The Republic of Dissent

Pornography and propaganda

The quote of the year, so far, is from the great Michael Haneke (hat tip: Jennifer Pan ):

In my definition, anything that could be termed obscene departs from the bourgeois norm. Whether concerned with sexuality or violence or another taboo issue, anything that breaks with the norm is obscene. Insofar as truth is always obscene, I hope that all of my films have at least an element of obscenity.

By contrast, pornography is the opposite, in that it makes into a commodity that which is obscene, makes the unusual consumable, which is the truly scandalous aspect of porno rather than the traditional arguments posed by institutions of society. It isn't the sexual aspect but the commercial aspect of porno that makes it repulsive. I think that any contemporary art practice is pornographic if it attempts to bandage the wound, so to speak, which is to say our social and psychological wound. Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking.

Predictable unknowns

Pertinent stuff from James Blitz:

In May 2011, many believed the global jihadist movement had been dealt a decisive blow with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Now, jihadist threats have emerged on two new and significant fronts. Whether AQIM in Mali and Jabhat al Nusra in Syria turn out to be movements with broad ambitions and which challenge western interests remains to be seen. What cannot be doubted, however, is that the toppling of Gaddafi, who was ultimately the west’s ally in the fight against regional jihadist groups, is a factor in their rise to prominence.

Unfortunately thoughtfulness and patience are not essential qualities in the elaboration and enactment of foreign policy of countries too worried about their power to focus on results instead of actions and reactions.

The paternalistic instinct to 'fix' Haiti

From Justin Peters's review of Jonathan Katz's The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left on Haiti and the 32010 Earthquake:

For as long as Haiti has existed, foreigners have been trying to fix it. Early in the island’s history, the tools of improvement were familiar ones: invasion, repression, economic suasion, and other favorites from the colonialism handbook. France transformed Haiti into a vast sugar plantation; the United States installed several puppet presidents favorably disposed to American corporate interests. But eventually, Haiti stopped being worth the trouble. (...) No one disputes that Haiti needed help [after the [2010 Earthquake]. Left unsaid was the implicit assumption that one certainly couldn’t trust Haitians to help themselves. Aid groups warned potential donors, “Do Not Give To The Haitian Government: Haiti is known to be a corrupt country;” media organizations announced that “the chief culprit of current or past suffering in Haiti” was “intense corruption.” It wouldn’t surprise me if some observers secretly believed the Préval regime had engineered the earthquake in order to steal billions from the international community. (...) The result? Donated money went directly to NGOs and organizations that were often fundamentally incapable of putting that money to its proper use.

The trouble with charity/aid in  'dark' places such as Haiti is that it is based mostly solely on good sentiments and ignores realities on the ground because the need of the fixers/helpers is to parent and to feel good about themselves.

Middle-class self-hatred

Interesting question from Chris Dillow:

[...] could it be that the belief that talking to rioters can explain the riots reflects a form of middle-class self-hatred - that the truth is to be found on the “street”?

My answer is yes, but it doesn't end the debate. It complicates it for as we know there are truths and no truth and although perception may be reality, it is almost always limiting and limited!

Wine not whine

Sentence of the day from Stephen Pollard:

It’s not the rich who are the problem it’s the protesters who behave as if the world owes them something rather than being prepared to graft for it.

South Africa, violence and the demons of the past

S'Thembiso Msomi on the difficulty of many South Africans including members of the majority party, the African National Congress to accept that Apartheid is over and that political violence is unacceptable in a democracy:

Just this weekend, a number of shacks and dozens of poor families were left homeless in Claremont, Durban, after a mob went on a rampage "evicting" supporters of the Congress of the People from the area.
Why ANC supporters would be so threatened by the presence of a few Cope members in the area that they feel the need to engage in violent acts escapes me.
But the problem is much bigger than political intolerance.
It has to do with the unintended consequences of the militant mass struggles of the 1980s and 1990s, which helped bring apartheid to its knees.
(...)Though the repressive political environment of the time necessitated the use of militant methods to achieve political objectives, it also had the unfortunate consequence of convincing certain sections of the disadvantaged that nothing can be achieved without violence.
Political leaders, especially those of former liberation movements such as the ANC and the PAC, have a duty to undo this damage by teaching their supporters that violence has no place in a democratic society.

One has to wonder whether South African, in spite of its strong institutions and civil society, can survive without strong and fearless political leadership exercised by people who will resist populism, but realizing that for South Africa not to become Zimbabwe, the many will have to learn to accept the few in spite of the attractiveness of identity politics.

Power and powerlessness

Amartya Sen on Power, powerless, and its effects on individual lives:

What about power – a concept that closely relates to the idea of freedom? To say that a person is powerless in reversing the kind of neglect that they have been experiencing can also be expressed in the language of capability: they are not capable of reversing the neglect from which they suffer. And yet there is some evocative strength and rhetorical force in the language of power, particularly in dealing with powerlessness, that the word capability, which is really a term of art, cannot really match. Analysing power and powerlessness can help to generate a better understanding of the divided world in which we live.

I have the feeling in so many ways the present state of the world has too much in common with the state of nature for people to worry about powerlessness rather than to have a single-minded focus on power.Social justice is becoming a forgotten concept because a diminishing number of people worry about those who cannot take advantage of individual freedoms for reasons, which they cannot change by just using will, courage, hard work, and determination.

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.
(...)Multiculturalism, on the other hand, by reposing political problems in terms of culture or faith, transforms political conflicts into a form that makes them neither useful nor resolvable. Rather than ask, for instance, "What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?" it demands recognition for one's particular identity, public affirmation of one's cultural difference and respect and tolerance for one's cultural and faith beliefs.
Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

Britain's brand of multiculturalism has failed because it placed at its center the cult of diversity and thus sacralized differences in the name of culture and of religion making moral judgments difficult and segregation/sectarianism unavoidable. I'm uncomfortable with drawing sharp distinctions between Britain's multiculturalism and diversity because  in the mind of too many those two concepts have merged. Nowadays, people who argues fanatically for diversity are in fact doing so  by categorizing people, by hierarchizing particularities, and thus deciding which ones ought to more important than others. The trouble with both multiculturalism and diversity as they are commonly understood is that they lead to desindividualization. People are forced to identity with a group of people in order to matter and to avoid marginalization because identity politics is the most potent form of politics.
To put things more simply, the only acceptable multicultural society is one, which sees that people as individuals, not as member of a group/community/whatever else and recognizes that culture and particularities are never legitimate justifications for the erosion of the social compact and the unjustifiable.

Depressive and medicalized America

Frightening stats:

In a study released this year by the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers concluded that antidepressant use in America has almost doubled in a ten-year period. That’s an increase from about 13.3 million to 27 million people taking prescribed medication for symptoms of depression. During that same period pharmaceutical companies increased direct-to-consumer advertising spending from $32 million to $122 million. In light of these numbers it could be argued that advertisers have managed to sell the idea of depression – and its attendant cure – to an easily swayed public.

In America and in many developed countries, the predominant notion that you don't have to experience pain is leading to the generalization of antidepressants and other medications that can alter one's emotions while "sanitizing" her/his state of mind. I have always wondered what was the point of the war on drugs if it was the norm within American society to believe that  drugs put people in control of their emotions and thus make them feel what they want to feel it and avoid feeling (anxiety, depression, etc...) what they do not want to feel.

