The Republic of Dissent

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!

The Wall Street protests and the Man

The Economist's Democracy in America blog on the Wall Street protests  :

HERE's my two cents on the Occupy Wall Street protests: Woo!

Maybe that's one cent. Anyway, I am not by disposition a joiner, but I'm nevertheless inclined to smile upon attempts to stick it to the man, even if the attempt is quixotic or confused and the man in the end remains unstuck. The Burkean horror of social upheaval is fine in its place, but there is no apparent danger of upheaval. And who among us doubts that the man deserves a good sticking to? So why not try?

I don't find the whole Occupy Wall Street stick compelling for the simple reason that it seems to me that the idealists willing to come to New York to protest against corporate greed are the same who fell in love with Obama in 2008 and who, instead of holding him responsible for his actions, are looking elsewhere to  blame for the state of the American economy and society.

In short, the Occupy Wall Street movement represents a unsettling manifestation of identity politics for as in the Salem Witch Trials, the priority is to stick it to certain people while refusing to acknowledging the responsibility of the others who look/think/feel as the 'occupiers' but never take a definite stand by acting and fighting back.

The elites messed up!

Sentence of the day from Paul Krugman:

(...) by blaming democracy, the people who have gotten everything wrong are letting themselves off the hook. The elites on both sides of the Atlantic have messed up catastrophically, and need to face that fact.

The unbearable futility of the erotic capital and of feminism

Nichi Hodgson 's 'review' of Catherine Hakim's Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital made me laugh to tears. Sugar except:

The reason women have failed to capitalise on their erotic capital, says Hakim, is the fault of feminism allied with Christian conservatism. Puritan Anglo-Saxon feminism, including post-feminism, Hakim claims, is "profoundly uncomfortable with sexuality, and frames it in a relentlessly negative perspective." As such, "feminists have been so brainwashed by patriarchal ideology that they have been quite unable to understand how sexuality and erotic capital can be sources of erotic power." Feminism has established a "false dichotomy" between beauty and brains.
While I doubt Hakim would recognise a post-feminist if fondled by one in a bi-curious flurry, she seems to be blaming mind-body dualism on feminists, despite identifying "Western thought" as its source elsewhere in the book. She also seems to have missed the point of what feminism has ever wanted from sex. A minority of radicals excepted, all feminists have ever asked for is women's stake in imagining and enacting sexual desire. Employing your erotic capital may be sensible opportunism but it's also pretty boring manipulating men whose sexual fantasies are predicated on the script for a "Girls Gone Wild" episode; depressing too, if these same men constitute your pool of potential life partners.(...)That erotic capital enhances professional, market-place performance makes perfect sense. But applying it to personal, intimate relationships overlooks one very important point. You don't need to be living in a tree house and swapping sacks of millet for acorns to want to leave commercial transactions at the bedroom door. In the Anglo-Saxon West, now that we don't need to marry to preserve family fortunes, secure male heirs or find someone to "keep" us, some things are worth more than erotic capital­-love, for example.

My view on Hodgson's take of Hakim is that it is unnecessary and a further indication that too many still don't understand that there is a difference between feminism and femininity and that feminism is to women's identity and rights (I have an deepening aversion for the term women's rights) what socialism is to liberalism/progressivism. It is tiresome even though often comically entertaining to see women still elevating and generalizing their personal views and differences as if speaking as a woman or as feminism means speaking for women and representing some other than an individual and therefore limited (and often irrelevant) viewpoint.

Attacking Islam and racism

Sugary excerpt from Hanif Kureishi:

I come from a Muslim family; I come from a Muslim country: Pakistan. I’m well aware of how dangerous religions like Islam can be. It’s ridiculous to think it’s racist to attack a religion. In fact, it’s racist not to attack a religion. These are systems of power, huge political forces of the world—you have to speak back against it, otherwise you exist in an authoritarian system. Look at the way these societies have attacked and tortured intellectuals in the past, in places like Iran, Egypt and Libya. The West has continued to patronise them and refuse to attack them. A very robust exchange is extremely important.

Class and class

Sugary excerpt of the day from the always pertinent Chris Dillow:

Successful power structures persist in large part because the way in which power is exercised is hidden from us. The importance of class and the lack of discussion of it are two sides of the same fact.

For some reason, I have this unnerving feeling that we are back in the time of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière) when class was determinative, what saddens/disturbs me is that that reality is true particularly in America where there is a strong and maniacal denial about the existence and the relevance of 'class.'

'Europe' failed the Libyan test

On point analysis from Charlemagne:

It is not just the fate of Libyans that is in the balance in the war against Muammar Qaddafi, but the commitment of Europeans to maintain - and, when necessary, deploy - serious military forces. Responsibility to protect requires, first and foremost, the means to protect.

The Europeans failed the Libyan test because they didn't give themselves the means to succeed; they were obsessed with the fear that Libya might become their 'Iraq' or 'Afghanistan.' In short, one of the EU's major problems is that it knows that it has a parent, the US, who may have many children and who may sometimes be irritated by it, but who feels closest to it, most of the time(that closeness will change with time).

Grow up, America sex isn't always political!

I have to admit that I don't care about the Anthony Weiner's story. I don't even find it titillating and having to see clips of another public apology by an American politician succumbing to the child-like need that Americans have to believe that their leaders are cleaner/purer than them is creepy. I'm happy that Weiner didn't resign. He shouldn't have to for that would be enabling an American public that doesn't vote, that is apathetic to real politics and make it feel good about its ability to have the political class it wants without working for it, without getting involved.

In short, America should grow up, hopefully not into France when it comes to politics and sex, but into a mature country where lying about sex isn't the worst thing that a politician can do and where what matters isn't purity, but rather political deeds and principles.  Anthony Weiner lied about sex and honestly, I don't have the energy to care about that. As long as his conduct wasn't illegal and that the two adjectives to describe his behavior are stupid and destructive, he should remain a congressman. Jerks and flawyed people have the right to be politician as long as they do their job effectively and don't break the law.

The personal isn't always political and the fact that it is int the US gives America a poltical class that isn't up to par with its greatness.

Réflichissez-vous!

Paul Berman needs to revise his French, but that said he makes a decent point on the impact of the DSK affair on the French-American relationship when he says this:

The more he is defended, the thicker and chillier will be the trans-Atlantic fogs, in the future. Dear champions of DSK, réflichissez-vous! But no one is going to reflect. Anyway, a bit more caution on the part of his loyalists would scarcely help, at this point. The ocean-liner of American justice and the ice floes of French conspiracy theories are already bobbing in one another’s direction, and nothing is to be done about it, and, oh dear, has anyone figured out what to do next, post-collision?

Since my bet is that DSK is going to be acquitted , I think that it will become only more obvious how different France is from America, even from Obama's America and there is as Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Obs would say a 'civilization gap' between America and France, which is essentially created by both countries's fanatical beliefs that their way is not only the best, but the only way to civilization. I'm still wondering why being part of an older county makes one more civilized or less barbaric.

Old and new lefties

Interesting stuff from Chris Dillow:

We old lefties see politics as one activity among others. We see no connection between Marxist politics and Marx’s, ahem, colourful sex life. And I, for one, have combined leftist politics with jobs in the City and non-political journalism.
The newer left, though, is less compartmentalized - hence the slogan, “the personal is political” and the desire to politicize everyday life.
On this point, though, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I’m tempted to defend my conception of politics on the grounds that it is more liberal: seeing everything as political is the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism.

