today’s august 31
August 31st, 2006 § Leave a Comment
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David W. Lesch
The fate of Syria, very much tied to its young ophthalmologist-turned-president, will profoundly affect what type of Middle East emerges in the near future.
Pasted from <http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300109911>
and
Hope for a better world
Means, rather than ends, must come under scrutiny, says Steven Poole after reading Ted Honderich’s Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War
Looking into things and following arguments might be our only hope. At times, indeed, Honderich expresses a wistfulness about impossible worlds: “The world isn’t a university or a book or a half-decent discussion. If it could be, there are people who make sure it isn’t.” Well, this is a book, and readers who enjoy being goaded into thinking for themselves will enjoy a better than half-decent discussion with it.
Steven Poole’s Unspeak is published by Little, Brown
Pasted from <http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1857488,00.html>
And, evidence that focus on the wars is a way of avoiding larer issues. War now is small scale compared to WW1&2.
Welcome to world peace
By Charles Kurzman and Neil Englehart
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. AND BOWLING GREEN, OHIO – World peace was not supposed to look like this. It was supposed to be more – well, more peaceful. But a remarkable global phenomenon is being obscured by headlines about bombs and conflict in the Middle East. The ancient scourge of war has disappeared, at least in the sense of one government’s army doing battle with another.
The world is far more peaceful than a dozen years ago, when slaughters in Rwanda and the Balkans led to gloomy predictions of rampant civil war.
Despite this outbreak of world peace, we remain fixated on international conflict. For example, the United Nations called for a traditional Olympic truce during the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, despite the fact that no countries were actually fighting one another.
Yet our sense of insecurity grows even as the threat level diminishes. Although Ameri- cans are far more likely to die in a traffic accident than a terrorist attack, politicians don’t scramble to demonstrate their toughness on auto safety.
Paradoxically, world peace may lead us to turn these nonwars into real wars. Without serious threats from other states, the US is more likely to use military power to address other goals – a temptation all the stronger when these are labeled as wars, too.
Militarizing the approach to these problems can lead to conflict with other states, and thus into real wars. The war on drugs has led us to get involved in the civil conflict in Colombia. The war on terror led us to the invasion of Iraq and, more recently, to help start a new civil conflict in Somalia, where we are funding warlords who claim to be fighting affiliates of Al Qaeda.
The remnants of war are nasty and brutish, and the world needs to address collective violence wherever it appears. But let’s keep these concerns in perspective. The global trend is a hopeful one, if we can avoid making wars out of problems that are not. Perhaps it is time to take a deep breath and pause to appreciate world peace.
• Charles Kurzman teaches sociology and Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Neil Englehart teaches political science at Bowling Green State University, with a focus on Southeast Asia and human rights challenges in failing states.
Pasted from <http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0830/p09s02-coop.html>
Dc: is it the lull before the storm, a period whre fighting is at the fringe while the cener decays, and fighting now can be seen as jkying for position I the next phase of real decline and reaction?
And I recall a visit to one of Mcnamara’s major aids when he was at Brookings. I enered (1970) and on his wall were large maps of Vietnam and mexico. Why Mexico I asked? I have to look out for my career, said he. But this seems drien more by imagntion than reality, which is messy in many other diretions.
Is War With Mexico Inevitable?
Written by William H. Calhoun
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
As recently exposed by various news sources, Islamic terrorists disguised as Mexicans have been entering the United States–and Mexico is assisting them. They not only look just like Mexicans, but they speak fluent Spanish too. They blend in as migrant workers–just waiting to strike.
These terrorists have training camps in Mexico and Brazil, and other locations in Central and South America. They first arrive at such places to learn fluent Spanish and how to blend into Hispanic culture. They then go to the US-Mexico border to find a way across. Sheriffs in Texas have recently found Iranian currency, military badges in Arabic, clothes, and other Arabic items along the banks of the Rio Grande River.
Pasted from <http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=23393&catcode=13>
And
Expert Political Judgment:
How Good is It? How Can We Know?
Philip E. Tetlock
CHAPTER 1
Quantifying the Unquantifiable
I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
–BERTRAND RUSSELL
This book is predicated on the assumption that, even if we cannot capture all of the subtle counterfactual and moral facets of good judgment, we can advance the cause of holding political observers accountable to independent standards of empirical accuracy and logical rigor. Whatever their allegiances, good judges should pass two types of tests:
- Correspondence tests rooted in empiricism. How well do their private beliefs map onto the publicly observable world?
- Coherence and process tests rooted in logic. Are their beliefs internally consistent? And do they update those beliefs in response to evidence?
In plain language, good judges should both “get it right” and “think the right way.”10
Dc: he argues tht the discipline of good prediction requires a kind of modesty that is couner to the tenacity and imagination required for science. Interesting.
