The Republic of Dissent

Self-knowledge and lack of ambition

I agree with Chris Dillow on this even though I find this 'reality' troubling:

In most organizations, you’ll be vastly better-paid as an awful chief executive than you would be as a top-rate underling. In business, as in politics, there's little space for the excellent specialist whose self-knowledge is misunderstood as a lack of ambition.

Absolute hysteria and child-rearing

Quote of the morning from Jennifer Howze:

If ever you started to wonder that maybe your counterculture attitude toward child-rearing was just a little too laid-back - that perhaps you should spend more time worrying about sex maniacs on the school run and that your every action (whatever it  may be) ruining your child's life - along comes an announcement that reaffirms the absolute hysteria that surrounds children these days.

To resist feminist guilt

The sugary quote of the morning is from Libby Purves on the complaint that there aren't enough women in the new British government

The phone rang: another periodical’s editor wanting a why-oh-why rant about the dearth of women in the new Cabinet. Four out of 23 gives us a female percentage one-third that of Spain, half that of France and the Netherlands; in the EU only the Portuguese Cabinet has a smaller proportion of women.
Well, a girl likes to oblige and I come of a liberated generation, fists poised to smash the glass ceiling in the conservatory of life. But after a few seconds’ thought I sadly replied: “Sorry. Just realised: I don’t care.” Feminist guilt flared and swiftly receded. There have been women in Cabinet and the great offices of state, there will be others. No law bars the door, there is no quota against us. Tokenism is anathema.

I've just realized that having women in government is less important than enacting policies that not treat them as sheep. In short, the power of symbols is always limited if their goal is to stop the conversation on real issues, by making people feel good about their own 'tolerance' and superiority.

Fanaticism works

Quote of the end of the afternoon from Neal Gabler:

The real problem with extremism as an attention-grabber isn’t that we don’t know what to do about it. The real problem is that it works. By knocking down the Twin Towers and announcing a constant stream of threats, the Islamic radicals got and continue to get publicity out of proportion to their numbers — just as the Tea Partiers have been dominating the national airwaves even though their ranks, according to survey data, constitute no more than 13 percent of the American public. Similarly, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are very well remunerated for their high-decibel hate. In other words, we may say we hate fanaticism, but we pay attention to it and may even reward it.

Surgical strikes, the new warfare and video games

I agree with Tom Engelhardt on this:

Whether in the skies or patrolling on the ground, Americans know next to nothing of the worlds they are passing above or through.  This is, of course, even more true of the “pilots” who fly our latest wonder weapons, the Predators, Reapers, and other unmanned drones over American battle zones, while sitting at consoles somewhere in the United States.  They are clearly engaged in the most literal of video-game wars, while living the most prosaic of god-like lives.  A sign at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada warns such a drone pilot to "drive carefully" on leaving the base after a work shift “in” Afghanistan or Iraq.  This, it says, is “the most dangerous part of your day."
(...)Here’s the fact of the matter: in the cities, towns, and villages of the distant lands where Americans tend to make war, civilians die regularly and repeatedly at our hands.  Each death may contain its own uniquely nightmarish details, but the overall story remains remarkably repetitious.  Such “incidents” are completely predictable. Even General McChrystal, determined to “protect the population” in Afghanistan as part of his counterinsurgency war, has proven remarkably incapable of changing the nature of our style of warfare.  Curtail air strikes, rein in Special Operations night attacks -- none of it will, in the long run, matter.  Put in a nutshell: If you arrive from the heavens, they will die.

What irks me is that this new form of American warfare can become popular and attractive not only with American presidents, but also with the American public because although it increases civilian deaths, 'collateral damage' it reduces greatly the number of American casualties. Unfortunately, the more American and modern warfare become like video games, the more likely it is that the world will experience more of them because war will become a 'clean,' effective and inexpensive solution for too many conflicts and issues instead of being used as the last resort.

Addicted to sex scandals

I agree with Judith TImson on this except that I don't believe that it is the fault of the internet if most of us love or rather are addicted to sex scandals:

Sex, sex, sex. We’re trapped in sex-scandal hell, and the story of Sandra Bullock – who has, as the cliché goes, “remained tight-lipped” about her troubles even as she’s mobbed everywhere by concerned citizens – is the latest manifestation.
The Internet has turned these private and painful tales of sexual betrayal into a multi-platform nightmare: blogs, voice mails, pictures, texts. The cycle starts with whispers and revelations, proceeds to widespread shock and outrage, and ends up with late-show jokes and op-eds in The New York Times .
We say, “No, we’re better than this,” but we don’t really mean it.

