comfortable with people who didn’t, which made him one of Them.
And anti-intellectualism is also part of it.

Nude objects

I don't get the following point, but maybe it's because I just need to get a third cup of coffee:

(...) there's nothing inherently sexist about depicting nudity. It's sexist when only women are deemed to signify the erotic; it's sexist when eroticised images of women are so normalised and widespread that women stand to be viewed first and foremost as sex objects – their value inextricably linked to their sexual desirability. The sexism is in the inequality.

Marion Barry, Obama, and America

I just watched the Marion Barry documentary on HBO, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry and I have to say that it was great. It's a must-see for anyone who loves politics and America. As a former resident of DC, I had head a lot of stories about Barry, most of them were bad although almost all people acknowledged that he was a politician who cared (whatever that means), that he had so much potential, which he wasted shamefully and most of all, that DC is what it is today because of him, a city, which is both prospering and struggling with its identity, poverty, drugs the racial divide, and its Americanness. The most touching part of the documentary was seeing him struggling to climb the stairs to get to his apartment with a sandwich in his hands. It made me wonder what defines success in politics, is it resilience, longevity, adoration, wealth, or something else, something more,  a certain something less flashy and less exuberant? For some reason, at that moment, I thought of Barack Obama and I realized how hard, how heartbreaking it will be for me and for so many people to watch him fail and to accept that he had choices. Of course, Obama is no Marion Barry (or rather Marion Barry is no Barack Obama), but they have, at least, one essential thing in common: an incredible number of people believe fanatically, desperately in them. They are, both,  the epitome of their dreams and what they believe to be the incredible promises of America. I heard Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-Germans leader of the Green Party, say on French TV, after his triumph in the European Elections, that he cried during Obama's victory speech. I shook my head in disbelief disgusted with this Hollywood thing that seduces us into becoming the slaves to our emotions, not to say to our passions. My only hope is that there won't be a documentary 4 or 8 years for now asking the immortal Langston Hughes question: What happens to a Dream deferred?

Prudence or fear ?

If I wanted to be abrupt, I would say that the threat of violence always succeeds in forcing people to censor themselves after reading this in the New York Times for I know that we live in a times when sense and sensiibility dominate, in most cases, only when the fear to lose something is overwhelming; I wonder what Kenan Malik would say:

It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed. So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

Tomorrow will never be another day

Is it just me or do Americans have an Hobbesian view of human nature and of the world, which lead them to believe the worst in people as this post by Ta-nehisi Coates about Niall Ferguson and the race card demonstrates? So much for the post-racial stick! I have to admit that after last year's presidential election, I no longer knows what it means to play the race card and in what circumstances, it is evil socially acceptable (I'm not saying morally because it will make any discussion impossible) to do so.

Ideologizing history

Well, I'm always amused when I read an interesting ideological take(and wrong,it isn't wrong because ideological even though the ideology of Andrew Klavan contributes to his misreading of history)  on French and American History :

It seems to me that the last several decades in America have been a weird echo of the decades in Europe around the coming of the nineteenth century—and that no figure can serve as a better guide to both wisdom and error than William Wordsworth, one of the greatest of the British Romantic poets and, in many ways, the very model of a modern neoconservative, defending the West’s liberal tradition against radicalism.
My argument in brief is this. The French Revolution was the historical tragedy that recurred as farce in America’s 1960s. Cranky-cons like myself tend, when thinking of the Revolution, to skip right ahead to the bloody parts, like a 12-year-old watching Friday the 13th on DVD. But the French overthrow of what Wordsworth called “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute” provided young Europeans with the same sort of goose of utopian hope that the Age of Aquarius gave the young here. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” Wordsworth famously recalled in later years. “But to be young was very heaven!” What aging boomer boring his grandchildren with tales of Woodstock wouldn’t say much the same?

C'est compliqué

Haideh Daragahi on Iran, its uprisings, Shadi Sadr and women's rights:

In the Western media's interpretation of the presidential election and its aftermath, Iran is caught up in the rivalry between political factions within the religious power elite. But irrespective of differences of interest and opinion, none of the factions have openly questioned the Islamic dictatorship as a system. Two weeks ago, when Rafsanjani, the heavyweight political figure and super capitalist, chose to take an openly oppositional stance towards the supreme leader Khamenei in his Friday sermon in Tehran, the gist of his message was that the religious social structure was in crisis and should be saved.
Shadi Sadr articulates a third voice which, despite the barbarism of the security forces, was heard loud and clear in the demonstrations and discussions throughout the country in the weeks following the elections. Her horizon lies far above the bickering about the number of votes cast in favour of this or that candidate of this or that faction of the power elite. In her article she outlines a direction - for the opposition struggle in general and the women's movement in particular - that corresponds to the new political reality.
One of her arguments addresses the very real threat that the women's struggle will be bypassed if the new social movement succeeds. Here she is bearing in mind the bitter lessons of the history of women's struggle as well as the fate of Iranian women's rights after the 1979 revolution. In the current protests two factors have been conspicuous: the age and the sex of the participants. Women and the youth have been at the forefront of the protests on the streets. Shadi Sadr regards these two social groups as the forces of the future.

Meaningless nothingness

There was a time when nothingness could be philosophical and cool (when existentialism was revolutionary and Sartre could still read what he was writing), this conversation about third wave feminism (who knew that existed) just proves that today nothingness is not only meaningless, but annoying and maddening. Just listening to this conversation, made me want to take my pencil and stab myself just to make sure that ennui didn't kill me while I was listening to it (the feeling was so enjoyable that I thought I would spread the joy by posting the video). Is it just me or do American women have a unique way of reminding us that feminism is dead?

Crazy God talk II

I just can neither bring myself to quote nor to comment this story because it is so crazy and so unfortunately so American that it scares the you know what out of me.