Pasted from <http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7959.html>
And
Not God’s PartyA new poll shows Democrats are losing (more) religious voters.
By Amy Sullivan
Dc; basic idea, that whie polls show decline, thins are mixed and complex and he democrats have some good territiry and should pres more for the cmmon good.
And they should shout from the mountaintops about Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid’s plan to reduce abortion rates, talk to every evangelical who will listen about tackling global warming, and re-embrace the concept of the common good that once united religious and political progressives. Democrats, take those lights out from under your bushels.
Pasted from <http://www.slate.com/id/2148547/>
And
Disarmed:
The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America
Kristin A. Goss
From chapter 1.
Studying the gun control issue in the early 1970s, Hazel Erskine observed: “It is difficult to imagine any other issue on which Congress has been less responsive to public sentiment for a longer period of time.”9 That insight is at the heart of the well-known “gun control paradox”: Most people want strict gun laws, but they don’t get them—why? This book argues that there is a deeper puzzle: Most people want them, but they don’t mobilize to get them—why? I refer to this as the “gun control participation paradox.” This book seeks to explain that puzzle. To put the question in stark, if overly simplistic, terms, Why is there no real gun control movement in America?10
Between 1992 and 2001, more than 336,000 Americans died by gunfire,11
The pattern of firearms regulation in the United States, coupled with its high gun violence rate, led historian Richard Hofstadter to proclaim America the quintessential “gun culture.”17 Interestingly, the popular image of America as a gun culture is at odds with more than fifty years of public opinion polls, which have found both widespread concern about gun violence and overwhelming support for measures to restrict access to firearms. Summarizing the findings, Tom W. Smith observed: “One of the few constants in American public opinion over the last two decades has been that three-fourths of the population supports gun control.”18 For example, in more than two dozen surveys conducted between 1959 and 1994, roughly 70% to 80% of respondents have favored “a law which would require a person to obtain a police permit before he or she could buy a gun.”19
Pasted from <http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8328.html>
Dc; so a politician should just say, polls show the majority are for control, so, as a representative, I am for control. It seems to be what the people want.
Avoid a fight, just aquiesce, end of story.
The gun control paradox properly understood is: Why do Americans who want strict gun control not mobilize, in large numbers in a sustained way, to get it?
Dc: because a few mobilized have more energy than many who nly care a little? His argeguemnts are comprehensive, and can be studied when thinking about any issue of change, like private property or innerst rates!
The gun control case serves as a cautionary tale. The Founding Fathers meant for political reform to be slow and difficult. Movements that adapt their strategies to that reality will expand; movements that do not adapt will falter.
Pasted from <http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8328.html>
And
Democratic voters have unambiguously repudiated the Bush doctrine. The same can’t be said for Democratic foreign policy elites.
Kenneth “Threatening Storm” Pollack, who recently co-wrote a piece in The Washington Post
The Pollack-Byman strategy “requires Americans to endure significant long-term costs — in both blood and treasure — in Iraq.” The authors look at history and admit that, given historical experience, we could be looking at 20 years of intervention in Iraq. Twenty years.
And it isn’t just Pollack and Byman. The Democratic Leadership Council has a big enough tent to house Marshall Wittman, the former John McCain staffer who spends time urging Hillary Clinton to “move to the right of the Bush administration on Iran,” and wondering, in the context of that country, “When does containment become appeasement?” General Wesley Clark, another top Democratic foreign policy thinker, stated in a speech at New England College earlier this year that he opposes starting to leave Iraq until “stability” is achieved and the Sunnis and Shi’a are at peace.
The haze of World War III delirium surrounding the Bush administration and its ideological supporters is making reality-based right-wingers squirm. Independents are clearly in play for the Democrats. And Democratic voters themselves, of course, call out for meaningful change every time they get the chance. The danger is that casting a ballot for a Dem in ’08 will yield a reheated, squishier version of the Bush doctrine, applied via people like Kenneth Pollack.
Pasted from <http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11935>
And
The Militarization of the American Language
By Vicki Gray
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
One danger of military newspeak is that it conditions the mental muscles in much the same way that video games do – to react instinctively, violently to perceived threats. Enemies are not to be understood or reasoned with. They are to be bombed – killed – as quickly as possible. No questions, no regrets.
Huntington’s is a truly dangerous book, a sort of Mein Kampf for the GWOT. Written in the mid-nineties, when the military-industrial complex was searching for a new “enemy” to replace the collapsed Soviet Union, it depicts the by-definition culturally superior West in a “civilizational war” with Islam and, to a lesser degree, China. All is black and white, life and death, kill or be killed … good and evil. No need for nuance. No need for understanding beyond “they” are bad, we are good. Simple minds latched on to such simplicity as an explanation for all the bad happenings in the world, missing even Huntington’s recognition of the causative tension between modernization and fundamentalism.