The battle of the Africa-saving egos

I agree with Nathalie Rothschild on this:

Apparently, we Westerners can’t take issues seriously unless the likes of Brad Pitt and Bono tell us to, and apparently people in Africa and elsewhere are too busy scrambling for food and swiping flies off their faces to speak up and lobby politicians. Enter do-gooding celebs, NGOs and anti-globalisation protesters to speak on behalf of the ‘voiceless’. As Bono put it at the time, ‘I represent a lot of people [in Africa] who have no voice at all…. They haven’t asked me to represent them. It’s cheeky but I hope they’re glad I do.’
(...)But what Make Poverty History really represented was an entrenchment of low ambitions for the developing world and of the division of the globe into Third World victims and Western saviours.
 (...)While celebrities strummed their guitars and tugged at our heart strings, and while aid organisations hired top ad agencies to create clever campaigns, those at the receiving end of poverty relief programmes were being condemned to a life determined by the poor ambitions of Western decision-makers and their celebrity and NGO cheerleaders.
So John Hilary has accused Bob Geldof of arrogance, of believing that ‘he alone was responsible for creating a mass movement on global poverty’. He is right. But it’s not just Geldof, but also international aid organisations, multilateral agencies, global leaders and a melange of celebrities who together have helped perpetuate the idea that people in the developing world are beggars who can’t be choosers, that they should be happy that Westerners are helping take the edge off poverty. Together, they have made sidestepping the democratic process seem acceptable, as time and again they claim the right to speak on behalf of poor people around the world who are portrayed as victims of corrupt governments, as starving, voiceless, weaklings in need of rescue.

The main problem with celebrity activism is that just as humanitarian interventionism, it assumes in a way that is often more paternalistic than humanitarian or charitable that those who need helps are powerless, unable to help them and even to know what is good for them. Thus, in too many cases, celebrity activism becomes about the activist, her/his brand, and desire to be perceived as doing good, by helping the poor and victimized Africa. I'm not a purist  and ideologist on this issue.  I believe simply that humanitarianism is a good thing, but that  it must not become about ego and forget that people are people and always want to have as much control over their lives as possible even when they are powerless and in need of a great amount of help. Celebrities such as Bob Geldof forget that essential fact. They are too willing to play god or rather to celebrate their own accomplishments by looking for the starlight and showing a disdainful and crippling contempt for the realities of the people and the countries they believe they are saving from hell and from their own shortcomings

Mums in politics

Quote of the early morning from Libby Purves decrying the role that mothers play in politics or rather in political elections.

Face it: parenthood is an extreme mind-altering drug, and those in its strongest grip should not be invited to swamp the political and economic argument any more than bankers, business leaders or trade unions. It is fatally easy to think of mothers, in particular, as saintly altruists sacrificing everything for their children, and therefore guarding all the virtues. But any honest mother (or properly involved father) knows deep down that it is not disinterested goodness or reason that fires us in the early years. It is what you might call transferred selfishness.

Laughing off sex addiction

Reading August Kleinzahler's post on his visit with Doctor Himmelfarb has me convinced that I'm right to laugh at this whole sex addiction thing. Sugary excerpt

(...) one question I asked the doctor, and whose response was most thought-provoking indeed, was why there were no women in the programme, unless they were at a separate, gender-restricited facility. The doctor assured me there was no such separate facility and that the Darkness, Be Gone program was not designed for women, only for men. ‘Why is this?’ I asked the doctor. He seemed impatient with the question, as though the answer were obvious, or should have been. ‘Because the human female has not the capacity for sexual remorse. Without this, my Darkness Be Gone 12-step program is useless.’ There followed a long silence. Finally, I asked: ‘Dr Himmelfarb, how did you arrive at the conclusion that women have not the capacity for sexual remorse.’ The doctor turned abruptly in my direction and asked sharply: ‘Are you fruit?’ By which, I gather he meant, given my acquaintance with low speech, was I homosexual. ‘No, doctor,’ I answered politely, but firmly, determined not to show dismay at the suggestion that I might be homosexual, or that my query to his assertion about women and sexual remorse suggested a lack of experience with women. The doctor turned to me and said: ‘Do you know why a dog or cat does not possess a sense of humour?’ I found that premise as bizarre as the other, but seeing the colour rising in the great man’s cheeks offered no challenge, thinking all the while of my generous honorarium. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because a dog or cat does not possess a soul, and without a soul you cannot possess a sense of humour.’ ’

I'm going to have to create a new addiction, just so that I can make money off of it and make people less guilty for behaving like animals. The next guy who argues that he is a sex addict, need also to castrate himself to show how guilty he feels for not being able to help himself. I hate this trend in modern societies to transform every frailty into disorders.

Curry as the positive aspect of immigration

Here is Nick Griffin's answer, the Chief of Britain far right party, the BNP the British National Party)  to put things mildly, to the question put to me by Iain Dale about the positive side of immigration:

Well, a wide range of curries is a plus. But there again, I've got the recipes.

I'm not appalled, just reassured that I'm right not to take Griffin seriously for he reminds me of Ann Coulter. He has a backbone or a little bit of political culture, he would have put things differently, Neither Geert Wilders nor Jean-Marie Le Pen, who are as far right as Nick Griffin, would have given that answer. In short, Nick Griffin is a clown.

South Africa, violence and the demons of the past

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

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

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

Rehabilitating Child killers

I agree with Julian Baggini on this:

(...) when we ask how much we should try to rehabilitate child killers, for instance, it is wrong to think that forgiveness should be the key motivation. It is not for the legal system to forgive. Justice in such cases is rather about giving the right answers to four main questions. First, were the killers sufficiently responsible for their actions for us to regard retribution as of primary importance? Second, would prioritising rehabilitation threaten public safety? Third, would prioritising rehabilitation weaken deterrence against similar future crimes? And four, would rehabilitation actually work?
The best reasons we have for thinking that the Norwegians dealt with their child killers better than we did with the Bulger killers is because the answers to these questions in most such cases is no, no, no and yes. It has nothing to do with forgiveness being a superior virtue. To prioritise the rehabilitation of violent criminals who knew what they had done and posed a danger to the public just because we thought it good to forgive them would be a terrible mistake. More than that: it would be unforgiveable.

