The Republic of Dissent

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.

The Albino body parts trade

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

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

Child sacrifice and witchcraft

More scary proofs of the destructiveness of irrational and inhuman superstitions and traditions:

The practice of human sacrifice is on the rise in Uganda, as measured by ritual killings where body parts, often facial features or genitals, are cut off for use in ceremonies. The number of people killed in ritual murders last year rose to a new high of at least 15 children and 14 adults, up from just three cases in 2007, according to police. The informal count is much higher -- 154 suspects were arrested last year and 50 taken to court over ritual killings.
Children in particular are common victims, according to a US State Department report released this month. The US spent $500 000 to train 2 000 Ugandan police last year to investigate offences related to human trafficking, including ritual killings.
The problem is bad enough that last year the police established an Anti-Human Sacrifice Taskforce. Posters on police station walls show a sinister stranger luring two young girls into a car below bold letters that call on parents to "Prevent Child Sacrifice".
Human sacrifices have been recorded throughout history and still occur in many countries, including India, Indonesia, South Africa, Gabon and Tanzania. One traditional healer in Uganda, when asked about the phenomenon, pointed to the story told in Genesis, when God asked Abraham to sacrifice a son.

What is alarming is that this trend is going to continue because our time is one where it is possible to claim that cultures are sacred and to use faith to justify the unjustifiable.

Witchcraft and witch-hunts

Appalling and frightening stuff:

Here is one story. It happened in India's Jharkhand state in October 2009, but might have come from any part of early modern Europe. Five women were accused of causing harm, a suspicion bolstered by local witchfinders and a cleric. A mob dragged them before a large crowd, where they were stripped and beaten until the authorities intervened. They were lucky. Every year hundreds of Indians, mostly women, are murdered by their neighbours, usually in the most atrocious manner.
In sub-Saharan Africa the problem is even worse. The war in Congo (1998-2003) killed millions, mostly through starvation and disease. High child mortality was widely blamed on "night dancers" – witches who steal blood and smear poisons on houses. European witches of the 16th century were charged with identical crimes, for instance the Swiss plague-spreaders known as engraisseurs. In 1999 the pro-government chief of Mwenga fled an advancing rebel army, leaving his wife behind with the town's protective charm; the soldiers publicly buried her alive with the charm. In the province of Ituri, as many as 4,000 may have been killed.

Just one more reason to decry the sacralization of traditions and other old, ridiculous an inhumane beliefs justifying the unjustifiable.

Celibacy, gender, and the Catholic priesthood

 Hans Küng on the need for the Pope to stop to refuse stubbornly to reconsider the issue of celibacy for priests:

Why does the pope continue to assert that what he calls "holy" celibacy is a "precious gift", thus ignoring the biblical teaching that explicitly permits and even encourages marriage for all office holders in the Church? Celibacy is not "holy"; it is not even "fortunate"; it is "unfortunate", for it excludes many perfectly good candidates from the priesthood and forces numerous priests out of their office, simply because they want to marry. The rule of celibacy is not a truth of faith, but a church law going back to the 11th Century; it should have been abolished already in the 16th Century, when it was trenchantly criticized by the Reformers.
Honesty demands that the pope, at the very least, promise to rethink this rule -- something the vast majority of the clergy and laity have wanted for a long time now.

My view on the question is that celibacy is just one of the symptoms of an archaic Catholic church, which believes fanatically and dangerously that inhumane traditions and rigidity are the only way to maintain its purity and its authenticity. Hans Küng ought to advise the Pope to let women be priests for that would revolutionize his church and send the message that Catholicism at last believes in equality and that women can communicate with God without any sexual tensions. Moreover, having women priests is a better way to address sex abuse than having married men as priests not because women don't abuse children, but because their inclusion would force the wall of silence to crumble and would make it a lot more difficult for the Catholic Church to believe that children and women are inferior to men and be ignored when they are abused by its members.

The suspicious invisibility of Teenage fathers

I agree with Paul Sagar on this:

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

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

The objectification of the 'African' woman

Atrocious, but ordinary personal story of an Ethiopian wife in the Independent who never made  choices about her life because of her gender to put it gently:

Nurame was in her bed when she was woken by an angry mêlée. In her family's hut there were grown men – an incredible number, 10 or more, all in their 30s, all standing over her father, shouting. They reached for her. At night here, where there is no electricity, perfect darkness falls, and everything becomes a shadow-play of barely visible flickers. But even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. "That was the culture," she says. But it wasn't her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn't want it. "I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut," she says. "I hid in the trees – hah! – but one of the men found me."
She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.
After three days, he finally left her alone in the hut. She ran for miles barefoot back to her family, wanting to return to her life, and to her childhood. She hurried through the door, weeping with joy. "But my father told me that now I had had sex with him, nobody else would want me because I was ruined goods, and I had to go back to him and be a good wife," she says. "My mother was very sad but she said it was true. I thought then, 'I have to do this. I have no choice'. I just prayed to God, 'Please help me, please...' I went back. Soon after that I was pregnant, and what could I do? Hah! Now many years have passed and I have six children. Life is hard for a woman. Hah!"

Many will argue that the ordeal of Nurame are exceptionally harsh and that she is an atypical Ethiopian wife and uncommon 'African' 'woman. That would be a way to dismiss the issue for what Nurame's case shows is that Ethiopian women and women in virtually all African countries are commodities and that the choices that they can make about their lives are limited solely because of their gender. To put it in more provocative terms, African manliness is close to godliness while womanhood is about objectification and the sexual gratification of the African manly king who has great needs. It is for this reason for example that Fela Kuti can write a song about "African women" advising them not to westernize and then marry 27 Nigerians at the same time as if they were sheep thus making the point that the issue is about submissiveness, giving up up individuality in the name of a weaponized and artificial 'africanity' and about respecting the so-called laws of nature and sacredness of an imagined "African" culture.

Political wives as campaign tools

I agree with Justin McKeating on this:

f you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.
Insulting the country’s intelligence by wheeling out the wife seems to be a political tactic for all scenarios. Gordon Brown is seen as too serious by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. David Cameron is seen as not serious enough by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. The meagre amounts of dignity and self-respect on display are such you wouldn’t be surprised to see the two leaders being dropped off at the televised election debates by their mums.

Unfortunately, the use of political wives as campaign tools is worse in American politics for Americans need to believe that only good family men/women make good politicians even though their history shows that it isn't true. The point is that political wives are their husband's best accessory, sometimes that he has to show to show voters that he is a good moral man who loves his wife and his family even though we know that good people don't make good politicians and leaders.  

Benedict XVI as the failed purificator

Attention grabbing bit from the Independent's article on the troubles of the Pope, the Vatican, and the Catholic Church:

When he was crowned Pope nearly five years ago, Benedict promised to clean up the Church. He would not be a showman Pope like John Paul II, he would not flog himself around the world addressing huge stadiums. The Church under his guidance would not have expansiveness as its goal, but purification. It might be a smaller, tighter institution but it would be clean, consistent, and true to its word.
But events of recent weeks suggest that corruption is rooted close to its heart. A wealthy Italian industrialist called Angelo Balducci had been honoured by the Vatican as a gentiluomo del Papa, a "gentleman of the Pope", but then in charges that hit the headlines in Italy last month he was put under investigation for allegedly raking in money from sleazy building tenders. Separately, a member of the Vatican choir claims he was paid to find gay partners for Balducci. Despite the Church's draconian stand on homosexuality, the Vatican has long been known as a gay hot house, and insiders believe that Benedict's elevation changed nothing.
Meanwhile scandals continue to rain down on the Church from abroad. Shortly after Benedict condemned the "heinous acts" of paedophilia among priests in Ireland, accusations of similar acts surfaced in the famous choir of Regensburg, in Bavaria, of which the Pope's brother Georg was director while Joseph Ratzinger was a professor at the university (Georg claims no knowledge of any such abuse during his time there).