I'm just confused about one thing, does being a Leftie is about politics or something else? Does it matter? I have to admit that I'm bothered with the idea that the personal is political because it makes politics sentimental. It reminds me of the 2008 Democratic primaries or even of George W. Bush in the 2000 election when in response to critical examinations of his record as Governor in Texas, he would talk about how hurt he was that people could question his heart. In short, the idea that 'good' people are good politicians bugs me and is moreover dangerous. That isn't to say that the personal doesn't matter or is irrelevant, but simply that more often than not, it is a part of a wider context and can be unessential, but titillating.

Côte d'Ivoire, Libya and the audacity of hope

A good question from Gideon Rachman:

If the UN and western military forces are prepared to intervene so forcefully in Libya, why has the response to Ivory Coast been so relatively feeble?

The answer is an easy, but alarming one:  Ivory Coast Côte d'Ivoire is Côte d'Ivoire and Libya is Libya. That statement of fact means simply that it is easier to deal with the dead of Côte d'Ivoire than with the ones of Libya because there is a widely accepted presumption that some parts of the African continent are  at the heart of darkness, and thus too barbaric, and too 'out there' to be helped/saved. That explains why Congo (DRC) has never captured the world 's attention.  In shot, it all comes that to that silly Obamanian world hope. It is easier to accept hopelessness in Côte d'Ivoire than in Libya.

American foreign policy and the United Nations

Interesting point from Professor Kenneth Anderson on the Obama administration 's reliance on the United Nations in the 'Libyan crisis':

We’ve got lots of problems in Wisconsin and Ohio and California and New Jersey and Indiana, and just so we’re clear, here’s the deal.  If we agree that the UN is the place to deal with all your funny and hard to figure out and frankly not very relevant or interesting foreigner stuff, will you all just sod off and let us get on with figuring out our new VAT tax and our grandchildren’s interest payment schedule to China?

Since the Obama's administration has no good choices in the Libyan crisis, it is trying to let the UN take the lead to avoid having to take responsibility for the worst and to be able to take credit for the good.

In short, we are in 2011, next year is a presidential election year, that fact is having disastrous effects on the foreign policies of both America and France (the french presidential election is in also next year).

Obama is Swiss

The sugary excerpt of the day is from Mick Hume's interesting take on Obama, Libya and interventionism:

The response of US president Barack Obama, aka the West’s commander-in-chief, has apparently evolved from speechlessness to impotence, leading one veteran commentator to wonder, in an ironic reference to the debate over Obama’s ‘true’ nationality, whether he might actually be Swiss. The administration quickly shot down European kite-flying about setting up an immediate no-fly zone over Libya. US commanders pointed out to their European partners that this would involve a full-scale military operation against Gaddafi’s air force. Some might naively wonder why that would pose such an insuperable obstacle to the mighty US air force. But after the damage done by Iraq and Afghanistan, the US authorities lack the political authority and will to impose themselves on Libya and fear getting dragged into another civil war.

The trouble is of course that Obama suffers from a lack of imagination due to the fact that in spite from what people wants to believe about his "difference" he is a typical president who has trouble accepting powerlessness and not making every crisis about America and his own political legacy. When I hear Charlie Rose for example repeating his delusion that the fact that Obama spent some time in Indonesia when he was a kid gives him a different world view, I shake my hand and realise how americancentric even the most cultured and most worldly American are to be able to transform insignificances because they seem peculiar into essentialities.

The essentiality of Freedom

I disagree strongly with Theodore Darymple when he makes the following point:

Certainly, it does not seem to me that the future necessarily belongs to freedom as we have known it, and such as it was, and that therefore China must break apart under demands for personal liberty. It is a mistake, in my view, to assume that all people want to be free, in the sense of the American pioneers.
I think they much prefer to be comfortable; as the establishment of welfare states almost everywhere as the political summun bonum has shown, the greatest of all freedoms, the one that more people want more than any other, is the freedom from responsibility and consequences. It is true that the Chinese have never had the freedoms of speech, etc., that we have enjoyed, and have taken for granted, but I am not sure how much they are missed there.
Moreover, I fleetingly, and no doubt dangerously, wonder whether freedom is as importantly a matter of the soul as of political arrangements. I cannot ever forget Arthur Koestler’s book, Spanish Testament, in which he said that the time he spent in the condemned cell in the Nationalist zone was the time in his life when he felt most free.

The trouble with Darymple's assertions is that they lead to dangerous slippery slopes, which he ignores in a attempt to be both provocative and cute (he fails at both). From now until the end of times, people have had arguments on the essentiality of freedom and whether we all we need/want it. That debate is meaningless. It is a way to avoid the question of responsibility and morality. The issue is not and has never been whether we want/need freedom, but rather what we do with our Sartrean/Existential eternal condemnation to be free and the heavyness of that burden. 

It is archaic to oppose freedom between comfort, but it is also as sterile as opposing existence and essence. In short, it isn't because some choose not to choose or choose sometimes to reduce their own their own choices, that freedom/liberty  isn't for everybody. Freedom is about what we want for after all, the world is human, but not anthropomorphic.

It isn't that complicated

Interesting stuff from Charlemagne:

The West is guilty of two errors, in my view.

Firstly, in the contest between the police state and the mosque, it too easily fell into the trap of backing the police state. It therefore became associated with oppression and hypocrisy in the minds of many Arabs. It never sought to help foster other democratic opposition forces, or to criticise rulers for their oppressive ways. President Barack Obama’s brilliant speech in Cairo in 2009 criticised the Bush-era’s (short-lived) notion that democracy could be brought at the point of a gun, but did not shy away from making a powerful case for freedom. The trouble is, Mr Obama’s America then did little to support the cause of democracy in the Arab world. The same was true of Europe.

Any promotion of democracy in the Arab world cannot avoid the encounter with some form of Islamism. And this is Europe’s second error: its failure to distinguish between different currents of political groups inspired by Islam. Not all groups bearing the name of “Islamic” are puppets of Iran’s mullahs, or comrades of Osama bin Laden. Hamas may be the violent Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt. But the Egyptian branch declares itself to be non-violent and democratic, and is hated by al-Qaeda. At the very least, its democratic credentials should have been tested through greater dialogue.

I disagree with Charlemagne's implied affirmation that there is such a thing as the Western world. Nevertheless, he isn't wrong. The trouble is that he doesn't assert explicitly that the problem comes precisely from the too-easily made assertion that some foreigners are different, not mature, brutal, have an exotic or homogeneous or simply an essentialist culture, which makes it impossible for them to have self-determination and other good things in life. In short, the issue is always going to come to Sameness, commonness, that is to how much Charlemagne's West believes that the people from the rest of the world have in common with them.

We are all Westerners

Richard Cohen doesn't get it and is stuck in a place where people are too different too immature, too barbaric to know what to do with the good things in life, which to him are 'western values':

Egypt's problems are immense. It has a population it cannot support, a standard of living that is stagnant and a self-image as leader of the (Sunni) Arab world that does not, really, correspond to reality. It also lacks the civic and political institutions that are necessary for democracy. The next Egyptian government - or the one after - might well be composed of Islamists. In that case, the peace with Israel will be abrogated and the mob currently in the streets will roar its approval.

