From Glenn Greenwald:
The very same western countries that snuggle up to and prop up the planet's worst dictators are the same ones who strut around depicting themselves as crusaders for democracy and freedom, all while smearing anyone who objects to their conduct as lovers of tyranny.
Well,we are all westerners now so...!
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Interesting assertion from Frank Furedi:
It is important to realise that much of the conventional wisdom on the impact of abusive behaviour is driven by moral revulsion rather than by disinterested research. Of course, it is entirely legitimate morally to condemn behaviour that society deems evil. But moral condemnation should not be confused with a medical diagnosis. Nor is it an alternative to seeking and gaining clarity on the matter at hand. We do no favours to those who have suffered at the hands of adult predators if we treat them as the casualties of a moral drama.
The problem with modern societies is that they not only like victims, they love the idea of perpetual victimhood and enduring 'sin' because it makes it easier to sacralize and indeed objectify victims instead of empathizing truly with them to allow them to remain people tout simplement.
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This sentence from Andrew O'Hogan on the BBC's child abuse scandal bothers me :
A man can’t help whom he fancies, but [Gilbert] Harding seems to have differed from the other BBC paedophiles only inasmuch as he kept it mainly to himself.
I have a hard time with the idea that man/people are just slaves of their passions, victims of their urges, their obsessions and never really choose the objects of their affection. Furthermore, fancying kids isn't about sex and taste.
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Sugary excerpt from the best article I've on Lance Armstrong's fall from grace written by Robert Weintraub:
Weintraub is right. Lance Armstrong became Lance Armstrong because he had beaten cancer. That exploit made people more willing to believe the improbable because he had had already done it once. It is also because he is a cancer survivor that Armstrong is going to make a comeback when he decides to talk. Cancer will always humanize him and make people empathize with him because he once faced death and triumphed.Perhaps I’m wrong, but even as he was winning the Tours, I think most people suspected he had to, at the very least, be keeping up with the Joneses, PED-wise, and was mostly forgiven, pre facto, because unlike the other riders, Armstrong was lucky to be alive, much less racing. The image of his press conference where he shakily announced his diagnosis served as a public inoculation. (...) Ironically, the fact that Americans either didn’t want to know about the science behind Armstrong’s rise, or didn’t much care, enraged the European writers who took pretty much the same blasé attitude with virtually all other champion riders when it came to doping. It was as if the mere fact that an American—worse, a Texan, like George W. Bush—was winning France’s most cherished sporting title sent the local press into hypocritical hysteria.
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From Norm Geras:
The belief that our species has characteristics and impulses that need restraining is not a monopoly of the right; it certainly shouldn't be. I'll make only passing reference here to the horrors of the last century, and then simply say that those today who believe that a reasonably peaceable society capable of fulfilling the needs and aspirations of its citizens is possible without the rule of law, and the necessary political force to back that law, are sadly deluded. 'Utopianism' in this domain should be about ensuring that authority is democratic and responsible, as opposed to tyrannical and arbitrary; and belief in the malleability of human nature should be limited to trying, so far as possible, to encourage its best rather than its worst features. But left-wing doesn't have to mean closing one's eyes to the more worrying realities of history, though unfortunately it sometimes has meant that.
Chris Dillow putting it more simply:
(...) you don't have to be a conservative to fear that our moral conduct is fragile, and we have impulses that need restraining.
I'm having a hard time agreeing with Geras and Dillow not because I disagree with their belief that human nature needs restraint, but because I am too Camusian to believe in a priori human frailties that make everybody potential criminals and thus guilty of something before they act.
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I agree wtih David Cole on this:
There is a place for limits. I am a professor. I do not tolerate, in my classroom, disrespectful speech of any kind, because it interferes with the learning environment that I seek to foster. I am also a father, and have a similar view with respect to the need for respectful speech around the dinner table. A responsible newspaper publisher might well decline to print an article that its editors were convinced was likely to spark violence. But these limits are not imposed by law, but by social norms and ethics, which are in turn informed by discussion, dialogue, and culture. Such norms are quite powerful, and ensure that for the most part, people do not use their freedom of speech irresponsibly. In those isolated instances where freedom is exercised irresponsibly, it is far better to employ more speech to condemn it (...)
The trouble is that 'modern' societies are less and less willing to educate their citizens because it requires more than the use of force and punishment and thus more willing to just squash what is considered to be unacceptable and intolerable.
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Question of the day from Norman Geras:
(...) who gives a cup of cold weak tea whether or not on some particular moral issue the view a person adopts is (regarded as being) left-wing?
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More puzzling puzzling words (I swear I don't go looking for them they are just everywhere and find their way to me)on rape from Luke Samuel:
(...) the drive to expand society’s understanding of rape was dependent on a legalistic understanding of what constituted rape. It required women to view themselves as victims of rape in virtue of the fact that they had experienced penetration by a penis without consenting, and nothing more. This was, in part, an understandable reaction against the prejudices about rape complainants. But as women were encouraged more and more to measure their sexual encounters against the legal definition of rape, the space for judgement and common sense began to diminish. If women who had been penetrated without consent refused to acknowledge themselves as rape victims they were ‘in denial’. If men questioned whether every instance of non-consensual penetration was rape, they became rape ‘apologists’. Consequently, the drive to bring rape into popular consciousness had a significant side effect: it encouraged us to define our sexual encounters strictly in reference to the law rather than our own judgement.