Unfortunately, most societies, most notably, the United States aren't Norway and believe less in rehabilitation even for child killers than in punishment and retribution because they were born bad and that there is nothing that society can do except protect itself from them.

Public toilets as the final battleground in the sex wars

Quote of the mid-day from Sally Feldman :

How would you fancy peeing into a shiny brass tuba – or splashing into the face of Saddam Hussein? Well, you can in America, which boasts some of the world's most inventive toilets. And Europe is catching up fast. In the UK there's a urinal in the shape of a red-lipped open mouth, while in France there's one held in place by two invitingly splayed legs. In Germany you can find a bowl with a football pitch and goal, complete with a strategically placed ball to aid accurate aiming. In Italy, your water can be made sacred by a line of Virgins awaiting your relief. And just in case you girls were feeling left out, there's a treat waiting for you in Spain – washtaps in the shape of penises with testicles for tapheads.
It's sweet to find this homage to human waste manifested so creatively all over the world. But, sadly, it's very rare. Most people in most places simply won't be able to find a toilet when they need one. And for women, the lack of decent facilities is more than a problem. It's an emergency. Public conveniences are the final battleground in the sex wars, the ultimate declaration of discrimination.

A Democratic triumph

Alex Massie takes on the Health reform bill:

Presidents have been trying to cover the uninsured since LBJ sat in the Oval Office. None have succeeded. Until now. It doesn't matter whether one approves of the bill or thinks it likely to work or not, one should be able to recognise the legislative achievement and, hence, the scale of this Democratic victory. It's probably the most significant progressive-inspired* piece of legislation in 40 years.
So how did it happen? A bit of luck, some arm-twisting, a lot of perseverance from Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House leadership and, with the benefit of hindsight, a spot of GOP blundering. There aren't, I suspect, 216 members of the House of Representatives who actually like this bill, far less 216 who could vote for it on the merits. But, as I suggested the other day, when substance runs into politics it's politics that usually wins. And so it was on this occasion too. 

I won't disagree with Alex Massie, I'm just wondering whether a triumph for Democrats is still a triumph for Progressives. I won't ask the same about Liberals because they love candy and fairy tales and will believe in the one that Obama is telling them until...

Nannies as the cause of serial infidelity

Stupidest thing I've read this week:

Dennis Friedman, a psychiatrist, says employing a nanny can turn your little boy into a serial womaniser (as if working mothers don’t have enough to feel guilty about). According to Dr Friedman, a nanny introduces a boy to the idea of the Other Woman who will always cater to his needs.

The rise of the malbouffe

Scary sign that even the French eating habits have been Americanized:

Today, France is the most profitable market for McDonald’s outside the US. In France this travesty is called malbouffe, literally junk food. French people try their best not to follow the American model in many ways, yet still Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders are threatening one of the characteristics of their culture that the French are most proud of.

Humanitarian interventionism and maturity

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

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

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

Islamism and Irony

TF Lane argues that Islamists are 'ironists':

Irony tends to be used in one of two ways: as an ideology or a tool. Used as a tool, it is possessive of a deeply affirmative power: that individual refusal to be coerced or to submit to tyranny – what WH Auden calls the “Ironic points of light / [that] Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages”.
Islamists believe this is the way they employ irony. The car bombs and beheadings, the audiotapes and jihadist websites, the curers who kill and the vocal opponents of free speech – all of them are “points of light”. Each is a message from the Just, piercing the obscure lies of liberalism.(...)
Many secular commentators talk of Islamism as a radical ideology. But jihadists believe there is nothing idea-listic about it: to them, there is a moral map beneath their feet as ordered and patterned as a well-spun rug. It is a code written down more than a thousand years ago, the unchangeable words of God, and a glimpse into a higher realm. What we engage with as reality, they view as an elaborate fiction.

The only question that I have is whether the use of irony here isn't common to all religious fundamentalist groups, which want to merge the religious with the political and needs enemies in this militant conquest. Are Islamists a particular breed of fundamentalists? I don't think that they are, but I could be wrong.

America and sin

I don't agree with Stephen Kinzer on this:

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

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

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

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

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

Greed, militarism, and guerrilla warfare

I found this quote from Zakes Mda about South Africa on point :

In this brave new world, accumulation of personal wealth is dressed up in militarism, as if capitalism is the continuation of the guerrilla warfare that was fought during apartheid.

'Muslim' hearts and minds

Flashy,  but problematic assertions from Roger Hardy

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

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

Self-promotion and street tactics

Quote of the early morning from Philip J. Cunningham:

Nowadays, self-promoters hijack the paraphernalia and street tactics of the people's struggle in service of elite establishment types and militant tycoons.

Politics and American foreign policy

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

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

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

The global war on crime

I agree with this:

America must recognise that not all the terror its suffers from abroad is the work of terrorists. Since the destruction of the twin towers in 2001, the West has been so consumed by terrorism that it has focused insufficiently on criminality. Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions,North Korea, Albania, the Balkans — these and other failed or failing states demand at least as much of our attention. If oil-rich but tottering Nigeria, for instance, were to tumble, the impact on both Africa and the world would be catastrophic.
These are not necessarily terrorist havens, but their actions can have terrifying consequences for the West none the less. It is time the war on terror was matched more rigorously by a global war on crime.