My take on all this is relentlessly gloomy. I care about Israel. I care about Egypt, too, but its survival is hardly at stake. I care about democratic values, but they are worse than useless in societies that have no tradition of tolerance or respect for minority rights. What we want for Egypt is what we have ourselves. This, though, is an identity crisis. We are not them.

I'm not buying into that ideological distinction between 'us' and 'them' and into the racialist notion that traditions are everything and that identity is a non-evolving state in all societies meaning that people are their history and their traditions. The lesson of our post-globalized world is precisely that 'we' are all westerners now in the sense that 'we' all choose who want to be and thus decide the future, which doesn't have to be like the past.  It comes to Hannah Arendt and to her favorite quote of René Char, which I never get tired of using:  notre histoire n'est précédée d'aucun testament.

People are not chained to their past. Egyptians are not the slaves of history, of what they may have been.

The Sarah Palin fantasy

Alex Massie affirms with too much satisfaction and guile for his statement to be true that Sarah Palin is done:

Palin is tarnished goods at the moment. More than any other would-be candidate in the prospective field she needs to build an inevitability strategy. She lacks the chops to win a policy battle (or even the appearance of one) and needs instead the kind of whirlwind operation that whips up a storm in state after state. That requires massive enthusiasm and persuading people to ignore their suspicion that she cannot win a general election. Unfortunately that also creates a collective action problem for Palin: people might vote for her if they think other people will too. But they don't think other people will and so they won't either.

I have to admit that I don't understand the rationale of Massie's assertions for Sarah Palin never begun. She has always only been the witch that liberals needed to convince themselves that they were good and that Obama was the best s*it !

To the contrary of many, I have never thought that Palin was stupid or that she was an abomination, I thought that she was likable enough as Obama once said arrogantly and with spite of Hillary Clinton, but that the problem was that she was never as good as her defenders thought that she was and more importantly as bad and evil her detractors believed. Palin is a legitimate political figure, but saying that doesn't mean much for she has yet too become real rather than a fantasy in the mind of her friends and her foes. 

Is Sarah Palin done ? Of course, she isn't. She just isn't real, that's the problem. Sarah Palin doesn't exist. Elle n'existe pas !

Self-cannibalization and pompous nonsense

It's almost Thanksgiving and the one thing I'm thankful for after reading this  is that I have never been able to take Pascal Bruckner seriously:

These are all dark episodes in the respective national epics that have to be explained, brought to light and made known to everyone. This work of memory is the greatness and the honor of free governments.

The paradox is that democracies seem more corrupt and criminal than other governments because they admit their faults, whereas tyrannies conceal them and represent themselves as irreproachable.

But this culture of suspicion is always in danger of degenerating into vilification and facile defeatism. The critical spirit then devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalization, taking a gloomy pleasure in destroying itself that leaves nothing intact. Hyper-criticism ends in self-hatred and leaves nothing but ruins behind.

That is more or less the current state of France, which is brooding on its failures and lost grandeur, and throwing itself into strikes that are not signs of vitality but rather of exhaustion and national depression.

Although sometimes a particularly serious crime must be expiated, a community cannot excuse itself for existing unless it dissolves and disappears. History consists in common remembering and forgetting, in the cancellation of the blood debts that human societies contract with one another.

The problem with Bruckner is that he has never been able to separate the concept of guilt with the one of responsibility and that there are things that he refuses/is unable to know or to see because he is too emotional to comprehend and accept the Sartrean notion of the dirty hands.  Hey Pascal, on peut être responsable sans être coupable, to get it just reread Camus's l'Homme révolté.

On the use of the word 'Tribal'

Thoughtless and aggravating quote of the day from Max Rodenbeck :

Yemen is a messy place, with a fearsomely well-armed, fiercely tribal society of immense complexity.

So Yemen is America!

The point of my purposeful (I hope) provocation is to put an emphasis of the fact that too many use the world 'tribal' when their underlying assumption is that what they are describing is foreign, 'non-western (that doesn't mean anything),' barbaric, backwards, illegitimate, or just uncivilized. In short. tribal is  a pejorative term, melting pot, countries filled with communities isn't.  It occurs rarely to people to criticize the fact that America accepts to be divided into communities without ever questioning the fact that it might be hindering its progress. The assumption is that the difference between tribal and 'communitarism' is solely a matter of civilization,' of the level of a society sophistication.' Barbarians are tribal, modern men are cultured and civilized enough to acknowledge that race, religion, sexual orientation and other particularities matter more than commonness or an artificial universality.

Western disaggregation

Sugary excerpt of the morning is from Professor Kenneth Anderson:

I continue to find mystifying the Western academic international law world’s infatuation with the ideals of the diminishing importance of states and membership in states.  Particularly when that mostly seems to refer not to a universal aspiration, but only to the inability of the leading Western-states-in-decline to persuade themselves to exercise the coherence that makes states socially useful - and that largely through the cultural and class predilections of the political classes of those societies.  When are we going to see proper analytic attention to the Globalized New Class as a phenomenon?  In any event, the rising new powers understand that states are about coherence, and that the constant struggle of most states, most of the time, is to remain coherent and prevent “disaggregation” of the state into internal groups of power and “public choice” struggles for primacy and the resources of politics to economic ends.

Disaggregation is attractive to many Western intellectuals, I’d suggest, however, because our species-being, so to speak, has gradually come to be purely contractual free agency.  We gave up on any kind of “fiduciary professional” model of the intellectual when we discovered that we could leverage our knowledge skills, at least until China and India caught up, across a needy global economy.  It required freeing ourselves from the strictures of local communities; but the opportunities for globally marketizing our professional expertise being very large, we have moved a long, long way from RH Tawney’s post-war British model of the professional as community leader through expertise.

I'm flustered by Professor Anderson's use of the terms "West" and "Western" for I have no idea what he means or rather I don't think that the assumptions that he makes in using those terms are relevant or even justified. That said, Professor Anderson is simply dancing around the central issue, which is as Jean-François Bayart would that the State is the product of Globalization and neither its victim or nor its enemy combatant. The issue never really is whether the State matters, but rather what it can do and ought to do. Incoherence always occurs when there is an understandable and I would argue an useful disharmony between two.

Acceptable biases and fears

Quote of the day from Glenn Greenwald about the firing of Juan Williams from NPR for expressing his fears over 'Muslims' 'who look Muslims' in certain situations:

The principal reason the Williams firing resonated so much and provoked so much fury is that it threatens the preservation of one of the most important American mythologies:  that Muslims are a Serious Threat to America and Americans.

I have to say that the whole thing makes me more than uncomfortable. America has entered an age where free speech is about content precisely because it is no longer possible for Americans to have a dialogue about issues. The goal of political or social discussions is to shut up the opposition and to make the argument that it is either simply or solely bigoted or dumb. Where there is a prevalent notion in a society that people have to be careful about what they say, it is in general because there also exists the prevalent and uncomfortable one that people can't change, that people are their vilest thought, and that education and dialogue don't matter.