And take our easy acceptance as “robust” such phrases as “regime change” and “pre-emptive war,” un-American phrases that have found their way into the pages of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Take also the president’s embrace of so offensive a term as “Islamo-Fascist,” a term popularized by a hate-mongering talk show host and softened only to Islamist-Fascist in the president’s mouth. Does he know how that sounds in the Middle East? Does he care? I doubt it. For in the closed mind of our Decider, there is no need to understand or talk with our growing number of real and potential enemies in the Middle East. Iran? Syria? No need to talk with them. “They know what they have to do.” We’ve told them.
And, if they don’t do what we’ve told them? In our militarized lexicon, they’ll “suffer the consequences.” We’ll bomb them. We’ll kill them. We know how to do that. That’s all we know any more. Trouble is, we can no longer follow through on our threats. It’s time to stow the “newspeak” and to start speaking truth to our friends, our enemies, and, above all, to ourselves.
——–
Vicki Gray, a retired Foreign Service Officer, served as Director for Northern Europe in the Department of State and as International Cooperation Director at EPA.
Pasted from <http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083006B.shtml>
and
Jihad in Islamic History:
Doctrines and Practice
Michael Bonner
Islam arose in an environment where warfare—or at any rate, armed violence with some degree of organization and planning— was a characteristic of everyday life. Even if it often amounted to little more than livestock-rustling, its threat was never far away,
I portray the origins of jihad as a series of events, covering all of the broad extent of Islamic history. Of course, I only have room for a few representative instances. However, I hope to show that many people have used the notion of jihad creatively in the construction of new Islamic societies and states. For this they have employed a shared idiom, derived from the Quran, from the various narratives of origins, from the classical doctrine of jihad, and from their own shared experience. However, their ways of doing this, and the Islamic societies they have constructed, have been quite diverse: not mere repetitions or reenactments of the first founding moment but new foundations arising in a wide variety of circumstances.
Pasted from <http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8280.html>
Dc: and perhaps is related to the psychology of sacrifice as part of the process of life. Baudrillard on reigion. If you want some good backgrund, here is a text fo careul study leading ot the conclusion that all is more complex and unintegrated, than we think.
And
Germany and U.K. narrowly escaped major attacks
By Stefan Nicola
Rolf Tophoven, Germany’s leading terrorism expert, spoke with United Press International’s Berlin correspondent Stefan Nicola about the recent incidents in Europe and what can be done to prevent similar attacks.
Well, who ever believed that Germany was not in the gridlock of terrorism was naive. We have a new threat situation since Sept. 11, 2001. The attacks in Madrid and London were perceived as signals of terror against the participation of both countries in the U.S.-led war in Iraq. But because of several reasons, Germany has always been a target, despite the refusal of the former government to take part in that war: We have soldiers in Afghanistan, we have navy soldiers taking part in the Mission Enduring Freedom at the Horn of Africa, and we are members of the alliance to fight terror, and cooperate in that field with many countries all over the world. Maybe we are not the number one on the terrorism hit list, but we are not ignored. All the above reasons are enough for terrorists to choose Germany as their target.
also strongly support the swift implementation of an anti-terror file, one that not only contains vague details but gives a complete image of an Islamist. Those are the things that make most sense right now. And above all, now is the time for intelligence strategists to come forward. You need good intelligence to fight terrorism.
Tophoven: At least, since 9/11, they know much more about Islamist terrorism. They can differentiate between the peaceful religion of Islam and the perversion of radical groups that use Islam as a justification for terrorist acts. But international intelligence cooperation can surely be improved. Especially in light of the dislocated structures of terrorism, the many small and smallest cells, which seem to spread like metastases, it is very difficult to guarantee successful access. Often, cell A does not know what cell B plans. So the fight against these groups is becoming increasingly difficult.
Pasted from <http://wpherald.com/articles/968/2/Interview-2nd-911-averted/Bin-Laden-mere-symbolic-figure-of-terrorism.html>
And
Let’s be Realists, Let’s Demand the Impossible!
Why pragmatic politics are doomed to fail in the Middle East
By Slavoj Zizek
Let’s try a mental experiment and imagine that, instead of Lebanese women and children, the human shields used by Hezbollah were Israeli women and children. Would the IDF still consider the price affordable and continue the bombing? If the answer is “no,” then the IDF is effectively practicing racism, determining that Jewish life has more value than Arab life.
The problem courted by Israel in its continuous display of power is that this display will be soon perceived as a sign of its opposite, of impotence. This paradox of power is known to anyone who has had to play the role of paternal authority: In order to retain its force, power has to remain virtual, a threat of power.
