The Republic of Dissent

Keeping the Tories out and voting for the lesser of two evils

This argument from Paulinlancs arguing that people should vote for 'Labour' just to keep the Tories out shws that Labour has already lost the election:

Labour may have done bad things, but a next Labour government will not be ANYWHERE NEAR AS REMOTELY DAMAGING to us all, and especially to the working class, as a Tory government.
You don’t have to support Labour’s track record to support Labour at this election.  It’s enough to want to keep the Tories out, and the way to do that is generally to vote Labour (I accept there is a tactical voting issue in some places).  Voting for TUSC, or RESPECT, or the Greens, will not keep the Tories out.  It’s not rocket science.

The argument isn't wrong, but it is paternalistic, disrespectful to voters, and not very convincing. It argues that Gordon Brown , his record and the one of his party in power don't matter because the Tories will always be worst. It is a little bit like a student been close to failing an important exam who stops to argue to the judges that the test doesn't matter because they know who is the smarter, and exemplary student and that therefore they don't have to pay attention to anything else. The bigger point is that Gordon Brown let this election become one about change and cannot argue that change doesn't matter because it is worst than the present when he has failed to convince the Brits that he is change.  Voters don't like to hear that they don't have any choice and that they are stuck between choosing the plague and the cholera, that is between an illness that hurts them, but gives them a chance to survive and one which will kill them.

The last debate

I haven't yet had the chance to watch the last debate of the British Election for I've been back from Chicago for less than two hours. Yet, I'm not surprised to read that most analysts including Alex Massie, Jonathan Freedland, Nick Robinson and Iain Martin believe that David Cameron won for Brown has already lost, Nick Clegg is no longer looking fresh, and Cameron has been at this for too long not to know how to win a post-debate debate in the media. In any case, to the contrary of most, I don't wonder whether Cameron can't close the deal, but whether Nick Clegg will fade. I have the strong suspicion that Clegg's fate is intertwined to Brown's ability to convince traditional Labor voters not to punish his party for his inadequacies given the fact that he won't be the next prime minister and that voting for Labor therefore just means saving the furniture now that the house is gone

Going to Obamaland

I'm going to Chicago this morning just for a few hours (10 hours). But do not despair, I will be back in New York by the evening, which means that I may post Thursday if I'm not too exhausted by my fast trip to Obamaland.

Elections as popularity contests

Quote of the evening from Andrew Robinson:

The reason elections are now no more than a televised popularity contest is that the main parties have fused into something akin to a single party, indistinguishable on major issues.  The most marked characteristic of the televised debates is the lack of distance between politicians on any of the major issues: in the two main parties, ‘everyone agrees’ that immigration is a bad thing, that public spending needs to be cut, that crime should be smashed with an iron fist, that workers must remain weak and unorganised, that benefits should be conditional on work, that education exists to serve the market, that the private sector should run or at least inspire the management of public services.

The Albino body parts trade

Scary, disturbing, but yet just another consequence of the deification of intolerable traditions:

Albinos are often betrayed by husbands or other relatives, lured by payments of up to $3,000 for an albino limb and $75,000 for a “full set” of albino body parts. The parts are ground into potions and talismans that are believed to bring wealth and power.
A recent survey found that 93 per cent of Tanzanians believe in witchcraft – the highest percentage in Africa. Witch doctors were banned by the government last year, yet many still operate freely.
Albinos have been murdered in other African countries too, including at least a dozen in Burundi. The difference, however, is that the Burundi killers were prosecuted and convicted, which rarely happens in Tanzania, despite pledges of action from its Prime Minister.

Papal satire

No comment necessary (via)

Demography and political power

Sunny's advice over at Pickled politics on the ways for minorities to have more power in a liberal democracy:

After a while the race and the religion doesn’t even matter: it comes down to numbers. If your numbers or clout is large enough then the establishment will pay lip service. Perhaps the mistake Latinos in the US made was to tilt too far towards the Democrats… removing the Republican incentive to avoid pissing them off. Although it looks like Republicans are paying the price already.
Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the only way a minority can get over the bigotry is either by expanding in large numbers, or getting very close to the establishment. 

There are two major implications of Sunny's advice and both of them bug them. The first is of course that it is acceptable to view having children as a means to an end, especially a political end. Children, thus become little things to enlarge a group giving them limited room to acquire an individuality. The second implication is that identity politics is so supreme that women should see as their mission to expand the numbers of their group by having more children. Women who are part of the minority group thus become essentially breeders since the objective is to have little ones to make their 'people' more powerful. How disturbing !

Defining tolerance

Robin Hanson offers what is, I believe, an excellent definition of tolerance:

“Tolerance” is a feel-good buzzword in our society, but I fear people have forgotten what it means.  Many folks are proud of their “tolerance” for gays, working women, Tibetan monks in cute orange outfits, or blacks sitting at the front of the bus.  But what they really mean is that they consider such things to be completely appropriate parts of their society, and are not bothered by them in the slightest.  That, however, isn’t “tolerance.”
“Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you.  Things that make you go “ick”, or that conflict with strong intuitions on proper behavior.

That means of course that most societies, even 'modern societies,' are pretty intolerant places.