Libertarians, liberals, and misfortunes

The always pertinent Ilya Somin on the difference between libertarians and liberals:

(...)the big disagreement between libertarians and liberals is not over whether individuals often suffer misfortunes that aren’t their fault (though there is sometimes debate over the degree of individual fault in particular cases). It is rather over the justice, efficacy, and potential negative side-effects of government action.

Is it possible to have justice, especially when it is administered through a government policy, without negative effects? I believe that it is very difficult, not to say impossible. The more thought I give to this subject the more I wonder whether government can really offer justice; it may seek to foster equality, equity, but those are not just remedies in every case and attempts by an imperfect actor to reach them are bound to be imperfect. The key question is whether justice ought to be an absolute value sought to be achieved through any means necessary? My answer is a resounding no because to paraphrase Camus, absolute justice negates freedom.

Obama, blood, origins and symbols of change

Self-indulgent fluff from A.Jay Adler which proves that America is stuck in the cesspool of identity politics and culturalism:

The Untied States, as now a long-time great power, is not aligned in the world political mind, or in the conservative mind, with one-time colonies, but with the civilization of their colonizers that it leads – and (here, now, is the point) their European, Western culture. However independently American culture may have developed from its European origins – so that Europeans themselves love to hate it and hate to love it – there are its origins nonetheless.

But we know that the nation is changing, if not in its origins – which cannot literally, and should never in its ideas and cultural foundation, be altered (we are always unalterably, in part, what we have been) – in its current and developing character. As much as the Right would seek, in its unceasing reactionary nature, to stave off modernity, the waters of the world flow and mix with ever diminishing impediment, to form new seas and spring new rivers, and nothing in the geopolitics of the earth, or the Untied States, will stop it.

Nothing represents the change more visibly than the election of the first Black president, a president whose father was born in Africa, not emigrant Europe, and whose place of birth was colonized in the post-Columbian era, not a colonizer in it. That is profound change. This president – this son of a man born in the colony when it was still a colony – takes office and (ah, you were wondering what Churchill had to do with any of this) returns to Britain a bust of Winston Churchill that had been lent to George W. Bush, as a symbol, after 9/11.

At some point, can we get over the fact that the artificial categories in our minds created by prejudices and received ideas that make us believe that change is about race, culture, and whatever are subliminal and nonexistent? When I read that Obama represents change because of his absent Kenyan father, the ways he looks and due to the fact the United States are changing because its 'racial' makeup is changing, I laugh  and shake my head in despair. I understand that some still have to understand that people aren't no their 'origins,' their 'race' or their gender, that culture isn't about genetics, and that people 'are'  being for themselves because of their blood unless of course, they stop thinking.

Spots of brilliance

I'm probably late to the game, but I was impressed by Obama's speech on Friday on the controversy over the construction of a Mosque near Ground Zero. I heard about it in the Cab that was taking me from JFK to Manhattan for I spent Friday in two airports and in a plane. My first thought was to say "at last, the Potus does something impressive that isn't solely self-serving." I thought the speech was on point and unlike the other flashy speeches Obama gives, I believed that it had meaning.

So was I disappointed by the fact that Obama "retreated" from his comment the next day? No and I wasn't even surprised. I expected him to do it for two reasons. The first is that Obama is a great politician and that as all great politicians of our era, he knows that it is difficult to educate the electorate or to lead on a issue when  the real issues are fear and resentment. Obama said what was in his heart on Friday, but then had to clarify it because he did the math and realized that once again, being himself, saying what he meant wasn't going to be good for him politically in the short term.

The second reason why I expected Obama to kill the greatness of his Friday's speech with clarifications is that he isn't an ideologue in the good sense of the word. There are few things Obama is willing to die, politically, for, I would write that there is nothing, but I have decided to be nice because I'm still infected by the Parisian atmosphere.

Obama knows that he has to get reelected for his presidency to become meaningful and to be something more than a symbol of what America wanted to be when it elected him without of course having to work for it. I always thought to Obama was an attempt by a symbolically out of shape America to put itself back in shape by having surgery instead of course of exercising and deciding to have better eating habits.

I have never thought that Obama was too good for America, to the contrary, I have always thought that America didn't have enough faith in itself, in its ability to repair the wounds of its early and recent history (Bush's eight years) for it to choose Obama blindly knowing full well the odds of a rookie quarterback doing well without years of training are slim. But again, America loves believing in the improbable and it is also one of the reasons why it is a country to I love passionately.

Defined down bigotry

The sugary excerpt of the day is from Norman Geras on the attempts to define down anti-Semitism:

(...) there are people who, keen to deny the scope of the problem of anti-Semitism, want to limit it to overtly anti-Jewish hostility of mind. 'Since I don't have the hostility,' they will confidently assure their audience, 'how can anything I say or do be anti-Semitic?' Such people fail to explain why the assumption behind their rhetorical question doesn't apply to other forms of racism; or why they temporarily forget the insight which elsewhere they recognize quite freely - as Howard Jacobson has lately expressed it, that 'language has a mind of its own'.

One of my favorite Paul Eluard's quote is "les mots ne mentent pas (words don't lie)", however I have to say that I have come to wonder whether the trouble isn't so much in defining down anti-Semitism or any form of bigotry than in making the end of any discussion, when it seems that bigotry always requires explanations and cannot be washed away or even just condemned with the idea of good or bad faith or with the idea that it is the end of something when it is its beginning.

Quand ça ne change pas, le hic est ailleurs

My reaction to reading this from Paul Sagar is no, you don't say!:

The claim or insinuation that campaigns for women’s rights and equality are rooted in a lack of family to cater for (“no homes”), rejection by men (“no husbands”) and infertility or barrenness (“no children”) are apparently as old as the hills yet very much alive and kicking.

Unfortunately, Sagar misses the mark by focusing on the omnipresent reality without asking the key questions about the the issues 'women's right' and feminism and what it says about them that they haven't been revolutionary or even solely effective in accomplishing their aims! To be blunt, I'm tired of the same realities being examined as if the convenient acknowledgment of their unsavoriness were enough to change it or to make one feel good for not being part, at first glance, of the problematic and everlasting statu quo. Assez de bons sentiments et un peu d'actions please!

The evil in us and genocide

I disagree strongly with Norman Geras's refusal to adhere to the idea that anybody can commit an atrocious act in a genocide expressed by Clive Owen in his article on Rwanda after its genocide:

That's an emphasis that has become common in the discussion of genocide: It's not about them and us. We have the potential to be those people. And it's a necessary theme, as well as a common one. The perpetrators who make up the them are not constituted of a different human stuff, much less of non-human stuff; they are like us, mostly drawn from within the normal range of social and psychological categories or types. As Owen says, it's better to know this from the point of view of genocide prevention; the murderers are people and not monsters. It may even be the case that, knowing that we have 'the potential to be those people' can put us on our guard morally against allowing ourselves to become them.
At the same time, I have long had a reservation about this kind of talk when it isn't appropriately qualified (...) We know this from historical and sociological evidence, just as we know the opposite and worse news about humankind. Therefore, to speak - as happens in this context - as if everyone will become a mass murderer or torturer or brutal captor, as if the potentiality is universal, maligns some unknown but large number of human beings. More seriously, such unqualified talk about the cruel and murderous potentialities in us all can also make wrongdoing easier, rather than discouraging it. Tell yourself that you, too, would be a murderer in such-and-such circumstances because everyone will, and it can lower the moral barrier. Tell yourself, on the other hand, that although this is a possibility of human nature and therefore, maybe, a possibility of your own nature, on no account will you ever allow it to happen - and the moral barrier is, or at least may be, strengthened.