Niqab, assimilation, integration, Québec, Canada,

Interesting: explanation of the different visions that Québec and Canada have on the Niqab, and more importantly on integration:

(...) English Canada embraces a multiculturalist ideal: Come to Canada, and bring your differences with you. In French Canada, you can have your differences, “but please do become a Quebecker.”
Quebec's francophone majority identifies itself as a fragile minority that must be ever vigilant against cultural erosion. In that context, collective rights often outweigh individual ones, especially when it comes to language or schooling. Quebec, like France, is also fiercely devoted to secularism. “We've had a long and painful struggle with the place of religion in this society, and a lot of people feel strongly about the separation of church and state,” says Mr. Lagacé.
The Quebec-English differences over immigration and integration echo those between France and Britain. France is contemplating a ban on the burka and niqab. In Britain, any politician who'd dare suggest such a thing would be denounced as a fascist.
In English Canada, provincial government officials are only too eager to distance themselves from intolerant Quebec. “We are an open Ontario,” said a spokeswoman for that province's immigration minister. “In Nova Scotia, people have a right to express themselves any way they wish around their faith,” its immigration minister said.

It makes sense that Québec would want its immigrants to assimilate in order to be Quebeckers first to increase its population and strengthen its special minority status within Canada and  Canadian second. The issue is whether it is framing the issue the right way and fighting the right battles. The problem is that these differences that exist within Canada are going to be increasingly difficult to coexist within the same country because they are based on very different visions of society and hierarchy of fundamentals value. The whole niqab episode has shown that even the politicians of Québec don't fully know how immigrants can become 'good ' Québécois, but they know what their fears are, which explains why the focus has been placed on the usual and weakest subjects: visibly "different" women.

American and self-indulgent blindness

I love Sean Penn as an actor, but I believe that he knows nothing about the world, international politics, American politics, which would not be a shame if he could stop himself from saying things like this:

Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.(...) We are hypnotised by the media. Who do you know here who's gone through 14 of the most transparent elections on the globe, and has been elected democratically, as Hugo Chávez?

Penn needs to go to Niger, learn about Mamadou Tandja to find out that getting elected 'democratically' doesn't mean not been a narcissist autocrat. The reason why Sean Penn is the a symbol of American self-indulgent blindness is  too e is  blinded by his ambivalence about Americanness and his to prevalence to it to realize that its adversaries are not always what he would like his country to be. I'm willing to bet my big toe that Sean Penn has never wandered in the streets or outside of Caracas without a police escort to meet "real" Venezuelans and to ask them how they feel about their beloved leader. I'm not saying that Chavez is Hitler, but that he is not Che Guevara (not he was a hero, but at least he was somewhat of a rebel) or not even a decent head of state.

Failing sanctions and Iran

Distressing fact from James Joyner's post on the ineffectiveness of the regime of sanctions against Iran:

America's regime of sanctions on Iran are ineffective but we're likely to see more of them.

What's the point of sanctions if it's known that they don't work? Well, it is to give the appearance of action, resilience, and of strength when as the sanctions against Iraq for example showed that they always lead to the inevitable: confrontation or acceptance of the feared outcome. The US is using sanctions to gain time in the hope that the situation will either change in Iran, i.e. another revolution, or on the world stage that would force, Russia  to join the US and its allies to form a block to have Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. My opinion is that neither possibility is likely.

Religious strife in Haïti

This is the last thing that Haïti needed:

Their cult, a form of west African polytheism that came to Haiti with the slave trade, is being blamed by some followers of the rapidly growing Christian denominations - evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Baptists - as the cause of God's anger in smiting their country.
"They say we're the ones who caused the earthquake. But we know ourselves that we didn't cause the quake, because it was a natural catastrophe," said Willer Jassaint, one of the priests, or houngans, leading the Voodoo ceremony.
Matters came to a head February 23, when a group of Protestant Evangelicals attacked a Cite Soleil Voodoo ceremony with a hail of rocks.
Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian Voodoo, said two days afterwards that a repeat of the violence would lead to "open war," with his followers told to meet aggression with aggression.

Whether it is Voodoo or whatever else, it seems that religions always divinize the most potent, backwards, and fultile traditions in a society, which might explain its inabilities to progress and move forward by letting behind its heavy past. I'm trying to say diplomatically that the religious strife among Haitians based on whether a cult, a sect, a religion or whatever else caused the earthquake is indicative of wider problem and who the fact that in those societies it is difficult not to believe that someone/something else is in charge of one's faith because things are so chaotic and so despairingly dark otherwise.

South Africa and the middle of nowhere

Needless to say that I agree with Daniel Howden on this:

Grandstanding foreign trips are usually the cue for questions about who is in charge of a country in the absence of its elected leader. Jacob Zuma's state visit to Britain has instead prompted some in the South African media to ask if anyone is really in charge of the continent's political and economic giant, even when he's at home.
Less than a year after winning the general election, the desire among ANC supporters to make a break from the divisive era of Thabo Mbeki has left them with a different, but equally dangerous, problem. Mr Zuma built support within the ruling alliance by reaching out to diverse – and divergent interests. While this worked in propelling him to the top office, telling everyone what they want to hear is a poor strategy for running a country.

Tthe problem has everything to do with whom Jacob Zuma is rather than what he says. He is a paltoquet, somebody who believes that he is South Africa and therefore has a lot of trouble rising above his own imperfections to make his country proud or at least to show enough leadership and wisdom to bow to the principle that in democracies, especially when they are as fragile and as unequal as South Africa is, it is critical that the people on the top accept the idea that their nation is one of laws and not one of men. I have to say that I cannot believe that anybody is surprised, but in any case, I hope that Zuma finds some humility in London and returns home a new man. Well, the trouble with fairy tales isn't that they never come true, but that they make one too hopeful that one stars to hallucinate.

Afghanistan, the Dutch, and the last illusions

Julian Lindley-French and Kurt Volker on the Dutch's scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan and its consequences:

The departure of the Dutch will doubtless reinforce a belief both in the Afghan Government and key elements of the international community, such as the United Nations and leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs), that only the Americans (and to some extent the British) are reliable partners. This will likely affect the willingness of the Kabul government to work with Europeans and further undermine the influence of Europeans over the government and mission.
The departure of the Dutch will take place just as the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) is being inaugurated, further undermining what is a very fragile process towards European security self-determination.
However, the greatest impact will be on NATO and with it the wider transatlantic relationship. The Dutch departure is scheduled for the eve of NATO’s new strategic concept, in effect NATO’s ten year plan for dealing with a dangerous and complex world in which stabilization and reconstruction missions will be front and center. Should the Americans and British be forced to fill the Uruzghan space with little or no help from allies in the north and west of Afghanistan, then to the heavily-burdened Americans and British the message will be clear: the solidarity implicit in the strategic concept will be as empty as the Helmand desert.

The biggest consequence of the Dutch's withdrawal is that it eradicates the illusion in Europe, at the very least, that Afghanistan is a war that can be fought endlessly without popular support and more importantly without concise and time sensible objectives.

The destruction of Mogadishu and the Somalization of the world

Tristan McConnell on Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and its permanent state of war away from the camera and thus from the gaze of the world that is destroying what used to be a beautiful city:

The current round of fighting is just the latest in Somalia's decades-old war. Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militia that recently confirmed its allegiance to al-Qaeda, is battling the Transitional Federal Government for control of the country. The TFG gets diplomatic support and money from the UN, soldiers from the African Union and military hardware from the US; take any one of these away and it would collapse like every other administration in the past 19 years. In 1991, the country's last functioning government - itself a venal dictatorship - was defeated by an alliance of clan militias. The warlords then turned on each other, fighting for economic and political control. Somalia has been a maelstrom of violence ever since.
There have been moments of respite. In 2006, the militias were defeated by the Islamic Courts Union - a political group of which al-Shabaab was the armed wing. But within months the union had been chased from power by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion.Now, al-Shabaab is back - stronger and more radical - and holds sway over much of Somalia. Mogadishu is a city of ruins, bearing testimony to the years of destruction. Roads are broken; buildings are shattered, concertinaed to the ground or lacking outer walls, like giant honeycombs.

