The Republic of Dissent

Your arsenal

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jessa Crispin's review of Sexy Feminism, the latest bling bling work on a comatose subject :

Perhaps my problem with it has more to do with no longer finding feminism to be a useful filter through which to look at the world. The Fourth Wave of feminism (apparently it is a thing, yes) looks exactly like the Third Wave of feminism, and endlessly recapping Girls doesn't seem to be making the world a safer place for women. The two "feminist" works I liked the most recently actually didn't have that much to do with outright feminism: Depression by Ann Cvetkovich and Why Love Hurts by Eva Illouz. (Also: Monoculture by FS Michaels.) They were more about, how do we live within this structure -- or outside this structure -- that was built by the patriarchy without losing our minds. This is the way things are set up, by capitalism and by that whole white male thing, and let's write about what that does to a person. Not just women, which is an important part of it. It has nothing to do with the rejection of feminism, and Brazilian waxes never come up for debate at all! It's about feminism just being one weapon in your arsenal. Your mighty, mighty arsenal.

En quelle année sommes-nous ?

A powerful speech and then nothing as usual!

From Helen Epstein :

The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.

After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech.

Oh Well as the one himself once said words matter and the trouble here starts with the fact that having an 'african' policy doesn't mean much for there is no africa. Moreover, the saddest fact  is that reality when it comes to Obama's deeds in countries on the african continent doesn't matter because of the worst and most dangerous anti-intellectual form of identity politics.

I bet that at least some Nigeriens are happy to have a drone base in Niamey.

A wonderful and irritating country

Et oui:

It is an absurd exaggeration to say that French industrial workers spend only three hours a day doing anything productive. Yet it is also the case that the 35-hour working week, combined with an entrenched role for unions within companies and intrusive labour rules, gives little flexibility for bosses. (...) Yet the damage to France’s image may be harder to shake off. At a time when the country has lost competitiveness to Germany, the economy is sliding into recession, taxes are at a record high, and the government has conceded that it will miss its deficit-reduction target for 2013, genuine concerns about the prospects of turning things around are wide-spread. Clara Gaymard, the French head of GE, an American conglomerate which successfully manufactures high-tech industrial stuff in France, put it well in her response to Mr Taylor’s letter. Yes, she said, “France’s image abroad is poor”. But “we are both a wonderful country and a very irritating one.

The Closet, the sexual revolution, and the female condition

From Nidra Poller:

Contraception and abortion alone could not bring about the desired transformation of the female condition. They were the technology. The metaphysics was what has become known as “gender studies.” In the early days of Women’s Liberation it was makeshift ideology peddled in volumes of look-alike fiction and non-fiction best sellers shouting that maternity was a drag, femininity a hype, sexual differences induced by cynical manipulation, love and marriage an extension of the military industrial complex, and men were chauvinist pigs. No more pink for girls and blue for boys. Sexually marked toys were not abandoned but switched: cars and trucks for girls, dolls and tea sets for boys. Women wanted, or were told they wanted, something called equality.

The harbingers of this “sexual revolution” were, more often than not, closet lesbians. Later we not only discovered that they were lesbians telling heterosexual women to kick their men in the balls and out of their lives, they were also playing stereotypical sexual roles in private, some as simpering mistresses to others more macho than any man could be.

I'm so speechless that I've lost my French!

'Breeding' women who can't win

Awesome stuff from Hilary Mantel:

Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. She was transfixed by appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore simple fabrics, she was accused of plotting to ruin the Lyon silk trade. But in truth she was all body and no soul: no soul, no sense, no sensitivity. She was so wedded to her appearance that when the royal family, in disguise, made its desperate escape from Paris, dashing for the border, she not only had several trunk loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.

Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. When it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’. Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners.

Beauty is always unproblematic and uncontroversial when it is/appears to be empty and yes, David Cameron can't read.

Nous restons tous américains

Pertinent stuff from Glenn Greenwald:

It's certainly true that Americans are justifiably proud of certain nationalistic attributes: class mobility, ethnic diversity, religious freedom, large immigrant populations, life-improving technological discoveries, a commitment to some basic liberties such as free speech and press, historical progress in correcting some of its worst crimes. But all of those virtues are found in equal if not, at this point, greater quantity in numerous other countries. Add to that mix America's shameful attributes - its historic crimes of land theft, genocide, slavery and racism, its sprawling penal state, the company it keeps on certain human rights abuses, the aggressive attack on Iraq, the creation of a worldwide torture regime, its pervasive support for the world's worst tyrannies - and it becomes not just untenable, but laughable, to lavish it with that title.

Assertions of one's nation's exceptionalism are banal and create more obligations than privileges. 

The word is american and America is increasingly going to have an issue with how much others have learned from its recent years.

Fertility not love

Oh no:

Much of the decline in fertility correlates with the development of poorer countries, increasing literacy and education of women, a migration from the country to the city, and a collapse in infant mortality rates with the arrival of modern medicine. All good things. But as Last describes, a population that is both shrinking and increasingly elderly leads to stalled innovation and other serious economic and political problems.

Everyone should be welcome to live life as they choose, remaining single or childless if that suits them. Freedom really does matter. But at the same time we ought to be thinking hard about how to make our society and our culture more child-welcoming. It’s a matter of life and death.

Kill me now! Why should humans be eternal?

Laisse tomber les filles

Pertinent stuff from Carly Lewis:

Male writers have had decades to remedy themselves, but still write jejunely about women, accentuating one isolated, exploitable trait (attractive, rebellious, sweet, rude, slutty, rich) for the sake of producing more easily understood subject matter. Until they learn (or at least try to learn) how to write about female subjects in a way that does not purposefully weave paternalistic generalizations into every paragraph, I propose a moratorium on this stagnant approach to literary writing. Let’s allow women to write about women for a little while. Maybe then we can swap the prevalent illusions of femininity for realistic portraits of women as complex human characters. I’m not saying that women are better writers than men, and I’m not saying all men lack the will to rise above stereotypes in their work (do you hear that, comment section?). I’m saying that something needs to change in the way literary profiles are written and the way the lives within them are handled, and that this would be a good step toward smoothing out what is currently an unbalanced gender structure in literary journalism. Too often, the privileged male writers whose bylines dominate the publications we read fail to write about women in a way that doesn’t simplify female existences into condescending phrases like “sassy kitten” and “bombshell.”

 

America is a problem

From Peter Temin and David Vines, authors of The Leaderless Economy: Why the World Economic System Fell Apart and How to Fix It:

The United States set the example for bank bailouts during the crisis itself, but then it vanished as a world economic leader, (...) Like Britain roughly a century earlier, America has become part of the problem, not the solution.

Linking

Words I munched on all weekend from Norm Gerras:

Racist incidents are, indeed, not just a matter of what is intended, as I have argued many times on this blog. But neither is the 'perception of other people' an adequate criterion. If it were, anyone could claim any word or gesture to be racist and that would settle the issue of whether it was. You could not have a flimsy or unfounded accusation of racism. There has to be some basis in the history and symbolism of the particular racism being alleged - whether anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Romani, anti-Chinese, or whatever - linking the incident or utterance in question with that 'tradition' of racial prejudice and persecution.

Gerras' definition makes me feel uneasy because history and traditions (or rather  precisely perceptions and interpretations of them) can be and are often wrong/problematic.

Extensive, perpetual, and cheap wars

I agree with David Cole's comment on the now infamous US Justice Department's Drone White paper :

Drone technology has made it possible to use lethal force in many situations where we could not or would not have even considered it in the past. Unlike conventional military operations, drone attacks require no “boots on the ground,” and therefore do not pose a risk to American lives. Unlike bombings, they have pinpoint accuracy; they therefore reduce the collateral costs of killing and may be easier to disavow. Because drones can effectively travel the world while being controlled remotely from home, they permit the “war” to move far beyond the battlefield. And drones have made it possible for the US government to do something that was unthinkable before, and should be unthinkable still—to kill its own citizens in secret. In short, drones radically reduce the disincentives to killing. And that may well make a nation prone to use military force before it is truly a last resort. That certainly seems to be what has happened here.

Kenneth Anderson has a interesting take on the subject.

 

Itchy tolerance

From Elissa Strauss:

According to Gawker, [Michael] Bloomberg once told a female colleague to “kill it” when she announced her pregnancy, only after teasing her about being too ugly to be engaged. Another Bloomberg employee complained of the institutional harassment at Bloomberg LP in the late 1990s, and believed that the misogynistic workplace culture was linked to her being raped by her superior in a hotel room. Also, “in 2007 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against Bloomberg LP on behalf of 78 women who claimed that Bloomberg — who at that point was not involved in the day-to-day company operations, despite being a majority shareholder — and Bloomberg LP ‘fostered, condoned and perpetuated’ a hostile work environment for female employees.”

This is pretty bad, right? Nevertheless, nobody seemed to really care when they elected him to mayor the first, second or third time. And nobody seems to really care now either.

Imagine if there was a similar history of his saying or condoning disparaging remarks against blacks or Jews. Our inboxes and Facebook feeds would be filled with celebrity-endorsed pleas to sign online petitions pressuring him to resign from office. He would feel obligated to at least mutter some public apology, even if it clearly wasn’t heartfelt. But talk down to women like this, and the outrage is barely existent. (Think I am over exaggerating? Remember what happened with serial misogynist Charlie Sheen? The actor’s career was derailed by a single anti-semitic comment, after years of reports of domestic abuse and porn addiction.)

Sure, sexism can be more difficult to define than racism or anti-semitism (because humans + sex drives = messy), but when there is a pattern of misogynistic behavior like Bloomberg’s, albeit alleged, I wonder why we are so darn tolerant.

Well, the answer to that question explains in part why Obama is president.

America is America

From Paul Barrett:

The reason why we can’t learn much in a practical sense from other countries is that we’re not other countries, and we’re not going to become other countries. We’re not going to have Australia’s society with Australia’s values and Australia’s attitudes toward firearms.

If your desire is to have a society that is more like that, it would be much easier for you to move to that society than to transpose that society onto this 300 million-person, 3,000 mile wide, incredibly complex, culture-of-many-cultures country.

Well d'oh or may be not!

Sexual Revolution and Counterrevolution

Sugary excerpt of the day from Kathryn Joyce:

Even among nonhysterics, John Kerry’s 2004 defeat was attributed by liberal writers in part to his outspoken wife, and the excesses of the Tea Party are denounced most vigorously by Republican moderates who ridicule the movement’s female politicians as unserious.

Even in the Democrats’ 2012 convention, lauded for women’s central role, First Lady Michelle Obama’s otherwise powerful speech discounted her entire professional life in favor of her role as “mom in chief.”  Listening to that speech, I don’t hear hysteria but rather calculation, which is sadly realistic at that. Understanding why it’s still necessary means understanding what continues to drive the backlash. And it demonstrates that, if the sexual counterrevolution is ever over, the unfinished work of the original revolution is still waiting.

Détruire n'est pas créer

I agree with Tim Black on this:

Under Cameron’s gaze, the problems in Mali are simply collapsed into a grand narrative in which good people fight bad people, just as Blair, alongside President George W Bush, proceeded to view world affairs through the prism of the ‘war on terror’.

The narcissism of this essentially Blairite approach to foreign policy is as incredible as it is reckless. In each case, they really do think this conflict is about them. Arbitrarily chosen, far-flung trouble spots act as ad hoc stages on which a Western leader can show the people back at home just what a good person he is. For Cameron, it was Libya and now neighbouring African states. For Blair, it was the Former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq.

It was a grisly irony, then, that while Blair spoke of the necessity of intervention in north Africa, of trying to do the right thing, the stage of his most infamous display of doing the right thing – Iraq – appeared once more on the fringes of the world’s news bulletins: a suicide bomber, aided by several others, had attacked a police headquarters in the northern city of Kirkuk. At least 36 people were killed and 105 were injured.

At some point, there has to be the recognition that as Camus would say détruire n'est pas créer and that destroying monsters ( which is more often than not about seeking them desperately) isn't the same as fixing problems that are so complex that they require something more than the use of force.

That said power, faith and money have pierced Blair's eyes and ears, which explains why he isn't just irrelevant, but the epitome of what political success can do to the people who are more ambitious and self-righteous than anything else.

Expressive politics

I agree with Sandy Livinson on this:

What I want to do now, though, is simply to vent about the patent irresponsibility of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in appointing his friend Michael Cowan to replace John Kerry as senator, apparently for no other reason than his (Gov. Patrick's) desire to have an African-American Democratic senator for at least four monts or so, and regardless of the fact that there is no reason at all to believe that Sen. Cowan, as I presume he'll become tomorrow or very shortly thereafter, has any real knowledge about national political issues that may in fact come up in the next four months.  This is "expressive politics" at its absolute worst, and Gov. Patrick should be ashamed of himself.  Frankly, it is the kind of self-indulgent gesture by someone with power that gives "affirmative action" (which I support) a bad name with many Americans.  He has, in one instant, disserved his state, his party, and the nation (even if, as I presume, Sen. Cowan is an extremely fine and able person whom all of us would be proud to have as a friend or, if governor of Massachusetts, an aide, as he was.)  Nothing in my remarks should be read as casting aspersions on Mr. Cowan's personal character (other, frankly, than that he didn't have the personal self-discipline to exercise what Madison might have described as the "civic virtue" to tell the Governor that he is highly flattered but not really qualified for the job). 

All politics nowadays is expressive politics, which is almost always a potent and dangerous form of identity politics.

Deval Patrick is Obama 1.0, he hasn't yet updated his operating software to make his errors of judgment appear to be brilliant avant-gardism and awesomely historic.

Realpolitik and hypocrisy

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...!

Le mal au Mali

The pic of the day via Spiked:

Mali, Niger, France, US, Whac-A-Mole

From the great Stephen W. Smith:

The bigger question is not why France decided to intervene but why America has held off. Is it simply imperial overstretch and war-weariness? That seems a little thin, given the hue and cry in Washington about ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘terrorist safe havens’. After all, the Sahara is six times as big as Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. And why sink money into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak links to international terrorism, but not lift a finger to stop AQIM from taking over Mali? Unless, of course, in addition to a division of labour with the French, the point is to ‘disaggregate’ the multiple terrorist threats in Africa, tackling each individually rather than addressing any common denominator, and so deny jihadism a chance to coalesce. In this regard, even if the French were drawn into the quicksand in Mali, Nigeria would most likely remain the region’s focal point for the US: with 150 million inhabitants, it is the most populous state as well as the biggest oil producer south of the Sahara, and has an active homegrown salafist-jihadist group, Boko Haram (‘Westernisation Is Sinful’). When I put these thoughts to a US military staffer involved in anti-terrorism in Africa, he replied tersely: ‘What we’re doing in Africa is a sort of Whac-A-Mole’ – a reference to an arcade game in which players force moles back into their burrows by hitting them on the head with a mallet. He went on to quote the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams: ‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ Well, not any longer perhaps. But France has done precisely that.

THIS can't end well!

Also on beauty

Quote of the early morning from Nadeem Aslam:

(...) beauty is a way of mourning the dead.

It isn't your penis stupid!

From Rod Liddle:

I have lost count of the times my own penis — a harmless enough creature, really — has been invoked, most usually by women, during an attempted refutation of some point I have made in an article. It is, I have been assured, minuscule, or inoperative, or unwashed, or diseased, or nonexistent. Sometimes all of these things at once. And as with Mary [Beard], the remainder of my physical being is not left unremarked: fat, hideous, stinking, vile, ugly… oh, lordy, we could be here for weeks. It is nothing to do with misogyny; it is just what people reach for when they, perhaps temporarily, hate someone. I remember a short while ago a complaint that Muslims in the public eye were subjected to the most horrid nastiness — the journalist Mehdi Hasan was one of the loudest complainants. Again, no, Mehdi; it’s not your religion, or the colour of your skin — it’s you. It’s just you.

Aahh, the only answer to Liddle is it isn't your penis, it's you. That said, Rod Liddle is a dick!

Pornography and propaganda

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

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

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

Southern dignity

From Garry Wills:

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

It is easy, comforting, and convenient to blame American idiocy on the South, it fits perfectly in the dumb culture wars narrative.

Flattening

Dan Drezner on Tom Friedman:

Friedman clearly needs a sabbatical from the rigors of column-writing to get his head back in the game.  In the interest of raising our country's foreign policy discourse, I beg you to put him on leave.

It is just sad to see someone stop growing and decaying

Primus inter pares

From Kevin Jon Heller:

Fortunately — though I know this comes as a shock to the US, which likes to pretend that it is primus inter pares — the US doesn’t get to unilaterally determine whether Palestine is a state. Nor does Israel (and note that that Rice’s “direct negotiations” lament is simply designed to give Israel a veto over Palestinian statehood by continuing to avoid negotiating in good faith).

My suggestion: at all future UN meetings, [Ambassador Susan] Rice should avoid turning her head toward the seat with the State of Palestine placard.  That will make it much easier for her to pretend that more than 70% of the world’s states didn’t recently vote to recognize Palestinian statehood.

Bien envoyé mais c'est plus compliqué !

Obama as a militaristic social democrat

I disagree partly with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Obviously, Obama is no socialist. But ask me if I think he's a (surprisingly militaristic) social democrat and you'll get an affirmative answer, which in my book makes him a lot more of a liberal on domestic issues than any other modern Democratic president.

I don't think Obama's militarism is surprising at all for it takes guts, audacity to be anything else these days in American presidential politics and Obama is only audacious in his speeches; furthermore Obama's liberalism is both a fantasy and an glitzy accessory used to keep him fashionable.

Gender bias and denial

The absurdity of the day from Heather Mac Donald:

Absent a showing that gender discrimination is causing the selection of inferior leaders, the sex of politicians and government officials is of no public import. And feminists’ cherished conceit that women today face a wall of overt or unconscious bias rests on deliberate blindness to the facts. No elite organization today fails to incorporate oppressive gender and race consciousness into its every hiring and promotion decision. Any woman in the public realm not acutely aware that her gender is a plus in getting selected for panels and media appearances, in all likelihood catapulting her ahead of more qualified male participants, is living in a state of denial.

Well, America is particularly in a state of denial when it comes to gender...

Cheap

Ah:

Though a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, several states retain trigger laws that would come into force if Roe v Wade were ever overturned (see map). Leaving them in place is a cheap way for politicians to place themselves on one side of a culture war without having to accept the consequences of their position.

Nowadays, in America and elsewhere, being successful in politics means being cheap!

Still Hubris and incompetence

From Brendan O'Neill:

What the current instability in north Africa really reveals is not that Islamists are taking over the world, but rather that Western governments are utterly incapable of acting in their own interests on the international stage these days. The chasm that now separates what is in the West’s interests and what the West actually does in global politics is enormous. So determined were the British and French to score some PR points by bombing Libya in 2011 that they didn’t give a moment’s thought to the potential consequences – and now the French military, backed by Britain, is getting stuck into the Libyan fallout in Mali, and both governments are panicked by what is happening in Algeria. The true danger on the world stage today is not a global Islamist conspiracy to demolish Western values, but rather the fact that international affairs is now overseen by immature, narcissistic showboaters who know nothing of realpolitik, nothing of diplomacy, nothing of blowback, and nothing of history.

The trouble with hubris and incompetence is that they lead to a stubborn blindness that makes results inconsequential for the emphasis is placed on feeling good rather than on doing what works.

Sexual rights

Food for thought from Alice M Milller via Balkinzation:

Contemporary sexual rights work has some of this same tendency in the hands of the nations who have picked up the standard as part of their geopolitical positioning.  Moreover, perhaps because sexual rights has had to gain credibility as a form of rights work, advocates have often mistaken respectability for respect.   There are many moments in which ‘progress’ in the sexual rights claims of one group has been made by the strategic clambering of one group  up the ladder of respectability over the backs of others.   Some sub-groups ascend the sexual hierarchy by conforming to as many of the prevailing standards of sexual legitimacy as possible.   Other advocates seek the longer and more difficult route of changing the standards of sexual legitimacy for everyone. Think of the respectability attached to monogamy, sex without money, regulated fertility.  These short cuts to advance by groups are not new problems, or unique to sexuality, nor are they likely to end—they are part and parcel of social struggles. 

The incult experts

Sugary excerpt of the day from Slavoj Žižek:

What is new today is that, with the financial crisis that began in 2008, this same distrust of democracy – once constrained to the third world or post-communist developing countries – is gaining ground in the developed west itself: what was a decade or two ago patronising advice to others now concerns ourselves.

The least one can say is that this crisis offers proof that it is not the people but experts themselves who do not know what they are doing. In western Europe we are effectively witnessing a growing inability of the ruling elite – they know less and less how to rule.

Conceptual boxes

From Daniel Drezner:

Foreign policy pundits are just like the rest of the monkey-brain population -- we like to put things in clear conceptual boxes -- particularly when we lack specific knowledge of the particulars, as is the case with Mali.  It will be easy, in the coming days, to put Mali into the "Afghanistan" box (bad) or the "Libya" box (good or bad depending on your partisan affiliation) or what have you.  Given that France and the West African countries are willing to shoulder the primary military burden of this engagement, however, it would seem that the U.S. could ramp up some humanitartian assistance for the affected areas.

Ah haven't we seen all of 'THIS' before and has fixing it ever worked?

Amour and Beckett

From Stefany Anne Golberg:

When we say that love is ineffable, as Beckett knew, what we mean is that, when we love, we don’t know what the hell we are doing. We can’t stop talking through it, trying to figure it out. We think we ought to be talking about everything, doing everything, doing anything — breaking into spontaneous rage, talking about suicide, playing games, complaining about our boots — instead of just loving. We wait and wait and wait. Inevitably, boredom creeps in, terror creeps in. (...) When we attempt to utter what we think we know, Beckett wrote, we are doomed, doomed to fail. Trying to talk about love may be the most futile performance of all. But just because words fail love doesn’t mean that love fails. Samuel Beckett is not known for writing explicitly about love. But he was writing about love all the time.

There is a lot of Samuel Beckett in Michael Haneke!

Not yet

This from Gregory Mann is worrisome:

Mali differs from Afghanistan in important ways.

Mali is not (yet) a deeply militarized society — although in the months since Tuareg fighters returned from Qadaffi’s Libya that is changing rapidly.

Mali is not (yet) a narco-state. Northern Mali has become a lucrative zone for drug smuggling, which finances al Qaeda franchises worldwide. Yet none of those drugs are produced in Mali, where Afghanistan’s poppy growers have no parallel. Faced with stiffer surveillance and interdiction, smugglers will go elsewhere.

Finally, Mali is not (yet) a failed state. True, it is grievously weakened, and its army is in disarray. But the government continues to function in the territory it holds. Children go to school, civil servants go to work, and people go about their business.

 I have the sinking feeling that most people are guessing when it comes to Mali just as they were about Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and that more often than not their guesses are not even educated, but based on hubris and wishful thinking.

Owning Mali

From Robert Fox:

Once more we are hearing of the need to combat an international threat from global Islamist extremism. No one dares use the term ‘war against terror' any longer, but the West faces many of the same questions as in the campaigns launched by President George W Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq.

France is in danger of finding that it owns the Mali problem, so weak is the Mali government and its forces. A long and uncertain ground campaign awaits them.

It's always dangerous to own a country one doesn't understand, isn't willing to allow to grow up and to thus make its own decisions.

Irresistible urge

The sentence of the day from Charlemagne:

However much successive French presidents say that they want to put an end to post-colonial intervention in Africa, with few other takers for the job it usually proves irresistible at some point.

Predictable unknowns

Pertinent stuff from James Blitz:

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

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

Saving women from brown men

I agree with Kweli Jaoko on this with the usual caveat that I don't agree with the west/rest division:

The banality, say, of tweeting and hashtagging, is part of the socio-historical through which misogyny becomes reflexive. Banality becomes the training we put ourselves through to make misogyny reflexive. What might it mean to understand misogyny through the kind of training that produces reflexes? Certainly the banality of tweeting and hashtagging labors to traffic the misogyny of #TeamMafisi and pass it off as ordinary, everyday, as part of the affects and intensities exchanged through the internet, and therefore something one must put up with. The fallacy is that misogyny is slightly inconveniencing.