In fact, this legalistic approach to what constitutes rape has significantly negative effects for our discussion of what ‘rape’ means. Perhaps, most obviously, it encourages the idea that rape is a simple crime, one which is wholly divorceable from any human context. In the language of many rape-awareness campaigners, ‘rape is rape’.
My point here isn't that Samuel is wrong and a moron, but simply that there is something unsettling about the way he says what he says that comes pretty close from being an apology not so much of rape, but of dismissive inculture by using the pretext that it is common sense and natural. Complexity and contextual factors are always essential and asserting that they are not when it is the norm in a legal setting to put them at the center of every mater is troubling.
Samuel is choosing to ignore the fact that in almost every rape case the "accuser" has a hell of time to get and to keep the status of victim precisely because rape is not rape.
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I want to agree with this, but so far, my mind is resisting for the argument is too gray:
The general thesis that we live under some sort of moral obligation to minimise participation in economic or political schemes we personally believe to be unjust, no matter how large the personal cost, or how infinitesimal the effect of this choice on the allegedly unjust status quo, is ridiculously, implausibly demanding. It cannot be that one is entitled to criticise the prevailing order only if one refuses to participate in it. A noble end doesn't justify taking any means, of course. But what if refusing to act within an allegedly unjust system only entrenches the system by ceding control to those unbothered by its supposed iniquities? In that case, morality plausibly asks us to make the best use possible of the objectionable tools we find at hand. At the very least, morality doesn't forbid it.
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Two quotes on Obama's kill list and assassination powers.
The first from Glenn Greenwald:
In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that. (...)to summarize the Obama campaign’s apparent argument: it’s absolutely vital that we know all about the GOP nominee’s tax shelters and financial transactions over the last decade (and indeed, we should know about that), but we need not bother ourselves with how the Democratic nominee is deciding which Americans should die, his claimed legal authority for ordering those hits, the alleged evidence for believing the target deserves to be executed, or the criteria used to target them. So low are one’s expectations for an American Election Year that there are very few spectacles so absurd as to be painful to behold, but the Obama campaign’s waving of the transparency flag definitely qualifies.
The second from Joseph Lelyveld:
Just how is a president supposed to take on terrorists thousands of miles away whom he believes to be targeting the country he’s sworn to protect in a constitutional manner? Should he file an extradition request with the government in Islamabad or, as Bill Clinton did before September 11 but after the attacks on the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa, lob cruise missiles from the Arabian Sea and hope for the best?
To settle this debate, we only have to quote Karl Marx or rather to use a Marx's quote used by Camus in the Rebel:
An end which requires unjustified means is no justifiable end.
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Sentence du jour is from Norm Geras:
Tradition is never an adequate justification for a fundamental harm or violation of an important human right.
I have a problem with the way Geras formulates his point even though I agree with it. My problem is with the expressions 'adequate justification,' ' fundamental harm,' and 'important human right.' They make the issue unnecessarily difficult. It is sufficient to say that tradition can never be a justification for anything other a personal preference, which affects solely an individual .
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Frightening fact from Peter Van Buren :
The Obama administration has been cruelly and unusually punishing in its use of the 1917 Espionage Act to stomp on governmental leakers, truth-tellers, and whistleblowers whose disclosures do not support the president’s political ambitions.
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C'est dur à dire mais …Lawrence Pintak is right to be disturbed by this :
On the morning Gaddafi was killed, an ebullient Wolf Blitzer told Sen. John McCain that he knew the senator was pleased on “this very special day.” The look on Blitzer’s face and the celebratory tone of his network left little doubt that he—or CNN—agreed.
As I said, “basic journalistic ethics” can be a slippery thing.
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Nathalie Rothschild just made my morning with the following sentences (I'm still trying to figure out whether I agree with her or not, but I think that she is onto something):
The anti-corporate agenda that is so central to the OWS [ Occupy Wall Street] movement is actually largely about defining which kind of consumption is acceptable and which isn’t. So, organic food – good; genetically-modified food – bad. Locally-sourced products – good; stuff made by multinational companies – bad.
In essence, OWS is a campaign for consumer politics. It’s about a belief that we can change the world by making ‘smart’ consumer choices. It’s about expressing your politics and your identity through what you do and do not eat, where you shop and which brands you refuse to wear. So while today’s consumption critics love to hate chainstores and big corporations, they always choose to direct their ire at companies that make stuff they don’t like (McDonald’s, Shell, Wal-Mart) rather than at companies that make stuff they do like (Ben & Jerry’s, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods).