When reading McConnell's description of the chaos in Mogadishu, I'm reminded of André Glucksmann's prediction that the world is going to be somalized, meaning that we would be seen more cities been destroyed and torn apart without much international concern and especially without any coverage in the media.Unfortunately, I fear that most of those dark holes will happen on the African continent for we know that it is easier to succumb to fatality, resignation and to  the grotesque idea that Africa is cursed  when the inconceivable and the unacceptable is happening within its countries.

Beckism and fascism

This line of reasoning from Sandy Levinson against Glenn Beck troubles me:

We are indeed in a true moment of cultural and political warfare, in which Glenn Beck has made very clear that he has no regard whatsoever for the most basic notions of civility (which begin by granting the possibility that one's opponents simply disagree rather than are "cancers" to be ripped out of the body politic).
What "Beckism" presages is more terrorist violence like that conducted in Austin, Texas, where a demented citizen flew into an IRS building and killed a true American "hero" a/k/a known as a public servant who had dedicated his life to tax collection. One might remember that Justice Holmes called taxes "the price we pay for civilization." Part of our move toward fascism is to view as "heroes" only those who carry guns and are prepared to risk their lives while preparing to inflict fatal violence on others. We must recognize that all public servants are, in their own ways, "heroes." The Republican Party for the past generation has systematically viewed all public servants, save for the military, as chumps, who if they had any real talent, would be working in the private sector (perhaps in Goldman Sachs, etc.). I truly fear for our country.

As despicable as I find Glenn Beck, I don't think he is Mussolini or Hitler. Beckism isn't a prelude to fascism or nazism, but simply a symption that in America, faux populism whether it comes from the right or the left works because it designates scapegoats for the increasing number of people who feel marginalized by the system. What surprises me is that many such as Levinson are voluntary becoming victims of historical amnesia  because they don't know how to fight Beckism. They don't have any answers for people who follow him precisely because they are angry about the fact that America no longer works for them and that he gives them answers that comfort their "conspirationist" world view. An analysis of the recent history of these types of angry popular/populist/fundamentalist movements show that branding them as fascist doesn't work for it doesn't confront the underlying issue which is that increasingly the American political system is seen as not dealing with pertinent issues. What Levinson ought to fear isn't the rise of "Beckist terrorism", but the widening gap between the elected and the electorate that would force people to turn to opportunistic figures such as Beck in order to explode the system. In one sentence, Beckism is just one of the symptoms of a more potent disease, which is ailing America.

Diversity shouldn't be an absolute value

The Boston Globe has a worth-reading article on Major Nidal Malik Hasan,  the main suspect in the Fort Hood's massacre. It focuses on the reasons why in spite of all his faults, his expressed extreme views, his superiors never made decisions that would have made him less of a security risk to others. Sugary excerpt:

The Globe was permitted to review the Army’s more complete findings on the condition that it not name supervisory officers who did not act, some of whom are facing possible disciplinary action.
In searching for explanations for why superiors did not move to revoke Hasan’s security clearances or expel him from the Army, the report portrays colleagues and superiors as possibly reluctant to lose one of the Army’s few Muslim mental health specialists.
The report concludes that because the Army had attracted only one Muslim psychiatrist in addition to Hasan since 2001, “it is possible some were afraid’’ of losing such diversity “and thus were willing to overlook Hasan’s deficiencies as an officer.’’
“Several of his supervisors explicitly mentioned Hasan’s potential to inform our understanding of Islamic culture and how it relates to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,’’ the investigators found.
In one classroom incident not previously described by the Army - which parallels another episode around the same time that has received press attention - Hasan gave a presentation in August 2007 titled “Is the War on Terrorism a War on Islam: An Islamic Perspective.’’
But the presentation was “shut down’’ by the instructor because Hasan appeared to be defending terrorism. Witnesses told investigators that Hasan became visibly upset as a result.

This episode is an example of the fact that in America, especially in organizations that need to "diversify visibly" for political, societal or economical reasons,  there is an overemphasis on people's ethnicity, religion or any other trait that make them a member of a minority group. There is very little focus on their individuality and on the reality that those traits are not necessarily (and I would argue rarely) the defining factors in their identity. In any case, diversity is becoming too much an absolute value because it camouflages the fact that America doesn't know how else to deal with its race problem, its segregating consequences, and the fact that it still believes that people with certain traits, from different races and religion faiths are all alike and that thus, their mere presence in certain surroundings are absolute proofs of openness and progressiveness. In short, diversity has become a totem.

Barbarity is the future

I love predictions of the coming of the "Apocalypse" or "dark times" especially when they are well formulated as it is this by Chris Hedges:

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.
My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement – such as those on the destruction of property – but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed.

The problem with Chris Hedges is that he is too "religious" and therefore, my intent here is not to be demeaning, he believes in the greater purpose, in the grand design and that the future has to be bleak if the present looks a certain way because catastrophes are predetermined by the existence of certain elements/factors. I don't believe that. I'm a constant pessimistically  optimist.  I don't believe that the Dark ages are coming back or that barbarity is the future, I believe that the future doesn't look good, but I don't believe that we ever go back in times, which isn't a comfort for what may be coming might be worse for it is true that progressive isn't continuous. The interesting answer is of course, what happens when it stops. In short, my point is that all points of history are potentially point zero, a period when the unimaginable can happen and it can all end. The good news is that since everything is permissible (yes, God is dead) even though that does not mean that nothing is forbidden as always added Camus, everything, including the best and the worst, is still possible.

Sniffing the ashes of Communism

Sugary excerpt from Enda O'Doherty's review of Uncivil Society by Stephen Kotkin in the Dublin Review of books:

The chief practical flaw of communism, however, has not been the absence of public-spirited individuals, or even the failure of Socialist Man to develop into a perfect being, but the persistence of the need for repression. Many individuals, whether fortunately or unfortunately, have a tendency to put themselves and their families first in any economic calculation. They may also have a little room in their hearts for their neighbours, or even “society” ‑ but it will not normally be the best room. Such people of course, particularly if they are stubborn, stand in the way of creating a classless society and may have be dealt with, through expulsion, intimidation, imprisonment or, in extreme cases (or just to be sure), liquidation. These measures will be carried out by a new class of servants of the regime, whose most prized quality will be loyalty, and who will be decently rewarded for that loyalty. It would be equally foolish to entrust administration of the state’s industrial or agricultural enterprises or indeed of its education system or entertainment channels to people who because of their known attitudes or class backgrounds are unlikely to be completely reliable. Here too loyalty, rather than drive or intelligence, will be the key requirements. And thus we are well on the way to a creating a society where, in the analysis of its most virulent opponents, stupidity rises to the top (but perhaps we should be a little sceptical of that reading too: extreme stupidity is unlikely to make it quite to the top in any society). Excessively stupid or not, we will have a non-performing society, and one where the abuse of power is routine and goes unpunished.

 (...) The collapse of the communist states has also, more or less, entailed the collapse of communism as an ideology and of communist parties and with that the disappearance of the idea that capitalist society could be destroyed or replaced. Social democracy has (at best) a meliorist programme; Trotskyism, which retains a certain ability to recruit among the young, is politically little more than a joke (though at times an annoying one). There are many people nevertheless whom the triumph of capitalism (seen in its ability to survive politically virtually unchallenged even at a time of severe systemic crisis) does not fill with unalloyed joy. Where communism wants to give you butcher’s shops called “Meat”, capitalism gives you five thousand brands of shampoo (not to mention talk radio). It seems, however, that the only practical choice is between bearing this idiocy cheerfully and engaging in a form of personal inward withdrawal. If capitalism ever does collapse it will have been due to an inability to master its own anarchic tendencies. And we may well like even less what we get instead.