As Western media deploys an Orientalist lens that locates rape and misogyny squarely in India—meaning, in the Global South, outside the West, and, yet again, as the need to save brown women from brown men—I would like us to think locally. Misogyny is not just a problem in India; in Kenya; or on Twitter. It is a problem everywhere, including here in the West from where I write.

Well it is always easier and satisfying even to criticize the barbarians rather than to recognize the world has, how should I put it, a woman problem!

Bad-man stories

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend from Scott Reynold Nelson on Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, which I'm planning to see because of what Roger Ebert said about it and because I don't want Spike Lee to be right in this case :

Immediately after the Civil War, African-American men built these powerful, folkloric characters in a world where slavery had ended but attacks against black men and women had intensified. The stories of quiet, unpredictable, and violent men who were fearless and died at the end could be simultaneously cautionary tales about the dangers of challenging white authority and covert stories about the thrill of resistance.

They are fantasies about striking back. Yet they are frank about how dangerous fighting back could be. Bad-man stories passed into rhymed insults called "the dozens," then into blues songs, then into rap, and finally into hip-hop.

They were also emulated and twisted by white interpreters into "coon" songs popular for decades, then by Jim Croce in "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and finally wended their way into blaxploitation films. Indeed, the stories have been so distorted that it is difficult to learn about the original songs, the parodies having outshone the originals. The legendary African-American bad man became irresistible to white interpreters simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the image of a quiet, violent, fearless black destroyer. The bad-man story that freed people told about slavery and its aftermath was quickly converted into the story of the sullen black stranger, the zoot-suit Negro with a razor in his pocket, the dangerous ghetto demigod.

A quagmire in the desert

Art Goldhammer on the French intervention in Mali:

I don't know if it is possible to have a quagmire in a desert, but Mali may offer an example.

The problem is that wars nowadays are won on TV especially when the victims are more than likely going to be people with no media access and to whom most, especially journalists, will have a hard time relating to!

The Hollywoodization of torture

Quote of the early morning from Karen J. Greenberg:

Hollywood, that one-time bastion of liberalism, has provided the final piece in the perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture policy.  If that isn’t a happily-ever-after ending, what is?

Hollywood has never really been about liberalism as much as it has always been about triumphalism. It embraces torture through Zero Dark Thirty because it has no memory (it gets in the way of good and fluffy stories and of the romanticization of history) and believes that everything did indeed changed after 9/11 including what is permissible and forbidden. 

The paternalistic instinct to 'fix' Haiti

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

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

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

Sex makes Americans stupid

Great stuff from Katherine Franke:

In an ironic sort of way, sex and sexuality have been collateral victims of recent advances in the rights of gay people to the extent that their claims have been framed as a right to family, not a right to sexual freedom.  Whether by design or by accident, some of the advocates of marriage equality who have defended and celebrated the sanctity, dignity and special-ness of marriage have fortified the rather conservative notion that sex outside of marriage (whether it be adultery or hook ups with people you find out the internet) is somehow indecent and worthy of reproach.

            Thomas Friedman famously observed that “9/11 made us stupid” – well, sex, it seems, makes us even stupider.  At precisely the moment when gay people’s right to marry seems to be reaching a positive tipping point, sexuality is being driven back into the closet as something shameful and incompatible with honor (in the case of Petraeus) or decency (as in the case of Clash).   How did we get to this curious place, a place with a politics that would be almost unimaginable to the sexual freedom fighters of Stonewall?

I wish Franke hadn't used Tom Friedman to ake such a poignant point.

Excessive trust in one's own judgment

Sugary excerpt of the day from Conor Friedersdorf:

Obama and [John] Brennan may both be more thoughtful men than most, as their supporters argue. The problem with both is their excessive trust in their own judgment. A prudent person does not trust himself with the unchecked power to kill in secret, nor does he trust the executive branch with so extreme an unchecked power in a system constructed around checks and balances.

Our era is the one of Me so nothing new here.

 

 

 

Collective guilt

Great stuff from Sadhvi Sharma:

The Delhi rape has led to an outburst of middle-class angst about modern India and its populace, and has generated widespread demand for more authoritarian social control. Commentators have turned this extreme act of violence into a symbol of nationwide decay, encouraging every Indian to assume guilt. With everything from Bollywood to Indian family values, from economic growth to parenting style, being called into question, the reaction to the rape appears more and more removed from the incident itself.(...)There is something perverse about the way we’re all encouraged to feel culpable for this crime. The aspiring, emerging nation of India appears simultaneously anxious about its economic and social transformations, and particularly about how those transformations are impacting on a certain class of men, who are apparently ill-equipped to deal with them. ‘Is the sight of a young, smartly-dressed educated female professional generating a sense of displacement in men?’, asks one journalist. The feminist writer Urvashi Butalia thinks an increase in the incidence of rape in India is related to the slowing down of economies in recent years and the fact that the ‘slice of the pie’ is getting smaller. That is, faced with rapid economic and cultural change, the ordinary Indian male becomes an even more brutal creature.

Tragedies encourage irrationality and oversimplifications for accepting that le mal, evil, unconscionable acts are banal and that shit happens is usually difficult and so unsatisfying!  

Rien ne change

Obviously, I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

t is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus.

Quelle surprise!

2013

One short sentence: Happy New Year to all; my hiatus ends Monday!

Newtown and Nakedness

Best thing I read about the Newtown tragedy so far from Bill Benzon:

Remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? The Emperor parades before the town proudly display his costly and gorgeous new outfit, NOT! For, as everyone sees, he's naked. But no one says anything for fear of displeasing the Emperor. And then one little boy blurts out "he's bloody naked!" and the whole delusion collapses.

Everyone saw what the boy saw, but no one knew that their neighbor saw the same thing. Everyone was quaking in their boots in fear that they, and they alone, couldn't see the Emperor's fine raiment. Therefore, there must be something terribly wrong with them. But there wasn't. Their eyesight was fine. The little boy's cry showed them that.

These terrible gun tragedies are like the little boy's cry. Now we all can see IT. But what is this IT that we can see, and why do we so quickly forget that we saw it? Why does seeing IT seem to make this failure of vision even worse? For that's what it does: "But after moments of healing, the partisan divide in attitudes toward guns has seemed only to accelerate after similar past events, as in Columbine, Colo." Just what is it that's been polarizing the American body politic over the last forty years?

The American literary ivory tower

Interesting stuff from Tim Parks:

America is very much a net exporter of literature. Its novels are read and translated worldwide, where readers generally accept miles and Fahrenheit, pounds and ounces, AM and PM and indeed have grown accustomed to these old-fashioned, American oddities (when it comes to doing science, of course, Americans use the more practical European systems). In Germany, for example, where around fifty percent of novels are foreign works in translation, Roth’s and Franzen’s characters are not obliged to discuss distances in kilometers.

Conversely, America imports very little—only three to four percent of novels published in the States are translations—and what it does import it tends to transform as far as possible into its own formulas and notations, in much the same way that Disney has turned every fable and myth worldwide into a version of Mickey Mouse. This situation is a measure of American power, but brings with it the danger of mental closure and inflexibility. Speaking recently at a conference in Milan, the Italian literary agent Marco Vigevani, lamented that fewer and fewer American editors are able to read novels in Italian, French, and especially German, and this inevitably has reduced their enthusiasm for publishing foreign literature, since they are obliged to rely on external readers for advice.

 

Tocqueville, Europe and America

From Danilo Breschi:

In America, the matrix of individual freedom is "republican," and it is older than equality. It creates, within American democracy, devices of self-government decentralizing the exercise of sovereignty: freedom of speech and of the press, "jury," the idea of law as a duty to partake in public affairs.

In Europe, equality is imposed before individuals develop awareness of their own freedom and independently of any practice of the latter. The matrix of the continental idea of equality is absolutist and is ensured by the royal gaze. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, he wrote that "this kind of love for independence grows out of certain particular temporary mischiefs wrought by despotism, and is never durable; it passes away with the accident which gave it birth. What seemed to be love for liberty turns out to be mere hatred of a despot." For Tocqueville a "habit of despotism" was ingrained in the French people, becoming a sort of widespread popular culture.

Another reason to read Tocqueville.