The markets are bad

Quote of the midday from Charlemagne:

(...) it is striking how press reporting in bits of Europe starts from the position that markets are up to no good.

America is married to Europe for the better and for the worst

Walter Mead on the Greek crisis and the fact that it affects not only on the European Union, but also America:

It is tempting and superficially agreeable for Americans to gloat about Europe’s troubles.  After all, every time something goes wrong in American domestic or economic policy, European elites and journalists are quick to gloat and find fault.  After listening to two years of stern and self righteous lectures about the ‘failure’ of the American capitalist model, many Americans who deal with the Europeans are quietly enjoying the spectacle of the smug Europeans writhing in helpless indecision and pain over the continent’s self-inflicted wounds.
But bad news for the EU is bad news for us too.  Irritating as a strong EU can be, a weak and divided Europe is much worse.  A peaceful, prosperous and geopolitically boring continent that exports tedious platitudes about global governance is a far better place than any other Europe we have seen in modern times and American national interests are in no way enhanced by economic and political instability in the Mediterranean — to say nothing of Ukraine and Turkey.
Europe’s problems end up in the American in-box.

I'm wondering whether the Greek crisis isn't a welcome one for America as long as it doesn't get out of control and doesn't last too long, but dents simply the threat that the euro has become to the dollar by making it again seem as the only safe global currency. The point that I'm making is that although the US is married to Europe, their relationship remains one where power is everything because it determines its directions, its parameters and most importantly the obligations that each party has to one another and how open the relationship can be. The weaker Europe is without being in a state of complete disarray and while remaining state, the more Obama is able to set his own agenda by focusing on Latin America and Asia without any tangible consequences.

Sarkozy, the burqa and the potency of identity politics

Agnès Poirier argues, and I agree almost fully with her, that the ban against the Niqab/hijab/burqa has become a legal nightmare for Sarkozy:

If the niqab ban is passed as law, the question then arises of how you make it effective. Do you also forbid visiting tourists from Saudi Arabia from wearing it? A number of French MPs want to limit the ban to public administrations, but then a law already exists which bans all conspicuous religious symbols from public places such as hospitals, courts and schools. Or do you simply resort to a fine? Even the National Front is against a law: "it should simply be a police regulation."
The ban of the niqab: a fine legal mess.

I don't think that Sarkozy cares about the law because otherwise, he would have been mindful of these complications, which were to be expected. His goal is to change the focus of the political debate in France from his policies and their ineffectiveness to an irrational and explosive one about Frenchness and about the conviction that many French have to all their problems come from the fact that too many French are refusing to be French and to respect French values. The burqa/niqab/hijab debate  provides the best way to do it because it isn't based on facts, but on fears, suspicions and ideology, which suit Sarkozy just fine because it embarrasses the Left and while reminding the right and the lower classes that he is defending their right to who they are and for the others to assimilate if they want to be good citizens of France. In short, Sarkozy must be happy in spite of the legal complications because while the French are talking about the burqa, they aren't focusing on the fact that his presidency has been a disappointment, so far.

The patriotic French burqa

No comment necessary after this pic from Retrofuturs.

Cameron, Clegg, Blair, and political brands

Interesting  take on the two front runners of the British elections David Cameron and Nick Glegg from the Virtual Stoa  (via):

I’ve never had much time for Cameron and Clegg, with Cameron modelling himself on Blair, and Clegg on Cameron. But what the election campaign is bringing out is the extent to which Cameron was only ever offering the most fraudulent impersonation of Blair, and that it’s because of this that the Clegg-as-Cameron strategy is working out so very nicely for the Liberal Democrats.
The reason Blair was far more successful as a centrist politician than Cameron is managing to be is that he went out of his way to humiliate the Left of his party in public as a part of his move to the right. He chose to pick fights that he really didn’t have to fight, with the result that it made it all much easier for former Conservative voters to think that it was safe to vote Labour after all.
Cameron, by contrast, has made a lot of centrist noises, and he’s done various things that the Tory headbanger tendency doesn’t much like (stuff on the website about tackling homophobic bullying in schools, running more women candidates or candidates from ethnic minorities in winnable seats, banging on about the environment, usw), but he’s never seriously tried to stage a meaningful fight with the party’s Right, to lure them out into the open, and to slap them down in public.

David Cameron is trying to impersonate Blair because he can't impersonate Thatcher without scaring everyone or rather reminding them of John Major. I believe that he has trouble taking on the right of his party because it doesn't like humiliation or even confrontation as the left of the left does because it reassures it of its intellectual superiority. As to Nick Clegg, his choice given that Labor has been governing for more than 13 years can't be to look at the left, but to rather look as David Cameron would be looking if he was sure to be the future prime minister. The goal is to make himself look not as a unsettling novelty or a risky change candidate, but as a bold, but reasonable one that would give the Brits change without taking their country back to the Eighties or to even the Blair years. In short, the point is that people like toxins in politics if they make them feel good and politicians tend to go back to what has worked before.

Fanaticism, ridicule, and the steps forward

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the whole South Park and Muhammad affair:

Islamists seek to replace the rule of law with that of commanding right and forbidding wrong. With over a billion and a half people calling Muhammad their moral guide, it is imperative that we examine the consequences of his guidance, starting with the notion that those who depict his image or criticize his teachings should be punished.
In "South Park," this tyrannical rule is cleverly needled when Tom Cruise asks the question: How come Muhammad is the only celebrity protected from ridicule? Now we know why. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right. I'm only wondering whether the whole cycle of shock, awe, screams of cultural insensitivity, apologies or a refusal to back down lead anywhere, but down the ground. It is true that backing down is dangerous when an essential value such as free speech, which includes the right to make fun of gods and prophets is challenged there must never be a surrender to fear and to threats. The most difficult question to me isn't about fighting extremism and refusing to accept that in the name of  religion or whatever else some forms of speech are forbidden, the capital question is what happens afterward standing the confrontation.

As impotent as the pope

Quote of the afternoon from Andrew Brown :

The pope, as is well known, can't even stop Catholics from using birth control, let alone the rest of the world; and while I understand he is not keen on sex of any sort, I have never been turned down by anyone on the grounds that the pope would disapprove. Somehow, they have all managed to find even more compelling reasons. Perhaps more fanatical atheists have had a different experience.

Spanking and the Council of Europe

Ed West on the desire of the Council of Europe to have countries ban spanking to obey the European Convention on Human Rights:

Most parents do not smack their kids, but smacking is not abuse, any more than neglecting your children’s studies, letting them get overweight, spoiling them or smoking around them is. All of those might be examples of bad parenting, but they are not abuse, and there is a fundamental and important difference. It is the crucial distinction between what is wrong and what is illegal.
In a free society, the state does not interfere in the nursery any more than it interferes in the bedroom. That the Council of Europe seeks to do so is fundamentally sinister, creepy and totalitarian, and very un-British.

For some reason, I'm not outraged about this superfluous polemic, but that's probably because I'm not a parent and because I'm still sore from all the spanking that I got when I was a child.

Cultural insensitivity

Thought-provoking examples from Margaret Wente of the most outrageous of censorship and of blackmail:

In 2005, Burger King in Britain got in trouble when some Muslims thought the swirly design on the wrapper of the ice-cream cones looked like the word “Allah.” “I feel humiliated,” complained one unhappy customer. “I’m going to make [the person who did this] see that it was the biggest mistake in his life.” Burger King promptly recalled the ice cream and apologized. Instead of telling people to get a life, the Muslim Council of Britain said: “We commend the sensitive and prompt action to prevent any hurt being caused to the religious sensibilities of others.”
Nike got in trouble in the U.S. for the same reason – putting a design on a running shoe that some Muslims thought resembled the name Allah. Nike eventually negotiated a settlement with a leading Muslim group. It apologized for any unintentional offence, recalled all products carrying the design, introduced training for Nike designers in Islamic imagery, and agreed to investigate how the design came about. McDonald’s goofed up too, in quite a different way. A few months ago, for fear of offending Muslims, the Singapore chain pre-emptively omitted a pig from a series of animal toys it had created to depict every sign in the Chinese zodiac. This time it was the Chinese who were infuriated. They demanded that their beloved pig be reinstated, and blasted McDonald’s for cultural insensitivity.

The problem is both in the US, in Canada, and many other countries, culture has become sacred as a result of the supremacy of identity politics. The implication of this sacralization is censorship and the crippling fear to appear to be insensitive to others' cultures because it is seen as the most unacceptable of all violations. Wente's examples are also a proof that an eroding togetherness created by the segregation of differences and the reinforcement of different communities at the expense of the whole society. Unfortunately, this trend is going to continue because identity politics is the present and I'm afraid the future.

Being unfu**able

The sugary excerpt of the day from Jessa Crispin:

The other lie, which you will hear from your male friends, is that a woman can get laid whenever she wants. This is meant to be comforting, I think. A woman permits and denies access to sex, and all she has to do is want it bad enough. Bad enough to make the effort, of course. One can't just have a line of men appear on your doorstep just by trying to attract them all The Secret-like, although Craigslist can come in handy for that. But it, too, is a lie. There is such a thing as being unfuckable and female, whether because of weight or lack of femininity or age or poverty or that desperation you start to emit in waves after a few years without anyone trying to get into a dark corner. Because if you are unfuckable — and let's use the right word here — if you are a hag, you have no voice.
(...)There are no ugly girls, no old hags in popular culture. Every week we are supposed to pretend like Tina Fey is ugly on 30 Rock, that America Ferrera was hideous even beneath the glasses and the braces on Ugly Betty, that every homely girl is a pair of contact lenses, short dress, and good haircut away from being prom queen.
If that is the epitome of public ugliness, well, then the actual hags are way below the line of visibility. Women are allowed to have some power, but only if they're hot.

Crispin is mostly right, but I don't think that there is such a thing as an unfuckable woman, there are just women who think that they are unfuckable because sex appeal is supposed to be about beauty and hotness, when it isn't. But then again, the main point is that women's sexuality is defined by their desirability and thus their objectification.

There are no Western values

I agree with Kenan Malik on this:

what we now regard as "Western values" – individual rights, secularism, freedom of speech – are modern values, distinct from those that animated European societies in the past. And it's not just medieval Europeans who would reject contemporary European values. Many contemporary Europeans do too. The British writer Melanie Phillips is militantly hostile to what she sees as the "Islamic takeover of the West" and what she calls "the drift towards social suicide" that comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created "a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets." Muslims "have concluded that the society that expects them to identify with it is a moral cesspit", Phillips argues. "Is it any wonder, therefore, that they reject it?" Caldwell, too, thinks that while the West's current encounter with Islam may be "painful and violent", it has also been, "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialist intellectual life of the West", for which we need to express our "gratitude".
There is, in other words, no single set of European values that transcends history in opposition to Islamic values. Nor indeed is there a single set of western values today. The very values against which radical Islamists rail – the values of secular humanism – are the very values that so disgust some of Islam's greatest critics.

Paul Berman, Tariq Ramadan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Josh Gohlke reviews Paul Berman's latest The Flight of the Intellectuals and highlights his views on 'Western Journalists' and their preference for Tariq Ramadan over Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Ramadan is attractive to Western journalists partly because he is moderate in manner, always seeking consensus and middle ground. But Berman encourages us to ask: A middle ground between which poles? Between stoning adulteresses and maybe not stoning them if we can come to an accord?
Berman figures Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee-turned-activist who has unequivocally condemned mistreatment of women in the Muslim world, as Ramadan’s foil. Hirsi Ali is infallibly immoderate in tone. For that she has earned the backhanded admiration (at best) and disdain (at worst) of Buruma and other journalists. But at least some of her principles—a woman’s right to keep her genitals intact, for example—aren’t the sort on which democratic societies can afford to compromise.
How did Western journalists come to be more respectful of decorous fundamentalists than they are of brash secularists? For one thing, they fear that Hirsi Ali’s criticisms of her own tradition will embolden anti-Muslim bigots and xenophobes in America and Europe. Berman adds another answer that’s startlingly simple: rejections of Islamism have become life-threatening. 

I agree with Berman's main point about the attractiveness of Tariq Ramadan and the fact that he has acquired a legitimacy because he is moderate in tone while Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn't. I think that such a disparity in treatment shows that the notion of difference is so ingrained in certain elites that they are willing to apply different moral values to unacceptable situations as long as one is able to agree on them one some issues and thus to reassure that they are on their side, which means being on the left politically. Tariq Ramadan is perceived as being a lslamic leftist while Ayaan Hirsi Ali as radical conservative, which isn't as attractive. To use a telling comparison, I would say that in the mind of most journalists, Ramadan is close to Barack Obama while Ayaan Hirsi Ali is closer to Sarah Palin. That explains the difference in their treatment by the media. However, these realities don't lead me to the same conclusions as Berman.  I think that the mistake is always to draw a line in the sand and to chastise those such as Ian Buruma who are uncomfortable with absolutism. In short, Paul Berman is unable to accept the idea that there isn't just one way to fight extremism and that confrontation can be about something other than a brutal clash and the castigation of the wolves in sheep clothing. That inflexibility may be a sign of moral rectitude, but is problematic because it strengthens one's intellectual status without providing  solutions that change reality. But again, Berman's problem might be that he isn't interested in changing reality, but simply in condemning abnormalities and atrocities while scolding those who don' t do i with the same vigor as him.

Fanaticism works

Quote of the end of the afternoon from Neal Gabler:

The real problem with extremism as an attention-grabber isn’t that we don’t know what to do about it. The real problem is that it works. By knocking down the Twin Towers and announcing a constant stream of threats, the Islamic radicals got and continue to get publicity out of proportion to their numbers — just as the Tea Partiers have been dominating the national airwaves even though their ranks, according to survey data, constitute no more than 13 percent of the American public. Similarly, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are very well remunerated for their high-decibel hate. In other words, we may say we hate fanaticism, but we pay attention to it and may even reward it.

America doesn't have a 'Muslim' problem

Essential questions from Glenn Greenwald responding to Ross Douthat's op-ed on South Park and its caricature of Muhammad

Who could possibly look at the U.S. and conclude that brutal, inhumane, politically-motivated, designed-to-intimidate violence is a particular problem among Muslims, or that Muslims receive special, unfairly favorable treatment as a result of their intimidation?  Do you mean except for the tens of thousands of Muslims whom the U.S. has imprisoned without charges for years, and the hundreds of thousands our wars and invasions and bombings have killed this decade alone, and the ones from around the world subjected to racial and ethnic profiling, and the ones we've tortured and shot up at checkpoints and are targeting for state-sponsored assassination?

Immigration as a losing political issue

I agree with Bill Richardson, New Mexico Governor on this:

When immigration is an issue, nobody wins. (...) for Democrats to pass immigration reform before November, party leaders would have to force members from conservative-leaning districts to cast yet another tough vote that could raise the ire of swing voters. But Republicans face longer-term peril — if they continue to push aggressive legislation cracking down on illegal immigrants, Hispanic voters are likely to continue their exodus to the Democratic Party. 

The point is that immigration when it is solely a political issue is rarely about realities, but about fantasies and fears that policies can only address by being as radical as the Arizona Immigration bill without resolving the issue, but by being harsh to give the public that their fears are being taken seriously.

Racist Tea parties

The assertion of the day from Cathy Young:

The endurance of racial stereotypes in this day and age is disturbing; but Tea Party supporters differ little in this regard from mainstream Americans.

Most of the times, when the charges of racism and of anti-racism are used within the political context, especially the American one, the intent is to shut down the debate by diabolizing the opposition in order to ignore their concerns. The point is that racism is America is no longer about racism, but about identity politics and ideology.

Multiculturalism and Diaspora politics

Good point from Jeffrey Simpson on Canada, multiculturalism, and the threat posed by Diaspora Politics:

Multiculturalism has greatly enriched Canada, making it a more interesting, vibrant and outward-looking country. But multiculturalism can be dangerous if diaspora politics twist Canada’s foreign policies to suit ethnic demands.

Nick Clegg, fils du peuple

Worth digesting point from Jonathan Raban on Nick Clegg:

Though, like Cameron, he comes from a rich family and was privately educated, Clegg’s accent is mongrel-London and his pleasant face looks more fils du peuple than to-the-manor-born. His great strength is that he comes off as entirely inoffensive; decent, knowledgeable, articulate without being dangerously eloquent or witty, bright but not brilliant, telegenic but not a natural star. Eight days of national fame have led to a rash of silly comparisons with Obama, which, I think, miss the whole point of Nick Clegg, one of whose chief merits, to the skeptical British eye, is that he is no Obama. Clegg and the Lib Dems give the electorate the chance to teach the British parliament a lesson that it won’t forget.

Nick Clegg is able to play the role of le fils du peuple because again, he is neither David Cameron nor Gordon Brown and because his party has always been on the outside, which gives it the possibility to pretend to be on the side of the people who feel misrepresented by Labor and the Tories. I have to admit that the UK election fascinates me and that I'm wondering how much like Americans the Brits are. I have the suspicion that David Cameron is the next prime minister and that Nick Clegg might just have to become his number two.  I hope that I'm wrong.

Suspending judgment

Quote of the mid-day from Frank Furedi:

The act of suspending judgment need not mean a commitment not to judge. It can mean the postponement of judgment while the sceptic continues to inquire into the problem. Unlike doubt, which involves a negative judgment, scepticism represents a form of prejudgment. It is opposed to dogma and the attitude of unquestioned certainty.

Fighting and Dying for a mistake

I agree with Tom Engelhardt on this:

Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously?  Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England?  It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey.  Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.

I am reminded when I think of Afghanistan of John Kerry and of what he asked during his days as an anti-Vietnam activist "how do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" Remaining in Afghanistan is a mistake not because it is Vietnam for all wars are different, but because the war is not winnable. It takes political courage to admit it and to realize that not every single battle against terrorism has to become an armed conflict. Whatever NATO does in Afghanistan there will always be Talibans  and Al Qaeda. It cannot change that essential fact because what is happening on the ground isn't changing that reality is feeding the hatred against 'foreigners' because they cannot transform Afghanistan into Japan.

Unifying ignorance

Provocative assertion from John Quiggin:

The unifying feature of the right in the 21st century is not so much ideology as an embrace of ignorance, represented most obviously by the leading figures on the right in the US, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Rather than reflecting an even partially coherent world view and political program, rightwing politics now consists of the restatement of talking points in favor of a set of policy positions that represent affirmations of tribal identity, rather than elements of a coherent program.

I'm just wondering whether the same statement can't be said of the left while adding the fact that it is also bound by the condescending notions that it knows better and therefore is better. I is disingenuous of Quiggin, to say the least, to suggest that only the right plays 'tribal identity.'

Bad people politics

The quote of the day is from Nick Cohen:

(...)with the possible exception of the BNP, the Lib Dems are indeed the most unscrupulous campaigners in politics, the only party to my knowledge that has taken stolen money from criminals and then refused to return it to its rightful owners. Meanwhile, you do not have to be a deranged militarist to look at the Liberal Democrat front bench and suspect that they would, if they could, leave Afghan women to the mercy of the Taliban and feel very pleased with themselves as they did it.

Another Change election

I'm disgusted by the empty and flashy word that is 'change' during political campaigns. Change i used as a way to avoid talking about substance and to camouflage troubling policies, but Jonathan Freedland is right when he reaches the following conclusion:

(...)with Nick Clegg repeating the accomplished performance of the week before – means the two largest parties now have to accept that they are in a new kind of contest from now till polling day. Any hope that normal service would be resumed has gone.
For Labour, that should prompt a radical conclusion. A government in power for 13 years cannot hope to win an election that is now all about change. Instead its best hope surely has to be to maximise its core vote to prevent a collapse into the low 20s on percentage points, a defeat even more absolute than that of 1983.

I don't see how Gordon Brown can defeat both Clegg and Cameron in an election when change is the buzz word because  everything that he does looks old and just reminds people that Labor has been in power for a long time

Liking Sue Sylvester

My favorite TV character is Sue Sylvester, the deliciously mean cheerleaders' trainer in Glee, which is my number one reason why I watch the show. I make the prediction that Jane Lynch, the actor who plays her, is going to go places. She has been so hilarious for too long not to make it big by at least having her own show. In this video, she succeeds in making homophobia and gay bashing funny, which is quite an achievement.

Britain, Europe, Brown, Cameron and Clegg

Gavin Hewitt summarizes the positions of the three main candidates to be the next prime minister of Britain

The debate came down to this: the Conservatives will resist any new powers going to Brussels. The differences between Labour and the Liberal Democrats over Europe are slight. They believe the EU delivers a string of benefits in dealing with common problems.

Something tells me that the European policy of the next prime minister will be lukewarm and careful not mater who wins because the result of his election will be too tight for the winner to ignore the fact that the Brits don't feel that warm towards Europe.The form might be different, but the substance will be the same meaning that the tone will be Thatcherian and the meat not very much different from the one of the policies of the Blair-Brown governments.

A reason to resist Nick Clegg

Chris Dillow offers reasons not to vote the Liberal Democrats and thus for Nick Clegg. The most convincing of Dillow's reasons is the following:

I have many more arguments with Labour policy, and yet I feel an instinctive fondness for the party that I don’t towards the Lib Dems.
One reason for this is that I’ve never been sure what their core principles are. At best, this reflects the tension between Orange Bookers and tofu-munching eccentrics. At worst, it’s manifested itself in a mere search for a gap in the market between the two main parties, and the tendency to tell voters on the doorstep whatever they want to hear.

It is in that sense that Nick Clegg reminds me most of Obama, you hear what you want to hear and you have to wonder what he really believes and whether there is more beef to the change candidate than cheese and air. The fact that the campaign is really short compared to the one in America helps and hurts Clegg because he has to rely solely  on image to seduce on voters by providing them with just enough substance so not as to turn them off and to convince them he is not a lightweight while offering them enough sweeties with charm to get to them to marry him even though they don't know him very well. Thus, Clegg is hoping for a coup de foudre, but the trouble with love at first sight is that the awakening can be rough and lead to a brutal separation.

Scripted politics

Entertaining story from Charlemagne:

A Labour MP I know tells a story about the young Tony Blair, campaigning in a tough council housing estate years before he was famous and powerful. At the time, Labour was still promoting a platform of more cordial relations with the Soviet Union, and nuclear disarmament. According to this (supposedly true) story, the young Mr Blair began explaining to an elderly woman that only Labour could avert nuclear armageddon. "Can Labour stop the yobs peeing in the lift?" she replied. Mr Blair waffled, sticking to his lines about disarmament. "Young man," said the voter severely. "If Labour can't stop them peeing in the lifts, how are they going to stop a nuclear war?"

Cleggmania and the state of the British Democracy

Brendan O'Neill on Cleggmania, the popularity of Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat candidate to be Britain's next prime minister:

Cleggmania, as the media (who else?) have dubbed it, is an extraordinary phenomenon. Not because recent opinion polls seem to indicate that the Lib Dems are benefiting from Labour’s and the Tories’ disarray – the Lib Dems have long been a dustbin-style repository for the electorate’s disgruntlement with the two main parties. And not because some newspapers are getting overexcited about a young(ish) and allegedly handsome politician – from Blair to Cameron, hacks have always had a soft spot for soundbites combined with cheesy grins. No, Cleggmania is extraordinary because it indicates that the media are now becoming more and more politically influential, to the extent that they can almost singlehandedly frame the way that politics is understood and even how the political leaders conceive of themselves and their campaigns.

Humm, I wonder if O'Neill thought the same thing about Obamania. In any case, he isn't wrong, the trouble is that the Brits and their journalists have been infected by the Obama syndrome, which is the willingness to believe that it is enough to vote for somebody who epitomizes, symbolizes and looks like change to get it. It's easy anyway and gives the impression that one special and providential man can change a nation without asking it to make some sacrifices and to change itself like Lionel Messi can win a soccer football game. If Nick Clegg were someone other than a good 'clean' white man, he would be unbeatable. That said, I like Nick Clegg, I just don't know what he really stands for and I'm sure for a lot of Brits what matter is that he isn't the other two and that he represents a difference alternative, a chaotic and potentially dangerous one, but a different one nevertheless.

UK Debate II: Gordon Brown can't win

My take on the second Britain election debate is that Gordon Brown cannot win because Nick Clegg's presence hurts him. David Cameron looked good, but I don't think he has sealed the deal but I thin that he helped by Clegg in he same way that John Edwards helped Obama during the Democratic primaries debates by reminding voters that how much they want change and that Brown is the status quo. Alex Massie has an interesting take on the debate. His conclusion is that Gordon Brown won narrowly. Massie is too close to the trees to realize that for Brown to win, he has to be better than both Cameron and Brown, Cameron only has to be better than Brown, and Clegg is the wild card for he is trying to convince the Brits to go against their history by trusting him enough to vote for him, which means remaing both fresh and steady. 

Obama and Sudan

Expected development from Obama's views of Sudan and Darfur:

Until he reached the White House, Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that the United States apply more pressure on Sudan so as to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur and elsewhere.
Yet, as president, Mr. Obama and his aides have caved, leaving Sudan gloating at American weakness. Western monitors, Sudanese journalists and local civil society groups have all found this month’s Sudanese elections to be deeply flawed — yet Mr. Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, pre-emptively defended the elections, saying they would be “as free and as fair as possible.” The White House showed only a hint more backbone with a hurried reference this week to “an essential step” with “serious irregularities.”

The fact that Nicholas Kristof is surprised that Obama is behaving differently as a president than as candidate especially when it comes to an oil rich country like Sudan whose natural resources are coveted by China, France, and other European countries, shows that  he doesn't know much about the realities on the ground in many African countries. The fact is that when it comes to natural resources, realpolitik will always supersedes good sentiments and human rights. The cat was let out the bag when Carter landed in Khartoum  to supervise an election that all the main opposition parties boycotted.

Iran in 1975

A great video on Iran in 1975 (via). It's frightening to see how religious or any kind of political revolutions can alter the face of a country.

Un-Islamic music

Another proof that there is something rotten in the Republic of Somalia:

Last week, in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, more than a dozen radio stations switched off their music in accordance with an ultimatum from Islamist rebels.
Apparently seeking to bolster their global-jihadist credentials, Somali extremist groups Hezb al-Islam and their sometime-allies al-Shebab decreed that all music - Arab, East African or Britney Spears - ­ is "un-Islamic", and ordered all radio stations to cease playing it, in any form, or face "serious consequences".
Broadcasters were quick to devise light-hearted alternatives to their scheduled music, re-recording ads and replacing bridging jingles with the sounds of car horns, frogs croaking, roosters crowing and, with grim irony, gunfire. ­ The situation was bizarre enough to earn the beleaguered Somalis a spoof-tribute on America's National Public Radio.

Freedom, gender, and the fear of rape

Sugary excerpt of the morning from Jennifer Thorpe:

The saga around the gender testing of Caster Semenya rocked our foundations last year. Suddenly we weren’t sure what the boundaries for man and women were. We were forced to reconsider the nature nurture debate, but it remained a theoretical one as the protections for her dignity prevented us from knowing the results of these “gender tests”. The result would not have been able to answer the question though. Caster Semenya might not tell us whether her test revealed that she was female, or male, but she might be able to tell us what it means to be a woman, having been subject to such scrutiny herself.
Perhaps she might tell us that women in South Africa don’t have it easy. It’s hard to feel free when you must constantly evaluate your surroundings waiting for a rapist to strike. It’s hard to be free when the crime of rape is one of the only crimes where the burden of proof is on the survivor because of a problematic definition of rape that talks about consent, rather than coercive circumstances.

Berlusconi as a reality TV star

On point analysis from Alexander Stille on Berlusconi and the reasons for his longevity in spite of the uncountable scandals that never seem to make him unattractive to the majority of Italian voters:

Berlusconi has transformed the political life of a major nation into a kind of reality TV show in which he is star, producer, and network owner: he is the ultimate “Survivor,” who will lie and cheat to kick others off the island as well as “The Bachelor,” distributing roses to a group of beautiful young women. Consider that Berlusconi’s approval ratings are consistently higher than Barack Obama’s. As The Daily Beast pointed out recently, Obama’s TV ratings and poll numbers have gone down in lockstep as his health care legislation has been weakened and unemployment has remained high: “The fact is he had 49.5 million listeners to [his] first speech on the economy. On Medicare, he had 24 million. He’s lost his audience…. He has plunged in the polls.” Berlusconi, facing public scandals similar to those of Tiger Woods and John Edwards, has kept his audience.
Berlusconi has understood that contemporary politics is a permanent campaign. In the old days, a US president campaigned for six months and governed for three and a half years. Obama rather quaintly followed this old-fashioned model, working largely behind the scenes to promote health care and other legislation, while the Republicans held the stage, claiming that the Democratic plan imposed “death panels” and socialized medicine. Berlusconi would never have let that happen.

Another reason for Berlusconi's persistent success is the poor state of the Italian left, which has never been able to stay unified long enough to keep him out of politics. In short, Berlusconi is helped by the fact that his opposition has never been able to take advantage of his 'imperfections' and of fertile political terrains because it was too busy destroying itself.

Rwanda, the rule of law and genocide ideology

As a lawyer, this troubles me:

Rwandan authorities arrested a top opposition politician on Wednesday and charged her with genocide ideology — a contentious crime that many critics say has been used to stifle dissent — and with cooperating with a notorious rebel group.
The politician, Victoire Ingabire, has been one of the most vocal opposition figures in a country that seems to have grown increasingly intolerant of political challenges. She was summoned to a police station at 9 a.m., according to her assistant. Mrs. Ingabire, an accountant who had lived in Europe for years, has been under investigation since nearly the moment she returned to Rwanda in January and announced she was running for president.
Investigators have interrogated her several times on suspicion of instigating ethnic divisions. She said in an interview last month that she was being persecuted for simply challenging the government.