History teaches that purification are never possible because more often than not they are used to maintain a code of silence about the injustices of the past to avoid having to acknowledge them and to address the serious issues that they pose. Purification is about repentance without admission or change and that's why they are about continuation with the illusion of transformation and are exposed as such at the first crack on the facade. I have always believed that the designation of Joseph Ratzinger as pope was in fact a thumb at the nose of modernity and of those within the church that believed that what was needed was pope who could have the courage to break with certain ways of the past and to provide the bind between tradition and modernity.  I have the feeling that Benedict XVI's reign is over, but that only his death will make the Vatican choose a successor. In short, the Vatican has lost its head.

Burqa wearers

Fascinating stuff from Andrew Brown:

In France, where there is an inflamed debate on the matter right now, the first investigation carried out by the police last year found that there were 367 women in France who wore burka or Niqab – 0.015% of the population. This was so low that the secret service was told to count again, and came up with a figure of 2,000; in Holland there seem to be about 400, and in Sweden a respectable guess suggests 100. The most fascinating figure of all, though, came from the Danish researchers, who actually interviewed some of the covered women. Most were young, or at least under forty, and half of them were white converts. I think this makes it entirely clear that in modern Europe the burka is not an atavistic hangover, but a very modern gesture of disaffection from and rejection of society, which appeals to a certain kind of extreme temperament.

If those stats are right, it means in my opinion that banning the Burka/burqa is even more of an invitation for women who want to make a point to wear it as an act of defiance and of rejection of 'modern' society. The question that I have then is whether the Burqa/Burka becomes less threatening to the usual suspects if it isn't a symbol of women's submision or of a proof of Islamisation, but simply an instrument of rebellion? My answer is that it doesn't matter for what a woman wants to wear is her business and should never become a matter for the state or for a religion.

Religious strife in Haïti

This is the last thing that Haïti needed:

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

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

To abort not to have the burden of raising a girl

Just one expression comes to mind, 'despairing, but business as usual' after reading this:

IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.
Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?
For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son. In China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.

I'm wondering how soon we are going to have billboards and people claiming that there is a genocide against little girls in the world in order of course to put the focus on abortion and not the context. Glenn Reynolds is already using the word gendercide, interesting.

Deconstructing Geert Wilders

The Daily Telegraph has a portrait of Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right politician whose party is calling for the stop of the Islamization of the Netherlands and increasing its popularity with that message. Sugary excerpt:

Wilders describes his far-Right label as "nonsense".
"My supporters say: 'At last there is someone who dares to say what millions of people think'. That is what I do," Wilders said before the European elections last year, in which the PVV took four of the 25 Dutch seats.
"People are fed up with the government; the leftist elite that has failed them," said Wilders.
(,,,).Arguing that "Islam is the Netherlands' biggest problem," Wilders has urged parliament to ban the Koran, comparing it with Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
He also wants a total ban on the burqa as well as a halt to immigration from Muslim countries and the construction of mosques in the Netherlands.
He is awaiting a hate speech trial trial at home and was barred from entering Britain last year to stop him spreading "hatred and violent messages."
"I want to defend freedom, which I think will disappear into thin air the moment the Islamic ideology gains a stronger foothold on this country," Wilders, who is married to a Hungarian, told AFP.

I'm not alarmed by the ascension of Geert Wilders because his ascension and his views are not new in Europe, Extremism, both on the left and the right, tends to rise everywhere especially in times when there is so economic, social, and political distress, which none of the "legitimate" parties seem to be able to address to the satisfaction of an increasingly impatient and radicalized electorate. One only has to analyze the short, but tumultuous and tragic political career of  Pim Portuyn in the Netherlands or even the long and flashy one of Jean-Marie Le Pen to realize that politicians such as Wilders are always very opportunistic, but that they are rarely able to leave any serious political marks or even to ascend to power without cleaning up their message or at least expanding because soon or later two things happen. The first is that their message is co-opted by other political parties who start to pay attention and to realize that they must find less "intolerant" ways to deal with the concerns of the voters who may be unsavory, but are very real. Sarkozy did it very effectively in 2007 and beat Le Pen at his own. The second thing that happens when politicians such as Geert Wilders are actually very good at politics or very ambitious is that soon or later, they come to the realization that they have to widen their message and that Islamization or any other message exploiting the fear of others and of unwelcome change is not enough to be more than a pestilent gadfly.
For these reasons, what I'm really wonder is whether Wilders is ever going to be willing to form a coalition with other Dutch parties of the right if his party becomes a political force or whether he will be content to remain on the margins believing that the system will collapse. I'm also wondering what is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's opinion of Geert Wilders.

The tyranny and fetishism of culture

Jacob Zuma just won't let me leave him alone when he continues shamelessly and shamefully to use culture as an excuse for his incivility and barbaric manliness:

When the British came to our country they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way ... I don't know why they are continuing thinking that their culture is more superior than others.(...) Bear in mind that I am a freedom fighter and I fought to free myself, also for my culture to be respected. (...) I've not looked down upon any culture of anyone ... and no one has been given an authority to judge others.

What a limited, pompous, and dangerous argument ! I guess we should just let the Talibans stone women in the name of Islam, we should tolerate female circumcision because Africa was colonized and yes, finally,  we should say to "African women" as Fela Kuti would say that they should be grateful to be one of the numerous possessions of "African" men who are all Kings with great needs that no just one of them can satisfy. I have the feeling if Zuma were white, and were justifying the unjustifiable by using culture, he would be called a racist because people would say that he is in fact saying that some people have the right to be savages because it is their nature and because their culture encourages barbarity.

Welcome to the postfeminist world

Midge Decter asserts that the Woman question has been answered badly by feminism, which is therefore passé. I don't disagree with her conclusion, I just disagree with her logic, her assertions, and suppositions particularly when she writes this:

The primary appeal of the women’s movement, then, lay in the message that everything that troubled her was somebody else’s fault. How could any thinking or spiritual discipline designed to help her carry the burden of freedom stand against the siren song of her victimization?
The result of that question is history. There is no need to expand upon what everybody, most of all she herself, knows: a quarter of a century of agitation on her behalf has left her emotionally and intellectually worse off. Especially intellectually. All the demands for unneeded preference in admissions and hiring, all the absurd litigation, all the efforts at speech control and thought control, and most important, all the programs to manage and “improve” the behavior of the men in her life, whether husband, boss, roommate, or date, have left her more disaffected and more mentally self-indulgent than before.
Moreover, just as feminists gained a following by promising that women were non-responsible for their lives and everything in them, so movement spokesmen have extended the principle to cover the content of their own ideological development. Angry with men? say the feminists when it is pointed out to them that relations between the sexes, always delicate, are now almost paralyzed with mutual distrust, we were never angry with men. Hostile to motherhood? Never. Denigrate homemaking? We never for a moment even dreamed of doing that. We have only been saying, give women the option. And so on. It is as if the Marxists, faced with the grinding poverty of Cuba and Nicaragua, were to say. Capitalism? We’ve never been opposed to capitalism.

Fascinating, but narrow arguments, which lead inevitably to the realization that feminism has failed/is failing to achieve its objective. My take of this issue is that feminism is too restrictive and more often than not unusable because in its own way, it reaffirms the limitations of gender without trying to overcome it by asserting as Judith Butler would say that it is an imperative to undo gender, rather to make it an obsession.

Loss, transition, tradition, and modernity

Deep thought of the day from Chaim Potok:

I think that the people who were in possession of the tools to move into modernity are gone

Frightening stats

Just reading this scares me:

There are 41 million girls around the world who should be in primary school all week, but aren't, the Department for International Development says. At least 20 million of them are, like Abigail, in sub-Saharan Africa.
In Ghana, 91% of boys, but only 79% of girls finish primary school. By the time they complete junior high school – for 12- to 15-year-olds – 65% of boys and just 54% of girls are still in lessons, says the lobby group the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition.