I disagree with Geras for two reasons. The first reason is that recognizing that the potential or rather the possibility to do bad acts reside in all people increases human recognizing; it leads to the acknowledgment of the fact that, as Sartre would say, we are all condemned to be free. The tendency to dehumanize evil by making it something inhuman or subhuman leads to excuses and to the stubborn refusal to explain or even to analyze what may lead to a genocide or to even to recognize that they don't happen out of the blue or aren't punishment of God/faith/whatever else . The second reason for my disagreement with Geras' s point is that to the contrary, I believe that putting the emphasis on the fact that one can be one of us and do evil things demystifies evil while forcing us to reflect on humanity and on the fact as beings for ourselves what matter isn't who we are, but what we do because that is precisely what defines who we are. The point isn't that genocide are normal, but that they are conducted by otherwise normal people in specific context and who have chosen to do the unacceptable. It's too easy after a plague to blame a few and to accuse them to have recklessly contaminated a whole society when the contamination is a symptom of wider and deeper reality that can only be alleviated by the decision, whatever the context is, to do the good.

It takes a nut to change the world

Paul Sagar's latest post disappoints me because it is narrow-minded and more dangerously, it is expressing the self-fulling prophesy that a nut guided by Sarah Palin can destroy Obama and his plans for America

Remember: One lone nut got to Abraham Lincoln. One lone nut got to JFK. One lone nut got to Reagan and was unlucky not to succeed.*
It only takes one lone nut. My guess is that, right now, there are a great many nuts – lone or otherwise – laying their plans.

I'm disappointed because it seems to me that Sagar and others would have never expressed the same views about virulent and fanatical opposition to George W. Bush and to Ronald Reagan who got shoot by a nut. My complaint isn't that Sagar isn't right that there was a lot of nuts willing to harm Obama, it is that he implies both implicitly and explicitly that the America and the Americans who oppose Obama are nuts and willing to kill him.  These views coming from a man as honorable as Paul Sagar who knows better is disappointing and willfully ignorant.

Sarko shrunk

John Lichfield offers an on-point explanation of why Sarkozy has shrunk from Superman to mini-Me, a caricature of a superhero who can't get anything right:

What has changed is that core Sarkozy supporters have lost faith, and patience, with the style and personality of Sarko himself. Two events, above all, have angered them. The first was the promotion to culture minister of Frédéric Mitterrand, the late president's nephew: not only another leftie but also a homosexual and writer of dubious autobiographical books about cruising Thai boy-bars.
Worse, there was the egregious Jean Sarkozy affair. Here was a President who spoke of equal opportunities for all and his determination to break down the French elites. Here was the same President pretending it was quite normal for his unqualified, handsome, law student son to be promoted to political head of the vast La Défense office ghetto on the outskirts of Paris. Mr Sarkozy's claim to be a different kind of politician, closer to the thinking of real people, died in defence of his overhasty son's right to be boss of La Défense.

I believe that one of the main sources of Sarkozy's problems is that he was so successful in killing the opposition that he believed that he could do everything, sell anything and that nobody would dare to challenge, After all, none of the members of his expansive court dare to say to him that he had stop to be able to read the French because he was isolated in the Elysée palace. But Sarkzoy isn't dead for as Obama, he has the advantage of having no credible adversary to personify the growing discontent against Sarkozysm.

Assessing Sarkozy's failures and the rise of far right

I  agree in part with Jim Wolfreys on this:

Sarkozy came to power on a promise to break with the compromises of previous governments. One apparent measure of his determination to do so was the trenchant language used on immigration. It is this combination of authoritarianism and anti-immigrant rhetoric that has contributed to Sarkozy's undoing at the expense of the FN.
This is largely due to the demagogic nature of racism in the political arena. Since it is based on the myth that immigrants (or ethnic minorities in general, or Muslims) are to blame for unemployment, crime or other aspects of social decay, it has become a self-defeating tool for the government.
Under Sarkozy, unemployment stands at its highest level for a decade, at 10%, and France has one of the worst youth unemployment rates in Europe. Here, the link between racism and authoritarianism is important. The debate over national identity engineered by Sarkozy's UMP has seen Islamophobia reach a new pitch – at one point the party spokesperson compared the burka to a "Mickey Mouse mask".
Yet however shrill the scapegoating of Muslims, it has done nothing to obscure the government's impotence in the face of serious social and economic problems. Moreover, the realisation that Sarkozy is not an enforcer but a rather insecure figure in thrall to wealth and celebrity, has strengthened the claims of Le Pen to be the real authority figure in French politics.

One of Sarkozy's biggest failures is that he has legitimated the arguments of the French far right by using its language and that by not providing results,he has lead a part of the electorate to conclude that they may as well vote for the real dea forl when they were voting for Sarkozy they thought that, contrary to the far right, he would do what he preached since he would have the power to do it.The trouble is that Sarkozy's rhetoric is likely to get tougher.  He needs the vote of his right whether it is extreme or not to get reelected. This reality explains why yesterday, in his first public intervention after the Sunday's elections, he put back the Burka/burqa in the center of the political debate, but saying that it was one of his priorities to have the parliament vote a law to ban it.

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.

The vulgarity of hate speech laws

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

For as long as I'll live, I'll never understand how people want to vest in the Government the power to criminalize particular viewpoints it dislikes, will never understand the view that it's better to try to suppress adverse beliefs than to air them, and will especially never understand people's failure to realize that endorsing this power will, one day, very likely result in their own views being criminalized when their political enemies (rather than allies) are empowered.  Who would ever want to empower officious technocrats to issue warnings along the lines of:  be forewarned:  if you express certain political views, you may be committing a crime; guide and restrict yourself accordingly?  I obviously devote a substantial amount of my time and energy to critiquing the actions of the U.S. Government, but the robust free speech protection guaranteed by the First Amendment and largely protected by American courts continues to be one of the best features of American political culture.

Hate speech laws are both paternalistic and ineffective, More importantly, they are vulgar, because they assume that hate is solely a problem when it is expressed and that the State is a nanny that can forbid the content of expression without eduction.  All one has to do is to look at Europe to realize that the attempts of governments to disinfect and to civilize through force rather tan education lead to the rise of marginal groups, to the fetishism of the forbidden views and of disobedience within society and to the multiplication of zones (football stadiums) where people express violently point of views that can express publicly.

Burka, right wing ideology and feminism

Mona Eltahawy on the ban of the Burqa/burka,right-wing Muslim Ideology and women's right(hat tip: Norm Geras):

I abhor the rightwing Muslim ideology behind the veils but I equally abhor the political rightwing xenophobes of Europe. The European political right – be it President Nicolas Sarkozy, his ultra-right rival Jean-Marie Le Pen (who did alarmingly well in the first round of those regional elections) or Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders – do not give a rat's ass about Muslim women or their rights: they are merely using the issue in an attempt to win votes.
The racism and discrimination that Muslim minorities face in many countries — such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and Britain, where two members of the xenophobic British National party were shamefully elected to the European parliament — are very real. But the silence of the left wing and liberals isn't the way to fight it. The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both the racist right wing and the niqabs and burkas which are products of what I call the Muslim right wing. Women should not be sacrificed to either.