What I find fascinating is that although Communism (and I believe Socialism) is dead, it's still very much alive in people's mind. The reason for this fact is that Neoliberalism gave it, willingly in my opinion, a new legitimacy in order to create new monsters to slay and to make the perpetual point that Fukuyama was right and that we are indeed living the end of history since even the most brutal regimes believe in some form of the market. Unlike Alain Badiou and others who are living in the past in order to create the possibility of a new future, I don't believe that history is solely about repetitions (I have Hannah Arendt and René Char to thank for that conviction) or continuity and that it is impossible to create something new without  sniffing some of the ashes of Communism by trying to perfect its old model or trying to humanize it or perfect it. I'm coming to the conclusion with some regrets that the relevance of Communism or of even socialism is a proof that our times has run out of imagination, at least in the political sphere and that explains what it is focusing either on fear, the old, the past or simply and more alarmingly in my view fluff.  At some point, I hope somebody of influence will simply stop the discussion and say in more convincing manner than Walter Mondale in 1984, "Where is the beef?"

Bush isn't dead, he lives in Obama

Unsurprisingly, I agree with John B. Bellinger III  (hat tip: Julian Ku) when he makes the following point:

President Obama may be able to do more to translate his words into action with respect to international law and institutions in his second year in office. But given the continuing threat of terrorism against the United States and election-year politics, we should not expect dramatic shifts in U.S. policy. When it comes to international law, the international community may find that there will be more continuity than change between the Bush administration’s pragmatic second term and the Obama administration.

I'm starting to believe that the problem has never really being Bush (on the issue of international law), but rather that for too many American policy makers international law doesn't matter unless it serves uniquely American interests and that it can be superseded when it doesn't. It is neither a controversial nor an illegitimate point of view to have, but the trouble comes when the world becomes more interdependent and that it becomes necessary to have less American-centric arguments to defend international actions. The problem with the Obama administration now is the same as it was with the Bush administration: it believes neither in the relevance nor in the universality of International law, which in its eyes is solely the weapon of those fighting evil to humble/crush their enemies.

Greece and the integration question

Interesting stuff from Norman Tebbit on Greece, the Euro, Brussels, the European Union:

Gradually, bit by bit, the Greeks and the Germans are discovering that while they have a currency in common, they have absolutely no common economic policy.(...) Already, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, leaders of the member states who really matter in the Eurozone, are dictating instructions to the Greek government – but they are utterly unaccountable to the Greek people. The Greeks are, of course, responsible for their own predicament, but their masters in Brussels also bear a heavy responsibility for having misled them into the trap of membership of the euro and knowingly allowed the Greek government to falsify its statistics to qualify for membership.
Now the Greeks cannot afford to stay in the euro and the Germans and French (and indeed to a lesser extent we British) cannot afford to see the Greek economy collapse.
For our masters in Brussels, this is a moment of great danger and of great opportunity. Their solution is simple. Not just a single currency and a single central bank, but a single finance minister administering a single tax and spending system, and a single government across the EU. Without that, either the Eurozone will shrink to a hard core of states around Germany and the Deutschmark will be reborn under the name of the euro, or the euro will cease to be.

I'm starting to wonder whether European monetary integration can continue, successfully, without more European political integration (deepening that is) and whether more vigorous central institutions (The European Central Bank doesn't seem to be enough to fix  crisis.) aren't necessary for Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European council has not only been invisible, but is becoming irrelevant.
Nouriel Roubini has a different take on Greece in the Globe and Mail.

Fukuyamism 2.2

Francis Fukuyama in the Spectator on current events, history, and the future of democracy (hat tip: Hattie Garlick):

I think that even in the wake of the Ukrainian election and other recent reverses, the future of democracy is not so bleak. In the first place, democracy remains, in Amartya Sen’s words, the ‘default’ political condition: ‘While democracy is not yet universally practised, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.’ Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Putin’s petro-nationalism, or Chavez’s ‘21st-century socialism,’ or Ahmedinejad’s Islamic Republic.
(....)The next phase of global history will be a challenging one, as America and Europe stumble to get back their economic balance. It seems doubtful that either the US or Britain will achieve the degree of growth in the next generation that they did in the previous one. But one of the great advantages of democracy is that it does not depend for its legitimacy on continuing high levels of economic growth, as the Chinese system does.
As we move forward, it is important to keep in mind the simple power of the idea of a government by, for, and of the people. We need to match those high ideals with unglamorous but steady investments in institution-building if liberal democracy is to deliver on its promises.

It is good to see that since The End of History, Fukuyama has become timid about making bold and grand predictions about the future. However, the problem is that he has become so timid that he is no longer original so busy that he is to cleanse his reputation from his original sin, which was to have the arrogance to assert that history had ended, and from the fact that he, maybe in spite of himself, inspired Neoconservatism. To come back to his essay in the Spectator, the problem that I have with it is its shortsightedness and its author's unwillingness to ask the grand question, which is whether societies who are dominated by the market can remain Democratic no in the superficial sense of the world, but in Tocqueville's sense of it. If corporations are people and can greater influence in politics because they have more money, if the electorate's vote is solely based on identity politics,  if not all voices are represented in a representative Democracy, is  such a political system still democratic and can we really ignore its shortcomings by arguing in a Thatcherite and autocratic fashion that there is no alternative? Unfortunately, Fukuyama, in my opinion purposely, offers no answers and furthermore and that is most disappointing, he doesn't even allude to those problems by pretending that the crux of the future legitimacy of democracy is elsewhere.  

Marriage and disinfected love

I agree with Nicholas Lezard on this:

What amazes me is that anyone gets married at all. For hundreds of years, since Shakespeare really, people have noticed that comedies end with a marriage; in other words, the laughter stops. Congreve noted that courtship was to marriage as a witty prologue was to a dull play; and a current T-shirt shows a stylised smiley-faced bride next to a sad-faced groom; the caption is "game over".
In other words, the diminishing popularity of marriage is simply a matter of increasing clarity. Up until the first world war, pretty much the only way, unless exceptionally fortunate, a man was going to find out what a woman's naked body looked like was to marry one, or see a prostitute – itself, in those days, a highly risky business, what with there being no cure for venereal disease. How a woman ever got to see a man's naked body without marrying him was either to become a prostitute herself, not exactly appealing, or risk ostracism by polite society.

My suspicion has always been that marriage isn't about happiness or love, or all the sweet stuff (fluff) but about avoiding loneliness for too many people and delusion that love should be cleaed, categorizable, and eternal. It is for these reasons that religion and the State got involved in it. Deep inside, most men are as Jacob Zuma. They like the chase, the excitement of the new while at the same time the idea that what they have at home, will always be there to put their needs first just like their mother did appeals to them. In other words people, remain single, date different people, have kids with responsible adults, and accept that at the end we all die alone even if there is the illusion that children and people crying on our dying bed would be a comfort.
Baudelaire had this saying, which I've never been able to forget "L’église a inventé le mariage pour désinfecter l’amour (the Church invented marriage to disinfect love)," experience always proves him right.