I may be too cynical, but there is something very Comtesse de Ségur about OWS or rather very Harry Potter like to use a more contemporary metaphor. It looks good and feels good when you are a Paul Krugman's fan as I am, but then you have to wonder how much of it isn't a fantasy.
I'm trying to suggest by taking short cuts that Americans don't do revolts well, they do it beautifully, loudly and for a short periods of time. Then something or someone comes along and they forget or rather learn to live with what irks them by focusing on their dreams and the pursuit of happiness.
It's always, as Reagan reminded us, morning in America again. (I still can't believed that empty political ad worked or at least I couldn't until 2008).
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This quote from Slavoj Žižek mopping the floor with Julian Assange made my weekend:
At first I treated you as not an idiot, out of politeness, but more and more I have to admit that you are not an idiot.
I agree with Žižek's characterization of Assange who is a self-righteous and useful idiot, who did something necessary by chance, but yet found the way to contaminate it with his fanaticism.
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I agree almost completely and for different reasons with Amanda Marcotte on this:
We’re in the throes of a cultural bout of misogyny, and its focus is on sex. And the people who pay the highest price are women whose access to abortion and contraception is threatened by this national game of “Shoot the Slut”.
The word 'slut' is in need of a re/definition and an explanation of why being a slut is the worst thing that a woman can be.
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I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:
This isn't a case of illegal sex activity or gross hypocrisy (i.e., David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley (who built their careers on Family Values) or Eliot Spitzer (who viciously prosecuted trivial prostitution cases)). There's no lying under oath (Clinton) or allegedly illegal payments (Ensign, Edwards). From what is known, none of the women claim harassment and Weiner didn't even have actual sex with any of them. This is just pure mucking around in the private, consensual, unquestionably legal private sexual affairs of someone for partisan gain, voyeuristic fun and the soothing fulfillment of judgmental condemnation. And in that regard, it sets a new standard: the private sexual activities of public figures -- down to the most intimate details -- are now inherently newsworthy, without the need for any pretense of other relevance. I'd really like to know how many journalists, pundits and activist types clucking with righteous condemnation of Weiner would be comfortable having that standard applied to them.
It's astonishing to me that the media and most of America have trouble with the idea that sex can be perverted, destructive, and disturbing without being illegal and becoming a public matter. Nobody seems to be asking the question, why should the public are or rather why is it something that should concern Weiner's constituents and that is because it is a private matter between a man who like most of the people I know lied stupidly when his private life was exposed for no reason. That's my opinion, but it may change if Anthony Weiner broke the law, but still this scandal is silly, childish and an indication that the media love sex stories because it offers it an excuse to become tabloidlike and because int the post 9/11 world hasn't found ways to educate and to inform the American public on matters that affect the future of the US such as Afghanistan.
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Gideon Rachman gets this right as he does more often than not:
It does look as if the Europeans, backed by the Americans, will manage to push Christine Lagarde into the job. But the groundswell of protest against the idea of a Western fix – and the accompanying commentary highlighting the shift in economic and political power from West to East and from North to South – will probably ensure that this will be the last time that a European appointment can simply be bulldozed through.
So President Obama is right when he insists “the time for leadership is now.” But Madame Lagarde might add – “Apres moi, le deluge.”
As a true non-believer in the division of the world between the West and the rest, I have to say that it would be more than a disappointment if the new head of the IMF came from Europe, it would be scandalous. Such an outcome would be indicated of the existence of more than a Western fix, but of a problematic bias within that organization that must be influencing its policies. Furthermore, I baffled by the fact that Christine Lagarde is a credible choice to be head of the IMF not because she isn't competent, but because she just isn't a good choice for so many reasons, the least important of which is that France isn't entitled to get a second chance at the position after it supported Strauss-Kahn knowing full of the risks that something could happen.
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To the contrary to BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy), I take Slavoj Zižek seriously, but I rarely agree with him even though he too tends to oversimplify to make his arguments cute and flashy. That said this video is great (hat tip: Jonathan Glennie)
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I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:
One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).
In light of that fact, ask yourself this: if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them?
Well to paraphrase David Mamet, that is in part the reason I am no longer a brain-dead liberal and I have decided to be an independent. Politics should never be about loyalty or to be more accurate partisanship but about thought and action.
John Quiggin has a take on Greenwald's post that makes me wonder why politics has become about good and evil and about saying that the others are scarier and therefore should be kicked to the curve. More people should fight the talibanisation of American politics by refusing to make it about good and evil and solely about actions and no empty words such as hope and exceptionalism.
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I disagree strongly with the following assertion by Norman Geras:
Whatever you may think about it, similar to and/or different from the intervention in Iraq, the Libyan action is a vindication of sorts for Tony Blair and his doctrine of liberal intervention.
What!? Why by the same token isn't it a vindication of the crusades or simply of war in general? Geras's assertion is as true as saying as the financial collapse of 2008 is a vindication of Marxism.