My disagreement with Eltahawy comes from the fact that I don't view women as victims or particular creatures that have to remain clean, pure, and always make good choices. I consider that they have the right to be whoever they want to be even if it means becoming an object and making disturbing choices. My point on the burka/burqa/niqab debate is simple, women are instruments to fight Islamic ideology or to promote secularism, they are normal individuals whose rights to individuality should be judge by the usual criteria used in a society to decide when individuality becomes criminal and dangerous to a society. I'm not against a burqa ban in France and elsewhere in the name of feminism, because I don't think that women's rights (whatever that expression means) is the issue, but that the right of women as human beings to define their womanhood and their femininity is in question. I'm still waiting for somebody to tell what is the male's equivalent of the burqa to reconsider my position.

Rehabilitating Social Democracy

Oliver Kamm on Tony Judt's latest book Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents:

Judt claims too much from limited evidence. That would matter less if his account of the breakdown of social democracy and the rise of free-market economics were reliable. But it’s flawed. Throughout the book you struggle to gain an insight into why expansive welfare states and interventionist industrial policies fell out of favour in the 1980s. The nearest you get to an answer is the power of ideas — malign and acquisitive ones, in Judt’s depiction — and the rise of individualism. This is not wrong, and Judt is astute in noting parallels between the counterculture of the 1960s and the appeal of economic libertarianism. But it is question-begging. Why, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, did some ideas gain political traction and some fall out of favour? The reason is that social democracy appeared to have reached natural limits. Economic planning had turned into an unaccountable system of corporatism. Legal immunities had turned the trade unions into “insiders” against the interests of the public. The quadrupling of the oil price in 1973 by the Opec cartel and wage claims by powerful unions caused accelerating inflation. It is extraordinary that the word “inflation” appears only twice in Judt’s book, and each time in a specific technical context (the effect of inflation in pushing workers into higher tax brackets). The notion that the great inflation of the 1970s damaged working-class living standards and was a source of social discontent is absent from the book.

My only observation is that the biggest trouble with social democracy is that it has  lost its meaning and that social democrats in order to circumvent this limitation have try to become all things to all people and more importantly by solely defining themselves against a Right that knows what it is and what it will never agree to be.

Suspicious powerful women

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend, which was Siri Agrell's on Martha Stewart, a new book by her former best friend and what it says about other powerful women who are perceived to have more than they deserved:

Stewart, along with the subject of this year's other two other hot, hardcover take-downs – Oprah Winfrey and Angelina Jolie – occupies a strange space in our collective opinion of successful women. All three seemed born for the spotlight: talented, driven, camera-friendly; each embodies a contradiction that makes them as polarizing as popular.
Stewart built an empire by creating inviting home environments, but personally generates the warmth of a frozen pot pie. Oprah is marketed as the everywoman's best friend. But her success has turned her into one of the world's richest people, elevating her beyond the reach of mere mortals and allowing her Midas touch to impart untold wealth to a variety of disciples. And Jolie, the beauty with a Hollywood pedigree, created a brand of super celebrity by revealing just the right amount of skin and bizarre personal information and then cloistering herself in a world of international philanthropy, Brad Pitt and their brood.
We are drawn to these woman, but we are suspicious of them. They can't possibly be as poised, as nice, as attractive or generous as they present themselves to be. And publishers are certainly betting that there is an audience for their public dissections.
(...)You could tell me that Martha Stewart eats kittens to stay young, that Oprah heats her African school with furnaces that burn nothing but money, and that Angelina Jolie can actually levitate during sex, and I would simply shrug and say, yeah, I suspected as much.

My take on the subject is that people, particularly women tend to view powerful women, who appear to have it all with suspicion because it has ingrained within humanity that women because of their gender are imperfect,, inferior to manliness. The implication from this omnipresent assertion of the inferiority of femininity is that to become powerful, women by waling on others, especially other women by robbing them of what is or was supposed to be theirs.

A win is a win is a win

Clive Crook on Obama's victory for it is his:

Thanks to the unrewarded exertions of conservative Democrats, this healthcare plan has moderate, centrist ambitions. It is not socialism in disguise. Shame on liberal Republicans (if there are any) for failing to support it. Even so, the Democrats’ claims for the reform have been dishonest in one crucial respect, and most voters understood this. It is right to provide guaranteed health insurance, but wrong to claim this great prize could be had, in effect, for nothing. Broadly based tax increases and fundamental reform to healthcare delivery will be needed to balance the books. Denying this was a mistake. What was worse–an insult to one’s intelligence, really–was to argue as Obama has in the past few days that this reform was, first and foremost, a cost-reducing initiative, and a way to drive down premiums.
The guarantees are so valuable that honesty about the cost was worth trying. Eventually, perhaps, the Democrats will come clean about this, though doing so before November would be a little abrupt. Between now and then, the country may come around to liking the plan anyway, as Democrats hope. As I say, the guarantees are so valuable. But obviously this could go either way.

As I said, to the contrary of most, I'm not jumping up and down about healthcare reform for I know that the victory is essentially a political one for Obama and I'm wondering if it is a victory for Americans who needed a better health system. To put it another, I'm wondering whether what we got was Obamacare or Obamanuts. I'm reminded of my childhood when my mother used to want me to eat bananas even though I hated because she said that it would me taller, I hated bananas, I still do and I'm shorter than Sarkozy so when I think of all of those bananas that I hate during my childhood hoping to be as tall as Steffi Graf, I want to puke. Let's hope that America doesn't feel the same about healthcare a few years from now.

Tiger Woods and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Robert Zaretsky makes an interesting parallel between Rousseau and Tiger woods:

Reality and truth are elusive ideas in an age of reality television and fictitious memoirs. Yet, the public fascination with his confession is quite real and true. Where does this event leave him and us? At the same place where it leaves us with Rousseau – or rather, where Rousseau leaves us: caught in the modern obsession with authenticity. In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques does not offer an objective standard by which we can measure the truthfulness of his account. Only Jean-Jacques, he insists, can weigh the truth, or authenticity of his self-portrait. The scales that weigh the truth are buried deep inside him, far too deep for the world to assess or affect. Only Jean-Jacques can see these scales (or tilt them with his thumb). This is the only truth that matters, regardless of what passes for “truth” in our everyday world.
But as Rousseau and Woods remind us, there is a problem: every effort to express our authenticity through language is, by definition, a work of artifice. The world is a stage, Jean-Jacques warns, and we are nothing more than actors. Even if we write our own script – another much debated aspect of Woods’s address – words inevitably come between what we say and what we mean. In a world dominated by spectacle, Rousseau claims, even the words and gestures we choose are not our own, but borrowings from countless others who have already had their day on stage.