Short-termism and foolish pride

Ah, finally, some common sense on Jacob Zuma and the lack of outrage over his conduct and the gullibility of too many South-Africans and Africans:

(...) We are all guilty of "short-termism". And we are all so malleable. We are interested in the here and now, and are so quick to consign history to the dustbin.
We are momentarily outraged that the country's president, Jacob Zuma, has with a friend's child sired yet another child out of wedlock. We are then even more dumbfounded by his logic -- that once he has paid inhlawulo, he has taken personal responsibility and that should be the end of the matter.
We fall just short of asking him to resign, but are all mortified by South Africa's international reputation as represented by this first citizen. But ever the strategist, Zuma releases a statement apologising on a Saturday, essentially dictating the content of the country's largest newspapers on Sunday. He gets the front page on his terms and we all move on.
Moving on means mechanically changing gear -- disconnecting from the discourse of Zuma the philanderer to speculate on his state of the nation speech.
We are so easily gratified and gullible. It reminds me of how former president Thabo Mbeki was crucified for a very long time for not speaking out against Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe. And once he had muttered a reluctant, incoherent disapproval, we were left with nothing to say other than "too little, too late".

A Dark continent

Provocative words from Leo Igwe:

Part of the reason why Africans are deeply religious, spiritual and supernatural in outlook is because the people have given up hope of achieving justice and happiness in this life and in this world. (...)Justice is light and injustice is darkness. Eradicating injustice is an enlightening and illuminating process. So tackling unjust systems is critical to the growth and development of humanism in Africa. Today Africa is a dark continent not because there is something fundamentally wrong or lacking or extraordinary with the regional geography and weather conditions. Africa is a dark continent because of so many acts of injustice that reign supreme in the region. Africa is mired in darkness because of the reign of anomie, the terror of barbarism, the ubiquity of impunity, criminality and savage acts.
Unfortunately, Africans always point accusing fingers on colonialism and imperialism for injustices on the continent. As if there were no unjust acts or systems in Africa before its contact and ‘corruption’ by the outside world. When it comes to analyzing and addressing Africa’s problems and predicament, colonialism is always a cop-out or an alibi. Imperialism is a reason or an excuse Africans always tender to avoid responsibility- accepting or taking responsibility for their mistakes and failures.
Africans always comfortably prefer blaming the West and the whites for their woes and troubles. Surely, injustices predate and post date colonialism in Africa. Unjust acts have been going on in Africa for ages.

The trouble is not that Igwe is right, but that he isn't wrong.

Existential questions about the European Union

Interesting stuff from my second favorite law professor Kenneth Anderson on the future of the EU and its lack of a clearly defined political ideology, which impedes cohesion and may put into question its viability:

I am mostly an admirer of the EU and what it has done in many things, starting with the long term transformations in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, to start with, let alone the expansion eastwards.  But that does not lead me to any belief that it has worked out the deep internal contradictions in the political governance project, and less still any view that the EU points the way to some genuinely new kind of governance structure in human affairs.  It might, I suppose — I’m not ruling it out.  But let’s give it, say, a hundred years to see if it has staying power before we draft up too many theories of its historical inevitability.
In any case, how much does it matter? I’m not referring to myself — I mean simply that the Obama administration’s pooh-bahs seem to have written off Europe as the past, Asia is the future.  The irony is that it is precisely on account of striving so desperately, so mightily, to become a Western European democratic socialist state that the Obama administration feels no need any longer to look to Europe.  It has already priced-in internally anything of ideological value Europe might have to offer, on account of the transformations under way in the US.  We’ve now got — thanks to the decension of Bush and the inclension of Obama –anything of value Europe might offer in the way of values, so why pay attention to those losers?  What could Europe possibly teach President Obama about community, fraternite, welfare, socialism, social safety nets, unions, public sector employment, all the rest of the stuff in which Europe ideologically specializes?  This is President Obama, after all — on all of these things, O Europe, you should learn from him.  And from Rahm Emanuel.

I think that Professor Anderson is partly right but fails to realize that the biggest threats to the EU existence are its increasing democratic deficit (the Lisbon Treaty is an example) and its enduring inability to have a common foreign and security policy. As for the increasing disinterest of the Obama administration for Europe, it is, I believe, solely temporary and due to the fact that Obama doesn't believe that the United States needs the EU as much as it needs the United States, this explains why he believes that it can wait for him to it  in his second term.

A lethal sentimentalist education

It is rare for me to say, but Melanie Phillips is absolutely right when she writes this:

Cynical as this may sound, there is no doubt that appealing to public sympathy is now a way to score political points or a 'get out of jail free' card in public debate.
We see this when politicians use personal adversity to tug at the heart-strings. And what all but silences any cynicism is that such politicians' personal anguish is all too real.
We saw it over David Cameron's disabled young son, Ivan, who, before he died a year ago, featured in many moving interviews with Cameron and accounts of his family life.
Some found this tasteless and exploitative; Cameron himself simply said that Ivan was a part of his life he was not prepared to conceal.
What was undeniable was the wave of public sympathy this engendered for Cameron, and the way this humanised the hitherto callous and uncaring image of a Tory politician.
Now we learn that in a forthcoming TV interview, Gordon Brown is overcome by emotion when talking about his daughter who died in 2002, ten days after being born prematurely.

The politics of the Me era is about feelings and images (the two are interrelated). People both want to watch grand spectacles, which explain why politics is more theatrical and to feel/get "the self" of their politicians so that they can be reassured that later s/he will feel their pain. It's not about empathy, it's about egocentrism and the increasing difficulty for uncultured or discultured electorates to resort to cold analysis when it comes to politics.

Haiti and the lazy culture

I don't know what to say about reading Peter A.Coclanis's oped in the Wall Street Journal on Haiti. I'm speechless, but here is the part that sent me in a state of shock (which isn't bad because it made me pensive):

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Some 98% of the country is deforested. It lacks many of the fundamental institutions necessary for a vibrant economy, such as a reliable police force, protections for private property, and schools that boost literacy rates. Just 50% of Haiti's population is literate now. Haiti also lacks a culture that encourages a strong work ethic, the accumulation of capital, and the passing of assets on to future generations. Realistically, building an economic base for Haiti will take generations.
Before the quake there were more than 10,000 nongovernmental organizations in Haiti feeding the poor, providing health services and much more. This fact alone should give the world pause. Haiti doesn't need to be rebuilt. It needs to be built from the ground up.

Can a culture encourage people to be lazy? And if it is the case, is it still culture, but nothing more than the sum of received ideas and perceptions? Is the problem of Haiti, that Haitians aren't working hard enough or rather that they haven't had tried things that work precisely because the world's and their state's emphasis has been on charity and on aid? My guess is that the point in my last question is the right one.But in any case, Coclanis has the merit to say things that need to be said and to point out the difficult fact that Haiti has to be built and not rebuilt, which is essential to help people understand that aid is nice, but something more here is needed.

America, Canada and melting pots

Sugary excerpt of the day from Nav Purewal's fascinating article in the Walrus:

Canada’s kaleidoscopic shards form a culture more overtly variegated than America’s comparatively homogeneous stew, but they also elide both nations’ colonial pasts, a history that has particularly important implications for Canada’s complicated approaches to assimilation. The truism that everyone here came from somewhere else obliquely acknowledges that English and French imperialism supplanted existing cultures.
Modern Canada is as much a palimpsest as a mosaic, a truth perhaps engrained somewhere in our national consciousness — and one that manifests itself in two divergent traditions of immigrant assimilation. In English Canada, the fraught legacy of cultural imperialism — whether the slaughter of native tribes or the injustice of residential schools — results in a reluctance to impose a uniform Canadian culture on newcomers; whereas Quebec, ever afraid of diluting its francophone heritage, demands that immigrants conform to an atavistic conception of French-Canadian culture.