Many political theorists, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant to Joseph de Maistre, have elaborated on the ways in which nation-states have manufactured heroic national mythologies to replace and ultimately erase their “foundational crimes,” i.e. the illegitimate political violence necessary for their creation. With regard to this notion, it is true what has often been said: The misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century too late, in conditions when such “founding crimes” are no longer acceptable (and—ultimate irony—it was the intellectual influence of Jews that contributed to the rise of this unacceptability!).
One would automatically attribute it to an Islamic terrorist group and condemn it. The author, however, is none other than Menachem Begin, in the years when Hagannah was fighting the British forces in Palestine. It is interesting to note how, in the years of the Jewish struggle against the British military in Palestine, the very term “terrorist” had a positive connotation. Today, amid Dershowitz’s acrobatic rationalizations, it is almost heartening to look back at the first generation of Israeli leaders, who openly confessed that their claims to the land of Palestine cannot be grounded in universal justice, that we are dealing with a simple war of conquest between two groups where no mediation is possible. Here is what David Ben-Gurion wrote:
Everyone can see the weight of the problems in the relations between Arabs and Jews. But no one sees that there is no solution to these problems. There is no solution! Here is an abyss, and nothing can link its two sides … We as a people want this land to be ours; the Arabs as a people want this land to be theirs.
This is why the way Simon Wiesenthal approached this problem in Justice, not Vengeance appears today deeply problematic:
One should finally take cognizance of the fact that one cannot found a state without curtailing the rights of those who were already settled at this territory. One should be satisfied with the fact that the violations were limited in that a relatively small number of people was hurt. This is how it was when the state of Israel was founded. Eventually the Jewish population lived there for a long time, while the Palestinians were, in comparison with the Jewish one, sparsely settled and had great opportunities to withdraw. That is to say, the continually victorious state of Israel cannot forever rely on the sympathies that the world accords to victims.
What Wiesenthal is advocating here is nothing else than “state-founding violence with a human face,” with “limited violations.” (As to the comparative sparsity of settlers, the population of the Palestinian territory in 1880 was 24,000 Jews versus 300,000 Palestinians.) However, the truly interesting part of this passage is the last sentence: Its only consistent reading is that now that Israel is “continually victorious,” it no longer needs to behave like a victim, but can fully assert its force—true, insofar as one doesn’t forget to add that this power also involves new responsibilities. That is to say, the problem is that Israel, while “continually victorious,” still relies on the image of Jews as victims to legitimize its power politics (and to denounce its critics as closet anti-Semites).
Arthur Koestler, the great anti-Communist convert proposed a profound insight: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.” Cécile Winter recently proposed along these lines a nice mental experiment: Imagine the state of Israel, as it has developed over the last half century, without the history of Jewish suffering as a rationale for its policies. It would be a standard story of colonization. So why should we, as Alain Badiou proposes, abstract the Holocaust from our judgments about Israel’s actions toward Palestinians? Not because one can compare the two, but precisely because the Holocaust was an incomparably worse crime. It is those who evoke the Holocaust who effectively manipulate it, making it an instrument for today’s political uses. The very need to evoke the Holocaust in defense of Israel’s actions implies that its crimes are so horrible that only the absolute trump-card of the Holocaust can redeem them.
The big mystery apropos of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is: Why does it persist for so long when everybody knows the only viable solution?—the withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza, the establishment of a Palestinian state, as well as some kind of a compromise concerning Jerusalem. There is effectively something of a neurotic symptom in the Middle East conflict—everyone sees the way to get rid of the obstacle, and yet, nonetheless, no one wants to remove it, as if there is some kind of pathological libidinal profit gained by persisting in the deadlock.
So what would be the truly radical ethico-political act today in the Middle East? For both Israelis and Arabs, it would be to renounce the (political) control of Jerusalem—that is, to endorse the transformation of the Old Town of Jerusalem into an extra-state place of religious worship controlled (temporarily) by some neutral international force. What both sides should accept is that, by renouncing the political control of Jerusalem, they are effectively renouncing nothing—they are gaining the elevation of Jerusalem into a genuinely sacred site. What they would lose is only what already deserves to be lost: the reduction of religion to a stake in political power plays.
Dc: limp conclusion, what of security in such a place, a non issue?
Pasted from <http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article_two/2793/>
and
Borderlands journal of the humanities cross discipline… for example.
Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties
and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee
University of South Australia
In this paper I develop the concept of necrocapitalism by discussing contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. Drawing on the works of Agamben (1998, 2005) and Mbembe (2003) I discuss how some contemporary capitalist practices contribute to this subjugation of life. I discuss some ideological formations of necrocapitalist practices and examine what kind of social relations are disrupted and destroyed as a result of these practices. I discuss the organization and management of global violence and explore the rise of the privatized military and its use in the so-called war on terror.