It isn't all about the concept, the context does matter so do actions and their consequences. I'm sure that if people look hard enough they can find events to vindicate all the wrongs in history and those who made fanatically, in spite of evidence, the conscious decision to do the knowing full well that smart people like Geras will always find reasons in the future to clean their dirty hands. Juan Cole has a persuasive post, which explains why Libya 2010 isn't Iraq 2003.
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Okay, this is the last sugary excerpt of what must have seemed as 'bash Obama week' and it is from Glenn Greenwald:
(...)in Barack Obama's administration, it's perfectly acceptable to abuse an American citizen in detention who has been convicted of nothing by consigning him to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, barring him from exercising in his cell, punitively imposing "suicide watch" restrictions on him against the recommendations of brig psychiatrists, and subjecting him to prolonged, forced nudity designed to humiliate and degrade. But speaking out against that abuse is a firing offense. Good to know.
Well, I guess none of this matters since there is no alternative to Obama as John Quiggin and others would argue. Yeah, doesn't it feel great to live in a world where hope and the one killed ethics?
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Sugary excerpt of the day or rather of the night from Juan Cole:
Note to Muslim-hater Bill Maher, who should know better: It is not true that women cannot vote in 20 Muslim countries, and please stop generalizing about 1.5 billion Muslims based on the 22 million people in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the only place where women cannot drive and where men can vote (in municipal elections) but women cannot. It would be like generalizing from the Amish in Pennsylvania to all people of Christian heritage and wondering what is with Christianity and its fascination with horses and buggies.
I have to admit that I have stopped watching Bill Maher years ago because I couldn't take him seriously. He is exactly like the people he criticized, arrogant and fanatically persuaded to be on the right side except that his views are seen more fashionable and more 'cultured' (some forms of inculture in America and elsewhere are tolerable/fashionable than others when they lead to more palatable conclusions).
Bill Maher doesn't care about the status of women in the "Muslin world," to use an expression that I hate. He is using it to make a cheap point to win an argument that isn't about women, but about a group of people he considers as savages. My own point here isn't that there is no there there, but to make the assertion that consistency matters when being self-righteous.
I will not foolishly assert that women in America are not privileged compared to others or that foreign countries especially those in certain parts of the world have a 'woman problem.' I will just argue that saying that isn't saying much for the question remains what is the ideal, what are absolute and universal values, and to stop using women as human shield, as props to win ideological wars.
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Alarmingly, Norman Geras is right when he makes the following assertion:
(...) the global human rights community overlaps significantly with left-liberal political 'orthodoxy' - a sector of opinion in which the wrongs done by democratic Western governments are always to be condemned outright, whereas those committed by tyrants, terrorists and other such criminals may be softeningly 'explained' and thereby either wholly or partially excused (see here and here). It's one of the major moral and ideological disgraces of our time, and the human rights community has not been immune to it.
Are we really all just prisoners of the past and of history?
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The statement of the day or rather of the late evening is from Chris Dillow:
Politics is about power, not fluffy things like truth and trust.
Chris Dillow should have a conversation/debate with Glenn Greenwald. I don't want to agree with him, as a matter of fact, I won't but he is isn't wrong. I wonder whether Dillow would make a distinction with a difference between politics and governing. What would Hannah Arendt say?
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For some reason, which I can explain intelligently, this from Professor Bainbridge troubles me:
Some things are just too yucky for a civilized society to tolerate. This is what Leon Kass calls the "wisdom of repugnance," which makes good sense to me in this case and a number of others.
I'm wondering if the fact that something is too repulsive for words doesn't precisely mean that one needs to make an extra effort to 'reason' one's repulsion.
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I agree with Chris Dillow on this taken from his great post on Julian Assange:
The fact is that it’s perfectly possible for men who are good, even heroic, in some respects to fall short in others.
The belief to the contrary seems to me to be a naïve form of the fundamental attribution error, a belief not only that character rather than environment determines actions, but also that there is a single, unified thing as “character” which is either “good” or “bad”.
I have always had a problem with the separation of good and evil and that is why my favorite quote is Eluard's "Le Bien et le mal doivent leur origine à l'abus de quelques erreurs." Human ignorance and imperfection make it, in my view, impossible for heroes not to be also people who can behave badly, awfully in different situations. I don't think that Assange is a hero and I don't think either that the fact that he may have committed a 'crime' means that he is incapable of doing anything noble or good.
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I agree with David Cole on this:
It turns out that looking forward, not back, will never resolve the torture legacy. Until we own up to and provide a reckoning for the moral and criminal wrongs committed by officials at the very highest levels of the former administration, the fact that we tortured will continue to fester—and cause problems for its successor. The prevailing view in Washington seems to be that we should move on, but such wrongs cannot be forgotten. Try as we might to ignore it, the fact that we tortured and did nothing about it will periodically raise its head—in a failed prosecution, a foreign court judgment, or a terrorist incident inspired by images from Abu Ghraib. And even when it does not manifest itself so dramatically, the fact that the president of the United States was able to order torture, boast about it in a best-selling book, and walk way scot-free will fuel a deep vein of worldwide resentment. Torture and its after-effects will be with us until we are willing to confront them head-on.