I find it disturbing that America is obsessed not with the idea that  he has failed it by failing to live up to the image that his talent had enabled him to create, the one of a man who is good and decent because he is so talented and the best. The trouble with America and its  absolute belief in greatness, is that it believes that it has to be authentic and that be God's reward to a good person. Tiger Woods reminds America of itself, of its contradictions, and  more notably of its unwillingness/stern refusal to accept that being  first doesn't always meant being the purest or even being good.

Centrism as the meeting of liberalism with reality and its separation from purity

Timothy Egan on liberalism, purists, and centrism:

Reality is always a problem for purists. On the liberal side, many fail to comprehend that they are a distinct minority, stuck for years at around 19 percent of the public. When a liberal like Obama gets elected, he has to govern as a centrist for the simple reason that four-fifths of the country does not share his basic political outlook.

I would love to agree with Egan, but I cannot. Liberalism in America is not longer a political philosophy, but rather simply a societal ideology in the sense that liberals do not really ask their politicians when they get to the top of the mountain to enact a political philosophy, but to remain like them. by talking their language, and keeping the same enemies. My point is that Obama was never a liberal, but a centrist who understood that liberalism is essentially about identity, which meant for hm focusing on being the kind of person liberals would had trouble believing was not one of them (smart, black, intellectual, open to the world, eloquent, charming). In short, liberalism  is no longer about political actions, but about being the right kind of American and having a certain vision of the American past, present, and future. The problem with liberals is that they are fell in lust with power and with image, that they no longer know how to win political disputes and to be good at political bargaining. I think that Kucinich flipped on healthcare because to him, Barack Obama stylistically, intellectually, and visually epitomized liberalism and therefore he is willing to give more than the benefit of the doubt and to assume that he may be taking detours, but he will lead  America to the liberal promised land.  I suspect that he would have flipped the bird to Hillary Clinton had she been the one asking for his vote because she epitomized the evil compromises of centrism.

Humanitarian interventionism and maturity

Conclusion of Mark Mazower's must-read essay on humanitarian interventionism and its decline::

(...) the ending of the era of humanitarian interventionism may come to be seen as a sign of the waning of Western power, and mourned as consigning more of the world’s peoples to the mercies of the tyrants who rule them. But it is possible to view it more positively, as the belated emergence of a new maturity in international relations.

I would like to see that the fact that  humanitarian interventionism is less popular than it used to be as a sign of maturity. However, I'm convinced that it is the consequence of the slow and painful realization the people who have  to be saved/reed, more often than not, have a strong dislike for any kind of lasting intervention (which is required in most cases to be successful), within their own affairs.  They resent it and end up resisting it violently or in others ways because they perceived it as a form of imperialism and of recolonization, which are still  the most evil of ills in most parts of the world.  To say differently, Le devoir d’ingérence, the duty to intervene to help has become stop to be viewed as humanitarian to be viewed as both paternalistic and symptomatic of a complex of superiority of the interventionists. Salvation doesn't work when the ones supposed to be saved are suspicious of their purported saviors.

The suspicious invisibility of Teenage fathers

I agree with Paul Sagar on this:

In the universe I inhabit, pregnancy outside of IVF clinics requires two people, male and female. Assuming that most teenage girls are having sex with teenage boys, the preoccupation with “teenage mothers” is thus striking. Why don’t we hear more about “teenage fathers”?

The fact that we hear rarely about teenage fathers is a proof that in most parts of the world, when a teenage girl gets pregnant she is the sole culprit and the boy involved, often he is a man who likes young girls,  has no obligations and is left off the hook. I have always found it to be an abomination for example than in many schools, pregnant girls are ostracized when they start showing when the soon to be father can go on with life and his teenage years as if nothing happened because it is normal for him to have sex. To put it bluntly, teenage mothers still have to live with the stigma that they were "naughty," had sex too early and must therefore suffer the consequences to show other little girls not to follow the same path.

America and sin

I don't agree with Stephen Kinzer on this:

Rather than embrace Mitt Romney's aggressively ignorant view of the world, Americans should try to accommodate themselves to history. That means accepting the reality that every nation, like every human being, has sinned. Nations have the moral authority to point fingers at others only if they also reflect on how their own policies have contributed to the suffering, rage and violence that is shaking the world. "We abominate in others those faults which are most manifestly our own," Montaigne wrote five centuries ago. Then he quoted one of his favorite Latin proverbs: Stercus cuique suum bene olet. Everyone's shit smells good to himself.

My problem is with Kinzer's use of the word "sin" which is too religious and too absolute and negates the reality that Nations, countries aren't godly. I prefer to use  the term "error" or "mistake" for one of the things that plagues our time is the religionization of history and politics, which leads too many to ask for apologies and to divide humans incessantly, cunningly, and spitefully between victims and sinners. America has never committed any sin. It has made mistakes, outrageous and reprehensible mistakes that apologies or atonement cannot erase, but which acknowledgment can enable it to uplift itself above the unnecessary guilt by enabling it to avoid to repeat them through responsibility and the acceptance of the obligation to do and to be better.

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.

Amnesia Nigeriana

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on the Nigerian propensity to ignore bad news or rather to live with it as if it is part of the Nigerian normality

I’VE heard it said that we Nigerians are the happiest people on earth. We’re also accused of being passive about issues that would stir up revolutions in other countries. For instance, it’s been just over a week since ethno-religious violence left hundreds dead around Jos, a city in central Nigeria, but the slaughtering of our fellow citizens has already largely faded from our headlines and conversations.(...)Amnesia Nigeriana, someone called it: that tendency of Nigerians to blank out national trauma. As it happens, more than anything else, it is the reports that persist on the BBC and CNN that remind us that hundreds of innocent Nigerians, women and children, were slaughtered in their sleep that Sunday night. When I look up at the huge TV screen in the newsroom where I work, there’s usually a foreign reporter with a look of high seriousness, scenes of Jos in the background.
Every time Nigeria experiences an episode of violence, we seem to go quiet while the rest of the world becomes fixated. Perhaps it’s understandable that we begin to resent these foreign journalists and the constant focus on our disasters.

Something tells me that Amnesia Nigeriana is an affliction that does not plague uniquely Nigerians...

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.

Domesticated intellectuals

Slavoj Zizek on the state o fintellectualism today :

The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries; the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges; the philosophical policeman tries to detect those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundation of our societies...
One should thoroughly reject not only this criminalization of intellectuals, but, even more, the defensive domestication of radical intellectuals who, so the story goes, offer a provocative correction to democracy which,through his exaggeration, renders visible the inconsistencies and weaknesses of the democratic project. The idea is that radical theories are provocations which are not really “meant seriously,” but aim, through their “provocative” character, to awaken us from the democratic-dogmatic slumber and thus contribute to the revitalization of democracy itself… This is how the establishment likes “subversive” theorists to be: turned into harmless gadflies who bite us and thus awaken us to inconsistencies and imperfection of our democratic enterprise – God forbid to take their project seriously and try to live them…

Zizek is always pertinent, but I wonder whether his love affair with radicalism hasn't done to him what he believes modernity, capitalism, and democracy have done to other intellectuals, that is whether he hasn't been domesticated. To put it differently, I'm coming to the realization the sole major distinction between Zizek and BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy)  image and other technicalities because both of them seem very domesticated to me in the sense that they sell and don't really bother the powerful, which means that they are not really gadflies, which doesn't mean that they aren't relevant and useful. I wonder how Zizek would feel, if he had enough distance and was less narcissistic, if he realized that he was the BHL or the Olivier Besancenot of a pseudo radical philosophy, which for some reason is extremely marketable in a capitalist society..