Conclusion
30. To return to the questions I posed at the beginning of the paper: a theory of necrocapitalism requires us to pay attention to the specific colonial capitalist practices that result in the subjugation of life to the power of death. These are the practices that manage and organize global violence by privatizing sovereignty and creating states of exception that enable accumulation by dispossession and death. Debord (1995) described capitalism as an accumulation of spectacles, not just an accumulation of images, but a ‘social relation among people, mediated by images’. The society of the spectacle represents an image of the world in which the forms of the state and the economy are interwoven and ‘where the economy achieves the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over all social life….. where everything can be called into question except the spectacle itself which as such says nothing but “what appears is good, what is good appears”‘ (Agamben, 1993: 79). A critical theoretical approach must necessarily create a space for challenging necrocapitalist practices. The ideology of neoliberal market fundamentalism is so prevalent that it has almost become immune to empirical disconfirmation where the nexus of governments and corporations leave no room for a no-war zone. New theoretical perspectives are required to rethink the relationship between the economy, the polity and society as alternatives to necrocapitalist practices. Perhaps the questions asked by the African novelist Ayi Kwei Armah provide us with a fitting beginning to these challenges:
Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Strategic Management and Director of Research at the International Graduate School of Business, University of South Australia. He is attempting to create states of exception that enable critical reflection in business schools.
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and
The American seen
Stein Ringen
Claus Offe
REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA
Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States
Translated by Patrick Camiller
What outside observers have always seen, writes Offe, is “the precariousness of liberty in capitalist societies”. Today, of course, there is deep concern over the destiny of freedom, and not only in the United States, but that concern is as old as is the republic of liberty.
That similarity breaks down when we get to Offe’s own reflections on the United States in the twenty-first century. So much has changed that an inclusive transatlantic concept of “the West” hardly applies any longer. The US has become “distinctive”, and the comparative curiosity of Offe’s predecessors is no longer meaningful. Offe’s reflections then turn away from the American social model to America the world power.
Tocqueville was a radical democrat. He deplored the backwardness of Europe, specifically France in his case, and admired America for its “almost complete equality of condition”. By equality, he meant the absence of aristocratic hereditary political rights. For most contemporary Europeans, that was tantamount to anarchy and mob rule, but in America Tocqueville saw democratic order. Europe’s difficulty with democracy, he concluded, had nothing to do with democracy as such, but with the transition to democracy, a difficulty America had been spared because it was created as democratic.
Dc: we face the problem of “transition” here in the US, to redo the economy.
While political equality itself contains no threat to liberty, order or stability, this is not so with “extreme equality”, by which Tocqueville meant equality in economic life. The trouble here is that once people set their minds to equality in this sense, that passion becomes insatiable and the smallest difference proves the greatest annoyance. Dire consequences then threaten. Governments will be asked to provide and regulate ever more, and we are on the way to despotism, or “soft despotism”, as Tocqueville called it. Community disintegrates under the force of acquisitive individualism, and we sink into a culture of greed, conformity and a flattening of tastes.
Like Tocqueville he was fascinated by what he saw, and developed an almost childlike admiration for the Americans he met, their customs and way of life – in particular their associational life which, echoing Tocqueville, he thought of as producing a “magic of freedom” that maintains liberty in spite of the odds. The visit was so invigorating for him personally that the experience pulled him out of a near-debilitating depression.
Weber was a deeply pessimistic student of modernity. His ambition was to explain the meaning and consequences of “occidental rationalism”. In Europe, specifically Germany in his case, he believed those consequences were mainly negative: bureaucratization, depersonalization and a flattening of life, so that freedom was available only to a privileged minority. He now needed to fit America into that theory. That proved difficult. He found social life there to be lively and free. For example, this son of the European university establishment found that the American universities outshone those of the old world in creativity and free education. His solution, while making many of the same observations as Tocqueville, was to turn the interpretation of trends upside down. For Tocqueville, America was advanced and represented the future Europe should aspire to; for Weber it was raw and backward in not having yet subjected life to “rational bureaucratization”. That backwardness was America’s good luck, but the luck could not last. America was doomed to catch up with Europe, and all the magic of associational life Weber saw there would come to an end.
Unlike both Tocqueville and Weber, Adorno did not see the pressure for conformity as a mere threat, but as something actually happening. This was at the core of his great contribution to sociological theory, that of “the culture industry”.
What is the destiny of freedom and is it better protected in the American or the European social model? Are we excessive in our demand for equality, and if so what follows? The state is both necessary for and dangerous to freedom; how do we find the balance? Is culture, now a huge sector of economic growth, an industry of manipulation? Is there a social architecture between the individual and the state or was Margaret Thatcher right that there is no such thing as society?
the European model is more state and less voluntarism, the American model less state and more voluntarism. Which serves the cause of liberty best?
Egalitarians today tend to think of it in distributional terms. The classics saw it as a matter of rights and liberty, and warned against reducing the great idea of equality to a quest for goods. Their challenge, translated to present day conditions, is this: are propenents of the European social model obsessed with little inequalities at the cost of ignoring the big ones? As an egalitarian, I am uneasy about not being able to dismiss that question.