In short, even the 'One' or rather especially the 'One' cannot redeem America's moral failings without doing more than simply saying that a page has been turned and that the past has passed. Obama has more than a torture problem, he has a moral one for he was elected to save America, to cleanse its soul; it is thus more difficult for him than for anyone else to argue that he is change if his point because that his sole election put Humpty Dumpty together again and makes clear that a lot was happened before him happened before him and therefore no longer matters.
Jesus cannot be Pontius Pilate.
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Because I'm avoiding like the plague or just water-boarding the whole George W. Bush's 'I wasn't that bad' tour, I missed this:
Plugging his memoir Decision Points, Mr. Bush revealed the family secret (described in the book with his mother's permission) in an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer last night.
The former president said Barbara Bush asked doctors to save the fetus so she could show it to him. (He was a teenager.)
"There's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life," he told Mr. Lauer. "There was a human life, a little brother or sister."
I guess there is nothing stronger than the bond between a mother and her child. That said, I'm wondering whether 'values' can be said to be sacred and absolute when they are justified or rather legitimated without thought or analysis, but just with a 'being,' whether it is/was in itself or for itself.
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Norm Geras on humanism responding to Mary Midgley:
Any serious-minded humanist today ought to know enough about humanity's flaws to be protected against the temptations of a posture of worship. In addition, humanism can be, and for many humanists is, an entirely irreligious doctrine, or commitment, shorn of the trappings of religious observance. Equally, no humanist is bound to the belief that human beings are central to the cosmos; humanists can absorb what we know from research about the universe, which (as things stand) is that we are not at all central to it.
I have to admit that I have never taken humanism seriously even since munching, digesting, to integrate finally in my psyche that humanity is loved in general in order to have to love somebody in particular. In short, humanism is like veganism, even when it is serious; it remains incredibly self-centered and absorbed. Those aren't always flaws, but they are often limitations (which can be delicious in erudite people) difficult to overcome even with g.
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Sugary excerpt of the day from Andrew Brown's 'satire' on the existence of human rights :
We are told that the two qualities of human rights is that they are "self-evident" and "unassailable". This is like saying that the chief quality of porridge is its excellence as a material for building skyscrapers. The chief evidence for the existence of these unassailable and self-evident human rights is that we are told, by people who believe in them, that they are everywhere attacked and trampled. What difference does a right make if it doesn't change.(...)Everywhere that human rights have gone, terror and bloodshed have followed, from the French Revolution, which convulsed Europe in war for nearly thirty years, through to Stalin's Russia, where the constitution protected more rights than almost any other one has ever done, and now in the invasion of Iraq, where nearly people have died from our determination to impose rights and democracy. Of course the apologists will claim that these are perversions of the original idea. But why should we listen to the apologists, when they believe in something that doesn't even exist?
I have always found the term 'human rights' to be problematic because it was based on an assumption and because the word 'rights' cuts short an essential conservation about not its existence, its definition, and the problematic fact that it isn't accompanied by obligations. That said the fact that when reading Andrew Brown's piece, one questions its nature as a satire shows that 'human rights' have come to mean all things and nothing; they are solely a notion used to stop an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous dialogue on morality.
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One of the reasons why I love reading Chris Dillow is his amoral approach to complex subjects as this sugary excerpt shows:
The allegations that Wayne Rooney paid £1200 a time for sex brings a well-respected profession into disgrace. I refer, of course, to prostitution. In selling her story, Ms Thompson has broken the code that prostitutes, like priests and lawyers, do not divulge their dealings with clients.
I'm not offended by the idea that prostitutes are comparable to priests and lawyers. However, I'm disturbed by the notion that their clients more than sex when 'hiring' them.
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Quote of the midday is from Bella Gerens:
Not that I ever expected him to be, but Obama is surely not the saviour he tried to make us all believe he was. And I absolutely do not understand why it is an outrage for Bush to read our emails but it’s fine for Obama to authorise the assassination of an American citizen. I do not understand why it is an outrage for Bush to deny foreign terrorism suspects their rights but it’s fine for Obama to do the same to American citizens on American soil. I do not understand why it was good that Obama was going to try Kalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civil court in Manhattan (where he would never get a fair trial), and now it’s also good that Obama’s not going to try American terrorism suspects in civil courts (where they might just have had a chance at a fair trial). I do not understand how American Congressmen can even propose this sort of thing during the administration of a constitutional lawyer, when the merest idiot can see that it’s plainly unconstitutional. There are no exceptions for terrorism in the Bill of Rights.
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Stephen Bainbridge on the fact that some are calling for Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the failed Times Square bombing, to be tortured or even to be stripped of his American citizenship(Joe Lieberman):
This despite the fact that the SOB is an American citizen arrested in the United States. Oddly, moreover, I don't recall the Journal or others on the right expressing the same concerns about Timothy McVeigh or those militia nuts that got arrested a few weeks ago.
I'm more than a little appalled about how readily some on the right are to toss out the window centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence to win temporary advantage.