I think that the single-minded focus on terrorism has been to the detriment of the fight against so many crimes, which have also dangerous consequences. The point is that single-mindedness is never an effective way to ensure security and political stability in a world that is too integrated, too complicated, too interdependent for its ills to be solved solely by the 'war on terror.'

Psychologizing Sarkozy's love life

I'm not touching this bit from Duncan Brown on Sarkozy's sex life, but it's interesting because it offers a different read of the gossip around Sarkozy's marriage who for once must thinking his lucky start that he is not an American president:

When his last marriage to the long-suffering Cecile broke down, Nicolas Sarkozy was attacked over his lack of “pudeur” (a word part-way between shame and modesty) as he pandered to the press: an Anglo-American tactic that went against the grain of the Fifth Republic’s Catholic origins.
However, all the French coverage of the recent alleged Bruni/Sarkozy dalliances isn’t necessarily a sign of the French media becoming more like the British in its appetite for celebrity scandal. Rumours that Sarkozy’s liaison with his ecology minister has been invented to salvage his reputation as a “sex dwarf” (in the face of being cuckolded by his man-eating wife) point to an undiminished gulf between French and English attitudes to sex.
We have no concept of the chaud lapin: the very idea of a prime minister sleeping with a member of his cabinet would make English blood run cold. But for the French, such news can be bundled together with Bruni’s liaison as “extramarital affairs” as a face-saving measure. Meanwhile, the English-speaking internet resounds to a dwarf joke about Sarkozy that David Cameron made in September. We’re not identical yet.

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.  

Attacking the lawyers

Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn have a op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, which I find despicable and demagogic. Sugary excerpt:

In the last several days, the debate has taken a detour about what some have called a "shameful attack" on the "noble attorneys" who have chosen to defend "unpopular people." A national security organization, Keep America Safe (of which Ms. Burlingame is a board member), used the phrase "Al Qaeda 7" in an Internet ad to describe seven unnamed Department of Justice political appointees who previously represented or advocated on behalf of terrorists.
The purpose of the ad was to prod Attorney General Eric Holder to disclose to the public which detainee attorneys he has hired to work on behalf of the American people, and whether they are involved in the policy-making decisions that will affect the nation's safety and security while we are at war. He was asked for this information by several members of the U.S. Senate, and he was stonewalling.
The attorney general has the right to select whomever he chooses to work in his department, and to set policy as he sees fit. He does not, however, have the right to do it in the dark. The policies he advances must face the scrutiny of the American people, his No. 1 client.
The public has a right to know, for instance, that one of Mr. Holder's early political hires in the department's national security division was Jennifer Daskal, a former attorney for Human Rights Watch. Her work there centered on efforts to close Guantanamo Bay, shut down military commissions—which she calls "kangaroo courts"—and set detainees who cannot be tried in civilian courts free. She has written that freeing dangerous terrorists is an "assumption of risk" that we must take in order to cleanse the nation of Guantanamo's moral stain. This suggests that Ms. Daskal, who serves on the Justice Department's Detainee Policy Task Force, is entirely in sync with Mr. Holder and a White House whose chief counterterrorism official (John Brennan) considers a 20% detainee recidivism rate "not that bad."

I find those arguments not only troubling, and ideological, but more importantly unconvincing. They are are made in a vacuum and with the implicit assumption that it is un-american to defend alleged or known terrorists and that there are times when the rule of law should become the rule of men especially if means shutting up or killing the lawyers who dare to question the actions of their government. The central issue of this whole debate isn't about a few lawyers who can easily be scapegoated as defenders of Al Qaeda, but rather whether, even in times of crisis and of great uncertainties, America still believes in its own laws and will view as normal Americans, its citizen, who hold the rule of law as sacred, and who choose to defend that principle above all else when their government isn't, . It's always easy to blame the lawyers when the politics of terrorism have become almost so one-sided and that thus, only radicalism can help score political points.

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.

The dark, but necessary compromises of charity

I agree with Alasdair Palmer on this:

Charitable organisations usually calculate that doing some good is better than doing none, and are willing to compromise with corrupt, violent and tyrannical regimes in order to get some support to the starving. Only last week, the UN concluded an investigation which claims that as much as half of the food currently donated to the starving in Somalia is being stolen by soldiers and government officials. Even Sir Bob has admitted that, in 1985, Band Aid had to work with, rather than against, Mengistu – one of the 20th century’s most brutal dictators, whose plan of forced collectivisation and population relocation helped to precipitate and prolong Ethiopia’s famine.
Aid agencies are terrified that if the truth about the compromises they sometimes have to make with corrupt and vicious authorities were to become known, their funds would dry up: people would stop giving.

The sad truth that the world isn't clean and that countries who do need charity/aid or whatever else more often than not are not sheltered from corruption or rather are undermined severely by it. To deny it is a stupid attempt to purify charity, by making it about good versus evil.