'Muslim' hearts and minds

Flashy,  but problematic assertions from Roger Hardy

Much of the talk about winning Muslim "hearts and minds" is shallow and misguided. The issue is often seen, especially in the United States, as a matter of public relations – as if America has an image problem in the Muslim world, and dollars can buy it a better one. Or it is seen, in a facile way, as a matter of bolstering "good Muslims" while clobbering "bad Muslims". Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the battle for Muslim hearts and minds will be lost.

What bugs me about Hardy's assertions is that they are full of air and not much else because he tied together awkwardly and dangerously the issue of discontent with the so-called West and its foreign policies and the one of "identity." Talking about Muslim hearts and minds is as dumb as talking about a "western" identity for we know that an American is different than a French and has different sensibilities. The point is that too many people tend to homogenize groups of people when they want to make an ideological and grand point that fits their world-view, but does not reflect the realities. In short, I'm rebelling here against the notion that "Muslims" are so different from other people that policy makers trying to appease tensions and address apprehensions while dispelling misunderstandings should forget about the simple fact that people just hate being stripped of their individuality and being told that they matter less than anybody else because of something that they haven't chosen. It seems to me that by claiming that Islamism is different and misunderstood, Roger Hardy just reinforces the old and dangerous stereotypes that values and reality are relative and that some people are allowed to be barbarian and that the rest of the world should accept it.  What bothers is that Roger Hardy would never make the same point about Christian fundamentalism and that's the problem.

Wole Soyinka's Nigeria

Wole Soyinka reminds me of Fela Kuti when he talks about politics. When he analyzes the situation in Nigeria, he gets a lot of things right, but unfortunately, he also perfumes reality with his own extravagances making it more fantastical than it needs to in order to justify radicalism and impossible revolutions. Case in point:

Mr Soyinka condemned what he called the "industry of lies" that had grown up around the President's medical condition. He said Nigeria's first lady, Turai Yar'Adua, who has denied access to her husband and kept his true condition a secret, should stand trial for her role in the power vacuum. "This woman is there standing guard against the truth of his health," Mr Soyinka said. "When will the rest of the nation wake up?"
Mr Yar'Adua was taken to hospital in Saudi Arabia in November and only came back to Nigeria last month. Since his return he has been kept in an ambulance; he is treated only by Saudi doctors and no one outside his wife's inner circle has seen him, including the acting president, Goodluck Jonathan.(...)
Mr Soyinka said Nigeria had a failing "neocolonial constitution", a wave of "political assassinations" and was a place where power failures were "the norm" and its leaders were "robber barons" looting the country. "There is this myth of Nigerian resilience, that we will always pull back from the brink, but there is a critical mass at which some things implode," he said.
He defended the "real militants" in the Niger Delta, whom he said had a right to take on the government over decades of neglect, rights abuses, environmental crimes and theft of resources. He called Mend "a small, well-organised and resourceful militant group" that could choke the government's lifeline of oil. Yesterday, Mend launched its biggest attack since last year.(...)The author compared the task of reforming Nigeria to that of Sisyphus, saying: "You roll that damn rock up the hill, you don't get anywhere and the rock rolls back down."

Politics and American foreign policy

Matthew Yglesias on the role that politics has played within American foreign policy in the Post-cold war era:

In the post-Cold War era where politics drives foreign policy rather than the other way around, this seems to be a fairly stable equilibrium. Presidents will pursue an activist course, with the nature of the activism determined by their own predilections, but the public must not be asked to bear any burden. The question is how long can this be sustained. During the Cold War, objective considerations of international relations constrained American options, even as relatively small oscillations around the mainstream view were the subject of contentious argument. Today, no country can even remotely match American military might, and none is likely to do so for decades.

I wonder whether Yglesias's view isn't too American-centric to see the big picture, as a matter I know that he  is for he doesn't seem to be able to realize what are the essential and international consequences of his hypothesis. The issue within American foreign policy has never been that it is driven by politics, but rather that it is made and formulated badly for the simple reason that Americans only understand foreign policy when it relates to domestic policy and is said to affect them. The distinction that I'm making here is that all foreign policy reflect domestic politics, but some of them are made more effectively and with the acknowledgment that foreign policy requires some expertise and some knowledge of foreign countries, In short, I don't think that the United States has the foreign policy that it deserves  because as Yglesias, it doesn't realize that results have as much to do with power (military, hard, soft, diplomatic or otherwise) than with knowledge and a non-ideological awareness of different realities.

Democracy and genocide

I find this bit by Geoffrey York about a Rwanda's official and his arguments against democracy alarming:

With an election looming in a few months, Rwanda’s authoritarian government has made an astounding claim: democracy leads directly to genocide.
The claim is made in an article this week by Jean Paul Kimonyo, an advisor in the office of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. He argues that Rwanda has only had “plural politics” for two brief periods in its history, and both times it “led to mass killings.”
He also makes the sweeping statement that “political parties and independent media” were a big reason for the killings. All parties and all media, in his view, are just as dangerous as the hate-spewing radio stations and politicians that fuelled the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
His conclusion, apparently, is that Rwanda needs to suppress its political parties, restrict its independent media and tightly control its elections, even though it’s been 16 years since the genocide. Democracy – or “confrontational politics,” as he prefers to call it – would “almost certainly lead to renewed violence.”

The questions that I ask myself is whether there isn't a false dichotomy created between democracy and genocide in order to justify the unjustifiable, and finally, the second, which the more complex question, is whether Kagame is doing as best as can best expected given the fact that things could be worse or whether adding that caveat is stopping too many for either giving him either the credit or the criticism that he deserves. I have neither have a Manichean view of Kagame nor an absolutist one because it is undeniable that he has a number of  successes, which can not be dismissed, but it is also true that as with all politicians, he is a complex figure, who neither be divinized not vilified without understanding the importance of the context, but also by without indulgence when it comes to principles such as human rights and democratic ones.

Sarko's down

Charles Bremner on Sarkozy and the butt whipping he got last night in the French regional elections:

Sarkozy no longer looks like the automatic choice for the centre-right in the next presidential election in two years time. He could face a rival from his own camp. The vote was not just a signal of unhappiness with the recession and unemployment -- which have been milder in France than elsewhere. It was a protest against the way that Sarkozy conducts himself and France. The ultra-confident, I'm-in-charge manner, has come to look hollow, unpresidential and divisive.  He has changed course too many times. His two most recent U-Turns have been the abandonment of his inflammatory debate on national identity and a decision to dump his trail-blazing carbon tax.

I still remember when Sarkozy, pretty much like Obama, was thought to walk on water and to be the best thing that happened to France since the revolution or just Brigitte Bardot. My own opinion on the issue is that although Sarkozy is down, he is not out and that last night's results are such a warning to him to get a grip and to stop to try to be a Superhero who does everything except please his base and the electorate. Like Obama, Sarkozy has the advantage of being predominant and of not having an opposition with an audible alternative that is just anti-him. That may change if he doesn't get a grip and realize that his supporters need proofs of love.