It's always telling and alarming to realize that the rule of law to some is conditional and that the ends justify the means when it comes to security.
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Scary, disturbing, but yet just another consequence of the deification of intolerable traditions:
Albinos are often betrayed by husbands or other relatives, lured by payments of up to $3,000 for an albino limb and $75,000 for a “full set” of albino body parts. The parts are ground into potions and talismans that are believed to bring wealth and power.
A recent survey found that 93 per cent of Tanzanians believe in witchcraft – the highest percentage in Africa. Witch doctors were banned by the government last year, yet many still operate freely.
Albinos have been murdered in other African countries too, including at least a dozen in Burundi. The difference, however, is that the Burundi killers were prosecuted and convicted, which rarely happens in Tanzania, despite pledges of action from its Prime Minister.
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Robin Hanson offers what is, I believe, an excellent definition of tolerance:
“Tolerance” is a feel-good buzzword in our society, but I fear people have forgotten what it means. Many folks are proud of their “tolerance” for gays, working women, Tibetan monks in cute orange outfits, or blacks sitting at the front of the bus. But what they really mean is that they consider such things to be completely appropriate parts of their society, and are not bothered by them in the slightest. That, however, isn’t “tolerance.”
“Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you. Things that make you go “ick”, or that conflict with strong intuitions on proper behavior.
That means of course that most societies, even 'modern societies,' are pretty intolerant places.
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Quote of the afternoon from Anthony Grafton:
The Pope seems to have seen priestly abuse of children, for a long time, as an American problem, rather than the general one it clearly is. He still seems to regard journalistic discussions of it as part of a broad, deliberate attack on the Church, a line that his surrogates and some outside defenders have made their own. He responds to accusations defensively, in the first instance, like many long-serving officers in powerful established institutions whose members wear uniforms and live, in some ways, outside the normal social world—think of the armed forces or the police. At bay, as he is now, he has not yet acknowledged, and may never accept, the wisdom that any competent PR consultant would offer: cover-ups are always worse than the crimes they are meant to conceal. Instead, for the most part, he has turned his spikes outward, as hedgehogs do.
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Though-provoking words from Edmund Standing:
Throughout human history, societies have not been predominantly based around compassion, but rather around in-group loyalty. Until the advent of modern transportation, most human beings lived their entire lives in small communities based heavily on in-group loyalty, rather than universalism. Individuals were loyal to their families or clans, which in turn may have been loyal to a wider (essentially tribal) community, but that was largely where any sense of moral imperative ended. The whole of human history is marked not by universalism but rather by conflict – conflict over resources, ownership of land, the dominance of clans, and so on. This tribalism is arguably far more fundamental to human beings than any sense of the ‘brotherhood of man’, and the idea that most humans have felt any moral responsibility to the weak and vulnerable of other families and clans is dubious at best. The evidence that humans are essentially tribal, bound by loyalty to the in-group and a complete disregard for those outside it can still be seen time and again in modernity, let alone throughout history as a whole. The history of genocide, for example, is an on-going one, as is the history of adherence to exclusionary belief systems.
My reaction to Standing's assertions is not solely to wonder whether he is right, but also to question whether what is historical and natural is determinant in the issue of morality and of beliefs. In shot, I'm not sure what difference the fact that humans have always been essentially tribal ought to make to the idea of wrong and right because I refuse to accept that history, nature, and traditions determine morality.
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Ross Douthat is seldom right that when he gets part of the truth, it is necessary to say it to encourage him to let his brain out the box as he did when he wrote this:
The world didn’t always agree with Pope John Paul II, but it always seemed to love him. Handsome and charismatic, with an actor’s flair and a statesman’s confidence, he transformed the papacy from an Italian anachronism into a globe-trotting phenomenon. His authority stabilized a reeling church; his personal holiness inspired a generation of young Catholics. “Santo subito!” the Roman crowds chanted as he lay dying. Sainthood now!
The world didn’t always agree with Pope John Paul II, but it always seemed to love him. Handsome and charismatic, with an actor’s flair and a statesman’s confidence, he transformed the papacy from an Italian anachronism into a globe-trotting phenomenon. His authority stabilized a reeling church; his personal holiness inspired a generation of young Catholics. “Santo subito!” the Roman crowds chanted as he lay dying. Sainthood now!
They will not chant for Benedict XVI. The former Joseph Ratzinger was always going to be a harder pontiff for the world to love: more introverted than his predecessor, less political and peripatetic, with the crags and wrinkles of a sinister great-uncle. While the last pope held court with presidents and rock stars, Cardinal Ratzinger was minding the store in Rome, jousting with liberal theologians and being caricatured as “God’s Rottweiler.” His reward was supposed to be retirement, and a return to scholarly pursuits. Instead, he was summoned to Peter’s chair — and, it seems, to disaster.