Volapük

I've always said that Sarkozy was as good with words as Obama, just in a different way, this proves my point:

The French president, complaining about negotiations leading up to last December's UN climate summit, said world leaders had been handed a draft text "similar to volapük."
Even native French speakers were stumped by this one, and some at first thought he said "vol a Buc", or "flight to Buc," a small and obscure town near Paris that has no airport.
Better-versed minds prevailed, and it turned out not only that Mr Sarkozy was making a nod to history and his hero. Volapük is a language invented in the late 19th century by a German Roman Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, who dreamt of creating a universal means of communication. His idea never really took flight and other international languages, such as Esperanto, emerged as more successful candidates. In French, "to speak volapük" was once used to denote gibberish or gobbledegook, but it was last used in any major context at a press conference in 1962 by General de Gaulle, who is revered by Mr Sarkozy.

Would it too condescending or too cynical of me to suggest that Sarkozy had no idea what Volapük meant until his advisers suggested that he used the word this morning to convey his mastering of the situation? It is amazing how language is important in politics especially when it is used either to elevate one self or to suggest that one is part of the common folk. Something tells me that Sarkozy is about to undergo another transformation just in time for his reelection 2012.

The scars of invisible racism

Interesting stuff from Margaret Wente, but what does it mean? :

Sensitivity to perceived discrimination is so acute these days that it can lead to perverse results. One instructor at the University of Toronto was told not to criticize foreign-born students for their poor language skills, even if they were unintelligible. Some aboriginal students say they shouldn't be evaluated by the same standards as everyone else, because they have different ways of knowing. Yet, as Mr. Al-Solaylee sensibly observes, his students will be working in an English-speaking, Eurocentric world. So they might as well get used to it.

I have to admit that I'm no longer sure what racism is and whether all racisms are equal and all 'racists' equally despicable. The screams of people who love to be outraged have gotten to my brain. One of the most surprising and remarkable lessons that I have learned in the last few years is that people who have prejudices might be more willing to help the people who are the victims of their prejudices than anti-racists who believe that their openness is a sign of purity and virtue and doesn't mean that they have to do more or at least to remain open. It is always unsettling to me to realize that the first thing  that most "white" New Yorkers say to me to approach is about race and the ways that they assert  it is still holding "my people"  down, then my lack of enthusiasm for the subject and my silence lead them to conclude when they are from the creative or other elitist class that I'm a legal alien in New York.

Killing all lawyers

Quote of the morning from Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represented Gitmo detainees: 

(...) as the years went by, the right did learn one thing useful about Guantanamo detainees. The public can’t distinguish one from another. If imprisoned endlessly, the detainees will furnish an endless source of scaremongering — that rich mulch in which votes will grow.
And so Cheney and Grassley beaver away to Keep America Scared. Some Americans will see the rule of law as a threat, and lawyers as the enemy. Small men with loud voices will exploit their fears on cable television. Petty politicians will mine them for votes. It’s been this way since Shakespeare’s famous policymaker Dick the Butcher said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’’

The conventional wisdom about Obamacare

Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen express the conventional wisdom on Obamacare, which strengthens the meme that there is nothing that Obama can't do for the American public has already made up its mind:

(...) the overwhelming majority of voters have insurance coverage, and 76% rate their own coverage as good or excellent. Half of these voters say it's likely that if the congressional health bill becomes law, they would be forced to switch insurance coverage—a prospect hardly anyone ever relishes. These numbers have barely moved for months: Nothing the president has said has reassured people on this point.
The reason President Obama can't move the numbers and build public support is because the fundamentals are stacked against him. Most voters believe the current plan will harm the economy, cost more than projected, raise the cost of care, and lead to higher middle-class taxes.
That's a tough sell when the economy is hurting and people want reform to lower the cost of care. It's also a tough sell for a president who won an election by promising tax cuts for 95% of all Americans.

Boy do I disagree with this analysis ! I don't think that polls tell the truth about healthcare, but rather just demonstrate the degree to which the electorate is confused and disheartened by a debate that is incomprehensible and that doesn't address their concerns. I have to admit that when I listen the debate, all I hear now is "Democrats want the Government to do everything" and "Republicans are hypocrites" all of that after all gets tiresome because it neither not clarifies the issue nor makes essential points about the future direction and the needed changes. The mistake of Obama was precisely to think that healthcare was about numbers as Rasmussen and Schoen believe, when it is about people.

Authorizing torture

I agree with David Cole on this:

Responsibility for the illegal brutality inflicted on CIA and Guantánamo detainees cannot be limited to Yoo and Bybee. It extends to all those who approved the tactics—even those so eager later to condemn Yoo’s reasoning. And unless we as citizens demand that these lawyers be held to answer for the wrongs done in our name, responsibility extends to all of us, too. We must continue to insist on accountability—whether in congressional hearings, citizens’ commissions, civil lawsuits, or the marketplace of ideas. The essential lesson must be that torture and cruel treatment are not policy options—even when a lawyer is willing to write an opinion blessing illegality.

It is too easy to put the blame on Lawyers and to ignore the ones who approve the opinions by framing the issue in such a way that they got the advice that they wanted to receive and that gave them so political covers. As much as I dislike John Yoo's lawyering, I recognize that he was the tool of an administration who needed ideological lawyers to justify a serious break with international law in order to avoid having another 9/11 on their watch. After all, the fact that the Obama administration is still unable to break completely with the Yoo-Cheney tactics to fight 'the war on terror', tells us all we need to know about where one should look to ask for some accountability.