Pasted from <http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2334832,00.html>
And
The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life
Ingmar Persson, The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life, Oxford University Press, 2005, 494pp., $99.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199276900.
Reviewed by Jonas Olson, Brasenose College, University of Oxford
Pasted from <http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=7463>
Overly wordy and acceting of a narro frame of discussion.
And
The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics
Michael B. Gill
University of Arizona
Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists – sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design – disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors’ most deeply held philosophical goals.
Contents
Introduction; Part I. Whichcote and cudworth: 1. The negative answer of English Calvinism; 2. Whichcote and Cudworth’s positive answer; 3 Whichcote and Cudworth on religious liberty; 4. Rationalism, sentimentalism, and Ralph Cudworth; 5. The emergence of non-Christian ethics; Part II. Shaftesbury: 6. Shaftesbury and the Cambridge Platonists; 7. Shaftesbury’s Inquiry: a misanthropic faith in human nature; 8. The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody; 9. A philosophical faultline; Part III. Hutcheson: 10. Early influences on Francis Hutcheson; 11. Hutcheson’s attack on egoism; 12. Hutcheson’s attack on moral rationalism; 13. A Copernican positive answer, an attenuated moral realism; 14. Explaining away vice; Part IV. Hume: 15. David Hume’s new ‘science of man’; 16. Hume’s arguments against moral rationalism; 17. Hume’s associative moral sentiments; 18. Hume’s progressive view of human nature; 19. Comparison and contingency in Hume’s moral account; 20. What is a Humean account, and what difference does it make?
Pasted from <http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521852463>
And, for Garden world.
From deforestation to the art of topiary, humans have a long history of altering their environments. But our environments, say scientists at Arizona State Univeristy, may also change us.
In a multi-year project called the “The North Desert Village Landscaping Experiment,” researchers transformed 24 identical family housing units on the Arizona State University campus in the Sonoran Desert, creating five mini-neighborhoods, each with a different landscape style. The multidisciplinary project, encompassing everything from sociology to ecology, allows scientists to observe how people’s behaviors and attitudes vary in response to different environmental characteristics.
Pasted from <http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/08/arizona_researchers_study_whet.php>
Dc: Striking how small scale the differences are. Compare to the great issues in architecture.
And
One Hundred Semesters:
My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned along the Way
William M. Chace
A witness of higher education for that half-century, I continue to find the American campus an attractive and even a good place. Most informed people believe that American higher education is the best the world has to offer. They are right. Our colleges and universities might also be the best of America’s achievements. Inventive, responsive, energetic, and endlessly productive, they are the cynosure of the world and a tribute to the possibilities of the human mind. I champion them and, in this book, offer an enthusiastic defense of them. But I also find, and report on, things about them to lament.
My praise is mixed with descriptions of some tough problems they face. The best schools are too expensive, and only a tiny fraction of the young people who could benefit from them even apply to them, much less gain admission to them. Those who arrive on most campuses do not now find what once was the mission of America’s best colleges and universities: a commitment to the kind of moral development that produces an informed and responsible citizenry. That kind of education, to which I was introduced decades ago at little Haverford College, is now in danger of being lost. It is sinking beneath the waves of faculty neglect, administrative busyness, preprofessional frenzy on the part of students, and the depressing uncertainty on almost every campus about what moral development might even mean. But it is what some parents want their children to have, and it is a realm of learning that no other entity in the country is prepared to provide. That the nation’s best schools cannot, or will not, provide it is profoundly lamentable.
Dc: actually sad
Pasted from <http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i8245.html>
And Interesting that a more right website would carry this, close to reasonable,
What are we to do? There are no easy answers, but we should begin by jettisoning as folly the naive idea that all Muslims want the same things the liberal West wants. Followers of Qutb’s brand of Islam hold that our wealth, secularity and freedom, especially for women, are evidence of our corruption.
While Qutb’s prescriptions are quite mad, his diagnosis of the Western spiritual and psychological condition was serious, and it requires a serious response. If we Westerners cannot look at the world we’ve created for ourselves and understand that Sayyid Qutb was not all wrong, we will never figure out how to convince the Islamic masses he lived and died for that their holy martyr was a false prophet.
Rod Dreher is an assistant editorial page editor. The views expressed here are his own. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com .
Find a link to an English translation of Sayyid Qutb’s “Milestones” at DallasNews.com/Extra.
Pasted from <http://stoptheaclu.com/archives/2006/08/31/know-the-enemy/>
And the outline of an empowering state. What does it take to et everyone there? Vision first.