Of course, image and style aren't the only causes for the current Pope's problems. They are symptoms of a larger malaise and bigger flaws of the Catholic Church, which make it enable to understand to the realities of its members. If the Cardinals who chose Joseph Ratzinger as pope had known a little bit about a world that they execrate, the modern world, they would have chosen somebody able to sell Catholicism to the masses or at least to defend it vibrantly and convincingly.The point is just the sex abuse scandals are the most convincing proof that Ratzinger cannot be Pope in this century and that in any case, he is not the biggest worry for the Vatican in times where religions are popping from everywhere.
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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.
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Sugary excerpt from Terry Eagleton's superb essay on evil:
On the whole, postmodern cultures, despite their fascination with ghouls and vampires, have had little to say of evil. Perhaps this is because the postmodern man or woman - cool, provisional, laid-back and decentred - lacks the depth that true destructiveness requires. For postmodernism, there is nothing really to be redeemed. For high modernists such as Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, or the early T S Eliot, there is indeed something to be redeemed, but it has become impossible to say quite what. The desolate, devastated landscapes of Beckett have the look of a world crying out for salvation. But salvation presupposes sinfulness, and Beckett's wasted, eviscerated human figures are too sunk in apathy and inertia even to be mildly immoral. They cannot muster the strength to hang themselves, let alone set fire to a village of innocent civilians.
To acknowledge the reality of evil, however, is not necessarily to hold that it lies beyond all explanation. You can believe in evil without supposing that it is supernatural in origin. Ideas of evil do not have to posit a cloven-hoofed Satan. It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word "evil" as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate. It is what one might call the community-worker theory of morality. It is true that this is one of the word's most priggish uses. But to reject the idea of evil for this reason works better if you are thinking of unemployed council-estate heroin addicts rather than serial killers or the Nazi SS. It is hard to see the SS as merely unfortunate. One should be careful not to let the Khmer Rouge off the same hook on which delinquent teenagers are impaled.
Unlike Eagleton, I am appreciative of the fact that post-modernists aren't obsessed with evil or at least don't say much about it as it is framed by Eagleton. The result of that refusal to focus on evil isn't that it denies its existence or leads to an unfulfillable void, but rather that it places the emphasis on the fact that it isn't out there somewhere waiting to get the innocent. It acknowledges bravely that evil happens when people make bad decisions and stick to them. It is more human to desacralize evil by acknowledging that it doesn't happen when shit happens, but happens as a direct consequence of human choices and actions. It shows that the concept of guilt and sin are meaningless for there is no god or authority figures to beg absolution from the abject, but solely responsibility and the burden of the realization that people aren't little gods and that the doing the bad trumps believing the good. To the contrary of Eagleton, I still think that that there is nothing to be redeemed, because that would mean that evil is about sin, about god, about something non-human. It isn't.
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I agree with Glenn Greenwald's on his reaction to Howard Kurtz's article about the fierce competition among journalists covering the White House to get inside stories to write books:
The conflicts in having "journalists" report on the administration while simultaneously begging top White House officials for highly lucrative book-access are as self-evident as they are corrupting. Richard Wolffe covered the Obama campaign for Newsweek at the same time he was writing an access-dependent book on Obama; when he left Newsweek, even Newsweek staffers complained about the prospect that he had used magazine funds to cover the campaign while withholding key stories from the magazine so he could use it in his book instead (the same controversy that has plagued Bob Woodward in the writing of his Bush-glorifying books while also working for the Post).
(...)Is it even remotely conceivable that this stable of access-desperate reporters would write negatively about the White House or the President, or conversely, refuse to do their bidding? Look at what Ryan Lizza writes to get the answer. They're all vying for the lucraticve position of unofficial royal court spokesman (which Bob Woodward occupied in the prior administration). How can one possibly purport to be a "watchdog" over the very political officials on whom one's livelihood and hope for riches depend?
Journalists are always reluctant to call each other out when one of them crosses the line. They would rather point their critical glare to others; this lack of consequential self-criticism and of the lack of mandatory ethical guidelines to put things awkwardly are one of the main causes of the problem. Journalism in America has become first and foremost a business.
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Sugary excerpt from Hazel Rowley's review of new books of France under Nazi occupation:
In June 1940, when the Germans sheet-bombed their way into France, Beauvoir "experienced the depth of despair". Back in Paris after the famous exodus, she decided that the only way to collect her nerves was to write about the horror she was experiencing:
I purchased this notebook and a bottle of ink with the intention of untangling the history, the story of these last three weeks, and writing everything down for Sartre and Bost, and for the future. It was the first day that I came out of my shell and stopped living like a "crushed bug" and tried to become a person again.
(...)She and her friends got around Paris on stolen bicycles. They were hungry, and occasionally resorted to blackmarket food. As a teacher, Beauvoir was required to sign an affidavit declaring that she was neither a Jew nor a Freemason. Not signing would have meant losing her job, income, ration card and identity papers. She signed.
After school, she worked on her autobiographical novel, She Came to Stay, about the loves and jealousies of four young people. Surprisingly, the novel got past the German censors. To her astonishment, she heard that it was a serious contender for the top literary prize in France. This was Vichy France: Jews were debarred from professional life and Jewish writers were not allowed to be published. Nevertheless, Beauvoir admitted: "If I had been awarded the Prix Goncourt that year I should have accepted it with wholehearted jubilation."