The politics of healthcare

Via Alex Massie, some news about what is happening with Healthcare reform:

So where are we? All I know is that some Democrats who thought the bill dead and buried just a couple of weeks ago now believe that it's a 50-50 proposition. Given that, in the words of one, Obama has "remortgaged the White House" to pass what a leadership aide calls "the most significant social policy advance in my lifetime" it's not good for the bill that, despite all this investment, it remains a touch and go affair. If the administration loses this bet it's hard to see how Obama can retain enough political capital to remain in the game this year.
But because the White House has already spent so much capital on this project, the administration and the House leadership are, in poker terms, pot committed. The time for calculating sunk costs and walking away has passed. This calculation also holds, I think, for Democrats in vulnerable seats. The odds suggest they'll be hammered in November even if the bill doesn't pass so they might as well go all in now and trust to luck or, to look at it in a different way, go out in a blaze of progressive glory.

I have to say that the whole healthcare episode has been disheartening because it showed that Obama had no real vision/true and inflexible convictions on this issue and therefore could not lead the debate until he realizes that losing might have some effects on his presidency.  What is maddening is that the debate about healthcare is no longer about healthcare or rather about health and care, it is about politics, which explains why the public, who needs it, for the most part, has no idea what it will get if a bill gets passed or even whether the changes would be lasting changes. This lack of clarity and confusion on an issue as easy to personalize/humanize tells me that policy, for the foreseeable future in America, isn't going to be about nuts and bolts, but solely about winning and losing arguments. It isn't a new trend, but the fact that it is the predominant one is worrisome.

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.

Obama and the Post-Western World

Quote of the day from Roger Cohen can sometimes, probably in spite of himself, be pertinent:

The Obama presidency has been a shock to Europe. At heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist. He grew up partly in Indonesia and partly in Hawaii, which is about as far from the East Coast as you can get in the United States. “He’s very much a member of the post-Western world,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund.

I'm still wondering whether what you symbolize is more important than what you do or who you really are.

The Hurt Locker, America, and the need to have it both ways

Aaron Bady has a great and must read review of the Hurt Locker at the Valve, which strikes me as being on point

I don’t think it’s a great film, first of all; its characters are fairly tired war-movie clichés (another cowboy who gets results? really?), its ticking time-bomb scenarios are suspenseful in almost the cheapest way possible—a literal ticking time-bomb—and the dialogue ranges from the bathetic to the banal (the line “I’m too old for this shit” badly needs to be retired). (,,,)
But more than that, the movie can’t seem to decide what kind of a hero or anti-hero it wants its main character to be; is he the awesome cowboy who gets results because he breaks the rules? Or is he a supreme asshole who puts the satisfaction of awesome bomb turning-off over the well being of his buddies and success of the mission? Manifestly, he is both, and the movie can’t decide if the young soldier’s eventual “fuck you” to him is where it wants to place its narrative emphasis (...)
Like America, I think, this movie needs to have it both ways, which the penultimate man vs. woman narrative turn lets it do: it wipes the slate clean by making a movie that has been about men fighting with each other (the exact same Kirk-Spock dilemma, in fact, mediating the same Bush-Obama problem) into a narrative about a beset man’s melodrama of escape from the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” of a particular feminine and domestic influence. The former story would bring up uncomfortable problems; the latter solves them in a comfortably Dodge-Charger-American-Man sort of way.

First, I have to say that I liked the Hurt Locker because it was a different American film about war, one which didn't have too many special effects to make the audience forget that that it is about people and destruction. Nevertheless, I felt that it was limited precisely because Kathryn Bigelow refused to make definite points and chose to be safe in order to please everybody and not to be attacked for having made an anti-American movie or just a patriotic movie that ignores the costs of war. That said, I think it was smart of Bigelow to limit her focus and not to try to answer questions that she knew answering would crippled her film, but forcing it to take a stand or a side on the Iraq war.I see the Hurt Locker as incomplete enterprise, as the beginning of something else within America if somebody has the courage to grab a camera and to say actually " Shit, this is what war is all about and does to people."

Bringing Congo to London

Great stuff from Jon Day:

The Congolese embassy, a shabby unassuming building at the insalubrious end of Gray’s Inn Road, is very different again. I used to go there regularly, on jobs from mining companies asking permission to get digging. Occasionally, I’d share the waiting-room with immaculately dressed Sapeurs, flamboyantly suited and booted fashionistas who’d wait in line clasping ornate canes and wearing Davey Crocket hats. More often than not, I’d be alone. But I’d often clock up an hour’s waiting while the correct stamp was being located, or the right person came back from lunch. I don’t know if any of the visas I subsequently delivered turned out to be fakes.
The embassy was set alight in 2007, in an arson attack allegedly perpetrated by supporters of Combattants de Londres, a group dedicated to preventing Congolese musicians who support Joseph Kabila from performing in Europe. Embassy staff were evicted from their homes in 2008 as no one had paid the rent. Ovens, clothing and furniture filled the embassy’s waiting room for months. The hallway leading into the building remains blackened by fire, and the burnt smell still lingered in the air the last time I was there.

Something is wrong with this reality, but I don't have the words to formulate it because I believe that it would be too painfully simple to say that we are uniquely the product of our environment.