Geoff Gallop: Liberation a marriage of rights and obligations
The welfare state needs to become an enabling state
From Tom Paine to T.H. Marshall, the welfare state pioneers simply assumed that the values of the times would ensure personal responsibility in the exercise of these rights and capacities. Their radical successors, such as Anthony Giddens in England and Noel Pearson in Australia, have recognised that personal responsibility, alas, has been amiss. Indeed Pearson argues that a welfare system too focused on income supports traps many of his people into poverty.
But as a 2003 report by the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the St Vincent de Paul Society showed, those with social, intellectual, mental health, addiction, education or communication difficulties are the victims of narrowly applied mutual obligation policies.
The problem with the modern welfare state is not that it is a welfare state but that it has yet to become a truly enabling state. In the first place, regular outbursts of ideological overkill from Left or Right set the clock back. In the second place there are timelines and resource implications here that are much longer than the regular election and budget cycles of government.
Human welfare requires rights, capacities and responsibilities. Rights need capacities and capacities need to be exercised. Both context and commitment are required, as are individual and collective responsibilities. When our nation’s commitment to equal opportunity is effectively discharged and combines with a desire for change and improvement on the part of individuals and communities, significant results follow. I would call it liberation.
Geoff Gallop is a former Labor premier of Western Australia and a professor at the graduate school of government at the University of Sydney.
Pasted from <http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20297136-7583,00.html>
And
General Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda, dictator of Paraguay, died on August 16th, aged 93
He did not give interviews to the press, having no wish to reveal himself. A single conversation, with Isabel Hilton of Granta when he had just begun his long exile in Brasilia in 1989, is almost all obituarists have to go on.
As a firmer, more loyal base than these soldiers, General Stroessner used the Colorado (“Red”) party, a right-wing body that became steadily more so as its moderate politicians were ejected. Membership of the party was compulsory for all teachers, doctors, engineers, officers or those who hoped for government service. In a population of 3.8m, 900,000 belonged to it,
for eight years in the 1970s, the highest rate of growth in Latin America. General Stroessner was a master-dispenser of illegal spoils. Yet the dark truth of his Paraguay was that he co-opted even his opponents into that system with him.
Pasted from <http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7826946>
And
Muammar al-Gaddafi has rejected terrorism and brought Libya back into the international fold. Now he is returning to his early radical ideas, which he thinks have common ground with some of new Labour’s. By Anthony Giddens
You usually get about half an hour when meeting a political leader. My conversation with Gaddafi lasts for more than three.
He likes the term “third way”, because his own political philosophy, developed in the late 1960s, was a version of this idea. It has been written up in the form of The Green Book, authored by Gaddafi, on display almost everywhere in Libya.
The Green Book is based upon a theory of direct democracy. Representative democracy, Gaddafi argues, is an inadequate form of government, given that it means rule by a minority and in which the majority have little direct say. Soviet communism, on the other hand, led to government by an even smaller elite. His “third alternative” favours self-rule, in which everyone can, in principle, be involved. At one point in the conversation he points to the symbol with which the awning is covered. It is a series of concentric circles, with points of connection between them marked. The outer circle is formed by the basic people’s congresses, which anyone can attend and contribute to. They communicate decisions to inner groups, which pass them on finally to the General People’s Committee – which is supposed to register and act on them, with further consultations if necessary. In theory, Libya has self-government without a state.
Gaddafi’s economic theory holds that everyone should receive the fruits of their labour. In a capitalist economy, so his account runs, workers get only a proportion of the wealth they create, the rest being appropriated by the employer. Freedom can be built only on individual econ o m ic autonomy. The material needs of life – clot h ing, food, a home and means of transportation – must be owned by the individual family. Hence in Libya, at least until recently, no one was allowed to rent property.
During our talk, we discuss the fact that there is a major revival of thinking in modern political philosophy about participatory and discursive democracy. I say that, contrary to his thinking, a democratic system must have mechanisms of representation, choice between parties and a regular system of voting. Yet these could be complemented by direct forms of citizen involvement, making use of information technology, such as citizens’ juries, and national “discussion days”, as pioneered in Scandinavia, in which important initiatives are debated. Much will depend upon the creation of a healthy civil society.
Discussing these matters with others later, I find out that the modernisers working with Saif are taking such ideas seriously. A committee has been meeting for the past two years to draw up a new constitution. I sit in on one of their discussions and am impressed by the sophistication of their ideas. The group has made much progress and has recognised the need for far-reaching trans formation of the political system, while seek ing to sustain the genuine elements of egalitarianism that Gaddafi’s rule has sustained.
Gaddafi does not demur when I point out that his economic approach has to be rethought. Egalitarianism is a core social-democratic value, but it cannot be built upon denying basic principles of capital accumulation and investment. Competition and profit are the conditions of economic success, not intrinsic barriers to it. To control inequality, the country needs other measures, especially in relation to taxation, welfare and corporate governance.