I am wondering whether both America and Canada integration's models are adaptable and suitable for any other country. I have the suspicion that that the answer is no and these variation of the melting pot model, which in fact lead to fractured societies made of communities (which can cohabit without "mixing" given the size of those countries),but which are in fact legitimated and thus, reinforced by the State (s). The most interesting question has to be whether those  models are sustainable. At the time, when analysts such as Bruce Bawer, Christophe Caldwell and Mark Steyn are making loud (and disturbing) noises about the end of Europe as we know to put things more tastefully, I wonder if they should look at America and Canada and wonder what might happen if the communities that form their societies stop having common interest and a share of the apple pie. In other words, what happens when American and Canada become even more unequal, and more "varied societies." Implicitly, I'm suggesting here that identity matters less in wealthy and prospering countries where the poor, and minorities feel that they have a shoot to reach the mountain top. This might suggest that Canada because it is a "fairer" society (one where welfare  and universal healthcare are not fighting words) might face great of an identity crisis than America. Unfortunately, literature doesn't have the answer to that question. 

The era of narcissism

I agree with Chris Dillow on this even though I would make the following distinction, we like in an era where the focus in more egocentrism than on narcissism because I'm not sure that people actually love themselves, they just think that they are the center of the universe, that politics is solely about them and that bad people are evil because they are not like them:

When someone says “I am a Christian” or “I am an atheist”, the emphasis is entirely upon the “I”.
In this sense, we are living in an era of narcissism - albeit in perhaps a different sense from Christopher Lasch’s - in which the self is all-important.
Which raises a paradox. We think of the modern, post-Enlightenment era as being defined by liberalism and the scientific method. But these have in common the belief that propositions are separate from the individual - that the individual is a disembodied subject distinct from his beliefs. However, our public life effaces this distinction, whereas - as Sennett pointed out - people in the 17th and 18th century had a strong sense of a distinction between the public and private person.

There is nothing left to the Left of the Left

Sugary excerpt from an editorial from the Guardian on Oskar Lafontaine, the German Left, and its lessons from the European left:

But there is no disguising the continuing weakness and gradual decline of the German centre-left as a potential party of federal government. Failure to adapt to globalisation has produced weakness. Weakness has caused splits and the splits are reflected in further weakness.These current travails of the German centre-left are part of a wider European pattern of division and defeat. Something of this sort has happened in many EU nations. But they are also a cautionary tale for the Labour party. Those who believe that the only problem with the Labour governments is that they have not been left-wing enough, or that everything will be solved by a proportional representation system that would allow the left to "be itself again", need a reality check.

Hum, I have the strong suspicion that the argument made here is more circular than anything else. The problem for the Left in most industrialized countries is that it has lost It in the sense that it does not believe in Leftism for it really believes in Fukuyamamism and in the theory that we are living the end of history for there are no alternative to the market, capitalism, free trade and other goodies. I remember during the Ohio primary how stupid both Clinton and Obama were sounding when they were trying to convince the people that they were never really for NAFTA. What I wanted to ask them was "what's your plan B?" This isn't a cynical, but a realistic question for it seems to me that the Left solely believes in the heart, that it is better than the right because it is more compassionate (that's why Bush created compassionate conservatism. At the time I wondered what was the point of being compassionate if you are not helping fixing the ill that creates your self-serving compassion). The problem when the heart is at the heart of politics is that any policy becomes justifiable when the argument that the heart of the policymakers is in the right place becomes plausible for the media and the masses. Is there really nothing left Left to the Left? I don't think that's the real question for liberalism in the American sense of the word has stopped to be a political ideology, to be just a societal one where the compassionate are separated from the mean zealots like Sarah Palin and the greedy. Leftism has no backbone. It is too busy admiring its grandeur and nobility in the mirror.

The end of American exceptionalism

I would like to be able to disagree vehemently with Nick Cohen on this, but I cannot because experience has shown me that he is, alas, in part right when he makes the following point although it takes him to another direction than I because I don't make the mistake of confusing a symptom with the disease:

Pride in American exceptionalism ran through Obama's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. "In many countries, there is a deep ambivalence about military action today," he told his doubtless deeply ambivalent Norwegian audience. "At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America." He would take no notice of it. "Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms." Obama drew a map of a pacifist Europe, unwilling to face reality, and a tough-minded but idealist America ready to defend civilisation with "the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms".
Nowhere has American satisfaction with its uniqueness been more noticeable than in the applause it awards itself for its treatment of immigrants. Articles contrasting the success of the US in integrating Muslims against the failures of Britain have been a regular feature of the American press. Liberals emphasised that immigrants who wanted to leave their old identities behind were helped by a constitution and bill of rights that accepted them as equal citizens.
Conservatives claimed that immigrants could not sit resentfully at home living on welfare payments and developing sectarian grievances, as they could in corrupt Europe, but had to find jobs that inevitably brought them into contact with Americans from other cultures.
(...) Depressingly, Americans seem to be as bad as the British are at recognising the differences between Islam and Islamism. They can no longer, however, get away with pretending that Islamism is an un-American disease. Trying to explain the rise of religious hatreds and identity politics, Obama said in Oslo that "given the dizzying pace of globalisation, and the cultural levelling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities", which was true enough in a platitudinous way.
I wonder if he yet understands that Americans are not exempt from the manias of our time and that his formerly special country is not looking so exceptional any more.

Prudent censorship

Reading this sugary excerpt leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because of my anxious apprehension that it is a sign of things to come for we are in a world where taking offense or crying wolf put a stop to necessary interrogations and deserved criticisms:

There is, however, a glaring omission in The Cartoons that Shook the World. None of the twelve cartoons has been reproduced in the book. In August, Yale University Press announced that it would suppress the controversial images, citing advice from a handful of academics, diplomats and journalists, including Marcia Inhorn, John Negroponte, and Fareed Zakaria. According to the publisher, “the decision rested solely on the experts’ assessments that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.”
Klausen reluctantly agreed. After all, by her own count, the publication of the cartoons had already been responsible for at least 200 deaths and 800 additional injuries. Yale University Press had to tread lightly, and it was certainly within its rights to do so.
To justify its decision further, the publisher noted that curious readers could easily view the cartoons online. Here, at least, Klausen is clearly at odds with her publisher. In the text, she warns readers that “the longevity of such sites is unpredictable and they are often marred by obscene commentary and misleading translations of the Danish captions.” 

For some reason I'm reminded of the second debate of the 2000 Presidential election  where to any timid criticism Gore made, Bush responded smartly that he was hurt because his heart was being questioned, which killed a debate, which he feared. If our biggest concern becomes to bow to the sacred and to the fanatical and absolute adoration that people have for it, why don't we just pass laws forcing us to love and to respect each other and not to question any religious or personal  beliefs..It's scary that we live in times where the heart and the divine are annihilating reason.