The Hurt Locker and the realities of the Iraq war

Tom Streithorst argues that the Hurt Locker shouldn't have won the Oscar for best picture because it doesn't portray accurately the war in Iraq:

Before making Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola famously made a list of all the things that should go into a Vietnam war movie. If I were to make such a list for Iraq, it would include: Egyptian interpreters who don’t understand Iraqi Arabic and their American bosses who don’t have a clue they are making up both questions and answers, US soldiers who spend their entire tour in Iraq never leaving the base, and grizzled Mississippian truck drivers earning over $100,000 a year hauling the pork chops and ice cream from Kuwait that feed the troops. But the most important thing I would include is the casual killing of innocent Iraqi civilians, not from malice but from fear and misunderstanding.
Three scenes are absolutely wrong. In one, Sergeant James escapes his base and roams Baghdad by himself, lost and confused, looking for an Iraqi he suspects of killing a boy. No, Americans never leave the base by themselves. In the second, the soldiers wander around their base, drunk out of their minds. One of the exceptional features of the Iraq war is it is probably the first war ever fought without alcohol or drugs. And, in the last and worst, our boys have their guns aimed at an Iraqi they suspect to be a car bomber. Despite his repeatedly not obeying their orders to back up, they don’t shoot him, even though they themselves might die.
I repeat, I have massive admiration for the American soldiers in Iraq. In my experience they are brave without being brutal. It is an honorable military: the most honorable and the least vicious I have hung out with. But its primary ethos is one of limiting US casualties. In the film, Sergeant James is a cowboy, eager to risk his life, yet ever careful of not risking the lives of Iraqi civilians. In my experience this is the wrong way around. The cowboys in the US military are never reckless with their own or their comrades’ lives, but careless with those of the Iraqis.

The problem with Streithorst's arguments is that he makes two key and false assumptions. The first is that the most important quality of a movie whether it is about war or anything else is its accuracy, the fact that it portrays what it is meant to portray as it is. One has only to pick a few random movies of the last decade which were deemed to be serious and wonderful to watch to realize that in Hollywood and elsewhere the most important quality is the entertainment value. The second assumption, which renders Streithorst's arguments moot is that he thinks that the Academy, the people voting for the Oscars care about reality, about accuracy and that they are not motivated by other factors, which they consider to be more essential such as politics, commercialism and glamour. The point is that I doubt seriously that the people who voted about the Hurt Locker cared or will care about its inaccuracies and would be shocked to know that reality in Iraq is very different for all that mattered was that the movie felt real to them.

Yep, feelings trump reality!

Soliciting, gender and race

Cath Elliott and Thierry Schaffauser on the reason why soliticiting should be criminalis5a :

Criminalisation of soliciting is a sexist law and it's one that concerns all women, because any woman who goes out at night without being accompanied by a man can be suspected of soliciting. All women should have the right to occupy public and nocturnal spaces, legally, and without fear of harassment or violence.
Criminalisation of soliciting is also racist. It's frequently used, for example, to arrest migrant sex workers/prostitutes and deport them. Victims of trafficking deserve our protection; they should have the legal right to choose to live in the UK for as long as they want, and they should not face deportation back to countries where they run the risk of being re-trafficked by those who trafficked them here in the first place.
Soliciting shouldn't be an offence and it shouldn't be classified as antisocial behaviour. If society doesn't want sex workers/prostitutes working on the streets, then measures should be taken to provide those who are at risk of sexual exploitation with better economic options, routes out or professional reorientation, and harm-reduction help when they suffer drug and other addictions. Repression is never a solution: it only pushes those who are among the most vulnerable away into more remote and dangerous areas.

I have the strong suspicion that the arguments of Elliott and Schaffauser although they evoke both race and gender would never be listened to in the US because it is a religious country, which still views sex through a moral narrow prism, which for example why Tiger Wood is no longer the one.

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.

1776, Kesha Rogers, Texas, and inculture

After reading this quote from Kesha Rogers who just won a Democratic primary in Texas, I'm wondering what is wrong with Texas or whether we are just back in 1776:

I am leading a war against the British Empire. I'm not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.

I have to admit that I missed the memo, which explained to Democrats that they could win election by attacking Britain. I wonder if Kesha Rogers has been outside of America to realize who has the real power in this world. I wonder how long it is going to take people, especially open-minded and tolerant Liberals, to compare Rogers to Sarah Palin.

Scumbags and Freedom of Speech

I agree with Mr. Eugenides's point on the visit of Geert Wilders to London:

Since when did freedom of speech entail rolling out the red carpet for scumbags?

How Conan O'Brien got his balls back

I have to say that this bit on Conan O'Brien and remasculation (whatever that is) by Jeff Gordinier made me die of laughter:

For so many years Conan O'Brien was such a good boy—so deferential, so self-effacing, so darn nice. On the air, with his wooden body language and his orange Irish choirboy's cowlick, he always had a way of seeming as safe and gelded as a marionette—Howdy Doody Goes to Harvard. The funnyman was patient, too. Back in 2004 the suits from NBC tiptoed into his office and reassured him, "Yes, yes, we'll give you The Tonight Show, Coco, we promise, just as long as you're willing to keep cracking jokes for college kids in the after-midnight tiddlywinks league for the rest of the decade."
And Conan said, "Okay!"
Which is why it came as such a surprise this year—the sort of surprise that gives you a vicarious urge to blurt out "Hell yeah!" in the street—when Conan O'Brien, after being jerked around in a January ratings panic by NBC executives who suddenly wanted to shunt him back to TV sleepy time, looked his corporate overlords straight in the eye and explained how he felt about that.
How he felt, more or less, was: Fuck. You.In that instant, Conan the Barbarian got his balls back, and probably not a moment too soon. If you weren't watching him before the blowup, you were compelled to follow him afterward. That's because the late-night donnybrook didn't fizzle out with the usual televised hissy fit. Instead, O'Brien channeled the frustrations and aspirations of every stuck-in-a-rut striver in America by triumphing—and by doing so with a deft example of professional jujitsu. Using wit, charm, humility, and a neatly focused media strategy, he managed—finally—to become America's hero.

Is just me but doesn't the American male spends too much time worry about being emasculated, about no being male enough, about bromance or worrying about his balls for that not too start to be a worrisome trend and stop being attractive? It seems to me that when a guy is obsessed his balls, that usually means that he doesn't feel them and have no idea how to be a man without them.

Geert Wilders as a freedom fighter

Toby Young, my favorite judge of Top Chef, defends Geert Wilders in the Daily Telegraph by arguing that he is a freedom of speech warrior:

are the Dutch people just fed up with being told they’re not allowed to criticise Muslim extremists because to do so is “Islamophobic”? As a defender of free speech, I don’t believe for one moment that the Koran ought to be banned. But if I was a member of the Dutch electorate I would vote for Geert Wilders’ party nonetheless because I don’t think he deserves to go to jail for 16 months just for arguing that it should.
Wilders doesn’t really want to ban the Koran, of course. It’s a theatrical gesture — a situationist move — designed to underline the absurdity of trying to limit freedom of speech on the grounds that certain words or phrases or images might move people to violence. What Wilders is saying is that if you believe the critics of Muslim extremism should be silenced because their words might incite religious hatred, then, logically, you ought to ban the Koran on the same grounds. It’s not a serious suggestion, so much as a reductio ad absurdum of a completely untenable, illiberal position.

It is for precisely this reason that I have always believed that European countries are wrong to attempt to censor what they consider to be hate speech or speech denying certain historical events such as the Shoah. Hate-speech laws or any other laws that try to limit free speech based on its content always make the extremist the victim. Moreover, they force people such as Toby Young who likes to provoke and who believe that freedom of speech is the most sacred of values to defend Geert Wilders without seeking to see behind the trees. Guided by his orthodoxy about free speech,  Young is convinced that Wilders can only be right because that it is always absolutely unjust to try to shut somebody hate because society doesn't like what he is saying or finds it too distasteful. It isn't an erroneous positon to take, just a limited and an absurd one because the conclusion seems to be that victims of censorship are always and absolutely right or rather they cannot be right or even extremist.

Political entrepreneurs

Daniel Henninger argues in the Wall Street Journal that Obama's economic policies (particularly the jobs bill) will lead to the rise of political entrepreneurs and to the decline of market entrepreneurs who have made America America:

Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant. Rockefeller took on and beat the world's dominant oil power at the time, Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan "New Jersey must be free," broke Fulton's government-granted monopoly.
If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public subsidies for wind and solar technologies plus taxes on carbon to suppress it as a competitor. Politically connected entrepreneurs will spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies, congressional committees and Beltway door openers. Our best market entrepreneurs, instead of exhausting themselves on their new ideas, will run to ground gaming Barack Obama's ideas.

I suspect that Daniel Henninger's dislike for the intervention of the state within the economy and his idolization of what he believes to be real entrepreneurship are narrowing his perception of reality. Nevertheless, reading his arguments forces one to wonder whether entrepreneurship in itself is always a good for a country and should be privileged over anything else whether it is based on politics or on the market. To put it differently, I wonder whether in an age where a lot of entrepreneurs can go wherever they want to innovate, governments have real policy choices if they believe in entrepreneurship as a good in itself.
In any case, to come back to Henninger's strong distaste for "political entrepreneurs," I wonder if his problem is more with the politics that they are following rather than politics itself. To phrase it differently, I wonder if Henninger would be saying the same time if Obama were Bush or the venerated Ronald Reagan.

The buffoon and the cultural imperialists

The South African Times's editorial on Jacob Zuma's State Visit to Britain puts it just right :

You've got to feel for Jacob Zuma. There he is in London being described by one right-wing commentator as a buffoon and bigot. The state visit to the UK was supposed to finally afford him the opportunity to move on from weeks of criticism of his scandalous relationship with Sonono Khoza. Instead the sex scandal is following him around like chewing gum on the sole of his brogues.
But why, oh why, did he choose to react by saying that the British believed Africans were barbaric? All because one blogger on the Daily Mail's website was provoking him.
His ill-considered response accomplished two things:
It soured the attitude of his hosts, who were now being caricatured as racist jingoes - not by a lone South African blogger, but by its president; and
He displayed vulnerability when he ought to have projected strength.

Whoever is advising Zuma ought to be taken out back and given a sharp kick on the shin.

The point is that buffoons especially the ones who cannot justify their own vile conducts or who have their godly manliness challenged are prone to attack others, to use culture as an excuse, and to accuse others of cultural imperialism because they refused to accept that some people have the right to be barbarians.