Dc: Giddens seems to want the country to merge with the western model, and ignores the contribution of an alternative frame.Why is ecnomic success so important and what does giddens do about the deterioration of quality of life at the increasingly lare margin?
Libya thus far has squandered its oil wealth, but it could be used to help diversify the economy, and encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, highly visible in Libya, in spite of its being constrained by a welter of restrictions. It could also be spent on a state-of-the-art welfare system to protect the poor and vulnerable. Libya needs foreign direct investment, and the expertise that comes along with it. Such investment will emerge if it is clear that social and economic reform are for real. The country has some clear advantages over others in the region. Literacy, for example, is above 80 per cent. Women fare better than in most Muslim countries. According to the latest report of the Economist Intelligence Unit, economic growth in Libya in 2006-2007 is expected to exceed 9 per cent. There are clear strengths to build on and it is in the interests of the global community to support those people in the country who are pushing for change.
Pasted from <http://www.newstatesman.com/200608280032>
And
The return of people power
Here in the west, we have much to learn from resistance movements in dangerous places and their tactics of informed direct action. By John Pilger
In researching a new film, I have been watching documentary archive from the 1980s, the era of Ronald Reagan and his “secret war” against Central America. What is striking is the relentless lying. A department of lying was set up under Reagan with the coy name, “office of public diplomacy”. Its purpose was to dispense “white” and “black” propaganda – lies – and to smear journalists who told the truth. Almost everything Reagan himself said on the subject was false. Time and again, he warned Americans of an “imminent threat” from the tiny impoverished nations that occupy the isthmus between the two continents of the western hemisphere. “Central America is too close and its strategic stakes are too high for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power with military ties to the Soviet Union,” he said. Nicaragua was “a Soviet base” and “communism is about to take over the Caribbean”. The United States, said the president, “is engaged in a war on terrorism, a war for freedom”.
Whereas Powell’s lies paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and the violent death of at least 100,000 people, Reagan’s lies disguised his onslaught on Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guate mala. By the end of his two terms, 300,000 people were dead. In Guatemala, his proxies – armed and tutored in torture by the CIA – were described by the UN as perpetrators of genocide.
In my experience, this critical public intelligence and moral sense have always been ahead of those who claim to speak for the public. What Vandana Shiva calls an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge” is on the rise in Britain and across the world, perhaps as never before, thanks to a revived internationalism aided by new technologies. Whereas Reagan could get away with many of his lies, Bush and Blair cannot. People know too much. And there is the presence of history; no imperial power has been able to sustain three simultaneous colonial wars indefinitely.
On 13 August, as the Israeli army advanced in southern Lebanon, they warned people not to return to their homes. This was defied almost to a man, woman and child, who abandoned the refugee centres and headed south, jamming the roads and flashing victory signs.
An eyewitness, Simon Assaf, described “gangs of local men along the route clear[ing] paths by dragging away the piles of electrical cable, rubble and twisted metal that littered the highway. A new stream of cars would rapidly form through every breach in the rubble. There were no army or police . . . it was the locals who directed traffic, guided cars past dangerous craters and pushed buses up dirt tracks around collapsed bridges. As they neared their homes, the refugees would form great processions. Town after town, village after village was reclaimed. Powerless to confront this human wave, the Israelis abandoned their positions and began fleeing to the border. This flood of people emerged out of an unprecedented mass movement that grew up across the country as the bombs rained down.”
Throughout Latin America, mass resistance movements have grown so fast that they now overshadow traditional parties. In Venezuela, they provide the popular support for the reforms of Hugo Chávez. Having emerged spontan eously in 1989 during the Caracazo, an eruption of political rage against Venezuela’s subser vience to the free-market demands of the IMF and World Bank, they have provided the imagination and dynamism with which the Chávez government is attacking the scourge of poverty.
Here in the west, as people abandon the political parties they once thought were theirs, there is much to learn from resistance movements in dangerous places and their tactics of informed direct action. We have our own examples in Britain, such as the achievements of the growing resistance to Blair and Brown’s privatising of the health service by stealth. An American giant, United Health Europe, has been prevented from taking control of GP services in Derbyshire, after the community was not consulted and fought back. Pat Smith, a pensioner, took the case to court and won. “This shows what people power can do,” she said, as if speaking for millions.
There is no difference in principle between Pat Smith’s campaign of resistance and that of the people of Cochabamba who refused to pay almost half their income to an American company for their water. There is no difference in principle between the people’s movement that saw off the Israeli invaders and the stirring of people everywhere as they become aware of the real meaning of the ambitions and hypocrisy of Bush and his vassal, who want us to be ever fearful of and cowed by “terrorism” when, in truth, the greatest terrorists of all are them.
Pasted from <http://www.newstatesman.com/200609040016>
And, just a brief review,
The New Lion of Damascus
Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria