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She deserves all the crap she gets

The fact that so many are willing to jump on Palin and to accept sexist attacks on her by using stereotypical refrains such as "she deserves it," "she did it to herself," "she objectified herself so others are allowed to do the same," "she is ripping what she sow" shows that in our world, the dominant opinion is that it's okay to attack bimbos if they are bimbos and to  forget that discrimination, demeaning treatments are unacceptable no matter what the person they "punished" did or is doing. In other words, sexism isn't about the goodness or the purity of the victim, but about the ethics of the sexist and of the people agreeing with her/her.  Situational ethics have always been problematic to me because they justify the unjustifiable by too often putting the burden of proof on the object of the attack to show that it doesn't deserve be attacked, to prove that s/he is good enough to be defended. Sugary excerpt of Lindsay Beyerstein's post arguing that Newsweek's cover is wonderful because it exposes the real Palin's problem (hat tip : 3quarksdaily):

There's nothing scandalous about Palin showing some skin, or wearing Spandex. But this cover image is deliberately styled to make the then-governor of Alaska look like a Vargas pinup girl. Unlike the other images in the series, this one references her status as a governor. As she poses like a swimsuit model, she's clutching one icon of political power--the Blackberry--and leaning on another. The theme isn't Sarah Palin, athlete. The theme is Sarah Palin, Sexy Governor. (As in: one of those dime store Halloween costumes: sexy cop, sexy lady bug, sexy sanitation worker...)
Predictably, Palin complained that Newsweek's use of the image was sexist. Yes, the image was plucked from its original context. The whole point was that the picture was appalling it its original context. Newsweek is holding this picture up to the world and asking: Who does this? 
The bottom line is that Palin's a clown. She doesn't get a pass because her chosen clown persona is stereotypically feminine.
She caricatures herself. Day in and day out. Good for Newsweek for pointing and laughing.
The story is about why Sarah Palin is a problem for the GOP. The picture answers the question. She's a problem because she's a freak with no judgment who regularly makes a spectacle of herself.  Obviously, she's a potential problem for America because she's an incompetent leader who supports terrible policies. But that's not Newsweek's question.

I wonder whether we can go there with race, whether we are willing to say that some Blacks who use race solely to guilt others and for profit can be depicted using racist imagery. Would it have been acceptable for Newsweek to do a cover with Jesse Jackson or Al Sharton in a plantation or just chained as Charles Barkley was on a cover for a sports magazine a few year ago? I wonder why so many women are unwilling to defend Palin on things that they would usually find offensive just because they think that they would be legitimating her.  Why has Sarah Palin stopped to be a woman for too many women to become an object or rather her political views? I thought that we live in an era where the consensus was that women were people too and that thus, there was no need to attack their gender to attack their beliefs. Are we still living in an America where people, most specially women think that despicable bitches deserve to be beaten, rape, humiliated, belittled just because they aren't good people or don't believe in the right things? Apparently, we do.

The death of idealism

I agree partly with Ian Buruma on this:

The way it looks now, liberals, in the “progressive” American sense of the word, may actually have been among the losers of 1989. Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many social democratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice and equality, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism.
This process was already under way before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the free-market radicalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Society doesn't exist, Mrs. Thatcher once famously declared – only individuals and families count. Everyone is for themselves.
For many people, this had the ring of liberation – from overregulated markets, from overbearing trade unions, from class privilege. That is why it was called neo-liberalism. But free-market radicalism undermined the role of the state in building a better, more just, more equal society. Neo-liberals are less interested in justice than in greater efficiency, more productivity, the bottom line.
While the neo-liberals were slashing and burning their way through old social democratic arrangements, the left was dissipating its energies on cultural politics, “identity” and ideological multiculturalism. Democratic idealism was once the domain of the left, including social democrats and liberals. In the United States, it had been the Democratic Party, embodied by John Kennedy, that promoted freedom around the world.
But in the late 20th century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism” than it was to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Mao, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Ruhollah Khomaini) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.”
As a result, all politics derived from Marxism, no matter how loosely, lost credibility and finally died in 1989. This was, naturally, a disaster for communists and socialists – but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

Defining national identities

I would like to say amen to these words from Jim Wolfreys on the debate on the definition of Francité (Frenchness) that is occurring in France, but a part of me is resisting it:

At one extreme those who find themselves concentrated in the poorest areas of France do so not out of choice, but through ethnicity and income. Neither Islam nor "ethnic communitarianism" are responsible for such divisions: they are the product of social deprivation and racism. At the other extreme, however, is a section of society that wilfully separates itself from the rest of France. The top 10% of earners choose to live in the most segregated areas of the country, well-heeled districts like Neuilly and St-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. It is they who have created what Maurin calls "the bourgeois ghetto".
If the present debate is to reassert the historic republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity then government priorities will need to be overturned. The targeting of "illegal" immigrants – Besson aims to deport 27,000 people this year, more than double 2002 levels – focuses attention on a tiny proportion of the population. Likewise, high-profile campaigns to impose a republican dress code on Muslims are a distraction from more fundamental divisions shaping French society, divisions determined less by religion than by poverty, racism and inequality. In France, as in Britain, if debates on citizenship are to involve denouncing the extreme right while pandering to its bugbears, they will only obscure the real issues – and in so doing become part of the problem.

I believe that the trap of any debate on national identity, whether it be French, British, Moroccan, or Nigerian, is to cast it in the terms  Wolfreys is choosing to frame by emphasizing the risks as if nationals of a country should be afraid to define/decide who they are or who they would to be.There is this morbid and unhealthy connection between patriotism, any attempt to show national price and fascism and there is one between any admission that national identity can grow, change or even be redefined drastically with self-hatred, deculturation, Arabization, de-europeanization, and dewesternization.

Ubuland

I found this video of Idi Amin Dada, the former dictator of Uganda talking his ability to dream the future not only funny, but enlightening. Not very much has changed for the perceptions remains and when one looks at things today in Uganda and elsewhere, it is difficult not to think of Alfred Jarry's famous play Ubu Roi  except that here it is not the French middle class, which is at the center of the theater of the absurd in this case. What is alarming is that there are some who believe that Dada was great partly because he was a thorn to the sides of the Brits and to the Israelis. In other words, the standard for political greatness in many African leaders is standing up to the former colonizers and to foreigners and being a menace to the world as leaders such as Dadis Camara and Omar Al Bachir show just to name two of them.

Guinea and its dangerous manly man

I would find this video outrageously funny if it wasn't about the fate of a poor, small, and martyred African nation, Guinea, in desperate need of leadership taken hostage by a dangerous and manly idiot who believes that God made him king. Even by the worst or the most generous of standards, Captain Dadis Camara is a clown who should have never been allowed to rule Guinea. He is convinced that to be Guinean, African, and finally a statesman means to be just as Harvey Mansfield would say manly that is to scream when he can neither reason nor convince and to crush the people who contest his authority. It's heartbreaking to say, but the fact that an African country can have such an idiot as its head of state shows that its future generations, because they were lied to by a previous group of political leaders, which was more or less polished and "western," will in the hope for change (here those two hypnotizing words again) be tempted to follow manly fools who will try to convince them that to be authentically African (whatever that means) is to defy reason and civilization.

Losing the moral high ground

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

I'm all in favor of applying disgusting political rhetoric and twisted political arguments to the purveyors of such tactics in order to demonstrate their hypocrisy and/or to neutralize those tactics.  If that's all that were going on here -- if it were made clear that these tactics are unacceptable and dumb but that the Rovians on the Right who have spent the last eight years wielding them should be hoisted on their own petard -- I wouldn't have any objections to it.  But, plainly, that's not all that is going on.  Instead, the DNC and these groups are clearly arguing that it's improper and unpatriotic to object to or even question Obama's award.
( ...)What's particularly bothersome about yesterday's attacks is the premise that it's improper, unpatriotic and even Terrorist-mimicking to do anything but cheer -- have a "national celebration" -- when Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize.  Whether Obama is actually pursuing policies of peace happens to be an extremely legitimate topic of debate.  The same is true for whether he's done anything meaningful yet to merit the award.  (...)  While there are arguments to make in his favor -- I even made some myself yesterday in the first two paragraphs of what I wrote  -- there is something unquestionably bizarre about awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a leader who did not merely "inherit," but is advocating, actively prosecuting and escalating, a major war that is killing large numbers of civilians with no plans to stop, while at the same time building prisons to house people who will have no due process.
Unquestionably, those are and must be legitimate topics of debate.  Some smart people yesterday made some reasonable arguments for Obama's Prize.  But to insist that it's the patriotic obligation of every American to stand and cheer -- and that those who don't are "casting their lot with the Terrorists" -- is creepy and repugnant.  It's also a very dangerous game to play.