This reality is going to be very difficult to change as long as people keep using traditions and the so-called absolute divinity of "ancestral" norms to justify the unjustifiable and the inexcusable.

Motherly warriors

Two questions come to my mind when I read these arguments from Mary Eberstadt against the inclusion of mothers in combat, are we really in 2010? Do women really still have to live for their children as soon as they become mothers::

Nevertheless, it needs to be said: The argument that “women, including mothers, have served in the military, therefore women, including mothers, should serve in the military,” remains a blatant non sequitur. Of course women have, and can, and will serve bravely in all walks of life — including in combat and other violent situations if necessary. As news stories emphasized, for example, the murderous rampage by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, also in November 2009, was interrupted by the courageous intervention of a female soldier — Sergeant Kimberly Munley, who charged him at point-blank range and fired her weapon till eventually he went down. Sgt. Munley, incidentally, is also a mother. Where was it ever written that men have a monopoly on courage, and if it has been, who knows so little as to believe it? The history of humanity and its literature and art abound with examples of extraordinary valor exercised by mothers in particular — typically, on behalf of their children.
In fact, for that very reason, the ideological fervor over the years by feminists demanding women in the military betrays a bizarre kind of anxiety on the part of those exhibiting it. The literature advocating for female soldiers is shot through with breathless, romanticized insistence that women can indeed behave like men — changing truck tires, crawling through mud, urinating standing up, and killing and wounding as necessary. It is a pattern of protestation that raises questions of its own about the convictions of just such advocates. Did feminists and their allies think somewhere deep inside that women couldn’t do these very things — and more?
Yet again, however, this question of whether certain people can tote guns and endure physical discipline and die for their country too is not the same as asking whether they ought to. Many children and teenagers, for example, could work competently through the workday doing menial labor — as many did throughout the centuries leading to relatively recent laws protecting them from child labor. But most people today would not champion that fact to invalidate the laws against child labor or truancy. And for those who might object that this analogy conflates women with children, consider a few more examples of activities that American law puts the brakes on, even though all involve potentially consenting adults: drugs, prostitution, gambling, suicide, assisted suicide, selling oneself into slavery, having sex in public. In all kinds of ways, the law imposes limits on what consenting adults can do.

An awaited return to traditions

No Comment necessary to this pompous assertion by Terence Blacker who seems inebriated by his beliefs in the absolutism of the laws of nature concerning gender:

The idea that, in spite of feminism, the emancipation of the market and a more grown-up attitude among most men to domestic life, an increasing number of woman now yearn to be at home and are pining for a male breadwinner is difficult to take too seriously.

Age, gender and desirability

Key lines from the best post I've read all day from Christian over at Ok Cupid who is trying to make the case for older women:

A woman's desirability peaks at 21, which, ironically enough is the age that men just begin their "prime," i.e. become more desirable than average. (...) you can see that a woman of 31 is already "past her prime," while a man doesn't become so until 36. As we mentioned above, after age 26, a man has more potential matches than his female counterparts, which is a drastic reversal of the proportion in young adulthood, when women are much more sought-after. Because men's dating preferences skew so young, and women's are age-equitable, men peak later, and have a longer plateau of desirability, than women.

There is some many things I could say, the only thing that I would say is that cougars (I love hating that term) are the future.

Zumaland is the heart of darkness

I'm not going make a comment, but since today is the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release, I will only say that I hope that there is a way to clone Mandela before he dies to avoid South Africa and Africa to remain Zumaland.

Prudent censorship

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

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

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

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Harmful sex

I don't know what to feel after reading this :

I am pretty confident that that sex is more likely to be physically harmful for girls than for boys: Obviously, only girls can get pregnant (something that isn’t strictly a physical harm, but that is often harmful when unintended, and harmful because of the physical consequences of the sex). Also, unless I’m mistaken, females are more likely to get HIV from males than vice versa; females are more likely to suffer directly from the effects of HPV, such as death, illness, or infertility caused by cervical cancer; and females are more likely to become infertile as a result of various sexually transmitted diseases than are males.I’m less confident (hence the “I suspect”) about the emotional matter, but my sense is that at least in our society today females are still more likely to feel used and degraded as a result of a sexual relationship that has not gone as they had hoped, and in particular that involved less emotional commitment from the other person than they had hoped. Perhaps this is something that is innate; I can see why it might be, though I don’t know if there is any serious evidence of that. Still, whether this stems from nature or nurture, my sense is that this is indeed the case today in America.

I "suspect" that there is something fundamentally wrong with Eugene Volokh's views of gender and of sex and that he interprets his facts wrongly not to say ideologically; I guess the most important thing is that his views don't offend me (it's so easy nowadays to use offensiveness as an excuse to avoid debate and to shame the other into submission), but they do bother me very much because they are restrictive and lead to the conclusion that nature is queen when it can be wrong.

Ubuland

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

Family

Agnès Varda on Family and her feminist principles:

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family, and whenever it goes very well—some families don’t get on that well—but we need the idea of family—the concept more than this one and this one. It’s peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families, and the good friends I have—I see them all the time. We choose our family—the family of what we believe in, people who share our opinions—it can be political, it can be artistic, it can be a position, as feminism. I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don’t even want to meet them or see them.

Well, a least she tries to practice what she preaches.

A beer and six cane strokes

Thought-provoking story in Der Spiegel about a woman in Malaysia sentenced to six cane strokes for having a beer in a hotel:

The whole thing began in July 2008. Kartika took a long weekend trip to a beach-side hotel in Malaysia with a few friends, a relaxing break from the stressful daily grind. Her husband, Muhammad Afandi Amir, watched the children while she was gone. Born in Singapore and a member of the country's Muslim Malay minority, he makes his living as a computer technician.
In the afternoon, Kartika checked into the Legend resort hotel in Cherating, whose slogan is "discover heaven on earth." The hotel has an international clientele, so the six guests from Singapore aroused little interest when they met up in the hotel bar in the evening and ordered a small Tiger Beer each.
Beer is available throughout Malaysia. The 7-Eleven convenience store chain, for example, offers nine different varieties, from Singapore's Tiger Beer to Guinness from Ireland and Carlsberg from Denmark. About 26 percent of Malaysians are of Chinese descent, while 8 percent are of Indian descent and 12 percent belong to indigenous populations. The alcohol ban affects only the Muslims, including the 53 percent of the population who are Malays. These last are the group that has steered the country's fortunes since its independence. Shariah law also affects only the Muslims, and is enforced especially strictly in three of Malaysia's 13 states. The Legend hotel is located in one of those three: Pahang.
The young women in the hotel bar raised their glasses to each other at around 6 p.m. Kartika was the only Muslim in the group -- the rest were Chinese and Indian. None of them seem to take particularly seriously the strict alcohol ban that applied to Kartika. The waiter didn't seem to care either; at least, he didn't ask to see her identity card, which would have shown her religious affiliation.
Half an hour later, religious police came storming into the hotel foyer. Was it a routine check? Or had an informer in the hotel blown the whistle? Kartika was the only one brought in to the station, where she had to give a urine sample. The police questioning lasted until 6 a.m. And at some point during her interrogation, Kartika admitted to occasionally posing for advertising photographs in Singapore. The keepers of the country's religious code were suddenly all ears.

Sex crimes and hypocrisy

I can't muster enough energy to be outraged about the arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland. I don't have any bone in this fight, but what gets to me about this  murky affair is how much it demonstrates that sex crimes, especially in America where morality can't be separated from anything, aren't about the act, the sex but about, sorry to be crude here, but I believe that crudeness is necessary in order to get my point across, who got fucked, who did the fucking, and how society feels about these people. What do Polanski, Michael Jackson, R. Kelly have in common ? If your answer is nothing, then you must be living in a world where Obama can still walk on water or where God chose Bush over Gore. Can we please be consistent or at the least stop to act as if societies, no matter how modern they are, view certain sex acts as criminal for all their citizens. I'm trying to say that when it comes to sex, the views of most societies are not only sexist, but elitist. I'm not worry about Roman Polanski, he is going to be just fine even if  he is shipped to California.