I'm bother by this kind of sentimentalization of the law for political purposes for two reasons none of which have to do with Victoire Ingabire and her views, which I find despicable. The first is that it shows that Kagame who is, undoubtedly, one of the best African president when it comes to managing his country and enriching it, is also an autocrat. The second reason is that the charge of genocide ideology in my opinion, which isn't one of an expert in the area, is that it keeps the past alive and therefore makes national reconciliation among Rwandans difficult because the Hutu will always be guilty or rather suspected of preparing a genocide. I always find it dangerous when history is used by politicians to maintain their grip on power. 

Out of touch

I'm not a Brit, but I am still appalled by how out of touch Lord Pearson, of the United Kingdom Independence Party, is.(via) What is he doing on TV?  That's the kind of people, smart operatives keep in the background especially when there is an election going on.

A choice about choice

Good point about abortion in the US from Stuart Derbyshire:

Perhaps now is the time for the pro-choice lobby to recognise that Roe vs Wade was a mixed blessing. For the past 30 years, it has been the Supreme Court, and not broader society, that has made the necessary decisions about abortion. Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe focused on abortion as a privacy right (the ability of patients and doctors to pursue clinical decisions without fear of interference from the state) and the right of clinicians to practice their profession. In contrast, the rights of women to control their bodies and their destinies did not feature in the 1973 opinion. Roe effectively took the power to decide about abortion away from society and gave that power to the Supreme Court. Thus began more than 30 years of legal wrangling and posturing over abortion that has increasingly pushed everyone but lawyers and judges to the side.
In an important sense, the battle for autonomy over fertility was lost in 1973 rather than won because the battle shifted away from women’s autonomy to decide their life course as equal citizens and towards influencing nine Supreme Court judges. Women need access to abortion to have control over their own destinies rather than having their destiny dictated by a biological accident.

The trouble of course comes the particularity of the American context. America is a religious country and for that reason, even those who are in favor of abortion (especially politicians who want to get elected) are always ambivalent about the right of the woman to control of their body if it is proven that what she has inside of her is a living thing. I don't think that Roe vs. Wade will ever be overturned because it is not necessary to do so to make it impossible for women to make an increasingly difficult and socially unacceptable choice to have an abortion .

Free will and antisocial behavior

Fascinating:

One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial.

Philosophy and politics

Julian Baggini on philosophy and politics:

In many ways, the disconnect between politics and philosophy is neither surprising nor unhealthy. Real politics is a messy business of compromise and coalition; political philosophy the scrupulously tidy task of conceptual clarification and justification. Nevertheless, there should be some interplay between the two: the pragmatics of the real can be guided by visions of the ideal, and vice-versa.

I' less comfortable than Baggini with the idea that politics and philosophy are disconnected because it makes the former being about everything but thought and substance

Manly men and shrill strident hag bitches

I agree with Ophelia Benson on this:

Being considered strong and tough is not all that unpleasant even if the people who consider you that detest you. Being considered a shrill strident hag bitch is a whole different thing. (...) women can’t win no matter what they do. Either they hang back and don’t get the top jobs because they didn’t grab for them, or they grab for the top jobs and spend the rest of their lives as shrill strident hag bitches.

Canadian multiculturalism and extremism

Quote of the day from Ujjal Dosanjh:

I think what we are doing to this country is that this idea of multiculturalism has been completely distorted, turned on its head to essentially claim that anything anyone believes – no matter how ridiculous and outrageous it might be – is okay and acceptable in the name of diversity.  (...) Where we have gone wrong in this pursuit of multiculturalism is that there is no adherence to core values, the core Canadian values, which [are]: That you don’t threaten people who differ with you; you don’t go attack them personally; you don’t terrorize the populace

New Europe as a self-satisfying delusion

Another proof that Mary Dejevsky lives in another world:

New Europe was the neat formula coined by Donald Rumsfeld in aid of the Bush administration's war effort. The "old Europeans" disliked and derided it, as it suggested that Europe was more divided over the Iraq invasion than it actually was. But they could never deny its grain of truth. There was indeed a split between those who signed up to the Bush crusade for democracy in foreign parts – not least because of their recent history – and those who saw the same campaign as a misuse of military might.
But that was then. Now that Poland and Russia are making up, East and Central Europe have lost their appetite for fighting US wars, and the Obama administration is eschewing the whole idea of special relationships, it could be time to lay this irritating concept to rest. Six years after the European Union completed its greatest single expansion, the divisions are neither as sharp nor as resentful as they were.
Even as "new" Europe blends with the old, however, could it be that a new breed of rather different "new" Europeans may be arising in that least likely of places, here in Britain? There are reasons to doubt, but suddenly, too – for us pro-European dinosaurs – to hope.

My reaction this paragraph and to Dejevsky's article is that pro-Europeans like too much the politics of hope instead of dealing with the reality, the fact that inadequate institutions and the lack of ambition, of pragmatism, of political courage and the refusal to acknowledge that countries have different interests is crippling the European Union. The point is that Eurocrats like Dejevksy like fantasies, grand ideas because they make them what I'm started to believe they like to be: optimistic dreamers instead of being builders and leaders. It seems clear to me that Dejevsky is enamored with the idea of "new Europeans"  who will do what their elders couldn't  because it is an empty dream that doesn't cost her anything or rather require nothing more than hopefulness. Ah, if life were that easy, I would have already capitulated to Obamania!