Tragedy

Good point from Christopher Hitchens on the media and what it considers to be tragic:

The media now say tragedy when they mean that bad things have happened to good or—even worse—famous people. But the types of tragedy that really deserve the name are of two main kinds, the Hegelian and the Greek. Hegel thought it was tragic when two rights came into conflict. The Greeks thought it tragic when a great man was undone by a fatal flaw.

Ambivalences, equivocations, and simplifications

Bombastic sugary excerpt from a letter written by Vanessa Redgrave, Julian Schnabel and Martin Sherman in the New York Review of Books (Hat tip: Norm Geras):

A group of prominent filmmakers has protested the Toronto Film Festival's choice of Tel Aviv, in its "City to City" section showcasing films from and about a particular city, as "a propaganda campaign on behalf of...an apartheid regime." Their letter declared that the signatories were not protesting against the Israeli filmmakers who were included or their films. Their stand seems to us to be improperly thought out and to have distressing implications.
The protesters use the term "apartheid regime." We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government. Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter.
In their letter the protesters say that "Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages." True. Just as much of America is built on obliterated Indian property. Are they implying that Tel Aviv should not exist? At least not in its present form? Which would mean that the State of Israel (the original State of Israel, not including the occupied territories) should not exist. Thousands of Palestinians have died through the years because the Israeli government, military, and part of the population fervently believe that the Arab states and, indeed, much of the world do not want Israel to exist. How then are we halting this never-ending cycle of violence by promoting the very fears that cause it?

I have the sick feeling that defending just causes too often give people the permission not so much to use words without weighing their meaning, but assertions without verifying their veracity or without caring about their truthiness precisely because they are defending a cause, which they feel is noble. But again, do you have a decent chance to be heard and to make a difference in the current environment if you don't shout, provoke, or are just fanatically/religiously inflexible ? Of course words matter, but so does every little thing that pollutes capital debates by making them about who is good rather than about what is right and what should be done.

It's always about exploitation

Sometimes, in spite of himself and I would say by pure luck if I wanted to be needlessly mean, Nick Cohen gets things almost just right:

According to the received wisdom of our times, we are living through a phenomenal feminist advance. Women have stormed the bastions of male privilege and cracked, if not smashed, the glass ceiling.
But the success of women is based on exploitation of women. The households of privileged families and a large proportion of the middle class could not function without the labour of servants fleeing the Brezhnevian tower blocks of eastern Europe, Asian slums and poverty and oppression the world over. Our social structure would collapse were it not sustained by shadowy legions of women, living outside the law as illegal immigrants or living outside the welfare state in the black economy.
Stern left-wing writers in the 20th century told their readers that their wealth depended on the exploitation of far-flung colonies. Lectures on how our clothes and trainers come from the sweatshops of the east remain a standard of liberal journalism today. But the line between the rich and the poor worlds does not run between north and south or east and west but through British homes, touching the most intimate aspects of family life – the care of children and the happiness of marriages. Small wonder there is a gap between public pronouncements and private behaviour.

The Outsider

It's always interesting and alas too predictable to see Tariq Ramadan skillfully portray as a victim:

The rector places me outside the Western world. But I was born in Switzerland. I grew up and I was educated in Europe. I am a part of this continent. And I would not understand the West? It is ironic that the way I am being treated in the West is a lot like people are treated in Eastern, non-democratic countries. What has happened here is not Western. It is only by casting me as an outsider who just doesn't get it that the rector can justify his decision.

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.

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.

Discrimination and Banishment

I wonder if Frank Furedi would apply the following principle no just on the British National Party (BNP), but on every shameful views including those who advocate for example the Burqa for women, deny the Shoah, and favor violence:

Discriminating against people on the grounds that they hold the wrong views is no more legitimate than discriminating against individuals on the basis of their religion or race.

I believe that the banishment is an admission of powerlessness, a confession that one doesn't possess the tools/doesn't know how to educate society and to persuade it to make good decisions on important subjects. There is such a thing as the duty, an obligation to persuade/to educate for those who believe fervently that they are on the right side of any issue, especially  when those issues are decisive to the overall health of a society.

American society and breasts

Nancy McDermott dissents against the American view that breastfeeding is best and that women who don't are not only bad mothers, but bad people; the one thing that bugs about the subject is the prevalent opinion that a woman's body doesn't belong to her and she should always do what is best for her child even if she doesn't want to or can't do it:

But the notion that ‘breast is best’ – and its implications for women’s role in the family and even society – goes unquestioned today. And it goes unquestioned because it is presented narrowly as a matter of science, as a proven ‘fact’ that cannot be challenged except by anti-science deniers or twisters of ‘the truth’. (...)
Most men and women today approach marriage and family life with an expectation of equal partnership and shared domestic responsibility. But the arrival of children has a drastic impact on the division of labour in the home and on women’s fortunes at work. This is not simply a matter of America’s pitiful employment policies, its miserly six weeks of maternity leave or the lack of affordable childcare; alongside these things, the pressure to breastfeed has become a new, apparently science-led way of making women accommodate to a more domestic role in their children’s early years.
Breastfeeding is the last biological link between women and their traditional role in the family; it is something only they can do. Whether it means being physically available to nurse or pumping milk while at work, it drastically tips the scale towards a situation in which women take on primary responsibility for domestic life in a way that is not totally different from in Friedan’s day. Unlike in the past, however, when it was assumed that women would stay at home and attitudes to breastfeeding were relatively relaxed, today the decision to nurse is imbued with moral significance.  After all, if the science is clear and breastfeeding is best, what does it say about women who choose not to breastfeed? What is wrong with them?

Democratization, values, and the whole nine yards

Things are getting more dangerous for women in Afghanistan, and thisalarming  reality leads me to wonder whether it is possible for the United States and the others to save the Afghans from themselves (thus making themselves susceptible to the charges of Western condescension and paternalism) and whether they should even attempt to remake a country to their image or to mold it according to their self-interests. The Financial Times had a great article last weekend on democratization in Arab countries; its central question was whether the West was getting in the way of reform in the Middle East. This sugary excerpt caught my attention because it sums the situation not only in Arabs countries, but in other countries where democratization may lead to something other than what are mistakenly called Western values:

Democracy, in this unpromising context, could open a long period of illiberal politics that may be inimical to stability. Yet the west’s only realistic choice is to foster, or at least not actively obstruct, the right of Arabs to decide their own future, in whatever form they wish. That form will be heavily influenced by Islamism. Yet the west should be able to see the similarities between Islamism (or Islamic revivalism) and 19th-century nationalism in Europe. Both started as a sort of forced march into the future and then they detoured in sinister and destructive ways: fascism then and the jihadi cult of death now. Any sane policy would be devoted to preventing the evolution of a lethal form of radical Islam, in no small part by finding space for a thoughtful Islamism to emerge.

The trouble with democratization is that it cause widespread chaos in certain regions of the world which are too important to the US and its allies to accept it or to wait patiently for things to improve on their own. In Afghanistan, it may soon become apparent that neither democratization nor stabilization can happen through nation building fostered by foreign powers.

Democracy, rape, and Afghanistan

Quote of the day from Mohammad Asif Mohseni, a top Afghan Cleric defending the Afghan rape law:

The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights. (...) In Shariah law, it states that a woman cannot go out without the permission of her husband.(...)It is essential for the woman to submit to the man's sexual desire. (...) If she is not sick, and if she does not have another problem, it is the right of a man to ask for sex and she should make herself ready for it. This is the right of a man.

This should make the nation building efforts fun in Afghanistan especially if it ends up creating a country that resembles parts of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.