Sense and nothingness

I would like to be able to always take Terry Eagleton seriously but I wonder sometimes if he is able to see trees because he needs to be a true believer to have a purpose to live and to make sense of the meaninglessness of religion or rather of the constructed religiosity of nothingness (hat tip: Norm Geras)  :

Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture.  The scandal of the New Testament -- the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois -- all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version.  I'm presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan "God, Country, and Notre Dame."  I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries.  Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless.  He can't be used as a totem or fetish in that way.  He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so.  His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it.  Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

Changing normalcy

Heaven on earth... umh no quite just on the US for there are still a couple ways I could think to improve this situation, but in any case, I have always agreed with Baudelaire's assertion that marriage (any kind of categorization of love or sexuality for that matter) was created to disinfect love:

Terisa, 41, is at the center of this particular polyamorous cluster. A filmmaker and actress, she is well-spoken, slender and attractive, with dark, shoulder-length hair, porcelain skin—and a powerful need for attention. Twelve years ago, she started datingScott, a writer and classical-album merchant. A couple years later, Scott introduced her to Larry, a software developer at Microsoft, and the two quickly fell in love, with Scott's assent. The three have been living together for a decade now, but continue to date others casually on the side. Recently, Terisa decided to add Matt, a London transplant to Seattle, to the mix. Matt's wife, Vera, was OK with that; soon, she was dating Terisa's husband, Larry. If Scott starts feeling neglected, he can call the woman he's been dating casually on the side. Everyone in this group is heterosexual, and they insist they never sleep with more than one person at a time.

Culture of fear or fear of culture and humanity

Pankaj Mishra on what he considers to be a culture of fear that is created in too many countries by the increasing popular sentiment that foreigners are assailing their land, their culture, and their national identity as seen in Christopher Caldwell's latest book on the threat of Islam and of Muslims to Europe, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West :

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger that "minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties".
This at least partly explains why a few hundred women in headscarves incited such fierce passions in a nation-state whose geopolitical and cultural insignificance in recent years has only been partly obscured by its hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In The Politics of the Veil, the distinguished scholar of gender studies Joan Wallach Scott explains how the banning of a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck affirmed an "imagined France", one that was "secular, individualist and culturally homogenous" and "whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation". Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were directly affected by the law on the foulard, were "strikingly absent from the debates" in France, which were dominated by intellectuals and politicians frantically defining the dangerous "other" (typically by describing the veil as, in Jacques Attali's words, a "successor to the Berlin wall").
The veil has now been turned into, Scott writes, a highly charged "sign of the irreducible difference between Islam and France". Elsewhere, too, politicians and journalists - self-proclaimed "liberals" as well as unabashed rightwingers - rhetorically ask whether "Islam", which allegedly enforces a harsh divine law on all Muslims, is compatible with "European" values of reason and tolerance, which are supposedly derived from the Enlightenment (or Christianity, as Sarkozy blurted out in 2007, in a revealing breach of republican protocol).

I have always thought that the debate about culture, assimilation, and identity masks what I believed to be the essential debate of our time, which is how free are we allowed to be when choosing who we are as people, citizens or whatever else? Because if one really thinks about the subject, one has to come to the realization that only people who believed in the totalitarianism of the Good./traditions/God are really obsessed with culture and with the idea that civilized people/nations can become barbarians or barbaric. The idea that if there is no God, no moralistic state or culture then everything is permissible is laughable and obscurantist because it dooms humanity since it asserts that people are incapable of making good decisions and that there is nothing that they won't forbid themselves to do if something or someone doesn't forbid them to do bad things or rather things that are for them. I may be stupidly or charmingly naïve but I don't think that banning the veil in France solves any problem with Islamism and I don't even think that it is the goal because otherwise, Sarkozy would have had the wildly imaginative idea to just ban Islamism and to therefore put the State at the center of deciding what kind of Islams are compatible with French Society.

The perils of tradition

A great example of the perils of the divinization of traditions and of culturalism

For as long as I can remember, I’ve placed Pakistani culture in the category of indifference/acceptance when it comes to the matter of protecting women and children from the effects of domestic violence.
As a child, domestic violence was an inextricable feature of the culture in which I grew up. My parents, who emigrated from Pakistan in the eighties, settled in a small town in New Jersey where we interacted little with the Pakistani Christian community. But I recall clearly the time I was six years old and we went to Philadelphia for some kid’s birthday party. I tugged at my mom’s blue dupatta. “Hey mom, what happened to Aunty N.’s arm?”
My mom looked at the aunty’s cast-covered arm and then at me. “Her husband broke it,” she said calmly. For the rest of the party, I kept peeking in shock and horror at Aunty N. and her husband, who I adored because even though he pinched my cheeks like the other uncles, he always followed it up with some candy.

Expensive speech

I love India, but stories such as this one scare me:

A leading politician of India's ruling Congress party was arrested today and her house set on fire by activists after she suggested that a rival leader be raped so she can better understand the plight of victims.
Rita Bahuguna Joshi, the chief of the Congress party in northern Uttar Pradesh state, was placed under 14 days custody pending investigations for allegedly promoting social enmity, insulting a woman's modesty and insulting a person of lower caste. No charges have been filed yet, but the three offences are punishable by up to 10 years in jail.

Distracting fixations

I agree with this:

(...) fixating on conspicuous religious symbols like the turban or burqa does not feel like an effective way to preserve French traditions and identity, especially when it keeps people out of state schools or other public institutions — just the kind of places where I imagine they have opportunities to study and participate in the culture and traditions that are part of a nation’s heritage.

This woman's work

The best post I've read all day is from Gitl Wallerstein-Braun on Judaism and Feminism. It is short, on point, and interests so no comments are necessary. Sugary excerpt:

As a busy mother of eight children, and a full-time carer of my elderly mother-in-law, a survivor of Auschwitz, I could not get used to the community. Neighbours, for decades, just gazed through me, as if I were made of thin air. There was no way or where to return. I realised that just to keep my thoughts positive, I must learn English and pursue education to make something of myself. Thus, I was lucky to find my way to the wonderful world of contemporary art.

The Dumb and the faithful

Ruth Gledhill gives the following take on the Pope's comment on condoms and aids on the road to a continent where his view are deadly because they are listened to by some:

(...) the Pope here is saying it is not condoms in themselves that advance Aids, but that they aggravate it by encouraging promiscuity.
Try telling that to the faithful woman stuck in the village, whose husband returns from work and finding 'relief' in the towns and cities, to demand his conjugal rights. Condom use, were it sanctioned by the Church, could save that woman's life, save her children from being orphaned.
Did the Pope really have to do this? It comes in the wake of the Linz disaster, of Richard Williamson, of the illiterate mother of the child raped by her stepfather excommunicated for saving her 9-year-old's life by signing the necessary abortion document with an 'x'. (The rapist stepfather was not excommunicated, although the doctors also were.)
Pope Benedict XVI has re-opened a running sore in the side of the Church and Africa with another scientifically illiterate attempt to justify a policy that is unjustifiable even by faith.

I don't think that the Pope misspoke or that he did something that he didn't want to do. He thought about what he was going to say on the subject and said it in order to accomplish the goal of his mission in Africa, which is to remind Africans that Catholicism is the true religion. What one does in order to remind people that one's religion is the best and that the others are just copycats is not to be more tolerant or to be more modern, but to be more conservative and old-fashioned in attempts to show a continent forgotten by the world that it has a chance at redemption through other roads than materialism and corrupting ideas such as sexual liberation. In other words, the message is that the willingness of Africans to feel pain, to accept deprivation, and reject a modernization, which in the Pope's mind has dechristianized the West offers the best chance at entering God's kingdom. Quite a program for a continent used to be told what to be!

Chivalry should remain dead

Thoughtful points on Manliness, Feminism, and Chivalry from Brandon McGinley in the Daily Princetonian:

Manliness and feminism should meet at chivalry. This should be their common ground, the place where these two ideas, these two identities, find their most profound expression.

I define modern chivalry as a male disposition of profound respect toward women, which is most importantly and courageously expressed in refusing to make inappropriate sexual advances and defending women from other men who do not abide by that code of respect. It is a disposition that transcends the sexual nature of human males, particularly young men, which rarely orients itself in a respectful manner toward the opposite sex. Chivalry, then, does what it can to replace the aggressive sexuality of young men with a profound and healthy respect for women not because they are weak or helpless, but because they are the object of men's most emotionally and physically dangerous desires.

If there were one word with which true manliness could be defined, it would have to be "courage." It is not strength, force or sex, as too many, particularly young men, perceive, but the courage to use that strength when it is right to do so and the courage to reserve sex only for when it fulfills a true human good. Chivalry requires both of these and many other manifestations of courage; it is one of the strongest expressions of true manliness.

Chivalry should also be embraced by feminism. It tries to harness men's energy and direct it away from the disrespectful misogyny of womanizing and instead toward countering that predisposition. Yes, it does not treat women as equals; it treats them as better than equals, as people who deserve more respect than the hypersexualized male is ready to show. But, in a case of runaway ideology, modern feminism has spurned chivalry as quaint, paternalistic and misogynistic.

Hmmm, I read McGinley’s words and although they are not offensive in themselves, they rub me the wrong way because they sound hallow and because he stops at the water edge of the issue in other to score points on a difficult and complex subject. I’ve never liked the word chivalry not because it sounds old fashioned in the pejorative sense of the term, but because it reminds me of patronizing expressions such as “Christian charity ”and “Loving the sinner not the sin”. What bugs me about chivalry is that it gives men special points for being polite and for treating women elegantly when women receive nothing. Chivalry implies that there is something difficult about being nice and gracious to a woman without receiving something in return, whether at least society’s recognition  or at most a woman’s heart and body. According to that idea, girls, women cannot be chivalrous because chivalry is understating manly strength and virtues that they don’t possess.

Thus, women cannot open doors or engage in any other chivalrous behavior for a men or another woman without it being awkward, humorous or simply inappropriate. The point is that chivalry reinforces gender roles by refusing to recognize that elegance and politeness don’t have more value when it is masculine or when it is directed towards members of the supposedly weaker sex. Thus, the debate isn’t about whether it is acceptable for a man to open a door for a woman or not to slap her when she slaps him. It’s about whether a man should get special recognition from not being a brute or from being civilized while a woman doesn’t because that difference in treatment leads to the conclusion that the man’s task in this case is harder given his superior strength and his nature.

One of the best conversations that I’ve ever had with one of my best male friends was on this issue. He was explaining to me why he had stopped opening doors for women and doing other “free” elegant gestures. He told me that he was simply tired of doing it without receiving any praise any prize, but just a smile or a thank you, which with time had become meaningless. He was tired of chivalry, of doing everything to catch women, he wanted to settle down and to get married.

It is true that feminists make this debate unnecessarily contentious, but that isn’t because they are wrong on the issue, but simply because they have no solutions and would rather have the issue than to settle it once and for all.  Jeanne D’Arc wasn’t just burned because she wanted to chase the English away from France; she was grilled like a pig at the stakes also because she couldn’t be chevalresque and that a woman who doesn’t what men do, who believes in chivalry is a witch that deserves to be burned at the stake. That’s where the crux of the problem lies.

Like a manufactured virgin

William Saletan makes the case for virginity restoration surgery:

[...]The virginity fetishism these women endure is sexist, hypocritical, and totally unrealistic. The pressure applied by families and communities to enforce it is obscene. One woman interviewed by the Times says her fiance's family is insisting that she go to Morocco so a doctor of their choosing can inspect her for proof of virginity. Don't even get me started on the mental sickness of insisting that your wife bleed on your wedding night. And to top it off, the procedure is a sham. Restoring your hymen doesn't make you a virgin.

You and I can sit here all day rehearsing these complaints. And some day, God willing, the twisted culture of virginity hypocrisy will wither away. But until it does, hypocrisy is its own best remedy. Help these women deceive their husbands and parents. If they want artificial hymen restoration, let them have it.

I'm no fan of most cosmetic medicine. It's a surrender to stupid social pressures. It's superficial, unnecessary, and expensive. It perfectly expresses our insecurity and triviality. We should use technology to overcome tragic realities, not to alter stigmatized appearances.

But sometimes, a stigmatized appearance can become a tragic reality. That's the paradox of virginity fetishism. The quality of your soul doesn't matter. If you don't have that bit of tissue between your legs, you're garbage.

I don’t agree with Saletan because I believe that virginity restoration surgery when it is about  upholding cruel traditions and encouraging atrocious behavior is a self-indulgent form of surrender, a way to reaffirm the supposed sacredness of the hymen while given one’s a good conscience by believing the manufacturing an hymen is heroic. I don’t believe that virginity restoration surgery helps the women it is supposed to help because to the contrary, it puts the ones who make them victim in a more definite and accepted position of power by showing them that they are to want to sleep with or to marry virgins. In case of clear moral conflicts as this one, the goal should be to take the easy road out but rather to take on the difficult task to confront those who are willing to reduce a woman to her hymen. The fact that women who enter into a marriage by passing the requirement duplicitously or not to be virgin are condemned to submission (which isn’t necessary a bad thing when it is chosen) and objectification for they will have entered into a contract that makes them their husbands’ possession and that makes the goal of their lives their happiness. That is the reason why honor crimes happen because the husband sees the woman as an object that neither disobeys nor embarrasses him. Virginity restoration shouldn’t make it possible for women to enter into these types of situations.

Writing transgressively about sex

Howard Jacobson on the memoirs of what he calls “Prada Prostitutes,” high-class “hookers such as Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl:

You can't mess around with sex, in life or in literature. It is never not serious. When a man denies the significance of an adultery with the line, "It didn't matter to me," and the wronged woman replies, "Then why did you do it?", they both miss the point. Everything in sex matters, including the experience of its not mattering. Isn't that what O pursues, the sensation of nothing mattering, least of all herself? And isn't that why some men visit prostitutes, for the intense experience of abnegation associated with payment, for which next to nothing is given and next to nothing is felt?

[…] We have to be careful, with sex, what we don't believe. Jean Genet never accepted that Story of O was written by a woman. No woman had a sufficient understanding of sexual degeneracy, he thought. The more fool him. And the more fool those who lambast Belle and Bruna, not for being shallow, but for telling lies. "It's a fantasy," wrote Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian when The Secret Diary of a Call Girl was shown on ITV. Rosie Boycott, writing in the Daily Mail, said the same. For both, what made the programme nonsense were the 68 per cent of prostitutes suffering stress disorder equivalent to a combat veteran's that it didn't show—even though that's the street, and Belle de Jour doesn't work the street. But so what? The prostitute might change her place of business but male desire remains forever male desire. What Belle de Jour does, in Bunting's view, is "buttress men's sense of entitlement to use a prostitute." "Use." Not visit, not hire; "use." That is, depersonalise and do violence to her.

[…] If it is inhumane to belittle the miseries of the prostitute, it is no less inhumane to minimise the miseries that make some men their clients. There is at least this to be said about the Prada call girls with their obliging mouths and vaginas—along with the freedoms they insist on for themselves, they grant men the freedom to be creatures of desire. Why, when all is said and done, should a prostitute not be touched by a man's shyness or ineptitude or sadness, or made curious by his turning up in her room looking for he doesn't know what, or excited when on rare occasions what he does want coincides with what she does? Is the battlefield so unforgiving that none of this is conceivable, and that any man who goes out looking for such an eventuality must be treated as a criminal?

Ah, there is so much to say that I don’t know where to begin. I am not sure that I like the idea that sex is such a sacred subject or rather a vital one that it is necessary to be careful with it. The sacralization of sex is a problem not really in literature, but in real life because it reinforces the absurd notion that when people are having sex, they are involved in an activity that is more important than themselves that the readers, others, and more importantly they have to take seriously. The problem nowadays is sex is not only the supreme and the sublime, but that it is what feels the most real to too many people. The memoirs of Prada prostitutes, to use Jacobson’s expression, thus become a hic because they transgress the rule that sex is serious and that it mustn’t be used to bug people by reminding them that sex is both personal and meaningless in itself. Depersonalization, degradation, and violence can therefore be sexual and writing about sex, prostitution, even when one insists that one is telling about one’s experiences doesn’t have to fit a mold. Writing about sex doesn’t have to mean to treat the subject from any other perspective than the one of the writer and with unnecessary and undeserved respect in order to be taken seriously and to affirm the idea that one is dealing with reality.

The refusal to believe sexual tales written by high class hookers is nothing more than the denial to women the power to transgress and to violate willingly the sacred without it being the fruit of a impregnation by a phallus, which at one point or another dominated and conquered them. What bothered Jean Genet was that he couldn’t imagine that a woman could be his equal or the equal of Sade because to him, women followed and didn’t violate the laws of Nature because they were, as Baudelaire stated famously, natural thus abominable. Thus, the question of credibility is purely one of gender, prejudice, and societal norms. People have never really focused on the credibility of Sade’s Justine or Genet’s Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. The sex within those works although it is transgressive is considered serious because its depravity is sublimated by its masculinity and because the laws of nature which make it possible for sexual male fantasies to be considered serious in themselves, believable, and thus worthy to become part of the readers’ reality.

Because I don’t worship sex and because I don’t believe that it is serious  in itself, I am neither obsessed nor bothered by the memoirs of prostitutes whether they are the work of males or females, high class or low class people, or believable or unbelievable. However, what interests me is the realization that I live in a time when both women and men are willing to make sex about morality and something grand when it becomes an instrument used by women and mastered by women writers who don’t give a damn about what others think.

Ethnonationalism

Jerry Z. Muller has an article in Foreign Affairs on Ethnic nationalism and its enduring power. It discusses the history of ethnicity and its implications in Europe and the role that it plays currently in  societies that have to deal with populations that are different from the ones of their past. It is a good read. Sugary excerpt:

The most dramatic transformation of European ethnic balances in recent decades has come from the immigration of people of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern origin, and here the results have been mixed. Some of these groups have achieved remarkable success, such as the Indian Hindus who have come to the United Kingdom. […] As a result, some of the traditional contours of European politics have been upended. The left, for example, has tended to embrace immigration in the name of egalitarianism and multiculturalism. But if there is indeed a link between ethnic homogeneity and a population's willingness to support generous income-redistribution programs, the encouragement of a more heterogeneous society may end up undermining the left's broader political agenda. And some of Europe's libertarian cultural propensities have already clashed with the cultural illiberalism of some of the new immigrant communities.

I don’t like the term cultural illiberalism because it is more offensive to me than the term barbarism. More importantly, it puts the emphasis on culture by divinizing it, which encourages fruitless confrontations when the emphasis ought to be on togetherness and the separation between the public sphere and the private sphere.

Patriotism and virility

Interesting, but infuriating point by George Kateb on Patriotism:

The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. Socratic notions of gratitude or Jamesian notions of infinite indebtedness are not necessary for this love. In the sport, where aristocrats used to play their games, elites now mobilize groups or masses to slaughter each other. Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.

In general, an activist foreign policy works tirelessly to de-legitimate any constitutional democracy. Patriotism is the greatest asset in the internal and ever-present war against the sentiments and institutions of free government.

I wonder if Kateb is contending that there cannot be patriotism without masculine virility because that would be just silly.

Gatekeeping, Elitism and French culture

Guy Dammann makes the following thought provoking point about the late Robbe-Grillet, l’Académie Française, and the effects of gatekeepers on French culture:

The Académie has a venerable tradition of excluding controversial authors. Tireless scourge of the French establishment Émile Zola stood for election 13 times, eventually giving up after the J'accuse affair forced him into exile in England. Balzac, before him, was passed over for Victor Hugo on the grounds that the genre in which he worked was too lowly, and later because he was too poor. Denis Diderot, polymathic figurehead of the French Enlightenment's racier side and editor of the Encyclopédie, was barely even considered for election while Jean d'Alembert, his co-editor until the censors turned up the heat in 1759, became one of the institution's leading lights.

Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, stirred up trouble with vigour and relish from the moment his literary career got under way. Arguably, he courted controversy for its own sake as an integral part of the anti-literary aesthetic of the nouveau roman movement whose undisputed founding father - or "pope", as he preferred it - he was.

[…]Aside from the distribution of some 70 literary awards, none of which have the prestige of the Prix Goncourt (administered by another "Académie" set up as a progressive thorn in the establishment's side), the primary function of the immortels is to "safeguard the purity of the French language". This duty they discharge through their own dictionary, the last edition of which was published in 1935 with a total of 35,000 definitions.

[…] the wonderful thing about French culture has always been the dichotomy between haughty officialdom and rampant liberté. For while the academicians police the official language, doing their best to ward off the invading franglais hordes, the less exalted regions of French society have never lost any time in inventing their own argots.

A good parallel here is with the French education system, which, though based on a rigorously old-fashioned "learning-by-rote" model designed to stamp out original thought and its causes, has nonetheless consistently turned out an exceptionally high proportion of the intellectual and artistic world's mavericks, revolutionaries and left-field geniuses. Perhaps, in much the same way, the staid and fusty Académie, in maintaining standards that few find themselves able to live up to, is all the while silently fuelling the rude health of France's unofficial linguistic life.

Dammann is wrong to see in Robbe-Grillet somebody who tried to shake things up because he was so conventional that all of his attempts to be different, to write differently, and to shake things up were fluffy. They were, unfortunately, not well-thought and poorly executed stratagems to remain relevant, which are already forgotten because they weren’t intended to survive their author.

The big question of whether French culture is being “damaged” by its gatekeepers is bigger than Robbe-Grillet and very much relevant because it is impossible not to answer positively that interrogation precisely when considering the case of Robbe-Grillet and of the infamous Académie. The existence and the importance of the Académie Française is the proof that it is possible to have too much of a good thing and that attempts of preserving a culture from commercialization and devaluation can make it elitist and inaccessible. I love the fact that French culture is rich, stylish, difficult, and complicated but I stop loving those qualities when it becomes clear that they have nothing to do with substance or meaning, but everything to do with conservatism and the erroneous desire to resist modernity and simplicity because they are viewed as ways of dumbing down French culture and “unfrenching” it. My point is that I love French culture so much that I don’t want it to be clustered in a museum like the Mona Lisa of Da Vinci under the pretext that it is a masterpiece that ought to be protected from the common folk. My worst nightmare is that I will have to grow old in a world where French becomes a dead language as Latin and where French culture becomes something that only a few members of a shrinking, disappearing and educated elite treasure.

Loving the Barbarians

Via Joan Smith in the Independent, an argument against honor killings:

We urgently need to recognise honour-based killings as an expression of classic patriarchal values, which give fathers, brothers and uncles absolute power over women and younger, less-powerful males. In societies built on such values, girls and women are regarded as commodities, not individuals. They are usually married off before completing their education, passing illiteracy on to the next generation.

[…] Honour-based cultures depend on strict rules and even surgical procedures to allay their fears about women's sexuality, and a staggering 97 per cent of Egyptian women have undergone genital mutilation.[…] Patriarchal values are supposed to make men feel strong but the evidence is that they do just the opposite, filling fathers and sons with unbearable anxiety and trapping entire families in poverty. They are the enemy not just of women's rights but economic prosperity, and they have no place in the 21st century.

The problem, as I see it, is precisely the fact that Joan Smith has to explain why honor killings are intolerable and that she has to come back to grandiose, but still incomprehensible words such as “patriarchal.” The fact that it isn’t not enough to say that killing a woman in the name of honor or other values show us that the problem with women may not be solely in what Smith calls “Honour-based cultures.” I think that in the middle of her article, Smith should have realized that she is explained to the members of a modern why killing a woman isn’t acceptable and that is unsettling. It isn’t a matter of wondering where is the outrage, but rather to question why a woman’s body, life or whatever is always considered able to provoke not only men, but all humans to act either as barbarians or to accept it when others do.

Western superiority

Simplistic, fashionable, and provocative assertions from Ibn Warraq:

The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery. The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing.

[…] One could characterize the difference between the West and the Rest as a difference in epistemological principles. The desire for knowledge, no matter where it leads, inherited from the Greeks, has led to an institution unequaled—or very rarely equaled—outside the West: the university. Along with research institutes and libraries, universities are, at least ideally, independent academies that enshrine these epistemological norms, where we can pursue truth in a spirit of disinterested inquiry, free from political pressures. In other words, behind the success of modern Western societies, with their science and technology and open institutions, lies a distinct way of looking at the world, interpreting it, and recognizing and rectifying problems.

The edifice of modern science and scientific method is one of Western man’s greatest gifts to the world. The West has given us not only nearly every scientific discovery of the last 500 years—from electricity to computers—but also, thanks to its humanitarian impulses, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The West provides the bulk of aid to beleaguered Darfur; Islamic countries are conspicuous by their lack of assistance.

Moreover, other parts of the world recognize Western superiority. When other societies such as South Korea and Japan have adopted Western political principles, their citizens have flourished. It is to the West, not to Saudi Arabia or Iran, that millions of refugees from theocratic or other totalitarian regimes flee, seeking tolerance and political freedom.

The one question that comes to mind when reading Warraq’s assertions is whether there is any essentially western about liberal democracy, human rights, rationalism, and self-criticism. I don’t think there is, but again the fact that Warraq was talking to Tariq Ramadan shows how limited and idiotic the dialogue about the West and its so-called clash with the rest has become.

Over-parenting, bad-parenting, and heaven on earth

Johann Hari on “Over-parenting”:

The rise in bulimia, anorexia and self-harm among teenagers is partly a product of all this over-parenting. As Dr Levene says of a typical teenage self-harmer she treated – a 15 year-old girl who carved the word "empty" onto her arm with an old razor: "She felt little control over what happened to her. Cutting was one of the few things over which she did feel control."

Why is this happening? Why have so many of the baby-boomers turned out to be baby-Führers, strangling their kids with their apron-strings? Their children are the safest who have ever lived. They are more likely to die in their beds of old age than any generation in history – yet their parents fear, constantly. There is no detailed research explaining this paranoia but there are some prosaic explanations.

Parents are having fewer children, later in life, often after gruelling fertility treatments. We live in a paranoid culture where every negligible risk is blown up by a 24/7 media into a drum-beat of doom. We live in a hyper-consumerist culture where we define ourselves by what we own. Children are inevitably drawn into this vortex, as another glistening status symbol. 'Have you seen my handbag? Have you seen my child?'

Whenever I talk to my friends' parents as they crash-land into their children's lives for another burst of command-and-control, it's clear this is not about their child's needs but their own. They need their children to be dependent on them (and Successful with a capital-S) because they see their kids as extensions of their own ego, not as separate individuals with their own lives to live. This isn't love. It is narcissism. It's time we told these middle-class Boomer parents: you need to grow up – or your children never will.

I don’t like the term over-parenting because it misses the point because there is only good parenting and bad parenting. I think that baby-boomers have trouble letting their kids go because they don’t want to become their own parents and admit that they cannot remain young (in the pejorative sense of the word) forever. Victor Hugo said more than a century ago that heaven is parents remaining young and children remaining children. Parents today just have the same vision and are doing everything they can to live heaven on earth.

America and Christianities

In this videa, Garry Wills discusses his book Head and Heart, which discusses the place and the nature of religion or rather of "Christianities" in America. It is worth watching.

French hibernation

Graham Robb had a great article on Sunday in the International Herald Tribune on what he calls the French tradition to hibernate rather than to work longer hours as Sarkozy wants them to :

In the autobiography-manifesto that he published during his presidential campaign, Sarkozy wrote of "the harm that the 35-hour week has done to our nation: "What madness it is to think that the way to increase wealth and create jobs is to work less!" On Oct. 1, he effectively abolished the 35-hour week by removing fiscal penalties on overtime. The strikes and protests in France this month gave a taste of the unions' reaction to Sarkozy's measure.

Sarkozy's 19th-century predecessors would have been amazed that such comparatively small adjustments are treated as matters of economic life and death. They, too, were worried by the snail-like progress of the French economy, and wondered how to compete with the industrial powerhouse of Britain. But they were faced with something far more ruinous than unemployment.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

[…] But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They "hibernated" even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region's economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: "These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately."

Sarkozy's campaign slogan, "Work more to earn more," would have meant nothing to most French peasants. After the Revolution, government officials complained that farmers were "abandoning themselves to dumb idleness" instead of undertaking "some peaceful and sedentary industry." Income acted only as a deterrent. The people of Beaucaire on the Rhône made enough money at their summer fair to spend the rest of the year "smoking, playing cards, hunting and sleeping."

Robb shows that how important a country’s history is and that Sarkozysm might fail because it has no sense of French history.

Witchcraft and African children

Via the International Herald Tribune:

The notion of child witches is not new here. It is a common belief in Angola's dominant Bantu culture that witches can communicate with the world of the dead and usurp or "eat" the life force of others, bringing their victims misfortune, illness and death. Adult witches are said to bewitch children by giving them food, and then force them to reciprocate by sacrificing a family member.

But officials attribute the surge in persecutions of children to war - 27 years in Angola, ending in 2002, and near constant strife in Congo. The conflicts orphaned many children, while leaving other families intact but too destitute to feed themselves.

"The witches situation started when fathers became unable to care for the children," said Ana Silva, who is in charge of child protection for the children's institute. "So they started seeking any justification to expel them from the family."

Since then, Silva said, the phenomenon has followed poor migrants from the northern Angolan provinces of Uige and Zaire to the slums of the fast-growing capital, Luanda. Two recent cases horrified officials there. In June, Silva said, a Luanda mother blinded her 14-year-old daughter with chlorine bleach to rid her of what she thought were evil visions. In August, a father injected battery acid into his 12-year-old son's stomach because he feared he was a witch, she said.

Angola's government has campaigned since 2000 to dispel notions about child witches, Silva said, but progress comes slowly. "We cannot change the belief that witches exist," she said. "Even the professional workers believe that witches exist."

Instead, her institute is spreading the word that children cannot be witches - and trying to teach everyone, from police officers to teachers to religious leaders, that violence against children is never justified.

"It is not easy to achieve results," she said. "But it is possible."

The city of Mbanza Congo, just 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, from Angola's border with Congo, has blazed a trail. After a child accused of witchcraft was stabbed to death in 2000, provincial officials joined forces with Save the Children, the global charitable organization, to round up and shelter street children. They reunited 380 of 432 children with relatives, the witchcraft report stated.

Eleven fundamentalist churches were shut down because of reports of child exploitation. Eight Congolese pastors were deported. Villages formed committees to monitor children's rights. The authorities say the number of children who are abused or living on the streets dropped drastically.

"It is very, very, very common in the villages," he said. "We know that some children have been killed. Police are far, and villagers take matters into their own hands."

His church runs the town's only sanctuary for children victimized as witches, a shelter barely bigger than a three-car garage with a dirt yard and spartan furnishings. Thirty-two boys, including Domingos, occupy bunk beds stacked a foot apart, their few clothes stashed in cardboard boxes underneath, toothbrushes hanging from the bed posts. No shelter exists for girls.

Since July, all newcomers have been turned away. "Children come here to ask for protection, but we have no space," the bishop said.

"To date, we have not found any special way to fight against this phenomenon."

Many of the shelter's boys describe pasts of abuse, rejection and fear. Saldanha David Gomes, 18, who lived with his aunt until he was 12, said she turned on him after her 3-year-old daughter fell ill and died.

Afterward, he said, his aunt refused to feed him and bound his hands and feet each evening, fearing that he would take another victim.

The saddest thing about such stories is that they show how difficult it is to overcome foolish traditions and cultural beliefs and that religion usually reinforces them by divinizing the unseen and the belief that not only evil exists, but also that it can be personify in a child. It is for those reasons that I’m strongly against the idea that our past should be our present and that the humane should be sacrificed or even brutalized for the divine.

International adoption, gender, and China

Jacob Sullum has a great article about China, little girls and international adoption on Reason. Sullum debunks what he believes to be myths fabricated by the Chinese government about international adoption and including the one that says that girls are not wanted and are most of the time abandoned by their parents. Sugary excerpt:

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say these girls are “unwanted” only because the Chinese government has made them so. Although the government’s oppressive, family-destroying policies have had the incidental benefit of bringing joy to the lives of adoptive parents in the U.S. and elsewhere, it will be a great victory for liberty when such heartwarming stories stop appearing on newsstands and bookshelves. These adoptions would not be occurring if the Chinese government did not try to dictate the most basic and intimate of life’s decisions.

[…] Given the barriers to adoption in China, its frequency, once informal adoptions are taken into account, is impressive evidence that, far from being unwanted in the country of their birth, China’s daughters are highly valued. It’s true that China’s strong patriarchal traditions, according to which sons carry on the family line while daughters become members of other families when they marry, mean parents are anxious to have at least one boy. Especially in rural areas, parents value a boy’s superior strength and expect sons, more so than daughters, to support them in their old age. These longstanding attitudes explain why boys are rarely abandoned in China and rarely end up in orphanages. […]

Even couples who give up daughters, leaving them in hospitals, in busy markets, at police stations, or literally on the doorstep of orphanages (as our daughter Mei was left when she was about 10 days old), may not be eschewing girls so much as trying to complete their families within the restrictions established by the government. Because of the one-son/two-child rule, Johnson reports, the typical abandoned girl is a second daughter.

Although I am for international adoption, it is impossible not to recognize their complexity and the ethical and moral dilemmas, which they pose. One of them is that one is about deciding what importance to give to the context and local culture during and after the adoption. The point that, as Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig has written, there is an irrational aspect to adoption, which makes it possible to consider children on both sides that is on the one of the those who desperately want to adopt and those who believe that no foreigners should adopt children from a different part of the world as commodities. What matter at the end, more than everything else, are the children and their well being.

Name, identity, and profiling

Via the New York Times, there is the following interesting bit on what a name means in France:

IN France, a person’s name can signify as little as a measure of what’s big on TV at any given time, or as much as an entire country’s nature.

The recent publication there of two annual guides charting the popularity of first names could only prompt more soul-searching in a nation already painfully struggling with how to define its character. The issue appears so urgent that President Nicolas Sarkozy felt the need to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and the government has passed a law authorizing DNA testing to establish family links among would-be immigrants.

[…] In a recent article pegged to the publication of one of the guides, Joséphine Besnard’s “Index of First Names in 2008,” the newspaper Libération asked 15 people to talk about their own names, prompting a lively debate on its Web site. A few readers commented on some French assumptions. “What of the new first names — Binta, Jamila, Lin, Ahmed, etc. — of an increasing number of French people?” wrote one commentator at the Web site. “It would have been interesting to look into that issue and how society perceives people with those names, people who may be born here but whose parents almost certainly weren’t.”

But Guy Desplanques, a demographer, pointed out in 2002 that names like Ahmed and Jamila actually were on the wane, and that second-generation French men and women work toward integration by coming up with variations like Yanis or Rayan; the latter has become popular in some banlieues, evoking both the Maghreb and the relatively widespread Ryan.

[…] Sociologists like Mr. Besnard observed that first names were often quick markers of social and educational status. […] Indeed, bourgeois French parents are unlikely to give their children “Anglo-Saxon” names; Jennifer was the most popular name for girls from 1984 to 1986, but it’s a safe bet few Jennifers came from well-educated families. (The craze is commonly explained by the success of the TV series “Hart to Hart” in France at that time — Jennifer Hart was one of the title characters — while “Beverly Hills, 90210,” featuring a popular character named Dylan McKay, is sometimes blamed for the explosion of Dylans a few years later.)

This quick profiling can hamper those looking for a job: Several studies have shown that all things being equal, applicants with “foreign”-sounding names are less likely to be hired.

It is possible to expand the discussion to America with the case of Barack Obama for example. The fact that it is possible to un-Americanize him by using his middle name by purposely confusing his last name with Osama without paying any political prize speaks volume about the importance of a name and of race in America. It shows that in the US, to the contrary to France, the main problem with having a different name and looking foreign isn’t so much the difficulty of finding a job, but rather the difficulty of becoming the representative for all Americans and of acceding to the highest class status through other means than entertainment and sports. Sarkozy loves to tell the story that his father told him that he wouldn’t succeed in politics with his name. However, Sarkozy had the advantage that he looked French and that he could take off the “de Nagy Bócsa” of his name to make it sound less foreign. All he had to do was to wrap himself in the French flag and to use extreme language against immigrants to look more patriotic than the French of pure blood to get to the Elysée palace. The recent polemic about Obama and his supposed lack of patriotism shows that the perception of one’s foreignness is reinforced by one’s name and one’s physical appearance. To come back to France, a large part of the French elite and politicians knows that the French integration model doesn’t work. However, because they are conservative, they are still clinging on to the idea that it doesn’t work because France got the wrong immigrants who don’t want to become French or rather cannot become French because of their cultures and religions.

Making the political spouse invisible

Anne Applebaum makes the argument in her column that America should follow the example of France and allow political spouses to disappear:

Admittedly, the divorce was one step too far. But right up until the French first couple announced their permanent separation, I was rooting like mad for Cécilia Sarkozy. At last, a prominent wife of a prominent politician who did not pretend to be totally absorbed by her husband's career! During the few months since her husband became the French president, Mme. Sarkozy did not entertain, did not give interviews, did not show up for lunch with George W. Bush and did not even live at the Elysee Palace (the French equivalent of the White House). She certainly did not craft policies. "As far as nominations and decisions go, I keep the door of my office closed," she declared, post-divorce announcement, last week.

See no politics, hear no politics and above all speak no politics -- and whatever else she was doing, she didn't keep the media informed, at least not on purpose. Yet her silence didn't prevent her husband's election, perhaps because most of her countrymen wholeheartedly approve. The vast majority of the French -- 89 percent, according to one poll-- think that their president's marriage is none of their business.

Increasingly, much of the rest of the Western world feels the same way. The husband of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, grants no interviews, makes no public appearances and teaches chemistry at a Berlin university, just as he's always done. Though she had some unfortunate tangles with the press, Cherie Booth, otherwise known as Mrs. Tony Blair, did go on practicing law while her husband was prime minister of Britain. And here I declare a personal interest: Though I am married to a Polish parliamentarian, I played no part whatsoever in his recent election campaign. Nor did anyone expect me to. In fact, whenever I do appear at Polish political events, people seem mildly surprised to see me -- which is how it should be.

America is in so many ways a traditional country. Americans want its president to be at least to able to present the image of the perfect family because it’s reassuring and makes it possible for  people to still lure themselves into thinking that leaders are good spouses and good heads of a family and these facts means that they will make good politicians. All of these ideas are part of a myth, which isn’t grounded in reality, which is precisely the reason why it will be very difficult to change things. But again, America loves myths because it enables it to remain an optimist and idealist country.