It's unfair to portray Beauvoir as someone who was willfully unaware of what was happening around her and who didn't care while ignoring the context. The bigger point is that not enough French intellectuals had the courage to oppose Nazism and to write about that opposition. To the contrary, many adapted to the realities of occupation longing for a return to a normalcy that would permit them to write tranquilly without having to care about Nazism and its victims. My point is that Simone de Beauvoir was not an exception, but the norm. Her attitude and behavior during occupation shows that even for philosophers who believe in the supremacy of existence in defining being, doing the right thing or rather making the choice to behave honorably and courageously while taking the chance to die is a difficult choice to make.
The irony of the sotry is that years later Sartre, BeauvoIr's partner in crime, pun intended, would write a manifesto arguing for littérature engagée, thus arguing, conveniently after his own shameful neutrality during the war, that writers have the obligation to take a stand on every political and social issues because neutrality is unacceptable.
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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.
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I agree with Julian Baggini on this:
(...) when we ask how much we should try to rehabilitate child killers, for instance, it is wrong to think that forgiveness should be the key motivation. It is not for the legal system to forgive. Justice in such cases is rather about giving the right answers to four main questions. First, were the killers sufficiently responsible for their actions for us to regard retribution as of primary importance? Second, would prioritising rehabilitation threaten public safety? Third, would prioritising rehabilitation weaken deterrence against similar future crimes? And four, would rehabilitation actually work?
The best reasons we have for thinking that the Norwegians dealt with their child killers better than we did with the Bulger killers is because the answers to these questions in most such cases is no, no, no and yes. It has nothing to do with forgiveness being a superior virtue. To prioritise the rehabilitation of violent criminals who knew what they had done and posed a danger to the public just because we thought it good to forgive them would be a terrible mistake. More than that: it would be unforgiveable.
Unfortunately, most societies, most notably, the United States aren't Norway and believe less in rehabilitation even for child killers than in punishment and retribution because they were born bad and that there is nothing that society can do except protect itself from them.
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Sugary excerpt from Sean Wilentz's must-read review of Leo Damrosch's book on Alexis de Tocqueville and his views of America, Tocqueville's Discovery of America:
Early on, Tocqueville rejected the idea dear to the Constitution's framers and mourned by later patricians that disinterested civic virtue would animate the new republic. In its place, Tocqueville said, the Americans had found a way for individual interest (understood in the French, intérêt, as including everything that matters to an individual) to take the place of virtue, to make, he wrote, "a sort of refined and intelligent egotism" into "the pivot on which the whole machine turns." Interest properly understood required no grand sacrifices of station or treasure, but it did require a fundamental sense that individual well-being actually required foresight, small daily compromises, and acts of cooperation, lest disorder turn into chaos. Interest could provide no spirituality, but it could provide ethics and ethical habits that, even if based in utility, could reinforce morality and enhance political stability.
I'm still amazed to realized that Tocqueville was more right than wrong about America and to realize that Americans are probably unique in their belief that individual interest can be a source of virtue. An example of this belief is that Americans are most willing to believe that the ones who fight for their individual interest successively and become right are good people who deserve what they earned than the French.
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Stupidest thing I've read this week:
Dennis Friedman, a psychiatrist, says employing a nanny can turn your little boy into a serial womaniser (as if working mothers don’t have enough to feel guilty about). According to Dr Friedman, a nanny introduces a boy to the idea of the Other Woman who will always cater to his needs.
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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.
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Fascinating excerpt from Evan R. Goldstein's article on Sheena Iyengar and her new book, The Art of Choosing, which is on my reading list for this year:
Her experiments have also looked at the psychological costs associated with making unpleasant decisions, like whether to discontinue life-sustaining treatment for an infant. Doctors have historically taken a paternalistic approach to their relationship with patients, making such anguishing decisions for them. In France, that is still the case. In America, however, since the 1950s, a doctrine of "informed consent" has placed more control in the hands of patients.
So are Americans better off? Along with Simona Botti, an assistant professor of marketing at the London Business School, and Kristina Orfali, an associate clinical professor of bioethics at Columbia, Iyengar compared how French and American parents of children who were removed from respirators were coping. The three researchers found that while the Americans struggled with guilt and resentment, the French were much more at peace with the decision to let their children die.
"When confronted by tragic choices, individuals are likely to be better off if those choices are either physically or psychologically removed from them," Iyengar and her collaborators concluded in a paper last year. They called for a nuanced approach that takes into account how people benefit from not making such agonizing decisions. "The medical professionals I've heard from agree that there is a problem," Iyengar says, "but no solution."
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I found this quote from Zakes Mda about South Africa on point :
In this brave new world, accumulation of personal wealth is dressed up in militarism, as if capitalism is the continuation of the guerrilla warfare that was fought during apartheid.
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